January 2015
Nobody lives there
According to recent census data, 47 percent of the United States’ territory is uninhabited.
A Block is the smallest area unit used by the U.S. Census Bureau for tabulating statistics. As of the 2010 census, the United States consists of 11,078,300 Census Blocks. Of them, 4,871,270 blocks totaling 4.61 million square kilometers were reported to have no population living inside them. Despite having a population of more than 310 million people, 47 percent of the USA remains unoccupied.</blockquote>
Maternal stress relief
My wife shared this image with me the other day, which shows how having more kids can actually give you fewer things to worry about. One or two kids more and she will be completely worry free.
Mixed messages
One of my credit card providers sent me an email this morning promoting some of the ways I can use my membership rewards points.
Here’s a screenshot from the email:
Through You (Too) is my jam
The albums Through You and Through You Too are incredible works of remix art. The two albums consist of video songs made up of clips from unrelated YouTube videos. Somehow Kutiman–the man behind the music–manages to bring the seemingly random videos into coherent original songs that have enough of a unified sound to go together on an album.
The YouTube clips Kutiman used in his songs come from guitar instructors demonstrating riffs in their basements, members of a brass ensemble rehearsing in a hallway, a kid’s recording of her piano lessons, a high school string quartet practicing in a kitchen, lots of teenagers singing a capella into their computers’ web cams, and many other sources. Kutiman even made the intro video for Through You Too by combining clips of other people talking.
The Pillars of Creation
The Hubble Telescope, which launched 25 years ago, recently sent back some incredible high definition photos of the Pillars of Creation.
The last time Hubble sent back an image of this cosmic phenomenon was in 1995.
Augmented hands
I do not want to try this machine that changes how you perceive your hands, but seeing what is possible with augmented reality is amazing.
The “Augmented Hand Series” (by Golan Levin, Chris Sugrue, and Kyle McDonald) is a real-time interactive software system that presents playful, dreamlike, and uncanny transformations of its visitors’ hands. It consists of a box into which the visitor inserts their hand, and a screen which displays their ‘reimagined’ hand—for example, with an extra finger, or with fingers that move autonomously. Critically, the project’s transformations operate within the logical space of the hand itself, which is to say: the artwork performs “hand-aware” visualizations that alter the deep structure of how the hand appears.
Climbing to new heights
My oldest boy is becoming more adventurous, climbing anything and everything he can find. Here he is sitting atop a rock climbing wall at Lakes Park. Last winter he couldn’t get more than a few feet off the ground at this rock wall.
Bat-Santa
Christmas is over, and the photo is from last year, but this is too cute to not re-post.
Bed time protestations
The wife is at a girls night out this evening. I put older two boys to bed shortly after she left. We had a big day, and they had short naps, so they went down without incident.
The baby girl, on the other hand, made it very clear that she was not yet ready to go down for the night. I wasn’t surprised since she had slept in the car on the way home from the children’s museum in Naples in addition to her regular nap.
The world is becoming a better place
Little by little, the world is becoming a better place for the humans who live here, and no amount of bad news seems to slow it down. Improvements in broad economic, health, and security trends are making life better for millions.
Progress is slower than many would want, but there is progress. Poverty and hunger are falling, life expectancy and leisure time are increasing, violence is diminishing, education and literacy are increasing, technology is moving forward fast, and fewer children are dying from preventable diseases.
Fourteen things I'm thankful for from 2014
2014 was a good year for me and my family. Here are a few of the reasons I’m thankful:
There was so much to be thankful for in 2014, and so much more to look forward to in 2015. I can’t wait to find out what exciting new adventures will make this new year special.
