Unacknowledged legislators

Percy Bysshe Shelley famously said, Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Here are two recent examples of the poetry underlying current events…

In this election season

Two voices calmly suggesting we shouldn’t demonize “the other side” — after the election, we have to live and work with them.

And the same goes for Sunni and Shi’ite, and anyone else at risk of genocide or civil war…

Flight and fugue

Two very similar modes of transport:

Waxing and waning (i)

The diagram at the bottom is a “stocks and flows” diagram of how memory accumulates and, sadly, decreases. The image at the top is of the waxing and waning moon…

Waxing and waning (ii)

This second version uses the same systems diagram, but marries it to a psychological version of the waxing and waning of memory…

Search and replace

Two faintly humorous examples of how easily a machine “search and replace” function can get confused…

Outside, inside