Notices by Dr. Eric J. Fielding, PhD (ericfielding@mastodon.social), page 4

@AkaSci @TMEubanks @spacegeck The area near the East Gate is the oldest part of JPL and includes Building 11 that was built around 1940, long before there were advanced fire-resistant building designs. I am sure it has been upgraded since it was built but I bet it has a wood frame inside.

@AkaSci @TMEubanks @spacegeck Yes, JPL has been hardened against fire in many ways, but we had previously expected the fire to approach from the north through the mountains. A previous fire, the 2009 Station Fire got within 300 meters of JPL northern edge, but there was no wind that day. The winds last week were unusually strong and damaged several buildings at JPL without the fire reaching the campus.

@TMEubanks @AkaSci @spacegeck Yes, the Arroyo Seco is a good firebreak for slowly moving ground fires, but I am not sure it would have stopped the streams of burning embers that were blowing in the wind, if the fire had reached the last line of houses across from JPL.

@AkaSci @spacegeck Yes, I believe the closest house that was completely destroyed was about 400 meters east of the East Gate of JPL (where the bridge crosses the Arroyo Seco river). The building where I work is another 400 meters further west.

@AkaSci seriously can't get over the resolution of this IR data. you could see if someone's backyard BBQ was going

@AkaSci @spacegeck Thanks for the link to the NOAA viewer, it is much more informative with the streets labeled and other annotation. The Maxar images I saw before were hard to navigate. The data may be the same, but the NOAA viewer is much better.

@AkaSci @spacegeck Yes, I have seen a Maxar very-high-resolution satellite image acquired on Jan. 10 in several viewers.

@kevinrothrock I thought the apocalypse was supposed to have four horsemen.

@mloxton The name will be different.

@alienghic Thanks for doing this comparison! I have been busy with other tasks and didn’t get a chance to look at the LA County maps yet.

@alienghic Thanks for the hint!

@dansup

German media now has the story...

Thanks to @ajsadauskas here is a first example of German media picking up the story of Meta blocking links to Pixelfed:

https://social.heise.de/@heiseonlineenglish/113820189442440223

link to article: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Unprecedented-growth-Facebook-blocks-links-to-Instagram-alternative-Pixelfed-10237928.html

Will update if and when there is any US tech media story, but don't hold you breath.

@sundogplanets They can’t allow those Canadian dollars to cross the border. Thanks for trying though.

@chad I hope that large passenger planes are more resistant, since they have to deal with hail and large birds.

@chad I expect that changes in regulations will happen after this incident. The 249 grams drone is enough to do damage to the Super Scooper.

@DoomsdaysCW Those earthen bricks may be fire-resistant, but they look like the worst possible building material for earthquake risk.

@alienghic That is great news! I am grateful to the firefighters who stopped the fire from reaching the Observatory.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department made a short briefing this morning (Sunday, January 12), on the status of the Eaton Fire. The containment of the fire perimeter has increased greatly, but the southern part in residential and commerical areas of town of Altadena and city of Pasadena is complex for firefighters to declare no chance of spread. #EatonFire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8w3GUMcIqU

@dsmdexter @ai6yr @acdha The town of Altadena was full of modest houses, many a century old. It was a place where people could live in a home close to the city for a lower price than nearby cities and had a large Black population from the time when it was one of the few places that Blacks were allowed to buy houses.

@ohmu I know Kyle MacDonald very well. He used to be in the office next to me. He has moved to New York to be a professor at City University of New York, but he maintains an affiliation at JPL. I still work with him often on radar image analysis. He and I both work on the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission.