Welcome to the Conical Time blog. I assume as posts accumulate the purpose of this blog will become increasingly apparent. Here goes.
Yesterday, August 24th 2008, saw the close of the 2008 Olympics Games in Beijing, the XXIX Olympiad. The Closing Ceremony in the Beijing National Stadium ('Bird's Nest') starting at 8:08 pm. In Chinese culture numerology is popular and the number eight is associated with prosperity and confidence. The Arabic numeral for eight indicates its significance in others cultures too. Some commentators protested against the continual focus on the number eight (the Olympics also started on 08.08.2008 at 20:08 local time) as they felt it to be too 'masculine'.
As expected, the closing ceremony was a grandious and involved event with the usual trappings including dignitaries and celebrities. One acrobatic item on the agenda was something called the "Memory Tower" by the event's organisers. A YouTube video of the performance can be seen here.
The event is described as follows in Wikipedia:
Performers on a tall pillar (called the memory tower), waving arms and symbolising the Olympic flame, eternally unextinguished. Performers group to form Chrysanthemums, with hurdle runners on top of the pillar. Performers then reclimb the pillar, which is then covered in huge red streamers. Roses are formed along with athletes below (with pillar as a stigma), the athlete crowds as petals. Red streamers are levitated upward and reveal the performers arranged in the form of Dancing Beijing, the 2008 Olympic logo.For a culture preoccupied by symbols and form and clearly very mindful of the visual effects created by performances, I found the "Memory Tower" to be quite a potent symbol of memory visualised. Over 300 acrobats were harnessed in concentric circles leading up to the top of the 'pillar', or what I would describe as a cone shape. They were dressed in outfits which were red on one side and sliver on the other and moved rhythmically to the accompanying music. A number of performers raced from the bottom to the top of the tower before posing in what seemed to represent athletes in moments captured from the games. Clearly this performance was intended to be reflective and was more musically subdued than the other performances.
It was proposed to me many years ago that memory in the brain works something akin to a cone, where we funnel our way in to certain memory areas of the brain and that it is in this way that we built 'bridges' from one memory to another (e.g. with mnemonics). It seems the Chinese involved in organising the ceremony have similar ideas. Such an elaborate performance was obviously not done without ample consideration. So now for the tricky question:
What is the shape of memory?
