jubjubbird

Department of Interior tried that, but "Interior faces challenges with maintaining a sufficient drone fleet because drones compliant with its policies are more expensive and do not always have sufficient capabilities, among other issues, according to officials."

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106924

Here's a cool demo I saw recently that allows a cyclist to specify risk tolerance for busy roads, based on traffic data. Take the direct, busy route, or the roundabout way, using bike paths where available.

https://rc.nau.edu/cranc/?profile=ibc&layer=OpenStreetMap

I'm looking at a legal agreement on my desk to lease 120 acres of productive eastern Nebraska farmland to build a commercial scale solar project. The land would be taken out of production ("sacrificed") for the 50 year lease, with payments about twice what the land leases for for agriculture (soybeans).

Here's the LK-99 tie in: the most precise gravity meters in the world are superconducting meters, which require a lot of power (2 kW contonuous) to maintain a helium dewar at 4K. It's tough to make that a field instrument. A compact, stable, room temperature gravity sensor would be a huge advance for hydrogeophysics.

The MEMS accelerometers in our phones are in theory sensitive to gravity changes, but they're not nearly sensitive enough. This group is trying to improve the MEMS sensing technology, but it's doubtful it will be as good as classical gravity meters (falling mass, or spring) or quantum (BEC) ones:

https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/beacons/nanoquantum/wee-gglas...

One important distinction is between measuring gravity (generally, acceleration in the vertical direction) and the gravity gradient. The latter is generally easier and more useful for navigation.

Navajo Generating Station, which was the largest coal-fired ppwer plant in the western U.S. and powered CAP pumping stations, closed in 2019 along with the accompanying coal mine.

Speaking of Albuquerque, this just-published paper shows how measuring the change in acceleration due to gravity can be used to map aquifer storage change. Importation of San Juan River water has made a big difference.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrh.2023.101413

Too bad Google gets the credit for the amazing https://www.shakealert.org system developed by the USGS and other public entities. Altering the user is the easy part, detecting the earthquake is the hard part.

Seems like more often than not I see them folded up, not in use. Even with the price of diesel. I wonder how much they save?

Apologies for the paywall, but this paper describes imaging cargo containers with gravity gradient sensors (to look for, e.g., plutonium):

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4215058

Basically you can image anything if there is a density contrast, it's "just" a matter of how good your sensor and inversion algorithm is.

I spend my day-to-day working on measuring gravitational changes to determine groundwater storage change. There's a huge difference between demonstrating something in the lab vs. building an actual field instrument you can use in the real world.

If you just want some nice (public domain) art to hang on your wall:

https://www.usgs.gov/centers/eros/science/earth-art

And here's a USGS site that delineates a watershed from any point on a stream:

https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/s...

For context: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/?s=brian+wansink

(he's a Cornell prof with dubious research/PR tactics)

> The report shows that Detroit had 130 total traffic fatalities in 2015 - 46 of those were pedestrian.

This, and the recent megathread about children, made me think of Tom Robbins' B Is For Beer book, it's the natural history of beer, kids version. Rereading it now with the third kid-something a little different than the usual kids fare.

USGS Elevation point query service with an API:

https://nationalmap.gov/epqs/

In the U.S. it varies widely by state. The USGS has a map of "recent" groundwater levels:

https://groundwaterwatch.usgs.gov/default.asp

With some obvious large gaps. There are more collected by state agencies, consultants, etc. In most places there are probably more wells than you'd think.

In addition to measuring gravity from space to monitor groundwater it can be measured at the land surface, with better spatial resolution and worse accuracy. A 1x10-8 m/s^2 change in gravity is 2.4 cm of groundwater!

https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2018/3032/fs20183032.pdf

I had everything wired until a lightning strike took out everything connected to the router (tv, avr, PC). Now everything that can be connected by Wi-Fi is. I also added a grounding rod to the coax service entrance, knock on wood...

So this is a wrapper for PyInstaller? I see that it creates an installer .exe on Windows or a dmg on Mac, which is nice (I'm having trouble with PyQt and the latter at the moment).

It's unclear what the other advantages over PyInstaller are. Does @cached_property provide a performance benefit?

Another interesting podcast here, with the story of how Chouinard gave the CEO position of Patagonia spin-off Black Diamond to Peter Metcalf

http://enormocast.com/episode-90-peter-metcalf-big-peaks-and...

I have a collection of several dozen Scientific American magazines from the 1970s, they're the same way (although most of the articles are pretty interesting too). The ads are just so dense with information. For example, the Kodak ads will have a full page interview with an engineer describing some arcane chemical process. Now it's usually just a photo and a slogan.

Same here. I remember very distinctly the first Christmas spent with my own child and feeling like an adult, compared to spending Christmas with my parents.

Hey! That building's right outside my office window. It's really spectacular. There are some time lapse videos of the construction here if you're into that kind of thing. The interactive site (second link from the bottom on that page) is sort of interesting.

http://enr2math.blogspot.com