Martin Kroeker
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kroekermartin.bsky.social
Martin Kroeker
@kroekermartin.bsky.social
130 followers 53 following 1.5K posts
Chemist drifted off into programming and mechanical CAD; Acting OpenBLAS maintainer. Always doing things I know too little about.
📍Germany
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kroekermartin.bsky.social
This could have been a much better picture if I hadn't startled the small colleague who was already admiring the mushroom
a forest floor covered in old leaves, pine twigs and needles, with s big fly agaric mushroom in the bottom right and a small frog in the top left
October 18, 2025 at 9:24 AM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
me too :) but shaky freehand phone for what could be a decent stacked image
October 11, 2025 at 1:17 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
Video of the DB Class 23 steam locomotive pulling a heritage train (upload limit here appears to be a bit below the advertised 100mb still?)
September 7, 2025 at 5:12 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
German Class 23 on the Three Lakes line at Schluchsee earlier today
A lake front with a steam train crossing a bridge in the background (a row of shrubs and a stretch of lawn separates the lakeside from a paved footpath with people and dogs walking) Front view of the steam locomotive with black body and red undercarriage (houses in the background) A heritage train with green passenger carriages and a white freight car right behind its black-and-red steam locomotive, standing on its track between a lake embankment in the foreground and a rural Black Forest town with a bulbous church spire in the background
September 7, 2025 at 4:58 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
#BraggYourPattern Fiona Tan's "Het Grote Raam" in the (secularized) Grote Kerk of Alkmaar🇳🇱
A stained-glass church window consisting of colorful caleidoscopic squares, predominantly yellow and green at the bottom, red tones in the middle and blues towards the top, culminating in dark blue in the tracery. (A chandelier hands to the right of the window, modern light fixtures to its left) closer view of the stained-glass panels closer view of 4x5 squares, reds and yellowsvfrom the lower left of the widow closer view of 4x5 squares from the lower right of the window, yellows giving way to orange and red/blue
August 27, 2025 at 11:17 AM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
Liminal spaces - inside an Art Nouveau water tower
A narrow stone staircase with black metal handrails leading up along the bare quarry stone wall inside a round tower, and a large vertical pipe to the left, between the stairs and a window a dimly lit room with several square concrete pillars, bare except for several large diameter pipes in the background and one running towards the viewer. A narrow spiral staircase made of black metal extends from the center of the room through a square opening in the ceiling another barren storey with a square concrete pillar in the center, and a concrete staircase winding along the quarry stone wall, light flooding in from a small window on the right The watertower seen from outside against a blue sky. Basalt quarry stone masonry, four windows aligned vertically under the decagonal tank with contrasting white and light brown paint. The black dome roof features a continuous row of windows
August 12, 2025 at 5:06 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
getting stalked by a stork
August 7, 2025 at 11:12 AM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
so this isn't how magnitudes are determined ?
a figure scating jury with scores of 4.5 and 5.0 displayed on screens set into their bench
August 3, 2025 at 7:43 AM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
not entirely sure how to dress for this weather, any suggestions ?
an obviously broken weather forecast table for August 15 predicting 500mph winds and a midnight high around 100 Fahrenheit with minus 167 Fahrenheit wind chill
August 2, 2025 at 4:45 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
Freude schöne Gelbbauchunke 🎶
Tochter aus Elysion🎶🎶
(young yellow-bellied toad in a shallow forest pond purpose-built to support their reproduction)
young yellow-bellied toad in the water, looking out among some floating duckweed and leaves of grass. some orange-yellow of the underbelly is visible between the spread hind legs to the left
July 12, 2025 at 6:23 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
The jug topper from the Reinheim grave is weird, wikipedia has a photo of an enlarged replica here upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co... (but if that was their Jesus equivalent, maybe the guys with the leaf crown were something like our 18th century prince-bishops)
July 12, 2025 at 1:35 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
Midsummer scenes
a big field of ripe grain (possibly rye) with a small village surrounded by trees in the background, and wooded hills under summer clouds beyond Four white storks following a red tractor that is turning hay, with shrubs and trees filling the background
June 28, 2025 at 2:48 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
stag [beetle] night near Freiburg
stag beetle in flight, sideways snapshot against the evening sky with only the beetle in frame, wings and the big pincers visible on the left flying stag beetle snapshot in (I think) dorsal view and almost upright against the evening sky, the big pincers and a smudge of the flapping wings visible above the wide open wing covere
June 13, 2025 at 8:22 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
Repost of the text panel from the original post with alt text added (the other image is just the object in question - a largish gray pebble with an orange smudge in its center, with paired natural ridges and grooves on the ends of the pebble creating the faint illusion of a face)
I think we have to be very careful with such minimally modified objects not to project interpretations (as has happened before with a claimed face made from a bone splinter in a piece of flint from Roche-Cotard). In the current case what the team infer to be representation of a nose on a face might, if turned the other way up, be seen as a navel on a human figure. We can't really say what it is meant to be. That's not to say Neanderthals weren't interested in faces or images of faces(I'd be amazed if not, since our closest ape relations are) but I don't think it's demonstrateed obviously that this stone was intended to be a face. What we have in actuality is a red dot placed centrally on an unusually large stone. It might have been made alone, or in a group, intended to be seen by others or not. That might not sound so exciting, but this artefact is still extremely important in understanding the ways Neanderthals were interested in altering surfaces, as part of their intense appreciation of materials: what I prefer to call technaesthetics rather than art. This is a unique object in the wider archaeological context, but it still fits well with what we see elsewhere - applying color to surfaces, and attempting to create a regularized impression in the placement of modifications (eg engaged lines on a hyaena bone from Les Pradelles). And like other cases, it's also a unique object within that site - there's only one, rather than a local tradition of similar creations, which is what you find more with early Homo sapiens.
May 29, 2025 at 9:34 AM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
Birds will look and sound different if you keep walking
a dirt path leading uphill through a spring forest in Bavaria
May 10, 2025 at 4:44 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
subalpine mountain landscape with a meadow full of yellow meadow buttercups filling the foreground, three wooded mountain ranges in the back and a blue sky with a line of white clouds above
May 1, 2025 at 9:01 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
Fritillaries (Fritillaria meleagris) flowering in the Spessart meadows near Jossa, about 80km from Frankfurt
three red-white checkered flowers in a row on the edge of a meadow, with several more visible among the grass in the background view of one of the red-white fritillary flowers from below, against the blue sky (and a bit of red-white barrier tape marking the temporary path though the meadow) A lush green meadow with clusters of small whitish flowers everywhere and the big, dark hanging single flowers of fritillary dotted among them
April 28, 2025 at 5:46 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
#Invertefest in our Spiraea (Cetonia aurata)
Eye-to-eye with a big green rose chafer beetle crawling among the white flowers of a meadowsweet shrub Two green rose chafer beetles copulating on the white flowering twigs of a garden spiraea cultivar
April 28, 2025 at 7:33 AM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
Spring in the cherry orchards near Appenweier🇩🇪 (close to 🇫🇷 Strasbourg)
Cherry trees in full bloom Flowering cherry trees in a meadow full of dandelions several rows of flowering cherry trees in a valley with wooded mountains in the background Close-up of a cluster of cherry flowers against a background of flowering branches and blue sky
April 6, 2025 at 8:27 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
Mood
male toad in a dark pond, only the eyes and nose sticking out of the water
April 4, 2025 at 9:20 AM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
Spring in the woods
Forest scene with a ground carpet of white wood anemones Detail of wood anemones in flower Flowering violets among the wood anemones Yellow flowers of cowslip primrose rising above the wood anemones
March 23, 2025 at 5:13 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
Timeline cleanse with the song of my people (Bufo bufo)
March 23, 2025 at 5:07 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
Spring
European grass frog sitting in the sun on a sandy forest trail
March 6, 2025 at 3:41 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
by executive order of president von der Leyen, the EU has released the kraken
February 1, 2025 at 2:46 PM
kroekermartin.bsky.social
December 9, 2024 at 3:12 PM