“So It’s Come To This:” is a scrapbook for my philisophical essays on the world, casual observations, and personal rants.
Speaking of cool visualizations, Zero Hedge brings us another one from the National Weather Service: the Chliean Earthquake Tsunami travel time. Very cool, indeed if we forget the horrible destruction the earthquake and potential tsunami caused.
Chilean Earthquake Tsunami Travel Time Estimates | zero hedge.
From Google Buzz, founder & CEO of Seesmic, Loic Le Meur, shared a recent Harvard Business Review article discussing the visualization of Twitter’s stream. Its a fascinating read just for the inferences one can get from the data. The article uses different trend analysis projects like Twitter Spectrum, TwitterVenn, and StreamGraphs to highlight comparisons between different search terms.
The author, Scott Berinato, has more visualizations than the one I’ve pasted below but you can see how a Venn Diagram of Twitter’s data could be useful for marketers and modern sociologists. In this image, Berinato compares the search terms “Apple,” “Google,” and “Microsoft” to one another to see how frequently they were tweeted.
As you can see, Apple was mentioned more often that their competitors. But as the author notes, Google was hardly mentioned at all. What this suggests needs further research but it might imply that Google is not as hip or popular as almost everyone else would have you believe. Still, its cool just seeing such data represented in some more manageable way.
Jeff Clark, who runs the site Neoformix, has all types of visualizations including the frequency of words used in the latest State of the Union Address and links to other visualizations like the Daytime vs Nighttime Population of Manhattan.
If you’re into marketing, sociology, statistics, or just freaky facts, I’d recommend visiting Clark’s site pretty often. While he doesn’t seem to have an RSS feed, I’ve “subscribed” to is using Google Reader’s new “follow changes” feature. If he adds any more cool visualizations, I’ll post them here.
Neoformix [via Four Ways of Looking at Twitter - Research - Harvard Business Review]
First, let me address the lack of writing as promised in my New Years Resolution post from December. My wife and I welcomed a baby boy into this world on January 27 and the days leading up to – and certainly following – his birth have preoccupied my mind. So hopefully that explains why I haven’t written anything. But now to make up for it…
A while back, I read an article on Boing Boing that covered one man’s experiment of showering without the use of soap or shampoo. Lured by the idea of naturally soft but not greasy skin & hair, I thought about performing a similar experiment one day. But because I didn’t want to go to work during the two week “normalization” period, I never fully embraced the idea. I did manage to go soap free for nearly all of January but still used shampoo as I didn’t want to show up at the office with natural dreads.
But with the paternity leave I get from work and the added vacation I attached to the back of it, I had time to let my body adjust to a soap free lifestyle. Its been two weeks since I last used soap to wash (other than my hands when handling the baby or food) and I have to say I’m pretty impressed with the results. I don’t know if I’ll stay soap free when I go back to work, though.
First, the two weeks to adjust is probably a variable – my skin didn’t take that long to get used to being soap free but my hair still feels greasy at times. And for the most part, I feel clean all day. Only very late at night do I feel like I could use another shower. I still use deodorant – the natural kind from Tom’s of Maine – so I’m using some kind of odor protection. And I feel I get the best results when I use a washcloth – something I’m not sure if Richard Nikoley used for his experiment. And while my skin feels soft, it still feels a little dry – using hot water doesn’t help in that area, though.
As I mentioned, my hair still feels greasy at times. In January, when I first tried being sans soap, I still used shampoo because I knew I’d never be able to go to work while my scalp adjusted. With my time off, I went all in and didn’t use shampoo. And, at first, my hair was really greasy. But after a week, I noticed only the areas closest to my scalp were greasy. If I keep it up, I might be able to go without shampoo. But I’m not sure I want to.
My wife says she never noticed I stopped using soap in January. She could tell I stopped using shampoo and I think for that reason, I’ll go back to using it after this weekend. I might also go back to using soap as I noticed the time it took me to shower increased – probably because I wanted to make sure I got every area with the wash cloth. There is also a certain amount of paranoia I have about the experiment. I didn’t detect any foul body odor and neither did my wife. But I know I stopped using soap and, for some reason, I’m conditioned to think that soap equals clean and if others knew I hadn’t used soap, they’d think badly of me. Worse yet, they’d actually be able to smell me when I couldn’t detect my own scent.
If anyone else has tried showering without soap or shampoo, what were your results? How long did it take you to normalize and did you ever go back to using cleansers? Despite the comments saying their experiments have been a great success, I still remain a little skeptical – even after performing my own personal hygiene experiment.
It’s quickly approaching that time of year again where we replace the calendars (if you still use dead trees for that kind of stuff). It’s also when those who observe start their Christmas shopping. What, you already started?!?!?! Overachievers. Anyway… along with the New Year, comes the famously proclaimed but hardly every applied New Year’s Resolution. It’s been a while since I’ve done one but this year, I resolve to carry out a resolution: Get back to being healthy.
Many life altering and disrupting things happened this year – and more altering and disrupting is on the way. Some of the changes were bad… some good. But the result of all this upheaval is I stopped going to the gym and starting eating poorly again. And while I’ve tried to make up for past bad behavior, I haven’t fully enacted a plan to reclaim my health and physique from days of yore. That changes now – a whole two weeks early! Who’s the overachiever now?!?!? But I’ve already started… so it’s not a resolution I’m starting in the New Year.
What I want to change this year is my writing prowess. Starting with this post, I want to see how well I can write a typical “blog” post and see how I can stack up with the pros. My guess is that I can’t and that my ability to crank out a steady stream of words will not be as successful as I really want it to be. But I’m not giving up before I start. I’m slowly going to build up to a respectable level of posts per week to see if the skill can continue to develop into the following year.
So starting in January, I’m going to write a medium-ish length post on something – a product review, a discussion on something in the news, or a general update on how I’m feeling – something personal, perhaps – per week so that the total number of published articles equals the month number. Confused? Yeah, me, too. What it means that for every week I’ll be writing one article per week in January and two per week in February. Then three per week in March and so on until I’m churning out 12 posts per week in December.
Of course, I might have to vary the length at times but the goal is to test my chops at professional blogging. Not that I’ll ever make a living off of it. I love my current job and company and I don’t want to do anything to get in the way of that. But I’d like to think I have a creative streak in me that could be more than just thoughts in my head. If I can swing it, I’d like to at least one “in-depth” article of some kind to test my journalistic chops.
In case you were wondering, this post doesn’t count towards my goal; I’m not starting this resolution early. But I will try to stick to a regular schedule and spread my writings across several days as I start writing 5 articles a week. Not sure if I’ll have a column that appears on a particular day every week or if I’ll make them somewhat random. But I think, like most things I do, I’ll dive into it and see if I can swim my way through the sea of writing. Thus far, I haven’t been so successful but if I spin this as a self fulfilling and enriching activity – much like getting back to the gym – I can pull this off.
So I’ll take suggestions on what to write about in the comments. I’m also looking for advice from my professional blogger friends and journalists (which is pretty much just one person). But still, the advice and feedback is much appreciated no matter if you’re a “professional” at something. The help in achieving this goal is much appreciated.
Now to think about what I should write about two weeks from now.
I don’t know if I’m paying more attention lately or just simply seeing a lot more instances of homeless people. I certainly hope its my awareness going up and not the actual population of people out on the streets. If it is my awareness, chalk it up to the creativity of those dispersed from a home.
In the major streets of New York, you see them sitting on the sidewalk, leaning up against a building, faces looking downward, cardboard sign in hand (or leaning up against their bodies sitting “Indian Style“). They look dirty – but not too dirty. Almost really, really, grungy… like a Pearl Jam fan who hasn’t showered in a week or so. Sadly, they are young and, at times, with a companion – usually a dog. Other times, they are with a partner making them (presumably) boyfriend/girlfriend. I see them smoking sometimes. They almost always have piercings or tattoos. Their signs mostly talk of food but some simply say they need a bus fare home or somewhere. Many of them read. If they weren’t on the floor with a cardboard sign, they’d actually look cool and hip.
I trust they are really homeless or in need of money, food, or whatever their sign says. I don’t want to doubt the needs of someone sitting on the cold hard concrete of an, at times, unforgiving city. But the hipster-ness of their look certainly makes me wonder how someone who looks cool can end up like that.
They don’t look crazy. They don’t appear to talk to themselves, shout back at an imaginary enemy, or act strangely in societal terms. They just sit there slumped and quiet. Those with dogs – an increasingly common sight – gently pet them and care for them as any other pet owner would; I even saw one guy holding his pet while the two were sleeping.
So seeing these people (and pets) really tugs at my heart strings. Not being intrusive, they really appear to rely on the kindness of others to get by. And while I’d never give anyone money (I have an irrational fear they’ll go by drugs – including cigarettes – instead of food), I would really like to help them out.
So to all the homeless people out there: if you can’t find a place to stay and feel you must be out on the streets, get a dog or a lover/companion, look like a grungy hipster, write something clever on your cardboard sign, and just sit there. You’re going to attract a lot of sympathy from me and the next time I see you, I’m going to buy you and your dog a meal.
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