The Brooklyn original.

Despite telling New York Magazine four years ago that he would "never, never, never" cut meat for Peter Luger, meat titan Pat LaFrieda last night told Grub Street that he now supplies "90 or 95 percent" of their product. The butcher, who's also got a big book on steaks and such coming out this fall, was in attendance at a party held at Otto Enoteca E Pizzeria, where he and Mario Batali launched EAT (RED), DRINK (RED) & SAVE LIVES, a restaurant-based initiative designed to raise money and awareness in the fight against the spread of AIDS worldwide.

For those who keep track of the various brisket and short rib blends that make up the city's hamburgers, or sweat the difference between 14- and 28-day aged rib eyes, this is huge news. Previously, LaFrieda had said of the venerable Brooklyn steakhouse, "They have no loyalty. They're rainy-day customers. They buy from many meat companies. We don't work that way." Now, though, it sounds like the arrangement is working out: "They're very diligent. They're very stringent as to what their requirements are," LaFrieda says. "Their business is so repetitive and they can really anticipate what they're using that we have meat blocked off for them for the next six or eight weeks. We can't wait for them to order. That's how much product they use. So we already have that product blocked off for the next almost two months."

Read more posts by Trupti Rami

Filed Under: beef, pat la frieda, peter luger, porterhouses, steak

 Word Lens wowed when it debuted back in 2010, with its tech that could translate the wording on signs captured with your smartphone’s camera automatically. Now, Quest Visual, the maker of that app, has been acquired by Google, the company announced today on its site. With the acquisition, Google gets Quest Visual’s tech, which it will incorporate into Google Translate in the future,… Read More

Starting May 21, Atlanta’s High Museum of Art will play host to an exhibit that offers insight as to how concept cars continue to be some of the most imaginative automobiles ever designed.

The “Dream Cars: Innovative Design, Visionary Ideas” exhibit is set to feature seventeen extremely rare and very imaginative concept cars that were created by the likes of Porsche, Ferrari, Bugatti, BMW, and others, with some models even dating as far back as the early 1930′s.

Focusing not only on futuristic designs and technological advancements, “Dream Cars” will also show how concept cars have helped to shape the current landscape of the auto industry. “The concept cars presented in ‘Dream Cars’ demonstrate how design can transcend the present and offer new paths and opportunities for the future,” said the exhibition’s curator and the High Museum of Art’s Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, Sarah Schleuning. “While these cars were never mass-produced, they shaped the future of the automotive industry by challenging the notion of what is possible, technologically and stylistically.” Also on display, will be conceptual drawings and scale models, among other things that are sure to excite car-lovers.

For more information on “Dream Cars: Innovative Design, Visionary Ideas,” click here.

There's a lot of junk you can buy to stick on your camera. Point-and-shoot enthusiasts are likely acquainted with those pricey screw-on lenses that let you capture at a slightly wider angle or zoomed a bit further in, while action cam owners probably...

New York's Museum of Modern Art won't display the early work of choreographer Ted Shawn—so Adam H. Weinert is doing it for them. Surprise! MoMa just got a permanent unauthorized exhibition that displays performances inside the museum through an augmented reality app.

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Samsung's marketing juggernaut is reaching new heights today with the announcement that Heathrow's Terminal 5 will be rebranded for two weeks to promote the company's flagship Galaxy S5 Android phone. Starting on Monday, every area of the terminal will feature the "Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5" moniker, with all the signage and digital screens promoting the handset and projecting images of it. Russell Taylor, Samsung's UK marketing VP describes this as a "one-off opportunity to push the boundaries like no other brand has been allowed to do before." A Heathrow Airport spokesperson clarifies that Samsung hasn't bought the actual naming rights to the terminal, just an expansive ad campaign to be distributed within it. She says "Samsung want...

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Khoi Vinh:

It has become increasingly clear that we are not moving with enough urgency. That’s been true for years, and it was exactly my experience while employed there. To be sure, for a company founded in 1851, The Times has done a remarkable job navigating the turbulent digital landscape, but there’s no prize for best 19th Century enterprise still operating in the 21st Century.

Weird stuff happens a lot in San Francisco, and then there's this: a giant, orange Amazon locker that's appeared without warning, or explanation. Amid the throngs of tourists, Amazon's put what it calls "Giant," an aptly-named variant of its locker system that can be found in 7-11 convenience stores, and other retailers. It's plugged into power, and appears fully functional, with a keypad and display screen where people can plug in their confirmation number and collect things they've purchased online.

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Crazy that something like this could be shot using a phone camera. Stick through to the end to see behind-the-scenes footage. (Via Phil Schiller.)

Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen is moving beyond the feathered friend that brought him massive recognition — he just announced on Twitter that he's building a new game and attached a screenshot to go along with it. There's no other detail on the game yet aside from a small helmeted human being jumping through a small opening into what appears to be a building — it's not all that dissimilar to what you need to do in Flappy Bird, in fact. Polygon notes that Nguyen described the game as "some guy jumping from building to building" in an interview on CNBC.

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Very nice.

Even though it doesn't always feel like it's almost summer, Sonny's Soda Shoppe is ready to go: The indoor-outdoor penthouse rooftop space of the Mondrian Soho — in the space formerly home to the boozy juice bar Soaked — is a turf-laden Italian beach club, with its own bathing beauty mascot and cocktails ($18) paying homage to the motherland. There are drinks like the Dolce Verde, made lacing Avion Blanco, honeydew, lime, arugula, and tarragon with olive oil; and a Blood-Orange Float with Don Julio Anejo, blood orange soda, and chartreuse with vanilla gelato. And speaking of gelato, a rotating list of the dessert comes courtesy of Il Laboratorio del Gelato, and you can enjoy pizza with the spectacular 360-degree views, too.

Sonny's Soda Shoppe, Mondrian Soho, 150 Lafayette St., nr. Grand St.; 212-389-0000

Read more posts by Vanita Salisbury

Filed Under: openings, bars, new york, sonny's soda shoppe

Decades ago McDonald's realized that food wasn't the only way to draw kids into its restaurants. Toys, playgrounds, and cartoon characters all help the cause, and now a Brazilian food chain called Giraffas has come up with a clever way to lure soccer fans into its restaurants, just in time for the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

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Like a burst of color on an otherwise grey canvas, a single majestically colored building rises out of a sea of dull grayness. This is not Christo’s latest “wrapping” project, which is what the photographer Peter Steinhaur first thought, naturally, upon encountering the phenomenon. In fact, these are construction sites wrapped in a colorful mesh material, a traditional method employed in Hong Kong to prevent debris from falling onto the streets below. According to Steinhauer, who’s lived and worked in Asia for the last 21 years – but was stunned to discover this unique construction method in Hong Kong – buildings are wrapped regardless of whether they’re coming up or going down. I’ve seen a similar method employed in Japan with smaller houses, but never anything of such monolithic scale. You can see many more photos over on Steinhauer’s site, where he has two series aptly titled “Cocoon.” (via Featureshoot)

Doumar, with the ice-cream-cone-making machine used in 1905 on Coney Island.

Restaurant and ice cream parlor proprietor Albert Doumar died yesterday in Norfolk, Virginia, at the age of 92, the Virginian-Pilot reports. The business now known as Doumar’s Cones and Barbecue has stood in its current location since 1934, but the family traces its origins to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, when Doumar's uncle Abe introduced what is credited as the very first waffle cone. WTKR reports that Albert Doumar worked at the restaurant that bears his family name up until last month. For much of his career, he was known for arriving extra early each day to produce several dozens of Doumar's famous sugar cones from scratch, manning a machine that was first put into service on Coney Island in 1905.

In addition to its ice cream cones and a signature drink called the Orange Freeze, Doumar's serves an ample menu of hamburgers and pork barbecue cooked in the restaurant's "inimitable way." The restaurant was named one of "America's Classics" by the James Beard Foundation in 1999, and was recognized as the country's best cone purveyor by Gourmet in 2002. Here's Doumar telling Guy Fieri about his "two or three" cones-a-day diet.

"Any time," Albert Doumar told a writer last year, "is a good time for an ice cream or a shake."

Albert Doumar, longtime owner of Doumar's, dies [Virginian-Pilot]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: rip, albert doumar, big al, doumar's, ice cream cones, norfolk, obits

In a clinical trial at the Mayo Clinic, a woman with a type of blood cancer called myeloma was given an injection of measles virus large enough to innoculate 10 million people and has been "completely cleared" of her cancer.

So, as part of a two-patient clinical trial, doctors at the Mayo Clinic injected Erholtz with 100 billion units of the measles virus -- enough to inoculate 10 million people.

Her doctor said they were entering the unknown.

Five minutes into the hour-long process, Erholtz got a terrible headache. Two hours later, she started shaking and vomiting. Her temperature hit 105 degrees, Stephen Russell, the lead researcher on the case, told The Washington Post early Thursday morning.

"Thirty-six hours after the virus infusion was finished, she told me, 'Evan has started shrinking,'" Russell said. Over the next several weeks, the tumor on her forehead disappeared completely and, over time, the other tumors in her body did, too.

The cancer of the other person in the trial was unaffected and larger randomized trials still have to be performed, but this is encouraging news. Between this and the remission of cancer using HIV, it looks like viral therapy has a real shot at being a powerful weapon in fighting cancer.

Tags: cancer   medicine   vaccines

No running. No jumping. No minecarts. Some developers in Uruguay have been making a game called Bullet Boy that seems to be exclusively based on the barrel levels of Donkey Kong Country (perhaps the most fun parts of those games?).

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[Photographs: Joe Roy]

Between Nick's stealth BYOB(un) mission a few years back and my recent visit for a cheezeborger, cheezeborger, cheezeborger (translation: triple cheeseburger), we thought we had nailed down the definitive word on Billy Goat Tavern coverage here at Serious Eats. But there were a few straggling considerations we felt we couldn't ignore.

The first is obvious: what if you don't want three hamburger patties on your burger? There are, after all, people who prefer not return to their desk in physical pain after lunch. The second is an oft-mentioned, but never fully substantiated, secret of the Billy Goat experience: the "kids' bun." George Motz wrote about this (really, just a regular old white hamburger bun) back in 2009 as an alternative to the house Kaiser roll. It's the default bun for junior Goatlets, but apparently burger purists can order one too, if only they know to ask. It was clear that there was more work to be done on the Billy Goat front.

But first, let's back up to just what makes Billy Goat worthy of all this attention in the first place. 

Admittedly, the sear isn't as covetable on the patty I actually photographed.

The thin, preformed patties aren't smash burgers, but they sear beautifully, take a covetably crisp crust, and beg to be stacked. This isn't to say the meat is flawless; these are fast food burgers after all, and the crumbly lean and woefully unsalted (as in no salt whatsoever touches them!) patties taste beefiest when compounded in triplicate.

My plan of attack for a comprehensive Billy Goat experience required two consecutive days of tastings. Since I only had my lunch hour and one trusty sidekick for each outing, I figured this would be the closest I could get to side by side comparisons without keeling over on the spot. Day One would be devoted to the Kaiser Roll, with Day Two to focus on the Kids' Bun.

The Kaiser Roll: Go Big (But Not Too Big)

Billy Goat's menu lists Singles, Doubles, and Triples as the burger options. But it turns out you can also order a Quadruple if you ask nicely. I went with one of each. Unless you say otherwise, the burgers will come out on Kaiser rolls.

Nick was right about the Single ($3.30), which is simply overwhelmed by the bun. However, the lack of balance is oddly appealing, in a lighter fluid soaked charcoal summer BBQ kind of way. Not appealing enough to order again, though.

The Double ($4.50) is twice as good as the single, but the meat still gets lost in the bun.

With only two thin patties and a single slice of cheese sandwiched between, bread and condiments dominate, leaving your mouth dry and begging for one of the house beers. Maybe that's why the grillman is always saying "double much better."

As we suspected, the Triple ($5.65) is the Kaiser bun ideal. Three patties stand up, nay complement, the bready roll, and two slices of cheese add just enough richness without overwhelming. This would be great the day after a hard night of drinking or as an afternoon fortification leading into one.

I thought the Quadruple ($9.00) could be the One True King, but unfortunately, the balance was totally off. Dense bread, four patties, and only two slices of cheese—doesn't that cutaway look angry to you? It sure tasted angry, and we quickly left it to stew on its own. 

Not only was the balance off, but the Quad also offered a taste of what was to become a recurring problem: Billy Goat's lack of patience with custom orders. Not only did they look at me like I was crazy when I ordered four patties on one burger, but they charged me for two double cheeseburgers for the pleasure. Even if the Quad had been life changing, I can't imagine actually shelling out for one again at that price.

The Kids Bun: Did Somebody Say McDonald's?

The guy at the register recognized me the second time around, so he hardly flinched when I ordered a Single, Double, and Triple, all on "kids' buns." Since the Quad was such a disaster on the Kaiser, I shuddered to think what it would be like on an even less substantial base. That question is best left to the masochists in the audience.

As soon as I saw the buns, I knew I was going to be happy with this round. Rather than being the sesame bespeckled ones from George Motz's blog post, these were straight up white buns, S. Rosen (of poppy seed hot dog bun fame), to be exact. They sit on the grill just long enough to pick up a little color and become warm and pillowy.

There's no way around it: these burgers bear a striking resemblance to the ones served under the Golden Arches. This is most apparent on the Single ($3.30), which sports a great meat-to-bun ratio and a crumbly, unseasoned patty—just like the ones Ronald serves. Topped simply with a dab each of ketchup and mustard, a smattering of chopped raw onion, and two pickle slices, I was looking around for the PlayPlace as I bit into this one.

The Double ($4.50) causes the stars to align. I like a quarter pounder (or, ahem, double quarter pounder) with cheese as much as anyone, but more often than not, it's a double cheeseburger (or two) that gets my vote when I'm swinging through Mickey D's: it's cheap, filling, and very satisfying. This is that burger, though I guess if we're being technical, the single slice of cheese makes it a McDouble.

Like the Quad on the Kaiser roll, the Triple ($5.65) upset the kids' bun balance. It certainly wasn't over the top out of control, but if you're going triple, you might as well get it between buns that can handle the heft.

The Condiments: Load Up For Free

When I talked about how great the patties are, I was being a little generous: condiments are where Billy Goat actually shines. You have to dress the burger yourself, but that's actually a boon if you don't mind rolling up your sleeves.

Thick ridge-cut and crisp, with a strong dill flavor and plenty of pucker, the pickle slices are some of my favorites anywhere. The relish is sweet like the neon variety served around town on hot dogs, but with a subdued hue. The small size of the chopped raw onion means that they slightly steam between the hot meat and buns, lessening their bite. And the sliced raw onion might be the best part of all: the large, thin disks ensure a sharp allium bite with each mouthful.

I didn't know about the caramelized onions until the grillman flirtatiously offered some to my wife on a previous visit. They're rich but oily, without any salt to speak of. Still, they add pleasant texture and a bit of sweetness to the burger and are definitely worth batting your eyes for. 

Between the bready bun and the unseasoned meat, condiments are essential at Billy Goat. I messed with different combinations, but burger nirvana is really up to you. My ideal setup for the triple on a Kaiser roll consists of ketchup and mustard on both buns, caramelized, raw chopped, and raw sliced onions, dill pickles, and relish. In short, everything.

The same rules as above apply for the double on a kids' bun: the more patties you pile on, the more toppings the burger can support/require to get some needed moisture into each bite. Here on the double, the tried and true McDonald's formulation worked great.

Messing With Success: Just Add Bacon

Confident that the Triple on Kaiser and Double on a Kids' Bun were the two best ways to enjoy Billy Goat, I decided to end the experiment with a little lily gilding. As great as the condiments are, dry burger patties are still dry burger patties. Absent additional cheese, these burgers are still lacking in flavorful fat. Enter Bacon ($1.65).

The Double with Bacon on a Kids' Bun ($6.15) transforms your McDouble into a Wendy's Double Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger. This was my go to for a number of my formative years, so I wasn't complaining.

The Triple with Bacon on Kaiser ($7.30) is as over the top as you can get at Billy Goat without asking the grillman to start sandwiching patties between grilled cheese sandwiches. Meaty, rich, and still somehow balanced, this burger is a testament to the hardworking Kaiser, which apparently will take just about anything you throw at it. Challenge accepted?

Final Observations

Nine burgers and two days later, I now feel confident to speak definitively on the Billy Goat. The hard truth: judging by taste alone, these are not destination-worthy burgers, and the blame lies with the lean, under-salted, and crumbly patties that they're slinging. Stacking and judicious condiment usage helps, but there's only so much lipstick you can put on a cow. 

However, taste alone does not a dining experience make, and I can't think of many places with as much, ahem, atmosphere as Billy Goat—even the above ground Wells location. If you've never been, it's a definitive Chicago experience, and if you work nearby, it beats soulless neighbors Poag Mahone's and Franklin Tap by a long shot. 

Honestly, the real problem with much of this information being useful in the wild comes down to cost. As I mentioned above, Billy Goat doesn't take well to custom orders. This makes ordering a burger on the kids' bun or adding bacon problematic: there's no discount for the less filling former, and they charge you the price of a side order for the latter. To be blunt, add bacon to your Triple on Kaiser, but be sure to do it on Fridays when the triples are $4.20 a piece. If you're only hungry enough for a McDonald's style burger, take a hit on ambiance and eat one a few blocks away. You can swing by with your change for a beer at Billy Goat. Better fries and a beer to wash it all down? That's the best of both worlds.

The FCC has voted to accept Chairman Tom Wheeler's proposal for a new net neutrality framework, kicking off a longer rule-making process that will conclude in the next several months. And while the new proposal has been amended from an earlier, more controversial text, it leaves open the question of internet "fast lanes," an issue that many see as fundamentally undermining net neutrality.

The new proposal builds on the 2010 Open Internet Order that was struck down earlier this year, but it's seeking comment on a number of issues that have proved central to the net neutrality debate. Broadband providers would have to hold to a minimum level of quality for any service, but otherwise, they're only required to adhere to "commercially...

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 Oculus Rift has plenty of potential for changing human interaction, but what about other animals? One project from Iowa State University assistant professor Austin Stewart (via FastCo Exist) imagines how VR goggles could make chickens believe they’re free-range, even when they’re not. They can explore a virtual grassland, and with future iterations of Oculus, even peck at the ground… Read More

Foursquare's Swarm app is now available for iPhone and Android, letting you find nearby friends and check in to bars, restaurants, and other places. Foursquare announced Swarm two weeks ago as one-half of its new split personality — one app for finding friends and checking in, and another (launching later this summer) for finding great places to go nearby.

Like Foursquare, Swarm lets you check in to show friends where you are, but it also uses passive location signals to show you which friends are nearby even when they haven't checked in. Where Find My Friends shows you a friend's location down to the foot, Swarm lets you see who's in the neighborhood when you want to get one more drink at 1 AM. If you want to hide your location, you...

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All is not well.

"I used to go out for fro-yo like five times a week," said a co-worker at Grub Street HQ recently, with a sigh. "But I can't remember the last time I visited 16 Handles." It wasn't the first time I'd heard this kind of comment recently. A friend who runs a bar in midtown used to stop in for fro-yo a few times a week, but his appetite has cooled. "It's been a while, even though I have enough loyalty points to buy a Maybach." The toppings bars in the shops are still full of colorful gummy bears and rosy diced strawberries, but New York's fro-yo boom has hit dark times.

The slow decline of New York's recent frozen-yogurt dessert-scape can be seen more acutely in the East Village, long a haven for frogurt shops. Twist on Avenue A opened last fall, then promptly disappeared; the unrelated shop Twister on Second Avenue closed in March, lasting just over half a year. The festive-sounding Yogurt Crazy was first announced for Third Avenue in 2012 but instead, a notice from NYU — its landlord — appeared taped to the storefront last year demanding $37,134.87 in back rent. Over in Brooklyn, Forever Yogurt signed a lease near Barclays Center, but that ended in eviction papers and a claim of $12,000 in unpaid rent.

Independent shops aren't suffering alone. Big Frogurt is having similar trouble: Pinkberry Chelsea, at Eighth Avenue, closed recently. Pinkberry Gramercy and Pinkberry Columbus Avenue were filled with customers this time last year, but have since gone dark. The chain's once-mighty 177 Bleecker Street location, which had lines out the door, closed without any fanfare in 2012, three years after the Red Mango across the street had done the same.

Then there's the West Village. Chicago chain Forever Yogurt, which was supposed to debut in the hallowed old Bleecker Bob's, has quietly canceled its plans. Perhaps it was put off by the rent, which is rumored to have been between $15,000 and $20,000 a month, a tall order even for a chain that boldly proclaimed it was scouting the Lower East Side, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, and Brooklyn.

In other words, it's bleak out there. Here's what's going on:

New York hit a natural saturation point.
Businesspeople kept opening new shops even as interest waned, and that's because the logistics of opening a fro-yo shop over a traditional restaurant do seem tempting: Locations don't need to be outfitted with full kitchens, employees don't require much training, and food costs are both steadier and lower than at typical restaurants. (Yogurt and toppings cost operators about 25 percent of the price they can sell them for; a restaurant is lucky if its costs are at 30 percent.) In fact, the model is so popular that the USDA says frozen-yogurt mix is among the few dairy categories to actually increase in production compared to levels from the previous year. (But more operators buying yogurt mix doesn't necessarily mean more customers are buying yogurt.)

The shops sell the exact same product, which makes it impossible to stand out.
That yogurt mix is just one reason these shops all feel the same. Hardly anyone makes much of the fact that almost every business uses the same commercial mixes, produced by a company called YoCream, a division of Dannon. But if all these shops look the same, and they all buy the same core ingredient, it becomes increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd. Shops try to tout the hiring of a "New York City-trained pastry chef," or attempt to make customers think that flavors like "Birthday Cupcake Batter" are somehow substantially different than a competitor's "Yellow Cake Batter" flavor, but it's not enough to get new customers in the door.

Yogurt shops require increasingly expensive real estate.
"I don't know how many more frozen yogurt places we can handle, but every time I think I'm done, you see another one," says Julian Hitchcock, a commercial real estate broker. The big problem is that the yogurt chains operate stores more like a retail business than a traditional restaurant, meaning it's important to them to have prime spaces on stretches with lots of foot traffic (instead of tucked into a former garage in Bushwick, for example). According to Hitchcock, that means they all take "incredibly good, and incredibly expensive spaces," which aren't cheap. "We used to joke about starting a side business that would just be me talking to the frozen yogurt chains as they would inevitably go out of business, because there's just too many." Hitchcock suggests that what's happening now is a natural course correction.

Discounts never look good.
Unsurprisingly, some shops are now offering big sales to compensate for the lack of demand from customers. But at the newest Red Mango location, an ongoing glut of deep discounts — East Village residents and NYU students get 10 percent off by presenting valid I.D.; cups are 20 percent off from noon until 5 p.m.; everything is 25 percent off from 5 to 7 p.m.; etc. — can also affect a sort of anti-charm.

Green juice replaced yogurt as the city's premier no-guilt expenditure.
Tellingly, fro-yo's most adaptive strategy seems to be to try to steal some mojo away from the sector that's done the most to displace its novelty, the green juice business. Red Mango has begun to experiment with kale and drinks with names like "Cool Pineapple Zen," and all new locations will get a juice bar. It doesn't help that juice bars have even begun targeting kids (who might otherwise prefer strawberry-topped fro-yo to a kale smoothie). Last month, the two locations of the fashion-model-friendly Melvin's Juice Box even introduced "Melvin's Junior" menu, consisting of 100 percent organic, made-to-order drinks. The "powerful antioxidants and Vitamin C" in the "Orange Pop," for example, "go under the radar with a citrus kick from oranges and pineapples." No wonder Melvin's will open its second location, in the East Village, next week.

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: busts, 16 handles, bleecker bob's, forever yogurt, fro-yo, frozen yogurt, pinkberry, red mango

An Instagram user called FakeWatchBusta is making a name for himself by identifying which rappers and other celebrities are wearing counterfeit timepieces. His account features photographs of the famous people, their knock-off watches, and explanations for why they're fake. FakeWatchBusta's list of victims so far includes rappers like Soulja Boy, American football player Garrett Wolfe, and even multi-millionaire Mohamed Hadid. Despite his seeming talent for spotting replicas, the 30-year-old is not professionally connected to the luxury watch industry. He is a "detail freak" and a "watch geek" fascinated with their mechanical aspects, according to Noisey.

Unsurprisingly, the self-styled "Horological Batman" has been threatened with...

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$2 Undecillion Lawsuit

What if Au Bon Pain lost this lawsuit and had to pay the plaintiff $2 undecillion?

—Kevin Underhill

The bakery-cafe chain Au Bon Pain (with a few other organizations) is being sued. This is how much money the person suing them is demanding:

This is how much sellable stuff there is in the world:

This is the estimated economic value of all goods and services produced by humanity since we first evolved:

Even if Au Bon Pain conquers the planet and puts everyone to work for them from now until the stars die, they wouldn't make a dent in the bill.

Maybe people just aren't that valuable. The EPA currently values a human life at $8.7 million, although they go to great lengths to point out that technically this is not actually the value any specific person places on another person's individual life.[1]Note that they don't say whether they assume that amount would be higher or lower. In any case, by their measure, the total value we place on all the world's humans is only about $60 quadrillion.[2]The world's combined oil reserves are only worth a few hundred trillion, which suggests that purely from an accounting standpoint, the "no blood for oil" slogan makes a lot of sense.

But while people may be worthless,[3]I'm rounding down. we're hardly all there is on the planet. Out of all the Earth's atoms, only 1 out of every 10 trillion is part of a human.

The Earth's crust contains a bunch of atoms,^{[citation needed]} some of which are valuable. If you extracted all the elements, purified them,[4]This is just one of many reasons that this idea wouldn't make sense in practice. The reason many elements (like U-235) are valuable is that it's hard to manufacture or purify them, not just because they're rare. and sold them, the market would crash.[5]Both in the sense that the supply would cause a drop in prices, and the sense that the market is like 20 miles above the mantle and you just removed the crust supporting it. But if you somehow sold them at their current market price, they would be worth ...

Oddly, most of this value comes from potassium and calcium, and most of the rest comes from sodium and iron. If you're going to sell the Earth's crust for scrap, those are probably the ones you should sift out.

Sadly, even selling the crust for scrap doesn't get us close to the numbers we need.

We could include the core,[6]It's down there. which is iron and nickel with a dash of precious metals, but it turns out it wouldn't help. The amount demanded from Au Bon Pain is just too large. In fact, an Earth made of solid gold wouldn't be enough. The Sun's weight in platinum wouldn't be, either.

By weight, the single most valuable thing that's been bought and sold on an open market is probably the Treskilling Yellow postage stamp. There's only one known copy of it, and in 2010 it sold for \$2,300,000. That works out to about \$30 billion per kilogram of stamps. If the Earth's weight were entirely postage stamps, it would still not be enough to pay off Au Bon Pain's potential debt.[7]Also, the stamps would probably be less valuable now that there is literally an entire planet of them, but that's the least of Au Bon Pain's problems.

If Au Bon Pain & co decided to be intentionally difficult, and pay their debt entirely in pennies, they would form a sphere that would squeeze inside the orbit of Mercury.[8]The fate of this sphere of pennies is left as an exercise for the reader. The fate of Mercury is that it would fall into the pennies and disintegrate. The bottom line is that paying this settlement would be, in almost any sense of the word, impossible.

Fortunately, Au Bon Pain has a better option.

Kevin, who asked this question, is a lawyer and author of the legal humor blog that reported on the Au Bon Pain case.[9]And which we encountered in Question #90. He told me that the world's most highly-paid lawyer—on an hourly basis—is probably former Solicitor General Ted Olson, who recently disclosed in bankruptcy filings that he charges $1,800 per hour.

Suppose there are 40 billion habitable planets in our galaxy, and every one of them hosts an Earth-sized population of 7 billion Ted Olsons.

If Au Bon Pain hired every Ted Olson in the galaxy to defend them in this case, and had them all work 80-hour weeks, 52 weeks a year, for a thousand generations[10]This scenario assumes that the former Solicitor General reproduces asexually....

... it would still cost them less than if they lost.

Being a huge fan of pools I can't believe I missed this 50-meter-long swimmable bridge between two condo towers in Singapore. Living at the 574-apartment, 38-story-tall Bishan Central would be my idea hell, but I'd love to have a friend there to enjoy that roof and swim through that bridge.

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On July 1st, 2015, it will be illegal to sell a smartphone in Minnesota without antitheft software preinstalled. That's because Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton just signed the first so-called "kill switch" bill into law. The idea is that if smartphone owners can always remotely disable and wipe their phones after they're stolen, it will deter criminals from stealing them at all. It's a feature that police departments across the country have requested, due to how popular it has become for thieves to snatch the small, high-value devices. Nationally, an estimated one in three robberies involves smartphones, according to the FCC.

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John R. Moran:

The opposite of design, then, is the failure to develop and employ intent in making creative decisions. This doesn’t sound hard, but, astonishingly, no other leading tech company makes intentional design choices like Apple. Instead, they all commit at least one of what I term the Three Design Evasions.

Spot-on.

Cabel Sasser:

Coda 2.5 is essentially complete. But, we’re still encountering sandboxing challenges. So, in the interest of finally getting Coda 2.5 out the door and in the hands of you, our very eager and patient customers, we’ve decided it’s time to move on — for now.

In short: Coda 2.5 will not be sandboxed, and therefore will not be available in the Mac App Store.

Please note that this doesn’t mean Coda 2.5 was rejected by Apple, rather that we’re going ahead and proactively making this call since all Mac App Store apps are required to be sandboxed and Coda 2.5 will not be.

Lots of good news here, too, though. Coda users who bought through the Mac App Store can upgrade to version 2.5 free of charge, and Panic has created their own (free) sync service to stand in for iCloud. But it’s pretty damning for the Mac App Store (and the sandboxing requirement in particular) that a top-tier developer like Panic has to pull an app like Coda.

Update: Daniel Jalkut points out that Apple awarded Coda “Best of Mac App Store” in 2012 and an Apple Design Award (for which only App Store apps are now eligible) last year.

Owning a home nudges people to set aside money for the future, but a mortgage doesn’t have to be the only vehicle that encourages saving.

Comcast says it could begin capping monthly data for all its customers within the next five years, a change that could potentially end up costing some heavy internet users additional fees. Speaking at a media summit in New York earlier today, Comcast executive David Cohen said that he expects the company to move entirely to a "usage-based billing model" in the next five years, while adding that most customers don't go over their monthly allotment.

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