Space Friends

I Made an Asteroid Doomsday Lamp
Via Dustbury. Previous meteor posts. Previous asteroid posts. There's a difference, but right now I don't care.

Tree Map

NYC Tree Map

The New York City Parks Department has gone to the trouble to create a digital map of all their trees. I suppose this a good and useful thing, but are we going to map all the trees in the world? And once we do that, are we going to start on the shrubs, and then grass? Will every blade of grass eventually be connected to the internet of plants?

I added the link to the Online Tools - Maps list in the sidebar.

Via Detroit Steve.

A New Model for Journalism

A Texan's Map of the United States

A couple of journalists moved to Tyler, a small town in east Texas, and started a website devoted to local news. They seem to be making a success of it. Tyler is a university town, and so is Nacogdoches, so despite it's reputation, there is some intelligence there.

I lived in Houston for a couple of years and I wasn't impressed. Actually, I thought it was pretty wretched. But then I wasn't making enough money to pay for air conditioning, so yeah, pretty miserable. But there is the oil business and where there's oil, there's money, and where there's money there's gonna be people.

Via Indy Tom.

Obfuscation 102

Lionel Richie, the new face of obfuscation

You shouldn't blame Lionel for this. I suspect that whoever wrote Spellf***er happens to like his music. What is this thing? It is a computer program that takes English text and respells all of the words phonetically. I suspect they were inspired by the auto-correct feature found on Smart Phones.

Just... why?

Text obfuscation is not about changing "a" to "à" as it becomes revertable easily (like we see at obfuscator.uo1.net). Spellfucker's method uses random replacements which makes the reverting process more difficult. The cool thing is that the text still stays readable.

I added it to the list of More Tools in the sidebar. Via Detroit Steve.

Obfuscation 101 here.

Europe to Sao Paolo Time Lapse

FlightLapse #01 - MilkyWay from SkyProduction on Vimeo.

    An amazing video, filmed from the flight deck of a commercial long-haul flight, has captured a view of the night sky not usually seen by slumbering passengers.
    The video, shot by pilot Sales Wick, shows a plane taking off from Europe and heading towards South America. The plane flies along the Alps towards Switzerland before taking a turn to join the Rhone Valley towards the Mediterranean Sea.
    It continues towards Algeria and past the tip of the Sahara. Then it's out to the Atlantic Ocean, via Dakar.
    The flight landed in its destination, Sao Paolo, before dawn at around 6am.
    The most amazing aspect of the footage is the sheer volume of shooting stars that can be seen flying across the sky. In the post accompanying the video, the pilot says there are a few days every August when this occurs, and the he and his colleagues lost count of the number of shooting stars in the sky after a few hundred.
    The constellation Perseus, which the plane is flying past, is well known for this phenomenon. In mid-August, around 11pm local time, the sky is filled with meteor showers named the Perseids, after Perseus' son in Greek mythology.
    The Milky Way is also visible in video, especially after the lights of the city disappear. You can see more of Wick’s amazing time-lapse videos on his Instagram or his Facebook. - Hannah Blackiston on Elsewhere

Via FlightAware

Giant Man Builds Classic Cars

Dwarf Cars: Mechanic Hand-Builds Mini Motors
Or maybe he's a regular size man building tiny cars. There seems to be an endless supply of videos on YouTube of people doing unusual stuff. As Dennis pointed out at lunch, whatever you can imagine, someone has done it and put it on YouTube, which, if you think about it, kind of indicates how many people there are on the planet.

Figuring it out one jotted note at a time.

Posted on April 18, 2017 by Jessica Hagy

Stolen entire from Indexed. This is why I write this blog. I also use this technique for sorting out complicated computer programs. Many, if not most, computer programs are pretty straightforward, you just need to extract some data from one structure and stuff it in another, or if you have large quantity of data you might need an array. These kinds of programs are not too difficult to write, you can often go straight to coding.

But some programs can get a bit more complicated and you might need chains of structures (linked lists), and if you have more than one criteria to keep track of, which one do you use for your primary control, and which ones do you use for secondary control? At times like this (usually after I have started coding and written myself into a corner), I find it helps to lay out my plan in plain English.

Via Comrade Misfit.