For example, are you going to buy a new home and want to check out neighborhoods for various factors, such as crime, income, education opportunities, neighborhood walkability, etc.? Or are you interested in checking out your current neighborhood? Do you want to open a business and so want to target specific markets?

Below are a number of online tools that you may help you answer these questions:

• SpotCrime: shows crime statistics for a given address
• PolicyMap: shows census, real estate analysis, crime, mortgage origination, education, income, demographic, job, energy, and other statistics
• Walk Score: rates a given address on its walkability - a measure of the quality of life around a given address when walking
• Criminal Searches: search a given neighborhood or even people for crimes and offences.

As the first of several examples, here is an image of the distribution of household incomes around VCU in the year 2000, using the PolicyMap service. The free version unfortunately only gives access to old data (e.g., year 2000 for incomes), and the resolution is a little course (does not give block-by-block resolution), but you still can see overall trends. In the figure, the regions shaded with the darker colors indicate higher median household incomes.

The image below, from SpotCrime, shows the various crimes that were reported and logged by police from March 4, 2008 to May 4, 2008 around VCU. The different icons indicate different types of crimes, such as assaults, thefts, arson, arrests, robbery, burglary, vandalism, etc. While the number of crimes over just a two month period might seem high, VCU is an urban university in the middle of a low-income part of town (see previous median income image) with a dense population, so some amount of crime is unfortunately probably to be expected without better enforcement and more security.

Finally, on the bright side, VCU does appear to be a neighborhood that is quite walkable, as seen in the following graphic, where WalkScore gives VCU a walkability score of 88 out of 100, where 100 is the best walkability score you can get. Each icon represents a grocery store, restaurant, coffee shop, bar, movie theatre, school, park, library, bookstore, fitness center, drug store, etc., that are good to have within walking distance - the more of these establishments there are, the higher the walkability score.

Hint: where are the students?

They have a variety of land mammals and birds, such as llamas, giraffes, pot-bellied pigs, bison, emus, elk, zebras, camels, and some endangered African animals.

You can either drive through the three-mile trail or you can ride in a wagon, pulled by a tractor. As you drive along, the animals will come up to the car and you can feed them special food from plastic buckets. We bought four buckets of food for $10, and that was about the right amount for the three-mile trip.

Some of the critters will be happy to relieve you of your bucket if you aren't careful:

You also have to be careful that you don't get an additional passenger in your car:

In addition to the safari trail, they also have a giraffe feeding station, a kangaroo walk-about, a lorikeet landing, primates, tigers, warthogs, an aviary, and a petting area.

So it was a nice day trip up in the beautiful Virginia mountains, where the buffalo do roam and the antelope do play. Camels too.

We'll see if I caught mine in time, but for now at least I can begin the process of getting back in shape. Towards that goal, we recently completed setting up a home gym.

Why set up your own home gym? Why not just join a local fitness center? Well, for me, my biggest constraint is time, and so having a gym at home really pays for itself when you consider the overhead of travel to and from a fitness center. Also, as I learn more about what is involved in fitness and proper exercises, I have found that most local fitness centers just do not have the right types of equipment there to be worth my time and money. And I really shouldn't have to mention awful music, OPS (Other People's Sweat), and hefty fees commonly found at the local fitness centers.

A good guide on how to set up your own home gym, with pointers to proper equipment and possible vendors, can be found here in the September 1, 2002 issue of the CrossFit Journal. Our current home gym is a first-pass at their prescribed configuration, and includes a multi-station exercise center, plates and dumbbells (and a couple kettlebells), treadmill, striking dummies/bags, pullup station, and some tumbling matts. There are a few pieces of equipment I am lacking, such as a climbing rope, rings, and a rowing machine, but for the most part the current configuration allows for a reasonably effective and useful workout.

Note that the above-linked CrossFit Journal article also contains a list of things you can do to get kicked out of your local gym (I think they were being humorous) - maybe that's a way to get your gym to refund the remaining balance of your gym membership if you want out?

Day 1
Bring your own music - use a boom box - and turn it up to inspiration levels and start working out. ACDC's "Thunderstruck" should do the trick.

As for how to structure your exercise workouts, I can't think of a better program than CrossFit - there you'll find a WoD (workout of the day), videos on how to do each exercise, nutrition information, and lots more. They stress functional fitness, and their workouts will help you get into the best shape of your life.

If you want more of a tactical workout, then you might want to try The Pit Workout and The Pit Workout - CrossPit. I am currently working through The Pit Workout and, well, let me just say it's not yoga down at the Y or tae-bo. Once I get The Pit Workout under my belt, I'll move to CrossPit.

Finally, if you need some motivation to get back in shape, whether you stick with your fitness center or build a home gym, and want examples of how effective the CrossFit program is, you may want to watch this video of one of the CrossFit workouts.

Note that setting up this gym completes one task of my 101 Goals in 1001 Days project.

The book focuses on Robert Neville as he tries to stay alive and sane in a world ruled by vampires. He researches the plague and tries to find a cure, and his strength and reason are put to the test in a life where his days are spent preparing for the vampire onslaughts at night, and his nights are spent struggling to live to just another day. Trying to stay alive while all alone, especially after one's family and friends are killed and the only purpose in living any longer is to avoid being ripped to shreds by vampires, can test anyone's sanity, and Robert has his share of mental, as well as physical, struggles.

I haven't yet seen Hollywood's remake of the book, the I Am Legend movie, and I understand Hollywood changed the original story quite a bit (even turning the English-German, blond-haired Robert Neville into Will Smith), but the read was so haunting that I am hesitant to see the movie production. The book, at least, is recommended.

Note that completing this book meets one of my 101 goals in 1001 days project goals.

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

So, "turtles all the way down" refers to a belief about how the universe is constructed--our world rests on the back of a turtle, which rests on the back of a second turtle, which rests on the back of a third, etc.---and more generally refers to an infinite regression type of situation or problem or argument.

The turtle stacking nexus must be somewhere in Virginia, because so far this summer I've had to relocate seven turtles, going the wrong way on busy streets or otherwise getting themselves into trouble.

First, there was this turtle, then that turtle, then the following quick succession of honorable turtles:

Here's Turtle Three:

Turtles Four and Five:

Turtle Six:

Turtle Seven:

So how many turtles support the world on their backs?

Well, at least seven.

This book provides a very interesting glimpse into just how humans make decisions in real life---it turns out that in a variety of situations, humans are not the masters of rationality that we assume them to be.

Economics is very good at making lots of models to predict supply and demand, though a core assumption is that humans will always make rational decisions. One look at the current economy gives weight to the statement that economists have a very hard time with getting their complex models to reflect, in any reasonable way, reality. Dan's take on economics is that humans, more often than not, make irrational decisions, leading to a new field called Behavioral Economics. Through a series of very interesting experiments, Dan shows that his suppositions are correct---humans make irrational decisions a lot, and the results of his experiments give insight into why and how people respond as they do to life situations.

Example experiments include testing human decision making when we have lots of options, how our decision making is distorted when we are sexually aroused, why we are dishonest, and how we are influenced by the placebo effect and the power of suggestion.

I found this book very entertaining---now I know why a 50-cent Aspirin works and a 1-cent Aspirin doesn't---and I do think Dan has done a great service in highlighting and investigating how humans really make decisions, as opposed to how traditional economists assume we make decisions.

Finally, reading this book finishes one of my 101 goals in 1001 days.

I first read about the project, called 101 Things To Do in 1001 Days, on Robert Talbert's blog, and then visited the triplux site for more information. It seems like an interesting way to structure getting things done, so I figured it is worth a shot.

Remember, 1001 days is equivalent to about 2.75 years, so I'll be (hopefully) ticking off tasks as I accomplish them for some time to come, but if I go too long without accomplishing anything, feel free to ping me.

Also, you might want to consider joining in on the fun by creating your own set of 101 Goals or things you want to do and then, well, doing them.

But it is not just the high price of gas that is causing concern. All across the U.S., hundreds of thousands of people are losing their homes to foreclosure or are unable to sell their homes, and the crown jewels of the U.S. are being bought up by unsavory foreign governments taking advantage of the weak dollar.

Everyone wants to just throw their hands into the air, but if you have wondered why these events are happening, then you might consider reading The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash by Charles R. Morris.

This book won't help you get out of debt, sell your house, or improve the degrading quality of the education system. But what it will do is put the current economic crisis into context, give insight into how economic and personal spending practices contributed to the problem, and help us understand what can be done to improve our national situation. It will also help you realize why and how the much heralded Alan Greenspan and his Chicago economics theories may have actually led to our current economic downward spiral, as did the lack of critical thinking skills by the millions of Americans who tried to buy houses when they could not afford to, assisted by greedy banks, other lenders, and Wall Street. It will also show how the follies of the current Presidential administration led to the decline of American economic standing in the world, with potentially dire implications for us all going forward.

There are no quick fixes for the current situation we voted and spent ourselves into, but this book at least paints a plausible explanation for why we are here. Where we go from here depends in large part on the resilience and fortitude of the American peoples, and this book at least helps show a reality clearly the result of causes and effects rather than from forces outside our control.

But this ease of making a meal, no matter what the environment, has turned what was once a survival advantage for our species, when humans first struggled to spread across the globe tens of thousands of years ago, into a bit of a disadvantage in an industrialized world over-populated with people and, ironically, with too much of the wrong kind of food. Overpopulation and the need to feed so many mouths has led to the industrialization of food production, transforming small family farms into large monocultures of genetically-modified cornfields and acre-sized metal sheds of captive, steroid and antibiotic-injected cows. We might have once thought this scaling up of food production to be a good thing, but is it?

But why stop asking questions there? Just where does that McDonald's meal come from, really? Why does the U.S. grow so much corn? Why do the factory farms plant thousands of acres of corn, and only corn? And with so much corn, why does the government subsidize the factory farms to grow more of it? Is "corn-fed beef" a delicacy, or a perorative? How is Whole Foods, at the same time, different from and just like the modern factory farm? Why might Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm, in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, represent the best farm in the U.S.?

Why indeed. And you might be surprised at the answers to each of the above questions.

So if you have ever wondered about the food you unpackage from its plastic shrink wrap and plop into the microwave, if you have ever considered the moral hazard of eating meat - or corn, and if you have ever wanted to gather wild mushrooms, then you might want to read The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan.

With an admirable investigative tenacity and a gift for telling a good story, Michael details how our food is grown, produced, cooked, and eaten by examining the life story behind four meals - one bought from a fast food chain, one made from items bought in an organic store, one made from foods grown and raised on a sustainable farm, and one made from foods foraged from the wild. In reading about Michael's adventures, you will discover what it takes to get the food on your table to your table, and you will likely never think about corn the same again.

Modern humans have lost the connection to the land and the food it provides. Overweight, overpopulated, and increasingly unhealthy, Michael's look into what we eat and how it was made is perhaps the just desserts.

Here's the idea: Karen Fonstad (sadly, when writing up this post, I saw that Karen died in 2005 due to complications from breast cancer) reverse-engineered the route Frodo and Company took on their way to Rivendell in her book The Atlas of Middle-Earth. For example: leaving Bag End, heading west through the gate into a lane, following the lane for a bit, then following the hedgerows south is about a 3 mile trip.

In her Rivendell mileage chart, Karen notes the cumulative miles, miles between each milepost, and the description of each milepost location. So if you are just starting out and log 3 miles on today's run, then you would make a note in your notebook your mileage run for the day and the cumulative miles you have run. That way you can compare your progress against the progress of the Company as they (and you) head to Rivendell.

All this may sound a bit geeky, but it does work---I have started the journey, though extensive, non-fitness travel has kept me away from too much "Hobbit-walking", as my wife calls it. Nevertheless, yesterday I jogged 2.25 miles, which brings my cumulative total to 36.84 miles. On the Rivendell journey, this puts me just beyond that incident with the Black Rider, but before they meet up with the Elves on the Road.

As a final note: in case you are not familiar with Rivendell, Hobbits, or J.R.R. Tolkien, get thee to Amazon and buy the books, or at least the movies. Getting back into shape can wait until you finish - one has to have priorities.

The series depicts an FBI agent who is helped by his mathematics whiz brother in solving crimes - kind of like CSI with equations rather than microscopes. But don't let the equations scare you off - the conflict caused by the two different methods of problem solving, characterized by the FBI agent brother and the mathematics brother, along with the various crimes and bad guys, actually provides for exciting drama.

As an example, in the pilot episode a serial rapist/killer is loose in Los Angeles. The FBI agent has a map of the city showing the locations of the crimes, but is otherwise stumped on how to track the killer and predict where the killer will strike next. The mathematician studies the pattern of the crime locations and, rather than try to predict the location of the next crime, he estimates the location of where the killer lives. The analogy is that of a garden water sprinkler - it is difficult to predict where the next water droplet will land, but if you study the pattern of the drops of water, you can estimate where the water sprinkler must be located.

Note that the math used in the episodes is real, and if you are interested in finding more about the different techniques used in the various episodes, then you might want to take a look at the book The Numbers Behind NUMB3RS: Solving Crime with Mathematics.

I particularly enjoyed the sessions on data analysis and knowledge extraction - finding patterns and knowledge in large, complex, high-dimensional datasets. Along these lines, I gave a talk titled "Interactive Text Analysis with Iterative Denoising".

Durham, a former tobacco town, is home to Duke University and serves as one vertex of Research Triangle Park. One restaurant I particularly enjoyed was Toast, a small but good paninoteca, which was within walking distance of the hotel.

For the last several years he has been embedded with the U.S. and international troops in Iraq, detailing the tremendous changes occurring in that country, considering not only the perspective of our and allied troops trying to restore order, but also the perspective of the everyday Iraqis, whose country and lives were tossed into the air like so many pick-up sticks.

While some of you may be familiar with Michael's first book, Danger Close, which details his experiences becoming a Green Beret, Michael has chronicled his experiences in Iraq in a new book, called Moment of Truth in Iraq: How a New 'Greatest Generation' of American Soldiers is Turning Defeat and Disaster into Victory and Hope. From what I have seen, Michael tells it like it is, much to the dismay of the military brass.

Special signed editions of his book are available here.

You can read the first chapter of the book here.

Get it while you can---Michael is heading back to Iraq, already having logged more time in combat situations than any other reporter. I think he has a unique perspective on the situations on the ground there, and I believe his voice is an important one.