Not your usual marginalia

–Like so much of the talk about “power,” luck is the unexplained variance left over after used up all that we know to account for what seems to occurring at edge of what we know or can know.

–Should it need saying, this notion that one’s sense of randomness is created by thinking at the limits of cognition contrasts with the commonplace that pre-existing random variation, a.k.a. indeterminism, constrains our thinking and behaving.

–If we accept its definition—“the Precautionary principle that the introduction of a new product or process whose ultimate effects are disputed or unknown should be resisted”—then the precaution is based on what is known/unknown by way of effects understood today. Where so, there appears to be little or no possibility—no second chance—of any “afterwards” that demonstrates when and where the initial precaution was irreversibly in error.

–The opposite of a frightening uncontrollability or uncertainty isn’t controllability and certainty but restfulness, i.e., being indifferent to and not caring about either set of binaries.

–The father of artist Max Ernst is said to have painted a picture of his garden but was so upset at having to leave out a tree for compositional reasons that he had the tree cut down in order to match the picture. I have worked with project designers, engineers, ecologists and economists, who saw their worlds represented the same way. I still feel shame at having had village trees cut down for the planned road that never came.

–Some of those “. . .but-we-must-do-something-now!” are conveyed with the same urgency the Yankee poet felt when commemorating another Civil War battle.

–We should keep in mind the example of Phalaris, 6th century BCE tyrant in Sicily. He ordered the inventor Perillus to design a huge bronze bull in which to roast his victims alive. Their screams would, the tyrant hoped, sound just like the bellows of a bull. Phalaris was so impressed with the contraption that he promptly tried it out on Perillus, as the first victim.

–Have you ever attended one of those presentations where the engineer proposes all-benefit-and-no-cost designs and technologies of such fantastification as would bring a failing grade to an undergraduate in policy analysis?

–The only difference between the advocates of financial economism and Professor Sir Anthony Blunt, art historian and KGB agent seeking to undermine capitalism, is that Blunt didn’t have as good a roadmap to economic subversion as the Efficient Market Hypothesis, Value at Risk Model, and other such weaponry driving the last financial crisis.

–There’s also no small irony in the fact that the advocates of innovation privilege the role of error in their drive to innovation at the same time they dismiss as “patches and workarounds” the real-time operational redesigns of infrastructure operators necessitated by those innovations.

–System failure is the place where everything is actually connected to everything else, since each thing ends up as a potential substitute for anything else. “Need unites everything,” Aristotle put it, and need is greatest in collapse.

–That Christ was the first Christian doodler and painter—think John 8:6-8, where he bends down to draw something in the dirt, and Veronica’s veil upon which he wiped his exact image—doesn’t makes him good-enough in either, even if, or some say, he was as good as you’re going to get—and even then, just only maybe.