One great way to get adventurous folks amped up about scaling landmarks is to make the act of being way-the-heck-up-high even freakier. The Eiffel Tower is the latest to get a stomach-flipping glass floor 187 feet above the teensy little people on the pavement below.
You can search via U.S. postal codes to see who can roll out of bed a half hour before work and still be on time. [ more › ]
Last quarter, Samsung warned that the record-breaking earnings the company had been posting might not last forever, and now the company is reiterating that message. Today, Samsung issued guidance for its forthcoming Q3 2014 earnings, telling investors that it expected operating profits of 4.1 trillion won ($3.8 billion) for the quarter, down a hefty 60 percent from the $10.6 trillion won operating profit that the company booked in Q3 2013. Consolidated revenues of approximately 47 trillion won also represented a 20 percent decline over the previous year's third quarter total of 59.1 trillion.
Over at TWCIdentifier.com, Time Warner Cable wants to help you choose the very best internet package for you. You know, right after you let it know whether these are dude or lady internet needs we're dealing with. Because apparently, that matters.
If you must stand in line for over 30 minutes to clear a security check for your job, is that part of your job and should you be paid for that time?
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The Washington Post is now available as a free app on Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, according to a report in Bloomberg Businessweek. The announcement comes a little more than a year after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the the newspaper. The app, developed by a group inside the Post called Project Rainbow, will offer a curated selection of news and photographs. It will initially be free on… Read More
30% of Americans don't drink any alcohol during a typical week. On the other end of the scale, ten percent of Americans consume more than 10 drinks every single day. More from Wonkblog.
I double-checked these figures with Cook, just to make sure I wasn't reading them wrong. "I agree that it's hard to imagine consuming 10 drinks a day," he told me. But, "there are a remarkable number of people who drink a couple of six packs a day, or a pint of whiskey."
As Cook notes in his book, the top 10 percent of drinkers account for well over half of the alcohol consumed in any given year. On the other hand, people in the bottom three deciles don't drink at all, and even the median consumption among those who do drink is just three beverages per week.
This is shocking to me. I wonder what the distribution is within the top 10%...there must be people in the top 1% who drink, what, 30 drinks per day? Is that even possible day after day without very serious consequences? (via mr)
Update: Over at Forbes, Trevor Butterworth casts doubt on the conclusions in the Wonkblog article.
The source for this figure is "Paying the Tab," by Phillip J. Cook, which was published in 2007. If we look at the section where he arrives at this calculation, and go to the footnote, we find that he used data from 2001-2002 from NESARC, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which had a representative sample of 43,093 adults over the age of 18. But following this footnote, we find that Cook corrected these data for under-reporting by multiplying the number of drinks each respondent claimed they had drunk by 1.97 in order to comport with the previous year's sales data for alcohol in the US. Why? It turns out that alcohol sales in the US in 2000 were double what NESARC's respondents -- a nationally representative sample, remember -- claimed to have drunk.
Additionally, the statement I made above -- "ten percent of Americans consume more than 10 drinks every single day" -- is not true, even if the data is correct. Instead, it is accurate to say that top 10% consumes an average of 10 drinks daily...some individuals may drink 4/day and some 18/day. Looks like it's time for a reread of How to Lie with Statistics and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. (via @harryh & @gfilpus)
Tags: alcohol food
Two weeks ago, Kakao Talk users in South Korea users got an unpleasant surprise. After months of enduring public criticism, President Park Geun-Hye announced a crackdown on any messages deemed as insulting to her or generally rumor-mongering — including private messages sent through Kakao Talk, a Korean messaging app akin to WhatsApp or iMessage. Prosecutors began actively monitoring the service for violations, promising punishment for anyone spreading inappropriate content.
Remember Cycloramic? It was one of our favorite iOS apps of last year. It allows you to take hands-free 360° selfie panoramics by using the iPhone’s vibrating motor to propel it around your desk.
A key component of this trick, though, was that the last few iPhones have had squared edges. Those edges allowed the phone to be stood upright for proper pano-selfie framing. Otherwise… Read More
Here is the quote of the day/century: "The Chinese have money to spend and the inclination to do so." This comes to us from one Sean Hennessey, chief executive of Lodging Advisors, in a comment to the NY Times regarding the recent sale of the Waldorf-Astoria to a Chinese insurance company. It was announced today that Hilton Worldwide has sold the iconic property to the Anbang Insurance Group for $1.95 billion. (Bedbugs included.) [ more › ]
It's been a while, but in today's bit of Cronut news, the world has now been gifted with an official recipe from Dominique Ansel himself. That means the pastry chef's "at-home" version of his big-deal pastry is now ready to be undertaken by intrepid novice bakers, and perhaps also people who like to torture themselves with incredibly technical recipes. Even Good Morning America, which posted the recipe on its site and slapped it with a "Difficulty: Extreme" rating, wants to be clear that these sweet babies are not just thrown together in a stand mixer. Here's what you need to know before you dive in.
The recipe for the basic dough itself starts off like this: You make the yeasted stuff one day, "laminate" it with butter the next, then rest it, cut it, fry it, fill it, glaze it, and sugar it. The basic ingredients seem pretty simple:
3 3/4 cups flour, plus more as needed for dusting
1 tablespoon + 2 teaspoons Kosher salt
1/4 cup + 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 tablespoon + 1 1/2 teaspoons Instant yeast (preferably SAF Gold Label)
1 cup + 2 tablespoons cold water
1 large egg white
8 tablespoons unsalted butter (84% butterfat), softened
1 tablespoon heavy cream
But you soon realize this doesn't even include the 18 more tablespoons of unsalted butter to get as close to the original pastry's peel-apart layers as you can — overall, we're talking 368.55 grams of butter for every 412.5 grams of flour here, and that's not including even more heavy cream for the ganache — those recipes require tempering chocolate, blooming gelatin, and/or cooking custard. So, in addition to the two days of prep you need to do before you can fry your first Cronut (because the dough needs to proof and the ganache filling needs to rest), you'll also want to schedule a few more days of pre-planning.
Then there's the equipment: Just to get a plate of Cronuts to the table, you'll need a KitchenAid, for sure, and beyond that, some piping bags, a sharp Microplane, an accurate thermometer, a decent offset spatula, and two separate ring cutters. The recipe doesn't spell it out, but you'll also need a lot of parchment paper, a good slotted spoon to to retrieve your fried Cronuts from the hot oil, and, ideally, a resting rack to cool your hybrid pastries evenly — basically, voilà?
Maybe all those people waiting on the line are onto something.
Related: Year of the Cronut: How Dominique Ansel’s Pastry Icon Actually Came to Be
Related: Dominique Ansel Will Open in Tokyo in 2015
[GMA]
Read more posts by Hugh Merwin
Filed Under: bookshelf, cronut recipe, cronuts, dominique ansel, secret recipes; @digital-news
If you've got your eye on any of those new GoPros, they're now available for purchase. Prices start at just $130 for the GoPro Hero, and go all the way up to $500 for the Hero4 Black. In typical GoPro fashion, there are also a bunch of new accessories to sort through as well. [Amazon]
GT Technologies, the company tapped to make the sapphire screens on the upcoming Apple Watch , has filed for bankruptcy.
When Microsoft encourages its engineers to think outside the box, the results aren't always dead-ends like the Kin . In fact, the company's research division is now showing off an amazing thin transparent film called FlexSense that can sense deformations and allow us to interact with tablets and eReaders in fascinating new ways.
Brian Peiris built a live-coding web app for the Oculus Rift that lets you manipulate your virtual 3D environment in real-time. Sure, it’s just a bunch of simple manipulation of geometry for now, but it’s clearly a precursor to where the technology could take us: a metaverse where citizens of Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong are less concerned with their democratic rights than the general upkeep of their avatars. Create anything you want so long as you've got the coding skills to support your whims.
The link to the Metaverse is so obvious that it was Neal Stephenson himself, who brought Peiris’ project to our attention. Yes, that Neal Stephenson, the author who wrote the SciFi classic Snow Crash, where grotesque-looking "gargoyles" walk...
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"The storytelling of Halo, the scope of World of Warcraft and the co-operative fun of Borderlands — may eventually get patched in." Thus begins the brutally Honest Trailer for Destiny, "The video game equivalent of a beautiful mansion full of cheap Ikea furniture."
We all know the frustration of tearing open a huge, tantalizing bag of chips or nachos or Funyons or whatever and realizing the bag's 2/3rds air. Two South Korean college students just proved how empty our snack vessels are, by paddling a raft made of unopened potato chip bags across a river.
Yep — now there’s an Uber for cash.
I first became aware Nimbl earlier this afternoon, when I saw some skeptical commentary about it on Twitter. The idea, basically, is that you can use the app to call a Nimbl “runner”, who will bring cash to your location. Read More
Saturday morning American broadcast TV was once animation's home field. Filling a cereal bowl with artificially colored sugar pebbles and staring at the tube was every kid's weekend plan. Not any more: For the first time in 50-plus years, you won't find a block of animation on broadcast this morning. It's the end of an era.
Jerry Seinfeld has done plenty of endorsements and advertising campaigns over his career (never forget the Superman/American Express commercials), so he knows how the industry works pretty well. But when he received an Honorary Award at the 55th Clio Awards (the Oscars for advertising) in New York this week, he decided to unleash his alternate persona, the truth-telling sarcastic vagabond Edgy Jerry, for a hilarious anti-advertising speech. Watch it below. [ more › ]
The Federal Communications Commission is extending the time you'll have to file a comment on whether you think that Comcast and Time Warner Cable should be allowed to merge. The reason behind the extension is that Comcast recently filed an enormous document containing new information with the commission. The commission actually refers to the thing as "voluminous," noting that it's nearly 850 pages long.
Huy Fong Foods' iconic hot sauce may not be the only, or even the best, sriracha in the world, but it is no doubt the only one you can I.D. simply as "rooster sauce" and most people will know exactly what you're talking about. Owner David Tran recently opened up his California factory to the public so that the world can see how those peppers ferment, but it turns out he has no fun origin story about the iconic, strutting hot-sauce bird that's now appeared on everything from stilettos to underwear.
He tells Modern Farmer he only recalls it came off a sketch he got from a random street artist in Vietnam in the '70s. Now, at almost 70 himself, Tran "[doesn't] remember who he is." The rooster — Tran's Chinese zodiac symbol — was incorporated into the first bottles as a rough outline, then got a more refined look (and more prominent bottle real estate) when he later hired an artist in L.A.'s Chinatown to give the bottle a face-lift. Other than those details, the mystery will probably never be solved. Tran lost the original sketch, he says, because he "never thought that I'd be successful so I didn't keep any of my souvenirs."
Read more posts by Clint Rainey
Filed Under: mystic rooster, david tran, huy fong foods, sriracha
On a June morning in Washington, William Leneweaver, the state’s E911 IT projects and operations manager, was alerted to a call. A man had been attempting to dial emergency responders, but he couldn't get through. He was left listening to a "fast busy" — a pre-recorded tone.
Eventually, he made contact by borrowing someone else's phone. The staff of the state's Vancouver call center, where the call was received, began investigating what might have prevented the call from going through. They...