Comment on Strawberries are nuts đ
Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org âš9â© âšmonthsâ© ago
To me arguing over which fruit belongs in which category is a prime example of people arguing over shadows in Platoâs cave. Not that itâs a waste of time or anything but sometimes people act like tomatoes wonât grow if you call them vegetables. Like at the end of the day itâs just humans developing a system to make sense of nature rather than discovering an inherent, pre-existing system.
I totally agree. It is completely nonsense to say. In other languages it is different. I just know some Spanish, but they donât have a word for berries or nuts, it is all just fruit. (Forrest fruit for berries or dried fruit for nuts) but they donât call potatoes vegetables, but âtuberculoâ. Interesting difference, which i guess is because they have another climate and other plants.
We do just call it a vegetable in my language.
Bayas y nueces⊠Tubérculo is closer to the botanical definition because it is a tuber (storage organ) and not a fruit (like most vegetables). And I would think that tubérculo could be any tuber vegetable, not just papas/patatas
Thanks for the clarification. I was under the impression that nuez would only refer to walnut. And that an almond would not be a nuez.
Is it a country specific thing because I usually see frutos del bosque in Spain?
I guess things can have multiple names, too. In German you would also say WaldfrĂŒchte (forest fruits) to mixed berries, but they are still Beeren (berries) as well. If you search for âpostre de bayasâ or âpastel de bayasâ many recipes pop up. And sure, Spanish is obviously a diverse language with the divide between Spanish from Spain and from Latin America.
Disclaimer: Iâm part of the scientific bubble so thatâs why I may here more terms that are botanical in Spanish ;)
Like at the end of the day itâs just humans developing a system to make sense of nature
The core of the matter is that we have multiple, mutually incompatible schemes sharing in part the same terminology. Biology is not cooking, both fields care about vastly different things thus the categorisation scheme is different, thatâs the end of it. Culinarily, tomatoes have too much umami to be fruit. Botanically peppermint is an aromatic, I recommend you not put it into your soffritto.
You never had tomato pie? It would likely change your idea of what too much savoriness is.
I havenât but that sounds like a pie not a cake.
âBotanicallyâ âculinaryâ âterminologyâ âbiologyâ and then you say umami seriously. Which is entirely made up.
Oh, this is actually a perfect example of the arbitreity of mapping systems!
A looong time ago on reddit, I got into an argument with someone who was doing that thing where you confuse the map for the object itself. We were mostly talking about the chemistry table. But anyway, he just could not see how a change in motivation, that is what the map designer finds useful, could change how the map is arranged.
I mean, I donât think this would convince him: he would just say the culinary version isnât real. But still, I really like it.
I mean thatâs a pretty big difference right?
Like, the periodic tables mapping isnât arbitrary or alternate.
Like you canât actually map the periodic a different way and itâs in a sense âself evidentâ in a way arbitrary mappings arenât.
The periodic table itself is a kind of proof of quantum theory, or at least, strong supporting evidence. While it can be displayed differently, actually couldnât be arranged differently and the things we know about physics hold true.
Like, the periodic tables mapping isnât arbitrary or alternate.
Neither the biology nor culinary mappings are arbitrary.
Did you know that thereâs quite extreme agreements on what metals are? Chemists will tell you one thing and not be particularly unified in their response around the topic of semimetals, while astrophysicists have a very simple definition of metals: Anything that has more protons than helium.
Who is right? This has nothing to do with metaphysics (Iâve read a bit down the thread) as in âwhat is beyond physics, god, and stuffâ, but how we interpret our (scientific) observations. Neither definition of metals is more correct than the other, theyâre both maps drawn by scientists caring about vastly different things.
Back to the periodic table itself: Defining elements by protons has quite some predictive power but at the same time itâs a vast oversimplification of what actually goes on, ask any quantum chemist. It is rooted in quite hard science, but that doesnât make it ground reality. Actual reality is something we canât observe because to observe anything we first have to project it into our minds. All perception is modelling: Ask any neuroscientist. Or, for that matter, Plato.
Ah, there he is!
Just kidding.
The extreme usefulness of the one periodic table as we know it is why this is so hard to talk about. Philosophically, it isnât any different: it is arranged by human values for human consumption. I think there is likely a strong reason that alien values would converge here, but that doesnât really affect its arbitreity. The elements donât have value unto themselves, they just are.
And there are plenty of different ways to arrange it. For one, if all you care about are the metals for some reason, you can arrange the nonmetals out of it completely. You could keep a linear, alphabetical list because whatever work youâre doing is derived from chemistry but does not actually care about atomic values.
anzo@programming.dev âš9â© âšmonthsâ© ago
Technically, the pre-existing system could be evolutionary biology. Iâm just saying that in some cases, a little bit of pedantry is enjoyable. Itâs an acquired taste, maybe