Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Dating oaks

    There are a bunch of rather large oak trees in a park nearby to my apartment, and I quite like to sit under them in the evenings on nice days, to read or listen to the radio or just relax. Ever since reading "Wilding" by the aptly-named Isabella Tree last year, which talks about "veteran oaks", I have wondered how old these trees might be.

    The other week I decided to stop simply wondering. Knowing that you can get a rough guess at age from the circumference of the trunk, I brought a spool of yarn with me on an evening walk and wrapped one around one of the trees, cutting it to length with my pocket knife and bringing it home to measure. It's surprisingly difficult to keep the string perfectly parallel to the ground for the entire way around, so any estimate obtained this way will probably be a slight overestimate, but I did my best. Back home I used a nice old wooden metre ruler we found on the street to measure the string. It was 4.64m.

  • being happy with how you look

    increasingly often, I feel like maybe there's two different kinds of being happy with how you look:

    * being happy with how you look (because the way you look fits society's mold, which makes your life easier), and

    * being happy with how you look (because you like what you see)

  • forego mild thud

  • not said

    the quiet hurt 
    after words not said
    but meant 
          you don't care at all
    half of me knows
    half wants to refuse
    knowing 
    there is only one way out
    

  • On Agricultural Systems and Ecology

    I just got back from a wonderful trip to the Midwest. It was very nearly a perfect journey for me: I got to see lots of friends I hadn't seen in ages, but, I also got to explore a vastly underappreciated region of the US: the corn belt. I'm the kind of nutty person who, for whatever reason, fell in love with grasslands. The tallgrass prairies of the Midwest are truly incredible ecosystems, but very little of them exist today. Instead, we have millions of acres of corn and soybeans.

    Jumping back a little bit, what is a prairie? Prairies are, simply put, grassland ecosystems of North America. Basically, in areas with sufficient moisture for solid vegetation cover that lack trees, there are large swaths of herbaceous vegetation, dominated by graminoids. Prairies, in particular, are grasslands in North America that receive moisture during the summer: broadly, this is the area east of the Rocky Mountains and Pecos River, west of a line from the Wabash River to the northern and western ends of the Ozarks and the Ouachitas, down through east-central Texas to the Gulf of Mexico, and north to a line drawn from Edmonton to Winnipeg to Minneapolis.

  • june 8-14, 2026

    the power of the human spirit and of community and culture is so mindbendingly powerful. you don't really understand how much this is really the case until something just absolutely devastating happens. we were all searching - for her - we mentioned it - we all did. why isn't she here to be helping us through this? she's the one who should be here, and instead we...and she's...

    therapy went too well this week, so maybe that made it feel doubly awful. i shouldn't internalize it. it's not my fault - it's not my fault. and yet ...

    well. i've been having some strange thoughts about my own spirituality this week. maybe it's a way to not think about my own mortality. c'est la vie.

  • Dating Oaks & Other Trees

    Basically, they measure the circumference of an oak tree to get the age. Simple, sweet, to the point. Obviously, any oak with a circumference of 4.64 m is a big, old tree! For what it's worth, there is indeed significant variation from species-to-species and, importantly, from site-to-site in terms of growth rates for trees. While diameter can give you a guesstimate, the variation from one place to another can make an enormous difference.

    Take, for instance, live oak -- Quercus virginiana. There are live oaks in the Louisiana that were planted around 1830 with circumferences of around 6.5 m in 2020. These trees are around 200 years old, give or take a few. That's a big tree, for sure! Meanwhile, here in Central Texas, I had a live oak with a trunk circumference of about 2.5 m fall in an ice storm a few years ago. I counted over 200 growth rings in the stump of that tree! My tree had a diameter less than half that of the ones in Louisiana with known ages, but was as old or older. While there is some difference in the trees here and in Louisiana (ones in this area are intergrades with Q. fusiformis), the biggest difference is simply rainfall. We average ~30" per year, and much of Louisiana gets around 60"+. There's also a large difference in soil: my tree was growing on thin, extremely alkaline, rocky soils, which slow growth down.

• Science

  • Simulation realization

    But the simulation doesn’t last forever. It burns out quickly because it lacks fuel—real, steady, strong fuel. It becomes distorted, veers off course, and degenerates. The feigned enthusiasm fades when we stop understanding its cause. The garbled language, filled with complicated terms used contrary to their meaning, falls silent in a sense of meaninglessness. The memory of understanding and the will to strive for something good, something greater—it all begins to resemble delusions when we can no longer even articulate what we meant. When words are missing. Words that have meaning. Meaning is missing... Missing... What? What was it, if I can’t name it? Indifference remains. In incomprehension and confusion, indifference remains. Or small, mundane pleasures. Or a vast, incomprehensible, black void.

    The Neverending Story. I haven’t read it. But I know the movie, and I think everyone does. And remembers that void that’s devouring the fantasia world. It’s that feeling of losing our sense of being fully ourselves as a result of losing our place in the world—due to a world we ourselves(?) have distorted into something else—which causes us to become indifferent and senseless.

  • Theremin 1 - Ultrasonic sensor

    The original instrument is designed as a large capacitive sensor. As the distance between your hand and a charged conductor changes, it changes the frequency of an oscillating circuit. However, since the 1920s when the theremin was invented, there are many different ways to create a theremin that incorporate modern sensors and microcontrollers. Theremin World has dozens of designs.

• Programming

  • Elm, HTML, and... (by ~moendopi)

    So, if you want more context (but you'll likely not get it) I've semi-flailed around exploring hobbies, and expecially tech related hobbies/interesting/programming langauges for the past I dunno how long.

    Realistically I've been doing this off and on for the better part of a decade, but I've made a renewed effort and I am actually seeing myself being able to do things. Small things, but more than just little stuff in Python. So that's cool.