Self-contained pond

Apartment therapy have some great articles, in this case for making a water garden in a container:

Container garden by Bart Everson (licensed for use under Creative Commons)

Such a fantastic idea.

Sometimes stuff speaks to you...

Ursula Vernon, the woman I hope to be if I don't grow up, discussing the book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. 

"Now, it’s not a perfect book. Lots of people would find it a snore, or annoying, or whatever. But hey, I enjoyed it, parts of it spoke to me.  There is a scene where she sits in Italy and carefully arranges the absolutely perfect lunch on a plate and feels a kind of odd happiness and I stood in my kitchen more than once, carefully laying out several kinds of interesting salad on a piece of red Fiestaware, and feeling a fragile emotion that I would hard pressed to explain fully, except that it was something like even though my life is wrecked beyond measure and I do not know how much of it I am going to be able to salvage, this meal here is perfect and the rest doesn’t matter while I am eating it."

 Yeah, made me cry.  I'm still uncertain and messed up.  Woo.

800% more beautiful

A wonderful little bit of serendipity - a song, time-stretched 800% becomes so, so beautiful, ethereal, and calm...  I listened to a snippet of the original anaemic pre-pubescent poppy warbling, just so I could hear where it was coming from - yuck.  It was ignorable, I guess, but the symphonic, mutated version conjures slow waves on alien shores against violet skies, and I love it.

If you're not friends with flash, you can download it here.

Mmmmmpipes

I'm slightly stunned by the fact that I'm really relating to something on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour...

Unfortunately the prog doesn't appear to be available to listen again, sadly. *pout*

Andrea Boyd is a Nova Scotian, and woahman, can she play the pipes:




There's loads more of her online, I highly recommend a listen, if you like that sort of thing.

This has just been the biggest huge-wet-bag-of-nostalgia-slap-in-the-face I've had for a while, and it's strong! I played the pipes (well, starting with the beginner's 'chanter', of course) from when I moved to Scotland around age 8, until quite a few years later in high school when my Mum and I had a chat, and decided that with the introduction of fees, it wasn't worth continuing to learn as the eldest in a girls-only (rather than ability-level) class.  Paying to teach others!  Where's the mileage in that?  The thoughtless sexism which caused me to quit makes me sad but I don't really regret it - it allowed me to focus more on academic and crafty pursuits.  I do miss being good at an instrument though, one that felt so natural, and I especially miss making such a massive, beautiful noise. 

I hope that one day I'll have the time and money to get my own set and learn again, though I have the far more challenging ukulele to learn first ;) 

Mysteries and blank maps...

"...lived by the admonition of E. T. Jaynes that if you were ignorant about a phenomenon, that was a fact about your own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself; that your uncertainty was a fact about you, not a fact about whatever you were uncertain about; that ignorance existed in the mind, not in reality; that a blank map did not correspond to a blank territory. There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms. A phenomenon could be mysterious to some particular person, but there could be no phenomena mysterious of themselves. To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.

[...] People had no sense of history, they learned about chemistry and biology and astronomy and thought that these matters had always been the proper meat of science, that they had never been mysterious. The stars had once been mysteries. Lord Kelvin had once called the nature of life and biology - the response of muscles to human will and the generation of trees from seeds - a mystery "infinitely beyond" the reach of science. (Not just a little beyond, mind you, but infinitely beyond. Lord Kelvin sure had gotten a big emotional kick out of not knowing something.) Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it."

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by  Less Wrong