This site’s title and philosophical outlook were inspired by Douglas Adams and his Total Perspective Vortex. Here is how Adams introduced his creation in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula–for that was his name–was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex—just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
I call this endeavor Limited Perspective in acknowledgment that from any given viewpoint, what I can observe is dwarfed by what I cannot. As I move spatially or temporally, new things appear in my scope as others vanish, and it’s only by memory or record that I can triangulate* what and where things are. Anyway, as my standpoint changes from there to here, and from then to now, I will always have limits on what I can view and analyze within a micron of its life. As I progress, I’ll able to draw more conclusions about Life, the Universe, and Everything. Which brings us back to Douglas Adams.
(Because someone asked.) Why .org and not .com for my site? I don’t enter this as a commercial venture. This is exercise, self-therapy, erudite exhibitionism, whatever you want to call it. The suggestion that this site is actually organized is a bonus.
(Also, it sounds lovely when a person with a British accent says, “dot org.”)
You–hush!
*Should the word be tetrahedronate? That still covers only three dimensions, not four. Smart boy wanted, as Myles na Gopaleen would say.
