Mike Mahoney
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mikemahoney218.com
Mike Mahoney
@mikemahoney218.com
3.2K followers 420 following 1K posts
Helped build NYS's Forest Carbon Assessment. Currently helping build public water data infrastructure. PhD in Environmental Science.

#rstats, ML, Boston and spatial data.
Opinions my own. RTs imply causation.
https://mm218.dev
github.com/mikemahoney218
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mikemahoney218.com
E175 -> CRJ900
Interior passenger cabin of an Embraer 175, from the back looking towards the nose Interior passenger cabin of a Bombardier CRJ900, from the back looking towards the nose
January 20, 2026 at 6:07 PM
mikemahoney218.com
wild to me that people use any of these as search engines
Google search for "where are the Olympics this year". Google AI has helpfully replied (and highlighted!) "there are no Olympic games this year"
January 20, 2026 at 12:07 PM
mikemahoney218.com
of course these days I don't need tires, my wheels are 711mm of solid steel
The MBTA red line
January 15, 2026 at 7:08 PM
mikemahoney218.com
apologies in advance
your 2026 word: out of pocket
January 1, 2026 at 6:00 PM
mikemahoney218.com
in case anyone missed it, a terrifying harlequin has appeared at the end of the #AGU25 convention center
A terrifying harlequin. It's about 8' tall
December 18, 2025 at 11:58 PM
mikemahoney218.com
anyway, today I am grateful for IFR
Weather radar over Boston. It's all snow, everywhere, forever
December 14, 2025 at 3:49 PM
mikemahoney218.com
standards promote interoperability, which is why we're telling your users to not share their downloaded data with anyone unless they tell them it's broken

we also will not give you any guidance on how to tell people it's broken
GeoJSON normatively supports WGS 84 (without height: CRS84; with ellipsoidal height: CRS84h), but the "prior arrangement" provision allows other coordinate systems to be used. Requirement 14 /req/crs/geojson Servers that implement this extension plus the GeoJSON requirements class and clients that use this extension SHALL be subject to the prior arrangement provision in the second paragraph of section 4 of the GeoJSON standard. An explicit request by a client with a query parameter crs establishes a prior arrangement. It is the responsibility of the client that submits the request to handle the coordinates in the response correctly. In particular, clients should not make the GeoJSON document available to others unless they are aware of the prior arrangement. This standard does not specify any standardized approach to encoding coordinate reference system information in a GeoJSON document.
November 10, 2025 at 4:06 AM
mikemahoney218.com
My shutdown hobbies are getting weirder

(Poll worker training in preparation for Boston's municipal election on November 4th!)
The room for poll worker training for Boston's city elections
October 23, 2025 at 9:56 PM
mikemahoney218.com
my partner finished his journey of visiting every blue bike station today (please clap)

unfortunately the app does NOT throw confetti when you hit 100%
A screenshot of the blue bikes app with 100% of stations visited
October 5, 2025 at 8:10 PM
mikemahoney218.com
is this a typo in the Haymarket station artwork or is there a unit I haven't run into before

#boston
A black and white image of a storefront. Provolone and Acenelino are both labeled price per lb, while pecorino romano is labeled per bl
October 2, 2025 at 10:26 PM
mikemahoney218.com
damn it's a pretty city
The Boston skyline as seen from the MGH platform
September 19, 2025 at 10:54 AM
mikemahoney218.com
I'm not pretending to know the full MGL, I'm just reading the last sentence WBUR linked -- and you need 3000 signatures for the Boston mayoral preliminary election

Could be other laws they didn't link!
Section 13. A person nominated as a candidate for any state, city or town office may withdraw his name from nomination by a request signed and duly acknowledged by him before a notary public, and filed with the officer with whom the nomination was filed, within the time prescribed by section eleven for filing objections to certificates of nomination and nomination papers and no such requests for withdrawals shall be received after such time has expired. A person nominated at a city or town preliminary election may withdraw his name from nomination in the same manner, within six days succeeding five o'clock in the afternoon of the day of holding such preliminary election. Unless otherwise provided by the city or town charter, such nominee shall be replaced by the candidate with the next highest number of votes in said preliminary, if such candidate receives a number of votes at least equal to the number of signatures required by law to place his name on the preliminary election ballot.
September 11, 2025 at 11:55 PM
mikemahoney218.com
This seems incorrect or at least incomplete -- unofficial results show DaRosa getting under 3000 votes, which is the number needed to get on the ballot. At 2409 he'd have a decent gap to make up.
Because Kraft dropped out within six days of the preliminary, under Massachusetts state law, the next highest vote-getter could be moved onto the ballot for the general election. In this case, that would be longtime community activist Domingos DaRosa, who earned just 2.6 percent of the vote.
September 11, 2025 at 11:50 PM
mikemahoney218.com
Happy election day #Boston ! Thrilled to cast my vote to re-elect @wutrain.bsky.social this morning -- and grateful for our poll workers who got me in and out in about two minutes.

Polls are open until 7! Find your voting location here:
www.sec.state.ma.us/VoterRegistr...

#mapoli
An "I Voted" sticker on a nalgene water bottle
September 9, 2025 at 12:20 PM
mikemahoney218.com
Roosevelt is actually somewhat famous for physically fighting his agency heads (though here it's a few years earlier as governor), though in a friendly way

www.npr.org/transcripts/...
But Roosevelt had this wrestling mat installed in the governor's office - the governor's mansion in Albany, and when Pinchot would come up to see him, he'd unroll the mat, and they'd go at it. And Pinchot, in his memoir, described how one of the highlights of his life was boxing with Roosevelt and knocking him on his butt. So Roosevelt becomes president, Pinchot's his top aide, and together they try to do something audacious. They do create the idea of conservation. Now, John Muir's the third character in this, but he's off stroking his beard and making wonderful statements and living in his vineyard north of San Francisco.
June 6, 2025 at 11:11 AM
mikemahoney218.com
the new GDAL features in 3.11 are wild

I knew about some of the pipeline stuff, which is going to transform how people use the CLI, but the new gdal vsi command seems like a huge step towards portable spatial workflows
a screenshot (...phone image) of a slide from the GDAL 3.11 webinar, showing the new GDAL vsi command
June 3, 2025 at 2:41 PM
mikemahoney218.com
The biggest change is that our maps, built from leaf-on satellite imagery, don't seem to "see" accumulation in the tops and branches as well. That means we need to get creative with how we build these maps to better capture these important components of biomass.
Changes in carbon from 2005 to 2019 across both sets of allometrics, and then comparing the two. The new maps seem to be accumulating less carbon over time
May 21, 2025 at 1:36 PM
mikemahoney218.com
The Forest Service has updated the models they use to estimate biomass to better account for wood in the tops and branches of trees. This is a great change.

But we built the New York Forest Carbon Assessment against the old models, so we had a question: what does this change mean for our maps?
Two maps of forest carbon in New York State. Top map shows that most areas have more carbon under the new allometrics, bottom map shows the change in which places have "the most" carbon. Mountainous landscapes are the losers!
May 21, 2025 at 1:32 PM
mikemahoney218.com
this is probably the modern equivalent but I think we haven't recognized enough of the benefits yet for the average person to get why the big domino matters
same domino meme, small one is "Obama gets interested in environmental policy after losing his congressional majority" and big domino is "Biden passes the IRA and BIL"
March 16, 2025 at 4:03 AM
mikemahoney218.com
we've done crazy things before and I have to believe we can do them again
the domino meme; the small domino is "Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring" and the big one is "the USA establishes the EPA and passes the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Endangered Species Act within 20 years"
March 16, 2025 at 4:00 AM
mikemahoney218.com
this isn't the case for shutdowns -- shutdown furloughs don't trigger the 30 day clock, administrative furloughs do

www.opm.gov/policy-data-...
Note: Reductions in force (RIF) furlough regulations and SES competitive furlough requirements are not applicable to emergency shutdown furloughs because the ultimate duration of an emergency shutdown furlough is unknown at the outset and is dependent entirely on Congressional action, rather than agency action. The RIF furlough regulations and SES competitive furlough requirements, on the other hand, contemplate planned, foreseeable, money-saving furloughs that, at the outset, are planned to exceed 30 days
March 15, 2025 at 11:26 AM
mikemahoney218.com
reminded today just how great the {censored} #rstats hex is
a pixelated version of the parsnip hex logo, with a black bar that reads "censored" slapped over the package name
March 4, 2025 at 12:16 AM
mikemahoney218.com
And that's a wrap! Bizarre seeing this hall so empty. Thanks everyone for another fun #AGU24
A photo of the main reception hall at AGU. There's a large Christmas tree in the center of the image; a few people are milling about, but the hall is largely empty
December 13, 2024 at 10:12 PM
mikemahoney218.com
Starting off day 2 of AGU watching Brian Cosgrove speak about the next generation of the National Water Model!
A conference room, with slides about the national water model in the front
December 10, 2024 at 1:36 PM
mikemahoney218.com
like, the piece does call it a historic accomplishment, right after six paragraphs of calling it a devil's bargain likely to fail to have positive impact (as "skeptics' instinct have been right before")
The IRA and the climate policy it contains wouldn’t have passed the Senate on Sunday without the enormous amount of work put in by the people who feel most ambivalent about the devil’s bargain struck to get it. The environmentalists and other organizers who made this bill possible are painfully aware of the awful policies it contains, including a big new giveaway of public lands over to drilling, and a prospective overhaul of the laws that govern where and how fossil fuel infrastructure gets built. Without these organizers, the well-heeled set of politicians and pundits who remain thrilled about this bill might still be debating the finer points of hypothetical carbon taxes. And so, despite their eagerness to celebrate, establishment Democrats might be wise to listen a little more closely to those with mixed feelings—especially given how much remains to be seen about how the IRA will be implemented in the coming years. Skeptics’ instincts have been right before. In 2015—just after the Paris Agreement was brokered—Democratic leaders and renewables lobbyists got on board with another trade-off between clean and fossil energy. In exchange for a five-year extension of tax credits for wind and solar, that year’s must-pass spending bill repealed a longstanding ban on crude oil exports. The ban reversal was also, as Bill McKibben wrote at the time, framed as a bargaining chip for the Paris Agreement itself. Senior administration officials reportedly told activists they would “have to swallow” the change. “This is the biggest deal for addressing climate change that we are going to see,” Senator Martin Heinrich said of the deal, pushed in the Senate by oil state politicians, Lisa Murkowski and Heidi Heitkamp. In a Dear Colleagues letter, Nancy Pelosi wrote that, “while lifting the oil export ban remains atrocious policy, the wind and solar tax credits in the Omnibus will eliminate around ten times more carbon pollution than the exports of oil will add,” declining to provid… Environmental and climate justice groups railed against the deal, noting that it could expand U.S. oil production by as much as 3.3 billion barrels a day. Meanwhile, all signs pointed to the need for a rapid transition off fossil fuels. While the Obama administration narrative was the one that prevailed in the media, environmental groups were right to worry: Crude oil exports surged by 750 percent over the next four years, providing a critical bailout to U.S. drillers. The U.S. became a net oil exporter of fossil fuels for the first time in decades. Today, fossil fuel companies continue to rake in record profits while investing paltry sums in renewables. The IRA so far has enjoyed a similarly soft media landing. As details about the deal to secure the IRA emerged, comforting numbers did too, showing that any new leasing provisions—the fossil fuel-friendly elements in the text of the IRA—would be handily outpaced by the emissions reductions the bill’s clean energy provisions will furnish. The upshot was clear: the trade-off, even for an overhaul of permitting rules to come, is worth it. Let’s hope those analyses are correct. They might also be wrong, as modeling is wont to be from time to time. Projections in those models on how much carbon can be captured from new fossil fuel production in the coming years is optimistic, to put it mildly.
December 9, 2024 at 12:27 AM