8 ms·
Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't
- snarfy 1mo agoInstead of trying to make the plants healthy, make the dirt healthy. It seems like the same thing but it is a different mindset.
- TZubiri 1mo agoWhat is healthy dirt, if not dirt that grows healthy plants. Which will of course depend on the plant.
- razster 1mo agoSlowly killing my lawn. Red bud trees will soon forest my property.
- contingencies 1mo agoCongratulations! 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.
- DonHopkins 1mo agoAlso 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. The Ethnomycology of Ugly Landscaping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHRgY8fZNv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHRgY8fZNv4
- contingencies 1mo agoROFL. Banned in Australia. "Requires age verification." Next up: Ethnomycology of nanny state....
- BigTTYGothGF 1mo agoIt's a North American fungus and you want to sow it in Australia? You really do need to listen to Joey Santore....
- contingencies 1mo agoMany fungi have pan-tropical or global distribution. See p158+ in PDF https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-environ-112621-090937 https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur...
- franciscop 1mo ago> "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.
- gostsamo 1mo agoBecause 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.
- mantas 1mo agoLatin was the language for education and science waaaay beyond ex Roman Empire. Pretty much whole christian europe used Latin in medieval age and beyond.
- gostsamo 1mo agoChristian Europe waited until the XIII-XIV to get most of its latin inheritance in latin. Before that it was either greek or arabic.
- usrnm 1mo ago> 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?
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- scyzoryk_xyz 1mo agoWatch 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.
- chao- 1mo agoI 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.
- botanrice 1mo agoI 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.
- scyzoryk_xyz 1mo agoHey I've been telling myself I know about a lot of plant stuff just based off his videos. I don't really either, but maybe soon. These videos just have this quality of bringing you into a POV where you're reminded that there is a lot going on in every detail of the reality surrounding you. Maybe I didn't learn much botany from these videos, but I definitely learned to just pay attention more.
- wiether 1mo agoI 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
- scyzoryk_xyz 1mo agoI love those too - the combination of crude rant persona with extremely sophisticated knowledge is disarming.
- iammjm 1mo agoI 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
- otherayden 1mo agoThank you for the rec, I used it to identify a mystery house plant I was gifted :)
- dmos62 1mo agoBetter than PlantNet?
- sigmoid10 1mo agoPlantNet covers everything, Flora is more central Europe focused and has a hard time with non-native plants.
- iammjm 1mo agoI 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!
- sigmoid10 1mo agoThat'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. [1] https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041-210X.13611 https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041...
- chao- 1mo agoA 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.
- DonHopkins 1mo agoWoke Grocery Store (Whole Foods in Berkeley) https://youtu.be/PUFQouwqbe8?t=180 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. [...]
- HPsquared 1mo agoThe 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)
- Biganon 1mo agoThere's also guerilla gardening, where you plant stuff where you're not supposed to, typically municipal soil
- chabska 1mo agoThere 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.
- jcattle 1mo agoI thought you'd mention plant poaching. Which is just evil.
- avadodin 1mo agoMost plant–related crimes are pie–on–the–windowsill–on–Sunday tier.
- philips 1mo agoI 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. [1]: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9798317900410-concrete-botany https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9798317900410-concrete-botany
- rib3ye 1mo agoJoey is also an amazing fine and graffiti artist (ALONE) https://www.publiclandstore.com/blogs/gallery/joey-alone-exhibition https://www.publiclandstore.com/blogs/gallery/joey-alone-exh...
- Schlagbohrer 1mo agoHis 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.
- Brybry 1mo agoIs this it? https://youtu.be/-Eo4WuhpiJg?t=1085 https://youtu.be/-Eo4WuhpiJg?t=1085
- Schlagbohrer 1mo agoYes
- voicedYoda 1mo agoRailroad guy was Russell Butler. He was relatively prolific and had an insta account. https://www.instagram.com/buzblurr/ https://www.instagram.com/buzblurr/
- ChaitanyaSai 1mo agoWow this is fantastic stuff. Thank you
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- Schlagbohrer 1mo agoHe'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. https://youtu.be/SRRbspvheRc https://youtu.be/SRRbspvheRc https://youtu.be/AVPkBv-QQ6U https://youtu.be/AVPkBv-QQ6U
- rafram 1mo agoThe NYC video was about Floyd Bennett Field, a former airfield that's now part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, to be exact.
- xnx 1mo agoThe night heron gulping the rat was something! I think it even surprised them. https://youtu.be/SRRbspvheRc?t=2057 https://youtu.be/SRRbspvheRc?t=2057
- 3lambda 1mo agoLove this guy!!
- ouz-a 1mo agoThat's a great title & look for the website, I'm tired of generic looks we see everyday, something like this excites me as I remember the old web.
- yreg 1mo agoEvery page on this website ends with the How to make a herbarium pressing tutorial. I crave for some photos of the author's herbarium.
- contingencies 1mo agoI'm aware of this guy but the presentation is a bit full on for me. My buddy who is in to botany says apparently his podcasts are really good: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zJDjluBz6qVCGrF1I8JhP https://open.spotify.com/show/2zJDjluBz6qVCGrF1I8JhP
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- vw_bulli 1mo agoI know nothing about Botany, but I must compliment a good website and writing style when I see one.
- ggm 1mo agoGreat 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"}
- trentor 1mo agoI 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.
- klez 1mo agoFrom 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.
- ggm 1mo agoI 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.
- schainks 1mo agoOne 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.
- giov4 1mo agoI 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.
- visarga 1mo ago> 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.
- giov4 1mo agoyeah 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?
- jl6 1mo agoCan I get this, but for geology?
- cactacea 1mo agoGood news, he does geology too
- Aboutplants 1mo agoObviously a much different vibe but i really enjoy Myron Crook’s YouTube channel https://youtube.com/@myroncook?si=HE6EGqpemmVkaSDs https://youtube.com/@myroncook?si=HE6EGqpemmVkaSDs
- autoexec 1mo agoSame link without the useless tracking: https://youtube.com/@myroncook https://youtube.com/@myroncook
- smugglerFlynn 1mo ago> 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?
- garbagewoman 1mo agoThe ones listed? You might want to get in contact with them because they are unlikely to be reading this thread
- sophacles 1mo agoNeither 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.
- _whiteCaps_ 1mo agoI'm an author, and don't have any problem with it - however my book is obsolete as it's computer related. My publisher probably feels differently. :)
- chabska 1mo agoThey 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.
- frumplestlatz 1mo agoWhat specifically makes these issues, much less glaring issues?
- amiga386 1mo agoI 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-thing-as-a-tree/ https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
- picafrost 1mo agoI 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.
- sophacles 1mo agoToo busy focusing on STEM to talk about stems. (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)
- swiftcoder 1mo agoThat is an S tier domain name/title
- amelius 1mo agoPutting 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 :)
- CalRobert 1mo agoIf you watch only one video make it the Berkeley Bowl one https://youtu.be/PUFQouwqbe8 https://youtu.be/PUFQouwqbe8
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- jojocool0501 1mo agoMy favorite Youtube channel. Please watch the latest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDVcfSYcxc0 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.
- AHabe 1mo agoI 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.
- andai 1mo agoBrilliant, thanks for sharing. 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://archive.ph/j9025 https://web.archive.org/web/20150315123808/https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a5303/future-of-video-game-design-1208/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150315123808/https://www.esqui...
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- brunohaid 1mo agoLaunching a thing soon to make it more accessible, without sacrificing scientific depth, eg: https://www.meso.cloud/plants/tracheophyta/magnoliopsida/gentianales/rubiaceae/coffea/coffea_arabica 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!
- Aboutplants 1mo agoVery 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.
- brunohaid 1mo agoMuch appreciated! 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?
- vanessa1211 1mo agoI was gonna say botany will pay too
- metalman 1mo agomove 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.
- avadodin 1mo agoI loved botany and going outside before, but I loved it even more when he became popular(reference). I haven't watched him for years because I don't want to miss any of the botany.
- hypercube33 1mo agoAbsolutely 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!
- znpy 1mo ago> 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.
- KaiserPro 1mo agoIf 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
- kikokikokiko 1mo agoWell, he wasnt very good at conveying his idea then. I also stopped reading at that point. Fuck anyone that holds this idiotic beliefs.
- jckahn 1mo agoOh hey it's the Chonkasaurus guy! https://wgntv.com/video/giant-snapping-turtle-nicknamed-chonkosaurus/8634440/ https://wgntv.com/video/giant-snapping-turtle-nicknamed-chon...
- jpease 1mo agoI read through the site, but can’t find the crime pays part.
- hmcamp 1mo agoThe title is misleading. There was nothing in the article comparing/contrasting/linking botany and crime.
- virgil_disgr4ce 1mo agoMan you must be really fun at parties
- itomato 1mo agoYou’ll have to start with S1E1
- DivingForGold 1mo agoHort. 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.
- goda90 1mo agoI enjoyed his rant videos about soul sucking landscaping and the ways it could be better with lower maintenance native plants.
- lo_zamoyski 1mo agoWhat an obnoxious post. 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.
- BigTTYGothGF 1mo ago> (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here) Please expand on why you think it being phony is a benefit.
- lo_zamoyski 1mo agoI 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.
- greenyhuman 1mo agoimagine 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
- apercu 1mo agoI 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.
- fl4regun 1mo agoI'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!
- Aboutplants 1mo agoMe 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.
- arjie 1mo agoHaha, 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.
- tenderfault 1mo agoall we want to know is how to grow our own mushrooms. I clicked with high hope.
- yboris 1mo agoPlant(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. https://www.creatingtomorrowsforests.co.uk/blog/the-miyawaki-method-for-creating-forests https://www.creatingtomorrowsforests.co.uk/blog/the-miyawaki...
- wowczarek 1mo agoAs 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.
- Aboutplants 1mo agoMy 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.
- ButlerianJihad 1mo agoOne 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.
- talon8635 1mo agoSo happy to see this Chanel posted. Love this guy!
- BurningFrog 1mo agoStopped reading when he out of nowhere felt the need to say that Linnaeus was probably a racist bigot, based on nothing.
- PatHyatt 1mo agoWonderful podcast and shorts.
- chabes 1mo agoJoey is a gem
- ratelimitsteve 1mo agoone of my favorite youtubers but I feel like if you're linking directly to a reading list the title of your post should reflect that
- olivierlacan 1mo agoOdd 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 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/ https://indigene.app/release-notes/. It also takes privacy & safety very seriously: https://indigene.app/privacy https://indigene.app/privacy
- hinkley 1mo agoThere 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.
- gooob 1mo agohell 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?
- gooob 1mo agoglad to see this posted here on my day off! the universe seems to have a way of reminding of certain things and pointing me in the right direction!
- ASinclair 1mo agoI saw him talk at SF Nerd Nite years ago. Very entertaining and informative. The crazy thing is he's self taught. Smart man.
- fastaguy88 1mo agoTwo nits to pick, one major, one minor: Major: "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.
- cmpb 1mo agoTo nit 1: "totally unrelated" could reasonably mean "not in the same genus", but even relaxing that to "not in the same family" holds true for the word "cedars". The author's point about "common names" seems pretty salient To nit 2: I fail to see what you're actually nitpicking here... How evolutionary related things are and how they evolved _are_ pretty well illustrated by taxonomic ranking. Some organisms (in a stable ecology) don't change much over time and some things do, and taxonomy gives us a good way to discuss that.
- fastaguy88 1mo agoI suppose "totally unrelated" might mean not in the same genus to some set of taxonomists, but for the larger audience to which this essay was directed, unrelated might mean "is not related in any way" (as in, does not share a common ancestor). Yes, they are "totally unrelated" in the sense that I am likely totally unrelated to you, but this not a very evolutionary sense of the word "related".
- ivraatiems 1mo agoThis guy is the Regular Car Reviews of botany - no punches pulled, heart of gold. I love his work, especially his parody of the depraved landscapers of today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=be5ZnQiZslE&t=74s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=be5ZnQiZslE&t=74s
- pvaldes 1mo agoThis may explain why they are so few botanists and so many criminals, even when everybody needs more botanists but nobody needs so many criminals.
- Transformanshen 1mo ago[dead]