Sharp Puzzles poem and Uncertainty rant

Sharp Puzzles

Dice have razor edges,
every roulette game is russian.
The world is full of butterflies
and their fatal affects;
the sigh, the batting of the eye,
But the reaper whirlwind strips them of facade.
Yet we still sow,
mending the leftovers,
creating frankenstein futures
from fractured glass pasts,
only to realize we cannot find
the heart of the situation,
cannot find the purpose to shards,
but that is all we have left.

I want to be able to sing this to a woman some day...


Uncertainty and unpredictability are the most dangerous things in this world, yet they are inevitable as long as we are reliant on our senses and on outside information. The more unpredictable something is, the more dangerous. Things that seem harmless, like food, water, air can become deadly once unknown agents are introduced. The more variables that can go wrong, the more variables that will go wrong.

That is one thing that fascinates me about engineering, we say a car is a lemon if it needs a major repair 2 or 3 years after being "brand new" yet think about a car. How many parts does a car have that are absolutely necessary to functioning properly? hundreds? thousands? Most cars runs on EXPLOSIONS for gods sake! Controlled, but still one of the most seemingly unpredictable expressions of energy one can think of. The energy from those explosions are transferred to the wheels through gears and shafts and whatnot, each has to withstand various forces in various directions at various temperatures and fit to extremely tight tolerances. I find it amazing that a car can go hundreds of miles without wearing itself out, or spontaneously combusting, much more thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even 1 million miles http://autos.aol.com/article/million-mile-car-donated-to-museum/ (with luck and proper care)
so you can usually be certain that your car will work when you need it

Computers have billions of gates and parts that control it and work together to do extremely complicated tasks through logic and physics. It can calculate and store information using electrical charges for heavens sake. It can turn mere numbers into words and colors and movement and shading and physics. This is how I feel when I think about it too much: http://xkcd.com/676/ and the most amazing part is that they work, almost always, the number of defective computers is very low despite that they rely on both hardware and software to allow them to run. Now we even have software that learns, how amazing is that? Most of us are certain that our computer will turn on and work no matter what (that is if you have a mac lol).

Though my life is governed by the laws of physics (and chemistry, a subset of physics) it is not predictable at all. All is uncertainty, and frankly I dislike uncertainty, I have a tendency to paralyze myself until I am certain, I delay making decisions until I have sufficient information. But I do not have the time nor the information to see what is next, and I do not know when it will come. So what the hell do I do now?