Rexfeng

Last week Japanese botanic artist Makoto Azuma attempted to go where most artists only dream of going: to space. In a project titled Exbiotanica, last week Azuma and his crew traveled to Black Rock Desert outside Gerlach, Nevada. In the dead of night Azuma’s project began. The team launched two of Azuma’s artworks – a 50-year old pine suspended from a metal frame and an arrangement of flowers – into the stratosphere using a large helium balloon. The entire project was documented, revealing some surreal photographs of plants floating above planet earth. “The best thing about this project is that space is so foreign to most of us,” says John Powell of JP Aerospace. “So seeing a familiar object like a bouquet of flowers flying above Earth domesticates space, and the idea of traveling into it.” (syndicated from Spoon & Tamago)

Don't be fooled by that promise of a tepid weather week. July's usual summer swelter has been swapped out for a particularly thick dose of smog, and state officials have issued an air quality alert for the NYC metro area that's in effect until 10 p.m. tonight. Which is frustrating, because you were DEFINITELY planning on going for that run, and now you'll have to stay inside and play Doge 2048 instead. Pass that tub of ice cream, please. [ more › ]

The burritos remain the same.

Despite raising prices across the board, Chipotle is selling a bazillion burritos right now, and the future looks even rosier. This must help CFO Jack Hartung feel somewhat unstoppable, which is probably why the company is looking to maximize the burrito distribution process with new spots that favor takeout. During a call with investors yesterday, he laid out plans, sort of, for "some really, really small scrappy restaurants" with limited seating.

Of course, the move will allow Chipotle to expand at a much quicker pace by letting stores open in retail footprints that aren't large enough for traditional stores, but Hartung detailed "a number of reasons" why space and seats have apparently become extraneous, the first being that business has grown to be around "two thirds takeout." With the brand among the country's most established, he said they "aren't as concerned about someone coming in and not getting 'the full Chipotle dining experience' of being part of the restaurant atmosphere." In a nod to continued overseas expansion, where the burritos are generally fewer and farther between, Hartung added this minimalism would also work well "in France or England where the occupancy cost is super, super high."

Chipotle Is Building Tiny Restaurants [BI]

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Filed Under: the chain gang, chipotle, expansion, seating

Like with nuclear war, a water balloon fight isn't about pinpoint accuracy. What's most important is raining down as much soakage on your opponent as quickly as possible. Which means that the Bunch O Balloons, which promises to let you make 100 throw-ready water balloons every minute, could be the most important addition to your summertime arsenal.

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Roaming charges aren't something you should be worrying about on holiday, as most major UK carriers are well aware. Vodafone will let you use your usual call, text and data allowances abroad for as little as £2, while Three lets you do the same for...

Wii U owners can proverbially move home from one system to another using a new feature introduced in the latest system update. The 5.1.0 U firmware adds "Transfer Between Wii U Systems," allowing you to take all system data - user data, games and...

Mark Bittman on the true cost of producing a hamburger, after accounting for externalities like carbon generation and obesity.

Cheeseburgers are the coal of the food world, with externalities in spades; in fact it's unlikely that producers of cheeseburgers bear the full cost of any aspect of making them.

This made me think of something I wrote for Worldchanging several years ago about a True Cost rating:

Wealth doesn't just magically materialize into your bank account. It comes from the ground, human effort, the flesh of animals, the sun, and the atom. The global economy is driven by nature, and yet it's not usually found on the accountant's balance sheet. Perhaps it should be. I'd like to know the true cost of the stuff I buy. Embodied energy and carbon footprint calculations are a good start, but it would be nice if the product itself came with a True Cost number or rating, like the nutritional information on a cereal box or the Energy Star rating on a refrigerator.

When True Cost is factored in, conflict diamonds become a morally expensive choice to make when they're fueling turmoil in the world. Likewise clothing made in sweatshops. Organic tomatoes flown in from Chile may be less expensive at the register, but how much carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere flying/driving them to your table? What's the energy cost of living in the suburbs compared to living downtown? Do the people who made the clock hanging on my wall get paid a fair wage and receive healthcare? Just how bad for the environment is the laptop on which I'm typing?

(via subtraction)

Tags: burgers   economics   food   Mark Bittman

Ryan M. Pitts, a former Army staff sergeant, earned the medal for conspicuous gallantry after more than 200 insurgents tried to overrun his base, which was defended by just nine Americans, in 2008.

Researchers at Princeton have uncovered a new web-tracking method that's nearly impossible to block. It's called "canvas fingerprinting," and can potentially follow users between sites even if they've disabled more conventional methods like cookies and aren't logged into Facebook. Instead, the tactic works by asking the browser to draw a hidden image, and using that image to track the unique properties of the browser. Researchers found the tactic being used on five percent of the top 1000 sites on the internet, including Whitehouse.gov, YouPorn, The Blaze, and the official website for the State of California.

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 Facebook now owns Oculus. The $2 billion acquisition deal of the virtual reality pioneer announced in March has been approved by regulators and today become official. The FCC’s anti-trust team greenlighted the deal in April. Now it has passed the California Department Of Corporations fairness hearing and will go into effect. The exact price of the acquisition came out to $2,001,985,000. Read More

Sony will be staging a live reading and musical performance of The Last Of Us in Santa Monica on Monday, July 28 at 10pm ET. The performance will feature the game's voice actors and is overseen by the game's creative director, Neil Druckmann. Livestreamed on PSN/Twitch/YouTube. More details at the PlayStation blog.

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The gentrification of hipsterville is officially complete. Williamsburg's first Starbucks opened as promised this morning at 6 a.m. to a chilly welcome from the neighborhood. Grub Street reports that only a few caffeine crazed locals stopped by during its first hour in business. The shop, which is the neighborhood's first, is located in the Karl Fischer condo next to the Lorimer/Metropolitan subway stop. One passerby, however, speculates that the neighborhood will warm up soon enough to the idea of free bathrooms and a convenient Frappuccino: "It was the same thing when Dunkin' Donuts first opened, people will be pissed, but then it will get good business because it's convenient."
· Williamsburg Residents Not Exactly Flocking to Their Brand-New Starbucks [GS]
· All Coverage of Starbucks [~ENY~]

FXX is preparing to air the longest marathon in TV history. After acquiring every last episode of The Simpsons last fall for a cool $750 million, the young network is preparing to air all 25 seasons (and the movie) of one of the greatest television shows of all time from August 21st to September 1st.

This means that all 552 episodes of the series will air 24 hours a day, seven days a week for a full week and a half. In addition, Variety reports that FXX will launch the "Simpsons World" digital hub in October, which will allow cable subscribers to watch every episode on demand on their desktops at SimpsonsWorld.com, mobile devices via the FXNow app, and on compatible smart TVs and set-top boxes. All the more reason for cable cutters to...

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Stay away.

The FDA has issued a sternly worded safety advisory about anhydrous, or powdered caffeine, after a teenage boy from Ohio died in May from an overdose. "The difference between a safe amount and a lethal dose of caffeine in these powdered products is very small," a FDA spokesperson told the AP, unlike, say, the espresso content in those alarmingly sized Starbucks monstrosities. A teaspoon of powder, described as "nasty" tasting even in one of its more positive reviews, contains the caffeine equivalent of 25 cups of coffee. [AP]

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Filed Under: bans, caffeine, fda, powdered caffeine

Add a little of this with a little of that.

Outrage in China has made an investigative report by Dragon TV — which shows Shanghai Husi Food Co., a major meat supplier for the above brands, creating something you might call "recycled" meat, by mixing nauseatingly old patties and chicken with new material — the top trending story on Weibo, China's Twitter. The companies have apologized and say they removed affected menu items, though that hasn't necessarily stopped people from trying to order them. [Reuters, Quartz]

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: the chain gang, china, expired meat, kfc, mcdonald's, pizza hut, shanghai husi food co., yum brands

Filed under: Etc., Plants/Manufacturing, Read This

With all the money they generate, you'd be forgiven if you thought the roads to America's oil wells and shale fields would be paved in platinum and lined in gold. The reality is, though, that these roads are so devastated that they're starting to actively hurt the oil industry.

A large portion of the blame can be placed squarely on the shoulders of the semis that bring things in and out of the fields. As Bloomberg points out in an excellent piece, the popularity of fracking has required huge imports of water, sand, chemicals and steel structuring to the fields, consequently increasing the weight and frequency of trucks on roads that were originally designed for cattle ranchers.

"If you drive a cattle truck one or two times a year, you're not affecting that road very much, but the first day you drive a 175,000-pound substructure of a drilling rig up that road you begin to destroy it," DeWitt County judge Daryl Fowler told Bloomberg.

There are other issues, though, that are making life difficult for the men and women in America's oil industry. Roads are crumbling due to torrential rains and spring thaws in addition to the weight of trucks. The result is a situation that's not only hurting profits, it's increasing accidents.

Solutions, meanwhile, are in short supply. Tax dollars are short, with Texas estimating it'd need to spend $1 billion just to maintain roads in its energy producing regions. That's equal to the total road maintenance costs for the rest of the state - to which we ask, wouldn't it make sense for the oil companies, whose trucks are responsible for much of the wear and tear on these roads, to chip in for their upkeep?

Head over to Bloomberg for a comprehensive piece on the problems facing these surprisingly important roads, and what it will take to fix them.

US energy boom thwarted by... bad oil field roads? originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 19 Jul 2014 09:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Plants/Manufacturing, Crossover, BMW, Luxury

Which automaker do you think ships the most cars out of North America, one of the Detroit Three or perhaps one of the Japanese automakers? Nope. It turns out the BMW's Spartanburg, SC, factory is the biggest automotive exporter from the continent in the United States. According to a recent profile by Bloomberg looking at the plant's 20th anniversary, Bimmer's southern ops sends out more vehicles than all of Michigan combined.

When the Spartanburg factory opened up in 1994, its success was hardly assured, largely because of South Carolina's relatively small economy at the time. However, BMW picked the site because of its proximity to East Coast shipping that made it easier to move engines and transmission in from Germany and export vehicles back to Europe, according to Bloomberg. The Bavarians clearly made the right choice.

Today, the plant has developed into an absolute powerhouse. The factory currently assembles the X3, X4, X5 and X6 and exports about 70 percent of the vehicles built there. Things are only getting better. BMW is investing $1 billion through 2016 to boost annual production from the current 300,000 units up to 450,000 and to build a new flagship crossover called X7. The expansion also adds a further 800 jobs there to take total employment up to about 8,800. Including the latest financing, BMW has put over $7.3 billion into the factory since it opened, notes Bloomberg.

These days, BMW clearly sees strength in the North American market as a production hub. In addition to Spartanburg, it runs a carbon fiber factory as a joint venture in Washington State that is due for a further $200 million expansion in 2015. The Bavarian automaker also just announced a $1 billion factory in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, that will build 150,000 cars a year starting in 2019.

BMW is the US auto industry's leading exporter originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 18 Jul 2014 17:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Office furniture giant Herman Miller is acquiring the modern design retailer Design Within Reach. The pairing puts together two of the bigger names in modern-styled furniture: Herman Miller, which dates back to 1905, and Design Within Reach, which was founded just a decade and a half ago, in 1998. While Herman Miller is known in particular for its office chairs, Design Within Reach's fame doesn't come from any one category in particular. Instead, it sells a wide variety of home furnishings, some made in-house and others from famous designers (though, despite its name, its prices are not strictly within reach).

Herman Miller will pay an estimated $154 million in cash for an 84 percent ownership in Design Within Reach, with the deal...

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Colin Nederkoorn, a startup CEO living in New York City, was unhappy with his Netflix service. He pays Verizon for FiOS service that promises 75Mbps down. But when he tried to stream video, it was a miserable experience, with buffering and low-definition pictures. So Nederkoorn decided to measure the speed of his connection. What he found was that when he was streaming Netflix he was getting speeds of just 375kbps, or 0.5 percent of what he was paying Verizon for.

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There has been a back-and-forth battle in recent weeks about what is causing the internet congestion that is degrading service to Netflix consumers. Last week Verizon published a blog post that offered the first real specifics in the debate, saying that it had studied the situation closely based on a customer in Los Angeles and found that there was plenty of capacity available at different points where Netflix could deliver traffic to its network. The congestion, Verizon said, was being caused by Netflix, which had made the decision to send all its data over a limited set of very crowded routes. Today, Level 3 — which helps carry that Netflix traffic to Verizon's network in LA — fired back in a blog post of its own. It says the problem...

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It's official. Carbone Hong Kong will open mid-August in the LKF Tower, Jeff Zalaznick tells Eater. "The menu will be very similar to NY but will also embrace some of the special ingredients available in Hong Kong." More saucy details here. [Eaterwire]
[Krieger]

 Yo, the simple app that just sends a “yo” to your friends, has closed $1.5 million in seed funding with a $10 million valuation and is finally ready to talk about its investors. They include Betaworks, Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, and the founders of China’s Tencent, among others. Read More

The European Commission has said that while Google addressed its concerns around games with in-app purchasing, Apple has yet to offer a strategy. Following hordes of complaints by outraged parents, the EU asked both companies to implement changes to...

The service that a few Amazon users spotted making a premature appearance a couple of days ago is today official: Amazon's Kindle Unlimited is a $9.99 subscription that provides access to over 600,000 ebooks and "thousands" of Audible audiobooks. While Amazon touts the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series among the titles carrying its new "Read for Free" button for Kindle Unlimited subscribers, this service falls short of giving access to its complete library of content. Amazon sweetens the deal by throwing in a complimentary three-month Audible membership, which expands the audiobook selection to the full range. So Kindle Unlimited has some definite limits on what you can consume, if not how much. You can start a free 30-day trial...

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Using large thin sheets of Chinese rice paper, artist Bovey Lee (previously) meticulously cuts intricate scenes of plants, roads, people, and architecture with an impressive array of cutting implements. The near weightless artworks are mounted against silk before being hung on gallery walls.

Lee most recently had work on view with Grotto Fine Art as part of Art Basel in Hong Kong, as well as an exhibition with Gavlak Gallery for the Armory Show earlier this year. You can see many more pieces from the last few years in her online cut paper gallery. (via This Isn’t Happiness)

Jonathan Le Drappier's collection of Pokeball illustrations include Pokeballs for Tumblr, Reddit, and Youtube, and also translucent Pokeballs revealing the Pokemon inside:

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The Simpsons has become a cultural monolith since it first aired 25 seasons ago (and counting). Now it's getting a live show befitting of its stature.

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The hero of Sony's Uncharted games isn't the stoic type. He's a chatterbox when all the jumping, shooting and punching is going down. It's not all quips and punchlines, though. One thing he says a whole damn lot? "No."

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The United Nations approves of the criminalization of narcotics. But the World Health Organization, a branch of the UN, apparently disagrees.

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The tie-dyed cupcakes will continue to be available at its one million other locations.

The five-year-old kiosk that begat the entire mini-empire of thirteen subsequent Baked by Melissa locations will permanently close in a few days, not because no one wants to eat quarter-size, tie-dyed cupcakes anymore, but because a long-in-the-works construction project at Broadway and Spring Street is finally set to kick in. Henceforth, the end of some sort of era will be commemorated on Monday, July 21, when Melissa herself will hand out free cupcakes between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m., just as it was in the beginning. Stop by and relive all your glorious buttercream memories, if you have them, just don't call it a cupcakepocalypse — Melissa has a Soho pop-up shop less than two blocks away, on Broadway between Houston and Prince streets, as it turns out. [Official site, Related]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: closings, baked by melissa, cupcakes