There’s no such thing as a tree, phylogenetically

> imagine a park or botanical garden where every species is edible.

Make it happen! If the way we’ve been doing things is dumb then there is a massive market opportunity. Save the world, become the first trillionaire.

Cool reference that I hadn't heard of before, so I just looked this up. The fruits of this tree look absolutely nothing like strawberries (more like lychees, IMHO), so I don't think this is a good example for what you're describing.

It still loses in profit per investment to modern industrialized farming, so (almost) nobody cares. If you want people to care - tax soil degradation.

Turns out with artificial fertilizers and modern technology neither work nor soil degradation is as important as quick adaptation to market forces and economies of scale.

I just want to point out that the way modern agriculture came to be is not dumb at all, the thing is that its focused on maximizing yield above other things. 7 billion people eat something (almost) everyday, I find it quite impressive that the infrastructure to support that, exists.

I hope the world could be stopped (as it happened, more or less, with COVID) in order to fix some of these problems, but in the case of food, it's going to be hard to ask people to stop eating for a while.

> One take-away is that agriculture as it has been practiced is about the dumbest way to grow food. [...]

One very useful technique in modern agriculture is crop rotation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation

You grow each year a different crops, because they have different fertilizer requirements (and some even fix Nitrogen) and also helps to reduce some plagues. It's also possible to plant different crops in succession, so you get multiple harvests in the same year.

For these, a perennial version is bad.

But if you like those, you should try the berries of haw and ash. They're similar in texture, lack of flavor, and seediness, but their mouthfeel is significantly improved by the lack of scales.

It takes volunteers real work to keep it tame enough for a city, but they’ve done it for as long as I’ve lived here and it’s a really beautiful spot.

Sometimes annuals are just handy to use the land in a more efficient way. You can obtain three crops in two years in the same land with annual species

ˈ(h)ər-bə-ˌvȯr

As for "an" and "a", I was taught to follow the rule you stated in school. To my eye, using "a" is informal and mimicking speech, whereas "an" is "correct".

> Usage Note: In writing, the form a is used before a word beginning with a consonant sound, regardless of its spelling (a frog, a university, a euphemism). The form an is used before a word beginning with a vowel sound (an orange, an hour). · An was once a common variant before words beginning with h in which the first syllable was unstressed; thus 18th-century authors wrote either a historical or an historical but a history, not an history. This usage made sense in that people often did not pronounce the initial h in words such as historical and heroic, but by the late 19th century educated speakers usually gave their initial h's a huff, and the practice of writing an before such words began to die out. Nowadays it survives primarily before the word historical. One may also come across it in the phrases an hysterectomy or an hereditary trait. These usages are acceptable in formal writing.

As someone who grew up in the US and has never left the country, "an herb" really bothers me because I've always pronounced the "h".

Words that are not commonly used in spoken English may often be mispronounced. Common words are subject to drift.

Then there are regional variations in the US. But then also people move from one region to another. And of course different dialects may coexist.

This document from the Minnesota DNR expresses just how hard it is to kill it: https://files.dnr.state.mn.us/natural_resources/invasives/te...

Specifically it suggests cutting it to the ground and then, if you don't want to use herbicide, to cover it with a black plastic for one to two years. And it says the seeds it drops remain viable for five.

> First, what is a tree? It’s a big long-lived self-supporting plant with leaves and wood.

That is such a broad thing that it's hardly remarkable. I find carcinization, or independent evolution of eyeballs from completely different tissues to be more remarkable.

This is no more remarkable than that animals independently evolved to be large, and in doing so evolved different hard support structures to support this, which for instance worms lack.

Maybe in some way most things can be viewed from the lense of a compiler/interpreter. "Structures" are really just existing meta-cache for how to efficiently traverse the language to enforce semantics that result in computations.

e.g. tail call optimizations are basically structures in the compilers that help to traverse a subset of the language (i.e. tail recursion) more efficiently time-and-space-wise

You're describing a (for the lack of a better term) "fad cycle". Our industry, like all, goes through cycles where a given practice is declares holy and sacrosanct, doctrine evolves around it, eventually flaws in the idealistic view appear and because the entire foundation before was "this is flawless and essential" and turns out it's not flawless and essential, the practice is wholly rejected. It's swinging to extremes. Neither of which is useful.

Experienced developers neither considered inheritance crucial property of OOP, nor they avoid it completely now.

Inheritance is static decoration. Decoration is a form of composition. It's all forms of the same thing, where you can make some choices AOT and some choices JIT and you pay for AOT vs JIT in terms of ending up with a different performance/flexibility balance.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Such_Thing_as_a_Fish

Thanks!

Because as we know... birds aren't real, either.

When folks say "forest", like "I'm going to go hiking in the forest", they usually don't specify what species or genus of tree. A street could be lined with "trees", or a "tree" could fall on someone's car. We categorize trees together because they tend to occupy the same enough overall role and profile.

Now if there was a "baobob tree" forest, or a "palm tree" fell on a car, those are distinct to merit specification.

The birds bit is an analogy. It's not about looking identical, it's about looks (tall woody thing) and shared name (tree) not corresponding to phylogenetics.

What trees are you talking about ? or you mean in general ?

Imagine that we had grouped together all of the animals that were purple. Or all of the animals that were edible. That wouldn't mean that there was an evolutionary link between them that could distinguish them from all the things that weren't purple or edible.

Life is just one big chemical reaction that's been going on for a billion years. It's structured only so-so - not perfectly. In sexually reproducing organisms, genes of two parents mix up randomly(ish) to create offspring, which would suggest a tree structure - except when it doesn't. Sometimes genes mix wrong. Gametes can and do accumulate random mutation. Viruses occasionally inject genes into places where they can get carried to future generations. Incest happens. Not all life forms reproduce sexually. Cells can pick up free-floating genetic information from the environment. At the level of single-cellular organisms, this is arguably the bulk of what's happening. Bacteria exchange genes like people exchange cooking recipes.

The way you take this messy reality and arrive at a "tree of life" (and it's always a tree of life, not the tree of life) is by looking at how some set of genes seem to have spread across life forms. It's always conditioned on what particular genetic marker you're looking at, and is equivalent to selecting an interesting spanning tree in a highly interconnected graph. Pick a different genetic marker, you'll get a different tree.

Sure, once you get to studying trees and dogs and humans, gene transfer becomes more tree-ish - but it's a difference of degree, not of a kind.

The biological classification matches intuition in overwhelming majority of situations.

All of these systems of categorization are necessarily arbitrary in a way, since all of life is a big messy tangle of related organisms, and there is nothing to clearly tell you where to draw lines to separate them. That's the source of your confusion right there. Turns out, groupings that seem obvious to someone who hasn't looked closely can be really difficult to delineate clearly.

So, biologists try to define rules by which to do that, which they can apply unambiguously. One of the possible rules to apply is that groups should be paraphyletic, i.e. only contain (some of the) organisms with a shared common ancestor, or monophyletic, i.e. contain all of the organisms with a shared common ancestor.

Other groupings do not fulfill those criteria, those are called polyphyletic. Grouping organisms that way has somewhat gone out of fashion, now that evolution is well understood. What this article is saying is that trees form a polyphyletic group. In addition to that, even just defining a group (for example, based on structural or functional properties of the plant) that neatly maps to what people usually consider to be a "tree" is harder than it sounds. Since all of that might be surprising, you see it here on HN.

It’s why we have scientific names in Latin, military beds are called a rack, and whose life matters.

A "monophyletic" set of organisms is defined to be a set for which there exists a common ancestor, which ancestor has no descendents outside the set. (Try to ignore sexual reproduction when thinking about that; think about "lineages" of "species" first.)

This concept is the basis of modern biological taxonomy.

A "tree" is a plant with very pronounced woody structures.

There is nothing about the botanical concept of a "tree" that immediately suggests they should be monophyletic. At least to someone with general biological knowledge, it would seem entirely possible that this woody morphological form could have arisen multiple times independently, and indeed that is what one would suspect, given knowledge of the prevalence of convergent evolution elsewhere.