Shoals

Watching the Desert Bloom

Captivated by timelapses of agriculture in the Sahara.

Posted on December 8, 2016

Landsat 1 launched in 1973, and the world hasn’t been the same since. Nearly 50 years later, Google has provided a way of realizing the promise of such a long transect of data, offering a viewing portal for timelapses anywhere on earth (well, anywhere that the clouds occasionally part). [Read More]

Drawing the planet in brushstrokes

Posted on November 11, 2016

To take my mind off certain things, I’ve been experimenting with a novel style of cartography: cubism. [Read More]

Putting the Clinton campaign on the map

Posted on October 25, 2016

Everything happens somewhere. In the home stretch of this epic presidential campaign season, location awareness can impact the razor-thin vote margins we expect to see in battleground states. [Read More]

Superblocks for a small city

Posted on August 11, 2016

Bernie Sanders’ hometown of Burlington, VT is tiny: just 200k people in the metro area. Barcelona, on the other hand, clocks in at 4.7 million. [Read More]

From Above

Posted on April 1, 2016

On a plain in western Kenya, mesquite trees flourish where a river spills out of the mountains. Introduced from North America, mesquite has been used worldwide for rapid re-afforestation. It sinks deep roots, quickly. It fixes nitrogen and sequesters carbon. [Read More]

Primary 2016 Manifesto

Posted on February 4, 2016

Howdy folks. [Read More]

Better friendships through mapping technology

Posted on December 11, 2015

I have trouble getting together with friends these days. I’m not alone in this — distance is a surprising obstacle to maintaining relationships in the landscape of modern America. Can a hack-of-an-app help? [Read More]

Social Silos

In which I find a parallel universe in my own backyard

Posted on November 3, 2015

Upon the occasion of Halloween, and the need to optimize, I took a look at NextDoor for the first time. They apparently had some sort of dope candy-targeting map for every neighborhood, and since that’s my catnip I had to check it out. Step 1: sign up, because the candymap... [Read More]