Posts – page 2 of 74

This is the first post on the new version of the site.

Built with Jekyll, deployed by GitHub Actions, and served behind Cloudflare. The design is intentionally minimal so it can grow into custom article layouts, a portfolio, or a photo gallery later without fighting the foundation.

Drafts live in an obfuscated folder that is excluded from the public build, indexes, feeds, and robots.txt.

Unfortunately, there is not much you can do when an idea like Mad Thomas: Fury Tracks pops into your head. My options–after searching to see if it already exists–were to think about it all day or to just make and post it. Apologies to everyone involved with both franchises.

The fist day of every history class should include watching a video in this format on whatever the subject the teacher intends to cover.

Daniel turned four yesterday. The kid is getting huge but is still so sweet. He is the luckiest middle child. Instead of being forgotten in the middle (overshadowed by his older brother or ignored because his baby sister hogs all the attention), he gets best friends on both sides–a loving big brother to look up to and a sweet little sister that shadows him everywhere.

I posted when Daniel turned three and turned two, and it is baffling that it is already past time to post his birthday well wishes. Gabi also wrote some sweet words about our son on Facebook and included another picture of him in his Iron Man costume–which he’d probably always wear if we let him.

Brian Kesinger, a story artist at Disney animation, created a great collection of Star Wars: The Force Awakens drawings done in the style of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes.

via Pascal Campion

This gif kinda makes it seem as if the Star Wars prequels are not awful garbage movies. Also, how long before this gif is updated with scenes from The Force Awakens?

Age and productivity have an out-sized effect on the global economy. The challenge of the next hundred years is to figure out how fewer workers can support an increasingly older population. Greg Ip wrote an in-depth exploration in The Wall Street Journal of how shifting demographics are changing the global economy.

Ever since the global financial crisis, economists have groped for reasons to explain why growth in the U.S. and abroad has repeatedly disappointed, citing everything from fiscal austerity to the euro meltdown. They are now coming to realize that one of the stiffest headwinds is also one of the hardest to overcome: demographics.</blockquote>

via Twitter

I really enjoyed the optimism Matt Damon exudes in his performance in The Martian. He stays positive and focused on solving every problem he encounters even the most hopeless of circumstances.

Last year I wrote a post of Fourteen things I’m thankful for in 2014. This has been another year filled with new challenges and joys, and I’m glad to be able to share another list of blessings. Here are some of the things I’m thankful for from 2015:

This really was an exceptional year, and I’m looking forward to the challenges and joys of 2016.

There is a gallery on Imgur that shows close up photos of many of the models and sets used in the original Star Wars trilogy. It is amazing to see the care and craftsmanship that went into each model–even the ones that only get a few second of screen time. There are a couple of examples below, but the whole gallery is worth exploring.

There was so much great art and care that went into the production of the three original Star Wars films. And now, 30 years later, there are still new and imaginative remixes and fan creations–like this Auralnauts video that made Gabi and I laugh and laugh last night–keeping the work as fresh as ever.

This world map shows countries by the proportional size of their stock markets.

Created by Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Chief Investment Strategist Michael Hartnett, this illustration shows “free-float equity market capitalization” in billions of dollars.

My kids and I really enjoyed this superhero alphabet by illustrator Simon Koay. They were able to identify almost all the comic book characters, which is impressive for a six and three-year old. 

Here is Koay’s description of the project:

A synthetic perspective view of Pluto, based on the latest high-resolution images to be downlinked from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, shows what you would see if you were approximately 1,100 miles (1,800 km) above Pluto’s equatorial area, looking toward the bright, smooth, expanse of icy plains informally called Sputnik Planum, in this image taken July 14, 2015 and released September 10, 2015. The images were taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 km).

It doesn’t matter how many attempts it took Jonathan Toews of the Chicago Blackhawks to make this trick shot. It is amazing how he pops the bottle of the top off the net and then hits it out of the air with the second puck. Here’s the shot again from another angle.

The first shot:

And another view:

via Dave Ellis at NoVolume

Two years ago, Gabi and I had our sweet little baby girl baptized.

She’s not so little now but still very sweet.

Art by Pascal Campion.

The webapp, Baby Name Explorer, lets you see a graph of the popularity of baby names over time. The site was created by Randal Olson, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Biomedical Informatics. The app makes it easy to see when common baby names were most popular. 

It looks like my parents picked my name right at he height of its popularity. 

  However, I don’t feel like I encounter that many other Jonathan’s. On the other hand, my in-laws picked a name well ahead of its time for my wife.