Paul Hurt's linkage site: home page

Most pages (but not this one) use an innovation in Web navigation, 'the rail,' a long, thin band on the left margin.
Clicking on the rail gives a means of reaching top of page very quickly. At top of page, links are provided for
rapid page travel, travel within the page (to different regions of the page) and travel to other pages.

The British Library (the national library of the United Kingdom) has selected all of this site for preservation, in the
Arts and Humanities / Literature archive and the Computer Science, Information Technology and Web Technology archive

I've been working on new, very demanding projects. The time I have available for other projects is restricted.
Pages I intended to revise / extend, pages with formatting issues, will have to remain for now in their present state.
The images which are the 'exceptions' mentioned above, images without a link to a page, will be provided with links
but again, other demands will delay the process of providing these links. In some cases, new pages will need to be created.

The 'New Growing System' is one of the new projects. It has been awarded 'Patent Pending' in the United States and
offers a wide range of benefits in vineyards, orchards and in the growing of various polytunnel crops. The advantages
include very substantial and wide-ranging environmental advantages. There's detailed information on the page
vineyard-orchard-polytunnel-growing-system. The invention title is 'Integrated dual layer structure and structure-group system
with modifiable components and configurations for growing, protected cropping, protected working, materials handling,
water collecting and water conservation for use in vineyards and orchards and as a polytunnel substitute.'

The greenhouse I designed and constructed and the New Growing System (images of the greenhouse as well as the
New Growing System are included below) offer similar advantages, aesthetic as well as environmental. The practical
advantages include effective plant protection in cold weather, effective ways of reducing internal temperatures in heat
waves, facilities for collecting and storing water, essential at a time when drought has become a major threat, and ways of
making use of natural precipitation to a great extent in this protected cropping system.

A full page article on the greenhouse design which I wrote has been published, with photographs, in the magazine of
The National Allotment Society (Issue 2, 2023.) Obviously, publication of the article by the National Allotment Society
doesn't amount to endorsement of any of the diverse material on the site.

PHD-C, Paul Hurt Design-Construction - Innovations for
farms, gardens, workshops, construction of small buildings, the home

PHD-C, Paul Hurt Design-Construction, offers genuine innovation, practicality
and a concern for aesthetics in the design and construction of

Agricultural growing systems, as in the invention now 'patent pending' in the United States.
Greenhouses - greenhouses with presence, flexible, adaptable, with large, removable panels
to lower the internal temperature during heat waves and to allow rainfall to water the crops in
the greenhouse, reducing use of hose-pipes, with water-collecting surfaces to conserve water.
Other water-collecting surfaces, directing water to storage containers, a pond or directly to plants.
Implementing green roofs, eg, the roof of the PHD-C Greenhouse, with grape vines / hop plants, with
no need for bulky, heavy soil or compost.

New bed-and-board systems in gardens / allotments, with many advantages.
A solar composter, speeding up production of compost by the greenhouse effect.
A solar wood store, speeding up the drying of wood for efficient burning in wood stoves.

Wildlife aids - a bird table, a swift nesting box, very different from all existing designs -
easily constructed, easily installed at a height without a ladder - it takes a little over a minute.
Hydraulic machinery for log splitting / apple pressing, elegant, useful furniture when not in use.
Other domestic furniture- a table, a bookcase, storage systems - distinctive designs, not copies.
A radical new roofing system, allowing inclined roofs (including water collecting roofs)
to be constructed as easily as flat roofs, within (not above) a new walling system.
Workbenches for woodworking / metalworking, easy to construct, easy to dismantle,
easy to move from place to place, but solid and immovable in use, with ample storage
space and versatile working surfaces.
A vice for woodworking, with pressure exerted by a ratchet strap, not a screw thread.
Van to campervan conversions which are cost-effective, practical and harmonious.
Simple aids to moving heavy loads up slopes, and on level ground, in gardens / allotments.
Simple aids to safe working, e.g. in sheet metal work.
As well as contributions to design / construction in fields other than these.

PHD-C (which began as PHD) has never been a business. I have never earned money
from my work. It has been carried out for personal reasons but with the hope of
giving wider benefits. The time may come when I do start a business, although the demands
on my time will make that not at all easy. Other factors will make it not at all easy.

Linkages as well as contrasts underlie to a greater or lesser extent most of this site.
I stress methods, techniques, ideas, concepts, values that are common to very
different fields of activity, often ones which unify, and not only in design / construction
but far more widely - the project TTL, 'Theme, Theory, Practice.'

A project which is a substantial part of my work, in the field of comparative literature:
'literature, broadly defined, and other spheres of human activity, including history, politics,
philosophy, art and science' and in multiple languages. Work in the field of poetic technique
and innovation in poetics is a separate, linked project.

One interest of mine, music, has no coverage in any detail. I do include brief information about
some writing of mine on an aspect of violin technique. It was included in a violin concerto which
received its world premiere at a Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall. The concerto includes
text as well as the music, obviously the main component of the work. I had studied with the
Hungarian violinist Rudolf Botta, commemorated by the concerto. Before switching to the violin
and viola, I was a cellist, and played the cello in an orchestra which included professional players,
the members of 'The Lindsays' (The Lindsay String Quartet.)

South Yorkshire Counter-Evangelism is a recent addition to the list of projects. It makes extensive
use of earlier work and has close linkages with issues concerning freedom of expression.
Its object is 'Scrutinizing and holding to account selected Christians, Christian churches and
Christian organizations in South Yorkshire and beyond.'

South Yorkshire Advocacy for Israel is an even newer project. My page Israel gives more information.

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Images are an important part of the site. So too are ideas and concepts, particularly
the concepts I call {themes}. The project TTL, 'Theme, theory, practice' involves practical
applications as well as abstract theory.

I discuss many, many applications of {themes} in pages of the site. These two lists give
some idea of their range and variety.

List 1 gives examples organized by {theme}. Each {theme} has its own page in the site.

List 2 gives examples which are all discussed in the page 'Interpretations.'
The treatment is generally more thorough, making use of the symbols of {theme} theory.

1.
{adjustment}
Pseudo-science
Commercial pressures
Nietzsche
Goya and violence

{completion}
Mathematical proof
Truth tables
Digital electronics
Biological taxonomy
Aristotle's 'telos'
Gothic and Renaissance architecture

{direction}
Generalised linkage connective
Implication
Material conditional
Teleological arguments
Trends
Vectors and directed lines
Ferromagnetism
Entropy
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 3.144

{distance}
The key system in music
modulation in poetry
The unities of drama
Narrative {distance}
'Du' and 'Sie' in German
Edward Bullough's aesthetic {distance}
Wordsworth's boy at Windermere
The subjunctive and optative in Thucydides iii, 22
Web design and {distance}
The law of negligence

{modification}
The Journey
James Connolly and the Easter Rising
Innovation
Nietzsche
Transformation in Rembrandt and Rilke
Mind, body and the rest of the world
George Orwell: capital and corporal punishment
Activism and opposition
{modification} by {diversification}
The necessary, the impossible and the contingent
The ship of Theseus
Invariance
Variables and pretensions
Corroboration and falsification
Typography and action
Modal properties

{ordering}
Ethical decision-making
Digital technology
Military medicine: triage
Priorities in politics
Dependence
Nietzsche
{ordering} and {grouping}
The mind and concentration

{restriction}
Limitation and limits
Disappointment and imperfection
Exemption: slavery
Quantum mechanics
Jokes
Linkage schemata
((surveys))
Framing
Linkage isolation
Isolation and abstraction
Isolation and 'The Whole Truth'
Isolation and distortion
Poetry and prose
Kant and the limits to knowledge
Allowing and disallowing

{reversal}
Thermodynamic reversal
Elastic deformation
Negation
Undoing
Inversion and musical intervals

{separation}
Of people: Shakespeare
Of people: Auschwitz-Birkenau
Commuters
Between past and present
Vegetables and fruit
Human characteristics and versatility
Thermodynamic separation
{separation} and application-sphere
{separation} and separability
Causation
Areas of competence

{substitution}
Evaluating the thing itself
Mathematical and scientific {substitution}

2.
Commutative operators
Demarcation: science-metaphysics
Endothermic and exothermic reactions
Foundationalism and coherentism
Implication
Induction
Inertia
Infinitesimals
Interchangeability
Intervals
Inverses of functions
Kantian categories
Mendelian factors
Meta- and para-studies
Newton's first law of motion
Newton's third law of motion
Pacifism
Particle in a box
Polish (prefix) notation
Referents (ambiguity of, in similes)
Regions
Schopenhauer's pessimism
Selection: natural and artificial
SI units
Thermodynamic systems as partitions

{

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Email address: paulhurt100@gmail.com

About this site gives introductory information on a wide variety of topics, including this: 'Emails sent to me are treated as confidential. Emails sent to me won't be released into the public domain, including publication on this site, unless with the sender's permission.'

Mikhail Bakhtin writes of "Dostoevsky's passion for journalism and his love of the newspaper, his deep and subtle understanding of the newspaper page as a living reflection of the contradictions of contemporary society in the cross-section of a single day, where the most diverse and contradictory material is laid out, extensively, side by side..." ('Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics,' translation of Caryl Emerson.)

My approach is in part systematic and rigorous, sometimes at a high level of abstraction, but I see no contradiction between system and rigour on the one hand and on the other, passion, compassion, activism, humour, an intense concern for the health of language and the vitality of culture, a whole range of other concerns. A systematic study can reveal gaps very clearly. The meticulous work of cartographers helped to show explorers which regions were still unexplored, to suggest new areas for risk and discovery. Activism and activists - deluded and deranged activists as well as ones I respect and admire - politics and politicians, have a part to play in the pages of the site, but also journalists, poets, musicians, scientists, engineers, labourers, scholars, miners, and many more, including animals.

The 'diverse material' in this site covers a very wide range, some of it of journalistic, some of it academic, some of it personal, some of it practical - working with wood, metal, other materials, designing and constructing buildings, other structures and sometimes machines, the growing of a wide range of plants. Some of it is concerned with aesthetics, some of it is concerned with ethics - with humane values and harshness, unavoidable harshness as well as harshness which can be reduced by reform or technical advances, harshness in peace and harshness in war, industry and nature.

Ethics: theory and practice has technical and non-technical sections. It introduces symbolic notation for 'outweighing,' a concept which I see as fundamental in ethics.

Pages concerned with value judgments include appreciation as well as criticism - fair-minded and balanced, I think, even when outspoken. There's criticism of anti-feminists as well as radical feminists, criticism of people who oppose 'woke' views as well as criticism of 'woke' views, criticism of Christian beliefs without assuming that non-Christians and anti-Christians have a monopoly of good sense, without assuming that they are incapable of stupidity (and worse, much worse), arguments and evidence in favour of 'conservative' views, but with significant reservations. The page on university education contains criticism of some aspects of some universities (Cambridge is the focus of attention, with comment on others). But in general, the astonishing achievement of universities vastly outweighs the failures.

My poetry - very varied - appears on the page Poems. Some of the poems have also been published in literary magazines.

The study of linkages is one of the broadest of all studies. Linkages / contrasts, are fundamental organizing principles of the site. I discuss linkages in many different fields and create new ones - there are many innovations here.

Many linkages are problematic and disputed. Astrologers find a linkage between human personality and celestial objects whilst skeptics find no convincing evidence. Scientific advances involve new linkages: Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation proposed a linkage between all the bodies in the Universe, Darwin's Theory of Evolution new linkages between organisms.

Most of the material is non-technical. The page introducing {theme} theory (which includes linkage and contrast) is one exception. I explain some conceptual innovations and go beyond natural language, developing a symbolic notation with many uses and substantial advantages. Pages which make use of this notation include Interpretations. Most of these concern topics in mathematics, physics, chemistry, philosophy and logic, including commutative operators, thermodynamic systems as partitions, inverses of functions, indeterminate logic, induction, prefix notation, foundationalism, coherentism, S.I. units.