Emma and I made a gingerbread village!

Quite bit of effort, but lots of fun. Easily the best Christmas-themed arts and crafts project ever.

I was up in Boston visiting Emma this weekend. It was delightful, and looking back, extremely productive and fun-filled.

• We finished painting Emma’s room from this hideous pale pink color (something is wrong with whoever thought that was a good idea) to an eye-pleasing gray shade.
• We tried a nearby Thai tapas restaurant. The highlight of the meal was the Paradise Beef, made from an “ancient recipe.”
  
• We played some Scrabble. I am getting better, but Emma still demolishes me most of the time. I am pretty sure she cheats.
• We had some fun with whiteboard contact paper.
  
• We made some pizza. This one featured chicken sausage, caramelized onions, and goat cheese. Yum.
  
• We learned about dimples. They are an inherited, dominant trait caused by variations in the facial muscles. It’s much rarer to have just one. I am special.
• We used fabric markers to decorate some infant onesies as a gift. Adorable. Way too awesome to give to some baby who’s just going to make a mess of them. Maybe I could use them as gloves.
  

On the deck after the snow became easier to pack. Awesome.

Rolling Stone has this really fascinating article about a blind, teenage phone phreaker. I didn’t even know people still did that kind of thing now that there’s the interweb. Awesome:

There seemed to be no limit to what he could do: shut off your phone service, dig up your unlisted cellphone number, even listen in on your home phone — something only a handful of veteran phreaks can pull off. Celebrities were a favorite target. Weigman claims to have hacked and called the cellphones of Lindsay Lohan (“She was drunk, and my friend tried to have phone sex with her”) and Eminem (“He told me to fuck off”). Last year, during the presidential campaign, Weigman heard a YouTube video of Mitt Romney’s son Matt dialing his dad. Weigman listened closely to the touch tones, deciphered the candidate’s cellphone number — and then made a call of his own. “Mitt Romney!” he said. “What’s going on, dude? Running for president?” Weigman says Romney told him to shove the phone up his ass, and hung up.

This is not new; I’ve seen it somewhere before. Still freaking hilarious. Louis CK is amazing.

This video will bend your mind practically to the breaking point. Incredible.

The universe.. So big, it’s almost terrifying. Unfathomable doesn’t even begin to describe it.

We took pictures. From space. Of 10,000 other galaxies. With light beams from 13 billion years ago. We did that.

Hundreds of billions of galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars each. That’s so much stuff, you’re practically guaranteed to have a lot of crazy random totally amazing and unpredictable things. That’s big enough that you could have a whole planet, where one day you accidentally make imperfectly self-replicating structures that constantly reproduce and feed off the energy of a nearby star and then over time change the planet itself, so little by little they become all kinds of different and more complex things until finally millions of years later you get a bunch of monkeys that can build a telescope and send it up into the sky and see what the other galaxies looked like when the universe was young.

Who knows what else is out there?

Ridicule is one of the best defenses against pseudo-scientific nonsense. This guy Dara O’Briain is particularly good like that. Bonus points for the Irish accent. Awesome.

In what is easily the best idea so far this year, an artist in London used helium, soap, vegetable dye, and some sort of black magic (science!) to make floating smiley face clouds.

Awesome.

An incredibly impressive breakdown of the financial crisis: