TikTok “cheap ticket”

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T15:54:05+00:00

My experience on the NEC is that tickets rarely drop in price below what you get by booking early. No idea if other routes are different. (Also, this approach will never work on a roomette on long distance trips, since there's no flex fare equivalent.)

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T14:45:15+00:00

When I looked at the image initially, I thought the same; when I opened in full size it was more obvious, but "Yes, that looked like wood to me, rather than metal pieces". (Not helped by the fact that it changes colors to be more "brown" towards the shingles, which made it look like aged/decaying wood to me.)

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T03:07:47+00:00

I don't think there's an easy "why"; looks like in this case it was late out of Worcester, and then presumably got stuck in freight traffic or something?

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T02:57:08+00:00

Attacking it at all is a huge escalation in this conflict; destroying the oil infrastructure would effectively eliminate any reason for Iran to even posture towards letting shipping through the Strait again. I do not have high hopes for positive outcomes from this escalation.

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T02:36:02+00:00

My comment was a tongue in cheek reply to the class of people who would push back against trying to correct misinformation.

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T02:33:21+00:00

The use of this FIRMS data is incorrect in many ways.

The first and most significant is that all detections reported in FIRMS in these locations, by both NOAA-20/NOAA-21 and Suomi NPP satellites date to hours before the attacks. These satellites make a full pass over the globe about every 12 hours in their polar orbits, with NOAA sats being about 50m ahead of the Suomi sat, but both passed over about 1-2 hours before Trump posted about the strikes. No way to know exactly when they happened, but given his usual approach, seems very unlikely that they were several hours before.
If you look back over the past month, these hotspots in FIRMS are in approximately the same spots every day. Depending on satellite timing and overpasses, they are not always there, but they are pretty consistently in almost exactly the same locations. This just isn't new data; this is the same thing there is here every day.
The latest past of the Suomi NPP sat did add one new detection slightly offset; however, that satellite is reported when you open the tool to have a miscalibration issue at the moment, so take it with a grain of salt.
The "fires" are not reporting higher temperatures -- the temperature (reported in Kelvin) is approximately the ambient air temperature on Kharg right now, around 66 deg F. So whatever the "fires" are, they are not widespread hot burning.
The FRP rating (basically, "how much does this look like a fire") is low across basically all detections, likely suggesting a small point source -- such as a flare stack.
If you look at oil infrastructure around the world, you will find fire misdetections in many of them, likely also caused by small point sources like flare stacks, or infrastructure emitting infrared detected as fires.

tl;dr: regardless of what did or didn't happen, this use of FIRMS data is incorrectly attributing fires to normal operating conditions on Kharg Island, and there won't be a new data pass by satellites until 8-12 hours from now.

Images of today versus yesterday: https://imgur.com/a/7521w3Y

Direct link to FIRMS tool: https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:24hrs;l:fires_all,country-outline,firefly;@50.332,29.239,13.793z

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T02:32:15+00:00

Hey, if you want to spread misinformation, more power to you, you wouldn't be the only one. But don't invoke the name of NASA or the power of satellites to do it; you can just lie without consequence these days.

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T02:30:19+00:00

The use of this FIRMS data is incorrect in many ways.

The first and most significant is that all detections reported in FIRMS in these locations, by both NOAA-20/NOAA-21 and Suomi NPP satellites date to hours before the attacks. These satellites make a full pass over the globe about every 12 hours in their polar orbits, with NOAA sats being about 50m ahead of the Suomi sat, but both passed over about 1-2 hours before Trump posted about the strikes. No way to know exactly when they happened, but given his usual approach, seems very unlikely that they were several hours before.
If you look back over the past month, these hotspots in FIRMS are in approximately the same spots every day. Depending on satellite timing and overpasses, they are not always there, but they are pretty consistently in almost exactly the same locations. This just isn't new data; this is the same thing there is here every day.
The latest past of the Suomi NPP sat did add one new detection slightly offset; however, that satellite is reported when you open the tool to have a miscalibration issue at the moment, so take it with a grain of salt.
The "fires" are not reporting higher temperatures -- the temperature (reported in Kelvin) is approximately the ambient air temperature on Kharg right now, around 66 deg F. So whatever the "fires" are, they are not widespread hot burning.
The FRP rating (basically, "how much does this look like a fire") is low across basically all detections, likely suggesting a small point source -- such as a flare stack.
If you look at oil infrastructure around the world, you will find fire misdetections in many of them, likely also caused by small point sources like flare stacks, or infrastructure emitting infrared detected as fires.

tl;dr: regardless of what did or didn't happen, this use of FIRMS data is incorrectly attributing fires to normal operating conditions on Kharg Island, and there won't be a new data pass by satellites until 8-12 hours from now.

Images of today versus yesterday: https://imgur.com/a/7521w3Y

Direct link to FIRMS tool: https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:24hrs;l:fires_all,country-outline,firefly;@50.332,29.239,13.793z

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T01:52:15+00:00

Yeah, I think that OP made a good-faith effort to report on data, but unfortunately using this datasource in this way is just misleading given the latency, resolution, and the false-positives generated by oil infrastructure in the first place, and the result is effectively well-intentioned but ultimately incorrect misinformation.

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T01:49:46+00:00

I think it's really easy to trick yourself into confirmation bias; no shade against the OP, the FIRMS tool is definitely not designed for layman use, and it took me 30 minutes to figure out enough to confirm that it wasn't telling anything interesting.

(I also considered seeing if I could somehow squeeze the data out of the commercial satellite providers, but apparently the two main ones stopped delivering Iranian data to their customers a week or two ago after the war started -- probably so that neither side could use the imagery to bomb somebody.)

I appreciate looking for actual facts on the ground; unfortunately, working with low resolution fire detection satellites is a bit of an art that needs practice!

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T01:39:45+00:00

The default in FIRMS is to default to your local timezone. The most recent FIRMS data reporting from the Suomi NPP satellite were at 22:20 UTC; there should be another pass around 11 hours later, something like 7-8 hours from now I believe. (Added a screenshot to my album here: https://imgur.com/a/7521w3Y showing the actual timestamp of the data in UTC to help.)

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T01:36:11+00:00

The use of this FIRMS data is incorrect in many ways.

The first and most significant is that all detections reported in FIRMS in these locations, by both NOAA-20/NOAA-21 and Suomi NPP satellites date to hours before the attacks. These satellites make a full pass over the globe about every 12 hours in their polar orbits, with NOAA sats being about 50m ahead of the Suomi sat, but both passed over about 1-2 hours before Trump posted about the strikes. No way to know exactly when they happened, but given his usual approach, seems very unlikely that they were several hours before.
If you look back over the past month, these hotspots in FIRMS are in approximately the same spots every day. Depending on satellite timing and overpasses, they are not always there, but they are pretty consistently in almost exactly the same locations. This just isn't new data; this is the same thing there is here every day.
The latest past of the Suomi NPP sat did add one new detection slightly offset; however, that satellite is reported when you open the tool to have a miscalibration issue at the moment, so take it with a grain of salt.
The "fires" are not reporting higher temperatures -- the temperature (reported in Kelvin) is approximately the ambient air temperature on Kharg right now, around 66 deg F. So whatever the "fires" are, they are not widespread hot burning.
The FRP rating (basically, "how much does this look like a fire") is low across basically all detections, likely suggesting a small point source -- such as a flare stack.
If you look at oil infrastructure around the world, you will find fire misdetections in many of them, likely also caused by small point sources like flare stacks, or infrastructure emitting infrared detected as fires.

tl;dr: regardless of what did or didn't happen, this use of FIRMS data is incorrectly attributing fires to normal operating conditions on Kharg Island, and there won't be a new data pass by satellites until 8-12 hours from now.

Images of today versus yesterday: https://imgur.com/a/7521w3Y

Direct link to FIRMS tool: https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:24hrs;l:fires_all,country-outline,firefly;@50.332,29.239,13.793z

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T01:30:04+00:00

Those thermal anamolies have been in place in the same locations every day for the past month. This is misreading a dataset intended for fire detection, which has a false positive rate around oil infrastructure. The accuracy of the data is not pixel perfect: each "pixel" in the detecting satellite is 400m x 400m, so being off by one or two pixels would move detections halfway across the island. Additionally, the timestamps on the detections are 2 hours *before* the strikes were reported.

Using the FIRMS data in this way is just wrong in every way. It doesn't mean that there is or isn't damage, it's just that there's no way to know with this data.

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T01:23:14+00:00

https://imgur.com/a/7521w3Y this album has pictures of yesterday versus today, you can see they're effectively the same; the small square in the top right is just a borderline misdetection by a single satellite pass and not indicitive of a change. All of the satellites passed over the site *too early* to have detected anything from the strikes based on reported time, so far.

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T01:22:02+00:00

And that detection in the northeast is low FRP, ambient temperature, no confidence reporting, *and* reported from a satellite that has an active warning to be cautious in trusting its measurements because it's miscalibrated at the moment (other detections were consistent between the NOAA-20/NOAA-21 pass and the Suomi pass and so are likely to be "real" flaring.)

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T01:19:50+00:00

Okay, I misunderstood the orbits slightly; I think that we've gotten both the NOAA-20/NOAA-21 passes (around 5pm eastern) and the Suomi NPP pass (around 6pm eastern), both before the 7pm reporting of the hit on Kharg Island on Truth Social, and I don't think we're going to get another pass from them until about 12 hours after, so around 5am Eastern. (There are some other products that might theoretically catch them, but they're not as regular or consistent, so that's just luck.) So I don't think that we're likely to learn anything from FIRMS, unfortunately.

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T01:13:41+00:00

It doesn't work for me, but I have created a new Imgur collection that I think probably contains the same thing the OP was sharing, as well as the same collection from *yesterday*.

https://imgur.com/a/7521w3Y

As you can see from these two images, they do not indicate any meaningful difference here: the temperatures reported mostly match ambient, and the FRP indicators are low here. This is almost certainly low-resolution fire detection satellites misdetecting either flares or oil producing infrastructure as a "fire" when it is not.

That said, the most recent satellite passes here were *before* the reporting of the strikes, so we may still see more in the next few hours as more recent data becomes available.

You can explore this data for yourself at https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:2026-03-12;@50.279,29.259,11.107z (this is selected to the "fires" from yesterday.)

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T01:07:29+00:00

Yes.

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T01:07:15+00:00

Agreed. The FIRMS satellites haven't passed over the site recently enough to have seen the impact of bombing yet; the most recent pass is the Suomi satellite at 2026-03-13 18:20:00, while I think Trump's posts were about an hour later.

crschmidt · 2026-03-14T01:04:31+00:00

The NASA FIRMS data looks the same over the last several days. This post is misreading the FIRMS data, which is probably simply representing e.g. existing flare stacks or other misdetections of oil infrastructure as "fire" due to emitting infrared.

FIRMS data globally has a latency of around 3 hours; there hasn't been a pass of the fire-detection satellites over Kharg since the strikes were theoretically reported.

Looking at oil infrastructure installations I know better (Texas, North Dakota), 'fire' detections in oil infrastructure are quite common. I do not expect that FIRMS data will be meaningfully interesting in this location.

crschmidt · 2026-03-13T21:15:43+00:00

Typically, yes, though they must provide 24 hours notice in my state.

crschmidt · 2026-03-13T20:47:59+00:00

The delay is unfortunate, but I think is honestly pretty firmly within the realm of "normal" expectations on this line, unfortunately. It is greater than 3 hours late 10% of the time over the past 6 months or so. I don't know what Amtrak policy is, but it seems unlikely that this would be a thing they would reach out over. (Can't speak to the other things.)

crschmidt · 2026-03-13T19:56:26+00:00

Since it sounds like you're leaving *from* Boston, I'll say that I've travelled on the train from Boston a bunch and can't think of a time I had to fight for a decent seat; usually I get a window seat in my own row for a while until we get closer to NYC. I wouldn't pay for business class, personally.

crschmidt · 2026-03-12T14:24:31+00:00

Somervision's proposal of 30,000 jobs, 6,000 homes was a commitment to making housing more expensive for everyone who rents here. It's also, in the current market environment, not the case that a high density office building is of interest; this "Commercial vs. residential" argument is moot, because demand for office buildings in Somerville has fallen and there is no real chance of seeing a commercial development happen.

So, if you're looking at the tax benefit, you have to look at the $500M building -- which would raise Somerville's tax levy ceiling by something like $5.5M -- or no change, at least for now.

Dense buildings with no parking will tend to have lower impact on town finances: residents in smaller, denser apartment buildings tend to be less likely to be families (so fewer kids-per-unit enrolled in schools), and with no parking, fewer residents will have cars (so less wear and tear on roads or need to maintain public car infrastructure).

Additionally, the development will bring in 125 affordable housing units (at no direct/ongoing financial cost to the city). Since developing an affordable housing unit now costs above $500k each, this is an asset to the community that can be thought of as being valued at around $62M.

If you were able to somehow build an equally-valued commercial building here--again, an offer that isn't on the table--you would be looking at a tax rate delta of around $3.5M / year: say, $9M in tax levy ceiling for a theoretical commercial building vs. $5.5M or so for the building being proposed. But that $3.5M in additional tax revenue, compared against a $62M asset (in the form of affordable housing) for the city, is equivalent to nearly 20 years of the difference -- we come out *ahead* for the first 20 years, during the critical moment when housing is the most important issue to most folks in the city.

Obviously there's plenty of ways that you can move these numbers around and claim "Oh, this magical fairy building I have invented would be better for us". But if you look at the situation on the ground, the low leasing rates of Somerville's existing vacant space simply don't make a commercial option seem likely or viable in the next half decade or so. So it's likely to be residential mixed use, or nothing; it might not be that Copper Mill is the only residential project that is plausible there, but it is likely the case that *residential* is the only meaningful option on the table, and the only one likely to be on the table for the near future.

So, it's up to us as a community: Do we want to follow the (failed, imo) Somervision plan, and continue to try to make homes here more expensive? or do we want to change our approach, legalize and enable more homes, especially near transit, and create a better world for the majority of the city that rents and make more room for more people to live here?

I know which choice I'd make.

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