UNCLE HERKIMER'S KORNER: ©1988
Jane, Jack, and Sarah have eleven oranges. They divide them up. Each child has three oranges and there are two remainder. Four thousand, six hundred thirty two divided by eighty one is fifty seven, with fifteen remainder. The remainders, unwanted, forgotten, drifted steadily away over the centuries....
Across many dimensions, through uncountable parsecs, she watched the incessant flow. The Keeper of the Remainder Receptacle was worried. The furrow in her brow deepened as the stretching noises increased in intensity and frequency. The sides of the receptacle were clearly distorted.
One nanosecond the receptacle stood there in hyperspace, an ominous tumescence; the next there was only a blur, sensed rather than seen. Across every universe, through every dimension, the blur raced at a speed too great to measure. Indeed, there was nothing left to measure it with.
The Recorder walked through the smoldering landscape. Here was a short series of numbers 11,12,13,14, the sequence interrupted by what appeared to be a portion of Boltzmann's constant. Here a quadratic function, there an almost complete problem in conditional probability...given this carnage, what is the probability it actually occurred? All of mathematics was in ruins, swept away by the Promethean flood of remainders. The Recorder did the best he could to document the damage, but he had no way of counting what he had already recorded and what still needed to be done. Already, new and unknown formulas were appearing, metamorphosing from the jumbled fragments of once mathematics.
One reason for using a fantasy lead-in for this month's topic is that the phenomenon is so prevalent in our human activities that choosing a representative sampling of its occurrence would have been misleading at best. This business of dropping things by the wayside as we go along because they aren't central to our then effort has, I believe, brought us straight up against arguably the most perplexing dilemma we now face as a species.
Firmly astride one horn of this dilemma is the obvious notion that the ability to discount ideas is paramount to the ability to choose ideas. This single minded focus on specific goals; the capability to incorporate elements essential to goal attainment and discard superfluities, has and will continue to be, a primary attribute of our most successful members. And if, when we assigned remainder status to something, whether idea, chemical by- product, or cigarette butt, it truly went away to some other-dimensional nether land, then the greatest harm that could come of that process would be a certain amount of waste. For the most part, that might as well be the case. Most remainders are de facto inert. The other horn of the dilemma emanates from those that are not.
Nothing illustrates this motif more poignantly than Love Canal. Dioxin and other chemical byproducts that were circumstantially created under such precisely controlled conditions, were then discarded into an uncontrolled, indeed unobserved, environment within which they continued to interact, eventually bringing illness and death to many of the citizens of Niagara Falls. From the the selenium laden San Joaquin Valley irrigation runoff, to the tons of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, to the barge of garbage wandering up and down our east coast looking for a final resting place, the idea of throwing something away no longer carries with it the badge of finality it once did. But the issue extends far beyond the need to more carefully monitor our discards.
In virtually all our activities we are faced with unclear choices to make. We choose not knowing whether we are overlooking some element that will later prove vital, or whether in the leviathan amalgam of choices not made some unexpected pestilence is mutating. Most of our attempts to deal with this problem are directed toward finding better ways of predicting the future. These attempts have generally failed abysmally, apocryphal explanations after the fact notwithstanding. The mathematics of chaos (more about that soon) have clearly demonstrated that our ability to predict the consequences of our choices can only get worse. Yet the increasing interconnectedness of the world forces us to make choices without the luxury of extended contemplation.
If we are to survive this plethora of disasters-in-waiting we must undergo evolutionary changes at least as dramatic as those that occurred when we took our first halting steps away from the trees towards the plains. We are unlikely to develop ways of seeing how our actions effect future events, and the potential for disaster is escalating on myriad fronts. The survival skill we must develop is the ability to adapt rapidly in changing situations; to maintain a continual process of environmental reassessment; the dexterity to make dramatic shifts in direction instantly. We would then see our world as a succession of constantly shifting patterns. It would not be a directionless world, just not a linear world. Imagine some future politician on the campaign trail bragging about her/his ability to rapidly change course.
And here I am, at the end of the available space. Whatever this is there's more of it, but I guess that will just have to be a remainder for another time. Hope it stays where I put it.
MensaMuse, Boulder, Colorado, Jim Moore
Back to the curator's desk.
