Living in the Past

I think that the most annoying habit that anyone can develop is the simple of act of throwing a couple of number pairs down onto a Cartesian coordinate and then drawing a line using the two points to define the slope.  Lately, there has been little useful work done in the greater bulk of the world of man when this pernicious habit is trotted around.

Now, don’t get me wrong, line segments are fine thank you, what irritates me if the full on line, you know, the ones with arrows on the ends, pointing out toward infinity in either direction.  Those fuckers really bug me.  I am even offended by a ray. 

Now, don’t think that I am angered for a minute by the mathematical concepts.  No way.  What I am annoyed is that every thing that happens in the world is sampled for something that a pair of numbers can be attached to to place the now-polluted concept on the holy grid of Saint René of  Neuburg an der Donau.

These linear heresies are everywhere.  In economics, that bit of masturbatory haruspicy that infects the blogosphere, the line is the mark of the shill.  The price of something (that something usually being a heavily manipulated stock or commodity) is located on the grid by date.  The fell line (or ray) is then drawn and whether the path leads to heaven or hell is defined by m.

Descartes and Newton, Leibnitz and Spinoza.  Gotta love those knuckleheads.  They came up with a system of the world that really stroked our cupidity.  We could control the world and understand it.  The trouble is that the unwashed got hold of the faith and twisted it.  Tried to apply it to arenas where it didn’t really fit.  But it was just too beautiful, and it allowed us a false feeling of control and understanding that we have cherished now for centuries.

I think that the day to day world that we live in is defined by a much different model, there a astonishingly non-linear systems.  Arbitrariness is a daily event and luck defines much.  There are some cases where linearity can be achieved in a range, but there is little in the worlds of politics, economics, and faith where Mssr. Decartes little party trick can be said to be useful.