pcplantdb

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

John Schinnerer wrote:

> > > We are already a culture addicted to abstraction; I think plant 
> > > objects in an OO database are less an abstraction than relational 
> > > database tables full of bits of data about plants.
> >
> >
> > Can you explain this a little further?
>
>
> For examples of our abstraction addiction, I submit phrases such as 
> "collateral damage" and "friendly fire," and news commentators referring 
> not to their fellow human beings but only to "consumers" or "voters" or 
> "protesters" or "terrorists" or "patriots" and so on.
> Our money is an abstraction; most of our food is far abstracted from its 
> source; most of our "education" is abstractions removed from actual 
> experience; etc. etc.  Our whole culture is very "head" (intellectual 
> abstraction) oriented.
>
> If our model of plants and their interrelations is as much as possible 
> like our observations of how plants as living systems do whatever they 
> do, IMO it is less abstract and thus more life-giving, life-enhancing.
> The model itself might even teach some users more about plant 
> interactions themselves, besides just providing "info about plants."
>
> I suspect it will also be easier to build and use, though of course I 
> have no proof until we bake a pudding and see what happens.

Sounds like the permaculture information web OO database you describe could
become a model of life/energy/matter itself, a three dimensional fractal,
four dimensional as it evolves over time. Absence of abstraction, pure 
science,
objects constructed as pure entities would allow the dynamics of nature's 
forces to be exoressed in the
content of the DB. Plant taxonomy as an abstraction of pure plant 
evolutionary biology could
take on a new life in such a DB as relationship data gleaned from other 
branches of science was applied to
a search and analysis engine in the DB.

I once thought about designing and constructing permanent notill raised bed 
mandala and keyhole gardens arranged within
a fractal pattern as a way to bring plants closer to and in greater alignment the 
"positive" forces of nature.

Maybe a lot of BS but interesting to me anyway. My debris-covered sticky 
ball-on-a-pole analogy suggests possibilities
for information archive/search/retreival mechanisms.

LL
--
L.F.London
lfl@intrex.net
http://market-farming.com
http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech