Monday, July 09, 2012

Iterations And Interruptions To World Domination





“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.



























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