I've always thought the culture and heritage surrounding bonsai is amazing. I was in a local bonsai club when I was younger and the patience required to produce a really great tree is something to be respected. Sometimes the trees will just die for no discernible reason and you just have to start over after months or years of work. Some of the oldest trees are estimated to be over 1000 years old and have been passed through generations of care takers.
I always compare software engineering to bonsai. To be happy doing either for a long time, you need to enjoy the work of becoming a craftsman for its own sake -- the things you build or cultivate can die quickly and for no good reason, and all that remains is the appreciation for the work you put in. Whenever someone asks for a fifth round of changes for a button's color, I think about a Japanese monk raking gravel. When the Tibetan monks blow away their mandala after weeks of painstaking work, I see startup pivots and acquihires.
That's a really interesting analogy. I struggle with the idea of working so hard on things that feel pointless and ephemeral, and that's a nice way to think about it.
I'm not sure that's the point of a mandala, but it's definitely an interesting idea to ponder.
Thanks for this. Recently I've been getting frustrated by some code. Your message helped me sort it out :-)
Interestingly, when I was a child I saw some artists making chalk drawings on the side walk outside of a church. It started raining, slowly ruining the drawings. The artists didn't budge, but kept on drawing until they were finished. They didn't care about the drawing (the thing), only the drawing (the action). Since then I've tried to live my life that way, but sometimes it is hard to remember.
I know the feeling, one of my favourite tree just died in spring; it was all fine during the winter, and just died like that. 5 years of work, and p00f!
I had a mentor of sorts who was this retired engineer who went to MIT and he gave me the advice that bonsai is one half art, one half biology, one half philosophy. This adds up to over 100% obviously but the point was that to be good at bonsai you needed to have at least two of those things down pat. The biology is interesting, (just kind of stream of thought here) although I was pretty young at the time I remember there being a great deal of interest in soil mixes, and special types of fertilizer which allow the tree to be healthy while also staying small. I was also taught to think of the root structure as a mirror of the visible part of the tree, and in some ways more important than the parts that you typically see. You can recover a tree from pruning its branches but if you over prune the roots it will likely die, similarly you can't let the roots overgrow because they will get over crowded in the small pots. Also certain species of tree with different root structures required differently shaped pots. Grafts were common, sometimes you might desire a tree that does not grow well in pots but you could achieve the same thing by grafting a branch of one species onto the root stock of another but this was difficult to do because you can end up with ugly scars or a contrast between the two types of bark. Another thing I remember being interesting is that some fruiting trees will produce miniature fruits, or miniature flowers.
One not very often discussed fact is that the effects of even an all-out nuclear war (detonation of all existing nuclear weapons) are exaggerated, for various fairly obvious reasons. The total number of people killed will be "only" 10-15%, and it will be definitely not a threat to humanity as the species.
I read somewhere that if all existing weapons in the world were detonated uniformly over Texas, there would be still some survivors even in Texas itself.
I agree that they are overplayed for effect, but there is some math. I saw Kissinger explain it when asked about nukes killed the whole world ten times over.
The math started with WWII Germany. They kept reasonably reliable records of where and when people died during allied air raids. So someone drew up a formula linking the tonnage of bombs dropped with the number of dead on the ground. This was then extended to nukes and their power measured in thousands (kilo) and millions (mega) of tons of TNT. So bombs with explosive power greater than all of WWII (a common description) could "kill" as many people as an entire war. Kissinger was correct in saying that all the bombs in the world would not, could not, destroy everyone ten or twenty times over.
This false analogy was also part of debates during Vietnam. Many, on both sided of every argument, used the math to estimate the number killed by US bombing raids, ignoring the fact that German cities and Vietnam jungle are in no way analogous.
Quite; particularly considering that the strategies of the bombings were reversed.
In WWII, Germany was bombed so that strategic bombers (B-17) attacked strategic targets (civilians and factories in cities), and tactical bombers (P-47) attacked tactical targets (tanks or trains near combat).
In Vietnam war, Vietnam was bombed so that strategic bombers (B-52) attacked tactical targets (jungle with suspected Viet Cong activity in combat area), and tactical bombers (F-4) attacked tactical targets within strategic targets (a bridge in Hanoi).
Eh, I think that's underplaying it a bit. Of course you can't literally turn a state the size of Texas into a plate of glass with nukes, but a couple thousand dropped in the most economically productive parts of the world?
In terms of the nuclear blast and radiation itself, it's true that probably only a half a billion people or so would die. But you'd be essentially ripping out the entire economic and political nervous system of the world, resulting in massive economic dislocation and political chaos. I find it plenty plausible that that by itself could easily get the body count up to the billions.
There are also possible environmental effects: the dreaded nuclear winter. It's not clear to me if the debate was resolved one way or another about how bad it'd actually be, but it seems like a real possibility that it'd hurt the climate much worse than even the most dire warnings of global warming. And it'd happen more or less instantly, as black soot would immediately be sent up to the stratosphere.
An article from 2007 in the Journal of Geophysical Research, courtesy of Wikipedia, states:
A global average surface cooling of –7 °C to –8 °C persists for years, and after a decade the cooling is still –4 °C (Fig. 2). Considering that the global average cooling at the depth of the last ice age 18,000 yr ago was about –5 °C, this would be a climate change unprecedented in speed and amplitude in the history of the human race. The temperature changes are largest over land ... Cooling of more than –20 °C occurs over large areas of North America and of more than –30 °C over much of Eurasia, including all agricultural regions.
That's bad news, and would compound the political strife, wars, and economic dislocations. And while now refugees from war have to possibility of fleeing to a neighboring stable country, with this scenario pretty much everyone is in a terrible place, so you don't even have that possible pressure valve.
EMP would probably feature in a nuclear war as well, so there goes most of your power grid, cars, computers, and everything that comes from them like modern finance and modern agriculture.
Humanity would be fine, but civilization would be in for some real trouble. I imagine that deaths from starvation and disease would rival or exceed immediate deaths in the nuclear exchange.
The novel War Day is an intense and fascinating look at the aftermath of a limited nuclear strike. From my limited knowledge it's pretty accurate about what would happen.
Well, stockpiles are significantly down relative to the Cold War peak, due to strategic arms reduction treaties. Detonation of Cold War peak stockpiles would have been "really bad" for the human race. Likely not an existential threat for humanity as a species, though very possibly one for the current state of human civilization.
No. Airburst nuclear bombs for the most part don't make things radioactive, air pretty much can't become radioactive (pure water also can't become radioactive, although you can mix radioactive elements into it of course).
Ground blasts are worse, but it's the ground itself that becomes radioactive, not the things that are far away and are affected by the blast.
And no one purposely does ground bursts, because they don't do a good job of damaging things with a blast - most of the energy ends up reflected into space, or absorbed into the ground. (I guess a terrorist might want to, since they don't have military strategic goals.)
The material of the bomb itself is radioactive of course, but there isn't usually all that much of it, and it's dispersed quite widely.
Her journals did not become radioactive because they were neutron-activated, but because they were contaminated by radioactive material. But there's a limited amount of that, so only a small amount of material becomes radioactive that way.
(Note: I'm speaking relatively here, if you have a sensitive enough detector you'll find stuff of course. That's one of the things that makes people so scared of radiation - it's so easy to detect at even minuscule levels, while far more dangerous things are harder to detect so no one reports them.)
Water can and does become radioactive through neutron capture breeding tritium.
However, neutron flux falls off quickly with range, and for an airburst explosion it would not have been high enough at the surface to cause significant neutron "activation" of local materials. Almost all of the fallout from the blast came from the material in the bomb itself.
That's true, but atom bombs make very very little tritium.
To make tritium you need to start with deuterium, which is already rarely made by atom bombs. So you have two rare events that have to happen in sequence.
So that means that atom bombs pretty much don't make any.
Little Boy was air burst 580m above the city, so most of the fallout traveled away into the atmosphere.
There were many acute radiation poisoning deaths (though there were far more deaths from the fire and the blast), and about a third of the survivors suffered radiation injuries that increased their risk of cancer, but there was very little to no long-term contamination of the area.
I think the value of this tree is in the idea that one day America might give it back to Japan as an act of peace, since it is clearly a very special organism and the value of the act would truly communicate the idea of transcending the causes of hostility. Exchanging such a beautiful life form as an act of peace would surely be the penultimate act of bonsai...
Quibble: surely that should be 'ultimate act'. The meaning of 'penultimate' implies a further ultimate act. Since bonsai are essentially immortal, you would never be able to tell if an act involving one was penultimate?
Essentially immortal? The article seemed to indicate the expected lifespan of this tree was around 200 years, despite it having lived nearly twice that long.
I get trying to humanize stories, but Moses Weisberg does nothing for this story. I spent as long reading the article as trying to find out why this guy was interesting... other than he once walked a bike past it.
I go to the local bonsai meetup, but it's out in a suburb and not really oriented toward younger folks in the city. I'd still encourage you to go (they have great speakers and material at affordable auctions). But it'd be cool to talk to geeks about geek things like bluetooth soil sensors and watering automation. Or how real trees are like B-trees :)
For some reason, I worked on a bonsai farm for a few years. The old trees are amazing as they are beautiful. We had some in the 200 year range, no more than 18 inches tall.
Looks like radiation makes it stronger. Theoretically some pine species can have around 700 years lifespan. As it comes out from dendrochronological data. But America is the first here - meet Nevadan pine <i>Pinus longaeva</i>. The oldest known living specimen is a tree, somewhere in the White Mountains of California. The tree was sampled by Schulman in the 1950s. Its great age, 5,060 years. Its still there.
To those downvoting me. I spent 2 years planting pines in experimental plantations to study radioactivity effects on pine in mixed forest plantations in 1993-1994. So I know a thing or two.
The National Arboretum is the coolest place I've been in DC. It's a bit out of the way, but worth the trip from downtown.