Taxonomists may squabble and quibble (as a recent article called “Why Do Taxonomists Write the Meanest Obituaries?” makes clear), but most taxonomists are baffled by the works produced by the late Chonosuke Okamura, discoverer of the mini-creatures. Here is a set of photographic images from one of Okamura’s books. These, say Okamura, are faces of several minimen. Okamura […]
Tag: taxonomy
Interview with the scientists who wrote the paper about Pokémon
Aggie TV interviewed Matan Shelomi, Andrew Richards and Ivana Li — three of the four co-authors of the paper “A Phylogeny and Evolutionary History of the Pokémon“, which was published in the Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 18, no 4, June/July 2012, pages 15-17: Their institution, The University of California, Davis, wrote about the paper […]
Doom Metal and Experiential Richness
Do you know your Doom Metal from your Goregrind, or your Blackened Death Metal from your Funeral Doom? If not, help is at hand in the form of a taxonomic ‘map’ which was developed by Jonathan Nicholas Piper as part of his PhD in Critical Studies/Experimental Practices at the University of California, San Diego. The […]
Who’s behind the Taxonomy of Barney
The Alcade wrote a short article, quite a while back, about the authors of the landmark study “The Taxonomy of Barney“. This image is from the original study: BONUS: Widipedia’s partial history of Barney the Dinosaur, which ignores the evidence presented by the “Taxonomy of Barney” authors as to whether Barney really is a dinosaur. […]
Towards a taxonomy of teddy bears
New efforts (see below) in France are adding info to the past, isolated attempts to classify the different kinds of teddy bear. The three most celebrated academic studies are: “The Survival of the Cutest: Who’s Responsible for the Evolution of the Teddy Bear?” P.H. Morris, V. Reddy, and R.C. Bunting, Animal Behaviour, vol. 50, 1995, pp. […]
Towards a LEGO Minifigures® taxonomy
Dr. Christoph Bartneck, at the University of Canterbury HITLab NZ, not only investigates whether robot cats and dogs can be programmed to convincingly display ‘pain’, he also develops taxonomical models for LEGO Minifigures® – of which there are now more than 4000 (and 3600 are listed in his book ‘The Unofficial LEGO Minifigure® Catalog’ He […]
Bugged by buggy bug IDs
Alex Wild writes in his Compound Eye blog: Why are media insects misidentified? That’s not a bee…. How does a fly end up advertising a book whose target audience, not to mention the mortified authors, will instantly recognize as a mistake? Publishers, photo editors, and stock agencies—those entities that purchase from image creators—trust photographers to correctly […]
The gentleman’s least favorite museum
The Disillusioned Taxonomist writes: Guzelyurt Museum of Nature and Archaeology is my least favourite museum of all that I have been to. I admire the fact that northern Cyprus has a museum dedicated to its natural and historical treasures, but I can’t help but feel a little disheartened by the way the specimens look, and […]