Binomial elimination (fwd)

[Neal Evenhuis]

Collecting expedition in the rainforests of Hawaii, 2015 AD:

"Raul, come over here! Look!" Raul saunters over with his REI collecting
bag and takes a look where Sacha is pointing. "My God . .. it's . . ."
"Yes, Raul, yes!" "It's . . a 2145638-2!" Raul reaches in and pulls out
his pocket computer and enters the number. "Gosh, Sacha, in all my life, I
never thought I'd see a 2145638-2 here!" "Yeah, pretty exciting, isn't it?
It really looks more like a 2467189-33, but I remember from our guidebook
that that species went extinct after they put in the hotel over there a
few years ago." Sacha leans over to see what the pocket computer in Raul's
hand is displaying. "What's that word?" Sacha asks with a puzzled look on
her face. "It's what they used to call 2145638-2 before the binomial
revolution took place." "Yuck! A word?" Sacha looks like she ate a lemon.
"Yep," says Raul, "it used to be called . . " Sacha stops Raul in
mid-sentence, "Hey, let's get out of here, Raul!" Sacha points to
a clearing "It's a pack of 234-98s and they look awfully mad!" Raul and
Sacha run for their lives, but the 234-98s overtake them and devor them in
one bite.

Raul and Sacha were the last human taxonomists to collect on Earth. It
became to dangerous for humans to collect in the "outer zones".
Cybertaxonomists were all the rage now and they had a penchant for
remembering ALL the species numbers that humans never could.

End of Expedition story.
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Come on. Get a grip out there you non-binomialists!

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Neal L. Evenhuis                     |  tel:   (808) 848-4138
Department of  Natural Sciences      |  fax:   (808) 847-8252
Bishop Museum,  P.O.Box 19000        |  email: neale at bishop.bishop.hawaii.org
Honolulu, Hawaii 96817-0916 USA      |  I can't be reached at: (808) 555-3423
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Do not try this at home. Not for resale. Other usual disclaimers apply.
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On Sat, 18 Mar 1995, Jim Croft wrote:

> > Or...Homo at sapiens L.
>
> Now we are finally getting somewhere!
>
> Better to give each taxon its own internet address:
>
> sapiens at homo.hominidae.anthropoidea.primates.mamalia.vertebrata.chordata
>
> These could then be aliased, mirrored, proxied and linked in various
> ways to take into account the fact that no two taxonomists or
> systematists will ever agree with each other, thus comfortably
> representing the plethora of alternative views of the world.
>
> A bonus in asigning each taxon a unique internet address, is that you
> have a ready made repository for all information pertaining to it, a
> site we can all post our hoarded data to.  Yes, a Web site for each
> terminal clade, and a Web crawler to index all the information and we can
> dispense with systematists and code jockeys altogether...
>
> Well - it's no worse than most of the other proposals on this topic - a
> topic that has become veritable oasis of erudition on the arid arena
> of the internet.
>
> -- jim                    URL=http://155.187.10.12:80/people/croft.jim.html
> ___________________________________________________________________________
> Jim Croft         [Herbarium CANB & CBG]          internet: jrc at anbg.gov.au
> Australian National Herbarium &                      voice:  +61-6-246 5500
> Australian National Botanic Gardens               faxmodem:  +61-6-2509 484
> GPO Box 1600, Canberra, ACT 2601, AUSTRALIA            fax:  +61-6-246 5249
> _________________Centre for Plant Biodiversity Research____________________