mcld.co.uk blog

Tea grown in the Netherlands!

Morocco has a nice set of birds - fun to encounter, for a European.

Morocco's street food gave me a lot to discover!

This Kurdish lentil soup is lovely and smooth.

Oven-roasted fennel is great - it's roasty, and yet still fresh and fragrant.

Did you know that cranberries and rice are the 2 crops that can be grown on fully-saturated (i.e. damp) land?

I've seen some great music played at some ace festivals this year.

I've been doing a lot of academic travel recently: conferences, project meetings, workshops, PhD exams.

"Cobbler" is a British kind of casserole made with a topping that looks like cobblestones.

There's an open letter circulating this week entitled "Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia", initiated by academics at Radboud.

It's rhubarb season.

Dear editors, Today I saw some news about the Royal Society which made me very uncomfortable.

I was concerned to see news of sonic weapons apparently used against the public attending a peaceful vigil in Belgrade.

Video of the year 2024: "The glymphatic system" This was an absolute eye-opener.

The man in the little Turkish shop got excited when I bought a tin of coconut milk and a fennel.

"Stamppot" is the Dutch way of making a big hearty mashed-potato dish for the autumn/winter months.

Porridge is great for breakfast, especially now as the days get shorter here in the northern hemisphere.

Imagine you have recorded lots of very long audio files.

Training AI models, or running AI experiments, can consume a lot of power.

The idea that rail travel is "difficult" is hilarious when you compare it with eyes open against plane travel.

Only recently, we discovered that you can make tasty flatbreads quickly -- and shockingly easily!

We've been asked the question: "Is using LLMs bad for the environment?"

I had a dream, that made me think that dreams work in some way like GANs.

We are pleased to announce a special session on "Signal Analysis for Biodiversity" to be held at the EUSIPCO 2024 conference: August 26-30 2024, Lyon, France.

This simple millet and pulse dish is adapted from the recipe "chana dal pulav" by Vijaya Venkatesh.

Just in time for Dry January - we made it to 250!

Hey you!

Cover versions of songs can reveal the "quality" versus "flimsiness" of the songs themselves, especially covers that take the song into new territory.

In the spirit of the 2023 International Year of Millet, I went to the shop and bought some millet.

This year at Tilburg University I launched my new undergraduate course: "AI for Nature and Environment".

This dhal has good flavours from spinach, fennel seed, and coconut oil.

I was really excited by the vegetarian food scene in Ljubljana, Slovenia - it's way more interesting than most other cities I've been so far.

As we head into summer, I want to tell you about the bumper crop of new research papers we have from my amazing students and postdocs.

Since I'm thinking about ecology, philosophy, and multi-species coexistence, it was about time I read "Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene" by Donna Haraway.

I'm re-reading "Down to Earth" by Bruno Latour (2013).

I'm gradually discovering that every culture has its own "stupid chips meal".

ChatGPT (and the other GPTs) is an example of "large language models" that are making a big splash at the moment due to their unprecedented abilities at generating plausible text on demand.

A very simple loaf, good for a tea break - it's easy, only a handful of ingredients, and vegan too!

I don't know how I came across it, but I found this "decolonised" version of Settlers of Catan. ...

Did you know 2023 is the international year of MILLET?

I've been thinking about how our research team can maximise the effectiveness of their machine learning (ML) experiments.

This lovely cake is a nice moist vegan cake, made with plenty of zest and juice from a bunch of mandarins.

Here's my vegetarian haggis recipe.

For our group at Naturalis, it's a great start to 2023 because we recently welcomed two new research team members - two postdocs with expertise in AI species recognition: Rita Pucci and Burooj Ghani.

I decided to pick some of my favourite research papers from 2022, NOT from my group or my collaborators.

Find me on Mastodon!

It's actually astonishing how much of the super-impressive recent work in machine learning is based on vector representations of data -- simple "embeddings" in which a data item becomes a coordinate in a Euclidean space (or at least, a metric space).

Posthuman's "Requiem For A Rave" is, as the title tells us, very explicitly a contribution to that thing that seems to be becoming a genre - "rave-nostalgia", which looks back at 90's rave music often with a forlorn air.

The Spruce Eats website has a guide on what to do with witlof (aka Belgian endive) with some really tempting suggestions.

Kapsalon is a famous kebab-shop meal in the Netherlands.