I currently have a bit of an identity crisis with this blog, hence the random posting of YouTube videos. But here's another one. For those not on Facebook, this won't make much sense. But I've been dabbling in it the last six months or so and this is pretty funny.
Andrew Sullivan posted this super cool audio recording of Walt Whitman reading on of his poems. As an English major and Dead Poet's Society Watcher, this is super cool!!!
This one by a geography major trying to understand the rapper Ludacris' romantic attachments is rather illuminating.
No, I haven't heard on any grad school fellowships yet. But some sermons do make you want to jump up and shout more than others...
I've been reading David Kuo's blog on and off the last few months. He was the initial director of Bush's fath-based initiative program, but ended up leaving when he felt it wasn't being funded as promised. In any case, he's currently taking a trip to Uganda and writing about his experience there. This post today was pretty striking to me--it's an issue I think about regularly living in north Minneapolis.
I'm taking a research methods class this semester and found this graph of polling data for tomorrow interesting.
There's a lot here--you easily see the condition of the race in multiple states, and the shaded dots give you the sense of motion. It's relatively easy to interpret as well. Cool.
Credit: Pollster
Found this link on Andrew Sullivan's blog--10 quite extravagant home theaters. Even in the last ten years, it seems like home entertainment has become a massive industry. It's the theater experience at home. I can't help but wonder, though, if the novelty wears off when it's your house. Part of the appeal of an extravagant setting like this is the uniqueness of it. It's all feasting and no fasting, so to speak, which makes the feast less feast-like. Still, while the movie was mediocre in my opinion, I like the Titanic theme here...
There was a BIG jump in my viewership this week--from about 60-70 a week to almost 500. I'm not sure yet exactly what happened, but most people seem to be looking at a picture from Ratatouille a few weeks back. Maybe Thomas Keller's recipe is sweeping the nation? In any case, welcome, new guests!
That's a geographical quetsion posed by this piece about the effects of communiting on human happiness and community. The short answer: not good. Long commutes result in significant amounts of both. Here's a quote:
Postwar zoning laws aggressively separated living space from commercial space, requiring more roads and parking lots—known to planners as Euclidean zoning (after a Supreme Court decision involving Euclid, Ohio), and to civilians as sprawl. Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five- minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can spend an hour or two travelling each side. “You live in Pasadena, work in North Hollywood, shop in the Valley,” Putnam said. “Where is your community?” The smaller the triangle, the happier the human, as long as there is social interaction to be had. In that kind of life, you have a small refrigerator, because you can get to theBologna Italy store quickly and often. By this logic, the bigger the refrigerator, the lonelier the soul.
Part of our upcoming downsizing/relocation is an attempt to significantly shrink the size of our triangle. I don't think it's an accident that I've started to consider dropping our Costco membership at the same time--we'll be living a life of a small refrigerator. But hopefully it will be a richer life in other ways.