Unlike giant sequoias, each of which is a genetically separate individual, a group of thousands of aspens can actually be a single organism, sharing a root system and a unique set of genes. We therefore recently nominated one particular aspen individual growing just south of the Wasatch Mountains of Utah as the most massive living organism in the world. We nicknamed it Pando, a Latin word meaning I spread. Made up of 47,000 tree trunks, each with an ordinary tree’s usual complement of leaves and branches, Pando covers 106 acres and, conservatively, weighs in excess of 13 million pounds, making it 15 times heavier than the Washington fungus and nearly 3 times heavier than the largest giant sequoia.

Pando reached such vast dimensions by a kind of growth, common to plants, known as vegetative reproduction. A plant sends out horizontal stems or roots, either above ground or below depending on the species, that travel some distance before taking root themselves and growing into new, connected plants. […] The sum of all the stems, roots, and leaves of one such individual is called a clone. Quaking aspen clones may spread far across a landscape as they continue to reproduce vegetatively. How far one clone can migrate depends on how long it can live.

And how long might that be? The short answer is that we don’t know. It might seem as if all one has to do is count the annual growth rings in the individual stems. Aspen stems that I’ve studied in the Colorado Front Range rarely exceed 75 years. Elsewhere individual stems occasionally reach 200 years. But the age of individual stems tells us almost nothing about the age of the clone they belong to, since its living stems may only be the latest to sprout. The oldest clone with a firm age is an 11,700-year-old creosote bush (researchers were able to date it by measuring the rate at which its circle expands). But aspens may actually be far older. Based on evidence such as the resemblance of some aspen clone leaves to fossilized ones, Burton Barnes of the University of Michigan has suggested that aspen clones in the western United States may reach the age of a million years or more.

For reference, a million-year old aspen organism would be four or five times older than homo sapiens.

No matter how awesome you think the universe is, it’s awesomer.

Being a civil libertarian, I watched the conversation with interest. (I didn’t get too close, though — those guys are dangerous.)

After exchanging a few words, the cops handed the guy a piece of paper and told him to get lost. He grabbed his backpack and stormed off angrily down Granville Street. I caught up to him afterwards and asked him if they had given him a ticket, and indeed they had. BC has a law which, among other things, prohibits panhandlers from asking for change within 5 metres of a bank machine. There was an ATM inside the 7-11, and even though the homeless guy was more than 5 metres away from it, he was close enough for Vancouver’s finest.

The penalty? A $115 fine. Which, if you’re sitting on the street asking for money, is obviously way more than you can afford.

Naturally the cops were grinning at each other as they drove off.

Wordpress lets you set up pretty permalinks for your posts. However, if you’ve installed Wordpress on a computer running Ubuntu, you need to make some changes to your system’s configuration to get the permalinks to work.

Here’s what I had to do:

1. Enable Apache’s mod_rewrite module:

$ sudo a2enmod rewrite

2. Edit the appropriate config file in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled. Unless you’ve made other changes, the only thing you’ll find in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled is a symbolic link to /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default — that’s the file you need to edit. You probably installed Wordpress in its own directory in /var/www, so go find the following in 000-default:

DocumentRoot /var/www
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
# This directive allows us to have apache2's default start page
# in /apache2-default/, but still have / go to the right place
# Commented out for Ubuntu
#RedirectMatch ^/$ /apache2-default/
</Directory>

…and change both occurrences of AllowOverride to All:

DocumentRoot /var/www
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
# This directive allows us to have apache2's default start page
# in /apache2-default/, but still have / go to the right place
# Commented out for Ubuntu
#RedirectMatch ^/$ /apache2-default/
</Directory>

3. Restart Apache:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

4. There ought to be a .htaccess file in your Wordpress directory with the following contents:

# BEGIN WordPress
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /wpehlbc/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /wpehlbc/index.php [L]
</ifmodule>

# END WordPress

If that file (/var/www/wordpress/.htaccess) doesn’t exist, you should create it at this point.

5. In the Wordpress admin panel, go to Options > Permalinks and choose the “Date and name based” permalink structure (or whatever user-friendly permalink structure you want to use). Don’t forget to click the Update Permalink Structure button at the bottom of the page. You should get a notice saying “Permalink structure updated.”

That should do it. If it doesn’t work, or if there’s something wrong with the instructions above (but there shouldn’t be, because this describes my configuration pretty well), please leave me a comment and let me know!

Let me give you a hypothetical situation: I’m walking down the street, I pass a bookstore, and they have a little table out front with some of the latest novels. I pick one up. The jacket says it’s about a male professor of writing who has an affair with a much younger female student. I leaf through the book, and I come across a sentence about the student, who is also very beautiful, sleeping in the passenger seat of a car that the narrator (the professor) is driving, and the student wakes, and stretches, and looks at the professor, and—here’s the part that gets me—the pattern of the car-seat upholstery is still imprinted on her cheek. Well, there’s simply no way I’m not going to buy that book.

I’ll be honest: given the kind of fiction the New Yorker publishes, it took me a minute to realize that this was satire.

1. I’ve been occupied at work with trying to finish a big assignment (which in part has involved learning PHP more or less from scratch), writing documentation, and tying up various loose ends before my current position wraps up at the end of June.
2. I’m also in the middle of moving my fiancee, our pets, our worldly possessions, and myself from Edmonton back to the West Coast.

On the plus side, if you can call it that, I don’t yet have a job lined up in Vancouver, and I’ve got a whole bunch of vacation days in June, so I’ll probably find myself with a lot more free time during the next couple of months. When I’m not busy applying for jobs, I’ll be tidying up a few small projects for public consumption (I’ve got an old Perl script for mapping LC call numbers to subjects that needs some minor edits, and a few Wordpress plugins that I wrote for work) and making headway on some other commitments. Plus blogging a bit more frequently — hopefully once a week or so. And enjoying my new neighborhood, Kitsilano.

When André was young, he could not fit on a normal school bus and had to be driven to school. As his parents were unable to afford a car of their own so his neighbor, Samuel Beckett, drove him every day.

From the WaPo article:

The law prohibits anyone … from doing business with anyone whose name appears on the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s Specially Designated Nationals list … [A]ccording to the law, supermarkets, restaurants, pawnbrokers, real estate agents, everyone, even The Washington Post, is prohibited from doing business with anyone named on the list. “There is no minimum amount for the transactions covered by the OFAC requirement, so everyone The Post sells a paper to or a want ad to whose name appears on the SDN list is a violation … The law applies to you personally, as well.”

It’s a good thing those dastardly terrorists can’t obtain fake ID! Oh, wait.

Here’s the list.