Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

We have a new paper out! Named "The hierarchical morphotope classification: A theory-driven framework for large-scale analysis of built form”, it provides an overview of the method we used to build our Urban Taxonomy dataset.

https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0264-2751(26)00279-9

Morphology often hits scalability limits. This method is able to break those as shown by classifying over 90 million buildings (in the paper, we have 150 million + now).

1/n

We have a cover! Excited to be part of this. The publisher site for the book is https://www.routledge.com/Bayesian-Workflow/Gelman-Vehtari-McElreath-Simpson-Margossian-Yao-Kennedy-Gabry-Burkner-Modrak-Barajas/p/book/9780367490140

Note that a PDF will be freely downloadable once the book is out!

My therapist said I need to find things to keep me busy, so I created the @cdnspace Artemis II dashboard.

I reverse-engineered the Unity Engine powering the NASA AROW visualization and found an absolute treasure trove of data to display.

Little did I expect that it's now being seen by anywhere from 200 to 600 people at any given time with 130,000 people having looked at it in the last 24 hours. People are even building projects around my API.

Yesterday, I received a message on LinkedIn from someone working in Mission Control in Houston... and they're using my dashboard! He even sent me a photo, but I can't share it until after the crew has splashed down.

Mind blown, and an absolute pick-me-up. The best part? It's being served from my basement.

https://artemis.cdnspace.ca/

#artemis #artemis2 #artemisII #nasa #csa

A lot can happen in 57 years.

In 1969 the corrupt President Nixon was president, the U.S. could not afford universal healthcare but did find the money to go to the moon while waging a war in Vietnam.

In 2026 the corrupt President Trump is president, the U.S. still cannot afford universal healthcare but does find the money to go to the moon while waging a war in Iran.

A widely circulated Latin phrase is Vegezius’s "Si vis pacem para bellum" — if you want peace, prepare for war. However, I believe this expression does not do justice to the Roman world, which was well aware of the miseries of war. In fact, Tacitus, in Agricola, records this phrase, which is likely the one worth remembering: "Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant" — to plunder, slaughter, and steal, they call this empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

#history #language #books

A bit of whimsy for today.... the gradient horse art project (draw a horse and set it in motion) https://gradient.horse/

Great blog by Pat Thompson on academic writing:

▶️ https://patthomson.net/2026/03/08/getting-comfortable-with-being-uncomfortable/

"Academic writing is a form of thinking. It’s not the transcription of thoughts already completed, but a process of thinking itself. One of the ways we make writing harder than it needs to be is by writing as though our argument has arrived fully formed, rather than being wrestled into shape over several drafts."

This is why you *need* to write yourself, even and especially when writing is hard!

#AcademicChatter #PhD

I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.

I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.

This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.

#Fedora #Linux

I can't remember if I posted this rant already. Somewhere someone is teaching all science students to use the stupidest slide.

The slide says:

"But there's something quietly beautiful about a place where people just... share what they know. No brand deals, no engagement metrics, no algorithm nudging you toward rage. Just someone who spent twenty years studying Arctic policy posting a thread at 2 AM because they think you should understand what's happening."

https://matduggan.com/boy-i-was-wrong-about-the-fediverse/

Introducing kuva: A scientific plotting library in rust, along with cli binary with the option to plot directly into the terminal.

Feel free to drop me some feedback as an issue on the repo

https://github.com/Psy-Fer/kuva

https://crates.io/crates/kuva/0.1.1

Trump ran an entire campagin on “No more stupid wars”, and “America First”, only to rename The Department of Defence to The Department of War, and proceed to attack both Venezuela and Iran, while constantly being offended that he is not offered The Nobel Peace Prize.

The US is led by the insane.

#Linux tools for examining #sequencing data:

```
zcat sequences.fastq.gz | \
awk 'NR % 4 == 2 { print substr($0, 0, 10) }' |\
sort | uniq -c | sort -nr > index_list
```

Generates a list of the first 10 bases in sequences.fastq.gz, sorted by frequency. Handy if you need to check that the indexes you thought you used are in fact the ones that were used.

```
$ head index_list
10765621 ACGTACTGTG
9006389 AACCACGCTT
6891089 ACACCGTTGC
5198342 AGAAGCCATT
4202651 AATCGAGGTG
3788448 ACCTTGTGCA
3271929 ACGAGTTGCA
3027755 ACCGATTGCA
2682797 ACTATCCGTG
54372 ACGTANTGTG
...
```

This may become a blogpost at some point.

#bioinformatics

#Zimbabwe has rejected a US health deal that would have provided $367m (£272m) in funding over five years because of Washington's demand for sensitive data.

The decision has come to light after a government memo from December was leaked, revealing that President Emmerson Mnangagwa felt the deal was "lopsided".

What’s the biggest single crystal you’ve grown? David Boyce and students at Queenswood School have grown a 3kg crystal of copper sulfate. Now he shares his tips for how you can do it too.

Via Chemistry World on Bluesky.

#Chemistry https://www.chemistryworld.com/culture/how-to-grow-an-enormous-single-crystal/4022946.article