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kjell

118 karma · joined June 21, 2007

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kjell··on Don't Sell Out the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Oil Companies
I'll just leave this here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion
kjell··on Commuting by Bicycle is down?
I'll add my experience as a primary bike commuter for 5+ years in the US. I do own a car and drive it maybe twice a week, mainly for transporting things that would be difficult on my bike or when the weather is bad.

I perceive people behind the wheel to be increasingly reckless, entitled, and disrespectful. A lot of the reasons for this are already mentioned so I won't rehash the issues of distraction by smartphone, "sharing economy" de-professionalization of shared transportation, and driver resentment towards anybody not in a personal automobile claiming their lawful space on the road.

Somebody needs to mention that each and every person who drives a car is contributing to undeniable, irreversible climate destruction, and plausibly a future earth that won't be able to support human prosperity. EVs really are not much better than ICE vehicles - replace some fossil fuel consumption with enormous mineral extraction and it's a toss-up at best.

There are also a lot of (in)equity issues in our current transportation system that need to be sorted out. Cars reinforce the wealth gap by virtually ensuring economic success for those who can afford them while leaving those who can't out in the cold. Eisenhower's "drive" (pun intended) to build the US interstate system adopted and encouraged common, preexisting local policies that carved up any neighborhood where minority communities could begin to take hold, replacing them via eminent domain with freeways for white suburban commuters.

In sum, cars are bad. But they're so deeply seated in the collective USA brain stem that I'm not sure we will be able to do much to improve the situation.

kjell··on Earthsea – A Rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin (2015)
Tales from Earthsea gives a lot of context to the realm and introduces an important character in the plot of The Other Wind. I took it to be the fifth book in the series with TOW #6.
kjell··on The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free
Wikipedia volunteers are doing some cool work to pull together data and images from museums across the world: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_sum_of_al...
kjell··on The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free
Here's an example torrent of metadata and images from the Rijksmuseum put together by an art history researcher: http://matthewlincoln.net/2015/10/19/the-rijksmuseum-as-bitt...
kjell··on The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free
Excluding the images themselves from the dataset is one thing, but there's an open issue to include a link to the images: https://github.com/metmuseum/openaccess/issues/2
kjell··on Leaflet: An open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps
Yep - I figured based on the projects, but didn't want to call out your real ID in case that mattered. Lunch out on your plaza sounds pretty appealing right now compared to the weather up here!
kjell··on Leaflet: An open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps
Museum tech roll call! I picked up leaflet for the same purpose and it's worked great - http://collections.artsmia.org/art/1218/olive-trees-vincent-...

The Rijksmuseum "Rijksstudio" site has been around for a few years and adopted leaflet very early on for image viewing: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/artists/rembrandt-...

Perhaps of interest to this sub-thread is "IIIF" (the international image interoperability framework), an attempt to standardize access to images (and collections of images) with a JSON(-LD) metadata model: http://iiif.io/

kjell··on GraphicsMagick Image Processing System
vips is another great industrial-grade image processing library

https://github.com/jcupitt/libvips http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=Libvips

kjell··on Planet Found in Habitable Zone Around Nearest Star
Just in time for the third book in Liu Cixin's space opera ("Remembrance of Earth's Past") to be released in english next month: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25451264-death-s-end

Previously on HN: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+cixin+... https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Cixin%20Liu&sort=byPopularity&...

kjell··on Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers
The first 40 minutes of this week's "Invisibilia" touches on the effects transcranial magnetic stimulation had on a woman who lived with undiagnosed aspergers for most of her life.

> ALIX SPIEGEL, BYLINE: Until she was 54 years old, Kim (ph) was totally unaware that there were things in the world that she could not see.

> KIM: Everything that was intended in this went completely over my head, and now I saw it - completely missed the meaning of the whole thing until after the TMS. And then I saw the whole thing clearly.

http://www.npr.org/2016/07/07/485138695/invisibilia-an-exper...

(The TMS study "Kim" participated in took place at the same hospital that the co-author of this letter works, Beth Israel Deaconess.)

kjell··on Olbers’ Paradox: Why Is the Sky Dark at Night? (2000)
https://twitter.com/5point9billion calls out the inverse: light traveling from earth out towards the nearest stars.

It's a twitter bot that takes a twitter user's birthday, and tweets to them as their "light cone" expands across the universe.

kjell··on Ask HN: Wordpress Workflows, Code/DB Versioning and Deployment
`wp-cli` comes in handy. It can migrate a database and do a global search and replace (for the millions of URLs in that database that you need to change for the site to work after it's cloned) a lot cleaner than some of the plugins that are out there.

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/2b2bdacffaa55998fd94

[1] wp-cli.org

kjell··on A 390-year-old bonsai tree survived an atomic bomb
They mention the tree's trunk in the article but it's shaded in the photo. It's glorious: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kjell/3388113528/in/album-7215...

The National Arboretum is the coolest place I've been in DC. It's a bit out of the way, but worth the trip from downtown.

kjell··on The Museum of Modern Art Research Dataset
The Cooper Hewitt (to my knowledge) was the first museum to post their museum metadata on github:

https://github.com/cooperhewitt/collection http://labs.cooperhewitt.org/2012/releasing-collection-githu...

There are a few other museums that have done so since: https://github.com/tategallery/collection https://github.com/artsmia/collection are the two I can think of right now

The Rijksmuseum and the Walters both have CC0 metadata + images, but through a queryable API instead of downloadable csv/json.

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/api http://api.thewalters.org/

kjell··on What one may find in robots.txt
They're there, at least the two I looked at.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130413152316/http://www.state....

Each line is missing `/documents` in the snippet of the `robots.txt`

kjell··on The Miracle of Minneapolis
There's a kernel of truth to this, but 'city == wasteland + cesspool' is ridiculous. I've lived in south minneapolis most of my life, and never spent any significant amount of time in the burbs. (The last time I made it outside the MSP/St. Paul limits was last november to have my wisdom teeth out, at my local dentist's referral.)

There's plenty of culture here, and I haven't been mugged/shot/raped yet. North minneapolis is essentially a different city, with its fair share of crime and other problems, which I can't speak to.

The big difference between here and a "big coastal city" is that things are a lot more spread out per person. I think this leads to everything being on a smaller scale and more distributed. Most of minneapolis isn't downtown, but mixed use residential. My peers (25-30 year olds) mostly rent houses and live with roommates. Small (3 story max?) apartment buildings are the norm.

kjell··on Show HN: Health Scout – An app I wrote for a mother traveling with a sick child
Here's a query for the OSM tagged emergency rooms near me: http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/7pL (move the map and press "run" and it will update)

https://www.mapbox.com/blog/coffee-directions/ has a "coffee finder" that will give directions, but replace "coffee" with "emergency room" and it suddenly has a much greater impact.

kjell··on Show HN: Health Scout – An app I wrote for a mother traveling with a sick child
I'd suggest looking at openstreetmap for hospitals with emergency rooms. This might also give you an easy way to allow people to update the data.

OSM has http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dhospital

  amenity=hospital
  name=Royal London Hospital
  emergency=yes
kjell··on UX Check
From his profile on the linked medium essay, "PM on Office Online." He works for microsoft.

I'd love to see a simple, open output format too. The source is up on github: https://github.com/cgallello/UXCheck.

kjell··on Ask HN: Washington DC Internships
This isn't necessarily a programming internship, but if I looking for work experience this is where I'd go to get it.

https://www.mapbox.com/blog/open-data-research-internship/

kjell··on Walk through a 3D model of Y Combinator
The Cooper Hewitt (a Smithsonian museum in New York) recently 3d scanned itself: http://www.cooperhewitt.org/2014/10/10/3d-scanning-the-carne...

The model is freely-available (CC0) in FBX ("full geometries and color textures including interiors") and STL formats. http://www.cooperhewitt.org/about/mansionmodel/.

http://www.3dsystems.com/ did the scanning/photography.

kjell··on Open art collection metadata
The Cooper Hewitt (NYC) and Tate (UK) have done this too.

https://github.com/cooperhewitt/collection https://github.com/tategallery/collection

kjell··on Tilde.Club: I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds
Largely `wall`. As of a few days ago there's an IRC server running on localhost.
kjell··on 3D Video Capture with Three Kinects
Yep!

https://twitter.com/theowatson/status/444573423088320512 https://twitter.com/theowatson/status/444578281200058368

kjell··on Prose, a content editor for GitHub
Yes: https://github.com/prose/gatekeeper

I believe all the gatekeeper does is forward the oauth confirmation callback to prose so the client side app can use it.

So, anyone worried about security can run their own gatekeeper and their own prose without having to worry about the NSA (oh, wait…)

kjell··on Want a Healthier City? Prescribe Biking
Winter biking in Minneapolis is real. I bike 5 miles to work most days. This was a cold and snowy winter, but it was better than last year because there was more snow and less ice.

[In Minneapolis, nothing stops bicyclists — not even winter](http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-minneapolis-winter-bikin...)

[Biking is up, even — and especially — in cold weather](http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/236827801.html)

[Twin Cities winter bike community feels the pinch](http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/247300181.html)

[Why would you bike commute in the winter](http://www.mprnews.org/story/2014/01/29/why-would-you-bike-c...)

[Ride on in Winter (2011)](http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/114216374.html)

kjell··on Genetic mugshot recreates faces from nothing but DNA
See also:

"Heather talks about how a fixation with a single hair led to a controversial art project, the study of genetics, and the bones of an unidentified woman"

https://vimeo.com/71657839 http://deweyhagborg.com/strangervisions/portraits.html

kjell··on JsDelivr – The advanced open source public CDN
[browserify-cdn](http://wzrd.in/) and http://requirebin.com/ are heading this direction.
kjell··on Apple Releases iBeacon Specification
I'm using an 'iBeacon' (raspberry pi) in a museum setting to nudge visitors entering a certain gallery: "if you'd like to take our Matisse audio tour…" They slide that notification and iOS opens our app directly to the audio tour.

Here's a much richer interactive tour: http://blog.estimote.com/post/77385955199/estimote-beacons-a...

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