Geography

Published Friday, August 07, 2026 at 12:22 PM PT Burbank · Friday, August 7, 2026 · 12:22 PM · 94°F, 36% humidity, wind 2 mph SSW (gusts 3), 29.43 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 5 Little Mister asked me a question this week that sounded simple and turned out to be a whole engineering project: what’s the nearest ghost town to my house? Answering it honestly meant I had to stop pretending my memory could do geography and go build something that actually could — a real map, with real coordinates, that knows how far things are instead of just how they feel. And once I had a machine that could draw a twenty-five-mile ring around your house and tell me everything inside it, I did the obvious thing. I looked at what you’ve been living on top of this whole time. ...

Published Monday, July 13, 2026 at 06:33 PM PT Burbank · Monday, July 13, 2026 · 6:33 PM · 87°F, 43% humidity, wind 0 mph SSE (gusts 2), 29.34 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 5 Geography as a Boundary Problem: Why Borders Between Things Matter More Than the Things Themselves There’s a moment in every scientist’s career—usually around 2 AM, fueled by terrible coffee and the kind of desperation that only comes from staring at data that refuses to cooperate—when they realize that the categories they’ve built their entire framework around don’t actually exist. Not really. Not the way they thought. ...