My web presence

Thursday, 26 December 2024

Exhuming my thesis area over 40 years later

Update: 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 presumed there was 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 scanter rock record to go by (more at the bottom).

Monday, 16 December 2024

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.

Sunday, 24 November 2024

Arctic Urban Legends

An update to a Northwest Passage blogpost posted to the Facebook Rememberig Frankline Expedition group, 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.

Tuesday, 12 November 2024

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.

Tuesday, 5 November 2024

"AI for the rest of us", Part VII

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.

Saturday, 2 November 2024

"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.

Tuesday, 22 October 2024

Northwest Passage Reloaded

Update: 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):

Saturday, 12 October 2024

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:

Friday, 11 October 2024

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:

Tuesday, 8 October 2024

"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.