Take me to the stake, but I'm not a fan of the Bugatti Veyron. I just think the design is a bad pastiche of old and new. But I'm a fan of watching things being carefully made and a fan of strange industrial machinery like the trolley above, used to join the different parts of the car. So satisfying.
Loved this piece by Dan Frommer at Quartz:
One of Apple’s most successful products — which rarely gets recognized as such — is made not of aluminum and glass, but of words and pictures. The Apple keynote is the tool the company uses a few times a year to unveil its other products to millions of people.
To understand their hidden structure, Quartz reviewed more than a dozen Apple keynotes, logging and analyzing key elements. Here’s what we found.
Jafflechutes, the pop-up parachute-delivery service for grilled cheese sandwiches, didn't go quite as well as planned. One diner describes it thusly: "The sandwiches were labeled, but that didn't seem to guarantee that you would get to eat yours, as many ended up tangled in fire escapes and wires during their lazy descent. At one point, an organizer shouted down to us, 'How does everything taste?' Everything tasted like a soggy cheese sandwich tinged with disappointment." [Greenpointers]
[Twitter]
I’d call them “Apple mobile payments”, not “Apple iPhone mobile payments”. Otherwise, this sounds, uh, right on target.
If you have a Moto 360 and a strong sense of nostalgia for Nintendo 64, download the Secret Agent Watchface and walk around with the Goldeneye 007 pause screen on your wrist (seen here, modeled by by Phandroid). The left bar seems to always stay at 100 percent (congrats, you're healthy!) while the right bar will go down according to the watch's battery life. And if Apple doesn't tempt you tomorrow, the more James Bond-appropriate all-metal Moto 360 is coming this fall.
If you don't have a Moto 360, you can do what I did about six months back and make your own $7 version. Touchscreen doesn't work but battery life is phenomenal.
Update: "Rmukapps," the app's creator, reached out to let us know about a beta version of Secret Agent...
Filed under: Coupe, Supercars, Bugatti
Bugatti to replace outgoing Veyron with new Chiron originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 08 Sep 2014 17:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Nothing wrong with funnel cakes and sausage coils. But when Feast of San Gennaro season approaches, the local food cognoscenti begin to wonder what surprises lie in store at team Torrisi’s stand outside Parm. This year, our street-fair source, Italian patron saints division, tells us, it’s ... bagels. And not just any bagels, but a preview of the bagel and appetizing shop that the Torrisi boys will open next year with former Per Se and Roberta’s baker Melissa Weller, a.k.a. the bagel avenger.
On the menu: Weller’s naturally leavened plain and everything models (with a new-and-improved “everything” seasoning), plus Weller’s own cultured chive cream cheese and house-cured salmon, not to mention the stupendous sticky buns with which she used to destroy the resolve of hapless dieters at Roberta's.
And here’s another scoop: Both the stand, which will operate 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. September 12 to 14 and 19 to 21, and the forthcoming shop will be called Sadelle’s, after partner Jeff Zalaznick’s great-grandmother — “the only member of the extended family who could cook, with the possible exception of me,” says Zalaznick.
Read more posts by Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld
Filed Under: bagels, major food group, melissa weller, new york, news, parm, sadelle's, san gennaro
The creators of Blackfish and The Cove will be making New York City's rats the stars of their next project, which will be based on Robert Sullivan's Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants. The news was announced at the Toronto Film Festival last night. [ more › ]
MSN is back. Microsoft is revamping its MSN brand with the introduction of several Bing-powered apps and a new homepage. Existing Bing apps like News, Sports, Travel, Weather, and Finance will all be rebranded to MSN soon, and the software maker is planning to release each app for iOS and Android. It’s just the latest move in Microsoft’s "mobile-first, cloud-first" vision, where a number of cloud-powered services and apps are available cross-platform.
It’s also a surprising move. Microsoft had largely abandoned its MSN brand in favor of Windows Live and Bing over the past several years, but now the company seems to be focused on MSN once more. A new MSN.com homepage, which enters preview mode today, highlights a number of services from...
This weekend, The Washington Post published a deeply reported look at "highway interdiction," a controversial tactic that has allowed police to seize hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists without formally charging anyone with a crime. Typically, police will stop a driver under suspicion of drug trafficking, seize their cash as evidence, and refuse to return it without a legal challenge. Only one in six seizures were challenged, typically because of the high cost of legal assistance.
Hundreds of millions of dollars seized, all without pressing charges
But the legal justification is only part of the practice. As private consultants sought to expand the practice, they turned to surprisingly familiar methods, including an...
Facebook has garnered a reputation for hopelessly complicated privacy settings, and now, a decade into its existence, the company's turning to a cute blue dinosaur to educate its users. It's called Privacy Checkup, and all users will see it over the coming weeks. It takes just a minute or two to complete, and it runs you through the basics: who can see your posts, which apps have access to your account, and who can view your profile information. And, of course, you get to do it all with a charming little dino by your side.
Details on Privacy Checkup were first revealed this past March when Facebook tested the feature with a smaller group of users — now everyone can see it. Privacy advocates will be quick to notice that the steps do not...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I'm biased because I grew up in California so it'll always be home to me but I'll always be a little jealous of people who aren't from here, just for the opportunity to be able to see it for the first time with brand new eyes. It's such a big state that there are so many different faces of beauty.
After years away, Arnold Schwarzenegger is returning as the Terminator in next year's Terminator: Genisys, and there's a good chance that you'll be seeing a lot more of him. Genisys was always intended as the first in a new Terminator trilogy, and Paramount has just set dates for a second and third film. According to The Wrap, the following two films will debut a year apart, with the second entry coming on May 19th, 2017 and the final entry coming on June 29th, 2018. The production company behind the new films is reported to only have rights to them until 2019, when they'll revert back to series creator James Cameron, so it's no surprise that it wants to get a full trilogy of films in before that cutoff. The good news, though, is that...
[Krieger]
Ladies and gentlemen, the day has finally come. Danny Bowien has found a new space for the beleaguered Mission Chinese Food to call home in Manhattan. The chef tweets a couple of triumphant family photos (with his son and Mission Chinese's chef, Angela Dimayuga) outside the space, which upon close inspection is clearly Rosette. Rosette only just announced yesterday that it would shutter for good tomorrow, having gotten "an offer for the space that's too good to pass up." Which means that Bowien has apparently slyly put in a liquor license application for the space right under our noses, under the name Andrew Yang. Stay tuned. More details as they become available.
· @dannybowien [Twitter]
· All Coverage of Mission Chinese Food [~ENY~]
Here it is, the Biscuit Taco, the latest not-really-a-taco thing Taco Bell has come up with by redeploying its proprietary and complex fold-over technique. The carbs here swaddle some fried chicken with jalapeño honey — proof that the spicy condiment is really going places — and there are apparently six other versions, all variations on egg, cheese, sausage, and bacon. It's already been tested in Atlanta and San Antonio and is now in four Los Angeles locations "for another week," so it's only a matter of time before this thing shows up on an Instagram account account near you. [LAT, Related]
Read more posts by Clint Rainey
Filed Under: the chain gang, biscuit taco, taco bell
There appears to be a design bromance brewing at Apple. The company's design chief Jony Ive and famed industrial designer Marc Newson spent a year and a half working together on more than 40 different product designs — including some one-off Apple products — for last year's (Red) auction in New York. Now Newson's joined Apple's design team, Vanity Fair reports.
From Wikipedia, a list of common misconceptions, including a recent favorite about life expectancy in the Middle Ages:
It is true that life expectancy in the Middle Ages and earlier was low; however, one should not infer that people usually died around the age of 30. In fact, the low life expectancy is an average very strongly influenced by high infant mortality, and the life expectancy of people who lived to adulthood was much higher. A 21-year-old man in medieval England, for example, could by one estimate expect to live to the age of 64.
Also, Vikings didn't wear horned helmets, Romans didn't puke in vomitoriums after rich meals, the average housefly lives for 20 to 30 days, medieval Europeans didn't believe the Earth was flat, Napoleon was taller than average, the Bible's forbidden fruit was not explicitly an apple, and humans have more than 20 senses. (via @linuz90)
Tags: lists
Ohio resident Scott Miller shot this timelapse video earlier this year of dozens of Amish men raising a barn. The entire construction cycle takes place between 7am and 5pm—with at least an hour for lunch—and yet the bulk of the work is done by the end of the day. Amazing to see how incredibly precise the entire endeavor is. (via Sploid)
One of the biggest things that we still don't know about the iWatch is what it'll actually look like, but Apple developer documents from Apple may just be laying out a hint. As spotted by Punchkick Interactive, Apple uploaded a document yesterday that features a "media remote" that looks suspiciously like a round-faced smartwatch. It's a pretty simple image and could certainly be referring to any number of other watches, but it's still something to go on. It's particularly worth considering given that right beside it is the silhouette of an iPhone acting as the "media source," so Apple clearly has some interest in using its own products as illustrations here.
That all said, Apple's been using this image for a little while now, so it may...
Even though we're seemingly living in a golden era of Chicken Fries and avocado-topped fast-food delicacies, analysts now say there's little room left for chains to grow, in the U.S. at least. Because the news that we've maybe hit peak hamburger coincides with word of renewed fast-food-worker protests and Burger King's moving-to-Canada announcement, it's all the more interesting that Shake Shack's rumored IPO has been valued as high as $1 billion.
Triumphant return of its lowbrow, frozen crinkle-cut fries aside, Danny Meyer's ever-expanding hamburger chain isn't really fast food, though, or at least fast food as we know it, even as it continues to siphon away customers from from much bigger chains. Shake Shack now counts 50 locations worldwide, and it seems as if a new one opens every other week. Its U.S. sales totaled $62.3 million last year, so a big more forward seems like a logical next step, and a forthcoming IPO would no doubt give Shake Shack its most generous kickstart yet toward total world domination, not to mention a lot more Shack Burgers. Perhaps those limited-edition black-truffle-topped burgers were just a sign of things to come.
[Bloomberg]
Earlier: Shake Shack May Be Gearing Up for an IPO
Read more posts by Clint Rainey
Filed Under: empire building, ipo, shake shack
Let's say you have latitude/longitude coordinates of 40.742041, -73.989579 (my current location). How precise are those 6 digits after the decimal point? Well, five decimal places will get you to within a meter and six will get you to within 11 cm:
The fifth decimal place is worth up to 1.1 m: it distinguish trees from each other. Accuracy to this level with commercial GPS units can only be achieved with differential correction.
The sixth decimal place is worth up to 0.11 m: you can use this for laying out structures in detail, for designing landscapes, building roads. It should be more than good enough for tracking movements of glaciers and rivers. This can be achieved by taking painstaking measures with GPS, such as differentially corrected GPS.
(via teendrama)
Tags: GPS maps
A recent Dell press event saw the computer manufacturer debut a number of new laptop and desktop models, but tucked into its product list came one particular stunner: a 27-inch monitor sporting a 5120×2880 resolution. The Dell UltraSharp 27 Ultra HD 5K Monitor, set to launch by the end of Q4 2014 for $2,499, will scream past the consumer-grade competition with a whopping 14.7 million pixels in all. That's over 70 percent bigger than the standard 4K spec of 3840×2160.
Maximum PC managed to make eyes with the monitor—and, perhaps more importantly, its backside, where their reporter found dual DisplayPort 1.2 ports required to handle 5K resolution; that dual-port solution suggests that Dell may be combining two 2560×2880 displays to make this monitor work. (Users who prefer the stone-age days of 4K can use a miniDisplayPort for that resolution as well.) Dell has also left out some details, such as the monitor's refresh rate.
At 218 PPI, the UltraSharp's pixel density just about matches that of a MacBook Pro with Retina display, and it will additionally sport six USB ports, a media card reader, and a pair of Harmon/Kardon speakers. We expect this monitor to serve as a workstation and photo-editing option for professionals who already split between multiple monitors as opposed to a jumping-off point for 5K gaming—most high-end rigs can barely render games in 4K resolution as it stands.
Read on Ars Technica | Comments
Let me open with an apology to John Gruber for my previous blog post.
We've been working on the Standard Markdown project for about two years now. We invited John Gruber, the original creator of Markdown, to join the project via email in November 2012, but never heard back. As we got closer to being ready for public feedback, we emailed John on August 19th with a link to the Standard Markdown spec, asking him for his feedback. Since John MacFarlane was the primary author of most of the work, we suggested that he be the one to reach out.
We then waited two weeks for a response.
There was no response, so we assumed that John Gruber was either OK with the project (and its name), or didn't care. So we proceeded.
There was lots of internal discussion about what to name our project. Strict Markdown? XMarkdown? Markdown Pro? Markdown Super Hyper Turbo Pro Alpha Diamond Edition?
As we were finalizing the name, we noticed on this podcast, at 1:15 …
… that John seemed OK with the name "GitHub Flavored Markdown". So I originally wrote the blog post and the homepage using that terminology – "Standard Flavored Markdown" – and even kept that as the title of the blog post to signify our intent. We were building Yet Another Flavor of Markdown, one designed to remove ambiguity by specifying a standard, while preserving as much as possible the spirit of Markdown and compatibility with existing documents.
Before we went live, I asked for feedback internally, and one of the bits of feedback I got was that it was inconsistent to say Standard Flavored Markdown on the homepage and blog when the spec says Standard Markdown throughout. So I changed them to match Standard Markdown, and that's what we launched with.
It was a bit of a surprise to get an email last night, addressed to both me and John MacFarlane, from John Gruber indicating that the name Standard Markdown was "infuriating".
I'm sorry the name is so infuriating. I assure you that we did not choose the name to make you, or anyone else, angry. We were simply trying to pick a name that correctly and accurately reflected our goal – to build an unambiguous flavor of Markdown. If the name we chose made inappropriate overtures about Standard Markdown being anything more than a highly specified flavor of Markdown, I apologize. Standard does have certain particular computer science meanings, as in IETF Standard, ECMA Standard. That was not our intent, it was more of an aspirational element of "what if, together, we could eventually..". What can I say? We're programmers. We name things literally. And naming is hard.
John Gruber was also very upset, and I think rightfully so, that the word Markdown was not capitalized throughout the spec. This was an oversight on our part – and also my fault because I did notice Markdown wasn't capitalized as I copied snippets of the spec to the homepage and blog post, and I definitely thought it was odd, too. You'll note that I took care to manually capitalize Markdown in the parts of the spec I copied to the blog post and home page – but I neglected to mention this to John MacFarlane as I should have. We corrected this immediately when it was brought to our attention.
John then made three requests:
Rename the project.
Shut down the standardmarkdown.com domain, and don't redirect it.
Apologize.
All fair. Happy to do all of those things.
Starting with the name. In his email John graciously indicated that he would "probably" approve a name like "Strict Markdown" or "Pedantic Markdown". Given the very public earlier miscommunication about naming, that consideration is appreciated.
We replied with the following suggestions:
We haven't heard back after replying last night, and I'm not sure we ever will, so in the interest of moving ahead and avoiding conflict, we're immediately renaming the project to Common Markdown.
We hope that is an acceptable name; it was independently suggested to us several times in several different feedback areas. The intention is to avoid any unwanted overtones of ownership; we have only ever wanted to be Yet Another Flavor of Markdown.
The project name change is already in progress.
This is our public apology.
I'll shut down the standardmarkdown.com domain as soon as I can, probably by tomorrow.
John, we deeply apologize for the miscommunication. It's our fault, and we want to fix it. But even though we made mistakes, I hope it is clear that everything we've done, we did solely out of a shared love of Markdown (and its simple, unencumbered old-school ASCII origins), and the desire to ensure the success of Markdown as a stable format for future generations.
Edit: after a long and thoughtful email from John Gruber – which is greatly appreciated – he indicated that no form of the word "Markdown" is acceptable to him in this case. We are now using the name CommonMark.
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For more proof that animal-derived protein is overrated, today we turn to Alain Ducasse, world's most Michelin-starred chef. His restaurant at Plaza Athénée (three stars before it closed) has been undergoing a massive face-lift, and he says when it reopens Monday, diners will notice it's pretty much gone meatless.
The new menu, reflecting what the chef calls "naturalité" — there's a tie-in cookbook, of course — will rely on vegetables literally grown at a garden at Versailles, a ritzy touch that no doubt helps justify the nearly $500 price, plus a few pescetarian options like black rice with shellfish and a bulgur–monkfish tagine. There just may not be a côte de bœuf, however, and other radical changes abound, such as dessert courses made without added sugar, and, elsewhere, red wine paired with the fish. Ducasse has already promised he'll begin championing the humble sardine, too, over French fine-dining warhorse fish like turbot.
[Guardian]
Read more posts by Clint Rainey
Filed Under: oui chef, alain ducasse, plaza athénée, veggies
