A circle would imply a gradual change, which doesn’t exactly happen. You start out with Life as grass, then it gets eaten and becomes Life as an antelope, then it gets eaten again and becomes Life as a lion, then it dies, decomposes, and returns to being Life as grass.
I grant you, “The Triangle of Life” may not pack the theaters for Lion King 3, but that would be a more appropriate description, don’t you think?
And that’s a pretty simplistic scenario. You could have shapes without right angles (The Rhombus of Life), or with as many steps as you can imagine (The Dodecahedron of Life).
And why limit ourselves to two dimensions? That antelope could be split amongst multiple lions. Why even limit ourselves to three? I heard a recent theory that the universe is a 12-dimensional super-torus, or something like that. That moves well beyond my ken for naming, but that’s Billy Joel’s problem.
The bell curve/normal distribution of life? It starts slowly with small bacteria, then mo ves quickly to dinosaurs, then shrinks down to humans, then eventually to rats and cockroaches (the only ones able to survive a nuclear holocaust).
It’s the bell curve
The bell curve of . . .
l i f e
The Arbitrary Polygon of Life ™, while being a great band name, doesn’t carry the “going back to where it started” message as traditionally as a circle, is all.
Hang on. You left out the “playing billiards all day and patting good looking women on the ass”-phase. Now, for some this is their student years, and for others it is their retirement. Personally, I intend to do both. I’m already halfway.
Well, all my life’s a circle, sunrise and sundown; the moon rolls thru the nighttime ‘til the daybreak comes around. All my life’s a circle but I can’t tell you why; the season’s spinning round again, the years keep rollin’ by.
Life? Not a good cereal? Um. . .Well. . . I had a good analogy at this point between cereal and life, but it’s completely slipped my mind now. So, I guess all I’m down to now is Life is the second best cereal known to mankind, bowing only to Peanut Butter Captain Crunch.
Damn, I wish I could remember what I had first thought.
Life is a nine-dimensional tetrahedron. I’m sorry but I can’t explain it any better than that. In our four-dimensional sensory world, it looks like a circle, or a triangle, depending on the light.
