Jingus Mcgee: Welcome all to our simulate a tree task. We had a lot of fun and we hope you all enjoy our work. Please note that this also marks the founding of Biome Gardens in Golden Gate Park. Biomers of the world, heed our call! Add to the garden, it will be magnificent.

Cameron When Lowteck invited me to this task, my first though was that it would be great to put up our tree next to our desert, and begin a garden, of sorts. That suggestion was met with approval, so I led the group to the wee hidden grove where the desert still stood. The building of the tree was a blast, and despite the lack of any real solid plans, it took shape quickly, and beautifully. I love our trees complete inability to settle on any one type of tree... (Cherries, bananas, flower, 37 differnt types of leaves)

When we finished, we hung a sign in the grove: Biome Gardens.

We invite any and all Biome players to complete any sorts of similar tasks in this area, in hopes of developing a strange little garden of wonders and oddities for all the city to see. I will happily provide a map to anyone that's interested.


Rock Hard Phantom: Not to brag, but I do have to say I am more than impressed with how real the fake tree looked. Structurally the tree is pretty darn sound, I wouldn't suggest climbing it, but it is great for a little bit of shade. The physical tree truly is great, but the real personality of the tree shines with its added accouterments: fruit, play dough bird complete with a bird house, and its own electrolysis process. My personal contributions were the birdie, and bird house, along with helping out with the fabrication of the tree. While creating the house I took into consideration the needs of the birds of Golden Gate Park. The house is pink with a nice sky light. I figured that birds mostly live outside and would enjoy having a skylight to remind them of their roots. The color pink was chosen to attract the birds to the house. Tell me what bird doesn't flock to the color pink?

Lowteck The tree simulation went very well. The night before, I loaded my car with a variety of odd lumber, tools, and more. I wasn't really sure how exactly it would work out at the time, so I just grabbed a lot of stuff, only half of which we ended up using:
big planks of wood, a few boards, small fence posts, sawX2, mallet, axe, hatchet, shovel, string, cherries, bananas, new years cuffs, brown and green spraypaint, and most importantly, some large wire mesh sheets. The others brought a very nice variety of stuff too. We made an awesome tree and as usual, this was a lot of fun. It was fairly sturdy and simulated quite a few tree functions too:
-provided food (bananas and cherries)
-provided shade
-wind protection (sortof), it did have a lot of braches on top
-released oxygen into the atmosphere, see avidd opolis
-uses the sun's energy, see avidd opolis
-beautification
-provided home/shelter for local wildlife including the indigenous San Francisco playdough bird.

Avidd Opolis I thought about how to simulate the functions of a tree. What is a tree really? We took care of the basic tree-isms such as providing shade, bearing fruit, and housing a simulated birdie. But trees do something mor for us: they take in water and CO2 and give us oxygen. I decided to make our tree simulate that function by adding a solar powered electrolysis device that would convert rainwater into oxygen.
When you run current through water (with salt added as an electrolyte), the H20 molecules get pulled apart into H and Oxygen. I took a 4.5v solar cell and added a medium sized capacitor so that it pulses a higher current instead of a constant low current, figuring that would be more effective. Then I ran into this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fuel_cell wherin the inventor claimed to have found a more efficient meathod of electrolysis by pulsing at water's resonant frequency of 42hz. So i did the math and tuned a potentiometer to 1082 ohms so it pulses 42 times a second.
I took a picture to prove that it is actually putting out voltage. The surprising part is that after fifteen minutes we observed little bubbles forming at on the electrodes; our tree is actually releasing oxygen!