The population of Boston in 2010 was 617,594 according to the United States Census Bureau’s decennial population count.

That was an increase of almost 5% from 2000, when the city’s population was 589,141, but quite a bit less than what recent population estimates had suggested would be the case.

Here’s the breakdown of the 2010 population by race:

White: 47%
Black: 22%
Latino: 17%
Asian: 9%

The number of children in Boston declined to about 104,000 in 2010 from about 117,000 in 2000.

Boston had majority non-white population overall in 2010, but a majority white population among those 18 and over, according to data from the 2010 Census that was released yesterday.

The city’s total population was 617,594 and non-whites made up 53% of that.

Of the 513,884 who were 18 or older whites made up 51.8% of the population.

Non-whites made up 77% of the under 18 crowd.

There was a slight non-white majority in the 2000 Census. The American Community Survey, another product of the United States Census Bureau showed whites as the majority during the last few years of the decade that followed. It now appears that the ACS somewhat overestimated not only Boston’s total population but in particular its white component.

Thomas Saves the Day is a live-performance musical starring every boy’s favorite tank engine. The play is less than 90 minutes and that includes a 20 minute long intermission. Besides Thomas there his his best friend Percy (the little green tank engine best known for pulling the mail on time), Sir Topham Hatt (also known as The Fat Controller), Sir Topham Hatt’s grandson, Devious Diesel and a handful of other characters of lesser importance. The biggest difference between the play and the typical Thomas and Friends episode is that the drivers get to talk and do a lot in the former.

The plot of the play spins loosely around the steam engines’ efforts to put Island of Sodor back in order in time for the Lantern Festival after the island has been ravaged by a storm. Thomas and Percy engage in various cheeky hijinks along the way while Diesel stays at the sheds and belittles them.

Below are a few pictures from Thomas Saves the Day at the beautiful Hanover Theatre in downtown Worcester in central Massachusetts. Check here for performances in your area.

Colonial-era militia reenactors on a Saturday afternoon at the Wayside Inn in Sudbury in Massachusetts. I think they were part of a wedding ceremony celebration.

Daybreakers is a 2010 movie that delves into a theme that is often hinted at but hardly ever explored in vampire movies, namely what happens if the undead bloodsuckers go through the world’s entire supply of human.

A mere ten years after an epidemic – described in fairly vauge terms – has turned the vast majority of humans into vampires vampiric civilization finds itself grappling with hunger, starvation and complete destruction (one could say they’re past peak blood). Attempts to develop a blood substitute have failed. Starving vampires are turning into deformed, violent cannibalistic creatures. Meanwhile, a smattering of human survivors, hiding out in a winery that is of no interest to the undead, have found a cure for vampirism. While trying to escape the police during a night time search for other humans they crash into a vampire scientist (played by Ethan Hawke) who detests being a vampire and longs for ways to restore human freedom and dignity. Unfortunately for him, his brother is vampire tribalist, so to speak, who loves being a vampire and has no use for reproachment with the people who spawned. As desperation sets in the cycle of violence speeds up and turns into a non-stop orgy of blood-soaked feeding.

Daybreakers is a well-crafted movie that serves up enough visual cues and gags to keep viewers entertained without overloading them. A fairly brisk pace also keeps viewers from spending too much time pondering the finer details of the largely post-human world. The vampire-run city in which the most of the action takes place is sort of a cross between Minneapolis and Japan (or maybe Germany, given how whites were apparently particulalry apt to turn vampires when the epidemic struck. While Minneapolis has an intricate system of tunnels and walkways to shield inhabitants from the harsh winters, Daybreakers’ city has a similar solution to allow movement during daytime, when the sun poses a lethal threat to the daybroken. But mostly the vampires simply stay at home during the day and go to work after sunset.

Human society more or less rotates around the securing the resources necessary to ensure reproduction. The vampires in Daybreakers are immortal and seem to have their sex drive entirely replaced by a bloodlust that is satisfied by rather sterile consumption of packaged blood. The mechanism for mortality is apparently that people stop ageing once they become vampires (thus Hawke’s character is celebrating his ninth 35th birthday). Judging from the newscasts that are sprinkled into the storyline the vampires more or less maintain the same governmental structures they inhabited as humans (they seemingly also favor the same kind of innane political gabfest shows).

It is tempting to read all kinds oallegories and metaphors and meanings into a movie like Daybreakers but given that that its creators are two 30-something brothers who’ve done pretty much nothing but movies their entire life it is probably a waste of time to do so. Michael and Peter Spierig, I think it fair to say, make movies about movies and that’s about it. Their stated interest in making sequels or a TV show based on Daybreakers can best be treated as a joke.

Daybreakers fared undeservedly poorly at the box office, probably because the vampires in the movie possess little of the powers typically ascribed to them in movies and literature. The only thing they seem to have going for themselves is immortality. Eternal life without sex isn’t the most compelling fantasy.

Here are some photos from Boston University Terriers men’s ice hockey’s 3-1 victory over Vermont at Agganis Arena on February 26. It was an entertaining game in which the home team produced several solid opportunities to score in the first period, but weren’t able to put the puck in the net until about half-way through the second period when Chris Connolly capitalized on a power play opportunity. With less than three minutes to go in the second period Alex Chiasson scored on an assist from Adam Clendening. Matt Nieto made it 3-0 late in the third before Tobias Nilsson-Roos got a consolation goal for the visitors.

Diseconomy: a factor responsible for an increase in cost. Merriam-Webster.

This past week a German journalism pundit I follow on Twitter tweeted a link to a post on his website that quoted a chunk of a blog post, with a link to the blog post at the end. A day or so earlier another person had tweeted a link to a post on Huffington Post that was basically nothing but a post with a link to another web site.

Welcome to link diseconomy. The far more famous “link economy” is “the new media economy” where “links are the currency” (all quotes by Jeff Jarvis). The most commercially viable instance of link economy is scraping and wholly or partially re-publish other people’s work (although the more polite terms are “aggregate” and “curate.”) I submit that link diseconomy is a result of this form of link economy. The increased cost is the extra time it takes to actually get to the content in question, and that cost is borne by users who have to traverse these layers of links.

As a non-commercial actor you can reduce link diseconomy by linking straight to original source while acknowledging whatever party brought you the link.

Yes, I am old and I have a hard time staying jiggy with it.

Last Friday we went to the Disney On Ice Disney Pixar Toy Story 3 at TD Garden in Boston. Not exactly my cup of tea but the kids in attendance loved it, every second of it judging from their enthusiastic screaming from start to finish. A five-year old girld described the event to her mother as “the best night of her life.” We went to a 7 pm show which got a bit late for many of the younger kids.

Here are the remaining showtimes at TD Garden Boston for Disney On Ice Toy Story 3.

February 20 Noon, 4 pm

February 21 11 am, 3 pm

February 23 1 pm

February 24 10 am 2 pm

February 25 1 pm 7 pm

February 26 3 pm 7pm

February 27 Noon 4pm

Tickets run from $20 to $90.

Showtimes in other cities

From other blogger who were at the show:

Ben Spark

The Amateur Mommy

The Coupon Goddess

The Boston Globe’s Megan Woodhouse wrote on February 14, 2011, about Marathon Tool, “a small contractor supply company” in Franklin, Massachusetts, to illustrate why job growth is so maddeningly slow in the wake of the Great Recession. To afford to hire another full-time employee the company would need to sell 20 million nails more per year:

At Marathon Tool, the Olsons said hiring one counter clerk at $35,000 a year would require them to also pay $1,750 in state unemployment insurance premiums, $2,170 in federal payroll taxes, $583 for workers’ compensation insurance, and $280 for federal unemployment insurance. Just covering the salary would require them to sell about 17.5 million more nails; add the nonwage costs, and that’s another 2.4 million nails.

While nails are described by Woodhouse as the company’s lifeblood I imagine that a incremental sales of 20 million nails – 5,000 cases – would also result in substantial increases in sales of other goods as well. Still, it makes the point.*

It is tempting to point to companies like Marathon Tool and argue that taxes need to be lowered to spur job growth, but I disagree, even though I very much belong to the tax-skeptic right wing of the politcal spectrum. If anything, the article shows why one should be quite cautious when it comes implementing policies aimed at increasing job creation. The company was founded in 1986 and peaked – so far – in 2006 with sales of $4 million and a staff of 17 full-time and part-time employees. Marathon Tool “were humming right along” according to Ms. Olson. As one might have expected a contractor supply company to do that year, at the height of the debt-fueled real estate boom, a boom that was dangerously inflated by President George W. Bush’s reckless ambition to increase home ownership among Hispanics. Debt-fueled growth was pretty much the only thing Bush offered in way of economic policy and it worked until it didn’t work.

The disaster that followed the bursting of the mortgage bubble brought about the very high unemployment rates that have utterly depleted state unemployment insurance systems throughout the country. It is clear that those systems were under funded given the risky economic policies pursued. I don’t think it’s good stewardship to simply assume that economic policy will become less risky in the future and consequently reduce unemployment-insurance premiums. It’d be as foolish as President Barak Obama’s request that corporations that have strong profits – but often little or no revenue growth – should increase hiring just because such an outcome would suit his short term interests.

Keep in mind that it was only two years ago that the economy was in a free-fall that seemed like it could be just about never ending. A year ago, by contrast, it appeared that “green shoots” in the economy heralded a reasonably strong recovery – one that failed to materialize. It’s been a harrowing time for companies big and small. Now is not the time to rush them in one direction or the other.

The U.S. economy could use a little bit of alone time.

*Selling an extra 15 or so cases a day actually brings about its own set of headaches, in particular the extra inventory to carry, both on the balance sheet and physically in the store and its warehouse.

Starting around summer 2010, I think, Starbucks has been rolling out new packaging for its instant coffee (or “ready brew” as it prefers to call it) Via. The original Via packages resembled WWII-era magazine clips or magazine clip holders. They were rectangular boxes with muted colors. High on function, low on form, one could say. I liked them.

Below is what the latest incarnation of my favorite Starbucks Via flavor, Colombian, looks like:

Glossy and colorful like a women’s magazine. The package is now longer a rectangular box, it is now needlessly tall and with an angular shape.

It is hardly surprising that the Seattle-based coffee company is going down that route. Women famously control the vast majority of consumer spending and products generally end up designed and promoted to appeal to them.

This endless catering to female sensibilities of course also means that men become ever less moved by advertising, necessitating the need to increase efforts to woo female shoppers.