HOME |
RSS | 
For those of you looking for ideas for a romantic Valentine’s Day date, the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn is offering a morning tour of its sludge-processing facility.
Put on some comfortable boots, snuggle up with your companion, and hold your breath when the plant’s ruggedly handsome superintendent, Jimmy Pynn, explains how the city cleans 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater each day.
You’ll get to see every aspect of the plant’s waste treating process, and even take a trip through its suggestively shaped digester tanks, where plucky microorganisms break down what you and your date ate for lunch yesterday, producing methane and carbon dioxide gas.
And at the end of the tour, Pynn will give each attendee a Hershey’s Kiss — because there’s nothing sweeter than protecting the environment.
One thing’s for sure -it will be a Valentine’s Day neither of you will ever forget. Link -via Breakfast Links
(Image credit: New York City government)
Meet Agata Oleksiak (aka OLEK), a “New York-based Polish artist” who’s the world’s first crochet street artist. Her works have been seen all over New York and London, and she’s bringing a bit of crocheted color to the world with her psychedelic yarn works and twisted gimp-esque crocheted bodysuits.
Head to the link to see some of her awesome guerilla artworks, from a crocheted car to the Wall Street Bull and some seriously twisted yarn covered rooms in-between. Olek seems hell bent on making the world a warmer place, one bright pink skein at a time.
Link –via DesignTAXI
Hudson Urban Bicycles decided to try out something interesting in New York’s SoHo neighborhood-chain up a bike, take a picture of it every day and see how long it takes to disappear, piece by piece.
The findings were surprising at first (it took nearly six months for the first piece to be stolen), then slipped rapidly into familiar territory (only took another 30 days or so for the bike to disappear completely).
Hey, at least the thief (or thieves) waited almost six months before snatching the bike up piece by piece, that has to be a world record!
–via Geekosystem
New York is the kind of place where anything can happen at any moment, and although that comes with plenty of bad, this video shows that there are also many instances of spontaneous goodness going down, even on public transit.
These strangers on a train, who both happen to have their instruments with them, break out in a soulful song, much to the delight of their fellow riders.
Whether this chance meeting was truly by chance or not ceases to be an issue once you watch them play, and feel that energy that seems to be in the air that New Yorkers breathe.
–via AnimalNY
It’s almost Christmas, so the critters from the Queens Zoo and Prospect Park Zoo in New York have started celebrating! The dwarf mongooses were given brightly wrapped mealworm treats, and the Andean bears were given packages full of a nutty treat, and I think it’s safe to say they won’t be needing gift receipts!
–via Gothamist
Comments Off
Before Stanley Kubrick was able to make a living as a movie director, he worked as a photojournalist for Look magazine. He took nearly 10,000 photos and 25 of these have now been made available as limited-edition prints.
Link – Flavorwire via Kottke
Comments Off 
This beautiful luxury home in New York’s Adirondack State Park has an awesome secret-it’s built on top of a former launch control center, and has an additional 2300 square feet of space which lies safely underground.
And now this cabin/bunker can be yours for a mere $1.75 million! Maybe Bruce Wayne is looking for a vacation home, complete with pre-constructed BatCave? You can see more pics of this survivalist dream house at the link below.
A year ago, we told you about artist John Morse and his Roadside Haiku project in Atlanta. Now his talents have been commissioned for traffic signs in New York City! The New York City Department of Transportation has installed a collection of curbside signs written in haiku along with graphics designed by John Morse. The seventeen-syllable poetry warns drivers, pedestrians, and bikers to watch for safety hazards. Some also have QR codes. See more of them at core77. Link -via Metafilter
Even if you’ve never been to New York, you’ve certainly seen enough movies and tv shows filmed there to get an idea of what it looks like these days. If you want to see what it looked like around the early half of the last century though, you might want to head to The Jewish Museum New York’s website and enjoy some of their featured photos taken by The New York Photo League. Of course, if you’re in the city, you really should head to the museum itself to enjoy the full gallery in person.
Comments Off
Katie O'Beirne has an idea so simple it's downright brilliant. She leaves a disposable camera in the park, tied to a park bench with a twine, and then waits to see what develops.
She posts the wonderful photos taken by random strangers on her tumblr blog New York Shots - via Kickstarter blog (with video interview of Katie)
There was a huge turnout of cosplayers at new York’s Comic-Con, and photographer Michael Tapp was there to document them. See a gallery of 43 photographs of the best costumes to be seen at the convention at Geeks Are Sexy. Link
(watch on MyDamnChannel)
Comedian Mark Malkoff offered New Yorkers free cab rides for an entire day, accepting requests via Facebook and Twitter. Mark says, “I hired a cab driver and kept the meter running for fourteen hours straight! Along the way we did fun stuff that’s never been done in a cab before including filling the entire cab with popcorn and plastering Tony Danza’s face all over the cab. The grand total on my 14 hour cab ride turned out to be $486.10. Afterward I showered for a long, long time!” I’m willing to bet the shower was also 14 hours long.
Thanks Mark!
Starting next summer, a partnership between New York City and Atla Bike Share will set up ten thousand bicycles for public use. Membership cards for the year will be priced lower than a monthly MetroCard, and the first 30 minutes of bike use is free. The video features Atla’s successful bike program in Washington, D.C., the largest in the country.
This collage of 200 street portraits, taken by photographer Brandon Stanton, is combined with the song “Empire State of Mind” to create a love note to the city.
The Humans of New York Project is an effort to create a photographic census of New York City. The project seeks to collect 10,000 street portraits, and plot them geographically on an interactive map.
Stanton has taken over 2,000 portraits so far. Find out more about the project, and read some of the stories of the people behind the portraits, at the Humans of New York website. Link -via Everlasting Blort
Comments Off
New York artist Jay Shells got tired of the rude manners of fellow New Yorkers and decided to take matters into his own hands. He created official-looking etiquette signs around Manhattan, under the guise of the "Metropolitan Etiquette Authority."
This one above is my favorite. Bravo! Link - via Laughing Squid
This image of Manhattan was taken by the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) aboard the Landsat 7 satellite, about 27 hours after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. It was uploaded to Flickr only a couple of hours ago. Link -via Gizmodo
(Image credit: Flickr user NASA Goddard Photo and Video)
Comments Off To promote their Prohibition Era show Boardwalk Empire, HBO has brought some vintage trains back to select subway routes in NYC. If you’re in the Big Apple in the month of September and find yourself in need of a ride, try to check out the express 2/3 track in Manhattan from 12 to 6 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. Laughing Squid writer Scott Beale just happened across one on the inaugural weekend and took the above video. Vintage features include rattan seats, ceiling fans (!) and drop sash windows. Pretty sweet.
Link via Laughing Squid
It’s nice work if you can get it. Last year, Ed Casabian began moving around New York City, living in a different neighborhood every week. He writes about his experiences, and is booked up through October already.
I’d like to stay with people of different ages, races, religions, sexual orientations and economic situations. I’d like to hit the five boroughs (Staten Island eludes me but its on the calendar!). I’m trying to do 52 neighborhoods. I’m at around 40 right now depending on how you define them. Ultimately though, I’m looking for different perspectives and ideas. So far, I have stayed with some of my best friends, friends of friends, relatives of friends, former coworkers, complete strangers through some of the recent press I have received. It has been difficult, scary, interesting, and exciting. Most of all, it has been immensely rewarding, which is what I expected when this idea first popped into my head.
Casabian was granted a SoundCloud Community Fellowship to underwrite his adventures. Link -via Laughing Squid
by Daniel M. Berry
Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
In software engineering, we are told that a software requirements specification should specify what the desired software should do, not how the software should do it. This is often summarized as “What, not how.” This paper explores the validity of the advice to specify “What, not how” for requirements, including quality requirements. In the domain of the New York bagel, it may be necessary to explain how in order to make the what precise enough.
In general, there are two ways to specify any system, software or otherwise:
1. a “what” specification describing what the system does, or
2. a “how” specification describing how the system does what it does.
A system may also be described by tests that are satisfied by the desired system.
A “what” specification and a test share the property that each leaves the question of how to implement the system up to the implementer. The freedom accorded to the implementer allows him or her to find the best technology to achieve the desired “what” or testing success.
Note that there can be no test specification for any but the most trivial systems, because no finite set of test cases can thoroughly test a non-trivial system for compliance to its requirements. Edsger Dijkstra once said, “Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!”1
While the “what, not how” mantra seems clear enough, in practice it may be very difficult to separate the hows from the whats. Indeed, for some requirements, it may be impossible to specify “what” without saying something about “how.” There are also requirements, usually called quality requirements, for which the “what” specification is simply not very useful, e.g., “The output shall look good,” “The user interface shall be easy to use,” or “The response time shall be fast.” In some of these cases, the only way to make the requirement precise enough to be tested is to say something about how it will be met.
A prime example of a product requiring a detailed “how” specification is none other than the New York bagel, examples of which are shown in figure 1.2
Figure 1 (Image credit: Flickr user Ezra Wolfe)
How many readers have ever really had one? A New York bagel, such as what you get at Zabar’s, H&H, or Rise & Shine, is not just a baked good with a hole in it, despite the widespread proliferation of places that make a bread with a hole and call it a bagel in order to profit from the current bagelmania.3 A donut is another baked good with a hole in it, and we all know that a bagel and donut have little in common except the hole; indeed, a bagel and a donut have literally nothing in common.4
The New York Public Library system is declaring fine immunity to over 140,000 kids who owe more than $15 in fines as long as the kids agree to participate in their summer reading program. The amnesty, known as “Read Down Your Fines,” asks the kids to log in their reading time on the library’s website. For every 15 minutes they read, the library wipes out $1 of fines.
“Kids might be afraid or ashamed because they are delinquent with the library,” said NYPL official Jack Martin. “The idea of this program is to bring them back in.
Personally, I could have worked off over $100 worth of fines over one summer when I was a kiddo, but I know most youngsters aren’t as eager as I was.
Link Via Consumerist Image Via Wonderfully Complex [Flickr]
Comments Off 
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again.
The place that gave Mr. and Mrs. Joe Schmoe the crazy idea that happiness was just a few subway stops away.
Between about 1880 and World War II, Coney Island was the largest amusement park in the United States. But back in 1609, when Dutch explorer Henry Hudson became the first European to arrive on the premises, he found nothing more than barren sand dunes and very unfriendly Native Americans. After his petty officer was killed in a skirmish, Hudson moved on to a much calmer and peaceful island later known as Manhattan.
At some point the island (which is five miles long and up to a mile wide) was named Konijn Eiland, which is Dutch for “Rabbit Island.” Konijn became “Coney,” possibly during the days of Lady Deborah Moody, a London widow in her mid-50s, who brought a group of religious dissenters to the island during a lull in the Indian Wars. It was rough going -the local Native Americans still weren’t all that friendly- but the plucky group stayed on.
EASY ACCESS
Coney Island remained an island until 1829, when it was connected to mainland Long Island by Shell Road, a road made of -you guessed it- shells. It’s been a peninsula ever since. But linguistically, it’s still an island: one is said to be “on” Coney Island, not “in” it.
Hotel Brighton
HOLIDAY INN
Five years after Shell Road was built, a large hotel, Coney Island House, opened for business in hopes of drawing a summer crowd to the seaside. The hotel’s success encouraged builders of even more elegant hotels. What started as a genteel resort recommended by doctors (sea bathing was considered to be healthy and invigorating), quickly became a hot spot with the upper classes. Before long, hotels along the seashores welcomed such distinguished guests as P.T. Barnum, Daniel Webster, and Washington Irving. Visitors lingered on the the hotels’ long porches, ate their meals in posh dining rooms, and took dips in the Atlantic.
BATHING SUITS AND OTHER PURSUITS
more …
Dan Abramson drew a map of the United States of America as seen by New Yorker over at Funny or Die. As far as I can tell based on my interactions with New Yorkers, it’s entirely accurate.
I love New York and New Yorkers. I found them to be amongst the nicest and most helpful people in the country. Their reputation of being rude and brusque is wholly undeserved (they are, however, direct).
But there’s one thing that I find very funny about New Yorkers (or those that blog anyhow): they think that everyone they like must live in New York because it’s inconceivable to live anywhere else.
Last night, the New York state legislature voted to legalize same sex marriage. Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the bill into law just before midnight. Celebrations began immediately.
Less than an hour after the New York legislature passed a marriage equality bill 33 to 29 during a late session on Friday, Twitter started filling up with messages about how the Empire State Building had “gone rainbow.” “OK, pictures of rainbow Empire State Building are getting me misty,” screenwriter Diablo Cody wrote. “A rainbow shines on the Empire State and the Empire State building tonight!,” another tweet read. And another: “Empire state building goes rainbow. Go us!”
Less than an hour? The Atlantic explains how the display was executed so fast. Link -via @Bad Astronomer
John Belitsky and pal Dan Wuebben wanted to do something "magical" so the pair hopped on a taxi cab in New York … and ordered a cross-country trip to Los Angeles:
The 2,448-mile trip took six days and included a stop in Las Vegas where the friends won $2,000. [...]
On 22 April, after their winning streak in Las Vegas, he tweeted: "Woke up Alam to a shower of $100 bills at sunrise."
Link | John’s documenting the trip on his Twitter page
This odd but appealing animated documentary was produced by Diego Maccione and Adam Gill for Al Jazeera. A rat narrates the history of New York hot dogs. Link -via Buzzfeed
“All the Buildings in New York” is the name of a blog where James Gulliver Hancock, an illustrator originally from Australia and currently based in Brooklyn, New York, will post creations from his ongoing project to draw all the buildings in his hometown.
Link – via kottke.org
Comments Off I am just back from New York, where I had a very unromantic Valentine’s Day. You see, your happiness is more important to me than romance and flowers. So instead of staying home with my sweetie and kids I braved New York in February. I was sent there to search for the greatest and newest toys for the NeatoShop. Oh, and did I find them.
Now I am not going to tell you about all the great things that will be coming to the NeatoShop this year. I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprises that we have in store for you. Instead I will share a few pics that I snapped with my phone and camera.
The first thing I did when I got to the hotel was take this picture. This is the drawing my daughter drew for me before I left. It’s a picture of my family. It includes my husband and 3 kids. My daughter drew this so I wouldn’t forget them while I was gone. I carried the photo around with me in my pocket.
Are you getting a clear picture of how much Mommy guilt I endured this trip? Apparently, however, it was needless guilt since my more than capable husband took the 3 monkeys to an amusement park while I was gone. The kids had a blast and didn’t even really miss me.
This is a picture I took when I got to the Toy Fair. If you look closely you can see that one of the Ugly guys is holding the picture of my family. This was no easy task since he could barely bend his arm. Thanks Ugly guys you are awesome!
These are pictures of a really awesome toy that it coming to the NeatoShop this Spring.
That’s all your getting out of me. Frankly, I think I have told you too much. If you really want to know what amazing things I found on this trip you are going to have to check in on the NeatoShop. We suggest you visit us often and frequently.
Comments Off It’s a river of people! Over 40,000 runners participated in the New York City Marathon last weekend. Thanks to time-lapse videography, you can watch most of them get started. -via Buzzfeed
If you’re a night owl, then this is the club for you: a group that meets to work/socialize/hang out for starting at 10 PM at night:
That is what led Amber Lambke and Allan Grinshtein to start a group called the New York Nightowls, a sort of study hall for entrepreneurs, freelancers and software developers who gather at 10 every Tuesday night and stay as late as 4 a.m.
“The goal is to come, get inspired, meet new people and get work done,” said Ms. Lambke, a creative consultant. “It’s six hours of uninterrupted, productive time where you’re surrounded by other creative people doing awesome things.”
Although the New York group has been meeting only since April, the concept is catching on. Others have organized similar weekly gatherings in nearly a dozen cities, including San Francisco, Boston, Stockholm and Melbourne, Australia.
Link | The New York Nightowls website
If you see this woman, do not approach. Do not try to apprehend her yourself. She should be considered armed and dangerous. Instead, you should call … Batman?
Police in Queens, New York is looking for a robber with the purr-fect disguise:
According to the source, the lithe 5-foot-6, 115 pound thief, described in a wanted poster as possibly Middle Eastern, strode into the store at around 1:30 p.m. She prowled for about 45 minutes before donning her disguise and pouncing on a sales clerk.
"Give me the money. I have a gun," read a note Cat Woman passed to the worker, according to the source.
John Doyle and Lachlan Cartwright of the NY Post investigate: Link
Comments Off 
