There is a feeling in the air that the events which are unfolding today bear a significance which, perhaps, exceeds the immediate relativity. Certainly we are told in the media that everything is doomed unless we change everything, immediately. When I consider it, I have to chuckle, because my sick sense of humor recalls my mother’s voice of astonishment, saying “what WILL they think of next?”.

Add to that an awareness of the profit margin in the doomsday machine… huge, HUGE… off the charts!  One could argue for days whether the profit margin is cause or effect, yet the fact remains… these are indeed epic times.

Our America is a young country, yet our President is called the leader of the free world. Our democratic system, premised upon the ancient Greek envy of the world, has become a model which all nations seek to improve upon. Our ‘American dream’ is now the dream of all nations and people, which seek to emulate (at least) the opportunities afforded to every citizen of this country; even as this overburdened system is seeming to crumble under the burden of such luxury. 

Is this the America our fore fathers envisioned? The governance of Greece, the military might of Rome, the best sciences and industries of all nations, seems to be the very definition. We have inherited the best minds from around the globe over two centuries. They came here, tired, poor, and beleagured. They came with little more than hope. How about that? Two centuries later, poised on the edge of the great abyss, our coffers plundered by the great robber barons of the world, we are forced to wonder if we will go the way of those affore mentioned great societies, Greece and Rome.

I wonder at the physics of building a nation to the status of world power in a mere 200 years. I wonder at the physics of the fall of the free world. I am amazed and astonished that some think to profit by plundering the great hope of a free world, wherein every soul is afforded equal opportunity. I am equally amazed and astonished with the immediate gratification syndrome which seems rampant among our youth. It seems the majority of young adults insist that every desire must be satisfied with no more effort or discipline than swallowing a pill or pressing a button. Thus, the newest generation of citizen in the free world is greatly concerned with the availability of pills and buttons, and voting for immediate gratification availability. This is unprecidented in our history, and in the history of civilization. In history, such luxuries were afforded only by wealth and slavery, to a very privileged few. All others were forced to labor long and hard for a meager existence.

Tags: America, culture, democracy, generation, immediate gratification, luxury

Creative Minds, Hard Times

Implications are, essentially, things left unsaid. “Two plus two” without a sum, a series of events left without a conclusion or, perhaps, presented without a linear sequence. Today, I would like to address the implications of linear thought. In part, because so very few of us recognize the effects of the Euclidean ideal in today’s western culture.

Borrowed from wiki:

“Euclidean geometry is a mathematical system attributed to the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria. Euclid’s Elements is the earliest known systematic discussion of geometry. It has been one of the most influential books in history, as much for its method as for its mathematical content. The method consists of assuming a small set of intuitively appealing axioms, and then proving many other propositions (theorems) from those axioms. Although many of Euclid’s results had been stated by earlier Greek mathematicians, Euclid was the first to show how these propositions could be fit together into a comprehensive deductive and logical system.The Elementsbegin with plane geometry, still taught in secondary school as the first axiomatic system and the first examples of formal proof. The Elements goes on to the solid geometry of three dimensions, and Euclidean geometry was subsequently extended to any finite number of dimensions. Much of the Elements states results of what is now called number theory, proved using geometrical methods. For over two thousand years, the adjective “Euclidean” was unnecessary because no other sort of geometry had been conceived. Euclid’s axioms seemed so intuitively obvious that any theorem proved from them was deemed true in an absolute sense. Today, however, many other self-consistent non-Euclidean geometries are known, the first ones having been discovered in the early 19th century. ”

It would surprise many of the western cultures to know that not all cultures embrace linear thought. Our way of thinking has been so grossly infected with this system of thought that virtually no aspect of life has escaped it’s misleading grasp. We frame everthing we know in linear, geometric, terms. We teach our children to do the same, from kindergarten through high school, with numbers, history, science, and even writing. We live by the linear steps of progression. We determine what we are seeing by association with similar shapes and sizes. We guesstimate distances by the range of recession. We speak in axioms. We have wholly embraced this limited perception for two thousand years! Small wonder, then, that despite mountains of evidence to the contrary we continue to cling to it. It a cornerstone in the social and cultural fabric of our lives. In order to reach the masses in western cultures, any and all communication must be structured in the Euclidean manner. This isnt a law, it is just a fact.

If we “release” the Euclidean bindings, we can consider time in non-linear terms. No past, present, future. No before and after.  No hindsight. No “psychic” visions of the future. (Then and now may be parallels.) Archelogists may find themselves mining for ”future” civilizations in the continuum.

We can begin to consider densities as a factor not related to volume or size. (Tremendously helpful in understanding the nature of magnetism, for example.)

We can embrace light as both, a wave and a particle, divorced of linear restrictions, and perhaps even as a living organism. 

We might realize that processes of learning are spiraling through the hemispheres of the brain, at speeds exceeding light. Implications, no less…

Tags: archeology, culture, education, Euclidean, evolution, Implications, learning, light orgnaism, light particle, light wave, living organism, organisms, Sociology

Relationships are the foundation of art, technology, culture… literally everything we know about anything. The more we seek to isolate and understand the nature of a thing, the more we realize the thing is naturally connected to other things.  For example, seeking to understand and utilize atomic energy, we came to realize that it had a relationship with mushroom clouds, cold war, and the end of the world as we know it. The event could not be isolated.  The fact is, no event is isolated. This is a basic premise of physical matter which mankind is only now conceding… well, some of us are. There remain throngs of people who still cling to the darkened shadows of the cave, refusing to acknowledge the relationship between shadow and light.

Is there a familiar pattern, here? (Continuity demands that we ask questions for which the answer is known, yet consistently try to tweek and isolate the specifics until we achieve the desired result, or confirm the stated hypothesis.) Studies will show that humans know what humans want to know, deny everything that proves humanity is in denial, and accept only that which affords the promise of continuity of life as we know it.

The arts look at hard times Toledo Blade

Tags: arts, culture, demand shaping, distances of rationalities, economic, entertainment, financial straights, Great Depression, infrastructure, innovation, movie, networks, News, patterns, social movements, sustainable, technology, trends