I was over in Kirkland today and discovered that a restaurant I liked – Meze Mediterranean Deli – closed. Here’s some proof of the closing.

This has been a popular story this week. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, sound in the ocean plummeted, due to the decrease in shipping traffic. Two studies of the North Atlantic right whale happened to be going on at that time, which of course had nothing to do with measuring whale response to lower levels of ocean noise.

I was surprised by how many of the “nerd tastes” in How to Be Silicon Valley by Paul Graham sound like my preferences. I had no idea I am so easily classified.

The work that I did as a member of the Math Libraries Group in Technical Computing at Microsoft has been released in the form of a SQL Azure Lab named Microsoft Codename “Cloud Numerics”. There is, of course, a lot of other technology in the lab that was not produced by my group, but all of our product is in the release.

First a note about the Geneagrapher: a new release is impending. The release includes many internal changes: lots of refactoring to improve the code, better conformance to Python coding conventions (remember, I wrote the first version a long time ago and my proficiency with Python has improved a lot since then), better code coverage by the tests, better design to enable more extensibility, and a local caching mechanism to eliminate multiple network requests for the same record. I will explain what I mean by extensibility in a later post.

I received a book about orienteering over the holidays (I had requested it). My trip back to Washington from Iowa last week was long enough, due to a four hour wait for the connecting flight, for me to get through the book.

A few posts back, I was talking about beekeeping. Shortly afterwards, I saw a couple articles about a Philips urban beehive. Click through one of those links for images.

This evening Michael looked at an apple I was eating and said something that sounded awfully like, “What’s that?” Chao-Jen and I both looked at him and then each other, both surprised. I looked back at Michael, pointed at the apple, and said, “Apple.” Almost immediately, he responded, “Apple.”

I have done additional work on the Delaunay triangulation that I mentioned in the previous post. The code is less messy, has tests, and is now packaged.

I spent a little time implementing Delaunay triangulation for learning. I am going to do a little more work on it, but here’s an example of its output.