Comments for Gavan P.L. Watson

Comment on Black Widow Spiders and Toronto: No Need to Panic by Paul

Paul — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:41:58 +0000

Yeah, be thankful you’re not living in suburban Sydney (Australia). There have been norther black widows in Ontario for years. People just need to be careful around woodpiles, stone piles, outhouses, etc. Just don’t stick your hands in without looking first.

Comment on Bell Canada & SP Data spread misinformation about the coming digital television switch by Gavan

Gavan — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 18:27:02 +0000

Mike. I don’t work for a cable company, so I can’t answer your questions.

Comment on Bell Canada & SP Data spread misinformation about the coming digital television switch by mike

mike — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 23:19:42 +0000

gaven lets be more specific on this issue.

number 1- i have a hd tv quite new and currently with a cable company offering basic cable (anolgue) for 30.00 a month. The dtv package with box not including HD can be 50.00 or more . THEREFORE cable companies charging for dtv and hd will cost you.

When the conversion happens in aug 2011 what happens .
1) Do i get digital picture for free
2) Cable companies are billing you for dtv – in 2011 what happens , no more billing for digital tv which means loss of income for cable companies.
3) Will cable companies hike up the basic cable bill which in 2011 will be digital.

So do i need a box from the cable company to receive dtv or will they hike up the cost of cable tv to retain there revenue.

yes hd can be free ota , but in small towns you may not receive reception even with those hd attennas that are for sale currently in the market. thx please respond

Comment on Finding, seeing, identifying, recording, sharing by Is it JUST a dog? « Grove of Blue

Is it JUST a dog? « Grove of Blue — Fri, 28 May 2010 17:45:39 +0000

[...] roles in our lives. Certainly all animals to some extent get hidden from view at times — people ignore birds, and people who DO go birding at times ignore individual birds… people ignore the mundane microfauna that live around them: squirrels, pigeons, house [...]

Comment on Vibrant Matter reading group by thejtree

thejtree — Thu, 27 May 2010 13:09:08 +0000

I’m intrigued… not sure I have the money or the time with my diss proposal to pick it up right now. Maybe I’ll borrow your copy when you’re done :)

Comment on Vibrant Matter reading group by michael-

michael- — Thu, 27 May 2010 07:34:23 +0000

welcome to reading rabble Gavan! Archive Fire :::: 'Skepticism, Vitalism and the Ecology of Politics' pre-reading Bennett’s ‘Vibrant Matter’

Comment on Finding, seeing, identifying, recording, sharing by Gavan

Gavan — Wed, 26 May 2010 11:04:13 +0000

I think when birding is enacted as a rigorous para-ornithology, then birds become little more than inscriptions. It’s not science, but perhaps the set practices that get legitimized. Yet, I do agree, and found, that practices go beyond they simple cataloguing of sightings. Or, even more difficult to tease apart, birds were counted but also engaged from a different ethical standpoint. It’s something of a fractal—each persons’ practice is so similar and yet so different that the challenge is trying to acknowledge these differences without it all falling apart.

Comment on Finding, seeing, identifying, recording, sharing by michael-

michael- — Tue, 25 May 2010 18:37:41 +0000

I totally agree with what you say here. I guess the next question, at least for me, is: ‘is scientific classification, or coding necessarily anathema to a deep (affective and cognitive) and meaning-full phenomenological encounters will animals?’

I would suspect ‘science’ as a set or tools and discourses is not necessarily cognitively (in the broad sense) restrictive in terms of deeper waves of aesthetic experience, but can become so – can be enacted as such – under certain life-conditions.

I would argue that hominids are at least capable of developing a modes of perception, apprehension, understanding and practice that enact ways of being which generate a sophisticated and deep ecological awareness. Human sentience, I suspect (or maybe just hope), can be aesthetically oriented/enacted towards a rich balance between the various intelligences (affective, kinesthetic, conceptual, mathematic, etc).

Many ‘translational’ and technic issues to sort out first I imagine…

Cheers~

Comment on Finding, seeing, identifying, recording, sharing by Gavan

Gavan — Tue, 25 May 2010 11:04:29 +0000

Ah, this is the question that I ultimately struggle with Michael. I’m not sure it is classification per se, as humans have been classifying organisms our entire evolutionary life. All kinds of folk taxonomies exist, and are at work at the same time people are IDing to species. My first suggestion is that science’s official knowledge-making endeavour has such power over the practices of birders (over other ways of enacting these relationships into being) that classification to species does abstract the phenomenological core. And it is the dematerialization of individual birds’ lives, as they move from observed individual in an larger ecological context to identified species to sighting and then record, that I would argue can make it an act of alienation.

And thanks for the comment. I appreciate your blog and the kind of questions you’re grappling with. We’re in similar boats—not philosophers—but also grappling with the ontology of beings and trying to defining a different way to engage with the more-than-human.

Comment on Finding, seeing, identifying, recording, sharing by michael-

michael- — Tue, 25 May 2010 05:12:10 +0000

i wonder if the classificatory aspects of birding fractures, or refracts, or otherwise distracts from the aesthetic experience enough that birding thus becomes ‘mechanical’ and alienating???