The world wraps around…

The world wraps around. There is no such thing as a left extreme or a right extreme. In most cases, you can see that the left extreme and right extreme don’t have much of a difference. We just see them as extremes because we are projecting reality onto a 2-dimensional space where the ‘wrap-around’ doesn’t show.

I feel exactly the same way when I’m feeling extremely hungry or extremely full. Under both circumstances I don’t want to eat anything. The only way to resolve it is to exploit the unstable equilibrium at the “extreme point”. Eating just a little bit brings my system out of the extreme point and collapses it to one of the two states “hungry” or “full”.

I feel exactly the same when I’m really really happy and when I’m really really sad. Under both circumstances, I don’t feel like doing anything. Under both circumstances, I feel like talking to someone. Under both circumstances, I’m liable to get angry easily. However, I’m yet to figure out how to exploit the instability of this equilibrium in this case!

Can go on providing such examples but it’ll be too much pain for you to read them. Want to close by talking about this convention in contract bridge which one uses to figure out how many aces the partner has. You bid “four no trump”. Partner bids “5 clubs” if he has zero or four aces, “5 diamonds” in case of 1 ace and so on. The information you have from your hand helps you resolve between zero and four aces, so it is easy to resolve this ambiguity.

Extreme points in life are like a Five Clubs bid!

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