What is Britain? Our nation is the UK. This report deliberately excludes NI (2 million UK citizens) then ignores the three remaining home nations of "Britain". Patriotism starts by respecting your country's actual constitution. This is English nationalism.

For the science feed? 🧪 #botany #taxonomy #systematics #nomenclature #biodiversity

The June solstice has passed, which means we have a fresh update for our WFO Plant List! The big news since December is we now have more than 200 named co-authors on the WFO Plant List. Watch to see what else is new and visit worldfloraonline.org to browse the Plant List.

YouTube video by Roger Hyam Strathglass - May 2025

youtu.be/_qlZF_J2fAY?...
My month away gave me the chance to make some photographs - and a video.

Rail nationalisation. It is a textbook case of parochial world view of British media (including OGWN I'm afraid). No coverage in the last few days has mentioned ScotRail. Nationalised in 2023. SNP have just abolished peak fares. Same county? UK. Worth comparing? What else does your coverage miss?

Will generative AI lead to the zombie name apocalypse? An online discussion about exchanging seeds of a new species called Meconopsis jiajinshanensis led to the Chinese botanical website iplant.cn and the page for Meconopsis balangensis var. atrata. ...

We think we have discovered a "feature" of LLMs that will cause havoc for taxonomists and nomenclature people. They are likely to pollute the literature and databases with hallucinated junk names. 🧪 #botany #taxonomy #systematics #nomenclature #biodiversity
stories.rbge.org.uk/archives/40107

Support for Labour is what has driven me away from OGWN. Our *Labour* government requires women to claim they were raped before giving them the support they need. That morally repugnant Tory stuff should have been changed on day one. But let's go for growth first! Enrich the rich first!

BBC Scotland have just killed off the slightly quirky Podlitical which covered Scottish politics in Holyrood and Westminster and replaced it with Scotcast that is just another bland BBC new magazine. Illustrating the BBC just don't get podcasts. (World Service excluded)

This is what if feels like to live in a society that is committing atrocities. How you feel in this very moment is how it felt. Kinda normal and not really your fault.

Hey come to think of it we don't even have the guts to talk about the fact that it is "normal" to do things that will appear appalling to people in fifty years. When our friend's Greek holiday is ruined by wildfires we don't dare mention they are contributing to the problem by flying to Greece!

Better analogy that human sacrifice: Ask what our climate descendants will think of us taking that cheeky city break on Ryanair or work jolly to the US or participating in a car based culture. We don't think we are participating in the atrocities our societies are committing.

Why not mandate that pension schemes must spend a % of their wealth on building social housing instead of speculating? Might that miff off the city. Mustn't do that 😂

Great idea! Increase people's debt and increase house prices! Typical Labour to do it all on tick. Just take all those wonderful PFI schemes that made it look like we were investing in schools and hospitals when we were enriching the same old chum network.

There are more plant taxonomists today than there have ever been In a previous post I proposed that the rate of plant species discovery had not significantly changed in the last fifty years despite enormous changes in technology. A comment was made that this might ...

stories.rbge.org.uk/archives/39789

A follow up to my post on the rate of species description. It is usually the next question people ask but not so easy to answer. 🧪
#botany #taxonomy #systematics @diimoffatt.bsky.social‬

I'll share another post on the number of working taxonomists.

Taxonomists work alone or in small groups. The graph shows that culture. If we had a moon-shot approach and organised everyone then we could ask your question. But we don't and "culture eats strategy for breakfast". We need Oppenheimer!

Molecular biology and the internet have had no effect on the rate of plant species discovery The title is somewhat clickbaity but probably correct. Working on the World Flora Online Plant List means we are continuously processing and reprocessing a list of all known vascular plant and bryo...

Sharing my Christmas thought piece with the wider community 🧪

stories.rbge.org.uk/archives/39768

Surely 16 years of decline? It started with the 2007/8 crash which occurred under Gordon Brown's Labour who were complicit. You can say the Tories dropped the ball but the mess didn't start under them. www.theguardian.com/business/201...

Hi Eryn, Could I be added to the science feed? I'm the tech lead on the World Flora Online Plant List. orcid.org/0000-0003-45...
Thanx.

No fibre in steak. Perhaps something else is delaying her 😨

It would be interesting to analyse how these new genera are formed. Are there lots of newly discovered small/monotypic genera or are they largely the result monographing known species. I'm not sure what the metric would be. New species vs new genera ratio perhaps?

Rising inequality/precarity and an associated sense that people in authority don't have your best interests at heart might be something to do with it. It's a symptom of societal change not a medical issue.

Then scientists, engineers, architects, carers are all creative and need to use all aspects of their brains in different complex ways to come up with "creative" solutions. The lefties being creative thing is just what they told kids when they were bullied - IMO!

Visual info is mapped to both sides of the brain. How does that work with painters? Audio information goes to both sides, one from each ear. How does that work for composers? Verbal reasoning is L brain (right hand) but emotions from R so poets & novelists need both to play together!

My comment was a creative contribution to the debate but maybe you couldn't see that. 😉. Seriously your comment said you had a genetic advantage over others. Maybe you do? But being left handed does not make you more creative any more than being black give someone a sense of rhythm.

If you are more creative because you are left handed then does that make make me less creative (a.k.a. worse than you) because I'm right handed? Are you promoting the exact same thinking the book was but in reverse?

Just what I needed at this point in the morning - along with a second cup of coffee.

I'm bemused by the minimum wage being milked so much after 25+ years. They've had it in the USA since 1930s! Yet Labour are still dining out on it and on every minor increase - even though it remains too low. Journalists should really say "so what" when a politician mentions it as an achievement.

Molecular biology and the internet have had no effect on the rate of plant species discovery The title is somewhat clickbaity but probably correct. Working on the World Flora Online Plant List means we are continuously processing and reprocessing a list of all known vascular plant and bryo...

I wrote this thought piece for the Christmas & New Year holiday break. I'd love it if someone took this further next year. stories.rbge.org.uk/archives/39768
#botany #biodiversity #taxonomy

Exciting times. Slowly but surely the North and South of Edinburgh will be connected by traffic free routes. If only we could get one through the centre of town!