Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't

https://youtu.be/PUFQouwqbe8

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.

https://youtu.be/SRRbspvheRc

https://youtu.be/AVPkBv-QQ6U

  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"}

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.

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.

https://www.publiclandstore.com/blogs/gallery/joey-alone-exh...

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.

I crave for some photos of the author's herbarium.

   > 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> 

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.

[1]: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9798317900410-concrete-botany

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. [...]