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By Posted on Posted in culture, Nature Literacy, Outdoors No Comments

TOOLS TO MEET OUR NEEDS We create tools to work for us: to dig foundations, to hoist steel girders for bridges, to record our words and thoughts for others or capture a likeness of another in a silver emulsion of an early photograph. Over the course of history, need drives those who make things to meet those needs by building tools to do the work. It is just who we are–two-thumbed, bipedal, big-brained inventors who get things done. And at every turning point when …

Digital Maps to Nature Literacy Read more »

By Posted on Posted in culture, Environment, One Place Understood 5 Comments

Rock Hill Church Road was once a state-maintained road with a county road number (714 I think) that is now in VDOT limbo status of not abandoned but not maintained. There are three full time residences on a half mile of single lane gravel road. That said, it is named for a church that presumably once stood somewhere along this short single-lane path–most likely near Roberson Mill Road, the “main” artery of travel for the community near the Blue Ridge Parkway. And so, as …

So Where’s The Church? Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Computing, culture, Tools and Tech 2 Comments

It’s a niche interest, maybe; geeky, if you will. But I continue to explore ways that the computer keyboard and monitor that most of us have in our homes these days can do a better job of gathering information and meaning, and not just stupefying us with entertainment and distraction. Also, we presently lack good ways of validation and credibility of the sources we find to support our thinking (we seldom set out to find evidence that falsifies our strongly-held beliefs.) Add to that …

Tools for Thought Read more »

By Posted on Posted in culture, education, nature No Comments

This topic of recent interest holds the potential for a vastly expanded ramble, with a point and even a conclusion perhaps, in another life time. But for now… Suffice it to say that I have been revisiting the mysteries of memory, and the various historical ways humans have possessed it, or lost it–individually and collectively. And so, beyond the arcane details of the “Major System” of phonetic numeric memory, the Locus System of memory palaces, the Vaughn Memory Cube, the Peg System and the …

Landscape, Place and Memory Read more »