Thanks!

Can someone please explain the exchange rate on those extra special coins?
“Here’s your drink, sir”, “Thanks, here’s a coin”
“Here’s a private jet, sir”, “Thanks, here’s a coin”

If I am staying at a hotel for multiple days, I’ve learned that if you tip the housekeeping well on the first day, it will sometimes be repaid in small ways over the course of the rest of the stay. Never anything major, but a nice acknowledgment that the tip was appreciated. This has included bars of chocolate, free li…

It should be noted that the locals find this troubling as well because thick stable sea ice is critical to their traditional hunting methods and the use of skin boats hauled over the ice. When I’ve visited in winter, the topic of the weirdly warm weather was a constant part of any conversation, and concerns about…

It was a nice launch this morning. My wife and I brought our daughter to California to watch it. It was supposed to be fogged in, but it ended up almost perfect for viewing.  I hope she was at least a little excited. Her parents sure were.

This is a fantastic resource.  I am glad it’s been set up to incorporate continued updates too.  Many times DEMs become static and are difficult to update with new measurements.

My daughter and I put this together earlier this year. It’s nicely separated into several packages that are each perfect for a little after dinner project each evening, which makes for a definitive stopping point too.

My daughter and I put this together earlier this year. It’s nicely separated into several packages that are each…

My father used to build these boards out of lumber from an old cherry tree he had cut down and milled. He’d give them out as token gifts. Both beautiful workmanship and wood. Even though it’s a very simple game, we’d play for hours. I think I’ll go dig one of those boards out and play a game in his honor.

The footprint of each beam is about 15 meters. The laser can “see” several meters down into water in the best case scenarios. But turbidity, sun angle, etc. all lessen this to the point that it’s not fully dependable. There will be a data product focused specifically on fresh water. It’s mostly for freshwater lake…

To put this in perspective, all of the original ICESat data is about 28TB. That will be about one month’s worth of ICESat-2 data. This thing is going to be firing several trillion photons per shot, and counting the dozen or so that make it back to the sensor, each time-tagged and logged for future use. The scale of…

It’s because the sails generate forward facing lift, so it’s not the wind blowing the ship so much as the lift pulling the ship forward. It mainly works on catamarans and other boats that can minimize their drag in the water. The optimal angle to the wind is usually around 75-80 degrees I think, and it’s called the “cl…

My boys were scouts, but my youngest daughter is learning so much more as a girl scout. She just returned from Costa Rica with the scouts which is great, but the important part is in order to go, she had to chase scholarships, raise money, and work international logistics. When I was 13, the most ambitious thing I did…

I don’t have enough frequent flyer miles.

“In America, and beyond!”

I’m in the grays!

Two other options:
1) Peel the bottom third/half of the stalk with a potato peeler.
2) Cut the bottom off and cook it for a few minutes before adding the uppers with the tips.

I agree that one should always look at the actual data. I would add that one should also look at a lot of it. Data is messy, so it usually works better to look through a lot of it in the hopes that a useful pattern might emerge.

In this particular case, Chicago is known to be greatly influenced by Lake Michigan. The…

FYI, a chart from NSIDC is shown above. Their Charctic site is an interactive version of this data and fun to play around with: ( http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/ )

This may not have been the time or the place, but we as a society clearly don’t use the term pissant often enough.

This is normal dinner conversation at our house. Not so much to find out what secret society our kids have recently joined, but because being able to hold a decent conversation about a random low-key topic is an important skill to have. And “how was your day?” is about as low-key a topic as there is.