Just walkin' and driftin'...

Our human stompin' grounds, Old Terra Firma...

There's this interesting mathematical modelling device called random walks, which amongst other things demonstrates that if you do a two-dimensional drawing of a random walk of a certain number of steps, you'll end up with a picture of something fairly random, not to mention abstract (try it! You'll see what I mean!). Apparently this is a useful tool with a lot of random applications, such as financial planning, or gambling as it is also known. But anyway you slice it, one thing is constant: any random walking is done on dry land (well, except for you know who...). And that dry land is/are our continents, as per the photo to the right. Random walks are associated with Brownian Motion, which is how we get on and off rapid transit, and which in turn is associated with entropy, a means of quantifying the energy in a system. All systems move naturally to a state of greatest entropy, which is a kind of universal laziness and explains readily observable phenomena such as couch potatoes.

...and a whole lot of random walks...

To the left we have a plot of a random walk of quite a lot of steps (I appropriated this, more or less, from a Wikipedia page, so it's real information, not just made up! - gt) . You'll notice that the walks are more or less separated into two clumps of information. Let your eyes wander back up to the satellite photo of the world, and you can see where I'm going with this...Continental Drift, a mechanism by which our planet seeks greater entropy, or 'couch-potatoeness', was probably caused by billions of people going on random walks over the past few hundred thousand years (I use the term 'people' to include everybody since we got down from the trees and started stomping around, more or less randomly, looking for a convenience store to get some smokes and a six-pack, maybe a hoagie and a 649 'financial planning' ticket). You'll notice there was a lot of random walking in Africa and up through Asia and Russia towards the Bering Strait - and also a lot around where Alaska is now, probably due to the land bridge that used to be there across the strait to the Walmart. Then there's a bunch of random walking up and down the Americas, probably after that land bridge disappeared and everybody was trying to find a way back home. All that stomping around must have had some effect on the planet, and sure enough the continents kind of got fed up with being treated like door mats and decided to split. By then it was too late, of course; people were procreating everywhere like rabbits, and the days of easy continental entropy on the Big Earthy Couch went the way of the dodo. This was before string was even invented, but the necessity was clearly beginning to be felt, if only to keep more 'stuff' from just drifting away, so to speak...Here's what Paul Butterfield had to say about it all, back in '67 at Monterey...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3LEhfbKCSc 

My sources tell me that was originally called 'Random Walkin' Blues', but who knows? Now, did you notice anything about that audience? Yes, some of them were stoned, or more precisely, a few of them might not have been stoned, or more precisely, totally stoned, but what about this: Did you see a single person who was looking at a GADGET!! No. You didn't. Peace, sisters and brothers.