InterContinental Boston

A new hotel has opened recently on the Boston waterfront. According to this article and the hotel website, it has:

• a 24-hour full-service restaurant called Miel with a 60-seat waterfront patio: "[At] 3am, eating a crepe out in the garden during July, [Miel's] going to be great"
• RumBa - a "rum and champagne bar"
• SUSHI-TEQ - a "very innovative, new concept" that "pairs sushi and vintage tequila"

I can't wait for their waterfront patio to open this spring. Boston needs more of outdoor cafes, bars and restaurants.

IN+ERACT 2

I went to IN+ERACT 2 last Friday. It was an artsy party held at Villa Victoria (former 19th century church in the South End) - a pretty cool venue with nice ambiance. There was a lot of beautiful and stylish people, DJs playing cool house music, an art show, live body painting, a fashion show and dancers from the Boston Conservatory performing behind a shadow wall set on stage to the music beats. Here are some pictures I've taken with my cell phone.

IN+ERACT 2

A Night In Tunisia

I went to a free concert at the Berklee College of Music (Recital Hall 1W) today. Walid Zairi (a Tunisian-born bassist) played five standards ("Whisper Not" by Benny Golson, "No Greater Love" by Isham Jones, "One by One" by Wayne Shorter, "Calypso Minor" by Abdullah Ibrahim and "Senior Blues" by Horace Silver) with a jazz quintet (sax, trombone, piano, bass and drums). It was a fun and interactive experience: musicians encouraged audience participation and half-jokingly asked if there was a singer in the audience for a blues song they played as an encore.

Genzyme Center tour

Genzyme is an international biotechnology company founded in Boston, MA, USA in 1981. Last Friday I went to see their new corporate headquarters building on a tour organized by the MIT Energy Club. This building has earned a Platinum certification - the highest under the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED® (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System™. The Genzyme Center is also pretty cool: natural light is everywhere, all workers have a view outside and there are several hundred windows that can be opened to let in the fresh air any time of the year. A virtual tour is available as well as some photos I've taken.

Genzyme Tour 2007

What Would Jesus Wiki?

From an article in Wired:

An alternative Wikipedia written by conservative Christians has become a major target of mockery on the web.

Conservapedia brands itself on its main page as "a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American."

Conservapedia's entry on kangaroos says that, "like all modern animals ... kangaroos are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah's Ark prior to the Great Flood."

Herding the Mob

An article by Annalee Newitz in WIRED Magazine discusses the concept of crowdhacking or manipulating the "wisdom of the crowds":

"Today we harness the masses for everything from choosing the next pop star on American Idol to perfecting open source software and assembling Wikipedia articles. But perhaps the most widespread and vital uses for group input online are in scoring systems. In addition to eBay feedback, these are the customer ratings that Amazon.com and Yahoo Shopping post with product reviews. They’re the feedback scores that Netflix tallies to help subscribers decide which movies to order. And they’re the up-or-down votes that sites like Digg and Reddit (part of the Wired Media Group, which also includes WIRED magazine) rely on to determine which stories to feed Web surfers.

But as rating systems have become more popular ... there has been what some would say is a predictable response: the emergence of scammers, spammers, and thieves bent on manipulating the mob. Call it crowdhacking."

Marijuana, the wonder drug

An interesting article in the International Herald Tribune by Lester Grinspoon (an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School). Here is an excerpt:

"Marijuana is effective at relieving nausea and vomiting, spasticity, appetite loss, certain types of pain and other debilitating symptoms. And it is extraordinarily safe — safer than most medicines prescribed every day.
If marijuana were a new discovery rather than a well-known substance carrying cultural and political baggage, it would be hailed as a wonder drug."