My employer gifted me a tree for my work anniversary, but I'm unsure where this tree exists, or what it is. Is it a living being? a number? capital? an idea?
If I forward this email from HR, will another tree be planted? Should I spam the world with anniversary trees and populate the entire continent in one sleepless night of tree spamming? Computing should be like that, tethered to the real world.
Facts: it turns out, my tree is in Ethiopia, and it is a Rhammus Prinoides tree, a small tree, a shrub native to that part of the world, known as Gesho by the inhabitants of that land. They make with its bark an alcoholic beverage called Tej. Tej is also called Honey Wine, because it's main ingredient is honey.
And I realise that I have zero knowledge about Ethiopia, other than its position on a map, some 3,500 miles away in a straight line. So I read. A compatriot of mine, Pedro Paez, a missionary in 17th century Spain, was the first European to describe the Tej to outsiders, like myself and himself. A catalogue was started.
I co-created the images above using AI, specifically an open source small model run on my laptop. I hacked the model, forcing the algorithm to converge into the simplest tree it could imagine. Like my anniversary tree, these are not trees with bark, but a distilled essence of tree-ness.