Christopher.kantos

The Send Me to Heaven app is simple: it tracks how high you can throw your phone.

You install the app (on your android, obviously). You then throw your phone as high as you can. Go on, throw it. Catching the phone is entirely optional, of course, but if you're anything like me, your phone is carrying all kinds of incriminating evidence, so if it breaks, you're in the clear.

And that's it. Well, there's more to it than that: what the app actually does is register how high it's been thrown, then it uploads that height to a leaderboard. Effectively, it turns throwing your phone into a sport akin to Russian Roullette; do you want to be the best? Then you should risk your expensive phone to do so.

A bit of evil genius, that.

This happened July 27, but we're just seeing it now because Bob's Blitz just saw it now. It's from a Tough Mudder event in Buffalo, N.Y., and this particular obstacle—the last before the finish line—is known as electroshock therapy because those are live wires hanging above all that mud and all those bales of hay. For the poor guy in the orange, getting zapped by a few volts wasn't the worst of it.

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I don't know who this cyclist is. I don't know the name of the race he has just competed in. I do know that he is suffering from some hellish cramps, and that the dude with the microphone should probably just leave him alone.

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It took photographer Jeffrey Martin two days of shoot and four months of editing to create the interactive panorama you're about to experience. At 600,000 pixels wide, it would measure 50 meters by 100 meters if printed at photographic resolution. And yes, it is every bit as awesome as it sounds.

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via http://tococrupegandofogo.tumblr.com/page/11

via http://25.media.tumblr.com/25ef083afd7bf0bd7477070ee03179f3/tumblr_mi8berLwVy1qf4nxzo1_400.gif

Good god. This picture could not be any more adorable.

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Mark your calendars for Week 16 of the 2017 season. That's when Adrian Peterson says he'll break Emmitt Smith's all-time NFL rushing mark of 18,355 yards.

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[Video Link] (Via Doobybrain)

Five-foot fence? Please. Parkour goat's got this.

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Windows RT is a dog. We’ve been saying that from the beginning. We weren’t alone. It’s very hard to find a positive review of Windows RT, and more specifically, the nine-month-old Microsoft Surface with RT. And now Microsoft, in its latest earnings report, finally revealed that we were right.

The company took a massive $900M writedown last quarter because of unsold Surface RT’s. Even more telling is that Microsoft actually revealed this loss. It’s that big. The company had to tell investors why it didn’t meet Wall Street’s expectations.

Sadly, the Surface RT hardware is not at fault here. The tablet itself is actually a beautiful machine: sleek, solid and downright stunning. It’s hard to pick one up and not be impressed. The Surface RT’s designers and engineers should be proud of their creation. It’s not their fault.

Windows RT should not exist as a consumer-facing product. It’s a reactionary move against the iPad and the multitude of Android tablets flooding the market. It’s Microsoft punching down where it should have just walked away from the fight. While Intel is quickly bringing most of the advantages of ARM chips to its x86 line, Microsoft decided it couldn’t wait and built a product that ignored Windows’ main advantages of legacy software. The Surface RT was sadly part of the ecosystem that is predictably failing.

The Surface product line was a big risk for Microsoft. The company went all-in on a PC for the very first time. And in a way, it was successful. The Surface RT and Pro brought a lot of attention to Windows 8 tablets — much more attention than HP, Dell, or Samsung could have provided. The striking product line put a lot of consumer electronic companies on notice, especially since Microsoft — historically a software-first outfit — took on the task of creating their own first-rate hardware. These tablets are the standard for Windows 8 tablets even if it’s clear after today’s news that they failed to live up to Microsoft’s expectations.

Without the Surface Pro and RT, the Windows 8 tablet world would be as stale and lifeless as Windows 8 laptops.

All signs point to a new Surface line being announced in the coming weeks. And even with today’s news, it’s entirely possible that Microsoft will release a second generation Surface RT with a starting price point much lower. If anything, Microsoft is a company that does whatever the hell it wants even if no one is buying the products.

Play the one-second stopwatch game...it took me 62 tries to hit 1:00 exactly. We used to play this in school with an actual digital watch. We also had a version where we'd see how fast we could start and stop the timer. Good wholesome times...we weren't rotting our brains with Candy Crush or Angry Birds Star Wars or social studies. (thx, nick)

This could only be more Canadian if he were riding a goddamn caribou. From YouTube user Ryan Doucette:

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It's not as cute as a snow-leopard, but this corpse flower has a webcam! Here's your chance to watch one bloom in real-time.

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Physician Eugene Lazowski was practicing medicine in the Polish town of Rozwadów when he discovered that injecting healthy patients with dead bacteria could cause them to test positive for epidemic typhus without experiencing any symptoms.

Working secretly with his friend Stanislaw Matulewicz, Lazowski began injecting thousands of Poles in the surrounding villages, deliberately creating the appearance of an epidemic. Fearful of a contagious illness, the Nazis quarantined the affected villages rather than sending their residents on to concentration camps.

Lazowski’s efforts saved an estimated 8,000 men, women, and children who would otherwise have been sent to prisons, slave labor camps, or death camps. He survived the war and moved to the United States in 1958, where he taught medicine in Illinois.

“He’s why I became a doctor,” one of the spared villagers, Jan Hryniewiezki, told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2000. “He was a patriotic hero because he wasn’t afraid to do what he did during very bad times.”

“The basic duty of a physician is to preserve life,” Lazowski explained, “and this was a way of saving lives.”

What's better than a shark with frickin' lasers? How about an iPhone case with a built-in stun gun! The Indiegogo-funded Yellow Jacket case (US$139.99 for the iPhone 4/4S case, iPhone 5 version is on the way) packs a 650,000-volt stun gun, perfect for those trips to the city where seemingly everyone wants to get their hands on your iPhone.

The chunky, 1-inch-thick case comes in black, white, pink and yellow colors, although only the black model is currently available. You don't need to worry about zapping yourself; the Yellow Jacket team designed a protective cover that needs to be moved out of the way to expose the electrodes. After that, there's a safety switch that must be activated before pressing the activation button.

The same battery pack that's used to deliver that powerful electric shock to your attacker can also be used in a much more benign way -- recharging your depleted iPhone battery pack.

Unfortunately for iPhone owners who'd like a way to protect themselves with a Yellow Jacket case, stun guns are illegal in a number of countries, seven US states and in some specific counties and cities (like Washington D.C.). If you've got a hankering for a Yellow Jacket, be sure to check their list of "forbidden places" prior to making your order.

[via Macworld UK]

iPhone case with built-in stun gun protects both you and your phone originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 12 Jul 2013 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Imagine if the deluge of Facebook Birthday well wishers were transformed into actual physical contact. Gross.

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Kii is a compact charger-connector that fits on a keychain allowing you to plug in to charge or sync devices from any computer without having to carry a charger or tote around a cable connector.

(via Doobybrain)

Otter Bends, Queer Spank, Frog Innard, and Lob Horn are some of the stations on the anagram map of the London Underground.

[Video Link]. The rap artist and actor formerly known as Mos Def agreed to participate in a video demonstrating and explaining the procedure of force-feeding as it is applied to Guantanamo detainees. The video for Human Rights organization Reprieve is directed by BAFTA award-winner Asif Kapadia, a British filmmaker of Indian descent.

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins this week, and over 100 hunger-strikers at Guantánamo Bay are continuing to hunger strike in protest of their indefinite detention without trial. More than 40 of them are now being force-fed. During the Muslim holy month, the US military will time their force-feeding in a manner that violates the religious practice of fasting during the day.

Google Reader is slowing down. Over the past few days, buttons have broken, marking feeds as read seemed to take a bit longer than usual, and the Android mobile website on some devices shifted over to the desktop view with no way to change things back. As users up until the bitter end, we can no longer complain about these events because Google doesn’t care – it’s shutting down Google Reader on July 1st and we all have to leave.

It’s the digital equivalent of bringing up the house lights when the rock concert is over. You don’t have to go home, folks, but you can’t stay here.

No one cares about RSS feeds, except for maybe 50 million of the Internet’s most voracious news readers*. Journalists, bloggers, programmers, technically-savvy I.T. workers, researchers, students, startup founders, and anyone else who has grown accustomed to a simple product that lets you – not algorithms or tweets – be in control of which news sources to track and which stories to read.

In the wake of the impending shutdown, a number of alternatives have sprung up to offer a “replacement” for Google Reader. Though some come close, none have completely nailed the experience yet.

*50 million: Digg’s estimate of those who care about RSS.

The Only Real Contenders So Far: Feedly & Digg

Feedly

Feedly has been building its RSS product for years, which gives it a huge head start in this space. Last week, it announced a reach of 12 million users as it officially launched “Feedly Cloud,” a backend infrastructure to power the ecosystem of RSS reader client applications like Reeder, Press, Nextgen Reader, Newsify, gReader,  and more, left abandoned by Google’s exit from RSS. These apps had only offered a front-end RSS browsing experience, which means they needed someone else’s API to function. Feedly is one of the few to step in and serve that need.

Why Feedly: Google Reader uses will love Feedly because it comes closest to mirroring the Google Reader experience, and it offers a number of settings which can be tweaked to your liking. The service’s “Titles Only” view (which can be set globally in Preferences) offers the same sort of compact view, perfect for headline-scanning action, that Google Reader once provided.  It also supports a number of Google Reader’s features, including support for many of the same keyboard shortcuts, tagging, favorites (“Saved for Later”), and “Mark as Read” functionality to quickly plow through categories.

What’s wrong: Feedly currently pulled out its “search” functionality, which lets you pull up content by keyword or topic – something that’s one of the top user requests today. That’s still in the works, the company says, but it’s a big undertaking to deliver upon. In addition, though the company offers clients for web and mobile, the mobile apps are still somewhat over-designed with big, colorful category headers instead of the basic list of folders like Google Reader.

That being said, it’s hard to find a lot of fault with Feedly, and the company is quickly working to add in the few missing pieces. There will be little things here and there which you’ll need to get used to, of course (like the “t” shortcut no longer lets you tag items, but rather tweets them). However, in some cases, they’re changes for the better (like the option to set the default view by category).

Digg Reader

Betaworks’ quickly built take on Google Reader is the new kid on the block, and has a lot of potential to be a viable Feedly competitor. Though initially, the team has been working to launch something that offers the core RSS reading experience, the plan is to bring the RSS reader into the modern age, by alerting users to what’s most popular among their network and better connect users with Digg.com. In Digg Reader’s “popular” section, the service scans your feeds and then ranks them with one, two or three dots to help you discover trending articles. In practice these recommendations were hit or miss at times, but the beta build we’ve been testing is unfinished.

Why Digg Reader: Like Feedly, the app lets you organize content into folders, view unread counts, move around with Google Reader shortcuts, save posts for later, and share to social networks. With the above-described “Popular” section, it also offers something similar to Feedly’s “Today” for an at-a-glance list of what’s trending. Ex-Google Reader users will also appreciate Digg Reader’s minimalistic look-and-feel, which is almost entirely black, white and shades of gray (outside of the RSS content itself.)

What’s Wrong: Most of what’s wrong with Digg Reader is a function of time – the team had a limited number of weeks to build this service, having only started after Google’s shutdown announcement went live. That being said, there are still a number of features which ex-Google reader users likely relied on that aren’t ready in the new reader’s product at launch (planned for this Tuesday). Search is also missing here, for example, as is the ability to tag content, or share to other social services beyond Facebook, Twitter or Digg. (“Read later” services like Pocket, Readability and Instapaper are supported, however).

Digg Reader offers just two views, “list” and “expanded.” While the former is meant to give users a headline-scanning option, Feedly’s “Title Only” view is even more compact, which means its more like Google Reader’s “compact” view.

At launch, Digg Reader will have an iOS app, but the Android version will not be ready for another few weeks.

The Startups

Offering a full Google Reader replacement is no simple task, so it’s notable that some startups have tried to take on this job without the resources of a larger company like Facebook or Betaworks behind them. That being said, for power users of Google Reader, none of these smaller companies will be able to replace what it is about to be lost.

NewsBlur (unlimited feeds, $24/year): This cross-platform news reader offers Reader import, compact views, saving stories, and even an interesting “training” feature which is meant to help teach the reader what sorts of stories you like best. But NewsBlur’s interface is too busy and cluttered, it lacks search, and can be slow when you have a lot of feeds to load.

Feedbin ($2 / month): Feedbin’s paid web app is another good alternative for tracking feeds, viewing unread counts, subscribing, tags, and it uses Reader-like navigation via keyboard shortcuts. However, while it supports Reader data import, it lacks a number of key features like search or Feedly’s wide variety of layouts. But most importantly, it’s not a fully cross-platform product on its own. If you use Feedbin on the web, then to keep data in sync across mobile, you’ll need to use an app powered by its API like Reeder, Press,  Favs, Tafiti, or others, or beta test the newer Feedbin Reader for Android.

The Old Reader and Hive (previously HiveMined): These two startups sounded promising in theory as both are focusing on simply rebuilding the original Reader – the former working to bring the social aspects back, as well. Unfortunately, neither of these have made it yet, and won’t be solid replacements by the time Google Reader shuts down.

Both apps have issues with speed at times (The Older Reader is far better on this front than Hive, though). Though The Old Reader does have search, it’s title-only, not full keyword search. Hive meanwhile has no search, and struggled to import Reader subscriptions. Sometimes Hive’s buttons are so slow to register clicks that you’re unsure if the app has gone down. Sharing to outside services is either limited or non-existent. Neither service offers a mobile app.

Reeder (paid): Until recently, Reeder was not a Google Reader replacement, it was only the front-end interface for viewing feeds hosted by Google. Since the Reader shutdown announcement, the company said it’s now making plans to continue development, but this involves major changes on its part. Today, Reeder uses Feedbin and Feedly’s APIs on mobile, and is also working to support standalone RSS (introduced in the iPhone app, but not yet the iPad or Mac apps). Because Reeder was built on top of others’ infrastructure, it’s not ready to replace Google Reader at this time. That said, it is one to watch given it has an engaged Apple user base and some traction.

The Rest: Me-Too’s, Flipboard Alternatives, Plus Aol’s Disastrous Attempt

Ever since the Google Reader shutdown announcement, our inboxes have been filled with pitches for “replacements” nearly every day. It would almost be a disservice to TechCrunch readers to list these here, because real replacements are huge investments in infrastructure, APIs, and show an attempt to honor the needs of Google Reader refugees with features like compact views, keyboard navigation, tagging and search. Simply offering an RSS-based product DOES NOT make a service an alternative to Google Reader, and attempting to position it like that is band-wagon jumping at best and dishonest at worst.

Many of these pitches look cobbled together overnight as weekend projects. None are any good. (And yes, I got your email.)

Also, several of these “me too” products tend to look more like watered-down versions of Flipboard, not Google Reader. Really, if you just want a news magazine, use Flipboard then, or wait to see what Facebook has in store with its forthcoming “newspaper for mobile” product.

Aol Reader 

Even Aol (disclosure: TechCrunch parent) bungled its RSS reader debut, and launched a product which the lot of us here at TechCrunch can’t even get to work properly. Aol’s RSS reader claims to offer Google Reader import, but refuses to upload Google Reader’s XML file in a multitude of browsers, according to several of us here who gamely tested the service anyway.

Aol’s Reader had intermittent issues in Chrome especially this morning, refusing to ever add the TechCrunch feed, for example (thanks Aol), and taking a good 30 seconds or so to do the same in Safari. This slowness may have been a launch bug, but it wasn’t promising. The reader is also missing is search, but does offer tagging, limited sharing, favoriting, four different viewing options (which are suspiciously identical to Feedly though), and oh, giant Aol On Originals video ads in the sidebar…

Well, at least they have a monetization plan.

There Is No Google Reader Replacement

In each of the products listed above, and the dozens of those we haven’t linked to which are still promoting themselves as a home to Reader refugees, there are huge gaps in functionality – like Search, for example, which no one has fully fleshed out just yet. Because of this, users will also lose their ability to search and uncover content from older websites which have long since shutdown, taking their RSS archive with them. Google Reader let you time travel into the web’s past, a personal Way Back Machine of sorts. Unless you’ve diligently been tagging or starring this older content over the years, it will essentially disappear into the ether without a search feature like Google’s, which once dug into seemingly infinite RSS archives.

Reader was also more than a web service. It was a mobile website, a mobile app and an API that allowed an ecosystem of RSS clients to flourish.

It was a quantified self tracker, who “Trends” section told you about your news reading habits, including which sites you read, clicked, shared, and emailed the most, and when, and one that kept track of the feeds that stayed fresh, or had become inactive.

It was also a discovery service, that connected you with friends, let you package up bundles of subscriptions and share them, search for content by keyword, and browse through posts that others found interesting. And it was an alerting tool which could track whenever a person, topic or keyword was mentioned on Google News, Blog Search, Twitter or eBay.

For anyone looking for a Google Reader replacement, the saddest news of all is that there really isn’t one yet.

There are only alternatives.

Late last year, Canadian astronomer Philip Gregory made the controversial claim that there are three habitable zone super-Earths orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 667C. Now, in a separate study, a group of European astronomers are saying he was right.

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Humans can have sex anytime we damn well please – so why do we mostly do it in the dark? Here's what science has to say about our preference for nighttime hookups.

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Newly minted Redskins receiver Donté Stallworth has opinions on things! He was not a fan of the flu vaccine. But he is a huge fan of today's Supreme Court rulings that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and killed Prop 8 in California. He took to Twitter to celebrate, and more than held his own against opponents of gay marriage.

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You hear that? It’s the sound of 130 million people closing the Instagram app.

Instagram video is a big mistake. Huge.

More than any other social network, Instagram is a consumptive experience first and foremost, even though it might have tricked you into thinking it’s all about taking pictures.

Instagram has never shared concrete stats on creation vs. consumption habits of its users, but the latest stats do shed some light on the behavior of the Instagram nation. There are a total of 6 billion photos on the service. This is a huge number, given the fact that Instagram has only been around for a little over 3 years.

But there are 130 million monthly active users on the network. Clearly, some of these users share hundreds and thousands of pictures while others share dozens. For the sake of this riddle we’re solving, let’s pretend they create an equal amount. That’s an average of 46 photos per user.

However, Instagram announced that there are over 1 billion likes on the service every single day. Per user, that comes out to around 230 likes per month.

Obviously, each user is different. Some post thousands of photos, while others have a measly 12. Some joined two years ago, and some just hopped on the Instagram band wagon. Some users like every photo they see, and others are stingy with their likes. But on the whole, it’s clear that users like/consume photos more than they post them.

This goes to show that consumption — the act of flipping through that photo stream, liking at your leisure — is a crucial part of the Instagram experience. It is precious. It works like a charm in those spare moments of the day. And it’s just been fucked with.

In the past three years, Instagram never figured out video, and the feature remained unlaunched despite conversations about it at the company.

When Instagram launched, the idea was to take the shitty photos your shitty mobile camera had captured and share them in a beautiful way. It was a huge success. Now, we’re much better at taking photos with our phones, and our cameras are way better than they used to be. But video is the new frontier.

Instagram wants to get in on the market while it’s hot, with the same formula it used for photos — capture something of low-quality, make it pretty and stabilized, and share it easily. Yay!

But Instagram isn’t dominant because of its creative properties. There are dozens of photo-sharing apps with filters and cool stamps, but none of them have 130 million users. None of them are filled with all of your friends’ photos. You can create in Camera+ or Line, but can you consume within those apps with the same pleasure as Instagram? Probably not.

Unfortunately, the addition of video to the Instagram stream takes from that pleasure for a number of reasons.

A few of them are solvable problems — bugs, really. When you have poor service and you hover over an Instagram video (I’d like to call them Vinstagrams, if everyone’s ok with that), chances are you move on down the stream if that video takes too long to load. However, once that Vinstagram does load, it starts playing (audio and all) no matter where you are in the stream.

But even if that doesn’t happen, there’s still a bandwidth issue. Yes, plenty of us are enjoying LTE speeds on our Android and iOS-powered devices, but some of us are not. Even still, some of us may find ourselves on a dragging Wifi network. There’s no guarantee of strong service at any given time.

Instagram never had much trouble with this when it was just doing photos.

Unless you had zero bars, or no Wifi, you could enjoy a stream of your friends’ photos. Maybe you couldn’t quite upload your own post, but you could still get the small satisfaction that comes with handing out likes.

Instagram Video slows down the consumption. There have been a number of times already, even with my LTE iPhone 5, that I couldn’t load videos fast enough in Instagram. I didn’t move to another area to get service, or switch to Wifi. I closed the app.

Instagram was made to be easy. Easy creation and easy consumption. Vinstagrams make things difficult.

But it stretches far beyond poor connectivity into the land of content. Not every Instagram pic is beautiful, or interesting, or a profound work of art. But most of them are pretty easy on the eyes, thanks to filters and other editing tools baked into the app.

Luckily for all of us, it’s relatively easy to take a good picture. It’s a single frame, a solitary moment in time that you have to capture. If the first one’s not so hot, you take a few more. You just need a single, beautiful frame.

With video, users have a full fifteen seconds to fill with beauty, if they so choose. But it’s not as easy as it seems. Even with Instagram’s “Cinema” technology, which is meant to stabilize the video, and 13 beautiful filters, it’s really easy to take a bad video.

Then let’s factor in the fact that Instagrammers are notoriously bad at capturing things people actually care about seeing. These things include your dinner, your coffee, your beer, your pet, the view our of your airplane window, and/or your feet, among other things. When it’s a single image of a pigeon on the street, it’s easy for me to scroll by. But, as a consumer, the little video icon makes me want to wait, and see what this Vinstagram has to offer.

It’s almost never worth it.

People are jacked up about Instavids right now (I’m still deciding on which name should stick), so it makes sense that they’d be uninteresting right now. I’m guilty too. In testing out the new feature, I took two very awful Instagram videos that I now regret. I apologize.

Perhaps people will get more stingy, or learn how to shoot a compelling video. Perhaps Instagram will be the same app it has always been, a place to look at people’s food.

But even if it gets bette, there are more issues that make me think twice every time I go to click on that Instagram app: the very simple issue of time.

Instagram is a time sink. It’s the app I go to every time I have a few spare minutes of boredom in my world — waiting for a table at a restaurant, sitting on the toilet, chilling on a smoke break. But when you combine slow loading videos and downright long videos — it may not seem like it, but 15 seconds is a really long time compared to the half second it takes to glance at a photo — Instagram consumption is no longer feeling like a “break time” app.

It’s now an investment of my time.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a place for Instagram video. Twitter’s Vine is taking off like a rocket, and Facebook seems to feel a need to dominate every corner of the social space. That now includes video, so I absolutely understand why this feature was launched, whether it follows Vine or was conceived of long before.

However, there’s a reason that Instagram has 130 million active users. If it ain’t broke, right? Changing the experience is risky, but there are ways to fix it.

I, personally, am calling for filtered photo streams. Let me choose whether or not I want to look at pictures, Vinstagrams, or both. There are plenty of aggregating apps like Divvy that let you toggle between certain streams or feeds, and there’s no reason why the same tactic can’t be used within Instagram.

Until then, I’ll be spending less time browsing through Instagram, so don’t feel offended if you’re getting fewer likes from me.

Paul Gallagher at Dangerous Minds: "There are some things in life that are best left unsaid. For everything else, there’s cake!"

This made me Laugh Out Loud for reals...Simone Rovellini doctors clips from movies to make actresses' heads explode. The first clip features Dirty Dancing, When Harry Met Sally, Pretty Woman, and Ghost:

And this one features a bunch of Disney princesses:

More videos and animated GIFs on the Exploding Actresses Tumblr. (via @scottlamb)

In certain species of spiders and insects, females kill and eat their mates after sex. But the dark fishing spider experiences a very odd twist on this gruesome tale.

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[Photographs: Jay Friedman]

The last time I was in Tokyo, I didn't make it to Rokurinsha, one of Tokyo Ramen Street's most popular restaurants, which is known for its tsukemen, or dipping noodles. This time, however, I vowed not to be denied, and arrived before noon to make sure of it.

By 11am, the line was already wrapped around the restaurant and up the steps across the hall, but it moved quickly. To expedite matters, a staffer gave me a laminated menu of ramen choices to ready me for the ticket machine ahead. After pondering the Ajitama Tsukemen (950 yen, almost $10)—Rokurinsha's original ramen with a flavored, boiled egg—I went with the "special recommendation" of Tokusei Tsukemen (1,050 yen, almost $11) which comes with the addition of buta hogushi (shredded pork).

I barely had time to tie on my paper apron (necessary in case of soup spillage and oil sprays) before the bowls arrived. In one bowl, there were noodles thicker and wider than any I'd seen at other ramen joints, save, perhaps, for the ones at Nagi Golden Gai, where I ate terrifically bitter ramen last year. There was also an egg, which comes whole and contains a brilliantly golden yolk.

The broth arrived in a separate bowl. The color was warmer and deeper than milky-white tonkotsu broth, though just as thick and creamy. It turns out that in addition to pork bones, the broth is made with chicken bones, niboshi (dried baby sardines), sababushi (dried, smoked mackerel flakes) and katsuobushi (dried, smoked bonito flakes), along with vegetables. In the broth were negi (looks like a leek, but treated like a green onion, though it's less sharp in flavor), a slice of chashu (fatty braised pork), naruto (a type of fish cake), menma (fermented bamboo), a small sheet of nori (seaweed), and the "secret" ingredient: gyofun (dry fish powder), which adds an aggressively fishy blast of umami.

Tsukemen is a style of ramen that has become increasingly popular, particularly in warm summer months, as many find it more refreshing than regular ramen. The noodles are cooler since they're not already in the broth, and you use chopsticks to dip them in the broth, which can be a clumsy affair for the inexperienced. The chunky noodles are a good vehicle for the thick broth, and their chewiness is something to appreciate and enjoy. Feel free to join the symphony of noodle slurping to get all the goodness in each bowl, pausing to take bites of egg, pork, and anything else you miss between slurps.

Once you finish your noodles, a worker will approach and ask about adding your choice of soups to your bowl. Both contain fish broth, and I recommend asking for the one with yuzu in it, as the citrus flavor plays nicely off of the fishy flavor. While Rokurinsha's noodles are more udon-like than I generally prefer, they're delicious tsukemen-style, combined with a rich broth so good that I did as the Japanese people around me did in lifting the bowl to drink the remains, and then giving a slight bow in ramen reverence.

Rokurinsha

1-9-1 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan (Tokyo Station Ichibangai Basement Floor, B1F Yaesu South Exit) (map)
(81) 03-3286-0166; rokurinsha.com

About the author: Jay Friedman is a Seattle-based freelance food writer who happens to travel extensively as a sex educator. An avid fan of noodles (some call him "The Mein Man"), he sees sensuality in all foods, and blogs about it at his Gastrolust website. You can follow him on Twitter @jayfriedman.

Jamaica's Veronica Campbell-Brown, winner of the 2004 and 2008 Olympics women's 200m and reigning world champion, reportedly failed a drug test after testing positive for a banned diuretic used as a masking agent.

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