my friend just showed me these chaps. brilliant! I can imagine something like this would never be aired in the US (well, excepting pay channels like HBO), let alone on broadcast TV.
Archive for the ‘trees’ Category
Angkor Wat did you say?
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010
Freeman Dyson = awesome
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
Now that’s a philosophy I can dig. Mainly because it’s one I hold myself.
Huge article, magazine style, but pretty entertaining. I’ll finish the rest of it tomorrow, just wanted to make sure this showed up on the radar.
From Discovery channel to Disco
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
I think it’s interesting to note that the decade and drugs have changed but the music has stayed the same. This is, however, is in stark contrast to the giggler I watched prior, but hey, I guess that’s why you don’t start off with a high dose of an unknown, though legal, drug. At least it wasn’t acid, which would last for twelve hours, not 3 minutes, though I’ve heard people say it can be like a whole acid trip in the few minutes.
And yet, it’s another plant that humans have been enjoying a relationship with for hundreds or thousands of years. Though admittedly in a religious context rather than this one, but if this is the effect it produces, well, is it any wonder ancient religions were so strange?
And it makes you slobber. What could be more fun than that?
Bonsai, giant trees, habitation
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009
So what’s one of the main fears of people owning houses with trees growing nearby? The tree falling down and crush-crush-crushing the house. So what do they do? They trim the tree mercilessly, without regard to the health of the tree. What does that do? It allows disease into the tree, which rots it, and eventually makes it fall down on your house.
I’m thinking a series of carbo/aramid/expoxy wrapped bamboo trusses could be used to help prop trees up and away from the house (standard tall-X shape leaned away from the house and planted a few feet into some permeable concrete plugs in the ground. Japanese gardens make much use of this on a small scale, but I want to keep massive oaks or camphors sheltering my house.
Which brings me to point two, habitation. If we can have super-strong trusses holding our trees up, what’s to stop us from just building up on/in that? Especially camphors, which are highly disease resistant. The idea is we’ll treat large trees sorta like bonsai (without all the root shenanigans) – training them to grow where we want, selectively keeping strategic branches but taking utmost care when we cut to properly protect our tree from disease – grow the tree in such a way to gently encompass the house, truss the branches in aforementioned ways to help support them and the house, of course build the house out of high-strength, lightweight composites. At times the trusses may need to be jacked up and more concrete backfilled under them, if the tree grows taller, though the pace is very, very slow. Another thing: how many houses outlast trees? How many human lives can outlast a tree, if well taken care of? None! Well, no houses made out of tree material – I’m sure some ancient stone domiciles outlast the 2000 and 3000+ year old trees we’ve found – but are no longer considered habitable by most means. The trees however are still making leaves and growing.
Oh yeah, don’t live in a hurricane or tornado prone area. Flooding and snowing should be okay (Go ahead, try to flood my treehouse Ms. Nature) as long as the roof is designed to easily shed snow (i.e. tall and tapering at the top).