Saturday, February 18, 2006

List of Lists

OK. I went to a very nice Jam session last night over at Farr's place and now I'm up. We got out at around 1 a. m. to find the snow beginning to fall profusely upon the streets of Paducah. Now we have a nice blanket of it, which is much more typical than the false spring we had last month. So I'm going to take this opportunity to share some brainstorming in the form of my own list of lists to help organize my thoughts, ideas, plans, dreams, aspirations, schemes, protocols, inventions and designs. Hmmm, I guess I can develop this list into an array and use that array to seed a table.


Please spend some time with this before you comment and follow the hyperlinked terms. The table will be replicated, in time at my other blog and in the project space. Please also take a look at my user space at Wikipedia to get more background on my focus. If you are a Wikipedian, member of SourceForge, Advogato or other association, please indicate such in your comment and feel free to provide relevant links.

I'll start with some custom definitions:

thoughts

These are the building blocks for everything else in the list. My belief is that a person's thinking drives their actions whether or not they are aware of it. I'm trying to bring structure and organization into my life that may help me channel creative impulses into practical and pragmatic venues. The term I like to describe the process is praxis, defined as "reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it."

ideas

Reflection on my world (which I am trying to compact by constraining my lifestyle to a scope and range that I and my friends can handle) has revealed to me that thoughts congeal into ideas only after they are formed into expressible packets and shared with others. My hope is that logging and cataloging (categorizing the log) may allow me to formulate acceptable proposals for 'saving the world' into something more than the chaotic storms that all creative people experience. Ideas, once adequately expressed and shared might indeed transform our world.

plans

Extending praxis and pragma into the 'real world' requires first a plan to move freely from the personal level to the global level with staging areas along the way. OzoneFarming is my own way of traversing intellectual time-space from the abstract to the concrete. Planners who don't learn how to share abstraction are predisposed to make costly mistakes, especially when dealing with the built environment. My thoughts and ideas are personal but not private. My plans include sharing what life has taught me and learning what others are willing to share and do.

dreams

Some thoughts, ideas and plans are simply not fit for prime time in the overrated real world, but still should not be discounted. Dreams must have their own space where they are protected from cynics and naysayers. I've always been a dreamer and spend much time out in the ozone. I'm conditioned to accept the freedoms afforded me as a fortress of Hope and I will allow others into my citadel if they will accept me as I am. If you are a dreamer too, I encourage you to take heart and enjoy the "peace that surpasses understanding" and find out for yourself where it comes from.

aspirations

Aspiration is the expression of inspiration. That's spiritual. When we externalize our inner thoughts, ideas, plans and dreams, we do it in the hope of finding kindred spirits and associates of like mind. The world needs inspiration from the angelic world. For the Human Community to survive here on this planet, we must capture the abstractions that bind us together; but we must do it in a way that transcends all limits and constraints. The global free Internet is a means we now have available for the first time in Our Story (History). Our responsibility is to aspire to become worthy ansestors.

schemes

A scheme, regardless of what motivates it, is a plan of action. For a scheme to develop into a predicated plan, I think it is imperative to examine the intention of those who commit to carrying it out. In my opinion, this is not a safe endeavor for an individual but is rather a basis for communitarian enterprise. My goal is to simply provide a schema for moving forward in my own way. If you are one of those interested in joining me in my quest, I shall in time present how (and why) I do what I do. My ambition is driven by intangible forces I don't even understand, but my methods I pledge to present in an open and logical way.

protocols

We are all special and unique. When we join each other in pursuits to augment the common good, we must develop methods of communicating a collective mindset. The tricky part is to behave ourselves in a mature, peaceful and productive manner (our manners). Protocol is a means to cross borders and transcend boundaries peaceably. Personality on the Human side has to define and control the machine side. The Internet can become a dreadful beast that our progeny may come to loathe if we are not careful. Human-machine interfaces must remain only that. As a designer of such, my contributions are to follow a trust metric clamped to a well-formed ideal of community.

inventions

A wise king once said: "Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions." (Ecclesiastes 7:29). Whether I'm coming up with a new device, laying out a building or composing a piece of music, I've found that certain ideas stick in my head. I'm not so concerned with protecting ideas with patents and copyrights as I am with the usefulness and practicality of my inventions. I'm convinced that I have some things that are original, timely and marketable in varying degrees, but my focus is upon the paradigm into which I hope they flow.

designs

My goal is to either lead or follow in the collective development of things we really need. I've had a lot of contention in my working life with systems, structures and other things that were simply poor designs. Reaching consensus on design goals, methods, procedures and desired form and function is a challenging aspect of how I want to do business in the future. A key specialty that I think is useful is the ability to build more complete conceptual models which can be shared and analyzed long before seeking funding or breaking ground. This list of lists is itself something I designed to help you and me focus on projects to come. Nothing says that any of us needs to be alone and in the dark on the edges of tomorrow's technology. By design, I'm going to close this list and await your comment...

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Keyline Design and Terraforming

Keyline_Design has become a focal point for integrating the topography of a site into where I want to go with the Lone Oak - Perkins Creek project (37.052985,-88.699493) and the things I'm planning for out here in Ballard county, even inside LaCenter (37.052985,-88.699493). I've always had a sense that the computerized model would have to start with the original topography and build up and down from there. I recently found The Keyline Plan by P. A. Yeomans. Yeomans was a mining engineer and evidently studied the dynamics of soil, sunlight and rainfall. His definition of the keypoint, keyline, and other contour features aligns well with my thinking on watershed management techniques.

A significant contribution to the Permaculture world is hoped to be my tractor-trawler rig for managing watersheds using Yeomans' keyline principle but extending the ridge/valley contour mapping toward terraforming along blue line creek beds.

The system might include a keyline styled plow and a set of attachments for terraforming using what I call hydrologic tools. The biofuel-powered tractor will have PTOs for pumping water and conveying solids with minimum stress to the lifeforms dwelling in the soil and water. The result will be richer soil and healthier streams for supporting agriculture and aquaculture.

I'm going to try to get the OzoneFarm server cloud9 back on line soon, so ya'll can see the rest of the documentation. It may be June before I can get OzoneFarm.net back up. The url will be cloud9.ozonefarm.net when we get it all aligned.

OzoneFarming

Howdy. I'm a yeoman farmer, web developer and musician from Western Kentucky, USA

My bailiwick includes Sustainability and a return the time-honored agrarian simplicity instilled within me by my parents and grandparents. The OzoneFarm Experiment is a project I and some cohorts began in June of 2001 to research and develop both old and new farming methods using an online community as a base.

The sub-term 'ozone' is a metaphor for the global free internet and the high levels of abstraction that are accessible through free thought and public discourse. The term 'farm' is used to represent both a server farm web development suite and an actual network of organic farms, permaculture projects, alternative energy initiatives for farmers and ranchers and many other down-to-Earth happenings. My current Work is the development of The OzoneFarmers' Almanac.

Special thanks to www.blogger.com for providing the ozonefarming blogspot!