Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

Forgot to add the warning: this is intended for, and only tested on, desktop browsers.

Weekend project (do not look at the source): https://sat9.land/x/swath/#0,25500

As a non-JS person who wrote a moderate amount of JS a long time ago and a little JS in the last few days, it feels like it’s been kintsugi-ed. It can never be so completely fixed that you won’t see how it was broken, but it can certainly become an open meditation on the nature of repair.

Woke up to a @aworkinglibrary newsletter.

I think this is important work done well, but I will complain about the headline: it’s really hard to define “visible from space” in a way that makes sense and matches what any two people think it means. Stop using it this way. https://www.npr.org/2023/10/06/1203372829/the-bruising-artillery-battle-in-ukraine-has-left-a-scar-that-is-visible-from-sp

I am very internet-oriented and generally think it’s good when things are available digitally, but the idea that someone has to use expensive hardware, proprietary software, etc., to receive the official time signal is sad.

Trying to get all the household’s clocks and watches synced to the CBC/NRC time signal was an extremely entertaining project in like 1996.

Over-the-air civil broadcasts that require only amateur radio knowledge to decode from scratch seem worth keeping alive. I hope that tide comes back in one day.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/cbc-stops-broadcasting-national-research-council-long-dash-time-signal-1.6988903

At its core, doing anything with geodetics is basically (1) very straightforward math that you can derive in your head from the Wikipedia illustration of trigonometric functions, plus (2) several hours of figuring out what φ means in this case and which definition of “up” the author is assuming.

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.

Notation for latitude and longitude is easy and people should stop being annoyed by it.

Simply use order (either the lat, lon convention or the lon, lat convention).

If you need cross-linguistic symbols for an equation, use the Greek letters (either the θ = latitude, φ = longitude convention or the θ = longitude, φ = latitude convention).

Personally, I find it clearest to just abbreviate them, so l = longitude and l = latitude.

A fun fact about aerobatics teams is that the leader is talking to them in a singsong the whole time like a slightly excessive high school choreography instructor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux7tPXTT0Ec#t=44m

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.

Dear software people,

Unicode is older now than ASCII was when Unicode was introduced. It’s not a weird new fad.

It’s complicated but so is the domain it represents. We recognize that we have to think about time zones and leap days and seconds, for instance. And it’s a cleaner abstraction when you aren’t halfhearted about it.

Sincerely,
Charlie

Who else has their phone out and is staring at it unblinkingly while holding their breath?

They did surgery on a grape. https://scholar.social/@Aepasek/111177327426338048

For the curious, here’s a nice writeup of how this works – it’s a fun combination of multi-decade–old ideas, “standard” structure-from-motion, and tricks that are inspired by (but not directly based on) the current GPU and neural network boom: https://aras-p.info/blog/2023/09/05/Gaussian-Splatting-is-pretty-cool/