Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

I mention this like once a week, but since she’s just died, let’s all go look at the ~20 cm Landsat image of Half Dome that Virginia Norwood made.

«Norwood had researchers load a breadboard version of the scanner onto the back of a truck. It amounted to “just a bunch of boxes,” she says. “We could use all the weight we wanted.” […] Having labored so long over the specs, Norwood wasn’t surprised by the high quality of the test images.»

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1025732/the-woman-who-brought-us-the-world/

For now, I need to work on developing more stretch without knocking it down too much. Next time I might roll them out. Or maybe I’m too worried about knocking it down.

Have given up on this “let’s find a moderate perspective on ‘AI’ and stop yelling” essay about a dozen times, then restarted it about a dozen times when I read something that got under my skin, and now it’s just 7,000 words of me pointing out that everyone other than me is wrong without a conclusion, so I guess I’m going to work on my baguette shaping technique some more.

Power’s out, so I guess I’ll just sit here and watch the barometer fall.

Come down to National Geodetic Survey marker AE5211 in the next 15 minutes if you want an ass kicking.

Happened to be learning about communication technology in the mid-fifties, and my goodness what a time to be reading the news.

Tired of feeling bad about what I’m paying for with my crossword subscription.

Last I played with consumer GNSS hardware much, the SiRFstarIII was considered very cool.

I just ran a new NEO-N9M overnight under a residential roof (no survey mode or anything) and got this wonderfully clean pattern.

All units are meters. I don’t know what pAcc actually is and neither does the official documentation.

This is like $50 for a USB-capable board with shipping and tax from a reputable seller. I’m delighted.

There’s what I would describe, in technical terms, as a “lazy fantasy map” vibe to the distribution of NGS survey markers.

Amazing that so many dreams fit in one mid-size cat.

Fissures across a railway and someone’s orchard just north of İslâhiye.

Türkiye is standard gauge, so that’s basically two offsets of ~70 cm just in this little area. (Pan pixels from Maxar 1040010082698700 at 31 cm resolution; the image is about 320 m or 1000 ft across.)

This is not the part of the image with the rawest human interest, but I think it shows some of the scale of what happened without feeding into voyeurism.

Wow, more cat dreams:

Me, watching the cat’s whiskers twitch as she sleeps on the couch: I bet she’s dreaming about catfood 😌

The cat:

Top to bottom: my sense of how the cat’s day went; the cat’s sense of how the cat’s day went.

@npseaver

[nodding thoughtfully:] As true of me today as it was of hadrosaurs 75 million years ago.

In conclusion, all the science happening in the heat index field is extremely normal and definitely absolutely nothing to be worried about.

Stipple of a hillshade of Tahoma.

The point placing algorithm is freely adapted from @BartWronski’s version of Ahmed, Ren, and Wonka’s stippling: https://bartwronski.com/2022/08/31/progressive-image-stippling-and-greedy-blue-noise-importance-sampling/

The data is from the WA lidar portal: https://lidarportal.dnr.wa.gov/

The hillshade is a mean of 1,000 angles from which the sun actually illuminates Tahoma over the year. (None of that top-left stuff for me, thanks.)

Buoy 46059 is having a real time, and this isn’t even that close to the middle of the storm. https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=46059

Just a few of the many textures present on Earth.