As I was out bicycling about the countryside and the city, pondering repeating patterns, I came across a thought.  There really aren’t many flat surfaces in nature.  Flat dirt quickly sprouts weeds.  Flat sands quickly gets shaped into dunes by the wind.  Seashores are not flat, for they are covered with dead fish, or tide pools, or holes for the clams to breathe, or footprints.  Flat oceans are no longer flat, because plastic disrupts the surface if the winds and the waves do not.  Crystals in caves have imperfections.  Plants don’t grow flat, at least not at any scale.  The tall ones are rounded, like cacti and trees.

I’m not sure what to think of that.  Nature likes waves and curves more than flat surfaces.  Even the blade of grass bends down under the weight of the dew or the insect.  Things in space tend to be ovoids, not quite spherical.  The stars are never cubes.  I suppose black holes could be tetrahedrons.  That makes The Borg a very interesting anomaly, although if you look closely enough, the surface isn’t flat there either.  Planets aren’t discworld, despite the claims of the flat earthers.  Natural things tend to be round, like pebbles in a stream.  Even volcanoes and fulgurites are rounded.

This makes for interesting thoughts about western industrial civilization education.  Schools are filled with flat things.  Paper is flat, and the students quickly like to make them into balls.  I suppose that appeals to their sense of naturalness.  Desks are flat.  The first algebra equations graph out into a flat line.  Graphs themselves are made of flat lines.  The first physics labs are about flat lines of velocity, of a ball rolling down a flat ramp.  Floors are flat.  Walls are flat.

Even swimming is taught flat.  Proper Terry Laughlin style swimming is not flat.  Oh no.  It incorporates spin and rotation, because much of nature is spinning and rotating.  From chemistry to electricity, the left hand rule matters, because spin matters.  Yet you can’t spin in writing, or elementary school subjects.  Why is that?  Why do the children’s games involve spinning in circles so often then?  Well, I suppose hockey is played on a flat surface of the frozen lake.  Except, if you’ve ever been on an actual frozen lake, that’s not exactly flat either.

Nature is filled with recursion.  Thus, the economies of entire nations are bubbles which rise and fall cyclically, despite all the efforts to keep them on a flat upward sloping surface.  That’s not how markets work.  If it were, there wouldn’t be so many software stock trading programs describing minimums and maximums and falling knives with curvy stuff in the middle.  You’re here, and you’re generally headed this way, but in the short term, there’s a lot of variability within the boundaries.  Confidence isn’t a flat surface either.

So, here we are.  We use oil, measured in round things called barrels, with a non-linear discovery rate, and a non-linear production rate, and a non-linear refinery rate.  This week’s reading has been several blogs worth of people explaining how energy is the thing that drives economies.  If global energy production falls, then economies must also fall.  If future energy is less than today’s energy, then being in debt, and lending debt, are both bad ideas.  See, debt is the bet that enough energy will magically appear to generate a positive return on investment.  In the past, that was human labor, or horse and ox labor, or perhaps whale blubber and coal and wood labor.  When tomorrow’s energy is more difficult to obtain than today’s energy, who will bear that risk?  Not the banks.  They will only write risky mortgages if they’re allowed to short them and know for certain when they’ll fail.  See the last 10 years for how that’s working out for the general economy.

Airplanes are round.  Their fuel tanks are round.  Their routes are circumpolar and not “straight”.  Bicycles are built from round tubes for the frame, round wheels, round cabling.  Buckets are round.  Propane and helium tanks are round.  Wine bottles are round.  Textbooks are not.  Pencils are round.  Diplomas are not.  Screens are filled with round pixels, but are flat.  Fondleslabs are flat.  Deeds of property are flat.  Sales are flat, and that’s supposed to be a bad thing.  Populations of any species are not flat over time.  They rise and fall, sometimes based on supply and demand of a keystone species, and sometimes not.

If you pave a road, nature will find a way to disturb it.  If you erect a gravestone or a rectangular building, nature will find a way to break it, to make it curvy and jagged, pockmarked and covered with ivy.