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.

@sgillies (Primly telling my friends that I only eat weed for the flavor.)

@sgillies Christ. I have back problems but I’ve never had it that bad. Beyond vitamin I, Zanaflex and weed both help me a lot when it flares up, if that’s useful.

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.

Show thread

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!

@dmahr That’s a great question and probably actually a good way to explain this one day when it’s more complete: “See how this distribution, in naïve WGS 84, is visibly stretched compared to this other distribution that knows about drift?”

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

Show thread

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

Show thread

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.)

Show thread

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.

Show thread

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.

Show thread

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

Show more
Horsin' Around

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