Photos From NYC Social Media Week 2013

"They say that New York City never sleeps; but I think they're only talking about me. It's 3 a.m. and 95 degrees. Whoa-oh." -- Thomas Dolby, "Evil Twin Brother"

So I'm back from New York City, and I survived. Stay tuned to this blog post over the next week as I add additional photos and commentary from the Social Media Week presentations that I attended. Meanwhile, here are two weather-related photos I took in the Big Apple:

The first photo, shown above, I'm really glad I stopped to take. I was leaving the Associated Press building in west Manhattan to catch the subway at Penn Station at about 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, just after the rain had stopped. I was fascinated by the city lights against the night sky in this scene (the Empire State Building is lighting up the clouds above it). I took it with my new GoPro HERO3 Silver Edition camera. I mentioned recently that the GoPro camera is the last camera you'll ever need to buy and it really proved its usefulness in New York City.

The second photo (a longer exposure taken with my Kodak Z990) shows the Empire State Building again, from our hotel in Soho, after I got home later that night.

The first seminar I'll mention is rather timely... because of a show launching tonight on a certain "channel of weather" (a wholly-owned subsidiary of a so-called "company of weather"). It was entitled "Telling Stories with Scientists." I was pretty hyped to attend this one, because one of the problems we run into at AccuWeather is getting the knowledge from our meteorologists out to the public in an understandable way. The seminar took place at the beautiful American Museum of Natural History. Photos I took of the building and the panelists are shown below.

The guy I circled in the photo is uber-nerd (not that there's anything wrong with that) John Rennie, former editor of Scientific American. He's also one of the stars of "Hacking the Planet" which airs tonight on that channel featuring weather that I previously mentioned. I guess I should give them some credit for having some hard-core scientists on the show, but did you know that most of their ideas are lifted from The Hurricane FAQ, an internet reference that was written in the 1990s? I'll be curious to see how close their "answers" are to those provided by Dr. Chris Landsea in that FAQ (who I met last month when he did a talk at AccuWeather - how's that for "six degrees of separation"?).