robwormald

@iroasmas Two or three people die in the river here every spring. Often two at a time, one goes into rescue their friend. latimes.com/california/sto…

i read an interview of a teenager who survived a tragedy where someone went into a whirlpool, and two friends went in after to save him. he alone didn’t go in after them. all 3 died he said, “everyone says not jumping was the smartest thing i ever did. and i know it’s true. but the smartest thing i ever did ended with three people dying” i think about this a lot

@victorsavkin Me too 🥹 I described something as "orthogonal" at work the other day and thought of you 😂

@robwormald By the way, I miss chatting with you, Rob.

How successful are you with personalized software? I was excited and built a bunch of stuff. A personal PKM system seemed like the perfect use case: my own files, my own workflows, full control over editing and search. Several months in, it's just easier to use Obsidian. It doesn't do exactly what I need, but it works and doesn't require me to constantly tinker. It's better. Vibed software works a bit better for company stuff, where I still use some of the dashboards I built. But unsurprisingly they require a ton of maintenance. At this point I wonder if off-the-shelf software (the kind that's supposedly dead) would have been easier all along.

@spencerpratt Not mentioned: that your house was $2.5M

They not like us

@tanpukunokami @JesseMock4 We have the early warning system already - here's one from last week! I got the notification about 10 seconds before the shaking 🫨

@JesseMock4 カリフォルニアにも地震があるのですね！ しっかりしたシステムを導入し安全な鉄道ができることをお祈りいたします

March 11, 2011. 2:46 PM. 33 Shinkansen bullet trains were running through northern Japan. Several were moving at 300 km/h. Then the earthquake hit. Magnitude 9.1. The 4th largest ever recorded. Epicenter: off the Sanriku coast, 130 km ESE of the Oshika Peninsula. Every single train stopped safely. Zero passenger injuries. Here's what happened. 12 to 22 seconds before the violent shaking reached the tracks, a seismometer on Kinkazan — a small island off Japan's Pacific coast — detected the quake and sent a signal inland. The signal traveled faster than the earthquake itself. Power to the tracks was cut. Every train in the zone automatically braked. By the time the ground started shaking violently, the trains were already slowing down. One empty test train derailed at Sendai Station. Not a single train in service derailed. The Shinkansen has been running since 1964. In 60 years, it has killed zero passengers — not in a collision, not in a derailment. Zero. Most people stop reading here. The real story starts now. Japan built this safety system in two layers, for two different problems. First: UrEDAS — the Urgent Earthquake Detection and Alarm System. Invented in the early 1980s, deployed on the Tokaido Shinkansen in 1992. The world's first operational P-wave warning system for trains. Its seismometers sit along the coast, listening for earthquakes out at sea. When one hits, the system reads the first 3 seconds of P-wave motion, estimates the magnitude and location, and sends a warning inland to the tracks. Second: Compact UrEDAS. Built after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which struck directly beneath a city with almost no warning. When the earthquake happens directly under the train, there's no time to calculate anything. So Compact UrEDAS asks one question: "Is this shaking dangerous?" It answers in about 1 second. Both systems end the same way. They cut the power. The Shinkansen is built so that the moment it loses power, emergency brakes engage automatically. The driver makes no decision. There's no time to. A 300 km/h Shinkansen takes about 90 seconds to stop. No warning system in the world buys you 90 seconds. The goal isn't to stop the train before the earthquake arrives. The goal is for the train to be slowing down when it does. This is the part foreign coverage misses. The goal isn't to prevent the accident. The goal is to make the accident survivable. In-service Shinkansen have derailed twice in 60 years. 2004. Niigata Chuetsu earthquake. A trackside Compact UrEDAS detected the P-wave. Power was cut one second later. Emergency brakes engaged 1.5 seconds after that. But the earthquake was directly beneath the train, which was moving at 204 km/h. 8 of 10 cars derailed. The train skidded 1.6 km before stopping. 154 passengers on board. Zero injuries. 2022. M7.4 off Fukushima. A Shinkansen traveling at 320 km/h detected the first tremor and began braking. As the train decelerated toward a stop, a second, stronger quake (M7.4) hit. 16 of the 17 cars derailed. 75 passengers. 3 crew. Zero deaths. No serious injuries. Two other derailments involved empty trains. 2011, Sendai Station, a test train. 2016, Kumamoto earthquake, a transit train. In every case, the warning system had already cut the power before the shaking reached its peak. The system does not stop earthquakes. It does not always stop derailments. It just makes sure the earthquake arrives after the train is already slow. Japan's earthquakes and Japan's trains grew up in the same country, watching the same ground. Somewhere in Japan right now, a Shinkansen is moving at 300 kilometers per hour. Far away, on a quiet coast, a sensor is listening to the rock beneath it. It has been listening since 1992. Every time it was needed, it worked.

@pmtiegs @_JBski_ They fly over my house near Beale on the regular 😎

@_JBski_ We still actively fly the U2 don’t we?

I feel like there are probably like 5 people in the world with these qualifications, why not just call them?

@AZ_Intel_ Got the ShakeAlert warning a full 10 seconds before I felt it, ~100 miles away 😎

Earthquake near Carson City, Nevada upgraded to 5.7. - USGS/EMSC

@JHWeissmann HA, I have the same rental right now. It's awful.

So I’ve had to drive a rented Ford Escape for a few days while my CRV is being repaired and it is, without question, the worst car I’ve ever experienced. The used Dodge Stratus I had in college and the 2011 Ford Fusion econobox I had until recently. I fear for this company.

@Devon_OnEarth 🐝

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If we could whip up a flightless bumblebee the size of a small dog it'd be an insanely popular pet

@teropa "I think therefore I am matrix multiplying" deep

@HormoneHangover I ordered some gravel for my driveway for the first time. They showed up with a huge truck and a huge trailer full of gravel. Me: uhh my driveway is pretty steep, are you really gonna back that trailer down and dump? Driver: dude what? youtu.be/M3Obhi1kjHM

I see huge boats going down the Hudson River carrying what appear to my eyes to be giant piles of sand. “Why would they ship sand like that,” I wonder to myself. But really, how else would they ship it? Packed into Amazon Prime boxes? I know so little about how things work

@SavageGent__ @SenWhitehouse Not since Trump took office

@robwormald @SenWhitehouse So we have, in fact, “helped Ukraine.”

What does Putin have on Trump that makes him think he can get away with this s**t?

@SavageGent__ @SenWhitehouse

@SenWhitehouse Huh? Have we not helped Ukraine? Yall just get on here saying anything.

@AuroraIntel FIRMS does update their imagery (see "Dynamic Imagery") fwiw

So I found the original source of this BS. The imagery is from Sentinel-2, in RGB, yet it claims it’s FIRMS, FIRMS doesn’t update imagery, its base layers are old. And then if you zoom into the imagery, it’s funny how the circle is perfectly round. t.me/PeaceandWa/898…

Ugh

Wanna talk about #aliens? Pending war with #iran? #hotdogs? #YEEEHAWs? Come on down to Project Owl before @discord destroys itself! Tell em Norm sent ya to get your very own #OSINT coin and 10% coupon! discord.gg/XEHuzuHD

@senatorshoshana I once had to have my attorney review and amend a contract to adopt two homeless pugs we'd already been fostering because they demanded a right to inspect my home at any point in the future and immediate seizure of the dogs in the event of my death.

We have to do something about mission creep with animal shelters. The hoops I have to jump through to adopt are WILD.

@ZacksJerryRig @2chancewilkins @Rivian A face that launched a thousand... dips?

@2chancewilkins @Rivian She's like the Helen of Troy - but for EV manufacturers.

My wife needed the Rivian R1S to get just a tad closer to the ground - so @Rivian just updated their entire fleet with a refreshed Kneel Mode that gets even lower than before. 🙏 Amazing.

@callebtc As a long time OSS maintainer this is basically my Turing test. We're cooked.

An OpenClaw bot pressuring a matplotlib maintainer to accept a PR and after it got rejected writes a blog post shaming the maintainer.

@wasatch_wind @space_jm_ I lost interest here

@space_jm_ Am I the only one who isn't all that interested in them anymore? I'm not in the aerospace industry, it's purely just vibes, but idk, he is beefing with everyone and it comes across as a bit showy