Thank your heroes
In memoriam: Jarlath O'Neil-Dunne
I got the news this morning that Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne has died, and it’s hard to grasp.
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A good season
The snow is flying this morning in Vermont - early, it seems - and therefore it’s as good a time as any to reflect on last winter in the Northeastern mountains. [Read More] -
Just Another Dark Age
Illuminating the things that grow in our gaps of perspective
In the Summer of 1934, author Patrick Leigh-Fermor entered the Transylvanian city of Kolozsvár, accompanied by his aristocratic lover and chauffered by their enthusiastic wingman. Even distracted as he was by such great company, he took note of his surroundings: [Read More] -
The Latest From Lower Saxony
I had given up. My previously-documented enthusiasm for SQLite had run dry, and I had already hammered out another solution. Then Charlie stepped in and saved the day with a window function. [Read More] -
Human stories in geologic time
Recommended reading for disentangling our own curses from the bedrock below
Steve Shell and his collaborators have an excellent anthology of gothic horror stories, told in podcast form: Old Gods of Appalachia1. It begins like this: Old Gods of Appalachia, start at the beginning with the prologue ↩ [Read More] -
Perception and reality
In which I fall into a well-documented trap of my [our] own devising.
I was at an amazing conference last week. The combination of a great setting, a warm and welcoming crowd - and a novel format that had us outdoors as much as we were in - led to a feeling of progress and connection that I don’t often get at events... [Read More] -
The B-Sides of Remote Sensing
Some of the edgier things to which humans have attached cameras in the hope of gaining contextual knowledge of their surroundings
In the course of a lifetime in the almost-accidental study of Earth observation, I’ve found that - over centuries of innovation - humans have tried a million strategies to build the Tower of Babel; not to compete with god, exactly, but to see ourselves more clearly. Inevitably, I’ve acquired a... [Read More] -
Dryland XYZ tiles
In which I discover how much geoprocessing you can get done with inline SQLite
Mapbox is occasionally referred to - not uncharitably - as “The Tile Company”. It’s true; we deal with big amounts of data, and the most common map/reduce unit we use is the old standby Mercator/XYZ tile. My past and present colleagues have built some really cool tools to make these... [Read More]