Science does have a lot of weird terminology that can be improved, though. One example is the thing I’ve always known since a child as the Fallopian Tube. At some point in my twenties, I learned Eileter - egg carrier - and the subsequent term oviduct. I’m a huge fan of Germanic compound words since destructuring them gives you information on the object - the ovum tube. There is a commonality in terminology between different parts of the body and this concordance aids memory and recall.
A Fallopian Tube on the other hand implies some kind of membership of the group of Fallopes and has no function description.
https://wgntv.com/video/giant-snapping-turtle-nicknamed-chon...
https://www.creatingtomorrowsforests.co.uk/blog/the-miyawaki...
At some point he taught an online course called "Blue Collar Botany" that went through plant ecology, evolution, identification, and other topics. It was fantastic, and finally got me into learning about the plants around me more rigorously. Years later, I still hear his voice in my head when I see certain parts of a plant like a laminar stamen. His affect is so unique that it actually helped me remember the content easier.
I don't know if he still teaches it or sells the videos from those sessions, but I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the natural world around them.
I crave for some photos of the author's herbarium.
So, mini show HN: https://indigene.app is a browser-only, offline & mobile-friendly, no account, no ads, open source tool to help you find native plants that would thrive exactly where you are. I've tried to make it as thoroughly sourced as possible but focus heavily on folks that have less experience with gardening and native plants in general.
I've been adding coverage to a handful of US and French ecoregions for now (what I know) and you can already do plant lookups by GPS, postal code, and ecoregion). The app will help you identify you spot, sun, soil, and specific ecosystem support goals (wildlife, birds, erosion or runoff control, growth) and offer a sortable list you can fine-tune with requirements (max height/width, no thorns, pet safe, spread, zero watering, etc.).
There's a lot more in there I've wanted for years like bloom windows, host species counts, dependent native wildlife, growth-over-time charts, propagation tips, and tons of sourced references that overlap with a lot of the resources Joey Santore and other native plant folks reference.
None of this replaces useful tools like iNaturalist whose excellent open API I use to show what native plants look like in Indigene, but hopefully it encourages folks who have the means and the time to start rebuilding local ecosystems we've neglected or actively destroyed.
PS: because I can't help it, the app has detailed release notes gendered from its changelog at https://indigene.app/release-notes/. It also takes privacy & safety very seriously: https://indigene.app/privacy
Please watch the latest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDVcfSYcxc0. It's an interview with an old botanist, who shares his wisdom and philosophy, remains engaged after decades of witnessing first hand America's nature getting destroyed. 2 main points: - destroyed old-growth forests, grassland, remnant prairies takes millennia to be back to what they were, not decades. Insects and other pollinators don't just reappear - water availability for plants comes in many forms, all of which disappear with tillage.
Joey is an acquired taste, but if you look past the strong and odd personality (the persona?), his channel is a gold mine. But this time he was (rightfully) impressed by Gerry (Gerould) Wilhelm's wealth of knowledge.
https://www.publiclandstore.com/blogs/gallery/joey-alone-exh...
https://www.meso.cloud/plants/tracheophyta/magnoliopsida/gen...
Aggregates 780k plants and fungi from many canonical sources (IPNI, Wikidata, GBIF, iNaturalist etc) and tries to present the data in an intuitive and engaging way, lets you search by common names in 300+ languages etc.
Feedback from especially botany nerds very welcome!
Later, while growing up, I noticed my brain noticing plants or tree details, auto mapping them to possible genre, trying to find out, trying to memorize... but not always voluntarily, meaning that i felt like I was much more attracted and focused on plants and tree details and recognition after a certain age.
Something similar happened with birds, my brain started recording and recognizing the different birds sounds, and I started recognizing birds types more. Like something that before was a random signal or a bunch of sounds suddenly with age started having patterns and clear distinctions that attracted my brain and memory, and I simply started being able to distinguish birds by just hearing them.
I love it, I observe, I listen, I learn. I use the plant apps and birdnet for the bird soiunds (from CornellLab and Technical university of Chemnitz). Cool projects, lovely apps and interesting tech usage. I'm planning to upgrade terrace with constant camera feed for auto-detection.
But the main point is, does anybody relate to this grown interest to plants and bird distinction with age? is it something known and defined? it kinda feels like part of a biological evolution related to age, but no idea.
1. political tussle. australian botanists managed to hijack the "acacia" name from the original African Acacia, to the totally unrelated australian plants that were also called acacia. I noticed that japanese botanists also have a habit of insular naming.
2. western bias. Names were given by the first white european man that "found" the plant, instead of the local inhabitants who have known and named the plants for thousands of years.
3. the eight rank taxonomy that only accidentally kinda work, but not really. The original ranks were domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Modern taxonomy only pays a glancing homage to this system, because the actual evolutionary path that we found out there doesn't care about this neat categorization system, and so we had to shoehorn in hacks in the form of sub-phylums, sub-classes, sub-sub-sub-families, and sub-species. We could probably come up with a better system using a tree coordinate system.
To be really good at botany is simple. Just learn how to be really good at {list of requirements which are themselves recursively complex and challenging, despite being written as one word like "learn"}I haven't watched him for years because I don't want to miss any of the botany.
In the 18th century someone living in Europe making science books would definitely be using Latin, maybe French if you were a modernist, as that was the language of science publication and communication. I don't see how this is either backwards or goofy?
It's similar to use English on an internet blog post nowadays (as the author does), since there's many more Chinese or Spanish native speakers than English, but English IS the language of international communication.
[1]: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9798317900410-concrete-botany
Loved him ever since I randomly stumbled across his guerilla tree planting video in I want to say 2020?
Anyway, we all must support the train driver turned botanist.
As an adult, I have found great value in assistive tools Merlin and Seek/iNaturalist for bird and plant identification. I would encourage everyone to try out Merlin at least once to learn more about all the great variety of birds in your neighborhood.
I am also building a personal tool that captures and analyzes various environmental data sources (GIS, weather, phenological factors, species-specific habitat factors, etc) so that I can explore landscapes/ecosystems in my area (Minneapolis and MN/WI more broadly) to make the ecology/terrain legible and support observing various target species (fungi, migratory birds, fish runs, wildflower blooms, and so on).
The format of the tool is very map/visualization/dashboard heavy which is fine for me - but carries too much bulk for friends and family. The project for this fall/winter is rewrapping the iOS experience around a quiet phone/watch/earbuds field-mode that only surfaces information/guidance/cue-stake recognition in skill-preserving/developing and eyes-up/phone away experience.
It’s a fun project.
> It is my firm belief that any of the authors listed below (unless they’re dicks) would not want anyone to be prohibited from reading their work <links to book sharing websites follows>
Always great to see fellow technologists in this space!
For the past few years I've maintained a free open source project called Ecodash (https://ecodash.ai) covering the world's native plants, with trait filters.
Code here: https://github.com/legel/ecodash
While I'm also an entrepreneur and *do* believe there is a lot of financial opportunity in this space, I also really just want to see ecosystems thrive.
Keep up the great work!
I actually vibecoded a personal app just last week to handle my personal collection of rare succulents and cactus I grow, primarily from seed. I wanted to create something for my young daughter that showed the mature plant along with information about its habitat, growing conditions, how to cultivate (I grow indoors due to my climate), etc.
I’m actually really interested in the devices you have coming soon as I grow indoors and am always looking for improvements on lighting, monitoring, etc. I have a real hodgepodge of lights and gadgets.
One slight piece of feedback: it's pretty clear a lot of the text was output of AI. IME (and just _my_ E, of course), this detracts somewhat from the authority of the page, as it makes it seem more like it just came from a conversation with Claude, rather than from your knowledge filtered through building an app. Might be worth doing a couple of passes to tighten up and human-ize it a bit :). (since it's open source, I suppose I could always PR myself if you'd be open to it)
I do, and I've seen it in others, but from the limited data points I've seen there's no causal relationship with age. I.e. what I've seen is people largely oblivious of nature/ecosystems/flora/fauna sudenly becoming very invested in it, for various reasons, but this doesn't happen at or only beyond a certain age. For me it was around 30 but that's simply because of a series of coincidences (new house, large garden, needed solution for mowing, happened to see a 2nd hand scythe, looked into grassland ecology, etc). But I know people whos obsession started at 16 and at 60 and like everything in between.
I'm reminded of an article I read once, it seems to have gone offline, an interview with indie game dev Jason Rohrer. He said the city took him to court for not mowing his lawn. He ended up winning under the 1st amendment (the lawn was "free expression" or something...)[0]
I thought that was really interesting (and obviously wouldn't work in other countries).
The other day I walked around the neighborhood and found this massive patch of grass and weeds that had been mowed, and scorched by the sun, so it was just mostly dead. Barely 5 minutes away, the city had fenced out special plots and paid to have a bunch of weeds instlled, to help the bees. Comedy.
[0] Edit: Yeah it's deleted. I found backups though!
https://web.archive.org/web/20150315123808/https://www.esqui...
I'm not really into botany itself, but I enjoy their rants about how people manage "green" spaces
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUFQouwqbe8
(I love BB)
No ads, non-profit, contribute to research, etc. It also allows you to find out what others have spotted in your area. I like the range maps, the images across seasons, and other seasonal information.
The actual ML-based recognition is somewhat hidden, I think that part of the UI needs some work; it seems like it was made for researchers first then hacked for non-experts to use.
For me, it's really just trees though. Birds and other wildlife are nice, but they don't draw my interest in the same way.
I'd suggest having ones that count from origin, and other that count from present, so the current extant species would be +1, LUCA would be -1.
Eukaryot? count from origin, Beagle? Count from present.
Seek is 220MB...
Our family is Catholic, and Mom hates Latin, so as a reactionary I absolutely love it. As a child about 10 years old, I began to collect books called "Field Guide" such as Field Guide to Spiders and Field Guide to Butterflies and so forth. These were wonderful, glossy illustrated handbooks, and while the only field trips I made were into our suburban backyard, we saw a quality mix of flora and fauna because of Dad's gardening and our proximity to a canyon.
And the index would have all scientific names listed, and so I set myself to the task of memorizing as many as possible. I hardly recall any today, except apis mellifera and mosca domestica but I can tell you, it was really influential for my social life at recess to be blurting out the Latin names of creepy-crawlies. Harry Potter was still at least 15 years in the future, then, and none of the girls showed interest in field trips.
His backstory is really one-of-a-kind. If I recall correctly, he got really into botany because he worked for Union Pacific railroad, and while stopping in a city, would go to the library and checkout different botany books.
But it was an interesting time as slowly native languages became more common. The chair for economic sciences at Uppsala was specifically to be taught in Swedish (1741).
Southern and central Europe were ahead of the curve a bit and it was more common to see French, English and German for example (French and English scientific journals date back to the 1660s).
For more information, I can recommend "Languages of science in the eighteenth century" by Britt-Louise Gunnarsson which specifically focuses on Linnaeus. It's Open Access: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/97831102...
Now I can’t not have a little garden(currently growing chilli’s and a citrus tree, from seeds)
I see this brought up often in all sorts of contexts. It's the "if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around" thing. If some indigenous group with no writing system nor contact with the rest of the world has a name for something... does it really have a name or even exist in the global sense since no one else can be made aware of it?
But, ultimately, the naming is just for us humans. We care, the trees don't!
To quote Richard Feynman:
> The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?” I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!” But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: “See that bird?” he says. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.” (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.)
Also, a tree coordinate system? We can't even be certain what a tree is, we can only look at a particular species and put it somewhere on a tree-bush continuum.
This diagram is insane: we have trees with non-tree ancestors, and non-trees with tree ancestors!
https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
I have a similar interest but mine is about passively assimilating foreign languages while watching movies. Every time I grok a new expression it feels like a rush of dopamine.
My publisher probably feels differently. :)
The most fun I had with Indigene was when I decided to add French ecoregions so my parents could use the app too. Most of the work is in this PR where I used a recently published study’s plant host species data to offer ecosystem value/services metrics since the Tallamy data doesn’t cover that: https://github.com/olivierlacan/indigene/pull/53
That stuff reignitated the kind of deep data hunt fever I haven’t had since my COVID Tracking Project days when I was finding random ArcGIS dashboards and extracting data from their JSON calls to find some reliable case data.
I’m bummed I didn’t find your project before. I kept looking for something when I moved from Florida to Washington after converting my entire yard there. Having to learn a whole new ecoregion was rough and it made me think the barrier should be drastically lower for people who aren’t as motivated.
On the financial opportunity side, I hoped for a while that there may be a way to align our best interest as a species (and our ecosystem) with what our modern societies value but the last decade has made it clear to me that neither governments nor private enterprise are capable to remain as focused as they need to be. Plus leveraging worldwide public-funded science to make a living seems a bit odd if I can instead use my engineering expertise to not require unnecessary waste of resources (servers, more LLM tokens, etc.) as the ecosystem rapidly degrades.
Level III/IV Maps are here: https://www.epa.gov/eco-research/level-iii-and-iv-ecoregions...
At the very least I'll make sure each region page links to this given it's the source that determines what species are shown.
Still thinking about how to fold in eFloras and the expanded CoL XR data, and add the immediate habitat/surroundings beyond the climate/geo/pics we already have in a compelling way. If you have any examples of someone who does that really well (sites, apps, books etc) that she likes that'd be great.
Taking the scenic route with devices, really want to nail comparing sensor readings with species' natural habitats and make that intuitive. What are your favorites so far in terms of vendors/items?
So I take this feedback to heart and just like with the (sourced & generated) French localization I’m working my way through validating everything. This is another benefit of the project being entirely public, you can see precisely in the repo what I did and didn’t think to do in order to ensure accuracy.
When it comes to prose & style, I’ve set some clear accessibility goals in the agent config, and I’ve rewritten some things but it can be hard to fight the needless verbosity of LLMs at times.
I would deeply appreciate if you took the time to send a PR for any kind of improvement or addition). Thanks in advance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simlish
For the same reason, botanical nomenclature should obviously be standardized in Simlish. Sul sul, Laganaphyllis simnovorii!
Laganaphyllis simnovorii is the scientific name of the Cowplant, literally suggestive of a plant that devours Sims. It first appeared under that name in The Sims 2: University as a Natural Science career reward. The Sims 3 Store also uses the full name officially.
https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Laganaphyllis_simnovorii
>This bizarre bovine vegetation is large enough to swallow your next-door neighbor whole. In fact, it WILL eat your neighbors. Your friends will be hard-pressed to resist the tantalizing vine-cake of the carnivorous Laganaphyllis Simnovorii. After it has consumed some prey, milk it for sweet, rejuvenating nectar of life. A swig of this liquid refreshment will add precious days to a Sim's life and wash away any regret they may have over their visitor's fate.
A proposed technical lexicon:
Plant: floragerb. Flora: floragerbia. Vegetation: verdigerbium. Fruit: pomofroob. Vegetable: olerinoob. Root: radixgerb. Stem: caulob. Leaf: folinurb. Flower: anthofleeb. Seed: seminib. Pollen: pollinoob. Spore: sporib. Cell: cellubo. Cell wall: muracellum. Chlorophyll: chlorofleebin. Photosynthesis: photofroobulation. Cellular respiration: respiragerbation. Germination: germinoobulation. Pollination: pollifleebation. Fertilization: gametogerbination. Transpiration: evapofleebulation. Xylem: xyloob. Phloem: phleebum. Stoma: stomabo. Phylogeny: ancestragerbics. Morphology: formagerbology. Binomial nomenclature: duonominoobulation.
> I say this because a few unthinking “performative leftist” nitwits as of late have decided to attack the science of taxonomy itself).
However, let's keep out the culture wars from a post mainly about plants.
I don't know about other countries, but in Poland you're just not required to cut down your lawn at all, unless it's a fire hazard (you have a lot of dead and dried up plants).
meaning that i feel it was a change also triggered by other factors and life conditions, or even a reaction to those, but at the same time I realize that my brain started receiving and analyzing and appreciating those signal, not me completely voluntary.
one thing that comes always to my mind is the possible reason of reaction to shitty work and work related stress that makes us crave for nature and nature contact, like a story of a friend stopping the car just to touch grass with the feet.
I relate to an approximate after 30 thing too. But in my case nature contact was reduced compare to initial life part, and I got a garden after that.
But again, it feels like an over semplifcation or easy shortcut, and I believe there is maybe just something innate that blooms at a certain point.
how can we get more datapoints for this? I was trying to crowdsource here :)
It's deeply rewarding to find the world around becoming deeper and more intricately connected. And you get to see more of it every day!
maybe is just how our brain is wired and predisposed to such things that let us notice and enjoy this evolution or process?
to me it sounds just more intelligent people that can see things average people cannot or don't care about, might be slightly biased :)
beside jokes is that defined somewhere? or is just that if somebody can focus and contextualize more things and details ends up in that "category"?
[0] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo145049...
Almost everywhere that white Europeans went and named things, they did so with native guides that had names for things.
Many of the Australian plants and animals named with European taxonomies still have common native names and aboriginals alive, kicking, and somewhat traditional that still use older native namings.
eg: (IIRC) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7h9V4aKlJw
I frequently get messages from people who really want to teach themselves botany and learn exactly where the fuck to start identifying plants and learning about them. The field is full of intimidating words (as well as some powdery stiffs, like much of Academia) and a confusing lexicon that can be a turn off to the layperson. I’m telling you this though - don’t be intimidated. With the internet, you have 24 hour access to the library. Use it. Ask questions. See a word you don’t understand? Look it up. Read about a concept that doesn’t make any sense to you (ie “what the shit does ‘monophyletic’ mean and why is it important)? Figure out what about it is confusing and ask the damn google.
That said, there are some key concepts you should understand that will make things a lot easier. They are:
Latin terminology - why do we use Latin? Well, because some dead guy named Linnaeus realized we need a universal system that scientists from multiple different cultures could use (at the time, he was probably mostly thinking of “white European cultures”, and while we can acknowledge how backwards and fucking goofy this is now, we can still admit that Linnaeus’ ideology was simply flawed like his time and NOT throw out the baby with the proverbial bath water. The fucker created a beautiful system, and it works. And that’s why we still use it. I say this because a few unthinking “performative leftist” nitwits as of late have decided to attack the science of taxonomy itself). Common names simply don’t work on a large scale. One common name (ie “cedar”) can refer to 8 different totally unrelated plants, where as Cedrus refers specifically to the genus which contains the species C. libani, C. deodara, and C. atlantica. When botanic names (or any organism’s name) is written in scientific nomenclature, the genus name is capitalized and the species name is lower case, and the name itself is usually written in italics. If you write a species name “Cedrus Atlantica” it is a dead give-away that you don’t know what the fuck you are doing. I was politely corrected on this point more than a decade ago, and I never hesitate to politely correct others. It’s like being courteous enough to tell somebody that they have a booger on their face.
Taxonomy : IS THERE A METHOD TO THE MADNESS? WHAT GIVES? - In short, yes, there is, absolutely, and it is so FUCKING cool. Why is it cool? Because we now group things according to how evolutionarily related are, and how they evolved. Once you learn the key concepts and traits that unite a family or a genus or a tribe, you can now identify members of that evolutionary grouping that you have never seen before. This is how I can see a plant that I have never encountered before and automatically know what other plants its related to, what family or genus it is in, and thus know what taxonomic group to search for it under (on inaturalist using the “explore” feature or with a key (flora), etc).
This is the seminal textbook to use if you are deciding to take the deeper dive into botany. Plant Systematics is the study of plant evolution, and furthermore is the study of plant identification as it relates to plant evolution via an understanding of SYNAPOMORPHIES. This textbook by Dr. Michael Simpson lays out why botanists were able to tell how closely related certain plant families and orders were BEFORE the advent of DNA analysis, as well as why some of those prior assumptions were found to be wrong. This is a family-by-family, and order-by-order way to become familiar with plant morphology and evolution. This is also an excellent way to one day be able to see new plants that you have never seen before and automatically know what families or genera they might be related to simply by observing them. At present, the third edition is the most current and it is a book that you will use as a reference for the next ten years (at least) of your life.
This textbook covers many of the basics of plant biology as well as getting into the nuances of plant evolution, with excellent examples of some of the more charismatic and curious plant species out there. It also does a great job of explaining what botanists know so far about how plants evolve and how selection pressures work to cause all the “variations on a theme” and “endless forms most beautiful” that got Darwin all horny. What is an ecotype you say? What is the Hardy-Weinberg theorem? What are allele frequencies? What is convergent evolution? All these concepts are explained, in depth, in this excellent text book.
It’s always great to be able to support authors by buying their books, but sometimes the cost of self-education can prohibitive. It is my firm belief that any of the authors listed below (unless they’re dicks) would not want anyone to be prohibited from reading their work. This is why sources like www.libgen.is and www.sci-hub.se and other book sharing websites exist. In this case I suggest purchasing a cheap android tablet and becoming acquainted with the idea of reading textbooks in pdf form. A half pound electronic device can store upwards of half a million pages or more worth of textbooks.
Phylogeny and Evolution of the Angiosperms by Pam and Doug Soltis
The Tangled Tree by David QUammen - A Good pop-sci explanation of molecular phylogenetics and understanding evolution
Plant Evolution : An Introduction to the History of Life by Karl Niklas
Botany Illustrated by Janice Glimm-Lacy
Annals of the Former World (geology) by John Macphee
Botany for Gardeners by Brian Capon
The Ecology of Plants by Jessica Gurevitch
A Botanist’s Vocabulary by Susan Pell
The Rose’s Kiss by Peter Bernhardt
Flowering Plant Families by Wendy Zomlefer
How the Earth Turned Green by Joseph Armstrong
The Origin, Expansion, and Demise of Plant Species by Donald Levin
The Ecology of Seeds by Michael Fenner
The Fungi by Sarah Watkinson
Biogeography : An Ecological and Evolutionary Approach by C. Barry Cox
Evolution Making Sense of Life by Carl Zimmer
Cacti Biology and Uses
An Island Called California by Elna Baker (a great text due to it’s explanation of ecological relationships even if you don’t live in California)
Serpentine Geoecology of Western North America by Earl Alexander
A Natural History of California by Allan Schoenherr
Ecology of Desert Systems by Whitford
The California Deserts by Bruce Pavlik
Plant and Animal Endemism in California by Susan Harrison (again - great explanations even if you’re not into California. IT is a great case study)
It thrives in otherwise hideous and tacky Home Depot woodchip landscaping beds in front of luxury yuppie condos, banks, and other nondescript, bleak looking buildings.
They'll lift the veil on your own bullshit, and make you deal with whatever's harming you, like four weeks of therapy in four hours.
The Ethnomycology of Ugly Landscaping:
If that were true, then you’re saying Linnaeus has the same problems as before it, and it only split people up? Maybe we should go back to the previous names? Of course the system could be improved and solve some problems, the relevant questions aren’t whether it’s possible, they’re about goals, scale, and agreement.
Feynman’s quote is cute but doesn’t seem completely relevant to a hierarchical taxonomic naming system that in fact does tell you something about what a bird is from the name, no?
Plants mimic each other for advantage facing herbivores. Isn't that fantastic!.
Learning Latin is the least burden here, the problem is that a profusion of morphological features defines set membership and professionals assign a significant role for DNA analysis. We have a hodgepodge, taxonomy has warfare inside.
Botany is great. Being good at it takes time. Being good at anything takes time.
I'm sure that's a thing for some people. And there's research to back that up IIRC. Even seemingly silly things like the smell of a wet forest being beneficial.
One aspect which stood out for me is 'awareness'. I find it deeply fascinating how many people, as I used to be one, can just stroll through everyday locations without even knowing the names of the most common plants let alone think about their connection to the surroundings. Once I started to realize how unaware I was of this I started forzing myself to be more aware and it's fascinating how much there can be going on in like even 1 square meter of nature. And of which I only know a fraction.
And for me this is really meditative - even though it's somewhat counterintuitive. Meditation is usually about clearing the mind, but for me being in nature and filling my mind with thoughts about the whole interconnection of individuals in ecosystems can bring peace and relaxation. Well, as long as I do not think about how we're collectively destroying a lot of it.
I have also seen this obsessive focus in sports fans: What was the half-season where Pat Maroon played on the New Jersey Devils as a rental? Well they made the playoffs that year which must have been Taylor Hall's MVP Award Season and ah yes! that had to be 2017-18!
Here in the UK there are no usually legal requirements, but it might be a social problem as your neighbours will not like it.
What actually would be goofy and backwards would be for this man to consider all of the world's cultures with whom he had never come in contact with, and try to create a system that worked for them. That would be very goofy and backwards, it would make him a crackpot.
The mere mention of this conciliatory statement for those "[pesky] leftists" (of which the author is one), the author is asserting that "Linnaeus was backwards and goofy but yet he made a good system!". Why does this even need to be said?
Do we call Confucius backwards and goofy for only writing his virtues in Chinese and only considering his Chinese peers? Why didn't he, or the Chinese (they had an empire and the means to do this), send envoys to the west so they could divine and predict what cultures would exist in a thousand years, allowing him to write his virtues in all of the languages and to consider all of the different mores of the world when writing his virtues? It's too Chinese! Or what about the Mayans, why didn't they in their backwards and goofy manner realize that a thousand years later their script would be indecipherable (for a while) to the European-language-speaking researchers of the future? If they had written in Latin we would be able to understand what they were trying to say! Very goofy and backwards of them. \s
The author's statement is what is backwards and goofy, and it's a cultural shibboleth that worked -- I stopped reading the moment I saw that, because to me it is a goofy and backwards thing to say.
Why do you think Latin was popular?
That's not to downplay giving things names! Obviously it's essential to get any collaborative work done that everyone uses the same name when they mean the same thing.
On applying my logic back to the introduction of the binomial naming system... very clever! But I think it was Linnaeus's peers liked the properties of binomial naming so much it had a unifying effect on them... and now they have unity, and there are many more scientists worldwide depending on this system to communicate, they don't need a challenger system to provide a different form of unity?
https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IPMC2024P1/chapter-3-gener...
The example clearly is discussing naming and not categorizing, which is precisely why Feynman’s anecdote is not fully applicable to the Linnaeus system.
> They have unity
I agree. That doesn’t mean the naming system can’t be improved, it just means unity is a goal and might be harder to achieve than before. This is what I meant about goals and agreement. If the new system were better enough, and unity was sought in advance, achieving unity might not be too difficult. It has happened before…
[1] https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041...
I just gave them a try for some common trees around Costa Rica that I'm confident in identifying, and they both did very well, slightly better than PictureThis and iNaturalist, which I've been using for a while.
I think you undermine your argument when you don't understand the complaint. Because I'd also like to see a lot more native plants, and less manicured, mono-culture yards with poison sprayed all over them.
But at least in my area, the problem isn't "oh look a spider"... it's "oh shit, that house is collapsing because of termites", and "Oh shit, my neighbor's mom's house just burned down because rats chewed through the wiring in the walls", and "Fuck me! That's hogweed growing in that yard! Time to call the city".
Pests are a real concern - they cause lots of monetary damage, and can seriously injure or hurt people if not monitored. Does that mean we should nuke everything with chemicals and make a sterile hellscape? No - I don't think it does.
But it doesn't pay to be dismissive either.
A healthy ecosystem with owls, snakes, and coyotes will keep rodents in check. But well before that point, the ubiquitous feral domestic cats usually wreak havoc on pests and songbirds alike. Not to mention that most of the problem starts with bad food storage and waste management in the first place, not tall grasses or a few fruit trees (hence the flocks of pigeons and seagulls around parking lot dumpsters).
Plus, no one is trying to stop you from tenting houses for termites, which are meditated by landscape practices like mulch and irrigation rather than the types of plants themselves.