MDMD(4) p.123 small re-write

[Matthew P Wiener]

Brian D McCary writes:

>As I recall, the importance of "non-linearity" was as a limiting case
>for modeling.  (This does, in a way, relate to Pynchon).  I'm gonna get
>windy here, since it's probably the only way to really explain the
>relevance of the issue.

>All math models of natural phenomena are approximations.  The
>assumption one makes when creating a model is that if you make small
>changes to the input, you will end up with smallish changes in the
>output.  The classic example is weather: The assumption, for a long
>time, was that weather was basically deterministic, and that if you
>could adequately model the temperature, wind, humidity, (ect)  [...]

The standard chaos theory paradigm is that some effect under observation
is _genuine_ chaos, which guarantees that models will have problems too.

>ob Pynchon: Several times in GR (I don't recall where, right now)
>Pynchon spins beautiful poetry about Calculus, epsilon and delta,
>dv/dt kinds of things.  [...]

Tom Lehrer was better at that sort of thing.
--
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba at sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)