What is a Model

Found on the Future Salon mailing list today, apparently penned by an upcoming speaker: What is a model? Walter J. Freeman Berkeley, California Perspectives in Biology & Medicine 18: 475-476, 1975. Let us bring to time You the feminine phases of the moon, I the masculine footsteps of the years. Time's arrow and the circle make a stream. From every point the past and future fan With infinite possibilities. Like rocks we stand as time swirls by. We do not know what happened or will happen But tell a past and cast a future By extrapolation of our motion. Mathematicians say we have Uncountable rates of change. So much for math, and for prediction. Turn and face a past And see another future. Try to recreate, and get nostalgia. Climb a hill and time Spreads all before, past and future, Fusing on the line in both directions Orthogonal to gaze. Our futures shrink To vanish at a mile or a millennium, Below the fixed horizon Receding as time runs by. Is time's rate constant? What shall be our clock? Your touch accelerates my pulse. Physicists assert their rate is fixed To keep perspective on their world of matter. Growing old, they sense time's quickening And blame it on their chemistry. Let us take time's measure not from world But you and me, and then the rate of time Increases exponentially. Our physics Says our universe is not expanding But time is shrinking. Theirs says the red shift Is the contrail of a fleeing star, Ours that it is fossil light Emitted when our universe was young. So much for physics. Shall we say the speed Of time increases in proportion to The number of our friends? Will time's rate increase for everyone As the world's population? Is it uniform For wastelands and the cities? Will crisis come when the rate exceeds the rate Of speech between ourselves? Is this why With time we drift apart? Let us choose a unit of a day And look back in exponential time. Four days: you and I were born. Seven days: man invented fire. Ten days: dinosaurs Two weeks: the universe exploded. Look forward. In two days You will take a day to brush your hair And I to dress. Six days: we will need A day to think a thought. Two weeks: Our last heartbeat will last forever. Long before, its time run out Our brains dissolve, their parts Returning to material time, And only thus we circumvent The deep freeze of time's tailing Immortal loneliness.

Comments

[cheesebikini]

this person clearly confused "model" with "spokesmodel"

[Camilo]

Nonlinear dynamics and poetry.
But is too cerebral (pardon the pun).

[Schuyler Erle]

(from "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem)

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Bools or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product o four scalars is defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!