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weather adjacent, day job, clever clever kitty 

I mentioned on Reddit, during a thread where I was defending the Army Corps from accusation of dishonesty, that I have a bit of experience with geographical datasets from work and could real easily see how a discrepancy in their own levee records could be totally innocent.

Someone bombarded me with very polite, fretful technical questions about their house's FEMA flood measurements. I explained that, oops, I'm not a real geologist! I just have to fuck with WGS84, GCJ02, and BD09 [basically different plots of the earth's surface] occasionally when our maps contradict China's.

And then I spent most of an hour researching the North American Vertical Datum of 1988 for them, until I felt like I had a safe grasp of what they were talking about, and explained to them that yes, their calculations were probably fine (with appropriate "I am geographical grunt labor, do *not* base your life on this!" disclaimers).

I feel so smart right now. :D

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