Essays on intelligence, geography, technology, and the strange places where they overlap. https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/ 2026-06-29T12:00:00Z Christopher L. Coffeyhttps://bluelensanalytics.com/about https://bluelensanalytics.com/images/BlueLens_Analytics_Logo_300x300.png https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/inference-at-the-source-optical.html 2026-06-29T12:00:00Z 2026-06-29T12:00:00Z

The decade since 2015 did not change optical Earth observation by building better cameras. It built cameras that can be used together. The correction that made them comparable, NASA's Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 product chief among it, became the training data for the foundation models now moving into orbit, where that same correction is hardest to reproduce.

https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/hot-in-here.html 2026-06-24T12:00:00Z 2026-06-24T12:00:00Z

At eight in the morning, off-grid in the Carolina Sandhills, an electric kettle and a half-built battery bank humbled me with the same lesson a nation's grid learned the hard way in Spain. A morning on hubris, energy storage, timing, and the only honest response to being put back down to scale.

https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/sustainable-war-tested-on-humans-ukraine.html 2026-06-21T12:00:00Z 2026-06-21T12:00:00Z

The defining output of the war in Ukraine is not a shifted front line but a combat-proven capacity for autonomous lethal force, fielded by the millions and built to finish the kill when the human is gone. The proving ground for a weapon no law governs.

https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/sustainable-war-tested-on-humans.html 2026-06-17T12:00:00Z 2026-06-17T12:00:00Z

By early 2026, the forces deployed to protect Haiti's population had become the leading cause of casualties among it. War reorganized as a self-financing enterprise.

https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/robot-war-that-never-happened.html 2026-06-15T12:00:00Z 2026-06-15T12:00:00Z

A fictional graduate paper imagined from 2035. AI won the economy and lost the culture, and every quote, survey, and source here is invented.

https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/what-the-hammer-truss-knows.html 2026-06-12T12:00:00Z 2026-06-12T12:00:00Z

There is a white oak on my property in the Sandhills of North Carolina that is becoming a roof. A medieval roof structure carrying a photovoltaic array, and a better framework for AI architecture than most of what is getting published.

https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/inference-at-the-source.html 2026-06-01T12:00:00Z 2026-06-01T12:00:00Z

Between 2019 and 2026 the Earth observation pipeline broke its decades-old shape. Inference moved off the ground and onto the spacecraft, and the field's defining unsolved problem is no longer whether a model can run in orbit, but whether its output can be trusted once it lands.

https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/consultant-in-the-next-room.html 2026-05-23T12:00:00Z 2026-05-23T12:00:00Z

Two years of real workflow. The consultant pattern, the air gap, and why the discipline that worked in 2024 still holds.

https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/ai-needs-a-theory-of-mind.html 2026-05-18T12:00:00Z 2026-05-18T12:00:00Z

AI systems can only process the world through structures already imposed on it. That is where Kant becomes unexpectedly useful.

https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/model-triages-analyst-still-decides.html 2026-05-14T12:00:00Z 2026-05-14T12:00:00Z

The standard pitch in geospatial AI right now is some version of 'deep learning makes your analysts more efficient.' After 30+ years of looking at imagery, I think the framing is off.

https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/diogenes-plato-chicken-hurling.html 2026-05-10T12:00:00Z 2026-05-10T12:00:00Z

In the last piece I closed with a line about Diogenes throwing a plucked chicken at Plato. It was a throwaway image, but it has been sitting with me since.

https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/sycophantic-ai-and-the-smiths.html 2026-05-08T12:00:00Z 2026-05-08T12:00:00Z

Yesterday I wrote a piece called AI Isn't Just Computer Science, arguing that frontier AI systems are quietly pulling older disciplines back into the conversation. A friend picked it up and turned a quiet blog post into something more interesting.

https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/ai-isnt-just-computer-science.html 2026-05-07T12:00:00Z 2026-05-07T12:00:00Z

Over the past few weeks, while reviewing work around IRAC-style legal reasoning frameworks for AI systems, I kept finding myself thinking about something larger.

https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/building-production-sar-pipeline-snap.html 2026-04-06T12:00:00Z 2026-04-06T12:00:00Z

I've been running ESA SNAP as my primary SAR preprocessing engine for some time now. Not as an academic exercise but as the actual workhorse of production pipelines I deliver to clients.

https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/honest-case-llms-gis-workflows.html 2026-03-26T12:00:00Z 2026-03-26T12:00:00Z

I've been doing geospatial work for over thirty years. The last several have involved serious integration of large language models into professional GIS workflows. Not as a curiosity. As a practical tool I rely on at BlueLens Analytics.

https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/independent-by-design.html 2026-03-23T12:00:00Z 2026-03-23T12:00:00Z

Back in 2015, I was making the case inside NGA for QGIS. The argument I kept making was simple: the tools are as good, the data doesn't care what software reads it, and dependency on a single commercial vendor is a strategic liability.

https://bluelensanalytics.com/blog/posts/seeing-through-the-storm.html 2026-03-23T12:00:00Z 2026-03-23T12:00:00Z

How synthetic aperture radar and a fully open-source processing pipeline are changing disaster response, and what Hurricane Helene revealed about the gap between data availability and data use.