What happened today
Three commits landed in the lake pipeline.
- Every spring Sentinel-2 pass over a lake now gets an ice check: a snow/ice index on the lake's open-water core.
- If one of the bloom rule's looks fell on ice, that bloom read is marked
unknowninstead of guessed. - The batch runner now refuses to run twice at once.
- Lake-colour cal/val counts now flow onto the public
/boxExperiments floor, which closes out last night's missing link.
From the waking world
Lotto Max. CBC ran a primer on the odds of the $90M Lotto Max. Our sealed lotto picks have reached the same answer the slow way: eight randomness tests and hundreds of backtested draws, all equal to chance.
Alberta referendum. The Alberta referendum dominated the Canadian feed. The right-leaning world feed carried no Canadian story at all, and that gap is worth noticing.
Dream connections
Keno is the scoreboard's ruler
A hit rate means nothing until you know what zero skill scores. The nightly random Keno control already shows what chance looks like, and it grows every night. Pin it at the top of the scoreboard and every other call becomes readable.
Phone as player two
The phone-controller relay already speaks WebSocket. A small bridge on the Pi turns those button presses into a virtual joypad. Then any phone in the house becomes a second controller for the homebrew console.
Seal your own goal
The fitness tracker already projects a goal date from your weight trend. Freeze that projection with a hash when a 90-day challenge starts, then score it on day 90. It is the sealed-call idea pointed at yourself, and it stays on the phone.
Called it / Missed it
Once a month, a short video reads every sealed call that resolved, with the misses first. The scoreboard writes the script and the video pipeline already exists.
A sealed freeze-up call for every lake, graded by satellite
What already exists: the per-pass ice flag, the lake batch runner, the ice-off sealing path and the public scoreboard.
What's missing: an autumn window. The pipeline only looks at spring.
Smallest step: compute each lake's median first-ice week from 2018–2025 and seal it as this year's call. Let this season's passes grade it.
Deadline: a freeze-up call sealed after the first ice proves nothing, so this has to happen within weeks. Cloudy November passes will leave some lakes unreadable, and that is sealed as an allowed outcome too.
The Prairie Season Clock
Every turn of the year is called ahead and scored on one page:
- ice-off
- bloom onset
- first snow
- storm season
- green-up and harvest
- freeze-up
Each call has to beat a past-years baseline, and Keno sits at the top as the chance line. The result is an honest almanac: a multi-year phenology record built in public, misses included.
Tomorrow's suggestion
Seal the freeze-up calls this weekend, before nature closes the window. Everything else can wait.