Category: My Work
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Do Not Look at the Sun—I looked at the Sun
With eclipse glasses. This week saw a solar eclipse race across the surface of the Earth, from the high Arctic past the British Isles and the Atlantic coast of France and then right through the Iberian Peninsula. But that meant here on the East Coast of North America we could observe a sliver of the…
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There’s Nambia
Happy Friday, all. We made it. Like the staffer at Foggy Bottom, we made it. (With a little help from our friends AI.) Earlier this week I wrote about the U.S. State Department’s map on American aid to Africa and how that map really stole the show. Unfortunately, the map was largely empty except for…
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But What About Nambia?
I was going to post about this Friday, but left it for today. We need to talk about this map. First, why so many colours? Each country is clearly separated from the other, and the best rationale for so many colours here would have been if the countries shared a border and you ran the…
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Global Integration. The Bad Kind.
I was hoping to post this yesterday, but as you will see momentarily, it is very much still a work-in-progress. Earlier this week, Ukraine sank an Iranian freighter in the Caspian Sea—a pugnacious though innocuous sounding sentence. Of course, Ukraine battles Russia in its eastern oblasts whilst Iran battles the United States and Israel in…
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Smoke Here, Smoke There, Smoke Was (Almost) Everywhere
Friday I wrote about an interactive air quality web application I designed for my website after seeing a similar type of dynamically generated graphic in my local rag, the Philadelphia Inquirer. I did not have a lot of time to finish the project, and so it lacked the planned overview page, where I intended to…
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Is It Always Smoky in Philadelphia?
Yesterday I wrote about a Philadelphia Inquirer article, which included an interactive display showing different monitoring stations around the Philadelphia area cataloguing just how bad the Minnesota/Canadian wildfire smoke is in the region. I noted during my piece that it was unclear if the little bars were actually recording the AQI values or just a…
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My First Half of Music (Streams)
Because I am headed out of town for several days, today is basically this week’s Friday post—just for fun. Last week I looked at my musical tastes via the vinyl. Today I look at the digital streams of music. This is far less surprising and arguably more representative of my tastes more broadly. Unlike records,…
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Just a Wee Bit Warm
This past weekend was a hot one in Philadelphia (and many other places across the eastern United States). As we enter July, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an article examining climate change’s impact on summer temperatures. Spoiler: it’s hotter. The article included two interactive line charts. The first one plotted the average high temperature of July…
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My First Half of Music (Records)
Two Christmases ago, my mother gifted me a record player. Ever since I have been slowly buying records—and then listening to them. And over the last year I have been recording those record plays and with 2026 now half over, I decided to run the numbers and see where I am at. As context, my…