Another Dog Story

Clearly not a good photo, but I was struck by how the woman seems to have chosen to dress like her dogs. They made a striking group as they jogged past the parking lot at Spring Lake this morning.

I spent a portion of the day cleaning out my closet and musing about the concept of emergence. According to Wikipedia: In philosophy, systems theory, science and art, emergence is a phenomenon whereby larger entities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities resulting in the larger entities exhibiting properties not shown by the smaller ones.

The classic example of social emergence is the jelly bean experiment. A group of people are asked to guess how many jelly beans there are in a big jar. The answers can be quite random and varied, but when they are added together and divided by the number of people in the group, the answer is usually very close to the actual number of jelly beans in the jar.

But this concept can be applied to all kinds of complex questions such as 'what is life?'. One reason this is true is that, much as it has been studied, nobody seems to be able to figure out why it happens. 

I love puzzles like this. They are a bit like a  koan. Wikipedia again: a koan is a paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning, and to provoke enlightenment. The classic example of a koan is, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

It also reminds me of string theory. Not that I have a clue what string theory is really about, but it always struck me that it would be pretty fun to speculate and create theories about something you have no way of proving...I read a book called The Elegant Universe by physicist Brian Greene. It is supposedly a discussion of theoretical physics for the layman but the only thing I understood from reading it was that you can speculate all you want about about fourth and fifth dimensions, but a way to prove it has yet to be discovered. For some reason, building  a supercollider seems to be the way proof will be found but I don't really get that either....I've been married to an engineer for too long.... 

Food for thought, even if there is no way to prove anything, except maybe my own ignorance. All I can say is that the woman and her two spaniels definitely make a bigger statement than a single spaniel, handsome as he is.Too bad I cut off the top of the woman's head. Too much going on in my own, I suspect....