{"id":15646,"date":"2015-12-05T09:39:55","date_gmt":"2015-12-05T14:39:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=15646"},"modified":"2015-12-05T09:56:50","modified_gmt":"2015-12-05T14:56:50","slug":"seeing-patterns-in-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2015\/12\/05\/seeing-patterns-in-this\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeing patterns in this"},"content":{"rendered":"

We live in an age of wonders! No, I’m not talking about the Pizza Hut hot dog stuffed crust pizza or Jimmy Dean’s frozen chocolate chip pancake and sausage on a stick. I’m not talking about the Hop Rod motorized pogo stick, or even the truly useful, countertop-saving Kenwood two-slice toaster\/radio.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/a>

Screenshot of Merlin bird photo ID tool from The Cornell Lab<\/p><\/div>\n

It all started with what became yesterday’s Photo of the Day\u2014a great bird photo submission but with no caption identifying the species–delivered up via a post on our Facebook page. That left me with a couple options. I could select another photo, but this one was really nice. I could ask Martha Foley, my go-to for wildlife and botanical IDs, but she was in a meeting. I could have crowd-sourced the question, but I like to get the POTD up early. I could even have reached out to the submitter via Facebook, but being a geek I\u00a0only do that interpersonal stuff as a last resort.<\/p>\n

So I was about to use the geek’s one true friend, Google, to do a photo comparison search. That can be a little chancy. For example, never try to do a photo comparison search on the Venus de Milo with “safe search” turned off. There are “photos like this” that you can never unsee again.<\/p>\n

But Jon Sklaroff had a better idea–ask a wizard, or more particularly, ask Merlin. And he sent me a link<\/a>. And that’s the wonder I’m talking about. Merlin is a genius bit of pattern recognition software and much easier to operate than a motorized pogo stick.<\/p>\n

It works like this. Drag and drop your bird photo into Merlin. Pick a rough location for the photo (northern New York) on a map. Click on the tip of the beak, one eye, and the tip of the tail. And voila, Bohemian waxwing. As a check, it provides several other photos of the species submitted in previous searches. “This is too good to be true,” I thought. So I started going back through POTD archives for other bird photos. Merlin knew them all\u2014saw-whet owl, wild turkey, osprey, great blue heron\u2014right every time. Some were in profile, some were head on, some were twisting around. Some were in flight, some perched. Wowsers!<\/p>\n

All of which explains why I am once again doing work on Saturday morning I should have finished Friday afternoon. Now I’m hot to get that app that recognizes bird species by the sound of their songs.<\/p>\n

Found anything totally wowsers in recent technology? Sing its praises in a comment below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We live in an age of wonders! No, I’m not talking about the Pizza Hut […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6128,99],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15646"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15646"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15650,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15646\/revisions\/15650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}