Mike O'Brien

@obrien.page

1107 Followers 803 Following

Full-stack fish ecologist. Richmond, VA culture leech living in Eastern Henrico. Small farm dabbler. https://obrien.page https://github.com/mhpob

Graph of air quality through time with a very rapid spike at the end.
Map of Richmond, VA combined sewer overflow locations. Active overflows shown by a poo emoji. No overflows shown by a thumbs up emoji
Man on stoop with his head between his knees. Graffiti behind him days "G.G."
A poster that reads, among other things, "coprolites aren't my favorite fossil, but they're a solid #2".
Snow on a porch. Snow on a car. Snow near. Snow afar.
Barred owl sitting in a tree. A squirrel jumps from branch to branch, eventually jumping at the owl and scaring him away
Screenshot of Google maps. "Allemeadmonupark-d Alley" and N Meadow Street.
Lolrus meme. Walrus holding a blue bucket saying "I has a bucket"
Tripod beagle stands in front of French doors thrown open to reveal French door screens and sunny weather. Two more dogs sit on the porch beyond the screen.
Screenshot from yesterdays.maprva.org showing the IH Adams map of Richmond, Virginia in 1858. A red point shows where the quote-posted picture was taken.
Night time picture of a picnic blanket on a lawn overlooking the Richmond, VA skyline.
"Hipster Ariel" meme. Ariel from The Little Mermaid wearing horn-rimmed glasses and looking angsty. Words are "I want to be \\ where the PBR"
An actual picture of two priests behind a makeshift alter in the back of a trailer. The trailer is opened up to a posed cadre of admiring women. A sign says "Church & home on wheels. All welcome to inspect. No admission charge".
Same trailer as previously, this one in front of the church... AKA "Trailer Chapel Headquarters".
Postcard of an old car hauling a trailer labeled "St Mary of the Highways Chapel". An inset has a priest doing his best "Christ the Redeemer" impersonation.
Screenshot from the Church Hill Lookout, Feb 14, 2025, showing the East End road closures.
Left: plot of animal detections in the northwest Atlantic ocean color coded by the root mean square error per location of the azimuthal equidistant projection, which ranges from 0-50. Right: histogram of the RMSE; spike around 5, 10, and 20 m.
Advertisement for Rooney's Malt Whiskey. Mural on a wall of a bearded man holding a glass and a bottle.
Time series of temperature (F) from Jan 24, 2026 (morning of the snow storm) through Jan 31. Temperature peaked near 40F for 2-3 days straight at all locations.
Figure of temperature (F) through time, starting morning of Jan 24 - morning of Jan 27. Temperature is near 60 F on Jan 24, and does not rise about 30F after.
Belgian Malinois staring into the camera, whiskers frozen with snow.
Multiple oyster mushrooms on the trunk of a standing stump.
Library of Congress. 1 photograph : albumen print ; sheet 210 x 306 mm, page 338 x 451 mm. | Photograph shows canal leading to destroyed Gallego Flour Mills with other intact industrial buildings, Richmond, Virginia. Subjects: union, destruction & pillage, canals, history, flour mills, war damage, civil war, richmond, albumen prints, ruins, united states, virginia Locations: union, united states, richmond, virginia Notes: Title transcribed from item. Another copy processed as LOT 11486. In: United States military rail road photographic album, page 93.
"Lovely day for a Guinness" poster. Multiple toucans carrying two Guinnesses flying over an air base.
Draws from a Stan program for the center of an azimuthal equidistant projection that minimizes the geodesic mean distance and distortion of a series of striped bass detections. The red point shows the mean location of the draws.
Pie chart showing the mix of fuels to create energy added to the PJM grid at 9AM EPT on January 9, 2025. The sum of all fuel types is listed at 102874 MW, with renewables being 13753 MW. The main sources are Gas, followed by Nuclear and Coal. Minor sources are Wind, Solar, Hydro, Multiple Fuels, Oil, and Other Renewables.
A man playing an organ on a theater stage. It's the MIGHTY Wurlitzer at the Byrd Theater in Richmond, VA.
Oblique Mercator projection centered on Cape Hatteras, NC with an angle following the North American coastline. Domain ranges from Florida to Newfoundland. PROJ4: +proj=omerc +lonc=-75.5 +lat_0=35.2 +gamma=-35.02
A 1950s trace of the original 1925 map showing the Church Hill tunnel collapse, including the location of abandoned cars, track path, and other annotations. Link: https://rosetta.virginiamemory.com/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE3526709
Arch over State St in Bristol, VA (or TN). Right side is Tennessee, left side is Virginia.
Wild ponies chewing on some hay in the snow provided to them through Grayson Highlands State Park management. Mountains in the background.
Shirtless pry-bar-weilding 70s guy with other 70s guys pushing a large piece of lumber in place. From the VCU Richmond, VA Comprehensive Planning Slides collection.
Screenshot from MapRVA's Yesterdays showing the crowdsourced location of 612 N 7th St.
A photo from the 1965 Richmond, VA Esthetic Survey and Historic Building Survey looking across Park Ave down Meadow St. The current location of Garnett's Cafe is on the right.
A screenshot from yesterdays.maprva.org showing the location and orientation of the photographer who took the picture of 4 E Hill St.
Close-up of a Sanborn fire insurance map. Edits to the map are visible where new construction was (literally) pasted over old.
Snow across a small landscape, large elm to the left, pink planter on the bottom.
Map of two possible paths a man who was murdered in 1869 could have taken on the way home from a tavern in Richmond, VA.
Original 1736 plan of the city of Richmond, VA.
CTD rosette on a boat, surrounded by a few people trying to remember what to do next. A rather pleasant ocean is in the background.
Screenshot of the iD OpenStreetMap editor, St James and East Hill Streets in Richmond, VA. Green dots showing Mapillary crowdsourced streetlevel imagery can be seen. An inset shows three Flock devices.
Aerial picture of the flooded James River in Richmond, Virginia. Mayo bridge is in the foreground, Mayo Island is completely flooded save for the roof of an old baseball field.
A screenshot of the DeFlock mobile app showing OpenStreetMap tags that are pre-programmed for Flock Ravens, the company's gunshot detector.
Google Streetview of 6th and Marshall St in Richmond, VA. Partly unfurled "Building a brighter future" banner above boarded up entrance to a permanently closed shopping mall next to a castle (defunct armory).
Screenshot of the Fall Line Trail on Open Trail Stash
Arrow showing the layer.
Find the URL to the server
Screenshot of a terminal showing the results of R code: > mgcv::gam(y~te(v,w,u, k=c(1e9,1e9))) |> mgcv::gam.check() Method: GCV Optimizer: magic Smoothing parameter selection converged after 5 iterations. The RMS GCV score gradient at convergence was 4.916294e-07 . The Hessian was positive definite. Model rank = 125 / 125 Basis dimension (k) checking results. Low p-value (k-index<1) may indicate that k is too low, especially if edf is close to k'. k' edf k-index p-value te(v,w,u) 124.0 72.7 1.15 1
A video of interacting with a georeferenced map of Boston via R.
Highlighted North Atlantic Right Whale pitch track, classified by a machine learning algorithm onboard a "real time whale buoy"
Screenshot of the Bluesky icon on a Google Pixel
Three pigs
Screenshot of the MapRVA map of surveillance devices in Richmond, VA, showing the newly-mapped ALPR at Forest Hill and Chocktaw
Screenshot of drone imagery of East End Cemetery in Richmond, VA. Locations of graves are shown, with burial dates shown with different colors.
Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech"
Two plastic film and bag recycling cans against the wall of a Food Lion grocery.
Figure from JLARC showing that no new data center demand means an increase in energy demand within Virginia of 15%. Adding data centers creates an increase from 99-183% of current demand.
Three domestic pigs staring at the camera.
View from the newly refurbished balcony of the Byrd theater in Richmond, VA
Is the cure to (~male~) any loneliness looking at neat maps?