Today, we salute Thomé de Gamond, early Channel Tunnel proponent, who had to figure out the geology of the seabed first. https://m.gutenberg.org/files/66685/66685-h/66685-h.htm
I feel like the one of the lowest level human internet problems we haven’t solved is how to be around millions of people, many of whom vocally disapprove of at least some of our thoughts and actions, without letting our hyper-social status-sensitive primate brains either melt or devote themselves to arguing that all our positions are the right positions for everyone.
Like yes, some algos are bad, but we also just built structures we can’t quite handle and are perma-mad at each other about it.
When I scheduled this live session yesterday to discuss Western North American wildfire situation, neither catastrophic fire in Canadian Rockies town of #Jasper nor dangerous #ParkFire in California had yet occurred. I will discuss both today @ 3pm PT. https://www.youtube.com/live/B5wskkRpadg
I am hilariously bad at going on vacation, but I was on the west coast and so I went to Cabo Pulmo, in Baja California Sur, to go scuba diving in the marine reserve. It’s kind of an incredible place — in 1995, the village (pop. 100 then, 150 now) worked together to get it declared a protected area. It’s now a UNESCO site and an absolutely thriving ecosystem, with careful ongoing oversight.
https://ocean.si.edu/conservation/solutions-success-stories/cabo-pulmo-protected-area
#PPOD: NASA's Curiosity rover ran over a rock and found crystals inside! They're pure sulfur. Elemental sulfur is something we’ve never seen before on Mars. We don't know much about these yellow crystals yet, but the team is already at work to figure it out! Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
An old friend is visiting, and we were walking through Berkeley. He pointed at an old restaurant and said “Hey! St Jude¹ took me to lunch at that Burmese place once! She was really nice.” and I felt very connected to a past that is not remembered well enough.
Draft Emoji 16.0 Design: Face with Bags Under Eyes #WorldEmojiDay https://emojipedia.org/face-with-bags-under-eyes
One of the things that always delights me about people is how adaptable we are and how willing we can be to take weird things seriously just to try them.
The older I get the more I see this as the obverse of a terrifying susceptibility to a spectrum of groupthinky social problems that starts merely cringey but ends out in death cult territory.
Persistently shocked by how much of adult life is dealing with the consequences of other adults determinedly (and obviously!) playing pretend, with terrible consequences.
https://lattice.com/blog/leading-the-way-in-responsible-ai-employment
If you've ever wondered how math fonts are made, the Noto project commissioned this amazing article from @khaled to explain all: https://github.com/notofonts/math/blob/main/documentation/building-math-fonts/index.md
https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2024.3378121 the preprint has been out for a couple months but my first peer reviewed journal article is out today in its finished polished form and I am still pretty happy with it
Me, politely but firmly taking the jar of kimchi out of the shooping cart and putting it back on the shelf: Darling, remember we talked about how this isn’t authentically Korean because it contains an ingredient introduced in the sixteenth century? And how that means it’s not tasty?
You know him on the internet. Eucalypt-adjacent; very occasional writer. Consulting and passively looking for work in geospatial, image processing, and related fields.