BERT(r)and (L)EARNI(ng) ....

Hello Folks,

Well it snowed all day yesterday – slowly and steadily – big, fluffy flakes – the kind that stick to your hair and clothing – within a minute you are a walking snowman.  Checked the town out a bit – went to McStiff’s Plaza – you gotta love the name McStiff – when they start serving that at McDonalds, I’ll start showing up.  

There is a used book store in the plaza and is somehow joined at the hip with the other two book stores in town. There is always something there of interest and I picked up a book on Utah Geology plus a couple of books by Bertrand Russell. I am a huge fan of Russell’s thinking and writing – his clarity of thought on all issues – whether you agree with him or not - is something you rarely find these days.

A lot of us seemed to be muddled and confused – ask somebody a question and you often get in return a rambling, incoherent response that leaves you scratching your head and wondering what that was all about.

Russell was both a mathematician and a philosopher – one would think the two disciplines would be worlds apart – not so – as Douglas Hofstadter demonstrated in his book, ‘Godel, Escher, Bach’.

I read this book when I was 30 and it set me on a path of scientific and philosophical readings that I am still pursuing to this day. The book is hard to summarize or describe but let me give it a shot – it explores the commonality of patterns and symbols in the thinking and the ‘doing’ of art, music and mathematics.

Yeah, I know – what the hell does that mean? It simply means that everything we do is the outcome of our thought processes and when you understand how ‘we think’, you realize that math, music and art are holistically linked; a reductionist categorization that has them in separate boxes and something to be understood and learned in isolation, masks and unintentionally hides, their inter-relationship.

What I would like to see in today’s education system is a linkage between courses such that one spills into another, and so on; so there is a continuous arc of learning, if you will. This would require a lot of work and coordination between programs and the deliverers of those programs but what a rich experience it would be for both student and teacher. Hopefully some innovative educational institution will see the benefits of this and offer such a program.

Just to return to ‘Godel, Escher, Bach’, I would recommend you find a copy and embark on the journey that is the book and it’s many annotations and sources. I can’t say it’s an easy read – but I will say, if you stick with it, it will be educational and it will lead you somewhere in your reading that you may have never thought of exploring – as they say, it is the journey itself, not the destination, that matters.

I want to return now to Russell; I would also recommend a read of his book, ‘The History of Western Philosophy’. I hope this book will also have you running for the library in search of other reading – and you know if it doesn’t, that’s OK, you’ll have learned a great deal just by the reading – it’s the journey, right?.

At about 3 PM the snow stopped so I roared up into Arches to see what the fog and cloud were doing – I hope you like some of the menace in these pictures that I sensed when I was up there.

Speaking of menace, ‘you know who’ was flying upside down with his head rotating like the young girl  in The Exorcist – 'one crow sorrow' ..oh yeah – are you familiar with the Crow Augry ... where the 'one crow sorrow phrase' comes from ..no ... well it goes like this ....

One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold,
seven for a secret, never to be told, eight for a wish, nine for a kiss, ten for a time of joyous bliss.

It’s derived from an older verse about Magpies – Augry is the practice of foretelling the future based on the number of birds seen ...

OK – let me tell you the future of the raven crow beast – and let me quote Harry Nilsson, ‘One is the loneliest number you can ever do ...’ – one for sorrow – the winged menace will be doing a ‘one crow’; I’ll be doing a ‘ten’ ... just a matter of time .....

More later,

Phil