My friend [Barry->] has a phenomenally active and sharp mind. While he composes and plays a variety of music for a living, he enjoys forays into nearly every other field of intellectual and artistic endeavor as well. We once whiled away a happy hour together playing with a program called Graphing Calculator which used to ship with every Macintosh computer. The program is a mathematical playground, which allows you to enter equations, drag the elements of the equations around while the computer does all the rebalancing for you, and, best of all, to create wondrous two and three dimensional graphs of nearly any equation you can come up with. You can even grab the three dimensional surfaces with the mouse, fling them around an axis, and watch them spin.

A recent post on his web journal touches on some of this intellectual play, and features one of my favorite passages in the Bible: St. Paul’s proclamation that “[he] will pray with the spirit, and…will pray with the understanding also: [he] will sing with the spirit, and…will sing with the understanding also.” Well worth a read.