You’ve been a little off this week. On one hand you’re saying that we’ve reached the limit and are now just recycling stuff. However, your graph seems to suggest that we’re not even close – like in any given year from now we will have considerably more stuff than we do now. It would make more sense if you moved ‘now’ to the point where the ’stuff curve’ is practically vertical. This would suggest that any year from now we will have virtually the same amount of stuff as we do now (we’ve reached the The Limit). There’s a problem here too, though, because it suggests that right now we have an infinite amount of stuff. Did you really intend to get into the concept of limits at infinity in your essay on green-lighting hipsters?
Also, you could clear things up a little by making the origin equal to zero on the X-axis. Like, have we been gradually creating an exponential amount of stuff in negative time? You’ve chosen the the Y-axis to coincide with your asymptote which essentially represents the end of time (while suggesting that there is no beginning of time). If this is the case, don’t you think you should at least label it as such? I’ve attached a couple of graphs that I think are superior (depending on what you are trying to say).
Dave
Dear Dave,
Allow us to explain: we are actually NOT out of riffs. That was meant to be of the comedy persuasion. The “music philosopher” Harvard Yeats does not exist and there’s no such thing as a music philosopher. This makes your second chart redundant and we apologize for that.
Secondly, moving “now” closer to the y-axis doesn’t mean will have the same amount of stuff a year from now. It means the opposite. The closer you get to the y-axis, the greater the changes in units along X. Kind of like world population. Back in Jesus’ time we were adding about 17 babies a year (hence the huge hubub when Jesus was born). Today there’s over 9 billion babies born every minute (most of them die). Next week the numbers will be that, cubed.
Third, I agree with you that when you go several hundred years towards the beginning and end of the function, you get into problems with infinity but you’re just going to have to suspend your belief for the sake of the argument because we’re not talking about the year negative 1,332,233 or the year 9,882,326,773,322. We’re talking about, say, 1950 to 2050.
Next week we’ll be adding a third dimension to the equation and spinning the function about the z-axis to determine its surface area. This will tell us if Courtney Love’s equation, “It’s 2 + 2 = 4. It’s sexism” has any efficacy.
Love,
SC
[Editors Note: You're right I took down the tits pic and put up something more honest.]
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Now I’m really lost. There was no mention of “Canada” on the graph.
08.08.08 at 10:27 am
I was promised tits.
08.08.08 at 11:42 am
i too came here for tits. instead i get graphs and math? you’re above this SBTVC
08.08.08 at 11:49 am
there was a pic of tranny tits up there earlier. wha happen?
08.08.08 at 12:58 pm
i just laffed at larry the cable guy. larry the cable guy in a nutisystem commercial. Does this mean i have brain cancer?
08.08.08 at 1:12 pm
Look, I couldn’t finish my math homework until i corrected yours, and now you’re doing it again. I was talking about infinity on the Y-axis, not the X-axis. In other words, y(now) = infinity; y(tomorrow) = y(now) + infinity = infinity. Thus, y(now) = y(tomorrow) = infinity. I didn’t mean to take the ’shit function’ so seriously but you’re the one that posted a Wikipedia link to asymptotes.
You know… ugh… why did you have to bring up babies? If you check the stats (as I’m sure you do), women are actually having less babies. Yeah a lot of them are dying, but they’re dying at decreasing rate. That’s why the earth’s population is still increasing (although its increasing at an exponentially decreasing rate). Apparently everything’s okay then, in that regard.
People think that math is gay, but they’re forgetting that when you’re on speed nothing is gay. You can take your magic studying vitamins, do your math (and do it much much better than nerds of yesteryear), and find that you will still have about 80% of your awake time left. And this is important because the civilized world needs more nerds. Over in China they are forcing everyone at gun-point to do study math and science, and you know how they are.
The people at Star Trek have always been telling us that when we do venture out into the cosmos, the human race will be represented by a semi-international team headed by some American guy. We will be coming in peace, seeking to make new friends, but with powerful weapons just in case. At the rate things are going, any spaceship that aliens encounter from earth will be loaded with Chinese. That makes the future very different.
08.08.08 at 2:44 pm
The Sciences on Speed! Street Carnage occasional “Math Corner”?
08.08.08 at 3:37 pm
more like’meth corner’ hoho!
08.11.08 at 12:21 am