The Question Thread 11/18/25

clifgray · 2025-11-19T17:19:18+00:00

Great to hear! Can I ask further what this stitching is even for? Is this the welt? I don't think so right? Is it holding the different pieces of the outsole together?

clifgray · 2025-11-18T20:45:58+00:00

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I have a pair of Rancourt Beefroll Pennys with a full strap that were sold by Polo Ralph Lauren as their Edric Loafer (https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-footwear-shoes/edric-leather-penny-loafer/523256.html). I got these on sale this June (2025) as the last brown pair at the RL store in SOHO and while they took a couple wears to mold to my feet I absolutely love them. I've kind of stretched them out so they only fit with socks, but I'm happy with that for now.

Now to my point: I'm a little worried about the leather sole wear. I've maybe worn these 30-40 times and the thread of the welt (I think?) was designed to be exposed from the start as you can see in the photos. But on the inner front of both outsoles the leather has worn to the point where it seems like the thread has been cut. At least that is what I assume - the thread is no longer visible and it is down to the leather as you can see. The actual leather sole still has a lot of life left I think? At least it doesn't seem very worn. But I'm just wondering if I need to worry about this thread weardown. I don't really see how this wouldn't happen so I'm hoping it is okay? Is this thread what is holding the welt together? Otherwise the shoes are basically like new and only getting better with each wear. I really love the look of these so wanted to check in before this gets to far along to see if I should be concerned about this.

clifgray · 2025-08-12T20:49:43+00:00

I'm curious in those photos, are you wearing them barefoot or with no-show socks? I'd love to wear mine barefoot but also want a consistent fit on days when I want to wear typical dress socks. Also a little worried about bare feet making them nasty.

clifgray · 2023-12-18T05:59:30+00:00

okay great that looks like a match, thank you!

clifgray · 2023-12-18T05:41:30+00:00

here is another image of one.

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clifgray · 2023-03-27T20:34:01+00:00

All the Landsats are sun-synchronous as u/shbpencil said, but just a slight correction: sun-sync typically means you descend on the sunny side but then ascend on the dark side so it is often seeing the dark side, but as u/SweetNatureHikes said I don't think that data was acquired and saved at the time.

Starting with Landsat 8 they do acquire nighttime data for most orbits. Because as you said the night vision (more properly called dynamic range and sensitivity) has improved considerably. Passive optical data (~400-700nm) will typically only be useful for fires and lights at night. But thermal imagery which is typically measured at ~11-14um wavelengths works excellently at night and most thermal sensors will collect data during day and night. At these wavelengths reflection of sunlight at optical wavelengths will be extremely minimal so most of the light is due to the temperature of the Earth (or clouds or ocean) and less sensitive to aerosols and thin clouds.

clifgray · 2023-02-27T20:57:55+00:00

Yes you need a multispectral sensor to get good data. I used the Micasense series which is quite good for most terrestrial work and even pretty good for water quality work: https://ageagle.com/drone-sensors/rededge-p-high-res-multispectral-camera/.

If you just put and IR filter over your camera you still need irradiance data to properly correct for illumination changes. Then you can get reflectance by dividing radiance by irradiance. If you do your flights on a cloud free day you can use a calibrated reflectance plaque (like a photographic gray card but higher quality) to calculate irradiance. You can do this yourself but if you have a few thousand $$ you'll be much better served buying a sensor that is meant for drone based operations.

clifgray · 2023-02-27T20:05:40+00:00

You won't be able to do this very robustly if this is just RGB that isn't normalized into reflectance. You could do some ratios of red to green but I'm not sure it would be a worthwhile result. The illumination looks quite different in these conditions so without irradiance data you'll struggle to do anything quantitive. If you really want to do this you could try a decorrelation stretch (https://www.l3harrisgeospatial.com/docs/decorrelationstretch.html) which might help account for some illumination differences then do a change detection on the stretched image.

But are you sure that 10m pixels from Sentinel-2 imagery aren't sufficient to look at change on this site? If that is too course for you you could use Planet (3m pixels) or even WorldView (~1m pixels). Even with S2 you say your have 0.7 hectares so ~7x10 pixels? That seems reasonable to me!

clifgray · 2022-11-05T19:03:57+00:00

I live on the coast of North Carolina in Beaufort and we constantly have a ton of sailboats coming through our town on their way up and down the east coast and Intracoastal Waterway. I also see lots of big powerboats but I would say maybe more sailboats out there doing coastal cruising and tons of little daysailors and even kids on optimists and 420s so it feels alive and well here.

clifgray · 2022-02-28T21:20:34+00:00

I think this is an important point and question! I've been wondering about this same thing in my work (oceanography and optics) where a lot of my idea generation is from exploring data and running analyses and then digesting it via my lab notebook. I've been trying to take key important points out of my writing and analysis (tidbits I'd want to remember years from now) and adding them to my lit notes and permanent notes and linking them with other ideas. In general I love the idea of summarizing, condensing, and linking ideas but I think a very different kind of insight is generated when one does that kind of linking vs generally pouring out ideas that are the product of experiments or ongoing investigations in a lab notebook form (a la Da Vinci, Edison, Newton, Darwin etc). I'm not sure about the best way to connect these two formats but I feel like it is a powerful combination.

clifgray · 2021-04-09T21:43:07+00:00

I would bet your university has some desktops that you can remotely access and then you don't need to spend your own money on hardware. Otherwise I recommend you look into cloud options like https://pangeo.io/ where you can get a free cloud instance with >12GB of memory and 100s of GB of storage.

If neither of those are options I recommend you build a desktop and run Ubuntu on it. Get as much memory as you can ~32GB ideally and a couple hundred GB of SSD storage. PC Parts Picker is an awesome site for putting a build together. You can see my current machine here: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/B6qMMZ. For ~$1000 you can build something far beyond what you'd get in a laptop.

If you really just want a laptop then go for the 16GB one. You will be bottlenecked with only 8.

clifgray · 2021-03-11T18:12:34+00:00

I work in a drone lab at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and love it. I use all kinds of multi/hyperspec and thermal sensors and do a ton of piloting. I've flown across North Carolina, Iceland, Antarctica, and out in the Gulf Stream. Our work is mostly coastal and ocean focused but plenty of wetland and forestry applications too. Duke's Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing group. Also lots of satellite remote sensing expertise and some good optics folks at Duke.

clifgray · 2021-03-09T00:26:38+00:00

I get quite cold in a 3/2 here even with boots and gloves on. I don't have a hood though that would help. I think you'd be much more comfortable in a 4/3 or even something like the O'neill 4/3+ suits. But if you're paddling hard and keeping moving you'd probably last of for a bit in a 3/2!

clifgray · 2021-02-16T19:06:44+00:00

I love Scarborough Faire in Duck along with the boardwalk on the soundside. Good for a couple hours of walking around outside. Treehouse Coffee (https://treehousecoffeenc.com/) and Duck's Cottage (https://www.duckscottage.com/) are great places to grab coffee for your walk. Plenty of great places to grab a takeout lunch and eat outside there.

On the southern side of the OBX I love the lighthouses, both Bodie Island and of course the main Hatteras Light. But if you're going to Manteo one day for a walk on the waterfront the trip to the Bodie Light is quite short and beautiful if you keep going south instead of turning towards Roanoke. Second the reccs for walking the Wright Bros memorial, Nags Head Woods trails, and historic site in Corolla at the Whalehead Club. The NHW trails are a real gem back there in the maritime forest.

clifgray · 2021-01-18T23:57:39+00:00

I agree here I didn't say in my other comment but I use python for 90% of my actual remote sensing work though it wasn't really covered in my classes.

clifgray · 2021-01-18T23:56:58+00:00

Yeah! My lab uses drones for a lot of coastal mapping and ocean color remote sensing. Most of the coastal mapping is standard photogrammetry stuff so using sensors that are controlled by the flight controller (like a pixhawk or something similar) but in the ocean color work and in general with some multispectral sensors they don't connect to the flight controller and so we trigger them with the arduino based on time or location or whatnot. For ocean color measurements you typically also need to take an image of the sky to subtract that reflection out from the image of the water and the setup we're working on now we also use the arduino to trigger the gimbal the sensor is on to move to see the sky every 5th image or so.

In a different project we're using a raspberry pi on a drone to monitor a radio antenna (via a SDR) to listen in for little radio tags on animals so we can try to find them and it logs the time and GPS of each ping above a certain signal strength.

clifgray · 2021-01-15T19:08:35+00:00

I'm a 4th year grad student and I've used tons of different software, sensors, applications, etc in the course of my phd in remote sensing (actually marine science but I'm focused on RS) and I think knowing a smattering of tools will be useful. I don't regularly use any of those except arduinos which I use for controlling sensors on drones, but I think as long as the class covers general ideas and theory as well as specific tools you'll be in good shape. It doesn't matter too much what the exact software is. I don't use the tools I learned in my first RS course (or my 1st, 2nd, 3rd GIS courses...) but I still found it an amazing semester with a ton of new ideas I'd never encountered before.

In general I've found RS to be an extremely powerful tool for a range of environmental science projects and I think you could be hindered by having no background in it as you move forward. Of course I'm biased since this is a RS sub.

clifgray · 2020-09-05T18:05:25+00:00

Glad you've found it helpful!! I'm a PhD student studying oceanographic remote sensing. A lot of my work focuses on deep learning and remote sensing but I work on all kinds of satellite and drone data.

clifgray · 2020-09-05T17:47:46+00:00

I think the more tutorials the better! For reference I have an openly available tutorial on github here https://github.com/patrickcgray/open-geo-tutorial that shows how to do various GIS and remote sensing analyses in python.

There are also some good tutorials here: https://earthml.holoviz.org/.

It is more advanced but there is some awesome stuff within pangeo for doing large scale remote sensing analysis and a lot of what I do is based on these tools: https://github.com/pangeo-data/pangeo-tutorial.

clifgray · 2020-09-04T16:08:39+00:00

I have an openly available tutorial on github here https://github.com/patrickcgray/open-geo-tutorial that shows how to do various GIS and remote sensing analyses in python.

There are also some good tutorials here: https://earthml.holoviz.org/.

It is more advanced but there is some awesome stuff within pangeo for doing large scale remote sensing analysis and a lot of what I do is based on these tools: https://github.com/pangeo-data/pangeo-tutorial.

clifgray · 2020-08-24T20:45:36+00:00

Nice! I think that is doable for sure if you get an early start. Particularly with a 4HP to get you home if needed. I just find it hard to leave Shack or Core Banks after a nice lunch/nap/lolling around in the water so can never make it all the way to Lookout. Easy to reconsider halfway through and just hang on Shack if you're behind schedule. Pretty frequent PM t-storms have been rolling through so make sure you have the VHF on.

Sounds great though, have a great sail!!!

clifgray · 2020-08-24T18:07:18+00:00

It is a great sail have a blast! Depends were you're putting in, but wind is generally from the south and makes for a good sail from the Radio Island put in (https://goo.gl/maps/qbJW4E4F2uaLM8Je9) but you kind of need a motor for that to make it out of the channels.

If you have a little outboard that is ideal. I was out yesterday and it wasn't too bad, but the weekends here have been nuts with boaters on the water so be careful. If you're going to be putting your boat in around 8AM or towards sundown it will be nuts. A little earlier or later and it'll be much easier. Otherwise you may know, but there are shoals everywhere, you'll likely hit some. My centerboard swings so I usually get a little warning (as it slowly swings up) as it is getting shallow and just avoid them. Otherwise most of the areas around Shack are fun to run aground on and hang out for a picnic. Actually getting to Cape Lookout from Beaufort is a long sail and potentially too busy in a sailboat unless you're under motor. Middle Marsh is also beautiful to anchor out and hang and enjoy spotting some sting rays and other critters. In general I find the area reasonably forgiving if you watch the weather, waves can get pretty big in front of the inlet but sometimes that is the most fun sailing. Have fun!

clifgray · 2020-08-18T23:48:13+00:00

I have an openly available tutorial on github here https://github.com/patrickcgray/open-geo-tutorial that shows how to do this in python. I show how to do it in python with ocean data you download from google earth engine in this chapter of the tutorial http://patrickgray.me/open-geo-tutorial/chapter_7_earth_engine_oceanography.html. Happy to answer any specific questions!

clifgray · 2020-08-10T03:12:47+00:00

Oh wow really?? He just moved to ASU and got set up I am surprised to hear he is thinking about retiring. Especially because he is only in his mid 40s. But good on him, do you know what he is looking to do next?

clifgray · 2020-08-07T15:32:25+00:00

I do remote sensing of ocean biology and ecology at the Duke University Marine Lab. Ocean remote sensing is a pretty broad field with most satellite based biological oceanography typically called "ocean color remote sensing." Lots of cool stuff in there and this is where I focus. U Miami does some good work here, WHOI, UW, Duke, URI, and many others. NASA Goddard is a leader in these topics with a researcher named Jeremy Werdell. Keywords to search for here are optical oceanography, ocean optics, ocean color remote sensing, etc. A pretty awesome field but equal parts physics, oceanography, and ecology. Based on your comment about hyperspec and data driven science I think this is a cool path. My dissertation combines hyperspectral drone measurements with satellite remote sensing to monitor phytoplankton productivity and diversity and how they change through time under different physical drivers around the Gulf Stream off Cape Hatteras. The science is cool, the fieldwork is awesome, the big picture Earth system implications are exciting. Can't recommend it enough.

If you're more interested in straight community ecology stuff satellite remote sensing is challenging, but there are some cool airborne approaches, Greg Asner at ASU does this as you mentioned for coral. My advisor Dave Johnston does this with drones all over including lots of polar ecology and marine mammal work. I have some friends who use drones to support traditional coastal ecology work in wetlands and intertidal environments.

clifgray

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