Beauty is fleeting (v2)

I was greeted by this all across the sky as I stepped off the train tonight. By the time I got the camera out to snap this pic, only half the sky was illuminated. Thirty seconds later, all color was gone from the clouds.

Happy Halloween!

Our annual Halloween party yesterday went off without a hitch and all attending had a great time. Thank you to all who came and made it such a successful party. Emma's and Deidre's pumpkins are now standing watch over the back porch.

Deidre got "booed" tonight

Apparently there is a New England custom with which I am completely unfamiliar.  A classmate of Deidre's left a sign and bucket of candy on the doorstep, knocked on the door, and fled before it was answered. This is quaint custom that I will continue to fully support (especially if there are Snickers or Kit-Kats for me).

Halloween preparations are underway!

Bucky Balls from Woot

This is my first "cool" creation. This is the most fascinating magnetic toy I've ever owned.

Fun with Faces courtesy of Picasa

Boy, it's been a while since I've posted to here.

The latest version of Picasa came out recently, and one of the new features is to make "Face Movies" from the people identified by their facial recognition feature. So, of course, I made one for every member of the family.

Deidre:

Emma:

Liz:

Meredith:

Fiona:

John:

Pretty neat stuff.

A modest comparison

I stumbled across a nifty little website today that allows one to create "word clouds". The size of the word represents its frequency of occurrence in the body of text analyzed for the word cloud. The article that brought this to my attention is here, and this is the graphic that they had in the article:



This is the "word cloud" for the most common words used by respondents to a Pew survey asking them to describe Congress. The survey was conducted just prior to passing the Health Care Reform bill.

I found this little web app pretty cool, so I went and played around with it a bit, and then was struck by inspiration. What would a wordcloud look like for the Health Care Reform bill?



Unfortunately, I couldn't copy the entire 2000+ pages of text from the loc.thomas.gov PDF, so I copied the summary of the bill and used that to make the wordcloud. Note the prominence of "Secretary". About as prominent as "Commissar" back in the USSR, eh? The size of "Requires" is pretty scary too.

But then inspiration struck again. How would the wordcloud of this, the latest legislation from the United States, compare to our first piece of "legislation"?



That, my friends, is the wordcloud for The Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights. Even with an Amendment dealing with specific limitations as to the Office of the President, the "States" are still more prominent than a single person, or even the two groups of legislators.

Perhaps our laws today should be written more like the Consitution than the recent Health Care Reform bill, focusing on the States, rather than specific people in the federal government.