If you're in the colored area of this map, look up into the sky this evening.

If you see a little bird with slender wings & a little stubby tail, flap-flapping up in the sky, It's probably a chimney swift.

A very common🐦... and one of the most remarkable animals on the planet. As you can see from the map, chimney swifts concentrate in urban areas in the summer, where they nest in... you guessed it, chimneys.

In the evening they're out foraging for food. They catch insects on the wing and bring them back to their young in their chimney nests.

The door to this place is apparently been propped wide open for despicable conspiracy theorists, so I'm going to take my leave.

On my way out, here's the best thing that ever happened to me on this site (🧵): In the early summer of 2015 I went up into the Angolan Highlands with @drsteveboyes and the @NatGeo team.

It was a tough trip. We followed a 6-tonne armored truck to get to to our launch point, because the landscape was (and is) riddled with active minefields.

We're in a short calm before a very large storm with LLMs and scams, via email text and voice.

If you have elderly friends and relatives it's a good time to talk to them about how to build up defenses. If you're a person who's written a lot online or even if you have an active social feed it'll become very simple to write messages in your 'voice'.

If you've given a lecture or been on a podcast it'll be possible for anyone to train a model to speak in your actual voice.

Here's my 🐙 in one clean thread:

When I was about 22 I worked as a naturalist at the Vancouver Aquarium (@vanaqua). As well as talking to people about the exhibits, putting on puppet shows, narrating beluga whale sessions, etc., I was on the dive team... Which meant that 1 or 2 times a day I'd be in the water w/ the sharks or the belugas, or most relevant to #WorldOctopusDay, the PNW (Pacific Northwest) tank.

One day on my way into the water, the aquarist who took care of the tank told me that he'd seen some parasites on the 🐙

The dude who took down the Colorado shooter owns a brewery.

His wife is the brewmaster.

They have merch: atrevidabeerco.com/product-page/d… atrevidabeerco.com/product-page/d…

If you notice a strange quiet from the🐦 in your neighbourhood today, it's because they are all watching the #WorldCupOfBirds finals!

This might seem strange to you, but it is a very popular tournament across the rest of the animal kingdom. If you want to know how we got here to the finals today, here are three threads for you:

https://twitter.com/blprnt/status/1594001413171970048

https://twitter.com/blprnt/status/1592887540847382530

https://twitter.com/blprnt/status/1590805428434501633

They are packed with information about all 32 competing World Cup nations' national birds!

By the end of the day tomorrow one of these 4 birds will hold the #WorldCupOfBirds aloft.

🇹🇳 The Cream-colored Courser.
🇰🇷 The Oriental Magpie.
🇦🇺 The Laughing Kookaburra.
🇧🇪 The Common Kestrel.

Which one will it be?

Let's find out. 🇹🇳

In flight, the Cream-coloured Courser has jet-black upper primaries and underwings.

This is the last thing that the Andean Condor and the Golden Eagle saw in this tournament, as two of the world's most impressive raptors saw defeat at the hands of this diminutive wader.

Related to the last tweet, the 6 year-old just tested positive for COVID.

2022, folks.

2022. We've both been a little sick. He had a night of coughing two days back, hopefully that was the peak of it and we'll have a smooth ride to testing out.

My PCR was negative but I'm definitely under the weather.

It's the first Monday of the year, so I'm going to try to conjure some things into reality for this strange and alliteratively new year:

1. Living in Data was translated last year into Mandarin for the Taiwan version. I'd love to see it in Spanish and Japanese and ? 2. Still on Living in Data, the paperback comes out from Picador on May 3rd. We didn't get a tonne of mainstream reviews of the hardcover... I'm hoping we can rustle some more up for this release.

If you want a review copy, please let me know!

I had a new therapist in the spring of 2020. He wasn't a perfect fit, but I was making progress & feeling better than I had for the previous months. In our last meeting in early March, I told him I was having trouble trusting any kind of stability.

"What if it all falls apart?" He sent me a text message the next day saying he had a fever. He thought he might have COVID. He did. He was the first person I knew to get the virus.

By the time NYC shut down I was already in quarantine.

Here are a few book pairings for you to consider if you're ordering Living in Data in the next two weeks. Because the only thing better than a new book is two new books!

And the only thing better than two new books?

(You get the point!) 1. If you want to use Living in Data as an on-ramp into deeper discussions about AI & ethics, and about how data systems are entangled with labour, resource extraction and capital accumulation, may I recommend @katecrawford's AI Atlas:

bookshop.org/a/7000/9780300…

Beautiful morning for a NYC snipe hunt. Making out way into the marsh. A tonne of flotsam, which is a nicer way of saying garbage

A thread about names and memorials and the hard work of remembering:

This morning, my family and I walked over the Manhattan bridge to the Lower East Side, to write two names on the sidewalk in chalk: Joseph Wilson and Fannie Lansner. Both twenty-two when they died, both workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, both Russian Immigrants, both living in the same low-rent neighbourhood near the foot of The Bowery. Both killed in a fire 110 years ago today. 1/

I probably could have written Living in Data without using Scrivener but I think it would have been a whole lot harder.

I'm by no means an expert user, but here are a few things that I learned.

1/5 First, stop thinking about Scrivener as a word processor. Its most important purpose for me was as a set of drawers. I threw everything in there - notes and .PDFs and maps and photos and transcripts and ideas and old writing and... you get the idea.

2/5

In honour of #WorldBookDay , here's the best book I've ever seen.

It's called the Astronomicum Caesareum, and it's pictured here with Stephanie Stillo, the Curator of the Lessing J. Rosenwald collection at the @librarycongress. Published in 1540, the book is famous for its rotating volvelles that act as 'paper computers', which allow for scientific tables to be shown in a stunning way.

Wow wow wow! There are a pair of ravens nesting on one of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge! Being the clever birds they are, they picked the nest spot that is pretty much unharassable

Asked these guys where I could find the Flat Earther table. They weren't amused. Them: "It's mass hysteria, man!"

Me: "NASA is guarding the ice wall!"

OK, here's a thread about something that just launched which has been a large chunk of my life's work.

TLDR: FieldKit is a *fully open* and modular platform for environmental sensing. You can order a station right this very moment from fieldkit.org.

1/? At the end of the summer of 2013, @shahselbe and I spent two weeks days together in the front two metres of a flat-bottomed canoe. It was like hanging out in a small wheelbarrow.

We didn't know each other well before, but we sure did after. *

2/?

When my studio collapsed in 2017, I was consumed with thoughts of suicide.

It took me too long to get help, mostly because I didn't know how to admit to what was in my head without sounding weak and failed and broken.

#nationalsuicidepreventionday Anxiety, severe depression, planning ways to kill myself - none of these things fit into the personal narrative I'd constructed for myself. The narrative that success is happiness and that hard work in sufficient quantities will produce success.

#nationalsuicidepreventionday

Sioux football team, circa 1910.

1 of 100s of thousands of images in the @librarycongress collection with almost no associated information. Here there's a guess at a year, and the text written on the photo - listed as 'unverified data'. I think a lot of these neglected objects.

There's a kind of magnifying effect at work here - the things with the least data are the least likely to be surfaced in a traditional search. The least likely to be flagged by researchers, to be added to, to have their stories told.

It's #WorldOctopusDay, so here's a story. When I was about 22 I worked as a naturalist at the Vancouver Aquarium (@vanaqua)... As well as talking to people about the exhibits, putting on puppet shows, narrating beluga whale sessions, etc., I was on the dive team...