permaculture

[Martin Naylor <martinwnaylor@yahoo.com.au>]

Hi
  As this got anything to do with string theory or how did dna joind with rna 
the original creation of life, and also is this revalent to this observation.
   
  WARNING Trading Post have a problem with Permaculture so don't mention it I 
allmost got kicked out of the goup
   
  Love 
  Martin
   
            Sat, 19 May 2007 20:06:09 -0600    From:  "TradingPostPaul" 
<tradingpost@riseup.net>  Add to Address Book    To:  
livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org    Subject:  [Livingontheland] Papago and 
Hohokam Irrigation   [input]   [input]   [input]   [input]    #message { 
overflow:auto; visibility:hidden }  
  
  Comparing Papago and Hohokam Irrigation  (from Rivers of Empire) Donald 
Worster  entire article at  http://www.waterhistory.org/histories/hohokam3/   
 Papago    The most extraordinary achievement in surviving the arid Southwest 
  belongs  to the Papago, the Bean People. They have dwelt for millennia in 
the  Sonoran desert, a land that gets an average rainfall of less than ten  
inches, where saguaro, paloverde, and the Gila monster are among the  
flourishing forms of life. It was an unlikely place to take up farming,   but 
 they made a stunning success there until the white man's technology   
entered  and destroyed their way of life(1). Papago agriculture, supplemented 
by  hunting and gathering, was a mobile affair, touching the desert   
lightly.  >From April to September they collected cholla buds, wild greens,   
acorns,  and fruit from the saguaro and prickly pear. For their protein they  
 killed  bighorn sheep, mule deer, peccary, and rabbits. But it was 
particularly  
 in  farming that they showed the most remarkable ingenuity. Whenever and  
wherever the rain fell, they rushed to get a bean crop raised. The bean   on  
which they thrived was the tepary, a fast germinator. It had to be fast  
given the short growing season in the desert, where erratic rainfall   may  
cause rivers suddenly to rise only to be followed in a couple of months   by  
soil that is bone-dry again.    The Papago and other Sonoran groups perfected 
a technique called  "floodplain irrigation," which was confined to a few 
river edges and   arroyo  mouths. Here is how it worked: A flash flood comes 
roaring down the   sandy  riverbed on a July day. It surges into a temporary 
catchment basin,   where  it immediately soaks into the soil or forms a pond 
for later diversion.  Cottonwoods, willows, and burrobushes, some of them 
artificially   planted by  the Indians in fencerows along the watercourse, 
slow the current,   spreading  the water over a broad, flat surface and
 trapping the suspended silt   for  fertilizer. Then, in the mud left by the 
flood, the Papago plant their  seeds, expecting to harvest them before the 
earth turns bricklike   again.  The fields irrigated in this way are small, 
irregular patches-two acres  here, three or four there. This technique, at 
which they were so   skilled,  was also called arroyo-mouth, or ak-chin, 
farming(2). The traditional  Papago had little margin for error or 
complacence, yet they can be  described as a people of abundance, at least in 
the sense that everyone  among them had enough to eat and enough leisure to 
spend, when work was  done, on stories, games, and tranquility.    Guiding 
floodwater as the Papago did required a communal effort, for no  solitary 
individual could handle the flood torrents. In 1895 an   admiring  white 
observer, W. J. McGee, called the system "economy of solidarity,"  adding 
that no creature, human or otherwise, could get along in the   desert  
without it(3). Besides
 cooperation, Papago agriculture demonstrated an  intimate knowledge of the 
desert ecosystem, stream hydraulics, and  agronomy. But theirs was not a 
science devoted to the technical   conquest of  nature; rather, it aimed more 
modestly at achieving a secure   coexistence  and a thrifty subsistence.      
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list  Livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org  
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/livingontheland  

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"Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net> wrote:
  Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:

> Someone in another forum mentioned "intelligent automata" and I remembered 
> hearing about
> Stephen Wolfram's cellular automata theory. The Wikipedia entry for this 
> contains suggestions that
> this system may accurately describe natural processes throughout the 
> universe.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automata
> This may then have some bearing, though very remote, to permaculture 
> relationships and guilds. A while back
> I thought a lot about heirarchies of relationships in a natural system on a 
> piece of land,
> or 100 square feet, for that matter; the implications that the most basic, 
> elementary ecological relationships
> in a system have for the whole system and for contiguous systems. The 
> language used by microorganisms,
> invertebrates, insects, mammals and plants to communicate consisting of 
> chemical, electrical, light, sound, pH, moisture 
> and nutrient signals create complex relationships between the elements of 
> any given natural system. This must play a 
> large part in determining the biodiversity, robustness and overall health 
> of any given site. Taking an inventory of
> the components of such systems and all observable site features could be 
> helpful to a permaculture designer when 
> involved in site restoration as well as site development with increased 
> diversity and production capability in mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automata

"In the 1970s a two-state, two-dimensional cellular automaton named Game of 
Life became very widely known, particularly 
among the early computing community. Invented by John Conway, and popularized 
by Martin Gardner in a Scientific American 
article, its rules are as follows: If a black cell has 2 or 3 black 
neighbors, it stays black. If a white cell has 3 
black neighbors, it becomes black. In all other cases, the cell stays or 
becomes white. Despite its simplicity, the 
system achieves an impressive diversity of behavior, fluctuating between 
apparent randomness and order. One of the most 
apparent features of the Game of Life is the frequent occurrence of gliders, 
arrangements of cells that essentially move 
themselves across the grid. It is possible to arrange the automaton so that 
the gliders interact to perform 
computations, and after much effort it has been shown that the Game of Life 
can emulate a universal Turing machine. 
Possibly because it was viewed as a largely recreational topic, little 
follow-up work was done outside of investigating 
the particularities of the Game of Life and a few related rules.

In 1969, however, German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse published his book 
Calculating Space, proposing that the physical 
laws of the universe are discrete by nature, and that the entire universe is 
just the output of a deterministic 
computation on a giant cellular automaton. This was the first book on what 
today is called digital physics.

In 1983 Stephen Wolfram published the first of a series of papers 
systematically investigating a very basic but 
essentially unknown class of cellular automata, which he terms elementary 
cellular automata (see below). The unexpected 
complexity of the behavior of these simple rules led Wolfram to suspect that 
complexity in nature may be due to similar 
mechanisms. Additionally, during this period Wolfram formulated the concepts 
of intrinsic randomness and computational 
irreducibility, and suggested that rule 110 may be universal—a fact proved by 
Matthew Cook in the 1990s.

Wolfram left academia in the mid-late 1980s to create Mathematica, which he 
then used to extend his earlier results to a 
broad range of other simple, abstract systems. In 2002 he published his 
results in the 1280-page text A New Kind of 
Science, which extensively argued that the discoveries about cellular 
automata are not isolated facts but are robust and 
have significance for all disciplines of science. Despite much confusion in 
the press and academia, the book did not 
argue for a fundamental theory of physics based on cellular automata, and 
although it did describe a few specific 
physical models based on cellular automata, it also provided models based on 
qualitatively different abstract systems.

In his 2005 book, The Lifebox, The Seashell and The Soul, Dr Rudy Rucker 
expanded upon Wolfram's theories toward a 
theory of Universal Automatism. This used cellular automata a model to 
explain how simple rules can generate complex 
results."


-- 
Lawrence F. London, Jr.
Venaura Farm
lfl@intrex.net
http://market-farming.com
http://market-farming.com/venaurafarm
http://venaurafarm.blogspot.com/
http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech

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we forgive those who put trash in our baskets." 
Unkown

 

              
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