Hi Friends!
Summer is here in full force in Los Angeles (I know this because my 1920s apartment doesn’t have central air!). I just got back from an extended vacation on the East Coast which was preceded by an intense month-long sprint at work where I delivered a pretty complicated build-a-box feature for one of our clients (you can check it out here, I’m very proud of it).
Following Nate Kadlac’s advice on including illustrations to spruce up my newsletters, I’ve included (below) a recent drawing I did of Pier 3 in Philadelphia (one of the stops on my trip). This ended up taking me more time than I would have liked, and I realized that doing “landscapes” is a slippery slope because I can fall into the trap of trying to include too much detail. But I’m pretty happy with how it turned out regardless.
I’m constantly trying to evolve the format of my newsletters. For the curation portion of the emails I’ve already have been focusing on data visualizations and inspiring art/illustrations, more recently I’ve been thinking of updating them to also touch on other topics that are important/of-interest to me — this will include: sustainability, tech being used for good (ie. In a way that benefits people, versus distracting or pacifying them).
As someone who is a proponent of using the internet to find your tribe, I’m especially excited to share the app that Devon Zuegel just released, called Small World (which uses the location from your Twitter profile to find nearby friends).
It’s already leading to IRL meetups!
I’m in Denver this week for a conference and used @devonzuegel’s http://smallworld.kiwi tool to see which of my Twitter friends live here. @Mar15sa and I just had lunch and it was lovely! The internet is cool, but even cooler when it leads to friends IRL 🥰. - @SimoneStolzoff
Earlier this year Snapchat launched a new augmented reality lens to encourage its users to learn ASL. I’m here for any technology that improves the lives of anyone with a disability, and I’ve written about how modern technology can be used as a medium that helps people learn through engagement and interactivity.
Earlier this month Apple hosted its annual World Wide Developers Conference and announced some useful upcoming features for increasingly powerful pocket computers:
I have my qualms with Elon Musk, but there is no doubt that he is a visionary whose technological pursuits will inevitably shape (and hopefully positively impact) the future of humanity. Recently, his company SpaceX’s Starlink terminals have been sent to Ukrainians as a way to provide internet in war-torn areas of the country that had otherwise lost access to the outside world.
It will be interesting to see if the war in Ukraine further expedites the renewable energy future as more European countries contemplate decreasing/banning Russian oil/natural gas.
Hopefully, Russia’s retaliatory cut-off of gas flows to Austria, Germany and the Netherlands don’t resort to restarting coal-fired plants to help tackle energy shortages.
There is a lot to dissect in this visualization — essentially, the x-axis is a measure of how much the various food-production-activities can lower the global temperature over the next century.
The two that stood out for me were:
Via: Our World in Data
With the unfortunate news of Roe vs. Wade being overturned today, I thought it was rather fitting to remind everyone about the downstream effects of lack of participation in our democratic system. Two-thirds of eligible voters don’t vote. Donald Trump appointed two supreme court justices during his time in office. And those justices don’t have term limits.
Via: @ToyGalaxyDan
Until next time!
P.S. You can respond to this email, I read every reply. I would love to hear from you!