Read: so you’ve been shamed by Jon Ronson ★★★★☆ 📚
I think I must have read excerpts of a lot of this over the years since it was published. Still quite interesting although I kept hearing Louis Theroux in my head.
Category Archives: Micro
The Biodiversity Heritage Library & Bird Bingo
Somewhere or other1 I Saw a link to v.2 (1799) – The Naturalist’s Pocket Magazine or compleat cabinet of the curiosities and beauties of nature. Intriguing enough which lead me to discover the Biodiversity Heritage Library:
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL is revolutionizing global research by providing free, worldwide access to knowledge about life on Earth.
About BHL – Information about the Biodiversity Heritage Library
There seems to be a vast collection of biological books that are free to read and download. There is also a twitter account, @BioDivLibrar and an amazing Flickr account: Biodiversity Heritage Library where there are over a quarter of a million images, many public domain. They have also contributed
over 2 million BHL images have been uploaded to the IA Book Images Flickr stream as part of the Art of Life project. These images are identified and uploaded in bulk using an algorithm. They offer a great opportunity for serendipitous discovery via browsing.
from: About Biodiversity Heritage Library | Flickr.
The Library are asking for people to help tag their flickr images and this might be a good activity for secondary pupils?
Bird Bingo
As a primary teacher, once I’d stopped just raking through some beautiful images I knocked up a quick Bird Bingo game for my class to help with bird identification. It has random cards and a caller.
There is page after page of beautiful pictures in the photo stream I defy anyone to leave it quickly. Example page 2094!
Featured Image: n456_w1150 | Natural history of the animal kingdom for the u… | Flickr public domain.
1. I don’t like not being able to attribute where I found this amazing resource.↩
The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld
Read: The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld ★★★★☆ Fragmented stories of misogyny across time. Quite unsettling in both content and style. 📚
My ability to concentrate on any task is limited, no matter how much I enjoy that task. Eventually I reach a point where my performance is severely hampered, things take longer than usual, and I make mistakes, become inefficient, less creative, and easily distracted. Sound familiar? Tangle of bare b...
Fascinating post on fascination. It proposes that Soft Fascination will restore out concentration and that this is facilitated by being in nature. I certainly feel it can be easy to become absorbed in the natural world. I was also pleased to read
On the contrary, smartphones may help us get out more, adding to a sense of safety, GPS means you can explore more, there are countless information sources and apps about the outdoors, and there’s the full set of UK Ordnance Survey maps available for download on a GPS enabled app. Photography provides a means of exercising soft fascination and probing the world. There’s a sense in which the great outdoors and what we get out of it is already mediated by decades worth of technology, not to mention presentations via art and the mass media.
I’ve found my phone a useful tool for navigating the natural world, not only as a method of finding where I am but of recording that and identifying my surroundings and neighbours. Trails, PlantNet and PeakFinder Are some of my favourites along with the camera and an audio recorder.
hat tip @livedtime
A world where public service can be the viable alternative to the surveillance capitalism and government surveillance. We need different models to keep each one honest, accountable and transparent.
Glorious morning on the Kilpatrick Braes. Blue skies, a touch of frost, not much breeze. Icicles, primrose, larks. walkmap
Lucifer’s Loch. Strange name, named on Google maps, not OS or open street. Had a walk this morning around the back of Jaw & Cochno: map & pics.
Scots Pine From Below
The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey 📚
Read: The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey ★★★★☆ a lot of fun with an unusual take on mermaids. 📚
Life in Links 42
The Spring Holidays, like others will increase my blogging. It has been a busy term both home learning and back in school. Looking forward to a holiday of wee walks (still stuck in Glasgow) and some random browsing.
- Johnny•Decimal a system for organising. Been a bit of discussion on micro.blog. Sounds good, I made a start with the mess that ins my OneDrive folder, but need to re-read the instructions and start again I think.
- Himalayan Balsam | Scottish Invasive Species Initiative
The Scottish Invasive Species Initiative (SISI) is a 4-year partnership project which aims to work with local organisations and volunteers to control invasive non-native species along riversides in Northern Scotland, for the benefit of our native wildlife and communities.
I see quite a bit of Himalayan Balsam around, quite pretty but a nasty smell.
- Contemplation. Dramatically Improving Your Photography With Reading via #tds2104 Contemplative Image Reading | The Daily Stillness This looks like an interesting practise.
via @wonderofscience- OpenSeadragon An open-source, web-based viewer for high-resolution zoomable images, implemented in pure JavaScript, for desktop and mobile.
-
"At startup, an Android device sends Google about 1MB of data, compared with iOS sending Apple around 42KB. When idle, Android sends roughly 1MB of data to Google every 12 hours, compared with iOS sending Apple about 52KB over the same period." https://t.co/nPXiM8Tqi6
— Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) March 31, 2021
- George Oates Returns to Revitalize the Flickr Commons | Flickr Blog
- Cuba is a vaccine powerhouse and Capitalism and greed gave Britain its vaccine success, PM Johnson says | Reuters via Micro.blog – @rom
The Featured image is Maxwell dynamic machine, 1961 | Science Museum Group Collection © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence found via the Never Been Seen | Science Museum Group Collection page, which I learnt about from Ian Guest