Bag of Randomness for Tuesday, September 22, 2015

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Posted in Personal | 7 Comments

Christian Family Goes A Year “Without Shopping”

I posted about this family several years ago, but now they are pushing a book they wrote about their experience.

The Dannemillers wanted to “reconnect” with each other and with their children, Audrey and Jake, who were 5 and 7 at the time, and “live out their faith” by spending 2013 committed to living with what they had and not buying more “stuff.”

It was to be a “vacation from consumerism,” in which they could buy groceries and consumables, and spend money on travel and “experiences,” but no money could be spent on clothes, gadgets, electronics, toys, books, home decor, etc.

This doesn’t mean they went the entire year without making purchases, so their rules are below, and they only broke them twice for what I think are valid reasons which are stated in this article.

• “We can buy stuff that can be used up within a year, including groceries, gas, hygiene products. No clothes.

• “We can fix stuff that breaks. Unless the repair cost is greater than the replacement cost.

• “Gifts must be in the form of charitable donation or experience gift, with the idea being to build connections and memories by doing things like going to dinner, the zoo or traveling to visit friends and family.”

To a much lesser extent, I’ve started to only order water with most of my meals as it’s hard for me to justify spending $1.99 – $2.50 for tea or a coke.  I actually had a good friend (and I hope still reader of this blog) do that with his wife for an entire year and us

 

Posted in Interesting, Spiritual | 2 Comments

To Scale: The Solar System

I love this video.  Totally worth the watch. It shows us how grand our solar system is and how small and far away we are from things.  It’s one thing to see illustrations or graphics of the planets in order, but they are never to scale, and it’s another to actually get a justifiable perspective.

Things that made my mind go “wow”:

  • It takes about seven miles of empty space to get this time-lapse video perspective when the Earth is just the size of a marble, and it’s a beautiful time-lapse that has to be filmed from on top of a mountain.  Note: Pluto ain’t’ included.
  • If the Earth was the size of a marble, that would make the moon almost an arm’s length away.  With the Earth that small, imagine how small a human would be. So when you consider that men actually walked on that thing and returned safely, it’s an amazing accomplishment.
  • If the sun was about a meter-and-a-half wide, that puts a marbled-sized Earth 176 meters or 579 feet away  Here’s another way to look at it, stand almost two football fields away (193 yards) and look at a meter-and-a-half wide object.  Now contemplate how much heat that meter-and-a-half size object has to radiate for you to feel it.
  • If you can spot a meter-and-a-half wide object from about three-and-a-half miles away, that’s how the sun would look from Neptune.

This is one of the videos where you need to view it in full screen to really appreciate it, and even though it’s seven minutes, it goes by quickly.

On a dry lakebed in Nevada, a group of friends build the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits: a true illustration of our place in the universe.

Posted in Interesting | 1 Comment