I love effective visualizations, and the Billion Dollar gram is a very simple and effective way to help normal people understand the relative sizes of some of the ridiculously large dollar values attached to various government, corporate, and public initiatives. As someone who enjoys data visualization I appreciate it. As a human being, I can’t get past that items across the top row without feeling a combination of almost blinding rage and terrible, terrible shame.
Tag: children
Way To Go America, Part 2
While I’m at it, here’s a little something Will clued me in to. There are other human rights that the UN is trying to craft declarations of, as part of its continuing efforts to establish some baselines for civilized national behaviours. These are two quotes from what are essentially meeting minutes from a committee meeting wherein 8 such new resolutions… Read more →
Raging Out: DVD designed to create xenophobia works
So, the Clarion fund, which exists to “educate the public about the threat of Islamic terrorism” has massively distributing their DVD, which sure seems designed to make Americans afraid of brown people. Interesting, the fund seems to have done this massive distribution in the swing states only. I wonder what objective they could hope to achieve by fanning the flames… Read more →
Geek Family
Apparently my daughter is now old enough that when I’m away on business we send each other emailsI have a suspicion that her mother may play a secretarial role here, since Sarah probably wouldn’t punctuate.. In order to illustrate for some people at my office why it was that I no longer was interested in my business travel being any… Read more →
Father’s Day
Warning: this will be a Sappy Dad™ post. I woke up this morning to a smiling three year old face. I was wished a Happy Father’s Day, and handed this: I was unsurprised by the signature, as I have seen Sarah working on writing her name quite a few times now. I was pretty shocked by the rest of it.… Read more →
Constant Subtle Reinforcement
A while back my wife passed me a PDF copy of an academic paper entitled “Polite, well-dressed and on time: secondary school conduct codes and the production of docile citizens” by Brock University researcher Rebecca Raby. The citation shows the paper as having originally been published in The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology; Feb 2005. Rather than link you… Read more →
Nasty
It should not be possible for a child that small to produce so much vomit. Apparently my hard-earned parenting experience has made me blase about all other possible organic messes, but has not really protected me from child vomit. I mean, I can do what needs to be done, but that stuff is nasty. Back in the diaper days there… Read more →
Achilles’ Heel
Apparently my wife is well aware of exactly what my emotional Achilles’ Heel is, since she sent me this story: 3-year-old found alive after plane crash kills two For five hours in the freezing mountains, a little girl hung from a car seat in the twisted wreckage of a crashed Cessna. When rescue workers finally reached her, her first request… Read more →