Copasetic Flow

 I wanted to take a look at the ionosphere over North America late last week, and that meant I needed to explore ionospheric readings via radio occultation from the satellite constelations launched by Spire and PlanetIQ. Spoiler: I haven't been able to get ionospheric data from either constellation yet, but that's a data publishing issue, not a data file structure issue. Exploring the availabel data was a bit clunky at first to say the least. Then, it occurred to me that I could probably ask an AI to write Python code to pull out the strucutre of each netCDF file somewhat automatically. Sure enough, the Google Gemini search enginee version gave me an immediate answer I modified the code just a bit per my personal taste. The complete code can be seen here . From there, with only the filename, I could get output like Where to get the data I was having the best luck with PlanetIQ data as published by UCAR at  https://data.cosmic.ucar.edu/gnss-ro/planetiq/noaa/nrt/level2/2024/ How...

 Last night was a shorter run at things in general because KO6BTY, (the 13 year old known as Diaze here), and I got a later start. We spent what felt like forever, but what was actually only 12 minutes trying to share files from the 'usual' file side of the kid's Chromebook with the Linux side using file folders and whatnot. Nothing worked. For whatever reason, the Linux folders weren't visible in the machine's 'My Files' app. Sharing folders led to the machine basically hanging. Then! Then, we handled the issue like a couple of programmers, and instead of downloading in one system and trying to copy to anther, Diaze just ran the following from her Linux terminal wget https://data.cosmic.ucar.edu/gnss-ro/cosmic2/provisional/spaceWeather/level2/2024/203/ionPrf_prov1_2024_203.tar.gz That was snazzy! It just brought the file right in because, well, command line interface tools are just... snazzy.  Having a chat record of our work together is also really helpful...

 KO6BTY and I are making another run through Python. Diaze has learned a bit of Python in the past when she set up our QSO mapping app to pull in pertinent ionosonde data from the Digisonde ionosondes. Now, we're working with Python again to analyze data not from ground-bound ionosondes, but from the COSMIC2 constellation of satellits that provide ionospheric data includihng electron density profiles. That was the intro, and the application, but this post is more about how to informallly teach Python. What will work, and what won't? With unschooling, a lot of learning is initiated by something called strewing . Strewing as it's comonly defiined is, essentially, keeping things a little cluttered around the house. It's leaving reading material, projects, web sites, and so on, out where everyone in the house, including and especially the kids, can see them. I've widened the definition to include our entire indoor and outdoor lives, and the city and world at large . For...

I've been referred to a lot of indie web blogs of late, and it's paying off quite nicely for me Here's the latest example. Simon Willison--co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette--has a blog that led me to Maggie Appleton's site . Once there, I found a very nice, and very pretty primer on databases . Within the primer was a perspective I'd never seen before. There was an emphais, (certainly not the only emphasis, but an emphasis nonetheless), placed on columns, like so: from " A Shelfish Starter Guide to Databases " I, frankly, had never considered coluimns in any way except, as 'fields' that contributed to rows, and that could have conditions placed on them. A column as a whole entity unto itself? I'd never considered such a thing. A few days later though, while studying the netCDF format used by COSMIC2 missions among projects, I suddenly needed that column perspective, and I had it! netCDF files from COSMIC2 are very much arranged a...