This image from Landsat 8 shows the western end of the English Channel off the coast of Cornwall. A phytoplankton bloom spreads for dozens of miles, filling the St. Austell Bay.

The only time I was on the Channel was on the ferry from Dover to Calais, on a particularly rough but clear day.

📽 How Children of Men Became a Dystopian Masterpiece

I didn’t realize until reading this piece that this movie was a commercial flop. $70m gross on a $76m budget. I remember seeing this several times in theaters, and many times after. This retrospective (from 2016) brought the film back to mind and makes me want to rewatch.

🌍 15 Years of Google Earth and the Lessons That Went Unlearned

Brian Timoney:

Google Earth led us to...

⚖️ The Trouble with Optionality

A 2017 commencement address from Mihir Desai, critiquing the phenomenon of infinite optionality and lack of commitment pushed by modern universities:

I’ve lost count of the number of students who, when describing their career goals, talk about their desire to “maximize optionality.” They’re referring to financial instruments known as options that confer the right to do something rather than an obligation to do something. For this reason, options have a “Heads I win, tails I don’t lose” character—what those in finance lovingly describe as a “nonlinear payoff structure.”...

☁️ Value of Cloud Based Services in Times of Crisis

Bryan wrote this post about how Fulcrum is supporting the COVID response efforts.

🏙 Cities After Coronavirus

I speculated a bit about this sort of thing earlier this week. How might urban design change?

One of the most pressing questions that urban planners will face is the apparent tension between densification – the push towards cities becoming more concentrated, which is seen as essential to improving environmental sustainability – and disaggregation, the separating out...

📱 Project LightSpeed: Rewriting the Messenger Codebase

A technical piece describing the goals for Facebook’s rewrite of the Messenger app. Interesting to see them avoiding their own React Native for this, and doing things in native iOS/Android.

🔩 “Let’s Use Kubernetes!” Now You Have 8 Problems

A humorous post, but has a point. There’s pressure to add new tools that don’t do much but add moving parts and complexity. There’s nothing wrong with Kubernetes, but there’s a place for it (and your small team probably doesn’t need it).

The more...

⌨️ I Pressed ⌘B, You Wouldn’t Believe What Happened Next

An entertaining talk about the complexity of typography, from Marcin Wichary at Figma’s recent Config conference.

🖥 Restoring Y Combinator’s Xerox Alto

An technical piece on restoring Alan Kay’s Xerox Alto he donated to Y Combinator. Amazing piece of technology history, and inspired so many future developments in computing — graphical user interfaces, WYSIWIG text editing, bitmapped graphics, the mouse, and Ethernet for connectivity.

Xerox built about 2000 Altos...

I finally got around to updating my local tracks database with all of the 2019 Strava data. I’ve been lax about updating it since I completed the Shore Acres project in the summer. Here are some fun snapshots:

This one shows how much of the St. Pete area I covered. Almost finished Snell Isle, as well, but missed a few segments. I might polish that off this year then work on the downtown area.

This was my...

⚾ Mapping the New MiLB Landscape

Combining baseball and maps? Sign me up. The MLB has a plan to “improve” the MiLB system costs, standards, compensation, and other things through shuttering 42 ball clubs around the country. In this piece for FanGraphs, the authors use some GIS tactics to analyze how this shakes out for baseball fans falling within those markets:

So how many Americans would see their ability to watch affiliated baseball in person disappear under MLB’s proposal? And how many would see their primary point of access shift from the...

🌶 Darwinian Gastronomy

Turns out cultures from warmer climates evolved a taste for spicy foods to combat the presence of more diverse bacteria:

Alas, nothing in nature turns out to be that simple. Researchers now suggest that a taste for spices served a vital evolutionary purpose: keeping our ancestors alive. Spices, it turns out, can kill poisonous bacteria and fungi that may contaminate our food. In other words, developing a taste for these spices could be good for our health. And since food spoils more quickly in hotter weather, it’s only natural that warmer climates...

📝 Blot.im

Blot is a super-minimal open source blogging system based on plain text files in a folder. It supports markdown, Word docs, images, and HTML — just drag the files into the folder and it generates web pages. I love simple tools like this.

🖋 Handcrafted Visualization: Precision

An interesting post from Robert Simmon from Planet. These examples of visualizations and graphics of physical phenomena (maps, cloud diagrams, drawings of insects, planetary motion charts) were all hand-drawn, in an era where specialized photography and sensing weren’t always options.

...

⚾️ How the Nationals Fixed Stephen Strasburg and Saved Their Season

Strasburg tipping his pitches almost ended the Nats’ run:

He remembered the game Strasburg pitched in Arizona on August 3. The Diamondbacks pounded Strasburg for nine runs in less than five innings. The D-Backs knew what was coming. The Nationals broke down the tape and discovered Strasburg was tipping his pitches by the way he reached into his glove to grip the baseball near his waist, just before he raised his hands to the set position.

...

✍🏼 Ted Chiang Uses Science to Illuminate the Human Condition

I enjoyed this interview with author Ted Chiang. It covers his recent short story collection Exhalation: Stories with nice context and background on the ideas behind each one. I just finished the book last week, and would have to say that The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling was my favorite. A story about the fallibility of memory and what it would be like if our memories were recorded...

This week’s links are all interactive notebooks on Observable. Their Explore section always highlights interesting things people are creating. A great learning tool for playing with data and code to see how it works.

⌨️ The Enigma Machine

Easily the most impressive interactive notebook I’ve ever seen. This one from Tom shows the electromechanical pathways of the German Enigma machine at work — enter a character and see how the rotors and circuits encrypt text.

🚲 A Bicycle Drivetrain Analyzer

Another great example of the power...

🧠 7 Tesla MRI of a Human Brain

This is one of the highest resolution scans ever performed on a human brain, at 100 micrometer resolution. Scroll down to see some awesome images.

👨🏻‍🏫 Anki

Anki is an open source framework for creating your own flash cards. A neat system for helping your kids with classwork, or even just testing yourself on topics.

Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and...

🏃🏻‍♂️ Everything You Need to Know About Rhythmic Breathing

I tried this out the other night on a run. The technique makes some intiutive sense that it’d reduce impact (or level it out side to side anyway). Surely to notice any result you’d have to do it over distance consistently. But I’ve had some right knee soreness that I don’t totally know the origin of, so thought I’d start trying this out. I found it takes a lot of concentration to keep it up consistently. I’ll keep testing it out.

🌕 The Atlas of Moons

This is an absolutely phenomenal project showcasing each of the major satellites in the Solar System. The full interactive maps of each one are incredible. It shows how much data we’ve gathered about all of these bodies with imagery on each one and thoroughly mapped with place and feature names.

🏠 Opendoor and Redfin Partner

A cool piece of news here. We bought our house with Redfin and had a great experience with it, after using the website heavily during the house search...

📺 5 Learnings from Zoom

Zoom is one of those admirable SaaS companies built on solid product and amazing execution. I love this — not relying on anything sexy or super inventive, just solving a known problem better than everyone else. My favorite bit is their retention; it proves what can be done even in SMB with lock-tight product market fit:

Zoom has 140% net revenue retention. This is similar to RingCentral from our last analysis and other leaders. Zoom also shows that yes, this can be done with smaller customers too, not...

🗺 (Who will be) America’s Next Big Mapping Company?

Paul Ramsey considers who might be in the best position to challenge Google as the next mapping company:

Someone is going to take another run at Google, they have to. My prediction is that it will be AWS, either through acquisition (Esri? Mapbox?) or just building from scratch. There is no doubt Amazon already has some spatial smarts, since they have to solve huge logistical problems in moving goods around for the retail side, problems that require spatial quality data...

🌐 Tissot’s Indicatrix

This is a neat interactive tool to visualize distortion due to map projection using Tissot’s indicatrix, a mathematical model for calculating the amount of warp at different points:

Nicolas Auguste Tissot published his classic analysis on the distortion on maps in 1859 and 1881. The basic idea is that the intersection of any two lines on the Earth is represented on the flat map with an intersection at the same or a different angle. He proved that at almost every point on the Earth, there’s a right angle intersection...

Our place for today I found via NASA’s Earth Observatory feed: the Great Slave Lake of the Canadian Northwest Territory.

While it’s a big body of water when you pan over it on the map, it’s size is hard to fathom when compared to other geographic features:

If you are traveling on Canada’s Great Slave Lake, you will notice one characteristic right away: it is enormous. Roughly the size of Belgium, it ranks in the top fifteen largest lakes worldwide....

⚾️ The Rays are a Surrealist’s Delight

Love to see the Rays getting some deserved attention in the mainstream sports media. They’ve put together a great, diverse lineup of consistent hitters that have performed well all season:

The Rays emphasize power now, but in a different way: Through Monday, their hitters had the highest exit velocity in the majors, at 90.1 miles per hour, and their pitchers — who specialize in curveballs and high fastballs — allowed the lowest, at 86.3. Hard-contact rates enticed them to trade for Pham from St....

Yesterday evening I attended a community meeting in our neighborhood on the tidal resiliency plan the City of St. Pete is putting together to combat the periodic street flooding we get during high tidal or rainfall events.

The city planning folks in attendance were showing maps of the neighborhood and projected areas of high water during these events. The crux of the issue in Shore Acres is that during spring tides, water from the bay pushes back up the storm drain pipes and comes out the streetside storm drains in some of the lower intersections in the...

🏃🏻‍♂️ On the Go Map

Found via Tom MacWright, a slick and simple tool for doing run route planning built on modern web tech. It uses basic routing APIs and distance calculation to help plan out runs, which is especially cool in new places. I used it in San Diego this past week to estimate a couple distances I did. It also has a cool sharing feature to save and link to routes.

🔮 As We May Think

I mentioned...

🧠 Your Brain Needs 1.5 MB of Storage to Master Your Native Language

“It may seem surprising but, in terms of digital media storage, our knowledge of language almost fits compactly on a floppy disk,” the authors wrote in the study. In this case, that would be a floppy disk that holds about 1.5 megabytes of information, or the equivalent of about a minute-long song as an Mp3 file. [3D Images: Exploring the Human Brain] The researchers estimate that in the best-case scenario, in a...

🛣 Creating Low-Cost LiDAR

This is a great breakdown of the different elements of LiDAR technology, looking at three broad areas: beam direction, distance measurement, and frequencies. They compare the tech of 10 different companies in the space to see how each is approaching the problem.

📚 An Algorithm to Auto-Generate Textbooks

Taking off of the Wikibooks project, this team is aiming to generate books from Wikipedia content using ML techniques.

Given the advances in artificial intelligence in recent years, is there a...

Every year since the pre-Stone Age area, visualized as a time lapse on a map.

This is amazing and puts into context what was developing where over time. I know when I read the history of one culture, like Ancient Greece, it’s hard to keep in the mind what was happening elsewhere in the world during the same time period. This video could be a good reference point to pull up to get a sense of what happened during, before, and after any...

🛰 Buildings from Imagery with RoboSat

This excellent guide shows how to combine take imagery from OpenAerialMap and buildings from OpenStreetMap, and combine to train a model for automated feature extraction. It uses an open source tool from Mapbox called RoboSat combined to compare a GeoTIFF from OAM with a PBF extracts from OSM. Very cool to have a generalized tool for doing this with open data.

🔐 The State of Software Security in 2019

An excellent roundup (with tons of ancillary linked sources)...

In this latest cartography project I’m working on, I’m rediscovering the tedium of searching for appropriate data. I’ll grant that it’s amazing how much high quality data is produced and freely distributed, but given the advances of web technology, it’s frustrating to see how bad many of the web map content management systems are.

Of course the difficulty of finding data depends on the geographic area. I happen to be working on a region that’s pretty sparse, so some data (like rasters) can be harder to find.

Here are a few resources I’ve either found or rediscovered worth sharing:

...

Each year GIS developer and cartographer Nyall Dawson puts together a thread of daily tweets leading up to Christmas, each with a helpful tip for QGIS. You can see all of them at the hashtag #24daysofqgis.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Day 8: Use the handy #QGIS Ctrl+F6 shortcut to open an attribute table containing only visible features, and Shift+F6 for a table containing only selected features. #24daysofqgis pic.twitter.com/ko1iIuxTvL

— North Road (@northroadgeo) December 8, 2018

Day 11: Use...

This week is some reading, but some simple admiring. I wanted to highlight the work of two cartographers I follow that is fantastic. We live in a great world that people can still make a living producing such work.

🏝 Hundred Largest Islands

A beautiful, artistic work from David Garcia sorting each island’s landmass by area. My favorite map projects aren’t just eye candy, they also teach you something. I spent half an hour on Wikipedia reading about a few of these islands.

🛩 On Airline Mapping

This is a project...

Borders in today’s world are remarkably static, ever-present lines we all get used to separating territories as if there are hard barriers to interaction between the multicolored countries of your average political map of the world. Centuries of perpetual war, invasions, treaties, intermarrying monarchs, imperialism, and revolutions redrew the global map with regularity, but today we don’t see this level of volatility. When a new country is formed, a disputed territory shifts, or a country is renamed, it makes global headlines. It’s only every few years that you see territorial shifts.

This level of...

With tools like Mapillary and OpenStreetCam, it’s pretty easy now to collect street-level images with a smartphone for OpenStreetMap editing. Point of interest data is now the biggest quality gap for OSM as compared to other commercial map data providers. It’s hard to compete with the multi-billion dollar investments in street mapping and the bespoke equipment of Google or Apple. There’s promise for OSM to be a deep, current source of this level of detail, but it requires true mass-market crowdsourcing to get there.

The businesses behind...

🎙 Computing is Everywhere

A great interview with Bret Victor on the Track Changes podcast. His work has always been an inspiration for how to think about both creating things and teaching people.

📊 Git Your SQL Together

This post from Caitlin Hudon is a great reminder for anyone that works with data. Combining git versioning with your SQL is super helpful for archiving and searching previous analysis queries.

1. You will always need that query again
2. Queries are living artifacts that change over time
...

This is the first book review post since I put up my library section. I hope to do more of this in the future with each new book I add to the collection. Enjoy.

The Story of Maps took me a while to get through, but it’s the most comprehensive history I’ve seen on the history of geography and cartography.

Of particular note was the history of the figures in antiquity, their discoveries, and the techniques they used to advance the science of mapmaking. From Strabo, Eratosthenes, and Ptolemy to Ortelius, Mercator, and Huygens, Brown is extremely...

I’ve been collecting paper maps for years. It’s one of the few collection habits I’ve allowed myself to keep (well, including books). Some time back I wanted to inventory all of them. So I built an app in Fulcrum to log the title, source, publishing date, and photos of each.

My collection’s up to 210 now. I’m working on a way to publish this. The other similar app I built a while back is a “map of maps”, basically a similar structure to my collection, but actually geotagging out in the world where...

⏱ Mapping Street-Level Air Quality in California

This is amazing work by Google putting air quality sensors on their Street View cars to collect air quality data. The resolution of this is amazing — to see how drastically the pollutant level changes from street to street.

🏔 Running in Circles

I love Ryan Singer’s perspective on product development. In this post he levels critique at the now-commonplace “agile” software development process. It’s been distorted into a simplistic set of tactical process methods (building in “cycles”), and has lost what its original value was as an upgrade...

🚙 Cartography in the Age of Autonomous Vehicles

An excellent, extremely detailed analysis from Justin O’Bierne on how maps and cartography might evolve if autonomous vehicles negate our need for turn-by-turn navigation.

We can’t apply today’s maps to tomorrow’s cars – but this is exactly what those who think cartography is dying are doing. (It’s not that we’ll no longer be navigating, it’s that we’ll be navigating different things – and we’ll need new kinds of maps to help us.)

🌎 Few Interact With Our Interactive Maps–What Can We Do About It?

Brian Timoney’s...

At work we’ve been building an integration between Fulcrum and DroneDeploy, a service for automating drone flight and data capture for aerial imagery. It’s compatible with the Mavic, so I gave it a shot with some test flights over my house.

The idea is simple: use DroneDeploy to draw on a map the area you want to survey from above, and their app handles building the flight plan, sending it to the drone, and flying the waypoints to take all the photos. You then take the pictures from the drone’s storage and upload to your DroneDeploy project for processing....

Querying OpenStreetMap with Amazon Athena 🗺

Using Amazon’s Athena service, you can now interactively query OpenStreetMap data right from an interactive console. No need to use the complicated OSM API, this is pure SQL. I’ve taken a stab at building out a replica OSM database before and it’s a beast. The dataset now clocks in at 56 GB zipped. This post from Seth Fitzsimmons gives a great overview of what you can do with it:

Working with “the planet” (as the data archives are referred to) can be unwieldy. Because it contains data spanning the...

I bought a Mavic Pro a couple weeks ago and just got a chance to take my first flights this past weekend. In short, it’s the most impressive technology product I’ve used in years. I’ve never owned any drone, so this is pretty cool for someone in the mapping industry. Let’s dive in.

Since going out to fly aerial mapping missions with some partners of ours a couple months back, I wanted to buy one of DJI’s drones — either the larger Phantom 4 Pro, or the smaller Mavic. Extensive research led...

There’s been a boom in the last couple years of big tech companies trying to reach to the periphery of the globe and bring Internet access to people without connectivity. Facebook is launching giant solar-powered drones with lasers, Google is floating balloons with antennae into the stratosphere, and smartphones are cheaper than ever.

The success rate of these projects is hard to quantify, it’s too early. But for the mapping industry,...

The concept of activity tracking is getting ever closer to ubiquitous nowadays with the prevalence of dozens of mobile apps, wearable wristbands, and other health monitoring tools like Bluetooth-enabled scales and video games based on exercise. Now the world’s largest tech company is even rumored to be working on some form of wearable hardware (and software APIs), at which point the whole concept of “life tracking” will reach 100% penetration. Everyone will be tracking and recording their lives like characters in cyberpunk literature.

I’m a casual runner and cyclist, and started testing a handful of...

I wrote a blog post last week about the first few months of usage of Pushpin, the mobile app we built for editing OpenStreetMap data.

As I mentioned in the post, I’m fascinated and excited by how many brand new OpenStreetMap users we’re creating, and how many who never edited before are taking an interest in making contributions. This has been an historic problem for the OpenStreetMap project for years now: How do you convince a casually-interested person to invest the time to learn how to contribute themselves?

There are two...

Generating a real-time topographic map with a sandbox, Kinect, and a projector.

This is the kind of thing I want to see more with augmented reality.

We’ve just posted a map of Kabul, Afghanistan built from spatial networks map data. I built this a couple of months back (with TileMill) for some mobile field collection project work we were doing with Fulcrum. This is the sort of challenging work that our company is out there doing, bringing high-tech (yet cheap and simple) solutions to up-and-coming communities like Kabul.

My talk from Ignite Spatial at WhereCampTB, talking about the OSM Tampa Bay meetup group. Check out the slides in better detail here.

It was a fun event a couple weeks ago — great participation from folks in all sorts of industries involved in mapping or using GIS tools.

A dymaxion projection — a sphere projected on a flattened polyhedron.

We just returned from a fantastic weekend up in DC - first at the Ignite Spatial event on Friday night, then the WhereCampDC unconference on Saturday. Being the first event of it’s kind that I’ve attended (with the “barcamp” unconference session format), I thought I’d write up some thoughts and impressions from an amazing 2-day trip.

Ignite Spatial

This was also my first experience hearing talks in the ignite format—20 slides, 15 seconds each, 5 minutes. A fantastic format to break people out of the habit of simply reading their slides off a screen. Held at Grosvenor Auditorium...

The front lines.

For the Vancouver Olympics, the StreetView guys have been hitting the slopes to get imagery from snowmobiles. The little StreetView guy is even a skier.