The Bay Model in Sausalito is a two-football field sized working model of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento - San Joaquin River Delta. Here's a 360 degree timelapse of the model in action so you can see the tide coming in and out (best in a VR headset but you can pan around as well):
Shot on a Ricoh Theta S and post-processed in LRTimelapse and Adobe Lightroom.
A relatively pleasant Sunday in San Francisco, which means the second you turn your back fog and low cloud are going to swoop in:
The first part of the video is looking west toward the ocean. Once any trace of blue is obliterated we turn south to see fog rolling over San Pedro Mountain near Pacifica and increasingly gloomy cloud cover over the French Chateau Sanatorium (which I think of as the West Portal Retirement Castle). This is a deeply strange building, nestled in a hollow and surrounded by trees. Most of the time you don't see it and then suddenly, on the right street at the right angle you're startled to realize that there is a massive chateau hiding in the neighborhood.
If you're in the mood for more West Portal oriented time lapse enjoy: West of West Portal, West Portal Mosaic Timelapse, West Portal Timelapse of Timelapses and Spherical Sunset.
5/5
Spoiler alert: we still don't know. Excellent review of the history of quantum mechanics and how we should think about science.
3/5
3/5
Update April 19, 2020: I made a longer, higher resolution version which you can find here.
Here's an animation showing a year of global cloud cover (from July 2017 to July 2018) :
The clouds are sourced from the free daily download at xplanet. I run a Google apps script that saves a copy of the image to Google Drive every day (basically the same as this script to save Nest cam images). The hard part was waiting a year to get enough frames. Xplanet combines GEOS, METEOSAT and GMS satellite imagery with some reflection near the poles. Although I didn't need to for this project note that you can subscribe to higher quality / more frequent downloads.
As well as the clouds you can also see the terminator between day and night change shape over the course of the year. This video starts and ends with the Summer equinox when days are longest in the Northern hemisphere.
Where it's nighttime the image is based on NASA's Black Marble. The daytime is based on Blue Marble, but blended with a different older image which has better ocean colors and interpolated daily between twelve monthly Blue Marble satellite images. The result of this is that you can see snow and ice coverage changing over the course of the year. If you look closely you'll also notice vegetation growing and dying back with the seasons.
Rendered in a slightly modified build of Catfood Earth (the main release doesn't know how to access my private cache of xplanet cloud images). As well as combining day, night and cloud images Catfood Earth can also show you earthquakes, volcanoes, US weather radar, political borders, places and time zones. It has been enlivening Windows desktop wallpaper for fifteen years now (as shareware back when that was a thing, these days it's a free download for Windows and Android).
Summer starts now in the Northern Hemisphere and the Sun is at its highest point in the sky. For those in the Southern Hemisphere I'm sorry to report that the opposite is true. Rendered in Catfood Earth.
(Previously, Previously, Previously, Previously, Previously)
If you're going to read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber don't decide to follow that up with Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk.
5/5
I'm not entirely sure if this is a bullshit book or not, but it was brilliantly written and provocative (and largely persuasive).
3/5
3/5
3/5
Having read (and loved) The Information I was expecting something similar. Time Travel is far more of a literary review than a popular science book. It touches on relativity and quantum physics but not in any great depth and spends far more time dissecting H. G. Wells.
3/5
Photo of the moon, taken with a Sony RX10 Mk 2 super zoom camera.
In The Guardian Dambisa Moyo proposes a test to improve the quality of the electorate:
"...why not give all voters a test of their knowledge? This would ensure minimum standards that should lead to higher-quality decision-making by the electorate."
However:
"Of course, such a system would be truly democratic only if everybody had a fair chance of casting their vote. It is vital that those with fewer life opportunities have their say, and we cannot have a system that is skewed against the worst educated..."
So the idea is a test of minimum standards that in some way is not biased against the worst educated? Or that we could only impose such a system once education has improved to the point where is is no longer needed?
Maybe we just need a test to improve the quality of Guardian opinion pieces.
For the service of telling UPS that I'm not in today and so they can save a whole bunch of time and money by not failing to deliver a package they want to charge me $5? This is UPS My Choice.
Export Google Fit Daily Steps, Weight and Distance to a Google Sheet
Accessing Printer Press ESC to cancel
Is it safe to open securedoc.html (Cisco Registered Envelope)?
Enable GZIP compression for Amazon S3 hosted website in CloudFront
Sending email via GMail in C#/.NET using SmtpClient
Automate Google PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals Logging with Apps Script
User scoped custom dimensions in Google Analytics 4 using gtag
Monitor page index status with Google Sheets, Apps Script and the Google Search Console API
Predicting when fog will flow through the Golden Gate using ML.NET
ITHCWY Newsletter for February 2023
OpenAGI, or why we shouldn't trust Open AI to protect us from the Singularity