Intro to Areography
February 7, 2021 • #The resemblance between Martian and Terran topography is amazing. Mars has volcanism, plains, valleys, and hard evidence of water formerly everywhere.
Great shots here with renderings of Martian topography.
The Valles Marineris canyon on Mars.
2,500 miles long, 120 miles wide, 4.5 miles deep. The largest canyon in the Solar System.
The resemblance between Martian and Terran topography is amazing. Mars has volcanism, plains, valleys, and hard evidence of water formerly everywhere.
Great shots here with renderings of Martian topography.
Bryan put together this neat little utility for merging point data with containing polygon attributes with spatial join queries. It uses Turf.js to do the geoprocess in the browser.
Amazing photography of the Mars surface:
NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured its highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface. Composed of more than 1,000 images taken during the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday and carefully assembled over the ensuing months, the composite contains 1.8 billion pixels of Martian landscape. The rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, used its telephoto lens to produce the panorama; meanwhile, it relied on its medium-angle lens to produce a lower-resolution, nearly 650-million-pixel panorama that includes the rover’s deck and robotic arm.
- “Easy” because there’s a delay between benefit and cost.
The cost of exercising is immediate. Exercise hurts while you’re doing it, and the harder the exercise the more the hurt. Investing is different. It has a cost, just like exercising. But its costs can be delayed by years.
Whenever there’s a delay between benefit and cost, the benefits always seem easier than they are. And whenever the benefits seem easier than they are, people take risks they shouldn’t. It’s why there are investing bubbles, but not exercise bubbles.
This is an old announcement, but new to me. CloudFlare now hosts privacy-centric DNS at 1.1.1.1, available to all:
We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. They thought it was a laudable goal. We offered Cloudflare’s network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.
The Mars rover Opportunity is now out of commission. This Twitter thread from Jacob Margolis goes through a timeline of what happened to the rover. It first landed and began exploring the Martian surface in 2004. The system exceeeded its intended planned operational lifespan by “14 years and 46 days”. An incredible feat of engineering.
I don’t post much about politics here, preferring to keep most of that to myself. I did find this piece an interesting perspective on the rise of a particular flavor of socialist-oriented ideology, and the too-common notion that so much should be guided, directed, or outright owned by government. On the risk of regulatory capture vs the value of the market:
Bureaucracy at any level provides opportunities for special interests to capture influence. The purest delegation of power is to individuals in a free market.