October 23rd - French Poodle on his Laptop

Okay - the foliage in DC is really beautiful, and there are rolling hills and farm country...so what do they need fantastic clouds for? So I'm pulling a Florida sky for this slot from an archive file because I just couldn't find suitable competition here.

I was fortunate to capture a cumulus cloudscape on the very edge where blue skies are quickly being overtaken. And at the bottom right a French Poodle works on his laptop...

Universal Language

I just watched an IBM commercial which was really well done, interesting, visually seductive. It's premise, however, is something I would have to dispute. The entire "pitch" is based on the statement "math is the only language humans share". 

I agree that math is a language that humans share across culture, race, religion, socio-economic and geographic boundaries. But the only language? What about music and art? I was always under the impression that not only are there universal languages, but they are immediately accessible to everyone. You don't need the ticket of higher education for admission.

And what about emotion, color, and expression of the collective unconscious? I know that geniuses in the fields of math and physics can appreciate the expression of these elements in their areas of expertise, but for most of us this is not where we turn for inspiration.

There are countless stories about the greatest geniuses having the epiphanies leading to their most brilliant work when they were playing the violin, or somehow involved in the performance of music. Einstein and Schweitzer are just a few.

At a time when the arts are being surgically extracted from our public schools across the nation, it is important to think about the current direction of thought on String Theory: That the music is basically a representation of the universe - the physics and math of music and our understanding of how the universe works are parallel (at least I think that's what I took away from my reading - the limits of my intelligence make it hard for me to know for sure).

I hope we have the collective brain power to realize that we must not remove the  inspiration for our next generation of mathematicians and scientists from the foundations of our children's education. Treating music and the arts as an expendable frill in our schools will undermine our progress in science and math as a country and hinder finding solutions to our greatest universal problems.