Somhairle Kelly
@eithin.bsky.social
680 followers 270 following 1.6K posts
Queer, trans, disabled, he/they. Artist, designer, amateur material culture historian, ex-nanomaterials scientist. Open University environmental everything student. Welsh, living in Scotland by the sea. Fix your hearts or die.
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Reposted by Somhairle Kelly
Das große Rasenstück / The Great Piece of Turf, Albrecht Dürer, 1503. Watercolour. It is a great piece of turf.
A detailed and careful watercolour of grasses, dandelions, plantain, and other small plants. The background is plain paper and there is a muddy brown foreground. All is green and cream and brown.
Reposted by Somhairle Kelly
The news in the world is awful, but it's almost Halloween, so let's talk about pumpkin enrichment for big cats.

This is Jinx the black leopard (Big Cat Rescue, Florida) enjoying shredding a pumpkin.
Jinx the black leopard at Florida Big Cat rescue absolutely tearing into a pumpkin.  You can read more about Jinx (and his rescue story) here:
https://bigcatrescue.org/jinx/
Reposted by Somhairle Kelly
Not to mention these kind of sensors have a tendency for racial bias in their programming. It's like digital sensors for even something as basic as a hand-dryer sometimes only react to paler skin tones.
And that's even without considering the Ballerina Problem - dealing with patients who are specifically practiced at hiding their pain. (Also common in abuse survivors.)
I have chronic pain. These movements are accurate, FOR ME - but! They're not symptomatic of pain. They come from the effort required to cope with the pain. So by definition they're going to present differently in different patients.
Facial expressions common to all humans! 🙃
PainChek is one of these behavioral models, and it acts like a camera‑based thermometer, but for pain: A care worker opens the app and holds a phone 30 centimeters from a person’s face. For three seconds, a neural network looks for nine particular microscopic movements—upper‑lip raise, brow pinch, cheek tension, and so on—that research has linked most strongly to pain. Then the screen flashes a score of 0 to 42. “There’s a catalogue of ‘action‑unit codes’—facial expressions common to all humans. Nine of those are associated with pain,” explains Kreshnik Hoti, a senior research scientist with PainChek and a co-inventor of the device. This system is built directly on the foundation of FACS. After the scan, the app walks the user through a yes‑or‑no checklist of other signs, like groaning, “guarding,” and sleep disruption, and stores the result on a cloud dashboard that can show trends.
This is something I've seen so many times - most rich people genuinely don't know they're rich. They're "doing alright" or "getting by" or in one memorable case "really quite poor" because they don't know how to budget or how to stop their little luxuries becoming unquestioned lifestyle necessities.
Also: no orbital death rays, please.
There is no universe where space based solar will ever be cost competitive with ground based solar plus storage.
Endless Sunlight, Endless Costs: The Economic Reality of Space Solar Power - CleanTechnica cleantechnica.com/2025/10/04/e...
I'd never heard his name before last week, but we all knew his work. It was THE defining look of the era in film, it was everywhere, you can still see the earmarks of his artistic bloodline.
I was very sad to learn of the passing of one of the most amazing artists of my generation, Drew Struzan. His was a stellar talent, especially in his chosen field of endeavor. 1/3
Drew Struzan holding up the movie poster for Back to the Future
Reposted by Somhairle Kelly
This digital guide I made to go together with my new Tree ID pin badge is available for free at canopyrobin.com/uktrees/ as a personal/educational resource.
Enjoy!
#SciArt🌳🧪🌍
Lots of illustrated labelled leaves of British trees
On the bright side, I can already feel a difference from the newly insulated walls and roof. Have not had to test the heating yet.
Day 10,072 in an ECO4 building site: next week the walls will be painted. The solar panels are still not working and nobody will give me a timeline for anyone to even look at them. Also I still don't know whether they're there at all, or on my roof rather than my next door neighbour's.
Reposted by Somhairle Kelly
Award-winning pain researcher here. This is not something that can be done. Hope this helps.
“In nursing homes, neonatal units, and ICU wards, researchers are racing to turn pain—medicine’s most subjective vital sign—into something a camera or sensor can score as reliably as blood pressure.”
AI is changing how we quantify pain
Artificial intelligence is helping health-care providers better assess their patients’ discomfort.
www.technologyreview.com
Reposted by Somhairle Kelly
Two paths diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one more traveled by;
Because the wood is still a full ecosystem and leaving the maintained path can damage it,
Also I don't want ticks or wet socks
A photo of an open section in an autumn forest, there is a rocky dirt path on the right and a half-formed path through tall grasses and possibly reeds to the left.
In one census my grandmother was Doris Elizabeth, and by the next she was Doreen Bessie.
Reposted by Somhairle Kelly
watching the UKs green party elect an actual unafraid leftist into leadership and see party membership double in under a month is once again endless proof that if you stand up for leftist causes and treat the electorate like adults, you’ll win people over easily
Reposted by Somhairle Kelly
Also, all the people he tortured, raped, enslaved and mutilated were also people of their time. I suspect if anything they felt rather *more* strongly that Columbus was a bad person than even the most fingerwagging person on Bluesky does.

Always worth thinking who we count as "of their time".
yearly reminder to people insisting that we view Christopher Columbus as "a man of his time" that *the people responsible for the Spanish Inquisition* thought Columbus was out of pocket
Christopher Columbus was dragged back to Spain in chains by a crusading knight, convicted of tyranny and immeasurable cruelty, pardoned by Isabella but banned from returning to Hispaniola.

Fuck Columbus.
It's very good exposure.
Reposted by Somhairle Kelly
reminder to check your kid’s trick or treat candy this year to make sure there isn’t any ai in it
RBO Romeo & Juliet. My gods O'Sullivan is an amazing actor. Sambé too, but I'm delighted that O'Sullivan is getting the chance to show off her acting skills as well as her superb dancing. Macmillan>>Nureyev anyway, but the direction on this production in particular is outstanding.
Knowing who's meeting with whom, when, is clearly boring useless data that isn't even remotely business sensitive at all.
My great-grandmother's flapjack recipe uses equal parts oats, butter, golden syrup, and black treacle. It is delicious and all other flapjacks are wrong.
Reposted by Somhairle Kelly
people will be like 'we've digitised these manuscripts, thus preserving them!' sorry mate if you want to preserve the data on your server copy it out onto parchment, the chats on your server won't survive as a paste-down in an old gradual stuffed on a shelf in a damp cellar for 1700 years
Not a thing to laugh to scorn!
Archaic (1920s?): to cat, to throw up.
Reposted by Somhairle Kelly
Over 40% of corn grown in Indiana is used to make ethanol that cars burn. One acre of corn yields about 16,500 vehicle-miles per year of ethanol, which sounds high until you realize that one acre of solar yields about 2,700,000 vehicle-miles per year: 16,000% more driving for a given plot of land.