To increase the usefulness of my poster for the INCF Congress of Neuroinformatics 2011 in Boston and to be a good citizen ™ in the land of reproducibility, I decided to build a small homepage alongside the poster with supplementary material such as linked references, all scripts used for the study and the revision numbers of the software used.
Nerd celebrity
The other day, at that small workshop on Creating, Documenting & Sharing Network Models in Edinburgh, I had the pleasure to listen to a very nice, spontaneous, and entertaining lecture by Steve Furber (a principal designer of the ARM processor, which powers all modern smart-phones). He talked about the history of hardware design in general and explained the role of the different tools for synthesizing circuits from high-level functional descriptions.
A very much recommended book that also circles around the history of hardware is The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. And I got reminded of the almost ancient TV show Triumph of the Nerds. Both are definitely worth checking out!
Lapin rôti
I just come back from a very nice dinner with three colleagues at La Garrigue in Edinburgh [Update 2015-08-11: their place in the New Town seems closed now]. For starters, I had “Le petit pot d’escargots et gésiers de canard confit, sauce tomate et croutons à l’ail”. My main course was “Le lapin rôti avec pipperade Basquaise et petits pois à la Française”. And as if this would not have been enough, I finished off with “La tarte au chocolat, rayon de miel”. Delicious!
Arrr!
My congratulations today go to the Pirate Party in Berlin! Very well done! Let’s hope that they can really stand up to the high expectations that their voters put into them and that they can cope with the rough tides of real world politics.
And of course, I feel very sorry for the clowns of FDP. Not!
One piece of art, please
On Tuesday I’ve been to the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum, where very impressive installations and paintings by Lee Ufang were on view. I totally enjoyed the minimalistic, yet very expressive work by the Korean artist that was shown.
The way, the images were arranged along the rotundas of the museum was just perfect. After seeing the first few of the paintings (From Point), it was completely clear, what the next ones from that series, and even the ones from the series From Line would look like. Nonetheless, the images were not at all boring and were still able to create tension and excitement.
Top of The Rock
On Monday, all signs of Irene were gone from the sky and it was clear and sunny again. Indeed, it was quite warm and much less humid than before the hurricane, and I decided to go to Manhattan and walk around a bit to get a feeling of the city. I first went to visit Jens in his lab and together we went to Bryant Bark for some lunch (falafel wrap and an iced tea) and Jazz and to Grand Central to look at the roof. After that I went to Times Square on my own. There’s a horrible amount of lights and displays, and I had to sit down to not get epileptic because of them. In fact their homepage is almost as ugly and over-colored as the real thing 😉
After that, I went to the Rockefeller Center, from which you have an amazing sight over the city. The pictures I took there show all of the hugeness of this city, but do not even come close to reality.
Looking at all this, I really was wondering if I should admire this as a sign for the creative power of mankind and their attempts to structure the world, or if this is rather a sign of sheer decadence and a megalomaniac’s dream come true. Only when talking to a colleague about my thoughts and impressions and after some more thinking, I found the right words to give it a name: Squares without control!
In the eye of the storm
On Sunday, it was actually quite windy in Brooklyn. Here are some pictures of, I took during a walk through Park Slope in the morning:
Other than the fallen tree, Irene didn’t destroy anything noteworthy in Brooklyn. Still, the overall trail of damage is quite notable.
The safest place in the appartment
So, we’re sitting here in Evacuation Zone C, drinking beer and waiting for Irene to arrive. The picture below shows the view of Manhattan, we have from the roof top of the place I’m staying at.
The way it looks at the moment, however, it will rather be a tropical storm than a ‘real’ hurricane, once it hits New York. It is still interesting, how all public transport was shut down already at noon and how people secured their buildings and their trash cans 😉
Traveling
So, I finally made it to New York. Yay! After a train ride, two flights, some more train and subway and a lot of walking, I finished my journey after about 23 hours and approx. 6500 km. I’ll try to blog some more from my journey. Now off to bed.
Public service announcement!
[eppler@hambach INCF2011]$ tail -f tail: warning: following standard input indefinitely is ineffective ^C