Pi Day Celebrants

As mentioned earlier, yesterday was Pi Day so a bunch of statisticians and other such nerds celebrated at the new(ish) Artichoke Basille near the High Line.  We had three pies:  the signature Artichoke, the Margherita and the Anchovy, which was delicious but only some of us ate.  And of course we had our custom cake from Chrissie Cook.

The photos were taken by John.

Pi Cake 2011
NYC Data Mafia
NYC Data Mafia

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

As many people are aware two nights ago was a total lunar eclipse that occured on the winter solstice, a pretty rare combination.  I won’t go into the math behind the eclipse or the solstice or discuss the rarity or physics of the event.  I just want to show off these great pictures.  Early Tuesday morning my friend John (who is not a professional photographer) and I climbed up to the roof of my building with his pro camera and gear armed only with many layers of Under Armour and North Face and hot chocolate.

We took probably a hundred pictures, but these are the two he sent me.  They were taken with a high end Canon DSLR with a powerful telephoto lens and a tripod.  I’m not certain of the specifics, but we used a middle-sized aperture setting and long exposures, ranging from 4 to 30 seconds.  Next up I want to mount this thing to a telescope.

He also took a bunch of pictures on a behind-the-scenes tour of Grand Central that I find breathtaking.

One more pic after the break. Continue reading

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

Last Wednesday I made a trip to Di Fara in Midwood, Brooklyn.  Since that place is well covered and lauded I won’t talk about the pizza, as amazing as it is. 

I gave Dom a copy of my thesis (pdf) on NYC pizza and he loved that his place was one of the few pizzerias mentioned by name (along with Lombardi’s and Otto Enoteca, two of my favorites) in the paper.  My friend captured these great photos and I’m extremely thankful to Dom for letting me in his kitchen. 

And to make the trip all the more surreal, Avenue J was lined with lulav and etrog vendors trying to clear out stock before Sukkot started.  The juxtaposition of Di Fara and the surrounding Orthodox neighborhood was striking and really shows the beauty of New York City. 

Gallery of photos below.

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Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.