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I’ve long been concerned—at least since my time at the Brookings Institution five years ago—about the shortage of data on the prevalence of air conditioning in the United States. While the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey provides data on households’ access to heating, including the type of fuel used, no data is available on access to air conditioning, although extended and extreme heatwaves are becoming more common due to climate change. Data on the presence Read more

Marco Chitti‘s recent essay on the importance of speed in public transit is a good read. Biology fixes humanity’s basic time budget. Likewise, the amount of time we are willing to spend on travel doesn’t change much, either. As Marco notes, density cannot make transit and transit speed irrelevant. No “15-minute city” based on walking travel times can contain all the services and experiences people need and want on a regular basis. Furthermore, a modern Read more

This weekend, my housemate Ruthanna Emrys is in Brighton, Sussex at the World Fantasy Convention for the release of her new novella, The Sheltering Flame. Thinking about fantasy literature and Sussex reminded me of a poem her wife is very fond of, “Puck’s Song,” from Rudyard Kipling’s 1906 children’s fantasy novel Puck of Pook’s Hill, in which the fairy Puck takes two Sussex children on adventures through fictionalized and magical events in English history. “Puck’s Read more

My intention for this blog is to use it to post small GIS and geography projects that aren’t large enough to try to find more-formal venues for. However, it will probably also end up having some things that aren’t specifically GIS or geography related but that I think are likely also of interest to my readers. Today, want to write up the results of an online research rabbit hole I went down this afternoon: trying Read more