Big glitch in computerdom

[Richard Zander]

I recently searched for my name on altavista.digital.com which has a web
spider that indexes web sites automatically. I found several mail
messages (one attached below) that incorrectly ascribed to me the words
of others.

Apparently the "On (date) (name) wrote:" phrase that quotes previous
email messages can automatically cite someone other than the actual
quote, if quotes are buried in quotes as is usual in long threads. I did
not say those things now archived on the Taxacom log. I would like these
messages deleted--in fact I would like to have deleted all messages
quoting anything I am supposed to have said.

This is a general message to all participants in Taxacom (and it probably
is true for other listservers, too) since you probably have all been
misquoted for posterity. Check it out....

The web is wonderful, but we are the guinea pigs.
--

*******************************************************
Richard H. Zander, Buffalo Museum of Science
1020 Humboldt Pkwy, Buffalo, NY 14211 USA zander at ag.net
*******************************************************
FROM TAXACOM ARCHIVES
http://muse.bio.cornell.edu/archive/gophtax.mar.96/0100.html

e: Binomial elimination

Stephen P. Rae (srae at COMMUNITY.NET)
Fri, 17 Mar 1995 09:20:03 -0800

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Stephen P. Rae (srae at community.net) Research Biologist
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On Fri, 17 Mar 1995, Richard H. Zander wrote:

> Many have complained that eliminating the genus name makes for confusion,
> like eliminating a person's last name. Not so. Say you know somebody named
> Jack. No problem. The *government* has no problem either, since Jack
> is known by his soc. security number. Thus, the tomato is a tomato, unless
> you definitely need to distinguish it from rare, unusual, exotic
> tomato relatives in a scientific paper, at which time you can refer to
> it as tomato (3488966600881-B) as an individual, and place it in the
> group Solanum or Lycopersicon for the benefit of your fellow scientists,
> who are the only ones who might care.
>
> Richard Zander
>Strictly as a matter of process, how do you see us leading a class on
plant id where we use the name Mustard-123456789? I know that the
character Ralph 124C was well known in a book, but such a plant name is a
real killer for the novice. So, now what?

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