Posts – page 4 of 74

Five years ago today I bought and started restoring the bike I currently ride to work—a 1972 Schwinn Super Le Tour. I’ve spent the last five years using it to commute in a city that is not particularly bike friendly and whose weather is too hot and rainy for most of the year. That hasn’t stopped me.

I rarely see other bikers who look as if their commuting to work. It just isn’t common in this part of South Florida. However, my understanding is that bikes are the most used mode of transportation in the world. Riding a bike is also how I got around during most of my childhood and through high school.

via @jasonthielke on Ello

via Reddit

My FitBit stats show that I have taken more than 3.5 million steps in the past year.

Like many others, I’ve been bingeing on the latest season of House of Cards over the past several days. This morning I woke up with an idea for a crossover between House of Cards and another show I’ve been guilty of bingeing on–24. The idea wasn’t for a full series or episode–just for a single scene.

The scene opens at the top of the back stairwell in the White House with Jack Bauer interrogating President Frank Underwood.

Today I listened to the Smashing Pumpkins album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness from beginning to end. The two-disc album has more than two hours of music spread across 28 tracks. This album was one of the musical staples of my college years. I bought a second-hand copy of it on my way freshman orientation and listened to it throughout my undergrad. The album has some amazing hits, some strange lyrics, some hidden gems, some bad songs, and even one that can only be described as musical malpractice. When you listen to the full album you get everything the band had to offer at one particular moment in its history.

Listening to a band’s playlist or radio station on services like Pandora and Spotify will get you the hits from throughout their career. However, you will miss out on the many songs that make a band what they are. I don’t listen to many to albums from beginning to end anymore, and I don’t know many people who do. In this age of Spotify’s smart playlists, themed radio stations, and algorithmic DJs, you can listen to hours of back-to-back hits. But I think I’m missing out on something important when I listen that way. There is a lot of value in hearing a full album in the order the artist chose.



Today my middle child turned three. It has been so amazing to watch him grow up this year. It seems like he just turned two, and suddenly he has grown into this big kid.

He is such a sweet boy and a good friend. It is so cool to see how he—as a middle child—can adapt his play between roughhousing with his older brother and being gentle (most of the time) with his baby sister. I am looking forward to another year of watching him grow up and turn into an independent young man.

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>

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.

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:

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 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.

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.

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.

Christmas is over, and the photo is from last year, but this is too cute to not re-post.

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.

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.