Associations

Is there really anything more fundamental to our privative understanding of this world than our ability to make associations? Associations are our metaphors for data, they are our symbols for relationships. They make sense out of the senseless by forgetting the noise and, instead, concentrating on the lone harmonic tone.

For all those endlessly inter-connected, infinitely complex systems within the fuzzy world of Eisenstein chaos that exist beneath this simple Newtonian world we experience, it is the one perfect image of an apple, falling from a tree, that represents in our minds that compound curve of time-space we call gravity.

A good, solid association makes so many things clearer.

The team is working on associating all collectible data generated by our online readers. My job is finding the right symbol, the right metaphor that captures the essence of a number. For numbers are very elusive in their true meanings. They are very similar to words in that regard. Unskilled writers (me) use words bluntly to stutter out our ideas. A poet, however, can find the right words to extract the exact expression.

The numbers are slowly revealing themselves to me. I know I have found the essence of a number when a clear association snaps into place and won't let go. Once number and association fuse, clarity overcomes chaos and things become simple, honest. Powerful associations bridge any amount of data complexity and present the viewer with single, understandable, attractive connection. A single apple, falling from a tree. It is from these images that imperfect, beautiful human understanding grows outward and upward.