Thanks Jos for the great picture! An oak that can't help but make you happy.
Old-Growth Forests vs. Second-Growth Plantations
My Funeral
At my funeral, this is the piece to which everybody leaves.
Mastodon - Open Source Decentralized Facebook/Twitter Alternative
"Mastodon is a decentralized social network that uses standard interoperability protocols and is completely [FOSS]. What this means is that anyone can run a Mastodon server, and the users of those servers can talk to each other. More than that, non-Mastodon servers are also part of this network if they conform to the same protocols. This means that Mastodon is more future-proof than Facebook or Twitter: Even if Mastodon-the-software falls out of fashion, the network can be simply continued by other interoperable software. You don't have to tear out your entire social graph to have all friends migrate to something new if that happens. Furthermore, Mastodon allows self-determination and control. When you run a server, it's yours. Your rules, your community, hosted on your hardware... you don't depend on anybody, definitely not on a [Silicon Valley headquarters]."
from BoingBoing
Find me at @collapsibletank@mastodon.social
Chomsky Gets to the Core of it
Nadal
Rafael Nadal looks like Tom Cruise with his face smushed against a window.
Think Twice
There are a number of great maths channels on YouTube, such as Numberphile and Mathologer - but the most beautiful and elegant is Think Twice, where smart and smooth animation visualises otherwise complex formulae or theorems. For example, here's the derivation and properties of the Dragon Curve.
(Mr Puzzle has a nice review of some laser-cut puzzles including a Dragon Curve one here.)
Ancient Beech in Ill-considered Leggings
A return to a tree in Danes' Wood I'd only seen out of leaf, and which was hard to find with the wood in its summerwear. Turns out it's a beech and I can't tell my arse from my arbour.
Surprisingly tricky, requiring quite a lot of repositioning in order to get a good enough line for several of the re-pitches, but each stage was quite short.
The tree branches considerably all the way up, so there are a lot of choices to make, but once at the top you can move from place to place relatively easily with a long lanyard to play with. Also - great for limbwalking.
Inevitably I'd climbed about one metre higher than my rope would allow for a return to ground, and because of being too lazy to climb up and move my anchor point, I ended up using my lanyard to unclip from my zig-zag and drop to earth with my foot ascender still attached. Getting cramp in your supporting leg while trying to detach from a foot-ascender is both hilarious and agonising in equal measure.
