Pigeons with Rucksacks Measure London's Air Quality | Hacker News Reader

Pigeons with Rucksacks Measure London's Air Quality

pigeonairpatrol.com

71 pointstomjhill19 comments

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In Lima they have vultures looking out for illegal rubbish dumps. [1]

Is the use of animal "volunteers" the natural next step for the sharing economy?

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jan/29/drowning-rubbi...

It's a great workaround for bans on quadrocopters.

Pigeons With Rucksacks would make an awesome band name.

Yes, they do tweet you the results

Optionally via Carrier Pigeons or Owl Post for the few without internet access.

IP over Avian Carriers: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt

As I recall, packet loss was the main issue, as the packet size was enormous.

Owls are way better at routing than IP, especially with roaming users ;)

You mean there are non-wizard who also use Owl Post? :-)

Cutesy copy written from pigeon perspective: "So don’t worry, we love flying, we’re pigeons after all." But serious copy about needing bicyclists as beta testers -- is the pigeon deal a publicity stunt, or a real situation?

Super interesting, shame both my home and work are engulfed in moderate pollution :/

Also a possible major UI fail (unless it's just me): I can't move the map.

Not just you. I'm guessing the map wasn't intended to be moved, but if that's the case, hovering shouldn't show the hand cursor.

They cant spell dioxide, and theyre not measuring pm2.5 theres a site at heathrow that does measure pm2.5 http://www.heathrowairwatch.org.uk/data/graphs

Particulates are usually at larger concentration at ground level; not sure if using variable-height sampling would make sense there.

Damn couldn't they be used for mesh internet in cities?

Tiny pigeon backpacks! Cute!

Get your website in check. Using that much of my CPU on idle is ridiculous. https://s3.amazonaws.com/coda-files/2016-03-14_12-33-55.png

Same here. AFAIK the page seems to be constantly updating itself even when idle.

Not much impact on my CPU in Firefox (+5% or so), but it's using 60% of my GPU/graphics card....

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