Category: Porch Ponders

Thoughts from conversations on the porch

Day Nine

“I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.” — Harry Emerson Fosdick

Music and math; is there a relationship beyond the obvious and that which lies in the realm of higher math and linguistics? In other words is there a realm of understanding that is beyond our current ability? Does music carry information in that realm?

Boethius, in his work De Musica, described three categories of music:
musica mundana (sometimes referred to as musica universalis)
musica humana (the internal music of the human body)
musica quae in quibusdam constituta est instrumentis (sounds made by singers and instrumentalists)
Boethius believed that musica mundana could only be discovered through the intellect, but that the order found within it was the same as that found in audible music, and that both reflect the beauty of God.

Do sounds in general carry such information? An animal’s sound or even the sound of a mechanical device? Is there a way to view it that is more than a Fourier analysis?

If I don’t know what I am looking for, how do I know when I have found it? The premise of Flatland comes to mind. How do I approach the idea of discovering what I don’t know I don’t know?

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” ― Arthur C. Clarke

education Porch Ponders

DIES SEX

Day Six; transliteration can be dangerous or amusing; is transliterate the correct word for this? What is the word for substituting word for word rather than letter by letter?

In my advanced years, I am attempting to learn other languages. I find that translating word by word is but a small, and sometimes incorrect, part of this. Even learning sentence structure is insufficient. Learning a language is more than the syntax.

During my brief stint teaching physics and engineering, I tried to impress on my students that mathematics is the language of those(and probably other) subjects. As with any language, the syntax is a necessary but insufficient part of learning mathematics.

Most of our understanding of the world is through mathematics. Whether it be quantum physics, climatology or politics, math is the language. One would never think of understanding quantum physics without it.

“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” — W. Edwards Deming

Too often we… enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. John F. Kennedy

education Porch Ponders

Day Five

“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

— Sir Arthur Eddington(1882-1944)

On considering “Oratorio for Living Things”, I am sitting on the porch, thinking. We view the world through the lens of a very small slice of time, space and wavelengths. We have built our view of our world in that set of dimensions our entire life. What if that set of dimensions is incomplete? What if the ‘spiritual’ dimension is real; but completely misunderstood? What if there are dimensions in which we exist but are completely unaware?

My view, education is the process by which we move the boundaries of the unknown; not a training ground for a high paying career.

“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” ― Socrates

Porch Ponders

Day Four

“I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.” — Harry Emerson Fosdick.

I am starting to believe that civilizations stagnate and die because they lose the desire to explore. This, in my opinion, is why space exploration, expansion and exploitation is crucial to the future of humans. Now, a darkly amusing thought, will spacers return in the distant future to help the ‘developing’ economies of these ‘earthers’? A question continues to ‘bug’ me. For thousands of years civilizations came and went all over the globe. A few hundred years ago something happened in Europe to place humanity on a completely different trajectory that has put us in this amazing technological civilization; what happened? Has it happened before? Was this really where it started? Has this civilization reached stagnation?

I am starting to believe that civilizations stagnate and die because we lose the desire to explore. Education is no longer an institution to explore one’s curiosities, it is a job training ground to further entrench our view of the current civilization. This is, of course, an opinion based on anecdotal evidence observed through the lens of one individual. An individual who has built a world view over a a 70 year span; a view that looks rather believable. A world view built on observations of a very narrow slice of time, space, and wavelength spectrum; and, perhaps, dimensions of which we are unaware.

“It’s a magical world, Hobbes. Old buddy … Let’s go exploring.”

— Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Waterson

Porch Ponders

Day Three

Words are interesting. A popular online game is Wordle. The Free Dictionary contains 158,390 five letter words; the goal of Wordle. The number used by Wordle varies from reference to reference; 2309 or 2315. In these references you will see the initial list contained 12,972 words of which 10,967 are accepted as guesses, but only the smaller numbers above are the solution words.

It is amazing to me that in three or four attempts one can eliminate most of these.