Summer 2003: I walk past the Balboa park BART station, here in the south-central outskirts of San Francisco. This place is not on the maps of the city that you see in the Travel pages or in guidebooks; usually it gets cut off just below the Mission. This is the las stop before Daly City. It is a place eviscerated by freeways, BART tracks, MUNI lines—bypassed, razor-wired, forgotten. But people live here, and on the side streets you can see sherbet-colored stucco bungalows built before World War II. The place is like a jigsaw puzzle made up of mismatched pieces from different boxes. You can’t put it together.

Carl Linnaeus quoted in Curious Universe, from the University of Montreal.

Read more about Linnaeus in this Wikipedia article, or in this tribute from Smithsonian online.

Music from ccMixter: "I Need Something," by copperhead, featuring Admiral Bob, WillemWillem, Norm Peterson, and Robert Siekawitch; and "In the Garden," by snowflake.

You can view the license which governs the music used, as well as this podcast, here.