Least Significant Nibble

This is part of a series covering how to create reusable Carto map components. Read the introduction to learn why one would even want to do such a thing. Read the previous installment, Carto Map Factory , to learn about adding a Carto map to a webpage and registering the map with the Angular dependency injector. In this post, we will discuss how to add custom zoom buttons to the map. What are directives? We will implement our custom zoom buttons by encapsulating them in an Angular directive. Directives are a technique for packaging up bundles of HTML content and JavaScript code. Once a directive has been registered in your Angular module, it can be interpolated into the HTML of your web page, most commonly as an HTML element or as an attribute on a standard element. A good use case for directives is a text field with a date picker. The date picker should pop up a window with a navigable calendar, allow the user to browse through the calendar to find the date they want, and then sa...

This is part of a series covering how to create reusable Carto map components. Read the introduction to learn why one would even want to do such a thing. In this post, we will discuss how to add a Carto map to a website and how to register the map with Angular so that our Angular components can manipulate the map display. Reference the scripts Before jumping into your new Carto map, you will first need to make sure that your web page has references to the Carto and Angular javascript libraries. In order for the map to tile correctly, you will also have to reference Carto’s standard stylesheet. Sizing web page and containers If you’re looking for an immersive map that takes up the entire web page, you will need to make sure that the html and body elements and the map container are all styled to fill all space available to them. My preferred method is to define a site-wide style implementing those requirements, including a carto-map-container CSS class that can be ...

If you work with geospatial data and haven't had a chance to work with Carto , you are missing out. Carto is a platform for creating interactive geospatial visualizations on the web. The canned maps that you can build from the web-based designer are surprisingly powerful, especially if you are already familiar with SQL and CSS . If you are a proficient web programmer, you can use their JavaScript API to customize your map in virtually any way you can imagine. Carto hits a sweet spot of simplicity and flexibility that suits me nicely. I work on a team whose job is to help our clients make sense of data. The efficiency with which we can produce Carto web applications frees up our time to add value in other areas. As great as Carto is, one problem that is becoming more pressing is that we're making a lot of the same maps on different data sets. Consequently, we're starting to do a lot of copy-and-paste code reuse . Over the next year, we will be refactoring essential map f...

You will never get read without an eye-grabbing headline. My beef with Schema arose while working through a set of programming problems that are published online. I was interested in using those problems to familiarize myself with the idioms of Scheme and Haskell , with which I am less familiar. The exercise in question asks for the sum of all Fibonacci numbers that do not exceed 10000 and are divisible by 2. For the purposes of this post, the Fibonacci sequence is defined by a recurrence relation: \[ \begin{align} F(0) &= 0 \\ F(1) &= 1 \\ F(n) &= F(n - 2) + F(n - 1). \\ \end{align} \] In an imperative language such as C , this problem can be solved with a program similar to the following one. The logic of this program mimics how a person might solve the problem with a pencil, paper, and a pocket calculator: it keeps a running total of the even Fibonacci numbers as they are computed. This is the kind of code I could write in my sleep, which is why I am interested in ...

Survey data is well known to be an imperfect measure of the truth. The many pitfalls of survey data mean that the numbers must be taken with some healthy skepticism. Evidence-free assertions that black people are three times more dishonest than white people in answering surveys about drug use do not a healthy skepticism make. @voxdotcom These figures based on self-reported drug use are notoriously unreliable. I thought it was your job to report "context"? — Billy Chav (@billy_chav) February 5, 2015

I was biking South down Ladd towards the stoplight at Division, when I heard the Suburban behind me pull around to try a pass. I was going at 25 mph, and there was another car that had just turned off of Division and was heading North in the opposing lane. Once I saw that there was oncoming traffic, I knew there was no way the Suburban could make the pass without causing a head-on collision. But he made the pass anyway! The other car had to slam on their brakes; the right taillight of the Suburban passed a foot from my handlebars. The stoplight at Division was red, so I caught him seconds after he passed me. I tapped on his window and said that he had passed too close. He had given me only a foot, and the minimum passing distance is my fall height (6 ft). He said that he had been "completely in the other lane," and that I should ride further over. Again, I was riding 25 mph--the speed limit--and had I been riding any further over I would have risked getting do...

About 8 years ago, I remarked to my eye doctor that maybe Alan Dershowitz's torture warrant idea wasn't such a bad one if the alternative was no accountability at all. Apparently he thought Dershowitz was an America-hating bleeding heart liberal, though, because he launched into a rant about how the CIA isn't stupid, they know that torture can produce unreliable information, and they always verify torture intelligence against other information gathered. (Other highlights: the ticking bomb scenario proves that using torture to gather intelligence is always justified; we don't know what is going on, so therefore no one should oppose it.) Now that we have the Senate report, we know that my eye doctor was hopelessly naive. The CIA did indeed take intelligence gathered under torture as gospel, sometimes to disastrous ends—nearly letting bin Laden's driver get away, torturing innocent people whose names were given up under torture, etc. I guess I shouldn't be surpri...