(no subject)
Oct. 16th, 2008 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Someone really ought to have told John McCain that during a televised presidential debate is not the time to pull funny faces. (Making Light, I believe, has the picture. I'm not going to link to it, because it's irrelevant and a cheap shot.) Does anyone remember anything else about the debate?
You know, it occurred to me, thinking about that phrase "presidential debate"...once the candidates are chosen, the president can only be one of them. So, in the persons of Obama and McCain and whatever other serious candidates there may be, you have a sort of quantum indeterminate "Schrödinger's president," narrowed down from billions of people to a number between two and maybe ten. (Unfortunately, they're not in a sealed box, with or without a poison pellet. The experiment isn't perfected yet.) Most of the work is thus already done, and you can tell a lot about what the next presidential term is going to be like from studying the candidates and ruling out anything that neither/none of them would countenance.
I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not...
Anyway. I need to rest my brain and eat something.
You know, it occurred to me, thinking about that phrase "presidential debate"...once the candidates are chosen, the president can only be one of them. So, in the persons of Obama and McCain and whatever other serious candidates there may be, you have a sort of quantum indeterminate "Schrödinger's president," narrowed down from billions of people to a number between two and maybe ten. (Unfortunately, they're not in a sealed box, with or without a poison pellet. The experiment isn't perfected yet.) Most of the work is thus already done, and you can tell a lot about what the next presidential term is going to be like from studying the candidates and ruling out anything that neither/none of them would countenance.
I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not...
Anyway. I need to rest my brain and eat something.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-16 03:35 pm (UTC)Whenever I think of Schrödinger I automatically merge in Heisenberg. I love your analogy, and will apply mine like this:
When you try to measure the momentum of Obama or McCain campaigns, you can't discover their positions. If you know their positions, you can't figure out which one has the most momentum. But when we open the box on Nov. 4, there will be two cats inside, only one's campaign will be dead.