Michele Tobias, PhD

I popped over to my local shoreline for some quick #KingTides views this morning, 12/4/2025. This trail was completely flooded.

SW corner of north basin in Berkeley, where Cesar Chavez Park/Marina Blvd meets Virginia St Extension/McLaughlin Eastshore State Park. Rocks on the right are riprap.

I probably wouldn't feel a 3.3 either. The warning for a 5.9 had me concerned. That's big.

It makes sense that it was a mistake.

bsky.app/profile/phan...

A Shake Alert for an earthquake 131 miles away on the other side of a granite mountain range seems little unnecessary. That being said, I hope all is well in Dayton, NV.

Hell yeah to Silversun Pickups and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs! I've been listening to those bands a lot lately too!

I'm so glad for code when it's time to write the methods section for a paper for an analysis I did like three years ago. Like hell if I know what I did back then! Oh, this code that I don't really remember tells me exactly what happened.

This is especially true when I work on medical & public health research. These teams work because of each expert involved. I have no expertise in the medicine - I'm a coastal plant geographer - but I contribute spatial analysis because location data is location data no matter what it represents.

Do you ever have those moments where you're like, damn, my career is cool? I mostly am grumbling about the details of stuff, especially when stuff isn't working, but sometimes it hits me that I get to do impactful research with amazing teams of people and that makes me really happy.

It's Pelias. It's really just being cranky.

I got to talk to a student in office hours today who is interested in Kite Aerial Photography which is totally my jam... crafting things, solving problems, remote sensing imagery...

In the US, property owner names are often considered public record. That was less of a problem when maps were paper and controlled by each county office.

That sounds like a special kind of nightmare.

There's definitely an art to preparing data for geocoding.

"We mustn't let the realities of today restrain the nonsense within us." I'm putting this on one of my inspirational desktop backgrounds on my work computer.

Let me tell you, it's worth the extra cost to get data entry folks who will pay attention to detail. I've spent about an hour cleaning and troubleshooting mistakes and missing data in a small dataset of addresses that needed geocoding.

Ooh! Another one: tabs before the house number.

New adventures in how to confuse a geocoder:
"CA" != "CA " to the geocoder.

Babysitting my Pelias geocoder install while wrestling my hair into a bun. Will this all get finished before I have to leave for dance class?

#gischat

Bodega Marine Lab’s pioneering white abalone research program grateful for community support After the Trump administration funds that support species recovery, the UC Davis-affiliated lab on the Sonoma Coast turned to outside supporters for help, hosting a community gala to showcase its p…

At the @ucdavis.bsky.social Bodega Marine Lab, scientists are fighting to restore endangered @whiteabalone.bsky.social amid complex pressures — and seeing remarkable spawning success, offering this iconic species a path home.

More from @pressdemo.bsky.social: www.pressdemocrat.com/2025/11/26/b...

#gischat Order yours today!
www.lulu.com/shop/randal-...

Starting my day with mechanical keyboard surgery to make me E and Space Bar keys work again. Thank goodness I had some extra switches on hand!

Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

"The cure for burnout is not 'self-care'; it is all of us caring for one another." From Burnout by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski

Damn, this book makes a lot of sense. I highly recommend this read for anyone who is just so damn tired all of the time.

bookshop.org/p/books/burn...

Introduce yourself with five concerts you’ve seen
(ok, but mine are dance concerts)

Alvin Ailey
Momix
Company Wayne McGregor
Capitol Dance Project
Tahoe Dance Festival

poorly drawn turkey cat

a photoshopped orange cat that looks like a turkey

happy thanksgiving!

You could stop right there. "Probably the oldest map store in the US" has a certain charm to it as a marketing slogan.

That's weird. It just played in my browser instead of the app.

It's true for so many things that the reason we don't see women and people of color in certain spaces is that they were excluded (or erased), not that they aren't capable. Thanks for making this point with respect to maps!

I'm trying to re-import the data. I'm not sure why elasticsearch forgot all the data except for Who's On First, but that's what seems like happened. At least that's the going current theory.

How to install Pelias locally on Windows in less than 3 days What is Pelias and why do you want a local one? Pelias is an open source tool that allows you to look up locations by name and turn them into geographically located data. In my line of work, I freq…

Apparently I wrote this blog post when I installed it last spring: experimentalcraft.wordpress.com/2025/03/10/h... I'm not sure why it's not working right now though.