oh hai guys!

I'm so excited to be headed to Philly this weekend!

Health

to be completely honest, I haven't followed the whole health care debate, even though I now live in the fishbowl of D.C.  It seems like wanting everyone to be healthy and have access to health care is something we should just all want for one another and I don't have patience for all the arguing.  All of the interviews I heard on NPR last night were just about how angry everyone is at one another and how long people are going to stay upset.  All that being said, I like the colors in this poster.

Good Luck Zerbe

Do you remember that awful-looking Dane Cook/Jessica Alba movie "Good Luck Chuck"?

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I've never seen it myself (although I'm pretty sure Nick watched it at one point), but my basic understanding of the "plot" is that every time Dane Cook's character sleeps with a girl, the next guy she meets is the guy she's going to marry.  I know it's a bit of a stretch for me to equate myself with this character, but it seems like most of the guys I've met down here and gone on dates with have immediately met someone else and moved on to something serious after hanging out with me. It's honestly not that big of a deal to me, I wasn't feeling any of them anyway, but I am surprised at how often its happened. Oh, and I didn't sleep with them either, which maybe means that I am even more "luck-ful" than Chuck?

Data Crunch

I stumbled across this interesting article that crunches data about Girl Talk's album Feed the Animals. 

Some of the data is what you would expect (list of samples from the whole album, number samples per song, etc.) but they take the data further and also chart the start times of each sample across each song, the median year the samples from each track came from, and the actual sample release dates for each track.  

 

The most interesting thing to me was the fact that a lot of the data was crunched using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. I had never head of this before today, but Mechanical Turk describes itself as a "marketplace for work that requires human intelligence". It seems like you can sign up to do small tasks that take a very short period of time for minimal amounts of money.  For example, I stumbled across another site called The Sheep Market that is collecting 10,000 drawings of sheep by online workers for $.02 a piece.

Anyhow, I think the whole Mechanical Turk thing is pretty interesting and I don't know why I hadn't heard of it before now because it sounds like it's been around for awhile.  If anybody has ever done it or looks into it more, let me know what you find out about how it works.

vortices

the classiest one

supplement

I love charts, especially pretty self-regenerating interactive ones with really interesting information.