Grrl Power #1078 - Disaster, more like... dismathter

Thank you for the support! You guys are awesome!

You know, sometimes the titles to these pages are funny references or portmanteaus or repurposed idioms, and sometimes they're "I can't think of anything better and it's been an hour." It's the equivalent of browsing Netflix for 25 minutes before finally clicking on something that barely surpasses the "I'm sick of scrolling" threshold. I will let you decide which kind this title is.

The equations floating around Deus are actual math I found after googling disaster recovery. Of course, without knowing what all those letters stand for, they're probably not immediately useful. It seems to me that there aren't nearly enough letters and symbols to cover all the needs in math. I mean, sure "c" stands for "the speed of light" in one equation, (which now that I think about it, is probably called "c" because it's one of the few universal constants. Huh. That's probably super obvious but I never really thought about it before.) What was I... Oh, right, so "c" means the speed of light in one equation, then it means "circumference" in another, and "number of accidental circumcisions" in another. Of course, the need to reuse symbols for variables is because we only have so many symbols in Romanized languages, but it makes me wonder if in Chinese equations for stuff like this just use the Chinese symbol? I mean, why memorize the what the fancy cursive "Q" in the equation means if you can just use a symbol that means "population" and instead of "Co" with a superscript "i" and a subscript "j", just use the symbol for "local economic impact" or whatever.

Okay, sure, despite Chinese having ~106K characters, there's probably not a singular one that means "local economic impact" but you get what I mean. And yes, I know I could probably just google the answer to my question, but I imagine the answer is probably no, Chinese math probably doesn't look like a three dimensional sentence, but I think that's a missed opportunity.

ANYWAY. Panel 5 there is just supposed to be a very truncated version of all the stuff going through his mind. He's also considering environmental impact, cost of relocating population, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis prevention, etc. Basically doing a super computer's worth of work, but guided by a creative, organic mind. His conclusion is that overall this is a net positive, but will take some effort to fully deal with.