this morning's research through the landscape of information theory in biology, neurobiology, and genetics brings me to many places, including the following. rhetorical clusters.

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nomological emergence, nonformal patterns, mereological emergence, feminist science scholarship, mechanism schemata, statistical relevance relationships, teleosemantic information, nomological supervenience, emergent with respect, successful intertheoretic reduction, mereological supervenience, basic physical parts, epistemological emergence, pointer observable, textbook semantics, biorthogonal decomposition, ceteris paribus problem, reasoning from data, causal mechanical model, qualified ceteris paribus, criteria for lawfulness, algebraic states, phenetic species, process structuralists, representational items

last day of swimming at the college pool. closing for a year's worth of re-modeling. been using this pool for many hundreds of kilometers over the 20 years visiting this place.

The most sacred of places is made powerful by the history, stories, songs and prayers it contains. As we see this place, it is an experience of awe and gratitude. It is as if the Holy People are physically comforting us, encouraging us, smiling at us, strengthening us. That Diné Tah (the land of the Navajo people, the Diné) seems an empty, barren place suits us -- we are among the most fortunate people in the world because of it. -- Luci Tapahonso

a successful trip with Uncle Al to Grand Falls, and with last night's rain and full moon, the falls were a torrent of mocha-red water.

tuckered the dog out on a bushwhacking hike.

my sister and her family. Steve may be taller than everybody in the family, but he's out-numbered 5:1. Dana, Nancy, Andrea, Steve, Cynthia, Casey. good looking bunch!

a trip into the Hopi reservation with the objective to get to Grand Falls on the Little Colorado with Uncle Al and some friends from his church. no chance. there is a heavy south-west wind blowing on the drive up to Flagstaff, nice to have a tail-wind going up the hills. but when we get onto the reservation, we cannot see very far east, from I-40 there is a plume of tan sky originating towards Walnut Canyon and stretching north as far as can be seen: sandstorm. the wind increases to probably 50 mph as we are heading down the last 15 miles of dirt road. but as pebbles the size of peas begin to rain onto the car, and visibility goes to zero we eventually have to turn back. end up mostly driving around, to Wupatki (Anasazi ruins above) and Sunset Crater National Monuments instead. though even then, the wind and sand makes any activity unpleasant.

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down! -- H.D. Thoreau

VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System): A perturbation in the reality field in which a spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex is formed, tending progressively to subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information. Characterized by quasi-consciousness, purpose, intelligence, growth and an armillary coherence. -- Philip K. Dick

that's no Internet!

"What is it?" we ask, meaning what is its name? This odd quirk of the human mind: Unless we can name things, they remain for us only half-real. Or less than half-real: nonexistent. A man without a name is nobody. A man's name can become more important that his person. A plant, an animal, a thing without a name is no thing -- nothing. No wonder we humans like to think that in the beginning was -- the Word. What word? Any word. Any word at all, anything rather than the silence and terror of the nameless. -- Edward Abbey

plowing (ploughing) through Abbey this time, after years since reading "The Monkey Wrench Gang," seems dated, depressing, even dark. so much of the landscape that he passed through is evolved, so much of what he prognosticated about the Southwest, at the hands of corrupt politicians and developers has materialized like a cancer across the face of the land. the forever-expansion, development-is-good, it-creates-jobs mantra that is chanted by deeply unholy men (and women). bringing 4000+ square-foot pseudo-adobe mansions dotting the land with Hummers in every five-car garage. although there are places one might go and on a middle-scale -- meaning the easily visible -- local scale, to the uninitiated eye, the natural system seems untouched. but with any consideration of scientific data on atmospheric systems, plant and animal ecosystems, hydrologic systems are being irretrievably altered. what of the domination of a species which will destroy most of the other macro-species only to live shortly in an impoverished environment: soon to succumb to viral celebration in the host of hosts. definitely, catch it while you can. take the last road trips around before gas costs what it should and the only way to get out of Dodge will be on foot. and the only way to survive the plague is through a slow and costly counter-evolution.

at any rate, this IS a frog (possibly a Canyon Tree frog - Hyla arenicolor). but note the incredible coloration. the green exactly matches a particular lichen that grows on the granite in that area. the pinkish blush of the feldspars in the granite. there were four of them literally stuck to a large smooth boulder on Mint Wash. I was sitting opposite from them, having lunch with Marianne, about 6 feet (2 meters) away, and at first I thought they were phenocrysts in the granite, but then saw they were frogs. this particular one was the only one I could get close enough to make an image of, s/he was crouched on a relatively reasonable ridge. the other three were literally glued to vertical (overhanging!) smooth surfaces, but there was a 2-meter deep hole in the creek bed, full of water immediately below them. so, this one had to do. the beast is about 1.5 inches (3 cm) long.

Josephine, the dynamo-hostess at funksoup asked me about adding a aud/vid stream to a live/situated performance called deCrypt0graphic she was choreographing as part of the Music for Peace Project out at Stony Brook University, so, fresh off the desert intensity, jump into practicing yesterday, then the performance runs today. she needed some Morse code remix, so I was able to dredge up a series of recordings of my father's from his days as a HAM radio enthusiast -- practice tapes for learning Morse code, along with real message transmissions from some of his radio friends. remixed that along with the audio from the archive. I'll be uploading some sample aud/vid clips shortly...

Dedicated to cultivating peace as both a means and an end, the Music for Peace Project creates a global celebration of peace and provides a voice for the vibrant community that believes in peaceful solutions for the future.

these remote things, never know what is actually happening at the other end, so, there's always a bit of a sense of dis-satisfaction, not knowing whether one's outgoing stream has any relevance to the located ambience at the receiving end. but Jos is great to work with, so it's always a good vibe. dunno when we will ever meet. she had a Fulbright over at deWaag in Amsterdam, with Guy and the anatomix crew, that's how we met, remote, when I was on the NIFCA residency in Helsinki last spring.

(catas)trophic cascades dominate most global ecosystems these days. with the apex predator being the highly adaptable human. here in the desert, there seems to be a local balance, but it is impossible to make any determination from cursory observation. with the air often filled with supersonic overflights, leaving an intense flux of sound to spread over the entire space. top gun dog fights.

sitting eating dinner and suddenly, about 50 meters away, a red-tail explodes from the air and almost nails a dove. not clear how the dove escaped, or why the hawk didn't pursue the prey. could be the once the surprise element is gone for the hawk, the dove is a more agile bush flyer, where the hawk is best in clear-air dive-bombing speeds.

today I cycle a few miles further in, towards the Arrastra Mountains Wilderness area. intersect a small corner of it. it encompasses a huge area of hard-core desert landscape. I come across an automatic 600-watt solar panel unit connected to a well in the dry wash, there is a 300-meter-long steel pipe to two water tanks and a water trough. there is also a broken Aeromotor windmill pump set over a concrete holding tank that is still filled with water.

find a large area where there are fragments of botryoidal quartz fragments, some with crystal vugs, but mostly with characteristic milky-white-to-clear amorphous silica in those organic forms. from a high-point near the water tanks, I can see on down the valley towards Alamo Lake, about 20 miles away. distance is relative. crossing this area on foot would be, literally, hell during 6-months of the year, and chilling the other six. either way, unless you carried water, or made caches, or knew for sure where the tanks and springs were, and whether they were full, you would die.

back to base and then, after a small lunch, to an overland steep climb to a resistant outcrop with what appears to be a cave. always expecting to see/hear a rattler, but aside from an oversized lizard, and the scattering of birds, nothing is confronted. deer tracks in the dry mud of an arroyo, very small. why be here when they can be in the ponderosa only a few tens of miles away. although, for the moment, the desert floor is green. period. bright green vegetation everywhere. along with the psychedelic splashes of blooming things. I can't recall being in the desert at this time of year. usually I've been elsewhere, teaching. middle of the end of the semester. or so. (more images)

and small guilty feelings about not being in a 'regular' job in the moment.

... nothing more can be attempted than to establish the beginning and the direction of an infinitely long road. the pretension of any systematic and definitive completeness would be, at least, a self-illusion. Perfection can here be obtained by the individual student only in the subjective sense that he communicates everything he has been able to see. -- Georg Simmel

the immediate sensation of walking in the desert is that of dis-orientation, not as though the earth is not located in gravitational alignment with the body, but just that local principles of verticality and level are distorted by the fields of each feature of the landscape. the barrel cactus making a vortex, the Joshua Tree making a rushing multiplicity of whorls that snake through the air in frozen torment. the Saguaro, massive, rakes the moving air with so many spiny teeth that there is a rush not so different from that through the branches of a live oak, in the fall when the leaves are stuck in crinkled brown misery, waiting for some winter storm to end it all.

I stumble slowly in random directions. stopping every few minutes to examine some thing, no, some tableau, of intricate intensity. first it is the flowers, the huge ones on some of the smaller barrel cactus, the color of which cannot be mapped on a spectral scale. it is beyond red, crimson, scarlet, and carnelian together. then the small yellow-orange poppies, scattered widely, punctuating, defining vertices. then there are the rest of the flowers, purple, white, yellow, spectral and brilliant, defining scale. then the variety of cacti. birds, seldom actually seen, unlike the red-tailed hawk that signaled the place to stop for the night. but there is plenty of song throughout the air. stone and earth given from volcanism, basalts and pyroclastics, with rare SiO2 thermal depositions. what looks like a man-chipped white quartz flake in one stream bed. nothing else of interest locally. one wash has some standing water alive with insects and larva in the water. butterflies and hornets, wasps drinking. water seeming fresh, but another week and it will be gone. for the rest of the 4 months until the monsoon brings an occasional flash-flood. then the sky, with a patterned layer of high-altitude clouds coming from a NW low pressure, bringing something from the Pacific. not rain, but only the dimness of vapor sun Light. something of a relief here in the day, at night, keeping the land-warmth in a bit. I walk for perhaps four hours, stopping frequently, in an outward spiral from the space-vehicle that brought me here. seeing it on occasion, far off and small, alien. near it's track. forward advance was halted by a hill a bit too steep and rutted and graveled to gain traction. the power urge to buy a 4x4 Tacoma nags at my hydrocarbon-nurtured soul. the soul born of the road-trip. a extravagant luxury in the near future. and only a strange memory for the next generation. grabbing food, bedding, tents, stoves, chairs, axe, bug-repellent, sun-screen, and some good friends, and head out, some where. topping the tank off at the last outpost.

with the clouds, Phoenix announces itself 120 miles away with a malevolent reddish glow reaching up about 15 degrees from the southeast horizon between two mesas. it brightens while I watch Jupiter, led by its four main satellites, pulling it like a globular puppet on invisible strings up the ecliptic plane. the two main tropic bands easily visible, the spot not apparent. (more images)

For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worth-while challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel looking, looking, breathlessly. -- Don Juan

naming of location is an old social process. it is an association of place with event (long- or short-term). event may be natural or social. the naming process was once local, embodied, idiosyncratic, or personal. local means that the naming is contextualized by a specific human experience of the place. embodied means that the naming was propagated by verbal expression, and stored in human memory. idiosyncratic in that it was the inverse of global -- it was understood by and carried situated meaning for an individual or small grouping of people.

located story-telling

physical signage is the first step in externalizing the naming process. as social structures become more and more global (de-localized), naming structures have evolved that are more and more universal. (exactly the same process as any kind of socially-driven standardization in engineering, language, and such). GPS, as a numeric cataloging of discrete points on a socially abstracted mathematical surface is a specific form of representation. why do we struggle to associate events with those places? are we continuing the inexorable alienation process that separates us from non-standardize be-ing? is there a praxis which can bring these two systems together without the seeming inevitable separation that the deference to standardization promulgates?

when I lived in Iceland, I quickly grew frustrated with the cultural system for locating ones-self in the landscape. coming from a long experience of DMA (Defense Mapping Agency) -based mapping and location activities -- Boy Scout orienteering, geological and geophysical mapping, remote sensing (low-altitude to satellite-based) -- reading, comprehending, and making the leap from the 'coordinated' map to the territory was a learned but very comfortable process. approximating distance, direction, and azimuth vectors from paper to topography was practiced. watching the stars and sun and making accurate estimations of location and time based on those observations was also standard. Iceland presented a radically different paradigm of location.

when I would come back to town after a weekend hiking trip, the occasion might arise that I would need to describe where I had been. a typical description would be: "you know the Hellisheidi road?" "ja" "well about four kilometers past the turnoff to Thorlákshöfn we turned due north and went along a valley on the west flank of a ridge for 6 kilometers and then crossed a small river and followed it west about 1 kilometer to the top of a valley leading southeast towards Hvergerdi." This kind description, one which would have been enough to locate one quite accurately in the landscape of the Rocky Mountains, never elicited much of a response. It was not until after some years of traveling in the remote landscapes of the country with native friends that I realized that I could simply say that I went to Grensdalur. That localized naming precisely located a particular place in what is often a disorienting fractal landscape. and indeed, the more I traveled in the country, the more I came to understand that virtually every location -- creek, molehill, cinder cone, hot spring, forested area, and (ancient or present) farm had a specific name. the more local the people one traveled with, the more precise the located naming (where each name itself represented a more-or-less comprehensive story that 'mapped' the human occupation of that spot). the names came out of embedded human occupation of that exact place at that exact time (or over a period of time).

the key to this anecdote is that this system cannot be simulated except at a loss. the loss comes from the separation by greater degrees of mediation between the embodied experience of the place and the means of social transference of the experience that 'names' it. it would seem that the embodied, lived experience is the primary source of placement, but equally important is the propagation method that locks a nam(e)ing / story to the place in the collective memory.

using one system will not allow a Utopian 'return' to another system. they exist in parallel to some degree, but they are different paradigms and ultimately different living practices.

fortune cookie: Be satisfied with what you already own. lucky numbers 16, 18, 21, 25, 29, 45. learn Chinese: Mayor = Shi-zhang

talk to Anthony on the phone, catching up with the poet, subject launch from Heidegger to Kennan (see following), to Paul Celan through to his individual efforts at poetic production.

The automobile has turned out to be, by virtue of its innate and inalterable qualities, the enemy of community generally. Wherever it advances, neighborliness and the sense of community are generally impaired. -- George F. Kennan

from a longer article at Transportation Alternatives. clearly another stab at the general principle that every technological implementation costs something on a scale of alienation. the converse of destruction of community. I place the destruction back at that granular level: where the particular implementation splits the Self from the Other by some means. the simplest example is the television, where the attention vector, a metric of the strength of personal connection, is generally directed towards the mediated/socialized flow, and away from, or at least perpendicular to the attention vector of the Other. it would be better to watch teevee with a macro lens as it is reflected in the eye of the Other. or, of course, just turn it off and do the face-to-face.

all day today, hypersonic craft rip through the skies, squinting without sunglasses hardly finds any of them, they are distinguished by their small size, odd flight trajectories, and the sonic delay related to speed and altitude, that and the sheer volume. to be under attack from one of them would be fearsome even with a rational understanding of what was going on. it's not common that they joy-ride around here, but neither is it unknown.