No corner unvisited, no object left untouched
There’s something intrinsically pleasant about applying textbook knowledge to real life. Despite the motivation of curriculum designers, the learner doesn’t always “get” the content of a lesson. No blame laid here; teachers and students are the warp and the weft of the cloth, each essential and neither able to sustain alone. But let’s cut to the chase on this one. Today I watched a video on YouTube that was simply cool.
The term Brownian motion is best illustrated by objects we hold near and dear. Like babies. Consider a young child at play. Not play, exactly. Rather, exploration in the most primitive of forms, where everything must be touched. Consider this young child, captured by a timelapse camera. There is nature reduced to the essential.
Tonight, American Idol moved to the most stressful part of the whole process: group performance. Detached from the rest of the competition, the individual performer must try to “play nicely with others”. A section on the report card, if you will. The roughly 150 candidates must fashion a performance in the worst of circumstances, among strangers in therapy circles. Here we have a sad reminder of every group project ever assigned in the highschool class from hell. Some people are affable enough to handle the night and day with others. Some burn out like tiny comets. Once in a while, we witness something that reminds us that the rules of Gestalt apply to everything.
The audition portion has ended too quickly, and the group performance is a distraction. Soon, the wheat will be separated from the chaff.
