I’ve said a few times that music is math. I’ve also said a few times that I’m a Chinese jet pilot and that Halle Berry wants to bear my children so it’s probably hard to know when you should take me seriously and when you shouldn’t.

But let’s go back to this “music is math” stuff. On that part I’m not kidding. At the end of the day, a lot of things can be math, including music and supermodels. A few months ago I did an article on how Phi, the famously named Golden Ratio, could even tell us who would be a supermodel. It contained excellent science, humor, Elle MacPherson, Carol Alt and Heidi Klum , yet still left some math questions unanswered.

In that article I mentioned the golden ratio in music, namely that the octave, fifth, and major and minor sixths are ratios of consecutive numbers of the Fibonacci* sequence, making them the closest low integer ratios to the golden ratio. But that doesn’t make a ton of sense until we get a little more basic, mostly because math doesn’t exist in the real world, it isn’t a hard science like physics.

So we’ll figure out how math is music but first we’ll show how music is physics.

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Guns, Guitars And Greenpeace

As a younger man, I was a big fan of Greenpeace.

As time went on, I thought they lost their focus by branching out from protesting nuclear weapons to whaling and trees and basically hanging out a shingle that said, “If you send us money, we will protest for you.”

I watched them change from instilling their people with scientific literacy to educating their people on political activism. Then I watched them turn on me because I was a scientist who didn’t much like exaggerated evidence in the name of fundraising and because I was a sportsman and because I was a businessman.

I’ve always believed that sportsmen - hunters, hikers, mountain climbers - are natural allies of the environmental movement.

I watched them turn on hunters because of the gun issue. I watched them turn on businesspeople because of the logging issue. I watched them devolve into silliness … hijacking ships, funnelling money to political groups, ramming a French sailboat competing in the 2003 America’s Cup and finally, in the absolute depths of their Klondike Kop level incompetence, running aground on Tubbataha Reef Marine Park off the coast of Manila last year, which they were supposedly visiting because they were worried about global warming. They paid a $7,000 fine and said it was an accident and the millions of dollars in damage done are still not fixed. I imagine the environmental movement wouldn’t have been so lenient if, after the Exxon Valdez accident, Exxon paid a token fine and left the damage.

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“What is a supermodel?” People sometimes ask me. It has a few definitions and sometimes people argue over them, much the way Heidi Klum and Elle MacPherson fight over who is called “The Body.” *

If you’re reading this site, you know that a supermodel is an aspect of complexity science that incorporates multiple variables to try and spit out the best solution.

Ha Ha Ha.

Okay, supermodels can also be really hot chicks blessed with the combination of low self-esteem and jaw-droppingly loose morals that allow them to easily be tricked into deviant sex. Just this once we get to discuss both. And by both, I mean just the hot chicks.

So what makes a supermodel super? Like many important things in life, we can look back in time and see if history gives us an answer and saves us some effort. For centuries mathematicans have been intrigued by the “Golden Ratio” because it appears so often in geometry. Is a “golden ratio” something German eurotrash does because they are bored with their sex lives? No, it is a ratio that is the midpoint between asymmetry and symmetry. Defined it is when “the whole is to the larger as the larger is to the smaller”.

In numerical terms, it is 1.618.

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