Our 2021 Summer Roadtrip

Perfect use of a story map: #minivanlife 2021

Warming as Topography

 Pretty cool! More @ https://www.woodwellclimate.org/research-area/arctic/

Why no action on climate change?

Well, this well-written paper provides the answers: Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven't We Bent the Global Emissions Curve? (Stoddard et al., 2021).

It's a long read, but worth it, and would make a great framwork for an upper-level course on climate change. My favorite section is on Page 672: "...any dicussion of emissions reductions is based on a percentage of reduction below current emissions. This presumption establishes deviation from the status quo as the burden to be divided rather than the burdens of the statuts quo themselves."

The rest of the papers in this volume also sound interesing - have a look: https://www.annualreviews.org/toc/energy/46/1

Push-Button Education

 

The Memex

In his essay 'As We May Think' (from July 1945!), Vannevar Bush describes a future device called 'the memex' and thereby (conceptually) invented Google and smart gizmos. Here, humans create their own associative joins bewteen items of information to build associative trails that can be shared from one memex to another.

Great read, especially Sections 6 and 7.

The Best Maps/Charts/Data Viz of 2021

It's that time of the year when the Top-10, 20, 30, 40, 50, etc. lists of 2021 come-out:

• Maps Mania Maps of the Year
• Favourite maps of 2021 (Ken Field)
• Data Viz Projects (Nathan Yau)

Exercises for GIS Guide to Public Domain Data book

Exercises for GIS Guide to Public Domain Data book presented as a story map - fun!

15 tips for cartographers in ArcGIS Pro

15 tips for cartographers in ArcGIS Pro is a beautiful story map (embedded below) with 15 tips for making better maps using specifically ArcGIS Pro.

GraphSnow

GraphSnow is a nice and simple way to visualize snow depth measurements from the National Snow Analyses database.

Communities in Crisis

Communities in Crisis shows the impacts of climate change on communities around the world. I like it: simple and effective. 

Weather Disasters 2021

It's the time of the year when these types of compilations show-up - first-up is the Washington Post with Cold, heat, fires, hurricanes and tornadoes: The year in weather disasters. One wish: please make these animations available as GIFs so we can share and use them.

EarthDEM

This sounds great: a DEM with 2 m resolution for non-polar regions: EarthDEM

The Nile Delta’s Disappearing Farmland

Great example of urban sprawl / urbanization at the expense of farmland: The Nile Delta’s Disappearing Farmland.

Climate Change & Conflict

How Climate Change Fuels Deadly Conflict is a nice map-based scrolly-map highlighting the connections between climate change and conflict around the world.

Geology with RICHARD D. LITTLE

Great YouTube channel Richard Little about the geology here in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts: Geology with RICHARD D. LITTLE.

Geology & Politics

The 'Blue Swoosh' in the Red South:  

Climate Change Solutions

Here ar a bunch of reasonable & robust plans out there to get to netzero carbon emissions by 2050 - here's one visualization of some of those plans: How to Get the World to Netzero Carbon Emissions by 2050 – A Graphical Guide.

I especially appreciate thaat the data are included as a shared Google Sheet - that's the way to do it!

Palm Oil, Deforestation, and Climate Change

 The World's Addiction to Palm Oil Is Only Getting Worse is a nice 'scrolly-map' by Bloomberg News.

Calculating where you should live

This could be cool: https://flowingdata.com/2021/11/24/calculating-where-you-should-live/ (if you can make it past the paywall).

Compare the Climate and Weather Between Two+ Cities Worldwide

Compare the Climate and Weather Between Two+ Cities Worldwide is very nice (just ignore the annoying ads). Take two or more cities & compare their climate, using the classic seasonality 'climographs' and interesting time-of-year vs time-of-day 'surface' charts. 

This could be a great teaching tool if it were not for the overwhelming and distracting ads.

Cities In Africa

AFRICA’S RISING CITIES: How Africa will become the center of the world’s urban future is a great 'scrolly-map' showing how the centers of urbanization are shifting towards Africa.

Salt & Ocean Circulation

Great video as usual: There's No Salt In The Ocean

Snowball Earth

This is a good listen: https://www.geologybites.com/paul-hoffman

ELI Videos

The Earth Learning Ideas Video Collection is useful for teaching and learning all things related to geography and geology.

The Analog Atlas

The Analog Atlas is nothing new: find the climate 'analog' for your location under either a 2 or 2 deg C warming. 

Bake My Day

This is just funny: https://youtu.be/2xBQQPSdqFE 

Scientific Visualization: Python + Matplotlib

Scientific Visualization: Python + Matplotlib (by Nicolas Rougier) is a free open-source book about, well, scientific data viz using these two tools. Read as a PDF, order a printed copy, and dig around on the GitHub for sources and code examples.

PDF Map Maker

PDF Map Maker is a fun little tool in case you just need basic map in PDF format. Plus you can overlay geoJSON files. It would be great if you could add simple annotions (circles, lines, etc.).

Census Mapper

Census Mapper is a great tool to visualize demographic changes across the USA between 2010 and 2020 and you can export/embed the visualizations.

iPhone LiDAR

Hmm, maybe the excuse I need to upgrade my iPhone: Evaluation of the Apple iPhone 12 Pro LiDAR for an Application in Geosciences.

The Roots of Structural Racism Project

The Roots of Structural Racism Project: Twenty-First Century Racial Residential Segregation in the United States. 

The Climate Accountability Institute

The Climate Accountability Institute has been around for a while: checkout their work on the so-called 'Carbon Majors'. What they really could use is some help with their data viz...here's one of their key tables: Top-20 1965-2018 Carbon Majors

Strava Art

Strava Art is nothing new, but fun! 

The Human Ecological Niche

Turns-out that humans (like any other species) have a preferred 'ecological' niche at ~13 deg C MAT. And, 13 deg C also turns-out to be the optimmum for economic productivity. There are a lot of issues with such statements and  Xu et al. (2020) do a good job offering context and discussion to their analysis. The figure below from the NRDC offers a nice summary.

Armored Mudballs

Everything you ever wanted to know: https://armoredmudballs.rocks/

NetCDF, Climate Data, and Satellite images

How to create multidimensional raster data is excellent and shows you how to handle multidimensional raster data in ArcGIS.

• Open a NetCDF file and map / analyze it. Great for gridded climate/ocean data or GCM outputs.
• Combine a bunch of Landsat 8 images into a multidimensional raster 'cube' - that keeps all your satellite images neatly organized and you can run your geoprocessing / raster functions on the cube as oppposed to on each raster individually. Cool!

That's A Problem!

Source: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3918955. For context: Young people’s climate anxiety revealed in landmark survey (Nature, 30 September 2021).

Mapping with Datawrapper

Datawrapper is just great and now it is even easier to add data & make interactive web-based choropleth maps (see example below): Use our completely redesigned data upload for choropleth maps

Learning R

Here are a few good resources:

• Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
• A Succinct Intro to R
• R for Data Science

The Projection Playground

The Projection Playground is fun: look at the world in different projections & you can even adjust the projection parameters to make things even more complicated. Plus you can get the D3 code.

Now: what is this useful for? No idea. For me, there are three challanges related to map projections:

1. Make students realize that what (they think) the world looks like is actually just a function of the map projection / parameters.
2. Understand the implications of 1).
3. For students in my GIS courses: Be able to project GIS data (although that's become less and less important.

Scatterplot vs. Bivariate Choropleth Map

Same data, different data viz - have a look at http://cartoblography.com/2021/09/24/get-vaccinated/ by Ken Field.

You can create a simple scatterplot to highlight the inverse relationship (here COVID-19 hospitalizations vs. vaccinations) or a bivariate choropleth map to show the spatial pattern(s). Cool!

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is a great example of how faith and science can live together just fine.

• On Jimmy Kimmel Live (23 September 2021)
• Book: Saving Us - A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World

Geospatial Data Science Data and Tools

Geospatial Data Science Data and Tools by the NREL is an amazing compilation of maps and data (and interactive viz) related to sustainable energy.

The Travel Planner

The Travel Planner and Carbon Emissions Calculator is pretty slick and an amazing example of what you can do with Tableau.

The St. Louis Map Room

The St. Louis Map Room: a community space for exploring and creating original, interpretive maps of the city. These maps are currently on display throughout the community.

• https://www.cocastl.org/stlmaproom/
• In the Map Room

The Traffic Simulation Game

Seen on Maps Mania: The Traffic Simulation Game

Download and then model traffic anywhere in the world: add bike lanes, sidewalks, etc. Not sure how it all works, but somehow OpenStreetMap is involved. 

Painting in ArcGIS Pro

This is cool: Painting in Pro. Reminds me a little of this: MS Excel Art.

Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet

 Great new open-access OER: Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet

• Read the online version
• Download the PDF
• Buy a printed copy ($25.54!)

This book is perhaps the 'update' to the classic book by David MacKay: Sustainable Energy – without the hot air.

Trust in Science

Two great cartoons:

• https://xkcd.com/2515/
• https://twitter.com/citycyclops/status/1356286601756770306

Highways & Racism

Great data viz / Story Map: What It Looks Like to Reconnect Black Communities Torn Apart by Highways.

Then, explore: How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering. This one sits behind the NYT paywall, but you can get the underlying scientific papers:

• Disproportionate exposure to urban heat island intensity across major US cities (Nature Communictions, 25 May 2021).
• The Effects of Historical Housing Policies on Resident Exposure to Intra-Urban Heat: A Study of 108 US Urban Areas (Climate, 2020)

Mapping Open Data Portalls

Mapping the specific location of an open data portal is a bit weird: is it the location of the server (if there even is a specific location) or the location of the data accessible via said portal? And: what about regional or global data sets? 

Still, I think the map is cool & the spatial patterns are interesting: A Map of Open Data Portals

Human Development Indices (5.0)

The Human Development Indices (5.0) are now available at the subnational level (e.g. states in the USA). Nice: the data are available for download. 

Climate Extremes

Urban Geography: Why We Live Where We Do

Soil Erosion

Finland Might Have Solved Nuclear Power’s Biggest Problem

That title is an exaggeration, but at-least Finland has some kind of facility to handle nuclear waste. Is it safe? Sure! But: Is is save for long enough?

Climate Change = More Extremes

It's really not that complicated and here are two quick videos:

• We're making hurricanes stronger (54 seconds)
• Climate-Fueled Disasters (1:54 minutes)

OSS and OSH/OSHW

Here's a great paper and some of the associated resources - it's pretty cool what you can do nowadays with open-source software and hardware. That being said: I have seen too many crappy weather stations for one reason or another (see pic below) - making consistemt and high-quality environmental measurements is complex, especially in harsh environments.

• Chan et al. (2021): Low-cost electronic sensors for environmental research: Pitfalls and opportunities
• http://www.freestation.org/home
• King's College London Geocomputation on GitHub

Honest Government Ad | Carbon Capture and Storage

This is awesome: Honest Government Ad | Carbon Capture and Storage

Unlearning Racism in Geoscience (URGE)

Unlearning Racism in Geoscience (URGE) ran a 16-week program in the Spring of 2021 using a cool 'pod' idea where interested individuals and organization formed pods of 12 people to work-through each of the 8 two-week units. The program is obviously over, but the curriculum remains accessible and it would not be too difficult to modify & run this program 'stand-alone' and include other STEM fields such as Biology or Environmental Science.

• The URGE Curriculum
• Example of a deliverable (2YC URGE)

Laura Guertin shared her 'pod' experience over on her GeoEd Trek Blog.

Climate at a Glance

Climate at a Glance (from NOAA) is simple and effective: see the data as a table or chart, then DL for further analysis.

Fires & Smoke

Plenty of maps like that - this one now has the smoke forecast layer: https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/wildfire/#@=-96.003,32.304,4

Cattle & Palm Oil = Deforestation

Great article from NASA: Sizing Up How Agriculture Connects to Deforestation. In-general, deforestation in South America is driven by cattle pastures whereas deforestation in Southeast Asia is driven by palm oil production.

Urban Sprawl

Nice and simple web mapping by The Washington Post (a simple comparison between 2001 and 2019): Where America’s developed areas are growing: ‘Way off into the horizon’

Map Posters

Seen on Maps Mania: This app/tool allows you to create your own colorful map as a basic image file - great for playing around with 'mapping' without the need for a cumbersome GIS. Here the focus can be on exploring your own space & place in a more artistic manner.

This may be a great tool to use in a Physical Geography Lab as an entry to the idea that we can indeed quantify spatial relationships - but - we first need to have a connection to the space that we are trying to understand.

• Maposaic

2021 Fall Foliage Map

 Always useful: https://smokymountains.com/fall-foliage-map/

Introduction to Modern Statistics

 This may be a useful & free book / textbook: Introduction to Modern Statistics

Flawed Data

Let's just make sh$% up with AI:

https://xkcd.com/2494/

Ice Tools

Here are a bunch of resources for glacier modeling:

• https://cryo-tools.org/
• https://www.grss-ieee.org/publications/remote-sensing-code-library/
• https://vhub.org/groups/ghub
• https://github.com/awesome-cryosphere/cryosphere-links

The Science of Climate Change Explained: Facts, Evidence and Proof

The Science of Climate Change Explained: Facts, Evidence and Proof - Definite answers to the big questions by Julia Rosen for the NYT is great. The first 10 questions are 'narrow' science and the final 2 questions deal with impacts and solutions.

For whatever it's worth: I organized the topic into 21 Big Questions.

The Day the Dinosaurs Died

This is a great video of the so-called KT Boundary: The Day the Dinosaurs Died - a play-by-play account of what happend.

Degrees of Uncertainty

This video is well-worth watching: A Skeptical Look at Climate Science (esepecially the last 9 minutes or so. The choice of title here is unfortunate...it implies exactly the opposite as the filmaker intended.

Ice Cores and Climate Change

 

Misconception of the Month: Talking Climate Models with John Cook

Misconception of the Month: Talking Climate Models with John Cook is a great video, but the title is  little 'misleading': the video is not specifically about climate models, but rather about John Cook's FLICC approach to teaching about climate misconceptions.

Moviemaps

This is cool: Moviemaps

I suppose you could just do this with a screencasting app: open a map, photograph, etc. and gives your audience a guided tour as you narrate. This would be a great assessment tool for a planning or geography class!

Richard Little's YouTube Channel

Great stuff here about the local geology of the Connecticut River Valley: Richard Little's YouTube Channel. Here's an example:

 

What Does a GIS Manager Do?

Sheens Kennard's career pathways and experiences in What Does a GIS Manager Do? are probably not the most-typical, but the video is well-worth watching if you are at all interested in pursuing a GIS career.

Solar @ Scale

This is the scale of solar plants that we need to think about: Noor III in Morocco!

Poverty Maps

 Here are two interesting ways to map poverty:

• Which U.S. Counties Have the Most People Living in Poverty? is a classic choropleth map created in Tableau. Look, I like Tableau, but for mapping there are just better options.
• All metro high-poverty neighborhoods looks at change: which neighborhoods are newly poor, persistently poor, deepening poor, or turning around. This map is created in ArcGIS Online.

Really Small Stuff

This is fun: Cell Size and Scale

River Runner

River Runner is awesome: drop a raindrop anywhere in the contiguous USA and watch it flow downstream.

COVID-19 will never go away!

Five reasons why COVID herd immunity is probably impossible is a great article. Take-home message: we will probably have to learn to live with COVID-19 like we have learned to live with the flu. Bummer.

Florence Nightingale's Famous Rose Chart

 

How Geothermal Energy Could Power The Future

 

The Virtual Rock Kit

Quick and simple: The Virtual Rock Kit 

Making The Grade?

Making The Grade? is a report how state public school science standards address climate change and comes with neat data viz created in Tableau: States at a Glance

I'm just not sure that Tableau is the way to data viz this...if the spatial patterns are interesting, then use a proper GIS app!

The Layered Atmosphere

This photograph is awesome: Smoke in the Stratosphere

STEM Teaching & Open Pedagogy

Karen Cangialosi has some tools and ideas @ https://karencang.net/openped/

How Do Some Waves Get SO Big?

 

How sure are climate scientists? | Degrees of Uncertainty

 

Sections in MS PPT

I'm not using MS PPT all that much these days, but here's a nice example of why MS PPT is still better than Google Slides: How to Organize PowerPoint Slides with "Sections"

Forest Ecology & Superheroes

EarthPorn

EarthPorn is great (and safe): mapping-out awesome photographs of the world based on Reddit posts. Try the different options & design your next vacation!

High & Low

Here are some cool 360 deg immersive experiences:

• Climbing the Zugspitze
• Climbing El Cap
• Going deep into the Son Doong Cave

Do we Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change?

The World’s 25 Largest Lakes, Side by Side

The World’s 25 Largest Lakes, Side by Side is nothing special, but a great visualization. Looking at the shapes of these lakes...it would be great to a) take say all lakes in the USA, b) determine their shape (e.g. roundness, elongation, etc.), and c) correlate that to how they formed (e.g. geologic faults, glacial erosion, etc.) - I wonder if there would be patterns?

Make a Postcard from R

Total nerd-alert here, but fun: use the ggirl R package to turn your chart into a physical postcard that will be mailed to a fellow nerd. Awesome!

Qualitative Data Viz

Open-ended questions are always tricky to visualize, but Ann K. Emery has some good suggestions here: How to Visualize Qualitative Data with Colored Phrases

The AT in 3D

I have never quite understood the fascination with the AT...but here's a cool and fun interactive 3D 'map': https://pom-static-backpacker.s3.amazonaws.com/2020/The+River/app/index.html#

ArcGIS Quick Capture

ArcGIS Quick Capture is a fun app and allows for quick and simple field data collection, for example photographs.

Latitude / Longitude

There are many ways to figure-out the latitude and longitude for locations, but this one has to be one of the simplest: https://what-two-figures.glitch.me/

Mapping Climate Proxy Records

This is great: Mapped: How ‘proxy’ data reveals the climate of the Earth’s distant past. The interactive map is great, but also the background information. Obviously, this type of research is extremely important, after all: the past is the key to the future. That being said, nobody is really interested in this - people want to learn about the climate change impacts on their own lives. I used to include paleoclimatology as a significant part of my Climate Change course, but dropped it in-favor of exploring solutions in more depth.

The Bee!

 

The Data Journalism Handbook

The Data Journalism Handbook has been updated: buy the physical copy or get the PDF for free. Awesome.

Colors!

Great advice and discussion by Lisa Charlotte Rost from Datawrapper:

• How to pick more beautiful colors for your data visualizations
• Which color scale to use when visualizing data (4-part series)

Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet

Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet is an excellent new OER textbook about sustainable energy = the updated version of https://www.withouthotair.com/.

KartaView

KartaView is the open version of Google Street View - cool.

Let's Plant 1 Trillion Trees!

For context, consider: The Surprising Truth Behind Planting Trees and Climate Change and The surprising downsides to planting trillions of trees.

Bird Migration Forecast

The Bird migration forecast maps are cool and simple: just a daily static map. Nothing fancy or interactive that would add 'visual junk'. 

'Seeing' CO2

This is cool: https://extraordinaryfacility.com/co2/

Texas and Wind Turbines

No, the power outages in Texas were not caused by freezing-up wind turbines - that's a fact, not an opinion. This Fox News lie is a classic red herring: attacking wind turbines instead of what they really want to attack: Joe Biden's climate plan.

• The Insane Lies About The Texas Blackouts is a great video (9:52 minutes). Also check-out the rest of this YouTube channel.
• The Rise Of Wind Power In The U.S. (17:21 minutes) offers some great context.

Deforestation in Papua

Deforestation in Papua is a great example what can happen between 2002 and 2019.

Five questions for better data communications

This is a great post: Five questions for better data communications walks you through a data viz process.

 Here's a great quote: I slowly came to realize that I was assigning my audience the tedious task of figuring out for themselves what the takeaways were. My visuals should have been highlighting the interesting things to those seeing them for the first time.

High Tide Flooding

 Also called nuisance flooding or sunny-day flooding - one of the first and most-noticeable impacts of global warming and associated sea-level rise. The High Tide Flooding App is pretty slick and you can look at different high tide flooding probability scenarios through 2100.

The Gulfstream

Great animation by The New York Times of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic and how it may be impacted by melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet: In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers

RAWGraphs 2.0

Sounds like RAWGraphs got an update (awesome): https://rawgraphs.io/

All Colleges & Universities

The Complete Directory: U.S. Colleges & Universities is a pretty impressive interactive infographic with charts, maps, pop-ups, and more - all rendered in Tableau. And that may be the problem: Tableau is great, but I'm not sure it is suitable for such a large and complex data viz.

Arctic Fog

Arctic Fog is pretty neat: explore the NW or the NE Passage.

QGreenland

QGreenland is a free mapping tool to support interdisciplinary Greenland-focused research, teaching, decision making, and collaboration and combines key datasets into a unified, all-in-one GIS analysis and visualization environment for offline and online use.

NADIR or Oblique?

Earth at a Cute Angle (by Robert Simmon) includes some great examples of oblique satellite images and how they can be more useful (at-times) than the standard flat (or nadir) imagery.

A New Map Of The World

Cool, but useless: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/science/new-world-map.html

Northampton Main Street

Here's the link: https://arcg.is/1THTWm

It's Cold In Texas

 Here's Katharine Hayhoe: https://twitter.com/i/status/1363649141218271232 

Climate Change and Cold Air Outbreaks

Perserverance

Nice work NASA! You can track Perseverance's Location, explore the Jezero Crater, and of course look at https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/.

Fun!

An interactive 3D spinning Earth with a time-lapse of the seasons: https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/digital_twin_sandbox/

Commute Time Map

This one is pretty cool: public transport, car, bike, and walk for travel times up to 60 minutes and it computes pretty quickly: https://commutetimemap.com/map

ArcGIS Field Maps

ArcGIS Field Maps is the new mobile data collection app from Esri - basically replacing the old Collector app. It all seems to work just fine as one would expect, but unfortunately my iPhone is too old to run the app. Here are some resources:

• Try data collection in ArcGIS Field Maps (the full workflow)
• Create a map for data collection in Field Maps (this is a little tedious using feature layers)
• Configure maps for the field (this should be obvious: offline mapping and downloadable map areas)
• Take Your Web Maps Offline with ArcGIS Field Maps (detailed PDF)
• Introducing smart forms in ArcGIS Field Maps (seems cool)

The World Imagery Wayback App

The World Imagery Wayback App is not new, but a fun way to explore satellite images from around the world and the Swipe Mode is great for quick comparisons.

Desirable Streets

Desirable Streets is a cool project and data viz from the folks at the MIT Senseable City Lab: why and how do people walk longer distances as opposed to the most-direct routes?

Deaths from Nukes

An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2020 Election

An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2020 Election by the NYT shows the 2020 election results down to the precinct level - good to know who your neighbors voted for!

Flipgrid

So I tried Flipgrid and here are some thoughts.

• First, to make one, you need to surrender your Google or Microsoft account to Flipgrid. I guess that's okay, but I would preferred a separate account.
• You have to respond by recording a video and that requires you to surrender your Google or Microsoft account. Recording a video is fun and easy for many, but terrifying for others.
• You can then comment on a video by text or another video.

So, I'm not sold. Its cooler than just a Padlet, but the mandatory video part is problematic.

Farewell to the Arctic of Old

Mark Serreze on the Hazen Plateau ice caps!

Earthrise (Amanda Gorman)

 

IPCC: Worlds Apart

IPCC: Worlds Apart is a nice attempt at a scientific storytelling infographic data viz thing. But, it does not work: too much of everything, but at-least they did not also use interactivity.

UN-HABITAT Open Data

Great and overwhelming for urban indicators data: https://data.unhabitat.org/

The COVID-19 Dashboard

Pretty cool data viz: The COVID-19 Dashboard (by informationisbeautiful.net). I like the five side-by-side charts comparing different countries. Obviously, these are absolute values and therefore the larger countries should always stand-out.

The Teacher's Guide to Tech 2021

The Teacher's Guide to Tech 2021 is back and updated for 2021. A pretty good $25 investment, but really this is something that institutions should provide for their faculty. A couple of examples:

• Mote looks great: a Chrome extension to leave voice comments in Google Docs.
• Google Lens is just cool, but also useful for teaching: point it at text and the app will read it for you aloud.

Decolonizing Data Viz

Good article by Stephanie Evergreen: Decolonizing Data Viz. Read and then move-on to Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein.

The net-zero america project

The net-zero america project is basically Princeton's solutions project for clean energy buy 2050 (to go along with the proposals from UC Berkeley, Stanford, etc.). The details differ, but the two take-home messages are consistent:

1. This is possible.
2. This will require massive scaling-up of clean energy technology.

One aspect here that often goes underappreciated: all these plans basically involve much much more electricity and that will require a massive expansion of our electrical grid. Not just making it into a 'smart grid', but also increasing its capacity by 50 percent or more. And this will create social and environmental issues and damages.

For a critical article of this and other 'climate neutrality solutions take a look at Mediocrity Is The Enemy Of The Solution.

2020 = Hot

It's official now: 2020 tied with 2016 for the hottest year on-record (since 1880). This GIF is just great and shows that a) there is variability from year-to-year and b) that there is an overall warming trend as the annual cycle 'creeps-up' the y-axis.

Warming in your city

Well, at least if your city happens to be in Europe: EDJNet’s analysis looks at temperature data for more than 100,000 European municipalities in 35 countries. Mean values of the 1960s were compared with those of 2009-18, in order to explore the scale of global warming in each local community. Data is drawn from Copernicus and from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

Here's the map!

Making Vectors

 I'm not sure what to call these things, but they are pretty cool:

• City Roads renders every single road in a given city and you can export as a PNG or SVG. Or put it onto a coffee mug.
• City Railways is the same thing, but - you guessed it - for railways.
• Peak Map draws, well, peaks. Cool.

Virtual Mars

 These virtual 3D Mars are just cool: Explore with Curiosity and Access Mars.

CDC COVID Data Tracker

The CDC COVID Data Tracker has a lot of great data and data viz - nothing too fancy, but simple and effective. One thing to improve: add a dedicated tab for the data downloads.