Moving to a restricted vocabulary for the holidays where I only use the attested Basque–Icelandic pidgin phrases: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque%E

I’ve been wondering why I didn’t see sliced optimal transport used to make cartograms, so this weekend I tried it. It worked reasonably well. My instance was down so I posted most of the experiments on Bluesky, but here’s the most elaborate one – red is population, green is Foursquare POI, and blue is modeled GDP (all normalized so there are ~2.5e6 of each): xoc.s3.amazonaws.com/also/five

I feel like half the time I read something anonymized to protect human lifeways and artifacts, exploitable wild species, etc., it contains the equivalent of “here at ‘Penny Station’ at ‘8th Blvd’ and ‘Western 31st St’ in ‘Mew Yonk Sooty’,”.

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If you’re writing an ethnography and you want to keep your study site anonymous, don’t put a map on the flyleaf and write a bunch of things about “an area of sandstone outcroppings to the north” or “the village is built at the first rapids on the river” or “here at the edge of the forest” or whatever.

Things I want from my incense: smells nice, benign ingredients, made in fair working conditions. Things incense manufacturers want to talk about: borderline illegal medicinal claims, holiness, purity.

New project finally out! ALA Lens is work for the Atlas of Living Australia, Australia's open biodiversity data aggregator.

Adrian Mackenzie and I used a combination of experimental design and social research to develop rich new interfaces for digital biodiversity.

Take it for a spin, and if you enjoy it please share: https://labs.ala.org.au/lens/

#biodiversity #opendata #dataviz #ui #frontend #shipping

Nice image from JBM. This sort of comparative perspective tends to rule out a lot of US-centric, highly contingent explanations for why things turned out as they did.

uspol / canpol 

Just for example, I think it’s entirely questionable whether there would ever have been a Trump without a Rob Ford and a Stephen Harper.

The rest of the English-speaking world complains about American-style politics, and they are right to do so, but it is not at all a one-way flux. We’re all in this together.

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I am once again asking people who want to make silly jokes about how peaceful, thoughtful Canada pities its weird southern neighbor to learn even a little bit about the consistent violence, disorder, and moral cowardice of Canadian political history that hides under the “your sensible friend” branding. (Note I’m not saying Canada is worse than the US in this way. I’m saying it’s not categorically better.)

Adding to that repost: Do not blur (or pixelate) things to hide them. Unblurring is pretty practical in a lot of cases. If you want to hide something in a photo, the simplest, safest way is to cover it with a block of solid color.

This is your regular SAFETY REMINDER that the tickmarks printed along the bottom of your mail, possibly in very faint ink that you have to double-check is there, is just your address encoded digitally. If you are covering your address for a photo, you MUST cover the tickmarks too!

[Do not send me long-winded whines that it's not teeeeeeeechnically your address at least in the US postal system, just the location of your mailbox, as if that's not quite equivalent for all practical safety purposes]

[Looking at a society where decision-making power is strongly inversely correlated with exposure to the consequences of one’s decisions:] Now hang on, why are there so many bad decisions?

I would just like to assure everyone with a strong opinion about a huge, complex, social topic that you’re really close to winning everyone over if you can just post three or four more specific incidents that really demonstrate your argument. Those compelling examples of single things will finally prove the general case. Just point out a few more instances of someone wearing sandals winning a charity raffle or a bingo game and we’ll all believe sandals are lucky. Keep going! Almost there!

So I think I’m borderline resolving the continental drift signal with $50 of hardware under a roof.

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This makes me happy because it’s pretty comparable to the trend from a nearby science-quality GNSS receiver: sideshow.jpl.nasa.gov/post/lin

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But it’s been a year, so I tested the main thing I wanted to see. If I aggressively remove outliers, average across long time periods, and eyeball a few load-bearing parameters just right – so I want to be clear that I’m not claiming rigor, only that it’s good enough for me personally – the data shows a velocity of 27.5 mm/year west, 14.4 mm/year north. (This is on the order of 1 nanometer/second.)

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Its output goes straight to a postgres database on a small always-on computer. Its SSD failed a few months ago, so I lost a chunk of data, but basically it’s just recording the chip’s output. Under my roof, you might note.

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One of them has been sitting on the top of the curtain rod over my desk, carefully wedged in place with magnets and a makeshift ground plane.

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Last summer, I got a couple of these little USB GNSS chips, a notch above the usual consumer quality but a notch (and $200) below the RTK-capable kind: mou.sr/4hrR4PY

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Horsin' Around

This is a hometown instance run by Sam and Ingrid, for some friends.