The title is just my old army number

The title is just my old army number. In the depths of my December depression, feeling at one Rosetta Stone V3 point that the struggle was no longer worth the pain, I remembered the advice of Theodore Roosevelt's, the 26th U.S. President, which a friend of mine is fond of quoting. Start where you are, Roosevelt would say, With what you have. Now. And thus it was that, at around half past three of a dark and dreary morning, I felt a relief like walking from death into life. I decided to take this advice. The effect was instantaneous: of happiness sweeping through me, displacing gloom. At last, I realised, it was time for me to be honest. So, just a week before Christmas I gave the owner of a little neighbourhood shop all my remaining copies of 473959'. Since I had got into the occasional habit of buying my newspaper there, the lady owner had become acquainted. I found her startlingly intelligent to be managing a small convenience store; but perhaps that is not an accident either. I asked her to give these copies away free. She read it first; then agreed. 473959 is not a fancy book. It was produced in hurry: this shows. It does, however, describe the experience of God first hand: then the struggle to communicate something of it; then the further surprise of discovering that I had chosen to teach the very subject, mathematics, that does this best. But of course another reason can be found for the moral structure of mathematics: the fact that it is prepared to treat everyone equally. How else it may be asked could it have evolved so successfully otherwise? Rosetta Stone German The answer, of course, is that it could easily have remained the secret of elite societies like the Pythagorean Brotherhood (which, incidentally, included women). Even the Renaissance mathematicians jealously guarded their secrets from each other. But this is really a chicken and egg problem. More instructive is the story of the elephant and the wise men. All were blindfolded then led to a quietly standing pachyderm and invited to describe it. One at once declared, This is certainly a tree.' Another insisted: No, a hose-pipe!' Another: A battering ram!' Yet another: Here's another hose-pipe'! This is sadly also like the enthusiasts who cry: Ours alone is the truth!, whilst others shout, No, definitely ours!, and another, Surely, ours!- and so on, ad infinitum. Such people preach humility, but are rarely humble. Religions are superior to science because they offer everyone the right freely to feel and express intense emotion. Science is superior to religions in accepting that all knowledge is provisional: that wisdom must evolve. Science has also tended to deprecate emotion. But we now know that, whilst emotions are not required by reason, it is the emotion of joy which tells reason that it may finally have made the most fruitful connection. Without this very particular emotion, reason can only produce every other kind of connection, mostly trivial.* This joy of discovery is something that even very young children can experience. Once experienced, it will transform their lives. Nothing is more addictive. Neither religions nor science are complete in themselves. Both must obey the same evolutionary rule. Simply expressed, it is that any species which best learns to use all its talents is more likely to survive; whilst the species which does not learn to use all its talents is less likely to survive. We can teach this in our schools. And if I am still invited to the Arab Thought Forum this year, this is what Rosetta Stone Software I shall try to explain there. Please wish me success! Colin Hannaford,Oxford, January 2010. (edited Snodgrass)* This fundamental connection was first pointed out by the neurologist Antonio Damasio in his book Descartes' Error' (Putnam, 1994).