Model Earth

[Ian Beardsley]

I would like to discuss "Model Earth" by Mr. Jan Hearthstone. It is located at:
http://gief.pair.com/hearth/modelearth.html

Has anyone read Entropy, by Jeremy Rifkin? He talks about the second energy law, entropy, which governs all designs for, well, let's call it "earth models" after Mr. Hearthstones phrase. The book tells how the average Chinese farmer, with shovel and hoe, produces more calories by a factor of thousands, compared to the energy he takes out of the soil in comparison to our methods of chemical fertilizers and tractors. Our method just makes more, quicker, but by no mean maximizes the Earth's potential in a healthy way. This seems to give credence to Paleoecology, the study of ancient agriculture.

As Buckminster Fuller tells us, the root of war is in in specialization, especially in science. It perpetuates spending on war, which gives an imaginary boost in economy, because what is taken from the earth is not put into energy that perpetuates the specie's physical needs in the wartime manufacturing scenario. I think the place to begin in a "modelearth" is effective shelter for all, governmentally subsidized. I actually disagree with Buckminster Fuller that the geodesic dome should be the basic module. Being a half sphere, or dome, you cannot build upwards with it, which I think would be neccsessary for human accomodation at the levels we require today, if not to maximize the land. Thus I opt for the hexagon module, or six-sided, equal sided, equal angled shape. You can build up with it, while it supplies the most surface area for materials used of any regular shape that tessellates. Like a bee's honey comb. You can build upwards with it. Tessellates merely means can be layed side by side without leaving gaps. Just throwing out ideas.

Mr. Jan Hearthstone, you have hit the nail on the head as far as I am concerned. The only way we can have "one world, one people", with universal equity and optimal living for all on an ecologically and socially sustainable basis, is if we all begin to see eye to eye and overcome our various cultural differences and establish what Bronowski called a "unitary vision". I fear that since all of the power is in a handful of of greedy corporations whose only interest is make more than they can spend in a life time, we will go on abusing the earth and exploiting others until something horribly devasting happens environmentally or socially. Perhaps humans are not as highly evolved as they think they are for this to be the only way for change. I believe it is neccessary for humanity to enter what H.G. Wells called "a new creative phase".

In his last work, H.G. Wells, author of the time machine wrote: "So great is the adaptation demanded of man that he must go steeply up, or down and out." Now this is true if you consider just how far away the stars actually are, and the odds that there will be one that suits our needs, but the factor he could not have predicted was the birth of bioengineering and the decoding of the human genome. This latest of sciences may actually be the thing that saves us, more than physics. It would seem with the decoding of the human genome, we may be able to control evolution, its rate and direction. Now this is the entering of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World". But if we consider the ideas of Arthur C. Clarke, the direction we should take, I believe, is clear. We should control evolution so as to make ourselves become pure energy that can move through space that "stores its knowledge within the structure of space itslelf." I believe in ten years we could actually engineer ourselves into a life form that actually bypasses the stage where plants convert sunlight into a form of energy that we can use. That is we will need no more than to absorb light from the sun directly, even on a cloudy day, or even from a light bulb, in order to sustain ourselves. At spece non fracta. (Hope is not broken.)

I think we need a governmental system where industry caters to nature, not the other way around. The two are connected, and one depends on the other. For example, nitrogen is a fertilizer, and is extracted from the atmosphere by industry, of course to fertilize plants, so we can eat. If we don't do things right, it won't be returned to the environment in a usable form. Buckminster Fuller calls it "chemical process irretrievabilty".

I have done a little research and found that while energy goes from a usable form to an unusable form, that only holds for a closed system. Now the earth is not a closed system, but the earth-sun system is closed. That is because all biochemical energy can be traced back to the sun, and the amount of time it will provide us with energy, that is converted by plants for us to a form that can be used, is limited. The sun will eventually run out of fuel, in say 5 billion years, and before then it will heat up to a temperature too hot for life to survive, in say a billion years. That is a pretty long time, so let's consider the Earth for all practical purposes to be an open system, inwhich case we do not have to consider the energy source a problem. In this case we are left to consider the single most important thing to life, biochemical regeneration. There are four things crucial to life, water, nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorous. All of these are wholly regenerative. For example we take in oxygen and respire carbon dioxide. But on the other hand plants and trees take in carbon dioxide and respire oxygen. Thus the two depend on one another in such a way that all is recycled. An ecologically sustainable scenario is possible, if we don't upset the recycling process. Thus I believe the point around a design for Mr. Jan Hearthstone's "Model Earth" that we should pivot, is in the four biochemical regenerative cycles. I am no biologist, so if I understand this incorrectly, it would be great know, but I think we have located the pivotal point.

[wade-w]

Welcome to the board, Ian. A hint: your posts will be much more readable of you use paragraph breaks. In other words, insert a blank line between paragraphs, rather than just ending the last sentence of one paragraph and starting the next on the line immediately following it.

Like this.

[Ian Beardsley]

Originally Posted by wade-w

Welcome to the board, Ian. A hint: your posts will be much more readable of you use paragraph breaks. In other words, insert a blank line between paragraphs, rather than just ending the last sentence of one paragraph and starting the next on the line immediately following it.

Like this.

A great suggestion. I just went in to indent each paragraph with the edit function, but it did not work. But I will remember to in future posting.

Now can anyone guess why I put a link to "Model Earth" on a freethought forum. You got it, freethought and separation of church and state is more threatend today than it ever was, and this was not the idea of our founding fathers, who were free thinkers. Thus Hearthstone's idea of projecting an ideal model through collective debate that will allow for optimal living for all, in a ecologically sustainable way, on a global basis seem to be called for.
--I. Beardsley

[Farren]

Hi Ian,

In advance let me apologise for the length of this post. Its difficult to express my thoughts without quite a lot of contextual material.

While I think the idea is noble, its also misguided.

There are already systems that process vast amounts of data using an incredible amounts of computing power for the purpose of making predictions in areas such as weather modelling, gene sequencing and economics.

What's emerged from our exsting systems is that many large natural systems (in which category I include emergent human phenomena, like the global economy) are inherently chaotic (in the non-stochastic sense) and inherently complex.

Many sets of outcomes are non-recursive (IIRC, you can tell which outcomes are within the boundaries of possibility, but can never say for certain that any given outcome is outside of the boundaries). Many natural problems are NP-complete, causing the minimum number of computations to increase exponentially with the introduction of each new element or any increase in the time over which predictions are made.

Then there are problems introduced by the quantization of natural phenomena, which aren't inherently discrete. If you imagine any long number you can (longest in terms of digits, not largest - e.g. 1.3324545425332543654432323....), there exists a measurement of nature that must be longer in order to accurately describe reality. The problem is that any contemporary digital computer system will at some point lack the capacity to actually process such a number and would have to round off. In chaotic models, any tiny deviation rapidly becomes significant in the outcome.

That doesn't mean a system can't be devised that can process a number of any arbitrary length. However, the computing method required for processing numbers of any arbitrary length is vastly slower than methods using limited length.

Furthermore, most natural phenomena are continuous in time rather than simply contiguous or consecutive. This means that there are not a discrete number of universal ticks over any giving length of time, so in modelling many physical phenomena there will always smaller time slices than the ones you've chosen that will yield more accurate results. In some computations the effect this has on accuracy is negligible. In others (such as, IIRC, three body gravitational problems) the errors introduced by using discrete time slices cause the model to rapidly depart from the reality.

These are very real and as far as I know insurmountable problems. Even accurate weather prediction is difficult beyond a few days using some of the most advanced systems on the planet.

That isn't to say all predictive models are useless. Our models of prediction have clearly served us well. The thing is, they've served us best in areas where we can artificially introduce boundaries to limit the problem space. If we've dug a trench and lined it with sturdy concrete, for instance, it becomes easy to calculate water pressure of water flowing from a specific contained volume of water along that trench. That doesn't mean the same logic and math will serve us equally well when predicting unbounded natural problems, including large emergent human phenomena like global economics.

Thankfully, the maths, logics and physics community have found ways of usefully modelling such systems. We can, for instance define the boundaries an outcome will be within, rather than the exact outcome, in many situations. IOW we can say "The outcome will not exceed this value". We can also use short-term predictive models with corrective feedback, such as our existing weather modelling tools, where short term predictions are made with a fair degree of accuracy but subsequent predictions work from new real world data rather than previous predictions.

My problem with the linked essay in the OP is that the author is calling, in rather vague terms, for some kind of "universal model" to presumably cover all areas of ecological, political and economic decision making. In light of the fact that such a model would have to unify a whole bunch of inherently complex and chaotic models with already limited utility, creating a grand unified model that makes any kind of useful predictions, even of a general nature, is a pipe dream at this point in time. But the OP appears to think it can be achieved simply by focussing on "connecting the dots" when the real effort is elsewhere.

The thing is, the theoretical and applied sciences are continuously moving towards that goal in any event. Where two models can be unified with useful results, they inevitably are. Often such unification is the life work of a particular scientist. There are already multidisciplinary conferences and institutions like the Santa Fe institute. So the OP appears to be stating a redundant goal. Its saying "Let's do science" which we're doing anyway.

A second egrerious fault of the linked article is that it repeatedly refers to "the optimal state" of Earth in terms of resources, people and so on. An any system, there are many possible optimal states, not one. Often the discarding of one principle allows the adoption of another advantageous principle. The entire system is a "bootstrap", where the advantage a particular element offers is determined by what other elements exist in the system. The value of a particular element is not intrinsic.

Any keen student of evolutionary theory will recognise this. Both Gould and Dawkins have pointed out that there are creatures and plants that existed in times past that would probably be highly compatible with modern ecologies. Their demise isn't necessarily an indication of some kind of eternal unfitness. It simply indicates that they were unfit for some transitional stage by which the current stage was arrived at.

The optimal nature of a system is value-dependent. Those values, in turn are usually axiomatic, or derivations of axiomatic values. The axioms define not only the values but their heirarchy. For instance, the relative importance placed on "needs of the many/sacredness of life".

The OP presumes that sustainability is a shared value and I'll admit that. However, there are a virtual infinity of sustainable models, so if one were attempting to define an "optimal" model, a vast number of other values and value heirarchies would have to be shared. Since many of these are axiomatic, theres no logical way to arrive at the values that should be shared and, by extension, "the" optimal model.

p.s. I agree with wade-w. Please insert spaces between your para's. I find it very difficult to read para's without line-breaks.

p.p.s. Welcome to FF Ian and thanks for the thoughtful OP!

[pzmyers]

While you might have said something interesting, I stopped when you mentioned Rifkin. He's a contemptible moron.

Sorry. I didn't even encounter the problem with paragraphing.

[livius drusus]

Originally Posted by Farren

Welcome to FF Ian and thanks for the thoughtful OP!

Very much seconded.

P.S. - If you'd like, you can click on the "edit" button in the lower right hand corner of your post and add hard returns between the paragraphs. Regular tab indenting doesn't work in this medium, I'm afraid (as you've by now discovered), so people have adopted the line break instead to make posts readable.

[Ian Beardsley]

Originally Posted by livius drusus

Very much seconded.


P.S. - If you'd like, you can click on the "edit" button in the lower right hand corner of your post and add hard returns between the paragraphs. Regular tab indenting doesn't work in this medium, I'm afraid (as you've by now discovered), so people have adopted the line break instead to make posts readable.

Thanks and greeting to everyone, it is a nice place to be as I was raised an epicurean.
I figured that was why he recomended tab breaks as opposed to indentation. I'lle go do that now.
--Ian

[Farren]

Ian, my apologies. I realised the bulk of my previous reply was to the linked essay rather than your substantial post that followed it.

On the issue of human's evolving towards optimal energy-using organisms I agree that would be ideal if we wanted to maximise freedom and sustainability.

Hell, being a spacefaring species would be a good start. I read an interesting viewpoint from one of the members of the L7 society (named after the Lagrange points, not the band) who pointed out that living in a gravity well stuck to a huge ball is very inefficent energy wise.

The vast majority of matter in such a system is dead weight, not contributing anything to the biosphere apart from the mass required for gravity. In contrast, people living in large self-replenishing environments in space ships have more freedom and are more energy efficient. His suggestion is not that we become space-travellers to reach other planets, but that we become a space-based species, period.

Ian M Banks does a good job of realising such a society in his "Culture" novels.

An interesting side effect of such a culture is that, by default, it's values would be "green". To become an effective spacefaring species an energy-efficient and ecologically sustainable viewpoint is a necessity.

At the heart of many of the unsustainable politics of selfishness extant today is the fact that the biosphere still has a vast amount of useable energy to be frittered away, so green politics is seen as an option, not a necessity.

A nascent spacefaring species would not have that option. While this may seem on its face to be a negative, the gains in freedom (and, inevitably the survival and diversification of humanity and DNA-based life forms) would be enormous.

In the long term, of course, there would be a return to the cornucopian phase as soon as such a culture has matured. There is an unimaginable amount of energy available to a spacefaring species that can mine asteroids, syphon gas off of the gas giants and build gigantic arrays in space to collect energy direct from the stars. A sufficiently advanced culture could collect energy beyond imagining from the thermal wash just outside the event horizon of a black hole.

[Dingfod]

The hell with space, I think we should burrow underground, starting with our heads.[/smartass jerk mode]

[Farren]

Originally Posted by warrenly

The hell with space, I think we should burrow underground, starting with our heads.[/smartass jerk mode]

You've gotta stop channeling that guy, Warren.

[Socratoad]

Hmmmmmmm, I really am beginning to despair of those proposing even more science to solve problems here on earth. Space give me a break ..... there is probably more life contained in one square inch of your backyard than in all of space.

It has been my observation that those most enthralled by the stars are usually crushing delicate flowers beneath their feet.

We do not have a crisis of science, but alas we certainly do have a crisis of values.

In my less than humble opinion the sooner that humankind starts to develop a worldwide economic system that actually recognized the the planet itself is important we will be taking our first baby steps towards sanity and perhaps salvation for all species.

And please do not even bother pointing out the great advances by humankind in so many fields, for although we may indeed be more knowledgeable than our ancestors, it is just not near enough as our ancestors could afford the luxury of ignorance, whereas in our increasingly overcrowded, over polluted world we really must do much much better.

Is not one definition of insanity, repeating the same tired old solutions over and over again, while continuously expecting different results. And so our economic system and thus our value system is a form of insanity.

[Farren]

Originally Posted by Socratoad

Hmmmmmmm, I really am beginning to despair of those proposing even more science to solve problems here on earth. Space give me a break ..... there is probably more life contained in one square inch of your backyard than in all of space.

It has been my observation that those most enthralled by the stars are usually crushing delicate flowers beneath their feet.

We do not have a crisis of science, but alas we certainly do have a crisis of values.

In my less than humble opinion the sooner that humankind starts to develop a worldwide economic system that actually recognized the the planet itself is important we will be taking our first baby steps towards sanity and perhaps salvation for all species.

And please do not even bother pointing out the great advances by humankind in so many fields, for although we may indeed be more knowledgeable than our ancestors, it is just not near enough as our ancestors could afford the luxury of ignorance, whereas in our increasingly overcrowded, over polluted world we really must do much much better.

Is not one definition of insanity, repeating the same tired old solutions over and over again, while continuously expecting different results. And so our economic system and thus our value system is a form of insanity.

While I think trying to engineer a universal computer program to solve all human problems is a pretty unworkable and even possibly dangerous idea I totally disagree on the space issue.

The aim of becoming a spacefaring nation and the aim of fostering values that create a sustainable habitat on Earth aren't mutually exclusive, unless one sees the former as the sole solution for (and soley for the purpose of alleviating) problems created by gluttonous values.

So its quite possible to "develop a worldwide economic system that actually recognized the the planet itself as important" and take "our first baby steps towards sanity and perhaps salvation for all species" and still be hot for extending humanity's reach into space.

I think we share a lot of values Socratoad, but I find your hostility to ideas about reaching for the stars curious. This statement "there is probably more life contained in one square inch of your backyard than in all of space" is highly contentious, given the possibilty that abiogenesis might well have occurred all over the universe - unless, of course, by "space" you mean the void between the stars.

If so, the statement is doubly curious. Isn't it a natural desire for someone who loves life and living things to want to spread them throughout the universe?

[Socratoad]

Originally Posted by Farren

While I think trying to engineer a universal computer program to solve all human problems is a pretty unworkable and even possibly dangerous idea I totally disagree on the space issue.

The aim of becoming a spacefaring nation and the aim of fostering values that create a sustainable habitat on Earth aren't mutually exclusive, unless one sees the former as the sole solution for (and soley for the purpose of alleviating) problems created by gluttonous values.

So its quite possible to "develop a worldwide economic system that actually recognized the the planet itself as important" and take "our first baby steps towards sanity and perhaps salvation for all species" and still be hot for extending humanity's reach into space.

I think we share a lot of values Socratoad, but I find your hostility to ideas about reaching for the stars curious. This statement "there is probably more life contained in one square inch of your backyard than in all of space" is highly contentious, given the possibilty that abiogenesis might well have occurred all over the universe - unless, of course, by "space" you mean the void between the stars.

If so, the statement is doubly curious. Isn't it a natural desire for someone who loves life and living things to want to spread them throughout the universe?

Farren, as you know I do respect your thoughtful posts, and some of what I posted was for shock affect and some was because of the disgust I have noticed among my fellows for an almost worshipful fascination for space, space travel and other such (in many cases) ethereal such pursuits.

I certainly have nothing but admiration for the study of space in order that we may better understand our own planet.

And looking at just what a piss-poor job we humans are doing here on earth I certainly have no desire to see us exporting our flashy science and lack of understanding elsewhere in the universe.

I guess that I have come to consider much of the ballyhoo about space to be little more than another form of human escapism.

I bloody well shudder when I engage in conversation with so many young people who can quite proficiently rattle off the names of every named body in the universe, while at the same kind are unable to name one plant growing in their own backyard ...... and no grass is not a satisfactory answer.

Again, and of course this is only my perception, I believe that most of so-called western man has become dangerously separated from the actual life sources here on earth. Understanding, no matter how brilliant the person, can become very distorted in the world of pavement/ labs and desire to succeed among one's peers.

Like Eric Fromm I have come to believe that whole societies can and indeed do become quite ill, in a pathological sense.

Just think of me as the small child observing the Emperor

[Ian Beardsley]

Whether it be wildflowers in the desert or stars in the sky, I like to think of it as all one thing. I am an amateur astronomer who is out their looking at the heavenly wonders by night, and touring the botanic gardens by day. Just as galaxies are golden spirals, leaves rotate around the stem of a plant, one to the next, by the golden angle.

[Socratoad]

Originally Posted by Ian Beardsley

Whether it be wildflowers in the desert or stars in the sky, I like to think of it as all one thing. I am an amateur astronomer who is out their looking at the heavenly wonders by night, and touring the botanic gardens by day. Just as galaxies are golden spirals, leaves rotate around the stem of a plant, one to the next, by the golden angle.

A balanced view is never a bad thing

[Farren]

I think you're probably quite accurate in describing a large number of science enthusiasts. A friend who I haven't seen in years told me quite a strange and sad thing a few years back.

He was always one of the bright kids at school but not so much so that he was considered exceptional or extraordinary. When he got to university things changed. After his first year of physics it rapidly became apparent that he soaked up the mathematics of physics like a sponge and by his second year only his lecturer and two or three other people in the country understood the maths he was doing.

People started using the "G" word more and more when referring to him and while he remained a fairly humble and affable person, it certainly, according to his testimony, had an marked effect on his prioritizing of things in terms of importance. He set aside less and less time for guitar-playing, which was his first passion, and spent more and more time doing physics math as his primary form of recreation.

At one point he showed me an entire exercise book filled cover to cover with math, occasionally interspersed with Far Side cartoons where he wanted to cover over an ugly mistake or inelegant calculation. Apparently that book represented the solution to a single problem. He did that kind of stuff for fun.

After getting several papers published in respected international peer-reviewed journals he began recieving invitations to work at places like Brown University and CERN. I think he did go over and work at CERN for a while, but sadly his father died and his mother wasn't coping so he returned to South Africa and took a position at Wits university so he could be close to her and take care of her.

In any case, the event I'm thinking of happened while he was working on his doctorate. His girlfriend had just broken up with him and he needed a shoulder to cry on so we were drinking whiskey at the bar down the road from my place.

His girlfriend had been admonishing him about not communicatng his feelings and he said something to her about "dealing with some non-trivial issues right now", which apparently was the straw that broke the camel's back as far as she was concerned. "Non-trivial" is, IIRC, used by many scientists to refer to results that are significant by virtue of having some utility (as opposed to "trivial" fndings, which may be true but aren't useful in any way).

The purpose of using language such as "non-trivial" and "trivial" is to avoid distorting the value of results by attaching hyperbole like "brilliant" and "astounding" to them. It is a quintessentially scientific and reasonable way of speaking about science when you want to be as disciplined and objective as possible.

Her anger on that day (or the day before) was because he had fallen into the pattern of speaking about everything in this manner, suppressing any expressions of extreme emotion, be they good or bad. She was a pretty clued-up engineer herself who'd studied a lot of the same stuff but apparently her understanding of what caused him to communicate like that only served to annoy her more.

He didn't hold it against her. When we were deep in his cups he admitted that he felt increasingly isolated and alienated an felt like he was in a trap of his own making. "I'm the guy engineers avoid at academic parties" he said at one point.

He said the reason he'd excelled in his chosen area was because of a growing fanaticism that precluded interest in almost anything else. People talking about a friend or relative having a baby, showing off their new pet or extolling the virtues of a movie currently on circuit elicited very little emotional response from him, resulting in him reacting inadequately, inappropriately, or not at all.

Even as he realised he was becoming more isolated among his peers and actually suffering emotionally because of it, his intense interest in the mathematics of physics gave him an immense pleasure of a different kind (and I assume still does). It was his hope, I think, that he would eventually be surrounded by people exactly like him in a place like CERN and knowing this I felt quite sad when I heard circumstances had forced him to move back to South Africa where he has so few peers at his level. I presume the Internet is a boon for him.

Anyway, I think a lot of the hard sciences have reached the level where its almost a requirement that one have a kind of gnomic commitment that precludes all else to be at the vanguard of ones selected area of specialisation.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. In the case of the chap I described above it was crappy when he found himself surrounded by people who didn't understand what he was talking about and were only interested in things he couldn't muster enthusiasm for, but when such minds can be channeled to places where they are surrounded by like-minded individuals, I think it can have tremendous benefits for humanity.

One might desire a society in which we were all holistic thinkers but that, IMO, is not a possible configuration for a human society. Its like a car that's exclusively made of fanbelts. Perhaps that would be a novel concept for an artist, but without an starter motor, radiator, wheels, petrol tank and all the rest of it it would have no dynamism, no motivation, no justification for existence.

Despite my misgivings about the hyprocrisy and inconsistency I see in human society I nonetheless see many positives in it. I'm happy to be living in such a vibrant and dynamic age and am constantly delighted with innovations such as the Internet.

Without people like the chap I've described, there would be a lot less dynamism and innovation. And there are, after all, a great many people in the world who are equally clueless about the names of flowers, fauna and other natural phenomena and equally disinterested in their fate and the fate of other human beings - without any redeeming strengths.

What riles me is people who have taken an interest, who have considered the state of the world - and have arrived at a personal system of values that is founded on their own selfishness. Its my firm belief that many of the most damaging political and social philosophies in the world are just complex jusifications for selfishness, such as many of the arguments I've heard for unfettered capitalism.

In fairness to the proponents of these ideas, I think many fail to grasp their own motives. That may sound strange but anyone who's ever caught themself ascribing greater intelligence or charm to someone simply because they find the person physically attractive will know what I mean.

[Ian Beardsley]

There may have been the downfall for your friend in giving up the guitar. It may very well be that it is best to use both the creative, and logical sides of the brain.

[wade-w]

Originally Posted by Ian Beardsley

There may have been the downfall for your friend in giving up the guitar. It may very well be that it is best to use both the creative, and logical sides of the brain.

For an engineer or a physicist, the dichotomy that you imply here is real. But on the level that Farren is describing, mathematics is most definitely a creative, as well as a logical, endeavor.

You hear mathematicians speak of "elegance" in a proof or solution to a problem. This is an aesthetic judgement. I noticed that Farren mentioned his friend's journal. In it, certain portions were covered up with Far Side comics, because they were "ugly." Again, an aesthetic judgement.

[Ian Beardsley]

Originally Posted by wade-w

For an engineer or a physicist, the dichotomy that you imply here is real. But on the level that Farren is describing, mathematics is most definitely a creative, as well as a logical, endeavor.

You hear mathematicians speak of "elegance" in a proof or solution to a problem. This is an aesthetic judgement. I noticed that Farren mentioned his friend's journal. In it, certain portions were covered up with Far Side comics, because they were "ugly." Again, an aesthetic judgement.

A good point, but I may have been over simplifying things. It may be that it is not a matter of one side of the brain being logical, and the other creative, but perhaps one side is mathematical, even in a creative sense, and the other artistic, even in a logical sense. Is all I know is that they find, I think, that the brain is more active on one side when someone plays the violin, and more active on the other when they do math.
--Ian

[wade-w]

Originally Posted by Ian Beardsley

A good point, but I may have been over simplifying things. It may be that it is not a matter of one side of the brain being logical, and the other creative, but perhaps one side is mathematical, even in a creative sense, and the other artistic, even in a logical sense. Is all I know is that they find, I think, that the brain is more active on one side when someone plays the violin, and more active on the other when they do math.
--Ian

When they do these tests, the test subject doing math is at most on the level of the engineer solving a differential equation. This bears little resemblence to doing math on the level that Farren is describing, or what Goliath does. It is more comparable to writing a symphony than it is to solving an equation. To excel at this level requires both hemispheres to work in concert.

[hearthstone]

I am opening a new topic on EnviroLink Forum: "Model Earth Re-Introduced"
at http://www.envirolink.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=637 , and also on this forum--the same name: "Model Earth Re-Introduced"--in order to to, perhaps, explain better what I think that Model Earth is about.
Thank you, Hearthstone.