Lately all of my updates have been about Spandex Force. Trust me, I could write a ton more on what’s happening with the game but today I’m just going to give you a quick link: Check out the Encyclopedia of Life project!

It’s an amazing attempt to catalogue the 1,8 million know species on the planet…and to add new ones as they are discovered. Here are some example pages of how it will look. There are two things that immediately strike me about this:

1. This looks like a lot of fun. Seriously, it looks awesome! I’ve mentioned my fascination with Wikipedia and how I can look up esoteric topics for hours on end…and I can definitely see myself doing the same on this site. As a kid I used to read books about nature, and I spent countless days browsing my mom’s library of books on sharks and reptiles and mammals and fungi and whatnot. This site will probably be the same for the next generation of nerds.
2. Listening to the-end-is-nigh environmentalists you get the impression that the world will end in a few decades. I googled for “extinct species per year” just now and found a page that claimed that 30000 species become extinct per year. I have no idea if that figure is correct, but if it is, negative people are probably saying things like “there’ll be no species left in 60 years!” Of course, they’re probably missing the fact that new species also emerge constantly. Either way, the thing is that if species are dropping and emerging at that rate, then it’ll be rather difficult to maintain this collection of species. 30000 per year means that someone will have to write a big red “EXTINCT” on 82 pages per day. I’m guessing that the 30000 species per year is either wildly exaggerated…or that the 1,8 million named species mentioned on EOL refer to a relatively stable core of species. Hey, I have no idea how many non-named species there are, after all!

Oh, and buy Spandex Force unless you’ve already done so! If you have you’ll be getting an update soonish; testing is still in progress.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Awesome Stuff, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.