You Look Like A Million Dollars, But What Does A Trillion Look like?
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on March 7, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Putting Things In Perspective
 Yeah, you look like a million dollars, but this is a hundred million… |
All the casual conversation about trillion-dollar budget issues lately reminded me of how poorly most of us understand numbers as they relate to reality. For instance, ask a person how far away the moon is: 24,000 miles? 240,000 miles? 24,000,000 miles? Don’t feel badly if you don’t know yourself. To put things in perspective on that scale though: if the sun were a beach ball about 2 feet in diameter, the Earth would be a pea 215 feet away (about a small city block), and the nearest star would be about 11,000 miles away. To put a trillion in perspective, the MegaPenny Project uses an image of a trillion pennies next to some familiar architecture. If you’d rather see examples using hundred-dollar bills, see this PageTutor.com page which utilizes Google Sketchup. Another way to look at things is to ponder what you could buy with large sums of money. For instance, WhatWarCosts.com tells us that with their estimate of $323 Billion spent on the war, you could hire 577,648 teachers for 12 years, or bribe every member of Congress 6,037 times. Which, on reflection, has probably in fact happened over the last couple of years. There are hundreds, if not thousands of sites out there with examples like this; one of my favorites is that with a trillion dollars we could pave the entire U.S. interstate highway system with 23.5-karat gold leaf. If you’re tired of bailed out bankers having all the fun, and you’d like to try spending trillions of dollars yourself, try The Three Trillion Dollar Shopping Spree. And if you missed it when you were a kid, check out the classic kid’s book How Much Is a Million
World Builder: A Charming & Visually Stunning Short Film
[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 6, 2009 by admin in Popular Media
A charming nine-minute short film created by Branit|VFX
I’ve mentioned before that due to my puppy-like attention span, I’ve long been a fan of short media. That’s one of the reasons I like the award-winning short film World Builder, featured at left. I also like it because it takes something usually used to blow things up or create monsters – visual effects – and creates a few moments of sentimentality and simple beauty. If you’re especially hip and cynical, don’t waste your time; there’s no jaded punchline. Although visually rather stunning and clever, it’s really just kind of sweet. Apparently the nine-minute film was shot in a day, but took TWO YEARS to complete in post-production. It was created by Branit|VFX of Kansas City, which has also provided effects for shows like Pushing Daisies and Lost, as well as producing the amusing 2004 short 405:The Movie, “The story of the wrong guy – in the wrong place – at the wrong time.” This kind of material is one of the things I love about the current world of media production: some of Hollywood’s best post-production work takes place in places Like Kansas City, MO! I could watch Branit|VFX’s 2009 Demo Reel repeatedly simply because it uses Kaki King’s music as a backdrop…. Read the rest of this entry »
Are You Really Stupid, Or Do You Just Have Poor Taste?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on March 5, 2009 by admin in Music
Correlating Facebook Data With SAT Scores
If you’ve ever been mystified (as I have) by the popularity of Beyonce or Lil Wayne, there’s a fairly good chance that you’re just intelligent. Or at least that you would do well on the SAT. Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith has gotten considerable attention for his tongue-in-cheek but slightly scientific analysis of how intelligence affects tastes in music and books. He plotted aggregated Facebook data against average SAT scores from various schools, and came up with graphs for both Books That Make You Dumb and Music That Makes You Dumb. Personally, I think you can be stupid and still like Beethoven (who was most popular with students that scored around 1400), but it is somehow telling that “I don’t read” and “Dan Brown” correlated with students who scored around 1000. I also have to admit I was a little surprised to not see The Decemberists over on the 1400 side given their popularity with ad-industry types and Stephen Colbert; and these are indeed troubled times when the Bible hangs down with the 900 scores while “Lolita” tops the smarty-pants reading lists, with an SAT/popularity score around 1300.
Lions and Tigers and…Well Okay, No Tigers Or Bears…
[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 4, 2009 by admin in Clean & Green
Amara Conservation: Sustainable Wildlife Conservation Through Education
…but there are some elephants involved. For several years I’ve worked with a very cool non-profit in Kenya called Amara Conservation. Originally founded by Lori Bergemann of Ann Arbor, MI, Amara focuses on encouraging sustainable wildlife conservation in Kenya, mainly by using a mobile film unit to show educational films produced by the African Environmental Film Foundation to the rural people of Kenya. Amara supports a lot of other projects in Kenya, including lion translocation, various activities of the Kenya Wildlife Service, and is currently working on some other interesting projects, including a mobile radio station in conjunction with UK-based Radioactive. The clip here is an early promotional video from 2001. We’re currently planning a May/June fundraiser in Michigan; if you’re interested in helping out somehow (volunteering, networking, fund raising), contact me or contact Amara via their web site. The clip here was written & produced Chris Cook, edited by Matt Zacharias, with music by yours truly, Ian Gray. Read the rest of this entry »
Laughing Your Axis Off
[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 3, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
A Collection of Humorous Graphs & Charts
Looking at yesterday’s Dow Jones chart probably didn’t make too many people happy, which is why I thought it might be nice to take a look at graphs and charts that WILL make you happy. A classic in this medium is the Percentage of Chart Which Resembles Pac-Man chart. Ingeniously recursive. For some reason, music-related themes are particularly popular; GraphJam has so many submissions in this category that it’s hard to find the actually funny ones. No worries, there are plenty of collections elsewhere, like this collection of humorous musical graphs (which somehow managed to omit a couple of important ones like Jay-Z’s 99 Problems and Classification of Young American Females According to Brian Wilson). As you might guess, the tech industry is also partial to this kind of goofing off, so we have collections like A Completely Unscientific (Yet Accurate) Look at Social Sites. And crappy graphs are such a familiar element of doing business that there’s even an online Crappy Graph Builder available to punch up your mind-numbingly dull PowerPoint presentation. No need to get all fancy and technical though, in the clip featured here, comedian Demetri Martin should have you laughing out loud with only an easel, a large sketchpad, and a some simple hand-drawn graphs. View video full size here if you prefer. Read the rest of this entry »