I have been building a public-interest dashboard (so unofficial) for the 2026 Venezuela earthquake context, using public Copernicus EMS Rapid Mapping data for activation EMSR884.
The official Copernicus platform remains the authoritative source. My aim here is narrower: to create a lightweight accessibility layer for selected public satellite-derived data.
I had heard the news about the earthquakes in Venezuela earlier today, but I’d only seen the text headlines and hadn’t looked closely at the reports. That was until I scrolled through Instagram and saw the devastating footage: collapsed buildings, people filming the destruction, and a voice off-camera screaming for his mother toward the rubble.
In another video, a young man sat atop his home, which had been reduced to a pile of ruins. The video was shot in HDR and incredibly high-definition—a crispness that formed a jarring, almost surreal contrast with the devastated background behind him. Even though I didn’t understand the language they were speaking (presumably Spanish), you only needed to look at the screen to understand exactly what had happened.
At the Alma 1 restaurant at KU Leuven, they clearly had chicken cutlets, but they absolutely refused to let you buy one separately, stipulating that you could only buy it as part of a set meal (5.6 euros for students).
If the set meal didn’t include the combination you wanted, and you just wanted to add something extra—for example, the set meal originally included a chicken cutlet, vegetables, and rice, but you only wanted the chicken cutlet—that was absolutely impossible there. You had to buy a whole set meal. But by then, I had already eaten lunch and couldn’t possibly eat a second one.
– Leuven, Belgium (14/06/2026). Photo by Cecilia Genova
This is a simple script that creates a Conway’s Game of Life-based animation of text on a grid of LED lights. The main text is initially displayed on the LED grid, and after 15 seconds, it starts to disintegrate into a Game of Life pattern. The animation stops after 17 seconds.
– Rome, Italy (17/06/2019)
– Vasto CH (12/2018, Italy)