Present One month and one day from this post, I'll have walked in my graduation ceremony. And damn, its a long way away from this post. To that end, the advice I followed has me headed to class to learn more about what cometary dust tells us about the formation of our solar system. After which, I'm heading to a workshop on how I can best review the GIS modeling techniques of previous airburst/bolide (meteor hit) events for my capstone project. Suffice to say, shit's kinda lit. Knowing I actually have less than 4 weeks since graduation happens after classes end is a nice reminder to plan backwards. Post-Graduation Heading to Cuba for a stint mid-January, then I'm off to Birthright in February. I want to lock in the farm to extend my stay there over this weekend. Relationshit I think I need to find other mediums alongside do another overhaul on my current dating platforms. 'Cuz this shit ain't happening. I've reaffirmed my standards are high in terms of emotional intelligence I'm looking for, so that may be a part of the latter... On that note, I have been connecting with someone who is not available in terms of dating and that's ok. Someone recently shared a couple key points: 1) There is (socializing) stuff anyone has to do before dating is on the table. When you get to that crossroad, then you can start talking about whether dating is something two parties are open to. 2) As such, there is no pressure with this person. Have fun, see it as practice for the former and enjoy what I cultivate with them. 3) Networking isn't just a business term. Perhaps this person can point me in the direction of what I'm looking for. Early Year in Review I met so many goals I set for myself. ☑️ Job ☑️ Car ☑️ Gaming ☑️ Running ___ Graduate (PENDING) The only couple glaring ones were fitness goals (absurd amounts of pull ups), and relationships (WIP). I found I could define the past few semesters by [failed] relationships. Each one had be get a little bit closer to what I'm looking for, alongside coming to understand redflags for me. And yet, my biggest take away there is the community I have around me to catch me when I fall. What I've learned from them on dating, how they've enabled me to work through getting 'unstuck,' and moving on to find/attract a more wholesome partner. God I fucking love sub-titles.
On mobile all day, so no graphs at the moment, but I have links! I'm looking at recorded events like Chelyabinsk and Tunguska in terms of the mapping of their area hit (or in gaming terms: area of effect). I'm looking to scrutinize the accuracy of the plotted areas on maps across a minimum of 3 models of how meteors fracture in our atmosphere upon entry. The plan is to validate said mapping techniques against newer models (I found couple fresh models produced last year and this year that I'm pumped to cross-reference). My asteroids professor gave me a couple huge leads on who's research to dig into for the project. Other than that, I'm lucky to have found an amazing guidance counselor in my college.
So far none of yet, I'm narrowing down to Chelyabinsk's event at the moment from the astronomy side to get a clear picture on what I expect to see from the GIS side when viewing the existing paper's plots. My paper itself is still in the works, and I'm getting a couple opinions from some astronomy professors on how the different models of the energy emitted inform the break-up of the meteor. Hoping to get enough material to make a plot to overlay onto existing papers using simple buffering tools (also highlighting individual meteorite falls with markers) depending on what I find.
If you're in the mood for learning a new skill, I highly recommend picking up PostGIS and SQL. It's a bit of a steep learning curve but it is an immense timesaver in any big league GIS work. Did a two day course myself and managed to write the Python/Arcpy model from my thesis in PG that ran in seconds, not hours.
Got plenty of time before traveling, looking into this now - especially with the Esri license expiring. I'm a newbie when it comes to programming languages. How would you compare this to R? A friend started using R to support her own GIS thesis, which was the first language I was going to review when the license expires.
R is not meant for GIS - it can handle some geo data in tables, but it is really no match for PG or ArcPy. R is much better for statistical analyses and one of my colleagues does most of his work in Excel or R because of it. He’s the only non-geo data scientist, though, and he doesn’t use R’s geo abilities because it’s not powerful enough. PG can do a lot, especially if you’re clever at combining the rather-basic-but-incredibly-fast functions it offers. (And then there’s always QGIS.) ArcPy has a larger suite of functions, but only within the realm of things Esri wants you to do, so if you’re out there doing anything groundbreaking, you run into barriers more easily. By the way - there’s an ArcGIS For Home license which gives you an Advanced ArcGIS license (including Pro) for $100/yr if you pinky promise to never use it commercially. I used it for my own experiments.
Jackpot, thanks for the rundown! I've been eyeing the Home license for Esri, but what I'm looking to do would be a mix of personal and business. The lighthouses in California map you posted a while back, which program did you use for that? Assume that qualified well for a personal experiment/ArcGIS?
I made the lighthouses with ArcGIS Pro, mostly because it's what I know best. But it was not much more than a good ordering of layers to get the desired effect, so QGIS would've worked just as fine. My opinion is that it's personal until you start to turn a profit. Legal departments of large, loaded tech companies might disagree with me on that, but I haven't heard from them yet.
Scripts driving Cairo or just scribbling postscript to a file works fine too if you don't want to buy ArcGIS just to have it draw things for you. The ewkb you get out of PostGIS isn't hard to parse. Placing labels legibly is a more complicated problem than anyone expects at first, but the rest is straightforward.