Just over a year ago, Mayor Bloomberg announced a redesign of NYC.gov, the official website of the government of New York City. When I learned of the announcement, I visited and clicked around. It’s an impressive site filled with helpful tools, incredibly useful resources, and history. Not all of the pages are pretty, but I appreciated that they were all under the same NYC.gov roof. One city, one domain^1.

San Francisco is a bit different. We have a lot of domains. After the launch of the redesigned NYC.gov, I emailed the SF Department of Technology and they shared their list of 45 domains. I kept looking and found another 35.

In sharing this list, I’m hoping someone will make something awesome with it. I’ve shared this list on GitHub here.

If you find more, let me know and I’ll add them.

Active

alertsf.org // AlertSF

ccsf.edu // City College of San Francisco

centralsubwaysf.com //...

I was saddened to hear the news of his passing yesterday. I had the privilege of meeting him in Berkeley in the summer of 2011. He was kind, soft-spoken, and I thought he looked like Zeno of Citium.

Photo credits to Shakko and Petr Novák, respectively.

The New York Times obituary is here. The San Francisco Chronicle’s is here.

Rest in peace, Les Blank.

A Google search for “global warming” on the websites of President Obama and Mitt Romney on the day of the 2012 presidential election:

site:barackobama.com “global warming” = 3,630 results

site:mittromney.com “global warming” = 4 results

My friend Christine recently posted a tweet on the topic of SMS usage in a post-SMS, iMessage/ WhatsApp/Weixin/GroupMe world. Curious how the launch of iMessage affected my own SMS use, I pulled my SMS messaging history dating back to May 2011. Apple launched iMessage on October 12, 2011 with the release of iOS 5, so this data set includes SMS usage for the 5.5 months preceding launch and 10.5 months since. Below are the data, which show the total number of SMS messages I’ve sent and received each day. Note: these data include SMS messages only, and not iMessages [1].

Before iMessage, I sent or received 12,906 SMS messages over 164 days, which equates to a mean of 78.7 SMS messages per day.

After iMessage, I sent or received 7,762 SMS messages over 327 days, which equates to a mean of 23.7 SMS messages per day.

That corresponds to a decline of 70% in my SMS usage. Of course, the...

“History repeats itself, nothin’ new.”

– Tupac, Black Jesus

I recently rediscovered “Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond”, an article first published in the February 1982 issue of The Atlantic on De Beers and the diamond trade [1]. In the article, author Edward Jay Epstein describes how De Beers grew to become a large, multinational corporation seemingly in tight control over both the supply of and – with the help of N. W. Ayer, America’s oldest advertising agency – demand for diamonds. The entire piece is fascinating, timeless, and I highly recommend it.

One portion of the article caught my eye in particular. Near the end of the piece, Epstein describes how the diamond market approached the brink of collapse, nearly taking Israeli banks with it. What struck me was the similarity to the story we’ve come to know all too well – the American subprime mortgage crisis of the late...