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Dan Stowell
@danstowell@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06I'm a scientist of sound. I apply machine learning to birdsong.
Associate Professor of Computational Biodiversity, at Leiden University and Naturalis (the Netherlands).
I also post food+drink here: @nomnomdan@hostux.social
and music here: @mcldnowplaying@ravenation.club
920 Followers
246 Following
42 Posts
Joined March 30, 2018
My website:
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I created a Wikipedia page for Azart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azart First time I've created a Wikipedia page in a long time. (The Dutch page already exists.) Will this page survive the Wikipedia editors?
RE: https://mastodon.social/@danstowell/116940768490006541
There's a joyous thread of absurd free-thinking artists in the Netherlands (especially Amsterdam?), and I think often gets forgotten. For me it includes Theo Jansen's Strandbeest, The Ex's music, Jaap Blonk's vocal extremes, and now August Dirk's "Azart" boat voyages! -- And... what else? #dutch #art
Got to say CONGRATULATIONS TO MY GREEN FRIENDS IN MANCHESTER! Happy news! Always remember that good parties do win! (even when the press gets obsessed with the xenophobes) The first ever Green MP in Northern England, hurrah! https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/27/green-party-wins-gorton-and-denton-byelection-in-blow-to-keir-starmer #ukpol
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Open Climate Fix's own evaluation is that their model predicts Dutch PV energy about 20% better than standard forecasts (that number is the normalised MAE averaged over various horizons withinin the day-ahead).
That's *before* they add cloud-forecasting to their NL model (coming real soon)
I gave an invited class to ecologists in Göttingen this week. In return I was given honey from the university orchard, harvested by ecology students!
Currently submitting a journal article with 22 co-authors. The best decision I made was to BEGIN the writing process by demanding they each fill in a form with their ORCID, email, and institution details! A simple afternoon of copy-paste ahead... (Instead of a week of pestering co-authors) #academicchatter #academicpublishing
This was a fabulous Bioacoustic AI week (@bioacousticai@sigmoid.social) here in the Netherlands! We welcomed our Doctoral Candidates and researchers to meet Dutch researchers for discussions, research planning, plus a desert hike, and a bat walk! #bioacoustics
"Can we talk to the animals? The ethics of using machine learning to decode animal communication" https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-026-10409-2 - I'm pleased that someone finally wrote a clear and complete ethical consideration of this emerging topic! #bioacoustics
New from me: "Torus embeddings" - a topological exploration in deep learning and CPUs https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03135 #preprint #deeplearning #topology
New paper from us: "A dataset of insect sounds from 459 species for bioacoustic machine learning", published in Scientific Data, led by Marius Faiß https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07123-4 #bioacoustics #datasets
20 wind turbines in the Netherlands ordered to shut down in daylight hours, after a young sea eagle’s death https://nltimes.nl/2026/07/07/zeeland-shuts-20-wind-turbines-overday-young-sea-eagles-death - notable here that the issue seems to be over the operator's decision not to install a bird detection system.
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Defining (or explaining) complex numbers from "i = √-1" is cryptic in extreme. Defining them via geometry-as-algebra and 2D rotations, with the above as a simple *consequence*, recruits our intuitions and generalises well. Magic!
Thinking about traditional moorish art, and the distinction between "geometric pattern" versus "algorithmic pattern". These visual designs are geometric. But definitely not algorithmic: humans make these by heuristically matching/filling the pattern, not by rule-following. In computer art we often conflate the two, since most programs to make these would proceed algorithmically. #computerart #MoorishArchitecture
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Two Crows Play in Snow on Car - 972897
I cannot stop thinking about this film I watched 6 months ago. "Neptune Frost", the most amazing imaginative scifi strangeness I could have wished for. Trailer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=acfBNIXovww When will I ever be able to watch it again??? #scifi #film
Call for papers: DCASE 2026 (28-29 Oct, Boston, USA) https://dcase.community/workshop2026/call-for-papers -- #DCASE is the workshop for audio intelligence R&D #audio
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@McWabbit@tenforward.social @chuuchuu@toot.community The Netherlands does have it worse than this shows, I'm sure of it ... I'm guessing *cancelled* trains don't show up in this data at all? There's been quite a lot of that. #trains
I'm super pleased that #xenocanto has launched this new feature: detailed annotations for its animal sound data! https://xeno-canto.org/article/318 Xeno-canto is the most valuable #birdsong/#animalsound archive. This will help even more!
Bandcamp Friday - let's do this!
If you want GENTLE then check this beautiful sumptuous album from Loma https://lomamusic.bandcamp.com/album/how-will-i-live-without-a-body
If you want UNGENTLE then this astonishing track from Manuja https://marujaofficial.bandcamp.com/track/kakistocracy #nowplaying #bandcampfriday
The Dutch are tying themselves in knots trying to police the craze for "fat bikes", a type of e-bike trendy with teenagers. The problem is that it's not really the fatbikes they want to regulate - it's the teenagers. (More precisely: their fast, social and risky biking.) There's no category of vehicle for that. #nlpol #fatbike
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@chuuchuu@toot.community Yo you should grab the croissant *after* the Paris metro has successfully taken you to the station. Doing it beforehand is asking for trouble...
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@poetaster Indeed, redfrik's sctoots were generally the most beautiful. Thanks for this reminder
#kitchendiary: Haggis flatbread (still working on my technique for this!) served with beetroot borani (a lively middle Eastern dip). #nom #vegan
I take it that McDonalds, Burger King etc are having crisis meetings about Ozempic? They must be. Looks like it could dent their earnings by at least 5% in rich countries.
(This toot inspired by the very informative #Kurzgesagt video about #Ozempic)
Who else will be at EUSIPCO 2026? https://eusipco2026.org/ (The European Signal Processing conference) Looking forward to it. #EUSIPCO #EUSIPCO2026 #Bruges
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@faro@sigmoid.social It (and related drugs) seem to be effective at reducing appetite, safe, very popular, and no reason to expect this trend not to continue. (Also, generics already available in various countries.) One statistic (whose origin I don't know) is that 8% of USAians have tried it. If it levels off at 10% usage, this could translate into a drop in fast food sales that they would certainly notice. And unlike lockdowns that reduction could be forever.
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Oh and there are multiple beautiful parallels between this (real-life) "Azart" boat, and Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo". Including, for example, the *macguffin* of the main character's obsession with opera! #film #fitzcarraldo #azart
@yaxu it's really not gatekeeping, it's more like "I've got these 300 macros in Word to format it just the way I like, and 500 macros to organise the macros, and I'd be lost without them"
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@gemelen@mammut.moe We'll be hiring some positions like that soon, at Naturalis (the Netherlands). Set a watch on their jobs page https://www.naturalis.nl/en/about-us/job-opportunities -- I don't understand from your text if you need the job to be remote. Not sure what the deal will be in this case.
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In the Netherlands, 34% of homes has solar PV. (That's massive! <10% in most countries.) 88% of NL solar capacity is on rooftops! Also lots of congestion on the electrical grid, leading to wasted capacity, many hours of negative energy prices, etc. #solarenergy #netherlands
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@Larvitz@burningboard.net Thanks! One tip to add: when your train is delayed and you miss a connection, your first task on arrival is to check for some other train at the station that is also late, with which you can make an "unexpected" connection. I've benefited from this many times in DB-land.
International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing (LOCO) (Lancaster, UK & online), 10--11 Sep 2026 (abstracts deadline: May 29th) https://lancaster-university.github.io/loco2026/