Comments on: Down to earth

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 05 May 2007 00:57:32 +0000

Hi angie – I’m glad this cheered you up. I was sorry to read about your dog.

By: angie

angie — Fri, 04 May 2007 18:06:11 +0000

Love the turtle, Dave. Cheers me right up, thanks.

My parents in Michigan have flying squirrels that we see at twilight sometimes.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 04 May 2007 02:46:44 +0000

Code Is Pottery
I love it!

My parents get a flying squirrel in their house once every few years. Unclear how they get in. But you can see them if you walk in the woods on a moonlit night, and you can hear their thin, whispery chittering almost any night year ’round. Here in PA, at any rate.

By: Larry Ayers

Larry Ayers — Fri, 04 May 2007 02:38:09 +0000

There’s another open-source weblog platform similar to WordPress; I can’t recall the name, but I got a kick out of their version of the WordPress slogan: Code Is Pottery.

Nice to see a flying squirrel photo; they are nocturnal around here and I’ve never seen one.

By: beth

beth — Thu, 03 May 2007 01:00:54 +0000

Bill – that’s probably what you saw. We didn’t see them often in upstate NY, but they were found occasionally, as were box turtles. I’m very fond of both and delighted to see this photo, Dave! And also the flying squirrel – what a treat!

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 02 May 2007 20:08:17 +0000

Wood turtles can go pretty far up into the woods. But I can’t tell you much more than that. We do find them on occasion – down near the river.

By: Bill

Bill — Wed, 02 May 2007 17:38:49 +0000

Dave do you get wood turtles? We saw the darnedest turtle last weekend. It was one of those experiences that open up the seeming range of the possible. It was long, low, oval, crowding or surpassing the 8 inches given as a maximum for the wood turtle. The closest I can come to it at this point is the wood turtle, which aren’t allowed to be anywhere near southern Missouri. It was high on a hill, a mile from deep water, definitely a land turtle by its looks.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 02 May 2007 17:24:44 +0000

marja-leena – I’m glad the post resonated with you. Thanks for stopping by.

dale – I think I acknowledged the range of options you’re talking about when I said that “In both [poetry and code] there’s almost always more than one way of saying something, and the trick is to find the best one.” But that’s not the same as an ambiguity in effect, where a given word or phrase is meant to be understood in two or more different ways simultaneously, as in a metaphor. In a code — hypertextual or otherwise — any lexical element has a single denotation. That’s what makes it a code.

By: dale

dale — Wed, 02 May 2007 16:52:58 +0000

Just a quibble, but . . . code has no ambiguity or nuance? I suppose in a sense you’re right, but in that sense poetry has none either. If you were God, and had the mental capacity to comprehend every either/or choice that makes up a program (impossible for a human being even for very simple programs, nowadays) it would have no ambiguity or nuance, but you could say something analogous about poetry, couldn’t you? We only get to have ambiguity and nuance because we aren’t God. Thank, um . . . well, thank God for that.

By: marja-leena

marja-leena — Wed, 02 May 2007 15:27:55 +0000

As someone who has trouble understanding some poetry and most code, I really understand everything you say here, heh! I love how you sandwiched your discussion inside your natural surroundings, making me feel as if I came along this walk with you and this was what we chatted about. Love the fungi and turtle…