April 17, 2004
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Saturday Thoughts
Here’s a photo of what I see from my office in the morning. My workplace is up on a hill overlooking the river and its east side (where I live). I almost always get to work between 6-7 am, so I usually get to see a sunrise. Walking across this particular stretch is always a spiritual hit for me to begin my day.
Here’s one of those interesting tidbits from The Da Vinci Code that I certainly didn’t know before:
“This number PHI…1.618, is a very important number in art…The number PHI was derived from the Fibonacci sequence–a progression famous not only because the sum of adjacent terms equaled the next term, but because the quotients of adjacent terms possessed the astonishing property of approaching the number 1.618–PHI!…Despite PHI’s seemingly mystical mathematical origins…the truly mind-boggling aspect of PHI was its role as a fundamental building block in nature. Plants, animals, and even human beings all possessed dimensional properties that adhered with eerie exactitude to the ratio of PHI to 1. PHI’s ubiquity in nature…clearly exceeds coincidence, and so the ancients assumed the number PHI must have been preordained by the Creator of the universe. Early scientists heralded 1.618 as the Divine Proportion….Did you know that if you divide the number of female bees by the number of male bees in any beehive in the world, you always get the same number? …PHI…Sunflower seeds grow in opposing spirals. Can you guess the ratio of each rotation’s diameter to the next? PHI…Nobody understood better than DaVinci the divine structure of the human body. He was the first to show that the human body is literally made of building blocks whose proportional ratios always equal PHI. …Measure the distance from the tip of your head to the floor. Then divide that by the distance from your belly button to the floor. Guess what number you get. PHI. Measure the distance from your shoulder to your fingertips, and then divide it by the distance from your elbow to your fingertips. PHI again. Finger joints. Toes. Spinal divisions. PHI. PHI. PHI….When the ancients discovered PHI, they were certain they had stumbled across God’s building blocks for the world, and they worshipped Nature because of that…Even to this day there exist pagan, Mother Earth-revering religions….The symbol the pentagram–or pentacle–is considered both divine and magical by many cultures…The ratios of line segments in a pentacle all equal PHI, making this symbol the ultimate expression of the Divine Proportion.”
Kind of neat huh? Ok Trivial Pursuits over and out.
Deep Thought: If you make ships in a bottle, I bet the thing that really makes your heart sink is when you look in and there at the wheel is Captain Termite.
Today I am grateful for: My Recovery
Comments (8)
Hey! That’s looking out over where I live too. Thanks for your comments today. I had a week where I ate way too much cheese…and it wasn’t a happy body. No atkins for me…. I can’t stand that diet anyway, two days and I think I’m going crazy. The fiber-rich foods are noticeably helping. And maybe drinking water instead of diet soda. I’m like you, I really have to force myself to drink water. It helps if its refrigerator cold. Have a good weekend.
There were several interesting facts in DVC. I found the existence of the groups themselves fascinating, as well as the details of the famous artworks.
I heard about the Golden Proportion from a miniseries on the human face, hosted by John Cleese. I tried the bit about measuring from my head to the ground and my navel to the ground…and unless I just screwed up because it’s hard to measure oneself, my legs are three inches too short!
All that math! Aaaauuugghhh!
But I like your view, you can look through that grid tower & it doesn’t block anything. It must be spectacular to watch the sunrise over those mountains.Thanks for sharing.
I learned about PHI in college and found that to be so interesting!! I kept screwing it up though LOL
You get to look out on mountains from your office! Cool.
DaVinci Code was one of my favorite fiction reads to date.
Nice view from the office!! Captain Termite, what a hoot!
Nice view…I will be looking at utilitarian buildings tomorrow. UGH!