Sunday, October 5, 2014

Rambling on with Robert Gordon

So, in order to understand 'Robert Gordon' of Tunnel Thru the Air, I'm studying planar trigonometry.  Kinda retro because what I really want to study is spherical trig which explains, IMO, RG's trip.  One step at a time. I had to go back to the beginning...where I was at about 14 years old some 49 years ago.  Alas.

And here I'm studying planar trig before Sunday services and I come upon the chapter in my trig course deriving Cartesian coordinates.  You remember, Dr. Descartes the nerve specialist on pg. 244 of TTTA.  [Yes, Cartesian coordinate were named after Rene Descartes, the great French philosopher and mathematician.]  As a nerve specialist, Dr. Descartes undoubtedly specialized in networks having vectors connecting neural nodes.  Hmmm.  Kinda similar to vectors of a trip that RG was destined to take in a time span '7 days?'  22 stops with mileage vectors of travel in between?  Recall from my spreadsheet in prior posts, RG traveled a spherical East/West distance of 18200 miles and a gross North/South distance of 18400 miles.  He circumnavigated the spherical distance of the Earth, 18842 miles at the 40* latitude (the latitude of NYC), both East/West (time) and North/South (price).  But I selfishly digress from the trig theme.

Back to the trig course I find my trig teacher mentions he is coincidentally describing 'Kinematics,' a multi-facted body of physics/science.  Gosh, you can go in so many directions with kinematics; mechanical structures (engineering), time and space structures (astronomy), organic structure (biomechanics).....  Vectors of force in space.  Kinda like there's nothing but geometric points of force in space?  Sound familiar?  So, the study of kinematics and Cartesian coordinates, not just in the planar world but in the greater, more important and more realistic spherical world.  From Wikipedia:


Again, back to the trig text, what's he using to teach planar Cartesian coordinates and intro kinematics?  The human finger (from www.khanacademy.org):



And he finds the anatomy of the finger's 3 divisions to be 2.4cm, 1.6cm and .8cm.  Interesting multiples; 3, 2, 1.5.  Also leading to 1.333, 4......  What struck me was Gann's use of the human body to demonstrate symmetry, 5, 2....  By George, I think Guardjieff taught similar anatomic analogies, symmetry and numbers, all within his construct of 'natural law' of all things.

Just some spaced out thoughts about time and space....and Gann.  I wonder what Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle might make of these ramblings?  He'd probably saying 'booooorrrrrrriiiiinnnnnnggggg.'

Jim