Morocco has a nice set of birds - fun to encounter, for a European. Easy to get to know them even in the cities. Here's my hit list: Moussier's redstart - This comes top of the list because (a) it's the national bird of Morocco! (b) it's endemic to the Atlas mountains …
Morocco's street food gave me a lot to discover! Whether from a stall, or from someone pushing a hand-cart through the busy medina (market), I was surprised how many tasty things were commonplace there, and new to me. Here are some of my favourites: "Kalinti" . It's a chickpea-flour-cake as a …
This Kurdish lentil soup is lovely and smooth. Simple but nicely balanced. A handful of rice balances the lentil flavour nicely and the whole thing becomes very smooth (even without blending it). Thanks to the Asylum seekers' and Refugees Support Group, Nelson, UK, for writing this down, and thanks to …
Oven-roasted fennel is great - it's roasty, and yet still fresh and fragrant. This simple dish makes the most of it. We made this in 2019 and remembered it today! And it's as lovely as it is easy. Serves 2. Takes 35 minutes. 1 bulb of fennel 1 packet (250g) of …
Did you know that cranberries and rice are the 2 crops that can be grown on fully-saturated (i.e. damp) land? I learnt that this week from a colleague who studies how Dutch "polder" land can be farmed to absorb the most carbon. So I decided to try making a …
I've seen some great music played at some ace festivals this year. Here are my highlights! YoungRubbi - a punk/rap kid from Rotterdam, whose energetic, angry but inclusive live set that was everything you need! The circle-pit was full of people of all ages. Here's a highlights video you should …
I've been doing a lot of academic travel recently: conferences, project meetings, workshops, PhD exams. Luckily, I've been able to do almost all of it by train, even though I've been to more countries than I can easily count! Here I want to list these and make an approximate carbon …
"Cobbler" is a British kind of casserole made with a topping that looks like cobblestones. It can be savoury or sweet. I grew up with savoury cobbler as a school dinner. And the topping, is, basically... scones! Stew and scones, what's not to like? Here's my vegan version, a delicious …
There's an open letter circulating this week entitled "Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia" , initiated by academics at Radboud. I agree with quite a lot of it, but their demands are quite sweeping and as a result I can't sign this letter. My reasons, my response, are …
It's rhubarb season. Rhubarb is IMPORTANT. You need to know how to make stewed rhubarb, because (a) it's lovely (b) it's simple, BUT (c) there are some basic mistakes that people make. Here's my expert guide. Come with me! The key things you need to know are: Don't add too …
Dear editors, Today I saw some news about the Royal Society which made me very uncomfortable. As a result, I am afraid I will withdraw my voluntary reviewing work for Royal Society. I will not after all be completing this review for Royal Society Open Science. The uncomfortable news is …
I was concerned to see news of sonic weapons apparently used against the public attending a peaceful vigil in Belgrade . These are powerful tools that could ruin many people's hearing and their lives. I don't know the details of the protest, but I don't like the idea of governments dabbling …
Video of the year 2024: "The glymphatic system" This was an absolute eye-opener. If you've ever wondered about sleep, you NEED to know about the glymphatic system. It's a 1-hour special guest lecture by the scientist who discovered this whole thing. Fiction book of the year 2024: "Semiosis" by Sue …
The man in the little Turkish shop got excited when I bought a tin of coconut milk and a fennel. "Oh, are you making fennel soup?" "...No?" But then he persuaded me, telling me how he used coconut milk to make it creamy and rich. What I love is that …
"Stamppot" is the Dutch way of making a big hearty mashed-potato dish for the autumn/winter months. It's good to serve it with something savoury and "meaty" like a sausage, which contrasts against the texture and flavour of the mash -- but of course we want a veggie version. I invented …
Porridge is great for breakfast, especially now as the days get shorter here in the northern hemisphere. I don't usually favour Felicity Cloake's so-called "perfect" recipes but for once with the porridge , she gets it right. So here's my slightly tweaked (veganised) version, with a couple of details that she …
Imagine you have recorded lots of very long audio files. Hours long, at least. Gigabytes long, at least. You can store these in standard formats such as WAV or FLAC. You can share those via cloud storage too. But now imagine that you want to do data analysis involving random …
Training AI models, or running AI experiments, can consume a lot of power. But not always! Some are large and some are small. This week I've been using CodeCarbon , a tool for measuring the CO2 emissions of your code. CodeCarbon tracks the amount of power that your computer's CPU/RAM …
The idea that rail travel is "difficult" is hilarious when you compare it with eyes open against plane travel. I avoid flying if I can, and I've had fabulous trips to many countries by train and boat. Some friends say "Sounds great, but I couldn't manage it from where I …
Only recently, we discovered that you can make tasty flatbreads quickly -- and shockingly easily! This recipe is great for any time you realise you haven't got flatbreads/wraps/pittas/roti/tortilla in the house, but thought you did... So, this is the "emergency flatbread" recipe. Keep it simple. You can …
We've been asked the question: "Is using LLMs bad for the environment?" It's an important question, since it's a new technology that many are trying to find uses for -- yet it clearly uses a nontrivial amount of energy to run LLMs, which translates into impacts such as CO2 emissions. As …
I had a dream, that made me think that dreams work in some way like GANs. There are two components in the brain, playing a "game", and the game is creative but also adversarial. My dream was mundane: I was walking around the house of a childhood friend, and I …
We are pleased to announce a special session on "Signal Analysis for Biodiversity" to be held at the EUSIPCO 2024 conference: August 26-30 2024, Lyon, France . Please consider submitting a paper. Deadline for paper submission: Extended to March 10th 2024 Special session description This Special Session will bring together practitioners …
This simple millet and pulse dish is adapted from the recipe "chana dal pulav" by Vijaya Venkatesh. It's a delighfully fragrant fluffy indian dish, which can be a simple one-pot meal or can be an accompaniment for a nice fragrant curry (e.g. a korma, or kofte with sauce). It's …
Just in time for Dry January - we made it to 250! Two hundred and fifty alcohol-free beers, from 20 different countries, ranked and rated, in our delightfully geeky spreadsheet . To celebrate it, in this thread below are some of our absolute favourites: Brulo , a Scottish brewery, makes a fabulous range …
Hey you! Need lovely food? Me too! So here are our top hit new recipes we discovered in 2023. They're all vegetarian and more than half of them happen to be vegan too. Pick a recipe, try it out: Plantain and black bean burgers (PS I only used 100g flour …
Cover versions of songs can reveal the "quality" versus "flimsiness" of the songs themselves, especially covers that take the song into new territory. You know that already from some well-known classic songs - even in rock and pop where lots of well-known stuff might be a great song or might just …
In the spirit of the 2023 International Year of Millet , I went to the shop and bought some millet. But what sort of millet? The bag doesn't say at all what it is. Just "millet" (in Dutch, "gierst"). OK, we don't eat much millet in this country, but it's a …
This year at Tilburg University I launched my new undergraduate course: "AI for Nature and Environment". After a few different conversations I was encouraged to put some information online about it, so here's an overview of the whole thing. First let me address one thing: "AI for Nature and Environment …
This dhal has good flavours from spinach, fennel seed, and coconut oil. I based it on a recipe by Rafi Fernandez, but then completely re-worked it trying to use Krish Ashok's recommendations from his "Masala Lab" book for maximum flavour! Serves 2, with chapati and sides. Takes 25 minutes, plus …
I was really excited by the vegetarian food scene in Ljubljana , Slovenia - it's way more interesting than most other cities I've been so far. That's because there's lots to try, with modern vegan/vegetarian stuff going on, BUT ALSO there's lots of local flavour and regional cuisine mixed in there …
As we head into summer, I want to tell you about the bumper crop of new research papers we have from my amazing students and postdocs . I'm working with a great "decentralised" team of research students/postdocs at Tilburg University, Naturalis Biodiversity Centre, and QMUL. The papers I'll link here …
Since I'm thinking about ecology, philosophy, and multi-species coexistence, it was about time I read "Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene" by Donna Haraway . The book reflects a very wise approach to multi-species coexistence. I found the overall message a good one -- but weirdly, to digest the …
I'm re-reading "Down to Earth" by Bruno Latour (2013). I recommend it: it's a short, accessible, imperfect but thought-provoking piece of climate philosophy. It's only around 100 pages yet it offers some tools for thought, for anyone wondering about the fundamentals of how we can achieve a sustainable society. And …
I'm gradually discovering that every culture has its own "stupid chips meal" . (Note to Americans: he's British, he's referring to fries.) In the UK we love a chip butty (chips in bread), and we struggle to justify it. But there are many other hard-to-justify dishes hiding out there. So far …
ChatGPT (and the other GPTs) is an example of " large language models " that are making a big splash at the moment due to their unprecedented abilities at generating plausible text on demand . Of course it's far from perfect -- for example, many people noticed its tendency to make up facts. But …
A very simple loaf, good for a tea break - it's easy, only a handful of ingredients, and vegan too! I am told that it's a classic wartime recipe. I only used one tbsp of sugar, to keep it on the un-sweet side, so you can have a slice of this …
I don't know how I came across it, but I found this "decolonised" version of Settlers of Catan . ... Decolonised? Well, now that you come to mention it, I hadn't really noticed that Settlers is all based on this mythical idea of a "land without a people", a "virgin territory" which …
Did you know 2023 is the international year of MILLET ? No??? Well don't worry, no-one seems to know about it, though it was decreed by the UN. The BBC has a nice article about traditional millet in India . But neither the UN nor the BBC seems to be willing to …
I've been thinking about how our research team can maximise the effectiveness of their machine learning (ML) experiments. I'm thinking of it as maximising the "throughput" but not in the usual computer-science approach (parallel processing, SIMD, GPUs etc) -- instead, I'm trying to pay attention to human factors, the full loop …
This lovely cake is a nice moist vegan cake, made with plenty of zest and juice from a bunch of mandarins. It went down well with our neighbours! You can use oranges instead, or any orangey fruit, I'm sure. Serves 12, takes about 90 minutes. Ingredients: 4 tbsp chia seeds …
Here's my vegetarian haggis recipe. Inspired by this and this . I've only made this twice, so consider it a work in progress. But it came out well: Serves 4--6 people. You can do most of it one day in advance, too. 75g pinhead or steel-cut oats 50g pearl barley 150g …
For our group at Naturalis, it's a great start to 2023 because we recently welcomed two new research team members - two postdocs with expertise in AI species recognition: Rita Pucci and Burooj Ghani. Their work is funded by Horizon Europe under three different (but related) projects: MAMBO , GUARDEN , and TETTRIs …
I decided to pick some of my favourite research papers from 2022, NOT from my group or my collaborators. Here they are: Three good bioacoustics research papers from 2022: " Acoustic indices as proxies for biodiversity: a meta-analysis " - a very nicely-done meta-analysis, for anyone wondering about "acoustic indices"! " Automated annotation of …
Find me on Mastodon! This is me: https://mastodon.social/@danstowell I also have a couple of separate "topical" accounts, where I post food and drink here: https://hostux.social/@nomnomdan music here: https://ravenation.club/@mcldnowplaying I'm really enjoying it so far, it feels lively. I don't know how …
It's actually astonishing how much of the super-impressive recent work in machine learning is based on vector representations of data -- simple "embeddings" in which a data item becomes a coordinate in a Euclidean space (or at least, a metric space). I remember doing something related to that back in my …
Posthuman's "Requiem For A Rave" is, as the title tells us, very explicitly a contribution to that thing that seems to be becoming a genre - "rave-nostalgia", which looks back at 90's rave music often with a forlorn air. The most famous example of that mood is Burial , whose desolate soundscapes …
The Spruce Eats website has a guide on what to do with witlof (aka Belgian endive) with some really tempting suggestions. They're not giving full recipes, just ideas. So when I saw this suggestion: "Bake a witlof tarte tatin prepared with date syrup, aceto balsamico (balsamic vinegar), and thyme." ...I …
Kapsalon is a famous kebab-shop meal in the Netherlands . We've had a really nice vegan version where the kebab meat is replaced by braised celeriac, so here's our home made version! Very nice for a Friday night dinner. Takes 40 minutes, serves 2. 600g celeriac (it's one small, or half …
Orange roast celeriac - a good centrepiece for a roast dinner. Perhaps even a bit Christmassy with the caramelly orange flavours. (I was inspired by this veg space recipe which is similar but no orange.) Serves 2, takes 65 minutes. 1 small celeriac, or half a large one 1 orange (you'll …