The blog, photos, and book reviews of Dan Snow
Today I’m launching OpenTimes , a free database of pre-computed, point-to-point travel times between major U.S. Census geographies. In addition to letting you visualize travel isochrones , OpenTimes also lets you download massive amounts of travel time data for free and with no limits. Visit the dedicated about page to learn more about the project. The primary goal here is to enable research…
Edit: This is resolved and nothing malicious is happening. See here for the GitHub issue update. The issue here appears to be the result of Safari pre-fetching DNS for Grafana’s forums, which are linked on the Grafana landing page and do use advertising scripts. I use AdGuard Home for DNS-based ad-blocking and recently noticed some suspicious looking traffic getting consistently blocked in…
GitHub gist for source code Edit: It turns out there’s a much simpler way to do this. See the update below. I run a small Jellyfin server at home to watch movies and other media I’ve collected over the years. Recently, in order to debug some playback/networking issues, I wanted a way to answer the following questions via Prometheus and Grafana : What media is Jellyfin currently…
Recently, I’ve been working on a project that requires the element-wise comparison of many rows. The goal is to calculate a sort of similarity score between two tables. A simplified version of the data/problem looks like this: Table X ID V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 X1 9 3 2 4 5 X2 9 1 2 1 1 Table Y ID V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 Y1 9 3 3 1 1 Y2 1 1 1 1 1 Y3 9 9 7 9 8 Each row of Table X is compared to each row of…
Recently, I’ve been working on a project involving travel time matrices. These matrices are the output of specialized routing software and are used in social science research, urban planning, and policy analysis. They look like this: origin destination minutes A A 0 A B 9 A C 15 B A 10 B B 0 B C 21 C A 13 C C 0 Where origin and destination are the identifiers of geographic points (usually…
This is a list of my favorite digital things, excluding media. It’s basically a blogroll , /uses page, and bookmark dump combined into one. It’s purpose is three-fold: Make cool things discoverable for others Serve as a personal bookmark page for things I like Force me to be intentional about the things I use and read This list is constantly updated. When I find a cool new thing,…
I’ve been working as a data scientist in local government for around a year and a half now. Not long, but long enough to learn some things and update a few of my opinions. None of these lessons are specific to my organization or role. Friends in other agencies confirm they generalize well to most positions at the intersection of data and local government. I’m sharing these lessons with…
GitHub gist for source code I’ve been on a bit of a transit kick this month. I read Human Transit (the blog and the book) and have been playing a lot of Mini Metro . I’ve also been playing around with GTFS feeds , which are a standardized data format for public transit systems. They provide schedules, stop locations, route shapes, and more. I wanted to see if I could take a GTFS feed…
I think I’ve made a personal website 3-4 times now. Each one sat on the internet dusty and unused. I made them out of a sense of obligation to have a site, not out of genuine interest in creating content. Well, now I finally feel like making some stuff and need a place to put it. So this site is my attempt at creating that space. It has five main purposes. It is: An outlet for rare creative…
Note: This is adapted from an essay I wrote as a research assistant during graduate school. You can see the original essay here . Rural America is facing a massive and growing shortage of physicians. For the past few decades, doctors have flocked to cities seeking better career opportunities, higher pay, and urban amenities. As a result, only 10% of physicians now live in rural areas, compared to…