Measuring hourly snowfall with a webcam and PHP | Hacker News Reader

Measuring hourly snowfall with a webcam and PHP

boutell.com

22 pointsjohnkary13 comments

Being stuck at home in snow days seems to inspire a certain kind of creativity ;) Here's some macbook camera timelapse stuff I hacked together during a blizzard last winter: http://niryariv.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/time-lapse-photogra...

Looks like Canada

The units are given in inches, so I'm not sure. People do use inches in Canada, but in weather reports, one usually sees centimetres.

The roof on the house in the background is kinda flat. Should be southern or even south of New England if in the USA.

According to her facebook she lives in Wilmington, Delaware.

Most days I imagine she will have no snow on her bucket. Neat idea. I may try this myself, living up in the woods of Vermont I have snow on my buckets from Nov-March.

The bucket is in the village of Arden, Delaware, which incidentally a single-tax Georgist community (I grew up there).

Seems to use some units of measurement that are unheard of in my part of the world. Oh 1 inch = 2.54 cm.

A bit ot, but is there a standard way to measure things? (I'm thinking about inches vs cm, or gallons vs liters).

Yes, the metric system.

Every country in the world uses it except for the US, Burma, and Liberia.

The UK still uses imperial units a lot, too.

Even Canada pretends to use it. Except everybody converts in their head.

Interestingly, I believe the US customary units are defined by metric values now. If they weren't, it'd probably make international trade between the US and other countries almost impossible.

It certainly doesn't dictate what hobbyists will use for a project. Though what does surprise me is that even people with an interest in science don't recognise the benefits of metric. Mathematical formulas often use metric values for simplicity. No doubt you could adapt them for customary values though it would needlessly add complexity thus increasing chances of error.

Wow, I'm surprised how much my original post got modded down. Didn't realise how sensitive US people were about their units.

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