Spaced Out :: 05 2016

What a cool video clip!

Wanted to give a plug to Spooly who are running a Kickstarter campaign at the moment. I’ve not link to them, but the product looks great - I’m always on the lookup for innovative products that solve problems or make life easier. And this is a little gem - its a USB charge cable but incredibly small and rolls up into a perfectly neat package. What can you say other than a fantastic piece of design, doesn’t cost much and worthy of the plug.

..what indeed?? Read here to find out, but, as they say, a picture tells a thousand words (data caveats excepting in the linked post).

I’ve been doing some more programming in R recently and working on a large XLSX spreadsheet (using the excellent readxl package) where I needed to cross-reference columns. Excel painfully uses letters for column titles and I needed the column number; useful to know then that you can change this option in Excel:

Pre-ribbon
Go to Tools, Options, General, check ‘R1C1 reference style’

Ribbon
Go Options, Formulas, check ‘R1C1 reference style’

What a great story - a 15 year old with a passion for Mayan civilisation discovers a lost city on the Yucatan peninsula using satellite imagery, hitherto unknown to archaeologists! This has been rumbling on for a couple of years after he hypothesised that the Mayan cities were laid out, spatially, based upon star constellations. One of the maps he used had one star with no known city located on the border of Belize/Mexico, The dense forest showed no obvious signs of inhabitation so the obvious choice is radar imagery which can penetrate some depth through the tree canopy. The Canadian Space Agency provided some Radarsat-2 data and with the friendly help of an academic, was able to identify 30 buildings and calculate the height of the pyramid at 86m. Really great example of moving from hypothesis to testing, incorporating open access data and then some serious image processing.