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December 29, 2005

Moving on

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I saw "Syriana" last night. It was the kind of movie with a plot so complex that one only grasps it hours after viewing. That is, if one has been lucky enough to see it with several smart people who will spend time afterward piecing together loose ends, even though they hated the movie too. Unfortunately, "Syriana" was not sufficiently confusing to leave you baffled enough not to feel totally pessimistic about the depths of evil and corruption in the oily world. Recommendation - if peak oil and the apocalypse are on your mind anyway, there is really no need to catch this film. If you are a neoconservative or a corporate executive in need of a baseball bat to wake you up, I would say it's mandatory, though I doubt it will be your first recreational choice.

On the heels of "Syriana", NPR, which has been awakening me (so to speak) with nice surprises lately - Christmas Eve morning with harpist Debra Henson- Conant, yesterday with my favorite risk communicator, Peter Sandman, and today with Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, author of “Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions” . She theorizes that there is a fifth dimension which occupies a separate flat “brane,” or membrane, parallel to the world we experience. She willl be able to test her theory when a new particle accelerator opens in Switzerland two years from now.

Her work is reminiscent of Thomas Banchoff's , Brown mathematician and fourth dimension explorer. He is doing for the fourth dimension, what Edwin Abbott did for the third in Flatland, helping us to conceptualize what might be going on all around us in the fourth dimension as we perceive in three. Take a peek at the animations of a three dimensional cube moving through a two dimensions, and you will get an idea of just what you might perceive about a third dimension if you happened to be flat. Now extrapolate what might be happening around you in the fourth dimension as you kick around in the third. As Banchoff says in his introduction to the Princeton University Press edition of "Flatland", "All of us are slaves to the prejudices of our own dimension".

This gives me hope when I feel that we have trashed this dimension so thoroughly that we'll have to go to another, in order to fix things -- if it isn't too late already.

Ah..... it's almost 2006 - a time to be thinking about thorny questions It's a good thing I have my Ladies Group tomorrow.

Photo note: I was saving this shot for New Year's Eve, but it has a few too many dimensions and triangles to pass up. I'll just have to shoot something else for New Year's Eve.

Posted by Dakota at December 29, 2005 06:27 AM