Matt Alldian

BirdNET-Go listens on a mic and handles the classifier. Fugleramme polls its api, matches each species to an illustration, then packs them onto a page, and redraws only when the birds change

Fugleramme displays real-time detected birds on e-ink using 1800s illustrations.

The issue has even risen to the level of MAGA World. Last July, Donald Trump’s Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, sent a letter to Congress outlining the administration’s policy priorities for the upcoming surface transportation reauthorization bill. Tucked in the letter was a new concept called “the Freedom Car,” which Duffy described as Americans’ right to “drive disconnected and non-automated” vehicles. The proposal would ban the government from requiring that vehicles be equipped with automated driving systems or have the capability to transmit data wirelessly — which, to my knowledge, no one is trying to do.

Andrew J. Hawkins on automakers collecting and selling driver data.

Nearly all people in history existed with some integration with their neighbours and knowledge of the broader world. It’s shocking to learn of a group that lived on their own for 50,000 years, and sealed off from everyone else for the last 10,000, nearly completely divergent from the rest of humanity.

An overview of the book First Contact which documents 1930s discovery of one million isolated highland Papua New Guineans. Definitely reading this book.

New project! Sweather compares today's weather to yesterday at a glance.

It is to humanity’s credit that we remain restless in the midst of all of this progress. We continue to look forward, pushing the frontier further with new treatments, new tools, and new institutions that will help future generations in ways we can’t even picture yet.

But our lives today are a gallery of past generations’ heroic efforts to do the same. It serves us, and honors them, to recapture whenever possible the old sense of awe at these wonders that have long since become commonplace.

Ordinary Abundance celebrates everyday miracles.

Maybe GDP per capita just has to hit a certain point before people even have time, attention and energy to think about new inventions that aren’t literally putting food on the table, a roof over your head, or a shirt on your back.

Jason Crawford asks why it took so long to invent the bicycle.

Far too many diseases are still untreatable. It’s painful to imagine gradually forgetting your children’s names, forgetting how to hold a conversation, how to recognize your own home, and eventually even how to swallow food, while your family watches someone they love disappear. But that’s the reality for over thirty million people with Alzheimer’s globally, and we have almost nothing to offer them. Part of the reason may be because the brain is so complex, or because it’s lined by the blood-brain barrier, a tightly sealed layer of cells which keeps out most pathogens and toxins, as well as most drugs. That makes it challenging to design a drug that can cross the barrier, reach the right cells, and do what it’s meant to do without any unexpected side effects.

A gorgeous WIP article on medical innovation. A good reminder that intelligence is rarely the bottleneck to progress.

Every dog license New York City has issued since 2014 — 819,323 license records, 34,663 distinct names. Search a name to see where it sits in the long tail, filter by ZIP code, and browse breed and name heatmaps. Counts are license records (dogs renewing across years appear more than once).

New project! NYC Dog Name Explorer shows licensed dog name popularity across the city. Inspiration for this from John Cook

We're breaking five stories today based on verifiable financial data which everyone missed for years.

Effort.News automates investigative journalism with five verified financial stories via marginalrevolution.com

Why do I think I will be able to handle all scams in a few years, when I am already struggling to detect simple AI slop, increasingly ignore cold emails and have to write off whole swathes of social media as a source of information, and I can already see how eager all my peers are to offload all their thinking and writing to chatbot assistants unworthy of that trust, and how many projects or mailing lists have had to clamp down on unvetted contributions (eg. today as I write this, ⁠Project Ladybird)? In a few years, won’t I be the equivalent of a rich old person with declining faculties getting a call from the IRS about how I owe them fines, conveniently payable via gift cards…? And if not, why and how not—concretely?

Gwern announces Guardian Angels.

The BBC Sound Effects Archive is available for personal, educational or research purposes. There are over 33,000 clips from across the world from the past 100 years. These include clips made by the BBC Radiophonic workshop, recordings from the Blitz in London, special effects made for BBC TV and Radio productions, as well as 15,000 recordings from the Natural History Unit archive. You can explore sounds from every continent - from the college bells ringing in Oxford to a Patagonian waterfall - or listen to a submarine klaxon or the sound of a 1969 Ford Cortina door slamming shut.

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The earliest recording in the collection is probably the world’s earliest natural history sound recording – made onto wax cylinder in 1889 by Ludwig Koch, and later bequeathed to the BBC. Some of the early BBC field recordings were made by David Attenborough, and others by recordist’s such as David Toombs and Nigel Tucker in the 1980s, and Chris Watson in more recent years.

BBC Sound Effects provides thousands of free, downloadable audio clips via DG