This is the first in a series of posts on the lessons I’ve learnt from various episodes in my life. First up: my dissertation. In case you’re not familiar with dissertations: they are the large written projects which are often given to students in the final year of their degree. The details of mine are […]
Quite through chance I just happened to stumble upon the USGS New EarthExplorer, and I’m really quite impressed. Remote sensing is a field that is almost entirely based around new technology: satellite sensors, computer processing techniques and so on, but for ages actually acquiring the data has been an exercise in frustration. Much as the […]
So, hot on the heels of my last post, I’m now applying another concept from a computing blog post to science. For many years I’ve been a fan of Joel Spolsky’s blog, and I’ve learnt a lot from it. One of his most interesting posts was called The Law of Leaky Abstractions. As with my […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]