Gleanings of the Week Ending July 13, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Authentic Happiness - Start with the home page of the Director of the Positive Psychology Center at University of Pennsylvania and then look through the site for information and do some or all of the well-being questionnaires.

Urban Observatory - Compare various aspects (like population density, senior population, traffic, etc.) of three large cities (16 of the largest cities in the world to select from) by looking at them side by side.

Powerful African Wildlife Bursts out of lively Landscapes - Enjoy the art of Karen Laurence-Rowe from Kenya.

The Joy of Old Age (No Kidding) - Read Dr. Oliver Sacks thoughts on becoming 80 years old - his mercury (element 80) year.

Technology Foresight - Think about the ‘Futuresaurus’ timelines coming out of Imperial College technology foresight event and posted by Richard Watson on his blog. I was intrigues by the items projected to disappear.

Watch North American City Skylines Sprout In 3-D Video, From 1850 To Today - Cube Cities combined commercial real estate data with Google Earth to provide these videos of midtown Manhattan, Chicago, San Francisco, Calgary, Downtown Los Angeles, and Toronto,

A View from The Overlook: A Virginia Farmer - I could not resist adding this post about Mount Vernon from National Parks Traveler to this week’s gleanings. I enjoyed my visit to the place a few weeks ago.

Disruptions: How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Cities - I like the projections of driverless cars being available by the end of the decade!

Stanford students capture the flight of birds on very high-speed video - Watch the video - the birds are amazing. The high speed video provides a window into flight that we cannot get with our unaided eyes!

10 mindblowingly futuristic technologies that will appear by the 2030s - How many of these seem plausible to you? Back in the 1960s - many thought we’d have a colony on the moon by 2013. With technology, know-how is not the only requirement.

Mount Vernon

Mount Vernon - George Washington’s home on the Potomac in Northern Virginia - is one of my favorite places to take visitors. There were a lot of visits when we first moved to the area 30 years ago but they have not been as frequent recently. When I visited a few weeks ago - all the construction that was underway a few years ago had been completed. The new visitor center and museum areas are built to accommodate large crowds; Mount Vernon is a popular place.

On the day we visited, it rained off and on. We carried umbrellas and appreciated that the air was warm enough that being damp was not a problem. The rain was to our advantage: it was probably one of the few times there was not a line to see the house. The rest of the tour is less crowded and includes:

The view of the Potomac from the house

The necessaries (one we saw was a three holer!)

The flowers

The vegetables - including cabbages and artichokes

The old boxwood that overwhelmed the garden in years past are mostly gone, replaced with smaller boxwood that border the beds in the flower garden. The magnolias were in full bloom and I can’t resist a slide show for them.

And finally - the view of Mount Vernon from its carriage gate. What an appealing house it still is.