Some North American Indians see a cat in the moon, unravelling the wool of the waning days.

Agricola, the seventeenth-century metallurgist [...] spoke of a juice (succus) that was a stone-forming spirit (lapidificus spiritus). Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, called it a “petrescent liquor,” from the Latin word petra, rock; and he thought there might be special juices for metals and other minerals [...] There were moments in the sevententh century when no one could admit that fossils might be the records of animals that lived before Biblical creation [...] It was supposed that “stone marrow” (merga) “dissolved and percolated” through the earth, sometimes forming bone shapes and other fossils. Alternatively, people thought that fossil shells had been real shells that were invaded by the stony liquor, a stone-forming spawn that seeped quietly up from the depths of the earth and overtook the slow and the dead.

James Elkins — What Painting Is, pp. 26-27

[The illustration of ammonites is from Boyle’s colleague Robert Hooke’s Lectures and Discourses of Earthquakes and Subterraneous Eruptions (1668?1700)]

Like Elvis Presley, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) had a professional career that fell into two distinct phases.

Vegas Wittgenstein? Maybe.

Nothing radically new in the book, but a decent overview of the field, with a nicely phenomenological slant (no mention of Bachelard though). For me, the most interesting discussion was of places versus spaces — something I’ve discussed here, briefly. Dourish and his colleagues seem to have similar views:

..the difference between space and place is an analytic one; space refers to the physical and mechanical aspects of the environment, whereas place refers to the ways in which space becomes vested with social meaning through the emergence of mutually consituted practices and behavioral norms when that space is populated…In fact there are many examples of such social practices developing in environments or media that do not base themselves on “real-world” models…There are places that succeed without an underlying model of space to build upon. “Space” is only a means to an end.