The Writing Hat

A bill providing for safer speed limits on roads with high populations of vulnerable road users, and preserving free use of reserved lanes.

Notes from a 2022 Halloween project, as written up for work.

A linkdump of urbanism and urbanism-related things in Columbus

I'm a zoning committee chair, and an area commissioner.

tl;dr: Columbus needs to build a lot more housing, ASAP.

Where to follow me on Mastodon.

The math behind the headline assertion, and some other public records request data

I almost got run off the road while bicycling on one of Columbus' greenways. Here's a proposal to fix the problem, which I think Columbus might be able to do for half a million dollars.

Disk bindings make it very easy to move pages around, which helps keep Bullet Journaling notebooks organized, and reduces maintenance overhead.

My prediction and hope for 2019: news websites get easier to build, maintain, sustain, archive and read, while the tooling to do all that simplifies. It’s a big order.

"People are constituents for journalism"

A quick rumination on the reason for the deluge of privacy policy update emails.

How is your newsroom product changing in response to the GDPR? I'm working on an article for OpenNews Source, and would love to hear from you.

Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination. Jorge Luis Borges

The above quote seems to go well in hand with James Somers' article "The Scientific Paper is Obsolete":

To write a paper in a Mathematica notebook is to reveal your results and methods at the same time; the published paper and the work that begot it. Which shouldn’t just make it easier for readers to understand what you did—it should make it easier for them to replicate it (or not).

The Jupyter notebook, the Wolfram Mathematica notebook — these are not extensions of memory and imagination, but rather extensions of thought.

Ben Welsh's Five Commandments, and commentary thereupon

Talk notes from my talk at the Ohio State University Open Source Club meeting about NICAR 2018 and open source tools in news and journalism.

Update May 23, 2018: Google Analytics has been removed.

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I'm re-adding Google Analytics to this site. Why? Because I realized that I don't know how much traffic it gets, and because I wish to know what browser sizes you visitors are using.

Today I encountered an institution that refused to accept a PO Box as a legit address. "Send me a check," I said, and they replied, "we need your physical address to do so."

What started as a throwaway worldbuilding exercise while driving became a Twitter thread, and then got significantly longer.

The first draft of this post was written on a plane between Minneapolis and Chicago, on not enough hours of sleep. Then there were drafts, and WordCamp for Publishers, but most of the bones of this were laid down in the days immediately after SRCSourceCONCon. With that preface out of the way, this essay begins.

This blog post is about @looming_midterm, a bot that counts down the days to the next midterm election. You can find the code for this bot at benlk/looming_midterms.

Contained herein are talk notes and links to examples and demonstrations from my March 2017 talk at the Collegiate Web Developers Group at the Ohio State University about NPR's dailygraphics rig. I don't use the dailygraphics rig professionally, but I think it's a really cool tool that people at CWDG may be interested in.

I made a tiny little phone tree to make it easier for me to call my elected representatives. It's not backed by a database and it doesn't have a newsletter. There are no calls to action. The checkbox doesn't do anything. The page is only there to serve as a reminder to me.

But because it's mine, it'll be more effective.

How will you help yourself become more politically active?

A blog post about Rogue One (A Star Wars Story) and why I enjoyed it.

Ohio became the third state to have passed a "heartbeat bill" on Tuesday, banning most forms of abortion after 12 weeks. Ohio's bill includes an exception allowing for abortion to preserve the health of the mother, but critics say the bill's restriction is unconstitutional.

Notes on the 2016 Society for News Design conference.

This post is a long collection of tools, resources, and tips that I saw at NICAR 2016 or in conversations around it. There's also some links in here that are not from NICAR 2016, but seemed relevant. This blog post serves as lecture notes for my March 24, 2016 talk at the The Ohio State University Open Source Club

Information Doesn't Want to be Free by Cory Doctorow is the News Nerd Book Club pick for our March 2016 meetup at NICAR. Here's a Cliff's Notes version of the book, with annotations and questions for discussion.

Sometimes you need a license more esoteric than the WTFPL. This collection of strange software licenses should keep your project contributors preoccupied.

What does your organization do with its archives? What will it do with them when the org goes away? How does it handle migrations?

Ranked Situational Fury served two purposes: a chance to play with Tufte CSS and an opportunity to expand vocabularies. There are so many non-ableist words that are great for describing feelings about situations, and creating the list was a great way to break up Tufte CSS and see how it works.

After the break, find the slides (including resources links) and talk summaries from my September 2015 talks at Collegiate Web Developers Group at the Ohio State University.

The 2015 Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference was an amazing experience. I couldn't attend all the sessions of the multi-track conference, so this doesn't cover everything. This is a selected chunk of things that I found especially interesting.

Most 404 pages say something along the lines of "We can't find that. Sorry." Offering search is better, if people know what to search for. If you're coming from a shortened link, or didn't pay attention, you may not know what to search for. I tried to improve upon the old design of "We couldn't find what you were looking for, so please search for the thing you don't remember."

I run across lots of similar-looking news websites while doing research for my internship at the Progressive Dairyman magazine. A significant portion of these sites all seem to use the same template, with some color and menu changes. Turns out they're all owned by Gannett, so I asked mysef, "What does the average Gannett website look like?"

I moved to Twin Falls, Idaho at the start of August. I threw the photos up on Flickr a while back, but now seemed like a good time to post them with some sort of detail.

Twin Falls, Idaho, is my new home for the next five months while I work for Progressive Publishing, writing at the Progressive Dairyman website. I saw a population figure for Twin Falls that was close to that of Ohio State Univeristy's student populace, and figured that I should sit down and churn out a comparison.

Read my post on the INN News Nerds blog about the end of my news apps internship at Investigative News Network, including links to some of the projects I worked on.

The instructions for updating Adobe's Brackets editor, while simple, haven't yet published in an easily-Googled location.

Investigative News Network launched my first major project today: Responsive Table Generator.

In which I build a better tool than Google Fusion Tables' embedded visualization thing, and apply it to the problem of tracking mumps casts in Ohio.

I'm fooling around with CSS for an eventual update of this site, and for features like last week's germs post I'd like to do something more like Medium's post 'cover' images. This is some of the requisite code.

The walls are 13-inch-thick reinforced concrete. So is the ceiling. There are no windows. The steel vault doors are welded to the hinges, the hinges are welded to the door frames, and the frames are set in the concrete walls. The door closes with a lever and a *thunk*.

I'm proud to say that The Lantern won Best Website at the 2014 Ohio Newspaper Association Annual Convention. I coordinated setup of the site on Wordpress during my summer 2013 internship with The Lantern and Media Network of Central Ohio.

Read my article "Bedding choice second to dairy bedding management" in Progressive Dairyman. It's a webinar recap about cow bedding options.

I now have code in Automattic's Co-Authors Plus Wordpress plugin, as of version 3.0.7. It adds the ability to list coauthor email addresses in templates, and is used on The Lantern's website.

Most people I talk to don't know for sure whether or not they should remove snow from sidewalks on their property. Some say that you should, but it's not required. Others say that if you do and someone slips, then you're liable for their injury. For Columbus, Ohio, the truth is that you have to clear your sidewalks.

The annual Mirror Lake jump has been a wet, rowdy, alcoholic and cold celebration of Buckeye spirit. Students and alumni alike striped down to bathing suits in cold water and near-freezing air, while police and university officials looked on. This year's policy changes that.

Assault, zombies and muggers danced through my head this morning when I left work.

I'm working on a refresh of this site based on Butterick's Practical Typography Rules. It's a typography textbook designed for — and published on — the Internet.

I'm happy to say that Dropplets, the platform powering this blog, now contains code that I contributed. It's a very minor thing, but it adds the significant ability to style posts independently of each other.

Pacific Rim was over-the-top awesomeness. From an original-yet-familiar plot to stupendous visual effects, the film blew me away.

Photos from the zeroth and first day of my study abroad trip are now on Flickr.

At what point does a documentary stop being a documentary and cross over into advocacy, or drama? "Dirty Wars" was thought-provoking, but it blurred the lines between documentary and docudrama.

Photo, audio of Richard Stallman's visit and lecture at Ohio State in April 2013.

Here's what various experts say is the best way to find out when your eyes will see the glory of the shining of the sun-barf:

Cory Doctorow has finished his tour of the United States, promoting his newest novel, Homeland. After a couple of failed intercepts, Doctorow and I sat down on Friday, Feb. 22 at opposite ends of the telephone network to talk about Homeland, writing sequels, writing science fiction and the absurdity of Hollywood depictions of technology.

Google Fusion Tables exposes the information you put in it. This is a feature of the product, and one that The Journal News was apparently not aware of when they published the names and addresses of over 33,000 gun owners in New York.

Geotechnical drilling project contractor breaks gas line near natural gas regulator on Lane Avenue. Links to *The Lantern*.

Repairs to Mirror Lake and the surrounding areas will cost an estimated $24,600, said Student Life spokesman Dave Isaacs. The public safety presence will cost an estimated $21,735, said Administration and Planning spokeswoman Lindsay Komlanc.

Students were encouraged not to jump in an email sent by the university Monday morning. "The combination of cold weather, alcohol, wet clothing and the slippery lake bottom can lead to lots of bad things," vice president for Student Life Javaune Adams-Gaston wrote. "I promise that your Ohio State experience will not be diminished for missing this."

Some students disagreed, including fourth-years Jeff Michael and Tyler Stauch, who paddled a canoe in Mirror Lake for a few minutes at about 8:30 p.m., before police ordered them to remove it.

"We're all about Buckeye Nation and the tradition," said Stauch, a business major, standing next to his canoe, which had a sail emblazoned with a Block 'O' and the word "tradition."

A photo of Pomerene Hall's abandoned swimming pool.

In preparation for the planned North Residential District renovation at Ohio State, maintenance crews are inspecting the sewers.

Two weeks ago last Sunday (has it really been so long?), I got a tip from an OSU student that Taylor Tower on North Campus was losing water pressure, that students were being sent to the RPAC to get drinking water and showers. The office assistants at the front desk of Taylor said it was a water main break somewhere on South Campus. Editors said "go" and I went.

There's a lot of talk in the news sphere right now about Julian Assange being labeled a "enemy of the state".

The maintenance man for the dorm complex, Dave, was working on the roof. I climbed up the access ladder and stuck my head through the hatch. It was a hot day, but not unpleasant. Great views from up there, above the trees.

If a dead human were found at the Union, there'd be investigations, police, reporters and a general large amount of hullabaloo. Insects, on the other hand, are generally encouraged to die.

My most-recent piece for The Lantern reatured an interview with Nikhil Chopra, a performance artist. As part of his performance "inside out: As the stars viewed the Palace," Chopra didn't talk from Thursday, Aug. 23, to 4 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 26.

It’s the electronica band’s first album featuring collaborations with other artists, such as Mark Hoppus of Blink-182 and Carly Rae Jepsen, widely known for her song “Call Me Maybe.” The featured artists add some needed variety to frontman Adam Young’s vocals, but they can’t save the series of songs with metronome-like beats and muted tunes.

Read the whole article at The Lantern.

This is my first published article. I'm writing for the Arts and Entertainment section of Ohio State University's The Lantern this semester.

The solar eclipse on Sunday, May 18, 2012, will appear over Columbus as a partial eclipse beginning at 7:23 p.m. and continuing until after the sun sets.

Note, 2014: This post was an assignment for a college class, written in 2012. The assignment was to take a position on the future of agvocacy and blog about it. It does not reflect the modern state of agvocacy, and may no longer be accurate in any fashion. I now question some of my decisions when writing it.

A recent article on the Huffington Post website reflects the strange ways that new technology is influencing government, this time in courts.

NASA's projected 2012 budget will be an estimated $1.7 billion. For me, that's not enough. It's only 0.48% of the federal budget!

Click through for a Flash object without a transcript.

On the web, what is published can be removed from publication at its source, for example this YouTube video of JFK's assassination. It was a gory video, and therefore someone reported it to YouTube as unnecessarily violent. YouTube deemed the video to be in violation of YouTube's policies regarding violence, and the video was subsequently pulled from YouTube.

We have the technology to take archived video and enhance it, to make details more apparent than they were in the original. Necessarily, the emotional impact is increased.

Today, I downloaded a book for free, but it wasn't in the format I wanted, so I transcoded it. In that sentence lies the future of the news media.

Students met with architects hired by Ohio State on Jan. 24 to discuss potential additions to North Campus facilities.

Voldemort was killed Tuesday in a battle with Harry Potter. During Voldemort's siege of Hogwarts, Harry Potter surrendered to Voldemort's forces in the Forbidden Forest and was killed. Through unknown means, the Boy Who Lived survived death a second time and returned to Hogwarts, where he killed Vodemort in a duel.