Great article. I recently heard the ketchup bottle quote in the film "Kate & Leopold".
Linear assumptions are so seductive...and so many things in life simply aren't linear...the article is a good reminder of that.
It also reminds me of something that h appened years ago, while I was at Apple. Engineers liked to use the term "nonlinear" to describe how upset they or someone was, as in "when he found out, he went nonlinear". Well, at some divisional all-hands meeting one of the execs tried to use this phr ase in an effort to be "just a regular guy". Unfortunately for him, what he actually said was "when I heard that, I went totally LINEAR!"
My fellow workers and I just kind of blinked at each other, not sure whether to laugh or cry. It might have been a r eally funny mistake, but the exec was so bland and passionless, we thought he might have been serious.
In the Army people often say "went ballistic" to denote a person's extreme upset. The phrase derives from a very real loss of control: when a guided projectile or missile of some kind has stopped accepting guidance and is now on a path defined only by physics, it has "gone ballistic".
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Linear assumptions are so seductive...and so many things in life simply aren't linear...the article is a good reminder of that.
It also reminds me of something that h appened years ago, while I was at Apple. Engineers liked to use the term "nonlinear" to describe how upset they or someone was, as in "when he found out, he went nonlinear". Well, at some divisional all-hands meeting one of the execs tried to use this phr ase in an effort to be "just a regular guy". Unfortunately for him, what he actually said was "when I heard that, I went totally LINEAR!"
My fellow workers and I just kind of blinked at each other, not sure whether to laugh or cry. It might have been a r eally funny mistake, but the exec was so bland and passionless, we thought he might have been serious.
®
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In the Army people often say "went ballistic" to denote a person's extreme upset. The phrase derives from a very real loss of control: when a guided projectile or missile of some kind has stopped accepting guidance and is now on a path defined only by physics, it has "gone ballistic".