In a previous essay (not on this blog), I briefly profiled architect Christopher Alexander and alluded to his magnum opus, the four book Nature of Order. In this essay, I’ll be reviewing the first two books of the set, The Phenomenon of Life (TPoL) and The Process of Creating Life (PoCL). The prominence of the word life highlights the importance of this concept in Alexander’s thinking. For him, life is a quality inherent in all things, not solely a property of plants and animals. This is not a particularly radical belief. It’s a tenet of Buddhism and Taoism, and is beginning to find adherents among some scientists. The thing is, it’s hard to define life in a way that includes creatures like animals and insects, but excludes things like crystals or complex computer programs. Viruses are a good example of the difficulty; are they intricate crystals that self replicate in certain animals, or are they living beings in their own right? Ask a biologist sometime, and see what he says.

In any event, Alexander defines life very broadly, and believes that it exists in the world around us in varying degrees.

So, right away, we find that he is tackling some big questions: What is Life? What is Space? What is the Nature of Order? These are questions that occupy mystics, and there are some who see Alexander that way. I don’t. He is too practical and hardworking, and he is not too concerned with individual spirituality; his focus is on reforming the built environment but, yes, he addresses… spirit.

Spirit is always threatening to disrupt our lives

I wish I could talk about Christopher Alexander without getting into questions about the meaning of life, but it’s no use; the man continually and infuriatingly will point out the 600 pound gorilla in the room that we’re all trying to ignore – humans are spiritual beings, and the world is a spiritual place. We make demands on our buildings that aren’t satisfied by profit and efficiency. That we so successfully avoid this reality so much of the time explains much, Alexander contends, about the often unsatisfactory nature of the world we’ve made for ourselves.

Spirit is always threatening to disrupt our lives; seen in a certain light, the bureaucratization of our society’s large institutions seems designed to prevent such troubling eruptions—see Franz Kafka, Charlie Chaplin, Michael Moore, et al. It is axiomatic that no priest wants a saint in his parish, but then, neither does the mayor, or the factory owner.

Alexander points out that structure, too, can work against human wholeness and spirituality and this seems logical enough. After all, no one leaves nature to get ‘back to the city’ when seeking peace and enlightenment. There are, of course, exceptions. Beautiful gardens or soaring cathedrals can be engines of transcendence. But these are exceptions that prove the rule; generally speaking, the built environment is perceived to repress human wholeness. Why? Why don’t humans create beautiful living structure as readily as do bees, clouds, trees, or termites?

Nature of Order is a work of great detail and great force that attempts to answer this question. That the question of Spirit comes up, implicitly but insistently, is the work’s strength and weakness. The force of Nature of Order is derived from Alexander’s fearless exploration of the structure of the world, and the proper place of humans in that structure. But it also makes his philosophy threatening… a lot of people just want to build a better house, not wrestle with questions about the ontological grain of the universe.

Alexander’s confidence can resemble hubris; and sometimes he seems to rely overmuch on intuition when making his points. To read his books well, one must surrender to them. Not abjectly, and not forever, but a certain suspension of skepticism, while reading, helps enormously when trying to absorb the material.

The Phenomenon of Life
In Book 1, The Phenomenon of Life, Alexander gives his fullest and deepest explanation of his conception of life, and why it is more deeply felt in some places and things than in others.

Early in TPoL, Alexander describes an incident from his teaching career that succinctly captures many of the themes of his work, and the reasons his ideas meet resistance. He asks his students to compare two things: a picture of a 7th century illuminated manuscript (the Durham Gospel fragment) and the wall of the very auditorium in which the lecture was being held. Then he asked a simple question – which of the two had more life?

The question met enormous resistance. Not because it was hard—nearly every student agreed, albeit reluctantly, that the graceful, calm-yet-intricate manuscript held more life than the postmodern, brass-detailed wall. The question itself was what created resistance. Just admitting that one artifact can have more life than another was disturbing. If it is possible to enhance the life of a building, then it is important to do so; but the question of life is not being addressed in today’s architectural curricula—except by Alexander.

Alexander finds this ability in humans consistently, and he also finds that resistance is common. When asked, people agree with amazing uniformity on the relative amount of life imbued in various objects. Although the question seems strange, it has an answer. But this is astonishing, because it tends to destroy the difference between the subjective and the objective. Science stoutly rejects data which cannot be measured. Human opinions, notoriously squishy, cannot be measured by any known instrument… but what if humans, in aggregate, are themselves effective measuring instruments?

There is another, deeper reason for resistance. Lurking beneath Alexander’s simple question is a much thornier question: if humans respond to the life of a place, and if life can be detected and worked with rather simply, how is it that so much of the built world works against life? Suddenly, the work of a developer or a surveyor moves beyond the question of profit, and into the realm of religion. Faced with this, it is much easier to fight against the question, and the person raising it. But this is denial.

Alexander makes his case for pervasive life thoroughly and with great cumulative force. He begins by discussing what he calls centers:

“In using the word center in this way, I am not referring at all to a point center like a center of gravity. I use the word center to identify an organized zone of space – that is to say, a distinct set of points in space, which, because of its organization, because of its internal coherence, and because of its relation to its context, exhibits centeredness, forms a local zone of relative centeredness with respect to the other parts of space. When I use the word center, I am always referring to a physical set, a distinct physical system, which occupies a certain volume in space, and has a special marked coherence.” (TPoL, p. 84)

Redefining a word as basic as ‘center’—or ‘life’—seems willfully inscrutable at first, but the idea is actually quite useful. Consider a pond in a clearing; it is not exactly a whole in itself, because it is part of a larger whole, the clearing, which is in turn part of a forest, and so forth. But the pond is something, and calling it a center does help us to see it as a locus of interest in the midst of a larger whole, a locus that influences that larger whole. And the idea is recursive; the clearing is itself one of many centers in the larger forest and influences that whole, which in turn is one center of a larger regional whole, and so forth.

Like Alexander’s earlier concept of a pattern language the value of the concept lies in its use. Learning to analyze wholes in terms of centers makes it easier to actually see how a whole is formed, and how it can be strengthened or how it is being weakened. It gives those who are trying to analyze space an effective analytical tool.

If it seems presumptuous of Alexander to redefine a word for his own use and to propose an entirely new way of analyzing the world, well, that is a valid criticism but it is also pretty much the point of TPoL. Alexander is proposing a new way of perceiving and analyzing space—he is proposing the basis for a new theory of the world’s geometric underpinnings. Whether he succeeds or not is for each reader to decide.

Living wholes, then, are made up of strong centers, and the life of a whole is increased by strengthening and increasing its centers. As I began to get comfortable with this idea, I indeed found it to be a useful way of looking at the world around me, a way to figure out why I like some places more than others. TPoL is copiously illustrated, and the illustrations do help to convey what Alexander is getting at. But ultimately, an interested reader will have to decide for himself how useful the idea is.

Alexander continues his argument by explaining why some centers have more life than others. And here, I think, he presents an idea that is extremely compelling and immediately useful. It amounts to a general theory of aesthetics, and will likely be adopted rather quickly in the field of visual arts.

Alexander proposes that there are 15 fundamental properties—structural features—that appear consistently in things which have life. Let’s just list them:

1) Levels of Scale
2) Strong Centers
3) Boundaries
4) Alternating Repetition
5) Positive Space
6) Good Shape
7) Local Symmetries
Deep Interlock and Ambiguity
9) Contrast
10) Gradients
11) Roughness
12) Echoes
13) The Void
14) Simplicity and Inner Calm
15) Not-Separateness

About a third of TPoL is devoted to a masterful exposition of this idea. The 15 properties are shown and discussed in manmade artifacts and in natural phenomena. The illustrations and text work together and gather force like Ravel’s Boléro, culminating in an essay titled A New View of Nature. Ultimately we realize that Alexander has done an amazing thing; he has made it possible to talk, really talk, about why we like some things and places better than others. Rather than falling back on vapid words like ‘pretty’ or ‘awesome’ we can speak with precision about the qualities that distinguish Yosemite Valley from, say, a gravel quarry, or why we are more moved by a giant sequoia than by a mall. His beliefs and accompanying language legitimize human feeling, validate our intuitive sense of value, and, without hubris or solipsism, make the world personal.

I have barely skipped a stone over the surface of this remarkable book. In 476 exhaustively illustrated and footnoted pages, Alexander rigorously makes the case for his new view of the world, and takes initial steps toward a mathematical statement of that view. It is an intellectual tour-de-force and fully supported by his real world work as a builder and architect. Such seriousness commands respect; dismissing Alexander casually will not do.

The Process of Creating Life
Defining life is a good start for Alexander, but the major theme of his career has been actually getting more life into modern buildings. And to do this, Alexander found, more than a definition is needed; the what of creation is pointless without the how. That is, a living building cannot be designed, then built. The life of a building comes from decisions made during the construction process. Design and construction turn out to be pretty much the same thing.

Alexander begins to talk about this by returning to one of Nature of Order’s fundamental questions: why is it that natural processes automatically create beauty and a feeling of rightness, and human methods so rarely do? What is the difference?

In a series of fascinating examples ranging from a wave breaking to a glass plate shattering to a fetus developing, Alexander shows convincingly that development processes in nature are a series of structure-preserving transformations. Each recognizable phase of development follows naturally from the preceding phase. Put another way, each phase of development preserves and extends the wholeness of the preceding phase—the wholeness is never destroyed, it unfolds into a new wholeness.

Consider the famous sequence of photos of a splashing milk drop. Though discrete phases of the sequence are startlingly different from each other, the changes from moment to moment are gentle and comprehensible. Alexander argues convincingly that this is a feature of all natural development.

Furthermore, the structure-preserving transformations can be analyzed in terms of the 15 fundamental properties introduced in TPoL. As extended here, the 15 properties become 15 transformations. Change that preserves wholeness is shown to be a product of transformation based on one or more of the 15 properties. Each transformation introduces, preserves, or strengthens one or more of the 15 fundamental properties. Again, one of the most useful things Alexander has done here is to provide good language, which makes good analysis possible.

He goes on to argue, with multiple examples, that humans can build in this structure-preserving fashion, but usually don’t. To do this, he juxtaposes traditional (or pre-modern) building processes with modern examples. He is getting at something deep here; humans love old places. We visit New England, or Europe, to see the old buildings, not the modern ones. We have a sense that the old cathedrals, the old city layouts, are somehow richer. Alexander contends that traditional building methods followed the structure-preserving process he finds in nature. For example, he presents a series of plans that show the development of Amsterdam from 1400 to 1800. It is easy to see how the steady development process took previous development into account. Patterns that were latent in 1400 are realized in 1800, building shapes echo each other, the relationship of the town to the water is consistent throughout. There is no sense of planned development—Amsterdam seems to have grown.

The structure-preserving process occurs in the modern world, but more rarely. Beginning about 1900, many forces—changes in banking, in zoning, in planning, in architecture, etc.—began to produce structure-destroying transformations. The wholeness of an existing structure was no longer considered. A classic example would be the extension of a freeway through an existing neighborhood. The freeway is designed and built without reference to its surroundings, and thereby destroys those surroundings. And similar examples can be cited ad infinitum: a skyscraper designed on one continent and built on another, a planned community laid out with equal precision on the drawing board and on the ground, a giant Wal-Mart box seemingly dropped from the sky onto its scraped pad… in every case, the previously existing whole is disregarded and destroyed.

Alexander uses these examples to define two kinds of structure: generated and fabricated. Generated structure creates life, and fabricated structure, nearly always, creates… the opposite of life.

The discussion of generated structure begins with an analogy that struck me very powerfully. Consider a fairly complex origami construction. It is not built to a plan; that is, blueprints of the finished structure are not provided. Instead, a sequence of steps is provided. A plan of the figure would be quite complex—several pages at least. But a sequence—first do that, then do this—is relatively concise. This idea is then applied to the development of an embryo. DNA does not store a blueprint of the exact appearance of a particular animal, it stores a sequence of development which then takes place affected by attendant circumstances. Interestingly, this is proved by recent experiments in biology—cloned animals do not look exactly alike. Same sequence, different circumstances.

Brutally compressed into a nutshell, Alexander’s program for creating living structure is to generate a construction sequence that first, observes the whole, then, makes a change that preserves and enhances the whole while approaching the desired end state, then… repeats as needed. Or, in his more elegant language:

“A living process is any adaptive process which generates living structure, step by step, through structure-preserving transformations.”

These sequences can also be called patterns, harking back to Alexander’s early book, A Pattern Language. Here, they emerge as part of a comprehensive program for reforming human construction methods. As argued, the case for reform is convincing and ultimately hopeful. After all, the remaining remnants of traditionally built structure are good evidence that humans can build in a living fashion. As a species we have been unconsciously competent, are now unconsciously incompetent, but are beginning to notice deficiencies—to be consciously incompetent. It certainly seems possible that the human capacity for self-observation must eventually lead to conscious competence, and to a beautiful living world.

PoCL is a massive book, totaling 635 pages with appendices and notes. The illustrations are copious and superbly complement arguments put forth. I have, therefore, presented barely a skeletal outline of the book’s full force, but I hope I have adequately suggested that it is forceful.

In some ways, Alexander is the living human I most admire. He has, after all, come by his ideas the old-fashioned way… he’s earned them. He has poured his life into his writing and philosophizing and then he has done something harder. He has, for decades, tested his philosophy, often in difficult conditions in the poorest regions of the planet. He is, simultaneously, an idealistic ivory tower dreamer and a pragmatic contractor; that dirt under his nails is a mix of grit and ink and it’s been there for decades. When a man so rigorously tests his ideas in the real world, over such a span of time, and then adjusts his ideas to accord with the practical knowledge gained… well, he deserves a hearing.

The honeybee hive mind is one of the most sophisticated thinking machines on the planet, and even compares favorably with the thinking machine between our ears.

Hives store 50 pounds of honey in a season. To do this, hive workers complete about 4 million foraging trips, flying a total of 12 million miles. They systematically find dozens or hundreds of food patches, exploit them, and move on.

This is sophisticated stuff, requiring coordination at a level of complexity approaching that of a human corporation. In fact, bee intelligence is even capable of solving a mathematical series; in one experiment, entomologists placed a bowl of sugar water outside a hive. Bees quickly found it. The next day, the bowl was moved twice as far away. Again, the bowl was found. This went on for several days, with the bowl being moved away from the hive in a geometric, not arithmetic progression. The experiment was supposed to study search efficiency, but after several days something unexpected occurred; when the experimenters went to place the bowl, the bees had anticipated them and were already on the spot!

This is astonishing. There are, frankly, plenty of humans who have trouble with geometric progressions. How is it even possible for a hive to make this sort of calculation?

bees return to the hive and do the hokey-pokey

It is known that bees can communicate by means of the ‘waggle dance’, an abstract language that is eons older than any human language. Essentially, bees return to the hive and do the hokey-pokey; their jigs and jogs convey the precise location of food that may be miles away. In other words, they give each other good directions which, again, is not so common among humans. The dance’s vocabulary is known – there is even a dictionary; what is not known is how bees began to use such a sophisticated language.

Barbara Shipman, a mathematician at the University of Rochester, discovered that the shapes created during the waggle dance are the same as the shapes created when the possible curves of a 6 dimensional flag manifold are projected onto a 2 dimensional surface. Don’t worry if you don’t understand that – there are not many humans who do. The point is, there is a surprising, but real, correlation between an obscure branch of higher mathematics and the abstract language used by bees. Shipman even sees this as evidence that bees are able to sense quantum fields directly, a trick that human physicists believe to be impossible.

Be that as it may, bees certainly use abstract language to communicate, they are excellent navigators and planners, they can solve mathematical problems, and they manage food resources. What criteria for higher intelligence does this not meet?

Sadly, due to pesticide misuse, habitat reduction and mite infestations, honeybees are declining in the United States and could disappear entirely. The consequences are unknown – one possibility is agricultural collapse.

It may be, in fact, that the fate of the honeybee is bound up with the fate of our civilization, and that failure to appreciate their alien intelligence might lead to our demise.

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Scientists tell us that honeybees have learned to convert pollen, a natural substance, into a synthetic compound made of palmitate, palmitoleate, hydroxypalmitate and oleate esters of long-chain aliphatic alcohols. Bees use this substance for housing and food storage. It’s better known as beeswax, one of the planet’s most useful substances.

any equation as simple as ‘artificial = bad’ is bound to be wrong

Humans also produce wax, in our ears and also, like bees, synthetically, and we produce a multitude of other complex compounds such as plastics, resins, glass, ink, paper, etc., etc. etc. And we use these compounds for housing and food storage, to wash our hair, make tools, paint our homes and faces, kill each other, scent ourselves, etc., etc., etc.

Oddly, to me at least, when bees synthesize a complex chemical compound, it’s called ‘natural’ but when humans synthesize compounds they’re called ‘artificial’, and too often the word ‘artificial’ is automatically pejorative, as if humans, by making things, are doing something outside the bounds of nature. But of course we’re not. The conversion of existing materials into other materials is something all living things do, one way or another.

I’m not suggesting that everything humans make or do is wholesome and wise and in our best interests, but I am suggesting that everything we featherless bipeds do is natural, by virtue of the fact that everything is natural, part of nature; to pretend otherwise is to introduce an awkward and unnecessary layer into an already complex debate.

Consider monosodium glutamate, or MSG. The fact is, glutamates are exceedingly natural substances – our own traitorous bodies produce 40 grams of glutamate daily, and glutamates occur naturally in many foods. And MSG is simply glutamate mixed with salt. Yet MSG is the subject of America’s longest running food scare, despite an absolute lack of any evidence, other than anecdote, that MSG has any negative effects whatsoever. And it does appear to be largely an American obsession; after all, as one food writer has said, ‘If MSG is bad for you, why doesn’t everyone in China have a headache?’

I wonder if it’s merely the dread word ‘artificial’ that has been attached to this apparently innocuous substance. In other words, I wonder if reactions to MSG are an allergy, not to the substance, but to the idea of artificiality. And I wonder if this allergy to artificiality occurs in more important arenas than condiments. For instance, in the important struggle to reclaim agriculture from a morass of ill conceived pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals, are some genuinely useful man-made chemicals being rejected not because they’re bad in themselves, but simply because they’re man-made? I don’t honestly know the answer to this question, and I certainly don’t trust Monsanto, but I do know that any equation as simple as ‘artificial = bad’ is bound to be wrong. Humans are part of nature too, and we make things. To say that such making is inevitably a source of evil is to say that humans are inevitably evil… and surely that’s a bit of an exaggeration.

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This rant was inspired by all the gloom and doom about lately, and by a ridiculous article making the rounds. For the record, if Douglas Copland really believes this, he’s a useless asshole. All of the following was pulled out of my ass and written down in five minutes. People who actually know what they’re talking about have even more cause for optimism.

• Cheap Energy: I can name a half dozen plausible technologies, including concentrated solar power, fusion, cold fusion and clean nuclear, that could come online soon and make energy cheap and clean. In a world with an oversupply of energy, what can’t be created?

• Ubiquitous Supercomputing: Two about-to-happen technologies, quantum computing and molecular computing, can give humans the ability to design infrastructure with God-like skill, and build intelligence into nearly everything manufactured – I’m talking things like paint. When intelligence is everywhere, aren’t we likely to do smarter stuff?

• Nanotech: It’s been knocking on the door for decades, and we’re gonna let it in sometime. A world of functional nanotech is a world where you can pour goop in a vat and extrude iPods, antique wood furniture, car parts, a molecularly perfect Van Gogh, etc. Who cares about wealth polarization? In a world where anyone can have anything, it’s going to be people with taste, not people with money, who live well. Oh, and nano works the other direction, too: all the toxic sludge and other trash we make can go in one end of the hopper and come out as compost, or Deadwood DVDs. A clean abundant world, what’s not to like?

• Facilitated Social Change: Sure, you’re tired of hearing that social networking is changing everything, is making the world a smaller place, that humans are forming the neural network of a global mind, etc. Doesn’t mean it’s not true. What it means is that social structures that now seem entrenched, like government, the economy, bigotry, war, religion, and you-name-it are now global thoughts that humanity is becoming conscious of. And what’s easier to change than a mind? In an interlinked world, there is a new capacity for rapid, massive change. Think good thoughts, people, and talk to your friends on FB, twitter, LinkedIn, and of course your local pub. We can literally create exactly the world we envision. Indeed, we pretty much HAVE TO create the world we envision, so envision well.

• Biotech: Cloning gets a lot of attention, and genetics and new wonder drugs. Those are all cool. But I think the real promise is in agriculture. We haven’t got it right yet (I’m looking at you Monsanto) but shit, we will. And then we’ll have abundant, organic, fresh, tasty, cruelty-free meats and vegetables. Yay us.

• Rapid Adoption of New Technology: Remember how fast cellphones became ubiquitous? REMEMBER? They were bulky, expensive, cranky oddities for, like, a week or two and then EVERYONE had them in their pockets. Same with laptops and PDAs, and the internet and DVRs and, you name it. We humans obviously have no issues making use of the next great thing, which amplifies all the above trends. And there’s more, lots more, things that aren’t even glimmers in somebody’s brain yet, but will arrive overnight BECAUSE HUMANS ARE GOOD AT HAVING GREAT IDEAS AND IMPLEMENTING THEM!

Humans are awesome, and the universe is safe, abundant and friendly. Enjoy your lives, people, and get ready to live in paradise.

cheers,
Angus

Cave exploration is not for everyone, in fact it is for very few. Just reading about it can make a claustrophobe cringe. But for those few, those strong, fit, physically narrow and psychologically hardy few, an entrance to an immense world, almost a different planet, is available in Central Kentucky. The massive limestone stratum that underlies that region has been carved by the waters of the Green River Basin, and the mapped stretches of labyrinth in what is now known officially as the Mammoth Cave System total more than 360 miles, making it the world’s longest by a factor of three. It is a wonder of the world as impressive as any mountain, glacier, or ocean but but photographs can only capture slices of it and few humans will ever grasp it as anything like a whole.

Accurate surveying of the cave system began in 1908, when a young German mining engineer named Max Kaemper came to the area, intending to visit for two weeks. He ended up staying several months and produced an accurate map of many miles of cave passage, including several new discoveries. He set a precedent that has endured; exploration, discovery, and surveying are nearly synonymous in this sector of the planet, more closely entwined than in any other human endeavor. Disorientation underground is the default state; it has even been said that a sense of direction underground is something of a handicap, because the circuitous passages so often double back on themselves. When exploring new passages, cavers will sometimes stumble into a known section and reel with vertigo as they reorient themselves. Explorers can push on a bit from known regions, looking backwards often, and find their way back. But only careful surveying and mapping make it possible to have a sense of the cave as a system, locate new passages, explore them, and return safely. Without maps, far fewer miles of cave passage would now be known.

Beginning about the 1950s, it became apparent that careful surveying and mapping were also the key to connecting cave systems, a goal of exploration that is unique to caving and which attained its fullest expression on September 9th, 1972. That’s when a party of six cavers, led by John Wilcox, then Chief Cartographer of the Cave Research Foundation (the body that has organized Flint Ridge exploration for several decades), entered the Austin Entrance of the Flint Ridge Cave System and left through the Elevator Exit of the Mammoth Cave System, thus connecting the two and conquering what had become known as the “Everest of Speleology”. One team member, a small, tough woman named Pat Crowther, compared the experience to giving birth.

At the time, the Flint Ridge System was already the world’s longest known cave system, with 86.5 miles of mapped cave passage. The Mammoth Cave System was not too far behind at 57.9 miles of mapped cave. Between them was a deep valley that seemed to sever the most promising passages. Connecting the two was an awesome event in speleology, much like finding a way to stack Mt. Everest on top of K2 to create the new world’s tallest mountain – some even called it the ‘Holy Grail’.

The actual moment of connection could hardly have been more definite, or more dramatic. A series of remote Flint Ridge ‘leads’ – promising new passages 10 hours or more from cave entrances – had been systematically explored for several months. One expedition had even found scratched initials of early Mammoth Cave explorers, suggesting strongly that a connection was at hand. But the actual route remained frustratingly elusive, and optimistic parties would often return the way they came, crawling and wriggling for hours at a time rather than walking out the easy way. Wilcox’s party faced a particularly heart sinking moment; after nearly a day of work, they knew from survey data that they were within a few hundred feet of the Mammoth Cave System… but they appeared to be blocked by a ‘siphon’, a section of river with no airspace. Wilcox decided to take a closer look, and found that in fact he could duck carefully through the worst section. When he pushed on he saw, up ahead… a straight line?… could it be… a railing?! It was, and Wilcox turned back to shout to his companions, “I see a tourist trail!” – the words became immortal among cavers. Wilcox later wrote, “My memory of the next few moments is indistinct. Victory is a feeling of vastness inside the skull. In this case, it is doubly sweet because it seemed so far way only moments before.”

This awesome moment would not have happened without the careful, cumulative work of hundreds of cavers over several decades. In particular, meticulous surveys were essential. Intuitively, it would seem that surveying would come after the pathfinders pushed new routes and came back to tell the tale. Alternately, it seems that cave exploration might follow the ‘base camp’ model of mountain expeditions, with a few individuals pushing deep into the cave for days at a time, supported by ‘porters’ schlepping in food and other supplies. But neither approach held up to the realities of Flint Ridge caving. Without surveys, pathfinders had no way of knowing where they were in the vastness of the cave system, and no way of telling others how to follow and build on their lead. Of course, some cavers like that aspect of caving – the thrill of having miles of cave forever to oneself – but under the aegis of the Cave Research Foundation, Flint Ridge exploration was remarkably cooperative, with most of the teams involved contributing to the gradually accreting knowledge of the system. Conversely, the base camp system didn’t work, at least in Flint Ridge, because it was terribly inefficient. Resupplying and sleeping underground took enormous amounts of energy. ‘Blitzkriegs’ with occasional cat naps turned out to be the right formula.

The system eventually settled on worked for team players and individuals, and is probably the single factor most responsible for the great successes of Central Kentucky caving. Caving parties of (typically) four would strike out on long expeditions, sometimes lasting 24 hours or more. Support crews on the surface stood ready to assist. The underground teams would go to the furthest limits of explored cave and begin surveying, so that surveying and exploration happened more or less simultaneously. There were variations. On occasion, a party would explore several hundred feet (a very long distance in the twisty, narrow passages) and then survey back to known areas. But this method was frowned on; too often the surveys were left ‘hanging’ – not connected – and were useless. A better system was when two parties surveyed together, leapfrogging each other and moving relatively quickly.

The resulting maps were maintained obsessively; reading histories of Flint Ridge caving suggests that donating rooms – or whole houses – to the maps was a good way to become president of the Cave Research Foundation and perusing ‘map walls’ was an occupation nearly as absorbing to veteran explorers as actual caving. The maps definitely took on a life of their own, and even have an application outside the Mammoth Cave System. Portions of the maps were used as a template for the early (and groundbreaking) computer game “Adventure”, and aficionados have been known to recognize rooms and passages solely from game descriptions.

Equipment used was (and is) sparse compared to modern surveying; it resembled colonial surveying. The use of tripods, total stations and prisms was literally impossible in some passages, due to bulk, and merely impractical in most of the cave. Survey equipment had to be small and light. So Flint Ridge cavers relied on tapes and compasses with built in inclinometers for their surveys, a minimalist set of equipment that has been in use for hundreds of years. In ‘stand up’ passages, the procedure is straightforward: the compass is used to determine direction, inclinometers measure vertical angle, and the tape is used to measure distance. A good survey will also include sketches of the passage cross section, to give a sense of volume. Simple. But doing the same thing in tight tubes or watery channels is difficult and tedious; in some constricted areas, cavers have to back out of a passage after taking a reading so they can move their hands enough to take notes. Keeping the field book dry is a constant consideration. And sometimes progress is painfully slow – in difficult areas, sight lines of just a few feet are common meaning that it takes dozens of readings to get through short passages. To do this kind of work many hours from a cave entrance, with the prospect of a difficult return journey, seems superhuman… and perhaps it is. Certainly there are very few who attempt it. But the work has been done, and done well; the overall mapping error is believed to be within about 0.3%.

The connection of the Flint Ridge and Mammoth Cave Systems was as momentous as any achievement in the history of exploration. It built on several decades of difficult work by hundreds of individuals. It’s curious that cave exploration isn’t as closely followed as, say, mountaineering – perhaps it’s because one can’t see a cave, not in the way a mountain or ocean can be seen. But the physical work involved, and the privation, loneliness and danger, make cave exploration one of the most difficult of sports. The achievements in Central Kentucky, though underground, are one summit of human endeavor.

The above was drawn largely from The Longest Cave by Roger W. Brucker and Richard A. Watson. It is a splendid book, one of the great classics of adventure writing. If the above has piqued your interest even slightly, you will thoroughly enjoy reading this superb tale, told by two veteran cavers. Additional information, and a much appreciated review, was provided by Bill and Sarah Bishop who were elite members of the Cave Research Foundation during the connection era – Sarah is a past president of the Foundation.

In 1990, Rick Strassman injected 60 people with 400 doses of the illegal drug dimethyltryptamine. But Strassman wasn’t breaking any law—he was the first federally approved researcher in 20 years to study the effect of a psychedelic on human subjects.

Here is one more weird thing about DMT—you’re on it right now

Dimethyltryptamine—known as ‘DMT’—is surely one of the strangest chemical substances found on our chemically rich planet. It is possibly the strongest of the plant hallucinogens (though Salvia Divinorum is definitely in the running) and even among veteran psychonauts it is spoken of with awe–gonzo drug theorist Terence McKenna used to say that the biggest danger of DMT is that a person could simply ‘die of astonishment’. For one thing, DMT is one of the relatively few drugs that can produce true hallucinations, defined as virtual experiences that are indistinguishable from reality. And DMT is nearly unique in that it consistently delivers one of the strangest experiences humans have—encounters with aliens. In Strassman’s study, 20% of those injected reported clear, detailed encounters with alien beings, all taking place in what the volunteers usually referred to as, ‘another dimension’. That is, after injection with DMT, 1 in 5 of Strassman’s subjects experienced entry into another plane of existence where they met aliens. Less formal ‘trip reports’ suggest that the ratio is much higher for those experimenting at home, and that the experience is even stronger when the drug is smoked rather than injected.

What’s astonishing about the alien encounters is that they are incredibly weird and yet remarkably consistent. Nearly all users report a strange ripping sound and intricate, radially-symmetric visual phenomena as they enter the DMT space. They then report meeting astounding machine-like elves that are able to transform themselves at will, and are also able to modify reality by means of a weird language—in his lectures, McKenna even used to replicate this language.

So what is going on here? Other psychedelics, like LSD or psilocybin, create different trips in different people. But this drug seems to fairly often create the same trip in different people, even in people who are very different from each other. The ayahuasca shamans of South America, for example, have used DMT for thousands of years… and often encounter aliens.

Could it be that these encounters are simply a mental fantasy created by this particular drug? Of course—humans know very little about the way hallucinogens work, largely because governments repress psychedelic studies.

But, could it be that DMT somehow precipitates a genuine trip to another dimension inhabited by self-transforming machine elves? Also of course—we know even less about aliens and other dimensions than we do about hallucinogens and brains.

For such an uncanny substance, DMT is astonishingly widely distributed and deserves the epithet ‘weed’ far more than, you know, weed. It’s found in many plant sources, including Canary Reed Grass… you’re probably within 100 feet of Canary Reed Grass right now. Go nuts.

Here is one more weird thing about DMT—you’re on it right now. Dimethyltryptamine is found in small quantities in all human brains, possibly produced by the pineal gland. Scientists speculate that DMT plays a role in dreams and near death experiences, and possibly in the mystical religious visions that periodically alter humanity’s course—the trip reports found in the Hebrew scriptures, for example, don’t sound all that different from some DMT visions. Damn hippies, as the Pharisees used to say.

All human problems are rooted in human consciousness, and DMT consistently delivers the most radical known expression of human consciousness… maybe we should keep looking into it.

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Peters went further by claiming that the Mercator Projection was inherently racist

The ‘Peters Projection’ was announced by historian Arno Peters in a 1973 speech to the United Nations—the grandiose setting must have seemed a little over the top to serious workers in the rarefied world of cartographic projection. Nevertheless, Peters struck a nerve, and his self-titled projection became very popular indeed—many groups actively lobbied for its use in schools and it was quickly adopted by several U.N agencies and the National Council of Churches for all uses. In 1983 the N.C.C. even published Peters’ book, The New Cartography: A New View of the World. Peters’ map remains in vogue today, being prominently featured, for example, in an episode of television’s The West Wing.

Why all the fuss? What was it about this projection that made it so popular? Well, Peters (who died in 2002) was a master at combining indisputably true points with a few that were disputable. He maintained that the Mercator Projection, then commonly used for wall maps, badly distorted the relative areas of world land masses so that, for instance, Europe looks much bigger than it really is and Greenland appears to be roughly the same size as Africa… when in fact Africa is about 14 times larger. So far, so good, but Peters went further by claiming that the Mercator Projection was inherently racist, and unfit for any use. He based this on the positional and spatial prominence of developed countries as shown on the Mercator Projection. He apparently believed that only ‘his’ map, which accurately showed land mass areas, should be used.

Actual cartographers rolled their eyes at this. To begin with, the Mercator’s problems as a wall map were well known, but to say it had no use at all was crazy talk—it is still indispensable to navigators because straight lines drawn on the Mercator Projection are ‘loxodromes’, lines that show true compass bearing between two locations. In fact, it is axiomatic among cartographers that no projection is suited for all uses—they all have their strengths and weaknesses.

Moreover, Peters was attacking a straw man. Long before 1973 the Mercator’s weaknesses as a wall map were well known and it was gradually being replaced by several projections, notably the 1963 Robinson Projection, the invention of Arthur Robinson, probably the most eminent modern cartographer.

But most damning was Peters’ claim to have invented the ‘Peters’ Projection. Cartographers recognized it as being, in fact, a special instance of the Gall Projection, published in 1885 by Scottish astronomer James Gall. At best, Peters may have independently re-invented it, and the projection is now more properly known as the Gall-Peters Projection.

Buckminster Fuller also gave it a try

For all these reasons, Arno Peters was never going to be popular with cartographers, but aside from that tempest in a teapot, the Gall-Peters Projection still has problems judged strictly on its merits. Though it does allot area accurately, it does so at the expense of shape. Toward the poles, land masses are distorted East-West but near the equator they are distorted North-South; in Robinson’s scathing phase, the resulting maps look like, “… wet, ragged long winter underwear hung out to dry on the Arctic Circle.” Furthermore, other equal-area projections, such as the Albers Conic or the Lambert Azimuthal, have long been available and do a better job of managing unavoidable distortions.

There is no doubt that Arno Peters was a sincere, idealistic man devoted to the cause of fairness and equality. His other major work, the Synchronoptic History of the World, was an attempt to tell the story of all the world’s peoples, giving equal weight to each and avoiding Eurocentrism. He was also keenly aware of the power of ideas and well-versed in the techniques of getting those ideas across—in fact, his 1945 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Berlin was titled, The Use of Film as a Propaganda Medium. But he wasn’t a cartographer and it may be that his genuine sense of mission and flair for promotion ended up obscuring better approaches to the worthy goal of fairly and accurately representing the world in two dimensions. Nevertheless, he deserves credit for popularizing the issue and for educating the public about the problems of conventional mapping in general and the Mercator Projection in particular.

Arno Peters wasn’t the only 20th century non-cartographer visionary who ended up inventing and popularizing his own map projection—Buckminster Fuller also gave it a try. Fuller (1895-1983) patented his Dymaxion Projection in 1946, based on the simple, brilliant idea of projecting the surface of the globe onto a regular solid. The 1946 version used a cuboctahedron (8 triangular faces, 6 square faces), but by 1954 Fuller was using a slightly modified icosahedron (20 triangular faces) so that the resulting Dymaxion Map could present all the Earth’s land masses without breaking them up. ‘Dymaxion’, incidentally, is a contraction of DYnamic MAXimum tensION and is little more than ‘genius style’ marketing language—Fuller applied the term to cars, houses and even to his preferred sleeping pattern.

As a mathematical feat, the Dymaxion Projection is considerably more sophisticated than the Gall-Peters Projection and consequently has a number of technical advantages. To begin with, distortion of shape and area is minimal and, more importantly, the distortion is evenly distributed. This compares favorably to most projections, which generally distort quite a bit in some parts of the globe but relatively little elsewhere. The Gall-Peters Projection is one of the worst at this since it—somewhat ironically—distorts the shape of developed countries very little but badly deforms the undeveloped countries that Peters was trying to represent more fairly!

The Dymaxion Projection can also be unfolded in different ways for different purposes—that is, the icosahedron can be laid flat with different countries at the center. This avoids much of the almost automatic emphasis that most maps give to Europe and North America, and also avoids the tendency to think of North as ‘up’, thus avoiding a great deal of unconscious cultural bias. In Fuller’s view it was better to think in terms of ‘in’—toward the center of the Earth—and ‘out’—toward the stars.

The most common method of laying out the Dymaxion Map is with the North Pole more or less at the center, and seeing the Earth this way is a revelation. The separate continents appear to be not separate at all! Rather, they look like more like one large island, somewhat fragmented by water but still essentially one mass surrounded by ocean. It’s a compelling view of the world and a startling contrast to any rectangular wall map.

Like Peters, Fuller was a tireless promoter of his many ideas and the Dymaxion Map held a special place because of its role in what he called the ‘World Game’. The game was (and is) played with the aid of a large map that dynamically displays multiple world variables. Fuller’s hope was that the game would evolve into a method for global citizens to directly make responsible decisions about allocation of global resources. To that end, he even produced a basketball court sized version of the Dymaxion Map, dubbed the ‘Big Map’, and presented it to Congress! Though still widely played, the World Game has, alas, so far failed to replace current methods of governance.

Presently, Buckminster Fuller tends to be remembered for his invention of the geodetic dome and little else. One gets the impression that he was simply too prolific to be taken seriously—his ideas and philosophies are so numerous and so far outside the mainstream that it may take the rest of us a generation or two to catch up. But it’s a shame that his unique map is not better known, and almost a crime that the relatively clumsy Gall-Peters Projection seems to have displaced it as an educational tool and wall map. All of Peters’ stated goals—fairness, equality, non-bias—are better achieved by Fuller’s simple, elegant and brilliant creation.

There are several Internet sources for information on the above topics: bfi.org is the address of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and a good start for those interested in Fuller’s life and work, and odt.org sells Peters Projection maps and also has a good biography of Arno Peters.

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I love the philosophical implications of modern physics, but to me, it always seems a little far away from my reality when it is evoked on galactic or subatomic scales of existence. I mean to a fly water tension is a greater force than gravity which is far from my experience and flies are the size of solar systems to atoms, let alone an electron or a quark. It’s just sooo…. far away.

I’m a little more comfortable in the organic world of biochemistry and even there the world is disintegrating from form into information. If one takes the modern view of the body as a system that is continually rebuilding itself then chronic disease can only be understood as misinformation repeating itself over and over in the newly rebuilt system that is the body.

According to Bruce Lipton, i.e. Biology of Belief and other writings, biological information is not some predestined DNA code of conduct, but the expression of that code which can be strongly influenced by the human mind.

What prevents us from living in a (healthy) reality that conforms in every way to our personal vision? It is our beliefs that prevent us, of course, and if we can change our beliefs we can act like the alchemist in Ted Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemists Gate” and “search for tiny pores in the skin of reality, like the holes that worms bore into wood, and upon finding one he was able to expand and strech it the way a glassblower turns a dolop of molten glass into a long-necked pipe…”

The story mentioned, by the way, is exceptionally beautiful, especially when read aloud amongst friends during a drive to Baja.

we ourselves are made up of intangible mystery

Physicists tell us that there is no bulk, there is only information. ‘Matter’ is made of molecules, and molecules are made of atoms, and atoms are made of subatomic particles and subatomic particles aren’t particles at all, they’re waveforms, or probabilities, or concepts, or something but they’re definitely not little marbles that bounce off of each other. We can say they’re energy, whatever that means, but we can also say they’re information, bits of code that interact with other bits of code in predictable ways that cumulatively add up to what we optimistically call the ‘laws’ of nature.

This is non-intuitive. Deep down, most of us live in a Newtonian world where gravity controls everything and the apple in our hand is made of tiny tinkertoy molecules. If we think at all about atoms, we tend to visualize them as miniature solar systems, with electrons and positrons orbiting a nucleus. This is the picture often presented in school textbooks, but it is astoundingly wrong – there is no way to effectively visualize subatomic structures because they don’t look like anything.

Acknowledging this truth, letting it sink in, can be a little frightening because it means that we live in a world with, literally, no solid ground; everything we observe is made up of intangible mystery and in fact we ourselves, the observers, are made up of intangible mystery.

The fact is, we live in a completely inscrutable world, a world where literally anything can be true. For if there are no little bits of matter, most of the limits we place on reality are meaningless. A world without bulk is a world where realities can overlap and William Blake was merely being observant when he said,

“… a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”

In fact, Blake and all the other visionary mystics that have graced humanity’s existence seem to be on to something – their visions of deep unity, of paradises and other realms existing along side our quotidian lives, of immortal selves that transcend the body, are more in line with the true nature of reality than the Newtonian sleep of our daily existence.

Many of the phenomena that so puzzle us are easily explained by a world in which anything is possible. The UFOs that are seen by 1,000s every year, the supernatural intrusions of gods, demons and ghosts, the mysteries of crop circles, Bigfoot, dark matter and, well, everything can all be as firmly grounded in the same sort of fungible reality that we exist in.

But suppose all this folderol is actually the case, and we really do live in a world of overlapping realities and mystic visions… how do we profit from that knowledge? If any conceivable reality is as potentially real as the one we live in, what prevents us from living in a reality that conforms in every way to our personal vision of a perfect world? As near as I can tell, the answer is… nothing prevents us, nothing at all.

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