Published on 16 May 2025
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.
Published on 11 May 2025
Sometimes, I want to me able to write a note in LaTeX, and not just in a comment, which I can have in the finished PDF and then come back to later. I think comments can be a bit too hidden, and when you have a lot of them, it’s tough to remember which ones were urgent. Highlights can do that.
Right now, I’m using this method to do highlights:
% TODO Remove this during final editing
\usepackage{soul}
\sethlcolor{yellow}
\newcommand{\highlight}[1]{\hl{#1}}
The comment helps me remember to remove it before I publish.
Published on 11 May 2025
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.
Published on 09 May 2025
I often want to read books that I haven’t read yet. I want to have a better way to keep track of those books.
Here it is. This list will update as I go.
- Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (New Mexico, 2006); translated Malintzin: Una mujer indígena en la Conquista de México (Ediciones Era, Mexico, 2015) by Camilla Townsend. Recommended by Federico Mena Quintero on 9 May 2025.
- James by Percival Everetter. Recommended by Federico Mena Quintero on 9 May 2025.
Published on 14 April 2025
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.