The New York Times newspaper publishes, every day, a file showing COVID-19 cases and fatalities for each county in the USA. They put their file on github here for anyone to use. So, let’s use it. Let’s download it and learn a few things about using SQL to explore data as we dig into it. Their file is called us-counties.csv.… Read more →
Donald J. T***** will you please go now!
With credit to Dr. Seuss and newspaper columnist Art Buchwald: The time has come. The time has come. The time is now. Just go. Go. GO! I don’t care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Donald J. T****, will you please go now! You can go on skates. You can go on skis. You can… Read more →
Choropleths: color-coded maps showing data by state or other geography
A Choropleth is a colored map, typically showing information gathered by some kind of census. A well-known example is the New York Times’s COVID-19 map. Let’s say you have some data that’s coded by geographic area. For example, you might have a table showing the number of COVID cases per 100,000 people county by county in Massachusetts. It might look like… Read more →
From around the ‘toobz: articles marking the 50th anniversary of Friedman’s article
Milton Friedman wrote an article called “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits” fifty years ago. It is here. Here are some articles marking that anniversary, for reference. Some of them challenge the status quo Friedman established back then. Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times Tom Poldre, B Lab UK Article about the Business Roundtable’s challenge to… Read more →
Half a century of this is enough: Friedman’s piece saying business must be irresponsible
Fifty years ago come this Sunday, on September 13, 1970, Milton Friedman (a professor of economics at The University of Chicago) published a piece in the New York Times called “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits.” Invoking the socialist bogeyman, he argues that businesses should focus only on increasing their profits. Fifty years on, this has… Read more →
Conceived in bigotry and dedicated to the proposition that my tribe is holier than thine
“Conceived in bigotry and dedicated to the proposition that my tribe is holier than thine”. With deep apologies to President Lincoln, I fear this describes the practice of Christianity among White americans in the twenty-first century. It’s really painful to admit this. What is going on? Recently I visited a man wearing a T-shirt that said “Jesus is my savior.… Read more →
Safari web extensions compatible with the rest of the world
About time! Apple announced in Safari 14, Web Extensions will be compatible with those used by Chromium and Firefox. They’ve bravely added a tool to XCode to help people convert their old Safari extensions to the what they call the new format. Most people probably won’t find that useful, having converted their Chromium extensions to work on Safari in the… Read more →
getDisplayMedia vs. getUserMedia
I’ve been messing around with the browser API navigator.mediaDevices.getDisplayMedia(). The question I hoped to answer: can I capture the content in some computer display surface and push it through the same sorts of process that I use with .getUserMedia()? I tested on Google Chrome 84. Answer: yes. It has some quirks. It doesn’t need, and indeed rejects, elaborate constraints. {… Read more →
Flood Maps Miss Risk Factors
The US Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA’s) national flood insurance program has a non-governmental competitor. Here’s a Times piece about a Brooklyn-based non-governmental outfit called First Street Foundation. They’ve put together an online address lookup scheme called Flood Factor that returns a risk of flood at a property. They claim that FEMA’s rating system, based on Flood Insurance Rate Maps… Read more →
Bar codes (QR Codes) for web sites
I was really getting tired of the Wookiee look. So, I called the barber who usually takes care of that for me. She said they don’t allow walk-in customers because of the pandemic, and proceeded to read me a long URL over the phone to make an appointment. Generally I’m a geek and a Mr. Fixit, so I made her… Read more →
