Peering into the Heart of Darkness / / No Comments This week the European Space Agency released the first full-color images from the Euclid telescope. Euclid is a space telescope (situated in a halo orbit at an average distance of 1.5 million kilometers beyond Earth’s orbit) which has been tasked to explore dark energy and dark matter. The telescope is capturing highly detailed astronomical images across a large area of the sky. The first five Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Darkness, heart, into, Peering
Can GenAI help you win in Vegas? / / No Comments No. Thank you and goodbye. Ok, first off, I apologize for the click-bait style title. Every now and then when I get an idea for a demo, it doesn’t work. But sometimes, it doesn’t work out in a fun and interesting way, and I figure it’s a good idea to share it anyway. (Also, there’s always the strong chance that it didn’t work out because I did something wrong!) Today’s demo is a perfect example of that I think. Earlier this year I built a Blackjack game using Alpine.js and the quite excellent Deck of Cards API. Yesterday I was thinking about the game and I wondered – what would happen if I used generative AI to ask for help when playing it? So for example,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: GenAI, help, Vegas
The Interactive Pathfinding Map / / No Comments The Pathfinding Visualizer is an interactive pathfinding tool that allows you to discover the most direct route between any two points in the world, using a number of different pathfinding algorithms. A map pathfinding algorithm is a way to find the shortest or most efficient route between different points on a map. It helps you find the best path to go from one location to another, considering Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Interactive, Pathfinding
Creating Human-Readable Summaries of Data with Google PaLM Generative AI / / No Comments Like a lot of folks, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about generative AI, and AI, in general, and oddly (well for me), trying to focus on productive uses for it when working with APIs. A few weeks ago I shared my initial impressions of Google’s PaLM 2 API, and today I came up with an interesting use case for it. I’ve seen text summarization as a fairly common use case for gen AI, and I agree, it can be incredibly helpful when working with lots of text. However, I got to thinking today, would it be possible to use this as a way to summarize numerical, or other data? So given some process that returns a set of information, can we use gen AI to summarize it? Here’s... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: creating, data, Generative, Google, HumanReadable, palm, Summaries
A Map of the World That Is Gone / / No Comments When Elan Ullendorff moved to South Philadelphia this summer he realized that he knew very little about the recent history of his new neighborhood. So he decided to change that. The result is Love Letters to Places I’ll Never Meet, an interactive map which summons up the recent past of South Philadelphia by creating an interactive map of some now shuttered stores. To create his love letter to Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: gone, World
Mapping the Oct 7 Hamas Attacks / / No Comments Over the last three weeks news organizations around the world have produced many maps in their efforts to help explain the 2023 Israel-Hamas war. Many of these have been curated in the Data Vis Dispatch. Unfortunately the paywalls of many of the major news websites make a lot of these maps inaccessible to many.The current attacks on the Palestinian people by Israel are in response to the events Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: attacks, Hamas, Mapping
Building a Generic RSS Parser Service with Cloudflare Workers / / No Comments About once every three months I’ll write a quick JavaScript demo and attempt to fetch someone’s RSS feed… and then remember that the vast majority of RSS feeds don’t specify a CORS header to allow remote scripts to load them. I know this – and yet I still tend to forget. I thought it would be kind of fun to build a serverless API via Cloudflare Workers to handle loading, parsing, and returning a RSS feed with CORS allowed. I figured this would be pretty easy, but I ran into a snag right away. Workers and NPM Modules # Cloudflare Workers is Node.js compatible… with some issues. Cloudflare has a documentation page on it addressing what you may run into, and for... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: building, Cloudflare, Generic, Parser, service, workers
Why the Spanish Like Vertical Living / / No Comments Spaniards like living in apartments. In fact Spain has one of the highest percentages of apartment dwellers in the world. Only in South Korea do more people live in collective dwellings. There are historical reasons why so many Spaniards live in apartment buildings. You can learn more about the historical causes of Spain’s vertical living in El Diario’s story map Spain lives in flats: why we Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: like, Living, Spanish, Vertical