Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

One of my favorite things on the Internet is when you watch a “Columbo” clip and there’s a comment where someone describes the concept of Columbo at a second-grade level and is massively upvoted for it. This sounds wry and ironical but I do honestly enjoy it.

Someone should check in on the astrophysicists.

I note that a major commercial map (left, compared to OSM on the right) isn’t showing the massive new reservoir behind the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam™. It started filling in 2020.

The Pleiades, Antarctica, in synthetic aperture radar (from the Umbra open data collection).

Let’s set aside petty politics and remember the great statesman in his own words, committing one of his several unimaginably gruesome crimes against humanity.

Time keeps sneaking up on me. It’s already November again and time to pick up a new screen light for the insect sky.

The Seattle area at night, in color, from a stack of Landsat 9 scenes. Denoised with some clumsy FFT editing. I can’t imagine why you would use this for anything over one of many other options, but it’s neat that it works.

Woke up to a @aworkinglibrary newsletter.

Lest anyone think I’m making up the Greek letters.

And to be fair, sometimes you also see λ. That’s great because λ is equivalent to l, so it stands for the one of longitude and latitude that starts with l.

I don’t like what the Blue Angels think they are but I do kind of enjoy their chaotic vibes, and I feel roughly the same about my bargain-basement 500 mm mirror lens that focuses about as well as a weed grinder, so here’s a picture of the one with the other.

Very slowly converging toward the GNSS observatory dashboard I’ve imagined for years.

YouTube’s front page in an incognito window. I did look up SimCity videos from this IP recently, so that one’s on me. I think this is bad.

Gently closing the Desmos tab where I’ve been trying to build some kind of trigonometric intuitions about … ah … circles, maybe?

Lots of tinkering left to do on both the hardware and software sides, but I think my indoor GNSS setup is already picking up tidal signals on its test run.

Okay, fine, @jonty cajoled me into it. Lighter is more traffic; warmer is more positive anomaly for the day.

Now, certain nerds and haters might squint at this and say “It looks like you did this in oklab color space and then tried to half-ass some gamut mapping when you remembered that a lot of the highest z scores are in places with very low traffic counts!” and I would rebut that in scrupulous detail with one simple argument: Good night.

When math looks like this, with a lot of sub- and superscripts, it’s in tHe SpOnGeBoB mOcKiNg VoIcE.

Well, that’s enough of that.

Same general idea and source data, but this time it’s just z-score (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_score), with red positive and green negative. Hard to say that this makes it easier to spot the interesting anomalies, but it seemed like the common sense thing to try. You can see the the OceanGate incident, the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, probably some festivals, etc.