Olympia, like all of the Pacific Northwest and much of the US, is in the middle of a homelessness crisis. One of the drivers of this crisis is housing prices. In Olympia median list prices for homes has jumped from $260,000 to $355,000 between January 2010 and January 2019 (Zillow). And a major driver of […]
Happiness, Contentment, and Purpose
“Being happy” is a terrible, self-defeating life goal. So why do we keep seeing advice about how to be happier in pop culture?
Mass Transit, Mk. II
So in this post about mass transit I made the same mistake a lot of amateurs do – I tried to solve the wrong problem. Kinda. Let’s try and fix that.
Local Cooperative Paper
Local news is in decline. Stories of local papers being consolidated into titanic media conglomerates, shedding staff, cutting back on reporting, or all three are ubiquitous. This puts people who want quality local news in a bind. The only way to support your local paper is to buy it, but who wants to pay for […]
A multiplayer game I would actually play
I would love to play a multiplayer Railroad Tycoon style game, with seasons of 1-3 months, shards with 6-12 players, and balanced for 15 minutes to an hour of play each day.
Mass Transit
A thing that’s on my mind right now – how to tackle the last mile problem.
Economics, Ethics, Quantum Physics, and Hydrology
I just read the Aeon.co article Economics is Quantum by David Orrell. The author makes some solid points about the state of economics, but I think he’s missing an even bigger opportunity to talk about science & engineering in general.
Searchable/collapsible FAQ
UPDATE – Ecology has a new website. The MS4 FAQ still exists, but it looks like the underlying technology has changed. Nothing permanent on the web, I guess. Design is still generally the same, which is cool, but they killed the fulltext search/filter, which is lame. Such is life.
Making D3.js and WordPress Play Nice
WordPress is a great, flexible blogging platform, but it can make things that are easy in straight HTML, like simple Javascript, kind of a pain. Slightly more complicated things, like showing demos of neat D3.js tricks, can be tough. This afternoon, though, I got it working.
Visualizing Water Quality Data
For the past few months I’ve been getting into Edward Tufte’s approach to visualizing data.