In the warm evenings of the year, I sleep on a sofa in the sunroom, often woken up by my wife on her way to work.
This morning, after my wife left, I heard the pitter-patter of tiny feet and opened my eyes to see a squirrel licking up the dew on top of one of the skylights.
On the driveway yesterday, a line of ants moved back and forth from one location to another, unencumbered by hungry predators, the ants walking around dry leaves and hickory nuts that fall from trees in this miniseason of early autumn.
The sounds of residential construction hit my ears — hammering, sawing, splintering wood — and I wonder about not just the waste and fraud in the medical business but the waste and redundancy in construction.
As long as it’s cheaper to dump leftover construction material in landfills, we have no incentives to drive innovation in construction methods unless there’s also a profit motive.
How can we increase the profit motive without imposing fees or adding regulatory disincentives?
For instance, what happens to old material — shingles, tiles, sheet metal, nails, underlayment — after a house is reroofed?
Where are the innovators in the reuse/recycle field?
We can easily see the potential energy of water behind a dam but we can’t see the potential energy of material in a house before remodeling?
I look through the lens of my eyes and all I see are sets of states of energy devoid of anthropomorphic qualifications.
What if we all saw life that way, how some states of energy bond more readily than others, rather than superficial qualities that are in meme states only?
Outside the window, the redbud leaf that is full of holes and starting to yellow has a sense of beauty about it but beauty is truly only in the eyes of the beholder. The holes chewed in the leaf indicate a set of states of energy found the leaf material useful for strengthening its bonds, not for any sense of beauty I may assign either one.
Let us not confuse our brain’s excess capacity for making sense of the world around us for more than what it always is — adapting to our environment to improve our chances to reproduce our sets of states of energy.
Some useful websites for today:
treetrunkdings 