Rexfeng

Images taken by NASA's Aqua satellite showed the Great Lakes were more than 80 percent iced over this month. The image above was taken on February 19th in the early afternoon, and, according to the NOAA's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, shows ice covering 80.3 percent of the lakes. Ice cover tends to average around 50 percent in the region, and the present levels haven't been observed since 1994. "We had an early ice season this year, owing to cold temperatures in the fall and early winter," said George Leshkevich of the Great Lakes lab. Ice cover even hit 88 percent earlier this month. Thankfully, spring starts in only a matter of weeks.

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With a handful of phone calls, some Google mapping, and a little persistence, Tribeca Citizen has uncovered the seamy web of fake restaurants currently operating on Seamless and GrubHub. After a reader noticed that a new Chinese restaurant called Joe's Noodles listed an apartment building as its address, the blogger traced one of the restaurant's phone numbers to a different place called AAA Asian Food. That restaurant had its own fake address, plus a sister restaurant, Asian Diet Food, with the same number and a different fake address. Eventually, with a little more digging, it all boils down Lily's Japanese & Chinese Restaurant, a real restaurant that is apparently fielding the delivery orders placed to all of those places.

Tribeca Citizen got in touch with GrubHub/Seamless (now one company), and the director of PR responded: "As I write this email, our team is taking steps to correct the situation. GrubHub Seamless takes measures to ensure that every restaurant is correctly represented on our services and invites diners to report inaccuracies to our customer care team." As of now, the restaurants are all still on both sites, and also, bizarrely, offering reservations.
· How Many Fake Restaurants are on Seamless? [TC]
· All Coverage of Seamless [~ENY~]
[Photo: Instagram/Seamless]

These mesmerizing time-slice GIFs show twinkling views of the passing of time in a series of subtle snatches of the same scene stitched together.

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I know, I know, you're all probably sick of Flappy Bird by now. Flappy Bird this, Flappy Bird that. I promise you that this story, despite its focus on Flappy Bird, is different. This story has a robot!

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All that and a seeded roll at Parm.

Restaurateurs Jeff Zalaznick, Mario Carbone, and Rich Torrisi are in the process of bringing Parm to the Columbus Avenue space that was last Lansky's Old World Deli, the Post reports. The rapidly expanding, home-grown chainlet first opened on Mulberry Street in the fall of 2011, and while Major Food Group has operated a Parm outpost as a seasonal sandwich operation of Yankee Stadium for some time, the partners are about to open full-fledged restaurants in Williamsburg and at Brookfield Place. The 2,800-square-foot UWS space is expected to open this summer. [NYP, Earlier]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: coming soon, parm, umami burger, upper west side, williamsburg

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s budget proposal would eliminate an entire class of Air Force attack jets and scale back the size of the Army not just to pre-9/11 levels, but to the force’s size in 1940.

We’ve seen all matter of snow and ice photography here on Colossal, as well as time-lapses of melting snow and snow drawings, but this is the first video individual snowflakes forming I’ve ever come across. Created by filmmaker Vyacheslav Ivanov this microscopic short shows the intimate details of fragile snowflakes as they form in their miraculous hexagonal forms. Robert Gonzalez writing for iO9 gives us an idea of what we’re looking at:

The ice crystal(s) in snowflakes owe their six-fold rotational symmetry to the hydrogen bonds in water molecules. As water freezes, water molecules bound to other water molecules crystallize into a hexagonal structure, where each point on the hexagon is an oxygen atom and each side of the hexagon is a hydrogen bonded to an oxygen. As freezing continues, more water molecules are added to this microscopic six-sided structure, causing it to grow in size into the six-sided macroscopic structure that we recognize as snowflakes.

We have a line into Ivanov to see how he filmed this and will update as soon as we hear something. Music by Aphex Twin.

(via Kuriositas, PetaPixel, i09)

Update: Ivanov confirms from his home in St. Petersburg that the video is indeed genuine (non digital) and was filmed through a microscope with a “lot of effort and patience.”

The developer kit model of the Oculus Rift VR headset has gotten so unexpectedly popular so quickly that the company has run out of the components needed to make the thing.

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Comcast has reached an “interconnection agreement” with Netflix to ensure that its videos would be streamed directly — and thus faster and more reliably — to Comcast’s customers.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Netflix and Comcast have signed a multiyear paid contract allowing the video streaming service a more direct route to Comcast's network. The first indications of the new agreement came when App.net founder Bryan Berg noticed more direct traceroutes from the service, but Journal sources indicate the change is the result of a formal agreement between the two companies, and money has indeed changed hands. (Update: Comcast has confirmed the scope of the deal without mentioning any financial aspect.)

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Lumbering across the countryside in your cozy sleeper cabin, the endless fields, pastures, and forests whizzing by your window: a long train ride can be a relaxing place, and relaxing places are conducive to writing. So conducive, in fact, that author Alexander Chee likes trains best for putting pen to paper. "I still like a train best for this kind of thing. I wish Amtrak had residencies for writers," he said during a recent interview with literature advocacy group Pen. Writer Jessica Gross picked up the cause on Twitter, which eventually led to a response from Amtrak:

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A Girl Scout of America selling cookies last year.

Assisted by her mother, an enterprising Girl Scout set up shop on Monday outside a San Francisco medical-marijuana clinic and did some mighty brisk business: 117 boxes in two hours, or roughly one box of Thin Mints or Tagalongs per minute. (By comparison, Mashable reports that 13-year-old Danielle Lei was only able to move 37 boxes the following day outside the local Safeway in the same amount of time.)

"We're not telling people where they can and can't go if it's a legitimate business," the organization's director of marketing and communications says, which is cool, though we're going to guess that the inflammatory Colorado pastor who claimed Girl Scout cookies bred communists and lesbians isn't going to be too happy about this one.

A Savvy Girl Scout Is Selling Cookies at a Cannabis Clinic in San Francisco [Mashable]
Earlier: Pastor Says Girl Scout Cookies Promote Lesbianism, Communists

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: smart cookies, dispensaries, girl scout cookies, marijuana

Nowadays, plenty of companies will — with permission — scan your contacts to find people you know already using their app or service. But LinkedIn may be taking things a step too far; users have complained about the company's "people you may know" section listing contacts who aren't even on the professional networking site. But you'd have no idea simply looking at the tool, which makes it seem as if they're active LinkedIn members, complete with an "add to network" button that's akin to a Facebook friend request. Instead of linking two existing accounts, though, hitting that button will dispatch an email asking your selected contact to create a LinkedIn account. Essentially, what you're sometimes seeing are non-existent ghost...

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It's been a rough couple of weeks for industrial food, what with Subway, Hot Pockets, and Kraft Singles all appearing in the news for one reason or another (and industrial food never shows up in the news for good reasons). It was all enough for Jon Stewart and the Daily Show team to tackle the topic on last night's episode with a mid-show snack segment. (They can't convince Sam Bee to cook for them?) It's not really up to the level of Jon Stewart on Chicago pizza, but it's still worth five minutes of your time this morning. Do have a look.

Read more posts by Alan Sytsma

Filed Under: video feed, hot pockets, jon stewart, subway, the daily show

Many of his creations reduced the need to send physical mail, but late Apple founder Steve Jobs will still get a fitting tribute from the US Postal Service: his likeness will appear on a postage stamp beginning in 2015, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post. Other deceased icons receiving their own stamps that year include Elvis Presley and famed Tonight Show host Johnny Carson. Since 1957, US postage stamp subjects have been selected by an advisory committee of ordinary citizens, who look for suggestions that are "contemporary, timely, relevant, interesting and educational." Any member of the public can nominate someone to appear on a postage stamp, and the committee reviews all suggestions. Clearly, the late Apple CEO...

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TextIt, “Your Path to a $16B Exit? Build a J2ME App”:

That was the genius of WhatsApp really, they recognized that messaging apps are all about network effects and instead of focusing on the comparatively small market of the ‘developed world’, instead targeted the other 3 billion people who don’t have smartphones. And at that they have been supremely successful.

If you are anywhere apart from the States, WhatsApp is the de facto standard for messaging. Here in Rwanda, it has far more penetration than Facebook, it is used by literally everybody who has a capable device. That came about not by having some edgy new user interface, or by a gimmick around disappearing messages, but by providing real value, value that can be measured in the pocketbook of a market that is massively under served.

So the next time you are thinking about “putting a dent in the universe”, maybe you should look a bit farther, and maybe, just maybe you should start with a J2ME app.

I think they’re right that building apps for all phones is what got WhatsApp to 450 million users and the attention of Zuckerberg. I don’t think the lesson holds for any other sort of app. It was an opportunity unique to messaging.

(And WhatsApp didn’t start with a J2ME app — they started with an iPhone app.)

The settlement of a claim filed by David Ranta was made by the comptroller’s office because of overwhelming evidence, lawyers said.

Unperturbed by the scourge of vertical video shot on mobile phones, a bunch of Serious Artists have banded together for a film festival devoted exclusively to incorrectly oriented videos. Why subject our eyeballs to such unnatural composition? For art, duh.

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Iconic LES institution Russ & Daughters has been teasing us with the promise of a second location for a while now, and it looks like that day is almost here. The loxsmiths confirmed today that they're opening a restaurant "in the next few months," and, hey, they're hiring! Hone those whitefish-deboning skills while you still have time, future Delicious Food-Makers of America. [ more › ]

A poster on Reddit asks: What are two events that took place in the same time in history but don't seem like they would have? A few of my favorite answers (from this thread and a previous one):

When pilgrims were landing on Plymouth Rock, you could already visit what is now Santa Fe, New Mexico to stay at a hotel, eat at a restaurant and buy Native American silver.

Prisoners began to arrive to Auschwitz a few days after McDonald's was founded.

The first wagon train of the Oregon Trail heads out the same year the fax machine is invented.

Nintendo was founded in 1888. Jack the Ripper was on the loose in 1888.

1912 saw the maiden voyage of the Titanic as well as the birth of vitamins, x-ray crystallography, and MDMA.

1971: The year in which America drove a lunar buggy on the moon and Switzerland gave women the vote.

NASA's Gemini program was winding down at the same time as plate tectonics, as we know it today, was becoming refined and accepted by the scientific community.

Spain was still a fascist dictatorship when Microsoft was founded.

There were no classes in calculus in Harvard's curriculum for the first few years because calculus hadn't been discovered yet.

Two empires [Roman & Ottoman] spanned the entire gap from Jesus to Babe Ruth.

When the pyramids were being built, there were still woolly mammoths.

The last use of the guillotine was in France the same year Star Wars came out.

Oxford University was over 300 years old when the Aztec Empire was founded.

Related: true facts that sound made up, timeline twins, and the Great Span.

Tags: history

The ongoing Winter Olympics in Sochi may be the last time you see figure skating in its traditional form. From next season, the singles and pairs programs will allow the use of music backed by vocals, thanks to new rules agreed on by the International Skating Union. Although lyrical music is already commonplace in the ice dancing discipline, which requires couples to skate to a backing track with a beat, most singles and pairs contestants opt for classical accompaniment.

The New York Times has taken an in-depth look at the reactions and implications of the change. "We have to innovate," said Katia Krier, a coach with France’s figure skating team. "Our sport is already losing viewers, but we have to give people the desire to watch us....

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Jim Goetz, writing on behalf of WhatsApp investor Sequoia Capital:

Jan keeps a note from Brian taped to his desk that reads “No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!” It serves as a daily reminder of their commitment to stay focused on building a pure messaging experience.

This discipline is reflected in WhatsApp’s unconventional approach to business. After one year of free use, the service costs $1 per year — with no SMS charges. This can save users trapped in expensive data plans up to $150 per year.

It’s easy to take this novel model for granted. When we first partnered with WhatsApp in January 2011, it had more than a dozen direct competitors, and all were supported by advertising. (In Botswana alone there were 16 social messaging apps). Jan and Brian ignored conventional wisdom. Rather than target users with ads — an approach they had grown to dislike during their time at Yahoo — they chose the opposite tack and charged a dollar for a product that is based on knowing as little about you as possible. WhatsApp does not collect personal information like your name, gender, address, or age. Registration is authenticated using a phone number, a significant innovation that eliminates the frustration of remembering a username and password. Once delivered, messages are deleted from WhatsApp’s servers.

The company only has 32 engineers on staff. So they have roughly 14 million active users per engineer, and the company’s acquisition price works out to $500 million per engineer. That’s simply astounding.

The article doesn’t make clear whether WhatsApp was running in the black, or what percent of those 450 million active users have signed up for the $1/year subscription. But it sounds like they’ve built a service that can profitably scale to serve everyone for just $1 per year, with no ads — through solid engineering, staying lean and mean staffing-wise, and focusing on simply making users happy through simplicity and reliability.

I don’t know if Facebook was smart to pay $16 billion for them, but bravo to the WhatsApp team for building something amazing, and cutting against the grain of the Valley’s conventional wisdom.

Opening Sushi Nakazawa was a major departure for restaurateur Alessandro Borgonogne, who came to it from running his family's red sauce Italian spot, Patricia's, in Bay Ridge. Borgonogne tells the Post the whole story of how he tracked Daisuke Nakazawa down, and adds the rumor that he's working on "poaching" another chef right now. [NYP]

I don't care if all of this vocabulary of NYC's best bars is made up (it sure sounds made up), I still loved reading it. You can totally tell which places are about the drinks, which are about hospitality, which are bitchy, and which are all about the benjamins.

Sipper: A small pour (typically Mother's Milk) gifted to a colleague, loved one, regular, etc.

Amuse-booze (experimental term): A tiny sipper to acknowledge a guest an reassure them they will be served soon.

The Cousins: Affectionate term for other cocktail bars (after the British secret service's name for the CIA in Le Carre's Smiley novels).

Even if it's fake, it's real.

Tags: Ben Schott   food   language   NYC

Cade Metz, reporting for Wired:

Steve Perlman is ready to give you a personal cell phone signal that follows you from place to place, a signal that’s about 1,000 times faster than what you have today because you needn’t share it with anyone else.

Perlman — the iconic Silicon Valley inventor best known for selling his web TV company to Microsoft for half a billion dollars — started work on this new-age cellular technology a decade ago, and on Wednesday morning, he’ll give the first public demonstration at Columbia University in New York, his alma mater. Previously known as DIDO, the technology is now called pCell — short for “personal cell” — and judging from the demo Perlman gave us at his lab in San Francisco last week, it works as advertised, streaming video and other data to phones with a speed and a smoothness you’re unlikely to achieve over current cell networks.

“It’s a complete rewrite of the wireless rulebook,” says Perlman, who also helped Apple create QuickTime, the technology that brought video to the Macintosh. “Since the invention of wireless, people have moved around the coverage area. Now, the coverage area follows you.”

Yes, please.

Some Netflix customers may know the feeling: the time you just spent browsing the movie carousel was longer than the movie itself. But the real fun is in the journey, right? That's the logic behind the (fake) new Netflix plan highlighted by The Onion, which gives users the ability to browse movies endlessly for just $5 a month. "Netflix will add up to 1,000 additional movies that you've never heard of," The Onion says, and "the new plan will allow users to add titles to their queue that they will never watch."

Of course, if you're using Netflix through a major broadband provider, you might not be watching its movies for different reasons.

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Kanye West has never bothered limiting himself to a single medium like music, and it looks like he's currently working on a film project with one of the most controversial novelists of the 1980s. In an interview with Vice, novelist Bret Easton Ellis — the author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho, and the screenwriter of The Canyons — reveals that he was approached by West to work on a film project last year. "I didn't want to at first," Ellis recounts. "Then I listened to Yeezus."

Ellis says he found the album so compelling he decided he wanted to work with West right away, and while the script has since been written he couldn't provide any additional details. "It's in Kanye Land," he says, "and that's subject to a whole other...

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You can now use Amazon Coins, the online retailer's virtual currency, to purchase apps, games, and in-app content on Android devices. Unsurprisingly, those purchases must all be made within Amazon's standalone Appstore; Google Play is sticking with more traditional payment options. Amazon first unveiled Coins last year and gave every Kindle Fire owner $5 in an attempt to boost the currency out of the gate. Customers can also buy Coins at a discounted rate and automatically earn extra Coins when downloading apps or by hitting achievements in certain games.

These measures are clearly meant to entice users, but we've seen little evidence that Coins are catching on. Nevertheless, and without offering any hard numbers, Amazon says it's...

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Right now, more than 100,000 people are trying their best to control a single trainer over at 'Twitch Plays Pokemon.' They know that if they send in a command via the 'Twitch Plays Pokemon' chat, it'll make the character in the streamed version Pokemon Red do something. What many of them don't know is that, in doing so, they're also controlling a game of Tetris elsewhere.

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A maritime law from 1920 is delaying the shipment of the road salt, because there is no ship with a United States flag and crew available at the moment to deliver it.