Months passed. New Year arrives. 2018. The number looks beautiful. Every year since the calculated new century hit the calendars looks beautiful. The curve of the "2" instead of the blunt "1". Then there is the lovely feeling of "2". Songs say it: "It Takes Two", "Tea for Two", etc. And then there is the Orwellian theme of power erasing empirical truths featuring that number. We remember that moment, at least from the latest film version, where power tells people 2 + 2 = 5; however, the last shot shows the hero carving 2 + 2 = 4 into a cafe tabletop. Someone will encounter that good math message and realize they are not alone. The truth still stands.
Good news everybody! In spite of continual attempts by "power" in the "real" world, good math still stands.
2 + 2 = 4
Student survivors from the latest slaughter in a school do the good math: AK15s (?) are weapons of war. Ban them.
Texas wind farm owners do the good math: This clean energy industry creates more jobs than our President's beloved "clean" coal and . . . well, collecting wind doesn't annihilate the land.
Math. And then poetry.
The Prez still loves to quote song lyrics (he calls it a "poem") made famous by Al Wilson. "The Snake" is being twisted to serve an anti-immigrant movement. More bad math. (I am really mixing metaphors here, but you get it.)
This Business Insider article responds to Donald's bad math and bad spin:
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-the-snake-poem-2016-9
Well, at least he is messing with a pop song and not a classic piece of actual poetry. Donald needs to think about Shelley's poem. I wonder if this could help him do "good math"?
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
2018
Beautiful . . . in spite of bad math.
XO
