Shoals

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]

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]

The cartographer’s promised land

The new Mapbox Studio just went to private beta today. Here’s what I’ve learned using it.

Posted on September 17, 2015

There’s a lot of marketing behind the new Mapbox Studio, along with a glowing review in Wired. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to play with it for a few months now as it developed, and the Mapbox team should be proud. [Read More]

Caught in the Cartographic Crossfire

The work of a geographic vandal reminds us what’s missing from the map.

Posted on April 24, 2015

This morning Ahmad Babar noticed a curious feature on Google Maps just South of Rawalpindi, Pakistan: [Read More]

GeoASCII

A throwback mapping technique at the modern console

Posted on March 10, 2015

I’ve recently been spending a lot of time on Faraday’s remote servers, running one PostGIS operation after another in search of idealized geometries or custom market borders. In each case, I like to do a visual check to see that I haven’t created a node-sharing, topologically-laughable geo-monster before handing it... [Read More]