Jay’s Blog

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

The Economist recently came out with another really interesting graph, though this time more so because of the content than the format.

Citylab, one of my favorite online publications, had a story on the vandalism of a hip London cafe that was targeted by anti-gentrification protestors.

What I found interesting about the story was the fact that the cafe existed in the first place. It’s such a…

Google (well, not really Google, but a company copying their branding and using their name) created a website that claims to be able to predict the future: