Be the explorer in your own neighbourhood, discovering the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Help build the Swords Tree Trail
Together, our mission is to discover all 7,000 trees mapped so far. These trees are hidden in plain sight the real treasure is standing before one and seeing it yourself.
The app sets you on the adventure by revealing these hidden tree locations. You find one, see it, and experience it first-hand. Then, by making a tiny contribution a picture, a name, or a note you enrich its story for the next explorer.
This is a shared journey, one tree at a time.
Over time, the places you touch will grow richer layered with what you and others contribute. Imagine returning to a tree that holds not just data, but contributions from explorers across time.
Begin the adventure now: open Swords Live, find your first tree it might be right outside your door snap a photo, and become a pioneer of your own backyard.
Reflections on TFI’s Invisible Disabilities Poster
Valid Aim, Flawed Execution
This student-designed poster seeks to highlight invisible disabilities, which is a valid aim. The comments below respect the student creator’s creative freedom and focus instead on TFI’s choice to use this poster as official campaign material.
Blurry and Competing Messages
The poster contains several competing signals that weaken its clarity and impact. The phrase “She looks fine though?!” can easily be read as a remark on appearance. The second bubble, “Why is she sitting there?!”, sits over the man, with only a small tag indicating it belongs to the second woman also, requiring close inspection to understand. The tagline “You don’t see it. But SHE feels it” adds a distinctly gendered frame. Together these elements create a muddled judgement scene that distracts from the intended message.
Unrealistic Expectations of Passengers
More importantly, the poster presents natural passenger scepticism as a failing that needs correction. Yet invisible conditions are, by definition, not visible. TFI encouraged passenger awareness of priority seats and offer them up to those in need. Now the same organisation criticises ordinary people for reacting with normal scepticism when those seats are occupied by someone whose need is invisible. The underlying message is that the public is simply not doing it well enough - they are the problem for not seeing the invisible.
Shifting Blame to the Public
This campaign shifts blame onto the public. TFI operates and controls Ireland’s public transport network. With its resources and authority, it has the capacity to improve the overall experience through greater seating capacity, higher service frequency, and better system design and execution. It would be better advised to focus on that rather than moral pontification.
Overall Effect
When official communication contains so many layered and competing elements, it risks undermining the very empathy it aims to create.
@tfi@DarraghOBrienTD
Congratulations to one of the winners of the Smarter Travel Student Awards for creating this impactful poster.
The poster delivers a clear and important message, closely aligned with the TFI Please Offer Me A Seat initiative.
Well done to all involved!
Probably the greatest thing I built with coding agents is a one click copy photos and videos from iPhone on windows.... no itunes, no apps, no special libs - a few lines of code. How was this so difficult for so long :) I'M FREE! Works prefectly. @Apple
@Tesla I'd rather press the button!
Been using this for couple of Months now - Very handy but Infuriatingly dumbed down compared to other Ai access points....
In Swords Live, Trees build up a memory over time - the more people submit photos the more they learn their own story - it's a new concept where we can undertand our place better over time. I call it place memory - hope you can come visit trees Even this Dead Horse Chestnut has new life on swords live tree trail....😊
Made a nice video with @imagine but an @X aspect ratio limitation won't allow me to share it with you. So you'll just have to imagine for yourself that it was great.
🚨Lab gloves are inflating microplastics data. U-Michigan 2026 study: Common nitrile/latex gloves shed stearate particles that mimic polyethylene in IR/Raman spectroscopy — up to ~7,000 false positives per mm² (avg 2,000).
🌊🍃Hits air/water sampling, filters & small-particle counts hardest.
🔃 Switch to cleanroom gloves drops it to ~100/mm².Real microplastics still exist, but many older spectroscopy numbers are likely overstated. Please check your own sampling kits!
7,000 false positives per square millimeter. The culprit was the lab gloves.
University of Michigan researchers just upended a core assumption in microplastics science. Latex and nitrile gloves, worn by the scientists doing the measuring, shed stearate particles that look chemically identical to polyethylene. Standard infrared and Raman instruments can't tell them apart. The gloves were counting as plastic.
Seven glove types tested. All contaminated. The cheapest fix: switch to cleanroom gloves, which dropped false positives to around 100 per mm² vs. 7,000.
The "credit card per week" headline (5 grams, WWF/Newcastle 2019) has separate problems. A 2022 re-analysis found severe methodological errors in the original estimate. Actual measured intake is likely 100x lower.
None of this means microplastics are harmless. Last month's data on brain accumulation still stands. But the numbers driving the panic may have been measuring the scientists, not the environment.
Science catching its own errors is exactly how it's supposed to work.
Just ticking up a 13 hour day on Swords Live - Talking to a tree reminding myself for an original postit from a year ago... and nobody pays me for this....