Jul 24, 2022Mapsticulations: giving cartography the fingerThere’s a funny thing that happens when people want to tell you RIGHT NOW exactly where they’re from. When there’s no time for Google or an atlas, maps sprout out of napkins and appear scratched into the dirt with a stick. Scraps of paper and objects plucked from tables are…Cartography3 min readCartography3 min read
Apr 18, 2022Using Serval to Fix RastersI’m making some more dive maps and this time I’m looking at the Channel Islands. In my bathymetry rasters I’m running into this weird series of holes in the seabed that are just too uniform to be anything other than anomalies in the data collection and processing. Sometimes there are…Elevation3 min readElevation3 min read
Dec 11, 2021YouTube as Remote SensingI’m starting to carve myself a fun niche in the cartographic community by making scuba diving maps and they’re getting attention. From my friends at least. One of them is a partner at a dive tour company in Maui and he wants me to make some maps of west Maui…Open Source6 min readOpen Source6 min read
Dec 2, 2021Manual Raster Manipulation or, How Making Sh*t Up is Good ActuallyI’ve been working on a project for a few years now and it feels like every few months I come up with a new way to make my maps a little better, a little more complicated and a lot more labor intensive. At no point are the maps ever more…Cartography11 min readCartography11 min read
Aug 27, 2021Obituary for a RabbitWe don’t live with animals in the hope that they’ll do our bidding. We live with them so that they surprise us, and lick us, and worry us, and pee in our beds, and snuggle on the couch with us and pose just barely long enough to take a picture…3 min read3 min read
May 12, 2021Making Grids for North Arrows and Scale BarsNo one gets tattoos of scale bars. They’re not nearly as pretty as a compass rose, you never see as much variation or style in them and I think the best that can be said for them is that you can tuck them out of the way and forget about…Cartography6 min readCartography6 min read
Nov 6, 2020Go Fly A Kite“Go fly a kite” is very nearly a perfect metaphor for “fuck off and do nothing” and we have Mary Poppins (1964) to thank. A stuffy English patrician, a banker literally named George Banks, gets fired from his job only to realize that his regimented aristocratic life is an absurd…Maps14 min readMaps14 min read
Sep 25, 2020Packing Your Digital Go-BagAt the beginning of fire season in 2019 I visited the Situation Room at PG&E’s downtown San Francisco headquarters and it was like walking onto a movie set. There were floor-to-ceiling monitors and rows of analysts watching live-streams from remote webcams on fire watch towers and dashboards tracking Twitter, weather…Fire20 min readFire20 min read
Aug 16, 2020Imagining Solitude with ‘Winter Road’A good college friend wheedled me into writing this all the way back in May so that I could submit it to an online magazine that was trying to catalog how art is helping people get through these wild times. I got a lovely personalized rejection note from the publisher…Art2 min readArt2 min read
Jun 1, 2020Oakland May 29, 2020There’s a lot that I don’t know about Friday night. As I understand it, riots are not often understood well but this one for me was particularly chaotic and disorienting. I’ve been to marches and protests aplenty but none quite like this. I want to provide as much context as…9 min read9 min read
