Jay’s Blog

This was written for A Cartographer’s Story, a series of posts on “the power your maps have had within your own life”. I highly encourage you to check the rest out!

My freshman year of college I sent a dumb, pretentious email to a Geography professor on campus asking him for…

I came across this NPR article on using hexagons for tile maps recently. These types of maps, where states are abstracted to an equal-sized shape have been all the rage this past year, featured on NYT, FiveThirtyEight, and the like.

CityLab had an article recently titled, “The Worst Architectural Renderings of 2015.” Contextualizing the piece was the submission phase of the potential Guggenheim Helsinki building where apparently tons of bad renderings were submitted. The point of CityLab was to convey that even…

I recently found a Mike Bostock post on visualizing algorithms. It’s an amazing read and I’ve been trying to show it to as many people as possible. The post is really the essence of visualization: making complex ideas easy to understand. Mike also takes this a bit farther by making…

The New York Times had another piece that I felt it was my duty to comment on; this time, it was on the “Hyperbole of Internet Speak”. The obvious bent of the article really could not be ignored, as the print version of the article was titled: “Stop Your…

The New York Times ran a story a while back on a New York bookstore founded on the principle of handpicked recommendations from famous and interesting people (“If you were stranded on a desert island…”) These recommendations will also include why…

Last night I had the privilege to see Youssou N’Dour live in concert at Zellerbach Hall. It was quite the experience, mainly because of the way it differed from the traditional American concerts that I am used to. To prepare for the concert I had watched about fifty minutes of I Bring What I Love, the…