Recent content on tracks and traces
I do not believe in glamorizing empty lots. Empty lots in cities do not symbolize some kind of urban wilderness. They are not wilderness, and they do not exist as functional ecosystems. Anyone who believes they do would benefit from touching grass an endemic perennial forb. They are a placeholder, hopefully temporary and when long-lived exemplify a process failure of some kind. With that said,…
Who do you think pays more in property tax, the owner of this recently-sold five-story Bed-Stuy brownstone? Or the owner of this tiny one-bedroom Bed-Stuy condo? That’s right, it’s the tiny condo owner. Am I missing something, or is New York City’s property tax system pretty wild? After reading so many pieces about Mayor Mamdani’s pied-a-terre tax , the properties that…
Photos from a recent tour with aci-d club on a blisteringly hot May day. Weiss Building, 1230 York Avenue 250 E 63rd St Edward Durell House, 130 E 64th St Fifth Avenue Synagogue, 5 E 62nd St Kramer House, 32 East 74th St Pavement Ants (Tetramorium caespitum) 2026/05/17 12:25 PM 130 E 64th St, New York, NY 10065, USA Insecta 0 IDs Manhattan Church of Christ, 48 E 80th St Breuer Building, 945…
The federal government of the United States has a vast footprint. Real property – that is, land, buildings and other fixed structures that can’t be easily moved – possessed by the United States includes military bases and border checkpoints, scenic highways and historic bridges, court houses, post offices, warehouses for schools, warehouses for spaceflight, warehouses on Pacific…
We don’t build housing like we used to. Per-capita housing starts never recovered from the 2008 crash and the supply deficit outside of the sunbelt is even worse. But this blog post isn’t a YIMBY screed. That’s right, it’s another abstruse geo project shrouded in alienating politics . Taking Measures Across the American Landscape, James Corner and Alex MacLean (1996) In…
On January 6, 2026, the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency expanded “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis into “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out” by sending over 2,000 agents to Minnesota. Though ICE is required by law to publish weekly detention statistics, after publishing data on January 7th, no data was released again until…
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Statistically speaking, if you’re reading this, it’s unlikely you know anyone who voted for Eric Adams (“America’s Mayor”) in 2025. If you live in New York, there’s even a good chance that you voted in one of the 1,430 electoral districts that had zero votes for Eric Adams (33.5% of the city.) But the other 66.5% exists. While Eric Adams officially dropped out…
Every item at IKEA, sorted by price ascending from cheapest . Helpful for hitting free shipping thresholds. Eight of the cheapest items at IKEA (US) right now.
Early morning on the B48 , my mind turns, as so oft it does, to thoughts of the Brooklyn Bus Network Redesign . Alas, the dream remains distant, and here in 2025 the bus still makes a scheduled stop on almost every 270 ft block. The bus lurches forward just as the light ahead turns red. New York City must have some of the closest bus stop spacing in the world. Could GTFS transit data prove this?…
While hiking, I like to take photos of nature things to figure out later and post to iNaturalist . But most non-phone cameras don’t add geotags (geographic location info) to images, and uploading these to iNat is a pain. One way to solve this is by logging your own position with a smartwatch or app, but my smartwatch was stolen and I often don’t have the cellphone battery for Strava.…
I led four sessions at ITP Camp 2025 , preserved here. On Observation A presentation and a discussion about observation: what we observe, how we do it, and what it means. We’ll talk about the history of weather stations, borrow ideas from birdwatching and science, and learn about tech tools for observation: from optics to machine learning. Portions of this talk made it into my presentation…
See also my post about my project at Dinacon 2025, Passive Acoustic Listening . I didn’t take very many photos of people, but of course it was the people that made Dinacon such an inspiring, creative, collaborative and warm experience. There are also many moments missing photographs, and perhaps more meaningful for it. Thank you to everyone, especially the organizers , Sea Communities ,…
Back in 2023, I downloaded every research grade observation from iNaturalist and made a map that classified each one as a “local” or a “tourist,” depending on the length of the observer’s history in that area. iNaturalist has only grown since, and updating the data for 2025 was long overdue! Dario shared it in the iNat forum earlier this week, and this wave of…
Whale songs were first noticed by accident, when analysts tracking Russian submarines at the height of the cold war heard cetacean interference instead. An engineer sent some recordings to Roger Payne, a biologist friend of his, who did something that proved pivotal: he played the hours-long recordings on his hi-fi at home, while he went about his day. By listening for hours at a time, Payne…
What percentage of the bird species in the Netherlands do I recognize? What percentage of the world would they “recognize”? I can stare for hours at the range maps in bird guides. A single species with habitat spanning arid steppes to frigid wetlands. Another species restricted to a (sky) island. These maps tell a story not only of bird adaptability and sensitivity but also, as the…
A six-day trek across the Dovre, starting in the high alpine moors of Dovrefjell, climbing 2286m Snøhetta, and descending into the glacial valleys of Åmotan and Sunndalen. Leaving Kongsvoll The train pulls away and we are alone in the mountains. The E6 highway quickly recedes. A detour up a valley where another hiker told us they had seen muskoxen. Muskox (Ovibos moschatus) ✅ 2024/08/12 5:37 PM…
a cat magpie frame manipulation brand new designs
Hello Hey what are you doing? Excuse me, are you Aaliyah? Hey, it’s Lauren. Logan, please don’t ignore this message. Did your stomach just drop, friend? Hey Logan, I’m sure you have a lot on your plate. Your order is ready for pickup. Hey what are you doing? I’m Marissa. Don’t you remember me? Hey, I’m not sure who else to ask. Logan, we’ve got great news.…
I exhibited Bird signs and cycles at MozFest House 2024 . Thanks to Yan for the idea, and the MozFest team for making it happen.
KEYWORD : hall
KEYWORD : hall
Written to share some sights and sounds in the hopes that this is useful to other nature lovers planning independent travel to Jamaica outside the resort-industrial-complex. We found it rather difficult to find up-to-date information to plan our trip, and there is quite a bit of fear-mongering on the internet. We had a wonderful time exploring with our own rental car, hiking, birdwatching, and…
converts a webpage to a bitmap and throws those bytes at your audio output it's a bookmarklet, remember those? made extremely quickly for the Recurse Center's Never Graduate Week 2024 WAM BAM JAM Drag the link below to your bookmarks bar: SONIFY Some links to try out: a simple test, relax checkerboard more checkerboards the gray lady fence vents spotlight css zen garden Source code
KEYWORD : camouflage
A short edit of some Adam Curtis clips that includdes only scenes with on-screen text, in random order. Week 1.5 class project for Algorithmic Film.
I’ve always thought these sunshine maps were a little suspicious. Not just the JPEG artifacts, but is Ohio really that much sunnier than France? Britain is dreary, but is it so dreary that Estonia is brighter? Maybe it was the gloomy weather in Amsterdam but for some reason I tried to recreate this map the other day. A few hours messing around with a dataset from the World Metereological…
I was working on a map recently and tried to use SAGA in QGIS to make a multilevel b-spline raster from some scattered vector points. (More to come tomorrow!) However, I kept getting the vague error “The following layers were not correctly generated.” I found some Stack Overflow posts with the same error but my problem seemed unrelated to the filename/disk space issues mentioned. As I…
Ophrys apifera Herminium monorchis Epipactis palustris Liparis loeselii Dactylorhiza All observed on June 18. Thanks to Thim for showing us around.
On the last day of FOSS4G, I went for a little hike with Will in the morning. We took a taxi up the road out of Prizren into the mountains, and got dropped off at the Oshlak trailhead. The trail quickly climbed out of the forest and on to Oshlak ridge, a beautiful grassy ridgeline. It was a clear morning and everything was in full bloom. We were able to find many orchids and Orobanches, as well as…
A quick map from Sentinel-1 SAR (satellite radar) imagery that shows recent flooding in the San Joaquin Valley around the Tulare Lake Basin and the towns of Corcoran, Alpaugh and Allensworth. Inundated areas can be distinguished in dark black. Imagery is from Sentinel-1 pass on March 26th, 2023 at 01:59 UTC.
In 2010, cartographer Erica Fischer made some simple and spectacular maps of images added to Flickr . She classified photos as either from “locals” or “tourists”, based on how far their profile location was from the photo’s geotag. These maps revealed fascinating psychogeographic patterns of urban exploration and photographic worthiness. Last summer, Dario Taraborelli…
This weekend I went on a bike ride I haven’t done yet: following the Ringvaart* (“circular canal”) around the former lake of Harlermermeer (“Haarlem Lake.”) It’s a touch over 60km around the loop, so a perfect distance for a short day trip. There are basically no navigational decisions to be made, and relatively long stretches of smooth, uninterrupted road. Like…
Land artists often practice a kind of landscape scarification. Take Michael Heizer’s deep gouges in the Nevada desert and James Turrell’s preternaturally manicured craters. Or consider the abandoned construction site aesthetic of Holt’s Sun Tunnels or Christo and Jean-Claude’s Wrapped Coast . These are less site specific installations than sculptures which happen to be site…
Enter the orchids A few months after we moved to The Netherlands in 2020, Alison and I took a trip to a nursery near Hilversum that I had found while searching for horticultural destinations. We rented OV-fietsen from Hilversum Centraal and biked through the Gooi heathlands to OrchidWubben . We didn’t know what we were in for at the nursery. The greenhouses were attached to a large…
For my recent post about the Alta Via 1 , I wanted to integrate iNaturalist observations. To make this easier, I made a Hugo shortcode that calls the iNaturalist API and renders an observation in detail automatically. This turns {{< inat "https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/50674264" >}} into Mountain Bluebird (Sialia currucoides) ✅ 2020/06/16 8:41 AM PDT Trinity County, CA, USA Aves 1 IDs…
186 species documented on iNaturalist, over 317 observations. You see a lot when you’re in the mountains for 12 days. Especially when you walk slow. Or vice versa. Scroll through for vistas and highlights, or click “All observations” to see all iNaturalist posts for that day. Thanks to Alison for additional notes. August 6th: Lago di Braies to Rifugio Biella Notes Lake Instagram.…
I analyzed historic data from ADS-B Exchange to map out the most common places that Oakland Police Department chooses to deploy their helicopters. The data shows concerning patterns of geographic inequity, with residents of certain neighborhoods forced to deal with the noise and environmental pollution from low-flying helicopters much more than others. While some of this “merely”…
Anole À la carte food Abbey Abdomen Abrasive saw Abseiling Absolut vodka Academic conference Academic dress Acanthocereus tetragonus Accipitriformes Acerola Acerola family Acianthera Acrobatics Acrylic paint Action figure Acura mdx Adaptation Adventure Adventure game Adventure racing Advertising Aegean cat Aeolian landform Aerial photography Aerospace engineering Aerospace manufacturer Afro…
I discovered a phenomenal dataset of California agricultural land, identified by crop down to the specific field (sub parcel!) This seemed like the perfect opportunity to stretch some of my map making/map styling/passive interactivity skills. Also, I just find the regional variation in crops, how in one county you might drive through orchard after orchard of almonds, and then you hit some…
I just returned from Recurse Center’s Never Graduate Week 2019 – an inspiring week of old and new friends and a familiar company. Like last year, I got roped into making a quick puzzle for this year’s friendly Capture the Flag created by a friend of mine. It’s about possums. Give it a call! (224) 877-7663 Source code and spoilers below! I really wanted to make something…
At Signal Culture, I’m working on a generalization of the technique I used to make my “isometric spacelapses.” It’s a realtime application for interactively slicing and sliding a video as a 3-dimensional object. A release version and source code will be out by the time I finish my residency. Here are some in-progress previews, more to come soon!
(Skip to the demo?) I remember when it was a big deal when web maps started allowed arbitrary slipping and sliding, instead of moving in fixed increments. Then, it was super cool once we could rotate a map an arbitrary direction – north didn’t have to be up anymore! Then GPS navigation made everyone familiar with the pitch of a map as an adjustable quantity too. But there are more ways…
I saw an interesting visualization on Jason Davie’s website last night of Lloyd’s relaxation algorithm. I thought it was fun to watch the cells slowly change number of sides and irregularity, so I extended his visualization to color cells differently depending on their irregularity. Source is, well, in the source.
James and I paired on creating something with Mike Bostock’s Observable Notebooks. We made a notebook that uses D3.js and some convenient TopoJSON repositories to automatically download and map Census data variables. Some work needs to be done: Better UI for selecting variables Title and legend on the map Multivariate comparisons Check box for normalizing by population But we got it working!…
Besides the interactive art jam and Tidal Cycles live coding workshops , I’ve been up to a lot at Recurse Center recently. On Wednesday, I launched Conceptquest , an interactive hypertext adventure game based on navigating Conceptnet, a dataset of real world relations between concepts that I’ve been fascinated by since I learned about it 18 months ago. Conceptquest is itself an…
Most consequences of climate change will be felt most severely by the least wealthy and most vulnerable populations in the world. However, this may not be true of every effect of climate change. In 2017, devastating wildfires in Northern and Southern California captured headlines across the US for weeks. Many of these stories accurately described how climate change was causing shifting weather…
I co-hosted two workshops at RC recently, one on Monday, and one on Tuesday. Both went pretty well! On Monday, Bryan and I ran an “interactive art jam.” This was something I came up with partially (ok mostly) as an excuse to use Kate Compton’s Generominos with a group of people. Last Thursday, I gave a creative brainstorming presentation, and we practiced rapid idea generation…