Random Dispatches

So yesterday I ran the inaugural Rehoboth Marathon.  It was a whirlwind of a time.  In the course of 23 hours I drove over 400 miles to get there and back.  Minutes before I got to Delware there had been a freak snowstorm and I saw no fewer than 8 accidents over the course of [...]

Personally, I’ve never really wanted to be Tom Cruise - with the exception of two moments.  The first was when he was rocketing around in an F-14 Tomcat in Top Gun.  The second was when he got to play with that really cool interface in Minority Report (and yes, I’m aware that this makes me [...]

I couldn’t help but notice all the chatter on Facebook today about Barack Obama’s election as the 44th President of the United States.  Here are a couple of status updates by my friends (who, it should be mentioned are overwhelmingly in the Obama demographic: highly educated, urban 25-35 year olds-but mostly not American):
ABC is raising [...]

I had an interesting experience the other day while shopping for groceries: I discovered a new fruit.  I’m not talking about some mild variation on apples (golden honey crisp granny smith…), rather something mind-blowing that I’d never seen before - the Buddha’s Hand citron.  The thing looks like a yellow octopus; here’s a shot of [...]

I was going through an old German magazine the other day and came across this ad, which I thought worth sharing:

At first it doesn’t look like much.  I mean after all, it’s just a train set, right?  Actually, it’s a little more subtle than that.  It’s called the “Stop-den-castor-start-set” which would translate as “Stop the [...]

If you live in NYC, chances are that you’re voting for Obama (as a non-American I’m one of the lucky few who don’t have to choose sides).  Yahoo’s Political Dashboard has him leading here 60 to 35.  What’s amazing me is how he’s become a cult of personality.
You may have seen the Shepard Fairey Obama paintings, but [...]

I’ve always had a perverse interest in how humans simply abandon things.  We’re definitely the only species that covet objects and then abandon them as soon as our internal calculus judges them to be no longer valuable.  I’m not talking about no longer wanting your old plates or bicycle, rather the fact that we construct [...]

I just finished reading John McPhee’s Oranges.  It’s a fascinating book (and an easy read at 149 pages).  One of the interesting passages concerns Indian River, Florida.
Indian River is where the best oranges in Florida come from (they commanded a $1/box premium in the Northeast - and that was in the 1960s).  It’s also quite [...]

So the other weekend I cashed in all my loose change.  I had three coffee containers full - which ended up working out to be a little over $300!  I used a coin sorting machine that gave me an Amazon gift certificate, and that’s now led to the following:

That’s 17 books so I think I’m [...]

A little over a week ago I attended Edward Tufte’s day-long course on how to visualize information.  What follows is a chronological summary of what he presented; the course consists of a series of infographics along with running commentary.
The first infographic was actually an animation: the Music Animation Machine’s rendering of Chopin’s Berceuse, opus 57 [...]