Quote of the Day

When we begin to treat culture as an object of our awareness, we can begin to dis-identify with its power over us and become unique, post-cultural individuals.
--William Harryman

Great Richard Feynman Interview

Richard Feynman was a great physicist and teacher of physics and a fascinating human being. Here he is in one of the most wonderful interviews I've ever seen. Thank you Bill Harryman for making me aware of it through a entry in your blog.


via videosift.com

The Genius of Art Tatum

I'm inspired by Bill Harryman's post over at Integral Options Cafe of Georges Cziffra playing Lizst to post a video of of the incomparable Art Tatum playing jazz. It is said that awesome classical musicians such as Vladimir Horowitz would walk away from Tatum's performances astounded by his "genius,"that fellow jazz musicians called him "the eighth wonder of the world," that Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff proclaimed him the greatest piano player in any style, and that the great jazz pianist Fats Waller once introduced Tatum by saying: "I only play the piano, but tonight, God is in the house." It is even the case that, quoting Wikipedia, "In 1993, an MIT student invented a term that is now in common usage in the field of computational musicology: The Tatum. It means 'the smallest perceptual time unit in music.'"

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Art Tatum playing Yesterdays.



And here is a clip from a documentary about Tatum.

The Kosmos in a Single Sentence

Once upon a time, one of my philosophy professors asked the class if we could think of one sentence that did a good job of summarizing the essence of any great philosopher's philosophy. The one that came to my mind immediately was Spinoza's, "The better we understand particular things, the better we understand God." I was too shy to say this in class. But I ended up writing a paper that purported to show how the essence of Spinoza's metaphysics, ethics, theology, and politics could all be inferred from this one little quote. I say my paper "purported to show" this, because, in retrospect, I'm sure it was comically crude and didn't come even close to accomplishing its lofty task.

Yet, I think tremendous wisdom is nevertheless distilled in that pithy quote. So when I recently encountered, by way of Bill Harryman's blog, a blog article that asked its readers to post a single sentence that captures the essential knowledge or wisdom they have gained from their field of expertise or interest, I thought of Spinoza's quote and a couple of others and fused them into one compound sentence: "All is One and One is All; the better we understand particular things, the better we understand God; and in this life, we cannot do great things, we can only do small things with great love."

Actually, I posted the first two parts of this sentence in the comments section of Bill's and the other blog and have subsequently added the third part, courtesy of Mother Teresa, here to distill my essential metaphysics, ethics, theology, and politics. That is, I believe that we would do well to understand, not only with our intellects but also with our hearts, that "God" is the unified totality of existence in which every particular part of It exists and functions only in relation to the Whole, that the person who understands this deeply is overflowing with love for the divine Oneness and Its ostensive parts and conducts his or her life accordingly, and that the best political system is one that benevolently and effectively fosters this understanding, feeling, and conduct.