Interesting patterns

Music is pretty interesting stuff. Don't pretend like you are beyond contemplating how interesting a subject it is. You aren't. You listen to music, you enjoy it.. you should ask yourself why.

Well let's break it down a bit. We know when something sounds good versus something sounding awful. Something about the relationships between the notes.

What's really neat though, is if you look for patterns, as people who like math tend to do, you can find them very easily with music. All of the stuff that sounds nice sounds that way because the notes being played are related to eachother in very quantifiable ways. I'm pretty sure when you play something 'in the key of X', that you are playing with essentially the same relationships, only beginning at a different point, X.

Its all very neat how mathematics is everywhere. I'm no mathematician, but its amazing that people were able to figure some of this stuff out. Like Newton, for example. Guy had to be a genius. His ideas behind the forces of the universe, y'know, physics, are essentially still in use today. Granted he was only talking about macroscopic stuff, like my open hand slapping your face.. his ideas are still 100% accurate. It's only when we start talking about things way too small to be seen by the human eye that his equations start to break down.

But for god sakes, the guy invented calculus!

To let this stream keep moving, because thats how stream of conciousness writing is supposed to work, I think time is very interesting. Aside from the fact that we all know what it is but find it basically impossible to describe it or define it. It is interesting how time operates on different levels of reality.

Let me explain. We exist in a world where we like to refer to units of time by seconds, minutes/hours more frequently, and years when we talk about lots of time. The point is that we exist in this time frame, I mean, after all we are only alive for 80 years or so. But when you zoom in really close to things, where things exist as the same moment we do (and, in the case of our cells, ARE us), we see that the perception of time on that level is far different than ours. Things happen in milliseconds. Fractions of a second pass and basic functions happen, like ions flooding into and out of membranes. This stuff happens so fast, its almost hard to imagine. And then when you zoom out and look at galaxies, the lifetime of stars, etc. We are talking about BILLIONS of years. And yet it all exists simultaneously to create a single reality.

No, I'm not taking acid. These are just topics that are interesting to think about, when reflecting on time.

The next time you look up at the moon on a clear night, try to imagine what you know is true. It spins around the earth, the earth spins around its axis, and soon the sun will come into your vision. The earth spins around the sun. This is all basic stuff that you know is true... but when you imagine it happening, I'm betting that you imagine it in time lapse. Try to wrap your head around the idea that at that very moment, as you are looking at the moon... all that stuff IS happening. It may look like a picture to you, but you are spinning. The earth is moving around the sun. Its all very neat. This happens and yet it exists in such a different time frame that we can only identify the fact that any change is occuring at all because we have the abillity to remember things and notice patterns.

Ok, trippy post. Deal with it.

But the next time someone says something to you. try to imagine whats really happening, or what we think is happening. The person is forcing the air molecules to move in a recognizable pattern, this pattern is a wave that moves the air in all directions (well, mostly just out of the mouth) these vibrations move into your ear (designed nicely for wave-catching) vibrating your ear drum, which vibrates three bones that are used to amplify the sound, which shakes some fluid in your inner ear which sends signals to your brain.

It's all very interesting.