Rexfeng

Programming sorting techniques visualized through Eastern European folk dancing. For instance, here's the bubble sort with Hungarian dancing:

See also sorting algorithms visualized. (via @viljavarasto)

Tags: dance   infoviz   programming   video

What's this we have here? We just got a tip from a reader that this is Honeywell's answer to Nest.

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A state panel said that 22 applicants paid a $1 million application fee, the first significant step in the bidding process for four new casinos in upstate New York.

Animated gif by Paul Robertson and Jacky Ke Jiang.

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Tesla's ongoing battle for the right to sell its electric cars directly to consumers is one that's currently being waged with individual US states. But that's not stopping the Federal Trade Commission from weighing in on the matter. In a decidedly pro-Tesla blog post, the FTC today cautioned states that shutting down the automaker's retail operation is "bad policy for a number of reasons." Tesla has found itself locked in a battle with state lawmakers in an attempt to preserve and expand its direct sales model. Texas, Arizona, Virginia, and New Jersey have banned the company from selling its popular Model S to consumers in those states. It's fared better elsewhere, including New York.

Tesla represents 'a real change to the way cars are...

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This week, the Federal Communications Commission proposed allowing broadband companies to charge websites in exchange for faster service lanes. This ruling, according to experts, will effectively end net neutrality, a set of rules that allows websites to enjoy an open-ended, democratic flow of traffic. And if this is true, it's very bad news for the Internet, essentially clogging World Wide Web traffic with chain store-equivalent websites and keeping the voices and videos of smaller competitors down. Say goodbye to the Mom-and-Pop shops, because your web browser is on its way to becoming a Walmart. [ more › ]

According to several sources, the FCC is set to propose new net neutrality rules "that would allow broadband providers to charge companies a premium for access to their fastest lanes." That's decent news for deep-pocketed companies that can pay for faster connectivity and even better news for broadband providers that can charge more for a speedier service. It's bad news for everyone else. Faster service for some means slower service for others. Many of today's big internet companies got that way because they had access to a level playing field. The Internet let the little guy become the big guy. And now the big guy wants to have an unfair advantage with faster pipes. The hell with that.

Ryan Singel: The FCC plans to save the Internet by destroying it.

Tim Wu in The New Yorker: "It threatens to make the Internet just like everything else in American society: unequal in a way that deeply threatens our long-term prosperity."

Tags: FCC   Ryan Singel   Tim Wu

Comes served in its own reflecting pool ... of butter.

Since 1936, the venerable Solly's Grille in Milwaukee has been the prized purveyor of the butter burger, which is one-third-pound sirloin patty topped with what seems like a more or less equal amount of sweet and creamy Wisconsin butter. The burger is sliced and pretty much oozes a river of fat onto the plate by the time it hits the table. It's a treasured regional specialty that no one in their right mind tries serving anywhere else, but next month, patty-melt expert and Travel Channel host George Motz will do just that.

In honor of the ten-year anniversary of Hamburger America, Motz has wrangled two burger-maker veterans — Andrew Zurica, of Brooklyn's now-shuttered Luncheonette, and Black Shack's Jeffrey Maslanka — to re-create what will hopefully be a reasonable facsimile of the butter burger and other classics featured in the film, like the Wheel Inn's peanut-butter burger and Bobcat Bite's green-chile cheeseburger. This, and a lot more events, are part of Burger Week, which begins May 1.

New York Burger Week [Official Site]

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: foodievents, bobcat bite, buger week, butter burger, george motz, solly's burger, solly's grille, wheel inn

So much drama in every bottle.

Yesterday, the city of Irwindale finally got its chance to give Huy Fong Foods a 90-day ultimatum to fix its "powerful, painful odor," but the council members blinked and called for a two-week truce instead. Mayor Mark Breceda brought an olive branch (metaphorically, in the form of his half-empty "personal" bottle of Sriracha) to a not-tiny number of protesters outside City Hall, telling them he "loves the chili sauce," but just needs Huy Foods to do a few "little things." Later, when owner David Tran asked why they want him shut down, Breceda set the record straight: Despite filing a lawsuit, adding a breach-of-contract claim, getting an injunction, briefly halting production, and unanimously declaring the factory a public nuisance, he assured Tran, "No one wants you here more, Huy Fong Foods, than this city council. I'm positive we can resolve the issue." [Reuters, Related]

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: burn sauce, david tran, huy fong foods, sriracha, srirachapocalypse

Roy Latke, GeekTime:

In recent weeks I spoke several times with two sources in Cupertino pertaining to future products to be released by Apple later this year for the holiday season in the U.S. and Europe. Judging on the basis of the information revealed in these conversations, Apple has been working for a long time on a project that appears to be in its final stages of touch-ups.

What became clear is that the much anticipated Apple smart watch is not so much a watch as it is a smart band. It would appear that just as Apple has done with the iPhone and iPad, here too the technology giant plans to create a focal point around which a new ecosystem will evolve. To be more specific, Apple is looking to launch a smart band towards the end of this year whose collection of sensors will be able to be used not only to monitor the activity of the wearer, but also to operate other devices as a gestural controller.

Filed for future claim chowder.

In a few years, Amazon may handle the entire delivery process for your impulse Prime purchases. The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon is in the early stages of branching out its delivery operation into something that could eventually compete directly against UPS and FedEx — two companies that play a critical role in getting its packages to customers today. The online retailer is already testing such a service with trucks making "last mile" drop-offs in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, according to the Journal. Aside from giving shoppers greater control over where and when they take a package, Amazon's big plan would also eventually cut expenses and bring the company closer to offering same-day delivery in more cities....

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Every New York driver knows parking by a fire hydrant is a risky endeavor—violate the required 15-foot buffer by so much as a hair's breath and you'll be ticketed with glee by a vengeful meter maid. But the Manhattan parking spot that pulls in the most cash—a space in front of a hydrant at 152 Forsyth Street in the Lower East Side—might not even be illegal. [ more › ]

In the 1980s, when personal computers with graphics capabilities were first introduced, Andy Warhol was an enthusiastic early adopter. In 1985, Commodore commissioned the artist to produce some art on their Amiga computer, but the work was never widely shown and was assumed lost. Then artist and retro computer nerd Cory Arcangel learned of Warhol's Amiga experiments from this video (and perhaps this article from a 1986 issue of Amigaworld) and set in motion the process of finding out if any of the computers or storage devices in The Andy Warhol Museum contained his Amiga art.

CMU Computer Club members determined that even reading the data from the diskettes entailed significant risk to the contents, and would require unusual tools and methodologies. By February 2013, in collaboration with collections manager Amber Morgan and other AWM personnel, the Club had completed a plan for handling the delicate disk media, and gathered at The Andy Warhol Museum to see if any data could be extracted. The Computer Club set up a cart of exotic gear, while a video crew from the Hillman Photography Initiative, under the direction of Kukielski, followed their progress.

It was not known in advance whether any of Warhol's imagery existed on the floppy disks-nearly all of which were system and application diskettes onto which, the team later discovered, Warhol had saved his own data. Reviewing the disks' directory listings, the team's initial excitement on seeing promising filenames like "campbells.pic" and "marilyn1.pic" quickly turned to dismay, when it emerged that the files were stored in a completely unknown file format, unrecognized by any utility. Soon afterwards, however, the Club's forensics experts had reverse-engineered the unfamiliar format, unveiling 28 never-before-seen digital images that were judged to be in Warhol's style by the AWM's experts. At least eleven of these images featured Warhol's signature.

Incredible.

Tags: Andy Warhol   art   Cory Arcangel

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has just published a blog post that expands on a statement he gave last night on the topics of net neutrality and an open internet. Earlier yesterday, The Wall Street Journal issued a troubling report alleging that the FCC will soon propose new rules that effectively spell the end of net neutrality. Wheeler came out hard against that notion last night, and he continues to refute the doomsday scenario today. Despite his best efforts, Wheeler's words won't do much to calm the storm.

"There has been a great deal of misinformation that has recently surfaced regarding the draft Open Internet Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that we will today circulate to the Commission," he says. "The Notice does not change the...

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100 percent American, whatever that is.

This summer, the fast-food giant is putting away its gonzo fried-waffle tacos and growing up a little by opening the official-sounding U.S. Taco Co. and Urban Taproom in Huntington Beach, California. Much like Super Chix, the KFC spinoff that just launched in a strategic attempt to tap into Chick-fil-A's customer base, the test-market restaurant is Taco Bell's attempt to out-Chipotle Chipotle. To that end, the focus at U.S. Taco is "$4 premium tacos" that come in flavors like "Southern Squealer," which is kind of a sad way of saying pulled pork, and "Brotherly Love," the "cheesesteak-inspired" taco seen here, which one imagines a Philadelphian might leave on the doorstep of someone he does not like — it's got cotija on it instead of Whiz.

Here's more innovation: Taco Bell senior brand manager Jeff Jenkins tells Ad Age that one idea is that the eclectic menu — which may include 10 out of a backlist of 20 "developed" tacos at any given time — will lend itself to lots and lots of Instagram posts, while Nation's Restaurant News reports that customers "can also order their fries loaded with taco ingredients sans tortilla as a 'secret menu' option."

But isn't a secret menu item supposed to be a secret, especially at a time before the restaurant has served its very first customers? And is what happens in an "urban taproom" fundamentally different from what happens in a "suburban taproom"? Where have all the great suburban taprooms gone? And are fast-food rules, if they exist like the test-market restaurant's website says they do, really meant to be "broke," or just broken?

"Taco Bell is Mexican-inspired. U.S. Taco is American-inspired," is how Greg Creed, the chain's chief executive, explains what must have been the result of intense focus-group data-crunching and flavor profile-supercomputing. That also explains why the restaurant is serving a somewhat offensive-sounding boozy milkshake called the Mexican Car Bomb. In a Mason jar, no less.

Check It, Chipotle: Taco Bell Tests Fast-Casual Concept in California [Ad Age]
Taco Bell develops new fast-casual taco concept [NRN]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: the chain gang, chick-fil-a, huntington beach, taco bell, tacos, u.s. taco co.

Deep in thought about where to eat next.

One of the defining characteristics of the Obama presidency has been the commander in chief's surprisingly excellent taste in restaurants, most recently put on display during this week's visit to Sukiyabashi Jiro, the three-Michelin-star restaurant immortalized in Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Here are 21 times Obama exercised his ability to score seats at some very hot spots.

Where: Dixie Kitchen and Bait Shop, Chicago
When: August 2001
Back when he was a state senator, Obama liked to frequent Dixie Kitchen, a mini-chain of southern restaurants. In a 2001 episode of Check, Please!, he warned, "Those johnnycakes, they'll get you early, and you won't have room for the peach cobbler!"

Where: Sylvia’s, Harlem
When: November 2007
Before delivering a speech at the Apollo, then–presidential candidate Obama got dinner with Al Sharpton, who told the Daily News, "A man who likes fried chicken and cornbread can't be all that bad."

Where: Dooky Chase, New Orleans
When: February 2008
Dr. Norman Francis, the president of Xavier University, took the president to Dooky Chase, where legendary owner Leah Chase served him a bowl of gumbo. Obama then got chastised by Chase for putting hot sauce on the gumbo before trying it. Still, it's become a favorite restaurant of his ever since, and he made sure to get takeout from there in October 2009 during a four-hour stopover.

Where: Ben's Chili Bowl, Washington, D.C.
When: January 2009
Obama made his first visit to the chili institution with then-mayor Adrian Fenty, where they ordered the chili half-smoke with mustard, onions, and chili sauce — and washed it all down with iced tea.

Where: Equinox, Washington, D.C.
When: January 2009
On their first night out in D.C., Obama took Michelle to Equinox — not the gym — for her 45th birthday.

Where: Spiaggia, Chicago
When: March 2009
After watching the Bulls tank a game against the Wizards, Obama went to dinner at one of his mainstays. Chef Tony Mantuano flew in for the occasion to present the president with his favorite dish of wood-roasted scallops. Obama took a photo with Mantuano and called him his “favorite chef.” The Obamas have spent many special occasions there, including their anniversary in 2008.

Where: Blue Hill, New York
When: May 2009
Obama had a date night with Michelle at Dan Barber’s New York restaurant. After trying not to stare, the patrons reportedly erupted into applause when the first couple exited the restaurant.

Where: Il Mulino, New York
When: September 2009
Obama and Bill Clinton caused a huge scene when they sat down for lunch at this pricey Greenwich Village spot.

Where: Restaurant Nora, Washington, D.C.
When: January 2010, November 2013
For Michelle’s 46th birthday, the Obamas had dinner at Restaurant Nora, known for its locally sourced and organic produce. He ordered pan-seared Maine lobster and saffron risotto, like a boss.

Where: Topolobampo, Chicago
When: October 2010
According to Rick Bayless, the Obamas have been regular customers for years. "They just like to explore the whole menu. They’re our favorite kind of customer because they say, 'What’s new on the menu?'”

Where: Red Rooster, New York
When: March 2011
Marcus Samuelsson's Harlem restaurant hosted Obama and a group of 50 guests. Cornbread for all!

Where: Daniel, New York
When: June 2011
Obama took in a whopping $2.5 million from donors at the Upper East Side restaurant, which served a menu of lobster salad, kobe beef, and rock-shrimp spring rolls.

Where: Good Stuff Eatery, Washington, D.C.
When: August 2011
After concluding the debt deal, the Obama motorcade made a pit stop at Top Chef alum Spike Mendelsohn’s burger joint. He told Politico, "Michelle eats here all the time, but I don't get out."

Where: Gotham Bar & Grill, New York
When: November 2011
Caroline Kennedy, Jerry Seinfeld, and Susan Sarandon all paid $35,800 per head to eat a menu of dry-aged steak and apple strudel — and schmooze with Obama.

Where: BLT Steak, Washington, D.C.
When: January 2012
The Obamas celebrated Michelle’s 48th with an intimate dinner with friends, including Valerie Jarrett and Eric Holder.

Where: ABC Kitchen, New York
When: February 2012
It makes perfect sense that the Obamas would love the greenmarket-driven food here and host a fund-raising gala.

Where: The NoMad, New York
When: July 2012
Hopefully Obama's $40,000-a-head fundraiser at least included Daniel Humm's roast chicken.

Where: Ray’s Hell Burgers, Arlington, Virginia
When: June 2013
Where do you take then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev before the G20 meetings? To this famed burger joint, of course.

Where: Sweet Life Café, Martha’s Vineyard
When: August 2013
The first family had dinner at the Sweet Life Café while vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard.

Where: Morimoto Waikiki, Honolulu
When: December 2013
After attending a basketball game, Obama took the family out to Morimoto Waikiki, Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto’s eponymous Hawaiian branch.

Where: Sukiyabashi Jiro, Tokyo
When: April 2014
Obama kicked off his Asia swing with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the famed Sukiyabashi Jiro, the ten-seat, three-Michelin-star restaurant immortalized in Jiro Dreams of Sushi. According to the AP, the dinner was “unusually casual by Japanese standards.” And word on the street is that the president may not have actually finished his meal. Maybe he was just full.

Read more posts by Alex Jung and Sierra Tishgart

Filed Under: throwback thursday, barack obama, sukiyabashi jiro

Filed under: Truck, Government/Legal, Technology, Diesel

Head on out to Green Bank, WV, and you're likely to notice what looks like a giant satellite dish on the horizon. Only it's not a satellite dish. It's actually a fully steerable radio telescope - the largest of its kind in the world. It's funded by the federal government through the US National Science Foundation and operated by National Radio Astronomy Observatory. In short, it's one of the most advanced telecommunications devices in the world. So you'd expect them to service it with suitably advanced vehicles, right?

Wrong. Radio telescopes are hyper-sensitive to interference. That's why this one is located (alongside the NSA installation at Sugar Grove) inside the United States National Radio Quiet Zone. It's also why the NRAO only uses old diesel trucks to get anywhere near the telescope. Some of those trucks are 45 years old, but because they don't use spark plugs, computerized ECUs or even door chimes, they don't mess with the telescope. Head on over to Driving.ca to read exactly why.

High-tech observatory only uses decades-old diesel trucks originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 24 Apr 2014 07:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In case there was any doubt about it, NASA has confirmed that "ice cover this spring is significantly above normal." And with "significantly" they actually mean "are you freaking kidding me?" When the Aqua satellite passed over Lake Superior on April 20, the lake was 63.5 percent ice covered. Last year it was at 3.6 percent. It's the worst year in more than three decades by a very wide margin.

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You’re sitting on a flight, in a long queue of airplanes, waiting to take off. You were supposed to have left 30 minutes ago. The pilot comes on the loudspeaker to say your plane is next in line for takeoff, and tells you not to worry, because the plane can make up the lost time in the air.

I’ve always been skeptical of this claim, so I decided to check to see if this really happens: Do pilots put the pedal to the metal when their flights are delayed, even if the strategy is more costly because it uses more fuel?

To my surprise, I discovered that pilots do try to make up time in the air, but only for delays that fall into a particular sweet spot.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics keeps detailed records of all domestic flights. I pulled the data for 2013 and focused on transcontinental routes served by at least five major airlines. Six routes fit this criterion: New York (JFK) to Los Angeles (LAX), Boston (BOS) to Los Angeles (LAX), New York (JFK) to San Francisco (SFO), and the reverse routes. All are served by American, Delta, JetBlue, United and Virgin America.

For each flight, I defined “delayed departure” the way you might expect — as the time between the scheduled departure time listed on the boarding pass and the time the plane left the runway, or its “wheels-up” time. I then calculated each route’s “flight time,” which I defined as the time between the wheels-up time and the plane’s arrival at the destination gate. On-time flights on these routes see an average flight time of about 344 minutes, or 5 hours and 44 minutes.⁸⁸ If pilots can make up time in the air, the average flight time should be shorter for longer delayed departures.

And indeed, this is what we observe in the data — sometimes, anyway. When a flight is delayed by less than 30 minutes, it consistently takes between 340 and 350 minutes to travel between the East and West Coasts. But when the delay is longer — between 35 and 50 minutes — the flight time between coasts drops. Then, it only takes 320 to 330 minutes. The flight time reverts back toward six hours when the delay exceeds 50 minutes.

That means if your plane takes off 35 to 50 minutes after its scheduled departure, you can expect to make up about 20 minutes of that time in the air. But if the delay is any longer than 50 minutes, you shouldn’t get your hopes up. I suspect the pilots are more willing to press the accelerator, and consequently accept the higher fuel costs, if they believe there’s a good chance they can still get to their destination on time. (I ran the numbers across airlines, to see whether JetBlue pilots were behaving any differently than American pilots, for example, and didn’t find any statistically significant differences.)

Interestingly, the BTS defines a delay as arriving late at the destination, not leaving after the scheduled departure, as I’ve defined it — so the airline has an incentive to get to the destination on time. Once the window for a plausible on-time arrival passes, however, so does your chance of a shorter flight.

Which airline is the worst offender when it comes to longer-than-50-minute delays for these transcontinental routes? My results are summarized in the table below, which shows the share of flights by length of delay for each carrier.

As you can see, nearly 18 percent of all JetBlue flights left the ground at least 50 minutes after their scheduled departure time. On the other hand, Delta was the least likely to keep you waiting for 50 minutes or more. Still, about 11 percent of Delta flights had such a delay. And compared to the other airlines, Delta had the greatest share of medium-length delays, or delays ranging from 20 to 50 minutes.

When it came to leaving the ground in a timely manner, Virgin America came out on top, with the largest share of flights — about 59 percent — taking off within 20 minutes of their scheduled departure. On the flip side, Delta was the least likely airline to leave the ground within 20 minutes of its scheduled departure time, with 48 percent of its flights doing so.

Often, what delayed passengers care about is not how long they spend in the air, but how long it actually takes them to get to their destination. To check whether delays translated into a difference in total travel time, I analyzed each of the six flights, defining “total travel time” as the time between the scheduled departure and the actual arrival. I then found the average total travel time for each airline across all routes.⁸⁹ I weighted the routes by number of flights for each airline, so if one airline had more flights on the longer Boston-to-Los Angeles route, that shouldn’t have affected the results.

The average total travel time for all flights across these routes was 354.7 minutes, or just shy of 5 hours and 55 minutes. Delta’s relatively many 20- to 50-minute delays and JetBlue’s delays stretching beyond 50 minutes meant that these two airlines had longer total travel times compared to the other carriers. American Airlines had the best travel time, averaging 5 hours and 48 minutes; on a typical flight on a typical day, American will get you across the country 13 minutes faster than JetBlue. Coming in at second-fastest was Virgin America, whose airplanes traveled across the country in 5 hours and 53 minutes.

So while pilots on any carrier might make up some of your total travel time in the air if you’re delayed, they won’t catch up to the American or Virgin America flights that left on time in the first place.

Correction (April 24, 12:15 p.m.): An earlier version of this article misstated the share of Virgin America flights that left the ground within 20 minutes of scheduled departure as 68 percent, when it was 59 percent. The article also incorrectly said that JetBlue had the lowest share of flights leaving within 20 minutes of scheduled departure, when in fact Delta had the lowest share. The data in the table was and is correct.

Art director and model maker Jessica Dance redefines the meaning of “comfort food” with this new series of knitted lambswool recreations of common foods that from a distance could almost pass as the real thing. The project is a collaboration with food photographer David Sykes and is meant to encapsulate the feeling of British cafes and fast food restaurants with a woolly twist.

The sudden chaos of the Heartbleed bug drove home just how much of the web relies on OpenSSL software, and just how little was being spent to maintain it. But in the aftermath, some of the biggest players in tech are coming together to change that, and hopefully spot the next Heartbleed before it can wreak quite as much havoc.

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That's really ice.

Japanese liquor giant Suntory commissioned more than a dozen of what are easily some of the neatest ice cubes ever made, carved from solid blocks using a computer-assisted router before being dispatched to cool two fingers each of whisky in rocks glasses. (Watch a futuristic pagoda-etching video here.) Because 3-D-printing advocates say everyone's about to start chowing down computer-generated dinner, and because Suntory bought Beam, we're going to guess this ice artistry is the near future of all drinks on the rocks. For now, though, it's a gimmick that's really just one small step for cocktail-kind, which is exactly what this whirling-ice astronaut is probably thinking. The whole thing was no doubt really expensive; let's hope they used some fancy filtered water. [3D Rocks via Spirits Business]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: cool, ice cubes, suntory, whiskey

You want this.

The thought that springs to mind even before you’ve had a bite of Porchetta’s brand-new porchetta bánh mì: What took so long? Jenkins, an admitted bánh mì addict, already has a porchetta taco on the rotation, so a porchetta bánh mì always seemed to us like a no-brainer. It’s true, the trusty combination most Vietnamese sandwich shops list as a No. 1, consisting of various porky mystery meats, is hard to beat. But slow-roasted heritage-breed pork loins wrapped in bellies, combined with pickled veggies, Kewpie mayo, Sriracha, jalapeño, cilantro, and a squirt of lime is pretty much a match made in sandwich-mash-up heaven. They cost $10 each and will be available Thursday through Sunday, which means you can get your hands on one today.

Read more posts by Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld

Filed Under: what to eat, porchetta, sara jenkins

Ever since the FDA stopped making doctors seek approval to perform fecal transplants on Clostridium difficile patients (C. difficile) in early 2013, the procedure has become more widely accepted. The method, which involves introducing fecal matter from a healthy donor into the gut of an unhealthy donor, has a 90 percent success rate, so its increasing popularity should come as no surprise. Perhaps more surprising is that, until now, few researchers have tried to freeze donated stool to see if it works as well as the fresh kind. Fortunately, a group of researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital have given it the old clinical study try. And — lo and behold — frozen poo works, too.

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Tomorrow, the Federal Communications Commission will propose new net neutrality rules that will reportedly destroy the concept of net neutrality as we know it, making it okay for internet service providers to establish a "fast lane" for preferred customers and charge an additional toll. Needless to say, those who care about net neutrality weren't too happy to hear that an organization that is supposed to protect communications might sell out to corporate interests. However, Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler, a former cable industry lobbyist, says that there has been "no turnaround in policy," and calls those reports "flat out wrong."

Here's the FCC chairman's full statement:

"There are reports that the FCC is...

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President Obama and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had dinner at Sukiyabashi Jiro, whose chef was featured in the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.”

The internet is fucked, and the US government is making it worse.

Political cowardice caused the FCC to lose its first battle for net neutrality regulation: the rules that keep the internet as you know it free and open. The idea of net neutrality is that all traffic is created equal — whether you’re a movie streaming from Netflix, or a WhatsApp message, or a Tweet, or a bulletin board message. But according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, instead of trying to correct the errors it made in open internet rules the first time around, the FCC will consider enacting new rules that directly destroy the principles of net neutrality. The proposal would allow profit hungry behemoths like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon to become gatekeepers...

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Carson Yiu, who runs the Smorgasburg stall Outer Borough, plans to sell stinky tofu at this year's Taiwanese Night Market event in Williamsburg on April 25. The notoriously rank ingredient is rare outside of Taiwan, but Yiu's mom makes it and sells it to Flushing restaurants. Yiu describes the flavor as "an old sweaty sock that married blue cheese." [BP]

[Estela by Krieger]
Several years ago I slipped quietly into the back row of a professional wine tasting, took a seat, and began to wonder if drinking wine contributes to hair loss. Every head in front of mine was balding. Seemingly everyone else in the room was 50 years old or older. It is hard to imagine this scenario happening today, but back then the average age of wine buyers was much higher. Now the buyers at the tastings tend to be considerably younger, and the Instagram tag #birthyearwine has become more common as sommeliers are serving wines as old (or older) than they are. But what has happened to bring this about? What are the factors that have contributed to lowering the age bar in a field that ostensibly values knowledge and experience with wine? Let me propose some possibilities.

It has been a bad time to have set ideas about where good wines come from.
The explosion of competitively priced quality wine options from little known corners of the wine world has really changed the model of what a wine list looks like. But it has also changed the look of the buyers, in that those who hewed closely to the old prejudices of what were good winemaking regions — Bordeaux and Napa, namely — found themselves caught up in a whirlpool of escalating prices. As that pricing kept going up, the restaurant buyers purchasing those classic wines were locking their venues into a higher and higher price point of luxury. More than any other single item, it is the wine price that often determines the final check presented to the customer. Restaurant lists that became top heavy with expensive wines were in a tough spot after the economic recessions hit, first in 2001, and then in 2008, especially as younger sommeliers amongst the restaurant competition were rapidly embracing the less expensive wine regions that the older generation had shunned as second or third rate. It is extraordinarily hard for someone who has been buying certain wines for years to step back and see that they aren't buying in the direction the market is going. It is akin to someone looking into their own closet and realizing that they are now out of fashion: it is a painful conclusion to reach. And what happens on those TV makeover shows when someone needs a fashion rehab? They call in a team of young people to help.

Younger sommeliers grew up with wine.
If you talk to sommeliers today, you'll see that there is a basic dividing line. Those who are over 30 years old often "fell into" wine. It wasn't something that they had originally set out to do. They had wanted to cook, or to play music, or to study philosophy. Wine came to them later, as a revelation, and as a second career. When you look at the history of wine consumption in America, which started to take off after WWII, it makes sense that many of those people who are 40 years old today would not have had parents who drank wine. But the situation is different with the younger generation of sommeliers. They often speak about being introduced to great wine when their parents opened a special bottle for them. For the younger generation, wine is not something that they stumbled on, it is something that they were shown. This also shows up in the attitudes that members of these generations have about their own jobs. "Don't call me a sommelier, I just like wine," was a frequent comment from wine directors of a certain generation who didn't want to seem snooty or to put on airs. But today, with the younger generation, the term sommelier or "somm" is more popular than ever before. The younger people want to be sommeliers, they decided that early on, and they didn't go through a roundabout process of figuring it out.

Wine knowledge is a Google search away.
Up until the 1990s, books on wine were fairly scarce. There were a few tomes of knowledge that everybody owned, but the way that most people learned about wine was that they worked for someone who had already worked with wine for a number of years. Those older hands were the people who knew the answers that you needed to know. Was it corked or was it over the hill? They could tell you the difference. How long should I open the bottle in advance? They had the experience to say. Who made overlooked wine in a difficult vintage? They knew what to buy. In other words, wine knowledge was largely a verbal tradition, passed down from older employee to younger trainee. Yes, there were specialized publications that contained some of these answers, but you had to have purchased those magazines or newsletters when they came out to have them around to refer to. What really changed the field was the internet. The proliferation of information from paid sites with their searchable databases of back issues, from bloggers who endlessly chronicle small details, and from the wineries themselves, really leveled the playing field. It used to be that you needed to have a person with decades of experience on staff. Now everyone has Google. This has led to a fundamental change inside the industry: young sommeliers no longer stick around and work for another sommelier for a long period of time. They go to take up jobs as buyers on their own as soon as they can. They know how to find out what their boss can find out, for the most part. This has also brought about the increased status associated with travel and the opening of coveted bottles, as opposed to pure knowledge of the subject, amongst sommeliers: travel isn't something you can google.

Wine became less French.
Before anyone gets upset, I'll add that there is nothing wrong with French sommeliers. Not at all. I learned a lot working with a number of French sommeliers, and am glad that I did so. Actually, I would recommend that everyone do so if they want to learn more about wine, particularly about tasting wine. But I am also extremely happy that many people from other ethnic backgrounds are now sommeliers, some of whom I am pretty sure would have had some difficulty finding a sommelier job in the not so distant past. And what I am happy about is this: When the main qualification for the job is about wine, rather than about French fluency, you have a more talented pool of individuals working in the wine business. That's the end result. Amazing people, people who love wine, don't get held back from a job because of who they are. And don't underestimate the change, at least in the New York market. It has been dramatic. It has been a rearrangement that has had as much to do with the changing nature of what fine dining is, as about attitudes towards ethnicity. What it has also meant is that a number of younger people are being considered for jobs. I can tell you from my own observation that there actually aren't a large number of young French immigrants looking for a sommelier job. In the past, some restaurateurs wanting to maintain a French image have had to resort to offering special J-1 visas to workers willing to travel to the United States for employment. But when the requirement to be French is taken out of the equation, the pool of younger applicants widens considerably.

The model was shown to work.
In the middle part of the last decade, before 2008, there was a tremendous demand for sommeliers, often from restaurant groups moving into Las Vegas and other markets. At the same time, there was a relatively small group of "old hand" sommeliers plying their trade, and they already had employment. As a result, younger people were routinely offered wine buying positions. What operators soon realized was that instead of being a handicap, this could be a boon. This is because older clientele see in young people someone who reminds them of their grandkids, and younger clientele see in young people someone who is hip. Both constituencies stay happy. This is in keeping with the same logic that makes Jimmy Fallon an excellent replacement for Jay Leno. It is also true that younger sommeliers demand less in salary, as they are happy just to work in wine. As restaurants moved to more casual concepts following 2008, the idea of a younger staff only seemed more congruous, not less.

Older sommeliers welcome younger sommeliers into the business.
Given the choice, many head sommeliers would prefer to hire someone who is inexperienced and new to the field to be their assistant, rather than a candidate that has considerable experience. And there is a simple reason for this: the sommeliers already in place do not want competition for their own jobs. They want help, but they do not want to worry about being pushed out by a more popular second in command. So they hire people for enthusiasm and a willingness to move boxes, rather than for experience. The logic is pretty straightforward: Don't hire someone who could easily replace you, hire someone that is obviously too under qualified to replace you. That is what amounts to job security in a market where, as has already been discussed, information about wine is easier and easier to come by. Those who are a bit older must often look for lead positions of their own, as the assistant sommelier opportunities may often be closed to them.

The reference point wines changed.
The market has shifted considerably in its tastes. Some of the most sought after wines of today — Overnoy, Ganevat, and others — were virtually unheard of in this country 10 years ago. The older sommeliers have no more familiarity with them than the younger sommeliers do, and often they have LESS familiarity with them, as they came to them later. That change really nullified one of the advantages that older sommeliers generally have, which is experience with the wines.

For these and perhaps other reasons, the sommelier of today is often younger than has ever been the case in America's drinking history. Will the industry change to allow for these young people to have jobs as they get older? It is an open question that no one seems prepared to answer.

· Wine [~ENY~]

The Federal Communication Commission's proposal for new net neutrality rules will allow internet service providers to charge companies for preferential treatment, effectively undermining the concept of net neutrality, according to The Wall Street Journal. The rules will allow providers to charge companies for preferential treatment so long as they offer that treatment to all interested parties on "commercially reasonable" terms, with the FCC deciding whether the terms are reasonable on a case-by-case basis. Providers will reportedly not be able to block individual websites, however.

The goal of net neutrality rules is to prevent service providers from discriminating between different content, allowing all types of data and all...

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