smackay

It's a little abstract, but the map showing swallows breaking out of the south of Iberia, then rapidly heading north is rather cool. You'll get a much better feeling for what this shows, if, early next spring, you find a natural barrier like a river or estuary. Then you can see birds pushing north and understand what these maps are really showing. For extra drama, hope for a strong headwind, and your admiration of what 20 grams of determination can do, will only increase.

Look at how pure the signal is from the peregrine's wings. The signal from feral pigeon is extremely noisy in comparison, as if it is fighting to stay the in the air. The peregrine wingbeat is clean so I presume the energy is being turned into velocity with high efficiency. Extremely cool.

Same here. I can still hear them breathing quite clearly in the next room, even with the bedroom doors partially closed. My hearing for noises further away got more sensitive, but those nearby less so. I put this down to an ancestral ability to listen for sabre-tooth tigers trying to sneak up in the grass.

You forgot to mention personal integrity and setting a good example to others.

If you need an authoritative source, look no further than the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

https://www.jrf.org.uk/uk-poverty-2025-the-essential-guide-t...

Not at all, the slightly snarky wording, was typed on the spur of the moment. Incidentally, I tried the same terms on Google and the AI-powered answer was rather informative with the pros and cons of the approach. Indeed the cons seem to be playing out before our very eyes.

I'd be very interested in learning more about how DOGE got staffed.

If your goal was to dramatically cut government spending, then hiring bright, young people, with no prior experience, who axed first, and asked questions later would be the way to do it, otherwise you'd get bogged down in details since there was probably a good reason, at least initially for the said spending.

However, if you really, wanted to make a spectacular mess then hiring bright, young people, with no prior experience, who axed first, and asked questions later would be the way to do it.

Somebody, somewhere, thought this was a good approach. How could they not know it would turn into a massive clusterfuck. Hubris?

> you are always birding

Amen, Brother.

I think a large part of the blame for this state of affairs belongs to people like the BBC's Natural History Unit who licence their material to film and TV companies far and wide. So, for example, in many a scene you can thrill to the song of Willow Warbler (Phylloscopus trochilis) or Eurasian Chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs), which would be knee-deep in twitchers if the birds were actually there.

The path of progress is strewn with needles.

Microsoft at least sees the writing on the wall...

Microsoft announces new European digital commitments https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/04/30/europea...

A somewhat public thank you to Donald Omand from Aberdeen University for all the work he did in documenting the dialect of Caithness - that purple-ish bit at the far top right of the Scottish mainland.

https://www.wickvoices.co.uk/voices_listen.php?id=0806202309...

Spaghetti revealling scientific truths? Bobby Henderson would not be amused, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastafarians

1972 is the answer to the question on the lips of everybody too busy to look at the source files.

I expect first responders rarely have to deal with the level of depravity mentioned in this Wired article from 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/

You probably DO NOT want to read it.

There's a very good reason moderators are employed in far-away countries, where people are unlikely to have the resources to gain redress for the problems they have to deal with as a result.

Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) heads are white in the breeding season. Birds start breeding aged three to five. So technically the statement is correct but I wonder if Gemini didn't get its pelicans and cormorants in a muddle. The mainland European Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo sinensis) has a head that gets progressively whiter as birds age.

Technologists' very existence is based on the idea of improvement, and, as a result, making the lives of others better. Compared to other approaches, nothing has delivered quite on the same scale, though it's not without its costs.

What kinds of forests? For nature, or for lumber? If the latter, what is quality of the timber produced, or will it spark a new wave of power stations burning wood pellets. Lots of questions, with very little detail available in the article.

If you wear gloves, you'll always wear gloves - annec-data from the crew I used to go out with catching shorebirds, in Scotland, in the middle of winter. The glove wearers we unable to function within an hour of taking them off to band, measure and release the birds. The non-glove wearers were able to keep going for as long as it took.

This is a re-run of the end of the first dot-com boom where the rest of the organisation got some payback against the pampered and coddled engineers who built the web sites in between foosball games. Except this time around when your engineers are able to create agents, what do you need the rest of the organisation for. Software is eating the world, and it's only just getting started.

Interesting to see from the press release that Right to Repair is being cracked down upon:

When a product is repaired and upgraded outside the original manufacturer’s control, the company or person that modified the product should be held liable.

Will we see companies sue repair shops or compatible component manufacturers in order to prevent potential injury to their customers. Interesting times.

The prices for housing, in any form, in the major metropolitan areas suggest this will not be successful.

Thanks for that. I didn't realise that the community extended beyond the government departments.

Horn tooting time...

I wrote, https://github.com/wildfish/crispy-forms-gds/, a template pack for Crispy Forms for regular, form-based, Django sites.

Matt's done a great job and it will certainly take out a lot, if not most of the pain in dealing with accessibility requirements, and in particular the audit process that gov.uk puts projects through to make sure everyone has access to the sites.

Wikipedia always delivers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-resident_citizen_voting

"As of 2020 a total of 141 countries grant expatriates the right to vote in elections in their countries of origin."

tamaiti - a Maori name seems to be the obvious choice

It's Gwynne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX, who makes the rockets fly.

Shared purpose in some ways works better. It certainly can be fostered in the same ways that faith can. Sports works really well and "fringe" activities like birding bind people together really well. For example the solidarity among cyclists (the ones out and about in the countryside) here in Portugal is really strong. Pretty much everyone says hello and you can't stop on the side of the road or trail without everyone who passes asking if everything is ok.

Birds have accents, or at least their calls and songs vary by region. They're generally recognisable as being similar but sometimes it can be confusing. Throw in species like starlings or bluethroats (Luscinia svecica) which are accomplished mimics and life gets complicated.

Still, it's a great idea. Just listening to a blackbird (Turdus merula) or song thrush (Turdus philomelos) singing on a nice Spring evening is life-affirming all by itself.

That's my reading list for the next few weeks sorted out, thanks.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=William+Dampi...

Thanks for the reference. There are quite a few writers railing against the current Professional Managerial Class (PMC). It's very interesting to see that their rise has quite a long history. Where things appear to have gone off the rails is that the PMC are now more interested in the management of perception than actually managing. The proposed solution is to get more competent managers but Burnham points out that the issue is likely more fundamental than that and a new social organisation may be required to deal with their shortcomings.