![\"water](\"http:\/\/farm5.static.flickr.com\/4025\/4711097973_4ce0b18a45.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The two things which have stuck in my mind most since last week’s Permaculture class are: water levelling, and the role of “apertures” in landscape formation.<\/p>\n
Sounds heavy, eh! And indeed, gravity does have a role to play in both!<\/p>\n
Our practical exercise of the day was A Beginner’s Guide to Surveying<\/em>. You’ve all seen those TAFE students out in the park with their Hi-Viz vests holding those funny looking devices on tripods? Yep, we got to play with that stuff! (but not the vests).<\/p>\n It was quite fun. There were laser levels, telescopic levels, and – my favourite – water levels.<\/p>\n The water levels (among the most ancient and low-tech of the levelling family) are based on the extraordinary (but perfectly logical) idea that water in a closed system always reaches a level. So if you have a long see-through hose filled with water, you can stretch it out as far as you like, and the top level of the water at both ends will be the same.<\/p>\n The same holds for a hose which is connected to a large water container – as in the demonstration Nick provided in class. He even coloured the water with blue dye to dramatise the effect. Here’s a few<\/a> more photos <\/a>of the process.<\/p>\n The main “learning outcome” from all of this watery-levelly business is that no matter how flat a piece of land might look and feel, it’s almost guaranteed that it slopes in one way or another! This comes as quite a surprise: the raw feel and instinct of experience versus the empirical evidence of measurement.<\/p>\n If you’re not careful with your existential stability, it can quite powerfully throw into question the relative up-ness and down-ness of our occupation of the planet. Take for example, this amazing sci-fi picture of a space station Torus<\/a> thingummy<\/a>. How would a water level operate, if its length was a significant proportion of this Torus’ curve?<\/p>\n Come to think of it, the Earth is curved! So how can anything<\/em> be “level” (except relative to the human scale?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The two things which have stuck in my mind most since last week’s Permaculture class are: water levelling, and the role of “apertures” in landscape formation. Sounds heavy, eh! And indeed, gravity does have a role to play in both! Our practical exercise of the day was A Beginner’s Guide to Surveying. You’ve all seen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[425,293],"tags":[486,419,119],"class_list":["post-190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agriculture","category-workplace-relations","tag-education","tag-milkwood","tag-permaculture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lucazoid.com\/bilateral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lucazoid.com\/bilateral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lucazoid.com\/bilateral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lucazoid.com\/bilateral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lucazoid.com\/bilateral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lucazoid.com\/bilateral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lucazoid.com\/bilateral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lucazoid.com\/bilateral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lucazoid.com\/bilateral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}