My new booklet on the Lublin region!

As I write this I am about half way through proofing a new project – a booklet about this region of Poland based on about a dozen of my images and the kind of things that interest me about the region and which actually led to me creating the images.

I want to produce an alternative to the rather boringly similar other guides I have seen, and I have seen many, something that talks about stuff one does not need some qualification in the history or architecture to appreciate. Basically, I tie together a series of reminiscences to form a kind of story, introducing a little bit of many things to make the region more understandable, to have a bit more depth.

Anyway, here is a sample:

The Wisła River, or Vistula as we know it, forms the western border of the Lublin province, and has a number of bridges and ferries operating along its length. Rivers have always been some of the most awkward things to pass when we wish to travel on land as they are not something that we can simply go round. The particular ferry route we chose is quite ancient, lying as it does on the trade route between Krakow and Lublin, at the popular small town of Kazimierz Dolny. On this occasion we had intended on using the car ferry, but were thwarted by water too shallow for anything but a passenger boat to traverse. While this latter style of boat is today made of glass fiber, its general design is pretty much the same as the wooden boats that have long been used on local lakes and rivers.

I plan to publish it as an ebook, so it is available anywhere for very little money. I am sure I shall make some mistakes along the way, but it feels good to be doing something a little different.

Trevor

The God ‘n’ Science Question

The God ‘n’ Science Question. What is the nature of belief? Can we prove it? And why is my glass empty, I’m not a pessimist!

The God ‘n’ Science Question

Don’t worry. I am not about to convert you to anything. Honest.

Cross my beer and hope to fly!

Sometimes, though, although I believe in God, I find that I feel closer to atheists than people from my own religion, and although this should be a ridiculous state of affairs, at least I can safely nip down the bar and have a few with an atheist without any fear that they will start an inappropriate witter about something they have heard and would like to repeat to me about God.

However, it is not the thinking of the Goddy-two-shoes that I wish to discuss here, but that of their direct cousins, the science-purists.

I recently made a comparison of belief in the one true God with the belief in the one true Math, especially as there are people who believe that anything beyond simple math is either magic or a cart load of cow end product. So, there are people who both believe in Math and state that it is an exact science, that one plus one is always two – even though this is often not true. Yes, one apple I buy down the market plus another one apple should, we hope, always equal two apples, but there is also a classic chemistry demonstration where you add one glassful of one liquid to one glassful of a second liquid and end up with less than 2 glassfuls of liquid. OK, it is due to the differences in molecular sizes of the liquid, but the point is that math is not true everywhere all the time, and when we discover it isn’t we have to change something in our understanding to make our belief in maths true again. And that is OK.

One of the many arguments I have heard why belief in any god is untrue is that religious stories are no more than histories and fictional stories. So what, I say, why do they have to be true? I used a story about apples earlier to describe an aspect of maths, but it was not a true, factual description of an actual event as I have never in my life bought any apples from any market. Does my fictional apple buying story prove that Math is not true? No, that would be silly, but so is disregarding any god based on a story about that god or his or her religion.

Science is not the rock-steady fixed thing which education often suggests, there are often no answers, many answers, or incorrect answers later becoming correct answers and vice versa. Up until a couple of centuries ago scientists believed that heat was a fluid and coldness a second fluid (the latter being made up of sharp particles, hence accounting for the ‘sting’ of cold). It was a great theory, something seemingly rock-solid that could be taught. It was only when someone observed a cannon being bored with a blunt tool that it was ‘proved’ that the boring tool could not possibly contain that much heat fluid to keep a cannon hot for days that Science moved on to a new Truth.

The point is that it is hard to arrive at a proof until we first have a belief. In a way, proofs are merely those beliefs that we can prove, or prove sufficiently well to convince people in our time, while scientists are people who have a set of beliefs that they wish to prove and accept both that they may never find their proof or discover proof that disproves their belief.

Belief is the glass we keep in the hope that one day it will be filled with our chosen beverage.

My loss of this feeling of the certainty of school-room science stems from my personal experience of life in research and development. I never could predict what new invention I would make, but every time it happened it rewrote part of my understanding of the world, of science. Life in research is often like standing on water that happens to be able to support you for that brief moment it passes under your feet as it flows from the chaos of the future towards the chaos of the past: science is not fixed, it is a continuity.

To be honest, I believe equally in God, interstellar travel and the continuance of mankind, even though I have proof for none of them. Do we all need to share the same beliefs in some kind of god any more than we share the same tastes in wine, women and song?

Polish Cottage Interior

Dom Babcie

When one drives around the rural areas of Poland it is still common to see old wooden cottages, although there number is decreasing as they are replaced by homes made of cheaper materials, such as concrete blocks. The two issues of most significance are that wooden cottages are expensive to maintain, and most are still owned by people who, in some form or other, have work related to agriculture. In a way it is sad to say, but the future of cottages is often highly dependent on being bought by people with urban work, who can afford to pay the costs of living in rural housing. This drives up the costs of buying homes in the countryside and in villages, making agricultural work more difficult to achieve as a profession.

Since wooden cottages of the types found in Poland can be readily dismantled, it is not uncommon for them to be sold as a kit, ready for you to reassemble on your own land. Sadly, though, many are just allowed to decay until the only solution is demolition, although some are being clad in thermal blocks to continue their life emulating a more modern home.

To purchase a print of this image: http://shop.photo4me.com/picture.aspx?id=365885