Nautilus Shell (Author:Chris17/Wikimedia Commons)

As you all might have noticed, I watch a little too much television.  Fortunately, a lot of my curiosity does stem from information gleaned from the numerous shows I watch. The new addition to the FOX line up this week is the drama Touch with an interesting premise about a widower, Martin (Kiefer Sutherland), who struggles to deal with his son, Jake (David Mazouz) who doesn’t speak and refuses to be touched.  What’s amazing about the son is that he lives in a world of numbers and sequences, seeing the natural world in all the beauty that is the Fibonacci Sequence and using it to predict the future. Now, I understand that the Fibonacci Sequence is something math related, to do with the arrangement of the compartments of a shell and how new leaves unfurl. I thought I would take this opportunity to read a little more about it.

Obviously, that’s not all the sequence is about and by the way, the Shell that I mentioned is called a Nautilus Shell and is supposedly one of the only shells to have survived since the age of the dinosaurs. I found an amazing, albeit, glamorized visualization of the Fibonacci Sequence. The video shows quite beautifully that all the shapes in nature are made up of mathematical equations and angles.

Leonardo Fibonacci was an Italian mathematician (1170 – 1250) and was responsible for introducing Europe to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. To obtain the sequence, each number is the sum of the two previous numbers.

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 and so on.

If you were to draw a rectangle with any two of the values of the sequence, you can divide it up into squares measuring decreasing values in the sequence. You are then left with the Fibonacci spiral and this is the spiral we see everywhere in nature, in the Nautilus shell, the acorn, and in the way petals on a flower arrange themselves. You will see that I have attempted to create a Fibonacci Spiral here.

Golden Rectangle and Fibonacci Spiral

Leonardo Fibonacci didn’t technically discover the sequence, which was supposedly known to Indian mathematicians as early as the fifth century. I’m just happy that I now have what could be described as a kindergarten understanding of what this is all about aaand I will leave the fancy formulas to someone else as I sadly have no kick-ass math skills to speak of.

Back to the show Touch, the first episode deals with the idea that all of us are connected to the people we are destined to meet by a red thread tied around our ankle. According to the ancient Chinese belief, this red string/thread may stretch and tangle but will never break. On the show, all the red threads have been broken for some reason and the boy, along with his father must reconnect people. Traditionally the red thread refers to the destined connections between lovers or soul mates but, the show has broadened this idea to all the people who would have an impact on a character’s life. It’s a nice little optimistic belief I suppose. Anyway, we’ll see how the show develops over the season. So far so good.

Welcome to Hunting Pink Elephants. (Illustrations © Gowri Nambiar)

Hello World!! I think is an appropriate title for this very first of hopefully many blog posts.  I’m being cautiously optimistic, as one should be with new endeavors so welcome to my personal little social experiment.

I decided to call this blog Hunting Pink Elephants mainly because Toronto is my new jungle and together we can wander about and enjoy all that this city has to offer in regards to art and general consumerism. With some degree of stealth and use of covert tactics we might find some amazing treasures. Unfortunately, due to my lack of any such Secret Agent type skills and natural pessimism, this could also turn into sad…sad …disaster.

And, in an attempt to maintain a regular supply of reading material on this blog (because let’s face it, I’m not going to catch everything that happens in Toronto) I will be using the internet only because I sadly do not have my very own team of journalists, photographers or analysts. I don’t even have Siri which is extremely painful for me to admit but there you are.

Let’s get started, Talley-ho!!!

Ok, I really couldn’t find any hunting term for elephants so we’re going to have to use the fox one.