TEXT AND NOTHING BUT TEXT (December 2, 2014)
Over many a year, I have done my best not to encumber my Residua with anything but text. I eschewed tables, charts, and diagrams, let alone photographs or videos. Text and nothing but text. One of the reasons for this is purely technical. Text is so much easier to protect from the ravages of time than anything else. Sadly, I made only one mistake in this regard. Writing about the place of addenda in my writings, I succumbed to no less than two matrices (“Production of Residua by Means of Residua,” May 7, 1983). It was a joke of sorts on Piero Sraffa (1898-1983) and Wassily Leontief (1906-1999), two economists close to my heart. The matrices harked back to input-output analysis, where addenda represented flows between yearbooks. In later years, four more matrices appeared in two addenda to the original piece. Sraffa came to my mind a couple of days ago, and I wrote yet another addendum to the piece with six matrices. Having posted it on the World Wide Web, I noticed all sorts of problems with the matrices. In several places, they were squeezed against each other and the text. Try as I might, I could not get them straight. The trouble was with the software used when my writings were transferred to the World Wide Web around the turn of the millennium. I could not figure it out for hours upon hours. Having solved the problem a short while ago, I am back with a few additional words about my magnum opus. Once again, text and nothing but text. The six matrices will stay in it, of course, but I will make such a silly mistake never again. Perish the thought.