Furusato — the hometown of our dreams — There is an aspect to Japanese culture that I’ve come to appreciate in recent years that is nicely encapsulated by the word furusato. It’s a word that is both easy to pronounce and simple to translate, yet steeped in meaning. The simplest possible translation of furusato is “old hometown”, but…

Vacant home prices are astonishingly cheap — I’ve just returned from a two week research trip to Okayama prefecture. The purpose of my trip was to scout the area to find a suitable place to call home. If all goes as planned, I will enjoy my retirement years there, leaving America and saying goodbye to the San…

Japan’s secret gem is hiding in the land of sunshine — Recently, I’ve been looking for a good place in Japan to call home. Someplace away from the urban crowds, while not being isolated. Someplace that’s not too disaster-prone. Someplace rooted in the simpler life of the country’s traditional culture. Okayama prefecture is looking like a pretty good fit. Several people…

An allegorical tale of a not-so-civil war — “Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.” The podcast began with the alarm spelled out like an SOS distress signal. The two sides had been skirmishing for a long time before hostilities reached a fever pitch. What started out as a simple matter of taste, had become a serious dispute, with accusations and bitter…

Importmap offers fresh opportunities for code organization — JavaScript's module system underwent a revolution in 2015 with the standardization of the import and export keywords. But until now, the import process has been hampered by the single trunkline rule for relative pathnames. The long-awaited importmap tag provides the necessary flexibility to free developers from this restraint. Until recently…

How to use lineCap, lineJoin, setLineDash, lineDashOffset & miterLimit — Cartography might easily be considered the world’s most mature form of data visualization. Over the centuries, mapmakers have created and refined a sophisticated vocabulary of lines and symbols that convey relationships between objects and places. We can learn from their efforts. From blobs of blue, to “x” marks the spot…

How an experimental technology can save the day — For a while now, I’ve been developing a browser-based Earth mapping system using JavaScript and HTML canvas. One of the key challenges of this work has been keeping the user interface responsive while projecting 3D latitudes/longitudes onto a 2D canvas. …

The unlikely trio MUST, SHOULD, and MAY in internet standards — In March of 1997, Scott Bradner penned a short memo titled “Key Words For Use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels”. It is more commonly referred to as simply RFC 2119. The entire document fits comfortably on two pages of paper. That memo would go on to become the single…

There's an orthographic projection of Earth at https://simply.earth that tries to handle distortions in a different way -- by allowing the user to change the viewing angle using the mouse. Orthographic projects have the property that the area of least distortion is always at the very center of the map. By exploring the Earth this way we can more readily determine the relative size of things. Great article, thanks for sharing those gorgeous historical maps. I love them.