The video is an animation of three thousand generations of evolution. It starts with a random mix of line segments which are then mutated by adding or removing lines and by changing the start, end and color of existing lines. Each generation has 32 individuals. The best individual is mutated to create the next generation.
For this implementation the best or fittest individual is the one with the least error on a pixel by pixel comparison to a stock art drawing of a hummingbird. Because I care more about the shape than completely filling in the drawing an error outside the figure is penalized three times more than a gap inside the figure.
Color is mutated each generation but not selected for, so it's just changing randomly.
This is massively less likely than sorting out the Electoral College, but imagine for a minute that 100 Senators woke up tomorrow and decided to do the right thing.
Dianne Feinstein, the senior Senator from California would wield 6.04 votes. Mike Enzi, the senior Senator from Wyoming would have to make do with 0.09 votes.
Overall a party line vote would see 55.85 Democratic votes to 44.15 Republican, assuming normal independent caucusing habits. Not quite a supermajority, but enough to not send Kavanaugh to The Supreme Court for instance.
This is based on 2010 census figures from Wikipedia.
Not going to happen, but find my estimate of your State's fair voting power by Senator below.
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.
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).
