a crooked house
I was chatting the other day with a friend, who claimed that he had built an addition off of his house into the fourth dimension. He meant time, but I immediately thought of the old R.A.H. story “-And He Built a Crooked House-”, in which the Los Angeles protagonist builds a tesseract house as an unfolded net in our banal three dimensional universe.
When the inevitable earthquake struck in this tale, the house folded into extra dimensional space and hilarity ensued.
So it is with our fabulous world economy, a hypercube of mal - aligned assumptions on the grandest possible scale. A crooked house wired into an infinite energy panacea. The final outcome of this endeavor is damned near unpredictable.
For now, I think this: when the earthquake comes, hilarity will ensue.
Happy Monday!
posted by JMS @ 12:18 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Ugggh - comment spam.
Don't they realise no one will be able to afford to buy that stuff after the peak :-)
Zapped it.
Hey, how about the book Flatland? What we have here is the failure to see in more than two dimensions.
Apologies to Cool Hand Luke.
Careful! You are inviting Chromatic Sedition!
"This notion that the circle is getting ready to attack triangle is simply ridiculous. Having said that, all options are on the table."
The man you want to read is Charles H. Hinton. He wrote a book called "The Fourth Dimension" that came with a sheet of cut-out colored cubes that were to be assembled into an unfolded tesseract. I keep meaning to xerox my copy and try it, but I'm weirdly afraid of it (what if I actually assemble it and can't get my fingers out?). He's also got a description of the movements of a four-dimensional wheel that'll drive you to the brink of insanity.
He prepared for all this by envisioning an enormous cube made out of hundreds of smaller cubes, each face of which he gave a name. He then memorized all the possible relations of each cube face...he describes it in an essay called "Casting Out the Self." Invented the mechanical baseball-pitcher too, for what that's worth.
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