F

Notebook

Here's where we post periodic updates on what we've been up to at Fathom. Reflections on the interesting stories that emerge from our client work, side projects, after-hours rabbitholes, and other miscellaneous threads of inquiry.

You can also follow these posts as a feed in your feed reader.

Ben on Slate's “Top Right” list
A few weeks ago, Slate launched "Top Right", a project "to identify the Americans who best share Edison's dual talents for inventiveness and practical thinking."
Read more →
How special is special?
What does it mean to be one in ten thousand? If this was the incidence of, say, blue skin — am I likely to encounter a blue person in my lifetime? Would it happen once? Many times?
Read more →
It's Rag Time!
What’s better than typography and ragtime music? A typography game and ragtime music.
Read more →
Mail room
Scenes from the Fathom studio mailroom as we process our first batch of orders for the All Streets poster. Head over and grab yours while they last!
Read more →
All Streets now available as a print
After two (three?) years of receiving requests for prints of the All Streets project, we're finally making them available. In the course of preparing the project for an exhibition, I recreated the piece using more consistent data (updated TIGER/Line shape files from 2009), and, with Chris's help, wrote software to create tiles that could be reassembled into one very high-resolution image. (Most software isn't fond of images more than 30,000 pixels wide, so this part was tricky.)
Read more →
Katy steals the keys
Katy always tries to steal the key to the third floor. How to stop her? With a key ring that's too big to fit in anybody's pocket of course!
Read more →
If you're passing by 214 Cambridge Street...
Look up!
Read more →
Lunch with Sam Arbesman
Scientist and science writer Sam Arbesman just paid a visit and showed us his research on how and where innovation occurs. Sam draws from theories of scalability of cities, social network data, and experiments in cooperation to see how the number and quality of human connections affect innovation.
Read more →
How Power Happens
Last week a small Fathom delegation ventured to Washington, DC, for the Health Data Initiative Forum. More on that shortly.
Read more →
Surviving the Winter
It’s almost summer! For the casual gardener, that means you probably want to get your new plants in the ground before it gets too hot. To avoid the extra effort of replanting every year, lazy gardeners like myself prefer perennials, since they can survive the winter and bloom without any help from me come the spring. Of course, not all plants thrive everywhere, so the first step in finding out whether a plant will survive the winter is to check its USDA Hardiness Zone. This is an indicator of how cold the weather can get before killing the plant.
Read more →