The unseasonal weather, combined with my own lack of industry (by which I should have hoped to have raised funds by now for tree sensors and related monitoring equipment so vital to my research), has kept me much indoors and left me pondering how fickle the seasons can be in nurturing one type of species, only to thwart and diminish another.
The peas, the strawberries and I are mildewed and made mouldy by the incessant rain. The Compote Tree, on the other hand, has swelled - en-greened and en-purpled itself in such as way that it is hard to recall the harsh bare stumpy creature it was at the beginning of the year.
It thrives alongside the blackcurrants and the gooseberries and the sage – all of whom seem to have enjoyed the autumnal atmosphere that has hung over May, June and now July.
Even the most basic of measurements show how the trunk of the tree has thickened, how the stems have strengthened, how the fruit has grown and swollen. This is all the data I have managed to gather. It is a poor effort on my part:
And yet my research continue indoors and online. I was much encouraged, for example, by my Twitter correspondence with Tim Hopkins regarding QR codes . It started with me jokingly pointing out that joints of pork from the supermarket now come with a QR code. Surely it will not be long before all living things are 'scannable' in some way, I thought. Soon everyone's Sunday dinner will be 'readable'.
Tim ended our brief exchange by sending me a QR code of his own, which, if you scan, it will quite obviously make his point for him:
I assume that if you are *really* practiced at reading QR codes you may not need to scan Tim's message at all. Rather, you will simply 'read' the image. In much the same way, I am hoping to attain a state of natural expertise that will allow me to read the tree.
For example, rather than displaying the paltry data I am gathering from the tree in a spreadsheet (as above), there is nothing stopping me from converting it into a QR code. Thus:
But what - I don't hear you ask - if I perform this operation in reverse?
What if I take a unique image of the tree and then try to see how that unique image may yield some kind of data – or indeed a message. For example, simply take an image of the bark of the tree, magnify it, reduce it to its most basic constituent parts as a bitmap image, and then search this simplified image for something that resembles a code. Voila!
Perhaps we might call it a BARK-CODE:
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