The data is from millions of bird observations from participants in eBird and the Great Backyard Bird Count. (That count ran this year from February 12-15).
Scientists at the Cornell Lab used that data to generate an animated map showing the annual journeys of 118 bird species. You can see how the routes change in spring and fall as birds ride seasonal winds to their international destinations.
If you want to know which species is which, you can switch to another version of the map showing species represented by a number. It is fast moving and a bit hard to interpret at a glance but you can start by looking for species like the Black-throated Blue Warbler (#16) passing by me in New Jersey or look for the Bobolink (#20), Solitary Sandpiper (#88), Prothonotary Warbler (#76), Lazuli Bunting (#55), Purple Sandpiper (#78) and Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (#114).
Back to the Future day came and went yesterday and I saw no sign of Marty, Doc or Jennifer in 2015. Another disappointment to those of us who want to believ in time travel. And the Chicago Cubs will not win the World Series as the second film in that series predicted.
In the original 1985 film, Back to the Future, they only had to portray 1985 and the past. That's easy stuff for filmmakers. In the second film, they travel to the future of 2015 and that's a lot harder to do. Predicting the future, which often focuses on technology, is tough work. Still, many writers and filmmakers have tried and will continue to try..
When George Orwell wrote 1984, he flipped his own year of 1948 and probably wasn't too worried about when his predictions would come true because he was hoping his cautionary tale might help prevent it from ever coming to be.
Since none of us will be around to post online about how well Clarke was at predicting 3001, he was free from criticism. In that novel, 1000 years after Frank Poole was sent out into frozen space by the supercomputer HAL in 2001, he is brought back to life. That future is full of human minds that are connected to computers, space elevators and genetically-engineered dinosaur-like servants. Good old David Bowman and HAL are now one consciousness and those damn monoliths are still causing problems.
When the first film version of Orwell's novel was released in 1956, that horrible future probably still seemed quite possible. Thankfully, when the 1984 film version of 1984 was made, the Cold War had passed, but many of Orwell's predictions seem to have come true (NSA, privacy etc.). I think Clarke sets a good model for writers of the future: set the plot in a time after your own death, so no one can call you out for your predictions to your face.
The day has finally arrived. October 21, 2015. No, it is not another Maya prediction. Today, we are finally at the point in time to which Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) travels in Back to the Future Part II. The future of that Robert Zemeckis' 1989 sequel is the now of 2015. (2015 also marks the 30th anniversary of Back to the Future.)
Though I don't expect the time-space continuum to collapse today or to find Marty, Doc, and Jennifer visiting us, I do expect to see them in the media.
Watch the trailer for that film and refresh your memory. A number of news reports have covered what the film got right and wrong about this future that is our present - including its prediction of a Cubs World Series win.
I'm not too concerned that we don't have Marty's self-tying shoes yet (though Nike has a real-life experimental version). And the filmmakers did miss out on predicting the Internet and mobile phones (but so did most futurists). We have been anxiously waiting for flying cars for about a hundred years and people keep trying to make Marty's hoverboard. But the film series did predict things like computerized fueling stations (though not robotic yet) and non-military drones.
The predicting business is tough. In many cases things predicted in sci-fi came true, but it took a lot longer than expected.
In Marty's Hill Valley hometown, the theaters are showing in October 2015 Jaws 19, in 3D, directed by Max Spielberg. Thankfully, the Jaws franchise was killed by the actual 3D third film. Max Spielberg (Steven's real-life son, born in 1985) has worked on a few films, but no directing. That gag seems a lot more like an insider director joke than a prediction. (After all, Steven Spielberg produced the film.) They are right though - Hollywood is in love with sequels and franchises in 2015.
We are actually scanning eyes and fingerprints for identification as they do in the film. It's on your iPhone but not ubiquitous in our homes. I still have a boring doorknob instead of the McFly family's scanner.
We have advanced more into being paperless than the film shows. The USA Today there is quite a thick stack of paper and the film likes using fax machine devices which probably are only used by government agencies these days. Marty's dad gets terminated from his job in a video call that is confirmed by a printout that looks like it was done on a dot-matrix printer using Print Shop.
Some observers have pointed to Google Glass and Microsoft Hololens as versions of the different high-tech eye-wear in the film with cameras, magnification, information and some bluetoothy way of connecting.
The film's 2015 is having a bit of a nostalgic love affair with the 1980s. That allows the set decorators to use their contemporary props, like a Macintosh computer and a dustbuster vacuum, as collectible items of the future. Marty visits a Cafe 80s where 1970s jeans, NY Yankees t-shirt and Chuck Taylor sneakers would not seem out of place. Future fashions in films always seem to be metallic, unisex and either very odd or more like uniforms - but those fashions never seem to emerge. I think you're safer predicting that the future will look more like today than going over to the other extreme.
The filmmakers had Marty using cash to buy things in 2015, and even with all our credits cards and merchants experimenting with alternate ways of paying, a $20 bill still works just fine.
Inventor Doc Brown says that he had some life-extension procedures - a full blood transfusion, hair repair and a new spleen and colon – and I have always suspected that rich people were doing those things already. Those procedures help Doc (Christopher Lloyd) look a bit younger in the 1990 Back to the Future Part III, which was already in the works when they shot Part II. For III, they took an easier path and went back in time again where we know what to expect. (Not that filmmakers don't often get the past wrong too.)
The movie missed our 2015 penchant for watching video on small screens. It does provide plenty of big flat-screens on walls with multiple channels displayed, and as advertising and even on window blinds. No Internet in the film but the McFly family does use a big screen AT&T-connected device for video calls that looks like our Facetime/Skype/Hangouts kind of video conversation. The screen also carries data about the caller (names of children, hobbies, food preferences) which have been part of the database facial recognition being built into devices these days.
You'll often see a rubric used in academia as a guide listing specific criteria for grading or scoring academic papers, projects, or tests. But the word rubric has at least three other applications and an interesting origin.
It can mean: a heading on a document; a direction in a liturgical book as to how a church service should be conducted; or a statement of purpose or function.
The word rubric has origins in late Middle English rubrish which was the original way to refer to a heading, section of text. Earlier Old French rubriche had the same meaning and came from the Latin rubrica.
Rubrica was a color designation for terra, to describe both a red clay or ink in the red ocher/ochre color.
Medieval printers had few ways to give emphasis to text on headings and the first character of a paragraph. Illuminated manuscripts could be quite elaborate and beautiful, but fonts were not standardized and there was no italic or bold. That left them to use color for emphasis.
Ochre is a naturally occurring pigment from certain clay deposits containing iron oxides, and has been used since prehistoric times to give color to dyes, paints and inks. Ochre colors are yellow, brown, red and purple. The most common in printing colored text was red ochre. In Latin, red ochre is rubrica and that is the origin of the word rubric as these red emphasized headings. Scholars who penned manuscripts in red ink were known as rubricians.)
This was taken further in the many religious texts that were reproduced. Those texts, used by clergy, included a kind of "stage directions" for the clergyman who was reading. These directions were printed in red while the text for the congregation was printed in black ink. This gave an additional meaning to the red rubric writing as instructional text.
As universities were created and books became more commonly used, scholars grading student papers would use red ink to leave instructions, suggestions and corrections on student papers. The practice has survived, although in some educational settings using red ink is now frowned on as being too negative. personally, I find criticism the same in any color.
An earlier version of this post appeaed on my blog Why Name It That?
, they only had to portray 1985 and the past. That's easy stuff for filmmakers. In the second film, they travel to the future of 2015 and that's a lot harder to do. Predicting the future, which often focuses on technology, is tough work. Still, many writers and filmmakers have tried and will continue to try..
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, he flipped his own year of 1948 and probably wasn't too worried about when his predictions would come true because he was hoping his cautionary tale might help prevent it from ever coming to be.
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would have to update 2001: A Space Odyssey's technology and interpret the visuals.
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, which was already in the works when they shot Part II. For III, they took an easier path and went back in time again where we know what to expect. (Not that filmmakers don't often get the past wrong too.)