paisleypiper's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- a recipe for cadastre Another beautiful fall Saturday. Quinn and I are about to venture into the world of chirping birds and big adventure vehicles rolling along the quiet, over-packed roads. We will ride past houses and businesses varying from impressive, expensive and imposing to demonstrations of the eroding middle class. In the first tier suburbs it is completely evident that now we have the largest gap between layers of wealth than we have had in seventy years. The health of even the burbs where people live out their dreams and lives to the great tune of the American middle class dream are sagging. The cadaster shows their decline in value compared with what people earn and do without to live in them, a collection of folks seeking shelter and a decent school district. And the fancy houses along the way to the shopping center, are getting even fancier than I ever remember them being. We are going shopping for a birthday present for her brother. I don't have a brother (I have a step-brother) so I am always struck by what seems such an unimaginable accomplishment -- picking out a birthday present for a brother. One would think I would have observed this often enough to demystify it a bit, but then, as is the case with life, it so much more enjoyable with the myst rolling in from some unknown sea. Yesterday a couple faculty / researchers were showing me their brilliant GIS / cadastre mapping scheme. I asked them how it worked and they joked with me that they like to keep it mysterious because that way it is like magic. But then we laughed and I learned about their system for coding information. A cadastre is a public record, survey or map of the value, extent and ownership of land. It comes to us from the French who gave us such eloquent, governmental terminology. Culturally, one of the main rules seems to be to resist magic. Science has always seemed magical to me. And I believe it when I read about how folks several hundred years ago thought the devil lived in optics. (by the way, I completely buy-in to the optical theory for advancement in realistic painting during the Rennaisance) But, we find out the reason for things when it interests us or we feel we have the capacity to hold the chain of events in our brain. Otherwise, the computer, for example, is nothing more than a book of spells for me. I don't get circuits and mother boards and find it impossible to actually conceptualize how it is that all this information and transformation can happen in those artfully green metal pieces with the silver blobs and wires. I'm afraid that if I could come to understand it, I would become unintelligable in other senses. I would loose my technological innocense -- that sense of wonder about all of the ways we contemplate who we are and why we are and then tell others about it. So, out I go on the large adventure of purchasing a very small gift. Likely a shirt, sweater or maybe even a stack of socks. The chance to make selections based on details rather than category. To drill down to fiber content, color, pattern, texture to find just the item that rises up to the level of gift. 10:36 a.m. - 2003-09-27 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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