petalouda

Start helping with citizen science projects

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

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I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

It’s multiply-checked by more than one person, so don’t worry about fucking it up because your concentration is fucked. Your input is valuable but not the only input.

I find Zooniverse very good, and it does Citizen Historian work too - I spent time digitising concentration camp records because a) families still don’t know what happened to some of their loved ones b) this makes the records available for historians without travelling to archives in person, which I can testify is *invaluable* for disabled historians and helps cut the need for overseas travel to do vital historical work.

(Thanks to everyone who left these in the notes! If you know more, put them in the notes, and I might add them! And ty @enbycrip for the fantastic addition that covered a bunch of details I didn't get to)

Apps/Websites

eBird (birds

Merlin (birds)

citizenscience.gov (big project database, US-based)

iNaturalist (nature)

MapSwipe (collaboration between several Red Cross organizations and Doctors Without Borders, update vital geospatial data) Smithsonian archives (transcriptions, many subjects)

Cornell Bird Lab (birds)

FoldIt (folding proteins)

Fathomverse (sea animals)

Project Monarch (butterflies)

In person

Bioblitz (nature) Species watch (species) Audobon Society (birds)

Also:

This stuff makes a huge difference.

Also, if you want to make the biggest impact on these sites, release any material with the more permissive licenses, like CC-BY. If you add a NC or ND clause, for instance, your photos cannot be included on Wikipedia or bplant or a number of other educational sites, because those license restrictions are incompatible with combining with copyleft material.

So, hey. You. Stop doomscrolling. Take a deep breathe. And if you want, try doing some citizen science or citizen history instead

I'm also going to especially promote MapSwipe, for those who want to do something tangible to help people now.

From their website:

Data Everywhere

Humans have been coloring fabric, fibers, and wool for thousands of years and we can use many of the same plants they used to dye today. Using these leaves, flowers, and roots carries on cultural traditions, deepens our connection to nature, and encourages experimentation and creativity.

Dye plants come in all types. Sometimes you'll use the entire plant, sometimes just a part of it, sometimes you'll compound dyes or overdye to create the color you're wanting. You can dye with kitchen scraps, local plants you can forage for free, or dye plants you purchase. Just be sure you don't use any toxic plants and always research before tossing plants into your dye pot!

Basic Dyeing Process:

Two main ingredients are needed to start dyeing: your fabric/fibers and the plants you're using to color them.

Your dyeing results will differ if you're working with cellulose fibers like cotton, linen, or hemp or if you're working with protein fibers like silk or wool. Your process will also differ depending on what colors you're wanting to create so research specifics for the plants you intend to use. You may also want to mordant your fibers to get deep and long-lasting color.

Mordanting: treating the fiber with a substance to make the dyes last.

Some plants are direct dyes and don't need any mordants to attach to the fiber: indigo (best on cellulose fibers) or walnut, cutch, safflower (best on protein fibers) are a few direct dye plants.

Metal mordants like aluminum, iron, copper, tin, or alum create a chemical bond between the fiber and the dye. This fixes the color so it'll stay put through washing, sun exposure, and wear. Metal mordants can also subtly or dramatically change the end result color which is great for experimenting or more precise color needs. I'm not experienced in metal mordants (yet!) but there's tons of guides online if this sounds like the right treatment for your needs!

Soy milk isn't really a mordant but a binder. It enhances color uptake and makes cellulose fibers act more like protein fibers, but doesn't form any chemical bond between the fiber and dye. If you pretreat your fibers with soy milk and wash them gently you can still have lovely colors for years. This is my favorite method because it's easy and cheap!

If you dye protein fibers you can also choose to skip pretreating. Wool and silk take up dyes pretty well without mordants, they just won't be the longest lasting colors. It works plenty well if you're dyeing for fun or don't mind to overdye your fibers if the color fades too much.

*Don't get too caught up in mordanting and finding the perfect recipe if you're new to this. Half the fun of botanical dyeing is experimentation, creativity, and not knowing exactly what colors you'll end up with!*

Preparing Dye Plants and Dyeing

The specifics on prepping and dyeing will depend on what you're using, but you can generally use fresh or dried plants as long as they're in good condition.

You'll create your dye bath by either simmering the plant material, infusing it in hot water like tea, or soaking it in water for a period of time.

The exact amounts vary but a good rule of thumb is equal weights of your dye plants and your fibers to get a good color. More dye plants = richer colors and less = lighter colors. The dye potential in a plant will also vary from year to year and even season to season. This all just means that whatever you dye will truly be one of a kind.

Once your dye bath is prepared you'll add your fibers to it. Most plants use a hot dyeing method where you simmer the fibers in the dye bath for around an hour or until you're happy with the material's color. Remove it from the dye bath, rinse it, and dry it!

Some natural dye plants to try: eucalyptus, ivy, onion, avocado, elderberries, calendula, madder, coffee grounds. I also have this post listing dye plants and the colors they create if you want to check that out!

Drying wool, silk, and hemp fabrics dyed with madder root (dark pink), avocado skins (soft pink), and red onion skins (green).

We've prepared a zine version of "Mutual Aid, the Commons, and the Revolutionary Abolition of Capitalism," revisiting the difference between mutual aid and charity and exploring the role of mutual aid in struggles to change the world.

https://crimethinc.com/zines/mutual-aid-the-commons-and-the-revolutionary-abolition-of-capitalism

Showing off the Arapaima I made! (Pattern also made by me)

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?

I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)

Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you- even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news... It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin- ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.

Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially

Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain. Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.

-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.

Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:

Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions. August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.

The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process. By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164. Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.

Or, less scholarly:

Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.

By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.

From Self Sufficiency for the 21st Century, Revised & Updated by Dick and James Strawbridge  + Some experience 

How to grow more food in small spaces;

The city garden.

There are multiple ways to use your space optimally, however small your garden. Think vertically, grow climbing beans against walls, lead your fruit trees in space saving styles. Place a worm tower in a corner and catch rain water in a container. Don’t forget the fauna by adding nectar rich flower in between you vegetables. Try feeding your local birds. If you have a little extra space try keeping chickens in a movable coop and you will have fresh eggs for breakfast. 

1. Fruit trees grown by being led often give more harvest and take up less space. A small apple tree can still give kilo’s of fruit this way.  

2. You can have a small wall greenhouse for more winter harvest. (Ikea sold some very cheap shelving units with covers (Hyllis). I have had mine for a year and they are in great condition in-spite of being outside all winter! )

3. You can grow food and vegetables in hanging baskets 

4. Raised beds are great for gardens without dirt. 

5. climbing plants are a great space saver. They even have small marrows and pumpkins that you can let climb. 

6. You can grow potatoes in a potato growing bag (In my best year this gave me 3 kg of potatoes from one bag. Nice to try! Right now I am growing potatoes in big containers. To give them more space!)

7. Window sills can become plant containers. You can grow lettuce, herbs and tomato in there. 

(Self Sufficiency for the 21st Century, Revised & Updated by Dick and James Strawbridge)

8. Herbs do great in containers anyway. And fresh herbs are very expensive in the store here. Try growing basil inside for example! Great results. 

(Pixabay by  drumpie1) 

9. Foraging in the city can also be a great source of food! Some cities have chestnut trees, brambles, hazelnuts, a seaside or a park with nettles

If you have an old pot it’s worth cleaning the inside as well. “But I’m filling it with dirt anyway,” you may say. Yes, but you don’t want your basil to be competing with any weed that could be leftover in the pot.

Look for a, “chicken tractor,” for movable chicken home options–you’ll get tons more ideas with that keyword.

Pollinators that are endangered and vital to the rest of your local environment (such as that regional park nearby that you might love visiting) will benefit from you growing native plants rather than the other stuff that may be popular. Calscape is great for people in California. Check if your area has something similar! You want native plants because they and the bugs that pollinate them have evolved together for millions of years, while that other plant from somewhere else has not. Lots of things can work in pots, too! Just adjust how much you’ll need to water them.

Make sure your plant babies get the amount of sun that they need! 

(Native plants attract native wildlife)

Shows standard colors and conventions for drawing topographic maps.

Principes du dessin de la carte topographique/Principles for drawing topographic maps. 1825.

Today, many scientists acknowledge the troubling attitudes that have long plagued research projects in Indigenous communities [...] But some Indigenous groups feel that despite such well-intentioned initiatives, their inclusion in research is only a token gesture to satisfy a funding agency.

Has everyone just believed this whole time that I bring it up for optics?

Everyone nods, "of course he mentions Indigenous people," because they believe it would simply look bad for me if I didn't.

In fact Indigenous knowledge is a constant topic of conversation and point of reference when I discuss my work as a scientist who uses Western science because my work is useless without it.

I work with endangered species which are endangered solely due to continual colonial violence against people and the land. I can follow the Western scientific method all I want and publish 100 papers on how to fix salmon populations—and get nowhere without Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty.

Indigenous knowledge is not an afterthought to reference as back up to Western science. Believe it or not, we can and should lead any number of scientific projects with Indigenous knowledge.

Cormorant fishing in Yangshuo near Guilin, Guangxi, China. Christian Vaisse

five (5) X chromosomes

only the left ovary works

produces milk but has no nipples. the mother just kind of sweats milk out their chest. nature is beautiful

was nearly called the “duckmole”

swims with its weird fish eyes and ears closed, hunting entirely by electroreception

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.