Autumn Leaf Couture

yes

"Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots, then develop friendships" news.northeastern.edu/2023/04/21/par…

I seem to be closing out the year with an unexpected beef with the word "limpid". Ugh, what even is that... how on earth does a word like that square up to its purported meaning?? Just look at it. Why does it mean clear or transparent?

Interaction from yesterday

The numbers involved in the human trafficking in order to run online scams is horrifying. The scams still need offline people to run them, and these people are being trafficked. vox.com/world-politics…

Funny cultural differences: the crossword clue was "like many sauna users" (5 letters) so I went to "naked" rather than the answer "robed". Look, when it comes to saunas I'm a Finn...

NEW 🧵: how Britain became gripped by the worst homelessness crisis in the developed world

“Ontario's first measles death in decades offers grim reminder that unvaccinated kids are at risk” 😢😢 An unvaccinated child didn’t make it to their fifth birthday because of a vaccine-preventable illness.

Members of the Czech National Symphony Orchestra watching the game last night. Czechs REALLY like ice hockey!

The national service nonsense does give me the opportunity to tweet one of my favourite recent bits of polling when Ipsos actually ran the famous "Yes Minister" questions as a randomised experiment, and showed that it worked.

In case anyone needs to see a guinea pig cartographer, here you go…

Happy 20th Birthday OpenStreetMap! "OpenStreetMap has grown exponentially or quadratically over the last twenty years depending on the metric you’re interested in . . . The story isn’t so much about the data and technology, and it never was. It’s the people. " --@stevec,

🎁 HAPPY BIRTHDAY OpenStreetMap! You've come a long way in the last 20 years. 😍 Here's @steveC's desktop at University College London, the original OSM "server" until 2006. birthday20.openstreetmap.org #20YearsofOSM #opendata #Foss4G #opensource

What a fun guide - it's an ID guide to pavement plants from the Angela Marmont Centre for UK Nature via Natural History Museum nhm.ac.uk/take-part/iden… (The logo change caught me off guard though and I thought I'd wandered onto a different site!)

Was on iNaturalist looking for reference photos for drawing practice and OH my god the picture on this observation, I howled. inaturalist.org/observations/1…

I have to admit to momentary disappointment when the new British Ecological Society magazine cover story wasn't in fact about literary ecosystems... Doesn't the cover scream Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver??? It's even monarch butterflies!

i love this season of rot & decay & soul fermentation. i feel like i'm living inside a kimchi jar