On 19/01/2023 15:09, Jo Pattabiraman via Silklist wrote:
Thank you, Udhay, for adding me to the list. I am honoured!Hi folks, my name is Jyotsna, I'm a long-time Bangalorean. Like many of you, I am an internet veteran - my internship was at IISc ERNET where I helped build a GUI monitor for the backbone. I feel like I might have crossed paths with many of you.
Hello! I suspect this is our first crossing of paths :-)I live in Gloucester, UK, with wife, two kids, four cats, three chickens, and two rabbits. I'm a computer nerd, specifically one who specialises in the platforms people build apps on - databases, network protocols, operating systems, programming languages, frameworks, that sort of thing. Varied career but currently working for the UK Department for Education helping them to better integrate data about teachers throughout their careers (from considering getting into teaching, initial training, actual teaching careers, finding new jobs, further training, retirement, being disqualified, all that stuff). A lot "softer" than my usual deep-in-the-guts-of-a-low-level-software-component work, but I really appreciate having a break to do less mentally demanding things and talk to actual people from time to time :-)
I have lots of personal projects in software, electronics, and engineering, but the current new interesting one is that my family recently came into possession of six acres of ancient woodland, so I'm learning about how to look after trees.
"Ancient" is such a relative term. In the UK, "Ancient woodland" means something oddly specific:
"Ancient woods are areas of woodland that have persisted since 1600 in England and Wales, and 1750 in Scotland" - https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/habitats/ancient-woodland/
That's mainly because that's when decent maps were first made, so we don't really have good historical records as to whether a wood existed before that or not. But this definition "ancient woodland" is supposed to be as good an approximation as we can easily get for "It's been woodland since the last ice age so has a rich and complex ecosystem of diverse organisms". Woodlands planted in the last few centuries have a much small number of species present. Ours has been cut down in areas as it was a quarry and industrial site in the distant past (we need to get archaeologists in to look at the ruins, which from my research could be anywhere from "late Roman occupation" to "early Industrial age") so we don't have very many ancient trees, but it looks like the trees regrew through natural processes from the surviving trees in other areas, retaining the diversity; and the ground-level ecosystem has retained a dizzying variety of fungi, and therefore probably insects too.
Until about ten years ago, I lived in a house that was built in the 1600s, which made anything modern-day Americans call "ancient" seem funny.
And yet I think that most things we'd call "ancient" here in the UK are recent developments compared to the history of India!
-- Alaric Snell-Pym (M0KTN neé M7KIT) http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
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