quercus

Institution: MIT

Lecturer: Julian Beinart

University Course Code: 4.241J

Subject: #architecture #urbanstudies #finearts #socialscience

Year: Spring 2013

Description: This course covers theories about the form that settlements should take and attempts a distinction between descriptive and normative theory by examining examples of various theories of city form over time. Case studies will highlight the origins of the modern city and theories about its emerging form, including the transformation of the nineteenth-century city and its organization. Through examples and historical context, current issues of city form in relation to city-making, social structure, and physical design will also be discussed and analyzed.

Course materials can be found on the MIT OpenCourseWare website.

Source with pictures of example soft landing gardens, plant lists tailored to the North American Eastern Temperate Forests can be found:

https://www.pollinatorsnativeplants.com/softlandings.html

Oaks are universally the top keystone trees that support moths and butterflies. Across the United States, more than 940 types of caterpillars feed on oaks (Quercus).

Top genera: Oak, Willow, Cherry, Pines, Poplar

Lepidoptera in image: Great oak dagger moth, Luna moth, Red-banded hairstreak, Eastern buck moth

Many of the moths and butterflies that feed on oak trees must complete their life cycles in the duff and leaf litter (i.e., soft landings) near or beneath the tree, or below ground.

Lepidoptera in image: Blinded sphinx moth, Juvenal's duskywing, Hog moth

Creating soft landings under the dripline of oaks (as well as any other tree) invites all kinds of beneficial insects to complete their life cycles in your yard.

A number of beneficial insects such as fireflies, bumble bees, beetles, and lacewings need soft landings to survive.

Lepidoptera in image: Edwards hairstreak, Skiff moth, Pink-striped oakworm

Planting intentional soft landings under keystone trees builds healthy soil, provides food for songbirds and pollinators, sequesters more carbon than turf grass, and reduces time spent mowing.

Other ways to support insects that spend a phase of their life cycle beneath trees include eliminating landscape fabric and decreasing mowing to reduce soil compaction.

DON'T FORGET TO LEAVE THE LEAVES UNDER YOUR TREES!

Over the centuries, physicians have placed migraine in various positions along the mind / body spectrum. Headache experts currently consider migraine a somatic disorder rooted in the brain. But this is a break from the past. Up until thirty years ago, doctors primarily viewed migraine as having both a psychological and a somatic basis. In what follows, I trace these historical understandings of migraine from the nineteenth-century understanding of migraine as a disorder of upper-class intellectuals, to the influential concept of the “migraine personality” in mid-twentieth-century America, and finally to contemporary theories of comorbidity.

[...]

I pay close attention to how, at each historical turn, biomedical discourses come to enact and reinforce cultural narratives about gender, class, and pain via the encoded inclusion of moral character. After all, the credibility and the legitimacy of a disorder — and how much we, as a society, choose to invest in its treatment — is intimately tied to how we perceive the moral character of the patient.

Huffin' the flowers has been a huge stress relief here in the Southeastern USA Plains.

The shrub on the right is buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis). Flowers are: orange coneflower (Rudbeckia 'goldsturm'), sweet Joe-Pye (Eutrochium purpureum), anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum), pokeberry (Phytolacca americana), and catmint (Nepeta × faassenii).

Closer to the ground there's: wood sorrel (Oxalis sp.), three seeded mercury (Acalypha rhomboidea) and blue violets (Viola sororia). The empty space has wild stawberry (Fragaria virginiana) slowly creeping and a young little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium).

The image below shows the opening of the rain garden where the runoff enters. Plants are 4 - 5 inches max. Here there's: Virginia pepper (Lepidium virginicum), blue violet (Viola sororia), wood sorrel (Oxalis sp.), nimblewill (Muhlenbergia schreberi), prostrate spurge? (Euphorbia sp.).

Also seen: white clover, creeping cinquefoil, and Bermuda grass.

In short, this is a proposal for an abolition of compulsory work for all beings. It involves rewilding at least 75% of the Earth with guidance from local and Indigenous communities, and ensuring that the remainder of the planet “abolish[es] the wage system, and live[s] in harmony with the Earth” as proposed by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) (2021).

"Tarot & Acid Communism" Live at Tenderbooks in London

The launch party for 'The Philosopher's Tarot' at Tenderbooks in London on November 23, 2022.

Acid Horizon's first live event extends Mark Fisher's concept of 'acid communism' through prominent figures featured in the work of the podcast.

n her 2016 Edward W. Said lecture, Naomi Klein examines how Said's ideas of racial hierarchy, including Orientalism, have been the silent partners to climate change since the earliest days of the steam engine, continuing to present day decisions to let entire nations drown and others warm to lethal levels. The lecture looks at how Said’s bold universalist vision might form the basis for a response to climate change grounded in radical inclusion, belonging and restorative justice.

The Association of Space Explorers reached out to their fellow astronauts to pass on a simple message of solidarity, hope and collaboration to combat climate change and reach our political leaders during such a crucial time.

Simone Weil (1909 — 1943) was a French philosopher, labor activist, ascetic and mystic.

The author of the introduction, Gustave Thibon, shares the circumstances of his meeting Weil:

In June 1941 the Reverend Father Perrin, a Dominican friend then living at Marseilles, sent me a letter which I do not happen to have kept but which ran more or less as follows: ‘There is a young Jewish girl here, a graduate in philosophy and a militant supporter of the extreme left. She is excluded from the University by the new laws and is anxious to work for a while in the country as a farm hand. I feel that such an experiment needs supervision and I should be relieved if you could put her up in your house.’

Thibon later shares how he gained possession of Weil's writings which would become Gravity and Grace:

I saw her for the last time at the beginning of 1942. At the station she gave me a portfolio crammed with papers, asking me to read them and to take care of them during her exile. As I parted from her I said jokingly, in an attempt to hide my feelings: ‘Goodbye till we meet again in this world or the next!’ She suddenly became serious and replied: ‘In the next there will be no meeting again.’ She meant that the limits which form our ‘empirical self’ will be done away with in the unity of eternal life. I watched her for a moment as she was disappearing down the street. We were not to meet again: contacts with the eternal in the time order are fearfully ephemeral.

The Philosophize This! podcast has a four part introductory series on Simone Weil (with transcripts). There are short videos from this series on their clips channel on YouTube.

The Talk Gnosis podcast hosted a discussion about Weil's work featuring two poets.

17 years ago, I was amazed by the incredibly loud pulsing chorus of cicadas in my backyard. I improvised this tune that I had to name "The Cicada Reel". I recorded the tune a year later on "Journey to the Heartland" (Maggie’s Music, 2005). And the cicadas are back in full force. Shortly after I recorded this video, they hit 93 dB’s. So here it is again: The Cicada Reel, played on a Dusty Strings D670 with dampers.

Ways of Seeing is a 1972 BBC four-part television series of 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. Berger's scripts were adapted into a book of the same name. The series and book criticize traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images. The series is partially a response to Kenneth Clark's Civilisation series, which represents a more traditionalist view of the Western artistic and cultural canon.

CW: Around the 20 minute mark, footage of an execution is briefly shown.

Related essays can be found on ways-of-seeing.com