Month: January 2019

Sloppy Geocoding

MaxMind determined that 1m IP addresses were operated by entities in Pretoria, and so it geolocated those IP addresses to the coordinates offered by the NGA for the city. And any time someone uses one of those IP addresses to do something bad—like cyberbullying the owners of a leather shop—it looks to someone who maps the address like the bad thing is being done by someone sitting in John and Ann’s backyard.

Disabled Avatars

In December of 2018 I visited a temporary robot cafe, but it’s not the type of Japanese robot cafe that comes to mind to most. Rather than a robotic show, this was a cafe where the robot waiters were in fact avatars for people with disabilities, who remotely controlled them from their homes.

Art Thief

The skilled climber and thief Vjeran Tomic, whom the French press referred to as Spider-Man, has described robbery as an act of imagination. Tomic’s confidence as a burglar grew to the point that he felt “indestructible and invulnerable.” Once, while fleeing the police across the rooftops of Paris, he took refuge in an empty apartment in a fashionable building. He decided to take whatever jewelry he could find; suddenly, the owner came home. “I saw that he was an old man with a very sexy girl”. He hid in a closet in the bathroom adjoining the man’s bedroom. “I couldn’t get out of it without crossing the room,” he recalled. “The couple . . . began making love, and that went on all night!” He waited until they finally fell asleep, then made his escape. “I have taken many risks like this one, and sometimes much worse ones. But I always perform well when faced with these sorts of obstacles.” Tomic kept moving through the galleries, taking down “Pigeon with Peas,” by Picasso, and “Olive Tree Near l’Estaque,” by Braque. He almost stole a 6th: Modigliani’s “Woman with Blue Eyes.” “When I went to get it off the wall, it told me, ‘If you take me, you will regret it the rest of your life.’ I will never forget what this ‘Woman with Blue Eyes’ did to me. When I touched it, to take it out of its frame . . . the feeling started instantly—a fear that came over me like an iceberg, a freezing fear that made me run away.” It took 2 trips for Tomic to carry the canvases out of the museum. He had parked his Renault a few minutes away, along the Avenue de New York. He sat in the driver’s seat for 5 minutes. As a professional thief, Tomic knew that it was reckless to linger at a crime scene, but he continued to equivocate about the Modigliani that he hadn’t taken. Tomic headed back, but within 1 minute reality set in: the streets of Paris were deserted, and he was quite possibly the only person within blocks of a recently burglarized museum. He fled the scene again, though his regret lingered. “When I drove, the blue-eyed lady was in my head”.

Nakamura Niche

Called Niche, the restaurant will be next door to Nakamura’s popular eponymous restaurant and is expected to open with a limited menu. For the new, 14-seat restaurant, Nakamura is serving dishes that combine elements of traditional Japanese cooking with inspiration from New York food culture, such as the legacy of Jewish-American food on the Lower East Side. One is an homage to Russ & Daughters’ famous smoked fish store, topped with copious amounts of fish roe and salmon smoked in-house. There will also be a Japanese take on carbonara, with uni and bacon replacing the guanciale.

How to Make Friends

My wife and I have started a practice we call The Friendship Meal. What happens is something like this: we take a person or a couple and invite them to come have dinner with us. It’s almost always a disorienting thing to begin with — we don’t know them, they don’t know us, and everyone’s pretty shy. And sometimes the meals stay there: shyness and lack of connection, we eat and go separate ways. But sometimes that special spark happens, and, all-of-a-sudden, the conversations last for hours. And that makes the risk worth it!

Elmhurst Restaurants

It would be easy to characterize Elmhurst as simply Queens’ second, smaller Chinatown after downtown Flushing, or as a bustling Little Bangkok. Strong cases can be made for both, but the dining options here are as diverse as Queens itself. Tibetan dumplings, Venezuelan sandwiches, Indonesian noodles, Malaysian curry, and top-flight Thai can all be had along with some amazing old-school pizza. Herewith, a globe-trotting lineup of Elmhurst’s absolute best restaurants.