Two unrelated topics.

1) The University of Melbourne is gearing up to launch another satellite, yes a real one. Their first satellite was an “Oscar satellite“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_satellite . On 23 Jan 1970, Australia’s first amateur radio satellite was launched. Built in 1966, Australis-OSCAR-5 was the first amateur radio satellite constructed outside of the United States.” They’re now going to build and launch another Oscar cubesat. See their website http://space.unimelb.edu.au/the-program. I narrowly missed attending their seminar two days ago, and positions for paid staff on the program were filled last month.

“The University of Melbourne Space Program was established in late 2014 with the initial goal of forming a team of students interested in building a CubeSat. By harnessing the launch capabilities of leading international space agencies, the UMSP is currently working towards placing University of Melbourne satellites in orbit around the Earth under the supervision of Professor Stan Skafidas. Future missions will aim to place a satellite in orbit around the Moon and even other planets. Since being formed, the UMSP has grown to incorporate over 100 undergraduate and postgraduate students.”

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2) I’m starting to generate my own tree-of-life from memory, for the purposes of eventually learning the scientific names of organisms.

I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a mathematical rule for evolutionary taxonomy similar to the Pareto principle for income. The Pareto principle in a free market of the top 80% of income being earned by 20% of the people is mathematically refined in the Pareto probability distribution.

A connection is already known to exist between the Pareto distribution and Zipf’s law. Zipf’s law states that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table.

The mathematical rule for evolutionary taxonomy would be different, but perhaps related. I happened to note that roughly 40% of bony fishes are Perciformes, about 40% of metazoans are Insects, about 40% of mammals are rodents, about 40% of Insects are beetles, and about 40% of beetles are Weevils.

A general rule, if one exists, would be something like: In a freely evolving environment, the evolution of one organism into a large number of subclasses results in the largest subclass containing about 40% of all the evolved species.

A generalization of that rule would be a probability distribution for the ranking of the number of organisms in each evolved subset of all creatures evolved from a single organism.

What do you think?

did read that, too these below

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

>What do you think?

Write the paper then get back to us.

Bubblecar said:

>What do you think?

Write the paper then get back to us.

That good huh?

mollwollfumble said:

2) I’m starting to generate my own tree-of-life from memory, for the purposes of eventually learning the scientific names of organisms.

And here it is. ~1,800 entries. Common names only so far. http://www.keepandshare.com/doc15/7111/tree-of-life-pdf

I don’t know whether to be appalled that can only recall such a small fraction of the ~8.7 million Eucaryotic Species on Earth, or delighted that I can actually recall so many from memory.

That the list is far from complete, I can judge by that fact the three of the last ten entries were streptococcus, sea urchin, and spinach!

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

2) I’m starting to generate my own tree-of-life from memory, for the purposes of eventually learning the scientific names of organisms.

And here it is. ~1,800 entries. Common names only so far. http://www.keepandshare.com/doc15/7111/tree-of-life-pdf

I don’t know whether to be appalled that can only recall such a small fraction of the ~8.7 million Eucaryotic Species on Earth, or delighted that I can actually recall so many from memory.

That the list is far from complete, I can judge by that fact the three of the last ten entries were streptococcus, sea urchin, and spinach!

Probably because the remaining 8.6982 million species don’t have a common name.

PermeateFree said:

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

2) I’m starting to generate my own tree-of-life from memory, for the purposes of eventually learning the scientific names of organisms.

And here it is. ~1,800 entries. Common names only so far. http://www.keepandshare.com/doc15/7111/tree-of-life-pdf

I don’t know whether to be appalled that can only recall such a small fraction of the ~8.7 million Eucaryotic Species on Earth, or delighted that I can actually recall so many from memory.

That the list is far from complete, I can judge by that fact the three of the last ten entries were streptococcus, sea urchin, and spinach!

Probably because the remaining 8.6982 million species don’t have a common name.

Thank you for that. That could even be true. I got angry at some astronomers recently because none of them could agree on a common name for stars discovered by the WISE satellite – one brown dwarf had six different common names, for example. It never occurred to me to get angry at biologists for not inventing widely-accepted common names.

How about Rye for rhinovirus, Corrie for coronavirus, Addy for adenovirus, Clos for clostridium, Lack for lactobacillus, Rad for Deinococcus radiodurans etc. Just kidding ;-)