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14 sep 06 "Getsuan said to his students, "Keichu, the first wheel-maker in China, made two wheels having fifty spokes each. Suppose you took a wheel and removed the nave uniting the spokes. What would become of the wheel? If Keichu had done so, could he be called the master wheel-maker?"" nave = hub. if some fucker builds a wheel with fifty spokes, and then takes out the thing that provides the spoke-tension and keeps the rim from collapsing, then the wheel would moosh like a spaghetti-o under the weight of the fat chinese dude being hauled around by keichu, the master wheel-maker. if keichu had brilliantly taken the hub out of his wheels, he might have been praised as a zen master, but people would stop buying his wheels. he'd be called not "the master wheel maker", but "the crazy wheel maker", or "the wheel maker who was belaboring some tired philosophical aphorism by screwing up a perfectly good wheel, as if we needed to hear more of this shit, we being in the Exotic East and all". koans and their cousins aren't annoying, exactly, because you know that nothing is expected of you, the audience. if someone asks you "what is the sound of one hand clapping?", you're just supposed to stand there looking puzzled and then attain enlightnment through the transcendence of logical lanugage, not answer with "it goes pff, pff, pff". i'm trying to come up with some metaphoric significance to removing the hub from a wheel, but i can't. maybe something as obvious as center-less-ness, or even-distribution, or the lack of a power-head? interestingly, if you take this power-head away, in the case of the wheel, the wheel falls apart. this seems like not the sort of metaphor these zen master types would present -- "if you take away your leader, the whole kingdom will fall". it just doesn't seem in keeping with the spirit of things. but i answered your damned question. furthermore, i see the whole point of the thing: evenly-distributed computing does a better job of multitasking. but i could come up with a better metaphor, if i wanted to -- this one stinks. maybe it's the translation. |
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