Thank you, Martin Wattenberg, for the central idea of just throwing stuff at the screen until it fits. I raise my glass to the philosophy of “the dumbest possible thing that works.
At one end of the spectrum are people like Steve Coast, a British amateur who is hoping to create a communal map of the world as comprehensive as Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. Volunteers who contribute to Mr Coast’s OpenStreetMap.org literally redraw the map. “You buy a GPS [global positioning system] unit and cycle around the roads,” he says. “It drops a data point every second, like Hansel and Gretel dropping breadcrumbs.” Collecting those data points and joining the dots is the first step in sketching a map of the road network.
We met as a teaching staff later that day. We saw the decimation of Lego-town as an opportunity to launch a critical evaluation of Legotown and the inequities of private ownership and hierarchical authority on which it was founded.
Le Guin makes no secret of the fact that she likes Taoism because it is nontheist. She chafes that “it is assumed in the United States that you’re some kind of monotheist, that you believe there is a God.” She, herself, is quite comfortable with polytheism, “people like the Hindus or ancient Romans who had little gods everywhere,” or Native American religions, “a fully spiritual approach to reality, to the world. They don’t have gods, but everything is sacred.” Given that “since Reagan came to power this country has had a sort of orgy of self-congratulation about being Christian, I feel it’s incumbent upon me to say I’m not, because people seem to be afraid to say anything against Christianity at all these days.
I like the idea that these rifts, as Jack Harkness might call them, have a temporal viscosity, as Fassin Taak might say, that could range from foggy pea-soup to sticky treacle. I like the fact that the intersections, the crossing of streams, as Egon Spengler might say, rather than “…causing “total protonic reversal”, destroying the gate and removing Gozer…”, denote the rainwater outlets. The gutters. The connection to the wider infrastructure beyond the diagram.
