Mind-blowing visulization of population data

I’ve been watching TED Talks and Hulu while treadmilling (wireless video inside the house seems more reliable now that we’re on Comcast’s super-fast Internet service) and randomly chose this talk from the Top 10 list by doctor and researcher Hans Rosling. Bottom line? It’s must see TV.

If you are a fan of data visualizations, population trends, government policy, comparisons between countries, or just even mildly curious about changes to our world in the last 30-40 years, prepare to be blown away by this video.

The TEDTalks site blurb has it right: 

You’ve never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called “developing world.”

After you’ve watched the video and are hungry for more, visit Gapminder.org, Dr. Rosling’s nonprofit venture to help people create visualizations like the ones you saw in the video.

Mini coaster

Our kids — like us — are not big roller coaster fans. They thought the mini coastr in Toon Town at Disneyland was a little too much — and the Matterhorn was definitely too much. The slight drop at the beginning of Pirates of the Carribean is more their speed.

So we were pretty surprised when they declared the mini coaster at Discovery Kingdom a lot of fun. I’m pretty sure all the screaming you hear is from Katye and cousin Leann.

As usual, higher quality version on YouTube. (I shot the video on my Canon point-and-shoot as the Nikon D90 did not accompany us to the amusement park, in case you’re wondering.)

This is the first video we’ve uploaded through the Mac port of Picasa, which is now available in beta. We were big fans of Picasa on Windows, and though iPhoto is very similar, there are definitely things we miss about Picasa — mostly to do with the tight integration with Google’s Picasa Web Albums and YouTube. Uploading videos via Picasa sure beats doing it over their Web based uploader.

(You need 3.0.1.321 or later — the first beta they published a few days ago never successfully uploaded to YouTube.)

Jellyfish at the Aquarium

The British biologist J.B.S. Haldane is famously quoted as saying, “”My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” Most of the time, that quote is used by sub-atomic physicists talking about the completely non-intuitive behavior of quarks and bozons and whatnot.

But some sea creatures are improbable at the biological level as well: the impossibly ornate sea-horses and the glowing fish, and the chameleon-like fish which change color and markings to better blend in with the sand behind them, and this too-cool jellyfish (visit the video on YouTube for a higher-resolution version).

(The original video was shot on a Nikon D90 DSLR, in case you are curious.)

Water park

Colin and Ryan had a blast at the water park this summer. The water was pretty cold, but it was a hot day in Carlsbad. They eventually worked up to the nerve to stand underneath the big bucket of water.

If you’ve never seen it, it’s an impressively large bucket of water that gets dumped on the kids every few minutes.

I love the reaction of the kid who turns around right after the water comes down. Also, go check out the stop-motion photos on Smugmug — I finally got to use my little Canon’s multiple-exposure feature, and it did all right for a point-and-shoot.

Carpet angels

The kids do carpet angels at my grandparents’ house. And Katie lobbies to go to Canada so they can make snow angels with actual snow.

Why hello, dancing Hello Kitty

Erin and Katye celebrated their 4th and 5th birthdays yesterday with a big princess-themed bash. A surprisingly large Hello Kitty also made an appearance. Thanks to everyone who was able to join us!

Everyone had a great time with the princess (Aurora, I think), the food, cake, the bounce house, and the company.

But it was so windy that the entire bounce house would move a foot or two during the violent gusts, which caused one party-goer to declare that the “party” (that’s what she called the bounce house) was “terrible”.

Space Invaders

We interrupt the Disneyland pictures to answer the pressing question: what can you with 1 empty auditorium, 1 digital camera, 4 spare hours, and 67 extremely patient friends?

BTW, visit the artist’s site to see the same treatment for Pong, Tetris, and Pole Position.

Kina Grannis

The other day, I saw this hilarious video about Digg from a singer-songwriter named Kina Grannis. You have to be a Digg regular to understand some of the inside jokes (email me if you’re curious about why she mentions Ron Paul and the awful sound servers make when they go down). Hilarious!

Anyway, it turns out Kina Grannis is one of the 3 finalists for this year’s Doritos Crash the Super Bowl contest. Doritos is sponsoring a sort of American Idol for the MySpace crowd, in which the MySpace community is voting for the 1 video they’re going to air live on the Super Bowl. (I created a MySpace account just so I could vote!)

The whole episode — starting with the Digg video below — is a perfect example of this social networking, Web 2.0, user generated content, viral marketing thing that’s sweeping the world (and here I am working on enterprise software). Kina’s done a fabulous job using blogs, YouTube, Digg, and other Web 2.0 properties to supercharge her devoted fan base (check out the interview at Gizmodo) in a little over 6 weeks.

Good luck to Kina, and if you like this video or her other stuff (including a cover of Colbie Caillat’s Bubbly, which showed up on iTunes the other day, yet another example of the changing power structure behind popular music) — vote for her on MySpace. Today’s the last day.

The actual video

Just figured out that while you can upload videos via Blogger’s Web-based inteface, you can’t blog directly from Picasa. I hope they fix that soon.

In the meantime:

Raspberries!

As you might recall, Cameron loves berries. There was a period when that could have been his exclusive diet. All the world revolved around blueberries (which he called “boo-booberries”), raspberries (“red boo-booberries”) and grapes (“big boo-booberries”).

Well, we found some raspberries and blackberries at our local Costco, and sure enough, he still loves them. Here you’ll see the approved eating technique for raspberries. (Felt mildly guilty that they came all the way from Mexico and Florida in violation of our “eat local” preference, but oh well…)

Amusingly, you’ll also see Katye and Cameron making sure they get their share of airtime.