this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 35 points 11 months ago

Of course there's a xkcd about it.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I do wish there was a river settings to better highlight rivers.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 11 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

this is really cool, thanks so much

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If you're taking requests, could you point me to a visualization that shows the navigable ones (including canals, BTW)?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Tbh I only had this because of two reasons:

  1. ages ago an account on Mastodon shared it
  2. I need to prove to myself that taking a day to sort all my bookmarks was a good investment of my time.
[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Wow this is unreal

[–] tigeruppercut 2 points 11 months ago

There's another cool site like this that wasn't as graphically cool but popped up various rivers quickly just by mousing over. Can't find it right now but I'll check again to see if I can dig it up.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Good point. They're always impossible to find unless you know exactly where to look

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Download the surveyed water data, turn the layer on, profit?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago (3 children)

openstreetmaps ftw. Get that, turn on cartographic overlays (outdated scans but still useful), aerial imagery, download and import nhd data, pull up ngs website, and enjoy. Help us map rivers! Even better if you can do an actual ground survey w/ gps.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I spent way toonlong mapping our houses in my neighborhood. It's always funny to see my work on apps, I'm like shit that street is missing houses I need to get on it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

yeah, it's addictive, I started with sidewalks in my neighborhood, and before I knew it, I was mapping parking zones, fire hydrants, trash cans, benches, traffic signals, speed limits, turn lanes...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What's the best tool to map points? I walk my dog and would love to quickly drop a pin for a sewer grate or fire hydrant? Is there something I can do mobile?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I've only used vespucci and it gets the job done.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Okay what is nhd and ngs? When I'm horny for aerial imagery, I'm usually browsing Landsat and Sentinel archives.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

National hydrography dataset and national geodetic survey (but I actually meant USGS, they provide a lot of data, their map viewer is a good introduction).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Oh thank you very much. Yes, the map viewer I often use, although I've only touched Landsat and Sentinel imagery.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

btw NHD data tends to be too large for JOSM to handle... my one complaint about JOSM, I feel it could be more memory efficient. Qgis can be used to process and extract large datasets, just split them up into several files per state. (You also need to merge the source files.) But it's totally worth the pain, because you get a lot of rich, high resolution data.

Depending on where you live, your state or city might also have open datasets available.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the recommendation! Downloading osm now o7

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Be sure to check out the osm wiki! For editing, you can use their web viewer, but I personally prefer JOSM for more advanced work. Vespucci is a great tool for mapping on your phone.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I heard you're not supposed to go source-to-mouth

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Sometimes, in the heart of obsession, it's forgivable to go source to mouth.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Iz only smellz...

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I like to do this for civil constructions.

You ever took a look an desert settlements?

There are so many awesome things to see there, and thinking of all the little humans doing their shit there is mesmerizing.

Kind of Sim city/sims in real life

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Agreed, I've learned a lot doing this. Sometimes it leads to a story, like the ruins of a federal fire watchtower that was destroyed by arson, or discovering one of the largest fisheries in the country. I've also noticed a lot more houses are torn down in my city than might be expected. Whole blocks are empty fields now, or maybe have one derelict house remaining.

It's also disturbing just how much trash people collect in their yards... and the massive wounds of foresting and strip mining.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Ugh, I was in rural china once and the uncle of my ex threw all his trash in his back yard. Disgusting. Nobody really minded though. They didn't approve, but they didn't confront him.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

Trying to find the right zoom level that shows the name of the river

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

I feel targeted.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Why do that when you can pull in a hydrological dataset and perform stream network analysis to find the flow path between your points of interest?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

smh at folks using googlemaps instead of qgis

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

I feel seen :D

It’s a fun way to do some free virtual tourism. Especially if it’s well travelled places with plenty of user content. Plus, you get to be as nosy as you want, without making people uncomfortable.

I love looking at odd architecture for example, but not everyone would appreciate me walking around their building and peering intently through the windows.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I used to process aerial imagery and it was so good for this reason. It was like playing Geoguesser as a job.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That sounds like an awesome job. As someone who loves aviation, photography and maps, I’d probably really enjoy that. How’d you get into that field if you don’t mind me asking?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I minored in GIS and needed to feed myself before going to grad school haha. Saw the advert while on Indeed. It was an underpaid production job with in house tools so they took anyone that could use a pc. Very chill though, so I didn't mind the lower wages. A lot of that sort of thing is outsourced now.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Why follow a line when I could make a DEM from some LIDAR data, then run Aspect and Accumulation functions and dileneate watersheds?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You're now playing GIS DnD:

The LiDAR dataset you're using was scanned in a forested area and doesn't include any secondary return data. As a result, your watersheds are occluded and the data doesn't provide the greatest cartography.

What do you do?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I attempt to create a TIN from survey data collected with the tree survey.

Rolls RPLS....

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

This guy maps

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Lol, relatable.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Me exploring railroads on GSV....

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Bro wtf where does the river come from? I tried following it upstream on gmaps but it just stops in the middle of some field. Not even a mountain or something

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

It goes... underground!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Modern technology has really spoilt us

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Whom amongst us

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Prefer to go the other way around.

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