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Sunday, August 08, 2021

Biochar: "Good teeth are a luxury only the rich can afford."

Biochar: The waste product that could help mitigate climate change PhyOrg


The strange case of the dead-but-not-dead Tibetan monks Big Think 


Offers flooding in after woodland hermit’s cabin burns down 


https://500px.com/photo/1035548313/Just-the-2-of-us--European-Beeeaters-by-Evelyne-OConnor


BBC Future – “From green roofs to bee bricks and hedgehog drawers, there are plenty of ways to make sterile buildings more accommodating to nature….Part of the problem is that human civilisation, so dependent on built infrastructure, has colonised swathes of land once home to wildlife. While just 1% of the planet’s habitable land is towns, cities and urban infrastructure, the UN expects the square footage of all the buildings in the world to double by 2060. Some of that floor area will go into multi-storey buildings but some will be provided by ever-expanding urban sprawl, which will leave even less space for wildlife. 



"Good teeth are a luxury only the rich can afford."







These 3 Tools Will Help You Spot Fake Amazon Reviews

Make Use Of: “The first thing people do when deciding whether to buy something online is check the customer reviews. A quick scan of the most recent reviews can tell you a great deal about whether a product is worth your money. Unfortunately, there are unscrupulous sellers who commission positive reviews in order to mislead buyers into purchasing their second-rate goods. This deceitful practice means buyers often waste their time trying to return the inferior product and even lose their money in some instances. So how can you check which reviews on Amazon can be trusted? Which Amazon reviews are fake?..”



How to Download Any Video From the Internet: 20 Free Methods
Make Use Of: “Do you want to download videos from the internet? If you see a video you like on Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, or any of the other leading video sites, you might want to create a copy so you can keep it forever. Thankfully, downloading videos off the internet is surprisingly easy. And here are the best free ways to download any video off the internet…”



Five parrots separated at UK zoo after encouraging each other to swear at guests NZ Herald 


Why Planting Mangroves Can Help Save the PlanetEcoWatch 


Meet Surfside’s Disaster-Data Forensic Sleuths IEEE Spectrum 


Poison hemlock spreads across US parks, gardens: Beware of toxic plant USA Today 



28 ancient viruses unknown to science found in a Tibetan glacier Big Think


The Cornell Lab of Ornithology recently added the ability to identify birds from hearing their birdsong to their Merlin Bird ID app — a “Shazam for bird songs” as Fast Company says. You just start recording with your phone and the app starts telling you the birds it’s hearing. Here’s how it works:

Automatic song ID has been a dream for decades, but analyzing sound has always been extremely difficult. The breakthrough came when researchers, including Merlin lead researcher Grant Van Horn, began treating the sounds as images and applying new and powerful image classification algorithms like the ones that power Merlin’s Photo ID feature.

“Each sound recording a user makes gets converted from a waveform to a spectrogram-a way to visualize the amplitude [volume], frequency [pitch], and duration of the sound,” Van Horn says. “So just like Merlin can identify a picture of a bird, it can now use this picture of a bird’s sound to make an ID,” Van Horn says.

This pioneering sound-identification technology is integrated into the existing Merlin Bird ID app, meaning Merlin now offers four ways to identify a bird: by a sound, by a photo, by answering five questions about a bird you saw, or by exploring a list of the birds expected where you are.

Margaret Renkl tried the app out and it seems to work pretty well:

I set my phone down on the table on my back deck, opened the Merlin app, chose “Sound ID” and hit the microphone button. Immediately a spectrogram of sound waves began to scroll across the screen. Every time a bird sings, the sound registers as a kind of picture of the song. By comparing that picture with others in its database, the app arrives at an ID.

I watched as Merlin rolled out the names of bird after bird — tufted titmouse, European starling, Carolina chickadee, northern cardinal, American crow, white-breasted nuthatch, eastern towhee, house wren, American goldfinch, blue jay, eastern bluebird, American robin, Carolina wren, house finch. It didn’t miss a single one.

What amazed me was not merely the accuracy of the ID but also the way the app untangled the layers of song, correctly identifying the birds that were singing in my yard, as well the birds that were singing next door and the birds that were singing across the street. If the same bird sang a second time, the app highlighted the name it had already listed. Watching those highlights play across the growing list of birds was almost like watching fingers fly across a piano keyboard.

See also this video review. You can download the app here. I’m going to give this a shot over my lunch hour today. I try to eat outside when the weather is nice and there are always birds out singing.


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