When you give a tree an email address

http://www.citylab.com/tech/2015/07/when-you-give-a-tree-an-email-address/398219/

by mef • 11 years ago

275 50 11 years ago

citylab.com

nissehulth• 11 years ago

Dear Mr/Mrs Birch.

Please STOP this pollen nonsense immediately.

lingben• 11 years ago

I suppose 'Dear Mr and Mrs Birch' since they have both male and female flowers?

shiggerino• 11 years ago

Sounds like perfect Tumblr material.

“I'm birch-kin and my pronouns are xe, xir, xir, xirs, xirself”

escherplex• 11 years ago

From Melbourne’s email-a-tree service archive:

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

quaz3l• 11 years ago

Where would you find these email addresses? Were they on the tree? Or some website that would need to be looked up?

Mithaldu• 11 years ago

Seems you gotta find it through this map: http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au/

tim333• 11 years ago

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"

walterbell2• 11 years ago

From http://twentythree.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-168-do-object...

".. 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."

electrograv• 11 years ago

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.

walterbell2• 11 years ago

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.

derpderpdrep2• 11 years ago

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?

cbd19846• 11 years ago

Are you quoting these for comedic value?

cbd19846• 11 years ago

Literally none of those quotes make any sense. Can you explain them?

Conjoiner• 11 years ago

The middle one means "spimes take up space because they exist"

sleepychu• 11 years ago

Easily the best part of this article is that the interviewee is called Councillor Wood.

SigmundA• 11 years ago

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.

yourlocalcousin• 11 years ago

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

rokhayakebe• 11 years ago

"For how could I fall in love with a Moon, When having set my sight on the Sun first."

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

ntoronto• 11 years ago

This is one of the sweetest things I've ever seen on the Internet.

jschwartzi• 11 years ago

We should do this in Seattle. There are lots of great trees here that I wish I could write to.

bcbrown• 11 years ago

There's an elm on the UW campus that at least is on Facebook.

proactivesvcs• 11 years ago

Then make yourself the Postmaster General! Who knows, the idea might catch on :-)

guard-of-terra2• 11 years ago

You may also have twitter of a rock lying in some forest:

https://twitter.com/kamen_v_lesu

It's "Today nothing happened" if you're curious.

djloche• 11 years ago

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.

guard-of-terra2• 11 years ago

It could be, but it's not. It's an example of twitter art.

moioci• 11 years ago

How can it be that no one has referred to this as "treemail"?

barkingnet• 11 years ago

Must be barking up the wrong tree! But don't worry, I will get to the root of it. Leaving no leaf unturned!

workerIbe• 11 years ago

Way to pick the low hanging fruit...

twic• 11 years ago

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?

dikaiosune• 11 years ago

Oxygen considered harmful, remove all leaves from your current projects if you want to avoid the oncoming tidal wave of hyperventilation problems.

kremlin• 11 years ago

Maybe each tree could have its own git repo. Complete with branches

tripzilch• 11 years ago

Show HN: I made a fruit

datapolitical• 11 years ago

What happens if you give them bitcoin addresses?

Fiahil• 11 years ago

But, why trees do not respond?

noonespecial• 11 years ago

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.

jmduke• 11 years ago

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.

clockwerx• 11 years ago

Opentrees.org ftw

shoo• 11 years ago

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.

Some further reading : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9411658

rsuelzer• 11 years ago

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.

data set: http://caseytrees.org/resources/maps/dc-street-trees/

When you give a tree an email address

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