This is beautiful and moving to me in a way that is hard to express easily. Part of it is probably the sheer tweeness (not using that term disparagingly) of writing a love letter to a tree. I'm sure the samples in the article were pretty much the top of the barrel -- and I pray for the poor oaks which inevitably received a bunch of obscenities [^1]. But still, people are taking time out of their day to email the trees in their city.
I'm sitting here thinking about how this could be generalized into a mechanism of engaging with the world around us, which is possibly defeating the point; this is great more for the emergent gameplay of it (to steal a metaphor) than anything, and I think some weird startup that let you tweet your river would kind of rob the whole exercise of its innocence.
The Internet (or maybe technology in general, as if the two have a meaningful difference at this point) is so overwhelmingly used as a vehicle to accelerate maturity, to make us more jaded and cynical and disconnected. There's something great about this doing the opposite -- a glorified SMTP server letting us be more childlike, more honest and engaged in the world around us.
[^1]: There's, like, a 30% chance that there now exists someone in this world who has sent a dick pic to a tree.
I wish a boy would write me a love letter! It's awesome that trees now get get more love than many women in NYC but if I had the chance I would also write to my favorite tree in Central Park
Cool, although disappointingly the trees don't actually seem to have their own email addresses. I clicked on one and the address was "melbourneurbanforest@melbourne.vic.gov.au" and the email subject had the tree id "Information about a London Plane, Tree ID 1024530"
yeah man, it's like being a teenager in the last century all over again, when you would call someone's house and have to speak to their parent or whoever picks up first!
For some reason this immediately reminded me of Larry Nivens Draco Travern: "The Slow Ones". Were a race of aliens had a much slower metabolism than ours, they looked like rocks that slowly over decades where moving toward the tavern across the field to visit. You could communicate with them through email get replies back after a couple of months, to the aliens it was basically instant messaging.
Perhaps it is a warrant canary / dead man's switch. If it posts something other than 'today nothing happened' you know the account has been compromised. if it doesn't post 'today nothing happened' you know the silent switch has been flipped and any further signals cannot be trusted.
I wonder if people would have been this kind and thoughtful if the trees were on Twitter, or Reddit (topical!). How would we interact with trees here on HN?
Washington DC keeps a dataset of all of their trees. I wonder if I should build some sort of application for interacting with the trees, or just learning or posting more information about them.
There's a lot of positive pro-tree stuff happening in the city of Melbourne, this is one of the more whimsical aspects of it.
On the less whimsical side of things, a lot of Melbourne's trees are in decline / are dying, because the city decided to stop watering them during a drought. But, positively, lessons have been learned from that mistake.
You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.
".. Something strange happens however when objects acquire connectivity, semantic depth, and the powers of computation and memory – they immediately and drastically transgress the ontological borders assigned to them..
.. spimes actively enfold space and time because they have the capacity to carry around their entire existence as a semantic layer..
.. anthropomorphic metaphors are a way for humans to bridge the chasm between ourselves and objects. They create affective resonance between a human and a thing, thereby bringing us onto the same ontological plane."
I'm starting to think one of the trees was equipped with a Markov chain sentence generator that scanned a lot of philosophy papers and just spit out a lot of pretentious gibberish. To philosophers though, I'm not sure it would matter because nobody could tell the difference anyway.
The difference between philosophy you read because you want to be well read in philosophy, and philosophy you understand because you've lived it and perhaps come to similar conclusions yourself, is vast. Philosophy, especially of the modern era (not including the last 20 years or so), is mostly limited to the individual (existentialist sort of stuff).
You create technology that links people together in a myriad of confusing and obtuse, symbolic, mush of ways, treating link between person to person like it is an identifiable, atomic thing (of which a computer has limited understanding of compared to that of someone who is socially affluent), that seems to make 'okay' sense just because nothing better has replaced that 'yet'. Then after this is done, you don't expect the academic world philosophy to go completely nuts for a brief period in time?
In colleges we educate on philosophy but to most students that are brought into the classical philosophers, they haven't had the kind of living experience for philosophy to make sense to them, and those that stick with it find themselves in a world that is fundamentally separate and distinct, from the ones that Locke, Hegel and Heidegger wrote about (or not, but it's different enough to make you a little kooky).
There's more connectivity in theory and reason between the stuff that computer scientists dream up, and the stuff that post modernists seemingly automate as of logical consequence, than is capable of being seen. I'm a computer scientist and an artist, and I know it's not as simple as calling one field crap and the other field correct, when I find myself often standing in the middle of a storm. I've read some post modern philosophy that makes a great deal more sense to me than some computer science literature, or developer superstition.
Logic can really fool you into believing there is a singular way to perceive the world with. And it's tempting, because it just seems to prove itself correct, continuously, it creates a reduction in what is otherwise chaos made from white noise trying to perceive itself as anything besides white noise. But with that, I feel there is a great loss in individuality, creativity, freedom of thought itself. You can chase yourself in circles finding every logical and cognitive bias you may succumb to. Is that a reason to step on every misshapen and imperfect sappling before it can turn into a tree?
Many modern laws were influenced by philosophers. While the language of computer scientists and philosophers may appear to be gibberish, they often influence laws with side effects on humans who may not understand the source jargon. When the laws for Internet of Things (including but not limited to huggable trees) are written, hopefully there will be diverse philosophies at the table, including classics like liberty, speech and privacy.
> diverse philosophies at the table, including classics like liberty, speech and privacy.
'Speech' is hardly a philosophy, 'liberty' is deeply contested down to its core, and 'privacy' is, again, something you have or you don't, like speech.
I'm sitting here thinking about how this could be generalized into a mechanism of engaging with the world around us, which is possibly defeating the point; this is great more for the emergent gameplay of it (to steal a metaphor) than anything, and I think some weird startup that let you tweet your river would kind of rob the whole exercise of its innocence.
The Internet (or maybe technology in general, as if the two have a meaningful difference at this point) is so overwhelmingly used as a vehicle to accelerate maturity, to make us more jaded and cynical and disconnected. There's something great about this doing the opposite -- a glorified SMTP server letting us be more childlike, more honest and engaged in the world around us.
[^1]: There's, like, a 30% chance that there now exists someone in this world who has sent a dick pic to a tree.