On classification and data 2.0
The periodic table of the elements is my vote for "Best. Classification. Evar." It turns out that by organizing elements by the number of protons in the nucleus, you get all of this fantastic value, both descriptive and predictive value. And because what you're doing is organizing things, the periodic table is as close to making assertions about essence as it is physically possible to get. This is a really powerful scheme, almost perfect. Almost.
All the way over in the right-hand column, the pink column, are noble gases. Now noble gas is an odd category, because helium is no more a gas than mercury is a liquid. Helium is not fundamentally a gas, it's just a gas at most temperatures, but the people studying it at the time didn't know that, because they weren't able to make it cold enough to see that helium, like everything else, has different states of matter. Lacking the right measurements, they assumed that gaseousness was an essential aspect -- literally, part of the essence -- of those elements.
Clay Shirky, Ontology is ovverrated
