I was at a ceremony this weekend celebrating a death in the family, thinking about people and ancestry and residue. A person is not just their body and mind: a person is also carried by memories of them in others, their physical affects, and the networks that build and evolve in the wake of their life. My dad told me about how after his father died, there was dry cleaning to pick up—he called it a "residue" left in the world in the form of a dry cleaning stub.
Using the word "residue" struck me in this context, because I've been using it somewhere completely unrelated: my life-cycle class. Early in the semester we had a reading that said that "waste is just a residue that civilization hasn't figured out what to do with yet" (Graedel & Allenby 2003). I like the phrase for its optimism and viewpoint, and it rang in my head for a while. "Waste," linguistically, can enable a willingness to set aside, to ignore, to make pretend about finite systems in what is really a grand flux of material through the world; "residue" feels like a remainder that wastes are both present and (potentially) useful.
I was reminded of a class I took back college, on Complex Analysis. There's a "Residue Theorem" in this field (it follows from Cauchy's), and I remembered finding the proof very fun. I was amazed that the output of an integral on a closed loop on a connected chunk of complex plane—a set-up rooted in continuity of the domain and operation—could yield an effectively discrete output (effectively a sum of coefficients of a Laurent series corresponding to the orders of singularities that lie within your loop).
I found myself in the back of a car driving around suburban Michigan thinking about residue in these three ways. No grand message here, just hoping to squeeze a poem out all that "residue" can evoke.
Sticking around,
Lukas
Using the word "residue" struck me in this context, because I've been using it somewhere completely unrelated: my life-cycle class. Early in the semester we had a reading that said that "waste is just a residue that civilization hasn't figured out what to do with yet" (Graedel & Allenby 2003). I like the phrase for its optimism and viewpoint, and it rang in my head for a while. "Waste," linguistically, can enable a willingness to set aside, to ignore, to make pretend about finite systems in what is really a grand flux of material through the world; "residue" feels like a remainder that wastes are both present and (potentially) useful.
I was reminded of a class I took back college, on Complex Analysis. There's a "Residue Theorem" in this field (it follows from Cauchy's), and I remembered finding the proof very fun. I was amazed that the output of an integral on a closed loop on a connected chunk of complex plane—a set-up rooted in continuity of the domain and operation—could yield an effectively discrete output (effectively a sum of coefficients of a Laurent series corresponding to the orders of singularities that lie within your loop).
I found myself in the back of a car driving around suburban Michigan thinking about residue in these three ways. No grand message here, just hoping to squeeze a poem out all that "residue" can evoke.
Sticking around,
Lukas