“Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.”
Benoit Mandelbrot
quoted in Wild Randomness
Over the weekend I returned some books
to a library south of here. While there
I spent some time sitting at a table
with a clipboard and a calculator.
Someone said, “What the hell are you doing?”
I said, “Calculating. Taking some notes.
Making sure all my evil schemes compute.”
“It’s the twenty-first century,” she said.
“Don’t evil geniuses use computers?”
I shrugged. “They just use whatever they need.”
She pointed at my TI-89
Titanium calculator. “Is that
the evil genius equivalent of
a singer with an acoustic guitar?
An evil genius acoustic holdout?”
As I tried to think of something to say,
she laughed and added, “It is kind of cool
in—I guess—a retro-geek kind of way.”
So over the weekend I got to play
the evil genius and the hippie girl.
My world domination plans got pushed back
a little, but looking around the world
it doesn’t look like the world used its time
any more constructively than I did.
to a library south of here. While there
I spent some time sitting at a table
with a clipboard and a calculator.
Someone said, “What the hell are you doing?”
I said, “Calculating. Taking some notes.
Making sure all my evil schemes compute.”
“It’s the twenty-first century,” she said.
“Don’t evil geniuses use computers?”
I shrugged. “They just use whatever they need.”
She pointed at my TI-89
Titanium calculator. “Is that
the evil genius equivalent of
a singer with an acoustic guitar?
An evil genius acoustic holdout?”
As I tried to think of something to say,
she laughed and added, “It is kind of cool
in—I guess—a retro-geek kind of way.”
So over the weekend I got to play
the evil genius and the hippie girl.
My world domination plans got pushed back
a little, but looking around the world
it doesn’t look like the world used its time
any more constructively than I did.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I’m Standing At A Broken Window
I’m Thinking Of A Room With A Calculator
Beautiful Impossible Math Thing
Aberrant Forms
Songs For Hippies Don’t Scare The Pigeons
Love Sonnet With Piano Wreckage And Worms
No comments:
Post a Comment