Exhuming my thesis area over 40 years later

Update 2: this post here closes this series & loops the loop with AI to the rescue.

Update 1: see here papers a decade later that point also to precambrian terranes.

My 1982 M.Sc. thesis, Regional cross section of the Southern Province adjacent to Lake Huron, Ontario: implications for the tectonic significance of the Murray Fault Zone (ResearchGate) proposed a plate-tectonic (Wikipedia) setting around 1.9 billion years ago, in the Proterozoic (late Pre-Cambrian). I proposed there to be another buried land mass south of what I called the Manitoulin Island Discontinuity. While plate tectonics was well established in the later Phanerozoic (Wikipedia) record, it took a lot longer to be accepted earlier in the geologic time scale with lot sparser rock record (see "More" at the bottom).

Senegal delta sea level rise map

Five friends at Arts & Metiers engineering school in Paris took a ten month leave to sail around the North Atlantic: Lez'Arts Marins (here) sail south from Britanny past the Azores & Madeira to Senegal for a moth humanitarian aid project, west across to Martinique and northeast N of Scotland to Scandinavia and back.

Arctic Urban Legends

Update 2: the New York Times highlights here the opportunities & challenges in global warming opening up the Northwest Passage for shorter routes.

Update 1: this follows on another update on the Northwest Passage here.

An update to a Northwest Passage blogpost posted to the Facebook Remembering Franklin Expedition Group here, elicited a response from @aaron.spitzer. I post his comment below, which I thanked him for citing the fact my stories were from conversations that weren't fact-checked. That in turn got me to fact-check another story from the same 1986 summer in the Arctic Islands from my now-defunct original website reposted at bottom.

Cumbria classic revisited, Appleby-in-Westmoreland

Almost four years ago, a story map here showed the Skelworth Fold area of the Lake District for a friend, using advanced mapping and Environment Agency digital elevation.

"AI for the rest of us", Part VII

Update: the last of a series, follow my recap blog post here incl. Medium Channel posts on AI.

Note: the last post on my personal Medium channel shows how I used Copilot AI to good effect for fact-checking. 

Last we showed here how to create "quick & dirty" graphs while chatting on ur mobile. Now we'll see how we can create summaries, not from "text to hand", but from that cribbed off the internet. 

Having left socials, I'm down to corresponding at Extinction Rebellion "Media Tell the Truth" WhatsApp group. Jon Fuller there is also at "Climate Genocide Act Now" here. I was a scientist for Extinction Rebellion, and blogged here about the pandemic against the lies of the British government, as well as about floods and rising sea levels in East Anglia. I didn't know GCAN, however, as I'm no longer active.

"AI for the rest of us", Part VI

Update: Part VII here follows w using ChatGPT to summarize off the web direct.

 Part V (here) showed elaborate (mis)use of AI. Here is a super simple example whipped up in Google Gemini on the phone during a chat about value change over time. Notice all along, adding less & less detail shows AI perists previous prompts.

Northwest Passage Reloaded

Update 4: read here about further stories & urban legends of the High Arctic.

Update 3: see here an update on Beechey Isl. site discovered the year before my visit below

Update 2: see more Arctic stories here on my other blog re-posting some of my original website.

Update 1: right on cue, a photo exhibit on Arctic Life and Climate Change in Budapest HU on Euronews.

Here is an old webpage from 1996 I had to retire a couple years ago. It smacks of urban legend, had I not been told by airport staff in Resolute on Cornwallis Isl., the Arctic Canadian hub (read on):

Hurricanes, tornadoes and sea level rise

Update: see @ bottom example of a Cyclone (Wikipedia) as they're called in the So. Hemisphere.

 Further to our explorations in AI here and to the previous post here, this is a 'conversation' with Copilot, Microsoft Bing's AI extension. Conversation means that you can daisy-chain questions without repeating them, either to extend or to zero in:

Global sea level rise revisited

Update: so follow-on here with definions and relationsips among these topics

I posted here 3 yrs. ago among a series of DIY map notes to encourage Citizen Science, how to use NOAA global digital elevation data to model sea level rise data on straight geometry. See also here for an explanation referring to East Anglia. Here is what it looks like from the DIY document:

"Where in the world is Andrew?", updated

I posted a decade ago here re: creating dynamic maps where my travels can show on video. I have since improved on the original Mercator maps that smear out the poles and make N Hemisphere land mass look a lot bigger than it really is. 

Mercator projection (Wikipedia) started with mariners, whose maps allowed to plot sailings in straight lines. It was later kept by Colonialist Europe and Cold War North America, because it increased the size of colonizers and reduced that of the colonies, or conversely made the Soviet Union look bigger & more threatening.

Global harmonization of climate & temperature data since 1850

Update: a post in SciTech Daily shows that ocean  atmospheric science - shown in this and previous post - is alive and may help with assessing climate change: it's about the doldrums driven by downdrafts not updrafts; at a localized scale, downdrafts  were dramatically reported in passenger flight incidents here or the sinking off Sicily of a superyacht here, and updrafts in increasing mid-Atlantic hurricane generation here. 

CLIWOC tall ships sailings from captains logs

Update: global harmonization of climate data since 1850 follows next.

Update 2: further map video in a historical context as last paragraph here.

"CLImatological database of World OCeans" was my first outing using Esri tools as personal project. I found this fabulous dataset with ¼ M points! Detailed here, it came from a 5 yr. EU project to scan captains ships logs for climate data in the 17-19th c. before weather data were recorded. Tall ships were mainly British, Dutch & French, Portuguese notably absent due to Lisbon archive destruction in the 1755 "Great Earthquake" (Wikipedia). 

A return to my roots

Updates: mapping climate data from historic ships & global harmonization follow respectively here & here.

 "You can get Andrew outa maps, but you can't get maps outa Andrew" quipped a GIS map friend when I left Kuwait a dozen years ago... Well after quitting socials, Esri(UK) graciously helped me recover my desktop app. While I lost my story maps and web maps content, I maintained a free dev account - story maps and maps&data - this was chiefly to preserve my Living Atlas content inspired by John Nelson. 

"AI for the rest of us", Part V

Update 1: go to the bottom for a positive aspect of what AI can automatically generate, and how a test for AGI (artificial general intelligence) has been designed

Update 2: see next part here of this series for an ultra-simple use of AI

While I described opportunities AI gave in prompt engineering and text processing (ending at previous post here), I tried for fun to create a billboard from an advert I saw in TX or CA 20 or 30 yrs ago: it was Home Depot's "got wood?", after the wildly famous "got milk?" campaign from the Milk Board. 

Showing folks  sporting white 'mustaches' from drinking milk too eagerly, it was the dawn of the photoshop era: milk was traced into mustaches or smiles... "and no milk was spilled in the production of the advert".

Web maps for the rest of us

 The previous post on Community Engagement updated the rebranding of cambridgeshire.ai, with accompanying use of "AI for the rest of us" (work backward from here) this blogpost title came from. One of the mentioned changes were working with Wikimedia, OpenStreetMap and Climate Central - my Esri Developper or Non-Profit stacks are free and frozen, respectively - I had a whole lot of work put on ice, the same time I relinquished my original website www.zolnai.ca. This blog is OK however.

"AI for the rest of us", Part IV

Update: follow on Part V.

 The previous post (here) recapped our purpose to use current lessons-learned in new tech to help our community engagement. Here is another way to use AI, to summarise and to decant - summarise in a structured manner - information from an article my colleague Terry Jackson at Cambridgeshire.ai (under construction) asked me to try using Google Gemini (formerly known as Bard, their AI tool).

"AI for the rest of us", Part III

Update: follow on Part IV.

 Part II (here) showed a small but significant use of AI in preparing our Prospectus (link in that post). Let's look at how we're taking this further now.

The Spectator did a great state-of-the-AI here, including basically what we did above on steroids. They also highlighted Google Gemini, Bard's successor we signed up for. We also joined Wikimedia UK in open data space.

"AI for the rest of us", Part II

Update: follow on Part III.

 My previous post (here) showed a useful if trivial example of Bing AI (here), not only replying in the addressed language but also quickly & easily teasing a relationship among related items.  Now let's look at a non-trivial common task, to summarise a 110 page document.

"AI for the rest of us"

 Update: follow on Part II.

In my other blog (here) Language and mores, Part VII (here) described what I found out about my family's status as immigrants in our complex story of a pregnant mother's escape from Hungary and my siblings ½ generation later. When I later discussed how I thought my marriage ended, my family saw a Jungian influence in my thinking. Jung's disciple Adler apparently inspired Kishimi & Koga's recent best seller "The Courage to be disliked" (Google books). Ensued a three-language dicussion to understand what this was all about... Mum prefers our mother tongue Hungarian, my brother lives in Montreal and my sister in Paris.

Community engagement and social prescribing

Community Engagement 1,... 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 & 25

This follows an update on this blog here, where I announced my move away from Cambridge. This is also a good place to end the Community Engagement series. I will however continue on topics as they arise like re: AI here, or Sea Level Rise here & updated Thames Barrier starting here. Follow also the Blog Archive to the right-hand side of the desktop version here, as well as the right-hand side of the Banner Menu atop.

We recently rebranded Cottenham.info to Cambridgeshire.ai: the domain name is acquired but page not done yet finished; we have a prospectus as an evergreen document, meaning ever evolving.

Our community involvement over 5 years in March is one object of this blog starting  here (follow the links) and listed here. We engaged with various community interest  parties at the impact of climate change then the pandemic on social isolation in East Anglia.