Weathering disasters Just read: Flamingos In The Men’s Room: How Zoos And Aquariums Handle Hurricanes When you’re building a zoo disaster plan, there’s one thing to keep in mind: Murphy’s law. Anything that could go wrong, will. Just ask the flock of flamingos that weathered Hurricane Andrew in a public restroom at Zoo Miami in 1992. Srikanth Perinkulam

Nik turns 10 and we decided to spend the day outdoors. Head to Cunningham falls for a hike instead of Shenandoah. The falls by itself wasn’t any impressive. Took less than 30 minutes to reach the tiny cascade standing all of probably 80ft. Was expecting Maryland’s highest falls to be much higher than this! Looped back to the parking lot on a slightly longer trail. Miss shey totally killed it! This 2 year old hiked the whole stretch with absolutely no complaints! ...

Seward Johnson’s - Return visit A quick weekend trip to Chicago to meet Neeraj and Kanu. Took this opportunity to explore Chicago a bit. Chicago downtown felt like an eclectic mix of Boston and NYC. Spent some time walking around the city on Saturday covering the regular spots leading up to Navy pier and back. Totally mesmerized by the greenish-blue waters of Lake Michigan! Headed over to Native foods cafe (finally!) for dinner. Elizabeth joins us and later we decide to head to Hopewell Brewing company. Grab some drinks and dive into some interesting board games with live music in the background. Played a slew of bananagram rounds and decide to head back to the hotel. ...

#tufte #R #visualisation Srikanth Perinkulam Bookmark: Tufte in R The idea behind Tufte in R is to use R - the most powerful open-source statistical programming language - to replicate excellent visualisation practices developed by Edward Tufte. It’s not a novel approach - there are plenty of excellent R functions and related packages wrote by people who have much more expertise in programming than myself. I simply collect those resources in one place in an accessible and replicable format, adding a few bits of my own coding discoveries. ...

If there’s one thing you were to listen to today, let it be this! August 25, 2012. Apparently that’s when they estimate the voyager crossed the final frontier and entered interstellar space. Cruising at about 35,000 miles/hour it’s the ONLY man made object to enter these realms…All this with technology that’s 45 years old! Podcast: Where the Sun Don’t Shine https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radiolab_podcast/radiolab_podcast17voyagerupdate.mp3 Today we take a quick look up at a hole in the sky and follow an old story as it travels beyond the reach of the sun. We hear from some moon-peeping listeners and then, on the 40th anniversary of their launch, we check in with the Voyager space probes. We revisit the story of the romantic time capsules that were placed onboard, and a question we asked five years ago: where exactly is Voyager 1? ...

So what? Now what? Podcast: Rethinking School For most of modern history, humans have placed smaller humans in institutions called schools. But what parts of this model still work? And what must change? Srikanth Perinkulam

Torn between the Baldface trail and the Ferry crossing beach State Park, we decided to head to the latter. Proximity to water made it an easy decision. A short 2 hour drive from home and we reached the state park around 09:00am. The trails turned out to be much shorter than anticipated. Covered the whole state park in about an hour. Pretty well maintained. Humid conditions were a great recipe for the bugs though! Having covered the trails we head out to the beach. Pretty calm with just the morning walkers. ...

Came across this ‘freshly’ made trail in Skyline Park yesterday. I’ve been to this small park quite a few times but never quite spotted this ’extension’. Should get back here sometime soon to explore further! Yet another find off the blue that makes me love Boston all the more! Srikanth Perinkulam

Adding Night of the Grizzlies to my reading list! Just read: The Deadly Grizzly Bear Attacks That Changed the National Park Service Forever Glacier National Park’s busiest season came to an abrupt halt in the summer of 1967. In a matter of hours, two grizzly bears had acted as they never had before in the park’s 57-year history. Several miles apart, each bear had mauled a young woman on the same day, in the dark, early hours of August 13. ...

Joe’s past midway now!! An absolute thrill following him on this epic journey. https://instagram.com/p/BXn_YcZlU4-/ Srikanth Perinkulam