I work for a department where we try to do agile development. I liked this
Dilbert
about the subject.
Five places to eat in New York,
I used to live in New York a good few years ago, and now when friends of
mine are about to go there they sometimes ask me about what to do there. I
keep trying to think of great places to go in the city, so here is a short
list of five of my favorite places to eat in New York. Not fancy, not
exhaustive, just five places that I remember fondly now that I look back on
my time there. Most of these places are on the upper west side, which is
where I used to live.
Flor De Mayo
. Chinese Cuban fusion. Best half roast chicken in New York. In fact, best half roast chicken on the planet. It comes with a big helping of yellow rice and fried platains. It costs about six or seven dollars and it's on 79th and Broadway, or thereabouts.
Tom's Restaurant
(a.k.a Tom's Diner). It has it's own Wikipedia page, and
a flickrset.
Get the broadway shake. It's a cappuchino choclate malt shake, it's amazing.
Crispy Duck in China Town
Go eat in china town. Get free helpings of green tea. There is a place down there that has a menu that includes Chairman Mao's favorite dishes. I used to get the chicken in brown sauce. Most of the places down there are dirt cheap. You can get a good lunch for 5 dollars. I went to one place that did a crispy duck with spring onions and pancakes. It was a bit more expensive the most of the places, but it was one of the most delicious meals that I have ever had. It was called "Peking Duck House" (thanks phillip for reminding me of the name!). Oh, and the green tea ice cream that you can get there is great, and so are the little egg cakes, look out for the lady in the booth.Famiglia Pizza
This is simply the best slice of Pizza in New York, not the biggest, not the fancy schmancyist, just the goddamn best. There are a number of branches throughout the city, but the one I used to go to was on 116th and broadway. Incidentally the first pizzeriea in America is also in New York and it's pretty damn good too. It's called Lombardi's
Any Deli for a Sandwich
,But specifically broadway market deli where you should get a Sub filled with
roast beef, swiss cheese, mayo, and get it heated, mmmm. It's the archetypal
New York experience. You can get any type of bread and have them stick any
type of anything between the pieces of bread. Bagels are also really really
good in New York, go to H and H bagels, best bagels in the US, somewhere
around 72nd and Broadway.
A
recent blog post on Action Potential pointed me towards the neuroscience peer review consortium. They
have a description here about the
consortium and a list of
participating journals. I have no doubt that this is the future of peer
review. At the moment the peer review system is horribly inefficient for
papers that get rejected. Rejection from a journal can occur because a paper
is crap, but often it happens for many other reasons, because the journal
has already met it's page
quota, the journal is publishing a set of special issues on another topic,
the editors of the journal are interested in shifting the focus of the
journal, the topic of the paper is slightly away from the main interests of
the editorial board, the paper is good, but just gets edged out by a set of
better papers that come in. The author resubmits, rewrites, reformats the
paper for another journal, the review process happens again, sometimes with
the same reviewers being approached again to re-review the paper. This
multiple reviewing of the same paper is for the most part a waste of time.
There are of course cases where it is good to have the option, but for the
most part it wastes the time of communities who are highly trained and busy
trying to do important and original work of their own.
I personally always felt that pool reviewing was the natural solution to
this problem, but I never thought I would see it happen owing to the
competing nature of academic publishers. This attempt to work pool reviewing
in one area is very exciting. The issues that need to be overcome include
the issue of private reviewer comments that the Action Potential blog points
out, but also the questions of a set of editors of one journal being willing
to take the rejected papers from another journal. One would like to say that
in a totally equally fair system all journals are equally important to the
development of science, but that is not true. Some journals are just more
important for one reason or another. When two journals feel they are better
than each other are they going to be willing to take the papers rejected by
their competitors? I hope that the papers will stand up for themselves and
that this system will lead to a more efficient matching of papers to pages
in published journals.
If it works what next? One single format for submission? One pass
peer-review with a peer-reviewed preprint publication guaranteed for all
papers? I don't know, but I'm interested in seeing what happens with this.
tags: science, peer-review, science2.0
Web 2.0 is a buz word. At a conference that I attended last week it came up frequently as being one of the most over-hyped terms around at the moment, but there is substance behind it, and how that substance appears is fully up to the creativity of people who are willing to get their hands dirty with the actual data that is being produced by social web sites. I came across this example today and it exemplifies the type of thing that can be done.
These researchers are looking at time traces of pictures of locations uploaded to flickr and pulling information about those places out of this data. The image here shows activity in and around tuscany. They are also looking at routing through contries and heat-maps of tourist visits to cities.
You can read more here:
http://www.girardin.org/fabien/tracing/
The new terminal is very nice, but I did a wipe and re-install and was
wondering what had happened to my old terminal settings. Of course the
default .bash_profile file was being used as the settings file, so I deleted
it and now the terminal works as expected.
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From the Guardian today, a group of ultra-right wing MEP's were unable to
form a group within the European Parliament owing to internal xenophobia.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/farright/story/0,,2211167,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12
The Guardian ran an article this week listing 10. As a placeholder here are
some of them that I might find useful:
https://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/
http://www.saynoto0870.com/
http://www.quidco.com/
http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/
I got the email below a few days ago:
Hello to you all,
Please forgive the bulk email! We hope all is well with you.
We will be opening our new restaurant on December 1st. Please visit our new
website at www.bayou-berlin.com You are able to book hotel reservations on
our site using our corporate discount rate. We hope to see you sometime
soon,
All the best,
Steve and Brandon
Earlier this year I was on holiday in Nerja in the south of Spain. On one of
the last nights of the holiday we went to an amazing Cajun restaurant called
Cafe New Orleans. I got chatting to the two owners and they told us about
how they had been trying to sell their place in Spain and open up in
Germany. Well the food was great, and the guy's running the place were super
friendly, so I was delighted to get this message as it's clear that they
have finally made their place in Germany happen. If you find yourself in
Berlin then you should definitely consider giving this place a try.
I spent about half an hour trying to install the excellent Python Image
Library on my mac. It's one of those things that is more annying than it
should be. You get libjpeg from here
http://www.ijg.org/files/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz follow the instructions here on
how to patch the makefile and how to install libjpeg:
http://www.kyngchaos.com/macosx/install/libjpeg (all this after installing
the developer tools on mac), only to fail and then discover that there is a
prebuilt binary package here:
http://pythonmac.org/packages/py25-fat/index.html which works perfectly. Go
Lena!
References
- "Python Objects", Fredrik Lundh,
http://www.effbot.org/zone/python-objects.htm
- "How to think like a Pythonista", Mark Hammond,
http://python.net/crew/mwh/hacks/objectthink.html
- "Python main() functions", Guido van Rossum,
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4829
- "Python Idioms and Efficiency",
http://jaynes.colorado.edu/PythonIdioms.html
- "Python track: python idioms",
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/courses/cs11/material/python/misc/python_idioms.html
- "Be Pythonic", Shalabh Chaturvedi,
http://shalabh.infogami.com/Be_Pythonic2
- "Python Is Not Java", Phillip J. Eby,
http://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/python-is-not-java.html
- "What is Pythonic?", Martijn Faassen,
http://faassen.n--tree.net/blog/view/weblog/2005/08/06/0
- "Sorting Mini-HOWTO", Andrew Dalke,
http://wiki.python.org/moin/HowTo/Sorting
- "Python Idioms", http://www.gungfu.de/facts/wiki/Main/PythonIdioms
- "Python FAQs", http://www.python.org/doc/faq/
