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Here’s an incredibly wonderful piece on creativity, the origin of, and more specifically on surviving it, from Elizabeth Gilbert at TED. For those who are not smitten with her by the end, you are stronger than I.

I just love this image:

via This isn’t happiness and Let’s Go Mets

Happy President’s day.

Every time I hear “happy president’s day” I think of a laughing president, playing at the beach maybe, or at a cocktail party, telling jokes and being gay. It’s a nice image.

and the view is just lovely (click for large-size).

Ben Rosenbaum was talking about birthday cakes (and, err, good and evil). We just had a cake-a-lapooza here ourselves for Coen’s 5th(!) birthday. This is the impressive work of Coen’s grandmother.

This is a definite improvement over last year when we drank a bit too much, stayed up late and tried to recreate busytown.

This year it was a carrot cake (truthfully, we just didn’t tell him – we all wanted a carrot cake and the idea of carrots in a cake still sounds like putting turnips in a milkshake to him).

It seemed to go over well as it was promptly devoured by a horde of small two-legged creatures.

I was curious so I did a little research on blood today:

A unit of blood is 450 ML – or about .12 gallons.

$1680 = price of blood per gallon. (though blood varies in price – it’s more expensive on the coasts, according to this article in Slate.

1.25 gallons = ~ the amount of blood in your body ($2100 dollars worth).

A newborn’s body holds a cup of blood ($105 dollars worth).

There are ~5,375 gallons of blood donated every day in the US ($9,030,000 dollars worth)

An adult can usually donate about 1 pint at a time (or 8-10% of total blood) ($200)

At rest, your heart pumps ~1.5 gallons of blood per minute or roughly a 1/5th of a pint per second. This works out to about $42 of blood per second (hello Douglas Adams!).

Blood lasts 42 days  (hello again!)

There are 42 gallons (again!) of oil in a barrel of oil. As of today you could buy a gallon of oil for $40.06. A barrel of blood would set you back $70,560.

There are regularly blood shortages over the holidays.

You can lose about 10-15% of your blood without major problems developing.

Exsanguination is the process of bleeding to death.

here are some other blood facts

picture borrowed from this site