When you give a tree an email address
citylab.com
citylab.com
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.
Dugg into every manuscript written,
Every prose ever composed,
Yet I cannot find an instance of men describing.
Describing the sentiment in my heart when I think of you, YourLocalCousin.
And every moment, that is.
I am now sadly forced to believe,
"Man" has never felt it.
Ineffable, it is.
Elyvate is the name I give it.
My pen is my witness and will testify
That I am left with only one desire
That is: in your heart to Reside"
A boy
It's 2015. Can't I just email a tree!
Please STOP this pollen nonsense immediately.
“I'm birch-kin and my pronouns are xe, xir, xir, xirs, xirself”
My dearest Ulmus
While languishing inebriated 'neath your ample verdant canopy I was inspired to verse:
I think that I shall never hear a poem as lovely as a beer. A beer McSorley's had on tap with golden base and snowy cap.
The golden stuff I drink all day until my memory melts away. Poems are made by fools I fear but only [insert] can make a beer.
But you adjudge me MAD.
Best wishes,
Alfred E. Newman
https://twitter.com/kamen_v_lesu
It's "Today nothing happened" if you're curious.
data set: http://caseytrees.org/resources/maps/dc-street-trees/
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.
Some further reading : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9411658
".. 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."
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?
'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.
Are you seriously claiming those philosophies are on a level with the gibberish you quoted, which may as well have come from Sokal?
Are you seriously claiming those philosophies are on a level with the gibberish you quoted, which may as well have come from Sokal?