On MSL’s New Findings and What They Mean

Public perception is a funny thing. People can blow some stuff that rarely matters out of proportion but almost never pay attention to the most important stuff.

A couple of weeks ago, when John Grotzinger announced that the data they were getting from the SAM instrument was very interesting, everyone thought (considering Grotzinger’s line of work) MSL has found evidence of life on Mars. No one cared about whether this was possible or not. No one cared what Grotzinger really meant by his “one for the history books” comment. We all wanted to believe that we’ve found life on another planet. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because it’s always good to see people get excited because of science, but this time they got excited for all the wrong reasons.

I need to clear one thing up. After reading Grotzinger’s comments on this data, unlike most people, I never thought we’d actually found evidence of life on Mars. Not because it’s not possible, it certainly is, but MSL’s main mission objective isn’t to find life on Mars. It’s to find out whether Mars could ever have supported life whether in the past or in the present.

I never understood the hype. You have to understand one thing. SAM is an incredibly complicated instrument. It’s one of the reasons why Curiosity is the size of an SUV. It’s probably the most complicated instrument mankind has ever made and send it to an outer planet and it’s sending the results of its first test. No matter what kind of data it sends, that data will be one for the history books. Now, that data might not mean anything to you, but that doesn’t change the significance of the data. That’s the main reason why I didn’t care about the content of the data.

Enough with the chit-chat. Let’s get back to the point.

What NASA found was chlorinated hydrocarbons. Simple organic molecules made up of carbon, chlorine and hydrogen, sulphur containing compounds, and calcium perchlorate. I’m not an expert on chemistry (actually I’m not an expert on anything) but this is pretty basic stuff. What NASA found is some of the elements that needed to be present in order for life to be formed. That doesn’t mean we’ve found life but it gives us hope for future discoveries (also, read the last quote below). The most interesting thing is that we’ve also found calcium perchlorate. Phoenix lander found the same compound back in 2008 at the north pole of Mars. Curiosity is nowhere near that area and considering we’ve found the same compound on the other side of the planet, it’s definitely an interesting find. Why’s this discovery important? Well, since Mars is a very cold place, we had no chance of finding liquid water on Mars. But since calcium perchlorate is (I hate to use this phrase, but) some kind of salt, now we have hope that we may find liquid water on Mars. We already have enough evidence that Mars once had liquid water, but we’ve come to that conclusion by discovering indirect evidences since ’62. Finding a direct evidence would be huge.

Basically, the discovery itself doesn’t mean much of anything, but this is how science works. You make your way through up to discovery by finding pieces of evidences, therefore this discovery is important, as every other discovery. If it wasn’t important and wasn’t easy to misinterpret (because this is a sensitive topic), NASA wouldn’t spend a couple of weeks analyzing this data. I’m glad NASA learned its lesson because NASA had its fair share of false discoveries, most recently by the discovery of  GFAJ-1, which was a groundbreaking discovery and if it were true, was gonna change our understanding of how life happens. However later on NASA’s proved to be wrong and that didn’t help their image.

Now what?

Curiosity has been shooting lasers at rocks (literally) with its ChemCam,  scooping the soil, and now it’s going to start drilling (the drilling tool is mounted on the robotic arm) which will mark another milestone because after the drilling, Curiosity will complete testing all of its instruments and focus entirely on doing science and driving to Mount Sharp, which is 5.5 km high. To give you a reference point, this is where Curiosity is right now (as of SOL 116).  Getting and climbing to Mount Sharp will take some time (about a year) but Curiosity has the ability to touch & go, which is originally an aviation term, but in this case it means that the rover can drill/scoop/analyze stuff and then continue to move on its way in the same SOL.

Talking about this reminded me of Adam Seltzner’s quote. He said (right after Curiosity’s touchdown was confirmed): “Now we have to be patient. Which is why we think Curiosity’s middle name should be Patience”.

Also Grotzinger had a similar comment last night: “This mission is about integrated science. No single measurement will produce a hallelujah moment.”

Experts say we have to be patient, so we will. Meanwhile, stay curious.

So, I just got published on HuffPo

Despite of all its faults, I love Quora.

If I’m not mistaken, I’ve been a member of Quora for about 2 years even though I wasn’t using the service as often as I should. Since the last 2 weeks, I’ve been pretty active but I usually read some answers and never tried to answer any questions. There are couple of reasons why I did that, one of them being that I just didn’t know the etiquette of the site. I also didn’t want to provide false information. I like to learn about everything, but most of my knowledge comes from reading a lot of stuff. I’m not an expert on the stuff that I’m interested in. You may ask, what has changed? Nothing. I guess I have too much free time now and I don’t know how to spend it. I usually give long answers on Quora and try to explain my answer as best as I can. Writing an answer takes a lot of my time because I usually check my sources and since I’m not a native English speaker, I have to fix a lot of grammar mistakes. Anyway, a week ago, I answered this question and a day later, I got a message from someone who’s working for Quora. She wanted my permission to publish my article/answer on either HuffPo or Forbes. Quora publishes article on those sites quite often but it was still a privilege and I naturally accepted the offer. Couple of days later, I got a message with a link to my answer on HuffPo. Embedded version of my answer is below, I hope you’ll like it as much as the people on Quora did!

Read Quote of Abdullah Aloğlu’s answer to Red Bull: How could Felix Baumgartner jump from a height of 120,000 feet effortlessly? on Quora

First of all, it wasn’t an effortless jump. The jump was quite risky and things could have gotten messy easily (mostly due to weather).

In low air pressure, sky divers risk going into something called flat spin. In this position the body rotates horizontally. An uncontrolled flat spin could have rendered Felix unconscious, his blood rushing to his extremities, including his head which would have blinded him. To prevent this, Felix had a special parachute that would deploy automatically to help stabilize his descent.

Fluids in the human body start boiling above 62k feet (for more information, look up for “Armstrong limit”), unless the person who’s above that altitude has a pressure suit. Felix doubled that altitude, but before stepping into the capsule, he already had a helmet and his pressure suit on.

The air up there is cold and thin, so the temperature was an obvious problem. On top of that, as Felix plummets, he could have experienced -60 degrees C or lower. In such cold air, he would be unable to maintain the core temperature for the human body, which is 37 degrees C. However, Felix’s suit was strong enough to keep him warm enough when the air was as low as -68 degrees C up there.

Another problem that might have occurred during the jump was the shock waves. As Felix was approached the speed of sound he’d face some serious forces (look for:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son…). Forces at that altitude could have endangered him and his pressurized suit. Physicist Louis Bloomfield said: “Felix will be colliding with the gas so fast, that it can’t flow out of his way because it effectively doesn’t know that he’s coming”. Imagine that. Now, as far as I know, the team didn’t come up with any precautions to prevent this from happening because the help came from the air itself. Since the air at that altitude is so thin and less dense, the shock waves were less powerful.

I’m not sure about his exact landing location, but my guess is that he wasn’t that far off from where he took off. Following his landing, before he even detached his parachute, there were already few people around him, so my guess is he was fairly close to the location where he took off when he landed. I’m sorry I can’t be more precise.

 

The Newsroom

I’m gonna be frank. I hate this show with a passion. In every opportunity I get, I’m more than happy to unleash my anger towards this show. It deserves it. It deserves more hate than it already gets. The day humanity consider this show as the worst piece of crap ever that made it to TV, I’ll be a happy guy. Despite how I feel, I’ve been keep hate-watching the show and I gotta say, even though sometimes I’m embarrassed for the characters on this show, I quite enjoy how stupid things can get. I’ve been thinking about writing a piece on why I hate this so called show, but I recently read a comment on AV Club, which described exactly how I feel. Here’s the link, but you can also read the comment below:

I’ve been defending this show all season long, or at least I’ve been lukewarm on it or recognizing the things it does well. But you know what? I can’t do that anymore. This episode broke me. Fuck this show. Fuck it in its big, stupid, smug face. This was a pile of god-awful, warmed-over, clichéd bullshit that should have never made it to television. It might be the worst episode of TV that I’ve watched in 2012.

I thought Sorkin et al. were trying to make a show about the difficulties of making broadcast news in the modern world. But last night, The Newsroom doubled down on all the things its detractors have been pointing out: the empty political rhetoric; the go-nowhere relationship plotlines; the hero-worship of Will McAvoy; the yelling about the “news” and the “ratings” and the “tabloids” without getting to the heart of what those words really mean or imply. And moreover, there was no real plot to speak of; this was basically a bunch of angry Democrats standing on a dais and screaming the content of a Reddit thread.

Where’s the difficult work of cultivating sources? Where are the debates over how to report on specific news stories? Where is the clash of ideologies at the conference table? Mac and Will say something, everybody just agrees with it, and they all go on their merry way to fight imaginary wars against straw Republicans. Seriously, that conference room is like a fucking New York Times comment section.

And there’s the god-awful relationship stuff, a gigantic, pus-filled growth on the infected tumour that is The Newsroom. Who the hell cares if Maggie is fucking Don or Jim? This is college-level bullshit here. Everybody involved in this love pentagon is acting like an idiot. If they all just fucking said what they felt, then everything would be fine. But no, they have to go through misunderstanding after misunderstanding, and Don has to turn his apartment into a fucking fire hazard to get his girlfriend to move in with him, just so that she can conveniently ignore Jim’s phone call. Seriously, most teen dramas handle this shit better. Sorkin wouldn’t even be able to write for fucking 90210. And now Sloan is getting dragged into this bullshit. Fucking Sloan! One of the few awesome characters! And now she’s going to be pining after Don? No way. Fuck this shit.

Hell, Will and Mac can’t even get their shit together. They’ve been going back and forth for what? A year now? Shit or get off the pot, you morons. And was there any question as to what the content of Will’s phone message was? Seriously, how fucking stupid do the writers think the audience is? The worst part is that there has been almost zero progress on the relationship front for the entire season. Everybody (except for Sloan, whose attraction to Don came out of nowhere) is in the same damn place that he or she was at the start of the show. Here’s a hint: you can’t have a serialized drama where nothing fucking happens!

I also have to wonder: why is Will being elevated to God-like status for doing the same shit that Rachel Maddow does on MSNBC, or heck, the same shit that Jon Stewart does on Comedy Central? At least Stewart makes me laugh, and he’s been a hell of a lot more informative than Will McAvoy has ever been. News Night is essentially stealing year-old headlines off ThinkProgress and not even bothering to contextualize them. Seriously, what the fuck was with that montage? Romney thought that Obama was ruining the economy? So fucking what? What did that have to do with Dorothy Cooper? What did it have to do with anything else in the news report?

I was going to rant about the egregious wiretapping plotline and how it provided for too easy an out with Reese and Fiona – the villains can’t just be people who don’t see eye to eye with the heroes; they also have to be eeeeeevvviiiiilllll – but I don’t have the patience anymore. I’m fucking done with this show. I haven’t been this pissed off with a season finale since season 1 of The Killing. At least that show was fun to hate-watch. This is more like having caramel shoved down your throat by an overly earnest carnie yellling, “But you LOVE candy, don’t you?” Of course I love candy; I just don’t like Sorkin shoving his dick in my windpipe and ejaculating caramel-flavoured semen everywhere. So I’m giving up on this show, and with that, I say, “Fuck you, The Newsroom.”

by Merve

Breaking Bad, and incomprehensible hate towards Skyler

It’s quite obvious that this post is gonna be about a show that’s still on the air, so if you’re not up-to-date with the show, please stop reading. This piece includes spoilers from the last episode called “Say My Name”. You’ve been warned.

If you follow me on twitter and speak the language that I speak, you must be aware that I don’t understand the people who hate Skyler. I have to be honest, I used to hate her, too. When Walt was still a good guy who just wanted to provide for his family, she did patronize Walt a lot. Walt used to have two jobs. He was a chemistry teacher at a high school but when the school was over, he was cleaning the car of his students at a car wash. His life was pretty tough. Despite his wife, his son who’s disabled, and how hard he worked, Walt still had a relatively happy life, until he learned that he has cancer. After that, we all know what happened.

When Walt found out that he had cancer, his first thought was to provide for his family. He didn’t think about himself, his legacy after his death, nothing. All he cared was his family. He started doing something he probably never imagined that he would do. He started cooking meth. He endangered himself, but he didn’t care. As long as he made that $737.000, which he immaculately calculated and thought that, that amount of money would provide for every basic needs of his wife and his children, he was fine being dead. But then, he probably got the best news of his life, which turned out to be the worst news of his life: his cancer was in remission. That day, Walt find out that he’s gonna live after all, except he didn’t realize that he died that day. The day he was cancer free, he started losing the things that made a human, human. He eventually became a self-obsessed, self-righteous asshole.

Now, the issue with Skyler. The reason most people hate her is because she’s nagging Walt all the time with her attitude. She cheated on Walt just to get back at him and people are angry at her because of this. I’m not gonna use half measure here and say this: are you fucking kidding me? Walt becomes a partner with a child murderer, he actually poisons a child, he endangers his children, he takes prisoner of his wife, and people hate her because of her ATTITUDE? I just can’t believe how blind people can be. Walt is an egomaniac and obviously can’t see things clearly, but viewers has no relationship with these characters. You may like some of them and that’s not wrong, but I don’t understand how can a human being can side with Walter after all he’s done. Don’t get me wrong, Skyler has done some things she shouldn’t have done, too. I’m not denying that. But what she has done is no where near comparable to what Walt has done. She’s actually surprisingly sane, considering that the person she used to love holds him prisoner in his own house and forces her to make her kids live somewhere else. But she’s doing everything she can to keep their kids safe. She’s doing what any mother who loves his children would do. And she’s still waiting, waiting for the cancer to come back and kill her husband. When people who hate Skyler heard that line, I’m sure they hated her more. But they’re wrong. That was actually one of the most meaningful thing she could have said to Walt considering her situation. She knows that if she goes to the police, her children would have to live with the shame that their father was a meth cook. Not to mention Hank’s career would be destroyed. Besides those facts, maybe, somewhere deep down, she hopes that her husband still there and she wants him to die with whatever dignity he has left and remember him as the person she once loved. But we all know this story is not gonna end this happily.

Most of the TV writers I follow like to compare Vince Gilligan to David Chase. They’re right. If you watched The Sopranos, it’s highly likely that at some point you sympathized with Tony Soprano. You felt like he was a bad person, but it was all because of the way he was raised and despite the despicable acts he’d committed, there was still something inside of him that made him human. David Chase hated the fact that the audience felt this way. To him, Tony Soprano was evil. And he was. But even after the show was over, there were still some people thinking that Tony Soprano was the victim of his childhood. So David Chase did the best thing he could to fuck with the audience the way he finished the series. Vince Gilligan is aware of this and he doesn’t want to do the same mistake that David Chase did. Since the beginning of this season, he’s doing everything in his power to prove that Walter has become evil. He doesn’t want anyone to think that Walter is still a good person. “Say My Name” was the proof of that.

We liked and rooted for Walt because he was doing this despicable job for the future of his family. We knew he was still human. We knew he was aware of the fact that he was doing something wrong. But we forgave him because he was sacrificing himself for his family. Now he’s got no one left. His wife barely speaks to him, his children lives somewhere else, his partner is gone and he still can’t see how fucked up he is. He’s partnering up with a guy who killed a boy without even blinking. His manipulations went so overboard, he tried to manipulate Jesse into thinking that he couldn’t sleep for a few days because he thought of that kid Todd killed. And few minutes later, he didn’t mind whistling in front of Jesse. I’m so glad that Jesse can now see clearly the true face of Walter. He’s so sure of this, he even turned down his share of 5 million dollars. Because he knows that if he listens to Walter and cook all the stuff that they have, there will be no soul searching (remember Walt’s speech if this didn’t make any sense). There will be no soul searching because there won’t be any soul to search. With all these facts in mind, people are still in denial about Walter. They (and he) still thinks that after all things said and done, he’s gonna be the same chemistry teacher we all knew. This is not gonna happen. Vince Gilligan apparently thinks this way too, because he made Walter killed the only guy (probably) everybody loves. Walter killed Mike. Mike was evil too and he deserved to die but I’m still sad that he’s gone. Because Mike was still human. He had his granddaughter that made him human. He could see the real Walt as well as Jesse and he wanted out. He was gonna run away, except that he made a mistake. Apart from letting Walt to bring him the bag with a gun in it, his mistake was not to kill Lydia. Remember the “Half Measure” episode, where Mike told Walter a story about a guy who beat his wife all the time? He had the chance to kill the guy, and save that poor woman, but he didn’t. He chose half measure. He did what he thought was right. He warned the husband not to touch that woman ever again and he let him go. Only to find out after 2 weeks that the woman died in the hands of her husband. After that, Mike learned that he shouldn’t use half measure ever again, but he did. He said that he’ll never make the same mistake again, but he did. Which was probably the biggest mistake of his life. After Walt shot Mike, Walt basically told him that he was expandable, because Lydia also knew the names of Mike’s people in prison, who’re loose ends. I loved Mike, because I thought that he was the only character in the show that usually had the same thought as me, even though he didn’t speak a lot. He was always sulking and he was unhappy. He never interfered with anything unless it was necessary to do so. When he became partner with Walt, he said the things I’d like to say to Walt. I loved the last episode especially for this reason. He yelled at Walt’s face about how egomaniac he was but Walter just can not see how right Mike is. And at the end of this episode, I was so angry at Walt, Mike said the only thing that would’ve made me feel better at that time: “Shut the fuck up and let me die in peace.”

Curiosity

NASA is great. Despite all the political bullshit they get from the US government, they still achieve amazing things. I’m not an American, but you don’t have to be an American to appreciate what they’ve done for the mankind.

Curiosity is not a solo project of the US. They launched the rover (not rover itself, but the rocket which carried the rover) and most of its instruments were made by USA, however there are 7 other countries who helped build the biggest rover ever sent to Mars. I’d have loved to see my country on that list, but since we’re a nation still debating on whether the evolution is true or not, I guess we still have some work to do.

London is estimated to spend $12 billion dollars at the end of the Olympics and all NASA needed was $2.5 billion dollars to send a rover to Mars. This should put some things in perspective. Olympics are a big deal, I’m not denying that. But is it more important than doing science? Just imagine what would happen if the Curiosity would happen to find life on Mars (that’s not its mission objective, but you never know). Just the religion aspect of the discovery would be HUGE. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard for the US to give the budget to NASA that it needs. Obama promised that the US would start manned missions to Mars by 2030s. Yet he’s the one who cut NASA’s budget. I still don’t think we can solely blame Obama here, but he’s the guy in charge. I know politics is about making everyone happy, which is something that’s not possible, but I’d at least be grateful to see the POTUS fight for science. Still, like I said, it’s not solely his fault.

The landing was at 8:30 in my local time. I went to bed at 4 AM, but I decided not to sleep because I’m a deep sleeper and I wouldn’t forgive myself if I missed the landing. So I stayed up and it was worth it.

Few hours before the landing, at the press conference, Adam Stelzner (who’s one of the people in charge of this mission) said, “We’re rationally confident but emotionally terrified”. I loved that quote. Just shows you how much they worked for this day and even the %00.1 chance of anything going wrong terrifies them.

When the landing was confirmed, NASA’s Control Room at Pasadena went crazy. I’m not ashamed to admit that I cried. That was a big day for humankind. I hope everyone can recognize that. But the best we can achieve is ahead of us and the job is not finished. NASA’s gonna check the parts of the device to make sure it’s %100 working and the rover’s gonna install the Surface Software so it can move on the surface of Mars (I still get chills when I say that). This may take some time. To make people understand how long this process can take, people at NASA said “Now we have to be patient. Which is why we think Curiosity’s middle name should be Patience”. It may take about a month for Curiosity to start taking examples from the rocks but it may take 3 or 4 months to start its mission on full power.

This video explains the best on how Curiosity is going to operate on Mars:

I’m not gonna blabber anymore. I’m not a scientist and I’m nowhere near understanding the complexity of this stuff. I’m just a science enthusiast and I’m so excited about this. I truly hope everyone can recognize and appreciate what this team is doing for us.

August 6th, 2012 was a big day. Don’t forget that.

Wisdom of Douglas Adams

Ford Prefect explaining to Arthur Dent about why a robot said “take me to your lizards”.

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…”

“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”

“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”

“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”

“I did,” said ford. “It is.”

“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”

“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”

“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”

“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”

“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”

“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”

“What?”

“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”

“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”

Ford shrugged again.

“Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”

Muslim Medical Students Boycotting Lectures on Evolution

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2066795/Muslim-students-walking-lectures-Darwinism-clashes-Koran.html

OK. This is ridiculous. I do not have anything against religious people, almost every person I know is religious, I was once one of them. But no matter what you believe in, you simply can not say “I want to study medicine, but I’m not gonna listen any lectures about the theories of a person, which by the way seen as the most recognizable scientist of all time”. My mind can not comprehend the fact that some people can be this ignorant to say such a thing. I hope this makes some impact in the media, because this is a very, very dangerous thing. Can you believe 5-10 years later, these people will be the very people who will serve us as our doctors? That’s a terrifying thought.

Don’t get me wrong, every person has the right to decide what to believe and what to learn, but if you have vertigo, you don’t become a pilot. It’s common sense. How are these people are going to become doctors if they don’t know anything about evolution? Or after they graduate, when we go to them as their patients will they recommend us to pray instead of giving us the proper medicine for our diseases, like these people?

I hope the administration at UCL will either force them to take the class, or just kick them out of the university. Just don’t let them become doctors.

On the LeBron vs Jordan debate (from the Book of Basketball)

The story on the book is not quite about the Lebron vs Jordan debate, but it gives you a good idea and perspective about the situation. I copied the story from the beginning to make more sense for the people who haven’t read the book.

In the spring of 2007, I stumbled across NBA TV’s replay of Havlicek’s farewell game, which was showing on a Sunday morning when the only people watching were probably me and the Havliceks. Two things stood out about that game. First, the opening tip-off was delayed for eight and a half minutes because Celtics fans wouldn’t stop cheering after Hondo was introduced. Let’s see that happen in 2009 with … anyone. And second, according to CBS’ ancient-looking halftime graphics, Havlicek’s statistical resume on April 9, 1978, looked like this:

Most games played (1,269)

Most playoff games played (172)

Only player to score 1,000 points in sixteen straight seasons

Third in career scoring (26,895 points)

Second in career minutes played (46,407)

Seeing those numbers three decades later, my gast was flabbered. Yeah, I remembered Hondo carrying us to the ’76 championship, and I remembered that he was one of the best players of his time, a physical freak of nature, someone who routinely played 42 to 44 minutes a night without tiring. Throughout his final season, I recall opposing teams showering him with gifts at every stop. But third in scoring, second in minutes and first in games played? John Havlicek? I did some digging and found that Hondo made thirteen straight All-Star teams, four All-NBA first teams and seven All-NBA second teams; he played for eight title teams and won the 1974 Finals MVP; and he earned one of 11 spots on the NBA’s thirty-fifth-anniversary team in 1980. To this day, he ranks tenth in points, eighth in minutes and seventh in playoff points. By any measurement, he remains one of the twenty best players ever. But if you asked a hundred die-hard NBA fans under thirty to name their top twenty, how many would name Havlicek? Three? Five? Shit, how many of them could even spell “Havlicek”?

Which begs the question: does greatness have a shelf life?

A few weeks after that Havlicek telecast, young LeBron James dropped 48 points on Detroit to singlehandedly save the Cavs-Pistons series (as well as the ’07 playoffs, which were on life support). Clearly, something monumental had happened: not only did Marv Albert bless the performance as one of the greatest in playoff history, but it felt like a tipping point for LeBron’s career, the night he tapped into his considerable gifts and lifted himself to another level. When talking heads, columnists, bloggers and fans raced to put the night into perspective, for once the hyperbole seemed justified. More than a few people played the “MJ was great, but he never had a game like that” card, as if Jordan’s remarkable career had to be demeaned for everyone to fully respect what LeBron had accomplished. In my ESPN.com column the following day, I wrote that Jordan never physically overpowered an opponent the way LeBron ramshackled the Pistons, comparing it to Bo Jackson wreaking havoc in his prime.

By the weekend, after everyone had calmed down about the “48 Special,” I found myself recalling some of Jordan’s killer moments—how he coldly destroyed Drexler in the ’92 Finals, how he prevailed against the rugby tactics of Riley’s Knicks, how he stole Game 7 against the ’98 Pacers by repeatedly getting to the line, how he ended his Chicago career with the incredible layup-steal-jumper sequence in Utah—and regretting that, like nearly everyone else, I had fallen into the “let’s degrade the old guy to coronate the new guy” trap. I had always sworn never to do that. One of my favorite books is Wait Till Next Year, in which a sports columnist (Mike Lupica) and a screenwriter (William Goldman) trade chapters about a particularly crazy year in New York sports. Writing from the fan’s perspective, Goldman submitted an impassioned defense of Wilt Chamberlain’s legacy called “To the Death,” one of my favorite pieces and a major influence on this book. According to Goldman, great athletes fade from memory not because they’re surpassed by better ones, but because we forget about them or our memories are tainted by things that have nothing to do with their career (like Bill Russell being a lousy announcer or O.J. being a lousy ex-husband). Here’s the killer excerpt: “The greatest struggle an athlete undergoes is the battle for our memories. It’s gradual. It begins before you’re aware that it’s begun, and it ends with a terrible fall from grace. It really is a battle to the death.”

This piece was published in 1988, back when Bird and Magic were at the height of their superpowers and Jordan was nearing the same breakthrough that LeBron eventually enjoyed in Detroit. Already saddened that we would be poking holes in them someday, Goldman predicted, “Bird and Magic’s time is coming. It’s easy being fans of theirs now. Just wait. Give it a decade.” Then he wrote an entire mock paragraph of fans picking apart their games in the year 2000, complaining that Magic couldn’t guard anyone and Bird was too slow. He ended with this mock quote: “Sure [Bird] was good, and so was Magic—but they couldn’t play today.” Maybe it hasn’t happened yet because of the uniqueness of their games, the symmetry of their careers, and the whole “Bird and Magic saved the NBA” myth (we’ll get there). But with Jordan? It’s already happening. As recently as 1998, we collectively agreed Jordan was the greatest player we would ever see. That didn’t stop us from quickly trying to replace him with Grant Hill (didn’t take), Kobe Bryant (didn’t take), LeBron James (taking), and Kobe again (sporadically taking). Everyone’s willingness to dump Jordan for LeBron in 2007 was genuinely perplexing. Yeah, the “48 Special” was a magnificent sporting event, but it paled in comparison with a twenty-year-old Magic jumping center in Philly in place of an injured Kareem, playing five positions, slapping up a 42–15–7 and willing the Lakers to the 1980 title. If that happened today, pieces of Skip Bayless’ head would be scattered across Bristol.

So what makes us continually pump up the present at the expense of the past? Goldman believed that every era is “so arrogant [and] so dismissive,” and again he was right, although that arrogance/dismissiveness isn’t entirely intentional. We’d like to believe that our current stars are better than the guys we once watched. Why? Because the single best thing about sports is the unknown. It’s more fun to think about what could happen than what already happened. We know we won’t see another Bird or Magic; we already stopped looking. They were too unique. But Jordan … that one is conceivable. We might see another hypercompetitive, unfathomably gifted shooting guard reach his potential in our lifetime. We might. So it’s not that we want LeBron to be just as good as MJ; we need him to be better than MJ. We already did the MJ thing. Who wants to rent the same movie twice? We want LeBron to take us to a place we haven’t been. It’s the same reason we convinced ourselves that Shaq was better than Wilt and Nash was better than Cousy. We didn’t know these things for sure. We just wanted them to be true.

There’s a simpler reason why we’re incapable of appreciating the past. As the Havlicek broadcast proved to me, it’s easy to forget anything if you stop thinking about it long enough, even something as fundamentally ingrained in your brain as “My favorite basketball team employed one of the best twenty players ever when I was a little kid and I watched him throughout my childhood.” Once upon a time, the Boston Garden fans cheered Hondo for 510 seconds. And I was there. I was in the building. I cheered for every one of those 510 seconds and it was the only happy memory of that entire crummy season. But that’s the funny thing about noise: eventually it stops.