degringolade

From the Summer

I am not claiming it is the end of the world, but I think that the world has turned a corner and reverting to what is the historical norm. We did in fact live in the garden that Olaf Schultz described and now the weeds are a' comin'.

Now, folks who like the idea of the apocalypse and there are more than a couple of folks this flavor are squealing that the end is nigh. I guess that my feeling that we are just going to be experiencing a reversion to mean. My old buddy Ugo loves his "Seneca Curve" where things go to shit in a hurry, but I am not all that convinced of that. The downhill might well just match the uphill. But there is only one way to find out and that means living through what may be a less than perfectly pleasant process.

But, that being said, lets talk about a nasty and rude idea that Ike Newton (and (maybe?) Gottfried Leibnitz) came up with back in 1687. The idea of fluxions (Newton) and integrals (Leibnitz) set down the idea that you could calculate the are under a curve. I am not certain about the level that this applies to the way the world runs, but it makes for interesting thought experiments inside my noggin.

Folks like me want to imagine that you can plot the course of history on a cartesian coordinate system. Maybe that is true, but one also has to accept that things like discontinuity and chaotic/fractal systems have a say in the descriptions.

No one know what the future holds. Prophets aren't anything but lucky guessers. Things are changing and no one knows whether or not our history can be plotted on a cartesian plane. But I think that the area under the curve (integral/fluxion) remains pretty constant and is totally unknown.

It might be quite a ride.