ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

Images (top) self-explanatory from Charles Crowley at http://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/Complexity/index.html (bottom) Stephen Wolfram's four classes of cellular automata illustrating diversity with small initial differences or perturbations. Studies in Chaotic Systems, which are sub-cases of Complex Systems, show four types of movements: (1) movements that eventually become extinct of (2) movements which produce regular cycles (3) movements which grow structurally but the growth is not totally predictable (4) movements which dissolve into utter chaos. It is category 3 that is most interesting as it seems to represent the state which Life in this Universe follows and may explain how interesting, complex systems, such as living things, arise in a world where one of the most fundamental principles is that entropy, that is disorder, always increases. [Second Law of Thermodynamics]. Experiments carried out with Cellular Automata [which are grids created on a computer and populated and all...

The extraordinary powers that musicians have still mystifies me. For example, the fingerboard of the violin is only a few inches long. Each note is only a millimeter or less away from the next. So when you consider that an accomplished violinist can play at great speed and his fingers must always be in the correct position within 0.5 mm for him to play each note pitch accurately [note out by half a tone is still discernible as out-of- tune by the human ear], it is really a wondrous feat. But this is just a technical feat. Even more interesting is our ability to 'feel' the chord changes in a song. In a simple song with a Root chord, a 4th and a Dominant Seventh,[e.g. in C key, it is C, F and G7 chords it is usually no problem for an average musician to know when to change ]. But ask most musicians and they can't explain how they know when to change. It is just a 'feeling' and it's quite unerring in it's accuracy. Folk songs, church songs, country songs ...