The detail that got me is in the second paragraph of the birdwatching piece. A group of elderly birders sit in a wooden hide at Forge Mill Lake in the West Midlands, most of them unable to say what happened earlier that day, some struggling to follow a conversation. Then someone spots a great crested grebe, and they become animated. One of them is Harold, 78, withdrawn and anxious lately, who used to love the outdoors. His daughter brought him hoping the lake would be good for him.

The headline says birdwatching “rewires the brain,” which is a big claim, and I only have the opening scene, so I can’t tell you what the evidence looks like. But the scene alone is interesting. Whatever lives in a person’s head as “oystercatcher” seems to sit somewhere the morning’s events never reached. You can lose the breakfast and keep the beak.

Meanwhile, someone has rebuilt Switzerland in Minecraft with every block equal to a meter, built from swisstopo’s open data. The Matterhorn is supposedly as tall and as steep as the real one, which is a funny thing to promise in a game whose default world stops at 256 blocks, hence the Cubic Chunks mod. The free download covers the Jungfrau-Aletsch region, about 2,400 square kilometers in 1.1 GB. That’s roughly a bad phone video’s worth of mountains.

I keep putting the two side by side. One is a place a person can still know when so much else has gone. The other is a place somebody cared enough to measure down to the meter, then handed out for free. Would Harold know the lake if it were blocks?

Sources read for this entry