Budd
Does not load very fast, but in general the app is totally awesome. I think that biology is outstandingly interesting, so thank you for your work.
10K Apart
Explore the tree of life. Filter by branch, select two species and find their relationship. We are all related. Discover how.
Onychomys
I'm a biologist (my girlfriend's a programmer, which is why I'm looking at this stuff) , and there are a couple of things about this program that you should consider doing. First and foremost, you have to use scientific names for stuff. I realize that calling it "ape branch" saves you space over "Hominidae", but the latter is a scientifically useful term while the former is not. And something like "even-toed ungulates" is actually longer than just saying "artiodactyl"! Secondly, your biology is incorrect in a lot of ways. Reptiles, for example, is not a monophyletic group, and so shouldn't be used in a tree-of-life discussion. You're also using wildly disparate taxonomic levels. Ants and cockroaches have to share your "Insect branch" (by which you mean the class Insecta), while lions get the order Carnivora, bats and elephants get a generalized term for placental mammals (while the poor platypus is told that its redeeming quality is that it has four legs), and humans get a family! There seems to be neither rhyme nor reason for your taxonomic organization. Also, dude, come on. Rabbits aren't rodents. The last big complaint I have is that you don't show the tree. This makes the branch separation statistic totally useless. You have koalas and wolves separated by three branches, but there's no way of telling how those branches are arranged, which is the important part of doing phylogenetics! (Also, a small nitpick: you should really count the nodes, not the branches. The numbers aren't always the same, and the nodal number would be much more useful information.) Even if you didn't have the egregious taxonomic errors, this app would still be totally useless. You MUST show the tree!
Onychomys
.....that comment was formatted a lot better before I pushed Submit. Boooooo, AVA, for apparently not allowing paragraphs in comments!
Jack Appleby
*I do not pretend to be too knowledgeable about biology. This app was made out of a love for the theory of evolution and a fascination in how life on earth is related. The data comes from an Open University wall poster and is highly, highly simplified. I'd like to add a disclaimer stating that the dataset is minuscule (and therefore rather unrepresentative) in comparison to the real tree of life. Much more information can be found online about the tree of life than this app can possibly show, so please dig deeper if you are interested. I struggled with whether to include the ‘branch separation’ stat because it is rather misleading. Branches are not so simply defined, and there are many more branches than the application displays. Despite this, I decided the app would be an interesting and worthwhile thing to make. This competition is to 'inspire the web with just 10K'. The main aim is show that every living thing is related to everything else, and just how cool this fact is :-)
Chris Wallace
I am extremely confused as to how this could possibly be under 10k with so many images being called. I don't recall Google Images being on the approved "overhead" list. On a related note, I have a good deal of proof that shows the Earth is only 6,000-10,000 years old, so this theory of evolution is a pretty wild fairy tale. http://www.godsaidmansaid.com/topic3.asp?Cat2=262&ItemID=668
What could you build with only 10 kilobytes of code?
That’s the concept behind this here 10K Apart contest, the love child of MIX Online and An Event Apart.
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