Why "Syca"

I'm from Nanjing. Nanjing is planted almost wall-to-wall with sycamores — the trees people often call "French plane trees."

A sycamore doesn't win on any single rare tree. It wins by standing in rows, casting shade, sheltering the people passing by. Walk through Nanjing's old town in summer and the canopy overhead is one unbroken sheet of green — that's not the work of one tree, it's many of them growing together for many years.

That's exactly the roadmap I set for this lab:

One tree → a mile of sycamores.

In the first phase it's just me, making the trunk thick and tall. Once there are more projects, and they get seen, maybe people will show up with their own strange projects and we'll build things no one has built before. And even for the ones just passing through, I'm glad to be the one who records them, so more people get to see them.

A tree has to grow up first before it can shade anyone else. So for now, I'll just keep this tree growing — honestly, in the open, one day at a time.