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When you give a tree an email address
- nissehulth 11y agoDear Mr/Mrs Birch. Please STOP this pollen nonsense immediately.
- lingben 11y agoI suppose 'Dear Mr and Mrs Birch' since they have both male and female flowers?
- shiggerino 11y agoSounds like perfect Tumblr material. “I'm birch-kin and my pronouns are xe, xir, xir, xirs, xirself”
- escherplex 11y agoFrom 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 11y agoWhere would you find these email addresses? Were they on the tree? Or some website that would need to be looked up?
- Mithaldu 11y agoSeems you gotta find it through this map: http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au/ http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au/
- tim333 11y agoCool, 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"
- logicallee 11y agoyeah 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! It's 2015. Can't I just email a tree!
- walterbell 11y agoFrom http://twentythree.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-168-do-objects-dream-of-an-internet-of-things/ 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 11y agoI'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.
- walterbell 11y agoMany 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.
- cbd1984 11y ago> diverse philosophies at the table, including classics like liberty, speech and privacy. Are you seriously claiming those philosophies are on a level with the gibberish you quoted, which may as well have come from Sokal?
- cbd1984 11y ago> 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.
- sleepychu 11y agoEasily the best part of this article is that the interviewee is called Councillor Wood.
- SigmundA 11y agoFor 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 11y agoI 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 11y 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 11y agoThis is one of the sweetest things I've ever seen on the Internet.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- avoidhnipblock 11y agoI suspect it would need branch based root-ing, sorry, routing, and have to be careful the pruning algorithm on the leaves was not too aggressive. Packet loss due to squirrels also an issue!
- jschwartzi 11y agoWe should do this in Seattle. There are lots of great trees here that I wish I could write to.
- bcbrown 11y agoThere's an elm on the UW campus that at least is on Facebook.
- proactivesvcs 11y agoThen make yourself the Postmaster General! Who knows, the idea might catch on :-)
- guard-of-terra 11y agoYou may also have twitter of a rock lying in some forest: https://twitter.com/kamen_v_lesu https://twitter.com/kamen_v_lesu It's "Today nothing happened" if you're curious.
- djloche 11y agoPerhaps 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-terra 11y agoIt could be, but it's not. It's an example of twitter art.
- billpg 11y agoMaybe that's what they want you to think.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- moioci 11y agoHow can it be that no one has referred to this as "treemail"?
- barkingnet 11y agoMust be barking up the wrong tree! But don't worry, I will get to the root of it. Leaving no leaf unturned!
- workerIbe 11y agoWay to pick the low hanging fruit...
- twic 11y agoI 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 11y agoOxygen considered harmful, remove all leaves from your current projects if you want to avoid the oncoming tidal wave of hyperventilation problems.
- kremlin 11y agoMaybe each tree could have its own git repo. Complete with branches
- tripzilch 11y agoShow HN: I made a fruit
- datapolitical 11y agoWhat happens if you give them bitcoin addresses?
- Fiahil 11y agoBut, why trees do not respond?
- noonespecial 11y agoYou 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 11y agoThis 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 11y agoOpentrees.org ftw
- shoo 11y agoThere'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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9411658
- rsuelzer 11y agoWashington 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/ http://caseytrees.org/resources/maps/dc-street-trees/