When I eat at restaurants with my friends, I’m often indecisive in ordering. I take a while because I’m afraid of being disappointed when my dish arrives. I’ll look at my plate and become unhappy with its small portion, saltiness, or lack of freshness. Then I’ll look over at my friend’s and covet it for its girth, balanced flavor, or fresh-looking ingredients. Buyer’s remorse has hit me once again.
But buyer’s remorse is a only subset of my more general grass-is-greener syndrome.
This morning a cop in his cruiser sounded his sirens and motioned for me to pull over. I stopped pedaling. He got out of his car and walked over to me.
“Is there a problem, officer?” I asked.
“You went past a red back there,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Can I see your license?”
I handed my driver’s license to him. He disappeared into the cop car for five minutes. I approached the cruiser’s rolled-down passenger window.
“Am I getting a ticket?”
“Yes.”
“What does this count as? A moving violation?”
The officer said it was a vehicular violation. There is no point system so it won’t impact my automobile driving record or car insurance rates. The penalty is $50, but the court might only charge me $25 if I’m a first time offender.
Less than two days after the Oslo bombing and Utøya shootings, journalists and web denizens are digging up the digital finger prints left by Anders Behring Breivik. Norway’s TV2 cited police sources and reported that Breivik uploaded a video to Youtube and a 1,500-page manifesto to Norwegian website Freak.no.
Both the anti-Islam, anti-Marxist manifesto and video reference the Crusades and the dangers of Muslim immigrants and leftist leaders toward Europe.
Update: If you just want to download the data, click here.
I was bored this weekend, so I decided to collect some data from the Internet, aka web scraping. Not just any data. I just did a fun tutorial written by Dan Nguyen, a news application developer at the non-profit investigative journalism unit ProPublica. This article teaches you how to collect data on Pfizer’s disclosure of its payments to doctors as required by a $2.3 billion lawsuit alleging it illegally promoted drugs for unapproved uses.
The bombing and shooting in Norway is a tragedy. 92 people confirmed dead at the hands of single (so far) gunman Anders Behring Breivik. The Times calls the deadliest on Norwegian soil since World War II. The Economist wrote
Relative to Norway’s population, the two attacks taken together are of a similar magnitude to the September 11th hijackings in the United States.
New York’s MTA chairman Jay Walder announced yesterday that he is leaving to become Hong Kong’s MTR Corp’s CEO after only two years into his six-year term. MTR is Hong Kong’s urban rail operator.
Why is this news worth paying attention to? It shows how a firm bolstered by growth in China’s developing market is able to attract talent from companies in the U.S. Walder was given a tough job of maintaining and streamlining an old system of rails and buses stretching over 5,000 square miles (13,000 km2), serving more than 2.6 billion people a year, and employing about 70,000 workers. All on an extremely tight budget. $31 billion in debt and a $900 million gap in its operating budget for 2011.
Check out Spotify.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced yesterday that New York City will offer even more subsidies in the form of land and as much as $100 million for universities to develop an engineering campus in the city.
Last year, the city called on schools to indicate their level of interest in building a new campus. The city hopes to use the proposed engineering campus to spur growth in its tech industry. They hope the new school will create as much as $6 billion in economic growth by creating 30,000 jobs and fostering tech innovations.
UPDATE: I did this better in Python here
A while back I wrote a post on how to write a program that would at-reply Twitter users when certain keywords were found in their tweets. The program, or Twitter bot, had some major shortcomings. It only ran once an hour, replied to only one person when it ran, and wasn’t selective enough in its at-replies. My new Twitter bot still has some shortcomings but is much improved.
For several years now, the residents of my hometown of Wellesley, Massachussetts have received free copies of the Wellesley Weston Magazine once a quarter. The nearly 200-page, glossy, full-color magazine is printed on luxoriously thick paper. The magazine features articles about local charitable organizations, individuals, and events but is mostly advertisements. The 182-page spring 2011 edition has a editorial-to-ad ratio of about 1:2. I’m not an avid reader of the Wellesley Weston Magazine, but I think the magazine speaks a lot about the towns.
A large porportion of the ads are real estate listings or any of the various services associated with owning and maintaining a McMansion. The second page is a Coldwell Banker brokerage ad. It’s followed by a Williams & Spade interior design ad. Then there’s a table of contents page followed by home listings ranging from $1 million to nearly $7 million.