The other night, your Mom mentioned that it’s been three weeks since our visit and that you’ve been camping. With work and shopping and friends and all the talk since, it seems months and not weeks ago. It is all increasingly faint, three weeks, after all, are simply three weeks, though it was anything but simply or weeks. But what is certain, it returns in that rare, reflective moment. Otherwise the past gets lost in all the shadow and commotion.
I heard a poet reading what I took to be her words on NPR, on a station from Ithaca and Geneva, and she paused, framing her presentation carefully, and said “rest in the understanding,” and she rested, momentarily. But I stopped listening, blocking her out, thinking this was somewhere similarly written, maybe in the Bible, probably the Bible, so that why I stopped listening.
I thought of the article, instead, the one I sent you and I switched stations. The article I came back to tonight, trying to make sense of it. How New Understanding to the Director’s Cut in the New York Times on March 1 found some average, since the 80s, of movies numbering and pacing its edits to more closely reflect a the natural rhythm of our attention and thought
White noise is random right to its core, down to our fractal best.
But pink noise carries a signal and is an equivalency of two forces, random and non random. From the article, written by Natalie Angier there is the following quote:
Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world is ablush with it. Start with a picture of Penélope Cruz, say, or a flamingo on a lawn, and decompose the picture into a collection of sine waves of various humps, dives and frequencies. However distinctive the original images, if you look at the distribution of their underlying frequencies, said Jeremy M. Wolfe, a vision researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, “they turn out to have a one over f characteristic to them.”
I don’t understand this, but I’m maybe you do. There’s even more confusing and scary explanations, but why share those. It just ruins discovery.
Your Mom asked if there was red noise and joked that there should be. But she’s a partisan, as you know, and prone to absolutes. She’s a flag waving Bills fan, as you know! There are few things more wonderful!
I mentioned to her that we’re all slave to multiples of five and 10s, and numbers are like ripples, and have deep neurological roots, and about a growing psychology on the use of number, the demonstrated logarithmic association of distance to number in childhood across cultures, our leaning forward when talking about the future and back when recalling the past, and we’re learning more about the net that we fold universally. So there’s a lot more than a 15 hour off-set that separates the two, Australia and Upstate. More than the continents, though we describe them, lift them right out of the ocean’s depths, and write about them, or laugh about them, laugh and walk crazy like.
We complained about the walking, I remember that!