On mobile, this website seems to prevent you from pinch zooming in, which makes it slightly inconvenient to quickly zoom into the photos of the trees.
It's to help you learn to recognise different types of trees from quite a long way away.
Some Unusual Trees
21–30 of 94 posts
Re: Some Unusual Trees
#22The trees are not unusual at all for the people living in tropical climates. Fun trees Yes but unusual no. Most people of the world live in tropical climates so for most these are not unusual
Re: Some Unusual Trees
#23This is (was?) the advantage of a printed encyclopedia - one that I've never really been able to replicate scrolling wikipedia. I think it has more to do with the limitations and lack of linking than lack of information (each of these trees has a wikipedia article).
A wikipedia dive session is likely to get more and more specific into trees (attacked by twees!); an encyclopedia flip session is more likely to go across a wide variety of subjects.
Re: Some Unusual Trees
#24The trees are not unusual at all for the people living in tropical climates. Fun trees Yes but unusual no. Most people of the world live in tropical climates so for most these are not unusual
Let people enjoy things. You aren't contributing to the conversation, you're trying to shit on everyone else for finding something interesting.
Re: Some Unusual Trees
#25I would say the Eucalyptus tree, planted all over the world but native to Australia, is quite unusual. Young Eucalyptus trees have leaves that are rounded and are arranged opposite to one another. However, when mature the leaves of a Eucalyptus are lance-like and are arranged in an alternating fashion. This to me is quite unusual.
All I know about them is they're bad railroad ties, and they explode.
Re: Some Unusual Trees
#26I would say the Eucalyptus tree, planted all over the world but native to Australia, is quite unusual. Young Eucalyptus trees have leaves that are rounded and are arranged opposite to one another. However, when mature the leaves of a Eucalyptus are lance-like and are arranged in an alternating fashion. This to me is quite unusual.
All I know about them is they're bad railroad ties, and they explode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpH9gBsNEwI
True. Although in their native Australia they grew quite straight. It's the introduced trees that grow not so straight and make bad railroad ties.
In areas where they are introduced, they also become quite invasive by practicing something called alelopathy, whereby they introduce toxins into the soil to prevent competing tree species from taking hold.
While I'm at it, Eucalyptus trees have very very dense wood which means the wood burns very hot. This makes it even worse for forest fires where Eucalyptus trees dominate.
(I knew my botany studies would come in handy someday. I just never knew when!)
Re: Some Unusual Trees
#27Re: Some Unusual Trees
#28Related: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
There's no such thing as a fish either. Unless you count whales, parrots and Kanye West as fish.
Re: Some Unusual Trees
#29The trees are not unusual at all for the people living in tropical climates. Fun trees Yes but unusual no. Most people of the world live in tropical climates so for most these are not unusual
Let people enjoy things. You aren't contributing to the conversation, you're trying to shit on everyone else for finding something interesting.
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Re: Some Unusual Trees
#30Related: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
Thank you! Isn’t it amazing how a rigid hierarchical categorization system fails everywhere you actually look into details? See also category theory vs prototype theory.
It's amazing that most people don't realize it, and even in higher education you get people believing in taxonomies and categories as if they were a property of the natural world. There are no categories in the objective reality, rigid or otherwise; there are no metadata tags attached to elementary particles, that say what the arrangement they're part of is, and of what type it is. Whether in biology or in code, taxonomies are arbitrary - they're created by people for some specific purpose, and judged by useful they are in serving that purpose.
You'd think that now that we have LLMs, the actual in-your-face empirical evidence of a system that can effectively navigate the complexities of the real world without being fed, or internally developing, rigid ontologies, that people would finally get the memo - but alas.