Burnt Fen Creative

New Paper: _Lathrobium sapaense_

2026-04-15T11:41:03+12:00

My late night habit of reading open access papers published in Zootaxa continues to provide some interesting small papers. Last week, a paper of mine was published from this work:

Richard Littauer (2026). Lathrobium sapaense Tokareva \& Bekchiev, 2025 is the available name (Staphylinidae: Paederinae). Zootaxa 5792 (1): 200–200. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5792.1.12

The paper is, in short, a correction of a single name published in a new paper, so that the ending of the species name conforms to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. Why is this important? It isn’t. It is in no way important. The Code is incredibly silly for mandating this kind of change. But what is important is that we follow the Code.

Codes like the ICZN are arcane and byzantine. They’re difficult to manage and difficult to follow. The more obscure rules, like with gender agreement, are annoying. But when we don’t follow those rules, the entire edifice of the Code is threatened, and we’re closer to not having a Code at all. That would be very difficult for science as a whole, as these names are currently the standard for talking about taxa.

I wrote this paper because I think that following the Code is important – and because I want to not-so-subtly shift the field towards making these sorts of changes unnecessary, by pointing out to scientists how silly the Code currently is. The more people have to wrestle with a poor Code, the more they are likely to push back and go through channels to ask their commissioners to change the Code.

It’s not the best strategy. A better strategy would be for me to talk directly to commissioners about changing the Code (which I’ve done), or to write articles about the changes directly (done that too), or to get myself elected to the commission (tried that). Given that those avenues are already being used or are exhausted, I’m doing what I can - by making sure the Code is upheld as it is. Further, I am also incentivized to publish papers. Academia is silly, too.

This paper is so short it doesn’t have an abstract. And, because I paid the $25 fee and because the paper is therefore under a CC-BY-NC license, I can reprint it here:

Lathrobium sapaense Tokareva & Bekchiev, 2025 was first described as Lathrobium sapaensis Tokareva & Bekchiev, 2025. The etymology states: “The specific epithet is an adjectival form derived from Sa Pa, the forest waterfall in mountainous Lao Cai Province, Vietnam, where nearby the species was discovered.” (Tokareva, Bekchiev and Nguyen 2025) The adjectival Latin ending -ensis has been added to the stem, sapa. This is the normal process for using this morpheme to latinize scientific names with non-Latinate etymologies. However, the suffix -ensis marks for the masculine and feminine gender; the neuter gender would be marked with the suffix -ense. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN 1999; henceforth ‘the Code’) mandates in Articles 31 and 34 that adjectival species-group names must agree with the genus-group name with which they are combined. In this case, Lathrobium Gravenhorst, 1802 has neuter gender, so the species-group name must agree in gender with it.

The gender of Lathrobium can be ascertained through combination with other species-group names in the genus, such as Lathrobium longwangshanense Peng, Li & Zhao, 2012 or Lathrobium tarokoense Assing, 2010, or by analysis of the generic name according to Article 30 of the Code. Under Article 30.1.3, the name is neuter because it is a Greek word, most likely λάθρῃ ‘stealthy’, with a change of ending, and so should take the neuter gender as -um is normally neuter in Latin. Using a different interpretation, the word does not resemble a Greek word exactly (necessary under Article 26), but it is combined by Gravenhorst with other neuter names, such as in L. lineare or L. terminatum (Gravenhorst 1802). Under Article 30.2.3, this confers neuter gender on the generic name.

The available name is Lathrobium sapaense Tokareva & Bekchiev, 2025

You can read the paper here: https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5792.1.12

Te Herenga Waka PostGraduate Student Association

2026-03-16T19:05:35+13:00

Today I facilitated the Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington PGSA Special General Meeting, where we adopted a new constitution, elected some new executive committee members, and said thanks to those who were rolling off of the committee - including me.

I’ve been helping with the PGSA since I first landed, if at first in a minimal, arm’s length kind of way. I knew when I got here that it would be tempting to help with the PGSA, because I like organizing and helping students, but that it would be exactly the sort of job that would take a lot of my time, wouldn’t be paid work, and would get in the way of my thesis and my other organizing, such as with CURIOSS. Last October, after a year of attending events and meeting fellow postgrads, I realized at the AGM that there was a constitutional issue involving the amount of postgrads on the exec. So, I volunteered to run during the meeting, and ended up being elected.

For the last six months, I’ve been helping out where I could as an exec – helping to figure out strategy, advising on how to handle negotiations with VUWSA, the student association that includes undergrads and which was trying to take over all of PGSA’s activities, serving on various faculty boards where a postgrad voice from PGSA was missing, and organizing and attending some events. Today was the capstone of that, as I helped shepherd through the new constitution, something that was mandated by the Societies Act here. I helped with PythonNZ’s new constitution, too, as they went through the same process. The SGM today was a bit difficult to facilitate, as there was some excellent and very difficult questions to answer about how the new constitution is going. I think we managed. All of the motions passed.

I ran for the position of VP Academic/Research, but iff (if and only if) no one else ran. Thankfully, someone else did. So, for now, I find myself as of this afternoon without a position. I am now just a member of the PGSA again. I look forward to doing what I can on Te Here Tāura Rangahau Faculty of Graduate Research (FGR) board, and on Te Wāhanga a Manaia Faculty of Science and Engineering (FoSE) board, and others. But, from now, the exec meetings are optional – which is great, because it means I can focus on my thesis work. I’m happy about that.

I’m looking forward to being able to attend the coffee meetups, and just saying hi.

Kōkako photos in the press

2026-03-11T00:29:15+13:00

After the last Wikicon Aotearoa in Ōtautahi Christchurch in May, 2025, I made the decision to change the license on all of my iNaturalist photos to enable easy reuse for Wikipedia and elsewhere. I am not a professional photographer; while I have sold art before, and while I have had showings of my work, I don’t prioritize returns on my photography. I am just happy to see it used.

Which is why I was excited to get a Google Alert a few weeks ago that my name had been published somewhere on the internet. In this case, I was pinged that I had been mentioned in an article called Rat-free forest offers rare boost for kōkako north of Rotorua. The article talks about how an indigenous Māori-led conservation project in the north of the North Island is doing exceptionally well at eradicating predators that imperil the native birds here in New Zealand. The focal species for this project is the Kōkako, a beautiful endemic that has a haunting, organ-like call. I’ve only heard it once, on Tiritiri Matangi near Auckland, where I managed to snap some photos of a Kōkako as it munched on some Taupata on the coast.

I didn’t explicitly allow RNZ to copy this image. They didn’t ask. They didn’t need to, as it is freely available under a CC-BY license on iNaturalist. I don’t profit on this work. That’s OK. I profit in other ways - my work was part of a movement of people trying to save this rare species, and through having access to free, good imagery, the journalists were able to make the project come alive to a wider audience. That’s profit enough.

PythonNZ Committee: 2024 2026

2026-03-04T21:36:00+13:00

I arrived in Wellington with fresh eyes and a spring in my step, back in 2024. I almost immediately signed up and gave a talk at Kiwi Pycon 2025, where I also volunteered a bit and helped out setting things up. The community seemed amazing - a great group of pythonistas who worked on furthering the language and building a lasting, fun community here in Pōneke Wellington. Some of my friends from the before times were also at the conference - most notably, Chris Neuegebauer and Deb Nicholson, my former boss at the OSI and now the president of the Python Software Foundation.

When elections for PythonNZ occurred, I decided to run. Somehow, disturbingly, I was elected. So, from 2024 until today, I was on the PythonNZ committee. While I was there, we dealt with the normal rigamarole for these sorts of nonprofits - making a new constitution, dealing with finances, having long committee meetings where people talked over each other. It wasn’t always fun, but it was rewarding. I learned a lot.

We also planned and hosted Kiwi Pycon 2025, which was an entire conference in itself. Together with help from Chelsea Finnie and Devi Ganesan, we produced the first academic proceedings and academic track the conference had ever had - small, but a good start. I gave a talk. I got an arbovirus. I missed half the conference. What I saw was still great.

The time commitment balooned to a year and a half, due to changes in our constitution and how we decided to do the fiscal years going forward. So, today, at the AGM, I rolled off of the committee. I am now strangely noe a member of any nonprofit boards – wait, no, I am now on the EC for the PGSA. Good lord. Well, it’s one down, anyway.

I was grateful for the help and support I encountered being on this board, and for the friendship and care of those involved. We didn’t always agree - it’s a board - but it was well worth the effort.

During my tenure, I attended not a single Wellington meetup. I wish I could say I didn’t know about it, but the truth is that I live just far away that driving into Wellington is difficult, and because someone in my house is immunocompromised, we mask everywhere. Going into a meetup at night is never on my list of things I want to do. It’s difficult. I wish masking were easier, but it’s not for me.

PythonNZ isn’t just about the meetups - Kiwi Pycon is great, by itself. It’s also about the wider community and the Discord and so on. I felt honoured to have been voted in and to have been able to serve.

Now to take a much needed nap before I work on my thesis.

Taxacom

2026-03-04T16:13:00+13:00

TAXACOM is a mailing list that started some time in the forever ago, and ran until it was suddenly cut off at the end of 2025. It was one of the primary places for discussions of taxanomy and nomenclature as a listserve or public forum. I, together with Shinichi Nakahara and my mentor from the Royal Society Te Apārangi Neil Birrell, restarted it as a Google Group to allow continued discussion.

I’m hoping that we’ll end up having more good conversations in the years to come. I’m also hoping to institute the Contributor Covenant as a Code of Conduct, too.

Join us.

Kiwi PyCon 2025 Academic Track Proceedings

2026-02-10T13:37:00+13:00

Last year, I was on the organizing committee for Kiwi PyCon, the main Python conference held in New Zealand. Python is the most popular programming language in the world - this wasn’t a herpetology conference. This was part of my role and responsibilities as a board member for PythonNZ, which I joined because I wanted to help the Python here out, and to make new friends and learn. I had another motive, too. I wanted an academic track for Kiwi PyCon, so that researchers and students could submit academic papers or conference abstracts and have them count towards their publication records.

Today, I finished that task by publishing the Kiwi PyCon 2025 Academic Track Proceedings. You can read them here: https://zenodo.org/records/18516794.

All in all, this took a bit more time than I expected. In the lead up to Kiwi PyCon, we had to plan how who would be on the academic committee, eventually settling on me, Devi Ganesan, and Chelsea Finnie, who provided much needed support to keep the work going. We decided to publish only abstracts for the conference, not full papers, as previous experiences at PyConAU suggested that reviewing papers and submitting them to JOSS was too much effort. We sent out marketing materials for the event, wrote up a CFP, emailed university programs to share it, and organized a small group of peer reviewers. In the end, we had very few submissions - just three. Two of them were chosen to also be part of the main program track, and so were presented at the conference.

These abstracts have now been published on Zenodo, complete with DOIs and references and some light editing. You can read and cite them here:

Littauer, R., & Ganesan, D. (2026, February 10). Kiwi PyCon 2025 Academic Track Proceedings. Kiwi PyCon 2025, Wellington, NZ. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18516794

One of the published abstracts was, somewhat embarassingly, mine. I presented on similar work to what I had presented a week before in Rio for the OpenForum Assembly, on Open Sustainable Technology.

Littauer, R. (2026). Mapping the Open Source Ecosystem for Climate Science and Sustainable Technology. Kiwi PyCon 2025 Academic Track Proceedings, 4–5. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18597029

You can also see a recording of my presentation here.

I am amazed that I seem as cogent as I seem, as I was very out of it that day. I didn’t make it to the second day of the conference, as jetlag and an unknown arbovirus knocked me out flat for the next week.

This is my first time I have been an editor for a proceedings, not counting my failed attempt in 2012 to publish ULAB proceedings, published ten years later by others who took up the mantle here. It was surprisingly easy to do on Zenodo, although a bit finicky to publish both the abstracts and the compiled proceedings together.

Thanks to Devi for being coeditor, for Chelsea for the encouragement, and to the Kiwi PyCon 2025 team for organizing a brilliant conference.

Fellow of the Linnean Society

2025-10-24T14:57:00+13:00

On October 16th, I was voted in as a Fellow of the Linnean Society.

The Linnean Society was founded in 1788, and is the oldest learned society devoted to the science of natural history. It continues to provide access to collections, to host a variety of journals, and to provide services to its members. Why join, though?

Most days, I wake up and have to reform myself. I use some tricks to do this - journalling, routines, laying out goals for the day the night before. Some signals in my environment obviously tell me who and what I am - the house that I live in, my partner, the food in my kitchen, the language I speak. Other signals are less strong but still evident daily: my body tells me it needs to exercise, my emails and calendar remind me that I am a PhD student at a university, my bank account and obligations remind me that I am the type of person who does the work I need to do.

If I woke up tomorrow in a newer world, with no ties to the past, no English, no clothes, I do not doubt that I would act differently and that I would be a different person. We are the fictions and truths that we build up. I’m fond of saying that I remain on earth because of my friends and family (and possibly also myself as a friend, too). Without connections, what worth would there be in living?

Joining this learned Society is another way for me to signal who I am, to myself, and to others. Hey everyone: I work in the field of natural history, I am a dedicated evangelist for science, I value sharing and communication and ethics in what I do.

To be a fellow, one needs to apply and then be voted into the society by the Fellowship Committee. I am happy that they approved of my application, which I sent in with referential help from my advisor Kris Bubendorfer and my mentor from the Royal Society Te Apārangi, Neil Birrell. It feels good to feel welcome (and no, I don’t know the acceptance rates).

Really: I am incredibly grateful to the society for approving my application. I didn’t expect that. I’m grateful to those who’ve helped me get to the point where this is possible, too. Not just people who’ve listened to me natter on about nomenclature for the last year, although they are certainly the most patient.

One of the fun things about being a member is that I get to use the post-nominals ‘FLS’. I’m also a member of the Royal Society Te Apārangi (although not a fellow), which means that my full title is properly Richard Littauer MA (Hons) MSc FLS MRSNZ. Which is pretty wordy, to be honest.

I have a few qualms about this process. Am I being elitist by joining a learned society? I’m unsure. I’m far more privileged than most - but does application and inclusion itself lend itself to elitism? Another one - how are the funds of the society disbursed, and is it worth the annual fee? I don’t know yet. Is there ever a proper place to say, “Richard Littauer FLS”? I guess my CV. Otherwise, no idea. If you have thoughts on any of these, or other questions, I’d love to hear them.

But for now, I join a society with a rich history, whose fellows included Darwin, Huxley, Franklin, Attenborough, Turner, and others. I’m glad to be part of that number.

Visiting Burnt Fen

2025-10-23T21:00:00+13:00

I recently had the immense joy of visiting Burnt Fen. No, I’m not talking about this website.

The name in Burnt Fen has a rather long history. In high school, I was eager to break away from the yoke of Christian evangelicalism that I grew up under. One of the logical reasons I used to nurture budding atheism was the argument that ex nihilo nihil fit. This phrase has normally been used to justify the continued existence of all matter, and by creationists to point to the idea of God – nothing comes out of nothing, so all of this world must have come out of something. I’ve never understood that. God must have come out of something, too, if the logic is applied. For me, the argument was just as useful for showing that the existence of the world isn’t in itself a proof of God having created it. There’s no way to know, one way or the other, what caused it.

I was perusing The Strand, a bookstore in New York, when I found a hardcover copy of W.B. Yeats’ plays. On the inside cover, a Richard L. Fenn had written their name. I felt connected to that name, not least because it was so similar to mine. Fenn is an acrostic for ex nihilo nihil fit. And, since as long as I can remember, I have always loved swamps, bogs, vernal pools, and wetlands in general. I’ve always wanted to be near them, to find salamanders and turtles and life in them. Fenn seemed as good a name as any for a pseudonym. I tried it on for a while, mostly written underneath really bad poems.

In college, I started a webcomic. I wanted to write something like Buttercup Festival, a comic I continue to love (and David Troupes, the author, has a Patreon you should all support). I needed a url and a name. I thought of fenn.co.uk, but that was taken. Reading my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary with a magnifying lens, I found that fenne was an old variant spelling for fen, and that couk (from co.uk) was a variant spelling of coke, a byproduct of smelting. I thought that sounded pretty cool. Fenne.co.uk. I figured I would call the comic Dragon Ash to be more acceptable.

The problem is that there was already a Japanese band called Dragon Ash. They’re still going. I didn’t really understand copyright law very well, so I went back to the drawing board. I learned that Burnt Fen was a place in England which had been a large fen, and where Hereward the Wake, a real-life precursor to Robin Hood, had marauded from. I added a pretentious name for wandering on the end, and called my comic The Burnt Fen Maunderings.

The comic was not good. Some of the strips were alright.

It didn’t matter much. I ended up buying burntfen.co.uk, and eventually just burntfen.com. Years later, I needed a name for an LLC to show I was more respectable than I was, so I founded Burnt Fen Creative LLC, and set up gmail on the domain. I’ve been using burntfen.com and Burnt Fen Creative ever since.

Every few years something happens that reminds me that Burnt Fen is still a place. I was overjoyed to learn at some point that https://www.burntfen.co.uk/ had been rebought, and was now used for an alpaca farm from Norfolk. That’s the best!

This September, I travelled to see my friend Stephen Kyle in Ely, near Cambridge. I had planned a few days at his house to get over jetlag before I attended RSECon in Warwick. We luckily had a day or two to hang out before he left me alone for the weekend to convalesce. Besides dragging him around all of the RSPB sites in the land to find rare birds, we had one outing that was absolutely essential - a trip to Burnt Fen.

Burnt Fen used to be a part of the fenlands - a vast area of England that was both covered in water half the year and exceptionally productive in terms of waterfowl, eels, and human life. It was an excellent example of a well-run, community-driven commons, where people worked together collectively to manage nature and their own livelihoods without excess for thousands of years. This only changed when wealthy landowners ignored the people’s needs, drained the swamps, and sent militia to deal with any dissenting opinions.

Burnt Fen itself is fairly unexceptional; it’s a sign on the road, mainly. The area is now mostly plowed fields, as this is England’s breadbasket. But even a sign is worth photographing. I doubt that anyone has ever travelled from New Zealand to see Burnt Fen itself - although the author of Imperial Mud, James Boyce, a Tasmanian, comes very close. (It’s a great and very readable book, and has a surprising amount in common with open source and the defense of the commons. It even mentions Ostrom!).

So, almost twenty years after I first bought the domain, I finally have been to the actual Burnt Fen. Here’s a photo. Thanks Steve.

Postgraduate Student Association Time

2025-10-22T21:20:00+13:00

The PGSA is a student association for PhD, Masters, and other postgrad students at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. The goals of the association are to further advocacy for those groups - which have pretty different needs than undergrads or staff - and to organize events and prizes.

Yesterday, the PGSA had a general meeting to discuss constitutional changes. First, we voted on letting the committee in principle change parts of the constitution related to quorum for executive members, designating a Māori ex officio seat to the general student assocation at the university, VUWSA, and for removing advocacy as one of our main goals and instead delegating that to VUWSA. In return, VUWSA has promised to give us funding for a full staff member - 30 hours a week for advocacy, 15 hours for admin - so that the society can function. Currently, the society has been allocated a skeleton budget by the university. None of the executive positions are paid or given honorariums, and there’s no funds for even a part-time executive assistant.

We voted on the constitutional changes: they all passed. And then we voted new members in. We now have a new president, the fourth or fifth in a year, a new VP, and a few new executive members.

The coming year is going to be difficult for PGSA. Without funds to do a ton of events, it’ll struggle to justify itself for more funding to the university. With advocacy delegated to another organization - itself a competitor for university funding, which comes from a finite pool that officers must put in bids for - it’ll be difficult to justify funding the PGSA for advocacy in the future. And without remuneration for officers, all of the work will be volunteer, by people who already do not have a ton of time (postgrads).

I think it’s possible for things to get better, through assiduous effort, keeping VUWSA accountable on the advocacy front, and through working with the university to get access to the 5,000 postgrads at the university. Part of every postgrad tuition goes to the university with the express purpose of funding VUWSA. I think it’s a shame that more students don’t know this, and I think that the university should work with PGSA to help ensure that our rights are met as part of that.

Of course, for things to get better, there needs to be a strong executive committee. I wish I could say “Good luck to them!”, but it would seem oddly self-serving, because I threw my own hat in the ring to help.

So, here we go. I’ve added a new page to the homepage about my involvement.

If you’re a postgrad at VUW, reach out whenever. If you’re a member of a student association elsewhere, I’d probably like to pick your brain on how to help keep the plane flying.

Formatting bibtex entries

2025-10-21T21:10:00+13:00

I keep a list of all of my publications in a few places - on my CV, on ORCID, on Google Scholar, and on this site. When I have the opportunity to include a bib file in those lists, I try to. In order to do that, I keep a folder of all of my bib files. I use LaTeX, I find bibtex a useful format for storing citations, and I want to make it easier for everyone else to cite my publications.

I’ve been using cat to automatically make a giant list of all of the bibfiles for a while. But this wasn’t really great. What I wanted was a script that formatted all of the entries, and which checked the DOIs.

A few months ago I used an LLM to automatically generate a Python script to check DOIs and to concatenate the files easily. That worked well. Today, I extended it to check multiple DOI registries (not all DOIs are registered everywhere) for validation, and to use bibtex-tidy to automatically format each of the entries. I’m happy with the result; each individual file is more readable now. For example, this file:

@article{Littauer2025ZootaxaPycnocraspedum,
  author        = {Richard Littauer},
  year          = {2025},
  title         = {
    On the correct spelling of \textit{{Pycnocraspedum} rowleyense} {Schwarzhans, Psomadakis \&
    Nielsen}, 2025 ({Ophidiidae})
  },
  journal       = {Zootaxa},
  volume        = {5692},
  number        = {1},
  pages         = {200--200},
  doi           = {10.11646/zootaxa.5692.1.12},
  url           = {https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5692.1.12}
}

It just looks better.

That script is here. I hope its useful to someone else.

How do you keep your publications in order? Do you?

Nomenclatural corrections for gender of species group names for two Solomon Island birds

2025-10-19T11:39:00+13:00

In early September, I published a new paper on ornithological nomenclature.

Littauer, R. (2025). Nomenclatural corrections for gender of species-group names for two Solomon Island birds. Emu - Austral Ornithology, 125(3), 261–263. https://doi.org/10.1080/01584197.2025.2551298

This was the first paper that I have published that corrected the name of recognized, extant species names. Earlier in the year, I fixed some issues with the name for the subspecies of Kelp Gull that may be in New Zealand, although the name Larus dominicanus antipodum is not widely accepted yet, as we’re waiting on more study of the genetic differentiation of the species. I also published a correction of the spelling for the extinct bird, Archaespheniscus lopdelli. Both of those papers were published in Notornis, the main journal for New Zealand birds, and you can find them here: https://www.burntfen.com/projects/publications/.

This paper was along the same lines. I had been mindfully scouring changes in endings from AviList, a new global taxonomy of bird names that is joining together three or four previously separate taxonomies, when I came upon the name Ceyx gentiana. Gentiana is a Latin name for a plant, but some authors had corrected it to agree in gender with Ceyx (masculine) and made it gentianus. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, which governs how scientific names are formed, says this should only be done for adjectives. So, it really ought to be gentiana. It seemed like a reasonable mistake to make, and one that could be easily fixed.

A single species name being fixed for grammatical agreement like this isn’t quite big enough for a paper. So I scoured Wikipedia for a list of all of the birds of the Solomon Islands, and I found three others that needed changing. Zosterops tetiparia is another one that was changed without justification, as tetiparia could be a noun – it’s the latinized name of an island. I originally in my draft had corrected the two other names - Zosterops tetiparia paradoxus and Myzomela melanocephala, but some of the reviewers for the journal disagreed with my treatment. The first one was pretty clearly an adjective, although I still think the jury is out on that. The second one is a single name that has been treated badly, in my opinion, but if I changed it, another 200+ names need to be changed in ornithology, and one of the reviewers pointed out quite rightly that this journal wasn’t the right place to do that. Another reviewer thanked me for making the change, and said I was quite right.

Not to be an obstinate dumbdumb or to join the middle of a nomenclature war, I just removed both names. Publishing is a group effort. I am grateful for the reviewing and editorial work, all of which is volunteer, in any event.

So, the other two names were published, and I added in a good deal of text for the non-taxonomic readers of the journal Emu explaining why it is important to change these names. The article APC fees were covered by my university, so it is free for anyone to read. As I wrote:

Changing names for grammatical agreement alone may seem annoying and unnecessary. However, they are part of a wider goal to let us follow a set protocol for names so that we can speak the same language when we talk about taxa. The Code is a monumental artefact of science. Following it closely enables its continued usage. Like all systems, some parts may seem byzantine and bureaucratic. This is the cost of having a protocol for such an unspecific, imperfect, malleable thing as language.

You can read the short communication here.

Now, if anyone wants to fund me to go to the Solomons to see these birds and report on how they like the names, I would be very happy to entertain the idea. Please contact me as soon as possible.

The Sooty Shearwater as Melville's Inscrutable Haglet

2025-10-18T18:16:00+13:00

There’s a wonderful Calvin and Hobbes strip – almost certainly my favourite – where Hobbes comes upon Calvin, hands down in the creek, and asks him what he is up to. Calvin responds that he is looking for frogs. “Why?,” Hobbes asks. “I must follow the inscrutable exhortations of my soul.” In the final panel, Calvin adds as an addendum: “My mandate also includes weird bugs.” Rarely have I felt so understood by a piece of art.

While reading the epic historical nautical fiction Aubrey/Maturin series written by Patrick O’Brian, most well known as the inspiration for the feature film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World featuring Russell Crowe, I came upon an interesting exchange in one of the middle books. Steven Maturin, the naturalist, doctor, and spy, walks into Capt. Jack Aubrey’s cabin waving a manuscript, exclaiming that the author of it had sailed the very waters that they were now traversing, but that he could not for the life of him figure out what bird he meant by “haglet”. I didn’t know what haglet meant, either. I looked it up.

And I was confused. I stumbled upon some rather dry essays of Melvilliana, which tried to identify the haglet which Melville wrote about in his poem, The Three Haglets, about a doomed ship whose sinking was preceded by three eerie birds flying over the boat. The authors of the essays had decided that the most likely bird was the Great Shearwater, or maybe just a generic shearwater. That didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Great Shearwaters were white. And the references they used were obscure, too.

So I wrote a response. It turned into a roughly 5,000 word essay, where I broke down all of the references to haglets that I could find across ornithological and nautical literature. I borrowed books from the Montpelier library. I searched through obscure online archives. I endured looking at Tristanian philately collections. And my essay showed that, out of all of the birds called haglets over the ages, it is most likely that the Sooty Shearwater was the bird that Melville might have had in mind. This was new to the literature.

So I submitted it to Leviathan: The Journal of Melville Studies. Astoundingly, it was accepted with revisions. Those made, it was printed. And, recently, published, as:

Littauer, Richard. “The Sooty Shearwater as Melville’s Inscrutable Haglet.” Leviathan 27.2 (2025): 90-101. https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2025.a970199

The article is not available for free – it is unfortunately under a paywall. However, an early draft of it is available here, and I am of course happy to email a copy to anyone who asks.

I am proud of this essay. Mostly, of the fact that I got to cite Patrick O’Brian in published writing. Also of my use of the word ‘inscrutable’, which, like all of my uses of that word, is a reference to Calvin. But also of the fact that I have published a literary essay in a literary journal. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a poet. Not knowing how, I enrolled in a college degree in English Literature. Somewhere along the way that dream changed, and I find myself now curiously in the Computer Science department.

And now I appear to have flown around the globe, and come back to the roost I started from. It feels good to know that that dream never really stopped flying.

PhD Scholarship from the Royal Society Te Aparāngi Wellington Branch

2025-10-17T17:34:00+13:00

Last month, I was lucky enough to be announced as one of two recipients of the PhD scholarships from the Royal Society Te Apārangi Wellington Branch. They give these out annually. The award is unrestricted, and will go towards my living expenses here in Aotearoa New Zealand, as I am otherwise unfunded for my studies.

On their website, they added this blurb:

Richard’s thesis title is: Building Tools for Community Science Datasets to Model Bird Populations and Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza in Aotearoa New Zealand. Community science platforms, such as eBird and iNaturalist, have enabled the creation of global observational datasets which afford unprecedented insights into natural biodiversity. The heterogeneous nature of the data presents significant challenges for standardisation, quality assurance, quality control and workflow management.

The goal of Richard’s research is to build tools that enable researchers to use these datasets with higher degrees of certainty, to develop workflows to allow for standardised, reproducible processing of the data, and to use case studies that offer meaningful insights into how community science can be used to understand epidemiology and population demographics - all in order to inform public policy.

In particular, Richard focuses on bird populations in Aoteaora New Zealand and Oceania, and on predicting the oncoming significant threat posed by Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza. Richard’s supervisors are Kris Bubendorfer and Markus Luczac-Roesch.

As I mentioned in my application, this work was directly influenced by a talk I went to at the Royal Society Wellington, about avian bird flu arriving here, where I asked in the Q&A if anyone was modelling this. The answer was no - so, now there is. I want to thank the Royal Society Wellington Branch for starting me on this path, and for the award. I have promised to give a talk at the Royal Society at some point in the future about my continuing work.

10 Quick Tips at the IEEE Postgrad Symposium

2025-08-26T11:26:00+12:00

Yesterday I gave a talk at the 2025 IEEE New Zealand Central Section Postgraduate Symposium, about the preprint which I and many other coathors published: 10 quick tips for making your software outlive your job. The talk was only five minutes, but it was fun to give. I regret that I was pretty sick with tonsillitis and was unable to stay for the whole conference, as it was a good showing and I enjoyed meeting some of the people there in the lunch break before the talk (I didn’t unmask).

You can see the slides, here.

Still waiting to hear back on whether this paper will be published in PLOS…

Goodbye, Nomad as Fuck

2025-08-12T18:55:00+12:00

Nomad as Fuck is a project I ran, highlighting awesome nomads and talking about some of their stories. By nomads, I mean people with enough privilege to travel around the world and work remotely – somewhere between expats and tourists. This was the term I used ambiguously in the mid-2010s, pre-Covid and without a serious lens on what nomadism might entail.

The porject was born out of my desire to talk about all of the cool people I was meeting through Hacker Paradise, a remote coworker community I was a part of. Hacker Paradise changed me irrefutably; I learned a ton about different places, and made new and life-long friends. For all of the ills of remote work in third world countries, it was one of the first times in my life that I felt like I was experiencing abundance, instead of scarcity. Want to go climb that mountain then work? Sure! Want to travel to this country next week? Yeah! Want to see if you can put something on the front page of Hacker News? Why not.

I’ve been lucky and privileged enough to meet a lot of people, and to travel a lot, so Nomad As Fuck was my way of highlighting the ecosystem and talking about nomadism more. At the same time I ran it, I ran Antinomadic, which was the antithesis of this project – a series of letters between me and a friend about how hard it was to move all of the time. It didn’t last as long. It wasn’t as easy to write. It was more thoughtful.

Tomorrow, I am letting the domain nomadasfuck.com go. It’s not important for me to keep renting the project. But, for reals, I’ve just matured as a person. I would never make Nomad As Fuck now. I find it a bit nauseating, a bit naïve, and a bit silly. But I’m glad I had fun when I was younger. I don’t have regrets – just learning experiences.

I’ve now archived it and am hosting it only on Netlify. You can see the archive, here.

Renaming racist terms in science

2025-05-16T13:38:00+12:00

A couple of years ago, I was reading about differentiating subspecies of swans when I came across a paper that used a term that made me stop and stare. The paper was from Britain in the 1960s, describing how individual Tundra Swans could be differentiated by the pattern of black and yellow on their bills. Some birds were called “Nobbly”, some “Pennywise”, some “Shieldy”… and some “darky”.

I’ll grant that the original author was writing in the 60s, and that they may not have had the same cultural background that I do. But that term is invariably offensive in my own dialect. I kept reading, and I found that the term had unfortunately percolated through the literature since. Their paper had been cited as recently as 2018.

So, I wrote a short abstract and submitted it to AFO, the American Field Ornithologist conference. The conference was in Plymouth, near my uncle’s house and near my father, so I drove down, saw family, presented the poster, and made some connections. I think some of the people at the conference were confused why I was there – I didn’t have an agenda except to have something in the literature that said, “Hey, we shouldn’t use this term, let’s use another one.” After I drove home, I thought about how to make this more permanent. I worried that people wouldn’t find the poster online, hidden in my Google Scholar or my website.

So, I turned it into a short communications piece, and submitted it to Wilson’s Journal of Ornithology. Today, it was published:

Renaming a bill type for Tundra Swan (Cygnus columbianus)

The paper is really short. It’s hopefully easy to read.

Now that it is published, future scholars working on Tundra Swans should see it. Wilson’s demands that users translate papers into other languages; based on one of the papers that cited the original work, I asked some of my Dutch-speaking friends to help translate it. I don’t expect there to be a lot of Dutch authors who can’t read English, but it doesn’t hurt.

One of the considerations I had to think about during this paper was whether doing this would increase my risk of having liberal terminology on my résumé and website. That isn’t necessarily a good thing right now. Part of the reason I published this anyway is the open question: if I don’t publish anyway, why should others? I’m a very small target thanks to my privilege. It’s on me to do more, not less.

This paper is part of a much larger movement to rename bird names, moving away from eponyms. This has also moved over into taxonomy, with the recommendation that scientific names that are offensive should also be changed. I’m in support of those movements - I don’t think stability is as important as people say it is, as all human works ultimately change and we need to think on longer scales of time. Bill typing terms are not even remotely at the same scale as a name change for, say, the Cooper’s Hawk, but it’s all part of the same work.

I added a land acknowledgment to the piece, too, as I presented it in Plymouth. Across the street from the venue and a short walk south, there’s a small statue of my ancestor, William Bradford, a racist, genocidal colonizer. I’ve benefited tremendously from his and the state’s actions since the 1600s. The land acknowledgment is the least, almost literally, I can do. The work will never end, and every little bit helps.

Automatically grab the title of a web page

2025-05-11T16:51:00+12:00

I often need to grab the title of a web page. For instance, this comes in handy when I am creating a new Wikipedia Page, like this one for Raoulia grandiflora, where I needed to grab the title of web pages for the references.

To do this, I used to manually write out the titles, or guess at them. Then, I figured out that I could load up the sourcepage for the page using Firefox, and find the <title> tag. It wasn’t long after that that I realized I could use the Firefox Developer Console to type document.title, and then copy that to my clipboard and use it.

Today, I realized I could automate that, too. So, I made this Alfred Workflow. It uses osascript to copy the title:

tell application "Firefox"
    set winTitle to name of front window
end tell
set the clipboard to winTitle
return winTitle

This is great, because I can now type ‘copytitle’ in Alfred, and then have the title right on my clipboard.

To make it easier to put these titles into BibTex, I also made this TextExpander template:

@misc{,
  author={},
  title={},
  howpublished={},
  url={},
  note={Accessed: <insert date>
},
  urldate={Accessed: <insert date>
}
}

The date is automatically inserted.

This saves me a good amount of time. Great.

Case 12162: Desigation of a neoneotype

2025-04-14T18:28:00+12:00

ICZN Case 12162: Designation of a neoneotype

Borg, Carreras, Liberstein, Arno-Hunderra, and Kitchen (2034) have been widely lauded as the geneticists behind the de-extinction of Palaeoloxodon falconeri (Busk, 1867). In particular, the YouTube video of their children riding the dwarf mammoths has enlivened an otherwise dusty field of taxonomy. However, their publication poses grave concerns to the stability of the available name. Specifically, section 18, titled “Neoneotypification of P. falconeri” states that their flagship product, “Gozo”, is to be considered as the neoneotype according to the Code. They provide a full description, complete with photogrammetrical scans.

The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (1999) stipulates in Article 61 how species are to be typified. The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature’s most recent version of the code (2030) added an addenda to this, Article 78, which specified how neoneotypification is to be performed. It was largely this addition, along with Article 34 (dealing with the abolition of grammatical gender in all Latin words by removing suffixes entirely), which led to the split that is now widely seen in science concerning the names of zootaxa. The authors have little to say on this subject that has not already been published elsewhere.

The grave concern is not with neoneotypification, but rather with achrononeoneotypification. In this case, it is clear the specimen “Gozo” is, in fact, not a clone of P. falconeri. Instead, a close examination of the available evidence shows that the cloning process was not a cloning process at all, but a case where the lab, situated in Mdina, Malta, was stuck in a temporal loop while the authors were working through routine tests. Discussing the loop stretches the available tenses in the English language, but our argument could be summed up like this: “Gozo” is not a clone, but the original P. falconeri brought forward in time, having been frozen in a time loop itself, and then presented as a clone. We present our evidence below.

<Redacted for international security reasons>
<Department of Temporal Investigations>

This has been a short story, inspired by this post by Sarah Winnicki.

Wētā in the Wētā

2025-02-24T21:40:00+13:00

New publication post!

On February 4th, I found a Wellington Tree Wētā stuck in my recycling bin. When I took it out to take some photos of it for iNaturalist, I noticed some odd sounds it was making - a thin, scratching rasp. I recorded it, and then looked online.

And I found nothing. Not a single recording on XenoCanto or on iNaturalist. No one had uploaded the sound before, as far as I could tell. It wasn’t on Wikimedia, either.

So, I uploaded it, and then wrote a short note about it for The Wētā, the bulletin from the Entomological Society of New Zealand. It was published today.

Read it here.

While this is editorially and not peer-reviewed, it is my first publication on an insect, which is pretty cool! I have intentionally not included a photo of the Wētā here, as I know some people who follow me here have arachnophobia, and this isn’t that far off.

A new article on renaming brittle stars, and why scientific names are important

2025-01-17T07:59:00+13:00

This week, my first paper on zoological nomenclature was published. It’s not my first zoology paper – I wrote some horrendous papers on laryngeal air sacs in Homo during my second masters. But it’s the first paper I’ve published talking about the names of living things, and the first new paper I’ve had in the literature for a couple of years.

You can read it here: Corrections for grammatical agreement in Ophiodermatidae. In short - I changed the names of some brittle stars, a relative of the star fish, so that the species name agreed with the genus name, as is necessary under the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN, or the Code), which outlines how scientific names should look.

So, Ophiopsammus maculata should be Ophiopsammus maculatus, for instance.

This is kind of a weird thing to do. For one, it’s odd because it’s difficult to understand the Code. The ICZN is used by everyone across the world who uses a Latin name for an animal (except if you’re talking about butterflies, because lepidopterists are intense anarchists and more power to them). If you knew that humans are called Homo sapiens, and if you understood my first paragraph, you’ve used names that are described according to the Code. But this Code is really long, really technical, and also confusing, contradictory, and obscure.

It does say in Article 31 that species names need to agree with genus names, but how to do that well takes some knowledge of Latin or Greek, which most biologists don’t have. So, people mess up sometimes. And those mess ups, according to the Code itself, should be corrected.

Most people don’t bother correcting names, or, if they do, they do so as curators or taxonomic editors working on large projects. It is very rare to find papers on grammatical agreement coming from members of the public, and it’s a bit unclear if taxonomists even have to agree with them or implement any changes made in those papers. That makes sense - the main people editing Wikipedia are the few people who really understand Wikipedia, for instance, and big changes are normally done only by people who have understood how it works for a while. That’s how it is in any community.

But that doesn’t stop other people from getting involved. So, when I saw a brittle star that I found in a tide pool had a Latin name that didn’t make sense to me, I wrote a paper describing how the name should be changed to make sense. That is what the paper I wrote does.

Since publishing it, I’ve had a discussion a taxonomist about why I bothered making these unnecessary changes to species names. I’ve written a response, which I wanted to share more widely for those who are interested in why I think this work matters.

Here it is.

The Code is a monumental work because of its global relevance. Any educated person would recognize a scientific name. I think that is fascinating and awesome. As someone who works on protocols and with communities building digital infrastructure for society as part of my work in the open source ecosystem, the scope and breadth of the Code is really interesting to me from an anthropological perspective.

It is also deeply flawed. There are a lot of issues with it. The gender agreement clauses are confusing and occasionally contradictory. You can’t name a patronym after a non-binary person. The code is Eurocentric to the point of being explicitly colonialist. And the processes that the ICZN uses for updating it are byzantine, vague, and exclusionary (for instance - who is talking about abandoning agreement? How is the public involved with that?). Zoobank doesn’t currently fulfill its mandate. And species names don’t work well for classifying life, as is increasingly apparent for things like viruses. None of these controversies are new.

However, the Code does exist, and its authority is basically unquestioned. And the code does include grammatical agreement as standing articles within it. You’re right that Latin isn’t commonly known anymore (and much more so for Greek). So this creates a lot of confusion for people naming things. I think part of this confusion stems from the process where you don’t need a publication to use the correct name - meaning that Ophoipsammus maculata, O. maculatus, O. maculatos, and O. maculatum could all be at some point used by people who are trying to figure it out. Having a publication about changes in agreement makes it easy for people to point to that publication to say, “Here is the reasoning behind a change.” I think that that is helpful, because it clears up some of the confusion around names. O. maculatus was used in at least one paper that I found last night, but not by WoRMS - which means that confusion already exists in the literature for these names, and which could hamper search efforts by researchers using the internet. I don’t think just editing it is as useful as talking about why it is edited. And a species-by-species account, when people work on them, often doesn’t include these notes or overlooks broad changes that should be made.

“Necessary” is a word I would use for describing these changes, because I think that fixing errata should leave a papertrail, just like a Wikipedia edit should have a sentence describing the edit. And if we’re all going to use a Code, we should use it as it is currently written. I don’t mind the lepidopterists going their own way - at least they’re clear about it. A papertrail really helps with charismatic zootaxa like birds or turtles - the screeds written on why a name is what it is are helpful when a lot of people are invested in the correct spelling of a word.

The overwhelming response I’ve gotten from zoologists already in the establishment is “don’t bother”. I disagree with that injunction. I want to do what I can to be part of the conversation. It’s very rare for me to find a field where I can combine my work on protocols, open source, and open science with my Linguistics background - I have a masters (hons) in Linguistics and an MSc in Computational linguistics - and with my classics background - I teach Latin at the high school level, and did Greek for a few years in university. I applied to the ICZN to be on the commission this year, and wasn’t put on the slate, but have spent a lot of time talking to some of the commissioners about this sort of work, and want to continue doing that.

I wrote this paper on O. maculata because I found one in a tidepool and thought, “Huh, that name doesn’t make sense”, and just like putting it on iNaturalist (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/251421946), or creating the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiopsammus_maculata), changing the name is something I can do as a citizen scientist just interested in the world and how science works. It wasn’t a concerted, intentional effort to start here - I’ve been writing a few of these papers on other taxa, and am working on a much more thorough work on birds.

This paper on brittle stars is really small in scope, because I am still learning the system and how it works. The intent is never to shame other people for making mistakes in Latin, but rather to find out how and why the Code fails to make it easy for those people to do their work. I could make that clearer in my papers.

Don’t expect a lot of gratitude. Some may be happy, others will just wonder, who has time to spend on such housekeeping activities.

I don’t expect a lot of gratitude, but my hope is that people won’t take these things personally, because they’re not personal attacks. It’s the Code that is failing people, not the other way around. As for how people want me to spend my time – who cares? That’s not up to them. And hey, this work is fun!

Thanks for helping me understand that [how this process works]. The Code has a lot of unspoken rules around it (one could be “don’t change species names for grammatical agreement and expect to be thanked”).

There’s another argument for why I bothered that I didn’t get into in my response: science is about communication. Journals and books are just ways that people talk to each other, building up the world through words, just as blogs and social media posts also determine how we understand what each other are doing and how we should orientate ourselves.

Viewed in that light, the statement the taxonomist made that “this work is unnecessary” is really interesting to me. I’ve had several people tell me that working in this field is a waste of time, that I should “go grey elsewhere”, and that it is a rabbit hole that people fall down.

And a few people, mostly friends, have told me the opposite - that naming things is important, that I should follow my passion and curiosity, and that they think that this problem is the most Richard-shaped problem they’ve seen.

There is no God. There is no ultimate arbiter of the necessary. How we talk and what we do with our time is a personal prerogative. One could argue, probably correctly, that I am being ineffectual with these papers, in the sense that some people see it as bureaucratic silliness and they don’t think the spelling of maculata or maculatus is important, and the people who determine names in the major taxonomies could just ignore me.

But I think names do matter, because they determine how we understand the world. And the protocol behind naming matters, because it influences how people feel about names - whether they are easy to understand, or not, and whether science as a process is open to the laity, or not. Changing names for grammatical agreement and talking about that process is one small edit on Wikipedia, one piece of rubbish picked up off of an endless beach. And each small act adds up.

I once sat down with a friend of mine, a mother of four and an excellent birder. While we talked in her backyard, a Common Grackle walked by. I interrupted the conversation to say “Quisculus quiscula.” She asked me what I said, and I said, “That’s the Latin name.”

She turned towards me: “We don’t use Latin here.” I asked her why, and she mentioned something about exclusionary language. How I wish I had remembered what she said verbatim!

“Sure,” I responded, “but doesn’t it sound nice? It’s a fun word to say! Quisculus quiscula.” She paused for a second, and then tried out the sounds. Yes, she agreed, they were fun. Then her kid said it, too. I was overjoyed.

I think about that interaction a lot. What is it that turns something that is difficult, pretentious, unattainable, or obscure into a joy? And who decides how we approach the world?

The answer to the second question is, of course, that we do. Even if the work is seen as silly or useless or annoying by some, I don’t see it that way. And each small publication is me learning more about a system, so that I can go on to see if I can influence it in other ways - perhaps through eventually changing the code, or by pointing out issues that I notice that others who don’t have my background don’t. That’s all science, and it’s all part of what makes Homo sapiens into sapiens.

If you’re interesting in this stuff, I’d be really happy to hear from you. I’m a member of a community of taxonomists who want a decolonialised, trans-friendly, non-exclusionary, and non-Eurocentric world. Fixing the Code is part of that work.

Hit me up if you’d be keen on joining our discussions.

The Gender of a Bird

2024-12-18T20:57:00+13:00

I want to share stuff, and I don’t think I can easily, because of how publishing works.

I am currently going through a large list of scientific names for birds, looking for issues where grammatical agreement needs correction. In short, the ICZN has a Code which moderates how all scientific names - the Latin ones, like Passer domesticus or Homo sapiens, are properly formed and used. Part of this list concerns species names, which have to agree in gender with their genus (domesticus, masculine, must agree with Passer, masculine). People often get this wrong, because Latin and Greek are hard, and because the Code itself isn’t always clear.

Right now, I am going through a host of names from South America. As I am finding names which are to be corrected, I am marking them out, and writing about them for a future article to publish somewhere, with peer-review and in, hopefully, a reputable journal like Zootaxa. This work is laborious, interesting, and delightful.

A problem I’ve been having with the work is that, besides my long-suffering partner and roommates, there’s few people I can talk to about this work. If I post about a species name online, I’ll need to cite myself when I write the journal article. If I post about a species name on Codex Mutabilis, my journal for publishing name corrections validly according to the ICZN, then I can’t include those corrections in a future publication - they’re already done. But all of the interesting ones belong in this category. I could post about the other ones, but they’re not as fun.

Take, for example, Crypturellus obsoletus, the Brown Tinamou. Look at that bird. It looks great.

But its name is confusing. obsoletus is clearly a masculine Latin adjective - note the -us ending. That word is only an adjective, in both Classical and Medieval Latin, so it could and should be changed to match the gender of Crypturellus, which has been done here. So, the gender of Crypturellus has to be masculine.

But how can we know that? Well, it must come from Crypt+urus, probably. That means something like “Secret tail” in Greek. That’s what the etymological dictionary that Birds of the World uses says, too: “Gr. κρυπτος kruptos hidden; ουρα oura tail.” This has been transliterated well according to best practices - the kappa becomes a c, the upsilon a y, and so forth. But how does ουρα become urellus?

Birds of the World notes it came from Crypturus Illiger 1811. That means that Illiger was a scientist who published making that name in 1811. The problem here is that the ICZN Code doesn’t allow something that late to be Latin - Latin is only from the Classical and Medieval period, according to their Code’s glossary. So, it can’t be from that.

Here is the original description of Crypturellus by Brabourne & Chubb, 1914, which you can read here on archive.org.

Notice there is nothing about etymology in there, except mentioning Crypturus.

I suspect that most people reading this would point out that urus is the last word, and that urellus is just the diminutive, so that’s fine, that looks masculine. But technically, urus is not a well-formed word in Latin or Greek for “tail” - it’s a Latinized form of ουρα, which should have been transliterated as oura or more commonly ura. And even then, -ellus is a Latin suffix, not a Greek one. It could only apply if urus was Latin.

The Code doesn’t care about the etymology or whether a word is a mixture of Latin or Greek. But it does care about whether a scientific name ends in a Latin or Greek word or not. So, is urellus a word? Or, perhaps, some other form - Crypturellus, Rypturellus, Ypturellus, Pturellus, Turellus, Urellus, Rellus, Ellus, Llus, Lus, or Us?

Technically, both Turellus and Lus are words - both masculine nouns. But they are both also sort of not useful words - because they clearly weren’t intended. Another one is urus, which is a masculine noun for “aurochs” (an extinct bovine animal), and urellus would be a valid word for “the little aurochs”, although one wouldn’t find it in the dictionary. It would also be masculine.

None of these three words are great. The last one is the best, because at least Crypt is a word, although, again, technically, the Code doesn’t have anything written about making sensical divisions. The Code also doesn’t talk about what to do if a word ends in multiple words at different points - how does one choose?

The clearest thing to do here is actually to use none of these words at all. Instead, either treat it as ουρα transliterated into urus, with an added suffix, which is masculine. The code actually talks about this a bit - “a Greek word with a change of ending”, it says in Article 30. Or, treat the whole thing as a non-Latin or Greek word, as Cyrpturus as the name was intended isn’t a Latin word according to the Code, because 1811 is after 1500.

I favor the second one, because it makes the most sense to me. The former doesn’t because I don’t know how to scope where the ending was changed. What’s stopping me from calling “Crypturus” the word for “Gaia”, with a very changed ending? Nothing except common sense. But common sense differs across people, and can’t be measured, and isn’t codified in the code anyway. The second one doesn’t depend on that as much. Crypturellus is simply not a Latin or a Greek word, under any definitions of those words.

Ok, so Crypturellus is masculine according to the Code, because it is not from Greek or Latin and it looks like a Latin masculine word. What does that mean for the other species names? Nothing. Everyone has already been assuming that Crypturellus is masculine. There are very few ways it could be anything else – technically, it could have been if it wasn’t based off of Latin or Greek, and if the original authors made it available (used it for the first time) with an adjectival species-group name that was feminine. They use it at first with a species name ending in rostris, which makes it a noun, and the other name they use with it, tataupa, is also a non-Latin and non-Greek noun, as they explicitly state it came from Güaraní. So, again, it is masculine. Everyone has been assuming correctly. Nothing needs to be changed.

On to the next name.

This is the work which I am doing in between other work, because I like it. But all of the sleuthing above does nothing and goes nowhere, because it’s not worth publishing, and it’s not worth posting about. It’s interesting to me, though, but that’s all. It also takes far more time to write up than to actually do. The stuff that is more interesting comes when the conclusions I come up with mean that people have been reading the Code wrong. And I’d like to share those, but I’m not sure how to, until I finally publish the thing.

If anyone has ideas on how to publish or share that without sniping myself, let me know.

Announcing Codex Mutabilis

2024-12-11T18:35:00+13:00

In my last post, I talked about applying for an ISSN. In short, I wanted to get one because the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature has a code, which mandates how scientific names are made - and names are only made valid according to that code if published in particular types of publications. Getting an ISSN would be one of the ways to make an independent website like this into a valid place of publication.

Unfortunately, I heard back fairly swiftly from the National Library of New Zealand: No, I can’t have an ISSN for burntfen.com. The reason is that personal blogs are not suitable for ISSNs, according to the ISSN’s own website. This is interesting, as Jessamyn West followed this blog and got one for her website. But I was stymied for a few seconds - what can I do, instead? How do I make a blog that would be considered valid?

An day later, and Codex Mutabilis was live. A day later, the NZ library gave it an ISSN! Excellent.

Codex Mutabilis is a Jekyll blog running on GitHub Pages, with a new domain and an about page that makes clear that it isn’t a personal website, and is made exclusively for publishing scientific names for the ICZN. Because it’s a GitHub Pages website, there’s even an easy process for people to submit new names if they wanted, by making a pull request. After talking to Jessamyn on Mastodon for a bit, she agreed to join the editorial board (as long as there was no work involved, which is fair!). So, we now have an independent, new, microjournal.

This is pretty cool!

I’ve made a few posts already. I searched for a few minutes after setting up the page, and quickly found some issues in the taxonomy on WoRMS. One of these I have now registered on Zoobank - which took a few minutes, as I also had to register it on Zenodo to get a DOI. Both of those tasks are somewhat mundane and arduous, and I am going to think on ways to improve them.

For now, though, Prunum boreale is now Prunum borealis. As far as I can tell, this was a valid nomenclatural act, published on the site. The issue was minor - an adjective is also a noun in Medieval Latin, and so shouldn’t have been changed when it was. Publishing corrections like this is normal, although they’re normally a footnote to wider papers.

There are a few questions that jump out to me from this work. First, doesn’t the work need to be peer-reviewed? I don’t think so. The ICZN doesn’t specify that, and you don’t need to have work be peer-reviewed to be valid in a journal. I can’t put it on my CV as a peer-reviewed publication, but “Prunum boreale (A. E. Verrill, 1884) is changed to P. borealis” is, for all intents and purposes, published.

Secondly, why? What’s the point?

My answer to that is mixed. First, I wanted to do this because I wanted to see if I could. Curiosity is as good a reason for doing something as anything else.

But the second reason is a bit more complicated.

The ICZN Code is how we know what scientific names are formed correctly. If you’ve ever heard the term Homo sapiens, or Passer domesticus, you know what scientific names are. You probably wouldn’t expect to see a scientific name formed like You are a really good dog, aren’t you?. It doesn’t even make sense to think of that as a scientific name. The Code is what prevents that from happening.

However, there are a lot of issues in the taxonomic code. It is difficult to understand, confusing, and at times, contradictory. Most names are fine - but there are several bugbears that are crawling out from under the rug. For instance, you can’t name an animal after a person of non-binary gender. Or, a species name that is spelled wrong needs to stay spelled wrong, but if a species name is spelled the same as a Latin adjective by accident, it needs to be changed if the gender doesn’t match the genus. Or, genders of non-European languages aren’t even considered in the code unless a scientist explicitly notes them, but that isn’t the case for German or French. Or, any name ending in -ops is masculine, forever (unless the Code ruled in an opinion that it isn’t). The list of strange rules goes on.

Consistently, I’ve come across statements in the literature or talking to others that some of these issues shouldn’t be addressed immediately, because to do so would upset hundreds or thousands of names. That makes sense to me - but it also means that people get confused. Names get changed when they shouldn’t. And then have to be changed again. There’s a lot of time wasted on understanding Latin and Ancient Greek rules, when those languages have been functionally dead for a while now.

Understanding these concerns and issues takes a good amount of time, and then trying to fix them takes more. This is the kind of work that takes a lifetime to do well. Especially when you have to go through the peer-review process, and explain how the code works to reviewers, or why a word is or isn’t Latin. All of that work takes time and effort that could be better spent somewhere else, if the code was different.

Or if publishing was different.

That’s the point of Codex Mutabilis. It’s a fast, lightweight way to change lots of names. I imagine it is also horrifying to some academics - it breaks the social contract we’ve agreed on for how names work.

I see this from a different angle. Publishing on Codex Mutabilis isn’t any more or less worse than publishing on Zootaxa or in Nature. It’s exactly how the Code currently works. I’m not publishing things that aren’t valid or in a way that the Code doesn’t allow - I’m using the requirements listed by the Code itself. If the Code is broken, maybe the Code should be fixed itself?

If the Code is more like guidelines, than it isn’t a code. If the social contract doesn’t work, then there ought to be another way to do things.

At the same time as I am working on Codex Mutabilis, I am also working on several articles about nomenclature that address issues in the more regular way. I’ve gone through the entirety of the BirdsNZ list of birds in Aotearoa New Zealand for errors according to the code, and found several. I’m halfway through the list of British birds published by the British Ornithological Union, and I’ve found more. I’m working on an article about these, and am hoping to submit it to an actual journal soon. But in the meantime, small things can go on this new website.

I’d be happy to talk about this with anyone, and more than happy to learn that Codex Mutabilis isn’t actually valid. Let me know! You can email richard@codexmutabilis.com, of course. We’re also looking for editors, if you’re interested in being involved with peer review.

Applying for ISSN

2024-12-03T15:58:00+13:00

Today I’ve applied for this blog to have an ISSN, so that I can fix issues in Latin names for animals more easily.

The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature is the standard by which scientists in zoology know how to properly name species using the Linnaean classification system. It’s the reason that humans are known as Homo sapiens and not Homo the people who walk upright who think they know everything, and why Black-capped Chickadees are called Poecile atricapillus and not Those really cute birds formally. When you see Latin names in books, those books have been well formed according to the Code.

The code is long, and has a lot of bits about how to make Latin names look good. It also has sections specifically about grammatical gender agreement. This determines why the Duck-billed Platypus is Ornithorhynchus anatinus and not Ornithorhynchus anatina (not that the ending is different). These rules are normally followed very closely, but they have some issues. At times, they are conflicting. They privilege Latin and Greek over other languages, and European languages over the rest of the world. They allow options for naming species after people only if they are male or female, and not nonbinary. The code needs some work.

Sometimes, changes are necessary. This only happens when gender agreement was messed up, or if a different name has priority in the literature, or if there was a spelling error or something. In order to make these changes, one normally needs to go through the scientific review process, or to publish a name change in a reputable journal or book. For instance, a PhD thesis would be an acceptable place to publish a name change, if one ran across one in the work, just as it would be an acceptable place to publish a new species. This is what keeps personal letters from being places to define species; you need to announce them somewhere where scientists would read about it.

This is what I have been doing most recently. Going through the scientific literature, I have occasionally noticed that some of the Latin names don’t match the respective genders of their genus. An example is Ophiopsammus maculata; psammus comes from the Greek ψαμμος, which can be masculine or feminine, and it was translated with a changed ending, -us. Under the ICZN, that means it should be considered masculine. So, maculata should be maculatus.

I pointed this out by writing a short note - a two page journal article that goes over all of the species in Ophiodermatidae and suggests changes for the species that need to be adjusted. I submitted this to Zootaxa, and it was accepted, and should be published fairly soon.

This is a long process - it had to go through peer-review, editorial review, and then be published. I started to wonder if it was necessary; is there another way that I could publish these changes? How reputable does a venue need to be to make nomenclatural acts formal?

It turns out that “reputable” is pretty clearly defined in the ICZN code, in Article 8. I’ve listed these points below. As you read them, ask yourself: What is stopping a web blog from being a place to publish things?

1. Criteria to be met

A work must satisfy the following criteria:

1.1. it must be issued for the purpose of providing a public and permanent scientific record,

1.2. it must be obtainable, when first issued, free of charge or by purchase, and

1.3. it must have been produced in an edition containing simultaneously obtainable copies by a method that assures

1.3.1. numerous identical and durable copies (see Article 8.4), or

1.3.2. widely accessible electronic copies with fixed content and layout.

And then, in 8.5:

5. Works issued and distributed electronically

To be considered published, a work issued and distributed electronically must

5.1. have been issued after 2011,

5.2. state the date of publication in the work itself, and

5.3. be registered in the Official Register of Zoological Nomenclature (ZooBank) (see Article 78.2.4) and contain evidence in the work itself that such registration has occurred.

5.3.1. The entry in the Official Register of Zoological Nomenclature must give the name and Internet address of an organization other than the publisher that is intended to permanently archive the work in a manner that preserves the content and layout, and is capable of doing so. This information is not required to appear in the work itself.

5.3.2. **The entry in the Official Register of Zoological Nomenclature must give an ISBN for the work or an ISSN for the journal containing the work. The number is not required to appear in the work itself.**

5.3.3. An error in stating the evidence of registration does not make a work unavailable, provided that the work can be unambiguously associated with a record created in the Official Register of Zoological Nomenclature before the work was published.

I have bolded 8.5.3.2. Why? Because if you read the code clearly, there’s nothing that eliminates this blog from being a place to publish nomenclatural acts - except for this point. This website doesn’t have an ISSN - why would it? Those are for publishers, and people who want their work to be archived somewhere. But those publishers got their ISSNs assigned to them from somewhere, though. In the case of Aotearoa New Zealand, that place is the National Library, where there is a handy form for requesting them.

I have now sent in an application on that form.

I don’t need to be able to perform nomenclatural acts on this website. I could go with the process I have currently been doing, using journals and the review process. But I am curious about this workflow. It would help - for instance, right now I’ve had a paper stalled for four months by an unresponsive editor. With this, I could publish immediately.

The ICZN’s stated goal is to preserve stability in taxonomy. That is incredibly clear. But the ICZN also mandates how names should be made. Publishing is an arduous process. But it doesn’t have to be.

We’ll see if this process works. After getting an ISSN, I need to submit the blog to the ICZN itself as a publishing venue. Updates as they happen.

PythonNZ Committee Member

2024-10-31T11:40:00+13:00

As of last night at the AGM, I am now a new Committee Member for PythonNZ. This is the local community group for the Python language and ecosystem, here in Aotearoa New Zealand. We hold meetups and host an annual event called KiwiPycon. While I don’t use Python in everything, I do use it almost every day I am on a computer, and it is great to be able to support and be a member of a local tech community.

I gave a talk at the first KiwiPycon I attended, in 2024, on iNaturalist and eBird. You can watch it here.

South Atlantic Seamount Hotspots on eBird

2024-07-05T08:01:00+12:00

I am the eBird reviewer for St. Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha, three separate island archipelagos in the south Atlantic. They each have their own different ecology and biomes, with their own bird life that includes endemics for each group. Ascension and St. Helena are individual islands, with some small islets that often host large bird populations due to the lack of introduced predators. Tristan da Cunha has three main islands - Tristan, Nightingale, and Inaccessible - and then a fourth island much further south, Gough Island, which I sometimes think of as its own separate island group.

Recently, I was going through an old email from last year with my colleague Ian Worley to two other ornithologists, Andy Schofield and Steffen Oppel. Schofield mentioned that there is a marked difference in presence for Kerguelen Petrels at a few seamounts to the east of Gough: Yakhont and Crawford Seamount. I hadn’t heard of either of these seamounts before, and started getting curious.

The following image shows where these seamounts are. This is taken from a paper by Requena et al. 2020, and it helpfully names a few other seamounts - McNish and Zenker, R.S.A., and the Walvis Ridge, while also showing the different pelagic provinces that surround the islands. This also shows why Gough is so different from Tristan da Cunha and the other two islands; it is a few hundred kilometers south, which places it outside of the south central Atlantic Gyre, which means that the water temperature and nutrients are different.

The differences in the water realm is most marked near seamounts - islands which never break above the sea, and which aren’t quite high enough to be reefs. There, water from the depths is brought up, bringing nutrients for plankton, and there is more habitat for different types of fish and other life, which in turn means more food for pelagic birds. Nesting birds on Gough might fly out to these seamounts to feed more preferably, something that Requena et al. discovered by tracking the movements of a few species they tagged on Gough.

The large expanse of water near the islands isn’t necessarily homogenous, and these ranges under the sea help influence life above them. As an eBird reviewer, this is important, because it means that when observers are taking ships to and from the islands, especially on large tours during the seasonal visiting months (normally April), their pelagic observations won’t always have the same qualities. As a reviewer, it’s my job to ensure that entries into the database reflect accurate observations from users, and that they don’t have egregious data entry errors that would make the data less useful to future researchers. If someone saw many more birds in one spot than another, I might think it is suspicious. But knowing that there is a seamount there may help me judge whether an aberrant observation should be included in the database or not.

Recently, Michael Schrimpf at eBird developed a massive mapping system that split up the pelagic High Seas and coastal reviewing areas into more discrete portions, which means that I can build separate filters for each island, and for some pelagic areas around them. Going forward, working in observations near seamounts into the filters may be important, too. An observation of 30 Kerguelen Petrels 100 kilometers to the west of Gough would be far less likely than an observation 100 kilometers to the east of Gough, as there’s no seamount there. That’s interesting to know.

Of course, being an eBird reviewer can be difficult, because I am not on the ground (or on the waves) observing birds, and I am both helping to curate the data as well as using it to improve my understanding of bird movements in the area. My assumptions are important to understand, because when an observation is in conflict with what I think is happening, I have to ask whether I know enough to judge whether an observation is likely to be an accurate, or, at the least, sufficiently documented.

Knowing about these mountains under the sea - some of which have names, some of which don’t - will be helpful. After researching the seamounts near Tristan da Cunha, I looked for a few more seamounts to the north, for St. Helena and Ascension.

I found this map of some seamounts north of St. Helena, towards Ascension. I also found another map of a final seamount, Harris Crawford, far to the west of Ascension. These aren’t exactly terra incognita - this map came from a journal that described new fish found during a fishing expedition (Edwards, 1993), and fisherman are often the first humans to know about seamounts, as they’re much more productive for certain species than the open ocean. That’s one of the reasons many of these seamounts are named.

It’s useful for me to know that these seamounts exist, but it may also be useful for birders who are visiting these areas to know that they’re near one. In order to facilitate that, I’ve set up hotspots for each of the named seamounts. There are many seamounts, and some which don’t reach quite as far up as others. I decided to arbitrarily only include named seamounts in order to limit hotspot proliferation - hundreds of hotspots may not be as useful as just a few for general areas. I also decided not to make hotspots for the Walvis Ridge, as it’s farther from the islands and as it extends all of the way to Walvis, a coastal city in Namibia. Setting one there would be akin to saying “Green Mountain hotspot” for the entire state of Vermont, on just one mountain.

I still haven’t figured out which seamounts lie between St. Helena and Tristan da Cunha, but some sleuthing on bathymetric maps may show some. There also may be some near Trindade, closer to Brazil.

Hopefully, some birders going past these seamounts will select the hotspot location instead of a personal location, and we’ll be able to slowly accumulate an idea of what birds use them throughout the year. For now, there’s nothing to show for the effort of making them - I have to wait and see if they’re used. But that’s one of the fun parts of making hotspots. You create them, and wait.

Of course, I hope that one day I’ll be able to go out and see these locations myself. Until then, I’ll keep going to the south Atlantic in my mind every week as I review observations from others.

Cited

Edwards, A. J. “New records of fishes from the Bonaparte Seamount and Saint Helena Island, South Atlantic.” Journal of Natural History 27.2 (1993): 493-503.
Requena, S., Oppel, S., Bond, A. L., Hall, J., Cleeland, J., Crawford, R. J., … & Ryan, P. G. (2020). Marine hotspots of activity inform protection of a threatened community of pelagic species in a large oceanic jurisdiction. Animal Conservation, 23(5), 585-596.

OSS for Climate Podcast

2024-06-14T07:50:00+12:00

I’ve started a new podcast, focusing on open source and the climate crisis. Fundamentally, I think having open models and open source code reduces friction in development, and allows for greater uptake and usage - crucially important factors when dealing with the largest issue humanity has ever faced.

OSS for Climate Podcast

If you have the time, listen, and share.

Tobias Augspurger of opensustain.tech, my colleague on this and the funder for the initial six podcasts, and I have written a blogpost that is now on opensource.net. The text of that is below.

Why Climate Needs Open Source Action

Since 2017, SustainOSS has been a community of people who think about what we can do to make open source software more sustainable. We’ve talked about making better ways of compensate coders, building better communities, and welcoming more diverse voices into the open source ecosystem.

Many of these conversations have taken place on the Sustain Podcast. However, almost none of these conversations have been about the intersection of open source and environmental sustainability.

It’s all over the news that software energy consumption is bad for the climate. What’s rarely talked about, though, is how software actually enables climate science and sustainable technology, especially when it’s open source. It’s the glue that brings together scientists from all disciplines—biosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere—to create the highly complex collaborative earth and climate models that allow us to forecast what our future might look like if we continue to behave as we have in the past.

This is why we created the OSS for Climate podcast. The is a new initiative within the Sustain ecosystem hosted by Richard Littauer, the main host for the Sustain Podcast, who has recorded hundreds of conversations on this topic. The podcast is a collaboration with OpenSustain.tech, a free community accelerating open and sustainable technology. This podcast aims to fill the gap in discussions about how open source can be a key driver for climate action and sustainability.

Shining a light on those who take action

OSS for Climate highlights individuals and projects, aiming to provide support in terms of funding, sustainability, and onboarding new contributors. It will explore the systematic changes open source can provide for climate action, addressing issues of transparency and trust, and emphasizing the critical role open source plays in our efforts to combat climate change.

We need a place to give a voice to the people behind the projects, to better understand their needs and perspectives on how open source can accelerate action on the climate crisis. Our first study, The Open Source Sustainability Ecosystem, showed us that such interviews are essential to understanding the very nature of open software’s impact in this area. For this reason, we decided to combine the obvious synergies of our study with a podcast to make the interviews accessible to everyone.

That is why we started the Open Source Software for Climate podcast with Richard Littauer. He is the ideal voice to bridge the gap between what sustains the open source ecosystem and how open source can sustain the natural shared ecosystem on which we all depend. As an open source wizard, community builder, passionate birder, soon-to-be Ph.D. ecologist, and interviewer of more than 300 people in the open source community, there is no better host for this.

Comprehensive Coverage

On OpenSustain.tech we’ve listed around 1400 projects with an active community. Almost all of them are relevant to climate change. Even if you just look at climate models, the amount of software needed to make good predictions is significant.

If you include everything that affects the climate, everything that is affected by the climate, and all the technologies needed to adapt to and combat climate change, you end up with a significant number of projects. Some of these are massive projects that are used by tens of thousands of developers; others are dependencies, part of the digital infrastructure that underpins our shared world.

Involving Diverse Stakeholders

Solving a global problem such as climate change requires global collaboration between different fields, making open source the most relevant methodology for combining knowledge and skills from different fields.

This includes not only scientists, but likewise entrepreneurs, activists, politicians and citizens who are empowered by open source to participate in the implementation of solutions. We want to know how open source can change the spread of climate solutions in the world, how climate justice can be archived by enabling access to technology and knowledge for those who are most vulnerable and affected.

Our mission

Our mission is to promote and support the entire open source community in the area of climate and sustainability. To do this, we combined data science based on open source analytics and data mining with ecosyste.ms to discover not just those who are the loudest, but the people who are making significant contributions in the background.

Stay tuned for insightful episodes that bring to light the important work being done in the intersection of open source and climate action. Listen to OSS for Climate for a deeper understanding of how open source software can contribute to a sustainable future. Are you still on fire and want to find out more about how you can join our mission? Do you have a special person or project that you would like us to spotlight? Feel encouraged to contact Richard Littauer directly or the OpenSustain.tech community on Mastodon.

Sponsoring Open Source Projects

2023-11-30T11:37:00+13:00

A couple of days ago, I wanted a way to open my daily note in Obsidian for tomorrow, the day before. I couldn’t figure out how to do this easily, so I googled a bit and found this plugin. It was easy to install, and did exactly what I wanted, and saved me an hour of figuring out how to do it myself.

Looking at the README, I saw that the owner had a Donating section, where you could buy him a coffee. I thought about the time I saved, thought about the money I would spend on it, and decided - yeah, if I knew this person in real life, I would totally say “My treat” on a daily walk and buy them a coffee for their pains. So I did.

Yesterday, I had the same thing happened. I was using osx-learn, and thinking about how useful it was for teaching my OSX machine to learn new words. I use it all of the time. I know the maintainer - Titus, aka @wooorm - and I wondered how he was doing. I noticed another donate button on his page, using GitHub Sponsors. If I was in Amsterdam with him right now, I would also totally buy him a coffee as a way of thanking him.

So I did. I’m out $8, but I feel better about myself, and I feel like I’ve contributed back a bit more. I don’t do this every day, but it’s one way of giving back to maintainers while also practicing gratefulness, a gift that really gives back to the person who gives it (this is not news).

Who would you buy coffee for, today?

P.S. I’ve since pointed to this blog on fossfunders.com. My company, Burnt Fen Creative LLC (and its subprojects, like Maintainer Mountaineer) has a simple strategy for supporting open source: support maintainers who go out of their way to be nice by donating back to them when you can, what you can. At worst, this is too little and ad hoc; at best, this is more than most.

New publications

2023-09-09T15:11:00+12:00

I have added a few items to my publications list recently, and I wanted to add them here, too. None of them are peer-reviewed publications, but I thought each merited note there as they represent current work.

Book Contributions

I have contributed to these publications, and am listed as a contributor:

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2021). Developing a toolkit for fostering open science practices: Proceedings of a workshop.

The NAS is a congressionally chartered organization that serves as the collective scientific national academy of the United States, according to Wikipedia. I am thrilled that I was able to collaborate on one of their publications, as it may have an influence on future policy regarding open source software.

Facilitation

Recently, I also facilitated a panel at an ACM conference on open source.

Moderator of a Panel on the role of Open Source in Open Science, June 27-29, 2023 at the 2023 ACM Conference on Reproducibility and Replicability.

This panel was on reproducibility at CROSS, the Center for Research in Open Source Software at UC Santa Cruz, who have been long-time collaborators with me in OSPO++ and elsewhere. The ACM is the world’s largest scientific and educational computing society - and to have even a small role in it was excellent.

Poster

Last August I presented a poster at AFO, the Association of Field Ornithologists. This is a different field entirely than open source, but birds are something I care passionately about, and I was excited to dip my toes into the water of ornithological research. While working on a list of subspecies of birds in the Northeast for a book I am slowly working on, I found a term in the literature that I thought could be updated, as our language has changed since the 60s and it is now considered racist. Short of making a full paper, I figured a poster was also citable by others and can be used to update the term in the wider literature.

Littauer, Richard (2022). A Proposal for Renaming Bill Types of Bewick’s Swans. Poster presented at the Centennial Meeting of the Association of Field Ornithologists, Plymouth, MA, October 11, 2022. bib

You can check out the poster about Bewick’s Swans by clicking on the link above.

I have some more publications in the works, of course, but these are just three things that I have done recently that I thought were of note.

Socials

2023-05-30T12:21:00+12:00

The best place to reach me is undoubtedly Signal or email.

I don’t use social media very much at the moment, or, in the least, not in any structured, coordinated way. But, when I do, I use these accounts:

Mastodon: mastodon.social/@richlitt
Mastodon for Aotearoa New Zealand: cloudisland.nz/@richardlitt
BlueSky: @richlitt.bsky.social
LinkedIn: Here
Instagram: @richlittv3

I use various Slack, Discord, Element, and other chat programs, but I don’t think it makes sense to share them here. I no longer use Twitter for anything, and I would encourage you to leave, too.

I also use various other platforms to record activities, often with others:

eBird: Profile - for birds
iNaturalist: Profile - for life
Peakbagger: Profile - for mountains
Strava

Finally, I am a member of many different online groups, and would be happy to connect with others from them or about them:

SustainOSS
CURIOSS
US-RSE
RSE-AUNZ
Entomological Society of NZ
Wellington Botanical Society
BirdsNZ
PythonNZ
NZ Ecological Society
VUW PGSA
Vermont Bird Alert group
Washington County (VT) Twitchers
CHAOSS Community
Open Source Policy Network
rOpenSci

If I am missing something on this page, do let me know.

You can reach this page easily at richard.social.

VBRC checker

2022-01-27T21:23:00+13:00

The majority of my coding these days appears to be based around birds. Much of what I’ve been working on has been fun little side projects for birdinginvermont.com, my little site for playing around with eBird data and for finding new ways to gamify or help understand birding and birds.

One tool that I’ve built recently is a VBRC checker: https://birdinginvermont.com/vbrc-checker.

The VBRC - Vermont Bird Records Committee - is a committee of experts in Vermont who spend time keeping records of what birds are seen in Vermont. They do this not only for birders keen on knowing what’s around, but also to track long-term changes to bird populations in the state, and to understand when birds breed, migrate, and irrupt here. This spreadsheet can tell you when you should report a bird to the VBRC - but it is also hard to figure out. You have to spend some time looking at the dates, and maybe know more about birding that the average person would. That’s OK! It’s a specialized use-case. In practice, birders who see birds that are rare tell someone who knows how to check for them - someone like a VBRC member, or an eBird reviewer (who are often basically the same thing).

My tool uses the VBRC rare birds spreadsheet to automatically tell you whether a bird in any given town should or should not be submitted to the VBRC checklist. This way, anyone who knows the species for a bird sighting should be able to easily know whether or not they need to let someone at the VBRC know about it. I like that.

Technically, making it was a bit difficult. I used React for the site, and that’s been a pain to get working at times, especially when mixed with D3 for mapping. I would like to take a lot of the computation and put it in the cloud to speed up the site, but I’m not sure how to do that without making a headless browser for D3.js and generally just making the whole thing a horrible monolith. So, instead, I’ve just tacked on another page to the site. Let the browser beware the cost of downloading the site on low-data phones, I guess. Besides that, making it was straightforward, and took a few hours - load in data using a drop-down, make these autocomplete to make it easier to avoid spelling issues, and then just use a JSON file which was converted from the old, rather dirty .xls file. Fun work.

Hopefully this site will be useful. Let me know if you hear of anyone using it!

Approaching an Open Source Ethic

2020-04-22T09:21:00+12:00

One of the books that I’ve read recently which has furthered and deepened my appreciation for the natural world is Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. In the last chapter, he lays out a land ethic - how we can approach land ethically and sustainably. While I was reading, I couldn’t help but think about the corollaries between land and open source. The metaphor of open source as a digital commons is quite old; however, the metaphor of open source as an ecosystem in which all people are playing a part is less applied, and I think also worthwhile.

I’ve provided the salient last passage here in full. Where I thought prudent, I’ve interspersed my own comments.

It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.

The idea of open source as being valuable outside of its function in the monetary ecosystem is something I am keen on exploring, in general. Open source is more than a bank account.

Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separate from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a ‘scenic’ area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has ‘outgrown.’

This could apply directly to humans using technology, but could also be extended to refer to the modern user using browsers or applications without concerns for low-level modules which are incredibly important towards the end product, which not only are depended upon but also influence key design decisions. A good example would be protocols for communication, which influence how we build our applications (offline first? decentralized first? inevitably siloed, due to TCP/IP requirements? etc).

Almost equally serious as an obstacle to a land ethic is the attitude of the farmer for whom the land is still an adversary or a taskmaster that keeps him in slavery. Theoretically, the mechanization of farming ought to cut the farmer’s chains, ‘ but whether it really does is debatable.

One of the requisites for an ecological comprehension of land is an understanding of ecology, and this is by no means co-extensive with ‘education’; in fact, much higher education seems deliberately to avoid ecological concepts. An understanding of ecology does not necessarily originate in courses bearing ecological labels; it is quite as likely to be labeled geography, botany, agronomy, history, or economics. This is as it should be, but whatever the label, ecological training is scarce.

How many people who use the term ‘ecosystem’ to describe code have actually read an ecology textbook, I wonder?

The case for a land ethic would appear hopeless but for the minority which is in obvious revolt against these ‘modern’ trends.

The ‘key-log’ which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

Emphasis added. I want to add this quote to my email footer. If something doesn’t add to the integrity, stability, or beauty of open source, it is ethically and esthetically wrong. There’s a lot to mull on, here.

It of course goes without saying that economic feasibility limits the tether of what can or cannot be done for land. It always has and it always will. The fallacy the economic determinists have tied around our collective neck, and which we now need to cast off, is the belief that economics determines all land-use. This is simply not true. An innumerable host of actions and attitudes, comprising perhaps the bulk of all land relations, is determined by the land-users’ tastes and predilections, rather than by his purse. The bulk of all land relations hinges on investments of time, forethought, skill and faith rather than on investments of cash. As a land-user thinketh, so is he.

I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written.’ Only the most superficial student of history supposes that Moses ‘wrote’ the Decalogue; it evolved in the minds of a thinking community, and Moses wrote tentative summary of it for a ‘seminar.’ I say tentative because evolution never stops.

Which is, in a paragraph, one of the reasons I feel totally justified interspersing my thoughts here and not writing up some sort of watered down abstraction of Leopold’s thought.

The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well an emotional process. Conservation is paved with good intentions which prove to be futile, or even dangerous, because they are devoid of critical understanding either of the land or of economic land-use. I think it is a truism that as the ethical frontier advances from the individual to the community, its intellectual content increases.

All the feels, all the thoughts. One of the questions this brings to my mind is this: what is the nature of intellectual content? Tweets? Projects? Forks?

The mechanism of operation is the same for any ethic: social approbation for right actions: social disapproval for wrong actions.

And yet, how often are we constrained by the dual needs of claiming our employers are the end-all of our work, or can do no wrong (think gag statements or PR approval), and yet the other need of being willing to explore social disapproval as a growth mechanism for the industry as a whole?

By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam shovel, and we are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use.”

Overall, I think the rest of the book is also fantastic (his section on woodcocks and grouse are beautiful, and I’m not just saying that because I bird fanatically). This last section, however, reminds me over and over again about something my friend tried to drill into me over the dinner table one afternoon, using laughter as a weapon: your worth is not decided by your paycheck, nor your usefulness, nor your relationships. Your worth is somewhere else. Stop tying it down to individual aspects of your behavior and existence.

In the same way, we need to find a gentler and more objective criteria for the usefulness and worth of open source software.

As any great writing, this passage from Leopold opens up more questions than answers. I’d suggest you go read the book, too.

Revamping the old blog

2019-02-21T21:38:00+13:00

I haven’t used this blog in a while, but I want to do so again, for a couple of reasons:

I don’t like the old journal system I had set up. It leads to me not knowing where is what.
I don’t want to split attention across dozens of journals for my readers, either.
I don’t think that having a coherent blog is as important as it is. I think that posts are more interesting. I don’t go to websites anymore - I get newsletters. So, I’d rather write posts, put them somewhere, and then send a newsletter. It makes more sense, to me, than trying to curate a nice blog.
I don’t want my content to be stuck in a newsletter, either, or on a WordPress site. Using a blog as a repository fixes that.

So! This will be the blog, psot-dump, journal, common book, whatever you want to call it. Let’s get to making it, now.

So - here is a new post. Where does it go? Ok, rake post creates a new post at http://127.0.0.1:4000/2019-02-21/revamping-the-old-blog. Interesting. And the Archive page appears to be the listing. Let’s copy archive.html to blog.html and reset the links in the footer, and just use this format. It seems to work.

There. Done that. And:

Added some information to the top of the blog page, and linked to my tinyletters.
Gone through and added tags to old blog posts that didn’t have them, and deleted at least one empty post.
Decided against deleting or excising my blogs from before 2015. Let my past stand as it is.
Edited this post.

I’m not going to add a link on the front page, for now. Perhaps at some other time. For the open source work, I’ll make a post on Medium to showcase what I am doing; I don’t think it needs a permanent home, yet. For larger announcements, I’ve always found that Medium works fine. Hell, Twitter works fine - just link to a post elsewhere. This place should do, too. People can just link to my post here (why use Medium at all?).

Great.

Alright. We’re good to start blogging again. Excellent. And now, let’s go to bed, it’s almost 5:00am.