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This is the condo we signed a contract on.  It’s located in an area of Richmond called Jackson Ward, a very historic community that is undergoing significant gentrification right now.  The condo is a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom unit on the 4th floor of an old insurance company building from 1931.  The building was gutted and condos were built in its place.

Here are some pictures of the condo :

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We received the beautiful wedding photos from our photographer, Molly at Bloom Photography.  Enjoy!

I matched to Neurosurgery! I’ll found out where I matched to on Thursday.  What a relief!

Well, I used to.

I recently signed up for life insurance, and part of the process involves getting bloodwork done. After going through the whole process, they send you the lab results for your record.

My results looked excellent for the most part. Good blood count. Good cholesterol. The only abnormal result was my creatinine. It was very slightly elevated.

Now, normally I wouldn’t be concerned about a study that was only slightly elevated, but there’s been some recent studies that show that chronic soda drinking can result in chronic renal failure.

This was enough to scare me. I knew it was time to put my excessive soda drinking to an end. So how did I do it? One day, I just decided to quit. I decided not to buy any soda for home, and I refused to drink soda in the house. The only time I could drink soda was out at a restaurant.

That was a month ago. So far, so good. I had some seriously bad headaches for about week after stopping cold turkey, but Tylenol and coffee helped. Now the headaches are gone, and I’m patting myself on the back for taking action. Hopefully I can continue this positive trend.

Is there anything you’ve been wanting to end in your life? Maybe now’s the time to take that step..

Imagine having a box in your backyard the size of a power transformer.  This box would be filled with hundreds of little fuel cells that would power your house for cheaper than your electric company.  If all goes well, the future could be here within a decade.

A startup called Bloom Energy has built an amazing SUV-sized box designed to do just that.  It’s filled with thousands of solid oxide fuel cells pumping out electricity with only a minimal carbon footprint.  The cost currently is $800,000, but the company hopes to get the cost of the device down to a few thousand dollars within a decade. Ebay purchased the device recently and claim to already have saved a couple hundred grand off their electricity costs.

A device like this could really alleviate the growing problem of our decaying power grid.

60 Minutes covered the amazing device this past weekend, and it’s definitely worth a watch.

The Wall Street Journal today has an absolutely wonderful article about the evolutionary characteristics of the human body.

A 2009 Gallup poll found that 44% of Americans believe that God created human beings in their present form within the past 10,000 years. Many of them also think the human body is perfectly designed.

But most scientists—including biologists, anthropologists, paleontologists and geneticists—see the 21st century human body as a collection of compromises, jury-rigged by evolution as our ancestors adapted to changing conditions.

“In many ways, we are maladapted for modernity,” says Stephen Stearns, a Yale evolutionary biologist. He and others in the field are urging medical schools to include more evolutionary thinking when teaching doctors about modern diseases.

Everything from our imperfect spines, our little toe, and the evolutionary explanation of the appendix are all covered in this article.  It really made me think.  What will the human body be like 20,000 years from now?