What Happened in September 2021

Machine learning:

• Entered the STAC Overflow (get it?) contest. I managed to go through three iterations of my model, and improve a bit over the baseline model they had as a tutorial. I finished in 71st place out of 664 – not bad! However, my final score (0.5314) was nowhere near the winners; the top four were all over 0.8. Still, this was a good exercise.

Mapping/GIS:

• Work on Kaggle’s geospatial analysis course. Good exercises for me.

Hardware hacking:

• More fan runtime experiments. It’s interesting to see the different battery behaviours.

• Got the anemometer hooked up to the weather station and working at last! 🎉 The one thing it’s not is calibrated – so I’ve got RPM, but I don’t know what that translates to in wind speed. Yes, you can calculate the circumference of one rotation & figure it out from there, but…well, it’s complicated.

• This also required rejigging the cable on the tipping bucket rain meter to use the same cat6 cable I used for the anemometer. Twisted pair cabling, people, it’s the bomb.

• Big refactoring of the Arduino code for the weather station; it’s a lot more readable now. And I’m reasonably confident that my floating point math is probably okay.

• Begin plans for a bird feeder camera. I’ve got some Coral dev boards, and it turns out the example code for it includes a bird species recognition model based on iNaturalist data. Bought a cheap pair of binoculars to try using as a telephoto lens for a webcam.

Nature/science:

• Continuing phenology measurements for Nature’s Notebook.

• Lots of observations for iNaturalist and eBird, including submitting some historical bird counts from the past year.

• After a lot of looking around, I bought two big hardcover sketch books to use as phenology/nature journals: one page per day, and observations from each year on that page.

Climate emergency:

• Letters every week to government: mostly provincial because of the election, but federal too once that finished.

• Signed up for Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment’s seminar on “How to talk to your MLA about unnatural gas”. (Oh hey, it was recorded.) This is a call from CAPE to halt new fracking in BC. My MLA is the education minister, so I’m trying to book a meeting with her.

• Read Mark Jaccard’s “The Citizen’s Guide to Climate Success”, which is available as a PDF at that link. (I bought the dead tree version because books rock.) It’s an eye-opening look at what climate policies will be effective – not only because they work, but because they’re politically possible to implement. I came across him because of his article on assessing the climate sincerity of political parties in Canada’s national election.

• Paying more attention to the election than last time. Holy hell, the infighting in the Green party. Asked our Conservative party candidate why she didn’t bother showing up to a climate debate. (Hardly a surprise, as the Conservative candidates in my riding haven’t shown up to any of them over the years.)