There Is Some Good in This World

I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study

after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines

et voila

GIVE IT UP FOR BIRD NUMBUH 5, THE CANADIAN GOOSE, Branta canadensis!!!!

bird 5/14, Bluejay, Cyanocitta cristata

birds 6 and 7: American Goldfinch, Spinus tristis, male and female

BIRD NUMBER 8, (yellow shafted) NORTHERN FLICKERRRRR, Colaptes auratus

genuinely made me start questioning my sanity around day 3, it's half the size the of the goose, WHY did it take me 4 days to finish??

Bird number 9: Red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis

my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on

this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg 🙏

BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos

the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise

ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!

aaaand another one bites the duck,

we're movin right along with bird numero 11!! The lady Mallard!! Anas platyrhyncos

power couple that they are, here's bird number 12 and 13,

the Northern Cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis

and NOW that they are complete, ITS GO TIME, in the next five days (library's closed for mother's day 😭😭) i need to have the GBH fully rendered, the names of the birds vectored, weeded, masked, applied to the wall, and then painted, plus additional cattails throughout. I may be able to get away with just getting the GBH done in time for the unveiling and then just have the names and cattails added later, but i'm gonna really try to get it all done in time. BUT, i have a plan. Part of why i take so long on these is because i really am just figuring it out as I do it lmao. there have been many a time where i am sitting on top of the ladder googling "how to paint birds" but I think if i take the time tomorro to do all that figuring out how to approach it beforehand, this will go a lot faster. I may also recruit some of my artist friends to help with the placing of the names... hrmm we'll see.

Anyways, shout out to the librarian who tracked down exactly the thing i needed so i could figure out where to place the highlights in my birds eyes, ur the real mvp

Bird number 14 out of 14,

The Great blue heron, Ardea herodius

thank you to everyone who reached out or got excited about this project, it genuinely gave me the fuel i needed to keep going. In total, the 480+ total hrs it took me to cover this wall pales in comparison to how long its expected to spend on there, hopefully imparting a sense of beauty and love for the natural world to the next generation and here's hoping i'm only getting started with these.

At minimum about 4.5 thousand people liked this without reblogging it.

Progress.

I've only heard about it in passing, but @derinthescarletpescatarian goes into more detail about it in this post. Basically, a lot of studies using MRI data to make claims about brain activity were debunked when researchers ran dead salmon through the MRI and saw the same "activity" as living human brains, suggesting that what those papers interpreted as brain activity was really just background noise from the machine.

I connected this to the microplastics study because they both revealed the same problem - neither sets of studies were accounting for background contribution to results. When people are involved, we use control groups to account for things like the placebo effect. When a machine is doing the measuring, you need to establish what "zero" looks like, and the best way to do that is run something through the process that you know for certain contains none of whatever it is you're trying to measure - aka a blank (alternative option is to run something that has an established value for what you're measuring). The closest that "something" is to what you're actually trying to test, the more likely you've accounted for any variation in your procedure. But you can still get "good enough" even if it's not an exact 1:1 (in the MRI study, a dead human would be theoretically better than a fish, but in reality it's highly unlikely the fish would have a different result than a human, and certainly not to the degree that would completely nullify all the data previously collected. Also it's a lot easier to get your hands on a dead fish than a dead human).

For the microplastics (or any other chemistry analyses), they *should* have been taking whatever solvent the samples were in (hexane, acetone, whatever), run it through the same heating, extraction, dilution, etc. as the samples, and run it on the instrument the microplastics were run on. This accounts for any microplastics the samples were exposed to throughout the preparation and analysis process, the containers used to hold or transfer them, even down to the solvent itself. And you can still get results this way! as long as the result from your blank doesn't overwhelm your sample result, you can still subtract one from the other to get good data (if your sample comes back at 7500 ppm and your blank comes back at 7000 ppm, your sample contains ~500 ppm).

(It's also important to repeat this kind of testing. Are your blanks coming back the same every time? Then you're probably ok doing a blank subtraction. Are they all over the place? You can't trust any result you get even if you blank subtract.)

I did some more digging but wasn't able to find any non-paywalled studies discussing the actual procedure. However, while this specific study¹ was released this year, another study² published from Germany in 2020 revealed the same concern (with 140 citations through the American Chemical Society), so there's a decent chance at least some of the studies we've seen around microplastics in the last 6 years were already aware of this issue and accounted for it. (Citations below the cut)

An antiviral pill has, for the first time, been shown to prevent COVID-19 in people exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus at home, according to trial results published today in the New England Journal of Medicine1. The drug could be a lifeline for those who still face real danger from the virus, such as care-home residents or transplant recipients on immune-suppressing medication.

if writing is a hobby and not a job for you then you can never “fail at being good”, because there’s no such thing when it comes to a hobby.

(I keep scrolling back up to this post so fuck it)

4lb jasmine rice ($5)

24 eggs ($4)

4cups butter ($4)

4lb dry beans ($5)

buncha bananas ($2)

4lb oats ($4)

2lb ground flaxseed ($4)

10lb potatoes ($5)

10 cans tuna ($10)

2lb carrots ($3)

jar of peanut butter ($2)

a lil treat for yourself idk ($2)

(Butter, on the other hand, can't be found for <$3/lb ($6 for 4 cups)).

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

you ever have just like, a really bad idea