Genesis 2:16-2:17: And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
This cache is in the middle of the Central Washington University campus, an institution dedicated to the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, and it is also near the campus arboretum, a collection of trees. There is much to be learned at CWU about trees, one quick lesson about how trees contribute to sustainability can be learned by doing the Geocaching Adventure Lab that starts nearby.
The biology of trees is another fascinating topic you might study. One recent discovery is that trees communicate with each other through soil fungi. You can learn more about it here and here.
The Mathematics and Computer Science Departments study trees, although not the type that provide shade in the summertime. In these departments, a tree is a type of recursively generated undirected graph with the root being a base vertex (also called a node), the next layer of vertices are called children, and each is connected by an edge the root. Then each child vertex might be the root of a tree that is a sub-graph of the original graph. An example picture is below, where the dots are the vertices and the lines are the edges root of this mathematical tree is at the bottom. A collection of these trees is, of course, called a forest.
Binary trees are important data structures in computer science in which each node or vertex has at most two children, which are referred to as the left child and the right child.
In the Biology department, you can also learn about the phylogenetic tree (also known as the evolutionary tree) which is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological species or other entities based upon similarities and differences in their physical or genetic characteristics.
Tree diagrams are used in statistics classes to help understand conditional probability; the probability that one event occurs given another. For example, the probability that a random person finds a given geocache is low, but the probability that you find it given that they looked for it is high. Click here for another explanation.
The most important lessons of a University are not necessarily the facts or simple knowledge imparted, but instead, it is critical thinking or the habits of mind that are taught. We can easily look up simple facts by web searching. What is harder is analyzing facts to come to a judgment. It is important to understand how we know things, and to know how you would test to see if option A or option B is true -- this is the big idea behind the scientific method. Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined and self-correcting. A good critical thinking should be aware of the cognitive biases of humans, such as confirmation bias, and should always be employing methods to avoid common errors.
Use your geocaching field knowledge and critical thinking skills to find this cache on or near a tree at ground zero for the coordinates.
Congratulations to Tweeks for the First to Find!