2024-25 Cleveland Cavaliers
054 · 2025-05-14 · medium
For years I've been working on a correction to an old neo-Kantian hypothesis from the 19th Century – if sports journalism isn't going to make be rich, this most certainly will. I believe that the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, stated as b equals 100k over (log(t)) + k, is in fact an inverted bell curve and not a flat slope to zero. Whether the sun travels around the earth or vice-versa, a year is very much a year, and the month and date we're experiencing now has lots of similarities to the one from the previous orbit. There are plenty of mechanisms to assist you in re-surfacing a distant three-sixty-five: On This Date lists, Timehop, and those notification emails about the things you uploaded to the cloud an annum ago (hope it wasn't pornography). The Whelliston Addendum is also known as the 300 Day Rule, because like its distant kissin' cousin it's the kind of rule you had in school. It properly identifies the lowest Ebbinghaus ebb before the upward trajectory to an "anniversary", which will reset b to something resembling its original value. This happens at ten months and not eleven, taking into account theoretical situations like the following. Imagine that every year, your creative partner – who also happens to be the inventor of Shirtdoku – inserts into her Slack nickname a thirty-day countdown to her birthday, and then exacts spiteful Trumpian vengeance whenever the gifts aren't right. Thesis, practical application. Deep in the canyon of lost memories, there is something that we all blithely forget every March yet starkly recall each May. Every NBA regular season is a blur of Kia and State Farm blipverts, overpriced nosebleed tickets, fat old ex-players laughing at Photoshop collages of themselves, and three-point field goal attempts that spit and sputter like cheap roman candles. Everything – everything – that happens during those eighty-two games means absolutely nothing.