Going the extra mile for ratings

TV crime show host Wallace Souza went a little too far to boost ratings. He orchestrated murders so he could tip off camera crews who were in the area when the event happened.

But the strain of this lifestyle seems to have told on Souza. He died at a hospital in São Paulo, Brazil, after having a heart attack.

Souza is not the only tv worker to bring about his own downfall, but his story is more dramatic than most. It's a tough business and not one for the faint hearted.

Everyone in the video industry should think about his case the next time they are asked by a prospective employer if they are prepared to go the extra mile or if they are totally committed. Souza clearly should have been committed and put in a mental institution, not a tv channel.

The Wave

Just saw Dennis Gansel's 2008 film The Wave. Powerful drama. It suggests that Fascism could easily be re-born in Germany and that liberalism and toleration is just skin deep. I guess that's right, but clearly it could happen in England just as easily.

The film was impressive from start to finish, experimenting with different styles with even a few seconds of spoof Hitchcock style suspense thrown into the mix. Despite the pot porri, it was all quality work. Clearly the German film industry has reached levels of sophistication and professionalism not seen in the UK. Don't get me wrong, great films are made here, but I haven't seen a film that has attempted to explore the range of The Wave.

Gansel clearly believes in the power of film: not 3d spectacular or computorised wizardry, but real actors in real drama on real film. Maybe this is the start of the Campaign for Real Film?

It is certainly a film every teacher should see. If the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, this film should be part of your vigilance kit!

Entropy

Entropy, entropy, how could a hen throw pea? It's quite possible to imagine a zero sum universe where there is no such thing as entropy. But that isn't our universe. In our universe it is a basic law that all energy decays so that even if the universe does not collapse on itself ending up with a Small Squelch, it will still come to an end some day when it runs out of energy. That's entropy.

It's all down to the Second Law of Thermodynamics: as Flanders and Swann explained "Heat will not of itself pass from one body to a hotter body."

Since energy can only degrade, once it reaches the lowest possible state it can only disappear. But what happens to all those little bits of decay. Do they really just disappear? That's hardly logical. If they disappear where do they disappear to?

Douglas Adams in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy models the Big Bang as sand running out of the plug hole of a conical, ebony bath filmed and the film run backwards. It's a crazy image and meant to be a joke. But who knows, maybe that's what the big bang was like: the bottom half of an egg timer.

Suppose the other half of that egg timer contains the decayed energy and entropy is simply the connection between our universe and another, the neck between the two conical ebony baths. So energy seeps out of one universe and into another.

It's a crazy idea and probably totally unprovable. But it is rather beautiful.

One objection might be that the Big Bang happened rather quickly whereas entropy is exceeding slow. But time and energy are variables in Einstein's famous equation. When the whole subject of the discussion is the destruction and creation of matter and energy, what does time mean? In one ebony bath 100 billion years elapses while in the other ebony bath only a hundred billionth of a second goes by!

In fact some have speculated that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is about the creation of time or perhaps the description of the fact that time exists.

The Egg Timer theory is certainly a lot more elegant than the idea of the Higgs Boson, but here's hoping no-one ever builds anything like that Large Hadron Collider to check it out. I think it should remain just a neat idea.

Image of Divine Feminine- in progress by Donna Raymond