Monday, February 12, 2007

The legacy of Dwight

I hosted my first Sunday morning pancake brunch this morning! Aaron was kind enough to take some really nice pictures. I was too busy making a triple batch of pancakes. For those of you not familiar, Dwight rather-be-naked Bussman hosted a pancake brunch at his apartment almost every Sunday I was in college, and it was invariably a tasty, fun, and musical time. It's to him that I owe the inspiration, and to my grandma that I owe the excellent pancake recipe. His clothespin game also made a brief appearance, but since I only had one clothespin, it's unclear whether it's potential was limited by demand or supply. There were however some rousing games of Egyptian Rat Screw and Taboo, and I demonstrated that if nothing else, I can slap a table like an alpha-male gorilla.

Eleven people came over the course of the morning, and it was a great excuse to buy some more stuff at IKEA in preparation. I never thought I'd say these words in combination, but these are amazing stools. They fold up smoothly and take up a negligible amount of space, they are extremely solid, and they work equally well as impromptu drink/card/coffee tables as they do as chairs. Meenali contributed some Mangoes and grapes, Thu brought some syrup and made some delicious eggs. Dan brought Taboo. Nayema, through some otherworldly bending of the spacetime continuum, managed to do all of the dishes in 10 minutes. Clearly witchcraft. There is no other explanation.

My apartment handled the volume of people pretty well I think. I hope everyone had a good time, and I think I'll be doing this again. :)

In other news, the Google ski trip rocked. Let it be said that Google knows how to throw a friggin' party. I skied for 5 hours and danced for 5 hours on 6 hours of sleep, and followed that up with another 6 hours of sleep. Continuous delirious awesomeness all the way through.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Amazing Demonstrations of World Demographics

This is an amazing demonstration of how data can come alive with some smart visualization to really give you a solid mental model for the subject matter. The software he's using is hosted by Google, called Gapminder. Gapminder is also the name of the non-profit that is creating these visualization tools built on top of the demographic data that the UN collects.

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