Quote of the Day


"In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year.

Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.

And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."
- Mark Twain, from "Life on the Mississippi" (1917 frontispiece to this book shown above)


There is a serious message in this charming and amusing quote. Be careful of the advice of anyone who projects forward a line on a graph without stopping to apply common sense and ask themselves whether it is reasonable to assume that whatever trend they are analysing can or will continue indefinately. The message was once summed up by The Economist magazine in five words:


"Beware of optimists with rulers!"

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