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 <i>email the trees in their city</i>.<p>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 <i>emergent gameplay</i> 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.<p>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.<p>[^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
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.
You may also have twitter of a rock lying in some forest:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/kamen_v_lesu" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/kamen_v_lesu</a><p>It's "Today nothing happened" if you're curious.
I wonder if people would have been this kind and thoughtful if the trees were on Twitter, or Reddit <i>(topical!)</i>. 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.<p>data set: <a href="http://caseytrees.org/resources/maps/dc-street-trees/" rel="nofollow">http://caseytrees.org/resources/maps/dc-street-trees/</a>
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.<p>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.<p>Some further reading : <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9411658" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9411658</a>
From <a href="http://twentythree.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-168-do-objects-dream-of-an-internet-of-things/" rel="nofollow">http://twentythree.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-168-do-object...</a><p><i>".. 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..<p>.. spimes actively enfold space and time because they have the capacity to carry around their entire existence as a semantic layer..<p>.. 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>