Rahul gives unsolicited advice

I had nothing better to do on a Sunday morning so I made a map. If you have been following my blog, you will know that I am trying to make sense of the Indian Railways, why the trains runs late  and if there's anyway we can learn about the cause of the delays, based on patters in delay. Towards that goal, I posted two blog posts that described how and where I was collecting my data from and a first look at the data I was gathering . Even from the preliminary look , it can be seen that there are specific routes/stations that are causing a delay along a train's route. And the delays were induced on multiple runs at the same station, meaning that it wasn't simply a one time thing. Moving on, another way to look at the problem is to understand how crowded the railway lines are. By mapping all train movement in India, we will be able to understand how crowded specific routes are and if they're crowded at a specific time of the day. By adding delay information ...

In my previous blogpost , I talked about why I wanted to make an interactive map showing the locations of universities/labs where astronomical research is pursued. After my first attempt at plotting about a hundred locations on  a map, here are about 200 locations, spread more widely than locations just in the USA. I still haven't done all that I wanted to. And I remembered that I also wanted to add information on the application deadlines for PhD admissions at the places. Again, if you have any comments or suggestions, regarding what I already made or how I can improve it, I would love to hear them. Also, the data is available on plotly here and on google docs here 

Till November 2015, I was searching for PhD and research assistant positions in astronomy departments and labs around the world. There's no one place which lists out ALL of the places and the few lists I did found were outdated and were a list. A map is the best way to represent such a data set, in my opinion, so that is what I set out to do. I've been searching for and bookmarking universities/departments/labs/centers where people do astronomy for over 3 years now so I have a pretty long list to go through. I first had plans to automate the process of retrieving (Lat, Long) information given a URL but I couldn't figure out how to. I remember finding a website which, given a URL, would tell me the location as to where it is hosted, but I have since lost track of it. And instead of putting it off in want of a programmatic way of making this map, I thought I'll put in the time and do the whole thing manually i.e make a list of websites, check every website for a cont...