Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with classification

Eating animals. Lots of animals.

jimmythefish — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 14:17:02 -0800

I have a soon-to-get-serious contest with some friends to see who can eat the most animals in one calendar day. The question - what constitutes an animal? The initial day's eating in question (11 animals) was totally legitimate in my opinion - cow, pig, bison, deer, salmon, moose, turkey, clam, lobster, crab, prawns. It is all the more amazing that chicken wasn't eaten. This was incidental to the day, however, and thus the real competition has yet to begin. This will get ugly - mosquitos will be eaten. So, we need to sort this out now.

I'm of the opinion that for it to be a different animal it needs to be at the Genus level in the Linnaean classification system - ie if you were referring to salmon, an animal would refer to the genus Oncorhynchus. Coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) would be the same animal as Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha). Otherwise, you could eat five different types of salmon and call it five animals.

Some are of the opinion that the above list is bogus and that a higher (but ill-defined) classification should be used, such that ungulates would all be the same animal and fish would all be the same animal. This is total horseshit, I think.

What does a trailing zero mean in a Dewey decimal catalog?

saguaro — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 14:30:07 -0800

Hey Librarians! Why is there a trailing zero on this Dewey number? I've asked the available meatspace librarians why Tim Wendel's book The New Face of Baseball is cataloged at 796.3570, and the best they can come up with is that it's some topical designation. (The worst so far was, "Good question, troublemaker, I'm not a cataloger.") OK, so if that's it, which topic does a trailing zero indicate? If that's not it, what's going on here? Is it extraneous? FWIW, there's one other book in this collection with the same catalog number, and I can pull up more in the google.

Lists of things

OutlawedYeomen — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:36:17 -0800

Looking for artists, writers or blogs who work on lists of things. I'm looking for things (on or off-line) in the spirit of Richard Serra's Verb List, or Georges Perec's classifications.

Am I a good witch or a bad witch? A question about personality types

grumblebee — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 14:33:08 -0800

Psychology: is there a term for someone who can't define himself -- who has a hard time saying "I'm an X person" or "I'm a Y person"? Example: I was a lazy, unreliable kid -- the kind who always forgot to do his chores. I'm a super-responsible adult. Yet that kid is very much alive inside me.

Am I lazy or responsible?

I sometimes think of myself as a responsible person who works to resist a lazy impulse.

At other times, I think of myself as a lazy person who forces himself to be responsible.

I realize that this is just a matter of how you look at things, but my point is that many people -- even people with my mixture of laziness and responsibility -- seem to have an easier time thinking of themselves one way or the other than I do.

I also understand that thoughts are one thing and behavior is something else. And I DO behave like a responsible person. I think many people get into a feedback loop where behaving in a certain way makes them think of themselves in a certain way. "I am responsible because I behave in a responsible way." For me, it feels more like, "I behave in a responsible way, but I'm constantly aware of this huge irresponsible force inside me." (I'm not worried that this force will make me irresponsible. I have a pretty easy time doing what's right.)

This is not a question about laziness and responsibility. That was just an example. I feel the same way about many aspects of my personality. Am I an optimist or a pessimist? Am I an honest person or a liar? etc.

Most people I know think of themselves as honest, even though they're aware that they lie occasionally. But an occasional lie makes it impossible for me to think of myself as an honest person. Things aren't all bad, though, because my general honesty makes it impossible for me to think of myself as a liar. If you ask me what I am, I'll probably go by my behavior and call myself honest, but I'll have an overwhelming feeling that I'm simplifying myself for conversation.

I'm not at all worried about my behavior (I behave, in general, as a good, honest, loving person, and I doubt that will change), and I don't think that one necessarily NEEDS to classify oneself.

I'm just curious as to why so many other people seem to be able to classify themselves so easily -- and why I can't. (Or is everyone just simplifying themselves to make conversation easier?) Is this a recognized syndrome? The closest thing I can find to it is Borderline Personality Disorder. But -- thank God -- I don't think I have that. I don't fit the profile in other ways.

Classifying/cataloging periodicals for archives in a natural history museum?

Tullyogallaghan — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 18:28:23 -0800

I need to organize thousands of serials/periodicals which have been stored in boxes for the past 10 years, into a coherent, accessible collection. They go back 100 years. The goal is to place them, vertically, on shelves and make them available for research. Any ideas on how to classify them? The books in the collection are organized according to Dewey Decimal. Should I attempt to assign Dewey classification numbers to each "run" of a particular journal? How would I depict the Dewey number on an individual issue? I'm stumped! Maybe I should just go alphabetical. I'm a volunteer reference librarian who doesn't know anything about cataloging but I'm willing to learn to help this project. Thanks.

Man-with-a-van -type trasport rules and liability?

glibhamdreck — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 05:40:46 -0800

I'm thinking about offering a small man-with-a-van -type moving service for a few moves in the short-term. I have a couple of feasibility/legalish questions about transport rules and liability. I have large vehicle that's titled as an RV; if I start hauling cargo (even if it's not commercial cargo), does the classification of my vehicle change? What sort of registration and taxes would I be looking at? Do the rules change if I make moves across state lines?

Have you used a small, independent mover? What kind of liability agreement was in place for your belongings? Official or handshake?

Links are appreciated.

Red fish, blue fish, big breasted fish

FunkyHelix — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 12:48:33 -0800

If a mermaid were to have a scientific classification, how would I go about building the name so that it sounds half believable? What sort of notes would a scientist or naturalist keep about a mermaid beyond length, weight, etc? Something they would jot down quickly to expand elsewhere?

It might help if I explain what I'm trying to do. You see, I've created an art piece that looks like a drawing or old photo of a mermaid in a vintage-looking notebook. I'm trying to figure out what sort of notes would be written around it and coming up blank. Mostly because, at this point, my brain is shorting out from mermaid overload. Any help would be appreciated.

What kind of thing is a note?

Deathalicious — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 20:29:20 -0800

Ontology Filter: Give me a name for a category of things that I'm using in a system. Basically, I have a system with the following objects: Notes, Tasks, Groupings. As of yet, I'm having a hard time thinking up a category that all of these (and things like them) could fit into. I'm not sure if it's possible, but I figured I'd give it a shot.

Here are shared properties of these "things":

They are all "attached" to a concrete Person, Place, or Thing (for example, there might be three Notes about the Person John Smith: "He is 30" "His order for 5 eggplants was processed on July 12, 2006" "Do not get him angry")
They operate independently from the object they are attached to (Tasks themselves behave the same whether they are associated a Person or a Place)
They all contain, in some form or another, the following three facts: the concrete object they are attached to, a date/time, and some freetext that explains the relevance of the "thing" itself. For a task it would be the name of the task, for a note it would be the note contents, and for the grouping it would be the grouping's label (i.e. "Places and People that Suzy Likes").

So a legal "thing" under this category could be a task, assigned to Captain Planet on March 16, 1992, labelled "Get rid of toxic sludge." A non-legal thing would be a blank note attached to Albert Einstein dated March 14, 1879. Another non-legal thing would be a Birth Certificate which, although tied to a Person and having a date and descriptor, would only work with People (i.e. some of the fields entered into the Birth Certificate relates directly to being attached to a Person as opposed to any kind of object).

The best my boss and I have come up with is RelationalAttachment. Any better ideas?

I tried to post this anonymously so that I could keep who was developing the system (me) a secret but it hasn't been approved yet. I'm going ahead and posting it with my name attached and hope it doesn't get ripped down.

Classify Me a Manatee

marxfriedrice — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 21:46:41 -0800

How do you know when there's a manatee in your bed? You can smell the mangrove leaves on its breath!

There's the pod of whales, gaggle of geese, crash of rhinos. In honor of the manatee in the hudson river, who must be terribly lonely without a few mates, what do you call a group unit of manatee(s)?

What systems for organizing knowledge exist?

richard m — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 12:22:52 -0800

What systems for organizing knowledge (other than the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress) exist? I'm particularly interested in anything obscure or hare-brained.

How to determe the geographic location of a photograph

Chunder — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 08:56:20 -0800

How can one (easily?) identify a location based upon a single image? I have on my desk a nice tranquil image of a beach/cove - how can I go about determining where the place is?

There's been a very recent topic here with a similar request to identify an aerial photo, but just asking people if they recognise somewhere seems inherently... um... inelegant.

Is that the only way? Are there image resources that are categorised (and presumably meta-data'd) so that one can readily search for certain criteria within an image? Would that even be possible? It sounds like a huge undertaking...

Is my only solution to scan the image, and post it to as wide an audience as I can find? (Or perhaps a smaller, more select audience of knowledgeable people like on here ;-) )

I've put this in the "computers & internet" category, as I'm (optimistically) convinced that there must be a solution that is facilitated by computing!

Tag-based indexing for local files?

monju_bosatsu — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 17:29:46 -0800

Tag-based indexing for local files? Late last year I asked a question about good online bookmark utilities. I was introduced to del.icio.us, and it has been a revolution in the way I handle my links. Between del.icio.us and Flickr, I've become convinced that tags are the way to go for classifying certain kinds of data. For example, I've got a huge set of .doc files, each representing a federal securities case. Each case might deal with a range of causes of actions and the elements of those causes. Right now they're organized in a badly broken hierarchy, making it almost impossible to find the cases responsive to a given query. What I would love is a tag-based system for keeping track of these--and other--documents. Any ideas?