No funding or turning a blind eye

NASA can’t afford to keep many of its satellite programs funded, so several projects like LANDSAT, EOS, and other land use and climate monitoring systems are being canceled or put at risk of having major service interruptions.

Since many of these satellites give us an idea of what global climate change may be occurring, or how it may be affecting land cover and such, I can’t help but think of this as the current administration turning a high-tech blind eye on the whole climate change argument. The logic of the move? My guess is that it comes down to this:

“If we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.”

I realize these budget things take a long time, but it seems that the cost of disasters like Katrina and the importance of remote sensing would underscore the importance of satellite programs. I guess this plays in to another suspicion of mine – that cuts like this are huge boosts to private companies like Geo Eye (recently merged) that can provide some remote sensing services. I know nothing of the politics involved, but the benefit that these public satellite programs is almost immeasurable, and benefit more than just the folks that can afford the data.

Women and Median Income in Portland

Wednesday is International Women’s Day. I’ve been messing with 2000 census data for a GIS project and noticed that there was a difference between the median income for men and women in the various census tracts. For all the census tracts in the Portland Metro area, this is the average:

Mean Median Income Women 30,743
Mean Median Income Men 40,926

Just an observation. Here’s the visualization. Click for a larger image.

Median Income for Females in Portland Metro Area
Median Income for Females in Portland

Difference between Male and Female Median Income in Portland Metro Area
Difference between male and female median income

Quiz night

Last night I joined several PSU geography students and FOG members for a geo quiz night at Tugboat. Our team faired well, but didn’t win a single category, so we had to pay for our beer. Winning beer was about the only thing that could have improved the already perfect intersection of beer, trivia and geography. Next time, victory will be ours.

Custom ring tones from a Mac

One of the greatest reasons for having a bluetooth enabled phone is that you can put your own ring-tones on your phone. My old Sony-Ericsson T616 could play midi files so I was able to trim midi files down to short loops that sounded decent on the phone.

My Motorola RAZR plays midi files, but it can also play mp3s, which opens up a whole new world of potential. Now, instead of settling for whatever crap I could find on the Internet and removing any vocals or bad instruments, I can use bits of real songs from my own collection.

Accomplishing this is not as easy as I thought it would be. Trimming the Mp3’s is simple enough with shareware like Mp3 Trimmer. The first batch I made had been encoded at really high bit rates so 10 second clips were huge, and didn’t play on the phone. So after a few beers Saturday night I sat down, trimmed some tracks, and re-encoded them with iTunes into 56kbps, fixed bit rate, joint stereo files. This worked, and several sound great. Even some of the vocals are great, though I’ve decided not to use the sample from Gimme Some More for decency’s sake.

Any other advice? Yes – For some reason Motorola crippled the Bluetooth functionality on this phone with Windows, so you have to buy additional software to upload files to the phone, or sync your calendar. Uploading via Bluetooth Exchange on the Mac is cake though. So, do yourself a favor…

Also – choice of music is important. And not just because people will judge you by what gets played, or by the fact that you have a song playing when your phone rings. You want to get a small segment that sounds good when it loops, or pick something long enough that you’ll answer it before it loops. Also, space is a premium, so keep things short.

Google Earth fun

There’s quite a bit of activity going related to Google Earth as is evident by the volume of uses cataloged on the Google Earth Blog. Google Earth has the potential to replace other GIS programs for public participation and visualization exercises, as well as serve small niche uses. Obviously, there’s tons of room for fun; like a public data set for the Cheney shooting.

Our own PortlandMaps has made several data layers available in KML format.

In the same spirit, I used an ArcMap plugin to make a PDX Beer layer from the data I collected for my beer bar & brewpub maps.

bathroom etiquette

I’ve been fuming over this for a couple weeks now.

When a man enters a public bathroom, he is presented with 4 traditional ways of urinating. Three of these ways are what I’ll call “socially accepted” and they include using the urinal, lifting the seat on the toilet, and sitting down to use the toilet. The fourth way, pissing in and on the toilet without lifting the seat, is, assuming you’re sober, degenerate.

That’s why I have called for the castration of those individuals who intentionally piss on the toilet seat when there are 3 other methods readily available. This will ensure they prescribe to one of the socially accepted methods. This will also give them some extra time while they’re cleaning the seat to reflect on what a jackass they have been.

One could argue that the toilet seat is dirty, but that is why bathrooms also have sinks and soap. I would hope you’re washing your hands anyway, (though I see plenty of evidence to the contrary) but that’s another discussion.