When the US-Mexico border slammed shut at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I worried whether the small border town of Los Algodones would be able to survive just a brief closure. Little did I know at the time that the border closure would last for nearly two years. I’ll […]
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Well, I managed to time my last COVID update so that it was published the day South Africa announced it had discovered the heavily mutated omicron variant. Does omicron change anything from that update? A little bit, sure. However, those end-of-the-world omicron outlooks you see online and in the media […]
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As the COVID-19 pandemic grinds on towards its two-year anniversary, we’re all wondering when it will finally end. As vaccines fully rolled out to the general public last spring, the United States managed to get new case loads below 10,000 per day. But then the Delta Variant came along. Just […]
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Post-COVID travel. It’s a phrase we’ve all been waiting 20 months to finally say. As we cautiously emerge from under its shadow, the pandemic has done funny things to warp our sense of time. On one hand, my final pre-COVID adventure across Mexico, the US, and Canada feels like it […]
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Back in August, we made our official forecast for when the current Delta wave of COVID-19 will peak in the United States. Since we are now past the window in which we forecast the peak to occur, a lot of you are wondering if the current delta wave has actually […]
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Well, that didn’t last long. Our COVID-free summer lasted all of about six weeks. Thanks to the highly contagious Delta variant that first surfaced in India last winter, COVID-19 has come roaring back in the United States. In less than a month, the Delta spike has already surpassed all of […]
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In August, 2019, I made my final border crossing on an incredible road trip across Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Crossing from Stanstead, Québec to Derby Line, Vermont went so quickly and smoothly it was nothing more than an afterthought. My focus was on making it to the Haskell […]
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The spread of disinformation and fake news seems like it’s about as American as apple pie these days. As a data scientist, it’s beyond horrifying watching so much disinformation rip through every facet of our society like wildfire. Sure, you grow to expect it from the idiots on the internet. […]
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Several weeks ago, you learned how to create stunning maps without a GIS program. You created a map of a hurricane’s cone of uncertainty using Python’s GeoPandas library and an ESRI Shapefile. Then you created a map of major tornadoes to strike various parts of the United States during the […]
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As I sit down to write this, it’s dawning on me that this article would have been much more appropriate in May, 2020 instead of May, 2021, but I digress. Even though the world is starting to open back up, it will still be a while before we can travel […]
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Nearly 15 months ago, we made the painful, but necessary decision to indefinitely suspend all travel operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But I remember the 10th of March, 2020 like it was yesterday. Just two weeks earlier, I had returned from what would be my final pre-pandemic photography trip […]
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At least a few times every year, I like to pause, look back at the past six to twelve months, and reflect. What have you accomplished? Is there anything that you wanted to accomplish, but didn’t? If so, why not? What went wrong during that time period? And most importantly, […]
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