What ticks me off about some sorts of "proofs" of Mystical Revealed Knowledge

I saw a really, really cool lecture/show/thing tonight, and this is not a reaction to that show, but rather a reaction to a comment that a person in the audience had . . . that sort of "question" that is actually a five minute lecture of their OWN beliefs that takes time away from the person that you're ACTUALLY there to hear. . .

So: this sort of Mystical Revealed Knowledge could be proofs of Creationism, could be related to the Mayan Calendar ending (which actually simply means that the Mayans have to replace their Fifth Cycle Hot Firefighters calendar with the new Cute Puppies calendar for Sixth Cycle), proof that the Illuminati are behind everything, or, in THIS person's case, talking about how the sound of words reveals Significant Secret Knowledge.

"You can listen to the sounds of words! And then you hear connections between them!"

Yeah. That's right. BECAUSE THEY'RE FROM THE SAME DAMN ROOTS! Yes. There ARE connections. They were PUT there by the people who USE the language over time. Sometimes people use puns to tell stories, too. They're not SECRET MESSAGES FROM THE UNIVERSE -- they're things people do either directly on purpose, or indirectly, as ways to help their societies' express useful concepts.

It just struck me the same way as that whole Kirk Cameron "the banana is proof of Divine Intelligent Design" thing. Yes, you're RIGHT that the banana fits humans perfectly -- because HUMANS ENGINEERED IT over hundreds of years of careful breeding.

This person with the "SECRET MESSAGES FROM LANGUAGE" and "bananas, therefore Creationism" are appropriating human accomplishments and assigning them to some sort of Divine force. There may well be a Divine force doing things, but it's not cool to take human accomplishments and credit them to It. It's just an insult to my entire species.

Bill Barclay's MUSE ON FIRE lecture

Tonight, Lis and I went to a lecture/show/thing in Davis Square. It started with a piece by Michael Anderson, which was originally going to be his "A Bloody Deed" piece, but he just didn't feel comfortable talking about kids and violence, even fake stage violence, so soon after Sandy Hook -- there's no connection or anything, but he just didn't feel quite right about it. So he did his Language of Shakespeare/Language of Baseball piece, instead, which is every bit as funny, and a perfectly acceptable substitution.

Bill Barclay is a Shakespearean scholar and musician. About ten years ago, when he was 26 or so, Tina Packard told him that he was going to do a lecture for their summer series at Shakespeare and Company on something musical -- how about the Music of the Spheres. A topic which he knew from nothing. So he crammed for two months, and found that this was a topic that fascinated him, and he's continued to poke at it ever since.

Let me give a couple-sentence summary of some of the most basic parts of his thesis -- the ones which I find easiest to go along with.

Item 1: The notion of the "Music of the Spheres" is that each planet always creates some sort of musical tone, which, together, form the most beautiful harmony that could be imagined. For whatever reason, we humans can't hear this music, but it's there constantly anyway.

Item 2: As Pythagoras elucidated, harmonies are based on simple integer ratios. If you take a chord and strum it, it vibrates at a certain frequency. If you take simple ratios of the length -- half the length, a third the length, a quarter the length, a fifth the length -- you get the intervals that give us our basic harmonies, octaves, major chords, and so forth.

Item 3: For most of human history, people assumed that the orbital mechanics and dynamics of the Solar System had to be based on some sorts of perfect ratios, and simple, perfect forms. When Kepler discovered that orbits are ellipses instead of circles, this was, of course, deeply distressing to him, and he looked for ways to work with the data to see if he couldn't prove that these ellipses were, on some deep level, even MORE perfect representations of Cosmic Harmonies than circles were. One of the things he did was to compare ratios of the speed of the planets at perihelion and aphelion with each other, and with the speeds of the adjacent planets at perihelion and aphelion. He found a significant number of integral ratios -- not all of them, but a lot of them. This is not simply coincidence: it's an artifact of orbital resonances. Repeating systems have a tendency to reinforce themselves in more and more regular patterns.

Item 4: Pitches are frequencies. Frequencies below about 20 Hz are perceived by the human ear as individual events; above 20 Hz but within human hearing are perceived as tones. Nonetheless, there's no real difference between frequencies below 20 Hz and above, theoretically. You could consider a frequency of 1/year. You could say that the Earth orbits at B flat 32 octaves below middle C.

Item 5: Because of orbital resonances, orbital phenomena happen at frequencies of simple integer ratios. Frequencies of simple integer ratios is another way of saying Platonic harmonies.

Therefore, the Music of the Spheres is a real thing.