There is a crow in there

At this time of year, at least I can see them when they are waiting for the food.

Though Mr Driveway chose a more leafy tree.

That first tree, a lime with all those twigs overlapping and all complicated, was aligned with what I was listening to - a second time through James Bridle's Ways of Being. I liked this book first time around, but I think I am enjoying it even more this time.

What I was thinking about on this walk was the Coastline Paradox. Basically, this Quaker Lewis Fry Richardson realised that the (reported) length of a coastline increased as the tool used to measure it became finer. The finer the measure, the more little ins and outs you measure. But this could go on indefinitely, with you adding the measurements of each electron, quasar, whatever. The idea was given a theoretical framework with fractal theory. But it made me think of Zeno's paradoxes... to cover a distance, you must first cover half that distance, but to cover half of the distance, you must first cover half of half of the distance - ad infinitim.

Turn that into a metaphor for understanding a system. To understand a system, say an ecosystem, you have to understand some part of it, say the trees, but to understand the trees, you have to understand roots. To understand roots, you have to understand fungi... or nitrogen... there is always something deeper and beyond.

This is why science is an eternal quest for the philosopher's stone. Why they search for the one thing, the turtle under the turtle under the turtle that the whole thing rests on.

Maybe, just maybe, that's not the way to go about it. After all, how much does an electron tell you about a rain forest?