The Chez Panisse Foundation is supporting an initiative to make good, local food a part of every school: the Edible Schoolyard. The first edible schoolyard was established at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, and it has proven to be radically successful. This summer, the Foundation is spreading awareness about the program [...]
Cross-posted from the Thumbtack engineering blog. I recently released an open-source mapping toolkit called Rotary Maps that helps you make realtime maps on top of Google Maps v2 or v3. It also supports making maps in a simple DOM element if you don’t care for Google Maps. Check out the full post at the Thumbtack [...]
These maps are fascinating. Have you ever wondered why state or county or city boundaries are drawn where they are? It turns out that administrative and government boundaries are consistent with trends in human relationships; that is, people associate most with others in the same government-defined region. To investigate the geography of human relationships, a [...]
A comparison of the Linux call graph hierarchy with the E. coli regulatory network. Researchers at Yale discovered that the Linux control structure is top-heavy, with a few common modules reused often. E coli, by contrast, has limited central control with many specialized “workers” at the bottom of the hierarchy.
A great talk about Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form.
In the tradition of Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Frederick Brooks takes aim at the problem facing every engineer and designer: how do you architect and build a complex system? The question is especially pertinent to computer scientists and programmers. Included here are a few notes and observations from the book.
The most recent release of Cartographer.js supports county-level choropleth maps. This was the number one requested feature for Cartographer and I am delighted to finally be able to offer it in an official package. Counties are stored with efficient polygon encoding, and are easily referenced by name.
Our popular Walk or Bus chart is now an iPhone application. The app allows you to enter a travel distance as well as the time until the next bus, and the application will estimate whether you could travel faster by walking or by waiting for the bus. All estimates can be tweaked to match your walking speed, your city’s average block size, and bus speeds.
I have had several requests for the Color Sorting code I used to create these images. The pixel-based color sorting uses linear and Hilbert sorting techniques in RGB, YIQ, and HSV color spaces. ColorSorting is now on Github.
“Comics are juxtaposed pictorial and other images in a deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” These are my notes from Scott McCloud’s excellent book Understanding Comics.