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.
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!
> I thought that was really interesting (and obviously wouldn't work in other countries).
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).
Not just HOAs. Talk grass allows insects and vermin to move more freely. In cities, this contributes to their spread, so some places have city-wide ordinances that require lawn maintenance.
Rat and mice infestations are not fun. I have had enough trouble dealing with my pollinator and monarch butterfly habitats and mice. I actually TRY to get rabbits and squirrels but mice go after their babies.
I mean, I get it - I somewhat agree with your take, but this is somewhat of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" case.
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.
The complaint is not well founded and doesn't explain how native landscapes make the problem any worse.
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.
I had an interesting internal debate the other day about whether farm fields were more natural than fields of solar panels. (Ignore fields that have both for now). To me, a tilled field that is being chemically fertilized and tilled is at this point just as far removed from the former native state.
I love this guy, also my favourite Youtube channel and one of my favourite podcasts, he also guests on In Defence of Plants from time to time, I have the impression he's friends with the host.
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.
How is the world so difficult? People live nowadays better than kings of France used to live. In the last hundred years we've been going through an unprecedented wealth creation, not just in the West but accross the world.
"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."
Actually, those 8 different plants are hardly "totally unrelated". They are quite closely related in the evolutionary scheme of things (plants have been around for 1.6 billion years). Red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) and Cedrus (Cedrus atlantica) are both plants, but also Pinidae (conifers), and diverged about 250 Million years ago (time tree.org), so more distantly related that mammals (~80 y), but midway between humans/platypus (200 My) and humans/ducks (320 My). Hardly unrelated.
Minor:
"Why is it [taxonomy] cool? Because we now group things according to how evolutionarily related are, and how they evolved."
Yes, we group things by how closely related they are, but not necessarily by how distantly related they are in time. Taxonomy is about branch order, not distance in evolutionary time. The same species in a genus may include organisms that diverged several million years ago, but other species may have diverged much more recently. Taxonomy is a kind of evolutionary history that need not have a very regular clock.
Odd to see one of the best native plant communicators referenced on HN but I'll use to opportunity to mention a side project I'd been delaying diving in for years and finally committed to recently if there are folks here who want to not only learn to identify crucial native flora (and fauna) but contribute to restoring local native plants that are critical to ecosystems.
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.
I'm a Visiting Scientist at UC Berkeley focusing on AI for ecology.
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.
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.
It’s so nice to know you’ve worked on this. I’m very curious what sources you used.
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.
Wow, this is a lovely tool, and it's clearly built with a lot of your own knowledge! I'm in New England and this has some great recs for my land.
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)
Thank you, it’s very explicitly the result of a relatively tight but fast TDD development process with Opus (4.8 & 5 mostly), a lot of cross-referencing with established sources (see https://indigene.app/sources), and my own 30 years of amateur gardening experience and roughly 10 years of Florida & PNW native planting & observation experience.
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.
I'm at https://indigene.app/regions/pnw (on Firefox on Android) and I'm frustrated because I can't find a map of the region's boundary. It's not at all clear to me how far north or south the region extends.
This is all the motivation I needed. I want to add more species to Florida first because this project finally came to life thanks to a visiting friend who still lives in Florida and struggles to find what to plant around her house.
There are several branches of horticulture that require the same sort of systems thinking that makes one a good staff or principal engineer. Natives are one of them.
hell yeah, glad to see it, keep at it!
this is the type of thing that i always figured software people would naturally tend to support, because it's just systems thinking. what better thing to do than to heal the ecosystems on which we depend?
I think nature and plants always interested me since I was a kid. For example I loved to plant from seeds, see them grow, learn and explore a bit with curiosity my mum or aunt plants and when being out in the forest, but not a lot more than that.
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.
does anybody relate to this grown interest to plants and bird distinction with age?
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 think it's one of those things that for whichever reason you happen to get switched on to, and once you're attentive to it, you'll constantly be noticing and learning more - once that positive feedback loop of rewarded attention is going, you're off to the races.
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!
Feedback loop is right. I think there are parallels to the Blank Check podcast playing "The Box Office Game", where those cinephiles try to determine the Box Office Top 5 on the week a particular film was released (even though the players may have been in diapers or not even born on that particular week).
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!
if you guys like this kinda stuff i can recommend the latest dump of buckminster fuller institute on his life work (series of transcribed lectures). The guy is fascinated by similar things and has potentially a lot of interesting insights about this if you are unfamiliar.
cool! thanks for sharing, that's my usual fallback reason too.
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 :)
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
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 grew up in a small town in the upper Midwest and always had a strong pull toward the neighboring forests, streams and wetlands. There was a lot of wonder at that age, but I wasn’t prepared to really start contextualizing the depth/breadth of information until I was much older (which has obvious parallels to the systems/complexity thinking I enjoy elsewhere in my life/career).
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.
I've experienced that with trees over the last 5 years. I've been working on forest restoration on some land as a hobby and everywhere I travel I try to identify the trees I see.
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 knew I wanted to be a birder since I was a kid, but wasn't sure how to make that happen, now I can bird by ear and pick up a lot of species, have 700 wild bird species on the life list with photos, and hit the trails every weekend to look for birds, I run feeders, and track local wildlife with iNaturalist/eBird. I do think as some folks age they recognize that they want to be more connected with nature and work on that in their ways, my family was mostly the same. Nature's more real than what you see on the glowing rectangles.
> does anybody relate to this grown interest to plants and bird distinction with age
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.
yeah ok, now that you put languages in the pot, I felt the same when absorbing other foreign languages too, and I totally understand your feeling. I was grokking successfully foreign language phrases or expression with the help of IT terminology and latin roots on the fly, was very interesting. It was like unknown input but with some clues and the brain auto decoding and mapping in that case.
maybe is just how our brain is wired and predisposed to such things that let us notice and enjoy this evolution or process?
It seems to be the case for me, though I remember it being present as a child. It's like it went away in adolescence and came back later. Same goes for rocks, weather (beyond basic planning), and so on.
It is clearly a very useful skill to have as it helps us find food we know is safe. I think in the modern world this tends to be something most kids don't have an oppurtunity to develop. When in a more natural environment it would be expressed much earlier.
I don't relate to it myself, but I see it in people around me. It appears that's something that may not be limited to but is very prevalent in adults with very high functioning autism.
I can strongly recommend the mobile app Flora Incognita for quickly identifying plants. It’s made by one of the German universities so it’s free, don’t have ads, and don’t collect your personal data. I even showed it to my mum and she loves it
I use iNaturalist for plants and animals, mostly insects (and Merlin for birdsong recognition).
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.
Besides the utility for users, Flora Incognita is also a massive crowdsourcing project for science: They use the GPS location of photos in combination with the identified plants to build a temporo-spatial database of confirmed plant sightings. (To my knowledge no link to any personal data of users.)
It is a pity that, while their focus is on openness and accessiblity, neither Flora Incognita, nor iNaturalist or PlantNet can be installed from the F-Droid appstore. I unfortunately don't use Google Play, so can't testdrive them.
Flora Incognita and PlantNet are not open source, so they cannot be published to F-Droid. However, iNaturalist is and the apk can be directly installed from the GitHub releases page.
I live next to a botanical garden which has climate-regulated glass domes with all sorts of non-native plants from around the world and it gets 90%+ of them right, but sometime you have to feed it different parts of the plant. PlantNet does look great too, I’ll have to check it out!
That's a nice anecdote, but I didn't just make up this fact. According to their paper [1], Flora has 4851 supported species, while PlantNet covered 30,261 at the time. Flora also tends to mix up cultivated/ornamental plants with wild counterparts, so your perceived accuracy may be deceptive if you're not a botanist. So yes, it's a cute app if you are a walking outside in central Europe, but it's nowhere near PlantNet.
Looks like they've both added a lot since then. If I select their worldwide species list in app, I get 38k for Flora and 85k for PlantNet.
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.
PictureThis is an old favorite and still works quickly and quite accurately. I believe it’s a Chinese app though so do with that information what you will.
He's great, I love his concrete botany videos about weeds thriving in harsh human environments. His tour of the Chicago River is great, and an NYC parking lot that has been taken back over by nature is fascinating.
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!
Very nice! Really incredible amount of sources you’re pulling from.
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.
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?
Hort. Science degree from A&M in '80, employers offered to pay me $800 a month a water their greenhouses. Indeed, Botany was one of the more boring courses required. Scrapped by after the university as a landscaper-irrigator, then discovered too many years later the uber wealthy living on certain Texas Lakes would pay enormous sums to have me dive to service-install their pumps to feed raw water to their landscapes. Customers would call me in exasperation explaining they just got a water bill for like $900 to $1,000. Raw lake water was available at about $150 to $175 per 325,000 gallons with a permit. A lady I knew convinced me that horticulture, and especially botany, are "labors of love", not particularly a way to become financially successful.
Watch this guy's YT channel - have been for years now. I think what originally caught my attention on his channel was a video specifically about the flora around run-down Oakland urban-industrial areas.
I think I also first found him from his "guerrilla gardening" work in Oakland. I think it was in a median, planting native species on a barren strip of dirt. Something of that nature.
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.
I believe I discovered him through that same video! I now tell everyone I know about guerilla gardening lol, haven't got the know-how to do it myself quite yet though. Soon enough.
A friend from my youth always had an encyclopedic knowledge of plants, could identify them effortlessly just as we were walking around. I always envied him, but despite a love of plants, gardening, et cetera, I never went beyond a surface level until I started casually following Joey and CPBBD during COVID times. A big theme of what I've learned from him is how deeply geology is intertwined with plant evolution. Seems obvious once you hear it, but I genuinely never considered it until then.
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.
They spent a whole section glazing the Linnaeus system like it's a perfect thing, but as someone who has delved into taxonomy a lot (due to playing Metazooa and Metaflora), there are quite a few glaring issues with it.
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.
I don't think it's a real problem. It's a way that one group of humans agreed to label things, and that way is the currently dominant way. Even the agreed rules (whoever publishes first gets dibs on the name) are just an incentive for academics to publish. If there were another labelling system, it would have the same problems and would only serve to split the humans into multiple ways of doing the same thing.
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!
I didn't mean a literal tree that has leaves and bark. I meant the tree structure that you get when you trace the ancestry of all organisms. A tree coordinate system would assign a number to every node, so instead of saying Tectona grandis, you say 2.44.32.543.45.33 . If that looks like IP address to you, yes, an IP address is actually a tree coordinate system.
> If there were another labelling system, it would have the same problems and would only serve to split the humans into multiple ways of doing the same thing.
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?
Feynman's quote is distinguishing knowledge of the thing itself (e.g. its behaviour, properties) which he thinks is useful, from ontological knowledge (naming and categorising) which he cares less about. As a physicist he only had to remember 61 particle names and 4 force names :)
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?
> from ontological knowledge (naming and categorising)
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…
> 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.
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?
> nor contact with the rest of the world has a name for something
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.
His interview with the old railworker and grease-pen graffiti artist Colossus of Roads was fascinating. Unfortunately I cant find it on youtube anymore with a quick search, otherwise I'd put the link here.
As a child of an entomologist turned botanist and another naturalist, who grew up in our home library full of assorted atlases, monographies and other odd books, I often learned the Latin names together with the respective common names, and it's amazing how it sticks. Being able to look at a random plant and say I don't know what it is exactly, but it's definitely labiaceae, is something I will always appreciate. Only recently my father sent me a video of a dormouse making themselves at home at a friend's cottage and my brain said "Glis glis". How I remembered it, I have no clue. I'm an IT person.
My young daughter can identify a whole host of native species by their scientific names and it absolutely floors adults who catch her doing it. Our house is a plant nerd house so she just picked it all up on her own and enjoys it as a small component of her life.
One of my father's coworkers (environmental health & safety) was an entomologist. I wonder how much of her work was in forensics.
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.
Plant(ing) related: I planted 100 trees in my tiny back yard, creating a pocket forest / Miyawaki forest - a technique encouraging fast growth through dense planting (3-5 trees / shrubs per square meter). Routed my gutters into a swale along the tree line - looking forward to watching a forest appear over the next decade.
Great article with elements of "how to draw an owl" about it.
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 am lost they have training videos, they have a reading list, they have tutorials... everything you need to get started. How else would you acquire skills? There is no upload function yet.
I think there is a common belief if you make a lot of information available, acquiring skills is "easy". It's certainly easier than without, but the thing is, drawing the owl just takes a fucking long time to learn. There are no shortage of online tutes to learn how to draw, the genre is ancient.
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.
From mobile it's a bit unclear that there's a whole website beside this article. I, for one, noticed the hamburger menu only after I read your comment. I suppose GP had the same problem.
Haha, the Latin (or pseudo-Latin, I suppose) I like for the fact that it’s sufficiently alien to not introduce terminology confusion like “strawberries aren’t berries and pineapple is a berry” or whatever that is a colloquial language confusion.
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.
Congratulations! Add a water feature ... it will attract birds. And next to that some smaller shrubs. Then once the trees grow you can put climbers and ferns in them. And throw down some rocks for good measure. It encourages variant microclimates which encourages biodiversity.
Also throw down some Psylocybe Allenii spores (family Hymenogastraceae) for even better measure!
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.
> "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"
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.
Agreed. The author in question (Linnaeus) was from Sweden and professor at a Swedish university (Uppsala). Latin was used across the board in "traditional" sciences in northern Europe at that time and in fact the distinction of disciplines was not as clear as it is today. Linnaeus was a professor of medicine formally but focused on botany. He traveled a lot and had many international "contacts", especially in the Netherlands. His correspondence was usually a mix of Swedish and Latin (which I find interesting because I assume Swedish was not widely studied at the time) but his professional publications were in Latin.
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).
I'd also recommend "Scientific Babel How Science Was Done Before and After Global English" by Michael D. Gordin [0]. It goes into detail about which languages scientists have used over time.
Even speakers of more common languages like English used Latin for science. Newton wrote the Principia in Latin and William Harvey wrote De Motu Cordis (the book that showed that the heart was a pump that circulated blood) in Latin, for example.
Of all the things you could criticize as backwards in 18th century biology, the choice of using Latin is probably the silliest. It was the language of learning. It's a practical choice that you and I would make if we were transported to that time.
The way I parsed the sentence, the backwards and goofy part is just the """he was probably mostly thinking of “white European cultures”""", not the choice of Latin. Just a concilatory disclaimer to avoid being cancelled for talking good things about someone born before the abolition of slavery.
It was neither backwards nor goofy for a man in 18th century Europe to create a system only his 18th century European peers could use (the only peers whom he could even come into contact with in 18th century Europe).
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.
Same here, I stopped reading right when he said this idiotic "guy from 300 years ago - when science as we know it basically only existed within the realm of white european culture" didnt thought about the rest of the world BS
Sorry, please correct me if I'm wrong but with this follow up he's not contradicting the quote I put, but saying that despite of tha, the science is valid? Which means the bits I quoted are still stated as a matter of fact WITHOUT attacking the science of taxonomy itself. So he's still saying that using Latin in science was "backwards and goofy".
It's an interesting topic, though. If Latin is backwards because of assocation with European cultures, what are biologists nowadays proposing to replace it with? Some kind of universal coding system like ISBN or DOI?
Simlish was intentionally designed to be linguistically neutral, so we didn't have to laboriously translate all the game audio into dozens of languages.
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.
>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.
Because latin was common only for part of one continent where he happened to be and not to the rest of the world while english happens to be spoken all over the globe due to a big goofy empire that went places.
However, let's keep out the culture wars from a post mainly about plants.
If in 17 hundreds you wanted to choose a language that could be deciphered, say, also in China, Latin was a much better choice than any native language in various vicinity.
Latin was the language for education and science waaaay beyond ex Roman Empire. Pretty much whole christian europe used Latin in medieval age and beyond.
Absolutely check out his multi part series "it doesn't have to suck" about turning Tucson AZ into a living greenspace city. It's hopeful and inspiring what they are doing there!
I've recently taken to learning about plant identification, it's interesting to make observations about all the flora you see walking about. Will need to note these books for later!
Me and my wife we talking about A/R glasses the other day and we both agreed that one of our number one use cases would be having the camera actively identify plant species when taking a walk or hike. Not every time it sees a plant obviously, just when a new species is identified along the way.
One of my favorite channels of all time on youtube. You get to see new places, learn amazing botany facts, local history, and experience interjected spicy opinions.
The article actually is about botany, but the title reminded me there is a whole area that could be called "criminal botany". As in, there are specific plants cultivated for illegal purposes. And on the other side, forensic botany (things like analysing pollen traces)
There are a lot more to Criminal Botany. There's the chaotic evil variety, like planting an invasive species, planting bamboo near your enemy's house, and sprinkling mint on someone's garden plot. There's the chaotic good variety, like broadcasting native seeds on a grass lawn and releasing moles onto a golf field. There's chaotic neutral, like making air layering on trees that you don't own, or otherwise taking seeds, cuttings, or plantlets from them.
Putting a seed into the ground then waiting a long time and hoping (praying?) that something will come out that you will like is a lot like ... training deep learning models. The latter will pay more of course :)
imagine a world with no plants, how sad it would be. i try to fill my house with as many plants i can, a constant cloning of plants, i have started collecting rocks. its m new daily habit. collect a few rocks. it makes my plants happy.
and you know what, my plants like to be happy, if the plants are happy i am happy. are you happy ? there is a android application on github that identifys
plants on device using local ai plant net or something www.github.com/jegly/box
I just heard about a rare one in Wisconsin - someone I know knows someone that has land that includes original prairie and there is an almost extinct plant on that property. The local University has been studying the land for years, but a grad student stole seeds from this plant multiple years in a row and sold them - the landowner shut down access to the University, ending a 20 year study by a tenured prof.
> 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>
Hot take - any book authors who want to chime in and share what you guys feel about a statement like that?
Neither I, nor any author I know has published something with the intention of it going unread. Publishing something just to ne upset that it's being read seems rather dickish to me... The very act of publishing is a declaration of desire for others to read it.
I listened to his book, Concrete Botany[1], while doing my gardening last month. I really enjoyed it even as a long time watcher of his YouTube channel. I don't know if I could have read it because it does seem to drag on a bit but it was worth it for his narration.
I find it a real shame that botany doesn't receive a larger share of the curriculum in school. Plants are ubiquitous (obviously), they've been here well before we have and will remain here well after we've gone extinct. Despite that, in my experience, the average person knows very little about how and why they are organized into taxonomies and what characteristics that gives them.
Seed pod? Square stems and opposite leaves? Five petaled flowers? All simple things to identify and dramatically narrow to a small set of families, if not one. And then the morphology between plants in those families becomes interesting to observe. And so it goes on.
Then again, a great number of people live in areas totally absent of any plants that aren't from a Home Depot, so that knowledge can scarcely be used. This is something Joey (the author) loves to rant about in his videos.
(I know botany is a science but STEM has a inherent bias towards white collar job acquisition and nearly every jobs requiring plant knowlege are not that)
move you to Caniba and grow you some extra special weed, and sell it all legal like, fuck you could get a job as a "weed inspector", of "canibis quality inspector" here, but the whole industry was built on crime, which has been semi ish, legalised.
the Dutch have growing canibis down to a science, but there is a lot of room left, and as prices were set durring prohibition, profits remain very high.
Now this, this is the bargain, this is the bargain section.
Now shit gets a little hectic here, 'cause you get people, you get a bunch of hippies clubbing each other with the cucumbers, throwing shit, fighting to get, you know, the cheapest avocados.
But you get, like dollar thirty-nine for eight of these. They're about to go bad but, they're not bad yet. Still good, all kinds of good stuff.
You got little papayas and shit. Maybe a little soft, but still edible.
Okay but you get, again, sometimes you gotta wear a helmet when you come in there. Because it does, it gets hot.
There's people, just, it gets, I mean, you've seen, you know, on the outside they're soft, and they seems like they got nice soft liberal values.
But then they just start attacking each other, the claws come out, you know. I've seen a couple knifings in that room before, it's absolutely...
Oh look the berries! Physalis species. All right, who doesn't like solanaceae right there.
Golden gooseberries. I don't know what the fuck a gooseberry is, but that's a physalis. There you go, $3.25 for a basket.
[Watch the looks he's getting from people:]
Ok, so overall this is a wonderful spot to get talked down to, condescendingly lectured by a college student with a septum ring who can explain to you how you should think and behave and uh, and uh, you know, police your language.
Very uh, there's a lotta, there's a lotta lessons you can learn here, ok? You know. And if it wasn't for this spot, I don't know what I would do.
Now they, the got some guavas, they got some, I don't know where they hid the guavas at, but...
Now this is my favorite section, aka the hippie snake oil section, ok. Absolutely wonderful spot. [...]
Pro-tip: knock off the vulgarity and avoid making ignorant remarks that pander to presently fashionable sentiments. It doesn't "spice up" your text or make it more "fun" or "real", unless you mean "really bad". It makes it obnoxious, likely phony (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here), and base.
I didn't say being phony is a benefit. I was (in my view) charitably giving the author the benefit of the doubt by assuming that his vulgarity is feigned (posturing) and not ingrained and habitual.
> at the time, he [Linneaus] was probably mostly thinking of “white European cultures”
How boring this is, makes me want to close the page immediately.
The guy, Linneaus, lived in the 1700s and “white European cultures” were all there was to him. Us wasn’t even a whole nation yet and there wasn’t much scientific cooperation with other civilisations.
Also, at the time latin was the lingua franca for the scientific world.
Stop judging people by the customs of their time, it’s a moronic endeavour.
If you read a bit further, they author then explains why they put that in:
> The fucker [Linneaus] 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).
I think its in there to head of compliants from people who would otherwise say that latin scientific names are bad. The author goes on to illustrate why thats bad
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.
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://archive.ph/j9025
https://web.archive.org/web/20150315123808/https://www.esqui...
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).
Here in the UK there are no usually legal requirements, but it might be a social problem as your neighbours will not like it.
https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IPMC2024P1/chapter-3-gener...
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.
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.
Major:
Actually, those 8 different plants are hardly "totally unrelated". They are quite closely related in the evolutionary scheme of things (plants have been around for 1.6 billion years). Red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) and Cedrus (Cedrus atlantica) are both plants, but also Pinidae (conifers), and diverged about 250 Million years ago (time tree.org), so more distantly related that mammals (~80 y), but midway between humans/platypus (200 My) and humans/ducks (320 My). Hardly unrelated.Minor:
Yes, we group things by how closely related they are, but not necessarily by how distantly related they are in time. Taxonomy is about branch order, not distance in evolutionary time. The same species in a genus may include organisms that diverged several million years ago, but other species may have diverged much more recently. Taxonomy is a kind of evolutionary history that need not have a very regular clock.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
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!
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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 :)
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.
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.
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 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.
maybe is just how our brain is wired and predisposed to such things that let us notice and enjoy this evolution or process?
Now I can’t not have a little garden(currently growing chilli’s and a citrus tree, from seeds)
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"?
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.
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/about
https://github.com/inaturalist/iNaturalistAndroid/releases
Seek is 220MB...
[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.
https://youtu.be/SRRbspvheRc
https://youtu.be/AVPkBv-QQ6U
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!
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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...
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?
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?
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…
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.
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?
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
https://www.publiclandstore.com/blogs/gallery/joey-alone-exh...
https://www.instagram.com/buzblurr/
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.
https://www.creatingtomorrowsforests.co.uk/blog/the-miyawaki...
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.
https://youtu.be/PUFQouwqbe8
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.
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHRgY8fZNv4
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.
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...
[0] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo145049...
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.
> I say this because a few unthinking “performative leftist” nitwits as of late have decided to attack the science of taxonomy itself).
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.
However, let's keep out the culture wars from a post mainly about plants.
Why do you think Latin was popular?
I haven't watched him for years because I don't want to miss any of the botany.
I crave for some photos of the author's herbarium.
https://wgntv.com/video/giant-snapping-turtle-nicknamed-chon...
https://youtube.com/@myroncook?si=HE6EGqpemmVkaSDs
My publisher probably feels differently. :)
[1]: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9798317900410-concrete-botany
Seed pod? Square stems and opposite leaves? Five petaled flowers? All simple things to identify and dramatically narrow to a small set of families, if not one. And then the morphology between plants in those families becomes interesting to observe. And so it goes on.
Then again, a great number of people live in areas totally absent of any plants that aren't from a Home Depot, so that knowledge can scarcely be used. This is something Joey (the author) loves to rant about in his videos.
(I know botany is a science but STEM has a inherent bias towards white collar job acquisition and nearly every jobs requiring plant knowlege are not that)
https://youtu.be/PUFQouwqbe8?t=180
Now this, this is the bargain, this is the bargain section.
Now shit gets a little hectic here, 'cause you get people, you get a bunch of hippies clubbing each other with the cucumbers, throwing shit, fighting to get, you know, the cheapest avocados.
But you get, like dollar thirty-nine for eight of these. They're about to go bad but, they're not bad yet. Still good, all kinds of good stuff.
You got little papayas and shit. Maybe a little soft, but still edible.
Okay but you get, again, sometimes you gotta wear a helmet when you come in there. Because it does, it gets hot.
There's people, just, it gets, I mean, you've seen, you know, on the outside they're soft, and they seems like they got nice soft liberal values.
But then they just start attacking each other, the claws come out, you know. I've seen a couple knifings in that room before, it's absolutely...
Oh look the berries! Physalis species. All right, who doesn't like solanaceae right there.
Golden gooseberries. I don't know what the fuck a gooseberry is, but that's a physalis. There you go, $3.25 for a basket.
[Watch the looks he's getting from people:]
Ok, so overall this is a wonderful spot to get talked down to, condescendingly lectured by a college student with a septum ring who can explain to you how you should think and behave and uh, and uh, you know, police your language.
Very uh, there's a lotta, there's a lotta lessons you can learn here, ok? You know. And if it wasn't for this spot, I don't know what I would do.
Now they, the got some guavas, they got some, I don't know where they hid the guavas at, but...
Now this is my favorite section, aka the hippie snake oil section, ok. Absolutely wonderful spot. [...]
Pro-tip: knock off the vulgarity and avoid making ignorant remarks that pander to presently fashionable sentiments. It doesn't "spice up" your text or make it more "fun" or "real", unless you mean "really bad". It makes it obnoxious, likely phony (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here), and base.
Please expand on why you think it being phony is a benefit.
How boring this is, makes me want to close the page immediately.
The guy, Linneaus, lived in the 1700s and “white European cultures” were all there was to him. Us wasn’t even a whole nation yet and there wasn’t much scientific cooperation with other civilisations.
Also, at the time latin was the lingua franca for the scientific world.
Stop judging people by the customs of their time, it’s a moronic endeavour.
> The fucker [Linneaus] 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).
I think its in there to head of compliants from people who would otherwise say that latin scientific names are bad. The author goes on to illustrate why thats bad