Bird 🦅

 IF IT WERE ONLY ANHEUSER-BUSCH:  Lost In The Desert Bud Light Hires Swamp Creatures.

Putin’s War On Ukrainian Cultural Memory

April 24, 2023

It's always the libraries. "Three national and state libraries, including the National Scientific Medical Library of Ukraine, as well as some 25 university libraries, have been severely damaged or destroyed, the most shocking statistics relate to public libraries."- The Atlantic

LONGEVITY UPDATE:  Unlocking the Secrets of Aging: Sirtuin Enzymes in the Spotlight.

Bryan Caplan’s latest collection of essays, Voters as Mad Scientists: Essays on Political Irrationality is out and, as the kids say, it’s a banger. Voters as Mad Scientists includes classics on social desirability bias, the ideological Turing test, the Simplistic Theory of Left and Right and more. Lots of wisdom in these short essays. Bryan is a pundit who writes for the long run. Here’s one on the historically hollow cries of populism

 How quickly can people make accurate moral judgments?

 “The medieval Catholic Church deliberately and effectively splintered political power in Europe by forming temporal alliances, funding proxy wars, launching crusades, and advancing ideology to ensure its autonomy and power.”

BirdCast: “Showcasing the spectacle of bird migration When, where, and how far will birds migrate? How many birds passed last night? Our tools help you explore the answers to these and many other questions about bird migration. BirdCast proposed to provide real-time predictions of bird migrations: when they migrate, where they migrate, and how far they will be flying. 

When BirdCast began, much like many conceptual frameworks in the early years of big data analysis and Internet and crowdsourcing, its potential and realities were far ahead of their time. But there was a strong belief and understanding that knowledge of migratory behavior would inspire birders and scientists as well as support decisions about conservation actions on the ground to mitigate numerous hazards birds face and to prevent deaths of millions of birds annually. 

Accurate migration models could have broad appeal and even broader application, allowing researchers to understand behavioral aspects of migration, how migration timing and pathways respond to changing climate, and whether linkages exist between variation in migration timing and subsequent changes in population size. Beginning in 2018, after many years of research and developments in machine learning, cloud-based computing, and big data analytics, the BirdCast site began to feature migration forecasts that predicted how many birds would be aloft over the continental US and live migration maps that reported how many birds actually took flight. 

These bird migration maps represented the culmination of a 20-year long vision, so too the beginnings of new inspiration for the next generation of bird migration research, outreach and education, and application. For more information about radar ornithology and how to understand the application of radar technology for studying bird migration, see this primer.”