True. Although in their native Australia they grew quite straight. It's the introduced trees that grow not so straight and make bad railroad ties.

In areas where they are introduced, they also become quite invasive by practicing something called alelopathy, whereby they introduce toxins into the soil to prevent competing tree species from taking hold.

While I'm at it, Eucalyptus trees have very very dense wood which means the wood burns very hot. This makes it even worse for forest fires where Eucalyptus trees dominate.

(I knew my botany studies would come in handy someday. I just never knew when!)

> Then I has to cut

had*

@dang, I wish we had more time to edit our posts.

"Fish" is almost a good category, you only need to nuke a unusual branch and call it a day.

A better comparison is "Fliyers", that include most insects, most birds, bats, pterodactyls and perhaps a few gliding and kitting animals. It evolveded and disappeared a few times.

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It's amazing that most people don't realize it, and even in higher education you get people believing in taxonomies and categories as if they were a property of the natural world. There are no categories in the objective reality, rigid or otherwise; there are no metadata tags attached to elementary particles, that say what the arrangement they're part of is, and of what type it is. Whether in biology or in code, taxonomies are arbitrary - they're created by people for some specific purpose, and judged by useful they are in serving that purpose.

You'd think that now that we have LLMs, the actual in-your-face empirical evidence of a system that can effectively navigate the complexities of the real world without being fed, or internally developing, rigid ontologies, that people would finally get the memo - but alas.

Agree. Latour's got neat arguments too (commenting on Pandora's Hope)

Number thirty-three: the larch. The larch.

What's wrong with whales?

Pushing back against the subtle suggestion that only American and European viewpoints are normal is more an example of cleaning up shit than shitting on anybody.

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