More maple, less Musk
2025-03-12
Dear reader,
What is rhythm for?
I noticed gathering maple sap this morning that rhythm is not only a key language of the universe, but it's also one that we actively use to shape our experience.
Everything sacred in life has a relationship with rhthym. Prayer, religious worship, sex, music, chopping dinner, chewing dessert. If we could somehow conceive of a way to remove rhthymic activity from these activities, what would you be left with? They wouldn't be recognizable.
Even better, all activities like this -- in their authentic forms -- are also responsive to the rhythm and mood that you bring to the event. There is no one universal rhythm for chopping onions.
I have around 75 taps in maple trees in the woods around our house. As many locals who are reading this well know, each tree and each tap has its own production schedule. Some buckets are full by noon, and some only ever have two inches of sap in them. But later in the day, or later in the sugaring season (which is mainly a couple weeks in March), that could flip.
I need to get to all the taps once a day to harvest the fresh sap before it turns to a bleak jelly of stank. There are several challenges to this, besides getting to know the rhythm of the trees. Walking around in deep snow (see the "high-centered" pig video I posted yesterday here) is effortful, and carrying buckets is hard on my forearms. Also, I need to harvest the sap with a baby strapped to my front, and at a time when he'll willingly ride along and even fall asleep.
out harvesting sap yesterday from our sugar maple trees
On the first day I collected and boiled syrup, I was totally overwhelmed. I felt like I was throwing my body around the forest, running with collecting buckets in hand to make it everywhere I needed to be that day.
As of this morning, a week into the run, I did it all -- I napped the baby, collected the sap at its freshest but when the buckets were fullest. The evaporator has been bubbling constantly for 20 hours, and my finishing tub is on the burner inside. I check it often, watching the still-too-watery maple syrup boil off and increase its boiling temperature to the magic Fahrenheit 219.
How I solved my overwhelm is anything but trivial in the history of mathematics, computation, and organizational efficiency. The "maple farmer with scoliosis and a baby to nap" problem happens to be a more complex restatement of the "traveling salesman problem," which was first formulated in 1930 and has become perhaps the most studied problem in optimization. Given customers in a couple dozen cities around the country, what's the most efficient route?
example of the travelling salesman problem, in which it's a mathematical challenge to find the optimal route between all the cities visited.
The problem is pretty easy to solve with two or three cities. However, with anything close to my 75 maple taps, it requires infinite computing time to solve perfectly. The best that supercomputers can do is get to within 1%, but even then, the computer can only return a sophisticated "best guess" answer. There are simply too many possibilities for a computer to have to check, and not enough time. The best that a machine can do is to give us "heuristics," or "close-enough" suggestions for how to approximate the answer.
As a supercomputer crunches a problem like this, its rhythm is the binary on-off on-off on-off of millions of electronic gates opening and closing, opening and closing, opening and closing. Whether it's playing ABBA, computing a math problem, or reading the terabytes of data in a movie, a computer chip is going on-off on-off on-off millions of times. The on-off cadence is as fast as a chip-maker can possibly make it, and far faster than any human anything -- prayer, religious worship, music, etc.
The "amazing" thing about a computer is that it has no rhythm, and yet simulate any rhythm you want. The vinyl of a record album is physically imprinted by sound. It can only vibrate with that sound. On the other hand, simulating a wave-form that it isn't is what digital does. If you could listen to a computer chip compute, you would simply hear a buzz.
Like many conceptions of the devil, digital can be anything you want, and yet it has no fiber, no vibration of its own.
analog vs. digital signal
The analog signal contains an infinite amount of data. The digital computation of that is only ever an approximation.
How did I solve the problem of the maple farmer with many steps to go before he sleeps? I rebelled against the conception of the human brain as a "supercomputer." Instead, I recognized that I am an analog device, and as such can communicate and receive infinite, complex waveform data in real-time, and process it in the most effective way invented by humans to date. I noticed that, like the baby's nap schedule and everything sacred in life, fitting this chore into a 24-hour period in the most efficient way possible becomes a matter of getting into a rhythm.
I could draw up a diagram of our backyard and the taps, the location of the evaporator, the baby's nap schedule, and I could likely demonstrate the solving of complex math in how I harvested certain clusters of trees as a group and worked different groups of trees into different naps. But I have no sensation of having solved this problem like a computer. What I feel like is that I simply tried it for a couple days, felt the vibe of it all, and settled into it.
And it felt good.
Silent Sirens: Mohini Ghoshroy & Cam Quinn
***
With data centers using 12% of our electrical production and rising, and the national reins in the hands of men who want to see 50% of the grid devoted to AI alone, digital has become the boss of analog.
For the sake of the human soul and the sacred rhythms of life, join us in going "off-digital" more in 2025. Our Halifriends winter music series continues this Saturday:
"Silent Sirens" -- featuring the amazing Mohini Goshroy and Cam Quinn
this Saturday, March 15 at 4 p.m.
free! and there will be delish farm food
RSVP -- email or text me for details (802-275-2881)
There's nothing like live music in a sunny art studio in person. I find that bathing in the waves is like a form of meditation and clears the mind.
It's also mud season and the roads are not great, but you can get here. Please simply RSVP digitally for details.
***
Also this morning, I laughed with joy at the graphic design choices of McKenna, my collaborator on our farm's forthcoming catalog, called "Free Rapunzel!"
Our catalog and this writing will never appear online, and I'm really liking what we can communicate with the analog rhythm of print. Want to read it? I'm collecting mailing addresses from all over. What's yours?
[Preferred mailing name]
Mailing address
City, State, Zip
[any overseas info]
Thanks for reading. Please send news of your rhythms.
kind regards,
Tristan Roberts
Quill Nook Farm