A name for something I knew about, canopy shyness, but didn’t know.

“When the leaves are almost gone, the branches show their ‘canopy shyness’ – a phenomenon observed in many species of trees in which the crowns of mature trees do not touch each other,” says Niven.

wildlife photo award

I love trees from below. The photographs on the British Wildlife Photography Awards are amazing.

Illustration of Atlantic salmon

Despite mealy-mouthed words about sustainability and transparency the salmon industry is Scotland’s disgrace. The gap between the iconic identity of salmon as a wild symbol of natural Scotland, and the reality is massive. The potential to completely replace this industry with regenerative genuinely sustainable jobs is huge, but the Scottish Government seems to be missing a massive open goal here, instead propping up (and covering up) for short-term lucrative gain. A mass boycott of salmon should be the goal to exert pressure on government and industry.

Scotland’s Salmon Crisis

Also: island split over plans for salmon farm

I remember, as a wee boy, seeing the netting station at the mouth of the Spey, piles of fresh run wild salmon. I now avoid eating salmon.

gif of kidpix 'bomb' rummer

This is a blast from the past. This was one of the first applications I saw first apps when I first used computers. My classes at the time really enjoyed using this.

The other apps I remember from those days included Claris Works1 and HyperCard2
Amazing to see a Mac with kid pix running in emulation at archive.org. It feels snappier than the LCs we had back then.

A pity I can’t get it going on iOS as I’d love to see my current class using it. The is a dialogue to input your name and I can’t type in it on iPad. Workarounds welcome.

The featured image is of the ‘bomb’ eraser ,which my pupils would use endlessly.

  1. I really enjoyed teaching with Claris Works, the drawing documents were great for teaching about layers, rotation etc and could be compared to the paint docs. ↩︎
  2. First as a source of clip art, then as everything. ↩︎