🎵 Upon relistening, I declare Seefeel’s Polyfusia as my absolute favourite album from my adolescence. So many memories…
Somehow, I find this interactive DVD logo screensaver website extremely satisfying…
🥾Sunny walk around Radio Kootwijk during a short camping trip with family and friends.
🌱🐝 We had two bumblebee nests in our garden in the last couple of years, and I became really fascinated by these friendly creatures. Tonight, I attended the first lesson of an online identification course and even joined a community science project to become a bumblebee monitoring volunteer.
The Hidden Dangers of the Decentralized Web
“For example, a Mastodon server of hundreds of journalists who joined after Musk began banning tech reporters on Twitter is currently blocked by over 200 other servers, who claim the reporters are malevolently surveilling others.”
🌱 The lilac in our garden is blooming and its fragrance is as always intense and overwhelming. Not as ‘heady’ as in other years though, maybe because of the chilly weather. Now I would describe it more as ‘zesty’, or simply ‘fresh’ (fragrances are very nuanced and hard to describe in words!). Still one of my favourite fragrances ever.
Last Thursday, we went to a nearby commemoration of Remembrance Day, for the first time in our own neighbourhood (where we already have been living for around 8 years). It felt good, also because of the friendly weather.
🌱 Pretty happy with this fully automated solar powered watering system for our potted plants. It even uses the collected water from our rainwater tank.
Texel, may 2023.
🎵 It’s the last day of our short holiday trip to the island of Texel, where we stay at a cosy chalet near a forest edge. I got up extremely early, just to hear the dawn chorus emerge out of the nightly silence. And it’s an overwhelmingly beautiful experience.
🦜Awesome research, with very interesting results: Birds of a feather video-flock together (YouTube)
We developed an approach to allow parrots to engage in video-calling other parrots.
Our results show that 1) every bird used the system, 2) most birds exhibited high motivation and intentionality, and 3) all caretakers reported perceived benefits, […] such as learning to forage or even to fly by watching others.
Very much enjoyed the revealing of the Windstarter installation at the artist enclave of Ruigoord, Amsterdam. And very proud of M., who all made it possible, and our kids, who participated in it.
Want to read: Pessoa: A Biography by Richard Zenith 📚
🎵 Made some nice field recordings this afternoon, in the nearby stiltegebied Polder Teckop.
🎥 Mulan (2020) ★★
🥾 Easter walk with the family. Lusthof De Haeck, Nieuwkoopse Plassen. Spring is everywhere.
🎵The Story of Classical is a very informative and well produced album / free course on the history of western classical music. Launched as a 9 hour long accompaniment of the new Apple Music Classical iOS app, it is aimed at the novice classical music listener.
Why this wasn’t published as a podcast is beyond me though… The listening experience from within the app is just terrible: since every track has a duration of around 1 hour, you find yourself searching for the moment you left off all the time…
Homemade 🍕🍕 are the best 🍕🍕
Commas save lives! 😀
“The humble comma arose when a Greek scholar invented a single dot system to show the breath needed between phrases. Small, yet mighty, the comma can change meaning: “Let’s eat grandma!”. “Let’s eat, grandma!” Commas save lives.”
📚Read in this excellent little e-book: Slow Learning - A path to a meaningful and mindful future of learning
🎥 L’Immensità (2022) ★★★★
Watched with my oldest daughter in our local cinema. This review by Jonathan Romney sums it up quite nicely:
“In the 70s-set L’Immensità, […] Cruz is not the centre but the glamorous supporting player. The lead role belongs to Luana Giuliani as Adriana, a teenage girl who has begun to identify as a boy, preferring the male ‘Andrea’ […]. As well as coming to terms with his gender, Andrea is shouldering the standard burdens of an Italian Catholic upbringing”
🎵🎥 Certain albums keep guiding you through life. Dís by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson is one of them. Being an OST of a film I’ve never watched makes it easier to couple it with my own experiences and memories, like a flight to New York in 2010. This week, it helped me through some tough family issues.
📺 Rewatching Little Green Men, the great first episode of season 2 of The X-Files (1994). Coincidence or not, this episode focuses on SETI, the organisation that was backed by the just deceased Gordon Moore. I also just discovered that the Wow! signal was not fictional but real, detected in 1977.
<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/11985/2023/778f5a9cfd.jpg" width=“600” height=“338” alt=“A scan of the original computer printout featuring the eponymous “Wow!” message.">
🌱 Spent the whole weekend in our garden, preparing for the new growing season. This coming week, the time has come for last year’s cuttings of the butterfly bush to be planted out in the school garden. Together with a Philadelphus we decided to grub up to make space for more endemic varieties.
Want to read: It’s Only Words by Colin Walker 📚
As a follow up of this previous post, I decided to let Midjourney also generate an image based on a detailed description of my oldest 15-year-old daughter. She pretty much agreed with the result.
