journal features

west is left and right is east

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2015.09.28

Looking at one of Ken's homework assignments, we saw that he'd correctly divined a pattern in a set of diagrams of blocks that grow by accretion. The pattern starts with a single block. In the next diagram, a block has been added to the top of the first, plus one on either side. In the third diagram, this is repeated.

Ken was asked to write a description of the pattern. He wrote, "Add one to the West and add one to the East and add one to the North."

(At least there was no cruel slander about forgetting maps, this time.)

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)