I slept through everything. What are you betting on 1) all the cocaine is ours now? 2) they’ll release them in exchange for a deal on rare earth metals and oil? 3) Maduro turns up in Saratov?
Category: Geography
Exploring Open Data: A Deep Dive into Loudoun County’s 1.5 Million Trees | December 15 2025, 15:40
I’m checking out what open data we have in our county to play with data analysis over the weekend, and discovered, for instance, an open database of all 1.5 million trees in the county. The screenshot shows just a tiny part around my house.
Understanding Road Grade: The Math Behind the 10% Incline Sign | June 30 2025, 19:48
It turns out that the incline (incline, or grade) – the steepness of a road or slope – has quite an obvious definition, but I never really thought about it. It means the ratio of the projection of a line on the terrain to the vertical plane to the projection of the same line on the horizontal. In other words, the magnitude of the incline equals the tangent of the angle between the rise of the slope and the horizontal (the tangent of the angle of inclination).
Thus, a “steep climb” sign of 10% indicates just about 5.71 degrees of inclination. This is arctan(0.1).
It also turned out that formally among specialists when reading the notation, the “%” sign is pronounced as “hundredths.”
