Henry the Monarch Caterpillar

By -
I finally found a monarch caterpillar on my home-grown milkweed.  (I had no idea cold-stratification was a thing for seeds to sprout, nature is weird).  Henry is now living in a jar at my desk and being fed milkweed that grows around the office.



Henry is about 3mm.  (penny for scale)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Visualizing the user post migration paths across Reddit to extract linked communities

By -
Image
Someone was kind enough to crawl all of Reddit.com and produce a TB sized extract of all posts . This was cool.  I ran it through a small loop that said for each author if they post next in another subreddit (link strength from old sub to new sub)++" Then some trimming: keep the top 5 outbound connections from each sub, and top 20 inbound links.  Mix with some gephi layout and coloring , and voilà - how everything is connected! It would be fun to do a neurons firing lightning sort of animation - "pick a starting place based on popularity, and fire/light up one possible path the author takes from there"
Read more

Why people don't like Product Managers

By -
I recently attended p-camp , a fantastic get-together for product managers from all over the US. Hidden among sessions in the vein of "Agile Now!" and "Can you be more Agile?" and "Agile and Scrum: How to be more Agileriffic" there was a gem of "The Future of Product Management" where we explored where the career of Product Manager was and where it was heading. And what I quickly realized was that people don't like us much. Come again? Ok, people like PMs as individuals just fine. (Well, people seem to generally like me, and seem to like the PMs I've worked with) But in general, there is a greater than average distrust of the PM as a role in an organization. As it turns out, there are some perfectly valid reasons. Engineers: don't like being told what to do (who does, really), and they don't like having to guess how hard something is before digging into it. And they really hate having to stop work on one thing and swit
Read more

Inability to visualize the scale of our national debt

By -
With some needed brain-break time between recruiter calls, I wanted to visualize the national debt.  Inspired by the NYT tree-map visualization of our next proposed budget , and unsatisfied with the "if the national debt was dollars it would encircle the earth X times " type of answer.  I get it, it's big.  Very big. But, how big? So I started out with a nice slider (now easy in HTML5) and a picture of a crisp new $100.  (It's all about the benjamins!)  Apply some exponential math to the slider, and whammo... I crashed my browser. No problem, rookie mistake and I'm just exploring, let's have some stacks of $10,000, the amount of a federal bundle of $100 bills.  When the amount of images on the screen is too big, switch to the bundles.  Problem solved, right?  Wrong, browser crashed again. Er, ok. How about stacks of million dollars?  Easy, some casino had a stack in a glass case and everyone took pictures.  Stacks of billion dollars?  An artist put together
Read more