Monsieurcactus' Oolong tea

After 10 hours train ride on Amtrak, I am in Montreal for the next two weeks.  The Adirondack hits many stations on the way to Canada:

New York Penn Station

Yonkers

Croton-Harmon

Poughkeepsie

Rhinecliff-Kingston

Hudson

Albany-Renssalaer

Schenectady

Saratoga Springs

Fort Edward - Glens Falls

Whitehall

Fort Ticonderoga

Port Henry

Westport

Port Kent

Plattsburgh

Rouses Point

-----------------

Saint-Lambert

Gare Centrale

2.5 hours in, we were in Albany.  We still had 6 hours to the Canadian Boarder.  I thought Ticonderoga was where they made pencils.

I had trouble explaining to the Customs girl what "knot theory" was.  My internet reception worked right up to the border.  Then another hours to Montreal.

This conferences conference on Link Homology.  Great speakers like Mikhail Khovanov, Anton Kapustin, Sergei Gukov... It's related to Witten's paper on the Jones polynomial.

Do you think people would be interested in a go games question site?http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/164930/go-stackexchange-com StackExchange is a very nice question + answer platform.  Originally for computer programmers to ask their questions it has been extended to different kinds subjects: Lego, chess, poker... 

Apparently , the Go site was proposed two years ago and closed http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/11942/game-of-go Did you guys know about this?  We can still propose a variant of it. 

I've passed by the New York Times building many times.  Now I am writing from the inside!  "Hacking" with API's has become less about ingenuity and more about practicality.  It is also not hacking b/c that requires finding clever 

Programmable Web is a whole blog devoted to using API's.

The API Request Tool lets you 

There is a look on people's faces, exibiting a tension between the hackers and the journalists.  Especially at the New York Times, it must have taken time for veteran journalists to accept that not only are computers the "wave of the future" but that now "data" is the wave of the future.  We don't have to rely on hunches of experts, or even prediction markets and computers are measuring our every action.

I thought the food would be better.  The breakfast was these wonderful muffins.  Then I had 3 slices of pizza for lunch.  Already regretting it... I should just go outside and grab some jerky.

The CartoDB presentation was really great.  Some of the program-mentors were excited about me combining geospacial data from New York Times Semantic API and Articles API with the CartoDB graphic's engine. 

I learned at the New York Times presentation they have been tagging for the past 160 years.  DBPedia is a web site collecting metadata on Wikipedia itself.  

From the Visual.ly blog 10 things you can learn from NYT Data Visualizations

clarity for context and purpose

respect for the reader

editorial rigor and integration

clarity of questions

data research and preparation

visual restraint

layout and placement

diversity of techniques

technical execution

annotation

At the end of the article are portfolios of various contributors.  E.g. Marjie Rooze

I applied to a certain company that describes itself as "extraordinary".  I started looking at synonyms on Wordnet:

S: (adj) bonzer (remarkable or wonderful)

S: (adj) exceeding, exceptional, olympian, prodigious, surpassing (far beyond what is usual in magnitude or degree) "a night of exceeding darkness"; "an exceptional memory"; "olympian efforts to save the city from bankruptcy"; "the young Mozart's prodigious talents"

S: (adj) extraordinaire (extraordinary in a particular capacity) "a woodworker extraordinaire"; "a self-starter extraordinaire"

S: (adj) fantastic, grand, howling, marvelous, marvellous, rattling, terrific,tremendous, wonderful, wondrous (extraordinarily good or great; used especially as intensifiers) "a fantastic trip to the Orient"; "the film was fantastic!"; "a howling success"; "a marvelous collection of rare books"; "had a rattling conversation about politics"; "a tremendous achievement"

S: (adj) phenomenal (exceedingly or unbelievably great) "the bomb did fantastic damage"; "Samson is supposed to have had fantastic strength"; "phenomenal feats of memory"

S: (adj) frightful, terrible, awful, tremendous (extreme in degree or extent or amount or impact) "in a frightful hurry"; "spent a frightful amount of money"

S: (adj) great (remarkable or out of the ordinary in degree or magnitude or effect) "a great crisis"; "had a great stake in the outcome"

S: (adj) one, right ((informal) very; used informally as an intensifier) "that is one fine dog"; "a right fine day"

S: (adj) preternatural, uncanny (surpassing the ordinary or normal) "Beyond his preternatural affability there is some acid and some steel" - George Will; "his uncanny sense of direction"

S: (adj) pyrotechnic (suggestive of fireworks) "pyrotechnic keyboard virtuosity"; "a pyrotechnic wit"

S: (adj) rare, uncommon (marked by an uncommon quality; especially superlative or extreme of its kind) "what is so rare as a day in June"-J.R.Lowell; "a rare skill"; "an uncommon sense of humor"; "she was kind to an uncommon degree"

S: (adj) remarkable, singular (unusual or striking) "a remarkable sight"; "such poise is singular in one so young"

S: (adj) some (remarkable) "that was some party"; "she is some skier"

S: (adj) special (for a special service or occasion) "a special correspondent"; "a special adviser to the committee"; "had to get special permission for the event"

From the readme:

This is a script I created in response to the University of Chicago admissions essay question, "So where is Waldo, really?" I have published a version of the accompanyingcounselor-friendly essay, though I will not distribute Handford's entire drawings publicly.

It was inspired bya StackOverflow responsethat implemented rudimentary Waldo detection in Mathematica. This solution follows a more versatile algorithm in Python, supported by NumPy, SciPy, Scikits-Image, and the Python Imaging Library.

If you'd like to run the code yourself, it works on Python 2.7.3 with the latest versions of the four aforementioned libraries. You may need to boost the contrast of the images you're working with so that red-white borders are clear, and replace my reference values and color distance thresholds for red, white, and black (in the L*ab colorspace) with your own. Input images must be in RGBA colorspace, and my pixel counts are only tested to work with images where a single page is 1285x666.