Patrick Filler

Slice Harvester Tells it Like It Is

I’ve made no effort to conceal my love of pizza and am not ashamed to admit that there are more than a couple pizza blogs in my RSS reader. I don’t easily tire of reading about new pizza places and I’m always interested in a fresh perspective.

Colin from Slice Harvester is attempting to eat every slice of pizza in New York City (starting with Manhattan). There has been significantly more bad pizza than good thus far and, while that sucks for him, it hasn’t necessarily been bad for us readers. I mean, just check out the titles of these recent reviews:

• Cafe Amore Pizza: “Eat this if you are really hungry and hate yourself.”
• Bravo Pizza: “The Final Nightmare.”
• Cafe Amore: “MORE LIKE CAFE AH-BORE-AYE, AMIRITE?!”
• Z Pizza: “I should not have eaten here!”

The Slice Harvester feed found a home in my reader early on in his adventures and it’s going to be there for as long as he keeps writing. If you’re into NYC pizza, check it out.

Ranking NYC’s Neighborhoods

New York Magazine asked statistician Nate Silver to try and objectively rate the neighborhoods of New York City. He used a wealth of city data and a number of factors to determine the top 50 neighborhoods. Brooklyn comes away smelling like roses — holding 6 of the top 10 spots.

Nate’s model is thoughtful and interesting and the article is well worth a read. However, as he writes on his blog, the real star is the “Livability Calculator.”

The coolest part, rather, is an interactive applet that allows you to determine for yourself the relative importance you attach to 12 different categories of data (housing cost, housing quality, transit/proximity, crime, schools, green space, food/restaurants, health and wellness, shopping and services, diversity, “creative capital” and nightlife). If you play around with the applet for long enough, you’ll find that it’s fairly easy to slot any of 15 or so neighborhoods into the top position, and any of 40 or so of the 60 that we evaluated into the top ten.

The calculator is a lot of fun to play with. If you’re looking for property (whether to rent or own), this would be a great way to choose neighborhoods to focus on.