February 12, 2012

The Pachinko Effect

 History is neither preordained nor a straight line. It is a fiendishly complex game of billiards or perhaps a massive pachinko machine. The cascade effect of screwing with a few variables is inherently unpredictable as the tapestry of history is bound together with a collection of seemingly insignificant threads, the removal or reordering of which will unravel said tapestry in unknown ways.

  Pondering such things is often dismissed as silly fantasy or mental masturbation, but our future will soon be history, and it behooves us to remember what a near run thing our existence is. Such reflection might, for instance,  have made a great deal of difference in the August of 1914.


A short, glorious endeavor...sure to be finished by Christmas.

  As we look upon the uncharted, unlit highway that is our future, it is, perhaps, wise to reflect upon how surprising our history was to those that made it. We should take great care to learn as much as we can from their astonishment, for the road we travel has as many forks and is at least as precarious as theirs.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 04:24 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 185 words, total size 2 kb.

<< Page 1 of 1 >>
24kb generated in CPU 0.0203, elapsed 0.3977 seconds.
68 queries taking 0.3874 seconds, 242 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.