Interesting Links for 23-05-2025
May. 23rd, 2025 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- 1. Why are Scotland's councils so short of cash when tax is going up?
- (tags:scotland tax )
- 2. Greenland Signs Lucrative Minerals Deal with Europe in Blow to Trump
- (tags:Europe USA materials Greenland trade )
- 3. How I Beat NES Mario in 0.000005 Seconds (the nerdiest video I have ever watched. If you've seen something nerdier then do let me know)
- (tags:video games programming technology mario )
- 4. Trump's image of dead 'white farmers' came from Reuters footage in Congo, not South Africa
- (tags:USA politics Africa southafrica )
- 5. Programmers spend 5% of their time editing code, the rest is mostly understanding it/the issue they're trying to solve..
- (tags:programming research )
- 6. Which word made you old? (Mine was GOAT)
- (tags:language age change comic )
- 7. Explaining "what a species is" turns out to be very very tricky
- (tags:video ontology life )
No such thing as a species (or "it's complicated)...
Date: 2025-05-26 11:58 am (UTC)"A (former) botanist writes... This is because "species" is a human concept, born of the very human need to classify things. Individual or populations of other organisms neither know nor care what species they are.
When I studied bracken, it was classified as a single species with two subspecies and twelve varieties. A couple of years after I'd finished working with it, my former supervisor concluded it was in fact twelve different species. According to Wikipedia it is currently considered to consist of one or two species - depending on which species the article you read is writing about! (My supervisor was undoubtedly wrong: he was very much a splitter, seeing subspecies all over the place, whilst I am very much a lumper!)
DNA studies can tell one how closely related a group of organisms is and the relationships between them, but the definition of a species and where the break between one species and its closest relatives is always subjective.
And it the creator of that video thinks plants are difficult (they aren't!), wait till he finds out about fungi and bacteria...!"
Re: No such thing as a species (or "it's complicated)...
Date: 2025-05-26 12:27 pm (UTC)