thoughts and posts
Billy.Billy!
Billy is the name of a dog. A little Schnauzer that, by my judgement, was still a little puppy. We saw him and his owner, a young woman, on a walk along the Willamette River. The little dog was all over the place checking things out and running crisscross on the walking path and by doing so regularly got into people’s way. The young woman was trying to get his attention by calling him by his name – Billy. Billy! And repeating his name probably a dozen times – to all those calls there was no reaction. Finally, she pulled him close to herself and started talking to the dog: Billy, when I call you, you need to pay attention and you cannot run here and there. I could not see the dogs face, but I wondered – have dogs progressed to understand the human language? I recall fairy tales
Silence is gold
This weekend we had the opportunity to watch the annual closing ceremony of a Portland dance academy. Our friends’ daughter is part of that school along with way over one hundred children and also some adults that take classes there. Some of the older kids – high school juniors and high school seniors – perform truly at a professional level and apparently also participate in dance competitions. The show took place in the theater of a local high school. The program was structured in a way that all members of the academy got to perform at least in one dance giving everyone the opportunity to demonstrate what they learned over the course of the last year. The audience is overwhelmingly filled with parents, grandparents, siblings and family friends. This was not our first time watching this show. The performances are truly inspiring – the passion, engagement and focus that the
Lifelong learning
Most recently I completed the book “The Fabric of reality” by David Deutsch. It is a challenging read. The book explains and promotes a whole new world view – anchored on several very fundamental discoveries over more than a century. It was published in 1997 – so quite a while ago. Looking at the bibliography I found references for a number of quoted supporting publications that go back to the seventies, eighties and nineties of the last century. For example, a book “The selfish gene” published in 1976 by Dawkins is referenced. Richard Dawkins for example, expanded Darwin’s theory of evolution. I finished college in 1988 (This gives my age away!) and in the early courses we spent some time studying philosophy before diving deep into chemistry and physics. The interplay of different disciplines of science including mathematics, and others like crystallography, for example with chemistry and physics was illustrated