John J. Audubon’s Birds of America

I'm not much of a birder - myopia makes that difficult, but I do enjoy pictures of birds, and John J. Audobon's are classics. Now you can view and download all of the 435 plates in his famous Birds of America.

John James Audubon's Birds of America is a portal into the natural world. Printed between 1827 and 1838, it contains 435 life-size watercolors of North American birds (Havell edition), all reproduced from hand-engraved plates, and is considered to be the archetype of wildlife illustration. Nearly 200 years later, the Audubon prints are coming to life once again, thanks to our vibrant digital library. Roam around below and enjoy one of the most treasured pieces of Audubon's grand and wild legacy. Each print is also available as a free high-resolution download.

Needless to say the prints are gorgeous and the high-resolution scans are huge. Here's one of one of my favourite birds, the blue jay.

Using AI for Science

A while ago I linked to an O'Reilly Conference talk about using AI to help ophthalmologists to detect macular degeneration. Since then, I've found a couple more articles about how scientists are using AI to scan data and help them find patterns that they might otherwise have missed.

• Scientists are using AI to help predict disease outbreaks by "searching for the ecological and epidemiological patterns that precede spillovers—the harbingers of outbreaks that flicker to life in the wild, then trickle into humans."
• Geologists are using AI to find patterns in seismic data and "to try to demystify earthquake physics and tease out the warning signs of impending quakes."

I'm sure I could find more articles but these are the ones that I've read recently.

Featured Links - October 21, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• Do You Have White Teenage Sons? Listen up! How white supremacists are recruiting boys online.
• How Amateur Video Is Helping Us Understand Deadly Tsunamis. The ubiquity of video cameras is helping scientists understand tsunamis.
• The Quest to Get Photos of the USSR's First Space Shuttle. It's sad to see what has happened to Buran, which was arguably better than the US Space Shuttle.
• Dust-to-Digital, a record label specializing in early, rare music. Lots of great clips on their Twitter feed.
• 10 Neat Ways to Create Beautiful Google Documents. I used some of the add-ins mentioned in this article when I was at the TSX.

Posts May Be Sparse for a While

We are having an electrical problem in our house that has affected my office. As a result I've had to move my computer into the basement and I'm working on a cramped desk and using a small monitor. So posts may be sparse until we can get things fixed and my computer back to its proper place.

Our Solar System Has a New Visitor

A second interstellar visitor has entered our solar system, a comet known as 2I/Borisov. Unlike Oumuamua, the first interstellar object detected, 2I/Borisov seems to be an ordinary comet, very similar to the ones in our solor system.

In contrast to its predecessor, though, Borisov has been noticed on the inbound leg of its solar system sojourn. Researchers estimate it’ll make its closest approach to both the sun and Earth this December, before putting both in its rearview mirror and disappearing sometime next year. “Now we get a bit longer to watch it,” says Michele Bannister, a planetary astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast.

With just a handful of observations on Borisov under their belt, many scientists remain cautious. But so far, the preliminary results seem to support an intriguing idea: The comet’s extrasolar roots may be the most exotic thing about it.

Unlike ‘Oumuamua, it’s unquestionably a comet—one that bears a striking resemblance to those that originate in our own solar system, says Guzik, who, together with his colleagues, published a report on Borisov today in Nature Astronomy. The wayfaring rock sports all the necessary accoutrement for the classification, including a bright tail and a fuzzy, luminous halo called a coma—both byproducts of ice sublimating into gas under the sun’s heat. And with its reddish hue, it would blend seamlessly into a typical cometary lineup.

A Tale of Three Nametags

I've been to many conferences and workshops over the years and seen a wide variation in nametags. Invariably the names are too small, making it impossible for me to read without sticking my nose in someone's chest. In this article, John D. Berry rants on the usability (or more often lack of it) of conference nametags.

Aside from dueling jetlags (I was only home in Seattle for five days between the two trips), this juxtaposition provided a classic opportunity to compare approaches to designing the nametags or badges for such an event. I’ve written about this before, in an article about nametags published in FontShop’s Font magazine: “The moment when the design of nametags really matters is when you’re stumbling about at an opening reception, trying to spot familiar names without rudely staring at people’s chests.” Although the organizers might consider the first purpose of a nametag or badge to be labeling someone as a paying (or non-paying) official attendee of the event, for the attendees themselves the purpose is to be able to identify individual people by name. And the distance at which you want to be able to read the name is about three meters (ten feet), well before you find yourself face to face with that person whose name you know you ought to recall.

Conference organizers, please take his advice to heart!

Thanksgiving Break

It's Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend. It's not as big a deal here as it is down south, but it's still a holiday and time to concentrate on good things like cabbage rolls, turkey, and family.

So I'm taking the weekend off from blogging. I should be back on Tuesday.

Featured Links - October 11, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• How to Edit Any Web Page in Chrome (or Any Browser). I am embarrassed to say that I didn't know you could do this. 
• Wally Schirra Collection. More than 1,000 photos from the personal collection of one of the Mercury 7 astronauts.
• Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases. The chemical feat strengthens theory that the first life on Earth was based on RNA.
• A Twitter thread on the Soviet Union's Energia/Buran program. There was some information in this that I haven't seen elsewhere. 
• Decades-Old Code Is Putting Millions of Critical Devices at Risk. Many of the devices at risk will never be updated.

Hot About Hyphens

The Associated Press Stylebook is something of a bible for journalists, at least in the United States; in Canada we have the Canadian Press Stylebook, a copy of which sits on the shelf beside my monitor.

Recently, the AP decided to relax its guidelines on hyphens in compound modifiers (first period goal, for example), saying they weren't necessary when the phrase was commonly used and there was little chance of ambiguity. Prescriptive grammar pedants predictably protested and the AP backtracked slightly, as reported in Boing Boing.

After sustained outrage, the AP backtracked and reversed its advice: "We agree that, for instance, first-half run should be hyphenated. So to conform, we are returning the hyphen to the -quarter phrases. We also hyphenate first-degree murder. But we’re keeping the no-hyphen first grade student, just like high school student."

This, in turn, created more sectarian dissent from people who were still outraged over hyphens.

As a technical writer, I probably used hyphens (and the Oxford comma!) more than strictly necessary, but my main goal was to avoid ambiguity and confusion.

Read more about the controversy in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Adobe Screws Over Venezuela

Here's a good reason for avoiding cloud-based and cloud-licensed software as much as possible. Adobe, citing US sanctions, has just cancelled the licensing for all of their products in Venezuela. And they haven't given the users back their money.

Today, citing US sanctions, Adobe terminated every software license in the country of Venezuela. And because Adobe has "pivoted to the cloud," switching its software to "software as a service," that means that all the software that some of the most desperate, hard-hit people in the world paid good money for are out in the cold.

They're not issuing refunds, either.

Adobe isn't noted for their customer-friendly policies and this is a particularly egregious example of how they treat customers. You would think they're big enough to show a little spine too and stand up to inhumane US policies.

The Rise and Fall of Steampunk

If you read much science fiction or fantasy, you've probably encountered steampunk. Think of it as Victorian era history with Zeppelins and possibly steam-powered Babbage engines (mechanical computers).

I'm not a big fan though I did enjoy some novels: William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine and Ian McDonald's YA Planesrunner series come to mind. I like it more as a visual metaphor; it works better for movies than novels, I think.

In Whatever Happened to Steampunk, John Brownlee looks at the evolution of steampunk and offers some reasons why it seems to have faded in popularity.

In other words, steampunk is a bit of a power fantasy: not of the technologist, but of the maker, the tinkerer, the engineer. The guys who can rebuild an engine from scratch, but who are as powerless to fix the iPhone that they just dropped in the toilet as the rest of us.

And that is exactly why steampunk took off when it did, starting around early 2003. According to Rob Beschizza, an editor at Boing Boing — one of the web’s oldest and most popular fringe culture blogs, which reported on the rise of steampunk firsthand — steampunk became popular alongside the internet’s maker movement, which itself was a response to technology’s rapid evolutionary clip.

Bob Masters Leaving Weather Underground

Dr. Bob Masters, the founder of the Weather Underground site, is leaving WU at the end of October. He'll be starting a new blog for Scientific American.

I've been reading Weather Underground, especially the Category 6 blog, for more than a decade. It's definitely one of the most, if not the most informative weather sites on the internet and I recommend it highly.

The Weather Underground site and the Category 6 blog will continue on under the direction of Bob Henson.

Simul: Online Version Control for Word

Microsoft Word can track changes in a document and it has rudimentary version control. However track changes is often unreliable forcing users to use the document comparison feature for larger or more complex documents.

Simul is an online version control system for Microsoft Word that removes some of those limitations. Documents are stored online and several writers can work on the same document simultaneously. Changes are tracked separately for each user in separate versions of the document and can be merged into the final version.

There are many other features, including commmenting, notifications, and document merging.

Simul has a free account which allows you to work on up to 10 documents. Paid accounts are reasonably priced and start at $20/month per user.

For a review from a happy user, check out writer David Muldawer on the Cool Tools podcast.

What Newspapers I'm Reading These Days

I used to be a newspaper junkie (given that my dad worked for the Sault Star, that's not surprising), but as I've gotten older I find it too hard to read the print editions of most newspapers. The print is just too small for me to manage comfortably, even with strong reading glasses. So I read their online editions, mostly on my phone or tablet.

Earlier this week I noticed that my online New York Times subscription had gone from $4.50 a month to $22. I had a promotional deal that had expired, so I decided to cancel it. When I called, they ended up offering a one year extension at the old price, so I kept it. The Times' Android app seems to have most of the content from the print edition and offers a dark mode that's easy on the eyes and a straightforward, if somewhat old school, navigation system.

I decided to cancel the Toronto Star online subscription, which is about $16 a month. I'm not finding a lot in it of interest, and I can read it through TPL's PressReader service.

Then I looked at the Globe and Mail, which I've been wanting to read for a while and is not available through PressReader. They have a promo deal for $1.50/week for a year, so I subscribed to that.

I'm impressed with the Globe's online edition. You can download it as a reproduction of the print edition in which each headline links to a more readable text-only format. Or you can go to a website, which is a proprietary version of PressReader, making it easy to scan through and read. There's no comparison in the content between the Globe and the Star; there's much more in the Globe and their articles are more in-depth (although I do prefer the Star's editorial slant).

I also have a subscription to the Washington Post through Amazon Prime. Their Android app is also quite slick, although I don't think it includes everything that's in the print edition, and my account doesn't work on their web site. At only $1.25/month, it's the cheapest of my subscriptions. I'll drop that if and when the price goes up, but at that price it's worth it just for their political coverage. It's also available on PressReader.

Speaking of PressReader, they have a huge selection of newspapers and magazines. Toronto Public Library offers it, but not the Pickering Public Library, so I'll have to keep my TPL library card active.

Featured Links - October 6, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• The Tech Helping Dogs Learn to 'Talk' With Humans. This is seriously cool. 
• Graphics That Seem Clear Can Easily Be Misread. Misreading data visualizations can reinforce biased perceptions.
• 'Sci-fi makes you stupid' study refuted by scientists behind original research. Quality matters, not genre. I could have told you that.
• The SpaceX Starship page. I can't wait to see it fly!
• A Twitter thread about Google and the publishing industry. Worth the time to read and digest.
• This is the World’s Largest Optical Lens: It’s 5 Feet Wide and Took 5 Years to Make

Will Trump Ever Leave the White House?

With the impeachment process gearing up and what seems like daily revelations of more Trumpian malfeasance, there is a real possibility that Trump may be impeached and convicted in the Senate. But would he leave the White House? And if he didn't, what would happen.

That's the question raised by this article in the New York Times. The author spoke to several constitutional experts. Opinions varied, but the consensus seems to be that much depends on Republican senators and Fox news. Given the performance of the Republican party over the last few years, that does not leave me reassured.

In the end it will likely be the reaction of Trump's core supporters that determines the outcome.

Over and above that, Mason wrote, it’s possible that the social sorting that we have observed over the last few decades has been a gradual movement toward a real reckoning with race in American politics and society that we haven’t ever really had to face.

If, she continued, Americans were to have a true reckoning with our legacy of racial violence and bias, we should expect to see a strong backlash from the forces of white supremacy that have been in America’s DNA since the founding. An optimistic view is that we are in the beginning of this process now. A pessimistic view allows that the backlash might succeed. Either way, it is not inconsistent with Trump’s evocation of Civil War.

Fighting Trump's Smog War in California

I found this article on CityLab interesting because it shows how people, especially young people, using modern tech, can fight back against oppressive government actions that directly affect their lives and their health.

In this case, a high school student has created an air quality monitoring network that provides real-time information about the levels of dangerous airborne pollutants in Fresno, California. Fresno has some of the worst air pollution in California and will be directly affected by the Trump administration's bid override California's stricter air quality standards.

For White, the political volleying feels like a dismaying waste of time. To him, the stakes are higher than Fresno’s bad air: White also organized Fresno’s local climate strike, leading youth marchers through downtown streets to call on leaders to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet. They chanted lines that he came up with: We walk as one, we breathe as one, we’re not going to stop ‘til the work is done. In an upcoming march, White plans to brandish signs asking Costa to pledge support for the Green New Deal.

After all, election results don’t always fully represent what people need or want. The San Joaquin Valley has some of the lowest voter turnout in the state. In White’s neighborhood, people feel disempowered, he said. He hopes his work will change that. Right now, he’s working with city officials to install an air quality monitor in each of the 115 square miles that make up Fresno, which will make his platform more accurate and useful. And he’s building a database that anyone can use to find air quality information. “We want to give this data to the community and let them press it to decision-makers,” White said.

We're Toast 13

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Climate Change and Environment

• US and Canada have lost three billion birds since 1970. That's one in four!
• How Big Agriculture Is Preventing Farmers From Combating the Climate Crisis. Monoculture farming is not sustainable.
• 'Unprecedented Conditions' Will Rule the Oceans This Century, Striking New Report Finds. The oceans and arctic regions are being affected the most by climate change.
• Nine Million Cubic Feet of Ice May Soon Collapse in the Alps. The same thing is happening in the Canadian Rockies.
• New Studies Warn of Cataclysmic Solar Superstorms. If the Carrington event happened tomorrow, we'd be toast. 
• Could the Deadliest Wildfire in U.S. History Become the New Norm? “We now have mass-fatality wildfires—specifically civilian fatalities."
• 'I don't know how we come back from this:' Australia's big dry sucks life from once-proud towns.

Politics

• Piketty on the "Brahmin left" and the "merchant right". It's worth taking the time to read through the slide deck mentioned in the article.
• How a White Supremacist’s Haircut Became a Symbol for Hate. Far-right extremists are now using Dylann Roof’s haircut as shorthand for calls to violence.
• Trump Administration Takes the Axe to Marine Life, Invasive Species Advisory Boards. This will come back to bite them.
• The Shocking Paper Predicting the End of Democracy. Grim reading, but I feat the author is right.

Technology

• The Dangers of Delaying FAA Modernization. Grounded by mid-20th-century technology, air traffic controllers cannot handle the ongoing demands of commercial airlines and drones.
• What Would It Take To Shut Down the Entire Internet. I'd worry most about the DNS system and BGP poisoning.
• We're Not Ready for a Massive Digital Terror Attack. This from Microsoft's Brad Smith, who should know.

Ken Endacott's Microsoft Word Tools

I'm a bit of a tools junkie. I'm always on the lookout for something new and exciting. That extends to Microsoft Word, where I've installed a variety of macros and add-ons over the years.

I've just come across a new tool set for Microsoft Word, created by Australian editor, Ken Endacott. It's a set of Word templates that install a set of tools controlled from a custom ribbon. There are modules for working with styles, text editing, bullets and numbering and much more.

I haven't yet tried these out, but I will be doing so over the next month or so and will report back at some point with a more detailed review. But they do look worthwhile.



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How To Back Up Your Android Device Properly

Over the past few years, I've had more than one family member or friend lose data because they didn't have backups set properly on their Android phones. It's easy to set up once, and once you're done your key data (for most people, that will be pictures and contact information) is securely backed up to Google (or possibly Samsung, if you're using a Samsung phone).

How to Back Up Your Android Device Properly is a guide from MakeUseOf that covers several different aspects of backing up your Android device, be it a tablet or phone. (Some of the advice might also work for Chromebooks, but I don't have one so I can't verify that).

For most people, setting up backups on their Google account will be the first and most important thing to do. I should note that once you've done this, you can use the backed up data to help you set up a new device. When I recently bought a Samsung tablet, I was able to use the backup from my phone to simplify setting up the tablet.

The article also covers backing up your photos, contacts, text mesages, and other files, as well as copying your phone's files to a PC. There's also a brief description of third-party backup apps.

Don't risk losing your data. Backups are easy to set up and you'll be glad you did when your phone dies.