Five applications for the garden, a mole, two to laugh and another unequaled

It was a (other) black week for computer security. New vulnerabilities have been discovered in Intel chips, Facebook has reported a serious flaw in WhatsApp, hacking tools have been leaked by the US National Security Agency and Amazon has again had problems with notes and misleading reviews . Very good everything.

We comply with the announcement of this bad news
here and
right here. So that's it. We are Saturday, the body knows it and we are going to relax a bit.

With the exception of very special cases, we all love gardens and contact with nature. Otherwise, we would not have survived more than 350,000 years without traffic lights or asphalt. This is perhaps the reason why we are almost all dazzled by the scenery. They must draw something into the depths of our most primordial consciousness; we have spent less than 2% of our history as a species disconnected from nature.

Well, fortunately we did not stay in the caves and that the refrigerators, the tomographs and the vaccines are fundamental advancements for our survival, today I bring you some techno beads that I discovered these last months. Nature is very good with mobile digital devices, it must be said. I already made a list a few years ago. The ones I bring today are new. However, I will make two exceptions.

Aves Argentinas

The first is to strongly recommend the application
Aves Argentinas. It is a monumental field guide, with the 365 most emblematic species of the country. That's a lot, considering that in the city of Buenos Aires, with a bit of luck, we could see half a dozen species. A dozen, in the quietest and greenest areas. This is for Android and iOS.

Plantnet

The second, to mention the excellent Plantnet, a platform combining artificial intelligence and crowdsourcing to identify plant species. Its use is very simple. A photo is taken, for example, from the leaves of a tree and the system compares it to images from its database (provided by users). The more photos, the more accurate the results. In other words, the more people use it, the better; a clbadic of machine learning (
machine learning, in English). For Android and iOS.

I have tested it with several specimens in the last six months and it worked perfectly. There was one exception, a very rare shrub that arrived as a stowaway with ceibos that they gave me last year. It's a
Phyllanthus niruri, which I have been able to recognize only thanks to the people always anxious to
Infojardín.

The reason why Plantnet has not worked well with Phyllanthus niruri, I suppose, is that in this plant everything is very small and mixed: flowers of two types grow just in the middle of their minimal leaves. That, and I found it very difficult to get a good picture. However, once I had the data from Infojardín and checked not only the kind, but also the species, I uploaded the photo into the Plantnet database, which will be reviewed by the organization. Here is how it works. Oh, they have
a web version, so you do not need a smartphone to recognize the species.

Another very good application that also serves to identify plant species is
Flora Incognita, available for Android and iOS.

The tree, the map and the dogs

Apart from these two clbadics, there is a remarkable application that serves a lot of things, but above all to give us a bath of humility. This is called Lifemap. It's a huge project that puts names and information in the palm of your hand, if available on Wikipedia, from (literally) 800,000 species. Use the metaphor of a tree based on its phylogenetic relationships and trace the entire lineage of a particular species.
The full version, on the Web, has a million four hundred thousand species. When one looks for Homo sapiens and begins to grow, the vision takes the breath away, because, to tell the truth, we are a point in an incommensurable plot of living beings; and that Lifemap represents only the majority of the known species (about a million and a half). But it is estimated that the total number could be
between 12 million and a figure in the order of billions.

Unfortunately, this little point loosens the planetary tissue,
with potentially disastrous consequences.

Map of Life, for its part, lists the animal and plant species that could be found in a given region. Just touch a point on the map and then
Search here. The area is wide enough to include, for example, part of the Rio de la Plata and, for example, Caballito. Despite this, it is a very interesting educational tool.

Phases of the Moon, although from time to time, he asks us to update the commercial version (that bugs very little actually), he has a wonderful widget that not only informs the current phase of the Moon, but is spectacular on the home screen. Obviously, by touching the widget, the app opens and indicates the age of our natural satellite, the start times and sunset, the percentage of lighting, and you can further advance and backward in time by sliding your finger on the screen. impeccable

And these two will love him. It turns out that the same thing that is done with plants can be put into practice with dogs. Exactly, a picture of the dog is taken, the program compares it to an image database, and not always successfully, it takes the race to which it belongs. But, by chance, I discovered something very funny.

When I installed this application, I had no dog breed on hand. In fact, neither race nor any other clbad because it was in the newspaper. So I took a selfie, Dog Scanner scanned the image and after thinking a little doomed that I am human (thank goodness!), In 80% (alas!), "But something like a dog Danish and Swedish farm "(SIC). The company also offers an app to recognize cat breeds. Both are for Android and iOS. They will laugh for a while, although both are very annoying with the warnings and their comparison algorithm still needs to be tweaked. For example, with a tie, he compared me to a Cirneco del Etna (seriously) and a shirt of another color with an American Foxhound (ouch!). However, agree that it is not designed to recognize people;)

A pest

Finally, I leave one of the most useful applications you will get for your pots, orchards and gardens. He's calling
Plantix and uses image recognition to detect diseases in plants. At first, a doubt inspired me, but I tried it on my vine (a cabernet savignon that I offered Sebastián Ríos) and I detected it accurately, although I was not sure about it. this is a small sample, the Mildiú of the vine. He also recognized the plant species.

Plantix is ​​also a transcendental project. It has been designed to help millions of farmers around the world who do not have the financial means to access pest specialists and who depend on their crops to survive. This is a development of PEAT, a company from the Leibniz University of Hannover. This is only for Android, it offers a very comprehensive library of pathogens and is available in 14 languages, including Spanish. It takes a bliss.