inception
Four of us from the Laboratory of Computational Vision (LCV) at NYU are starting a small meeting to discuss essential tools for scientists. Our focus is largely technical and the list of topics we plan to discuss includes many about programming, software, and computing. Besides technical stuff, we intend cover other topics that we consider to be important to our lives as scientists, such as time management. We’ll meet soon to discuss unit testing (docTest and xUnit for MATLAB). We believe that our discussions will be quite useful for other people who do the kinds of things we do. If you have any questions or posts to contribute, please send them via the links at the top. We’ll update this blog after every meeting, and we may add other stuff here as followup.
The 2011 ICC Cricket World Cup had a subset of us meeting in the morning before lab at one of two Manhattan bars that had a pixelated feed. At one point the more proximal option was so crowded we agreed to look for a different place. We walked around in circles for a while, missing a few wickets, as we waited for someone’s Droid to bring up the names of Irish bars in the area, none of which were showing the match. Just after India won the final two of us we went to Saravanaa Bhavan, only to see that they too were showing the match. Unlike the place we ran away from, they had plenty of space and their required minimum expenditure went towards delectable South Indian food, rather than runny eggs and sausages. Moral of the story might be that knowledge is power. Or meeting to share knowledge about essential things is essential, but then are there people who’d be willing to “meet” to discuss where to watch cricket. More to the point of this, blogging about essential meetings covering essential knowledge is also quite essential.
