Brandymore Castle

A video of a dancing bird has become the latest YouTube sensation. Some people thought the bird's performance was faked, but for me, it is not surprising, given the sophisticated ability birds demonstrate for manipulating pitch and rhythm in their songs, that a bird shows the ability to keep time with music. Neuroscientists, including John Iversen of the Neurosciences Institute, have studied the dancing bird and confirm it is capable of extracting a beat from sound. What impressed me most about Snowball's performance is when he lifts his leg and gives it a little shake before bringing it down. As the investigators mention, it may be prompted by the pace being too fast to put his foot all the way down in time with the faster beat, but it piques my curiosity further. It appears Snowball is dividing the beat when he waves his foot, into two or three little waves, which if I am seeing it correctly, suggests birds are capable of division of the beat and perceiving and manipulating ...

If you live in Arlington County, please help save Gulf Branch nature center by signing the petition available through Save Gulf Branch Nature Center . The county is planning to demolish the nature center and leave a parking lot to save a pittance on the budget, totaling $132,057 . Our county is blessed with numerous streams and stream valleys rich with wild plants and animals running through the urban landscape. In the 1600s this part of Virginia was described as the finest place in the world to live, with its numerous stream valleys and abundant wildlife set in rolling hills. It would be wrong to lose one of the few points of contact children have with nature. The nature center is an island for the preservation of native species. Moreover, the nature center, due to the proximity of human culture to nature, is an opportunity not found elsewhere to understand humans and their culture are not separate from nature, which could help dispel the destructive urge to recreate a mythic Eden. I...

The order and symmetry of biologically created structures, such as an egg or the human body, are expressions of how correctly those biological systems worked to construct the natural artifact. Biological organisms are collections of cells cooperating with each other. The order and correctness is an expression of the successfulness of the collaboration. An egg comes out more egg-like when the biological processed working to make it cooperate and collaborate more correctly in its construction. I believe this has implications for the collaborative processes operating in networked software development and information science. The biological process of construction is inherently different than the one humans have inherited from their tool making and industrial heritage. What will we make of it?

Nature and culture are connected. Art emerges in nature. I like to photograph the happenstance or "found art" in nature, which is is just another way of saying that art naturally emerges in nature. The potential exists in nature for the creation of art through the juxtaposition of elements according to natural laws and emergent patterns (what we used to think of as chance). This is what I try to capture in my nature photographs. If you'd like to know more about how nature and culture are connected, read William Cronon's Uncommon Ground .

Our approach to nature is framed by the narrative where "...an original pristine nature is lost through some culpable human act..." "The myth of Eden describes a perfect landscape, a place so benign and beautiful and good that the imperative to preserve or restore it could be questioned only by those who ally themselves with evil." Echoes the appeal to nature. The similar religious zeal with which science is protected from dissent by accusing those who question prevailing thought as either delusional or malicious. This similar approach to questioning emerges from Enlightenment thinking, ironically, since this is the source of the "question anything" admonition, yet is also the source of dogmatism, once an idea has been baptized as "fact," which can only be questioned by the allies of evil (witness the scientists who say a "new dark age" is threatened by advocates of intelligent design. The imperative becomes hysterical when the prevaili...

"This habit of appealing to nature for moral authority is in large measure a product of the European Enlightenment." Explains why "science" is used as a non-negotiable trump card against dissenters--one must be delusional, ignorant or malicious to oppose "scientific truth" used as a cudgel by opinion shapers to silence their enemies. My ideal of nature has always been the one that suits humans, which we have every right and obligation to construct and maintain in order to sustain our existence. This includes the city, which I love, the suburbs, like Arlington with its special character, where I was raised and live and also love, and the country, which I am not so much in love with, but respect and enjoy visiting. (refer to p.36, Cronon, Uncommon Ground )

It is generally believed that order is preferable to unplanned development. The first villages to emerge with agriculture developed without any plan or structure. In time, people would learn to plan towns on a grid of streets and this became the normal way to develop a town or city, along a rigid grid of streets. But we know better now, after observing the formation of towns for over two hundred years in America, according to city planners, that street plans which emerged organically from the seemingly haphazard choices of many individuals over many years, produce the most efficient street plans which help alleviate and avoid gridlock. If you look at an English countryside village, you can see how the streets and paths are laid out efficiently to follow the activities of actual people. The preexisting activities and their most efficient paths determine the layout of streets. This also interestingly creates a plan of homes and buildings that people find pleasing, or "picturesque....

Jennifer Armstrong (author, The American Story) said in a talk (BookTv 1/29/07) at the Blue Willow Bookshop, "consciousness moves backwards and forwards in time." I stopped working as my mind dropped into gear and listened as she continued to talk about story telling and history. She had struck a chord in my mind with this observation. I thought how strange it is a thing to say. It seems obvious of course, since we all can move our minds back and forth over the events of our life, consider the future and reflect on the past. But it still struck me as strange. She followed up her remark with a disclaimer reminding us that at the quantum level time is not very orderly or linear, a thought that occurred to me almost simultaneously with her first remark, a little voice rising against the implied linearity of time. However, the distinction between the mind's comprehension of time and natural time was made clear as was the capacity for the mind to create this construct of linea...

I was talking with filmmaker Tom Davenport today and the discussion turned to my observations of a tree outside the window of my apartment, which over many years I have observed to display fascinating changes and cycles in response to climate. The conversation turned to haiku as he likened my noticing a leaf falling outside my window on a quiet day to haiku. I was startled when he said "in haiku, the tree and the person are not very separated." This is an idea very close to Zen. I won't go into the details of Zen belief here, but one idea of Zen is that individuals can reach a state where they feel as if there is no separation between the self and the things making up the world around them. Scientists and Zen masters may debate exactly how and why this feeling arises in the human mind, but what is interesting is the possibility haiku may represent a kind of expression or record of this kind of merging of the individual with things. I found myself agreeing with his observa...