It sure got smoky in the past hour or two in Spokane. PM 2.5 spiked on my sensor, Purple Air shows the same. I think it's from the central Washington fires, but I don't know why it's suddenly so bad here at ground level. #wildfire #AirQuality #spokane #wa

The first NISAR (NASA-ISRO SAR) L-band radar images have now been released! These are early images acquired before NISAR reached the final science orbit with radar test modes so only a few locations were imaged. The mountains of Mount Desert Island in Maine, USA, are beautiful. I first visited […]

"What makes this torment nexus special is you can self-host your torment and own your torment identity"

The billionaire in charge of the spyware glasses is named "Rocco Basilico"? The writers of this season of Late Stage Capitalism are just phoning it in at this point.

Sentinel-2 image of the ash kicked up two days ago (from kosmi) https://bsky.app/profile/kosmi.bsky.social/post/3lz4hmhdxus2 #remoteimaging #volcano

Significant layoffs at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (Richland, WA) today. Hundreds of people lost their jobs and were given under 30 minutes to gather their things and be walked off the premises.

I took a couple days this week to get out on some gravel rail trails in British Columbia. Beautiful country, the mountains get big quick north of the border. #BikeTooter #bc #Canada #gravel #railtrail

Just recently an earth-observation satellite photographed another satellite from space! 🛰️🧪 www.space.com/space-explor...

Talked to 23 people who suddenly have to pay huge tariffs or otherwise cannot get chainmail from Pakistan, yarn from France, retro computers from Japan, metal music from the Netherlands, DVDs from Germany, cosplay supplies, sunscreen, etc. www.404media.co/its-just-a-m...

Every time I have plumbers over I'm struck by the parallels with software engineering. * Different plumbers fixing different things that don't solve the problem because there are actually multiple problems. * You don't know the fix worked until you see it running in production, i.e. with water […]

Brought a 10-year-old broken link back to life!

The final hardware deployment of the NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) satellite, the 12-meter radar antenna reflector was successfully completed today, August 15. Congratulations to all the people involved in reaching this important milestone in the mission, in the USA and India. #nasa #isro #sar […]

AP: In CDC attack, man fired 180 shots, breaking 150 windows "...A Georgia man who had blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal opened fire late Friday, killing a police officer. No one at CDC was injured. The shooter was stopped by CDC security guards before driving […]

So yes, it is past time to diversify beyond #github for open source repositories. Everything I have there these days is just low-traffic personal projects, so it is certainly possible without much trouble for myself. Not trivial for projects that manage issues, PRs, etc. there, though. #xp

So many crevasses to end up in. This is the Buarbreen Glacier. 😬 Missing journalist up there somewhere. #oodanorway #buervalley #buarbreenglacier

Nice GDAL utility you found, Google! Too bad you just made it up and it doesn't exist.

So, summing up: software estimates are bad and wrong because even people asking for them rarely want good ones, and an effective project will learn enough as it goes to make them obsolete. If you have to do one, fine, hold your nose and do it in a low-cost way, and then run your project in […]

San Francisco, AI billboards are everywhere.

I have to admit that I am still not sold on the value of type hinting in Python. It's fine for many cases, but sometimes the dancing around to make the type checker happy leads to worse, harder to read code. My latest example is attempting to pass through **kwargs from one function to another […]

NY Times in 2018: "Autoplay Videos Are Not Going Away. Here’s How to Fight Them." NY Times in 2025: 10 separate videos are autoplaying on our home page, auto-enlarging over page content and showing scenes of violence […]

Last Thursday, Mark Skaggs was taking a timelapse of Mount #rainier and happened to capture this #avalanche on the upper slope of the mountain. Shared with permission. #volcano #washington

It's paper day! The first science paper with data from @vrubinobs.bsky.social's survey camera, the mighty LSSTCam, is a VERY quick turnaround of Rubin's observations thus far of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. ☄️ Chandler et al., submitted 🔭 A 🧵

French research vessel L'Atalante surveys radioactive waste barrels that were dumped on the seafloor over the course of 40 years (from the 1950s to the 1990s). #nodssum

"geometry glitch in the map data, or just the Dutch again?"

Two wildfires blowing up in Eastern Washington today, both over 3000 acres already. Meanwhile there is an arson suspect wanted, and a number of suspicious fires in and around Spokane in the past few days […]

I gave a lightning talk on a silly little way to hide data in NaN values in floating point arrays: https://github.com/kjordahl/steganan #scipy2025 #steganography

New fire in Spokane today, even closer to populated areas this time: https://share.watchduty.org/i/55010?ts=1752012369000 "Localized evacuations are occurring" #elliottfire #spokane #wildfire

That was an interesting few hours! I was on my way home from a hike when I heard that there was a level 3 (“GO NOW”) evacuation order at home due to a nearby wildfire m. I got home 10 minutes later, helped load up the car with the dogs and our emergency stuff, and turned around and left. We […]

Only the third ever interstellar object: a tiny world that started its existence at another star. Now cruising in toward our Sun at ~58 km/s, a faint dot (V~18) in the Southern skies. What a day 🔭

Titanium Force® replacement string trimmer line (does not contain titanium 🙄)

I cannot stop thinking about how a century of speculative fiction about catastrophic rogue AI meltdown became a self-fulfilling prophecy by building an AI that functions by running a probabilistic lookup on a table of all fiction humans have ever written to determine what the average AI would do […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is now being kicked out of its own headquarters building in Alexandria, VA: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-administration-ousts-national-science-foundation-from-headquarters/

> On November 28th, 2012, Randall Munroe published an xkcd comic that was a calendar in which the size of each date was proportional to how often each date is referenced by its ordinal name (…) "In months other than September, the 11th is mentioned substantially less often than any other date […]

"Advanced degree in a wildfire-related discipline (e.g., fire science, fire ecology, environmental science with a focus on wildfire, forestry, geography with fuels modeling experience) Direct experience in wildfire behavior modeling, vegetation fuels mapping, or wildfire hazard assessment […]

Planet is hiring a Wildfire Data Scientist, based in San Francisco. Do you use remote sensing data to model and understand wildfire behavior? This is a great opportunity to work with cutting edge satellite imagery at global scale. https://www.planet.com/company/careers/?jobid=6967679 #jobs […]

The biggest scandal in AI energy usage right now deserves to be the xAI data center running on 35 methane gas turbines that don't need air permits because they are "temporary" and don't have catalytic reduction pollution controls installed because... they just didn't bother? […]

Reconsidering my gravel ride hydration and nutrition strategy https://masto.hypertelia.com/@pete/114665128676481775 #BikeTooter #GravelRiding

Saw this beautiful Pac-Man fractal in Graz, Austria. #pacman #fractal #streetart

The White House's "Make America Healthy Again" report cites papers that appear not to exist: "Epidemiologist Katherine Keyes is listed... as the first author of a study on anxiety in adolescents. When NOTUS reached out to her... she was surprised to hear of the citation. She does study mental […]

Yet another dedicated scientist and public servant, this time from US Fish and Wildlife, showing up unpaid after she was fired to volunteer to protect an endangered species. What are we even doing here. 🎁 link: 🧪

If the headline features for your OS upgrade are 8 new emojis and a bunch of pointless AI features, you may be living in 2025.

"This algorithm allows the computer to be used for the drudge work, leaving the reader free for other more delightful tasks." I miss 1987. #digitalhumanities

Was this photo of the Grateful Dead with Al Gore taken in the West Wing? Did the Clinton White House have a huge print of the Apollo 17 Blue Marble photo on the wall? cc @rsimmon.bsky.social‬ #bluemarble #xp https://heads.social/@bourgwick/114552416447319048

I just finished a new #wikipedia article on the former Lake Idaho, which covered the western Snake River Plain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Idaho #geology

Got out yesterday to explore a less traveled part of Washington State. I've been wanting to check out the area where the Palouse to Cascades Trail and the Columbia Plateau Trail cross. Both are rail-to-trail paths now operated by Washington State Parks, and both […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

There were layoffs at MS yesterday and 3 #python core devs from the Faster CPython team were caught in them. If you know of any jobs, please send them their way (they kind of know Python, CPython, and its internals well 😉): Eric Snow: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericsnowcurrently/ Irit Katriel: […]

So, I have managed to lock myself out of my own oven. It has been having trouble with temperature, occasionally overheating, so last night I decided to take out the temperature probe and test it to see if it is obviously the problem. It measured 1080 Ω, exactly what is expected at room […]

San Francisco from Mount Diablo, which, amazingly, is only about 50 km away. https://www.flickr.com/photos/midendian/54513163868/ #sanfrancisco #MountainMonday