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Every Species on Earth
nickynicky9doors writes: "National Geographic News relates that scientists to date have identified less than 2 million distinct species with from 10 million to more than 100 million still undiscovered. Likening this dearth of information to doing chemistry knowing only one third of the periodic table, biologist Terry Gosliner is involved in the All Species Foundation. The foundation is attempting to discover, identify and classify every living species and place the catalogue online over the next 25 years. It is hoped new technology and new recruits to the field of taxonomy will make the timetable viable."
[we know] less than 2 million distinct species with from 10 million to more than 100 million still undiscovered. Likening this dearth of information to doing chemistry knowing only one third of the periodic table...
Seems to this non-biologist that it's more like knowing only 1/5th to 1/50th (or to be more precise, 1/50th to 1/5th) of the periodic table...
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
HOLLISTER: OK. Just one thing before the disco, Holly tells me that he's sensed a non-human life form aboard.
LISTER: Sir, it's Rimmer!
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
"Twenty-five years is one human generation," he said, "but it's six generations of students." If each successive student generation inspires similar growth in the next, "at the end of that pyramid you could have several hundred thousand new taxonomists."
Just classify a bug and send this email to 10 of your friends, and put your name at the bottom of the list, and remove the person at the top of the list!
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Noah got a pair of every species into his arc. I'll ask him, that should cover mammals.
/. classify the images which contain birds.
For the sea, I suppose I could just use another scientific principle. Take a litre of sea water, identify the number of species in it, and multiply by the volume of the sea.
For the air, I'll command a NASA spy sattelite and have it log images to a website, and have all of
Hows that?
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
The same way you know how many toes you have on your feet, count. Oh wait... they can't count unfound stuff can they? Good question.... perhaps they picked a number that would return good grant money?
I'm sure there are dozens of unidentified species living in there...
. . . the size that Noah's Ark should have been with 10 million pairs of creatures onboard.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
I hate tracking down bugs.
What do you mean, not those kind of bugs?
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Why can't scientists ever just admit when they don't know a figure, rather than give some ridiculous range.
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Slashdothropdis Lathargicus
Large smelly mammal with unusual sense of humor, total lack of social skills, and incapable of proper spelling and grammar. Good with tools. Scavenger instincs. Enjoys free beer.
Someone you trust is one of us.
> I'm trying to write a website to do this
Hey, me too! I'm starting an Excel spreadsheet that will list every species on Earth. I'll pass it around to my friends and let them add the ones I missed. We should beat the 25 year estimate in that silly article.
Later on if it turns out to be too big a job for Excel I may "super-size" it to Access!
That ought to be able to handle simultaneous access from hundreds of thousands of researchers on a database of approximately 100 Million records, each recording containing research notes and DNA samples among other things.
Good luck, Municipia, I'll race you to the end!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Does the term "entombed" apply when in fact life under a million years of ice is ALIVE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
I'm waiting to get my project to catalog every functional program ever written by anyone additional funding.
I expect there to be at least 35 million new species of "Hello World!" that have yet to be discovered.
~D