Edenovellis

Negotiations with the landlord were unsuccessful.

Garden at the Cellar, a longtime fixture between Harvard and Central Square, closed suddenly last week, reports Boston Restaurant Talk, citing a post on the restaurant's Facebook page:

"It is with heavy hearts that Chef Brandon [Arms] & the Garden at the Cellar team announce the end of the Garden's run as the food side of The Cellar Food & Drinks' operations. After negotiations with the landlords we could not reach an agreement for continuing forward. Thank you for your kind patronage over the past 8 years through both Chef Will [Gilson] & Chef Brandon's time owning the Garden."

Arms began as sous chef at Garden at the Cellar in 2009, under chef/owner Will Gilson, before becoming chef/owner himself in 2011.

BostInno gives an alarming account of the closure, citing a former manager in alleging that landlord Stephen Kapsalis is holding the restaurant's property, including equipment and a computer, and that Arms was escorted away by police when the restaurant closed. The cause of the closure is reportedly a breakdown in renegotiations between Kapsalis and the restaurant regarding their existing partnership regarding alcohol, where Kapsalis paid Garden at the Cellar's bartenders, provided the liquor, and took 100% of the revenue from alcohol sales.

BostInno also notes that an employee at the connected Cellar Wine & Spirits, which is owned by Kapsalis, indicates that the restaurant will reopen "in a matter of days," but what exactly that means in terms of Garden at the Cellar as we knew it remains to be seen.

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I still don't understand the relative size of planets. The universe is too big and my sense of scale is too small to fathom such large numbers. I wish someone would explain it to me like I was five years old. What? Avi Solomon used fruit illustrations to roughly show a relatable scale? Nice. [via Boing Boing]

Tags: astronomy, scale

Amal Graafstra

Any serious Bitcoin user will preach the benefits of cold storage: keeping the bulk of your bitcoins offline somewhere, like on an encrypted USB stick, or even printed on a piece of paper. The idea is that by keeping that data offline, it’s far less susceptible to being hacked.

So, the theory goes: what could be safer than keeping it inside your own body?

For the last 10 days, Martijn Wismeijer, a Dutch entrepreneur and Bitcoin enthusiast, has lived with an NFC chip embedded in each hand. One has data that he’s constantly overwriting; he can put his contact details in simply by having another person scan his hand with an NFC-enabled phone. But the other contains the encrypted private key to his wallet.

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Wow. Grow up, man. Be a human being.

themarysue:

"Now, I could point out that one might be able to use this shirt as an example of how women in STEM fields might be made to feel indirectly uncomfortable in a male-dominated working environment despite no overt sexism or harassment being inflicted upon them. But I’m kind of too distracted by how tacky and outright terrible this shirt actually is. Like, seriously, dude. You wore that in public.”

(photo via Twitter)

- Lead ESA Scientist Wears Shirt Covered in Gratuitous Sexy Chicks For Comet Landing Livestream | The Mary Sue

Kevin Ebaugh

As Uber continues to expand worldwide (and has run-ins with local regulators), it’s become famous for its "surge pricing"—the phenomenon where as demand increases for cars, the price dramatically goes up.

New York State went so far as to put a cap on the practice during "abnormal disruptions" in July 2014. Recently, a North Carolina man was charged $455 for a 15-mile ride on Halloween night. Outraged, he reported it to the state’s attorney general, which has taken up the issue.

To deal with this problem, enter a new, free iOS app (an Android version is coming soon) called SurgeProtector. The app aims to help Uber users avoid being shocked by surge pricing simply by telling them where they can go to pay more normal prices. (Uber did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.)

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Who are you, and what do you do?

I am Kim Boekbinder, musician, artist, iconoclast. I write, record, and release a lot of music. I also write essays and prose, make visual art, DJ, and perform live shows. Lately I've been composing soundtracks for games, audiobooks, and films.

What hardware do you use?

On a daily basis to get things done I use an 8x5 Moleskine plain unlined notebook and whatever nice pen I can get my hands on to make notes, lists of things to do, sketch out essays, jot down song lyrics, and plan world domination (even though world domination is so 2008.) I also use my iPhone 4S and my 15" MacBook Pro for the emailing, social networking, graphic design, writing of essays, booking of shows and recording of music.

I play an Epiphone Alleykat guitar which is a great guitar, semi-hollow body, narrow neck, well balanced, amazing tone, a dream to play, and it's sexy as hell. The Alleykat has amazing range, which is good for me because I play everything from quiet acoustic to loud rock. I haven't ventured into metal or rap yet but the day is still young.

My amazing boyfriend went out for coffee one morning and came back home with two amps for me: a Peavey practice amp for the keyboards and a Fender Acoustisonic for the guitar. I'm new to the world of amp ownership because I've been too nomadic to own anything I couldn't fit in a suitcase, but now that I've got two amps I can tell I'm going to have 10... 20... 100... how many amps is enough?

For years I've been using the Digitech Genesis3 amp modeler which has been great, it's got huge range and, though digital, it's really good at modeling all kinds of analogue amps and pedal effects, from fuzz to wah to reverb/delay. It also has the handy headphone output so I can practice electric guitar as loudly as I want and I'm the only one who hears it. Nothing compares to the physicality of cranking an actual amp though, feeling the music move through you.

My main synthesizer is a microKorg XL, a great analogue starter synth for someone like me who travels a lot and can't be lugging around an 800 pound instrument everywhere I go. I also use my iPad and a Line6 25-key MIDI keyboard for live shows when I'm traveling really light. The synth apps available for the iPad are epic, they sound so good (more on those in the software section below.)

For drums I've got a Roland Octapad SPD-30. I live-loop everything in performance and it's a great way to make beats with something I can actually hit. Even though my music has become very electronic in the past few years I'm still a very physical person and the act of actually playing an instrument is important to me.

I still use my old Boss RC-50 looping pedal, though some of the functions are starting to go and it'll be time to replace it soon. The pedal has three channels and allows me to create hugely complex loops with parts coming in and out. It's a great live performance and songwriting tool.

I just got a VoiceLive 2 which is a live vocal processing unit with thousands of possible options. I've generally shied away from any vocal processing because I want to sing well, not hide behind auto-tuning or effects, but in the past few years I've been open to exploring more tonal possibilities and the VoiceLive is really fun. It was a gift from a friend and I'm so happy to have it now.

My Bose noise-canceling headphones are my go-tos for recording because they're the best headphones I have. They also greatly improved my quality of life on long-haul flights. I was getting intense migraines on every flight for a little while and thought I might have to stop flying altogether, but the noise-canceling turned out to be migraine-canceling as well. Lucky me.

For demo recording at home I use a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2. A tiny, two channel unit that works perfectly for my home and travel set-up. I can pack my studio up into a single suitcase and head to anywhere on the planet to record new material. If that's not great I don't know what is.

For microphones I use a Shure Beta 58 for live shows and home recordings (really not a great home recording vocal mic, but it's what I have) and an Oktava MK-012 for acoustic instruments (a mildly obscure Russian microphone that mic nerds like to coo over.)

I often record field samples as well and for that I use my iPhone or my ZOOM H1, tiny and powerful.

And what software?

My Mac is still running one of the big cats - the one before Lion. Mountain Lion? Tiger? Snow Cheetah? Meow.

Skype for meetings and international calls and to stay in touch with my long-distance boyfriend/creative partner when he's antipodal.

For recording I often use Audacity, a free, open source, recording program which works great and is very simple. I have Pro Tools, the industry standard, but it's hugely complex and a bit of overkill when all I want to do is play and record a song.

I have the Adobe CS5 creative suite - a gift - which I use nearly every day. Photoshop for almost everything visual I do. Premiere and After Effects for video editing and processing. Illustrator and Dreamweaver get trotted out for exercise every once in a while.

Going through the list of software I use, it's long, but seems mostly standard and boring (Google Drive etc...) so I'm going to skip to the exciting stuff: iPad synth apps!

These apps sound so good, with great stock sounds and the ability to edit quite a lot.

Sunrizer - $10 app that I use the most. It has many synth banks and full edit capabilities.

Animoog - so Moogalicious. Yum yum synth tones.

SoundPrism Pro - which does some neat sound things and extra neat MIDI control things that I never use but intrigue me.

Samplr - an interesting program for sound experimentation and sample bending. I don't use it for live shows but it's fun for recording experimental noise pieces.

Figure - by Propellerhead, super slick and simple. I don't use this very often and never for shows but it does make great beats I've used as the basis for several recordings and it has some wicked synth sounds. It's also a great app for people who don't play music but like to play around from time to time.

Aardvark - a virtual analogue synth with multitouch interface I use for generating noise patterns during live shows.

I upload videos to YouTube. Music goes on Bandcamp - I've been working with them since 2008, they're the best. Twitter is not as vibrant as it once was but it's still an important part of my online presence. I begrudgingly use Facebook.

For my own website I use WordPress and Paid Memberships Pro to run the subscriber part of my website called MISSION CONTROL where fans get access to the songwriting process and downloads of everything I do, even the things that never get released.

What would be your dream setup?

For live shows I'm really happy with what I've got, though I'll need to be replacing the loop pedal soon. Probably with Ableton and Push. At some point I'd also like a Fender twin reverb amp and a few pedals: Fuzz Factory, and the Reuss RSH-02 to start, then every pedal ever.

A million fans. Every show sold out forever and magical and amazing.

A dedicated recording studio in my home with proper soundproofing. A wall of guitar amps. A wall of analogue synths. A Neumann mic for studio vocals. Ludwig drum kit - gold sparkle. Steinway grand piano. 1969 Black Les Paul custom guitar. Hot tub on the roof with a clear view of the city skyline and the sky. Private jet. Hot tub on the private jet.

And world peace - gold sparkle.

A header on Lysol's home page.

While no more than four confirmed cases of Ebola have been diagnosed within the United States since September, that hasn't stopped the marketing team at Lysol from getting ahead of the disease. The company's October Ebola-related ad campaign peaked on Tuesday with the revelation that the company bought ad space on Google for any search of the term "Ebola."

Tuesday's Vice Motherboard report confirmed the targeted advertising via a screencap, propped above Google's default result from the CDC. The link, labeled "ad," asked Googlers to "learn the facts about Ebola from Lysol." Clicking on the link took users to the company's October 14 post about the disease. That post opens with a direct link back to the CDC and then recommends that Lysol be used "for surface disinfection in hospital settings to help prevent the spread of the Ebola virus." (The post also clarifies that Lysol's products have "not [been] specifically tested to kill the Ebola virus.")

However, if Lysol visitors don't click through to the CDC's official page on the virus, they won't see some of the most obvious safety recommendations and clarifications, including the rare, specific ways an average, non-hospital worker might contract Ebola—namely, through contact with contaminated fecal and mucus matter. It also doesn't recommend common safeguards like washing hands (even though Lysol happens to sell plenty of hand soap).

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"His eyes seem to follow me wherever I go."

Vatican

Pope Francis took a stroll yesterday from the Vatican guest house apartment where he lives over to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to unveil a bust of his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. The bust itself is rather Teutonically foreboding, but the most interesting bit of the unveiling came when Francis made a short speech to assembled members of the Academy. Though only a few paragraphs long (and currently available only in Italian; the translation below is unofficial), Francis's remarks focused largely on evolution—still a controversial doctrine in parts of the worldwide Christian church.

"When we read in Genesis the account of Creation, we are in danger of imagining that God was a magician, complete with a magic wand capable of doing anything," Francis said. "But he was not. He created beings and let them develop in accordance with the internal laws that He has given to each one."

He went on:

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The Cambodian and French restaurant will open a new location in the South End in November. Its Porter Square location remains open.

After 20 years, The Elephant Walk has now closed its Beacon Street location as planned, reports Boston Restaurant Talk; the restaurant's website confirms the news. It will reopen next month at 1415 Washington Street in the South End, the former BoMA space.

At the new location, The Elephant Walk "will be serving [their] classic French and Cambodian cuisine along with new, innovative dishes drawing from these traditional roots," according to the restaurant's website. Stay tuned for an opening date.

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Three new pictures show off the in-progress interior of the soon-to-open Kendall Square restaurant.

Those looking forward to the not-so-distant opening of Cafe ArtScience in Kendall Square got a quick glance inside at the upcoming restaurant on its Facebook page with three new photos of the sleek interior. As previously reported, the Cafe ArtScience team includes Todd Maul (Clio), Patrick Campbell (Eastern Standard), Tom Mastricola (Commonwealth), and David Edwards, a Harvard professor and scientist who has invented lots of interesting products, particularly in the food and beverage realm, including edible skins for foods and breathable energy shots.

This story has two points:

1. There’s a tendency for scientific results to be framed in absolute terms (in psychology, this corresponds to general claims about the population) but that can be a mistake in that sometimes the most important part of the story is variation; and

2. Before getting to the comparisons, it can make sense to just look at the data.

Here’s the background. I came across a post by Leif Nelson, who wrote:

Recently Science published a paper [by Timothy Wilson, David Reinhard, Erin Westgate, Daniel Gilbert, Nicole Ellerbeck, Cheryl Hahn, Casey Brown, and Adi Shaked] concluding that people do not like sitting quietly by themselves. . . .

The reason I [Nelson] write this post is that upon analyzing the data for those studies, I arrived at an inference opposite the authors’. They write things like:

Participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think. (abstract)

It is surprisingly difficult to think in enjoyable ways even in the absence of competing external demands. (p.75, 2nd column)

The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself (last phrase).

But the raw data point in the opposite direction: people reported to enjoy thinking. . . .

In the studies, people sit in a room for a while and then answer a few questions when they leave, including how enjoyable, how boring, and how entertaining the thinking period was, in 1-9 scales (anchored at 1 = “not at all”, 5 = “somewhat”, 9 = “extremely”). Across the nine studies, 663 people rated the experience of thinking, the overall mean for these three variables was M=4.94, SD=1.83 . . . Which is to say, people endorse the midpoint of the scale composite: “somewhat boring, somewhat entertaining, and somewhat enjoyable.”

Five studies had means below the midpoint, four had means above it.

I see no empirical support for the core claim that “participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves.”

Here are the data:

Nelson writes:

Out of 663 participants, MOST (69.6%) [or, as we would say in statistics, "70%" --- ed.] said that the experience was somewhat enjoyable or better.

If I were trying out a new manipulation and wanted to ensure that participants typically DID enjoy it, I would be satisfied with the distribution above. I would infer people typically enjoy being alone in a room with nothing to do but think.

Nelson concludes:

If readers think that the electric shock finding is interesting conditional on the (I think, erroneous) belief that it is not enjoyable to be alone in thought, then the finding is surely even more interesting if we instead take the data at face value: Some people choose to self-administer an electric shock despite enjoying sitting alone with their thoughts.

He also asked the authors if they had any comments on his reaction that their paper showed a finding opposite to what they’d claimed, and the authors sent him a reply in which they wrote that they “were continually surprised by these results” which reminded me of our earlier discussion of how to interpret surprising results.

Reconciling the article and the criticism

It’s a challenge to go back and forth reading the original article, Nelson’s comments, and Wilson and Gilbert’s reply. I agree with Nelson that it seems incorrect to state that people did not enjoy being alone with their thoughts, given that more than two-thirds of the people in the study reported the experience to be “somewhat enjoyable” or better. On the other hand, Wilson and Gilbert point out that “The percentage who admitted cheating [doing other activities beyond just sitting and thinking] ranged from 32% to 54% . . . 67% of men and 25% of women opted to shock themselves rather than ‘just think’ . . .”

The resolution, I think, is that we have to avoid the tendency to think deterministically. There’s variation! As shown in the above histogram, some people reported thinking to be “not at all enjoyable,” some reported it to be “somewhat enjoyable,” and there were a lot of people in the middle. Given this, it’s not so helpful to make statements about what people “typically” enjoy (as in the abstract of the paper).

Finally, let me return to my original point about respecting the data. In their reply, Wilson and Gilbert write, “we believe the preponderance of the evidence does not favor Professor Nelson’s claim that most people in our studies enjoyed thinking.” Looking at the above graph, it all seems to depend on how you categorize the “somewhat enjoyable” response.

Perhaps it’s most accurate to say that (a) two-thirds of respondents find thinking to be at least somewhat enjoyable, and, at the same time, (b) two-thirds of respondents find thinking to be no more than somewhat enjoyable! The glass is both two-thirds empty (according to Wilson et al.) and two-thirds full (according to Nelson).

P.S. Nelson credits the paper to Science, the journal where it is published. I think it’s more appropriate to credit the authors, so I’ve done it that way (see brackets in the first paragraph of quoted material above). The authors are the ones who do the work; the journal is just a vessel where it is published.

P.P.S. Zach wins the thread with this comment:

I enjoy thinking, but I can do that any time. Put me in a room with a way to safely shock myself and I’ll take the opportunity to experiment.

The post When there’s a lot of variation, it can be a mistake to make statements about “typical” attitudes appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

mp3:
GORILLA VS. BEAR SEPTEMBER 2014 MIX (81 mb)

01 dd elle :: tell me 00:00
02 Wet :: don’t wanna be your girl (PURPLE remix) 04:03
03 Doss :: the way i feel (recycle culture’s slow emotion reel) 07:33
04 Kero Kero Bonito :: sick beat (danny l. harle remix) 14:18
05 Dreamtrak :: odyssey, pt. 2 (a. g. cook remix) 17:09
06 Kumisolo :: kung fu boy 20:40
07 Katie Rush :: dangerous luv (feat. samantha urbani) 23:03
08 Puro Instinct :: 6 of swords 26:51
09 Alina Baraz & Galimatias :: fantasy 30:17
10 Mr Twin Sister :: rude boy 33:50
11 SALES :: getting it on 37:06
12 Andy Stott :: violence 39:56
13 Thom Yorke :: pink section 46:20
14 Grouper :: call across rooms 48:47
15 Jon Hopkins :: form by firelight (with raphaelle standell) 51:30

[check our previous monthly mixes]

Tesla founder Elon Musk made an ambiguous post on Twitter yesterday evening, announcing that the company will unveil something on October 9:

"About time to unveil the D and something else," the tweet stated. It was accompanied by a shadowy picture of what appears to be the nose of a Tesla Model S peeking out from a half-open garage. The garage has the letter "D" emblazoned on it. Beneath the car, the date "October 9, 2014" is written.

We know that the next vehicle due out from Tesla is an SUV known as the Model X; after that, the company has previously said that it will turn its focus to releasing a lower priced entry-level vehicle it’s calling the Model 3 (speculation prior to the Model 3’s announcement was that the entry-level car would be called the "Model E," but this was changed to avoid a trademark dispute—and possibly also to avoid Tesla’s line-up spelling out S-E-X). The headlights, fog lights, and nose cone in the poster do indeed look like those on the Model S. Compare them to this still from our Model S video review:

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Ministerio del Interior 2014

James Comey, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, said Thursday he was "concerned" over Apple and Google marketing smart phones that can't be searched by law enforcement.

"What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law," Comey told reporters. He said the bureau has reached out to Apple and Google "to understand what they're thinking and why they think it makes sense."

The move to encryption is among the latest aftershocks in the wake of NSA leaker Edward Snowden's revelations about massive US government surveillance.

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NPR: Sagging Pants And The Long History Of ‘Dangerous’ Street Fashion