Life, or Something Like It
I’ve never been sold on the usefulness of the web, in general. Now, I recognize the power of a constant stream of news and a buffet of information to feed my overwhelming need to know just what the hell is going on out there, but I think the web has yet to see many items of real use. There’s Wikipedia, of course, and it’s pages of sometimes completely irrelevant wackiness to entertain us all on those nights when, blitzed out of our minds from that last beer bong, we just hit ‘X’ and let the topics fall where they may (”Bauxite, Thelemites -and- Burt Kwouk? Wiki-Trifecta!”). There’s eBay, to serve all of our ‘gotta catch ‘em all’ needs. But aside from these two bastions of trivia and commerce (and the dozen or so sites devoted strictly to mail-order Swedish porn I have bookmarked), the web has yet to spew forth anything of true usefulness to humanity.
Until now. Those who know me know that I disdain more standard sources of news, and get all of my news from the local public radio station. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the hard-right political spin of Fox News or the super-consumerist stance of CNN, I just prefer to have my news presented to me in such a way that at least gives me the illusion that the people talking about it think that their audience is smart enough to make up their own minds about things. I guess that makes me a liberal these days : ‘Just the facts’ is regarded by the establishment to be distinctly un-American, somehow. And so it was with great glee that I listened to the news, and heard that the web was finally getting something useful added to it : The Encyclopedia of Life.
What is this thing, you ask? Scientists have classified (they estimate) perhaps as much as ten percent of the fauna that exist on this planet. On average, they discover a new species of animal about once a week. To date, the number of animals they’ve found, classified and categorized is over a million. Now, there’s no way that they could ever publish any kind of book for this sort of thing, because they’re always finding new bugs in the Amazon, or analyzing and cataloging the six thousand different species of bacteria that exist in the average one ounce soil sample. And even if they devote only a quarter of a page to each species, the book is still going to be over 250000 pages long. Any attempt to put it in volumes would make any printing immediately out of date by the time it came out. That is what the the Encyclopedia of Life is all about : It’s a work in progress, where scientists will publish everything they know about every living creature they know of, continually expanding the knowledge of biologists, zoologists and others in the field of the study of life, to the web.
And not just facts. Pictures. Video. Sounds. Everything that they know about the 1.8 million known types of animals on this planet. The web is the only medium that could have ever have allowed this project to come to fruition, the only way that this information could ever have been brought to us, the public. And that is the web coming into maturity, and a step towards a useful future that doesn’t involve commerce, politics or the battle of the left, right and center.
The Encyclopedia of Life : www.eol.org
- lockstep