This is a park by my house. There are lots of soccer fields, but you can't use them unless you have a scheduled game. The soccer area is about the size of a neighborhood. Most of the time these fields are completely empty and if you try to practice on them a guy from the city shows up in a truck and tells you to leave. Although the birds make good use of the fields.


Gah. This building is ugly. Not to be negative or anything but it's just a fact. I wish they would cover it with some trees. It's surrounded by a large field and you can see it from very far away.


This is my middle school. this building has a common ornament used in many buildings now a days which is the oddly placed windows. I don't know how that will be treated in the future. I think it might bother people like they are like god the window thing! I get it! Oh god!



This is an interesting crop of my house. All the foliage gives this false sense of place. I didn't even recognize this as my house when I saw the photo.

This seems like an intentional solution to a potentially unaesthetic problem. The AC unit seems to be both machine and decoration. The wall with the foliage on it seems to cut off parts of the unit to make something interesting happen. I doubt the AC unit was designed just for that spot so really the considerations to start dealing with the shape of the AC machine as a given and work from there. Things like the wall can be considered in many ways but the AC unit cannot. I image designing for this is a lot like playing the Sims. Where you can build quite a different amount of stuff but you are still kind of stuck with lego like pieces.

I'm not sure what to think about buildings like these. It's cheeky on purpose ( most obviously with the odd window placement). But does the structure work well with its environment? It seems like the building was designed to be placed in many places like a fast food building. I wouldn't be surprised if there was another one of these standing someplace else in the country.



This is the same building from a previous picture but this time it is obscured by a gas station and some trees. What stands out in particular is the very bright illuminated gas station to the hazy naturally lit office building. It is kind of like watching a television program where one character is in high definition and another character is black and white and all grainy.

My mail box is very building like. It uses the same bricks that make the house. I always thought they looked rather silly, but everyone has them in this area. It seems like a lot of material to make a mailbox out of. They also are a pain to fix if a car hits it.

The arch at the top is curious though. Almost like a decoration for the sake of decoration. The bricks around the mail box seem to celebrate the mail boxes curvature. Now that I think of it, the form of the mailbox is somewhat similar to the brick structure only that the brick structure is elongated on the sides. I wonder if that was intentional or coincidental.

It also seems kind of weird to have this huge solid mass and only have a tiny box in it.

This building is in downtown Dallas. I often am interested when electrical wires start to play with buildings. It usually seems so intrusive to the building, kind of like a bug on a television set. I don't know if architects actually plan if the building will have power lines around them. This building in particular seems to be crowded by the wires and also possibly the road and some of the buildings around it.


I like this photo because these buildings seem kind of sneaky. They are peaking at me and I am peaking at them. The shape of the buildings are also truncated causing them to be something completely different than the building is look at from a whole.

Outside when it's night time outside my home

My neighborhood is a typical suburban development. I would like to imagine that this way of building is just a fashion on it's way out of style, but it's where I've lived for a while and there it is. I figure there's merit in giving it a really close look-at. There is a lot to be said but probably it's best to start with baby steps.



This here is my house. To me it is barely a visual thing. It is like a thing you stare at yet you don't recall anything in particular. At night I think this is more so since much of the building is turned into a silhouette. It barely exists at night.



Russell creek signs are at every street entrance. They take on this plain look. Very blocky. The streetlight lights it into a strange green color. There is something about it that reminds me of a funeral.



Some of the homes make me feel ticklish. They are deceptively funky. It all seems to be in the decorations with the sidding, gutters, windows, etc. It can be startling when I try to approach the neighborhood as obnoxious urban sprawl. The building shows itself in this ways as if it jumps out of a box to say "tadaaaaa!"

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Plato's Phaedo

Let us first take for instance the notion that the body is a prison for the soul. That is explicitly a Pythagorean ideal. Also in this dialogue the play on contraries is also a Pythagorean geared argument. The focus on Pythagorean ideals is also important considering the narrator, Phaedo, is also a Pythagorean. Without understanding this, the bias of the narration would be missed entirely.

The dialogue is not so much Socrates telling Simmias and Cebes what actually happens to the human soul, but is more of an attempt to calm them and to make his last moments alive pleasant. The Pythagorean approach which is heavily based on mathematics (body + soul = life) will not prepare someone to handle their own death. Socrates is explicit about this in his allusion to the second sailing. Even if one views death as the separation of the soul from the body, it will do little good to explain what actually happens. Actual life is not like an equation where once a body and soul are split, they can simply be brought back to life by the addition of them again.

The arguement isn't that Socrates is defending the immortality of the soul. The argument is that Socrates is trying to console Simmias and Cebes who would be devastated to think that the soul dissolves at death. The dialectical argument is geared towards Simmias and Cebes who have a way of understanding the world that will not explain death. Socrates is not teaching Simmias and Cebes about the immortality of the soul. Instead, Socrates is teaching Simmias and Cebes how to die, which they ultimately will have to do.

Platonic 'Forms'

In the Platonic dialogs, Socrates uses forms to demonstrate that people use 'forms' to justify arguments (such as Justice, Good, Noble). Socrates demonstrates that these 'forms' weren't gathered from the senses. You cannot see Justice, but only reason about it. The separation of the senses from the 'forms' is what gives the 'forms' special consideration from knowledge obtained by the senses. This means that 'forms' can be more susceptible to human longing.

In many ways 'forms' are anti-philosophical. They are the projections of the soul (better understood as pure thought) being a slave to the body. People will want something and invent something like love to explain and justify why they are doing this. The dialogs do not say forms exists but only that they exist out of human thoughtfulness that is distorted by the body. We do not see reality directly but only through special lenses. Forms are an invention of the human imagination to make life relevant to how are able to interact with the world.

Furthermore, It is well understood that Socrates makes bad arguments on purpose. The Socratic method is all about putting forth an argument and refining it and not about making an airtight thesis. All the arguments that Socrates' companions bring up require an assumption that forms exist. If you read closely, you will find that Socrates is quite critical of forms. While Socrates is arguing with his friends. He defines the argument as other people present it or how things are commonly thought about. Near the end of the dialogs Socrates then, after his friends still do not understand they are being foolish, offers a parable of some sort showing how reason is limited to certain things that pertain to how humans think. His friends still do not understand but we as readers can more easily recognize their foolishness.

Simply put, the tradition of philosophy that was started by Plato is a pursuit of knowledge with the understanding that reason is part of being a human and is not actual reality. This differs drastically from what maybe seen as the scientific pursuit of knowledge which tries to separate the human component of knowledge meaning that what science discovers is not part of human reasoning but an actual law of nature outside and independent of human thought.