Heidegger according to McCormack--The essence of a hammer is in its use--you can't sit back and meditate upon the hammer as hammer without implicating its use. a hammer is nothing to us without its ability to be held in a palm and fingers and struck against the head of a nail or used to dig one out. it is only our metaphysical imagination, our cling to the eternal, that makes us see the hammer outside of time and context.

I believe the point Dan was trying to make was that we have reached the status of a god when we replicate reality for ourselves...in the form of images, motion images, and 3-dimensional motion images. we enable this. we've reached a point, if one is to agree with darwin's discovery that the earth is extremely old, it is extraordinary that we may simulate the things we see as humans. these things ought not be separate from us. indeed they are us, just as birth and death.

A thought came to me yesterday as I listened to poppy talk with Greg about poppy's unsuccessful attempt at coaxing the Wilkinson's onto the anti-windturbine protest wagon. They're for clean energy, he said. And they said they wouldnt mind windmills on the horizon...they're majestic or something. I have trouble with one of these points and it's not the one that says they're aesthetically pleasing. Nearly everybody who is against the turbines still supports clean energy. Anti-coal, I like to call it. NObody wants to keep using coal. So we need to phase it out, right? A viable solution to that are the wind turbines, right? they produce energy, don't they? and they don't emit CO2? (except of course when they're being built). But we need to take a step back. Are the turbines efficient? to the point that they'll reduce our dependence on coal? This can be measured. Keith stated that Denmark, the world leader in turbine usage, has reduced it's coal dependence by 1% or thereabouts since the turbines were implemented. Others have stated repeatedly that the windmills don't pay for themselves, and that even on a windy day they account for only about 10% of what is fed to the grid. So why go ahead with something that's not economical and, as an aside, disruptive to the natural setting? The turbines mesmerize the urban citizen; they are illusions; false answers to our green energy needs...not because they aren't clean, but because they don't reduce what is dirty.