Chapter 7 — Boo
Hello Friends,
It’s happening! Our first form of time travel is hitting this website. For those of you who only experience these dispatches as newsletters or podcasts, and those of you whose first encounter with www.writtenbyrufus.com happens sometime after this post, you would be quite likely to sail on by, blissfully oblivious. But the historical record is being doctored, and I’m drawing your attention to it, here and now.
After all, The Curve of Time is about time travel, and that’s what motivated this whole journey in the first place, so it feels right to highlight what is happening, right now——at least for me, as I write this.
So, what am I alluding to? Put simply: the episodes tab and newsletter tab on the website will henceforth be merged. Alright, I hear you sigh. Not such a big change? Well, let me contextualize a little, because I think it is a nice example of a much more general phenomenon, and one that mathematicians feel very acutely.
Notational change can feel subtle, and sometimes, when first encountered, it can feel like vacuous pomp and ceremony. Take the switch from Roman numerals to decimal notation. Sure, it allowed for a more manageable way of presenting numbers big and small (how would you write the national debt in Roman numerals), but how big of a deal was it really? Well, pretty big. For one thing, it made calculations like addition, and, even more so, multiplication much easier. For another, it lays an abstract foundation, that later makes polynomial calculations feel natural (if you were never shown this I encourage you to take a mathematical excursion into James Tanton’s Exploding Dots). Indeed, many classes of numbers (integers, aka whole numbers, rational numbers, aka fractions, and real numbers, pretty much any number you can think of before you encounter imaginary numbers, and even imaginary numbers in case you have encountered them)——all these classes of numbers, and polynomials are all subsumed within the more abstract conceptual framework of rings (but, unfortunately, we don’t have room here for that beautiful digression).
Perhaps a more visual example of a notational advance would be illuminating. You’ve all seen various graphs. For example: growth curves or the stock market or population, or graphs of temperature compared to the day of the year. It’s hard to fathom if you’ve existed within today’s world (and let’s face it, if you’re reading this, that means you) but there was a time when people considered functions as collections of pairs of numbers without considering graphs that connected the input with the output. And without the wonderful visuals of graphs it’s a lot harder to see the annual cycles in which the weather comes. Cartesian coordinates also paved the way for calculus, without which we would not have modern machine learning … which means no Chat GPT, no AI image generation, no self-driving cars. In short, we’ve got quite a bit to thank Descartes for!
But what has all of this to do with the time travel I highlighted at the beginning of this missive?
Well, merging the episodes and newsletter tabs was only possible when I realized that beyond a form-factor, they really were the same thing. This presentational overhaul brings a seering clarity to that idea. Indeed, perhaps you, like me, were always a little bothered by the distinction on the website. The podcast episodes and the newsletters really only differed by a slight form factor, after all. All I can say is that those who look back may be baffled by my incompetence at separating them in the first place (though since I’ve now altered the record, they would never know were it not for this acknowledgement).
In my defense, I would like to submit that it wasn’t all a consequence of my lack of understanding that the underlying essences are the same. In point of fact, the design error was in no small part due to my technical incompetence when it comes to website design. Happily, as you can see, I’ve grown, and that specific incompetence is now in the past. All we have left is this post describing a reality before the timeline was doctored.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
And now, without further ado, let’s find out how Saskia’s disappearance last week felt to Mica.
