Can I get this, but for geology?
Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't
51–60 of 223 posts
Re: Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't
#52The 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.
Re: Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't
#53Great 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.
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.
Re: Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't
#54 > 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
Re: Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't
#55I 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 vo…
> 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.
Re: Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't
#56I 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
Better than PlantNet?
PlantNet seems pretty open as well right? Looks like is from several public institutions so it should be ads and trackers free, can you confirm?
Re: Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't
#57They 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.
Re: Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In XVIII there was no language that could be universal was my point and latin was known mainly through its derivatives.
Re: Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Christian Europe waited until the XIII-XIV to get most of its latin inheritance in latin. Before that it was either greek or arabic.
Re: Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> english happens to be spoken all over the globe due to a big goofy empire that went places Why do you think Latin was popular?
Well, it wasn't universally popular is my point.