Category: Research

Wikipedia Is… Actually Well-Organized!

“Don’t use Wikipedia as a source,” the teachers said, which may well have been my first introduction to the platform’s existence. Since then, it’s become a sort of shadow monolith – a baseline for perusing matters on which I know nothing or need very specific details formatted coherently, without extending much thought beyond the individual pages or the search function. It’s served me well! And, rather abruptly, I’ve realized how impressive that is.

In the last couple months, I’ve been doodling plants from different countries, coupling geography practice with gorgeous flowers and some really fascinating ecology – like the fact that there’s a parasitic, ant-pollinated plant growing around the Mediterranean. I’d never have found that out otherwise! It’s a funky lookin’ thing, too. This is the point in my life when I discovered the Categories feature.

Categories have saved this art-science pursuit so many times over, my friends. “Flora of Tunisia” on a search engine? Informational roulette. “Flora of Tunisia” on Wikipedia? An organized list of both species that qualify and adjacent topics, to do with the Mediterranean in general. Some countries have a subset for endemic plants specifically! More importantly, the superset “Flora By Country” guarantees this same lack of headache in the future.

What this is is an exceptionally niche use of a much broader application, I know. And isn’t that what Wikipedia is for?

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Duck… Duck… Not Goose!

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo on mobile for a while now, since hearing about the feature that keeps your other apps from sharing your data with each other. Aside from that, DuckDuckGo is a browser and a search engine, without the targeted advertising of its competitors.

This is both their appeal and their business model: they don’t collect your personal information, and they don’t use it. The ads that they make money off of? Paired to be on-subject with what you’re currently searching, not some behind-the-scenes profile of who you are and everything you like. Truthfully, I’d have swapped them in as my primary on desktop a long time ago, if only switching browsers wasn’t so tedious.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t! Once I finally plucked up the courage to transfer my digital life, I found out that DuckDuckGo has an “import bookmarks and passwords” option, which did most of the work for me! Since then, I’ve discovered that the desktop version also blocks tracking attempts, pop-ups, and most cookies, and has an omnipresent fire button with which you can wipe out all cookies, caches, browser history, and permissions, except on websites you’ve specifically and deliberately fireproofed. (The mobile version has this too!)

I’ve been further and perhaps most delighted by Duck Player, however. Privacy and self-determination are all well and good, but can they hold a candle to watching YouTube videos without the ads?! The answer is yet to be determined.

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The Great Mystery That Is Language

It’s not exactly a secret that I love languages, generically and in specifics. So I’ve been consistently delighted by K Klein, a YouTube channel all about linguistics!

Sort of like Tasting History, this is somewhere I go for specificity. Give me this very zoomed-in little niche of your science, whether the focus is on a specific language, specific feature, or specific event! K Klein covers a little bit of everything, from French’s spelling system to temporal pronouns to spelling reforms, which has given me both a deeper understanding of languages I speak, and a sort of starter platter as to the fascinating phenomena other languages offer!

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Overly Sarcastic Productions (The Right Amount Of Sarcasm)

In my opinion, anyway. Overly Sarcastic Productions is an educational YouTube channel that covers topics like history, mythology, and tropes in entertainment, and they’re a great joy to watch. They offer the facts intermingled with often-snarky commentary (if you’ve analyzed history or writing, you know it’s well-deserved) and visual presentations you’ll want to stop and read. Sometimes for the info, and sometimes for the sass.

This is one of those discover-your-niche-for-yourself situations, but to start you off, may I suggest History-Makers: Iceland’s #1 Menace, Snorri Sturluson, Miscellaneous Myths: Pride Tales, and/or Trope Talk: Noodle Incidents? This Trope Talk delighted me especially by featuring Leverage as a primary example; identifying beloved stories in the explanation or the background clips is part of the fun! If you’re a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender, you’ll find it works as an example for a truly shocking number of elements. The narrative kind, not bending. (And a good example, which not all of them are. Often the trope is as relevant for the ways it’s crashed and burned as the ways it’s been done well. And everything in between – the video on time travel is a good example of this.)

History and mythology, meanwhile, have a lot of “ugh, this guy again,” and “this guy” is frequently Murder. The narrators share our exasperation. And parts of those subjects that aren’t “ugh, murder”! As a treat. Honestly, I can’t believe I haven’t covered this channel yet – they’ve been a cornerstone of my edutainment for years.

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OmniSets

Happy holidays! Let’s talk about learning. OmniSets is a free digital study platform. There are a few of these, and I actually started on a different one, but when I came back to that in recent years I found it had paywalled its services, so I went looking for an alternative. What I found was OmniSets, and it’s been serving me well ever since.

The main tool is the digital flashcards. You can search the library for StudySets other people have made, or make your own! It’s really easy, and if you already made the set on another platform you can import it! (I thought I’d have to transcribe my 100+ flashcards individually, so this in particular was a delightful surprise.)

From there, you have several practice options. You can just use them as flashcards, plain and simple; you can Study, which provides a mix of true/false, multiple choice, and written response questions until you’re consistently correct; Quiz functions as a practice test; Match is, of course, a matching game; and Spell is purely written response. You can also pick and choose which types of questions you get in Study, and Favorite cards to if you want to just study those! The only caveat is that Match works much better with smaller StudySets; it uses your whole set, so when that’s 370 cards like mine, it’s kind of clunky. That’s on me for not splitting it out at all, though.

The rest of the site really centers around making the sets as helpful as possible: you can customize how your sets are sorted, decide whether they’re public or private, decide whether they can be copied by other users (“forked”), and set StudyPlans that account for factors like when your test is to best help you memorize everything! I can’t speak to the efficacy of StudyPlans, because my flashcards aren’t for a class, but I do think it’s awesome that they’re an option.

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B. Dylan Hollis

Last week I talked about Tasting History. Now for a more specific niche: baking recipes from the 1900’s through the 1980’s. This niche is occupied by B. Dylan Hollis, who posts to both TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Naturally, these videos are much shorter than Tasting History’s, but they pack a lot of wit into their brief duration as Dylan blitzes through the cooking process (with no small amount of judgement at the creative decisions involved) and then reacts to the final product! Forever my favorite is Pinto Bean Cake, which I may or may not have memorized by now, and I had enough trouble picking one other example that you get three: Lime Jello Fudge, Prune Whip, and Secret Cornbread! The absurdity of the concepts alone is amusing, but add to it Dylan’s commentary and the fact that some of them are actually good, and you have an ideal recipe for entertainment. (Some are also hilariously bad. Dylan’s face is priceless either way.)

He also does some long-form videos, the longest of which is Food for the Gods, in which he also goes into his process of taking vague vintage recipes and refining them into something specific and replicable for his cookbook, Baking Yesteryear! Where the shorts are super chaotic and packed with wit, the longer videos are calmer and more informational. I happen to like both!

Also, he plays jazz piano. A man of many talents, truly.

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Tasting History

One of my favorite YouTube channels is Tasting History with Max Miller. Each video features a different historical recipe, how to make it, Max’s thoughts on how it turns out, and a history segment centered around an ingredient, the era, a specific event… it depends on the recipe!

The mrouzia episode, for instance, stars the origins of the tagine as a cooking vessel. This one in particular imparts so much secondhand excitement, because Max went to Morocco recently and got to explore the culture himself, and you can definitely tell!

That said, all of his episodes are witty and passionate and a joy to watch. Another favorite is Byzantine Honey Fritters, which is mostly about Byzantine food culture, but also features one of my favorite fun facts ever: “[S]ince the majority of Constantinople’s water supply came from far off, they had to do some pretty fancy engineering in order to keep the city watered should the city ever be besieged. And the city was besieged… thirty-four times.” Talk about a smart investment!

Now those both sound fantastic, but not every recipe turns out that well. Like Ancient Roman Jellyfish. The food did not seem pleasant, but the history segment featured the Black Banquet, which I found fascinating!

While I especially loved these three, there are years of videos to choose from, and a Tasting History cookbook if you want to try some recipes yourself. (Side note: the cookbook is organized by parts of the world and then chronologically, which makes so much sense, I love it!) Regardless, if you’re a fan of food, history, and/or food history, I highly recommend giving this channel a shot!

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It’s A Wide And Wonderful Zooniverse!

Zooniverse is a volunteer-powered research platform, which I stumbled across by accident and have been obsessed with ever since. “What kind of research?” you might ask – a reasonable question, the answer to which is yes. They’ve got NASA projects, medical research, digitization of centuries-old handwritten documents… the list goes on and on. Another cool example is Saint George on a Bike, which is training an AI to caption European visual art from the 12th to 18th centuries, based off human input!

The great part about all this is that you don’t need to be an expert. Each project has a tutorial and a field guide, which will tell you everything you need to know to perform your classifications! Sometimes the images are a little unclear – they were taken at night, or in motion, or the handwriting is just awful – but because each piece of data goes through multiple people, everyone’s best guesses can still provide a useful approximation. (Ex: “We can’t agree what kind of wallaby that is, but it’s definitely not a dingo.”) Personally, I’m partial to trail cam research, where you’re identifying animals, so the classification pictured below is from the WildCam Gorongosa project based in Mozambique. They have some extra features in their system, so not only is there a field guide with information on each animal, you can filter by build, horns, pattern, etc. to narrow down your options.

There's a lanky, orange-brown, antelope-framed animal sitting at slightly above the center of the photo, with a tall, vertical piece of grass just in front of the camera, and a shock of foliage to the left of the critter. The classification on the side has "Oribi" selected, as the species I deemed it most likely to be.

Each project has its own homepage with a progress bar, which shows what percent of the data has been classified, the number of volunteers who’ve worked on it, and other relevant numbers. There’s an explanation of the project itself, and an About page in the toolbar with more detailed information. Also in the toolbar is a Classify link (there’s also one of these on the main page, and I appreciate that there’s multiple easy ways to get to the actual workflow), and a Talk section to ask questions, comment on specific subjects (that’s the image you’re classifying) and generally hang out. You don’t need an account to participate, but if you have one you can also mark favorites, make collections of related images, and revisit subjects you’ve recently classified in each project. Your profile page also has a pie chart of your classifications to date, and a shortcut to projects you’ve recently worked on, both of which I’ve found super helpful!

The other big feature I love about Zooniverse is that you can pop in and out whenever. If you want to show up and binge Galaxy Zoo for an hour, you can do that! If you only have time for two classifications before lunch, you can also do that! There’s no obligation, just the Zooniverse at your fingertips for when it suits your fancy. And when it’s fun, satisfying and convenient… what’s not to love?

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How Are You Feeling, Mr. Key?

For a school assignment a little while back, I did an emotional analysis on the origin of “The Defense of Fort McHenry,” later put to music as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This is one of those topics in American history I remember sort of hearing about, but up until I did this short essay, I didn’t have many of the details, and so since I presume that’s the standard experience, I thought it would be neat to share my analysis.

It’s unsurprising that Francis Scott Key had such a passionate emotional response to the sight of the American flag still flying after the Battle of Baltimore, for many reasons. First is the simple fact that Mr. Key was a patriot. He may have been opposed to the war, but more than that, he was outraged by the British’s actions, including the injustice that had brought him to Baltimore in the first place: the arrest of a physician, William Beanes, for having the courage to stand up to British soldiers who had been plundering his home. Mr. Key, a lawyer, was there to negotiate for Mr. Beanes’s release. By the time he had succeeded in his venture, however, he had learned of the imminent attack on Fort McHenry and was therefore withheld from returning to shore until after the battle’s conclusion. This means that not only was Key witness to the bombardment, he knew that it was coming and was helpless to stop it.

This helplessness would have been bad enough as it persisted through the daylight hours of the attack, Key watching from afar as “it seemed as though mother earth had opened and was vomiting shot and shell in a sheet of fire and brimstone,” but even worse as the battle carried into the night, and he had only red in the sky and the sound of “bombs bursting in air” as evidence that the fighting carried on, with no way to see the damage or which side the tides of war were favoring. It seemed inevitable to him that given the scale of the attack, the British would overtake the fort, and yet Key had not even the comfort of knowing whether that was so. I can only imagine the overwhelming relief he must have felt when dawn broke, and rather than the British Union Jack that Key feared he would see, the American flag still flew over Fort McHenry. It was, in his words, “a most merciful deliverance,” and from that raw emotion of relief and pride, “The Defense of Fort McHenry” was written.

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A Brief Explanation of Artificial Selection

Exactly what it says on the packaging.

Over the course of history, humans have continually and repeatedly manipulated the reproduction of organisms to manifest select traits of preference. This is known as artificial selection. Because at the time, farmers weren’t aware of genes and alleles, farmers selected based on phenotype, rather than genotype. Once they had chosen a trait they wanted to see prevalent in their livestock population, they isolated the organisms already expressing it to breed amongst themselves. By doing so for multiple generations, they ensured the organisms were “purebred,” or solely carrying the selected characteristics.

Since this selection isn’t natural, the target traits aren’t necessarily advantageous to survival, or useful at all, as can be seen with pigeon breeding, a popular hobby in England in Darwin’s time. In that case, they were selecting for size, shape of beak, color, and other such trivialities.

In contrast, plants like kale were selected for more defining traits, in this case the large leaves. Kale, like cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, broccoli, and cauliflower, was developed via artificial selection from wild mustard. Interestingly, though these are all drastically varying vegetables, and many of them are likely not mentally associated with each other, they’re all of the same species: Brassica oleracea.

This is because in artificial selection, the traits selective breeding is based on are all present within one species. This in itself seems obvious, since it’s a requirement of creating viable and reproducing offspring. However, in this case it means that even generations later, the results are manifestations of different alleles, not different genes, and as such their descendants are still of the same species. Furthermore, especially since farmers had no knowledge of alleles, but rather were choosing based on what they saw, they were selecting for many traits at a time, hence the drastic differences between resulting offspring.

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