I finished the Introduction to Sustainability MOOC organised by The University of Helsinki. It is a text-heavy course, where the writing is convoluted at times. I still have to go through the references and read some of the papers.
Knowledge and ideas from the course I find useful in my understanding of sustainability:
Historical context of international sustainability discussions
Sustainability as a concept . There is an underlying mismatch in values and ethics between people that needs to be addressed before useful discussions about sustainability can take place. This paper in particular explains it very well.
We got a raised bed in a shared gardening area. The only gardening book I bought was De Makkelijke Moestuin 2.0. I got overwhelmed by the choice of tomato breeds. Bought some seeds, planted some seeds, got overwhelmed by the need for regular maintenance, neglected the garden.
I’m not very good at leaving the house. Even though the garden is super close to our place, I found it really difficult to “go to the garden” as an activity.
Now that I know this about myself, I’ll probably expand the edible things I grow indoors (it’s basil and a pepper plant right now). And in the future add balcony space or garden to my housing wishes.
Books read
The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf
De grote tuin by Lola Randl
The Song of Seven by Tonke Dragt
De brief voor de Koning by Tonke Dragt
The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love by India Holton
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
Somehow all women authors. Most of these were read on the Kindle, three were physically borrowed from the library.
The last three I read in the span of two weeks while I was sick. I didn’t read the blurb of Ornithologist very closely, and was deeply disappointed that the birds were made up magical birds 😅 I didn’t doki-doki once throughout the bird book. I found the romance in bird book and uprooted weird, with bad chemistry. I’m in the Uprooted camp of “this romance is gross and made no sense”. I did find The Golem and the Jinni enjoyable though!
Job applications
I applied to 27 vacancies, didn’t hear back from 4. 2 were for PhDs, others were a mix of UX/service/product/experience research/design and innovation-related.
There’s a strong feeling of “my Dutch is not good enough” and “I didn’t study the right things for the things I want to do now”. This isn’t to throw shade on past-Lilian, she did the best with the information she had, as I do now with the information I have.
Time keeps moving forward :>
Things that made me feel a certain way
Study on learning learned feeding behaviour in blue and great tits. “Here, we report a cross-fostering experiment in the wild where we transferred eggs of blue tits, Cyanistes caeruleus, to nests of great tits, Parus major, and vice versa, to quantify the consequences of being reared in a different social context, but in an environment otherwise natural to the birds”. It’s wild to me that a cross-fostering experiment was simply carried out. Big Watson energy?
I didn’t like economics as a field in high school. But now in reflection perhaps I just didn’t like the neoclassical economics that was taught to me. It has become more apparent to me that the models/frameworks/theories that are taught are just one way to look at the world.
I am taught and evaluated on how to understand the world through specific lenses. It feels luxurious and unpragmatic to spend time thinking about the way I think about the world. And to do it eloquently in all the languages I want to speak. Baby’s first thoughts.
Imagine waking up one day and realising you’ve been wearing your pants inside out your whole entire life.
A6 Notebook
I started this year in weekly planner from an Taiwanese independent publisher. On the 21st of May I bought an A6 lined notebook from HEMA and have been bullet journaling in that since. I know dated planners don’t work for me, yet I bought one because it’s pretty and I’m stubborn.
I like the A6, I like that it’s lined. It doesn’t feel daunting to fill, and it captures a smaller period of time than the A5 dotted Leuchtturms I was using before.
To do’s for this blog
The footnotes don’t work on the homepage
Archive
Checkbox lists like this one
Text formatting. Is it possible my font size is too big??!
Science wasn’t always so specialised. I found this heartening, as someone who feels like they didn’t specialise enough.
Travelling by wind
It surprised me how it only took 41 days for Humboldt to cross the Atlantic (from La Coruña to New Andalusia). Fair Ferry is planning a pan-Atlantic trip in 2025. If you’re doing a straight across crossing, it can take as little as 18 days (see this blog post).
Women’s magic, Thoreau, and Nature at home
Having recently finished Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, I couldn’t help but wonder if the revelations Humboldt made in South America could’ve been made at home too if he’d spent more time getting to know the people who knew and depended on the lands at home.
And then I thought of the saying in Earthsea, Weak as woman’s magic (as well as Wicked as woman’s magic). I always understood the difference between man and woman’s magic in Earthsea to be cultural instead of inherent. Man’s magic was (seen as) institutional and rational; woman’s magic was (seen as) distributed and intuitive.
Woman’s science. Small science. Backyard science.
Earthsea’s magic comes from deep knowledge of nature. The chapters on Henry David Thoreau and John Muir reinforced this thought, that surely if you spent enough time in nature that felt like home, you would understand the interconnectedness of it all.
The physical copy of the book I read is a library book. The book is from Centrale Bibiotheek Leiden; I had to reserve it and they transported it to Delft. Wonderful how it all just works. Big fan of libraries. Prior to this, I hadn’t borrowed a book from a public library in a very very long time. ↩
I wanted a website that shows birds who appear in both the Netherlands and Taiwan, and whether I’ve seen them (link to project).1 I’m happy I had an idea and was able to execute the idea :D
The lists
I used the Lijst van Nederlandse vogelsoorten from the Dutch Birding Association, and the 2023年臺灣鳥類名錄 from the Taiwan Wild Bird Federation to compile a list of birds that appeared in both countries. The data processing was done in Excel using =IF(ISERROR(MATCH(A1,$C$1:$C$714,0)),"",A1) to compare columns. This was done with both the English and scientific names, then fixing discrepancies between the two (e.g. English names differed on the apostrophes used, grey vs gray, apostrophes), deferring to the Dutch list.2
In hindsight, I could have used Avibase’s compare regions function. Although their list has a few more birds than mine (290 vs 281). Some of the birds on the Avibase list don’t appear on the lists I used3, some on my list don’t appear on the Avibase list.4
I wasn’t sure what to do with subspecies. Sometimes Taiwan and the Netherlands had the same subspecies (e.g. Tree pipit - Anthus trivialis trivialis), whereas sometimes there was no overlap (e.g. Eurasian whimbrel Numenius phaeopus - nl: N. p. phaeopus, N. p. islandicus - tw: N. p. variegatus, N. p. hudsonicus. Also while we’re here, N. p. hudsonicus has been split off into its own species and doesn’t even belong in this discussion!)
The Excel (which looks similar to this checklist version I made) was then converted to JSON using https://csvjson.com, so that each bird looked like this:
The JSON was then populated with bird photo URLs from Flickr using its API search method. I was fiddling around with different license arguments, but ended up only grabbing photos under CC BY 2.0 license.
Not all birds returned a picture, and not all pictures returned were great, so some manual search and selection was done too.
The JavaScript
I’ve never used data from JSON to populate a page before. I found this Medium article useful. Note that Firefox threw an “Uncaught SyntaxError: import assertions are not currently supported” when I used import so I fetch()ed the JSON instead.
List of birds in Avibase and not on my list: Cackling goose, Greater flamingo, Ross’s gull, Caspian gull, Red-billed tropicbird, White stork, Striated heron, Lesser kestrel, House crow, Mistle thrush, Siberian stonechat, House sparrow. ↩
List of birds on my list and not on the Avibase list: Eurasian teal, Common house martin, Black throated thrush. ↩
I’ve been watching recipes from this Taiwanese YouTube channel. There is often an elaborate preamble about the origin of particular ingredients and their etymology.
In this one (a recipe for egg in a tomato basket), he says that tomatoes used to be seen as poisonous! Small google lead to this Atlas Obscura article about it.
On that note, I really like Atlas Obscura’s font choices.
Freight text and Platform(? not sure the exact sans serif they’re using, this one has a different ‘a’).
Earthsea started it for me in 2019. I inhaled the first four books and came to the conclusion that I need to learn more names. I ought to know what I’m seeing and who is living around me.
Now I know more names, some in multiple languages, but there’s always more to learn. It feels like I’ve been living in my own bubble, unaware of others around me. But now I see (some of) them. “Who are you?” I ask. How is your day going? Was the winter hard?
I write in circles.
Today I saw birds I’ve never seen before and I want to share.
I first heard about kievits1 in a Taiwanese podcast about how kievits are good ambassador birds for non-toxic farming (無毒農業). I looked them up and was surprised to find that they are common here in the Netherlands. Thus were they added to my apparent “birds I want to see” list. Now I am someone who has such a list.
I looked them up on waarneming.nl recently, and there are sightings super close to me?! So today I sought them out. It was easier than expected. There they were! Interesting wing shape in flight. Funny little hair thing. Not a fan of crows.
On the way back, we came across a couple pairs of spoonbills!2 A placard stated they breed here every year. Practically my neighbours yet I’ve never seen them before. But now I have, and I’m happier for it.
I think about occasions and dress codes. About appropriateness and expectations. About being told how I should think and how I should dress, given femininity and the state of the world.
It’s so difficult to move through; sticky and viscous and heavy. Responsibility and long term goals and being considerate and considering.
In this household we use the word ennui, in a childish way.
