You never know...

Traveling the web, you never know when you'll happen upon insight. It can happen in the strangest of places.

Why does this irk me so???

So on my web travels I come across the aforementioned link, "What is Stephen Harper Reading?" Where I read about an author who sends books to his Prime Minister. Which I can really get behind as I too have sent a book to our President. I like the practice and the idea.

While reading his about page I came across this quote, "Truly I say to you, there are only two sets of tools with which the rich soil of life can be worked: the religious and the artistic. Everything else is illusion that crumbles before the onslaught of time." which irked me so. What a line of self righteous claptrap.

So I wondered who was this guy and searched to find: Yann Martel- Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain. As an adolescent he attended high school at Trinity College School, a boarding school in Port Hope, Ontario. He grew up in Costa Rica, France, Mexico, and Canada. As an adult, Martel has spent time in Iran, Turkey and India. After studying philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Martel spent 13 months in India visiting temples, churches, mosques and zoos, and then two years reading religious texts and castaway stories.[3] His first published fictional work, Seven Stories, appeared in 1993. -Wikipedia

And to add to the level of incitement I was feeling I find out that our dear President apparently likes his book. The president wrote: "My daughter and I just finished reading Life of Pi together. Both of us agreed we prefer the story with animals. It is a lovely book--an elegant proof of God and the power of storytelling." -http://www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/A-note-from-President-Obama.jpg

So apparently all one has to do is travel, dabble in school and contemplate life (http://www.powells.com/essays/martel.html) and you too can have a mind "exploding with ideas. I could hardly keep up with them. In jubilant minutes whole portions of the novel emerged fully formed: the lifeboat, the animals, the intermingling of the religious and the zoological, the parallel stories." and right an "elegant proof of God".

"Mathematicians describe an especially pleasing method of proof as elegant. Depending on context, this may mean:

A proof that uses a minimum of additional assumptions or previous results.

A proof that is unusually succinct.

A proof that derives a result in a surprising way (e.g., from an apparently unrelated theorem or collection of theorems.)

A proof that is based on new and original insights.

A method of proof that can be easily generalized to solve a family of similar problems.

In the search for an elegant proof, mathematicians often look for different independent ways to prove a result—the first proof that is found may not be the best. The theorem for which the greatest number of different proofs have been discovered is possibly the Pythagorean theorem, with hundreds of proofs having been published.[3] Another theorem that has been proved in many different ways is the theorem of quadratic reciprocity—Carl Friedrich Gauss alone published eight different proofs of this theorem.

Conversely, results that are logically correct but involve laborious calculations, over-elaborate methods, very conventional approaches, or that rely on a large number of particularly powerful axioms or previous results are not usually considered to be elegant, and may be called ugly or clumsy."- Wikipedia

So we have a vagabond who has written a proof of God and tells us that only the religious and the artistic are real... all else is illusion whom is being paid millions for his book. Which I guess goes to prove humans are looking for purpose and will take the path of least resistance whenever possible.