Can Y Cardi re-released for President Dukat inaugurization

President Dukat is inaugurized today. The Dukat-Brunt team encourage all citizens of the galaxy to celebrate with this new version of Can Y Cardi (The Cardi Song).

Earth's political crisis continues after the planet voted to leave the United Federation of Planets in a recent referendum.

The Prime Minister of Earth, Tresera June still maintains that the planet will not only press ahead with plans to leave the Federation, but leave the UFP single market. The Romulan government is expecting this may give an opportunity to bring an end to trade sanctions imposed by the Federation after the Romulan annexation of two star systems in the Neutral Zone. This could even lead to the legalisation of Romulan Ale on Earth. However this would mean a hard border with Mars and its dependent asteroid colonies which will be remaining in the Federation, and the possibility of another independence referendum on Luna.

Dead Parrot - Python in Python

Giant dead parrot found in UK. Species 'Psitticus Brexitus'. Scientists insist it's dead & won't fly. Gvmt say "the people" demand it flies. pic.twitter.com/AH5Twgwjvo

— Scientists for EU (@Scientists4EU) 8 January 2017

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import sys, time
import imp
imp.reload(sys)
if sys.version_info[0] < 3:
    sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

class Parrot:
    def __init__(self, name):
        """
        initialise Parrot object    
        """
        print("Initialising parrot")
        self.latin = "psitticus"
        self.name = name
        self.isalive = True
        self.latin = self.latin + " {n}".format(n=name.lower()+"us")
        
    def dispatch(self):
        print("dispatching parrot")
        self.isalive = False
        
    def printName(self):
        print("This parrot's name is {n}.".format(n=self.name))
        print("Latin: {l}".format(l=self.latin))
        
    def checkAlive(self):
        if self.isalive:
            print("This parrot is healthy.")
        else:
            print("This is an ex-parrot, it has ceased to be.")
            
if __name__ == "__main__":
    if sys.version_info[0] < 3:
        pname = raw_input("What is the parrot's name? ")
    else:
        pname = input("What is the parrot's name? ")
    parrot = Parrot(pname)
    parrot.printName()
    parrot.checkAlive()
    time.sleep(3)
    parrot.dispatch()
    time.sleep(1)
    parrot.checkAlive()

For more EU referendum humour see my previous posts:
Gul Dukat wins galactic presidential election and
Federation Membership referendum.

Gul Dukat wins 2374 Galactic Presidential election with Brunt as VP

Campaign poster showing Gul Dukat and Brunt. Background from APOD by Rogelio Bernal Andreo.

The shock victory of Gul Dukat and Liquidator Brunt in the galactic presidential election has left the Federation wondering if Earth will reconsider plans to leave the Federation following the referendum in which the population narrowly voted to do so.

Although it is now eight Earth years since the Earth voted by 52% to 48% to leave the Federation, the President of Earth has not invoked Article 50 of the planet's membership treaty and is in battle over whether she can do so without a vote in the Planetary Assembly. The Earth orbital and lunar colonies strongly voted remain. The First Minister of Luna is advocating an independence referendum and several asteroid colonies are exploring transferring to Martian jurisdiction which has its own Federation membership.

Losing access to the Federation single market would make Earth more vulnerable to economic exploitation by the Ferengi.

The Leave campaign is now widely regarded as overestimating the amount of dilithium contributed to the Federation budget by Earth.

Galactic Information Systems

This is the result of georeferencing an image of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) using the QGIS Georeferencer plugin. First flip the image horizontally, because celestial right ascension coordinates go the opposite way round to longitudes, because we are inside the celestial sphere.
Then with the aid of a star chart, find a few reference points, and use SIMBAD to find coordinates for then. I used the M31 centre, the satellite galaxies M32 and  M110, and the stars 35 and 32 And.
The result was that M31 is just off the coast of Italy.
The distance of M31 is approximately 780 kiloparsecs, 1 parsec being 3.09x10¹⁶m. 1 degree on the sky corresponds to 13.6kpc at M31's distance (note that the stars in the image are Milky Way stars and much closer) and that means that 1 metre on the ground translates to 0.4 light years in M31.
Therefore the density of stars in M31 is perhaps similar to the corresponding density of trees in a forest, except of course that the stars are arranged in a 3 dimensional structure, and the stars themselves are vastly smaller then the corresponding trees, the Sun's diameter at M31 distance corresponding to about 0.7mm on the Earth, the size of a small insect.

Developers submit planning applications for arcologies in Truro

This morning it has been revealed that bold plans have been submitted by various developers to build arcologies in the Truro area.

A spokesman for Maxis Developments, who have submitted one of the applications, said that these 'arcologies' are self-contained structures that are practically a city in their own right. Cllr. Derek Poldark pointed out that these structures can provide Truro's housing needs in a fraction of the footprint that traditional suburban rabbit hutches housing would use.

Based on plans submitted, here are the four proposed designs for the buildings:

Koeswik, Lonchya, Aberplymm, Darko

One of the sites is the present location of County Hall,which would be demolished and replaced with an arcology that not only offers better office space for the council, but of course penthouse apartments for the Chairman and Chief Executive.

The view from the Duke of Cornwall's private jet of the Truro area after completion of the project.

The second of these, the Lonchya design, could be modified to provide a stadium under the dome on its upper deck.

Artist's impression

Artist's impression

In fact, the long term plan is to solve the traffic problems on the A390 into Truro by having the entire population of Cornwall move to Truro, which the arcologies will make possible.

In this case, the rest of the county Duchy will be made into an 18th century theme park in which visitors could ride horses around and watch actors pretend to mine copper.

Of course the new arcologies are expected to bring more visitors to Cornwall, therefore there is also a proposal for a new HS3 railway line to provide an alternative route to Dawlish in case of more storms:

If the mid-Wales line between Dovey Junction and Birmingham were to be upgraded, this would provide access to HS2 and a reduced journey time to London.

The Doggerland Reclaimation Project

As an entry to John Michael Greer's Great Squirrel Case Challenge (the name based on a proposal by high-school debaters in Seattle to generate the USA's electricity by vast numbers of squirrels turning wheels), here is my proposal for the world's most absurd energy solution:

The Doggerland Reclaimation project would use a series of dikes to allow the drainage of part of the North Sea using power generated by offshore wind farms along a dike from Aberdeen, Scotland to Bergen, Norway.

A second dike from Dover to Calais would allow water in to generate hydroelectric power. This would also carry a new motorway link to complement the Channel Tunnel and be linked to a new container port to replace Rotterdam and Hamburg.

The lowered sea would make the shallower southern part of the North Sea dry land which would be planted with fast-growing conifers for wood-chip biofuel power plants.

An unusual application of a MaxEnt habitat suitability model

The MaxEnt software is often used by ecologists, and others for species habitat modeling based on environmental layers.

So some data I used from the 2011 UK census (England, Wales and Cornwall) was 1. those with a skill in the Welsh language (the full question was only asked of census respondents living in Wales) and 2. those self-describing as Cornish for national identity.

The data is converted from census output polygons, to dots randomly placed within the part of the output polygon below 300m altitude.

Although there is quite a lot of land above 300m in Wales, there is actually only one or two census output area polygons that entirely disappear when terrain above 300m is cut out. So if you're in Blaenavon, apologies for deleting you.

Using the environmental layers of elevation, slope (from Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) and distance from the coast, this is the output:

Notice that the habitat suitability for Welsh speakers is actually higher in areas such as the North York Moors, and North Devon than Ynys Môn.

Habitat suitability drops off further than 60km from the coast

Altitudes of 200m-300m appear to be most suitable for Welsh speakers according to the observations of the census data.

The Welsh speakers are not suited to living on flat terrain.

A range of coastal areas are suitable for resettlement of the Cornish in the event of for example,  unexpected reactivation of the igneous activity of the Cornubian batholith.

Dissertation done, and the likelihood of Martian glaciers in Cornwall, Wales and south-west England

So, the dissertation is done now, you can get a copy here, or a special tablet-optimised version here. The latter is using the US Supreme Court's paper size and Century Schoolbook font, as was advised to me by http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Page_Layout.

In the dissertation itself, I explain that the Martian terrain is segmented using RSGISLib and a classifier function assigned to the segments using the Souness et al. 2012 glacier-like forms as a guide.

So what if we apply it to a terrain that is not on Mars? The Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission data is available at a similar resolution to that from HRSC for Mars.

I have done the segmentation for areas of Wales, Cornwall and the southwest of England using topography only rather than integrating the red image field, since it wouldn't really be comparable with all the vegetation etc. on the Earth.

The same procedure of highlighting segments with log(K) > 12, 13, 14, 15 with a semi-transparent overlay is used. The background images are from Landsat 8 using bands 6, 5, 2 for RGB. All images from 25th July 2014.

Ordnance Survey GB numerical coordinates are used.

Not much in West Cornwall, except on the north-facing slopes west of St. Ives. There are a few more segments on the North Cornwall coast and in some areas of southeast Cornwall.

The north coast of West Penwith has a high likelihood of Martian glaciers, see also the map in the following post which shows a relatively shallow area of sea that would have been dry land in the Early Holocene, perhaps sediment deposited by the Martian glaciers at some point.

Some martian glaciers expected on the northern fringe of Dartmoor near Okehampton, but perhaps surprisingly also in south Devon.

Exmoor seems a favoured location for martian glaciers.

The Welsh valleys and the Brecon Beacons are also highlighted for a high likelihood of martian glaciers.

Since Wales generally has a higher likelihood of martian glaciers, I have used a slightly different scaling with only starting to highlight at log(K) > 13:

A close up of the Valleys and Brecon Beacons:

Mid-Wales:

North Wales:

Snowdonia:

Aberystwyth area:

The southern part of Cwm Rheidol appears particularly favoured for martian glaciers.