On 15 April 2020, one of the most inspiring people that I have known in person passed away in his sleep. That was Prof Maarten de Wit. I have known him for the last few years, since I started doing postgraduate work at Nelson Mandela University. Ironically enough, he first came to my attention in […]
A question came up recently on the Spatial Community slack about getting graticules for a map in a QGIS layout. This is a quick overview of making these visible. If there are unclear or otherwise problematic sections to the below, please let me know. This newly-created grid needs to be modified to be visible and […]
Recently, because I like cartography stuff, I have been seeing a blogpost by John Nelson at ESRI about a very pretty style that he developed. It is inspired by the style of Eduard Imhof. John’s style is developed for ArcGIS Pro. I, on the other hand, use QGIS. At its heart, the style is pretty […]
Today my partner went out mushroom hunting. Apparently this is something that some microbiologists do. However, to my surprise, this does not entail serious expeditionary setup. Imagine, they (my partner and her supervisor) just went out to look for mushrooms. Annually, mushrooms seem to kill a handful of people a year in the USA, with […]
A few years ago I came across the suggestion of using an analogy of a movie to visualise geological time-scales. That is, each frame would be one year and you would view 24 frames per second. I incorporated this into a talk that I did, and then forgot about it. I was reminded of this […]
Over the last few months I have come across two causes that I think are worth supporting. Map Action The first is Map Action ( http://www.mapaction.org/ ). This organisation is based in the UK, and provides first response mapping in disaster situations. This may sound a trifle odd, but think about it: if the midden […]
Yeah, so this is not a race report, but it is of interest. The current curator of @curateZAR happens to be a travel nut (that might be putting it mildly…). Since I travel a far bit in northern KwaZulu-Natal, I figured she might like some of the photos I have taken. Without further ado: Hope these […]
This month’s Accretionary Wedge is asking about injuries obtained in the cause of geoscience. I do not really have any photos of gaping wounds and such, but nearly had a fairly nasty one once. While looking at a roadcutting along the N2 a short way outside Grahamstown, I got fairly high up on the roadcut […]
In an attempt to blog more regularly, I will be trying to take one thing that I read or came across in the past week or so and writing something about it. I am going to kick off this series with something from twitter, asked by @JacquelynGill: If you follow someone for science, does whether they tweet […]
This is a rather odd post, but bear with me. There are three Daves whom I have a great deal of respect for. I interact with one Dave fairly regularly, one had immense influence on me during my formative years and one I know only through the internet and do not interact with much, beyond […]