Author: David Faden
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Interview with Ginny Hunt of Seedhunt
Huge gratitude to Ginny Hunt of the wonderful Seedhunt.com, “Seeds of California Native Plants and More”, for being up for answering a few questions via e-mail. Previous articles about her work include “Unusual Seeds For Curious Gardeners” (2004; Archive), “Sowing Wildflowers” (2009; Archive), “Hunting for seeds: Watsonville woman”s website offers hard-to-find natives, salvias, restios” (2018;…
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Geophyte filter in Calscape
I see that it’s been just a little over a year since I heard back about volunteering with Calscape, a little under 11 months since my first commit (“Allow setting calscape server under test via flag”). It’s been a good year working with the Calscape folks and other volunteers, and I hope it’s something I’ll…
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Willow seeds germinated within 6 days
The young one and I planted some willow seeds recently. I was impressed to see yesterday that they had germinated in at most 6 days. (I wasn’t checking them everyday so I’m not sure exactly when they germinated.) It’s thrilling to see these little leaves. I want to say “new life”, but I shouldn’t forget…
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“use of `continue` for control flow is discouraged”
This comment caught my attention: https://github.com/scikit-agent/scikit-agent/pull/19#discussion_r2112768829 use of continue for control flow is discouraged. Is it? I see Guido cautions against using continue in a finally block in https://peps.python.org/pep-0008/: Use of the flow control statements return/break/continue within the finally suite of a try…finally, where the flow control statement would jump outside the finally suite, is…
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“Growing Up in Los Altos”
Recently, I finished a little book that I enjoyed: “Growing Up in Los Altos” by Barbara Collins Callison. One thing that catches my attention is mention of playing in Adobe Creek during the summer. In more recent times, it dries up before making it through what is now Shoup Park (although the section in the…
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Non-unique species names
If you’re given a species name of the form genus + specific epithet, does it uniquely identify a particular species level taxon? Nope. In R, playing again with taxa.csv from https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/inaturalist-taxonomy.dwca.zip, provided by iNaturalist: (This reminded me of an old conversation I had on r-sig-mac: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-mac/2008-September/005304.html.) Extracting the non-unique species: Here’s a spreadsheet with the…
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Percent of Iowans in county with OB Unit
Following up on my previous post, Obstetrical care in Iowa, I was curious what percentage of Iowans are in a county with an OB Unit. We can get this pretty easily using the handy usdata R package in combination with the data we extracted previously. With this preamble, now we can take a weighted mean…
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Obstetrical care in Iowa
The third article in Kalen McCain’s excellent series on maternal healthcare in southeastern Iowa, Barriers aren’t limited to birthdays, features a map from numbered page 14 of ACCESS TO OBSTETRICAL CARE IN IOWA: A REPORT to the IOWA STATE LEGISLATURE – CALENDAR YEAR 2021 [PDF]. This got me wondering what it would take to reproduce…
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Iowa county seats
I got the coordinates of the county seats using the utility I previously wrote to get California county seats: The generated CSV is now available here: https://github.com/fadend/county_seat_coords/blob/main/county_seat_coords/generated/ia_usa_county_seats.csv. One complication that it doesn’t handle: Lee County has *two* county seats. A little copying pasting from the R code from the other post produced a pretty okay…
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Save as “single file” via AppleScript is live in Chrome!
Back in December 2024, I got to submit a change to Chrome/Chromium adding support for saving as MHTML via AppleScript: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/6107133/1 — Adding support for MHTML in Chrome’s Apple Script “save” action. Just now, I noticed that it’s live: It’s a little thing, but I’m excited. Woohoo!