Who wants to buy a house?

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From the good people at Curbed comes an article about the last four luxury apartment towers to be built in Los Angeles (well, until residential real estate goes through its current bust and comes back to an inevitable boom).

Anybody have a few extra (million) dollars lying around?

Maybe You Should Move to El Paso

My sister, bless her little heart, knows that I really like maps. Especially Google Maps. So when she sent me a link today about an interesting Google Map mashup I was understandably excited. The link she sent, from a company named PSFK who's about section says this:

PSFK is a trends and innovation company that publishes a daily news site, provides trends research and innovation consultancy and hosts idea-generating events. We aim to inspire our readers, our clients and our guests to make things better - whether that’s better marketing, better lives or a better world.

This mission statement nonsense aside, what I thought was interesting was that PSFK titled the page "Google Map: When Will Recession End Locally?" The reason I find this interesting is that when you look at the map on it's original site from the Sacramento Bee, it's not really about when the recession will end per se, rather it is a visual representation of when a certain organization (IHS Global Insight, a "leading economic forecaster") thinks that different areas will return to pre-recession employment levels. Whew.




All this got me thinking about how different people have different ways of measuring what exactly constitutes a recession (or a depression for that matter), how to determine when a recession starts or ends, and how exactly does it affect day to day lives of people. I think we can all agree that employment is a part but is it the only part? I would say no. Then again, I'm 100% unqualified to make any kind of economic arguments. For a good place to read about the economy and finance I would definitely point you to the blog Calculated Risk. They even have a recent post detailing which states are currently in a recession. The answer? Basically everywhere except North Dakota. Maybe we should all move to Fargo instead of El Paso? I doubt we should move to Youngstown, OH or Elkhart, IN though.

NYC Metro Cuff

From Tiffany Burnett (ht notcot), a New York City Metro Map wrist cuff. Map Jewelry! Somewhat cooler than my London Tube T-shirt that my sister wouldn't let me wear until we left London.

Baseball Trip 2009

Hey kids it's been awhile since my last post. I finished a GIS class and worked on a pretty cool Google Map project (which is not quite ready for prime-time but I hope to get version 0.1 up running at some point in the next couple months). I also went on a 5-stadium, 1300 mile baseball roadtrip through America's Rust Belt and Ontario. Good times!


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ComputerLove - Google Maps Typography

Fortunately for me my sister is awesome. Not only is she a talented artist (one of the websites that she designed the artwork for was recently highlighted in the Huffington Post), but she also finds time in her busy day to forward me cool links like this collection of photographs gleaned from Google Maps.

The prior link is a collection of pictures were found on Google Maps that resemble the letters A-Z. Some are man made, some natural. Pretty cool.