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The USGS has historical high resolution aerial photographs for large portions of the country, some places going back to the 1930s:

https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

The interface is really clunky but some of the data is amazing.

On the first tab on the right, select "Search Criteria", select "Coordinates" which allows you to put the points of a polygon on the map.

Next, select the "Data Sets" tab. Select "Aerial Photography | "Aerial Photo Single Frames"

The "Results". If there are any, thumbnails show up. You can then download the actual images which can be huge.

Once you get used to the interface, you can narrow the results down by date, etc.

My favorite disaster of all time:

http://fortune.com/2012/08/02/why-knight-lost-440-million-in...

More details with references: https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-caution...

There should be a better set of symbols focused on recyclablity. I'm sure people see a symbol with a group of arrows in a cycle and assume it must be recyclable.

I like how they list these people and their degrees as if a degree is a "Certificate of Sanity"

In the movie "Wall Street" (1987) Gordon Gecko has his lackey Bud Fox follow a rival around to try and figure out what he's going to invest in, so they can undercut him.

He follows him to a private jet and finds out it's flying to mid-sized city that happens to be the corporate headquarters of a particular company. In the movie it's sort of implied that this activity is illegal.

I wonder if it actually was, and if so, why that would be different than what those hedge fund guys you reference were doing?

The signal from the first pulsar she discovered was later famously plotted as a stacked graph and ultimately became the cover to Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures"

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/pop-culture-p...

Finding a rhyme for orange is as annoying as a squeaky door 'inge

I was thinking more about squirrels and such

There has to be evolutionary pressure on animals to avoid cars on the road. I wonder if there is any evidence that road kill numbers are reducing?

How much of this drop is due to the US essentially "exporting" it's emissions?

The underlying data is specifically for "emissions from energy". The emissions created during the production of goods imported into the US are not captured here. Manufacturing that has been off-shored would look like a net positive in US emissions, but could actually result in higher world-wide emissions.

A better view would be “consumption-based emission inventories”

See section III.5 here:

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...

"... if we switched to a consumption-based reporting system (which corrects for this trade), in 2014 the annual CO2 emissions of many European economies would increase by more than 30% (the UK by 38%; Sweden by 66%; and Belgium's emissions would nearly double); and the USA's emissions would increase by 7%. On the other hand, China's emissions would decrease by 13%; India's by 9%; Russia's by 14% and South Africa by 29%."

People should check out the Earth Explorer site from the USGS:

https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

It has a huge number of high-resolution aerial photos for large swaths of the country going back to the 1930s, and not just urban areas. The interface is really clunky but once you get the hang of it you can find an enormous amount of data.

I couldn't find mention of it but I'm sure the OP site obtained their photos from there.

Did anyone else ever watch the TV show he had a hand in creating, “The Starlost”?

It had a great premise and I loved it as a kid, but I think it only lasted one season.

There needs to be term to describe these rail thin articles whose only real affect is to provide an HN conversation-inspiring headline.

People should check out the free, open source sky atlas/planetarium software Stellarium:

http://stellarium.org

A sort of Google maps for the heavens. You can download star catalogs with over 150 million stars.

It's amazing what you can do with it. Here's a little movie I made of the 2-day long transit of Uranus across the Sun as viewed from Neptune in the yer 46915: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU9yzUUMhqU

China's test of an anti-satellite device left quite a mess:

http://stuffin.space/?search=1999-025

https://www.space.com/3415-china-anti-satellite-test-worriso...

This is sort of bizarre to me. I say this because I use uBlock to remove everything but the newsfeed. The screen shots shown on that extension page is basically the inverse of what I have...

How do you engage with Facebook at all?

Twitter could start at home by doing something about the sewer that is "Moments". It ignores words in the "muted" list; it's full of celebrity crap and the sort of click-bait stuff I loathe.

The whole thing seems to set the tone for the sort of garbage that they talk about wanting to eliminate.

Original documents are harder to reference directly but lots of old probate records have been transcribed; e.g.:

"The Probate records of Essex County, Massachusetts"

https://archive.org/details/probaterecordsof01dowg

One thing I've noticed over the years reading old wills and probate records (16th -18th century) is just how few physical possessions even fairly well-off people owned. Estate inventories often list individual coats, shirts, bedding, bowls, tools, etc. I think the material wealth we have today is so incredible we don't even realize how much we've accumulated and could probably do without.

Also:

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist

If you want to read a book that has the potential of radically changing your perspective of things, give this a shot.

> is a lie

I dislike this (sadly, growingly) cavalier use of the word "lie"

There is such a law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...

I'm not sure what the terms of these employee's termination actually is. The article leaves the impression that they were essentially tossed onto the street, but it could be that they were all given the required 60-day notice.

The great Vaclav Smil wrote about the Haber process and its relationship to world population in a Scientific American article in 1997:

http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/Smil_SciAm_N2cycle.... [PDF]

It sort of blew my mind when I read it back then

I'd like to see another article on why in 2018 every meeting seemingly has to start with 5 minutes of fiddling with the screen projector.

I think Boston and Somerville are just two different manifestations of one regional proposal, though they weren't really presented that way far as I know.

The sites in Somerville are actually a much better choice than the Suffolk Downs site offered by Boston. They're a lot closer to the Boston itself and are better situated for housing and transportation. It would also knit together those grim parts of Somerville that are cut off from the rest of the town by Routes 93 and 28.

It would be great if you could post the details that you found in that Bible somewhere so that interested genealogists could pick them up. Most English church records go back to the 1530s or so; anything earlier than that relies on these sorts of private documents.

Is there any possibility that China could try to limit Apple product's availability to citizens there?

The location the Boston group has proposed for Amazon is the Suffolk Downs race track site on the East Boston - Revere town line. Perhaps with all the Amazon building the area would improve, but the place feels like a wasteland right now.

It's on the other side of Logan airport so there's a lot of airport service infrastructure around. There is a huge field of fuel tanks, big box stores and highways. It's also very cut-off from the city proper. There's no way to get to downtown Boston without going through the harbor tunnel and dealing with the associated airport traffic.

If might be interesting if they could build some sort of bridge directly over the Chelsea River into Chelsea.

That's interesting, because Cambridge, MA made a big deal about lowering the limit to 25 MPH in 2016 - which is still way too fast for most neighborhoods. I'd much rather see it taken down to 20 and even 15 for side streets. The funny thing though is, I haven't noticed one iota of difference in the speed that cars are actually traveling.

How many people are aware that the list of interests directing Facebook ads are easily visible and editable?

Settings | Ads | Your Interests

It's really interesting to see the full scope of the interests FB has gathered over time. Some of them are pretty hilarious.

They have a seemingly huge ontology of every subject you could think of. If you methodically go through an remove every interest, the ads suddenly become very generic - stuff targeted to, say, age group and/or location. Since removing everything, and periodically clearing it all out, I generally only see stuff for things like real estate and car dealerships, which don't really mean much for me.