I visited Boston from the UK last year and was struck by the lower level of traffic noise. I attributed it to there being far fewer diesel cars and more EVs & hybrids. In the UK we have diesel powered buses and taxis everywhere as well as lots of personal cars, and the engines all have a much deeper and louder rumble than petrol engines.
Oh that last point! My friends and I used to just strafe along every single wall and all you could see was the wall texture until it was time to shoot. We knew all the levels so well that just the changes in lighting, or sometimes how quickly a door opened, were enough for us to tell where someone else was (avoid the coloured corridors in Complex).
Screen cheating is a skill, countering it is a skill, and countering THAT is an even bigger skill.
Oh the sounds too. You knew when someone opened a door and there are only so many doors and if they opened two doors in rapid succession.. they were gonzo. The game is really a game of mastering all senses I guess lol.
The all-Europe equivalent is ENTSO-E[1], which has down to 15-minute granularity (depending on operator I think) data for every generation unit in Europe.
There's a similar platform for the gas network too[2] - only daily data but it does have a map interface where you can see the main transmission pipelines across the continent.
I work in energy markets analytics, so grab data from these on a regular basis for SMEs.
Agreed. I read the Mistborn books a few years ago and just found them very... sanitised, especially compared to other prominent fantasy novels by the likes of Scott Lynch or the brilliantly sweary Joe Abercrombie.
This is a great use of digital elevation data to generate images of what's visible from various places. It appears to be a real labour of love from the author.
My favourite kind of web scraping is when you have to pick apart some undocumented API that serves up data to an SPA, then figure out how to tidy up the response(s) into a single pandas dataframe. Always a satisfying feeling to solve one of those little puzzles.
> “Oh this person just throws stuff on Medium? Probably not worth my time.”
This is just the worst attitude. Someone's not worth your time because they don't have the knowledge or time to stand up a website on their own domain? People who aren't web developers might still have something interesting to say.
For me, it's not that they can't stand up a website, but that there's very little barrier to entry. An article on the New Yorker, say, tends to be better than one on Medium not because the writer can make a website but because they have a strong editorial team that only publish content of a certain quality and edit it to improve it. An article on Medium may not even have been proofread.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. The New Yorker is a magazine that curates and publishes articles by people who write for a living and stakes its reputation on only publishing pieces of a high quality.
The distinction here really is if someone publishes on joesblog.com or on medium.com/joesblog. Both are self-published rather than selected for publication, but the OP was of the opinion that joesblog.com is an indicator of higher quality of content, which I don't think is true. All it indicates is that someone has been able to set up a website.
Martin Gardner came up with a somewhat contrived but still brilliant extension to this:
"Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?"
