Your Name in Landsat | Hacker News Reader

Your Name in Landsat

landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov

234 pointswarrenm38 comments

snippet to view all the letters at once

  <!DOCTYPE html>
  <html lang="en">
  <head>
      <meta charset="UTF-8">
      <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
      <title>Landsat Alphabet Viewer</title>
      <style>
          body { font-family: Arial, sans-serif; text-align: center; }
          #imageContainer { display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; justify-content: center; }
          img { width: 100px; height: 100px; margin: 5px; object-fit: cover; }
      </style>
  </head>
  <body>
      <h1>Landsat Alphabet Viewer</h1>
      <div id="imageContainer"></div>
      <script>
          const letters = {
              'A': 3, 'B': 1, 'C': 2, 'D': 1, 'E': 3, 'F': 1, 'G': 0, 'H': 1,
              'I': 4, 'J': 2, 'K': 1, 'L': 3, 'M': 2, 'N': 2, 'O': 1, 'P': 1,
              'Q': 1, 'R': 3, 'S': 2, 'T': 1, 'U': 2, 'V': 3, 'W': 1, 'X': 2,
              'Y': 2, 'Z': 1
          };
          const container = document.getElementById('imageContainer');
          const baseUrl = 'https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/apps/YourNameInLandsat-main/public/images/';
  
          for (const [letter, maxNum] of Object.entries(letters)) {
              for (let i = 0; i <= maxNum; i++) {
                  const img = document.createElement('img');
                  img.src = `${baseUrl}${letter.toLowerCase()}_${i}.jpg`;
                  img.alt = `${letter}_${i}`;
                  img.title = `${letter}_${i}`;
                  container.appendChild(img);
              }
          }
      </script>
  </body>
  </html>

Your comment activates Reader Mode on Safari mobile automatically.

It does? Mine seems to load this page just like any other comment section. I’m using iOS 16.7.10, so perhaps Reader Mode activates automatically on higher versions. I’m curious to test this a bit more but, sadly, my phone is out of warranty for non-security updates so I’ll have believe that what you say is true without testing anything.

a function call that creates a list of dynamic URLs that then immediately/eventually gets added to the DOM would be the first example i and i imagine most would think of when using behavioral heuristics to determine a documents accumulative total security heuristic. If it's too 'weird', enable Reader Mode.

Could try to split/reduce the strings to try to "de-colour" the entropy/ heuristic to avoid it

File a bug report?

there's also this page: https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/your-name-in-landsat-interacti...

They have more than one image for each letter - does this snippet show every variation?

I was showing this to my daughter a few days back - naming her, her dolls, and what not. Between Landsat and Sentinel satellites, there are over 77TB of free satellite data available for public use every month. Lot can be done while a lot of these data are wasted and not-so-usable. And we have fun things like lettering words with earth's landscape. Have fun.

Reminiscent of the famous Butterfly Alphabet photographic artwork: https://mymodernmet.com/kjell-bloch-sandved-butterfly-alphab...

Would be cool to be able to cycle through images for a specific letter in a word. So you can refine the look.

Love this! But seems to be hugged to death.

The images load extremely slowly. This can be confusing as you do not see any spinner or indication that they are loading. But they do come if you are patient.

As you have some letters in the cache they render instantly so to the users it looks totally broken. Unless your linger on the page and the letters snaps in 20 seconds later (one by one).

An empty place holder (so you can see the space) until the letter loads would be nice. Maybe even a "Loading" placeholder text for each letter. An animated (fake) spinner would be a nice visual cue. Then swap the image when it is loaded.

Loads instantly for me.

This does have a profanity filter, but it's a bit rusty. Minutes of quality entertainment for 14-year-old boys of all ages.

Your comment made me check the code. IMO it isn't very clean, but if it works it works I guess.

I love the logo.

And it’s from a government agency.

Direct link: https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/apps/YourNameInLandsat-main/pu...

How did they locate these particular images? I would love to read something on that, or similar projects looking across satellite imagery for specific patterns.

Easiest way is going to be to downsample the images and then apply a pre-trained classifier that can ignore the fact these are sat images. You could probably turn them into 28x28 greyscale and then use a model trained on handwritten characters, like EMNIST.

Whatever approach you take, you'll probably be selecting the final set by hand, so it's just about building the candidate set in an efficient manner. Low absolute accuracy isn't really an issue as long as you end up with a managable set to review.

There simply doesn’t seem to be that many different images so I can imagine an even easier way than an image classifier.

As you work through your day as a satellite image person (I don’t know the job title, sorry) and see a shape that looks like a letter screenshot and save it. You’ll have an alphabet in a very short amount of time.

Given the repeats of letters I’m seeing I think that’s all they’ve done here.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm having trouble seeing the "N"s in the images:

https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/apps/YourNameInLandsat-main/pu...

That last one, yeah maybe, but gets kind of lost in the noise. The two first I have no idea how it's supposed to be an N.

Cool little experiment none the less :)

Cursive lower-case n.

Oh, thanks. That's what I get for skipping cursive classes in school.

You could try to take the class again.

Any guess what the class would be called? :)

Those were classes we had in primary school in Sweden more than 20 years ago, in "Lågstadiet" (Lower stage - mandatory school in English?), when we were like from 7 to 9 years old or something.

Unlikely to even attempt to go back there :)

I completely respect your refusal to acknowledge my terrible pun :)

I remember having to learn cursive on 2nd grade in the US, so I would have been about 8 at the time. Seems like a pretty obsolescent skill these days.

Having cursive under your belt helps you learn the rules, so you can break them later on as you develop a personal style.

I’ve worked in roles where I had a lot of hand writing to do. If I used printing, it would take about three times as long than if I used my shorthand.

Even taking notes in lectures, I could create notes by hand much faster than I could transcribe with a keyboard.

For some reason it never occurred to me that cursive is related to shorthand. I did self study cursive a little bit when in high school, but I simply recognized it as a way to write things that are more beautiful even though to modern eyes it might be more difficult to read. I did remember annoying a few teachers in high school when my work looked like the handwriting in https://mastodon.social/@waldoj/113082201727675702 and the teachers spent extra time understanding my writing.

It never occurred to me that there is a shorthand to increase my own efficiency.

Side note: in the word “shorthand” itself, the “hand” is “handwriting; style of penmanship” (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hand#English meaning 10), cf. “round hand” etc.

> I did self study cursive a little bit when in high school, but I simply recognized it as a way to write things that are more beautiful even though to modern eyes it might be more difficult to read.

That sounds more like calligraphy, IMHO. Many of the letter forms for some styles of cursive are similar to what happens if you write in block letters without lifting your pen. Depending on the particular style, there's some exceptions and embelleshments, but if you're taking a lot of notes in a hurry with a pen in block letters it kind of devolves into cursive naturally.

Shorthand is generally phonetic, so that's a different skill, IMHO.

Yea I recognized that writing cursive is faster because I don't need to lift the pen that often. But the question is whether that makes the reader do more work. A few teachers in high school preferred that I stop because it was more troublesome for them to read.

In any case I find any kind of handwriting to be slower than typing, and I am not even a good typist.

I simply recognized it as a way to write things that are more beautiful

The whole point of cursive is to make writing easier and faster than printing.

Once you know it, and aren't struggling against it, it becomes very fluid and your hand muscles hurt less than if you print.

Pretty much the only use of cursive today is for signatures. To me, the only rule you need to remember is that the signature you use for legal documents should not be the same as what you use for autographs. Are there any others that make sense for today's limited real world use of cursive?

Seems like a pretty obsolescent skill these days.

I had a younger coworker tell me that he can't read any cursive. I asked him how he finds Walgreens, or which license plates are from California.

People act like it's Klingon. If second-graders can figure it out, an adult can make an effort.

That is a cursive-like font which is designed for easy readability. A formal handwritten document like the Declaration of Independence is slow and difficult to read. And an informal documents like San Pepys diaries are nigh indecipherable to modern eyes.

https://www.magd.cam.ac.uk/pepys/virtual-exhibitions/diary#:....

The diaries are in shorthand, that's different.

The usual aim is to read present-day cursive, not centuries-old documents.

The Walgreens logo isn't a cursive-like font. It's correct Palmer Method cursive. The California license plate is, too. Though a sloppy interprtaion of it.

Cursive moved away from the style used in the Declaration of Independence 150 years ago.

Palmer Method cursive is what most people have been using for the last century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method

Recursive

history

It defaults to “landsat” on loading for those scratching their heads like I was (lanisal? What is lanisal!?)

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