Windy Melbourne

Alas in the storm last night I lost 2 of my medium sized trees. My 4 metre high, spreading Blue Pacific, (Ceanothus), was just about to burst into their beautiful blue flowers. Now it is in ruins on the back lawn. We have spent several hours cutting it up into large branches. The roots were very shallow, consistent with trying to grow in our hard clay soil. So the rain and 130 km/hr gusts reported in Melbourne last night were just too much.
The other tree was a Cape Virgilia. This one is not supposed to last very long as it is a fast growing tree. Unfortunately the bees will have a tough time with these 2 trees about to provide heaps of flowers for them.
We have another eucalypt tree in a pot waiting for a spot in the garden so will have to get the stumps out, add clay breaker (again) and try and build the soil up. So far we have lost 7 trees to winds over the years, always the tall ones and largely due to a mixture of wind and rain.
On the good side there will be plenty of logs and kindling for the wood fire for next year.

Blogging and the death of traditional media

As a librarian I have heard about the coming death of the book for years. Now that the internet is a major means of information dissemination, I have now heard predictions of the disappearance of newspapers and "expert" opinion with the rise of the blog. Radio National discussed this recently in the Philosophers Zone "The epistemology of blogging".
Having just looked up the meaning of epistemology in Wikipedia, I found the discussion rather interesting.

• What is knowledge? Well that is what the philosophers are for. As far as I can see (in a library) knowledge is anything any author has published, mainly non-fiction but that also encompasses fiction (literature).
  
• How is knowledge acquired? Knowledge is largely acquired through experience, reading and requirement. If you ask the year 11 and 12 students at the moment, knowledge is what will get them through their exams (required knowledge).
  
• What do people know? Lots of stuff but each person only knows a fraction of the whole and believes other people are either more knowledgeable or less knowlegeable than themselves, with various emotions surrounding this.
  

So how does blogging effect the acquisition of knowledge?? As far as I can see the blog is like a book. You choose what you want to read and think, respond to that information according to your background, culture and interest. And you do not assimilate or think about the rest.
Not enought time and brainspace to watch TV, Youtube and read the latest book about climate change simultaneously.
So I doubt blogging will change us very much. We will each filter our knowledge through our "rose coloured" tints. The internet is useful in that you can argue anything and find someone to support you very easily.
As wikipdia explains "Belief is a subjective personal basis for individual behavior, while truth is an objective state independent of the individual. On occasion, knowledge and belief can conflict producing "cognitive dissonance".

Update on Solar power

Yeah!!!I received our pre-approval for the $8000 Solar Power rebate from the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts. So once my provider gets all its paperwork done and its installers organised we can get the actual producton the roof in time for the early summer.
I keep seeing more houses around the area sporting the solar panels so more and more of my fellow suburbanites are trying to do something for the environment (as well as take up government rebates)!

I was reading the ACF's latest Habitat magazine recently and was pleased to see an article on the media spin by large resource companies in their lobbying against the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Good reporting ACF!