Black Holes, LeBron's Salary, Charles Abuou, Buffalo Bill

Black Holes, LeBron's Salary, Charles Abuou, Buffalo Bill

The Morning Show - Season 1, Episode 416

  • Jan 20, 2015 2:00 pm
  • 1:44:03 mins

MLK COMMEMORATION  Several hundred people of diverse backgrounds attended a candlelit walk on BYU’s campus last night to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.  African Americans represent less than 1.5 percent of Utah’s population, making a commemoration like last night’s walk all the more important, says Rev. France Davis, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Salt Lake City.  He was invited to participate as a guest speaker for the event.  “It’s important that everyone know why we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King,” says Davis. “It’s not about a particular group of people, but rather it’s about all of us being treated as equals. In this area, people tend to say this is an African American holiday and even some of the powers that be suggest Martin Luther King never came here or did anything for Utah. They’re absolutely wrong.”  Davis says this 50th year since the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the march from Selma to Montgomery makes Martin Luther King Day particularly significant this year.  African American BYU student Andre Johnson organized a gospel choir for the occasion, recruited from other choirs on campus. His goal was not just to create good music for the MLK Day celebration, but to share understanding of African American music and culture. “My main advice to them (as we’ve been rehearsing) is ‘Loosen up, this is not the BYU Men’s or Women’s Chorus. This is a gospel choir and we’re gonna have church,’” says Johnson.  SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE DISCOVERED  Apparently, in the realm of space exploration there’s massive and then there’s supermassive. Black holes fit solidly into the first category, but now some BYU scientists say they’ve found one that’s supermassive: a black hole 8 million times the mass of the sun.  Grad student Carla Carroll and professor Michael Joner made the discovery with help from NASA’s Kepler Satellite and their results appear in the Astrophysical Journal.  “To understand what a supermassive black hole, you need to understand that a black hole results after a star dies – it’s a mathematical singularity in space time,” explains Carroll. “It’s like smashing everything inside of a tiny, tiny space. It’s so dense that it warps all of space time around it, so light bends around it as well as everything else in the region.”  There’s a big gap between black holes and ‘supermassive’ black holes, says Carroll. “You don’t see black holes between 100 times and a million-times the mass of the sun. The supermassive ones are a lot more common. Nearly every galaxy has one."  When searching for a black hole, you can’t “see it” but you can look at galaxies in the background and see that they’re arced because of light bending around the black hole in front, explains Carroll.  Scientists use acoustic principals to detect an echo-like reverberation of light emitted from collisions of particles colliding around the edge of a black hole.  LEBRON DESERVES MORE THAN $17.5M  America’s top athletes seem to have a great gig: perform incredible feats of human agility and strength, and get paid millions of dollars. LeBron James, often considered the best basketball player in the world, made a salary of $17 and a half million dollars last year. But that’s less than half what he could – even should – be making if the NBA were more of a market and less of a monopoly, says University of Oklahoma economist Kevin Grier. Given all the LeBron brings to the NBA in terms of fans, ticket sales, ad revenue and sponsorships, he could be making $40 or $50 million.  Why isn’t he? Because of the salary cap the NBA imposes on its teams, which is negotiated by the Players Union, which dominated primarily by lesser players who want to make sure they get a piece of the pie, rather than all the money going to stars like LeBron or Kobe Bryant or Kevin Durrant, explains Grier.  “It’s a very socialist system,” says Grier.  On the plus side, the salary cap and wage limits ensure an “even playing field” for teams across the NBA. Without it, Grier says markets with smaller fan bases and local media offerings would be unlikely to sustain a competitive team. That includes his hometown Oklahoma City Thunder.  “The existing system spreads the money around to all the teams.”  As for why it make sense for a bench-warming NBA player to make a million dollars in salary while a star public school teacher earns a mere fraction of that, Grier says that’s a much larger question about what we value as a society. Wages and intrinsic value differ from one industry to the next, and the entertainment industry (ie. Sports and music) is an area where people are willing to spend a lot of their money.  DRAMATIC CHANGE FOR COLLEGIATE ATHLETE CHARLES ABUOU  During his senior year at BYU, Charles Abuou (’12) took class on chronic disease prevention from exercise science professor Ron Hager and did a lot of reading on his own. Then he took a drastic step, for a starter on the BYU Basketball team: “I made radical changes,” says Abuou, explaining his shift to a primarily plant-based diet, with less refined sugar and grain.  Hager says many of his collegiate athlete students think they simply can’t go to a diet like that and be competitive. “But then I show them a list of elite athletes that are succeeding with a plant-based diet and that quiets them down a little bit,” says Hager. “Charles took it to heart, even playing at a high-level of college basketball.”  “I didn’t know eating plant-based was a real thing,” says Abuou. “I looked at diets like that as a joke.”  “I think athletes go for the steak, fries, apple cobbler and ice cream at the training table because of lack of information – or maybe lack of willpower,” adds Abuou. “Looking back, I was responsible for those dietary choices. The training table gave us a lot of choice and healthy options I wasn’t choosing.”  “I’d get made fun of by my teammates for the stuff I started eating, the food I’d bring with me on the road,” says Abuou. “But they appreciated I was trying to improve my performance and health.”   Abuou says his performance did not immediately improve on his new diet. “I wasn’t making the best choices initially, but I was trying.” Eventually, he did see and feel improvement in his fitness.  “I dropped a couple pounds right away and felt a lot better. At this point in my career, I feel a lot better than I did in college,” says Abuou.  BUFFALO BILL: MAN AND MYTH  William F. Cody was perhaps the best-known American in the world around 1900. His “Buffalo Bill” persona and Wild West exhibition shaped European views of America and cemented the frontier mystique among American city-dwellers who turned out in droves, packing 20,000-seat arenas to see “a spectacle like they’d never seen before,” says BYU English professor Frank Christianson, senior editor of the Papers of William F. Coy project at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.  “Buffalo Bill ushered in “the beginning of the culture of spectacle,” says Christianson. But it’s wrong to think of the man as simply a showman. He began as a true frontiersman, a hunter of buffalo (hence the nickname “Buffalo Bill” and a horseman working for settlers in Kansas. While in his early 20s, Cody became the subject of a popular – and highly-sensationalized – dime store novel called “Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men.” His persona was born. He would go on to star in stage shows about frontier life before turning his vision into a travel “exhibition.”  “He never called it a ‘show’ because it was more than that,” says Christianson. Cody marketed the exhibition as “equal parts showmanship and education. He wanted to provide an authentic, ethnographic display of frontier life.”  To that end, one of his major innovations was the ability to recruit and hire Native Americans to perform in his show. They were mostly Lakota Sioux (called “show Indians”) says Christianson.  What we know about the real William F. Cody, has been culled from correspondence and other documents housed in the Papers of William F. Cody project. His letters are largely about business and pretty dry, says Christianson. “And his penmanship is terrible.” Cody wrote his first biography while still in his 30s, and it is peppered with fabrications meant clearly to market his image at an early point in his career. Christianson says Cody seemed driven to be a “representative” of the American West. While he was enormously successful, he did not die a wealthy man – “he made some poor investments,” says Christianson.  Read Cody’s papers and watch incredible early video of his Wild West Exhibition here.