Rexfeng

The pollution in Hong Kong is bad. Real bad. Besides the health risks, it makes the air all hazy. And that sucks for something far less serious: Photo ops.

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Ah, speed-runners who do the impossible. A few days ago, the world record for beating Ocarina of Time was nineteen minutes and twenty seconds according to Zelda Speed Runs. Then, noted speed-runner Cosmo Wright came along and beat the game in a record nineteen minutes and fifteen seconds—and you can watch him do it above.

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From Slice

The Pizza Button. [Photograph: JW Cannon]

You've just check in to your hotel after a soul-sucking flight (or train trip, or car ride), and you're starving—it's late, room service isn't an option, and the vending machine in the hall promises nothing more than a sugar crash down the line (they obviously don't have this yet). You prowl your room in hungry despair, when your eyes alight on curious salvation: a pizza button. On the phone. A button on the phone for pizza.

Thanks to pizza-wise overnighter JW Cannon (who snapped the picture of this ingenious device) and the sleuthing work of Hotel Chatter, we can take joy in assuring you that the pizza button is, indeed, real.

Well, real so long as you're staying at the Country Inn & Suites in Niagara Falls, New York. For your convenience and to free up more time for the service staff (apparently drastically overburdened with pizza inquiries), Country Inn & Suites has installed a one-click button for pizza on all of their hotel room telephones. The button connects you with a local and reputable pizza place—although which pizza place is still a mystery.

If we have any Slicer's heading to Niagara in the near future, be sure to give this a try and let us know about the experience!

About the author: Kate Andersen is a Contributing Editor for Slice.

As someone who tests lots of Foursquare apps, I’ve long wished for a way to avoid typing my email address and password every time I try a new Foursquare-connected app. Foursquare recently rolled out Native Auth for developers on iOS and Android, which eliminates unnecessary typing and makes the process painless.

Foursquare announced today via their Engineering Blog that Native Auth is now available on both Android and iOS. When an app is Native Auth enabled, users are taken directly to the Foursquare app (where they’re already logged in) to authorize the new connection and then sent back to the requesting app to complete the signup process. Users of the Facebook app have likely noticed a similar flow when signing in to Facebook-connected apps (although it’s become less common since Facebook support was rolled in to iOS).

This is a much faster process than the old method, which involved typing your email address and password, along with clicking various “sign in” and “allow” buttons.

As an example, Foursquare used fast-check-in app Checkie (our review), which is the first app we’ve seen that takes advantage of Native Auth (it rolled out quietly to iOS developers a month ago). Users simply tap the “sign in using the Foursquare app” button which opens the Foursquare app, then tap “allow” to connect Checkie to their accounts and are taken back to Checkie ready to go.

Foursquare’s blog post offers detailed instructions for developers on making their apps ready to take advantage of Native Auth.

What do you think of Native Auth? How many Foursquare-connected apps do you have on your phone?

Javier Pérez's En Puntas is a striking visual performance that examines the links between disparate behaviors. It features French ballerina Amelie Segarra, who dances with knives attached to the traditional pointe shoes worn by ballerinas. In an empty theater, the ballerina jauntily pirouettes on a baby grand piano, her pointe moves accentuated by the daggers on her feet.

As Segerra stumbles, screams, and struggles to keep balance, Pérez spins the camera around her, evoking the memory of a child's music box. Pérez uses metaphor to "reveal the weaknesses that become the boundaries between seemingly irreconcilable concepts such s beauty and cruelty, fragility and violence, culture and nature, or life and death." Extracts from the...

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Worth $500?

Ryan Sutton tried the 21-course, $500 tasting menu at the Restaurant at Meadowood in Napa Valley and penned an essay about finding luxury in vegetarian food. "My counter meal at Meadowood isn’t moderately more enjoyable than my most recent experience at the French Laundry; it’s infinitely more enjoyable," he writes. (Burn!) He spoke to Dan Barber, who revealed that over at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, the tasting menu now includes 70 to 80 percent vegetables and grains. Is "root-to-fruit" the new "nose-to-tail"? [Bloomberg]

Read more posts by Sierra Tishgart

Filed Under: the other critics, california, napa valley, restaurant news, the restaurant at meadowood

The Obama administration said it would monitor operations in 20 states to make sure they do not run afoul of several enforcement priorities.

There is no surer sign that the big-spending ways of the pre-financial crisis era have returned to the Hamptons than the similar looking mansions across the landscape.

A Hong Kong lending company accepts luxury handbags as collateral for loans.

Yes Lady provides a loan within half an hour at 80% of the bag's value -- as long as it is from Gucci, Chanel, Hermès or Louis Vuitton. Occasionally, a Prada purse will do the trick. Secondhand classic purses and special-edition handbags often retain much of their retail prices.

A customer gets her bag back by repaying the loan at 4% monthly interest within four months. Yes Lady says almost all its clients quickly pay off their loans and reclaim their bags.

The company recently lent about US$20,600 in exchange for a Hermès Birkin bag, but Yes Lady's purse-backed loans start at about US$200.

(via marginal revolution)

Tags: fashion   finance   Hong Kong

Another one from Quora's excellent weekly newsletter: What's something that is common knowledge at your work place, but will be mind blowing to the rest of us? On fast food in commercials:

Everyone thinks the burgers shown on TV commercials must be highly fabricated works of culinary art, but the fact of the matter is that food advertising is subject to many regulations. I am not sure whether these are company policies or laws, and they're probably a combination of both, but on a typical fast food shoot these rules apply.

The meal must be prepared from actual store stock (from the frozen patty to the bun to the seasonings). On a shoot, stylists would receive tons of product, which they would pore through to find the best-looking raw material.

Other interesting answers reveal the inner workings of political campaign events, the mining industry, investment banking, and orchestras.

Tags: working

Type Hunting. Prepare to lose yourself in this for awhile. Wow. (via df)

Tags: design   typography

Gentlemen! by Lucky Frame is a popular indie title for Android tablets, iPad, PC and Mac that has players swap gravity, chuck knives, and send homing pigeons at one another in local multiplayer deathmatches. It has garnered critical praise and the Android version has been downloaded more than 50,000 times - unfortunately, as of four days ago, only 144 of those downloads were legitimate, while the rest were pirated.

Yann Seznec, director of Lucky Frame, shared the disparaging data via a Gamasutra blog, where he tried to decipher why things went south. The largest group of pirates, Seznec found, came from Russia and China, where "... most of these pirates probably exist in a commercial ecosystem where the Google Play store does not even exist, and it doesn't occur to them to buy any games from there at all."

Seznec also pointed out that the game had some unlikely competition - South Korean singer Psy's hit, "Gentleman" - that made the game difficult to discover thanks to a flood of apps which hoped to capitalize on the song's viral success. The whole story is a bit heartbreaking, and Seznec wrote that for the moment, he doesn't have much of a conclusion to make, but that he and his team have a lot to learn going forward.

Indie game Gentlemen! was bought 144 times, pirated over 50,000 originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 24 Aug 2013 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The biggest problem with the NSA scandal is the lack of accountability.

A 2011 ruling held that the N.S.A. had violated the Constitution for several years by gathering tens of thousands of domestic communications unrelated to terrorism.

A lot of work went into that roll.

This week in The New Yorker, James Surowiecki notices that lobster prices on Maine docks have fallen to $2.20 per pound (in July it was as low as $1.25 per pound; it was $6 in 2005), while the cost of whole-lobster dinners and lobster rolls remains as high as ever. (The price drop is due to historically huge harvests; Benjamin Wallace examined the "lobster glut" that ensued for New York three years ago.) Surowiecki points to the luxury-pricing model and invokes the old idea that lobster tastes more delicious to customers because they're paying more for it. The psychological factors may be true, but the idea that a lobster glut at the source will inevitably translate to lower dinner bills belies several realities of the restaurant business. It takes middlemen and resellers to transport lobster from the markets in Maine and Canada to New York City, and that's just the beginning. A number of factors, most rarely discussed outside restaurant kitchens, account for the fact that restaurant lobster is often as expensive as ever.

1. There's a glut of the wrong kind of lobster. Lobsters molt their shells during the summer months when waters are warmer. So a sudden summertime explosion of fresh-caught lobster typically means a glut of soft-shells (as opposed to more mature hard-shells). Soft-shells may be relatively easy to unload from the docks — which is why people who eat lobster in Maine can get affordable, plentiful meat in the summer months — but they contain less meat and are more fragile (and thus harder to ship) than hard-shell lobsters. That means most soft-shells don't leave the city where they were fished, and so customers who aren't near the source won't see much difference in whole-lobster prices. Another disincentive to move soft-shell lobsters: Customers will sometimes complain about them because you don't get all the cracking-and-slurping satisfaction with a wan softy.

2. Moving, storing, and shelling whole lobsters is expensive.
Whether you're dealing with soft-shells or hard-shells, storage of whole lobsters also adds to the price: In order to survive, lobsters need fresh, cold, slightly saline water with oxygen pumped in. For wholesalers that are shipping lobsters, and any restaurant that deals in whole-lobster meals (with tanks where customers can choose their own dinner), these concerns take up significant real estate and consume vital resources.

Then there's the cost of putting a whole lobster on the table. The reason why Rebecca Charles at Pearl Oyster Bar charges $30 for a lobster roll is because the restaurant starts with whole lobsters, then pays for kitchen labor associated with pulling claws and tails from lobster bodies, poaching the parts, shocking them in ice water, then shelling the meat.

3. You actually can buy affordable lobster rolls now, but they use prepackaged lobster parts rather than whole lobster. As Wallace chronicled, the lobster glut has created an explosion of relatively affordable "street" lobster rolls — like the $15 roll at Luke's Lobster or the $16 roll from Red Hook Lobster Pound. But, by and large, these restaurants aren't buying whole lobsters for their rolls; they're buying meat that's been de-shelled and preportioned in Maine. They buy claw and knuckle meat, while the tail meat, which is the most expensive part of the lobster, is typically snatched up by large food-service companies that sell it to spots like high-end hotels and luxury cruise ships.

This type of preportioned meat used to come canned but is now minimally processed and fresher, which has enabled cheaper lobster rolls: The meat is cooked, mechanically — or hydraulically — separated at the source, packed in vacuum-sealed bags, then trucked down to NYC. (It's sometimes frozen too.)

The question of whether rolls made with prepackaged or whole lobster are better is much debated in lobster circles; both have ardent supporters. But, in general, the restaurant industry wants the public to think, Lobster is lobster. It's partly marketing, and it's partly because the conversation is much more complex than most people think.

Related: On a Roll [NYM]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: street lobster, lobster, lobster pots, lobster rolls, luke's lobster, mary's fish camp, pearl oyster bar, red hook lobster pound

Typical.

A Metro article is critical of the "no bookings" policy that's been imported along with "American themed restaurants in London" in the last couple of years. Though no restaurants are singled out in particular, Shake Shack and Five Guys have been among this year's big openings. "The joke is, a ‘no bookings’ policy really only benefits the restaurant," the paper says, adding that it has to stop. Just wait until cronuts and ramen burgers cross the pond. [Metro, Related]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: lines, cronuts, five guys, queues, ramen burgers, shake shack

Peter Cohan, Forbes:

When he worked at telecommunications consulting firm, Adventis, Raj Aggarwal met with Apple’s Steve Jobs twice a week for several months. In an August 15 interview, Aggarwal explained how Steve Jobs persuaded AT&T’s Cingular Wireless to provide service for the iPhone with an unprecedented revenue sharing agreement. […]

Aggarwal was impressed by the way Jobs was willing to take a risk to realize his vision. “In one meeting in the conference room with Jobs, he was annoyed that AT&T was spending too much time worrying about the risks of the deal. So he said, ‘You know what we should do to stop them from complaining? We should write AT&T a check for $1 billion and if the deal doesn’t work out, they can keep the money. Let’s give them the $1 billion [Apple had $5 billion in cash at the time] and shut them the hell up,’” Aggarwal recounted.

Justin Gillis, reporting for the NYT:

An international panel of scientists has found with near certainty that human activity is the cause of most of the temperature increases of recent decades, and warns that sea levels could conceivably rise by more than three feet by the end of the century if emissions continue at a runaway pace.

See also: Chris Mooney at Mother Jones on five of the “holy crap” details of the report.

Did you know there is a place on the human body that, when shot with a gun, will cause the person to fully explode? It's one of the many highlights in this Titanfall trailer from Gamescom.

Titanfall drops into Gamescom with a new trailer originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 20 Aug 2013 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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They're basically giving these things away in Maine.

People who follow such things will tell you that the price of lobsters has been steadily dropping for the last eight or so years — getting as low as $2.20 per pound this month. It's gotten so bad that many lobstermen are worried about making ends meet. But if lobster prices are so rock-bottom low, why are lobster dishes still so expensive at restaurants? Well, The New Yorker digs deep into this phenomenon and discovers some clear reasons: Lower prices make customers think quality will be diminished, part of the enjoyment of lobster is linked to its expense (a phenomenon particular to luxury goods), and higher prices for lobster make other seafood dishes appear to be more reasonably priced. But also, most customers at high-end restaurants don't follow the lobster market too closely, which means restaurant owners can get away with it as long as people continue to expect prices will be high. [The NYer]

Read more posts by Lauren Elkies Schram

Filed Under: the price is wrong, lobsters

0x10c (often pronounced "ten to the c") was for a time the next big thing from Mojang and Markus "Notch" Persson, creator of Minecraft. It was to be a sprawling sandbox space adventure, but Persson put the project on hold back in April, citing creative difficulties, and then this week said he'd shelved it altogether.

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted this week to uphold its policy against implementing dotless domain names, essentially bringing an end to a push from Google to introduce and own http://search, http://app, http://blog, and http://cloud. Google's proposal to ICANN was to allow each dotless domain to redirect to user-designated sites via a "new technical standard" that the company has spent months developing. For example, Google wanted http://search to bring up a search engine of a user's choice — whether it be Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anything else.

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Likewise, if Google had gotten its way, http://blog would direct web surfers to a user-specified blogging platform, while http://cloud would have done...

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Oh, yes, they did.

How lovely! Two restaurants in the Philippines — Wrong Ramen in Fort Bonifacio and Umami Hambaagu House in Pasig City — have teamed up to engineer a deluxe, limited-edition knockoff version of Keizo Shimamoto's ramen burger over the course of eight upcoming days, beginning this Friday. The freaky W.R.-U.H.H. version appears to be a lot like the original, except with sesame seeds instead of chopped scallions and mayonnaise sauce in place of shoyu. You know what they say: You're no one until somebody many thousands of miles away steals your idea and brags about it on Facebook.

Of course, there are already noodles aplenty at Wrong Ramen, and the house specialty at Umami Hambaagu House appears to be some sort of smothered, bunless burger, so the collaboration seems almost natural. The poster promoting the limited-time knockoff juxtaposes two quotes: "The cronut has finally met its match," from the New York Daily News on the lower left, and "Disgusting and overhyped piece of shit," from the proprietors of Wrong Ramen at the right.

The restaurant, it should be noted, regularly advertises itself with a simultaneously self-deprecating and chipper banner that proclaims, "Our ramen sucks!" Meanwhile, some Facebook fans are still trying to figure out if this whole ramen burger business is for real. "This is no joke," Umami Hambaagu House wrote on Facebook. "Wrong Ramen is just crazy."

You know this had to happen [Wrong Ramen/Facebook]
Related: Next-Level Noodles: The New Era of New York Ramen

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: knockoffs, keizo shimamoto, philippines, ramen burger, umami hambaagu house, wrong ramen

Amazon has assembled a list of some of the funniest, top-rated product reviews posted by its customers. Just don't expect the tongue-in-cheek examples to help with your buying decisions. "Helpful product reviews written by Amazon customers are the heart of Amazon.com, and we treasure the customers who work hard to write them," reads a new webpage that showcases the selections. "But occasionally customer creativity goes off the charts in the best possible way." Unsurprisingly, the best reviews on Amazon are often paired with some of the retailer's most famously bizarre items. Take for example the Three Wolf Moon t-shirt. A featured review by overlook1977 says, "Unfortunately I already had this exact picture tattooed on my chest, but this...

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For the Journal of the American Revolution, Todd Andrlik compiled a list of the ages of the key participants in the Revolutionary War as of July 4, 1776. Many of them were surprisingly young:

Marquis de Lafayette, 18
James Monroe, 18
Gilbert Stuart, 20
Aaron Burr, 20
Alexander Hamilton, 21
Betsy Ross, 24
James Madison, 25

This is kind of blowing my mind...because of the compression of history, I'd always assumed all these people were around the same age. But in thinking about it, all startups need young people...Hamilton, Lafayette, and Burr were perhaps the Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg of the War. Some more ages, just for reference:

Thomas Jefferson, 33
John Adams, 40
Paul Revere, 41
George Washington, 44
Samuel Adams, 53

The oldest prominent participant in the Revolution, by a wide margin, was Benjamin Franklin, who was 70 years old on July 4, 1776. Franklin was a full two generations removed from the likes of Madison and Hamilton. But the oldest participant in the war was Samuel Whittemore, who fought in an early skirmish at the age of 80. I'll let Wikipedia take it from here:

Whittemore was in his fields when he spotted an approaching British relief brigade under Earl Percy, sent to assist the retreat. Whittemore loaded his musket and ambushed the British from behind a nearby stone wall, killing one soldier. He then drew his dueling pistols and killed a grenadier and mortally wounded a second. By the time Whittemore had fired his third shot, a British detachment reached his position; Whittemore drew his sword and attacked. He was shot in the face, bayoneted thirteen times, and left for dead in a pool of blood. He was found alive, trying to load his musket to fight again. He was taken to Dr. Cotton Tufts of Medford, who perceived no hope for his survival. However, Whittemore lived another 18 years until dying of natural causes at the age of 98.

!!!

Tags: history   lists   Revolutionary War   Samuel Whittemore   Todd Andrlik   USA   war

When I was a kid and we'd visit places with fragile things, my mom would order me to "look with your eyes, not with your hands." But exactly the opposite is encouraged in a new exhibit called Ghosts, Underpants, and Stars at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, in which kids are encouraged to mess with iconic paintings.

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For some people, taking up to 12 different medications a day has become the unfortunate norm. And when you add another one into that already complicated heap, it isn't always easy to identify the potentially harmful interactions in your own personal prescription cocktail. MedSnap hopes to simplify that problem by both identifying your pills and their potential interactions all through one, simple snapped photograph.

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If you've ever wondered what that random button on your car does, or where your dipstick is located, wonder no more if you're an Audi A3 owner. The German car maker, famous for its Vorsprung durch Technik, has created yet another augmented reality app that's designed to guide an owner around a car. Audi's new A3 app covers over 300 elements of the car from windscreen wipers to the oil cap. Essentially, eKurzinfo is a modern manual within an iOS app that lets you use an iPhone camera to identify parts on an A3. If your engine is overheating and there's a symbol on the dash telling you so, you can scan it and then find instructions to top up the coolant.

Audi's no stranger to augmented reality apps. The company has launched a calendar,...

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The professor who built a villa on top of a Beijing skyscraper has been ordered to prove it was built legally or dismantle his new home. Professor Zhang purchased the top floor of a 26-story building some time ago, and spent six years building the two-story villa that sits on its roof. Reportedly without planning permission, Zhang moved ton after ton of rocks and foliage up to the roof, creating what he says is "just an ornamental garden." Although it could be mistaken for a rock garden from afar, closer inspection reveals there's clearly a house hidden within.

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