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- Hacker News
- 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"}by ggm - 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.by trentor
- Joey is also an amazing fine and graffiti artist (ALONE)
https://www.publiclandstore.com/blogs/gallery/joey-alone-exh...
by rib3ye - Wow this is fantastic stuff. Thank youby ChaitanyaSai
- 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.by Schlagbohrer
- 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.
by chabska - > western bias
How would you suggest improving the system that doesn't devolve into purity spiraling?
by doublepg23 - >We could probably come up with a better system using a tree coordinate system.
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.
by TZubiri - What specifically makes these issues, much less glaring issues?
- > 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?
by xienze - 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!
https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
by amiga386 - 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.
by chao- - 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.by scyzoryk_xyz
- His video about the hippie snake oil isle in Berkeley bowl is outstandingby talon8635
- I discovered it recently, and I find it quite funny
I'm not really into botany itself, but I enjoy their rants about how people manage "green" spaces
by wiether - His video trip to Berkeley Bowl West was so fucking funny and spot on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUFQouwqbe8
(I love BB)
- 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.
by chao- - 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.
- Launching a thing soon to make it more accessible, without sacrificing scientific depth, eg:
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!
by brunohaid - 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.
by Aboutplants - 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.by Schlagbohrer
- The NYC video was about Floyd Bennett Field, a former airfield that's now part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, to be exact.by rafram
- The night heron gulping the rat was something! I think it even surprised them. https://youtu.be/SRRbspvheRc?t=2057by xnx
- 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 itby iammjm
- +1 for Flora Incognita. This is what apps should be.by kamma4434
- I'm going to use Flora Incognita if only because it's a 29MB download so even if it's offloaded, it won't kill me to retrieve it.
Seek is 220MB...
by jkmcf - 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.by dyauspitr
- Thank you for the rec, I used it to identify a mystery house plant I was gifted :)by otherayden
- Better than PlantNet?by dmos62
- 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.by rapnie