Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
A #history of #maps showing #california as an island…which apparently persisted long beyond the point that expeditions had confirmed it was part of the mainland.
California, an island? Meet cartography’s most persistent mistake
The Glen McLaughlin Collection brings together more than 700 historical examples of ‘California as an island’.
And now I’m thinking of the idea of “soft places” in Sandman, where geography remains fluid until an area is thoroughly mapped.
@OldBrushNewPaper Yeah, I grew up in the 80s and 90s and earthquakes were relatively common, and then the last couple of decades have been, as you say, a lot quieter.
@JordiGH No damage here, just frayed nerves. But then we’re about 130 miles away from the epicenter.
What are the odds of a 7+ #earthquake hitting in the middle of upgrading Windows?
We’re far enough away that all it did was shake the ground and swing a bunch of stuff, but it lasted a lot longer than most quakes I’ve experienced.
Phone autocorrected “I” to “you” – how does that even happen?
“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.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/coquina-fort-in-florida
Arctic fox tracked as it walked from Norway to Canada over the ice.
I was looking for a particular photo and found an old folder of unsorted pics from my phone , 2010-2013. So I’ve been looking through them and sorting them, and there are a few odd ones like this message on a bike path that I never got around to posting.
@DialMforMara One time my wife and I were at a restaurant and she was facing the window. She kept catching a very square, tall bush out of the corner of her eye and having to suppress the “ack! it’s a creeper!” reaction.
@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.
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!
First hike of the summer today! Guess who forgot sunscreen… 🦞
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
Interesting: Apparently fudge was invented by students at 19th-century women’s colleges as a dessert that could be cooked in a dorm room for secret after-curfew parties.
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.
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.
Yelp review by someone saying they’ll never go back to a restaurant they used to visit all the time because they went late one day and Google had listed the wrong hours. Not the restaurant itself, not even the restaurant’s website, but Google.
C’mon, really?
Who writes these notes that appear at the bottom of the Firefox new tab page?
“Watching the sunrise outdoors statistically increases your odds of having a good day. And needing a nap after lunch.”
