Tea party

Green

Giles clears the garden

Many thanks to Giles young for flying from NZ to help with the garden. We have seen toads by the pond.

Ecocide

Polly higgins talking about a new global law. A 5th crime against peace - ecocide.

Boot factory

Bind weed in bloom

Opium honey

Baby mandela

Leo and Escher

Its all ecology

The most elegant pinhead fungi

Broad beans

Monday night download

Heres hoping this is the right place to eek out a few thought from tired synapses. The ecocentrus project continues to buoy me on, with each additional function stimulating a flurry of activity as I try it out from as many angles as I can think of and have time for. Of course there are always new things I would like to see, and I am developing a deeper sense of patience and confidence that Ali will provide.

Looking to the distant future I can see this site becoming a widely used tool for interfacing with nature and local ecology and economy. I think about farming the urban block, using the sightings to provide algorithms of microhabitat/climate to direct crop choice and management. So we can take urban permaculture out of the trial and error syndrome to the subscribed expert model, where we host experts who will in turn have followers who can be directed in their horticultural endevours. I hope these are geographically clustered so we end up with blocks of crops and a viable distribution system.

taking a leaf out of http://www.sylva.org.uk/myforest/ where you can post your produce into a local market system and find people to give a good price without all the wasted miles.

There need not be a glut of apples or beans as long as there is a pickler or cider maker in the area. We have plenty at our doorstep, and its only logistics which keeps us hungry.

Picking raspberries

This veggiepatch is fenced to exclude deer and rabbits. The fence has been planted with Rosa ruggosa and raspberries. The beans and brassicas are protected from pigeons with suspended CDs. The patch is very productive with soil enriched from composxt heaps I built many years ago.

Bee feeding

Full bloom at spring hill

Hornet

Digging in green manure

after teaching the students about CO2 cycles and the value of digging in green manure to put CO2 into the soil, we went outside and enriched our next planting opportunity

Spot the pollinator

ladybird atlas

there is this fabulous new atlas from the center for ecology and hydrology

http://www.ceh.ac.uk/news/gallery-slideshow/ladybirds-atlas-britain-ireland-slideshow.html

Stag beetle at forest farm

Ladybirds breeding

Aphid and ladybirds on burdock

Horse radish

Burock aphids

Boot factoory

The old boot factory on St Mary's Rd is nearly ready for the community, here is its wildflower garden

Loops

There are hidden depths to ecocentrus

The more times we return the deeper we go

Self referencing systems provide meaning

ecocentrus philosophy

A thought. Strange loops are inherent in growth. This is the idea that self referencing, which was once thought to be the antithesis of scientific analysis, is essential for growth. I have been reading a Book: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (commonly GEB) which is a book by Douglas Hofstadter, described by the author as "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll".[1]

GEB examines logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, comparing their common threads
Through illustration and analysis, the book discusses how self-reference and formal rules allow systems to acquire meaning despite being made of "meaningless" elements.

I think that ecocentrus needs to have inbuilt self referencing systems. Where by any new data entered will automatically generate a string of material which references the new material and references the subsequent strings of material etc etc.

Facebook does this to some degree, if you tag someone in a picture, this generates a series of notifications to those associated with the picture which in turns leads to more tagging and more notifications. As long as the notifications generate a 'buzz' for the user the additional traffic will not be seen as an interruption to them but a welcome distraction.

ecocentrus has the advantage of having 'meaning rich' data. A sighting will have who, where, when and what attached. Each of those coordinates has depth of meaning especially the 'what', ie a species. Any species sighting could trigger a whole range of notifications to neighbors, friends, enthusiasts, specialists, national data centers, gardians and more. Any sighting could also trigger a whole host of reports, which with various threseholds inbuilt could also trigger notifications and even 'generated news'. Generated news could be programmed to come up on the home page if certain thresholds were crossed, ie the number of species in a postcode exceeded that of another postcode. Or the range of a species was found to have increased.

Building in 'strange loops' would create meaning and give the ecocentrus system life.

Full Flush at Forest farm

testing the system