I think the defining moment for me was almost forty years ago when I was trying to teach a scientist's girlfriend to sing. She was a beautiful woman and had a good voice but the inner monologue that makes people sing was missing. I was studying a lot of different techniques to deal with this mechanistically rather than just saying, "you don't have the drive to do the work" which is what my teachers would have said to her.
The scientist would sit and talk with me about it for hours but he never "got it" either. It was like trying to search out the single theory to explain why you didn't want to do something but thought you should. About that time Scientific American came out with an article on the larynx as a mechanism for making music. That mechanism wasn't the problem with this student. The mechanism was fine but the impulse that made one sing was missing. The problem was musical not mechanical. I've had many students who had mechanical problems but had the impulse to music and the drive carried them through years of work until they solved it and actually made a living at it. When the scientist read the Scientific American article he declared that it told him more in four pages than I had in many hours. I guess it did but it was irrelevant information for what he said he wanted. Human nature is funny. Fracking will happen because people want the money and they don't care about the science. The same is true of the weather. They should have all been lawyers. REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of pete Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2012 4:21 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] SciAm (Was: Suppression of climate debate...) To be clear, they have not risen yet to their old standard. My empirical measure of their content is how much I can glean from a brief perusal on a news stand, and while I now don't find I've read the whole thing in ten minutes, I still am not left with the sense that there is enough content left to make it worth buying. That is in part due to my level of interest in the subjects they are discussing, but also my sense of how much depth I would find in the parts yet unread. -Pete On Thu, 5 Jan 2012, Mike Spencer wrote: > > Thanks for the update on SciAm, Pete. > > I used to buy it nearly every month. Since the German takeover, I've > given up on it completely. It's been -- I dunno, a couple of decades? > -- since I bought one. > > Early 80s, Douglas Hofstadter did a better job of explaining chaos > theory in a longish Metamagical Themas column than James Gleick did in > a whole book. The collapse into PopTechNews was a great > disappointment. > > So I shall have to have a look on the news stand tomorrow and see > what's what. > > Tnx, > - Mike > > _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
