Nature magazine is the last place you’d look for solid financial advice, but hey, nothing wrong with heavy science used for stock market prediction.
A psychology study has found that, at least in the short-term, stocks with names that are easier to pronounce consistently outperform those with more confusing monikers.
Gilbert’s offers a combination of ice cream / gelato / frozen yoghurt shop with Wharf-side entrance, and a restaurant/bar facing the Monterey Bay. Generally a place offering the clam chowder outside might seem like desperate for customers, but in case of Gilbert’s it’s just a case of advertising really good fresh seafood.
The menu offers a good variety of fresh seafood items, with some items market as restaurant’s specialty. The atmosphere is quite casual and friendly, the appetizers are good, and the entree items are generally not on the expensive side, between $15 and $35. They have a pretty good wine selection, featuring some local wines from Monterey area.
The fresh clam chowder is worth trying out, as this is the cafe specialty, as well as hot crab bake - a concoction of crab meat, shrimp and other seafood served hot on the sourdough. During the night time the view from the windows offers quite a nice picture of Monterey lights.
When you visit Monterey, you probably have a certain list of places to visit and things to try. Monterey Bay Aquarium is probably on that list, as well as Monterey Fisherman’s Wharf, followed by downtown. Monterey Hotel is conveniently located within walking distance from all the places of interest in Monterey, and since it’s right downtown, getting a cup of coffee in the morning or having a quick bite generally means crossing the street.
The hotel is historic, having been built in 1904. However, it has very nice interior, and none of the weird smells or unsanitary conditions you’d expect from old buildings. The staff is quite friendly and helpful to the newcomers to Monterey to figure out their way around. The hotel lobby contains the list of all the takeout menus available in Monterey (not that you’d want a pizza delivery, having come to the seafood capital of NorCal).
The cons of being a historic hotel include the lack of elevators (not a problem for most of the people in the 3-story building) and horrendously squeaky floors. We were on the 2nd floor, and were going to bed early, due to overdose of walks on the fresh air, and I swear they held the walking competition the floor above. The room was also smaller than what you’d expect to get for similar money at a chain hotel.
There’s continental breakfast served downstairs every morning 7-10 am, which includes bagels, yoghurt, cereal and a selection of fresh fruit. The hotel is within 20-30 minute walk from Monterey Bay Aquarium, and it’s definitely a very nice walk on the trail by the ocean. It’s realtively easy to get to from the highway.
There’s no onsite parking, an the valet parking at the hotel is $16 a day. We were there for the Memorial Day weekend, and the downtown streets and parking lots are open to the public for free on weekends and holidays, so we managed to get a spot on the street right outside the hotel. If you positively cannot find any parking in the street, drive to the very end of Alvarado, and right behind the Washington Mutual building there’s a public parking garage.
Hotel’s advertised WiFi hotspot was not secured, but did not want to associate with my laptop even at 100% signal strength. I got Internet for maybe 10 minutes (which was manifested by all instant messengers popping windows like crazy and Yahoo! Messenger making those gun sounds notifying me of new mail) and could not get online after that, even though the wireless connection displayed 100% quality all along, which makes me think it wasn’t my laptop that was the problem.
Located on Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey, CA, Isabella’s has to try hard to attract the customers among competing places with similar fresh-seafood menus, and it does a pretty good job. The menu is quite extensive, offering many fresh seafood choices, with crab and lobster at market prices.
The interior of the restaurant is quite upscale for a wharf location, and overall we got a great service. The butter garlic dungeness crab was a specialty that day, and it’s definitely worth trying out, if you feel like having a big meal, since the crabs served are generally pretty large.
The restaurant doesn’t offer a good selection of alcoholic or specialty drinks, but it’s well compensated by their wine selection. Wines were generally overpriced, since they figured out that when you get great food combined with the view of Monterey Bay, you’d want to complement it with a nice bottle no matter what.
The dessert selection is pretty good, with about 7 desserts brought out on a specialty tray. The helper to the waiter (not the waiter himself) turned out to have very little knowledge of the dessert names and ingredients, but the waiter made excellent recommendations.
Isabella’s has quite a few outside seats, that turned out to be too windy when we were there at lunch hour. However, the fast-changing weather is compensated by the view of sea lions and departing whale-watching boats.
MIT Technology Review takes a look at the current developments in the visual search arena and how new approaches to visual search involve analyzing brain patterns:
Neurophysiologists at the CBCL are studying how, exactly, the brain does its visual work. They note how each pixel in an image stimulates a photoreceptor in the eye, for instance, based on the pixel’s color value and brightness: each stimulus leads neurons to fire in a particular pattern. The programmers make a mathematical model of those patterns, tracking which neurons fire (and how strongly) and which don’t. They tell the computer to reproduce the right pattern when it sees a particular pixel, and then they train the system with positive and negative examples of objects. This is a tree, and this is not.
High Performance Computing Newswire runs an article on computer scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who evaluated the processor’s performance in running several scientific application kernels, then compared this performance against other processor architectures. The full paper is available from Computer Science department at Berkeley.
Toshiba Satellite laptop with Intel Celeron M Processor 380 will be $399.99 tomorrow at Office Depot after $200 rebate and $50 in-store instant savings. While it’s a pretty good deal, the specs are not breathtaking at all with 14″ WXGA TruBrite widescreen, 256MB memory, 60GB hard drive, DVD/CD-RW, 802.11g. You will probably end up buying another 512 MB - 1 Gig of notebook RAM to be able to run more than a couple of applications at once.
Associated Press has an article about new generation of US consumers, who shun the mobile devices packed with features in favor of simpler devices that get the job done. One would think that as cell phones involve into cameras, e-mail readers, Web browser and music players, mobile users would be happy with the device that fulfills their digital needs, but according to AP, “a J.D. Power & Associates survey last year found consumer satisfaction with their mobile devices has declined since 2003, with some of the largest drops linked to user interface for Internet and e-mail services.”
Business 2.0 magazine runs a special cover story on building a bulletproof startup. They discuss the business climate for starting a company nowadays, take the reader through incorporating a company, look at prototyping the product first, developing a beta version and finally launching the product. They discuss the financials of running a startup by having articles on angel investments and venture capital.
The New York Times runs a story on Toshiba G35-AV650, the 17″ laptop with HD-DVD support. There’s also a CNET review of the new laptop and price comparison on Yahoo! Tech. The laptop is priced at $2,999, and currently there’re only 8 HD-DVD titles available for purchase.