iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

What next, ML to predict radioactive isotope decay?

I will *never* understand why documentation will link from a very specific dataset that I’ve already found to the top level of a completely different interface to actually get the data.

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Robert "The Bobby Yaga" McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

VAR! In the early morning hours #OTD in 1923, Edwin Hubble took a photo plate of M31 that showed a Cepheid variable star. Using Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s distance-luminosity relationship, Hubble concluded that M31 is another galaxy outside the Milky Way. 🧪 🔭 ⚛️ Image: Carnegie Observatories

Photo plate of Hubble's famous "VAR!" discovery. This is a photonegative plate of an image of the Andromeda Galaxy, with several small annotations made in grease pencil. One of them was previously marked "N" for "nova," but the N has been crossed out and replaced with an excited "VAR!" to indicate a Cepheid Variable.

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Tara C. Smith @aetiology.bsky.social · 12h

OK so who's read Jacobsen's Biological War book? Cause I'm seeing all sorts of stuff being shared about she explains how the Russians spliced Y. pestis with a "euphoria gene" and "viral encephalitis" genes and that's the outbreak that's being "covered up" right now and just, what??

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Shoutout to @nsidc.bsky.social for offering their sea ice data as GeoTIFFs in a plain, human-readable directory structure (in addition to the NASA data portal): noaadata.apps.nsidc.org/NOAA/G02135/... noaadata.apps.nsidc.org/NOAA/G02135/...

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Still need to write the third, about bringing geospatial raster data into Python, manipulating it, and then exporting. Of course then I have to re-write everything for the *new* version of GDAL, which changed everything (for the better).

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

If you’re resizing files, I wrote two tutorials for that. 1st is GDAL + Bash medium.com/@robsimmon/a... second is using Python to drive GDAL on the command line: medium.com/@robsimmon/a...

medium.com

A Gentle Introduction to GDAL Part 9: Automation with Bash

The main strength of GDAL is its command line foundation, which unlocks capabilities that are difficult to execute otherwise.

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Michele Tobias, PhD @micheletobias.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Thank you so much to the people who write good documentation. I have not seen any today for what I am trying to do. But for the people who do write good docs for other things, you are amazing.

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

“I’m a crystallographer, so I want data-rich photos. I can’t do much with a photograph that only has six spots on it.”

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Aaron Becker @aaronjbecker.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Every river in North America, every day for two years. The combined flow to the sea sinks as low as 53,000 m³/s in winter and swells past 290,000 by late June, more than quadrupling each spring. Data: GloFAS, @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social #rivers #dataviz #hydrology

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Lisa Hornung @lisahornung.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Turned my explorations of word mentions in popular country songs into a mini collection.🐴🤠🎵 Had a lot of fun playing with circular shapes and earthy colour tones of country albums. Data from #TidyTuesday, made in python matplotlib + Figma. Detailed versions 👇 #Dataviz

Collage of four squared images. Each of them showing a circular shape that visualises word mentions in country song lyrics. Exploring patterns for 'girl', 'baby', 'love' and 'town'.

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I sometimes think it’s a subtle way to force you to remember the system password.

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Aaron Becker @aaronjbecker.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Typical peak foliage: the North Shore around Oct 3, the Twin Cities around Oct 16. Timing from 25 years of NASA MODIS phenology, checked against USA National Phenology Network observations; color from USDA Forest Service tree species maps. #fallfoliage #Minnesota

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Very noisy planes just flew over my house! Must be Fleet Week. ✈️

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

There are colors in CMYK that can’t be displayed in RGB space. My point was that if you already have CMYK separations, converting *back* to RGB for printing is less than optimal (acknowledging that separations for offset printing may not be the same as for an inkjet or plotter).

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tweety fish oh wow like a chimera or something spoooky @sifu.tweety.fish · 03/10/2026

Before I saw a talk by Bevil Conway I figured color perception was basically comprehensible by analogy to the rest of vision. After his talk I had no idea how color was processed, what it was for, or how to think about it, and you probably could have convinced me it didn’t really exist.

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I hate the mandatory RGB for print, but I guess it’s better than demanding CMYK but not providing enough info to do it right.

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

With both Lake Powell and Lake Mead at record-lows, here’s a look at how their water levels have varied since Powell was filled in 1980. Neither has recovered from a severe drought in the early 2020s, while Colorado River flows continue to drop. #dataviz #climate #globalwarming

Two graphs of water stored in Lake Powell (left) and lake Mead (right). The data are measured over the water year, which runs from October 1st to October 1st. Years when the lake level increased are marked in blue, years when they decreased are marked in red. Levels in Lake Powell maxed out at about 24-million-acre–feet in the early 1980s, and are currently just over 5-million-acre-feet. Lake Mead was just over 25-million acre-feet in the early 1980s and late 1990s, but is now just under 7-million acre-feet.

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

TIL: Eduard Imhof made thematic maps. #cartography www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet...

Two thematic maps of Switzerland: temperature in January (top) and July (bottom). Temps in January are cool or cold, and the colors are mostly blue and light green. In summer it is warmer, and colors are light green, yellow, and red.

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Don’t plotters use CMYK ink too?

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

How do you get a paper about use of color published in a scientific journal without even mentioning concepts like Lightness, Chroma, Hue (LCH)?

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

TIL: Eduard Imhof made thematic maps. #cartography www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet...

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

They’d be better than snapshots off my phone. 🙏

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Is there any chance someone has a scan of Bertin’s color palettes from one of the original editions? + plate 5 from a German edition of Imhof? I’d like to get the colors as accurate as possible for a presentation. cc @kennethfield.bsky.social #color #dataviz #NACIS2026

Page 84 from the ESRI edition of Bertin’s Semiology of Graphics. It shows a variety of color palettes.

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation: www.usbr.gov/uc/water/hyd... Recommended reading: Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner Encounters with the Archdruid, John McPhee The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey

usbr.gov

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Of course, looking at the original post on Twitter, it was a joke. Which my wife sussed immediately.

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Yale Program on Climate Change Communication @yaleclimatecomm.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Germany’s Climate Computing Center is preparing to store 5 petabytes of U.S. climate data. That’s equivalent to roughly 1 billion high-resolution images. This move will help preserve U.S. climate datasets amid growing questions about their long-term availability.

A picture of fiber optic cables with a text overlay that reads: “Germany is preparing to store U.S. climate data, preserving vital climate research for the future.”

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

That moment when you track down a high-quality scan of a rare book, only to discover that the maps aren’t included. 😭 www.loc.gov/resource/gdc...

loc.gov

Puissance comparée des divers états de l'Europe,

Also available in digital form.

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Climate.us @climate.us · 01/10/2026

October outlook: No part of the U.S. is favored to have a cooler-than-average month. Meanwhile, nearly 80% of the contiguous U.S. entered October abnormally dry or in drought. See NOAA’s temperature, precipitation & drought outlooks: buff.ly/i7Blwc7 #ClimateChange

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Simeon Schmauß @stim3on.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I hinted that there would be more images from the Juice flyby, so here is the timelapse of the full event! It's always amazing to get these views of our fragile Blue Marble from the spacecraft we send out to explore the solar system! 🔭🧪 #planetsci

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Kevin M. Gill @kevinmgill.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

150 Seconds of City Light - A stack of 10 images, 15 seconds each, taken by Anil Menon aboard the International Space Station on September 20th. flic.kr/p/2sDNZ95

Streaks of light from stars (above) and city lights (below). Steaks are interrupted periodically during breaks in the exposures. The atmosphere appears green. Some components of the ISS are seen at the edges.

NASA/ISS/JSC/ESRS/University of Texas at El Paso/Anil Menon/Kevin M. Gill

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Dave Petley @davepetley.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Examination of @planet.com satellite imagery before the 26 August 2026 Langtang Lirung landslide in Nepal, which initiated the massive debris flow and flood, suggests that there were surprisingly few signs of incipient failure:- eos.org/thelandslide...

Satellite image draped onto the Google Earth DEM for the Langtung Lirung landslide. Image copyright Planet Labs, used with permission, collected on 25 August 2026.

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I wonder if that would be trademarkable? Planet is planning to launch an owl constellation.

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Mira Rojanasakul @rjnskl.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

really appreciating the amount of petty grievance there is in the geographic file format universe switchfromshapefile.org

A big red "no" sign on top of an icon that denotes a shapefile file format.

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Mika McKinnon @mikamckinnon.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Our fault for installing a seismic station at a high school, really. Article: pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/srl/arti... Signal from “At risk: Earthquake & Tsunami on the West Coast”

Photograph of a book page with a seismic signal. The rest of the page reads: “1 minute
The characteristic signature of an earthquake - a P wave followed by a higher-amplitude S wave - is clearly missing in the record at the top of this page, collected on January 11, 1996. This recording shows a series of irregular waves interrupted by periods of quiescence. The record came from a seismograph located on the grounds of the Port Alberni High School and was telemetred to the Pacific Geoscience Centre. Based upon his experience and the character of the recording, one of the seismic technicians thought that someone was trying to break into the concrete vault that housed the seismograph. He phoned the Port Alberni RcMP who promised to immediately investigate. A short time later, the technician received a return phone call reporting that a young couple was found in flagrante delicto on the roof of the seismic vault. To our knowledge, this is the world's only seismograph recording of an act of love.

This seismogram was recorded by a seismograph located in a vault on the grounds of the Port Alberni Secondary School on January 11, 1996. The repeated waxing and waning of energy and the lack of distinct P and S wave phases indicate that this event was not an earthquake. It was discovered that its cause was a young couple getting to know one another on the roof of the seismic vault.”

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

“The Control of Nature” was extremely influential to how I view the world.

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Zack Labe @zacklabe.com · 30/09/2026

Wednesday El Niño update - The explanation for why SSTs are still at record high levels in the Niño 3.4 region is because of both climate change + El Niño. Far-reaching ENSO teleconnections are more dependent on temperature gradients, & relative SSTs are actually more similar to other strong events.

Line graph time series of daily sea surface temperature anomalies in the Nino3.4 region. Years are shown from 1982 to 2025 in shades of blue to light yellow, and 2026 is shown in red. Climatologically, the largest anomalies are during the boreal winter in terms of magnitude. Data is from OISSTv2.1.

Map of September 28, 2026 average sea surface temperature anomalies in the ENSO monitoring regions. Data is from NOAA OISSTv2.1 with anomalies relative to a 1991-2020 baseline.

Graphic showing the 2-week change in sea surface temperature anomalies across the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean from September 14, 2026 to September 28, 2026. Data is from NOAA OISSTv2.1

Graphic showing the 4-week change in sea surface temperature anomalies across the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean from August 29, 2026 to September 28, 2026. Data is from NOAA OISSTv2.1

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

So discouraging to see a roundup of new visualization packages illustrated with an egregious rainbow palette. 🙃

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Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

If you can spare ~20 min on an online study on perception & #mentalimagery please consider participating: #visionscience #psychscisky #neuroskyence tstbl.co/131-782

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The Map Center @mapcenter.com · 29/09/2026

Truly one of the all time great scale bars

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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Now plot universities and colleges on top. (And tourist cities, but I’m not sure how to quantify that.)

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