Posting this on the original Psybertron blog because it was missing from my 2006/7 archive. Forests, thickets, trees and clearings (and fences, and gates) are frequent metaphors in knowledge discovery (and identity and definition) contexts, and the number of times I’ve remembered this image, but failed to re-find the copy I blogged back then, is scary and time-wasting.
Thanks to ChatGPT for finding it for me:
It’s actually the salvage logging clear-up from a hurricane event in Sweden, so it’s questionable how much of the shape is due to the wind-damage process and how much is due to tracks of the logging operation, but the result is a distinctly tree-shaped hole in the forest. Re-documented here 20 years after “Storm Gudrun”.
Today’s context is that I was reminded of the missing image above when I saw this short MP4 below showing the rivulets left behind a tide ebbing over the mudflats of a Chinese river. (Social media algorithms being what they are, I have captured the image / video but have completely lost the details and provenance.)
(Despite the help of ChatGPT can only find similar but not the same video, so all I know: “Tidal tree” on the Qiantang River, Zhejiang, China. Original filmmaker/source currently unknown—identification welcomed.)
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