Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

Moving to a restricted vocabulary for the holidays where I only use the attested Basque–Icelandic pidgin phrases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque%E2%80%93Icelandic_pidgin#Pidgin_phrases

I’ve been wondering why I didn’t see sliced optimal transport used to make cartograms, so this weekend I tried it. It worked reasonably well. My instance was down so I posted most of the experiments on Bluesky, but here’s the most elaborate one – red is population, green is Foursquare POI, and blue is modeled GDP (all normalized so there are ~2.5e6 of each): https://xoc.s3.amazonaws.com/also/five.mp4

I feel like half the time I read something anonymized to protect human lifeways and artifacts, exploitable wild species, etc., it contains the equivalent of “here at ‘Penny Station’ at ‘8th Blvd’ and ‘Western 31st St’ in ‘Mew Yonk Sooty’,”.

If you’re writing an ethnography and you want to keep your study site anonymous, don’t put a map on the flyleaf and write a bunch of things about “an area of sandstone outcroppings to the north” or “the village is built at the first rapids on the river” or “here at the edge of the forest” or whatever.

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.

L Pod visited Penn Cove yesterday.

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.

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.

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

This makes me happy because it’s pretty comparable to the trend from a nearby science-quality GNSS receiver: https://sideshow.jpl.nasa.gov/post/links/EBMD.html

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.)

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.

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.

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: https://mou.sr/4hrR4PY