Posts Tagged ‘classification’
“The study of taxonomy in its broadest sense is probably the oldest branch of biology or natural history as well as the basis for all the other branches, since the first step in obtaining any knowledge of things about us is to discriminate between them and to learn to recognize them”*…
The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group (HORG) is a tongue-in-cheek non-profit organization founded in 1994 by John Daniel (a visual effects artist with a background in invertibrate zoology). It playfully researches and classifies plastic bread clips, calling them “occlupanids,” as if they were a species in a scientific taxonomy (Kingdom: Plasticae), documenting their diverse forms from around the world. They treat these common, often-ignored objects as fascinating organisms, collecting specimens and creating a taxonomy and a database of their shapes, colors, and “species”…
This site contains several years of research in the classification of occlupanids. These small objects are everywhere, dotting supermarket aisles and sidewalks with an impressive array of form and color. The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group has taken on the mantle of classifying this most common, yet most puzzling, member of phylum Plasticae…
Occlupanids are generally found as parasitoids on bagged pastries in supermarkets, hardware stores, and other large commercial establishments. Their fascinating and complex life cycle is unfortunately severely under-researched. What is known is that they take nourishment from the plastic sacs that surround the bagged product, not the product itself, as was previously thought. Notable exceptions to this habit are those living off rubber bands and on analog watch hands.
In most species, they often situate themselves toward the center of the plastic bag, holding in the contents. This leads to speculation that the relationship may be more symbiotic than purely parasitic.
Their stunning diversity and mysterious habits have entranced many a respectable scientist into studying, collecting, and cataloging specimens late into the night.
This site contains several years of research in the classification of occlupanids. For those of you who do not consume sliced bread, occlupanids do not form an important part of your life. For the rest of the world, These small objects are everywhere, dotting supermarket aisles and sidewalks with an impressive array of form and color.
The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group has taken on the mantle of classifying this most common, yet most puzzling, member of phylum Plasticae.
They’ve even created a handy, free print-your-own set of cut-out identifcation placards “for the excitable amateur scientists out there who want to start their own collection!”
Ready, set, browse: HORG- Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group
For more on HORG, see here and here.
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As we contemplate classification, we might send insightful birthday greetings to a man who revolutionized the understanding of the taxonomy of his field, Harold Varmus; he was born on this date in 1939. A microbiologist and medical doctor, he shared (with J. Michael Bishop) the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes— a discovery that led to great strides in the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of a variety of cancers.
“Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things”*…
From Kim (Scott) Morrison‘s and Dror Bar-Natan‘s, The Knot Atlas, “a complete user-editable knot atlas, in the wiki spirit of Wikipedia“– a marvelous example of a wide-spread urge in mathematics to find order through classification. As Joseph Howlett explains, that quest continues, even as it proves vexatious…
Biology in the 18th century was all about taxonomy. The staggering diversity of life made it hard to draw conclusions about how it came to be. Scientists first had to put things in their proper order, grouping species according to shared characteristics — no easy task. Since then, they’ve used these grand catalogs to understand the differences among organisms and to infer their evolutionary histories. Chemists built the periodic table for the same purpose — to classify the elements and understand their behaviors. And physicists made the Standard Model to explain how the fundamental particles of the universe interact.
In his book The Order of Things, the philosopher Michel Foucault describes this preoccupation with sorting as a formative step for the sciences. “A knowledge of empirical individuals,” he wrote, “can be acquired only from the continuous, ordered and universal tabulation of all possible differences.”
Mathematicians never got past this obsession. That’s because the menagerie of mathematics makes the biological catalog look like a petting zoo. Its inhabitants aren’t limited by physical reality. Any conceivable possibility, whether it lives in our universe or in some hypothetical 200-dimensional one, needs to be accounted for. There are tons of different classifications to try — groups, knots, manifolds and so on — and infinitely many objects to sort in each of those classifications. Classification is how mathematicians come to know the strange, abstract world they’re studying, and how they prove major theorems about it.Take groups, a central object of study in math. The classification of “finite simple groups” — the building blocks of all groups — was one of the grandest mathematical accomplishments of the 20th century. It took dozens of mathematicians nearly 100 years to finish. In the end, they figured out that all finite simple groups fall into three buckets, except for 26 itemized outliers. A dedicated crew of mathematicians has been working on a “condensed” proof of the classification since 1994 — it currently comprises 10 volumes and several thousand pages, and still isn’t finished. But the gargantuan undertaking continues to bear fruit, recently helping to prove a decades-old conjecture that you can infer a lot about a group by examining one small part of it.
Mathematics, unfettered by the typical constraints of reality, is all about possibility. Classification gives mathematicians a way to start exploring that limitless potential…[Howlett reviews attempts to classify numbers by “type” (postive/negative, rational/irrational), and mathematical objects by “equivalency” (shapes that can be stretched or squeezed into the other without breaking or tearing, like a doughnut and and coffee cup (see here)…]
… Similarly, classification has played an important role in knot theory. Tie a knot in a piece of string, then glue the string’s ends together — that’s a mathematical knot. Knots are equivalent if one can be tangled or untangled, without cutting the string, to match the other. This mundane-sounding task has lots of mathematical uses. In 2023, five mathematicians made progress on a key conjecture in knot theory that stated that all knots with a certain property (being “slice”) must also have another (being “ribbon”), with the proof ruling out a suspected counterexample. (As an aside, I’ve often wondered why knot theorists insist on using nouns as adjectives.)
Classifications can also get more meta. Both theoretical computer scientists and mathematicians classify problems about classification based on how “hard” they are.
All these classifications turn math’s disarrayed infinitude into accessible order. It’s a first step toward reining in the deluge that pours forth from mathematical imaginings…
“The Never-Ending Struggle to Classify All Math,” from @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* Isaac Newton
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As we sort, we might spare a thought for the author of our title quote, Sir Isaac Newton; he died in this date in 1727. A polymath, Newton excelled in– and advanced– mathematics, physics, and astronomy; he was a theologian and a government offical (Master of the Mint)… and a dedicated alchemist. He was key to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed.
Newton’s book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1687, achieved the first great unification in physics and established classical mechanics (e.g., the Laws of Motion and the principle of universal gravitation). He also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for formulating infinitesimal calculus. Indeed, Newton contributed to and refined the scientific method to such an extent that his work is considered the most influential in the development of modern science.
“Aurora had but newly chased the night, / And purpled o’er the sky with blushing light”*…
The solar storms of late have made for some compelling nighttime sky-gazing. But these geomagnetic storms can have serious consequences, for example power grid irregularities, degradation of high-frequency communications, GPS outages, and satellite navigation issues. To that lattermost, consider agriculture: a 2023 report by the US Department of Agriculture noted that more than 50 percent of corn, cotton, rice, sorghum, soybeans, and winter wheat are planted and harvested with “automated guidance.” These systems, on which farmers depend, especially in the mid-May planting season, have been compromised…
The powerful geomagnetic storm that cast the northern lights’ vivid colors across the Northern Hemisphere over the weekend also caused some navigational systems in tractors and other farming equipment to break down at the height of planting season, suppliers and farmers said…
Farm equipment suppliers had warned that the storm would result in disruptions. And on Saturday, Landmark Implement, which sells John Deere farming equipment across parts of the Midwest, said that the accuracy of some of its systems had been “extremely compromised” because of the event [as has the equipment of other manufacturers].
The company said in a statement that it was searching for a “tool to help predict this in the future so that we can attempt to give our customers an alert that this issue may be coming.” It described the storm as a “historic event” rather than something it would have to “continue to battle frequently.”
Terry Griffin, an associate professor in agricultural economics at Kansas State University, said that while infrequent, such storms still posed a threat to farming in the United States, where the majority of crops are planted using modern guidance systems.
“This was the first time we’ve had geomagnetic storms that were so strong, and we were reliant upon GPS,” he said, noting that among the worst times for a storm like this to occur was during the planting season, when precision is crucial. Alternative technologies, including systems that use machine vision and artificial intelligence, or a more localized navigation system that would not collapse in a solar storm, are being developed, Dr. Griffin added…
The Northern lights are beautiful, but their cause is playing havoc with agriculture: “Solar Storm Crashes GPS Systems Used by Some Farmers, Stalling Planting” (gift article) from @nytimes.
See also: “Solar Storm Knocks Out Farmers’ Tractor GPS Systems During Peak Planting Season.”
* John Dryden
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As we ruminate on radiation, we might spare a thought for Williamina Fleming; she died on this date in 1911. An astronomer and scholar of stars like our Sun, she was hired by the director of the Harvard College Observatory to help in the photographic classification of stellar spectra. She helped develop a common designation system for stars and cataloged more than ten thousand stars, 59 gaseous nebulae, over 310 variable stars, and 10 novae and other astronomical phenomena. Among several career achievements that advanced astronomy, Fleming is noted for her discovery of the Horsehead Nebula in 1888.
“Roget’s Thesaurus is an oddball philosophy of language masquerading as a reference book”*…
Austin Kleon on Roget’s Thesaurus…
I have always assumed — and maybe you have, too — that a thesaurus is just a synonym dictionary, the words arranged alphabetically with a list of synonyms and antonyms below. Somehow, every thesaurus I’d ever come across — even ones with “Roget” in the title! — had this alphabetic arrangement.
Because of this, it was easy for me to effectively ignore the thesaurus. If I needed a synonym or antonym, I’d just open an actual dictionary, or do a quick online search…
It turns out that Roget‘s Thesaurus is not at all what I thought it was. It is weirder and much more interesting…
… if you understand the man, you understand where his book came from. Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) was a Victorian polymath: a doctor by trade, but he did all sorts of stuff: he was a consultant on pandemics, he wrote Encyclopedia Brittanica entries and a book about natural theology, he helped catalog several libraries, he invented the scale on the slide rule, and he may have written a paper that contributed to the birth of cinema. Oh, and he was also obsessed with chess problems.
The thing he is now most famous for — his thesaurus — was actually a side project he took up in retirement, in his seventies. His whole life he’d made lists as a way of soothing himself. He carried a notebook around with him and jotted down lists of related words and phrases to help him with his own writing and lecturing. He made his own personal thesaurus in his twenties, but in retirement he thought maybe it might be helpful to others, and after four years of work, he published the first edition of his Thesaurus (from the Greek word thēsauros, meaning “storehouse” or “treasure”) in 1852, overseeing new editions until he died in 1869. His son, John Lewis Roget, a lawyer, painter, and art critic, then took over the project.
Roget, like many Victorians, was obsessed with order and classification. His hero was Carl Linnaeus, known as the father of modern taxonomy. Roget wanted to classify and organize words in the English language. This is the best way to understand Roget’s Thesaurus: it’s not just a book of words, it’s like a library of words.
When you go to the library, the books are not arranged in alphabetical order — they’re organized topically. In order to find a book in my local library, you have to look up the book in the catalog, note the Dewey Decimal Number, then find it on the shelf. The beauty of this system, and a major argument for physical browsing collections, is that when you find the book on the shelf, it will be surrounded by books on the similar subject. You may go looking for one particular book and while browsing you might find a better book or the book you didn’t even know you were looking for. This is the way a thesaurus is supposed to work.
In the very beginning of his introduction to his book, Roget emphasizes that what makes his book unique and helpful is that the words are not arranged alphabetically, like a Dictionary, but “according to the ideas which they express.”…
The fascinating story of Roget’s Thesaurus: “A Library of Words,” from @austinkleon.
Browse the 1911 edition– still in the format Roget intended– at the Internet Archive.
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As we look it up, we might send tasty birthday greetings to the literary genius behind green eggs and ham, Theodor Seuss Geisel, AKA “Dr. Seuss”; he was born on this date in 1904. After a fascinating series of early-career explorations, Geisel settled on a style that created what turned out to be the perfect “gateway drug” to book addiction– and a love of words– for generations of young readers.
The more that you read,
The more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
The more places you’ll go.
– I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! (1978)
“Am I as admirable as that ant?”*…
There are lots of ants on earth. And, as Anna Turns explains, they play a big role as ecosystem engineers– as well as providing insights on everything from the climate to aging…
To most of us, they are small, uninteresting and sometimes annoying, but 2022 revealed just how ubiquitous ants are and how indispensable they are to the planet. Scientists revealed in September that there are an estimated 20 quadrillion (or 20 million billion) ants globally – that’s 2.5 million for every person on the planet.
More than 12,000 known species of ant live in all sorts of habitats, from the Arctic to the tropics and they represent one of the most diverse, abundant and specialist groups of animals on the planet. Leafcutter ants are fungus farmers, slave-making ants capture broods to increase their work force, while wood ants herd aphids to the juiciest parts of a plant to harvest their honeydew sap…
Experts agree that ants are ecosystem engineers because they play a crucial role in decomposing organic matter, recycling nutrients, improving soil health, removing pests and dispersing seeds. But, historically, ants haven’t attracted as much attention as crop pollinators, such as bees, which perhaps have more of an obvious economic value. That bias could soon change. Ants have been used as a biological pest control on citrus crops in China for centuries, and research published in August indicates that the pest control potential of some predatory ants could work better than some agricultural chemicals.
The wonders of ant biology throw up plenty of other possibilities for real-world applications. Queen ants that live more than 30 years – yet have the same genetic material as a short-lived worker ant – could teach us something about senescence. Nobody understands how queens store sperm for decades inside their bodies without any degradation, despite colonies living in different climates. Meanwhile, Schultheiss’ [Dr Patrick Schultheiss, of the University of Würzburg] research into ant navigation – how they find food and how they behave when they get lost – could help build mathematical models that instruct a robot searching for missing people.
Looking back at how ants evolved can shed light on a huge array of other plants and animals, too. Butterflies that rely on ants to tend to their caterpillars could disappear if those ants are wiped out, says Corrie Moreau, a professor at Cornell University: “Nature is this intricate woven tapestry and if you pull one thread, you’ll never know which is the critical thread that makes the whole thing fall apart.”…
“Insects and us: a mind-blowing 20 quadrillion ants and what they mean for the planet,” from @AnnaTurns in @guardian.
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As we get antsy, we might spare a thought for Swedish botanist Carl Linné, better known as Carolus Linnaeus, “the Father of Taxonomy,” died on this date in 1778. Historians suggest that the academically-challenged among us can take heart from his story: at the University of Lund, where he studied medicine, he was “less known for his knowledge of natural history than for his ignorance of everything else.” Still, he made is way from Lund to Uppsala, where he began his famous system of plant and animal classification– still in use today.
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