I loved doing school musicals [as a kid], I even started at an early age to write little plays for the school to perform. I was not just keen on that, it was during that time, during the school period then from an early age, that I began to dream about acting.
Stephen Jay Gould
People are storytelling creatures. We like stories that go somewhere, and therefore we like trends - because trends are things that either get better or get worse, so we can either rejoice or lament. But we mistakenly depict many things as trends moving in some direction. We take the "full house" of variation in a system and try to represent it as a single number, when in fact what we should be doing is studying the variation as it expands and contracts. If you look at the history of the variation in all its complexity, then you see there's no trend.
