Monday morning / Friday afternoon thought inspiring blog

What is the difference between a teacher and a student? Answer: a teacher is someone who has finished learning. Of course this is not strictly and generally true, but I do believe there is some merit to this thesis. Teachers should feel confident with the material they are teaching and thus feel no incentive for further study, at least not for the material they are teaching. Teachers have a rounded message and a clear vision of the field in question, whereas students do not want to impose their view on others but want to know the view of others. Exploring the views of others is an essential part of the learning process. Furthermore, a teacher must be convinced that his teachings are worth the effort to bring them across. Generally it takes far less time to absorb clearly presented ideas then it takes to present ideas clearly. That is why I currently still feel myself being more of a student than a teacher: though I like to help people understand ideas that I have mastered, I prefer learning new ideas of others. When people explicitly show interest I am very willing to explain them what I know about the subject, but teaching more at less at random seems to be a waste of energy considering that I could have gained far more by learning something new myself. This is why I doubt the future consistence in updating and even existence itself of this blog: it takes a lot of effort to put ideas into words and when it is more or less randomly directed there is very little pay-of for the effort. As long as I feel far more a student than a teacher, I believe this blog stands little chance of long term survival.

Last Monday and Friday were holidays and since most people I know were at home that day, including myself, I did not write anything. Today, once again, there will just be a link. I encourage you to check out some of the publications of the the Applied Geometry Lab at Caltech. If you are not a scientist and possibly even have trouble understanding the abstracts, a visit might still be worth it. Their papers have many excellent illustrations that are stimulating and interesting even to people outside science.

I do not think that many people actively belief in absolute happiness, but nontheless we might not always be concious of the fact that happiness and knowning how to value certain priviliges –closely related to experiencing happiness– are derived by our minds by comparing. To make this more explicit I sometimes say: ‘If it was not for the vallies, we could not see the hills’.

As a consequence, people who do not know what war means, that is how nasty it is, they also do not know peace and hence its value. Of course everyone knows what war and peace are, but we all do on different levels of detail and abstraction. Some of us have lived during the way, others were born close to it, either in time or proximity, and thus have gotten to know the adverse effects through the people that did live in the way and yet others learn about in school or on the television. Paradoxically, those who have the least knowledge of war and the atrocities that it brings, seem to hold the least value for peace and the corresponding priviliges and rights that are necessary to maintain peace.

In a society where nobody ever gets ill, nobody values their health. A similar statement applies to experiencing happiness. It is hard to be happy when you always get what you want or –even worse– when you do not know what it means to be denied something. This is why we should actually value, at least partly, even the nastier things that happen to us, because they teach us how to appreciate all the rest.