opusculus

'Toad he went a-pleasuring': Toads risk their lives crossing a Somerset road to mate. This year, a patrol rescued thousands:

Charlcombe Lane is closed annually for six weeks in February and March as volunteers patrol every night from dusk to help toads, frogs and newts on their journey to their breeding lake. This toad patrol is one of more than 200 across the country that take part in the national Toads on Roads project run by the amphibian and reptile conservation charity, Froglife. Across the six weeks, more than 50 volunteers on the Charlcombe Toad Rescue group spent more than 648 hours in high visibility jackets, armed with torches, buckets and special gloves, walking slowly up and down the road.
Toads, frogs and newts are carefully picked up and taken safely in buckets to five drop off points to help them on their journey towards the lake.

Awwwww, bless.

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A rather grimmer tale - modern high-tech version of 'ooops the hospital mixed up the babbiez in the nursery and sent the wrong ones home with the parents': Legal and ethical ‘nightmare’ after woman gives birth to stranger’s child due to Monash IVF mistake:

“The evidence of it being an isolated incident is really only because they’ve never had to check or disclose,” said Dawson. “One in 18 births are IVF-conceived children, [and] if these checks and balances are being missed as recently as last year, there needs to be more record-keeping and more information.”
Leading Australian IVF specialist and former Monash IVF director Prof Gab Kovacs said there were over 100,000 IVF cycles in Australia annually, so every few years a mistake is made. “There have been mistakes recognised in the past, it’s more often that the wrong sperm is used when the sperm and the egg are put together,” he told ABC Radio Melbourne.

More on the problems generated by MODERN SCIENCE!!! in this case: Genetic descent: a new challenge for the management of human remains in museums:

Over the past year, an increasing number of UK institutions have received enquiries from customers of commercial DNA companies about individuals in their care who have been sampled for ancient DNA analysis.
Typically, ancient DNA results are published open-access and the data deposited with online databanks.
International commercial DNA companies who focus on ancestry are now using these datasets to match their customers with archaeological human remains – and advising them that they are a ‘direct descendant’ of this past individual.
Some customers, curious about their ancestry, are accessing the publications and then contacting the institutions curating the human remains. Typically, these enquiries ask for more information about the individual and their archaeological context – a request not too dissimilar from the usual range of questions received by an institution about their holdings.
But these new type of enquiry poses several challenges – foremost, that existing guidance and advice about the management of human remains published by (among others) the Advisory Panel on the Archaeology of Burials in England, does not specifically deal with this issue.

Most institutions in the UK do not have a curator dedicated solely to human remains, and many do not have an archaeology curator.
Institutional knowledge about holdings and research activities has been lost due to staff-cuts, and less well-funded institutions have been unable to continue their membership of specialist networks or other professional bodies, who can provide advice and support.
The situation is compounded by rapid developments in the methods and reliability of ancient DNA studies, which means that without specialist knowledge and access to that scholarship, understanding the issues raised by these enquiries may be impossible without help.

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Dept, 'More Money Than Sense' x 2:

Influencers 'new' threat to uncontacted tribes, warns group after US tourist arrest:

Social media influencers pose a "new and increasing threat" for uncontacted indigenous people, a charity has warned after the arrest of a US tourist who travelled to a restricted Indian Ocean island.
Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, 24, allegedly landed on North Sentinel Island in an apparent attempt to make contact with the isolated Sentinelese tribe, filming his visit and leaving a can of coke and a coconut on the shore.

‘Rachel Reeves is making us move to Italy’. This person is an 'entrepreneur' with 'an MBA and PhD in finance' as well as being a reality TV star, and yet she is terrified that Italian waiters will somehow compel her to ingest pasta and pizza. (Apart from anything else, this suggests a woefully limited knowledge of the range of Italian cucina, no?) Awww, diddums.

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Did I post this before? Seized Books! An online exhibition:

LGBTQ+ books and censorship in 1980s Britain.
On 10 April 1984, Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise raided Gay’s the Word bookshop in London’s Bloomsbury.
'Operation Tiger' saw officers seize over 140 titles, worth thousands of pounds.
Bookshop staff and directors were charged with conspiracy to import so-called ‘indecent or obscene’ material.
But Gay’s the Word and their supporters fought back...

Lively discussion over on bluesky the other day about the folly of thinking that 'modern digitisation' is anything to do with 'preserving for posterity'. How we laughed hysterically as we beat our heads against the wall.

And in the history of media becoming defunct, I may have mentioning delving into the strata of my desk drawers, and in one of them I have a pile of old CDs. Some of these actually contain some kind of data which is, yay! still readable though some not very (old outlook files....)

But I had quite a lot of disks which turned out to be blank when I examined them. I'm not sure whether I had an intention of doing massive backups at some point, or whether it was just that they came in that size of pack.

So anyway, I thought, maybe I could go some backing up?

And at first this went quite well.

But then I hit a batch of disks which did not like the current system and would not be appropriately formatted so that I could burn files to them, sigh.

I think it would be rather foolish to invest in yet more CDs just to have Yet Another Set of Backups....

Also in the realm of 'you do not understand the meaning of the word "archivist" do you?', I had this spammity thing;

I came across [name of my website] online and wanted to reach out because we're working with other archivists that are offering information resources.
‍I’m currently working with a few archivists on campaigns that are getting their sales teams meetings with warm leads every month. We’re targeting people who need information resources using personalized email sequences.

Unless, of course, these are archivists who are involved in some kind of dodgy operation selling off choice items from their collections?