A brief web history of mine

As I wind down my blog posts and I quit socials, perhaps this may be a good time to reflect on my Web journey that started almost 40 years ago (a recap of my IT journey is here)...

But wait... Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent it til just over 35 years ago (Wikipedia)! That's because I had a site dubbed HTTP in 1986, see inset below:  "world wide web" hadn't been coined yet, but I knew as a student at late 70's University of Calgary of Ted Nelson's failed Project Xanadu (Wikipedia), to try and link all forms of knowledge via hypertext; it failed partly due to Nelson's eccentricity,  partly because there was no global network to carry it. 

London Thames Barrier revisited

Update 2: see renewed Sea-level Rise extents according to new information here 

Update 1: see addition at bottom... thanks to our indefatigable London climate activists!

Further to Cumbria Classic revisited here and exhuming my old thesis here, I was asked to share maps of the area surrounding the Thames Barrier (Wikipedia): A group considered the necessity for a second barrier under Climate Change that increases both flooding and sea level seasonal elevations. 

Exhuming my thesis ... an update

Update 2:  ... aaaand I didn't plan on having yet another one here!

Update 1: this is my last post as I move on. Didn't plan it that way, but ending where I began  _is_ satisfying.

New Years Eve 2000 racing by Greenwich Meridian

Update: note a dash of AI mixed in at the bottom for fun

Our TV rung in 2025 live in Paris in my time zone, and six hours later in NYC dropping its ball in Times Square; nothing matches however this cracking event in London to usher in the New Millennium: barges were aligned in the middle of the River Thames, spaced exactly 1 s. apart as the earth rotated past midnight GMT in London, from the Meridian at the Millennium Dome to the east, to Vauxhall Bridge to the west.

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).

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

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.

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

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.