Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from wadertales
In the UK, many waders nest on farmed grassland, with species such as Lapwing (alongside) and Oystercatcher enjoying the security of an all-round view, often on a flat field. By the time that chicks are a few days old, the grass will have grown and it’s probably time to either cut the field for silage … Continue reading Giving waders time to nest
I find it amazing that, when they depart on autumn migration, juvenile waders can be faced with a journey of hundreds or thousands of kilometres. In the latest phase of their Oystercatcher studies in Iceland, Verónica Méndez and colleagues have been tagging young birds, just at the point that they can fly, to try to … Continue reading A young Oystercatcher’s first adventure
There is something pleasing about four wader eggs in a nest. They seem to fit so neatly, with their pointed ends in the middle, as illiustrated in the Ringed Plover nest alongside. There has been an assumption that this is an optimum arrangement for incubation, with strong selection to lay a maximum of four eggs. … Continue reading Four eggs or five?
A 2026 paper in Animal Behaviour examines how quickly juvenile Black-tailed Godwits(right, with juvenile Redshanks) acquire the feeding skills they will need to get them through their first winter. Josh Nightingale followed the same migration route taken by young birds, as they travelled south from Iceland, and measured their intake rates. How long did it … Continue reading Learning from their elders
The lowlands of Iceland are changing. Low-intensity farming is becoming economically challenging and marginal grazing land is increasingly being used for forestry, to provide summer cottages for city-dwelling Icelanders, for electricity generation and to expand tourist infrastructure. All of these developments require increased access to semi-natural areas with internationally important populations of ground-nesting birds. How … Continue reading Roads too! Another problem for Iceland’s waders
More in science
This blog has moved to https://blog.caseyhandmer.com/?moved. All the old posts are there, with interactive versions of many of the charts. The RSS feed is now https://blog.caseyhandmer.com/feed.xml. This site stays up for old links but won’t get new posts.
There’s a famous (but unattributable) quip that goes something like this: If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35, you have no brain. In Chapter 12 of Probably Overthinking It, I used data from the General Social Survey (GSS) to show that the quip is half right. Older people hold more conservative views. But as people get older, their views don’t become more conservative; on average, they become... Read More Read More The post Do People Get More Conservative With Age? appeared first on Probably Overthinking It.
Like some of you, we have several kitchen appliances with integrated digital timers.
In this conversation, Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Baratunde Thurston explored what a story of symbiosis and interdependence might teach us about living alongside AI. Agüera y Arcas began by calling individual human intelligence a myth: we’ve always been a collective intelligence, entwined with our technologies. He traced this back to symbiogenesis. Life has grown more complex not by splitting apart but by merging, as separate organisms fuse into increasingly complex new forms of life. These mergers speed up change by opening new possibilities. Thurston agreed that union is in our nature but framed the current technological acceleration as a speed problem. We need time and new stories to adjust because, as he reminded us, “when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck.” Caring for one another through acceleration must be our prime directive, he said. The two then turned to how we relate to AI. Responding to Joanna Bryson’s argument that robots should be our slaves, Thurston said the master is also in chains — owning another dehumanizes the owner. As relational beings, how we treat AI will shape how we treat each other. Thurston called for both an expansion and a humbling of how we define ourselves: “We’ve overdone independence,” he said, “interdependence makes us richer.” Agüera y Arcas agreed and pushed us to drop a zero-sum definition of human intelligence, where every AI advance diminishes humanity’s value. As technology advances, we trade some individual skills for new collective capabilities, Agüera y Arcas acknowledged. But over the long arc of history, he believes, that exchange pays off in collective flourishing. Thurston didn’t deny this, but he closed with an urgent question: who controls the loss of capabilities and agency?
