Just doing some SQL against the Catalogue of Life ‘09 database and came up with some figures unrelated to what I set out to do. I can’t decide if they are useful or not so they are going here.
|
Species |
% of species |
Genera |
% of genera |
| Species in monotypic genera |
41792 |
3.6 |
41792 |
38.3 |
| Working memory >1 and < 10 |
184811 |
15.92 |
46918 |
43 |
| Class Size >9 and <30 |
217306 |
18.72 |
13286 |
12.18 |
| > 29 species |
716609 |
61.75 |
7114 |
6.52 |
| Totals |
1160518 |
100 |
109110 |
100 |
I wondered what the mean/median genus size is but got distracted into wondering “Given any one species what does knowing the genus tell me about that species?”. I figured that we (being human) have rough classes of sizes of groups of thing. Firstly there are the unique things – monotypic genera. Then there are the small groups of things that fit in our working memory (7+/- 2). Then there are groups of things that are large but memorable like the size of a class of school children (in the UK) up to about 30. A typical teacher can probably list them and a taxonomist who was monographing such a group could probably list the species. Over 30 I figure we have the kind-of-things category where we just give up and may know set individuals but are more likely to think of set characteristics. This size includes anything over 30 right up to the super genera with thousands of species.
What does this mean in practice? I don’t know. Maybe something will come to you.
Amazon are selling an ebook of Siddhartha by Herman Hess for the Kindle for $3.51 and it appears in different versions for even more. Siddhartha is out of copyright so it costs them nothing for the rights on this book. The $3.51 is all for them.
Does this mean that $3.51 is the cost of distributing an eBook through the Amazon system? That would imply that the publisher (nee the author) would get the value of any ebook that retailed for over this sum. With Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig (which retails for $9.58 on Kindle) for example the authors would get $6.07? Somehow I doubt it!
That price tag of $9.58 doesn’t compare very well with $10.19 for the paperback version of Pirsig’s book. The Kindle version can be yours in 60 seconds or less but it is controlled by Digital Rights Management (DRM) so really all you are buying is the right to have a permanent relationship with Amazon who will supply you with a copy to read on an authorised device. For 61c more you could have one made out of real paper that you could hand on to a friend or loved one, sell, donate to charity or even burn to keep warm. Sure it won’t last forever but it still has a residual value. My paper copy is yellowing but perfectly readable. It was printed in 1978 (that is 32 years ago!). It has a price tag of £1 and I bought it from a second hand shop for £1.50 ($2 ish) about 10 years ago. Read more…
It is just past Christmas and the turning of the decade so I thought it would be worth capturing a train of thought on time and space.
- The future doesn’t exist yet.
- The past no longer exists.
- The present moment is vanishingly small.
Consider the sounds you hear in a piece of music. Sound is the changing in air pressure that moves our ear drums backwards and forwards. To hear Middle C we need to listen to a sound for a long enough period to judge that the air pressure is changing around 261 times per second. At any one moment our ear drums are stationary. There is no sound in the now. Read more…
Tremendous energy is required to re-animate the dead.
At last month’s TDWG2009 conference I was on a panel for a brief discussion at the end of a session. There were around 200 people in the audience and handful of us up front as lambs for the slaughter.
One of the questions from the floor concerned the automation of the taxonomic process. I don’t recall the precise question but it triggered one of my (probably boring) canned responses.
I pointed out that the usual practice in software engineering, when asked to automate a system, is to produce a Domain Model based on an analysis of some Use Cases that then leads on to some Object Model or implementation model that is actually created in software. The assumption behind this is that whatever was being done was good but needs to be done faster – with computers!
In biodiversity informatics, and particularly in biological taxonomy, this is not such a good idea. Current working practice was developed in the light of the prevailing technology of the time. If computers and the internet had been available from the start things would probably have been done differently. The worst thing we can do now is automate a paper based system. Read more…
Keeping up with the nearly-year-old tradition of putting all outputs on my blog here are the latest two reports I have submitted as part of the PESI.
Read and enjoy!
