Via his newsletter, Ed Yong profiled for the Cornell ornithology mag: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/ed-yong-writer-bird-immersion/

> Yong, who describes himself as a “quite restless person,” extols the power of birding and bird photography for mental health.
>
> “I’m always thinking about stuff. I have anxieties. I have a lot of things in my mind. And when I’m out in the field looking through a [camera] lens or binoculars, a lot of that just falls away,” he says. “I’ve described it as being more meditative than actual meditation. It really does focus the mind. … You are putting all of your attention on this other creature, often a very innocuous, honest, unassuming creature. We all joke about like the little brown jobs, right?
>
> “So you focus all of your energy and attention on this tiny brown sparrow, and it is the center of your world, for this fleeting moment.”

Like he writes in his NYT column from last year (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/30/opinion/birding-spring-merlin-ebird.html // https://archive.ph/dlIqZ): "While birding, I seem impervious to heat, cold, hunger and thirst."

I feel exactly the same looking for bugs. One minute I am sweaty, hot, annoyed—then I spot a particularly interesting spider or mite and everything else disappears.

Also this photo—!!! See it full size here: https://buttondown.com/edyong209/archive/the-eds-up-on-doing-something/

#birding #birds #spidering

For a month now I've been writing articles in Italian and English trying to make people understand the differences between #scraping, #indexing, #crawling and #spidering. I didn't realize how much confusion there was!

The real problem is that actions with very different goals use the same technical words (which are also misused in the debate).

Have you ever read something addressing this mess?