I love maps and I love charts. So I was particularly excited to find this great chart of the world’s population by latitude, which obviously resembles a map (because most people live on land): This is a much more eloquent way of combining latitude and longitude population charts, as I’ve previously posted about here. At the bottom of the post, the creator links to whackdata.com, where Ryan Brideau posted some R scripts that take publicly available data and create similar population map charts. Ryan does a great job describing why the chart is so interesting: “What I love about it is that, in the absence of any traditional map features, the outlines of countries and continents are immediately apparent. And as long as you are familiar
Category: General
The 10K Pushup Challenge
Sometime in mid 2014 I added 50 pushups to my morning routine. It seemed like a small and simple thing to do to supplement my gym workouts, taking just a couple minutes every day. I stuck with it for about three weeks, then forgot one morning. Once the streak was broken, I just stopped and didn’t think about it again for a while. Last month I decided I wanted to start again. But I knew I needed to approach it differently if I wanted to make it a longer term habit. What I quickly realized is that I don’t really care whether I do 50 pushups every day, and there isn’t anything particularly special about doing 50 reps. Some days maybe I’ll want
Interesting Facts About Currencies
From Vox: Try making it full screen, Vox doesn’t have very useful embed video options to adjust the size.
First Impressions of the iPhone 6 Camera: Callahan State Park
I’ve had my iPhone 6 for almost a month now, but hadn’t really tested out the camera in a meaningful way until today. With all the warm weather we’ve had this week, Laura and I decided to head out to Framingham to meet up with my Mom and take Bella for a walk in Callahan State Park. In rained for the first part of the walk, but the sun broke out right around the time we got to Eagle Pond. The light was perfect. I’d read the camera was a big step up from my previous iPhone 5, and after looking at a handful of shots on a big screen, I’m very impressed. The hardware is great, but I also
Uhhhh. Who gave this to you? The King of Sweden.
I found this to be very funny. Via Chris Blattman, 2011 Nobel Prize winner Brian Schmidt shares his experience taking a Nobel Prize through airport security in Fargo: “When I won this, my grandma, who lives in Fargo, North Dakota, wanted to see it. I was coming around so I decided I’d bring my Nobel Prize. You would think that carrying around a Nobel Prize would be uneventful, and it was uneventful, until I tried to leave Fargo with it, and went through the X-ray machine. I could see they were puzzled. It was in my laptop bag. It’s made of gold, so it absorbs all the X-rays—it’s completely black. And they had never seen anything completely black. “They’re like,
A Few Thoughts on Rhinos
I just learned that yesterday was World Rhino Day, an annual initiative to raise awareness about Africa’s big poaching problem. National Geographic has a nice series of pictures and history, including a picture that’s clearly from a very different time of a zookeeper feeding peas to a rhino while it’s carrying a woman on its back. Having just been to South Africa last month, where over 80% of the 26,000 rhinos in Africa live, I thought I’d share some of what we saw and learned. Previous posts on South Africa are here and here. While I had known that poaching has historically been and continues to be a huge issue, I hadn’t appreciated the extent of it. Over 1,000 rhinos were poached in
What’s the Matter with Small Biz?
The following is a guest post from Robin Bose. There’s a truism that small businesses are the backbone of the American economy. I happen to think it’s true that small businesses make local economics more resilient to shocks and changes in the overall mix of market forces. If we accept that, then we should all be a little worried. A mildly alarming study The Brookings Institution published shows a 30 year decline in what the US census calls “new firm formation” (i.e., baby businesses getting formed) accompanied by no real change in “firm exits” (small business owners closing up shop). Some surprising highlights: Troubling 30 year secular decline across multiple business cycles and political administrations Trend is prevalent across all 50
Bullshit Detection Kit
Via The Big Picture, a brief excerpt from Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, on how to detect when people are spouting nonsense: The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method. 1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.” 2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of
Are There Hats?
South Boston Filmed from a Drone