Category: Wandering.Shop

Florida’s Cannonball-Eating Spanish Fort

“The Mystery of Florida’s Cannonball-Eating Spanish Fort”

The rock it’s made from, coquina, is a sedimentary rock made up of compressed seashells. It turns out that under impact, the component shell fragments can shift, absorbing the impact. This explains why cannonballs simply sank into the walls like pressing into foam instead of shattering them.

#history #geology #weird

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/coquina-fort-in-florida

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@sohkamyung Thanks. I guess what I need most is to wait for them to slow …

@sohkamyung Thanks. I guess what I need most is to wait for them to slow down and stop. I did get a couple of decent shots of some butterflies that were resting, but the monarchs and the dragonflies never seemed to stop! The one time I managed to successfully track a dragonfly in flight, the result was so blurry I could hardly tell it was there!

I’ll keep the wardrobe tip in mind, too. I was wearing a red shirt at the time.

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Saw a ton of mallards and geese as usual for Madrona Marsh, plus a bunch …

Saw a ton of mallards and geese as usual for Madrona Marsh, plus a bunch of bluebirds. Discovered I’m not very good at taking pictures of dragonflies unless they’ve paused somewhere for longer than a few seconds.

Also spotted several monarch butterflies – see my comments on dragonflies!

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Most of us have seen a single #rainbow. Many of us have seen a double …

Most of us have seen a single #rainbow. Many of us have seen a double rainbow. But occasionally someone will spot a *split* rainbow. These can be produced if some of the raindrops are flattened or elongated, though it’s not always clear what causes the change in shape.

This is an interesting set of photos of a *multiple-split* rainbow and and an article on trying to calculate the circumstances that produced it.

A multi-split rainbow from south-east China, August 12th, 2014

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Interesting: A “car-sized” meteor exploded in the atmosphere above the Caribbean, 170 miles south of …

Interesting: A “car-sized” meteor exploded in the atmosphere above the Caribbean, 170 miles south of Puerto Rico.

Telescopes observed the asteroid before impact. A weather satellite designed to detect lightning picked up the flash. Debris showed up on weather radar, and a Nuclear Test Ban monitoring station picked up the infrasound.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/06/27/car-sized-asteroid-exploded-atmosphere-south-puerto-rico-weather-satellite-radar-captured-moment/

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whining about SDKs

OK, bad enough that they have separate SDKs for the separate APIs for the two different steps in this process that are almost always going to be run in sequence.

But why, WHY, when the APIs both include certain common features that should be the same in both steps, would the two SDKs use completely different terminology in the methods used to build that feature? I can’t just build it once? I can’t even copy-and-paste it?

I suspect the teams who built these SDKs – which are, again, for two steps of a two-step process – went off and did their own thing without any sort of coordination – no plan, no discussion, maybe they didn’t even say hi to each other in the hallway.

TBH, I half-suspect the same of the teams who built the APIs they connect to.

It’s like…if in order to post a photo with a caption, you had to post the photo to Instagram and the caption to Twitter and make sure the tags and usernames and timestamps matched properly to get them to show up together.

And yeah, you used to have to do that – when Twitter and image hosts were entirely different services. Even then, all you really needed to do was link from one to the other. You didn’t have to repeat half the information in a new structure (but get it exactly the same) – and you could justify it because they really were two different services, not two steps of the same process.