Did you try calling the clerk’s office? They might have an automated message with info about closures due to the hurricane. And generally if they open to the public at 9, the clerks and other staff will be there earlier, so you can try calling at like 8 or something. When I had jury duty, we were told to show up a full two hours before the court actually “opened” so they could do orientation stuff with us.

Yeah, i think minimizing the difference in area would be the primary goal, but you’d need to add additional constraints, like also minimizing the number of times that your edges cross the true perimeter, minimizing the non-overlapping area, or something like that. I dunno for sure, but this sounds like a fun problem. I might give it a shot this weekend. I’m in the early days of trying to learn rust (after years of pure python for work and school), and I’m always looking for toy problems to test myself with!

For a raster image, you could count the number of true and false positive pixels and true and false negative pixels. Then use statistical metrics for binary classification, like sensitivity and specificity. I guess you could even make an ROC curve by measuring the true positive rate and false positive rate for varying number of edges in the model. I guess for a vector image you could do the same thing, just using the sum of overlapping and non-overlapping areas instead of pixel counts?

Not the first. The cyanobacteria that first figured out photosynthesis put so much oxygen into the atmosphere so fast that it cause mass extinction of much of the anaerobic life (and most things were anaerobic life back then). They also caused a literal rust belt (since many metals up to that point were now able to be oxidized en masse), and that rust layer can be seen in really old rocks (“banded iron formation”).

Great Oxidation Event

it means we can change it enough that it will no longer support US, but life continues at its own rhythm, we are oarr of that rhythm, not separate from it

We are not the first instance of life forever changing the environment to the point of mass extinction. When early cyanobacteria figured out photosynthesis, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere they produced as waste killed off massive numbers of other species for which oxygen was toxic.

However, we are the first instance of life capable of understanding our place in the ecosystem enough to do something about how we as a species affect the biosphere and the pressure we are putting not just on other life forms but on ourselves as well. We are not mindless cyanobacteria pooping out oxygen to the detriment of all others; we can and MUST do better.

A huge part of that is understanding exactly what you pointed out: we are part of the ecosystem, not separate from it. I just wish someone could get the mega-wealthy and fossil fuel CEOs and politicians to understand it. There is no safety for them; their money and power will not save them.

Pretty sure it’s the beaters (assuming that’s an electric hand mixer type-thing, i’ve never heard them referred to by that term) that made them gummy. Over mashing will break up the cell walls too much, releasing the starches and ruining the texture. Cooking chopped or whole doesn’t matter as much, since the number of cells broken by chopping is negligible. And the skin is water permeable anyway.

You gotta mash by hand, that’s all.