Colbert and Wikipedia
Last night Stephen Colbert took on Wikipedia again, asking his viewers to edit the Reality article to say “Reality has become a commodity”. He was hoping to reprise his previous successes with the...
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Adium 1.0 is out!
Go pick up your copy of Adium 1.0, the new release of the greatest IM program ever. It’s Mac-only and it’s beautiful. I’ve been using it with only one complaint for at least 4-5 years (yes, it’s been...
View ArticleOnly Six Men Are Islands
A conversation at lunch today reminded me of one of my favorite trivia questions: what’s the most isolated any man has been in history? By “most isolated”, I mean that his/her instantaneous distance...
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GPS Tracking Polio Vaccinators
I’ve followed the Global Polio Eradication Initiative for the past few years, ever since I watched The Final Inch, a short documentary which chronicles the effort. The Initiative recently released a...
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Insights from a World Population Density Map
I recently saw this map on the delightful “MapPorn” subreddit: Please click through to the full image, it’s huge! What I love about this map is that insights spring right out of it. A few that came to...
View ArticleHow Many Living People Were Born in the 1800s?
According to Wikipedia, there are twelve living people born in the 1800s: # Name Sex Birth date Age Residence 1 Jiroemon Kimura M 1897 April 19 115y 310d Japan 2 Misao Okawa F 1898 March 5 114y 355d...
View ArticleKeep your HTML in your HTML
I sometimes see code like this to generate DOM structures in JavaScript: .syntaxhighlighter table td.code .line {white-space: pre-wrap !important; word-wrap: break-word !important;} var div =...
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NCAA Brackets
My group recently launched a custom UI for March Madness searches: The Sweet Sixteen view looks particularly nice on tablets, where you get high resolution team logos and crisp text for the team names....
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Generating Training Data
As you may remember from a previous post, I’ve been doing some work with a collection of old images. The first problem was to write a program to find the individual photos in images like these:...
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Daily Citibike Usage
I enjoyed Antonio D’Souza’s Citibike Traction chart but thought it painted an overly rosy picture by showing cumulative rides, not daily rides. Here’s a version of his chart with daily rides: Saturdays...
View ArticleAnd Then There Were Eight
Back in February, I posted a list of living people born in the 1800s. There were twelve. Now, six months later, we’re down to eight! As one of my coworkers says, there seems to be a conspiracy where...
View Articledygraphs 1.0.0
Six years ago I created dygraphs, an interactive JavaScript charting library. Four years ago, I open sourced it. Yesterday, we officially released version 1.0.0. The project continues to grow,...
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Statistics Knowledge Panel
A few months ago my group at work launched the Statistics Knowledge Panel, which shows you an interactive chart when you search for a public data statistic on Google: The feature uses query refinements...
View ArticleVernor Vinge on Video Calls
I’ve referenced an anecdote from Vernor Vinge’s A Fire upon the Deep several times during video calls in the last few weeks and thought I’d share it here. The novel is a classic space opera. Two ships...
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Fact Comparisons
This past fall, my group launched a new feature on Google Search that we call “Fact Comparisons”. It triggers for many numeric fact queries, for example distance from the sun to mars: The idea is that,...
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A deep dive into the Krubera Cave
After seeing this image posted on reddit last week, I took a deep dive into the strange world of extreme caving. This image is big! Click through to see the whole thing. The Krubera Cave is the deepest...
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Google’s New Finance Onebox
The last project I worked on at Google recently launched: a new and improved Finance Onebox. You trigger the feature by searching for a stock ticker, e.g. AAPL, GOOG or .INX: For comparison, here’s...
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Introducing git webdiff
After leaving Google and working in the open source ecosystem for the past few months, it’s become increasingly clear to me which pieces of Google’s infrastructure are ahead of the curve and which are...
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Introducing Comparea
Comparea is a tool that lets you Comparea Areas. It lets you answer questions like “how big is Greenland, really?” or “how large would Alaska be if it were in the contiguous US?” Comparea projects the...
View ArticleReading OSM data in C++
I’m interested in using OpenStreetMap data to add lots more shapes to Comparea. There are far too many polygons in OSM to include everything, so you have to filter to “interesting” ones. That’s a hard...
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