Eugene Alvin Villar
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seav4f.bsky.social
Eugene Alvin Villar
@seav4f.bsky.social
digital crafter (coder, cartographer, graphic designer, tech writer) ▪︎ open data/knowledge advocate ( #OpenStreetMap, #Wikimedia, #Wikidata) ▪︎ Oxfordian commaist ▪︎ 🇵🇭 ▪︎ he/him 🏳️‍🌈

primary microblog: https://en.osm.town/@seav (Mastodon)
Pinned
Last October I finished implementing the classic 15 puzzle game but using the standard @openstreetmap.bsky.social tiles as the sliding pieces! 🗺️🧩

Currently you can play any of 20 map locations. Enjoy! 🎉

seav.github.io/osm-15-puzzle/
One of the biggest political scandals in the #Philippines 🇵🇭 in 2024 was the accusation that Alice Guo, the elected town mayor of Bamban was not actually a Filipino citizen and instead was a Chinese spy that engaged in human trafficking.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OER...
How a Scam and Chinese Spy Scandal Rocked the Philippines
YouTube video by Bloomberg Originals
www.youtube.com
November 26, 2025 at 6:56 AM
#TuneTuesday (Nov 26)

@lizzobeeating.bsky.social’s “2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)” is such a bop and I can’t help liking its infectious energy! It certainly gives me 80s vibes because of the use of synths and especially with the key change for the final chorus. 🎧

youtu.be/krdQLzzAeZU
Lizzo - 2 Be Loved (Am I Ready) [Official Video]
YouTube video by Lizzo Music
youtu.be
November 25, 2025 at 8:49 PM
Oh nice! This new QUERY method is probably the biggest change to the core message format of #HTTP since HTTP/1.1 was released in 1997!

www.ietf.org/archive/id/d...

This method would've been really useful for designing better REST APIs that otherwise relied on POST requests too much.
The HTTP QUERY Method
This specification defines the QUERY method for HTTP. A QUERY requests that the request target process the enclosed content in a safe and idempotent manner and then respond with the ...
www.ietf.org
November 25, 2025 at 12:27 PM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
Two miles of ice core on the shelf at our national ice core facility in Lakewood, Colorado. The WAIS Divide core from West Antarctica is a 3400m long (deepest US core, 2nd deepest ice core ever) 68,000 year old record of high resolution climate.
November 24, 2025 at 5:03 PM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
“This is the final post-truthification of a platform that long ago pivoted toward a maxim used by the journalist Peter Pomerantsev to refer to post-Soviet Russia: Nothing is true and everything is possible.” — www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
Elon Musk’s Worthless, Poisoned Hall of Mirrors
How X blew up its own platform with a new location feature
www.theatlantic.com
November 25, 2025 at 2:46 AM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
One of the many joys of using AI for programming is the creation of huge PRs on complex topics that the authors barely understand, but still suggest "because they work". Here's a great example from #OCaml github.com/ocaml/ocaml/...

Kudos to OCaml's maintainers for handling this so gracefully.
DWARF support for macOS and Linux by joelreymont · Pull Request #14369 · ocaml/ocaml
DWARF v5 Debugging Support for OCaml Native Compiler This PR adds DWARF v5 debug information to the OCaml native compiler, allowing proper source-level debugging in GDB and LLDB. What's Impleme...
github.com
November 24, 2025 at 9:48 AM
November 23, 2025 at 10:50 AM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
"Too little was done too late”: New commentary with PIK director Johan Rockström warns of rising planetary risks after a missed decade of action. Climate & biosphere pressures keep increasing, but stabilising the Earth system is still within reach.
www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/late...
November 22, 2025 at 12:06 PM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
This young man has it exactly right.
November 21, 2025 at 11:30 PM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
What if color harmonies were a continuum? Not fixed rules, and you could glide through them just by interpolating?
November 22, 2025 at 12:15 AM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
Humans will NEVER colonize another planet. Never.

If we can’t even agree to do the minimum to keep Earth habitable, there’s no way in hell we’ll cooperate to make another planet habitable.
November 22, 2025 at 11:29 AM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
#30daymapchallenge | Day 22 Data: Natural Earth | The Great Islands

Earlier this summer I finished this print version of my map from last year depicting our Great Lakes as islands. Been trying to learn more about lighting techniques in Blender—I think this was a big leap forward from 2024 version!
November 22, 2025 at 1:20 PM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
art by rebecca salinas -- can't disturb cat, cat ghost is watching
November 21, 2025 at 9:10 PM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
If you ever find yourself writing a book, I highly recommend including the sentence “Britain has an unparalleled variety of crisp flavours” so that, at a signing event, a French person can meet you and say “oh no you don’t.” and give you a big bag of pesto and mozzarella flavour crisps.
November 22, 2025 at 4:28 PM
Another film, another unattributed use of @openstreetmap.bsky.social. This is the fourth film that I’ve seen this year do this and the latest culprit is this Christmas @netflix.com romcom named Champagne Problems.

Their travesty is now immortalized on the OSM Wiki: wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Films
November 22, 2025 at 11:21 AM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
When pregnant woman boarded a subway car, 38% of the time someone offered her a seat. If someone dressed as Batman was also in the car it rose to 68%.

phys.org/news/2025-11...
The Batman effect: The mere sight of the 'superhero' can make us more altruistic
If "Batman" appears on the scene, we immediately become more altruistic: in fact, research conducted by psychologists from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, shows that the sudden appear...
phys.org
November 21, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
"This is a network analysis tool for exploring relationships between people, places, and events captured in the Epstein emails released by the House Oversight Committee." epsteinvisualizer.com
November 21, 2025 at 7:01 PM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
Yes, you CAN go back in time! This StoryMap allows readers to experience several hundred million years of Earth history in just minutes with a scroll-driven animation. Happy GIS Day too!
ow.ly/ZjFV50XsVbc

Want to know how the team did it?
ow.ly/gC3k50XsVQY

⚒️ 🧪 #gischat #geogsky #geogchat 🌎 🌍 🌏
November 20, 2025 at 8:24 PM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
Remember this? The most amazing thing about this remarkable 2002 car commercial is that it didn’t seem to realize at the time, or perhaps didn’t care, how effectively it made the point that cars and car infrastructure are a HUGE waste of space in cities. Award-winning 2002 ad for Saturn car company.
Saturn Ion commercial
YouTube video by Eliyahu Biton
youtube.com
November 21, 2025 at 5:28 AM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
Monarch butterfly tracks in today’s NYT.

Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/s...
November 20, 2025 at 11:36 PM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
“One mile on a bike is a $.42 economic gain to society, one mile driving is a $.20 loss.”

“Which means that Copenhagen, a city of 1.2 million people, saves $357 million a year on health costs because something like 80% of its population commutes by bike.” #CityMakingMath

Some costs aren’t costs.
One mile on a bike is a $.42 economic gain to society, one mile driving is a $.20 loss
Copenhagen, the bicycle-friendliest place on the planet, publishes a biannual Bicycle Account, and buried in its pages is a rather astonishing fact.
grist.org
November 21, 2025 at 12:40 AM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
Our Global U.S. Temperature and Precipitation report is out again, this time for October 2025:

Find it at: www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-...

via NOAA"s NCEI
Assessing the Global Temperature and Precipitation Analysis in October 2025
Globally, October 2025 was the third-warmest October in NOAA’s 176-year record, with a temperature 2.21°F (1.23°C) higher than the 20th-century baseline.
www.ncei.noaa.gov
November 20, 2025 at 4:24 PM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
Happy Thursday! We're almost through the week! The star of today was 18 minutes before sunrise when the sky had this very nice combination of design and color, which dissipated shortly afterwards. Tap for full size. I hope you have a great day!
November 20, 2025 at 2:06 PM
Reposted by Eugene Alvin Villar
Before the midterms of 1866, President Andrew Johnson called his congressional opponents traitors and said they should be hanged.

Voters were so profoundly moved by his words... that they gave his opponents a supermajority in Congress, and the nation got the Fourteenth Amendment.
November 20, 2025 at 3:33 PM
In 2021 I gave a talk about “openness” briefly tracing the history from the Free Software movement, GNU, and OSS, to open formats like XML and ODF, then to the Free Culture and open data movement like @creativecommons.bsky.social, @wikipedia.org, and Wikidata. 1/2
November 21, 2025 at 6:41 AM