ALife 2025 day 3

The day started with some parallel sessions of contributed papers: I went to some interesting ones on evolution.  Then was the day's keynote, by Chris Kempes.  He covered a variety of physical constraints on living organisms: physical laws limit what life can be.  Scaling laws, metabolic rates and growth rates, the way proteins are more dilute in larger cells, the physics of the small: these are all consequences of physics, and so may be universal laws.

On to lunch, and then the excursion!  On registration, we were given a choice of several excursions to a variety of local temples.  I had little to guide my choice, except I saw the words "bamboo forest" on one, so chose that.  On the bus on the way there, the guide taught us to count to ten in Japanese (knowing what little I know of Japanese, I expect the reality is much more complicated than these ten little words!)

We walked from the bus park along a road of very touristy shops, to the temple complex.  We went in the main temple, after removing our shoes.  There was a magnificent painting of a dragon on the ceiling, with a gaze that followed you around the room, but sadly, there was also a no photography rule.  After that, shoes back on, we walked through the complex, admiring the outside of buildings, the raked gravel, and the carefully tended trees.

If you look carefully, you can see three guys up in this tree, pruning it. (Click to embiggen.)

We carried on around the garden, to a lovely lake, also carefully curated.  It's just a little too early in the year for the full spectacular autumn colours.

If you look carefully, you can see a big carp in the bottom right corner.

We carried on up around the garden, to a vista point.

Temples below, mountains in the distance, framed by trees. The tree on the right has amazing spikey leaves

spikey

On to the bamboo forest.  I wouldn't want to make my way through that; fortunately there was a nice wide path.

impenetrable

Bamboo is a kind of grass.  A special kind of grass.

a colleague providing a hand for scale

After exiting the forest, we descended back down the valley, and made our way back to the bus via an ice cream shop in the touristy road.  

The bus then took us directly to the conference dinner, held in a huuuuuge and very modern convention building.  We had a delicious buffet, and wonderful conversation.  There was a bus to take us back to the starting point, but the little group I was with decided to walk back down instead.  It made a very pleasant 30 minute stroll on a warm evening to finish off a great day.

make do and mend

 We've had our garden shredder since 2008 (when it cost £269), and it's worked hard since.

In particular, it recently reduced a huge pile of bamboo from the garden to little pieces that have become a new path.

We got it repaired when it was 10 years old, in 2018, when it needed some electrical work.  Since that cost £100 (parts, labour, and shipping) we did wonder whether it would be better to get a new one.  But we got it mended, and it lasted fine.

Until today, when a large chunk of aluminium fell out of it.

That doesn't look good!  Surely we will have to replace it now?

My other half took the shredder apart to find the problem.

That's the internal guts that does the shredding.  It does look like it would be expensive to replace.

But wait!  A quick web search shows that you don't need to replace the whole thing, just that broken piece in the front.

And that costs only £26.  So we'll try that before shelling out more than ten times as much for a new shredder.

silver and gold

We've recently removed a lot of bamboo from the garden, as it was getting rather large and overgrown.  We had a silver birch sapling growing on the edge of the thicket, but hadn't noticed quite how tall it had grown, desperate to find light next to the tall bamboo until the latter had been cleared away.  

Today, despite that early pink sky, the weather has been glorious, and has highlighted the tree in glorious low winter sunshine against a brilliant blue sky.  Beautiful, if in a slightly etiolated way. 

sushi

We invited speakers at the UCNC conference were invited to a super sushi dinner.  Lots of interesting things to eat!  Other people started photographing the amazing dishes, so I followed them...

many kinds of fish (each lovingly described) draped over huge pieces of bamboo

the next course is more shellfish-oriented

deep fried little tiny things

fish head

more shellfish, plus phoneshadow

The Mystery of the Garden Spoon

So this morning this happened:

Underneath the maple tree, a large serving spoon has appeared.  It is not ours. This is not a place people walk, irrespective of whether they drop spoons while doing so.  The spot is sheltered from our neighbours by a large stand of bamboo, so it probably wasn’t thrown there (not that our neighbours are in the habit of casually tossing stainless steel serving spoons around).

The bowl is covered with some pale substance, and lightly scratched.

The back appears burned, and more heavily scratched, including a bright pattern that partially dissapears under a patch of what looks like melted metal. .

Did an animal drag it here?  Did it fall from the sky?  Will other burned kitchen utensils start appearing around us?  Enquiring minds desperately want to know.

---

So a commenter says it’s something dodgy. Should I be pleased I didn’t know that? Should I be worried that they do? :-)

Someone must have hurled it a long way then, as we spotted nothing on our security camera...

Hamilton Gardens

Today was another relaxed day with my friends, breakfasting on duck egg and honey pancakes, chatting, then pottering around their smallholding.  In the afternoon we visited the nearby Hamilton Gardens.  This has a variety of different areas: we explored the Paradise Collection, the Fantasy Collection, and the Productive Collection, leaving the Cultivar Collection for another time (maybe!).

These collections were individual gardens in a variety of styles.  Interestingly, these gardens were not linked by a continuous path, but each was reached through a small "portal" area, which acted like a palette cleanser between one garden and the next.

Google Earth view of the various gardens.  The three "portals" are visible as walled circles (left, centre), and a hedged square (right).  The circular "snail" towards the centre top is the entrance to the entire collection.

First we went to the Paradise Collection, accessed through the square hedged portal.

portal area to the Paradise Collection

panorama: Japanese Garden of Contemplation

view through a ceramic bamboo screen: Chinese Scholars Garden

the 1.4m long, 250kg, bronze Celestial Yuan of Taihu

view down to the Chinese Scholars Garden

a riot of spring colour in the Indian Char Bagh Garden

Italian Renaissance Garden

The Paradise Collection also included an English Flower Garden (which brought it home to me more forcefully that it is barely even spring here at the moment), and a Modernist Garden (hmm, yes, well).

Then it was off to the Fantasy Collection, through its circular portal.

the Tudor Garden -- although it reminded me more of Portmeirion

pavilion: Chinoiserie Garden

There was also a Tropical Garden in this collection, but since I was in sub-tropical rain forest earlier in the week looking at massive trees, I was not as taken with it as the others.  Further gardens are being prepared, including a Surrealist Garden,  We glimpsed parts of this in skeletal form through a hedge; a suitably surreal experience.

Finally, the Productive Collection, through its circular portal.  This portal was rather interesting.

Google Earth view of the portal: there seem to be strange curved lines running across it.

the portal from the ground, showing the various curves in closeup

My friend asked me "do you know what this is?"  I stared at it for a while, and it was the asymmetrical figure eight shapes that gave it away, especially combined with the spike casting a shadow (out of view).  The figure eights look like analemmas, the shape traced out in the sky by the sun at a given time of the day over the year.  Here it's the path of the shadow cast by the sun.  There were three analemmas, for the path traced at noon, and at an hour before and after noon.  The long curves going across the picture are the paths traced by the shadow of the spike over a day, for several different days of the year.  What a wonderful concept!  An it might get incorporated into a future plan for our own garden, to complement the armillary sphere we got a few years back.

Finally, it was the Productive Collection.

traditional Maori productive garden: Te Parapara Garden

The collection included a Herb Garden, Kitchen Garden, and Sustainable Backyard, all interesting ideas, but probably better viewed in the summer, when there is more growing.

Then after dinner, the sky was dark, and clear again, so I went out to gawp at the alien stars. And tonight, it was even darker than yesterday, and I spotted both the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds!  Perfect.

more snow

We had a couple of inches of snow last night.  The view along the path now shows the bamboo bowed down under its weight.

first snow

The first snow of the year fell last night: only a few centimetres, enough to make things pretty but not cause any problems.  More snow is forecast, so the problems are to come!

a view along the path, through the bamboo

Harry Lauder's Walking Stick