THE ERA OF OVERPRODUCTION

We were talking in her studio, about living in The Era Of Overproduction.  I tell her about a guy who had been working on a computer program that would write 'new' Bach pieces. He'd finally got the program to a point where he was personally satisfied with it, so he hit 'start' before going to lunch one afternoon.  When he came back there were 4000 new Bach pieces on his laptop.  At CERN (the centre for nuclear research in Switzerland) there are experiments which generate 5000 encyclopedias of data per second.  It's said that every minute there's 32 hours of new footage uploaded to Youtube...

We talked about the impossibility of having anything remotely resembling an 'overview' of world literature or world cinema these days.  We sensed the presence of unbelievably perfect books in distant languages that would never be translated and which we would never read. Of beautiful articles on topics we had never consciously formulated even in our wildest reveries, in magazines that would go bust after a few issues without us ever hearing even their names.

We liked living in this world.  We liked the poverty and the richness of it.  But mainly the richness.  And at the same time we felt some strange tremor in our conscience urging us to .. to live in it more accurately ...

She's reading James Gleick's "Chaos". I see her highlights on the pages. I've just got time to share a few of  them with you but then I have to go...

At the national laboratory some physicists learned that their newest colleague was experimenting with 26 hour days, which meant that his waking schedule would slowly roll in and out of phase with theirs.  This bordered on strange, even in the Theoretical Division.

These scientists had experience with brilliance and with eccentricity.  They were hard to surprise.  But MItchell Feigenbaum was an unusual case.  He had exactly one published article to his name, and he was working on nothing that seemed to have any particular promise.  His hair was a ragged mane,

When he worked, he worked obsessively.  When he could not work, he walked and thought, day or night, and night was best of all.  The twenty four hour day seemed too constraining.  Nevertheless, his experiment in quasiperiodicity came to an end when he decided he could no longer bear waking to the setting sun, as had to happen every few days.

He thought about clouds, watching them from airplane windows (until his scientific travel privileges were officially suspended on grounds of overuse) or from the hiking trails of his laboratory.

Of course, the entire effort is to put oneself
Outside the ordinary range
Of what is called statistics.