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 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 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 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 Read more
A lesbian couple I know in Hyattsville, Maryland have on several occasions told me that—according to a source they don’t remember—Hyattsville has the largest fraction of lesbian households of any city in the country. This claim makes me wonder what the actual distribution of LGBT people in the US is. Read more