Let Zep, CCCF and Pictures

Let Zep! were amazing last night – two and a half hours of Zeppelin stuff, and performed really really well. It was quite funny, myself, Zishan and a few other guys were the only students there – the rest were 50 year-olds in leather jackets. My ears are still ringing, it was that good!

Today I met up with Lorna for half an hour, then had the Harry’s prayer meeting and worked for a bit and then met up with Cheng-shi for a bit. In the evening I went to CCCF and Bartow gave a really good talk on Matthew’s version of the rich young man. I also helped Lillian a bit with her essay and found out quite a lot about some of the Daoist philosophy in the process.

Over the past few days I’ve been noticing that the best way to explain something is through pictures. Perhaps not pictures drawn on canvas but pictures written with the pen. Perhaps it’s something to do with the brain having a good imagination and being able to see through the words to the picture they describe, but a written picture is much easier to remember than most other things for me. As well as this, it is much easier to describe to someone with limited English. I guess the description of the picture has a higher amount of redundant information, so even if you do not understand the full explanation of the picture, your mind will fill in the blanks and help you to understand the concept more fully. I remember Terry Pratchett writing something along the lines of “Humans can’t understand the big concept, so they come up with a nice picture to explain the concept. Then, because they understand the picture they think they understand the concept”. However, if you construct the picture correctly and remember that it is only an image and cannot be extrapolated too far, it is a very useful thing!