Today as David frantically co-ordinated Pierre and i in his application for a suplementary scholarship for his PhD meanwhile i multi-tasked on planning my holidays! These two endevours are related in more than just their intrepidness.

T-O maps and measuring hell ....

STRING THEORY BREAKTHROUGH LAUNCHES NEW REAL ESTATE BOOM

Conceptual Artist Discovers Undeveloped Acreage Through Latest Particle Physics... Plans to Sell Prime Bay Area Properties for Under Ten Dollars... Exclusive Public Offering at San Francisco's Modernism Gallery Scheduled for November 16th....

The large boulders in Australia have always touched something in me and i often feel the need to have some tactile contact with a good old boulder. Clearly i am not the only person who experiences something rather deeply from boulders, rocks and stones. Consider the growing collection of "sorry rocks" previously taken from Uluru-Kata Tjuta as overviewed. ..... Willie Gordon has kindly allowed me to post the pic of boulders in his clan's native country.

In thinking about birds recently i have concentrated on the way they have given place to me as a human interaction; quite ignoring the sense of place of bird integrated into an ecosystem. Yesterday, as i watched a crow attempt to raid the sunbirds nest, i became aware of nature and place as life that is red in tooth and claw. Having not seen the sunbirds since i can only hope they have flown with their fledglings. The empty nest fills my windows with sadness and i have to turn my head away.

so, the library doesn't have a copy of edward casey's "fate of place" ... i have been reading the few pages offered by amazon ... casey uses a word i had to chase up: topocosm ...

Not all the birds in the "hood" are quite as accepting of my presence as the sunbirds by my kitchen window. For the past month or so a feature of my daily cycle to work is my brief but regular close encounters with a magpie who, like last year, has a nest somewhere near the roundabout. Feeling leisurely today, being Saturday, with time to watch the sunbirds too-ing and fro-ing to feed their young. So in a relaxed mood on my bike managed to, somewhat precariously, record what happens when i peddle past chez magpie on the way to work (pic). Over time, the magpie tends not to batter my helmet with her claws as she swoops; it seems that if i explain to her, quite firmly, that i am just passing through my voice keeps her at a distance just behind my bike. Today, though because i had to fiddle to hold the camera she did swoop and managed to shift over my forehead a little more than is fashionably necessary.

The identity of this roundabout is very much magpie place for me even when later in the season they have flown the roost. This identity won't exist for other people in cars who would not have a physical encounter with the magpie.

The magpie sits on the telephone wires.

Things will always happen that we can't predict when we put technologies into the natural world, be they telephone wires, roads or bicycle helmets. So we need to stay physically in "touch" with the world to recognise what those things are.

trying to tidy up a piece on role and place in game design ... and doing my usual albeit horrendous-non-scholarly activity of searching google for phrases i am about to use .. hey, i call it double-checking :)

anyways: searches for "world as object" gets hegel, quite few articles on theological philosophy and also this one by f. david peat:

Nature Morte: Inscape, Perception and Thought

Seeking the world as landscape goes hand in hand with the sort of analytical thinking that takes consistency and logical connectivity as being preeminent and seeks to fit each new fact or observation into a preexisting scheme. In that approach, each new observation is conditioned by some pre-existing schema so that we find ourselves asking not so much "what is this new thing?" but "how does it fit into what we already know". Of course the great danger in all this is that each new experience must be stretched and transformed until it takes the form demanded of it by the mind's schema. When logic stands firm and each new experience is required to pass the test of consistency then the world begins to loose its immediacy and vibrancy.