In case it isn't clear, the wall here is a representation of the actual wall at the Visitor Center at the Cornell Lab Of Ornithology. They also have a live webcam of their bird feeder, that is literally just around the corner from this wall:
It's a really pretty place to visit, with 5 miles of hiking trails around it. If you get a chance to visit Ithaca, it's worth taking the time to visit:
The visual map that expands to short descriptions with the sounds, gives me nostalgic memories for Microsoft Encarta.
Is there anything as fun and interactive that is available today that could be used by kids? Wikipedia is great for adults but it’s just too much information and it’s not packaged in short and visual focus of Microsoft Encarta of the old times. The other cool thing of MS Encarta is it wasn’t too big, it was finite, you could exhaust one topic and then go explore something else, it wasn’t infinite rabbit hole.
traceroute66 1 hours ago [-]
> gives me nostalgic memories for Microsoft Encarta
Those were the days !
A bit like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? which used to ship with a physical almanac alongside the game disks.
ghaff 59 minutes ago [-]
Microsoft had a lot of CD sets back in the day when there was bit of wonder that you could have all this stuff on your local computer. There was a lot of things related to music, maybe natural history, etc.
snarfy 3 hours ago [-]
If you haven't tried it their Merlin app is pretty fantastic.
sib 22 minutes ago [-]
And their eBird app! A masterpiece of design for a user base that they deeply understand. Something of a learning curve, but extremely efficient and useful for advanced / expert users.
whall6 2 hours ago [-]
Highly highly recommend. I use it at least once a week and have done so for several years. My daughter loves scrolling through all the local birds and playing the sounds they make.
bobbiechen 3 hours ago [-]
I've used Merlin for a while and I'm still impressed by Merlin's sound identification, it continues to inspire me.
The sound and visual recognition around a lot of things is pretty impressive and I imagine it will work its way into less obstrusive AR in a lot of ways over time.
dd8601fn 2 hours ago [-]
Wow. I just tried it and it worked like magic. Thanks for mentioning that.
drcongo 2 hours ago [-]
It's Pokemon for old people, I love it and use it at least once a day. Personal best for a dog walk - 23 different birds, personal best for sitting in the garden drinking my morning coffee - 17 birds.
My family got a little tired of me using it on holiday in Portugal, but in my defence there were a lot of new birds I needed to add to my collection.
mkatx 2 hours ago [-]
Nice! I haven't tried Merlin, but I been meaning to set it up in the yard.
I've been using Seek on my phone, which is part of inatural. Similar thing, but pictures and most life, not just birds. That is totally Pokemon for non-pokemon peeps.. gotta bust out my phone every time I find something I haven't 'caught' yet.
njmike 59 minutes ago [-]
Am I wrong... no eagle?
Hussell 6 minutes ago [-]
There's one bird per taxonomic family. Eagles, Hawks, and Kites are all in a single family, so there's just one: a Black-and-white Hawk-eagle, in Mexico.
Dead3 1 hours ago [-]
Neat concept but looks vibecoded/authored by someone who does not know web programming. Many HTML and JS errors. Code is a mess. jQuery, angular, document.write, modernizr. Why?
Could be done at 5% of codebase size, with cleaner code, no var, better error handling ($http calls use .success(...), no zero .error()/.catch() handlers).
adjejmxbdjdn 3 hours ago [-]
It’s funny how they don’t include the most populous bird, the chicken. The cognitive dissonance is probably too strong.
bwestergard 3 hours ago [-]
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology studies wild birds.
radiorental 2 hours ago [-]
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology hasn't been to the island of Kauai
eichin 1 hours ago [-]
The description of Gallus Gallus ("Red Junglefowl" but also described as the "original chicken") mentions it being an introduced species in Hawaii (but also that it's interbred with "feral and domestic chickens" so it's hard to identify specifically.)
xhkkffbf 1 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of semi-wild and semi-domesticated chickens in the Caribbean and Florida. I still want to eat the rooster who woke me up from a great dream at 3am.
ghaff 2 hours ago [-]
Well, yes, although the ag school at Cornell has plenty of domesticated animals on campus.
BigTTYGothGF 2 hours ago [-]
Could you expand on what the dissonance is?
asibahi 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t understand this comment. Are you implying omitting the chicken is some sort of conspiracy?
techterrier 2 hours ago [-]
birds arent real
Rendered at 16:38:25 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
“all about birds” indeed!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x10vL6_47Dw
It's a really pretty place to visit, with 5 miles of hiking trails around it. If you get a chance to visit Ithaca, it's worth taking the time to visit:
https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/
Is there anything as fun and interactive that is available today that could be used by kids? Wikipedia is great for adults but it’s just too much information and it’s not packaged in short and visual focus of Microsoft Encarta of the old times. The other cool thing of MS Encarta is it wasn’t too big, it was finite, you could exhaust one topic and then go explore something else, it wasn’t infinite rabbit hole.
Those were the days !
A bit like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? which used to ship with a physical almanac alongside the game disks.
I wrote about it last year: https://digitalseams.com/blog/what-birdsong-and-backends-can...
My family got a little tired of me using it on holiday in Portugal, but in my defence there were a lot of new birds I needed to add to my collection.
I've been using Seek on my phone, which is part of inatural. Similar thing, but pictures and most life, not just birds. That is totally Pokemon for non-pokemon peeps.. gotta bust out my phone every time I find something I haven't 'caught' yet.
Could be done at 5% of codebase size, with cleaner code, no var, better error handling ($http calls use .success(...), no zero .error()/.catch() handlers).