Everyday He Waits For His Owner.

Doing HW: I hate physics I don’t wanna go to grad school

During Class: Tell me more about the math please I want to learn more thank you

By: Brian | brianmcw

*curtsies* So, I really, REALLY don't want to offend anyone, Duke, but a question has been bothering me for a really long time and I was afraid to ask it because I didn't want to piss off anyone and since you're really eloquent and knowledgeable, I thought I'd ask you. So here it goes: you always say that arts and sciences are equally important, but how can analysing Chaucer or ecopoetics or anything similar compare to biomedicine or engineering in improving human lives? I'm genuinely curious!

*Curtsies* All right. Let me tell you a story: 

When I lived in London, I shared a flat with a guy who was 26 years old, getting his PhD in theoretical physics. Let’s call him Ron. Ron could not for the life of him figure out why I was wasting my time with an MA in Shakespeare studies or why my chosen method of providing for myself was writing fiction. Furthermore, it was utterly beyond him why I should take offense to someone whose field literally has the word “theoretical” in the title ridiculing the practical inefficacy of art. My pointing out that he spent his free time listening to music, watching television, and sketching famous sculptures in his notebook somehow didn’t convince him that art is a necessary part of a healthy human existence. 

Three other things that happened with Ron: 

I came home late one night and he asked where I’d been. When I told him I’d been at a friend’s flat for a Hanukkah celebration, he said, “What’s Hanukkah?” I thought he was joking. He was not.

A few weeks later, I came downstairs holding a book. He asked what I was reading and when I said, “John Keats,” he (and the three other science grad students in the room) did not know who that was. This would be like me not knowing who Thomas Edison is.

One night we got into an argument about the issue of gay marriage, and at one point he actually said, “It doesn’t affect me so I don’t see why I should care about it.”

Now: If Ron had ever read Number the Stars, or heard Ode to a Nightingale, or been to a performance of The Laramie Project, do you think he ever would have asked any of these questions? 

Obviously this is an extreme example. This guy was amazingly ignorant, but he was also the walking embodiment of the questions you’re asking. What does art matter compared with something like science, that saves people’s lives? Here’s the thing: There’s a flaw in the question, because art saves lives, too. Maybe not in the same “Eureka, we’ve cured cancer!” kind of way, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Sometimes the impact of art is relatively small, even invisible to the naked eye. For example: as a young teenager I was (no exaggeration) suicidally unhappy. Learning to write is what kept me (literally and figuratively) off the ledge. But I was one nameless teenager; in the greater scheme of things, who cares? Fair enough. Let’s talk big picture. Let’s talk about George Orwell. George Orwell wrote books, the two most famous of which are Animal Farm and 1984. You probably read at least one of those in high school. Why do these books matter? Because they’re cautionary tales about limiting the power of oppressive governments, and their influence is so pervasive that the term “Big Brother,” which refers to the omniscient government agency which watches its citizens’ every move in 1984, has become common parlance to refer to any abuse of power and invasion of privacy by a governmental body. Another interesting fact, and the reason I chose this example: sales of 1984 fucking skyrocketed in 2017, Donald Trump’s first year in office. Why? Well, people are terrified. People are re-reading that cautionary tale, looking for the warning signs. 

Art, as Shakespeare taught us, “holds a mirror up to nature.” Art is a form of self-examination. Art forces us to confront our own mortality. (Consider Hamlet. Consider Dylan Thomas.) Art forces us to confront inequality. (Consider Oliver Twist. Consider Audre Lorde. Consider A Raisin in the Sun. Consider Greta Gerwig getting snubbed at the Golden Globes.) Art forces us to confront our own power structures. (Consider Fahrenheit 451. Consider “We Shall Overcome.” Consider All the President’s Men. Consider “Cat Person.”) Art reminds us of our own history, and keeps us from repeating the same tragic mistakes. (Consider The Things They Carried. Consider Schindler’s List. Consider Hamilton.) Art forces us to make sense of ourselves. (Consider Fun House. Consider Growing Up Absurd.) Art forces us to stop and ask not just whether we can do something but whether we should. (Consider Brave New World. Consider Cat’s Cradle.) You’re curious about ecopoetics? The whole point is to call attention to human impact on the environment. Some of our scientific advances are poisoning our planet, and the ecopoetics of people like the Beats and the popular musicians of the 20th century led to greater environmental awareness and the first Earth Day in 1970 . Art inspires change–political, social, environmental, you name it. Moreover, art encourages empathy. Without books and movies and music, we would all be stumbling around like Ron, completely ignorant of every other culture, every social, political, or historical experience except our own. Since we have such faith in science: science has proved that art makes us better people. Science has proved that people who read fiction not only improve their own mental health but become proportionally more empathetic. (Really. I wrote an article about this when I was working for a health and wellness magazine in 2012.) If you want a more specific example: science has proved that kids who read Harry Potter growing up are less bigoted. (Here’s an article from Scientific American, so you don’t have to take my word for it.) That is a big fucking deal. Increased empathy can make a life-or-death difference for marginalized people.

But the Defense of Arts and Humanities is about more than empirical data, precisely because you can’t quantify it, unlike a scientific experiment. Art is–in my opinion–literally what makes life worth living. What the fuck is the point of being healthier and living longer and doing all those wonderful things science enables us to do if we don’t have Michelangelo’s David or Rimbaud’s poetry or the Taj Mahal or Cirque de Soleil or fucking Jimi Hendrix playing “All Along the Watchtower” to remind us how fucking amazing it is to be alive and to be human despite all the terrible shit in this world? Art doesn’t just “improve human lives.” Art makes human life bearable.

I hope this answers your question. 

To it I would like to add: Please remember that just because you don’t see the value in something doesn’t mean it is not valuable. Please remember that the importance of science does not negate or diminish the importance of the arts, despite what every Republican politician would like you to believe. And above all, please remember that artists are every bit as serious about what they do as astronomers and mathematicians and doctors, and what they do is every bit as vital to humanity, if in a different way. Belittling their work by questioning its importance, or relegating it to a category of lesser endeavors because it isn’t going to cure a disease, or even just making jokes about how poor they’re going to be when they graduate is insensitive, ignorant, humiliating, and, yes,  offensive. And believe me: they’ve heard it before. They don’t need to hear it again. We know exactly how frivolous and childish and idealistic and unimportant everyone thinks we are. Working in the arts is a constant battle against the prevailing idea that what you do is useless. But it’s bad enough that the government is doing its best to sacrifice all arts and humanities on the altar of STEM–we don’t need to be reminded on a regular basis that ordinary people think our work is a waste of time and money, too. 

Artists are exhausted. They’re sick and tired of being made to justify their work and prove the validity of what they do. Nobody else in the world is made to do that the way artists are. That’s why these questions upset them. That’s why it exasperates me. I have to answer some version of this question every goddamn day, and I am so, so tired. But I’ve taken the effort to answer it here, again, in the hopes that maybe a couple fewer people will ask it in the future. But even if you’re not convinced by everything I’ve just said, please try to find some of that empathy, and just keep it to yourself. 

I want this in my house 

BOOKS ARE MAGIC

Slytherin: guys, if we don’t make it out alive, I just want to say that…

All other houses of Hogwarts:-shining eyes- what? What is it?

Slytherin: Since I’m almost perfect, I’m blaming this on you all

LL Ori and the Orion Nebula : Stars can make waves in the Orion Nebula’s sea of gas and dust. This esthetic close-up of cosmic clouds and stellar winds features LL Orionis, interacting with the Orion Nebula flow. Adrift in Orion’s stellar nursery and still in its formative years, variable star LL Orionis produces a wind more energetic than the wind from our own middle-aged Sun. As the fast stellar wind runs into slow moving gas a shock front is formed, analogous to the bow wave of a boat moving through water or a plane traveling at supersonic speed. The small, arcing, graceful structure just above and left of center is LL Ori’s cosmic bow shock, measuring about half a light-year across. The slower gas is flowing away from the Orion Nebula’s hot central star cluster, the Trapezium, located off the upper left corner of the picture. In three dimensions, LL Ori’s wrap-around shock front is shaped like a bowl that appears brightest when viewed along the “bottom” edge. This beautiful painting-like photograph is part of a large mosaic view of the complex stellar nursery in Orion, filled with a myriad of fluid shapes associated with star formation. via NASA

Geometry Matters. But why?

The contribution of geometry to the evolution of human and natural sciences is a well established fact. Since the Greeks started to realize that the argument is more powerful when backed up by empirical evidence, rather than previous experience, all sciences started to benefit from an approach that had something new: a system of thought. And that system was based on definitions and axioms given by geometric laws. For example, Pythagoras defined reality with three basic principles, extracted from geometric knowledge:

1. Some propositions must be accepted as true without being demonstrated.

2. All other propositions of the system are derived from these.

3. Their derivation must be formal and independent from the subject at matter.

And since for Pythagoras the things are an imitation of the numbers, their definitions and axioms, will reflect the universe, provide intangible harmony and build visible beauty.

The improving of left-right brain connections.

Most activities engage only one hemisphere of the brain and its corresponding functions: the left for language, hearing, logic and mathematics; the right for spatial recognition, images and music processing, symbolism and so on. By requiring both analytical thinking and spatial visualization, geometry activates processes that engage both sides of the brain at the same time, in resolving a given task. When picturing a cube, for example, the brain is tasked with recognizing spatial properties of the cube (height, depth etc) while maintaining its overall shape (by calculating its angles or the length of its segments). This leads to an elevated number of connections between the brain hemispheres, having a long-term benefit in the overall critical thinking or imagination of the geometry user.

The continuous visual representation of truth.

Because of the early traditions and methods of orally sharing and debating knowledge, the first visual (geometrical) representations of mathematical concepts where being drawn by scribes, sometimes directly when hearing a particular information.  This process was flawed, given that the person drawing did not posses geometric knowledge, thus leading to miss-interpretations and errors in the visual representation. In the early 300’s Euclid becomes aware of this error and begins drawing his own definitions and axioms, developing adjacent texts that can be understood by any mathematician or artist, for that matter.

And, with the introduction of the visual perspective by Leon Battista Alberti, the geometrical diagrams and laws became general accepted when depicting a mathematical truth or any given representation of reality.

Thus, geometry provides continuity in visual communication in general, and a context in which all individual things can be represented, calculated and later better understood.

The creation of visual reality.

The perception of the visual information and its abstract notions is connected to the perception of reality. As many others, Rudolph Arnheim shows how visual information is being formed by the perception of the new and by the memory of the old, showing a continuance in the cognitive process. And since all information has geometric properties when closely analyzed (height, weight, depth, curvature etc), geometry will be present in all aspects of the visual reality.

The perception of beauty and harmony in things.

If what is above is also below, geometry can be a mirror for these two dimensions. While symmetry defines what geometry is, geometric proportions and ratios define man’s perception of beauty and harmony. A harmonic state is associated with an element or an object having its inner components in perfect equilibrium.

Thus, nature is being perceived as beautiful and its creator, good. For example, the complex relation between symmetry and aesthetics is shown in how symmetry defines the perceived qualities of the human body and how these traits are a sign of good health or good genetic conditions.

Man uses beauty as an indicator of truth and while beauty is truth (Ian Stewart), symmetry, proportion and simplicity will define it.

While many of the elements of nature have an innate geometric structure - water, sound or even light - the more complex architecture of the perceived or the hidden dimensions of reality rely on very complex laws that have different types of shapes, boundaries, behaviors and interactions with the micro and the macro elements of the universe.

In analyzing these dimensions and interactions, many sciences rely on geometric studies and developments that generate universal accepted answers. For example, in his famous special relativity theory, Einstein describes the dimension of space-time by creating a coordinate system that fixes and standardizes measurements, in order to specify the relationship between a moving observer and the phenomenon or phenomena under observation.

The place of humans in space-time.

By placing man in the middle of all created things, human consciousness becomes a necessity of life. An antropocentric perspective explains why the universe has an age. Why the universe works at these exact parameters that an objective observer discovers. That we discover.

Thus, man connects himself to the main elements of the universe: the space-time and the fundamental laws of physics, geometric defined aspects of reality, that man can relate to, explore and evolve upon.

The geometric laws and ratios that nature confides in, are also bound to shape human existence. The human body, the human mind and their correspondent dimensions and proportions have geometric properties and attributes, similar to all other elements of nature.

The universal geometric code

The geometric code of information is inherent to nature, inherent to human consciousness and is present in all perceived and created forms, in the tangible and the intangible.

And maybe a reality built under the auspices of geometry is desirable, being a discipline developed with attention along several millennia and with which the greatest minds of history have created concepts, objects, religions and even the entire universe.

1 multiplies itself and creates 2. The paradigm of reality is the result of the conscious observation. If the system from which consciousness takes part is abstract, then reality is an abstraction of this, by reflecting itself and creating form.

2018 © Tib Roibu, Geometry Matters

i didnt know this until rn but apparently theres things called sundogs & moondogs that are basically the halo that sometimes appears around the sun & moon

this is a sundog

and this is a moondog

this is so cool & such cute names omg?????? i love space