Older but wiser?

With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.

Oscar Wilde

Like many baby boomers, I sometimes forget people's names and other important bits of information. Sometimes I can't find a word that's been in my vocabulary for decades. These lapses are often temporary but very annoying. It's a sign of age. (I am 77 years old.)

We often make fun of these incidents and consol ourselves with the knowledge that we may be old but we are much wiser than we were in our younger days. We have years and years of experience behind us and over the years we've learned a thing or two that we never understood when we were listening to the Beatles on the radio. We've lived through the Cuban Missile crisis, the war in Viet Nam, the assassination of two Kennedys and Martin Luther King, and a host of cultural changes. We've lived in several different countries and we've raised children. All of these experiences have made us wiser, or so we think.

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Food recipe cards to preserve family’s culture

In an effort to preserve part of her family’s culture, Jane Zhang designed recipe cards illustrating foods from her mother and grandmother. They provide ingredients and steps, but they also provide illustrations and diagrams that represent cuisine style, cooking method, texture, and taste.

My grandma spoke little English and I speak little Cantonese, so we often communicated through the language of food. So this project really speaks to me. I wish I had this for my own family.

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Food recipe cards to preserve family’s culture

In an effort to preserve part of her family’s culture, Jane Zhang designed recipe cards illustrating foods from her mother and grandmother. They provide ingredients and steps, but they also provide illustrations and diagrams that represent cuisine style, cooking method, texture, and taste.

My grandma spoke little English and I speak little Cantonese, so we often communicated through the language of food. So this project really speaks to me. I wish I had this for my own family.

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Same stars, different constellations

Cultures have formed different stories and pieced together different constellations from the stars, even though everyone are looking at the same thing in the sky. Nadieh Bremer visualized constellations across these cultures that share the same star.

Let’s compare 28 different “sky cultures” to see differences and similarities in the shapes they’ve seen in the night sky. Ranging from the so-called “Modern” or Western constellations, to Chinese, Maori and even a few shapes from historical cultures such as the Aztecs.

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Circle drawing as an indicator for culture

Thu-Huong Ha and Nikhil Sonnad for Quartz looked at the doodling dataset from Google, in search of cultural differences hidden in how we draw circles around the world.

We used the public database from Quick, Draw! to compare how people draw basic shapes around the world. Our analysis suggests that the way you draw a simple circle is linked to geography and cultural upbringing, deep-rooted in hundreds of years of written language, and significant in developmental psychology and trends in education today.

Love the added context showing character strokes in different languages.

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Looking for cultural expression in 50 million doodles

Using Google’s Quick Draw dataset, a collection of 50 million drawings across 345 categories, Mauro Martino looked for visual differences and similarities across countries in how people doodle. The result is his project Forma Fluens.

As you can see above, drawings of an eye, the sun, and a face came out roughly the same. But then there are country-specific things like a power outlet:

Good stuff. [Thanks, Mauro]

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What Kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs, Really?

Kobun-ChinoKobun Chino Otogawa, Steve Jobs’ Zen teacher. One reason I was looking forward to reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs was my hope that, as a sharp-eyed reporter, Isaacson would probe to the

Election Day in Canada: popular vote predictions

The CBC poll-tracker website tracks a number of public opinion polls and calculates a weighted average. The latest numbers have the Liberal Party winning the most votes with the Conservative Party (current government) in second place.


This is a close election so normally you would have to take these numbers with a large grain of salt but the trend over the past month is pretty obvious.


There has been a steady decline in support for the New Democratic Party (NDP) and a steady increase in Liberal support. The percentage of people who say they will vote Conservative has not changed much. It would be truly astonishing if the actual results tonight are much different than the poll results in terms of total votes. (There could be a total collapse of the NDP vote but not a reversal of fortune.)


My journey from civil war to global health

Dr Jibril Handuleh (centre) is physician, researcher and lecturer with dual nationality in Somalia and Djibouti. After training as a general practitioner in his homeland, he overcame multiple challenges to publish 15 papers over the course of two years, in some … Continue reading »

The post My journey from civil war to global health appeared first on PLOS Blogs Network.

Happy 10th birthday to YouTube!

The first video was posted to YouTube on April 23, 2005 [see YouTube]. I took this photo (right) a few years ago near my daughter's place in Playa Vista, California. It's a production facility, YouTube Space LA, on the site of the former Howard Hughes airport.

The main purpose of this post is to give me an excuse to post one of my granddaughter's favorite YouTube videos (below top). She's a big fan of YouTube and so is my two year old grandson—he likes videos of rocket launches (below bottom).