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.
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.
@@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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 ⚠
@@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.
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.🤦♂
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
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.
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!
@@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.
@@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?
@@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?
@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?
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
@@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 😅
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
@@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
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.
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.
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".
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. 😬
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
@@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.
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"
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
@@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! 😂
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.
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?
Mr Jackson flew around the world a lot. Is it possible the the time dilation created by his travels on a very fast jet aircraft affected his time on Earth shifting his life's exact mid-point enough to satisfy the myth?
This got so in depth for a spectacularly simple question my brain started saying things like "If we assume a normal distribution of spherical Jacksons in a vacuum . . ."
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!
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.
I love the fact that Matt makes videos that I don't always understand, but also makes these type of videos working out the half way point of MJ's life!!
4:21 Anyone who is upset with 00:00:00 being the first moment of a day is objectively incorrect. The living global standard that defines "midnight" and the beginning of the day is currently ISO 8601-1:2019/Amd 1:2022. This is defined as such to avoid the confusion caused by being forced to label noon and midnight with "a.m." and "p.m." in 12-hour systems when _technically_ those labels (referencing position with respect to the meridian) do not apply at those instants. Unfortunately this means 24:00 is also objectively incorrect, since _only_ 00:00 is allowed to be used to refer to that moment, but... because we know what 23:59 means, the day you're referencing when you say that isn't _as_ ambiguous. Linter's gonna get ya though. Also because it's just right to count from zero. Obviously.
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
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.
Matt, with a wonderfully satisfactory certainty for my given Saturday morning circumstances, that was the perfect amount of detail. Good sir, thanks for the video, helps a lot!
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.
Reading the comments I am left wondering: "Why do people think it is creepy or scary if it was the midpoint of his life?" How is a coincidental time point creepy or scary?
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.
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.
@@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.
Very interesting and sad - never knew this had happened to him. Seems still so strange that such a major event happened close enough to the midpoint even if not exactly!
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
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
@@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.
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.
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!
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.
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...
When he started talking about dates (and 50-year-long timespans measured in days) I jokingly thought that Unix time could have been useful. When he started talking about the time I non-ironically thought that Unix time would have been useful to calculate the midpoint without having to deal with calendars and clocks. When he said we were going to need to talk about timezones I seriously thought he really needed Unix time to avoid ambiguity. When he explained what a mess the timezones were in the US back in 1958 I just started screaming.
This video has just caused me to have an existential crisis. I had always thought of 50 years like it was a long time but now I know it isn't even 19,000 days. I have so many things I want to do and now I know I need to stop worrying about retirement and start living life.
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?
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.
Similar thing that I had been tracking prior to princes death and came really close to being almost exactly true: He died at almost exactly the time the song 1999 had been about the future for as long as it had been about the past. to be clear when i calculated it (and its a little weird lyrically just what moment one might pick) i found it COULD be true to about 11 days which I considered "close enough". I think this hair thing is "close enough" for most people to just say it as fact and you might be being too literal, lol
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.
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.
@@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.
Booooring. I'm here for the math, not the results 😂😂😂
The real answer is always in the comments.
So that's around 15.5 hours off. Not bad.
This is precisely the kind of weirdly specific math 'myth' content I love
hmmmmmm oh where do i know you from?
This midpoint of most people's lives was probably during this video. At least it seemed to last half a lifetime.
"That is a hundred percent accurate, I've done a lot of calculations here"
hypercubers gang 😎
Because you're a NERD /s
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?
I may have made a huge mistake.
But he could spice it up to get rid of it.. "if you ask me you get the upboard and 100$".
Oh no.
Is this video destined to be the exact midpoint of Matt's life??
@@georgelionon9050 He already could have spiced it up by including the push-pins, but given that he didn't even do that...
That isn’t the first mistake
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
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.
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.
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.
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
@Cream147player Its within a couple hours though, that is insanely close. I really don't think it's as unsurprising as you say
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.
I was expecting him to change everything to UTC like a good programmer/engineer should.
Yeah, timezones is instant game-over
negative Unix time baby!!!
Me, not a programmer: Flashback to tom scott descending into madness
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 ⚠
For 7 minutes you led me to believe I shared a birthday with Michael Jackson and now you've taken it away from me.
This made me laugh a lot, for some reason.
Yeah, but he gave it back to my brother.
I had the exact opposite, for the first 7 minutes he stole Michael Jackson's birthday from me haha
And then he sorta brought it back at 12:12
my main takeaway is that it's basically accurate to a scary degree
Worst case, it's about 0.006%, best case 0.003%. Very scary close 😉🖖
Very wild
within a hair
@@mremumerm I see what you did there and I approve.
@@mremumerm You win!
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.
I think that's a little off, coz 0.0985% of 18,562 is 18.283 days.
@@thechumpsbeendumped.7797 I forgot to divide hours by 24! It's 0.0041%
@@MCredstoningnstuff why would you need to divide the hours by 24 factorial? Wouldn't it just be 24?
@@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.
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.🤦♂
“Bobby is a friend of a friend”.
Imagine being the dude who is friends with both Matt and Bobby. What a legend.
I prefer the pronoun "dude"
@@BecHillComedian ?
@@yf-n7710 I'm not a guy
@@BecHillComedian fixed :P
@@BecHillComedian oh hey! You're that life-size poster from Matt's video about non-repeating 5-letter word pentuples.
We've finally done it! We've finally found the Parker Midpoint!
I'm at the Parker Midpoint of the Parker Square, eating a Parker Pi.
TH-cam shows, that video was uploaded 24 minutes ago, and you made your commentary 3 hours ago. How's that possible?
@@Kopetan4egX patreon early access I guess
@@bl4cksp1d3r Ah, i see, thanks
We?!
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
I felt the same way. It’s a really weird concept
cath on fire lmao
I love this.
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.
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!
D:
3 second video be like: "Matt here! No, it was not the midpoint. Patreon⬇️"
A 3-second video with an intro, a no, and an outro would have been funny, though.
"Out of the 18,563 days MJ lived, that day was number 9,282, so no."
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!
That was the deepest dive into something that I care absolutely nothing about but Matt somehow managed to keep me watching.
Same
Same! I never knew I could care so deeply about Michael Jackson's time of birth 😅
I didn't realize I could spend fifteen minutes watching someone say "no."
@@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.
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.
0.0985% per someone else's calculations
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
@@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?
@@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?
@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?
I wasn't sure how you were going to make this into a 15 minute video, but I was pleasantly surprised. Very entertaining thanks!
Craigelbagel in the wild lol
Craigelbagel in the wild
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.
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.
Nope, his conception was the signifying event marking his slow descent towards death. The aging process starts in the womb.
And he supposedly got hooked on pain medication because of the accident, which slowly led to his death.
@@EvenTheDogAgrees different aging process though. you dont become an old person for several decades later
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?"
⏱️⏳👶➡️⚡🤯🔥😡🔜🚒👨🚒🧯➡️⚰️💀⌛⌚🔚
(careful emoji translation required!)
Great point!
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.
@@NoriMori1992 On a continuous scale, the chance of two points being chosen at random being the same point is uncountably infinitesimal, or 0.
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.
The note is 1:1
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.
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.
Noteception, that's a concept 😅🖖
Brilliantly funny! Bravo!
Answering the truly important questions. Thanks, Matt.
Bobby fingers is a hugely underrated channel.
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
Ah yes. Femtoseconds
Ha I asked that too before reading your comment.. I wonder if Юрий Поляков is correct in the difference being in femtoseconds...
I'm sure it would be at least an order of magnitude more than a femtosecond, right?
Seems likely that MJ will have crossed the international date line at some point.
@@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 😅
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
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.
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.
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.
I can't believe Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire the exact middle week of his life.
I’m so glad that more people are starting to learn about bobby fingers, his channel is absolutely incredible
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.
I appreciate the absolute silliness of videos like this. Thank you.
I’m so grateful I live at a time when people can focus on things like this.
„Before he finally dies…“ That could have probably been phrased better😂
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.
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.
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)
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.
Wow, that's one hell of a midlife crisis
I admire your bravery and strength of mind that made you take on a question which involves dates and time
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@@jonathanrichards593 do you say you didn't get to sleep until 2am this morning or 2am last night? most people say the latter
@@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
Bobby Fingers ,what an artist!
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.
I checked out Bobby Fingers' after the mention on the Problem Squared podcast, and can confirm that it's amazing and hilarious! Thanks, Matt!
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.
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.
@@phiefer3 By that point Matt would try anything to justify the seven minutes he'd already had it posted as the 28th
@@phiefer3 There was an odd number of leap years between the birth and death though.
Speaking of counting days, I discovered today by accident that Wednesday this week was Microsoft Excel day number 45000.
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".
Well, his hair caught fire one day after the mid-point of his life!
Your dice jar gave me a revelation. Starbursts should have a D6 variety that are the size and shape of a standard D6.
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. 😬
I thought that Bobby fingers was joking that you made this video, but you really did. I love it.
Nonetheless, its impressive how close it is to the midpoint of his life
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
@@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.
@@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.
@@Artyomi Not something people will still be talking about 40 years later.
The Bing AI concurs, it was exactly the median day!
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"
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
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.
I was wondering what an "eeth" was! 😂
@@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! 😂
Omg I would never have guessed it was eeth.
This is why there are no mathematicians that are conspiracy theorists, they would actually very quickly prove/disprove their theory
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.
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.
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?
@@valinhorn42
I think he was joking🙄
@@valinhorn42 _"how [did] you know that that was the mid-point of your life"_
Simple trigonometry.
Mr Jackson flew around the world a lot. Is it possible the the time dilation created by his travels on a very fast jet aircraft affected his time on Earth shifting his life's exact mid-point enough to satisfy the myth?
FINALLY someone figured out what was happening in MJ’s life 2/e’ths of the way through it.
This got so in depth for a spectacularly simple question my brain started saying things like "If we assume a normal distribution of spherical Jacksons in a vacuum . . ."
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!
One of the things I love about this channel is the tremendous variety in opening titles budget
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.
The amount of things you did take into account, and you didn't factor leap-seconds in. 🤣
having his hair catch fire seems like it would have been a low point rather than the mid point
I love the fact that Matt makes videos that I don't always understand, but also makes these type of videos working out the half way point of MJ's life!!
Fascinating stuff. Michael Jackson is truly missed. What a talent.
What a PEED.
I just love these hyper-specific videos that I will never need in my life yet I would watch for hours and hours
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.
This is assuming that you do not need to shift back one hour.
I love the inherent disclaimers in this video.
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!
So, are we going to call August 28, 1958 Michael Jackson's Parker Birthday?
This is up so early Bobby Fingers' video isn't up yet. That's how up it is! Up!
"another day has entered the chat"
Finally, some asking the real questions
4:21 Anyone who is upset with 00:00:00 being the first moment of a day is objectively incorrect. The living global standard that defines "midnight" and the beginning of the day is currently ISO 8601-1:2019/Amd 1:2022. This is defined as such to avoid the confusion caused by being forced to label noon and midnight with "a.m." and "p.m." in 12-hour systems when _technically_ those labels (referencing position with respect to the meridian) do not apply at those instants. Unfortunately this means 24:00 is also objectively incorrect, since _only_ 00:00 is allowed to be used to refer to that moment, but... because we know what 23:59 means, the day you're referencing when you say that isn't _as_ ambiguous. Linter's gonna get ya though.
Also because it's just right to count from zero. Obviously.
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
The Bobby fingers video is a ride and surreal. Definitely give it a watch
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.
Matt, with a wonderfully satisfactory certainty for my given Saturday morning circumstances, that was the perfect amount of detail. Good sir, thanks for the video, helps a lot!
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.
Reading the comments I am left wondering: "Why do people think it is creepy or scary if it was the midpoint of his life?" How is a coincidental time point creepy or scary?
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.
Train times (here in the UK) are traditionally arriving at 23:59 and departing at 00:01 rather than listing midnight for either.
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.
@@rmsgrey Our online learning management system does that for due dates. An assignment is either due at 11:59pm or 00:01am
@@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.
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?
Very interesting and sad - never knew this had happened to him. Seems still so strange that such a major event happened close enough to the midpoint even if not exactly!
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
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
I agree with time zones but as a developer and regular human, daylight saving can sod off!
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)
@@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.
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.
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!
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.
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...
@@rmsgrey I agree. Of course it depends on when they found out the info, etc. But yes I agree.
I maintain that time is the single hardest problem in computer science. Great video!
@13:31
2 WHAT? eeths? I listened 5 times and i have no idea what that word is.
2/e = 2/2.178 = two e'ths
@@godfreypigott thanks! That actually makes sense.
7:25 I was about to comment, until I read someone's comment pointing out that you corrected it in the 7-minute mark.
Great video! Have you considered leap years in these calculations or do they not change anything?
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?
@@HungryTradie Given that his count was wrong by one day, I think not.
When he started talking about dates (and 50-year-long timespans measured in days) I jokingly thought that Unix time could have been useful.
When he started talking about the time I non-ironically thought that Unix time would have been useful to calculate the midpoint without having to deal with calendars and clocks.
When he said we were going to need to talk about timezones I seriously thought he really needed Unix time to avoid ambiguity.
When he explained what a mess the timezones were in the US back in 1958 I just started screaming.
@1:40 Lol that's a great bit. I love when brilliant people are ok with being used for extremely stupid jokes 😂
I never dreamed I'd see a collab between Bobby Fingers and Matt Parker. I hope this helps many people discover either of them!
I'm glad didn't string us along.
So far, I'm surprised he didn't convert everything to just UTC. Simply saves all the headaches. :)
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.
This video has just caused me to have an existential crisis. I had always thought of 50 years like it was a long time but now I know it isn't even 19,000 days. I have so many things I want to do and now I know I need to stop worrying about retirement and start living life.
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?
2:11 “Not To Scale” is the Engineer’s best friend. 😂
There are 18563 days in-between the two dates, not 18562. Why was this given for granted?
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.
Similar thing that I had been tracking prior to princes death and came really close to being almost exactly true: He died at almost exactly the time the song 1999 had been about the future for as long as it had been about the past. to be clear when i calculated it (and its a little weird lyrically just what moment one might pick) i found it COULD be true to about 11 days which I considered "close enough". I think this hair thing is "close enough" for most people to just say it as fact and you might be being too literal, lol
No way.
The Bill Nye sound effects while moving the post-its and stretching the string REALLY brought me back!