Weekword: Hole

Fig. 23a This is not Whole

After I made my weekword drawing above, I googled the two words (whole and hole), hoping to find a poem that cleverly combined the two (like I had) to flesh out my 2-minute effort. But what I found was even better - an interview with a very interesting man - Arthur M. Young (1905-1995), mathematician, engineer (he invented the Bell helicopter) and philosopher. Read more about him here.


Fig. 23b Arthur M. Young's Torus Whole (with an infinitely small Hole)

From an interview with Arthur M. Young:
MISHLOVE: It (the torus) looks like a donut, for people who may not know.
YOUNG: A donut, right. Now, suppose you had a sphere, and there was a cow on the sphere and you put a fence around him. He can't escape. It's the same as a field. If you put a fence around the cow, he couldn't escape. But if you did this on the donut, provided the fence included the hole in the donut, the cow could escape through the hole. In other words, he wouldn't have to climb over the fence, he just goes into the middle and through.
MISHLOVE: And comes around out the other side. Because the inside and the outside are the same.
YOUNG: Right. This is an image for our separation from the universe. I'm separated from you and you're separated from me, but if we were to go into our inner life, we would join up in the divine spark. That's the center of this whole thing.
MISHLOVE: That's very profound.

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So there you have it. For more interpretations of the weekword "hole" see Linda Sue's blog here.

Isn't Life Great?

I'm in love with the whole wide world today. I just feel great - I had a lovely email from a blogfriend which made me smile and smile, and I had a fantastic 6 km walk to Fish Hoek and back, and I saw a whale in the distance, and L'Usband took me for a lovely curry lunch at Bihari, and I finished my book, and I finished this journal page ...

I have just finished watching the BBC's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and what used to be a pink and doodly page in my art journal evolved to the above. (Collage: image of Darwin from Scientific American, my doodles, cutouts from a plastic shopping bag. Words are from the Introduction to Darwin's The Origin of Species.)

The Science of Tango

You wouldn't think that tango & science go together, would you? But look what I found in the latest Scientific American (Jul 2008) - an article about the neuroscience of dance that discusses a research study that was conducted using - wait for it - amateur tango dancers! I love how the lady in the PET scanner put on her fishnet stockings to get in the mood ...

A separate study found that tango dancing (in the form of a series of 20 tango classes) significantly improved mobility in patients with Parkinson's disease.

You can read the article (sans pictures) here.

Have a glorious week, darlings!