Author Archives: John A. Stevenson

In the future, all our fieldwork will be done by robots while we play around on our hover-boards. In anticipation of this, I have written a program for the robots to follow.  Until that day arrives, it is also a … Continue reading →

I recently gave a talk about the threat to the UK from Iceland’s volcanoes at the UK’s largest meeting of geography teachers, the GA Annual Conference.  The talk was kindly sponsored by WJEC, who filmed it and have posted the … Continue reading →

Don’t you hate it when you see the film of a book that you enjoyed and they have missed out lots of the best bits?  Or even worse, the director has made changes to the original story for ‘artistic’ reasons?  … Continue reading →

I’ve made an iPython Notebook that explains how to fit probability distributions to data when only binned values, or quantiles, or perhaps a cumulative distribution are available.  It uses a least squares fit approach.  View it by clicking the picture … Continue reading →

The Journal Impact Factor (JIF; average number of citations to a paper in a journal in the first two years since it was published) is such a poor predictor of an individual paper’s citation count that quoting it is a … Continue reading →

It’s 3 years since I started blogging at volcan01010. This post has some highlights from the last year. If you are into Iceland, volcanoes, Python, or open source software (especially GIS) then there should be something here for you. Buzzfeed … Continue reading →

During 2010’s Eyjafjallajökull eruption, as the planes stood on the tarmac, many people asked why this hadn’t happened before.  After all, Iceland’s volcanoes have been active since long before mankind took to the skies.  Well, there are three main reasons … Continue reading →

Excel is not a database. Even so, spreadsheets are commonly used as such. They are convenient places to enter and store data, but not to get it out again. This post aims to show how using a real database makes … Continue reading →

Each week, the FLOSS Weekly podcast takes an hour-long look at exciting projects in the world of Free/Libre and Open Source Software.  It recently covered QGIS (or Quantum GIS), which is a really nice, user friendly, Geographical Information Systems package … Continue reading →

Inspired by Erik Klemmetti’s recent blog post about the rise of the term ‘supervolcano’, and by the imminent launch of the Volcano Top Trumps card game, I’ve created a quick game of my own: Soup or Volcano? The rules are … Continue reading →