Mad dogs are MD-80s.

> A side effect of the geometry simplication is that there are some very small gaps between states. Based on your use case, you'll need to handle the case of the point not being within any state borders. In these rare cases, you could fall back to a different method, such as distance checking centroid points, adding an episilon to all state borders, or simply asking the user. (The user may also be in another country or in the ocean...)

This is a common topic and easily dealt with by working with topology-informed geometries; most simplification algorithms support topology handling between different features. For instance, TopoJSON can be used.

This sounds like one of those “easy if you’ve learned it”. I dabble with GIS at work, so in some sense I am a pro at this, and I don’t know how topology easily deals with this.

But I’d like to know!

That's true. I have a bias of having part of my formal education quite focused on geospatial topics. Seeing non-geospatial folks reinventing wheels taught in GIS 101 both makes me smile and grimace thinking that we have have been doing something wrong with basic tools and aspects of the trade not being wider known.

You can look into TopoJSON here: https://github.com/topojson/topojson And a good general introduction to topology in GIS setting is nicely found in QGIS documentation: https://docs.qgis.org/3.40/en/docs/gentle_gis_introduction/t...

it depends on what flavour of English you speak. British English for instance tends to use plural for collective nouns.

This sounds like marshrutki. These are very common in post-Soviet countries to fill the demand left unmet by public transportation service.

Americans had jitneys back in early XX century. Brits got jitneys in 1980s under Thatcher.

TCAS RAs are inhibited at low altitude.

I've seen this comment widely. But...why doesn't TCAS show the pilots at least as much information as I would have seen on my phone if I'd been browsing flightradar at the time? It's one thing to design a system with "don't saturate the operator with audible alerts" but another to say that it's appropriate to withhold very valuable information from the operator ("there are loads of planes in the general vicinity, but yeah look at that one coming at you from the left").

the TCAS data would have been displayed. but not on instruments or in any place that you typically pay attention to the most during final visual approach (ie., mostly outside).

yeah, and then you need to get refreshed orbital elements for those satellites. not good if you are in an airtight environment.

celestial ephemerides don't change nearly as much.

No problem, in a few hours orbits of satellites don't change much, a day or two days' old ephemeris are ok. Especially not those on medium earth orbits which are the ones to be used (geostationary and other high orbital ones are too dim + too far away to provide precise coordinates; low orbit ones are not visible most of the night)

your point being?

enough bro. don't feed the troll.

...which is obviously designed to be maximally visible from the public space.

it's useless thence I love it.

I lied, in fact I just used it to create a couple Slack emojis.

> it's useless thence I love it.

That's what kept me going while adding more features :D Just the joy of creating something so useless, but still capable of bringing smile to my (and hopefully your too!) faces. Glad you love it!