lumidaub:

Weirdness about frogs and names and Starfleet

A while back, there was news about three tiny frog species, called mini ature, mini mum, and mini scule (delight all around). Being no expert in frogs at all but generally interested in cute, unusual animals I went to look up what madlads (g/n) came up with the names. Among them, I noticed, was one called Mark Scherz. Which made me Question Things™, since Scherz is a German word for jest or joke. Didn’t have time to look into it further though (and it’s not that far out a name anyway).

Then, just the other day, another set of frogs was introduced to the world, this time with names of Starfleet captains, named thusly because their calls supposedly resemble sound FX from Star Trek. This being even more up my alley because it’s cute, unusual animals AND Star Trek, I tried to find recordings and happened upon the names of the madlads (g/n) responsible this time - and again, Mark Scherz is among them.

This almost convinced that there is no such person and it’s an in-joke by herpetologists, a fake persona they attach to scientific work that is a bit tongue in cheek (to MARK it as a SCHERZ, if you will). After all, there’s a number of names used similarly in academia so there’s precedence for this type of shenanigans. We have an entire member of parliament in the German Bundestag who isn’t real.

And then, my feed here, on this webbed site tumblr dot com, of all places, saw fit to show me a post about the Starfleet froggies by none other than @markscherz and I don’t know which reality I am in anymore.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.