Blog – Page 6 – Jonathan Frei

Augmented hands

I do not want to try this machine that changes how you perceive your hands, but seeing what is possible with augmented reality is amazing.

The “Augmented Hand Series” (by Golan Levin, Chris Sugrue, and Kyle McDonald) is a real-time interactive software system that presents playful, dreamlike, and uncanny transformations of its visitors’ hands. It consists of a box into which the visitor inserts their hand, and a screen which displays their ‘reimagined’ hand—for example, with an extra finger, or with fingers that move autonomously. Critically, the project’s transformations operate within the logical space of the hand itself, which is to say: the artwork performs “hand-aware” visualizations that alter the deep structure of how the hand appears.

The demonstration video is impressive…

January 7, 2015January 8, 2015 by Jonathan Frei

Bed time protestations

The wife is at a girls night out this evening. I put older two boys to bed shortly after she left. We had a big day, and they had short naps, so they went down without incident.

The baby girl, on the other hand, made it very clear that she was not yet ready to go down for the night. I wasn’t surprised since she had slept in the car on the way home from the children’s museum in Naples in addition to her regular nap.

I let her stay up while I worked on getting the house picked up and the kitchen cleaned. When I wasn’t looking she had gone into my room, pulled my pillow off the bed, and dragged it to the living room where I was gathering toys.

She then spent the next 15 minutes dragging the pillow to each room I worked on, and laying on it until I moved to the next room. When I finished cleaning, I laid her down in her bed, and she went right to sleep with no protest.

Update: She waited until I pressed publish on this post to resume her protestations.

January 3, 2015January 3, 2015 by Jonathan Frei

The world is becoming a better place

Little by little, the world is becoming a better place for the humans who live here, and no amount of bad news seems to slow it down. Improvements in broad economic, health, and security trends are making life better for millions.

Progress is slower than many would want, but there is progress. Poverty and hunger are falling, life expectancy and leisure time are increasing, violence is diminishing, education and literacy are increasing, technology is moving forward fast, and fewer children are dying from preventable diseases.

Dylan Matthews has a post on Vox collecting charts and maps that show many of the ways in which the world is getting better. He leads the post with a short explanation of how the good new often get buried under the bad.

The press — and humans in general — have a strong negativity bias. Bad economic news gets more coverage than good news. Negative experiences affect people more, and for longer, than positive ones. So it’s natural for things like Russia’s incursion into Ukraine or the rise of ISIS or the Ebola outbreak to weigh on us more than, say, the fact that extreme poverty has fallen by half since 1990, or that life expectancy is increasing, especially in poor countries.

It makes sense that bad news gets more coverage. Bad news is what people tune in for, and people tuning in is what advertisers pay for.

But could there be a better way to distribute news? It would be interesting to see advertisers sponsor news outlets dedicated to good news. It seems that would be a more attractive narrative with which to associate a brand. And I’m sure there is a large audience out there who are hungry for the good news of the day.

January 2, 2015January 2, 2015 by Jonathan Frei

Fourteen things I’m thankful for from 2014

2014 was a good year for me and my family. Here are a few of the reasons I’m thankful:

Moved to a new home that suits our family perfectly (also thankful for our old place—filled with all the memories and good times, and which was perfect for us, up until we our latest edition to the team started crawling around underfoot)
For friends who helped us move all our stuff to the new house and build the playground in the back yard for the kids
Stared listening to music again with better sound equipment and the near limitless catalog of a premium Spotify subscription
Started a fantastic new job at a great company, where I get to work with excellent co-workers
Got to watch my baby girl learn to walk with my parents while they were visiting
Getting to hear my middle child learn to talk (kid grammar is difficult to correct when it is especially cute—”Me love you!”).
Seeing my wife expand her musical career into some exciting new areas and develop her Yoga skills
Fort the writers, podcasters, comic book artists, and film makers that made this such an entertaining year
For the businesses and people who make the products and services I enjoy
For my new appreciation for Christmas music
For getting to visit and reconnect with friends from college
For having friends and family visiting us at our new home
For another year of riding my bike (and now getting to ride with the whole family)
For the opportunity to spend another year with my amazing family

There was so much to be thankful for in 2014, and so much more to look forward to in 2015. I can’t wait to find out what exciting new adventures will make this new year special.

January 1, 2015January 2, 2015 by Jonathan Frei

Deep Dark Fears

Last night, I read throught the entire archive of the Tumblr, Deep Dark Fears. The premise of the site is simple. Visitors can anonymously submit their deepest, darkest fears, and the site’s creator, Fran Krause, will then illustrate them as a short comic.

Some of the entries are funny. Some are morbid. Some come as a relief—because they let me know there is someone else in the world with the same weird fears as me.

December 31, 2014December 31, 2014 by Jonathan Frei

How speakers work

Jacob O’Neal makes animated infographics on his site, Animagraffs, that show how things work. A recent one that caught my attention shows how loud speakers work.

Below is an example of part of the Animagraffs on speakers, but you need to see the full sequence to appreciate how he breaks down the complex technical processes into a visual learning experience.

There are only about ten of these Animagraffs on the site, which isn’t surprising because of how much research and work they take to produce. Other interesting ones are about how a car engine works, what happens inside a jet engine, how to Moonwalk (the dance not the space activity), and the biology of tarantulas (not for the faint of heart).

December 10, 2014 by Jonathan Frei

Using kids as exercise equipment

This is how us dads stay in shape. (via artofmainliness.com)

December 9, 2014 by Jonathan Frei

Population.io

Well, this is depressing. I used to think I was one of the young ones, but it turn out I’m older than 51% of the world’s population, according to data from Population.io. I still have a ways to go before I’m older than half the people in the United States, and I live in Florida, so I’ve got that going for me too.

Population.io is a data visualization project that takes demographic and population data from a variety of sources to present personalized graphs. Here’s how the project’s creators describe it.

Population.io aims to make demography – the study of human populations – accessible to a wider audience. We believe that demographic data can play an important role in understanding the social and economic developments of our time. Our hope is that people from all walks of life, in all ages and across all countries will explore a new perspective of their own life and find their own place in the world of today and tomorrow.

Here are a couple of other interesting factoids I learned about my age in relation to the global population:

On May 24, 2017, I’ll be the 4 billionth person on the planet
I’m older than 40% of the US population
I share a birthday with 319, 574 other people (13,315 of whom were born during the same hour)
My estimated death day is August 2, 2067 (That date is marked in my calendar thanks to the site’s handy iCal download–morbid I know)

It seems I still have many years ahead of me–52.7 years–based on the average life expectancy of men in the US.