Week 7

I know ordered chaos well! Once upon a time it was my security blanket. I remember my room as a young teenager was ordered chaos indeed. There were objects strewn everywhere! And yet, I knew exactly where each item was. When I returned home, I would know if someone had walked into my room and exactly what path they took, because I noticed which objects were slightly out of place. I am happy to say I am much tidier now (thanks, Marie Kondo!) and do not obsess over belongings.

It’s interesting that we couldn’t come up with chaos theory until we had computers to run equation after equation for hours at a time. And as processing capability became more powerful, artificial intelligence emerged. As fractals are the “picture of chaos,” and our body, mind and heart are fractal, perhaps the endless fractal pattern is what consciousness emerges from, thus consciousness from chaos. 

This article discusses the details of the fractal nature of our body mind and heart and our reaction to fractals to be calmed and soothed. Even the pattern in which we analyze fractal images with our eye movements is fractal. This article discusses fractal patterns of language found in literary works, noting that Finnegan's Wake is the most fractal piece of literature to be found. After analyzing fractal language patterns in pieces of literature, they found that in general, “stream of consciousness” type writing is the most fractal. This inherently makes sense to me and reinforces the concept of “not over thinking things.” The more I analyze something by thinking hard about it, the more dead a concept feels. When I intuitively absorb ideas and let myself be with them without needed to categorize and analyze, the more I understand and feel like I have integrated the knowledge, though I can’t always verbalize it. 

Cool experiments you can do with stuff you probably already have around the house...

I did the little shop experiment with a spoon, knife and fork.

I am familiar with the concave and convex mirror aspects of a spoon from many dinners playing at the table as a child while the adults chatted. It was fun to play with this again, to watch the image of myself flip up or down depending on which side of the spoon I was looking into, and to magnify my nose with the spoon.

Using the knife to look at text was interesting. I started by holding the knife at a 90 degree angle to a paper with text on it, and tilted the knife toward the paper, decreasing the angle to the point of almost touching laying flat on the paper. The smaller the angle, the clearer the text appeared; the further away I put tilted knife from the paper, the greater the angle, the more faded the text appeared in the knife blade. It was fun to wiggle the knife from side to side and watch the text wiggle with it.

I tried to ping the fork and place it on a table to get it to amplify the vibration and sound. I couldn’t get this to work for me. Maybe my forks are too cheap! The article suggests using real silver utensils (right…).  When I placed the fork to the table, it stopped vibrating. I understand how this is supposed to work, but I think that my forks are too heavy for this. The end of the handle is quite round and heavy.