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This is from Chapter 2 Knowing and Seeing:

…The natural world, on the other hand, is one of infinite varieties and complexities, a multidimensional world which contains no straight lines or completely regular shapes, where things do not happen in sequences, but all together; a world where—as modern physics tells us—even empty space is curved. It is clear that our abstract system of conceptual thinking can never describe or understand this reality completely. In thinking about the world we are faced with the same kind of problem as the cartographer who tries to cover the curved face of the Earth with a sequence of plane maps. We can only expect an approximate representation of reality from such a procedure, and all rational knowledge is therefore necessarily limited.

The realm of rational knowledge is, of course, the realm of science which measures and quantifies, classifies and analyses. The limitations of any knowledge obtained by these methods have become increasingly apparent in modern science, and in particular in modern physics which has taught us, in the words of Werner Heisenberg, ‘that every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.’

For most of us it is very difficult to be constantly aware of the limitations and of the relativity of conceptual knowledge. Because our representation of reality is so much easier to grasp than reality itself, we tend to confuse the two and to take our concepts and symbols for reality. It is one of the main aims of Eastern mysticism to rid us of this confusion. Zen Buddhists say that a finger is needed to point at the moon, but that we should not trouble ourselves with the finger once the moon is recognized; the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu wrote:

Fishing baskets are employed to catch fish; but when the fish are got, the men forget the baskets; snares are employed to catch hares; but when the hares are got, men forget the snares. Words are employed to convey ideas; but when the ideas are grasped, men forget the words.

In the West, the semanticist Alfred Korzybski made exactly the same point with his powerful slogan, ‘The map is not the territory.’

What the Eastern mystics are concerned with is a direct experience of reality which transcends not only intellectual thinking but also sensory perception. In the words of the Upanishads,

What is soundless, touchless, formless, imperishable,
Likewise tasteless, constant, odourless,
Without beginning, without end, higher than the great, stable—
By discerning That, one is liberated from the mouth of death.

Knowledge which comes from such an experience is called ‘absolute knowledge’ by Buddhists because it does not rely on the discriminations, abstractions and classifications of the intellect which, as we have seen, are always relative and approximate. It is, so we are told by Buddhists, the direct experience of undifferentiated, undivided, indeterminate ‘such-ness’. Complete apprehension of this suchness is not only the core of Eastern mysticism, but is the central characteristic of all mystical experience.

The Eastern mystics repeatedly insist on the fact that the ultimate reality can never be an object of reasoning or of demonstrable knowledge. It can never be adequately described by words, because it lies beyond the realms of the senses and of the intellect from which our words and concepts are derived. The Upanishads say about it:

There the eye goes not,
Speech goes not, nor the mind.
We know not, we understand not
How one would teach it.

Lao Tzu, who calls this reality the Tao, states the same fact in the opening line of the Tao Te Ching: ‘The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao.’ The fact—obvious from any reading of the newspapers—that humanity has not become much wiser over the past two thousand years, in spite of a prodigious increase in rational knowledge, is ample evidence of the impossibility of communicating absolute knowledge by words. As Chuang Tzu said, ‘If it could be talked about, everybody would have told their brother.’

Absolute knowledge is thus an entirely non-intellectual experience of reality, an experience arising in a non-ordinary state of consciousness which may be called a ‘meditative’ or mystical state. That such a state exists has not only been testified by numerous mystics in the East and West but is also indicated by psychological research. In the words of William James:

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

Although physicists are mainly concerned with rational knowledge and mystics with intuitive knowledge, both types of knowledge occur in both fields. This becomes apparent when we examine how knowledge is obtained and how it is expressed, both in physics and Eastern mysticism. …

Sadly, this is no joke. ‘In the name of science’ this friday (tomorrow) Nasa will intentionally crash a satellite onto the moon.

How do you feel about that? Is this what should be done? What is your connection to the moon? Do you know how intimately we are linked to its rhythms and dynamics? And so now human genuity will destroy its surface purposefully…How disconnected do you have to be?

At the same time: That seems to be the nature of things right now. That seems to be where it’s at. Curious what it will do. – It hurts, though. Pobre luna…

On Friday, however, the Earth’s nearest neighbour is set to stage one of the strangest moments in space exploration, as Nasa prepares to send a 2.3 tonne satellite smashing into the lunar surface.

If all goes to plan, officials at the space agency say the strike will take place at around 12.30pm UK time, with a booster rocket and $79m satellite slamming into a huge crater near the moon’s south pole.

full article at the Guardian

The mycelium infuses all landscapes, it holds soils together, it’s extremely tenacious. This holds up to 30,000 times its mass. They’re the grand molecular disassemblers of nature — the soil magicians. They generate the humus soils across the land masses of Earth. We have now discovered that there is a multi-directional transfer of nutrients between plants, mitigated by the mcyelium — so the mycelium is the mother that is giving nutrients from alder and birch trees to hemlocks, cedars and Douglas firs.

The video presentation is intended to help local conservation efforts communicate more effectively the current situation.  Over 60 percent of Tijuana’s raw sewage flows directly into the river, through the Tijuana River Estuary and into the ocean.  Imperial Beach pays the price for this problem with over 200 days a year of closed beaches and periodically high levels of Hepatitis A measured in the coastal waters.  The video encourages viewers to join local efforts such as Pervious Pavers in an attempt to curb the overall pollution and runoff problem.  It will be posted on multiple websites on Earth Day, along with a Spanish language version of the same piece.

The project is part of the on-going efforts of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project (www.shiftingbaselines.org), which brings together ocean conservationists and filmmakers in an effort to communicate the problems to wider audiences.  It is based at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and has more than 20 partner groups, including co-founding partners Scripps and Surfrider Foundation.

‘THE FUTURE OF FOOD examines the complex web of market and political forces that are changing what we eat as huge multinational corporations seek to control the world’s food system.’ – keep on watching the other parts…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUwFPSDvB7I[/youtube]

You might also want to have a look at our ‘Corporate Watch’ playlist on youtube…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTwvkGjsNEY[/youtube]

Water Writer by Mitsui Zosen

The middle of the range, the mesoscale, offers plenty of mysteries yet. There is much that we know, from Newton’s laws to chemistry, but there are also the puzzles of the organisation of life, the conscious mind, and the uncontrollable weather. You don’t need to go down to the scale of the atom and Schrödinger’s wave-in-a-box to be awed by the mystery of waves. Mitsui Zosen’s arrangement of wave generators in a circular tank order to create standing waves of unwavelike shapes, such as letters of the alphabet, reminds us that they are strange enough in the everyday world.

The mesoscale is where matter and energy behave in the ways intuitively familiar to us, where visualization is most relevant, and therefore where it is most likely that designers have a real contribution to make.

All of biology happens at this scale. When he wrote about technology as the extension of man, Marshall McLuhan did not explicitly invoke technologies based on biological systems, although that possibility is inherent in our conception of such powers – we speak of of having eyes like a hawk or there are hearing ability of a dog, we envy bat’s radar and migrating birds navigational skill. The huge progress in bilogical sciences during the twentieth century now dictates that designers should no longer consider the mineral world as their raw material. Early work at this new boundary between science and design is both exciting and disturbing.

Seed Media Group Identity

Stefan Sagmeister and Matthias Ernstberger created the Seed Media Group Logos, based on a phyllotaxis structure, a quintessentially organic algorythm. Seed’s Mission is to establish science Position into culture. Jonathan Harris took the logo as a basis for a web-based project that symbolizes the space, where science meets culture, www.phylotaxis.com.

Susana Soares uses the fact that bees can be “trained” to react to specific odors to harness them in a kind of olfactory appurtenance that could enable us to sense toxins or pheromones. The idea may be bizzare now, but is it really stranger in principal than an explosives-sniffing dog? It is beayond question that closer appreciation of biological systems of all kinds now raises the prospect of extending human capabilities in many ways.

If tissue cells can be cultured to emulate human parts for use in reconstructive surgery, some designers have reasoned, then they can also be made to follow entirely novel forms. It is relatively straight forward matter to produce something faintly creepy using these techiques, as Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr do in their long-running project, Tissue Culture & Art. Their Pig Wings Project, wing shapes grown from pig tissue, is an example of a semi-living object, one which, by title and appearance, mocks the aspirations of the very biotechnology it utilizes to achieve its result.

It is all together harder, in the early days, to produce thing of beauty. However Tobie Kerridge, Nikki Stott and Ian Thompson may have succeded with Biojewellery, a project that allows wedding rings to be exchanged that are made of the bone grown from each marriage partner’s bone cells.

This approach on design seeks to adept specific advantages observed in natural ogranisms into human technology, but the polemical subtext of any design inspired by nature is that we are in danger of losing touch with the natural world. It pleeds for the biological, the technological, and the ethical to come together.

This is the objective of “consilience”, the term coined by biologist Edward O. Wilson for the reunification of the strands of intellectual inquiry artificialyy seperated as a consequence of the growth of specialized disciplines in science and the humanites. In his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilson writes: “If the world really works in a way so as the encourage the consilience of knowledge, I believe the enterprise of culture will eventually fall out into science, by which i mean the natural science, and the humanities, particulary the creative arts.”

Charles Eames and Richard Feynman were consilient personalities, but their meeting never happened because the world didn’t work in the right way. The question is: Does it now?

This was taken from the book “Design and the Elastic Mind”, edited by Libby Hruska and Rebecca Roberts, published by the Museum of Modern Art, NY.

‘Tatsächlich stagniert Deutschland beim Thema Umweltschutz schon seit der Wiedervereinigung. Es tut mir weh, wenn ich sehe, dass die Deutschen Umweltschutz immer noch als nachgeschaltete Umwelttechnik verstehen statt als Produktinnovation. Damit sind die Deutschen für das, was ich vorschlage, eine Gefahr.
…für die Zukunft brauchen wir kein Schuldmanagement, sondern positive Ziele. Ich untersuche seit siebzehn Jahren Muttermilchproben im Labor. Wir finden über zweieinhalbtausend Chemikalien darin, keine einzige Probe dürfte als Trinkmilch vermarktet werden. Das Ziel sollte lauten: In zehn Jahren stellen wir gar nichts mehr her, was sich in Muttermilch wiederfindet. Dann könnte jeder junge Chemiker, jeder Wissenschaftler mitmachen, die hätten Innovationsziele. Stattdessen verwalten wir den Untergang und halten die Leute ruhig. …’

Aus einem Interview der FAZ mit Michael Braungart (Chemiker, Verfahrenstechniker, Wissenschaftler, Entwickler des ‘Cradle to Cradle’ Design Konzeptes) vom 10. Jan 09.

Passt zum Thema: ‘Deutsches Umweltbewusstsein 2008‘, ‘Germany and being green – A reality-check‘, ‘Die nächste industrielle Revolution‘

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZyGKpE7r38[/youtube]

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