Capture: Roamin' Holiday
1354 Responses
First ←Older Page 1 … 25 26 27 28 29 … 55 Newer→ Last
-
Islander, in reply to
O goodness, the reaction from your students makes me feel more than a little sad - and a bit more hopeless...traditional knowledge is not perfect - but it also isnt as arrogant as some present day attitudes...
I respect science as the best tool humans have yet invented - also not perfect, but way better than previous methodologies we have used for understanding us, the world, the cosmos. And good science doesnt negate traditional knowledge.
Nature *always* wins. That's the way of our world.
Do your students study anthropology by any chance? It can be salutary to learn
just how gifted- and limited - an animal we are. And how nearly our species has come to permanant extinction (or, indeed, how various hominids *have* become extinct) over the past few hundred thousand years... -
Chris Waugh, in reply to
That incident was many years ago, and those students have long since been let loose on the world. They were only first years at the time, and my job then was to teach them spoken English, so I wasn't in much of a position to take things any deeper or broader.
My current students are Information Technology majors, and my job too focussed on getting their English writing up to scratch for study at a Western university, but I do like to challenge the older and stronger students and stretch their English out to their limits. Still, as a language teacher it's my job to teach them how to express themselves, not what to think. Yes, that can get frustrating, but that's my job.
We're agreed on the nature of both science and traditional knowledge, and I do think Taoist attitudes towards aligning oneself and one's actions with the natural order could use a little more airplay. The same goes for many other traditional philosophies. The thing is, traditional knowledge speaks to a lot of ethical concerns that science doesn't deal with, and so the two can, and should, inform each other, a kind of complementarity where the bright points of one light up the dark areas of the other.
I think one of our greatest limits is our giftedness. On a regular basis, and just yesterday and five days ago, I cross a bridge named after the reservoir that's supposed to be underneath it. Every time I cross that bridge I look upstream and see a dam holding back water (or ice, this time of year) so that the county town can have the illusion of a healthy river flowing (or frozen) along it's southern edge. I look as directly below as I can when driving and downstream and see a couple of tiny creeks and acres of grass and mature trees where the reservoir is supposed to be. On a good day I can see as far as where there is actually water stored. It's a long way away. With every intervention we make into nature, we seem to shoot ourselves at least one more bullet in the foot.
I dunno, how hard is it for us as a species to understand that everything we have comes straight from nature, and when we die we're going straight back to nature, and that we are inescapably a part of nature? Or that when nature no longer finds us useful we'll be discarded, just like countless other species before us? Our survival as a species depends on that understanding and acceptance of those facts.
Oh well, enough ranting. I'm discovering that although out in Yanqing County fireworks are set off during daylight on the 5th day of the 1st lunar month (I did our family's just before lunch. Nothing excessive, mind), down in city Beijing the 5/1 fireworks are mostly set off in the evening. I guess that means this must be the first 5/1 on the lunar calendar I've spent in downtown Beijing since fireworks were legalised within the 5th Ring Road. Another reason rural and urban China feel like different countries.
-
Sacha, in reply to
And good science doesnt negate traditional knowledge
nor other forms of reasoning and understanding.
-
Ian Dalziel, in reply to
just the facts...
...how hard is it for us as a species to understand that everything we have comes straight from nature, and when we die we’re going straight back to nature, and that we are inescapably a part of nature? Or that when nature no longer finds us useful we’ll be discarded, just like countless other species before us? Our survival as a species depends on that understanding and acceptance of those facts.
Excellent summation - could the Education Dept see that that is printed on all our school exercise books in future!
Oh, and given to every politician, too! -
Islander, in reply to
Tautoko-
-
Lilith __, in reply to
when nature no longer finds us useful we’ll be discarded, just like countless other species before us? Our survival as a species depends on that understanding and acceptance of those facts.
I do wonder if our big-brained existence will be one of nature's failed experiments. Our ability to learn and adapt and reason and invent gets us into trouble as often as it gets us out of it. We solve some problems and create even bigger ones for ourselves and for the planet. It'd be nice if we were smart as well as clever.
-
Islander, in reply to
There are other big-brained species around (cetaceans for example) to whom we are a significant threat.
Maybe the world ‘will decide’ that the experiment with those bigbrained omnivores with *hands* was the error…I also have come to think that, as a species ,we are less than wholly sane-
-
hmmm... now I'm wondering... If we were to zip ourselves round the cosmos at the speed of light for a bit then return to Earth, would we find Planet of the Apes or Planet of the Cetaceans? Or considering that some apparently not so big brained animals have been around a lot longer than any mammal and don't seem to be in any great hurry to shuffle themselves off into oblivion, Planet of the Crocodilians?
-
Islander, in reply to
Planet of the Cockroaches?
If survivordom is the goal, it's definitely Planet of the Bacteria! Cyano et al!
-
Lilith __, in reply to
Whales (including dolphins, which are a subgroup of the whale family) are descended from land-dwelling mammals. Inside their flippers are the same bones we have in our hands. The body undulations that propel them through the water are analogous to a horse's canter, not the side-to-side movements of fish.
The relationship of brain size to body size to intelligence is somewhat complicated, but we humans seem to be way outside the norm.
-
Chris Waugh, in reply to
The relationship of brain size to body size to intelligence is somewhat complicated
Indeed. When I took my wife to Rainbow Springs, she was most impressed by the smarts of Keas.
Planet of the Alpine Parrots?
Or with your comment on whales do you mean to suggest that marine mammals are going to re-evolve their arms and legs and come extract their revenge. I'm sure more than a few seals would be keen to get involved, too.
-
Lilith __, in reply to
Yeah keas totally rule ;-) I for one welcome our new flappy squawky overlords.
Seals, wow, if you've ever seen a dead one you'll know how creepily human their hand-bones are!
-
Geez. Just read of a run on supplies of bottled water in Liuzhou, Guangxi, down in the south of China, after a cadmium spill upstream. Whoever takes over once we're gone is going to have a hell of a mess to clean up.
-
Lilith __, in reply to
Oh, no. How awful.
I have a new appreciation of the unbelievable scale of Chinese industry/mining/resource recovery after seeing the movie Manufactured Landscapes.
-
Chris Waugh, in reply to
Impressive photos. Damn, I wish I had that kind of skill. And damn those photos and that interview brought back memories and some pretty raw emotion.
Like: Taking the ferry from Dalian to Tanggu (Tianjin's port), leaving Dalian taking in the view, breathing clean air, admiring the clean water (yes! admiring!). Next morning, waking up, taking a walk, look over the side and think, shit, I could walk on that muck. And ship after ship after ship vanishing off into the thick haze all waiting their turn to get into the port.
Or taking a rickety old minibus from Taiyuan out to Jinci, juddering over what might have resembled a road back in the dying days of the Qing dynasty, passing Taiyuan's biggest coal-fired power plant and then a collossal fertilizer factory belching flourescent orange smoke into the grey haze. Nice park, fascinating temple, good thing later that year the city government set up a new bus route down the highway away from the industry operated by fully intact buses.
Or my trip to Linfen (yes, I have been to the world's most polluted city), flying to Yuncheng (nearest commercial airport), when the plane crossed over the Taihangshan we could no longer see the ground. The descent was one of the freakier ones I've experienced, zigzagging all over the place, features on the ground only becoming visible when we were perilously low (can the pilot even see the airport?!). The plane door opens and instantly I smell coal. Ah, yes, back in Shanxi. I was picked up at the airport and we drove up the expressway to Linfen. Huge factory after huge factory loomed out of the haze and disappeared as quickly. Visibility couldn't have been any more than 100m. It was clear that the local governments of southern Shanxi were pumping huge sums of money into their tourism resources - and if you're into ancient Chinese history, forget about Xi'an or northern Henan, Linfen has Yao's tomb, and just outside Yuncheng is the original temple to Guandi, built right on Guanyu's birthplace.
Or when I lived in Taiyuan, taking the bus back over the Taihangshan after my semi-regular coffee, cheese and other luxury buying trips to Beijing, seeing up in the mountains villages of brick houses built into the mountainside with a small (so far as these things go) coal-fired powerstations sitting next to huge piles of coal, mysterious small holes in the mountainside (illegal coal mines? Quite likely), and the stream running bright canary yellow. Chinese industry isn't just gargantuan, but also tiny and almost as pervasive as the PM2.5 the Beijing city government finally started to report openly.
Photo: Linfen street scene, November 2008. The pollution doesn't look as bad in that photo. I blame Nokia.
And now my entry for one of those Tui billboards I've heard about:
I wonder if I could get a legitimate copy of Manufactured Landscapes in Beijing? -
Geoff Lealand, in reply to
And the mechanisation and drudgery of labour, in the opening sequence. I show it to my students as an incentive to them to aspire to employment more fulfilling than this.
-
Geoff: that opening shot, yeah! And the woman later on who's assembling switches for heaters, her fingers moving so fast they're almost a blur.
Chris: China makes so much of our stuff, and recycles it, too. It's important we in the West know where it comes from, and what the costs really are, both in working conditions and degradation of the environment.
Oh how cheerful this thread has become!
-
Islander, in reply to
We can get back to happy human anihilation if you'd prefer...
-
Lilith __, in reply to
We can get back to happy human anihilation if you’d prefer…
well yes that was what I was thinking! Can I post a completely irrelevant but funny column for the bibliophiles?
-
JacksonP, in reply to
Oh how cheerful this thread has become!
Don't worry, The Robots Are Here!.
This conversation has actually been very interesting, but yeah, we aim to bring the cheer. ;-)
-
Lilith __, in reply to
The Robots Are Here!
My immediate thought was, The Humans Are Dead! But no, a new Capture, woot!
-
Something nice from today's great kite weather at Brighton Beach
From Gudrun Gisela, who is out photographing a hole in the ground somewhere. -
Hebe, in reply to
Joe: do you know the name of the pointy hill under the purple Pooh's feet? Oh, if GG is looking for one, there's a choice sinkhole down Owles Terrace that nearly got me yesterday.
-
JacksonP, in reply to
From Gudrun Gisela, who is out photographing a hole in the ground somewhere.
What a great shot. I do love the way the hits keep coming on this thread. Thanks everyone.
-
Lilith __, in reply to
I snapped this lonely kite-flyer a couple of weeks back at Kaikorai Lagoon, Dunedin. Kids were swimming in the lagoon, which looked great fun but the water seemed somewhat more nutrient-rich than I prefer. :-) Lots of black swans, too, swimming up and down with snooty expressions.
Post your response…
This topic is closed.