Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds

academy.allaboutbirds.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 33 posts

Re: Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds

#21

Post by ghaff »

a1o wrote: post #14

The visual map that expands to short descriptions with the sounds, gives me nostalgic memories for Microsoft Encarta. Is there anything as fun and interactive that is available today that could be used by kids? Wikipedia is great for adults but it’s just too much information and it’s not packaged in short and visual focus of Microsoft Encarta of the old times. The other cool thing of MS Encarta is it wasn’t too big,…

Microsoft had a lot of CD sets back in the day when there was bit of wonder that you could have all this stuff on your local computer. There was a lot of things related to music, maybe natural history, etc.

Re: Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds

#23

Post by sib »

snarfy wrote: post #3

If you haven't tried it their Merlin app is pretty fantastic.

And their eBird app! A masterpiece of design for a user base that they deeply understand. Something of a learning curve, but extremely efficient and useful for advanced / expert users.

Re: Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds

#25

Post by SyneRyder »

In case it isn't clear, the wall here is a representation of the actual wall at the Visitor Center at the Cornell Lab Of Ornithology. They also have a live webcam of their bird feeder, that is literally just around the corner from this wall:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x10vL6_47Dw

It's a really pretty place to visit, with 5 miles of hiking trails around it. If you get a chance to visit Ithaca, it's worth taking the time to visit:

https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/

Re: Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds

#27

Post by xnx »

sib wrote: post #23
snarfy wrote: post #3

If you haven't tried it their Merlin app is pretty fantastic.

And their eBird app! A masterpiece of design for a user base that they deeply understand. Something of a learning curve, but extremely efficient and useful for advanced / expert users.

Does it make sense that Merlin and eBird are separate apps? This confuses me.

Re: Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds

#28

Post by Hussell »

SyneRyder wrote: post #25

In case it isn't clear, the wall here is a representation of the actual wall at the Visitor Center at the Cornell Lab Of Ornithology. They also have a live webcam of their bird feeder, that is literally just around the corner from this wall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x10vL6_47Dw It's a really pretty place to visit, with 5 miles of hiking trails around it. If you get a chance to visit Ithaca, it's worth taking t…

Because it isn't clear:

There's one bird on this mural from each of the 243 taxonomic families. That's why there are a lot of unfamiliar species: because taxonomic categories are usually very unbalanced, with a lot which contain only a handful of species, and a few which contain the majority.

The birds on the mural are life-size. The ostrich is about 7.5 feet / 2.3m tall.

One question I have: what's the map projection?

Re: Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds

#29

Post by The_Blade »

traceroute66 wrote: post #19
a1o wrote: post #14

The visual map that expands to short descriptions with the sounds, gives me nostalgic memories for Microsoft Encarta. Is there anything as fun and interactive that is available today that could be used by kids? Wikipedia is great for adults but it’s just too much information and it’s not packaged in short and visual focus of Microsoft Encarta of the old times. The other cool thing of MS Encarta is it wasn’t too big,…

> gives me nostalgic memories for Microsoft Encarta Those were the days ! A bit like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? which used to ship with a physical almanac alongside the game disks.

now i have the lyrics to the theme song from the TV show in my head

given the right group and timing that rockapella would totally play at karaoke

Re: Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds

#30

Post by The_Blade »

Dead3 wrote: post #20

Neat concept but looks vibecoded/authored by someone who does not know web programming. Many HTML and JS errors. Code is a mess. jQuery, angular, document.write, modernizr. Why? Could be done at 5% of codebase size, with cleaner code, no var, better error handling ($http calls use .success(...), no zero .error()/.catch() handlers).

Neat comment but looks prompted/authored by someone who does not know Bird Law
Post reply on HN