I used to fill out a lot of data tags for mammal and herp specimens that would be attached to the specimen. Much smaller than an herbarium sheet and written in waterproof ink. Maybe some did that in cursive but typically not. Now even the data tags are fading in use, with preprinted number tags being used. Museum catalogs that were handwritten in the past are now all in Excel or Access or something newer and dry data tags can often be printed from that. Handwriting itself is fading away.
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Ha! I remember this, too. But an extra problem I had was that I’d started learning Russian around then and for simplicity my brain had designated cursive for Cyrillic and print for English. This worked fine and dandy until I had to write that paragraph in English cursive and my brain fritzed out on letters that are shared in shape but not in meaning between the two alphabets’s scripts (e.g., r/p, t/m, d/g)!
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Yeah this is a good point. I use c.f. , s.s., s.l., etc only when I know, for certain, the person I am responding to knows what they mean; i.e. I adjust what I say depending on the person I’m responding to. If the person is one of Australia’s foremost experts on, I dunno, Prostranthera as a random example, I will use those abbreviations. If I don’t know the person I’ll use more common terms like “compare with” or “in the strict sense”. It doesn’t really matter, at the end of the day they mean the same things but I try to adjust my language to who I’m responding to. I don’t do that to be elitist or to exclude anyone or anything, it’s just just sometimes easier to abbreviate. I might say to one person Smilax similar to blah, and another person Smilax aff. blah. I don’t judge anybody on iNat, but sometimes you know who you’re talking to and adjust language accordingly. For example, @rgvhf opened this topic and I will talk to him about sori, scales, rachis, pinnae, etc, etc and maybe use other fern specific terms. But I might not with other people – I might use different language. It’s not because I’m trying to be annoying, it’s because I want to tailor my language to the audience I am addressing and I want them to understand. That’s the main thing. I don’t know if italics helps understanding… maybe it does and if so I will format future comments doing that
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A decade or so ago, a youngish, competent ICU physician, said he had a hard time understanding a watch with hands! I like them because the physical space between current time and the time I want to leave (or whatever) lets me have a spatial idea of how much time I have. 30 minutes - I could run the vacuum over the carpet before leaving. 5 minutes, no.
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Watches are very useful. In an IQ test you might be asked “what’s 75% of 60?” If you know how to tell the time on an analogue watch it’s very easy (45). If not, you might struggle
Edit: that’s watch talk. What’s 60% of 75 is trickier. Lucky it’s the same answer and you can see it on your watch as well!
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I hadn’t realised it in that way!
A clock is also used in dementia tests. Fast and easy. Draw a circle, ask the person to make it a watch, with the hands showing, say 10 min to 1 o’clock. In my time as a psycho-geriatric nurse I’ve seen many odd ones. All the numbers on one half of the circle. Vertical lines or a ‘cross’. None of them are a particularly good sign. They are not diagnostic, but they offer a fast way to test for cognition.
That test may need to be updated.
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They can read parts of it, but many of the letters are mysteries to them.
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Yeah, 15 minutes is one quarter (25%), 45 minutes is three quarters of an hour (75%), so 75% percent of 60 (one hour) is 45 minutes. Pretty easy. So 75% of 60 is 45. Can do it the other way as well using the same watch, as mentioned. But some people cannot read analogue clocks or associate the 15 minutes with 25%
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I’d probably fail that. I’d probably try to micro-adjust the positions of the hands lol
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Relax. As long as it’s in the ballpark, it’s OK!
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Well, if the big hand is at 10 I think the small hand should be just a little bit before the 1. Not sure now that I’m thinking about it. Maybe calculus or italics are needed
Edit: I think differently so I dwell on these things lol. If it’s EXACTLY 10 to 1 then the big hand should be at 10 and the little at 1, but I’m not sure it can be that exact. I think the little hand might be a little before the 1
Edi 2: Yeah, the little hand must be a little before the 1. My tongue is over my lip working out the exact angle now. It’s not an easy solution to get the exact angle
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Funny thing is the cartoon is usually spelled Spongebob by people who know the show, and SpongeBob is what people who have never watched the show spell it. Funny too that the actual show says SpongeBob in the intro.
As for taxonomy I do the first letters of common names capitalized, so Luna Moth (Actias luna). Having it say “luna moth” seems too informal, but common names suck anyway.
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I very rarely use vernacular names. I give scientific names no matter who the person is and they can google them if they want common/vernacular names. That’s not because I’m mean, I just don’t know the vernacular names and if they’re too lazy to google, not my problem :)
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haha, I remember before my GRE I had to write in script (cursive) and I was like “how the heck do I do this”. I hadn’t written in that way since grade school! It took longer to write that paragraph than to do a section of the test.
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Can’t say I am sad that I don’t have to handwrite all the thousands of data labels on my insect collection at the end of each field season. Labeling is already brutal as it is, and writing my county thousands of times is how I’d get carpal tunnel.
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Yeah, and maybe when you finish I’ll review the taxonomy, change the name and you’ll have to re-label? :P
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Yes that’s another “don’t get me started”. So many times for moths you have “Yellow edged Dichomeris” in the book and the scientific name is easier to say. Just say Dichomeris flavocostata. I have my iNat settings to scientific names only and that helps a lot because I don’t even know common names of half the moths I find, nor do I care to memorize another few thousand names. The thousands of Latin names are already taking enough space in my skull.
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Common names definitely don’t suck and shouldn’t be called so, especially when they’re much older names than Latin ones.
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Is there any way you can find labels that go into a printer?
Thanks for all the interest,
I think I’ll be a bit more lazy after this, it definitely is more work! Part of the reason for the thread was that I was starting to get tried of doing it :)
@vreinkymov I do like writing out nice, easy to read, linked comments, when (if) time alows but hadn’t really considered doing it with the actual taxa. Boops boops is a wonderfull name 
That a very good point Craig, and one which hadn’t occurred to me, though I only rarely use observation notes, but here’s one example (Pellaea calidirupium) I can think of where I did, I might edit that.
The only place I’ve found where markup doesn’t work is the title/subject on iNat mail.
Not weird to me, I do exactly the same :) But I think might apply the principal to plant names as well.
Interesting that Code has no recommendation on the subject. Thanks for the comprehensive answer.
I’m inclined to an initial capital on common names, but, like some others here, I don’t know many!
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