Wednesday, July 31, 2024

A Last Straw

:: before ::

In some ways, Working Out would make more sense here, in BizMo Diaries, as it's about physical body stuff, and the "business mobile" (peripatetic action studio) works for a stand-in, metaphor-wise. 

Likewise, this post, about Cybernetics, would make more sense in Control Room, just going by the relevant memes i.e. a "control room" is like a "bridge" or place to make things happen. Another type of "action studio" really (what isn't?), but relatively stationary.

Let's now turn to this meme of "last straw", which is also, presumably, the one which broke that poor camel's back. The camel was already laden with straw, one imagines, and was holding up. But that one last straw proved the tipping point and, snap, the camel's back lost structural integrity.

We tend to empathize with the camel, or in any case, if a beast of burden, now we have no animal to bear our load. Like a car broken down by the side of the road, the connotations are mostly negative, in the direction of increasing entropy. May the tow truck make it all better.

But what about critical "last straws" that, when added, open doors or otherwise lead to positive developments. What's the English language opposite of "catastrophe" and if none comes to mind, isn't that a symptom of something, about English. I've heard "benestrophe" suggested. I must've already added it to my dictionary, as so far my spell checker hasn't complained.

"To cyber" means "to steer" i.e. "cybering" is a matter of rotating a rudder, thereby repointing the craft. That may sound like a simple process but sometimes so much inertia is involved that even the rudder needs a rudder, which reminds us which principle (leverage) is involved.

Let's say you turn hard to starboard or port, and manage to miss the iceberg this time, because you had better intelligence ahead of time. You had more time to react. 

Optimal responses may require cool headed thinking, and lots of it, however if that time is not now, then the usual strategy is to substitute a reflex as a next best reaction, a proxy action, an approximation, perhaps not well-thought out, but at least in the repertoire.

If you escape catastrophe, that in itself is a benestrophe. In ages past, the king or queen might have a monument, perhaps an entire church or temple, in gratitude to whatever generalized principles allowed for a freakishly and unexpectedly positive outcome, what we call "a miracle" in the vernacular.

However, we need to remain open minded with regard to even more positive positives, which are not about surmounting the relatively low bar of narrowly avoiding tragedy. These high bar events may be likewise triggered by feather-light tiny deltas, fourth derivative actions, as it were, as insignificant as the fluttering wings of a butterfly.