Mike Mahoney

@mikemahoney218

Helped build NYS's Forest Carbon Assessment. Currently helping build public water data infrastructure. PhD in Environmental Science. #rstats, ML, Boston and spatial data. Opinions my own. RTs imply causation. github.com/mikemahoney218

574 Following3,262 Followers1,118 Posts

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Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· 18d

Film you've watched more than six times with a gif

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· 19d

Monday excitement, my app's traffic graph looks like this (blue line is all requests combined) and I simply do not know why

A time series graph. Total number of requests, in blue, sits at about 4.5 million for about a month before climbing to 10 million in about three days

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Jul 16

love when you can tell a museum curator is fighting for their life

Beliefs in Islam
Like Judaism and Christianity, to which it is related, Islam is a monotheistic religion

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Jun 25

Deeply funny that the only citations in the entire Wikipedia article for BUFR are documenting complaints about it

Wikipedia article for BUFR

The Binary Universal Form for the Representation of meteorological data (BUFR) is a binary data format maintained by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The latest version is BUFR Edition 4. BUFR Edition 3 is also considered current for operational use. BUFR was created in 1988 with the goal of replacing the WMO's dozens of character-based, position-driven meteorological codes, such as SYNOP (surface observations), TEMP (upper air soundings) and CLIMAT (monthly climatological data). BUFR was designed to be portable, compact, and universal. Any kind of data can be represented, along with its specific spatial/temporal context and any other associated metadata. In the WMO terminology, BUFR belongs to the category of table-driven code forms, where the meaning of data elements is determined by referring to a set of tables that are kept and maintained separately from the message itself.

BUFR is a complex format that can be difficult to use [1] and it presents some weaknesses.[2] The introduction of BUFR format led to data "disparition" and many formatting errors.[3][4][5]

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Jun 12

it is a CRIME there's no cast recording for Black Swan yet EASILY best thing I've seen this (last?) season

A "playbill" for Black Swan held up in the usual way at the American Repertory Theater

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Jun 5

oof ouch

The release of Microsoft Outlook is now closer to the Moon landing than to today.

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Jun 3

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Apr 28

I don't think of myself as a high maintenance person but also I do bring a full coffee setup when traveling

bag of coffee beans (from Broadsheet in Somerville), Kingrinder K6 burr grinder, and aeropress in front of a hotel Keurig used to boil water

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Apr 26

A still from It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Mar 21

we're so back

a beautiful sunny view of Boston from MGH

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Jan 20

E175 -> CRJ900

Interior passenger cabin of an Embraer 175, from the back looking towards the nose

Interior passenger cabin of a Bombardier CRJ900, from the back looking towards the nose

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Jan 20

wild to me that people use any of these as search engines

Google search for "where are the Olympics this year". Google AI has helpfully replied (and highlighted!) "there are no Olympic games this year"

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Jan 15

of course these days I don't need tires, my wheels are 711mm of solid steel

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Jan 1

apologies in advance

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Dec 18

in case anyone missed it, a terrifying harlequin has appeared at the end of the #AGU25 convention center

A terrifying harlequin. It's about 8' tall

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Dec 14

anyway, today I am grateful for IFR

Weather radar over Boston. It's all snow, everywhere, forever

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Nov 10

standards promote interoperability, which is why we're telling your users to not share their downloaded data with anyone unless they tell them it's broken we also will not give you any guidance on how to tell people it's broken

GeoJSON normatively supports WGS 84 (without height: CRS84; with ellipsoidal height: CRS84h), but the "prior arrangement" provision allows other coordinate systems to be used.

Requirement 14

/req/crs/geojson

Servers that implement this extension plus the GeoJSON requirements class and clients that use this extension SHALL be subject to the prior arrangement provision in the second paragraph of section 4 of the GeoJSON standard.

An explicit request by a client with a query parameter crs establishes a prior arrangement. It is the responsibility of the client that submits the request to handle the coordinates in the response correctly. In particular, clients should not make the GeoJSON document available to others unless they are aware of the prior arrangement.

This standard does not specify any standardized approach to encoding coordinate reference system information in a GeoJSON document.

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Oct 23

My shutdown hobbies are getting weirder (Poll worker training in preparation for Boston's municipal election on November 4th!)

The room for poll worker training for Boston's city elections

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Oct 5

my partner finished his journey of visiting every blue bike station today (please clap) unfortunately the app does NOT throw confetti when you hit 100%

A screenshot of the blue bikes app with 100% of stations visited

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Oct 2

is this a typo in the Haymarket station artwork or is there a unit I haven't run into before #boston

A black and white image of a storefront. Provolone and Acenelino are both labeled price per lb, while pecorino romano is labeled per bl

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Sep 19

damn it's a pretty city

The Boston skyline as seen from the MGH platform

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Sep 11

I'm not pretending to know the full MGL, I'm just reading the last sentence WBUR linked -- and you need 3000 signatures for the Boston mayoral preliminary election Could be other laws they didn't link!

Section 13. A person nominated as a candidate for any state, city or town office may withdraw his name from nomination by a request signed and duly acknowledged by him before a notary public, and filed with the officer with whom the nomination was filed, within the time prescribed by section eleven for filing objections to certificates of nomination and nomination papers and no such requests for withdrawals shall be received after such time has expired. A person nominated at a city or town preliminary election may withdraw his name from nomination in the same manner, within six days succeeding five o'clock in the afternoon of the day of holding such preliminary election. Unless otherwise provided by the city or town charter, such nominee shall be replaced by the candidate with the next highest number of votes in said preliminary, if such candidate receives a number of votes at least equal to the number of signatures required by law to place his name on the preliminary election ballot.

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Sep 11

This seems incorrect or at least incomplete -- unofficial results show DaRosa getting under 3000 votes, which is the number needed to get on the ballot. At 2409 he'd have a decent gap to make up.

Because Kraft dropped out within six days of the preliminary, under Massachusetts state law, the next highest vote-getter could be moved onto the ballot for the general election. In this case, that would be longtime community activist Domingos DaRosa, who earned just 2.6 percent of the vote.

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Sep 9

Happy election day #Boston ! Thrilled to cast my vote to re-elect @wutrain.bsky.social this morning -- and grateful for our poll workers who got me in and out in about two minutes. Polls are open until 7! Find your voting location here: www.sec.state.ma.us/VoterRegistr... #mapoli

An "I Voted" sticker on a nalgene water bottle

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Jun 6

Roosevelt is actually somewhat famous for physically fighting his agency heads (though here it's a few years earlier as governor), though in a friendly way www.npr.org/transcripts/...

But Roosevelt had this wrestling mat installed in the governor's office - the governor's mansion in Albany, and when Pinchot would come up to see him, he'd unroll the mat, and they'd go at it. And Pinchot, in his memoir, described how one of the highlights of his life was boxing with Roosevelt and knocking him on his butt.

So Roosevelt becomes president, Pinchot's his top aide, and together they try to do something audacious. They do create the idea of conservation. Now, John Muir's the third character in this, but he's off stroking his beard and making wonderful statements and living in his vineyard north of San Francisco.

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Jun 3

the new GDAL features in 3.11 are wild I knew about some of the pipeline stuff, which is going to transform how people use the CLI, but the new gdal vsi command seems like a huge step towards portable spatial workflows

a screenshot (...phone image) of a slide from the GDAL 3.11 webinar, showing the new GDAL vsi command

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· May 21

The biggest change is that our maps, built from leaf-on satellite imagery, don't seem to "see" accumulation in the tops and branches as well. That means we need to get creative with how we build these maps to better capture these important components of biomass.

Changes in carbon from 2005 to 2019 across both sets of allometrics, and then comparing the two. The new maps seem to be accumulating less carbon over time

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· May 21

The Forest Service has updated the models they use to estimate biomass to better account for wood in the tops and branches of trees. This is a great change. But we built the New York Forest Carbon Assessment against the old models, so we had a question: what does this change mean for our maps?

Two maps of forest carbon in New York State. Top map shows that most areas have more carbon under the new allometrics, bottom map shows the change in which places have "the most" carbon. Mountainous landscapes are the losers!

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Mar 16

this is probably the modern equivalent but I think we haven't recognized enough of the benefits yet for the average person to get why the big domino matters

same domino meme, small one is "Obama gets interested in environmental policy after losing his congressional majority" and big domino is "Biden passes the IRA and BIL"

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218· Mar 16

we've done crazy things before and I have to believe we can do them again