August 2025, pt. 3

Not too much to report this week—just as summer should be. Grateful for the chance to do good, tiring, satisfying work, for the company of old and new friends alike, and for the companionship and love of the members of my little family here at home, T, A, and P.

• Steph Gray, reflecting on a recent Second World War commemoration site, with a reminder that the “user need” for a digital product can be much broader than we sometimes think it.
• Continuing tales from the GIS industry vault, Ingrid Burrington shares delightful vignettes of where MapInfo founders ended up. Oh, for more wholesome post-tech stories!
• Dave Guarino’s first set of “kernels” (little thoughts, yay!), where, among other things, he introduces the “resource feedback loop” as another model for reasoning, a more broadly applicable version of what’s often called a “business model”.
• What’s the best way to dice an onion? The fine folks at The Pudding visualized J. Kenji López-Alt’s various techniques, with delightful interactive charts (of an onion being sliced, natch) to see the mathematical impact of different slicing styles. “We looked at all 19,320 combinations of onion layer numbers, vertical/radial cut numbers, radial cut depth (as whole number percentages), and horizontal cut numbers that are possible with this model. We then found which technique results in the minimum standard deviation when making 1-10 vertical/radial cuts into an onion with 7-13 layers.” Phew—are you salivating over that, or what!?
• Another from The Pudding, exploring some of New York’s semantic clusters, using data from Yufeng Zhao’s “all text in nyc”. (Zhao has many other fun projects, including Filetypes / Airports which “maps filetypes to airports when extensions overlap with IATA codes, with authentic thumbnail icons ripped from the original software”.)
• Alan Jacobs’s takes an intentional approach to internet use in his typical day, making it again “as a place I occasionally (and for some specific purpose) visit rather than the place where I live.”

Very grateful for this cooler weather. All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas