YouTube is in Fifth Grade

I recently saw a "retrospective" on YouTube and was quite surprised to learn that it is only 10 years old.  Given how ubiquitous it is, it seems like it should be much older than that - perhaps not as old as the digital watch, but still definitely older than 10 years.
I still recall my first digital watch.  I probably got it some time in the mid to late 1970's.  It was small and square and ugly with rounded corners - sort of like a iPhone is now, so Jobs wasn't the original genius everyone pretends he is.  The LCD display was very small and the functionality was controlled by a single button with an inset set button.  I was pretty proud of it at the time; within a few years it was the kind of watch that was given away in a box of cereal.

The first video uploaded and available for public viewing on YouTube was Me at the Zoo on April 23, 2005.  The retrospective included a sidenote that YouTube's original incantation was as a dating video site.  Perhaps this is related to the origins of YouTube being on Valentines day of the same year.  If true, I'm glad the video dating site concept ended up in the dustbin - although I'm sure that concept exists now.

My initiation to YouTube was probably not too much later than that original video when a friend sent me a link to a video of a guy crashing his new helicopter.  I recall poking around to see what YouTube was, and thought the concept was intriguing.  The over-sharing world was just getting going in 2005 so the immensity of the concept was hard to grasp.  I can't help but wonder what happened to the guy in the helicopter.  The passenger compartment does not seem to have fared very well.

According to currently available statistics, YouTube has about 1 billion users - nearly 1/7th of the world's population and 1/3rd of the internet population.  I'm not sure if this is real, as I have to wonder how many of those are 'bots and how many are people who have multiple user accounts.  I also wonder if that includes unregistered lurkers?  Regardless, there are a lot of people watching YouTube.

There are approximately 500 hours of content uploaded every minute, which means more content is uploaded in 60 hours than was done in 60-years by the big broadcast networks.  This is not entirely true, since much of the network content ends up on the cutting room floor.  Much of the content on YouTube should be as well, and there is a startling amount of redundant material on YouTube as well.  YouTube has done a good job of the democratization of crap.
What gets staggering is the amount of space all these video's take up.  If we assume an hour of video uses about 10GB of space, that means 5TB of data every minute.  Much of the video on YouTube is lower quality and compression is actually much better than this, but even if it takes only 10% of this, the amount of digital space this takes is frightening.  It wasn't that long ago when memory was hundreds of dollars per megabyte and disk space was 10'sof dollars per megabyte.
Again, the democratization of crap.

And I've contributed my own crap to this heap.  My paltry contribution consists of some 30ish videos which have been collectively watched about 1200 times.  Stanley Kubrick I am not.
I've previously maligned the hopeless situation of current copyright law trying to deal with the democratization of crap.  I don't think this situation will be resolved any time soon.  Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton have pledged to take a look at this "from day one!"
Still, the ability to strip the audio off of existing YouTube videos is a great functionality.  I'm sure it would never be used to flagrantly abuse copyright claims.

YouTube video ads are much more intrusive than they used to be, but I guess content owners and Google need to make money somehow.  I'm going to agree with Tim Kreider that Content Creator is a rather vulgar euphemism for creative types.  Another manifestation of the democratization of crap.

So YouTube now brings us full movies and full TV shows ... for a cost.  Along with brethren Hulu and Amazon, no real need to have cable anymore unless sports are critical to watch in real-time.  It is even possible to watch what Family Guy called "The gayest music video of all time" or watch American Dad, um, investigate the Cheetos aisle.

Of course, people like me who are fortunate enough to live in an area so rural that there is no DSL or cable internet access are not fortunate enough to be able to stream gobs of video.  Damn the data caps!  "That should be criminal," screamed the IT guy at work.  I guess this is also a factor of me being cheap, since even if I go over my limit, the cost isn't exactly prohibitive financially.

It is actually pretty hard to imagine a world without YouTube now.  In addition to being entertaining, YouTube is a mechanic, a chef, teacher, maybe even a pilot, but hopefully not like that guy in the helicopter.

Trees

Every year since moving into my current house, I plant a few trees.  Every year a few of them die, either newly planted or seemingly established.
The trees I've planted range from some I've lovingly grown from seeds to a row of arborvitae that have become little more than a mowing headache.  I have quite the emotional attachment to the small paw paw trees grown from seed taken from trees that marked the location of my dog's final resting place.  Happily, they seem to have survived a very late freeze this year, despite loosing some of their new growth.

Sometimes I think I should just give up and grow bush honeysuckle.  I'm quite sure that it would take over the whole world if given the chance; if they ever colonize mars, they should bring that plant along and find a way to turn it into food since I'm sure it would also grow even in Mars' harsh atmosphere.

There is a hazy plan to my planting, with nothing directly in front of the house, evergreens to the west and south, and deciduous to the northeast.  The evergreens are mainly screen trees and wind breaks.  I've lost a few planted by the previous owners and have replaced them.  The newer short guys look to their bigger brethren for inspiration.

Sourcing trees is very troublesome.  What is available at the big box stores is usually pretty disappointing and is expensive for what it is.  I'm not sure where they come from, but I suspect they are grown very far away since once planted they do, at best, tolerably adequate.  I've had even less success with bare root stock delivered by mail order.  Mail order sounds very 1980s.  Should it be called internet order?  Or catalog order?

"Seed catalogs are responsible for more unfulfilled fantasies than Enron and Playboy combined." - Michael Perry

I sometimes think bare root stock should be called dead root stock.  Even with the success of the arborvitae, I don't think I'll go that route again.  The local Soil and Water District does an annual tree sale.  A few of these have stuck it out, but overall success rates are abysmal.  At least cost is nearly negligible.  There have been some of these that have soldiered on mightily, despite being froze, dug up, eaten by rabbits, etc.  I'll attribute this to being native trees grown nearby.  Most recently, potted trees from local growers are showing some promise.  Prices can be wildly variable, but some of the smaller operations have a lot to choose from for very reasonable prices.

I'm somewhat partial to trees that are native to the area, but will try just about anything that looks hardy.  My deciduous trees are almost all native species, with the exception of a few ginkgo trees; since these were once thought to be an extinct dinosaur from Pangaea, I guess they could be thought of as native to both everywhere and nowhere.

I really love paw paw trees.  I planted several of these at my previous house and once established, they did fantastic, eventually becoming gorgeous large, tropical-looking trees that bore copious amounts of fruit, as long as the flowers didn't freeze in the spring.  They are not quite as happy at the new house, since they do best as an understory tree and the little trees planted in the last few years get too much sun.
In addition to the ginkgos and paw paws, I have sassafrass, maple, oak, peach, and whatever the root stock was after the cherry tree graft died.  I also have one tree that I had given up for dead and now no longer remember what it is - I suspect it is a pecan, but it may be some kind of chestnut.  I'm quite surprised at the difficulty I've had with both the maples and oaks.

This year's deciduous tree additions were a couple buckeye trees.  Buckeyes have quite a taproot (as do paw paws), so they do not transplant well.  But I had little to lose, so I thought I'd try to transplant some from the edge of a nearby field.  There is a small wooded area between two farm fields that had some small trees.  I wasn't sure who owned the ground they were on, but they are in an area that is frequently brush hogged, so I didn't have any qualms about taking them.  Once I decided this, I wanted to get them planted before the end of the spring season, so on an early Sunday morning, I drove down to dig them up.  While doing so, I realized that I had made a situation that was assuredly perfectly acceptable with permission look preposterously suspect instead:  On the edge of a field in the wee hours of the morning digging up some "plants."  As expected the transplanted trees died exceedingly quickly.  Shortly thereafter, I bought some yellow buckeyes from a local nursery and again found myself looking like I was engaged in questionable behavior.  I picked up the trees and drove home with them inside the cab of my truck, since I didn't want the tree to be horrendously ripped apart by the wind on the 50 mile trip home.  Any idea what buckeye leaves could look like to Joe LawEnforcement if they aren't familiar with them?

So far, these buckeye trees are doing well.

Planting trees often seems pointless.  So many of them die; best intentions, even with water, do not sustain botanical life.  What I do hope, is that over time enough of them will survive.  Trees grow stealthily, never changing size during day to day monotony, but little by little inch their way up.  My kingdom will never be one Roger Cook would be proud of, and this is OK.  Hopefully I'll pull into my driveway some day and realize that I have my own mini unkempt forest.

"No, I understand now," Auberon said, calm in the woods - it was so simple, really.  "I didn't for a long time, but I do now.  You just can't hold people, you can't own them.  I mean it's only natural, a natural process really.  Meet.  Love.  Part.  Life goes on.  There was never any reason to expect her to stay always the same - I mean 'in love,' you know."  There were those doubt-quotes of Smoky's heavily indicated.  "I don't hold a grudge.  I can't."
"You do," Grandfather Trout said.  "And you don't understand."
     - From Little, Big by John Crowley

Dust Devil

I took advantage of the warm dry Memorial Day weekend to ride the bicycle.  Sunday was a long ride down to the river; returning home meant a punishing but rewarding altitude climb.  Monday was a ride with no particular destination or route - just a meandering that was almost as much mental as it was physical.
Monday's ride took me through rural areas in Indiana, down many little-used roads.  The air was less humid than the previous few days, with the sun rapidly heating up the morning.  While headed north on a narrow farm road, I saw something I hadn't seen in quite some time.  A dust devil rolled from west to east.  After crossing the road in front of me, it picked up some of last year's corn husks and carried them over a recently-planted field before disappearing in a vibrantly green wheat field.  I stopped riding, taking time to watch the dust devil.  I wondered for a few seconds how a dust devil forms, but put the thought out of my mind and just lived the sight of it in the undisturbed morning.

Vacation is months away, but planning can allow the vacation to begin long before it actually does.  Hopeful stops can be estimated and potential routes planned.  All this early planning can then be scrapped, with new ideas.  Planning helps build anticipation and creates stamina for the painful monotony of the weekly routine before vacation actually happens.  Mentally, this means vacation is already starting.
The vacation will be a road trip to the Northwest; I was last through the area in 2012, so it hasn't been that long, but I love the big empty and how it slowly builds to the mountains and falls away to the coast.
I reread Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig as just about any route I look at will spend some time in the same areas that the author talks about in that book.  This makes my third reading of it; there are very few books that I've read more than once - let alone three times.  Each time, I pull new things out of the book, and remember previous highlights that I've failed to do anything with.  On my first reading, I liked the parts about the journey, but the philosophical parts could be hard to wade through.  Since I'm now more familiar with the storyline, I find myself more interested in the philosophy and slightly frightened that the author's mental train and non sequiturs can at times be so similar to my own.  The metaphysics can still be a painful slog in some places.  I'm not sure if I have my own Phaedrus, but we all have ghosts.

"The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain."

Among the things I look forward to when traveling are those times when I realize I'm so completely in the moment, unconscious of time, and existing in reality; as well as being completely separated, both mentally and physically, from the normal issues of work or the daily mayhem.  Time seems to stand still and pass quickly simultaneously.  I'm not sure what people who meditate are going for, but I bet it is something like that.  I'm also not sure meditating in the scripted sense will work for everyone, but riding for miles on a motorcycle, sitting in a hunting stand or riding a bike can supply some form of Zen - if accompanied by the right mental state.

"The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there."

Before I saw the dust devil, I was thinking about the upcoming vacation.  Between that and the extra day off of work, I guess I was in the right mental place.  However briefly, life made a little more sense watching that dust devil wander by on Memorial Day.

A few days later, I looked up online how dust devils are formed.  I wish I hadn't done that - Google has made it so we can almost always get too much information quickly, and then discard it like last year's corn husks.  I'm not sure information naturally creates comprehension.  And just watching the dust devil should have remained sufficient.