Blog AF

Everything is weird. In these strange times, I hope you’re holding up, staying healthy, coping, taking care of your loved ones, and trashing every single email that opens with any of the phrases above.

I have been mostly locked up in my apartment, occassionally going up on our rooftop, and taking my camera out almost every time I leave the building. At the top of my list of dumb purchases was a 2x extender for my camera, which effectively turns my zoom lens into a 140-400mm f8.0. It’s pretty ridiculous. More...

Back in November, when we could still go outside and interact with other people, a new trail opened in San Francisco: The Crosstown Trail, a 17 mile hike in the middle of the city hitting a bunch of neighborhoods and local businesses, climbing to many lookout points, and cutting through multiple parks, large and small. It wasn’t hard to convince our friends to hike it. More...

In Rayuela (English: Hopscotch), Julio Cortázar plays with structure and subjectivity in ways that no other writer I know of does. The novel, which the author insists in calling a _counter-novel,_forces the reader to be an active participant, not just by picking the order in which to tackle the book’s chapters, but also by deciding whether or not to skip those labeled “expendable.” Continue reading...

A couple of weeks ago, after seeing the first version of John Burn-Murdoch and co.’s Coronavirus data visualizations on the Financial Times, I decided that someone had to run the equivalent analysis aggregating at the state level for the US. Some searching led me to The COVID Tracking Project, a project by two journalists at The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal, which broke out the data exactly as I’d needed, and offered an easy to use API. After noodling around in a Jupyter notebook for a bit, I came up with this Continue reading...