Going nuts

Another lap around the Sun, one year finished, another begun…that's right, it's birthday time again. A respectable thirty-four this year. One more and I'll be eligible to be president!

Back in April last year I did a fun little Venn diagram on thing which we call berries, things which are botanically berries, and the overlap between them. Recently it was pointed out to me that nuts have a similar situation, so I figured I'd give them the same treatment and see how they compared.

Compared to the berry version, I had to make the top circle a bit larger to hold all the things I found with “nut” in the name at this Wikipedia page. Sometimes the line on what we call a nut is a bit fuzzy; I did include macadamia nuts, even though I've certainly heard them called simply “macadamias” on occasion, because to me the “nut” feels like an important part of the name. Feel free to disagree in the comments, though. That self-imposed restriction that “nut” appear (significantly) in the name means that a lot of things commonly thought of as nuts are absent; pecans, almonds, pistachios, and cashews, for instance, all don't appear. That's because they are not biologically nuts, and we don't tend to include “nut” in their names, so they don't actually fall into any category listed here. (Adding a “generally considered a nut” circle might be interesting, I suppose, but even fuzzier; considered by whom?)

When I did the berry version, my takeaway was that the various groupings were mostly balanced; in fact, the union of the two was the largest group, indicating that things called berries generally mapped to the botanical definition fairly well. Here, it looks like it's instead skewed towards things which are called nuts, but aren't nuts botanically. I also hadn't even heard of several of the nuts in the middle or bottom categories (they tend to come from Africa or Australia/Oceania).

Anyway, that's all for this post. I'm reminded that the original berry version came about due to time freed up from paper-writing last year, and that I still haven't written anything about my thesis…I'll get to it at some point, I really will! I do have some rough outlines for posts milling about in my head. But for now, a hui hou!