web/tech

Analyzing the tweets and the accounts of the turf industry on Twitter.

I’ve updated the OM246 calculator to v2 with two substantial changes. One is an entirely new tab for unit conversions between different ways of expressing sand rates. I like mm. Others use kg/ha or tons/ha.

The GCSAA announced last week that Dr. Larry Stowell and Dr. Wendy Gelernter have been selected to receive the prestigious Outstanding Contribution Award. I asked Google’s NotebookLM AI service to generate an audio overview of their contributions.

The ATC Doublecut podcast now has more than 150 episodes for your viewing or listening pleasure. Which ones have been listened to the most? My favorite episode to record was this one about locations in the world with 365 days in the year with a high GP for cool-season grass.

A couple of the science and statistics blogs I follow have recently shared AI-generated audio summaries of research papers. The ones I’ve seen were from Google’s NotebookLM. I hadn’t been using this, with most of my LLM (large language model) use over the past couple years being ChatGPT.

There are hundreds of posts on the ATC website. Topics range from the 2 green system, aeration, and algae to winter, writing, and zoysia. Some posts get a lot more views than others, and about once a year I update this list of top posts.

I’ve shared the posts from 2023 that got the most views. Then there are these 10 that got the fewest. For reference, the median post in the top 10 got 725 views in 2023.

These posts had the most views in 2023. They are on a nice balance of topics: three about growth rate and N, four about soil OM and surface hardness and topdressing, one about soil pH, and one about soil water content and evapotranspiration.

The temperature-based turfgrass growth potential (GP) is a utility function that rescales the temperatures that the grass is growing in. Rather than the temperature scale, the GP is a unitless scale from 0 to 1 (or from 0 to 100%) that expresses how close the average air temperature is to the optimum temperature for shoot growth.

For the sixth year in a row, I’ve taken a look at “turfgrass Twitter” to find some of the most influential and active accounts from the previous year. I cast a broad net to find the industry accounts, and I minimize manual intervention of account addition and removal.