Looks like "up" to me

Recent posts on "free will" led me to writing a parable for our time.

Once upon a time there was a scientist who discovered that things always go "downhill", and he was sad. He went to the town square to share his sadness.

There he met a young couple returning from the ski slopes, flushed with enthusiasm after their wonderful afternoon. He told them they had only gone downhill, trapped in the clutches of gravity all day -- so they became sad too.

He met a young woman who had spent the afternoon in a sailplane, soaring up and down the valley, riding thermals high into the sky and soaring down again to race the sailboats on the lake, all going back and forth downwind. He managed to defuse her joy as well, pointing out that sailplanes and sailboats, lacking engines, can only go downhill.

Finally, he met a mathematician coming from the art gallery where he had been studying M.C. Escher's painting of Waterfall, Hofstadter's strange loops, and a set of those funny dice that beat each other in a loop forever with no "best one". For that poor soul, directions seemed to be tangled together and refused to stay in their proper places. Still, at last, here was an audience with mathematical skill! The scientist shared how, even though the visible universe used to be a formless sea of hydogren and now was filled with trillions of fascinating objects and life-forms, it was really, if one figured entropy properly, all simply going "downhill". The mathematician refused to be depressed and just replied "Yes, isn't intuition terrible? He'd heard that bumblebees couldn't fly either. What a shame."

Unable to depress anyone else this sunny afternoon, the scientist brooded as he walked back up the mountain to his cottage. Finally, unable to take life any more, he hurled himself off a cliff and fell, downhill of course, to his death. After his funeral and a brief period of mourning, the town actually brightened up quite a bit without the constant drone of gloom, and everyone else lived happily ever after.

technorati tags:parable, down, up, downhill, entropy, sailplane, escher, dice, depression, gloom