farming
An information service society
Auditory Hallucinations from Offworld Megafarms
Quaker Square Inn
The modernist architect Le Corbusier was an admirer of American grain elevators, suggesting that their regularity and modularity could serve as a model for other kinds of buildings. At least one later architect took the suggestion seriously. The Quaker Square Inn in Akron, Ohio, occupies the shell of a former elevator. If you're in town for the night, you can rent a round room in one of the silos.
Introduction to Permaculture
A Book by Bill MollisonThe conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of the landscape with people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.
In Search of Organic Software
An Article by Pirijan KetheswaranTwo different kinds of farms can grow vegetables. One is a factory farm built for scale, and the other takes the time to grow more expensive but healthier plants without pesticides.
Will everyone appreciate the difference? Of course not, but the latter plants are labelled ‘organic’ to give us the information and the choice, so that those of us who do care can make better decisions.
So maybe we should have ‘organic’ software as well, made by companies that:
- Are not funded in such a way where the primary obligation of the company is to 🎡 chase funding rounds or get acquired (so bootstrapping, crowdfunding, grants, and angel investment are okay)
- Have a clear pricing page
- Disclose their sources of funding and sources of revenue
The Sheaves
A Poem by Edwin Arlington RobinsonWhere long the shadows of the wind had rolled,
Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;
And as by some vast magic undivined
The world was turning slowly into gold.
Like nothing that was ever bought or sold
It waited there, the body and the mind;
And with a mighty meaning of a kind
That tells the more the more it is not told.So in a land where all days are not fair,
Fair days went on till on another day
A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,
Shining and still, but not for long to stay—
As if a thousand girls with golden hair
Might rise from where they slept and go away.Data Farming
A Research PaperMiners seek valuable nuggets of ore buried in the earth, but have no control over what is out there or how hard it is to extract the nuggets from their surroundings. ... Similarly, data miners seek to uncover valuable nuggets of information buried within massive amounts of data.
Farmers cultivate the land to maximize their yield. They manipulate the environment to their advantage using irrigation, pest control, crop rotation, fertilizer, and more. Small-scale designed experiments let them determine whether these treatments are effective. Similarly, data farmers manipulate simulation models to their advantage, using large-scale designed experimentation to grow data from their models in a manner that easily lets them extract useful information.
The Interpretation of Microstructures of Metallic Artifacts
The meaning of objects
The meaning of objects is harder to grasp than that of words.
Something akin to style
My own attitude toward the microstructure of metals is not unlike that of an art historian regarding a painting or sculpture. There is something akin to style even in a photomicrograph. There are aspects of structure that are not immediately apparent to the untrained eye, and quite minor features may be clues to a deep meaning.
From the head of Jove
A complex structure is a result of, and to a large extent a record of, its past. Though a proton and an electron may, as a pair, be able to spring full-panoplied from the head of Jove, more complex things cannot, or at least do not.
Everything complicated must have had a history, and its internal structural features arise from its history and provide a specific record of it. One might call these structural details of memory “funeous,” after the unfortunate character in Borge’s story “Funes the Memorious” who remembered everything.
The objects themselves speak loudly
The written record is very little help in determining the techniques used by ancient metalworkers, though the objects themselves speak loudly to an educated ear.
The way it has been made
The internal structure of a work of art in metal can often throw as much, or more, light on its origin as can be derived from stylistic analysis. Moreover, the techniques employed can provide clues to the habits of mind of the people who originated them.
…Perhaps the most important reason for structural studies of museum objects is that the intimate knowledge so derived as to the way in which an object has been made adds so greatly to the aesthetic enjoyment of it. Very often some detail and sometimes the whole of an effective design arises directly in the exploitation of the merits and the overcoming of the difficulties of a specific technique, in the reaction between the artist’s fingers and his material.
Aesthetically motivated curiosity
It seems that the first and most imaginative use of practically every material was, before quite modern times, in making something decorative. People are experimentally minded when looking for decorative effects, but they can’t experiment with the established techniques on which their livelihood depends.
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It is of basic significance for human history that, from the cave paintings on, almost all inorganic materials and treatments of them to modify their structure appear first in decorative objects rather than in tools or weapons necessary for survival. Aesthetically motivated curiosity, or perhaps just play, seems to have been the most important stimulus to discovery.