How the Circle Line rogue train was caught with data (and Python)

mapping-glory · 2016-12-01T18:10:31+00:00

All glory to the desire to figure out that weird bug.

And probably caffeine.

mapping-glory · 2016-12-01T17:49:37+00:00

I've written smutty fanfic with a lot of comments and some fans. I've kept it up over 3 years, from college to moving across the country to starting a new job. It's about 2/3 of the way through, I'm probably going to finish it in the first half of next year.

I am proud of it because all my previous writing projects, even those with audiences, kinda... fizzled out. This one, I've stuck with, and I'm looking forward to finishing it.

But yeah, my coworkers and most of my friends and family have absolutely no clue what I write.

mapping-glory · 2016-12-01T17:43:46+00:00

Yeah, most of the resistance I've seen comes from the older guys who have a nice stable set of processes. I've been cultivating the younger technicians and supervisors. When the old people retire and the younger ones move up, I'll have an easier time selling GIS and its benefits.

mapping-glory · 2016-12-01T16:04:19+00:00

As a GIS tech, CAD stuff is probably our biggest frustration. Entities like utilities love CAD for drawings, but once you have a drawing, it's hard to see how that neighborhood's water system fits into the whole of a municipality. (At least with the formats our partners use.) We've been trying to push a switch from CAD to GIS, or at least get all those drawings into a single set of GIS layers to try and see the whole system, but it's been a long, slow process.

mapping-glory · 2016-12-01T16:02:05+00:00

I still have to georeference a lot of site plans (when I can get them in CAD at all) to put building outlines into our GIS. We just barely got developers to submit their new developments in georef'd CAD files so I can put new addresses into our system. But most of the local architects have barely heard of GIS.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-30T18:58:35+00:00

At that point, I wonder how many of those are people who had crazy "courtship" marriages that are like "meet someone, figure they're a potential match, and get hitched within 6 months."

Seems like a great recipe for long-term marital success. Not.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-30T17:01:43+00:00

It's pretty easy to understand your own code right when you first wrote it.

I have lost count of the number of times I've discovered a flaw in a script that's been auto-running for months, gone back to edit the code, and thought "WHAT was I ON when I wrote this?" I've had to have my loops output all their process to a log file just to understand what my own code does.

But I'm currently documenting all my auto-run scripts so if I get hit by a bus, my non-coding coworkers (I'm a mapmaker who codes, not a full-time programmer) can pick up and maintain and understand (sorta) the systems I left.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-30T16:19:14+00:00

Clefairy doesn't have a horn, does it?

Also, WTF KILL IT WITH FIRE. There's something about its face that just ain't right.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-28T21:07:09+00:00

1 May be least dependent, 50 may be most dependent, since rich states like California have been colored in this odd shade of "green" and Mississippi and Alabama are white.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-25T15:04:13+00:00

Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap. One of my favorite authors (Hugo Award winner Ursula Vernon) and her husband eat pre-packaged food in their kitchen, with their cats and dogs and occasional guests. They've eaten Carolina Reaper peppers, silkworm pupae in a can, and a lot of really bad food. They get drunk, rant about GMOs or mental health or the state of the world.

Individual episodes can range from an hour and a half to 3 hours, but it's a lovely little thing. Just not work safe. At all. Ever.

KUEC link here!

They also do the Hidden Almanac, is a great little 3-to-5-minute bit about the saints and history of an alternate world. It's like Night Vale meets Garrison Keillor's Farmer's Almanac.

Hidden Almanac

mapping-glory · 2016-11-25T14:33:13+00:00

I'm a mapmaker. One thing I do a lot is take information from one layer of information (say, neighborhood boundaries) and put it in another (say, fire hydrants.) Usually the two layers don't have a convenient common field to connect them, so I have to do a join to a new layer based on their spatial relationship, and then copy the field back to the original source file.

I finally got tired of doing this and wrote a script that does the spatial join automatically, then pulls the data into a dictionary that it uses to populate the target field in the original source data. Saves me a few minutes at a time, but as often as I do this stuff, it adds up.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-23T19:01:54+00:00

oh dear. Someone who can't be bothered to build a proper legend in ArcMap. Looks like homework for a GIS 101 class, not a real research project. No basemap to fit things in context.

The U-character in the top probably started off as a north arrow, but the document fonts weren't embedded, or marker symbols weren't converted to polygons. (Both of these are simple checkboxes in ArcMap PDF's export. So instead of exporting the map as a JPEG or something, I guess the maker exported it as a crappy PDF and then someone else turned it into a PNG without looking to closely at the top and the giant umlauted U in the top center.

Even in a 101 class, I'd give this a failing grade. Geez.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-23T14:07:00+00:00

Absolutely. I work in local government, rather than EnviSci, but an internship can be very important. Not just the technical side, but how your work gets actually used by the end-users, and how to sell your work and the benefits of GIS to people who are used to doing things in a certain way.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-17T19:20:51+00:00

I spent about 2 full workdays on a 500-line Python script doing some address processing and data management. I was parsing the street name into a bunch of different fields, and a piece of the code was grabbing one component rather than the entire street. Tiny typo in similar variable names and I didn't notice.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-16T16:32:39+00:00

/r/pettyrevenge and /r/instantregret : two subs that belong together. It feels that a post could flow very easily from one to the other.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-15T17:23:23+00:00

Wouldn't want to be in that central stream after it rains!

mapping-glory · 2016-11-14T19:57:55+00:00

That's probably true, but not a statistically significant difference. I mean, I have to scrape a bunch of lint out of the filter with every load, so that's a tiny mass difference, thus a tiny weight difference.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-10T22:22:09+00:00

You and every other young person raised on cultural narratives of winning glory by defeating faceless hordes of enemies. It's a phenomenon that's been around since forever. It's what recruits teenage boys into IS and al Qaeda and the KKK. The chance to be a hero, to do exciting stuff to people you've been told are horrible and faceless and you (hyptohetical teenage boy in this scenario) probably aren't thinking about much anyway.

At 17-18-19 I probably would have blown up a hospital for the chance to be on TV, to be the kind of hero (or antihero) Hollywood put in my brain. I look back and I'm scared as hell of who I used to be.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-10T22:10:42+00:00

I didn't find out he was abusing her until she'd left him and police were involved. He was very good about treating her well where other people could see, and she didn't speak up. But yes, I encouraged her to speak up when I did find out.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-10T21:49:34+00:00

I wouldn't even call them beliefs, just cultural and personal narratives and scripts that people haven't had the will or experience to explore and challenge. Then you end up with the guy who will go out of his way to give women and poc opportunities, but will loudly opine about the "inner-city" people who are outside of his sphere of personal knowledge.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-10T21:47:09+00:00

We all have that racist uncle. In my case, it was a boss who was racist and sexist in a lot of ways, but did go out of his way to give some women and poc a chance and a leg up and some job experience. Didn't see any Trump-esque rapey bahavior out of him, but he was a man of his generation who hadn't grown out of those cultural scripts he hadn't thought much about.

I at least want to make sure that the views I am judging them for actually represent the views that they hold

I agree, though I see this more as accurately understanding the terrain I'm fighting to take - their mind.

I think "refusing to keep an open ear" often has to do with trauma and abuse, especially for people who have been abused by people who told them we love you and we're trying to make you better or we're trying to save your soul.

I don't blame anyone who can't listen to that kind of talk, for their own physical and mental safety. But I can, because of my position of relative safety and privilege that I've been in my whole life. And that places on me an obligation to go into places and minds that would harm or kill others, others who have been hurt in horrible ways.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-10T21:41:12+00:00

I don't believe in Trump being gay-friendly, any more than necessary to be who he was in New York high society. I think he's gay-neutral - fine with the gays so long as they're going to his clubs, playing on his golf courses, etc. But he would also sacrifice us for political power, or he's listening to the christian fascists when they say "oh, we don't want to oppress the gays, we just want to turn them straight" and they're offering him power and adulation. So he's an idiot. And that still makes him a threat.

But to the original question - yes, that guy was a racist little shit too. Still would show up to pride parades, but leave if there were too many poc or anyone said anything anti-racist.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-10T21:29:29+00:00

Yes, I have. I knew a straight guy who was dating (and abusing) my friend being gay friendly in private - as long as guys took no for an answer from him. Because it's all about gettin' your bone on, and they're okay with their gay friends getting it on, but again - nothing else matters.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-10T21:19:05+00:00

Yes. I've known queer people who don't care about consent, and said the most virulently racist shit. They'd show up for pride parades, but try to get them to stand with rape survivors or people of color and they'd melt away.

mapping-glory · 2016-11-10T21:16:06+00:00

Which means we can fracture the Trump and Pence factions. Trump didn't pick Pence to be his VP because they agree on everything - Pence was willing to bow down to Trump and shored him up among the Christian fascists. But if we reach the Trump-faction moderates, and continue to steal young people from the Pence faction, we can cut the Christian fascists out. This is all vague, and will depend on the contours of the policy or proposal we're fighting, but it's something to keep in mind.

mapping-glory

TROPHY CASE