Replying to LO28934 --
Dear Organlearners,
Andrew Campbell < ACampnona@aol.com > writes:
quoting someone else (Angel~us)
>"You wrote that the word "theatre" means "to bring
>forward from the background"..."
>
>Yes, so I did, do, will...
>
>Pui l'alma acquista, pui 'l mondo perde. Michel~angelo;-)
>As the spirit increases, so in proportion the world loses
Greetings dear Andrew,
A theatre is certainly a place where something which could have happened
somewhere else, is presented so as to watch it.
I decided to have a look at the etymology of theatre. It was first
introduced from the French by Wycliff into English to translate Acts
19:31. The French got itself from the Latin "theatrum". The Greeks used
the word "theatron" for the same thing, namely a place for seeing shows.
When a Latin and a Greek word having the same meaning are similar,
i have learned that it means one of two things.
(1) The one language took it from the other langauge. (Imperialistic
Romans were usually the takers ;-)
(2) Both langauges share it because of their etymology of a much
older common langauage.
In the case of (2), that common older langauge is Aryan or also known as
Indo-European. It diverged into three main branches European, Baltic and
Indian langauges. So i had a look at Sanskrit, the oldest of the Indian
languages for a word having the root "thea" and what its meaning would be.
Sanskrit has the word "dhyai" which means to contemplate something
wonderful. Aha, so i went back to the ancient Greek to see what word it
had for wonder. Guess what? "thauma". In Russian the word for wonder is
"divo" -- hence the Diva on stage!
Performing an art is to create wonder. To watch a performing artist or
group of them is to contemplate wonder. The spirit can explore wonderful
things which cannot be shared with the materialistic world. Yes,
Michel~angelo knew it.
You quote that Angel~us wrote
>....."Now I continue on my journey and plan towards
>developing learning tools for children. ....."
Developing learning tools for children is wonderful. At this very moment
some fifty pupils of a high school is exploring them in the Discovery
Centre to which my office door is always opened when i work alone. How i
love the noise they and some of the tools make -- it means that these
pupils are almost bursting of free energy.
What is painful inconsistent for me is that we have displaced learners
from in situ to places between four walls where we have to import and
present expensive learning tools to make pupils aware of wonders readily
availble in situ. These tools become usually too expensive to be acquired
by a poor society which cannot even afford these places with four walls
into which education has to be confined.
I think that teachers who want to work with poor children must learn self
how to make the very place where these children live and its environment
there the theatre for education. Imported learning tools and four walls to
confine these tools and the poor (in more than one sense) children are a
benefit, but not of necessity. There exist many tools in situ for free.
The teacher just have to learn how to recognise them and unlock the
potential to sustain learning in each. In other words, teachers have to
master the art of "exemplar-exploring", one of the five ESCs (Elementary
Sustainers of Creativity).
As you will see later on, even the desert has learning tools.
>In Africa this coming year, thirty one million people may
>die because they hunger. Debaters of number and equation
>and equitable ratio...do we knot have enough...do our
>children knot have enough...have our ethics become no
>more than cheap pornography when people sue MacDonalds
>because they cannot control their own hunger. At, please
>write to us again about those devils - - whirlwinds - that
>arise spontaneously in the deserts around;-)
Dear Andrew, death on such a scale in Southern Africa due to civil war,
famine and epidemic diseases like AIDS and malaria is something peculiar
to the last quater of the 20th century. The documentation of life in
Southern Africa, how scanty it might be in the early stage, goes back not
more than 150 years, except for South Africa itself where it goes back
some 350 years. All these documents, how scanty they might be, made no
mention of a catastrophe of such magnitude, not of any oral tradition
heard about.
I wonder how anyone can claim that the peoples of Southern Africa were
self responsible for this catastrophe? I wonder how people of large
corporations with their greed for money can sleep in peace?
Andrew, these Desert Devils are a wonderful example of Irreversible
Self-Organisation (ISO). Prigogine loves to use Bernard Cells (BCs) to
illustrate ISO in an inanimate system. I wonder whether any fellow learner
have ever seen the forming of BCs. They can be seen in any hot day in a
shallow, muddy pool.
But let me begin with your bathtub to tell how it works. When you pull out
the the plug slowly, water runs in a laminar manner out of the hole into
the lower drain pipe. The gravitational pull on the water at the surface
is an entropic force. The water flowing through the hole indicates and
entropic flux. Only very little of it comes from the surface. Both the
entropic force and the entropic flux together produces entropy.
Take your finger and make but one circular stroke on the surface of the
water right above the hole. Soon a "whirlwater" akin to a whirlwind
develops, going from the surface of the water right through the hole and
even into the drainage pipe! Its organisation is more complex than that of
the laminar flow. This "whirlwater" organisation allows more water from
the surface than lower down to be drained.
In the desert whirlwind (Desert Devil or DD) the same happens, but from
the bottom to the top. DDs develop around 11 o'clock up to 4 o'clock. This
should give you an indication what causes them. The sun bakes on the
ground, make it too hot to walk on with bare foot. The hot ground heats up
the air above it. As the temperature of the air rises, so also its
pressure. Eventually there is a large pressure difference between air
close to the ground and air higher up -- again an entropic force. Air
begins to flow laminar upwards to relieve this pressure difference --
again the entropic flux. Consequently we get increasing entropy
production.
A desert lizard runs from the shade of one rock to the shade of another
one -- remember how hot the ground is. It is like you making a stroke with
your finger in the bath tub. Suddenly a tiny twisting trail of dust begins
to rise upwards, thin as a pencil. The higher it goes, the thicker it
becomes closer to the bottom. When the trickle reach the cool air higher
up, it begins to spread out in a mushroom. fashion. It is then when the
true DD emerges. To thebottom of the twisting column it becomes thinner
while higher up it becomes even thicker until it spreads out as the
mushroom. The windspeed at the bottom of the funnel also increases
dramatically and likewise the pressure in its centre decreases. It is then
capable of picking up any kind of debri. It also begins to meander over
the surface of the ground, sucking excess air immediately in contact of it
all along its trail. Unlike a tornado, a DD can scavange the desert floor
for more than an hour.
These DDs are by far not as dangerous and immense as tornados. The reason
is simple. The heat capacity of air is less than a thousandth of that of
water. Thus DDs are actually cute little creatures to watch and not
mortally dangerous to experience directly. Nevertheless, they are
frightening when catching the unaware or the inexperienced. They also have
the most important function of distributing seed in the desert which
otherwise would have stayed in a lump.
Far, far more dangerous is a few, smallish, dense clouds moving high up
over the desert, not a drop of rain coming from them. They spell death to
the inexperienced. One of them may any time send out a bolt of lighting to
the ground. This lightning goes straight down, following the shortest
route rather than the most ionised route as during a normal rain storm.
Its voltage difference is about ten times as much as that during normal
rain. Where it hits the ground, usually the top of a dune or a rocky
outcrop, the entropy production is so intense that it melts the sand or
rock within seconds. The whipping crack of its sound shock wave can be
heard up to 20 km away. It is never followed by the usual thunder because
there is no large cloud canopy to echo the sound.
I do not try to avoid these desert devils. They are inhabitants of the
desert during the hottest part of the day. Futhermore, their course is a
menadering one so it is impossible to predict it except when they are
closer than 50 meters. This gives one enough time to get out of their way.
But I do all I can to avoid a dense solitary cloud. Fortunately, it moves
in straight course because of the metereological powers of a vast region
involved. They are rare. I have seen them only three times, once in the
company of two Europeans travelling with me. The desert devils frightend
them, but these few high riders terrified the wits out of them. They did
not believe me when I told them to watch for the bolt of lightning. But
after several minutes one of them did sent a bolt down. Even 10 km away,
its brute force was far beyond my painting with words and their
imagination. Both waited with cameras ready to picture another event. But
the high riders moved out of sight without doing it again.
Some organisations are like desert devils. They thrive under stress
conditions. They can become irritating and cause discomfort when they
cross one's path. But they are needed to scavange the floor of
organisations to relieve it from excess pressures. They are also useful
because they redistribute localised information. Newspapers are an example
of them.
But some organisations are like the isolated, dense cloud high up,
following a straight course over the landscape of organisations. Like a
potential difference of millions of volts between the cloud and the ground
builds up, the greed of this organisation becomes zillions of times more
than that the need of organisations on the ground. When it strikes, the
viciousness and total anhillation of it is stunning.
Once, more than thirty years ago, my path of authenticity crossed the
course of such an organisation, a secret one. It was terrible, but I
learnt much from it.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@postino.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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