I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like:
The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the staff begin to look at major renovations to the building's architecture.
Until the Oxford groundskeeper heard about the problem. "We have a replacement beam," he said.
The groundskeeper took the curious admins to the edge of the grounds. There stood two old growth trees, over 150 feet tall.
"But these must be over 200 years old! When were they planted?" the admins asked.
"The day they replaced the previous beam."
This is an urban legend. The college archivist covered it: http://web.archive.org/web/20020816065622/http://www.new.ox....
> In 1859, the JCR told the SCR that the roof in Hall needed repairing, which was true.
> In 1862, the senior fellow was visiting College estates on `progress', i.e., an annual review of College property, which goes on to this day (performed by the Warden). Visiting forests in Akeley and Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire (forests which the College had owned since 1441), he had the largest oaks cut down and used to make new beams for the ceiling.
> It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling. It is standard woodland management to grow stands of mixed broadleaf trees e.g., oaks, interplanted with hazel and ash. The hazel and ash are coppiced approximately every 20-25 years to yield poles. The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.
But this urban legend must be over 150 years old! When was it created?
Right after they consumed the previous rural legend.
Remember it's "Town and Gown". Oxford is a city, even officially recognised so by the Crown.
Thank you.
> the roof in Hall needed repairing, which was true. > Visiting forests in Akeley and Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire (forests which the College had owned since 1441), he had the largest oaks cut down and used to make new beams for the ceiling.
So seems like the "legend" is true after all, the trees were 150+ old and let to grow, and the "takedown" is just not wanting to acknowledge that they did it purposefully, which is beside the point pedantic hair splitting...
> just not wanting to acknowledge that they did it purposefully
So the punchline of the urban legend is in question? The part that makes it so interesting? Not sure that qualifies as 'pedantic hair splitting'.
I would only "complain" about this urban legend if there was no way someone would be so future-thinker as to plant trees that are going to be used one or two centuries later.
But since I'm sure we have done things like that in the past, for me, the urban legend is "valid" and I don't feel like that specific case being true or false is that important, just the pattern...
> It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling.
> The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.
Splitting hairs a bit. In fact what they did was to maintain a more general solution, maintaining a supply of wood over the long term of 400 years.
Ah yes, "exacting young man debunks charming tale with touching moral, to the benefit of nobody". A tale as old as time.
It is good to be able to recognize charming tales and other biases and influences in a narrative. Having them pointed out counteracts the readiness of people to take things at face value. Knowing that something is a tale does not have to take away from it.
I don't know what irked you about the other comment, but I think there's a positive side to it.
>Knowing that something is a tale does not have to take away from it.
Oh, but it does.
Here's "a thing that happened" vs "here's a tall tale" means whatever message is approached very differently.
> Here's "a thing that happened" vs "here's a tall tale" means whatever message is approached very differently.
I agree. I meant to point out that tales can be entertaining and/or instructional, too, even while we're aware of what they are. ("Knowing that a story is fictional does not take away from it", maybe I should've written that.)
My point still stands, though: knowing a tale from a "thing that happened" is important, and what you said underscores why.
"You know the great story you've been telling others for years as truth? It was in fact a lie" is much much worse.
Better to know up front that a tale is only a parable.
I think it still works fine as a parable, and it doesn't hurt to know a little bit more about how the trees are Oxford are really kept.
There's a better version of this sort of story that I first heard also set at Oxford.
The stone steps in front of one of the college buildings have been worn down by centuries of people walking up them. The college decides to replace it, but it turns out that the stone used comes from a specific quarry in Wales that in the hundreds of year that have elapsed has been finished when it comes to this sort of rock.
Nobody is sure what to do. They want matching stone but the only other source is in South Africa and it would cost a fortune to ship the stone from there.
A young architect suddenly has a brilliant idea. "We could just extract the stone, turn it over and get a brand new edge". Everyone is very excited, and contractors and tools arrive to carry out the simultaneously tricky yet simple procedure.
It was at that point they discovered this had already been done.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit" - Paraphrased from Elton Trueblood
Which defines why American society seems to be F'ed of late. Decades of short term rewards combined with a baby boomer population looking at their last hoorah and declining relevance. Most of the old people I interact seem to be in a state of denial about soon not being here.
Or just compare the billionaires actions now - they are building tunnels in hawaii to prepare for survival just as they are knowingly destroying the future instead of spending their obscene wealth to protect it.
Elon Musk is working towards getting humanity to Mars in the low chance Earth becomes uninhabitable, and he'll never live to see the Mars dream become a reality even if everything goes as planned.
But I guess that doesn't fit the common narratives about a man that isn't a cartoon but a flawed human with strengths and weaknesses.
This is why we don't hear of great men anymore: We only hear about them when they're long dead and their transgressions forgiven and their strengths raised to a pedestal unattainable by real live human beings.
He is not doing that.
Amen. Mankind is not going to Mars as an escape route. Elon uses this as a way of generating a vision/dream.
When mankind makes serious progress to any of a) living at the poles in scale b) living underwater at scale c) living subterranean (underground) at scale, get back to me and we can talk about offworld habitation (Mars, Venus, or Luna). All of these are hard enough, and provide mitigation against various disasters, at some level. They're hard enough problems to solve as it is.
So you claim contrary to interviews and public reporting and Wikipedia that no, he isn’t working towards that until he gets us there.
EDS is a thing, I guess. Sad to see on HN of all places.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_colonization_pro...
Parent didn't say he doesn't pay lip service to it, or doesn't make bullshit timelines and promises.
Parent didn't say _anything_ and frankly doesn't really meet HN's criteria for good discourse. All it said at time of my reply was "He is not doing that".
He is doing that. Whether you believe him, or whether he succeeds, or whether he's lying, is an entirely different conversation and something I can't _prove_. All I can prove is that there are public claims he is doing it, and he keeps saying it in interviews.
One can be both "working toward" a goal and "making bullshit timelines and promises" at the same time, those things are completely orthogonal.
I'm surprised this kind of garbage is allowed on Wikipedia. The whole article reads like a PR statement, constantly stating what is "possible" or "planned", but never any actual progress in terms of missions.
Basically lots of forward-looking hot air like a financials press release for shareholders.
Utter nonsense.
Goals and means. No matter what end goal is, if it requires eugenics (hyperbolic example) to reach there, people will resist.
There are places on earth where life is unhabitable and on mars its absolutely nonsense really.
But maybe its a dunning kruger effect, I asked an actual aerospace engineer and he said its doable but he's a bit of an elon fan too, and I did read on HN an article on how life on mars is impossible..
Still, it would be most likely be very bad life on mars compared to earth but nope, we all are ready to burn our earth so damn quickly... and listen Elon has a band around him and you could say that he was a salesman in the sense that he had a lot of hype around him which inadvertedly helped tesla
But one shouldn't live life on rocks floating in water [hype] since that might just be a dream or you are crashing down.
And he's a little pathetic in the sense that maybe when I think of all, that could actually be done to help people and with all the influence he had, he fulfilled his agenda really but the agenda was never to better us humans but to get him more power..
So lets call spade a spade shall we?
>Elon Musk is working towards getting humanity to Mars
Sure
Why? It's very easy to get people to plant trees for you. Just give a gardener, even a very old one, some money and they'll do it for you.
Because "caring for the future" is not a problem that's solved with money. Especially when short-term profit trumps it, and the people that should be caring wont be alive in that future and don't give a fuck.
Thinking "we'll just pay someone to do it" is exactly the mindset that fucked up everything.
(And, for starters, you need to care for X to pay someone to do X, to begin with).
> Thinking "we'll just pay someone to do it" is exactly the mindset that fucked up everything.
What do you mean? We are living in a golden age of unprecedented prosperity.
> Because "caring for the future" is not a problem that's solved with money. Especially when short-term profit trumps it, and the people that should be caring wont be alive in that future and don't give a fuck.
Have a look at the history of shareprices for eg Amazon or Tesla. The stock market loved these companies long before they ever turned a profit. Investors can and do look into the future. (And even short termist who only want to quickly flip some shares will look into the future to try and predict what other people are going to be willing to pay for the shares soon.)
Another exhibit: during the pandemic stock prices recovered long before the world emerged from Covid. They recovered as soon as traders anticipated the broader recovery.
> (And, for starters, you need to care for X to pay someone to do X, to begin with).
Well, if someone in fifty years is willing to pay for the tree (even if she's not born yet), markets will do the rest to come up with a positive price for the tree today.
No amount of money allows the gardener to plant it in the past. You can pay money now to plant tree now whose benefit will be reaped 100 years down the line. Also, tree is symbolic so no point in going in details of tree growth.
The best to plant that tree is 50 years ago. The second best time is now. Just go plant it.
Greatness seems to come from long term vision, and with success that vision collapses to short term gains. It’s cultural. Why does that happen and how do you prevent it?
I don't know (not a philosopher or politician or whatnot), but I think great steps were taken when countries introduced a constitution; the US was one of the first modern countries 250 years ago. I think a constitution is that long-term vision, setting a country's morals and values in writing, spanning multiple generations and administrations.
Of course, it can never be set in stone because morals and values evolve; things like equal rights for PoC and women were only added later on, and they seem unsteady at best right now.
The other candidates for long-term vision (but not necessarily success) is organized religion (e.g. Holy Roman Empire) and generational authoritarianism (e.g. kingdoms/empires, North Korea). There's also an in-between with China's 5-year plans, where they make plans (or, feel like they do, I don't even know lol) instead of trying to make big changes one legislation or one budget term at a time.
What a heinous posting. Judging about others shows true evil.
What is the bad part? Still number 1 GDP.
When was the glory days? Pre 1900s with slavery? The war and interwar years?
The cold war?
Pessimistic.
> Still number 1 GDP.
China will overtake them in 10, 15 years; possibly sooner depending on the economic damage of the Trump admin's trade policies, possibly later if another US company does well abroad.
Unfortunately, while they bridle at the truth, Boomers are the most selfish generation in American history. Every single political and economic action of their generation has been done explicitly at the expense of future generations to enrich themselves. They are the first and only generation in American history to leave their children worse off than themselves. Unfortunately, they are also one of the longest living generations in American history also, and still control the reins of power long after most other generations had passed along. I think we're far from reaching the pinnacle of the damage they will do to our society and to the world. Depending on how long the US lasts as an entity, they might well go down in history as the worst generational cohort ever.
Zoom out: 200 years ago they were killing each other over slavery, 400 years ago, there was no american society.
The trend is up, but they're in a local minimum :D
> [...] 400 years ago, there was no american society.
Well, there were people living in that part of the world..
There's a youtube channel shadiversity that I haven't watched in awhile. It is mostly about fantasy media and swords but also spends a lot of time on medieval building techniques and clothing. One of the more interesting videos I watched talked about how before and even after saw mills could process and produce different sized boards people would 'grow' them instead by trimming trees to produce long straight narrow branches. There was even a still living example in some English village that some trimmed 100 years ago before the process was completely stopped.
This also reminds me of those Japanese temples where in order to preserve the institutional knowledge of how to rebuild the temple in case of disaster the monks tear it down and rebuild it from scratch every 30-40 years assuring the next generation has experience.
Can't wait to see this story used on some growth hacker / seeking new opportunities LinkedIn post talking about planning for success.
The funny thing is that 99% of the linkedin shills will miss the second crux of the allegory: To maintain the institutional knowledge for this to happen, you need to have a culture that nurtures employees, keeps them on long term and listens to them. And gives them time to write good documentation for future-proofing.
It's wild that they managed to retain this knowledge without a Confluence by Atlassian subscription (tm).
This reminds me of the US Navy's Oak forest for ship building: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Live_Oaks_Reservation
Although this story was debunked, many Universities own Timberland in their portfolios. They’re a good inflation hedge for schools with long time horizon. (Real estate and paper investments were historically very correlated to university costs)
https://blog.realestate.cornell.edu/2018/04/20/harvards-natu...
I have no idea if this story is true, but it should be.
We should all strive to make it so.
As said in Italian "si non è vero, è ben trovato".
Funnily, my country has a similar story but with the opposite moral.
Scattered around my country you will see plantations of huge oak trees, all the same age. What gives? Well, in 1801 and 1807, my countrys navy suffered terrible defeats by the Brits as part of the Napoleonic wars. The fleet was eventually rebuilt, but that took cutting down many old oaks. Fearing that oaks are a rare resource that must be replenished, the king ordered the plantning of new ones, so that future generations could still build powerful battleships. Those oaks matured in the 1960s.
The moral of the story is that you can't actually plan 150 years into the future.
Source: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oak-beams-new-college-ox...
Literally what they do for Norte dame?
>Rebuilding Notre-Dame’s “forest” also meant selecting 1,300 oak trees from across France that were “as close as possible to those of the 13th century”, that is, “very straight and very slender”, according to Desmonts, with “no defects”. Jean-Louis Bidet, the technical director of Ateliers Perrault, remembers the rush to harvest the trees in autumn so the carpenters could begin squaring the green wood from “dozens of truckloads” before the end of 2022.
Fantastic!
What is a "growth tree"?
((Old growth) tree), not (old (growth tree)).
Old growth trees are trees or forests that are centuries old and not recently cultures.
That should have been hyphenated then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest
It does not have to be. The English language has a process where phrases become hyphenated compounds which then become single words. It's permissible to be partway along that path, and for people to disagree where something is on that path.
Pick any point in the past few centuries, and there's going to be something, possibly nowadays always a single word, but not necessarily so even now, that was in a state of flux at the time. The same goes for today.
“Old growth forest” is incorrect in any formulation of English grammar that I'm familiar with. It's not about fixed phrases. It's about using an adjective+noun pair (in this case, old+growth) as an adjective modifying another noun (in this case, forest). This is a general rule that applies across the board, not an isolated phrase example.
The poster was correct in asking what a “growth forest” is, because without the hyphen, the phrase parses as an adjective (old) modifying a compound noun.
And "nowadays" is an example of that process https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nowadays,%20no...
Have a nice week-end! I fondly recall the days of my youth as a teen-ager.
Though I still lament the loss of the subjunctive form. And diaeresis.
Hyphenation is useful in phrasal adjectives, like "heavy-metal shield" (to distinguish it from a shield that is of metal and is heavy, but is not or a for example Pb) or in something like "four-day trips" (the trips last four days; they are not necessarily four in number).
I like it too, and you're talking to someone who has been trying, mostly in vain, to teach his kids the difference between "I wish I was there" and "I wish I were there", or how you can get eggs from a coop or a coöp, and they're different things, but eventually the hyphenation dies out and the phrase remains.
Tangential, how do you hyphenate (((very old) growth) tree)?
In English, we're making a compound adjective so it would be very-old-growth tree.
It's one step short of the German compound noun, and we make it easier to find the fragments...
English is the only language I know of that allows spaces in compound words at all. It's a very peculiar feature of English orthography.
Mandarin written in pinyin comes to mind as another example. Do you discount that because pinyin is not the primary writing system used for that language?
ancient-growth tree
This sort of thing comes up often for me. I use extended hyphenation to declare precedence: very-old--growth tree.
Not "growth tree" but an "old growth" tree. It just means a tree that was left to mature, and never cut down.
It means a mature tree in an old-growth forest. Trees that grow in the dense shade of other trees grow slower, and their growth rings are much closer together. The result is that a tree takes a lot longer to grow but it's stronger and harder than the same species grown in the sunlight.
The reason for the distinction is that most of the old growth forests have been clear-cut and the lumber available today is fast-growth farmed lumber. If you compare a 2x4 at Lowe's with a 2x4 out of a 150-year-old house, you'll see that the wood itself is very different even though the species might be the same. The tree the new 2x4 came from was fairly young, while the tree the 150-year-old 2x4 came from was probably centuries old.
Typically it also means one left to grow naturally, without forcing the rate by various methods (as is done in many modern tree farms).
is there any difference to just saying "old tree"?
Old trees are not necessarily old-growth trees. A fallow tree farm left to age has zero old-growth trees, regardless of how old they are.
You have the real answer, but I suppose it is contrasted with a "value tree."