Was Michael Jackson's hair catching fire in a Pepsi ad the exact mid-point of his life?

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Do check out Bobby's video. It's a work of art. But be warned: it contains adult themes and some strong language. So if you watch my videos with young people, maybe watch Bobby's when they're not around. • Michael Jackson on Fir...
And a huge thanks to my good friend BEC HILL who introduced me to Bobby. PS Hello to everyone reading this from A Problem Squared.
UPDATE: The envelope of pin-board paraphernalia has been claimed! standupmaths/stat...
First person to find me IN A PUBLIC SPACE can have the pin-up board (without the pins or board). I've put all the bits in an envelop and will carry it with me whenever I'm in public. Don't try to hunt me down at home. It'll be weird.
I think this is the original claim that it was the mid-point of his life. From April 2019.
www.mjjcommunity.com/threads/...
Here is the quote about the time of day his hair caught fire: "at the Shrine Auditorium Friday night"
www.upi.com/Archives/1984/01/...
Here is the regulation governing daylight saving time in Indiana when Michael Jackson was born:
1957: "The General Assembly votes to make Central time the official time of the state but permit any community to switch to daylight-saving time during the summer."
eu.indystar.com/story/news/po...
This website claims Gar did switch to daylight saving in 1958, specifically: "27 Apr 1958 - Time Zone Change (CST → EST)" but I'm not sure where that information has come from.
www.timeanddate.com/time/chan...
Huge thanks to my Patreon supports who keep in strings and pins. Join and you'll have a head-start the next I foolishly encourage the internet to hunt me down. / standupmaths
CORRECTIONS
- None yet, let me know if you spot anything!
Filming and editing by Alex Genn-Bash
Written and performed by Matt Parker
Produced by Nicole Jacobus
Music by Howard Carter
Design by Simon Wright and Adam Robinson
MATT PARKER: Stand-up Mathematician
Website: standupmaths.com/
US book: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo...
UK book: mathsgear.co.uk/collections/b...

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16 мар 2023

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Комментарии : 1,4 тыс.

@reschultzed Год назад

According to a family member with direct access to the birth certificate, Michael Jackson was born at 7:33 PM. Assuming that Gary was indeed on Daylight Savings Time that summer, that would place the precise midpoint of his life at 2:59 AM Los Angeles time on January 27, 1984. As for the fire incident, on the day after the L.A. Times reported that it had taken place at 6:30 PM. So his hair caught fire when his life was 50.00348% over, or 13,366,197 minutes into a total lifespan of 26,730,533 minutes.

@04LightningFan Год назад

Gary, Indiana is located near Chicago. While most of Indiana uses EDT, areas near Chicago in the NW corner and areas in the SW corner use CDT for local convenience.

@RonParker Год назад

@@04LightningFan They do *now*, yes. Before 2006, none of Indiana used EDT (UTC-4), but parts of Indiana used CST (UTC-6) in the winter. And even longer ago, during a period of time relevant to this discussion, it was a complete free-for-all, as Matt explained in the video. But it does seem likely that much of the northwest corner of the state, including Gary, would have opted to remain on EST that summer, because it would match Chicago's CDT.

@selatorepico5975 Год назад

Booooring. I'm here for the math, not the results 😂😂😂

@TheBlindfischLP Год назад

The real answer is always in the comments.

@piciaxel Год назад

So that's around 15.5 hours off. Not bad.

@theyellowstripe1 Год назад

Okay, how badly do people want those papers and string? Would it not be funnier to make Matt carry them around for the rest of his life?

@standupmaths Год назад

I may have made a huge mistake.

@georgelionon9050 Год назад

But he could spice it up to get rid of it.. "if you ask me you get the upboard and 100$".

@blockchaaain Год назад

Oh no. Is this video destined to be the exact midpoint of Matt's life??

@michaelsmith4904 Год назад

@@georgelionon9050 He already could have spiced it up by including the push-pins, but given that he didn't even do that...

@wobblysauce Год назад

That isn’t the first mistake

@Nicole73737 Год назад

This is precisely the kind of weirdly specific math 'myth' content I love

@geekjokes8458 Год назад

hmmmmmm oh where do i know you from?

@jjl3257 Год назад

This midpoint of most people's lives was probably during this video. At least it seemed to last half a lifetime.

@flapjacki9579 Год назад

"That is a hundred percent accurate, I've done a lot of calculations here"

@RowanFortier Год назад

hypercubers gang 😎

@GriffinsTale1142 Год назад

Because you're a NERD /s

@deadlyshizzno Год назад

I'm honestly still just shocked that this event was actually like roughly within 24 hours of the exact mid point of his life. That in itself is still crazy close

@stylis666 Год назад

24 is still ridiculously precise if you consider the 18 hour difference for a time on a day just before a leap day and the day difference because there were 6 leap days between his birth and midpoint and 7 between the midpoint and his death. The error margin is about 32 hours. 33 if you factor in the uncertainty of the time used on the day of birth and 57 if you factor in the fact that the time of birth on that day is unknown. So Matt could be an entire day off and the time of setting MJ's hair set on fire could actually be the exact midpoint of his life, or two days after the midpoint.

@Cream147player Год назад

But I mean looking at Michael Jackson's life, a lot of things happened on a lot of days. It could've been the day he got his first solo number 1, the day that he first did the moonwalk in public, the day Michael Jackson's Moonwalker released, and literally hundreds of other significant events that happened in his life. It's not particularly shocking that something would happen on or around the day that was the midpoint of his life.

@nola1439 Год назад

He had an extremely eventful life. He was famous as a child, peaked in fame in adulthood, and died young. And throughout his fame he was extremely busy doing all kinds of stuff. So it’d actually be more odd if nothing happened on his midpoint.

@woozie3241 Год назад

for a man that was touring around the world during his midlife and had an incredible careeer its not unlikely that his midpoint of his life is going to be during some event

@ronakparikh Год назад

@@Cream147player I am sure if none of those events lined up with the midpoint we would instead be talking about some other famous person that does have a significant event close to the midpoint of their life, so this is really more like the birthday paradox

@Sarafan92 Год назад

For 7 minutes you led me to believe I shared a birthday with Michael Jackson and now you've taken it away from me.

@ksven Год назад

This made me laugh a lot, for some reason.

@zyxwvut4740 Год назад

Yeah, but he gave it back to my brother.

@theshybiguy2908 Год назад

I had the exact opposite, for the first 7 minutes he stole Michael Jackson's birthday from me haha

@faland0069 11 месяцев назад

And then he sorta brought it back at 12:12

@juneguts Год назад

my main takeaway is that it's basically accurate to a scary degree

@shadmtmtn1603 Год назад

Worst case, it's about 0.006%, best case 0.003%. Very scary close 😉🖖

@DoctorX17 Год назад

Very wild

@mremumerm Год назад

within a hair

@OmegaSparky Год назад

@@mremumerm I see what you did there and I approve.

@LMG7 Год назад

@@mremumerm You win!

@nathanmays7926 Год назад

“Bobby is a friend of a friend”. Imagine being the dude who is friends with both Matt and Bobby. What a legend.

@BecHillComedian Год назад

I prefer the pronoun "dude"

@yf-n7710 Год назад

@@BecHillComedian ?

@BecHillComedian Год назад

@@yf-n7710 I'm not a guy

@nathanmays7926 Год назад

@@BecHillComedian fixed :P

@pranavflame Год назад

@@BecHillComedian oh hey! You're that life-size poster from Matt's video about non-repeating 5-letter word pentuples.

@Paplefication Год назад

We've finally done it! We've finally found the Parker Midpoint!

@bl4cksp1d3r Год назад

I'm at the Parker Midpoint of the Parker Square, eating a Parker Pi.

@Kopetan4egX Год назад

RU-vid shows, that video was uploaded 24 minutes ago, and you made your commentary 3 hours ago. How's that possible?

@bl4cksp1d3r Год назад

@@Kopetan4egX patreon early access I guess

@Kopetan4egX Год назад

@@bl4cksp1d3r Ah, i see, thanks

@iz5772 Год назад

We?!

@xyzabc4574 Год назад

As a computer programmer I was SOOO ready for @5:08 when we "now have to factor in time zones" and the crushing look of defeat on your face as you announce it.

@axthelm Год назад

I was expecting him to change everything to UTC like a good programmer/engineer should.

@refreshfr Год назад

Yeah, timezones is instant game-over

@okra_ Год назад

negative Unix time baby!!!

@almostcertainlynotapotato6528 Год назад

Me, not a programmer: Flashback to tom scott descending into madness

@idontwantahandlethough Год назад

AHHHHHHHH!!!! Sorry, you scared me. You can't just say stuff like that dude! Would you yell "fire" in a crowded theatre?! No. No you wouldn't. So don't talk about timezone programming in a nerd-infested comment section.. it's a serious public safety hazard ⚠

@MCredstoningnstuff Год назад

What you could say, even conservatively, is that it is within 0.0985% of the midpoint of his life and intervals really are as close as we'll get here.

@thechumpsbeendumped.7797 Год назад

I think that's a little off, coz 0.0985% of 18,562 is 18.283 days.

@MCredstoningnstuff Год назад

@@thechumpsbeendumped.7797 I forgot to divide hours by 24! It's 0.0041%

@PeterNjeim Год назад

@@MCredstoningnstuff why would you need to divide the hours by 24 factorial? Wouldn't it just be 24?

@I_Love_Learning Год назад

@@PeterNjeim Okay, Assuming this is a joke, that is pretty funny. Assuming it isn't, he was excited in the sentence and instead of using a period he used an exclamation mark, which also happens to be the sign for factorial.

@FLPhotoCatcher Год назад

He over-stated his case when he included the last two hours of Aug 28, 1958 and said that Jan 26, 1984 was actually the midpoint of Michael Jackson's life. Should the last two hours of Aug 28, 1958 even be included in the figures? His birth certificate says Aug 29, 1958. And MJ should not be referred to in the plural. I would hope a mathematician could get that correct.🤦‍♂

@peterbalholm2138 Год назад

Michael Jackson's life lasted a fraction more than twice as long as he was probably afraid it would have, while his hair was on fire. And I am sure that was a relief.

@user-qj4jb6cy9k Год назад

There's something depressing in the term "life mid-point" itself, that kept me thinking about it all the time. I mean, there is a mid-point in everyone lives and no one can know when it happens. Maybe the day your hair cath on fire, or a usual one. The point being - mathematic video oddly motivated me to do things I wanted and/or needed

@iagas9 Год назад

I felt the same way. It’s a really weird concept

@livingwater25 Год назад

cath on fire lmao

@NoriMori1992 10 месяцев назад

I love this.

@ljfinger Год назад

The engineer in me wants to see how far out of tolerance the hair on fire was with respect to the midpoint compared to the whole lifetime.

@victordrouinviallard1700 Год назад

0.0985% per someone else's calculations

@EpydemicZero Год назад

Wow! As to say that quite possibly if his split ends were trimmed just months prior his hair might not have been that flammable? Interesting

@smileyp4535 Год назад

@@EpydemicZero I think they mean if you "zoom out" and make the intervals bigger how far out would you have to look to make it the middle? Like groups of 3 days, 4 days? Weeks? Months? Etc. If you group it into months then yes it seems to be in the middle, but what about weeks? 5 days? 4 days? 3? Etc. Basically the question is, at what "resolution" does it become the midpoint of his life?

@jossypoo Год назад

@@smileyp4535 well, at the beginning when he throws 9280 before and after this 2 day period, would that not indicate that a resolution of "two days" would make it the centre, as in the first diagram?

@EpydemicZero Год назад

@Smiley P well golly gee! So you are saying that instead of days break the separation down to groups of days up to as to change the "resolution". So if the interval was in a different that the "tolerance" would allow the Pepsi commercials to the middle of his life?

@scottgriz Год назад

That was the deepest dive into something that I care absolutely nothing about but Matt somehow managed to keep me watching.

@miriamrosemary9110 Год назад

Same

@really-quite-exhausted Год назад

Same! I never knew I could care so deeply about Michael Jackson's time of birth 😅

@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 Год назад

I didn't realize I could spend fifteen minutes watching someone say "no."

@stylis666 Год назад

@@really-quite-exhausted _" I never knew I could care so deeply about Michael Jackson's time of birth 😅"_ Which wasn't in a leap year and neither were his birth or the midpoint, so to calculate the midpoint you need to correct for that. None of those days was the same amount off from a leap year either. The difference on the birthday was 12 hours, midpoint was 18 hours, and death was 6 hours. And there was an uneven amount of leap years between the birth and death, putting 7 of them after the midpoint and 6 before it. So imagine MJ was born 01.00 on August 28, 1958. His second year would have been completed on 20.00 August 27, 1960. Vice versa, if you're born 21.00 Jan 27 in 1981. Three years later your third orbit around the sun isn't completed until 06.00 Jan 28, 1984. Time on January 27th in 1984 was 6 hours ahead of August 28 in 1958, and 6 hours behind of the day of death and that would've canceled out nicely if there was an even amount of leap years between his birth and death, putting the calculated midpoint Matt arrived at 12 hours late in the year. It was never on the 28th, not in the morning or in the night, regardless of what the time of birth was.

@JimmyLundberg Год назад

This could've just as well been answered in a 3 second video. But I'm here for the full 15 minutes. Honestly, it could've been even longer!

@DFsdf3443d Год назад

@rom.ya.3799 Год назад

3 second video be like: "Matt here! No, it was not the midpoint. Patreon⬇️"

@RedHair651 Год назад

A 3-second video with an intro, a no, and an outro would have been funny, though.

@asheep7797 Год назад

"Out of the 18,563 days MJ lived, that day was number 9,282, so no."

@gfixler Год назад

Yes, he didn't even get into all of the issues of time dilation and reference frames with all of the traveling Michael Jackson did in his life. He was actually fractionally younger than any of us realized!

@harip.nambiar5674 Год назад

Hello Matt and Bec! This is Hari from the problem squared. I had seen this video when it was released. Came back just to comment and say Hi.

@CrashSable Год назад

What you could say is that as the 26th January 1984 was the central day of his life (let's call it the peak of his life), his hair catching fire was the signifying event marking his slow descent towards death.

@EvenTheDogAgrees Год назад

Nope, his conception was the signifying event marking his slow descent towards death. The aging process starts in the womb.

@skinnersphere Год назад

And he supposedly got hooked on pain medication because of the accident, which slowly led to his death.

@Blox117 Год назад

@@EvenTheDogAgrees different aging process though. you dont become an old person for several decades later

@Dywindel Год назад

I can't believe Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire the exact middle week of his life.

@AdrianWoodUK Год назад

Hi Matt. I understand from the "Not To Scale" note that the string timeline is not to scale, thank you. Can you I just confirm whether the "Not To Scale" note is, itself, to scale? If not, perhaps there should have been some smaller "Not To Scale" note labelling the original "Not To Scale" note as not to scale. I can't foresee any infinite recursion issues with doing that. If it is indeed to scale, to what is it scaled? That aside, perhaps you could add a note alongside saying "Note to scale", so that we know that that note is, in fact, to scale. So, a chart labelled with a note "Not To Scale", with that note labelled with another note, "Note To Scale", nothing could be simpler.

@MichaelOnines Год назад

The note is 1:1

@Twisted_Code Год назад

but what if the note is not to scale, not note to scale? and if the note is not to scale and the not to scale note is not to scale, obviously we would just document the limit of the infinite recursion and be done with it, the mathematician way. Not note the not to scale note.

@sanjaymatsuda4504 Год назад

The "not to scale" label is just a label; it itself is at the scale it needs to be. If it were actually the graph of a curve that just happened to resemble a handwritten "not to scale" label, and Matt had bungled its scale a little when drawing it, only then would it require its own "not to scale" label.

@shadmtmtn1603 Год назад

Noteception, that's a concept 😅🖖

@amazinggrace5692 Год назад

Brilliantly funny! Bravo!

@jukkajylanki4769 Год назад

I can't believe how this video was not about talking about two zero-length events having a zero chance of overlapping (since you don't need to do any computations to arrive at an answer "no"), followed then by trying to estimate how long Michael Jackson's hair had been on fire to give it a non-zero duration, so one could at least re-define the question as "at the exact midpoint of his life, was Michael Jackson's hair on fire?"

@gary.h.turner Год назад

⏱️⏳👶➡️⚡🤯🔥😡🔜🚒👨‍🚒🧯➡️⚰️💀⌛⌚🔚 (careful emoji translation required!)

@KalebPeters99 Год назад

Great point!

@NoriMori1992 10 месяцев назад

I doubt his hair catching fire was a zero-length event (if there even is such a thing), and I'm also not sure how you arrived at the conclusion that two zero-length events have zero chance of overlapping.

@leroture7750 6 месяцев назад

@@NoriMori1992 On a continuous scale, the chance of two points being chosen at random being the same point is uncountably infinitesimal, or 0.

@Zwiebelgian Год назад

„Before he finally dies…“ That could have probably been phrased better😂

@redcuillin 13 дней назад

If you think that was tactless, I wouldn't watch the end of the Bobby Fingers video.

@davidfinch7418 Год назад

I'm so glad that you put the trace of his first and last heartbeats on the time line.... but perhaps you should have included some faster ones in the middle... during the hairflammation event :D

@PastyMancer Год назад

Wow, that's one hell of a midlife crisis

@craigelbagel0012 Год назад

I wasn't sure how you were going to make this into a 15 minute video, but I was pleasantly surprised. Very entertaining thanks!

@GuildMaster Год назад

Craigelbagel in the wild lol

@novarender_ Год назад

Craigelbagel in the wild

@better.better Год назад

hey Matt. for Patreon bonus points, do the same thing, but include the relativity time differential for the world traveling that he would have done over the course of touring

@polyacov_yury Год назад

Ah yes. Femtoseconds

@ryanjohnson3615 Год назад

Ha I asked that too before reading your comment.. I wonder if Юрий Поляков is correct in the difference being in femtoseconds...

@OrangeC7 Год назад

I'm sure it would be at least an order of magnitude more than a femtosecond, right?

@fussyboy2000 Год назад

Seems likely that MJ will have crossed the international date line at some point.

@shadmtmtn1603 Год назад

@@OrangeC7eath has actually no universal definition (we don't even know if we should consider the heart activity or the brain activity 😅), so measuring the time of MJ's death to the femtosecond seems very ambitious to say the least, and would lead to endless theories and discussions 🤣🖖 Edit : grammar 😅

@backwashjoe7864 Год назад

When he puts up the "Not to scale" sign @2:19, I contend that the figure was actually to scale. He had just the birth date and death date on the board. There was nothing to be "out of scale" at that point. The length of string between the two push pins represents 18,562 days, with some value of days/inch represented. Thus, we had the "Parker Not To Scale".

@M4TCH3SM4L0N3 Год назад

I mean, it still feels quite remarkable to have such a major life impacting event so near to the middle of one's life, even if it's not precisely accurate. Not in some mysterious "the way that the universe works" or "was MJ supposed to die but he challenged death to a dance-off and earned an extra lifespan?" sort of way, but more in a tragic poetic sort of way: there's his life before the accident, and his life after the accident, and they are both tragic. The fact that they are so near in duration means that there could be some seriously interesting storytelling potential in there.

@playdischord1791 Год назад

Could see the biopic showing it at the middle of the film or even at the beginning (in medias res) then flashbacking to his life before and right up to the incident and then everything after it.

@theboysown Год назад

I’m so grateful I live at a time when people can focus on things like this.

@esotericVideos Год назад

Considering it was within 24 hours of the midpoint I would be willing to say "close enough". Particularly because we don't know Michael's sleep schedule or where he considered days to begin and end. So the day of filming when it caught on fire could be considered the midpoint.

@supermax64 Год назад

Agreed, you could always raise the resolution to a point where it's not actually the perfect middle of his life, so within the same day sounds close enough to me.

@restorer19 Год назад

We do know that his sleep schedule toward the end of his life wasn't much of a schedule (or arguably, much real sleep), so it's probably impossible to divide days that way any more accurately.

@jonathanrichards593 Год назад

I see where you're going, but we don't measure time in 'sleeps', except in the days before Christmas. There's a general agreement that the new day begins on the stroke of midnight.

@unbitri123 Год назад

@@jonathanrichards593 do you say you didn't get to sleep until 2am this morning or 2am last night? most people say the latter

@frankjohnson123 Год назад

@@supermax64 Technically not true because the event had finite duration (the time his hair was on fire), so it's possible for that range to include the exact midpoint. Practically, however, I agree this is definitely close enough

@darreljones8645 Год назад

Honestly, the statement "Michael's Jackson's hair was on fire at the exact midpoint of his life" isn't exactly a conspiracy theory; it's more of a coincidence. to make it a conspiracy theory, it would have to be something like, "Michael Jackson's hair was on fire at the exact midpoint of his life, and that's why Cthulhu stuck him down when he did".

@barticle Год назад

Speaking of counting days, I discovered today by accident that Wednesday this week was Microsoft Excel day number 45000.

@davelordy Год назад

Every man has a "hair catching fire" moment at the mid-point of their lives. For me it was shitting myself in Burger King, and not even the toilets. I currently live by myself.

@thechumpsbeendumped.7797 Год назад

Don't worry, by tomorrow it will no longer be your midpoint. Go out and seize the remainder of your life by the balls young/middle aged/old man.

@valinhorn42 Год назад

Now I'd like to know how you know that that was the mid-point of your life. Wouldn't that kind of imply that you already know the date and time of your death?

@thechumpsbeendumped.7797 Год назад

@@valinhorn42 I think he was joking🙄

@davelordy Год назад

@@valinhorn42 _"how [did] you know that that was the mid-point of your life"_ Simple trigonometry.

@Denjaminable Год назад

This just reminds me of that one Tom Scott hosted Computerphile video. Where he spirals as explaining how our time system is a nightmare to model 😂

@Shaun742 Год назад

Thanks for introducing me to Bobby Fingers. I'd never heard of him but just watched the video you linked and it was hilarious. Instantly subscribed.

@aervanath Год назад

I spent the first 7:30 of the video wondering why nobody in the comments was complaining that the birthday was a day off...now I can relax.

@TheNerdyOrganist Год назад

Honestly, even if it were off by a week, it's a pretty huge coincidence that this live changing event happened at about the middle point of his live.

@feronanthus9756 Год назад

Due to Gary's proximity to Chicago they (and the surrounding counties) most certainly were using DST since its practically the entire reason Indiana had that caveat in their laws (the other bit being the lower corner of the state near Lousiville, KY)

@Fjaloeat1 Год назад

Correct. Gary is considered part of the Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area and is currently in the same time zone as Chicago year round. Both the northwest and southwest corners of Indiana are in central time while the rest of the state is in eastern time. This makes it fairly reasonable to assume Gary shared whatever time zone Chicago was under in 1958.

@jamisonr Год назад

Its close enough that it qualifies as one of those party facts you pull out to amaze people. Many folks my age (mid 40s) remember the MJ Hair on Fire incident, so it has a special nostalgia for us.

@andyjdhurley Год назад

I'm not sure why it's amazing/creepy/wierd (delete as applicable), millions of people must have workplace accidents on what later turns out to be the mid day of their life. They just don't have as many people obsessing about it afterwards so we don't hear about it.

@joebleasdale5557 5 месяцев назад

Thanks for contributing to Bobby Fingers’ diorama

@nouche Год назад

Well, his hair caught fire one day after the mid-point of his life!

@dan_asd Год назад

Nonetheless, its impressive how close it is to the midpoint of his life

@Artyomi Год назад

You can really take any public figure, find the day they were born and died - and find the midpoint, and if they were famous/active enough you will find some record of them doing something at that time. Especially considering if most people may live 60-75 years, that midpoint will inevitably be at the height of their life and possibly height of popularity. I’m sure if you look at any celebrity, there will be something interesting at their midpoint

@EvenTheDogAgrees Год назад

@@Artyomi True, everyone will have been doing something near the midpoint of their lives. But something noteworthy? Something that makes it into the newspapers? It's not like we're debating whether or not MJ was consuming a pizza, or shaving, or something mundane like that near the midpoint of his life. Getting your hair caught on fire is a pretty remarkable occurrence.

@frankjohnson123 Год назад

@@Artyomi sure, but this is actually an extremely important moment in his life. It gave him a lot of medical issues and affected him pretty deeply.

@whompronnie Год назад

@@Artyomi Not something people will still be talking about 40 years later.

@colevano Год назад

Answering the truly important questions. Thanks, Matt.

@krampus91 Год назад

if you loved the parker square, you gotta love the parker timeline where august 29 predates august 28.

@marklonergan3898 Год назад

The amount of things you did take into account, and you didn't factor leap-seconds in. 🤣

@ZaximusRex Год назад

Your dice jar gave me a revelation. Starbursts should have a D6 variety that are the size and shape of a standard D6.

@ZaximusRex Год назад

New comment. You've opened the flood gates. People will ironically ask you for the strings and papers for the rest of your life knowing that it's over. 😬

@tielessin Год назад

I admire your bravery and strength of mind that made you take on a question which involves dates and time

@MonzennCarloMallari Год назад

Somewhere I can hear Tom Scott still fuming at time zones

@douglasboyle6544 Год назад

Thanks for turning me on to Bobby Fingers, that video was great I am definitely going to be subscribing.

@stevieklaer9347 Год назад

I’m so glad that more people are starting to learn about bobby fingers, his channel is absolutely incredible

@lucas.cardoso Год назад

Who would say that Matt Parker was to debunk a genuine Parker rumor? Although, in the end, he came up with the genuine Parker solution: the event MAY have occurred ON THE DAY SHARING the midpoint of Michael Jackson's life. TA-DAA!

@Pthaloskies Год назад

The Bing AI concurs, it was exactly the median day!

@plackt Год назад

It’s only an odd number of days because you arbitrarily based it off PST (taking it into 2200 on the 28th) instead of converting to CST, though. It wouldn’t change the relationship between the midpoint and the fire, because that would convert as well, but it would put it more firmly in that date.

@phiefer3 Год назад

It's also only an odd number of days IF he was born before 2am CST (adjusted to PST). If the time of his birth was after 2am, then his birthday would be firmly on the 29th even with PST conversion.

@markjackson5806 Год назад

@@phiefer3 By that point Matt would try anything to justify the seven minutes he'd already had it posted as the 28th

@stylis666 Год назад

@@phiefer3 There was an odd number of leap years between the birth and death though.

@johnboyer144 Год назад

@13:31 2 WHAT? eeths? I listened 5 times and i have no idea what that word is.

@godfreypigott Год назад

2/e = 2/2.178 = two e'ths

@johnboyer144 Год назад

@@godfreypigott thanks! That actually makes sense.

@ganymedemlem6119 Год назад

I appreciate the absolute silliness of videos like this. Thank you.

@alanmartin9207 Год назад

The lengths Matt will go to so that a cork board and some stationery supplies become tax deductible.

@TheStormingmonkey Год назад

This is why there are no mathematicians that are conspiracy theorists, they would actually very quickly prove/disprove their theory

@Yupppi Год назад

Matt, your sense of humor is something else. I've never seen a person so enamoured and humored by math. It's a treat to see what you come up with next, every time.

@custard131 Год назад

having his hair catch fire seems like it would have been a low point rather than the mid point

@Machiones Год назад

Instead of lighting my hair on fire I watched this video at the midpoint of my life. Equivalent suffering

@NaouakNawak Год назад

I love that the Parker's Michael Jackson birthday happens almost at the middle of the video.

@Mark_Williams. Год назад

I guess you could say, the day MJ's hair caught on fire was the first day he had lived longer than he had days left to live. Good investigation Matt!

@johnchessant3012 Год назад

13:29 Let's take a moment to appreciate what went into discovering this fact. Either he deliberately tested the fraction 2/e and tried to line up what event in MJ's biography was the closest, or even better, he calculated the decimals for all the significant events in MJ's life and noticed "hey, that one is extremely close to 2/e"

@ClementinesmWTF Год назад

He probably did the latter method then used something like Robert Munafo’s RIES Tool which can give you arbitrary approximations for any number you’d like. That event probably had the nicest approximation (2/e) so he decided to stick it in

@georgelionon9050 Год назад

It funny how e turns up everything. Who would have thought it be here. Next he will find a n/pi event and use it for pi day.

@gary.h.turner Год назад

I was wondering what an "eeth" was! 😂

@EvenTheDogAgrees Год назад

@@gary.h.turner I was confused too for a second, until it hit me and I couldn't stop laughing. The way he so casually throws out 2/e as a fraction, as if it's as common as say 1/2, 2/3, 1/4 or something similar. Only math nerds! 😂

@Ziraffo Год назад

Omg I would never have guessed it was eeth.

@joekelly7505 Год назад

My sister was in the audience that day and got to see him wheeled out on a gurney.

@SeishiZero Год назад

You've been hit by- You've been struck by- A smooth decimal.

@MarceldeJong Год назад

This is up so early Bobby Fingers' video isn't up yet. That's how up it is! Up!

@ubershare Год назад

Michael Jackson was born 7:33 PM according to Taj Jackson. So, it would have been the day of the mid point of his life.

@ubershare Год назад

This is assuming that you do not need to shift back one hour.

@Qermaq Год назад

Matt's shelf is where randomizing game pieces go to die.

@TylerJGelowitz Год назад

This is the exact type of significant over-analysis of some semi-insignificant mathematical fact that I subscribed for!

@andrewwallace6656 Год назад

I'm really surprised that your answer is "no" and not "sure maybe". It feels like a break from all your other videos where you're always quick to consider different ways something can be interpreted, and I really value that about your content.

@luketurner314 Год назад

3:43 I'm an American in America and use 24-hour time extensively, but I admit that I am also an outlier (math(s) pun intended). I also use Metric and Celsius as my primary/day-to-day measuring units. It is also very handy when setting alarms in 24-hour time to not get AM and PM mixed up (or forget to change it when updating an alarm) and set the alarm for the wrong time. Ask me how I know

@AnnieNoodle Год назад

Another odd coincidence: my friend introduced me to your channel on Monday (it's fantastic, thank you for all of these excellent videos), I was already following Bobby Fingers (also really excellent videos), and he mentioned your channel in his video as well. The world is full of interesting coincidences.

@Christian_Martel Год назад

2:11 “Not To Scale” is the Engineer’s best friend. 😂

@ThePatdine Год назад

Great video! Have you considered leap years in these calculations or do they not change anything?

@HungryTradie Год назад

I would think the quantity of days between birth and death would have been done using a computer program that accounts for leap years. Don't you?

@godfreypigott Год назад

@@HungryTradie Given that his count was wrong by one day, I think not.

@Khyranleander Год назад

Actually, "night of January 27th" could be any time a bit after 17:20 that day or a bit before 06:50 the next. But so long as the fire was before 24:00 of the 27th, odds *lean* towards it happening "within the same day" ( < 24-hour span) of even MJ's earlier midlife point. Considering the likely factors we don't have good numbers for, it's probably much less.

@flamingmojo9575 Год назад

Of all of the Michael Jackson Cobspiracy pinboards ever made, this is THE most frivoulous

@alandowney6961 Год назад

I checked out Bobby Fingers' after the mention on the Problem Squared podcast, and can confirm that it's amazing and hilarious! Thanks, Matt!

@masterandexpert288 Год назад

FINALLY someone figured out what was happening in MJ’s life 2/e’ths of the way through it.

@Rubrickety Год назад

There are so many misconceptions about what mathematicians actually do. It’s nice to see a good example of the kind of problems real-world mathematicians grapple with every day.

@MichaelHaskin Год назад

I’m going to play devils advocate for a hot second but did this factor in all the leap years and then the weird 2000s leap year

@Whyiseverythingthesame Год назад

Your video was playing in the background on the top of my home feed while I was typing out a comment for another video. When I finish there's exactly 15 seconds left in your video and I had no idea what the. Was going on. I loved it!

@Yojibby Год назад

The more I deal with time zones, the more I’m in favor of everywhere using UTC. Who cares if you wake up at 22:30? It’s just numbers on a clock. It would be so much easier

@Lattamonsteri Год назад

I guess it's important for places where they serve alcohol. If they have to close at 4am the latest, how does that work for places where 4am is during lunchtime? ;D

@TrekkerUK Год назад

I agree with time zones but as a developer and regular human, daylight saving can sod off!

@LeeSmith-cf1vo Год назад

We should move to metric time while we're at it(for hours, mins, secs, not for days, months, years - the connection with the sun is useful there)

@hyrriss6722 Год назад

@@Lattamonsteri Usually those rules are locally enacted and bounded to an area that already shares an existing time zone, so they just adjust the time to their own circumstance. If 4am is lunchtime, then they just change the closing to 8pm at the latest. It'll really only affect those places where there's already an extreme time difference between two edges of a country with a national law dictating that. So French Guiana and Eastern Russia will have issues there but most other places should be fine.

@animax2422 Год назад

It doesn't make sense to do that. Let's say you want to call your friend in Japan. You look up the time there and see it's 3:30 in the morning so you don't call because he is probably sleeping. Now, everywhere has the same time zone like you suggested. How will you know what is happening there now? It makes no sense.

@professordesilabagem Год назад

There are 18563 days in-between the two dates, not 18562. Why was this given for granted?

@brae.2401 Год назад

Betteridge's Law of Headlines really coming in clutch here

@brian5553 Год назад

Wow, Bobby Fingers' video was great! That guy will have no trouble at all getting to a million subscribers.

@brianvernaglia9449 Год назад

If it took place after midnight on the 26th, that could have been described as "night-time on the 27th!" Because it was night and it was the 27th. Then your analysis is perfect and it could have been the midpoint. Relying on the media fr time and date accuracy is asking a lot.

@rmsgrey Год назад

Maybe a newspaper would report "night-time on the 27th" for either end of the 24 hour period, but very few would print "last night" for something that happened the night before...

@brianvernaglia9449 Год назад

@@rmsgrey I agree. Of course it depends on when they found out the info, etc. But yes I agree.

@cvkline Год назад

As as software engineer responsible for parts of my company's date-time processing code, I wholly and painfully sympathize with everything Matt struggles with here. We even have a thing called "fancy midnight" to get around that "24:00" problem; if something finishes on a certain day and the time isn't specified, we jam in 23:59:59. And don't get me started on locales, time zones and DST conversions. It should be fun, but it isn't.

@rmsgrey Год назад

Train times (here in the UK) are traditionally arriving at 23:59 and departing at 00:01 rather than listing midnight for either.

@yarati4584 Год назад

Ah, locales. Just recently we had a mysterious case where a script, that had worked just fine for a year, fail -- but only on some machines. The reason? It's March. And March is the only month that includes a non-ASCII character in German.

@DougAdams Год назад

@@rmsgrey Our online learning management system does that for due dates. An assignment is either due at 11:59pm or 00:01am

@cvkline Год назад

@@yarati4584 Oh I just love those. We had a fun bug whereby Wednesdays were being displayed wrong on our calendar page in Danish. The reason? In Danish, Wednesday is onsdag, abbreviated "on" ... these were all specified in a YML translation file and by the YML spec, a value of "on" is the same as a Boolean "true" (ditto for "off" and "false"). So instead of "on" the calendar was displaying "true". Had to do some escaping.

@diynevala Год назад

I also want to make the first day of the year 2023-00-00. Time starts at 00:00, so why not dates as well?

@Gabrielecgomes1 Год назад

7:25 I was about to comment, until I read someone's comment pointing out that you corrected it in the 7-minute mark.

@GuildOfCalamity Год назад

I love the inherent disclaimers in this video.

@idontwantahandlethough Год назад

@1:40 Lol that's a great bit. I love when brilliant people are ok with being used for extremely stupid jokes 😂

@OneTrueBadShoe Год назад

I'm glad didn't string us along.

@alarcon99 Год назад

Mathematicians: it’s not exactly midpoint! Rest of the world: Close enough!

@mione3690 7 месяцев назад

This helped me today during a trivia game. "What year did Michael Jackson's hair catch fire?" Ooh, halfway point of his life! Thnx for the points ;)

@pon1 Год назад

That we can get so close to an important event in the midpoint of his life just shows how much the camera tracked him all the time.

@AM_9924 Год назад

Fascinating stuff. Michael Jackson is truly missed. What a talent.

@joekemp83 Год назад

What a PEED.

@alan2here Год назад

Hairspray, Epiderm Ointment, Rammsteining, guzzling gasoline?

@TiredKnitter Год назад

The amazing thing is that I started watching this video at the exact midpoint of my life.

@user-cj2zt3zu1t Год назад

I haven't finished watching this video, but wouldn't it make more sense to convert the datetime to a UNIX timestamp and then just do maths on integers?