If you ever took a Statistics course, you'll remember this diagram illustrating confidence intervals. The straight horizontal line with the random squigglies everywhere. The signal being the straight line, and the squigglies being the noise. The closer the squigglies are to the straight line, the stronger the signal is.
I never get rid of old emails,messages, or letters, and just keep them locked away in folders in my account. Who knows if you needed to recall something from the past and the proof no longer exists?
I was procrastinating on working on an essay for a class and went through the folders in my email account when he came to visit me in the library. After leafing through the countless emails sent from Shanghai, it suddenly occurred to me that I had carried a skewed version of the past with me all these years.
He asked me what I was looking at and I explained to him the context and the author of said emails, admitting that maybe the reason why everything fell apart was my fault. He said he never kept old emails and preferred to have an uncluttered account. He told me that he deleted all of the emails I sent him back from first semester. I asked him if he ever regretted this - if he ever wanted to look back, what could he possibly look back on?
He pulled out his wallet and showed me the origami turtle I had sent him in the mail during the summer.
He said:
"This is signal. The rest is noise."
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