I was admiring the curriculum materials shaping up around ant colonies, their study. Daniel knows a lot about ants, and yet humanity on the whole still has a lot to learn. The study of ants is somewhat humbling, in terms of revealing our own ignorance.
Picture a queen ant, surrounded by layers of caretakers and apparent hangers on. We say "apparent" because in some theories the seeming passive crowds may store collective memories, ready to be expressed if triggered. The queen never ventures forth and workers tainted with experience of "the outside" don't get anywhere near her. If she serves a decision-making role (unclear) it's from within an abstracted layer where experience consists of pheromones.
Remembering that Andrius wants to "know everything" (the answer to the prayers of those with boundless curiosity), I'm eager to introduce him to CJ's work on comprehensivity. The commitment to "learn everything" is inherently problematic, and sounds like empty chutzpah unless qualified with self awareness and acknowledgement of the inherent paradoxes.
"Tackling it all" is not only possible, but what we all do every day. It's just that, depending upon strategy, resources, and the practice of specific disciplines, how much we accomplish towards our impossible goal varies by orders of magnitude.
I took some time this morning, after feeding the dog, adding to my M4W repo on Github, where I chronicle recent progress. I haven't expressed a "know everything" goal, but I do value "comprehensivity" as CJ calls it, as many of the levers one needs to discover, as an activist, come to light only through considerable experience. Those into ML (machine learning) have a lot of concrete mathematics to show why quantity, not just quality, matters.
As a Quaker journalist, i.e. blogger, I need to keep twisting my strands together, and pulling tight, making a strong alloy, the way we often talk about our metaphorical language. The No More Secondhand God approach to religion means cutting out the middleman, a Buddhist teaching as well. We might be able to come up with more neurological-sounding explanations for why individuation is a positive. Transcendentalism here we come.
But we're also talking about sanitation and fish farms and Global Village communities. Where might we get to go, to gain all this leveraging experience?
On my end, I follow David Koski's research into phi-related topics. Phi (the golden mean) is already a hugely popular topic, but combined with Verboten Math it provides a goldmine of new material.
