Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

This paper is 5 years old but I just happened across it and have been talking it up to like four different friend groups because it’s so fun. I particularly enjoyed the retrograde klimarübe (you know, the rutabaga that represents an idealized continent for climate delineation purposes … you know).

Mikolajewicz et al. (2018): “The climate of a retrograde rotating Earth” – https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/9/1191/2018/

I work in the field of remote sensing but the only thing the name “remote sensing” has going for it is that it sounds like something that a gutta-percha magnate established an as-yet–unclaimed £5,000 prize to prove the existence of in 1926.

I had these vegan shrimp from a crustpunk grocery popup near Ladd’s Division in like 2004 that still jump-scare me out of my own memory sometimes.

Extremely appreciated @kissane’s piece on Mastodon and Bluesky, but honestly everything past the first paragraph was a bit of a haze through some intense sense-memories from 1995: https://erinkissane.com/blue-skies-over-mastodon

My sleep was disturbed by dreams of a TV show about long-duration astronauts. The writers couldn’t stick to a tone, so sometimes it was “What We Do in the Shadows” but about intense, mentally tough pilots in a tiny shared space; other times, they were doing Sorkinesque float-and-talks and making Important Arguments. I would rather have dreamed about falling off a roof again.

I’m not a Mastodon partisan, but I do have a pretty strong preference for not providing free #content for a commercial venture unless I know exactly what the deal is. https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/110273442030673147

Just for my own sick amusement, here’s what happens if you white-balance off a cloud near totality and crop: https://xoc.s3.amazonaws.com/also/gk2a-2023-04-20-0400-crop.jpeg

To my great though trivial annoyance, their processing pipeline cuts off the limb. It does look great, though, as expected. This is from the 4/20 eclipse, which @dscovr_epic also got an excellent frame of. Link to a 30 megabyte 1 km/pixel version: https://xoc.s3.amazonaws.com/also/gk2a-2023-04-20-0400.jpeg

Amazing that I’m so good at spotting the hypocrisies, biases, and unhelpful fixations of others on social media when I have none of my own. How do I do it?

Someone’s going to be like “Ah, but this is more theoretically pure, because—” Oh, all right, hot shot, it is theoretically pure to use -100000000000000 to mean undefined? Is that what a physicist would do? No, please, let us know.

Next time I write a CV it’s going to have a line like “I relish learning new datasets and working to make sense of them” but it’s going to be a lie because here we see longitude stored in radians:

Very happy to see GK-2A* data posted for free as open data – I’ve been wanting to get my mitts on this for ages. I burnt out on the green band stuff I was working on but perhaps it’s time to restart.

https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-gk2a-pds/

* The South Korean member of the GOES-R and Himawari-8/9 family of geostationary weather satellites.

Public ownership of gray, stable, safety-of-life infrastructure that should not be run at a profit is clearly necessary. It does not follow that everything publicly owned should be boring and reliable.

I think a lot of people who favor public ownership of publicly important things get tricked this way, into thinking that we should have the status quo but with different structures on paper.

Imagine a NASA that wasn’t being dogwalked by Congress, that got to apply most of its budget to weird-but-might-work stuff like New Horizons and the helicopter on Mars. Imagine a NASA with a 35% failure rate but a 65% “holy fuck, whoa” rate for uncrewed space missions.

Yes. SpaceX has done bad things and deserves to be criticized for them. But (and I think this is analogous to a lot of issues) the problem here isn’t that SpaceX isn’t NASA; it’s that NASA doesn’t have the political room to experiment and inevitably sometimes fail that SpaceX does. This is too complex an issue to fit all the layers and nuance into one honk, but “SpaceX is bad because their rockets explode” is not a good analysis. https://chaos.social/@russss/110249195107310284

The cat loves to be skritched but hates to be touched, and so far the best solution is for me to “lick” her face with a paintbrush, but she has to sniff it suspiciously before each session, make it take its shoes off, remove all electronics from its bags, etc.