that monolith tree gives me engineering anxiety, you mean all 20,000 shade users are depending on that singleton tree?
Some Unusual Trees
41–50 of 94 posts
Re: Some Unusual Trees
#42Since we're talking trees. Only trees that grow in an area with distinct warm/cold cycles have rings, tropical trees don't and the only way to tell the age of most tropical trees is to have planted it yourself
Re: Some Unusual Trees
#43I would say the Eucalyptus tree, planted all over the world but native to Australia, is quite unusual. Young Eucalyptus trees have leaves that are rounded and are arranged opposite to one another. However, when mature the leaves of a Eucalyptus are lance-like and are arranged in an alternating fashion. This to me is quite unusual.
It's funny, a neighbor had me cut their eucalyptus down, then it grew back from the stump and I had to cut it again a couple years later. Then I has to cut it again a few years after that. Now it looks like I'm going to have to cut it again soon. It's become a running joke at this point. Those things are tough, and they grow really fast in the right climate.
> Then I has to cut
had*
@dang, I wish we had more time to edit our posts.
Re: Some Unusual Trees
#44Since we're talking trees. Only trees that grow in an area with distinct warm/cold cycles have rings, tropical trees don't and the only way to tell the age of most tropical trees is to have planted it yourself
Wouldn’t a tree without rings still reasonably capture the atmospheric C13:C12 ratio as it grows? Or is the carbon motility within the trunk too high, or the ratio differences too small, to sample a bit near the core and use the ratio there as an age indicator?
Re: Some Unusual Trees
#45Related: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
There's no such thing as a fish either. Unless you count whales, parrots and Kanye West as fish.
"Fish" is almost a good category, you only need to nuke a unusual branch and call it a day.
A better comparison is "Fliyers", that include most insects, most birds, bats, pterodactyls and perhaps a few gliding and kitting animals. It evolveded and disappeared a few times.
Re: Some Unusual Trees
#46I was in Brazil for the first time last year and was very impressed with the trees.
Two examples right from downtown São Paulo,
Re: Some Unusual Trees
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you! Isn’t it amazing how a rigid hierarchical categorization system fails everywhere you actually look into details? See also category theory vs prototype theory.
It's amazing that most people don't realize it, and even in higher education you get people believing in taxonomies and categories as if they were a property of the natural world. There are no categories in the objective reality, rigid or otherwise; there are no metadata tags attached to elementary particles, that say what the arrangement they're part of is, and of what type it is. Whether in biology or in code, taxo…
Indeed, one of the epistemological lessons for me when confronting the power of LLMs is that a sort of "intellectual capability" can emerge in any system, from sheer scale/complexity alone.
If you're interested, check out Rupert Sheldrake:
https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/Is_the_Sun_Consc...
Re: Some Unusual Trees
#48Since we're talking trees. Only trees that grow in an area with distinct warm/cold cycles have rings, tropical trees don't and the only way to tell the age of most tropical trees is to have planted it yourself
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Re: Some Unusual Trees
#49Of course one reads a (nice) post like this and must add one's favorite not on the list. Here's mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fouquieria_columnaris
Re: Some Unusual Trees
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you! Isn’t it amazing how a rigid hierarchical categorization system fails everywhere you actually look into details? See also category theory vs prototype theory.
It's amazing that most people don't realize it, and even in higher education you get people believing in taxonomies and categories as if they were a property of the natural world. There are no categories in the objective reality, rigid or otherwise; there are no metadata tags attached to elementary particles, that say what the arrangement they're part of is, and of what type it is. Whether in biology or in code, taxo…
It's the same people complaining tomato is fruit, so it must not be a vegetable.