Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘Academic’ Category

Default deny: A signal of academic maturity?

I listened to a very interesting episode of The Pod Delusion podcast today. In fact, all of the bits of the programme were interesting: from a discussion of faith schools from an athiest perspective, to a description of Tesco’s planning policies from a local council planning officer. However, the item on the programme that I […]

How to: Find closest objects in ArcGIS with Python

As part of my DunesGIS project I had a need to calculate ‘closeness statistics’ for objects in ArcGIS. By ‘closeness statistics’ I mean statistics giving information about how close the objects are to each other. I needed to do this to calculate how dune patterns change over time. The code below takes a shapefile as […]

Aeolian Philosophy or “What is a sand dune?”

No, this isn’t about thinking deeply while the wind is blowing, or philosophising about how the wind is there but we can’t see it – it’s about sand dunes. Now, you might think that sand dunes are quite boring things, just hills made out of sand that sit there and do nothing. That couldn’t be […]

My academic values

I was chatting to someone the other day about the values in my life, and it led to a lot of thinking on my part. I decided to make two posts on my blog: one about my values in life generally, and one specifically about my academic values. I think that the values below define […]

How to: Snap points to lines in ArcGIS with Python

I’ve recently starting scripting ArcGIS using Python as part of one of my academic projects (about which I’ll post more later) and needed to be able to snap points to polylines – that is, move points so that they lie on the nearest polyline. An example would help to explain this: In the image above, […]