Naturespace | Blog

Thundergod has been reviewed by The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Check it out! If anyone has any questions about Thundergod, please feel free to post your question here. We take customer satisfaction very seriously, but we have no means to respond to you via the app store. That’s why we have this blog!

Location Spotlight:  St. Vincent National Wildlife Refuge, Florida

About a quarter-mile offshore, at the mouth of the Apalachicola River in the Gulf of Mexico, is a small, undeveloped barrier island, St. Vincent National Wildlife Refuge. With many types of habitats, ranging from tidal marsh to freshwater lakes and streams, St. Vincent is a haven for many endangered species. Bald eagles, alligators, sea turtles, indigo snakes, colonies of bats, red wolves, and a vast compliment of migratory and tropical birds take up residence here.

With no motor vehicles allowed, and access to the island only by boat, St. Vincent is preserved in as natural a state as possible. Hunting is done in a managed way with the goal of maintaining wildlife populations at a level compatible with the habitat. Our visit to St. Vincent was a unique pleasure; the absence of motors always brings us joy, but it was the uniqueness of such a small island with so many diverse species and habitats that really stands out for us. The Naturespace track Infinite Shoreline was recorded here. Since it is at the mouth of the river, the waves strike the shore at a very oblique angle, which presents a waveline that cascades from right to left, as opposed to head-on. Totally unique, quiet, clean, diverse, and on the ocean; it is one of our favorite spots so far.

Much of what we experience these days is digital. Broadcast television is now completely digital. Most audio is digital. And everything you do on the Internet is digital. Most people know this. But, after contemplating this most obvious of concepts for a while, it occurred to me that all of these things have no mass.

Digital means that something is converted into numbers, or more specifically, a particular sequence of numbers. If you arrange the 0’s and 1’s in just the right way, you get a Spongebob Squarepants episode. When you purchase something on the Internet that is to be downloaded, such as Naturespace audio, or a movie off of iTunes, you are essentially purchasing a specific numerical sequence of zeros and ones, which, in and of itself, has no mass. But it does take up space. And each time it is copied, it takes up more space. There are many of these numerical sequences that are sold on the Internet.

Now it’s not as if you were out of zero’s and needed to buy more, or that you have all these leftover 1’s around from your Spongebob purchase last week because you used more zero’s watching it. You already have the 0’s and 1’s on your hard drive or whatever, you just need to arrange them correctly. Once the numerical sequence is created, it can be disseminated and copied easily, only requiring the energy to transfer the numbers, but not actually existing in the world the way that doughnut you are eating does. Want to eat that doughnut again? Gotta buy/make/get another. Wanna watch Spongebob again? Just run the numbers.

The digitizing of data has made it into something much more analogous to thoughts and ideas: mass-less information. Text used to require a page in a book, now it just appears on the screen. It seems like the world is becoming a lot more like a brain every day.