It’s a busy week so I’ll leave you with a few pictures from a local zoo. I have mixed feelings about zoos. It allows people to see living animals which is cool and you hope that it leads to people wanting to protect the animals and their habitats through conservation methods, but do the costs outweigh the benefits to the lives of these animals? Probably not. I’ll keep my refrain beyond that.
The unwritten part: It’s also meaningless and irritating to the zoo staff and other visitors.
Look friends! Beth finds us another cool music project, this time the music of trees! (Back in April she found the music of spiders.) At the time I tried the livestream only the Red oak was singing, but it was beautiful.
Silent tree activity, like photosynthesis and the absorption and evaporation of water, produces a small voltage in the leaves. In a bid to encourage people to think more carefully about their local tree canopy, sound designer and musician Skooby Laposky has found a way to convert that tree activity into music.
By connecting a solar-powered sensor to the leaves of three local trees in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Laposky was able to measure the micro voltage of all that invisible tree activity, assign a key and note range to the changes in that electric activity, and essentially turn the tree’s everyday biological processes into an ethereal piece of ambient music.
You can check out the tree music yourself by listening to the Hidden Life Radio—Laposky’s art project—which aims to increase awareness of trees in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the city’s disappearing canopy by creating a musical “voice” for the trees.
Her eyes wrenched him from the clutches of reality He was plunged to the very depths of fantasy Their softness Their fragility It lent him strength It woke purpose within desire But alas when you wade too deep for too long, You find things not meant to be found…
In those trenches of beauty there was fear A dread that the outside was superficial And the inside would always be empty A panic that when the petals fell, When the beauty withered, Loneliness would remain
In her nightmare a dream took root Sown by his pledge Warmed by companionship Watered by commitment He would not abandon her to that darkness For he had always known; “From her heart grows a tree” And it blooms through all seasons
“From her heart grows a tree” whose bark has peeled and chipped, now leaving exposed wood growing moss and green creatures fertile with new life to pass. She is solid below the surface, and confident the new chapter will take root.
I remember standing in these aspens two years ago, my heart expanding as I gazed up, up, up at this tree reaching for the blue sky. However, aspens are not only magnificent above ground, but also below, because groups of aspen share a root system. A system one might imagine as an enormous “beating heart” below ground.
“From her heart grows a tree.”
Her heart connecting with mine.
Roots:
Lisa
From her heart grows a tree, a family tree, with many branches called generations.
Mary
The Family Tree is among the most wonderful images of trees; how people are connected over generations. Certainly not the beginning of my family tree – yet, a long time ago, Barnebus Maney, Captain during the Revolution – father of 12 children was the beginning. I (and you and Joshua and Noah) are related to more people than you can imagine. Like a tree – we grow branches. Like a tree, we grow new branches – each one making us stronger. I love the connections.
Below you will see a visual tree that has been done by a proper computer scientist. Instead of creating a trunk from an obscure phrase using search engine indexing like I did, he took tweets on Twitter using hashtags (#example) and created groups of tweets on specific topics. This is a circular tree, which I think represents any type of social grouping well. We are spheres of knowledge, spheres of associations, Venn diagrams within Venn diagrams.
Brent Schneerman Tweetgeister 2010
This diagram along with several others from The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge by Manuel Lima or several more examples digitally from this 2014 Gizmodo Australia article:
I want to share one more discovered in the book that I found particularly lovely and with a subject also close to my heart ;words, or in this case a visualization of words without using words:
The Nature-led Life 