The Difference Engine

[barnabas_truman]

A conversation between a paleontologist and a police special agent:

"Bureaucrats! They might have known this [social unrest] would happen, if they'd properly studied Catastrophist theory. It is a concatenation of synergistic interactions; the whole system is on the period-doubling route to Chaos!"

"What does that mean, pray?"

"Essentially, in layman's terms, it means that everything gets twice as bad, twice as fast, until everything falls completely apart!"

(from The Difference Engine by Gibson & Sterling, pp 210-211)

Comments

[barnabas-truman.livejournal.com]

"Period-doubling" is a bit of a mistake, though; it should be "frequency-doubling." Doubling the period would mean it gets bad half as fast.