Robert Simmon

Post a ship that’s not #StarTrek or #StarWars

YouTube video by Sigma Space Media Sigma Space Corporation - Blue Marble: The Making of (NASA Observatory)

youtu.be/RS99upE-dPs?...

It’s all fun and games until you start getting quoted by flat-earthers!

YouTube video by Chronicle 5 WCVB Meet the cartographer turning data into stories

Well, they put me on TV. youtu.be/vh1g-8HrUS4

Yup! I found an example of that in SkyBox data before Planet acquired them.

YouTube video by Billy Bragg BILLY BRAGG - CITY OF HEROES

mood: youtu.be/IKOW2ZikGW8?...

Iran IRGCN fast attack craft swarm spotted TODAY in Strait of Hormuz at

26.3253, 56.8145

40 vessels on international waters 14 nmi off Iran. Coming from Sirik´s Shahid Seyyed Majid Base at

26.3253, 56.8145

Note several high altitude drone contrail induced cirrus clouds.

I was laid off from the Washington Post today, along with hundreds (!!!) of incredible colleagues. If you need a data journalist, chart designer, or wacky-idea-specialist, give me a shout!

I'm not very active here, but given the news: I'm one of the hundreds of reporters laid off from the Post. I worked as a graphics reporter, mostly covering the U.S economy and politics.

My portfolio: www.lmelgar.me

You can tell when one of the San Ramon quakes is over M 3.0 because you can feel it on the other side of the hills in Oakland.

I tried to use OpenAI, Gemini, and Claude to help write a multi-step script with the new GDAL raster commands, Python CLI interface, and pipeline — only Claude got it right (and even then it took a few iterations).

Charley Harper, "Darwin's Finches", from "The Giant Golden Book of Biology", 1961

Anyone familiar with time series animation in QGIS? I have a series of GeoTIFFs with valid (I think) timestamps in the metadata that aren’t recognized as timestamps. And the QGIS tool to automatically assign timestamps thinks a month is always 30 days. 🤷‍♂️

So I’m at something of a loss.

Amid the hundreds of colleagues we’ve lost today, I wanted to highlight the BRILLIANT data/graphics folks who any newsroom should be fighting to hire right now—threading here:

Anyone familiar with time series animation in QGIS? I have a series of GeoTIFFs with valid (I think) timestamps in the metadata that aren’t recognized as timestamps. And the QGIS tool to automatically assign timestamps thinks a month is always 30 days. 🤷‍♂️

So I’m at something of a loss.

Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell Somewhat devastating news today from the CIA: One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. There's not even a hint as to why they …

The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions!

This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...

Weird thing is the climate (and weather) team that was heavily boosted under Bezos was about the best in the business a few years ago. Then dismantled because reasons? I’d like to go back to a world that makes some sense

Reentry trajectory plot of the Artemis 1 mission showing the skip reentry profile.

Internet hivemind - does anybody know where I might find the trajectory data for the reentry of the #Artemis 1 mission?

I'm looking to make a kind of telemetry overlay for a remastered version of the reentry video. A good predicted trajectory should also suffice

At least 2of the 3 people I know there were let go.

Cleaning Up After an Eruption Maybe you missed it, but the last eruptive episode at Kīlauea in Hawai’i was messy. Thankfully, that messiness didn’t mean injuries and fatalities, but it does mean that suddenly a lot …

The 41st eruptive episode of Kīlauea in Hawai'i a few weeks ago made a big mess thanks to tall lava fountains and strong winds. Check out some details on the clean up in the area around Hawaii Volcanoes National Park: eruptions.site/2026/02/04/c... #eruptions

A map with yellow-ish land and shaded relief, and lakes filled blue with some edge glow effects.

The same map without the blue lake fill, only retaining the glow effects on lakes.

Task at hand is a map that mostly copies @margot-carto.bsky.social's styles from a different map, and her work is so solid that you can accidentally turn off a major layer and it still looks great!

I worked at the Goddard DAAC before Terra even launched, I know how bad it can get!

It is on EarthData! But I wasn’t using EarthData, I was using a web search. Which led directly to the product page, which *did not* lead directly to the data.

Part of the problem is the interface simply doesn’t work on Safari.

And the more I watch this video, the more it appears that the slope that failed last week was actually constantly on the move, for at least the past 5 years. Curious what @davepetley.bsky.social sees.

Fact check: Climate change is not making extreme cold more common Sometimes it just gets cold

Is climate change responsible for increasingly frequent or severe cold events?

The evidence suggests it is not.

Instead, the impact of climate change is warmer winters and less severe cold events.

@hausfath.bsky.social has a great post on The Climate Brink talking about this.

The Utility of Machine-Readable Science Scientific papers are narratives. They transmit ideas from one scientist to another by weaving together data, observations, hypotheses, inferences, and speculation in a form optimized for human reading. In this sense, a paper functions as an API (application programming interface) for human understanding. But it is a narrow one: rich in meaning for people, but opaque to machines, and distilled to only one fixed narrative.

My views of this framing and narrative structure are likely to evolve over time, but at the moment my reaction is overt revulsion.

Why oh why do we still, in 2026, need a PhD in data access to download satellite data? I have already found the dataset I want via web search, I do not want to be kicked back up to the top level of a search tool in order to access the actual files.

nsidc.org/data/mod10cm...

“This fact about the Universe has spawned much outrage among physicists and philosophers alike since it was first noticed.”

What a banger line. Ethan’s posts break my brain in the most delightful ways.

Map identifying the approximate regions where various Indigenous groups lived in North America in 1776.

The Utah Historical Society just produced a new, excellent map of "The Peoples of North America in 1776." Great resource for anyone teaching, writing, presenting about Native peoples as part of their 250th work. america250.utah.gov/power-of-pla...