MetaFilter posts tagged with taxonomy

internet mapping

nickyskye — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:55:12 -0800

Internet Mapping Project l slide-showl more about it here. Please draw a map of the internet, as you see it. Indicate your "home". You can download a blank PDF here and email it to [Kevin Kelly] when done. In posting the images on Flickr I suggested that they would make great fodder for a creative scholar. Much to my surprise two days later, a professor in Argentina wrote the first paper with a first attempt to classify this initial set of maps. Other innovative mapping of the internet: The xkcd internet and online communities map. Data-Visualization maps. The Dmoz tree map of the whole internet. The DIMES map and related site. Mapping movements/feelings within the internet.

Let me show you a world of bats and bees, ants and trees, morning glories and a few beached whales

filthy light thief — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:49:39 -0800

The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, casually referred to as Sōkendai (a contraction of Sōgō kenkyū daigakuin daigaku), was founded in 1988 as the 96th national university in Japan. Amongst other things, it is home to the Soken Taxa Web Server which in turn hosts the first online Japanese Ant Color Image Database that currently lists 273 species of ant, the Illustrated Guide of Marine Mammals and the Marine Mammals Stranding DataBase, the Mammalian Crania Photographic Archive that currently includes 704 specimens, the Morning Glories Database that covers the many mutants of Ipomoea nil, closely related species and interspecific hybrids, the Makino Herbarium Database, which is named after the pioneering Japanese botanist, Tomitaro Makino, and the Japanese Bees Image Database.

The Visual Telling of Stories

carsonb — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 10:53:36 -0800

The Visual Telling of Stories
A lyrical encyclopedia of visual propositions;
a visually orientated taxonomy of the ways in which pictures are used to tell stories. And we, spectators always, everywhere Looking at, never out of, everything ! It fills us. We arrange it. It decays. We rearrange it, and decay ourselves. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, the eighth elegy, 1922

What Is A Species?

homunculus — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 00:12:17 -0800

What Is A Species? "To this day, scientists struggle with that question. A better definition can influence which animals make the endangered list."

Who writes the index?

tombola — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:18:40 -0800

This mind-boggling index won an award from the American Society of Indexers. Last year's winner was slightly less hard-core. As indexing blogger Seth Maislin says: "Scholarly indexing is WAY hard." And, as author Mary Beard (who indexed her own book) says, it's "Not remotely fun."

Buy Metafilter a species!

blahblahblah — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 07:26:30 -0800

Are you annoyed that there is no species of blind cave spider named Sinopoda metafilteris or worm salamander named Oedipina bluepepsi? You can fix that for 3,000 Euros at the controversal BIOPAT. For inspiration, the Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature site collects the puns, insults, and other weirdnesses that can be found in the scientific names of various plants and animals [prev.]. Genes are not immune to weird names, especially in the case of the fruitfly, where clever naming is normal; but even better are the world's strangest dinosaur names, which allow you to tremble in fear in front of the bambiraptor and meet the Dragon King of Hogwarts.

Swedish Museum of Natural History

tellurian — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 20:48:07 -0800

Some preserved animals. The Museum Adolphi Friderici has a catalogue in progress of the King Adolf Fredrik and Queen Lovisa collections. The collections apparently formed the basis for Carl Linnaeus's knowledge of animals.

Exploring enron

boo_radley — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 16:32:02 -0800

Exploring enron -- A breathtaking web of conspiratorial email messages. How often did Jeff Skilling email Ken Lay? How often were those emails about company business? Internal alliances? The company's allegiance? The California energy crisis? Who else was talking about it? Who wasn't? Temptingly complete with software download and MySQL tables for your own tinfoil hat explorations.

acculicorn: to accumulate in corners

Tufa — Fri, 27 May 2005 23:24:32 -0800

The Collier Classification System for Very Small Objects. By the Collier taxonomy, this bugger, which I just pulled from my heel, would be an onlipart shosolattach tanpointisharpanilik. [via]

The Barcode of Life

dhruva — Sat, 12 Feb 2005 20:14:23 -0800

The Barcode of life is a short DNA sequence, from a uniform locality on the genome, used for identifying species. This can revolutionize taxonomy, if more people join the consortium and more species are added to the database. This device would be a biologist's Uber-pony. (via World Changing)

Making Life in a Lab

mcgraw — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 07:31:29 -0800

When you create living, self-replicating cells from scratch in your lab, please include a barcode !

Are you an Asinus Petasatus? Then you'll love this...

taz — Tue, 18 May 2004 01:42:30 -0800

Arsole? Putrescine? Dickite? Moronic Acid? This list of Molecules with Silly or Unusual Names (one NSFW image) proves that scientists can be funny, as does this Stuffy Scientists page, and Mark Isaak's terribly thorough Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature (see, especially, Puns). If you are tempted to wonder what the Father of Taxonomy might have thought of the irreverence of those last two collections, keep in mind that Linnaeus himself named this plant "Clitoria Mariana" in honor of an 'acquaintance', according to this page.

LifeFilter

Gyan — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 13:00:29 -0800

The Tree of Life.

Taxonomy of links

monju_bosatsu — Sun, 13 Jul 2003 10:56:35 -0800

Randall Trigg's taxonomy of hyperlinks. Detailed thesis here.

WolfDaddy — Thu, 13 Jun 2002 19:09:09 -0800

Homophobia is not a phobia, researchers conclude. Well, DUH! However, it's really going to be difficult to march down the street chanting "Hey hey, ho ho, high negative affect scorers on the Index of Attitudes Toward Homosexuality have got to go!"

WolfDaddy — Fri, 19 Apr 2002 17:31:36 -0800

Mantophasmatodea! No, it's not some new sex position, it's a new order of insect life, the first one thus defined since 1914.

baylink — Thu, 26 Oct 2000 07:49:54 -0800

Are taxonomai copyrightable? This topic isn't new; West Publishing stole their legal referencing system from the government, then copyrighted it and successfully sued a couple people out of business. But should it be possible? [Hint: Hell, no!]