072: without snow, there’s a neverness about the cold

thesauruses, the generosity of tagging in OpenStreetMap, sitting in the sunlight

Before we could search, we had to have names for things.

All of the creation myths begin with some kind of naming convention. We emerged out of the clay of the newly created earth or the lotus flower or the great primordial swamp, took our first sweet breaths, and started affixing words to everything we could see or think or hold.

Then, came the work of placing all of it into systems of categories and hierarchies. We created Horace’s Ars Poetica, Linnaean taxonomy, the Dewey Decimal Classification and the tax code, before moving on to information architecture, Netflix menus, and I guess (?), the listicle.

We can’t stop ourselves: a woman gives birth—a name gets written into a family tree on the flyleaf of a Bible; Darwin sees some grotty birds on an island—here comes evolutionary classification.

Organizing and labeling stuff is soothing; it makes you feel like you are in control of your exist…