It's a Drone World

“A TV drone flies beside Canada’s Erick Guay during the second practice of the men’s Alpine skiing World Cup downhill race at the Lauberhorn in Wengen, January 12, 2012.” - Reuters (via)

[ed. I think when we look back on this decade the rise of drones (and robotics in general) will be viewed as one of the most significant developments affecting the future, on par with cloud computing and digital money as game changing technologies. Certainly the art of warfare has been altered forever. Eventually, everyone will have drones deployed for some purpose or another (countries, corporations, scientists, terrorist, etc. etc.). Want to spy on your ex-wife,  pre-plan your next hiking trip, have your pizza delivered hot and fresh? There will be a drone business that can help you with that -- probably already is. In any case, near-surface airspace will soon get a lot more crowded (not to mention personal airspace, when hummingbird and insect drones are perfected.]

h/t New Inquiry

Gaston La Touche (French, 1854-1913), Pardon in Brittany, 1896. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago.

via:

photo by trunk xu for numéro china, september 2012.
via:

by jamie heiden
via:

Are Hackers Heroes?

On the last day of June of this year, a tech website called Redmond Pie posted two articles in quick succession that, on their face, had nothing to do with each other. The first, with the headline “Root Nexus 7 on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, Unlock Bootloader, And Flash ClockworkMod Recovery,” was a tutorial on how to modify the software—mainly in order to gain control of the operating system—in Google’s brand-new tablet computer, the Nexus 7, a device so fresh that it hadn’t yet shipped to consumers.

The second headline was slightly more decipherable to the casual reader: “NewOS X Tibet Malware Puts in an Appearance, Sends User’s Personal Information to a Remote Server.” That story, which referred to the discovery of a so-called “Trojan horse” computer virus on certain machines in Tibet, pointed out that Apple computers were no longer as impervious to malicious viruses and worms as they had been in the past and that this attack, which targeted Tibetan activists against the Chinese regime, was not random but political. When the Tibetan activists downloaded the infected file, it would secretly connect their computers to a server in China that could monitor their activities and capture the contents of their machines. (The Redmond Pie writer speculated that the reason Apple computers were targeted in this attack was that they were the preferred brand of the Dalai Lama.)

In fact, the Nexus 7 story and the Tibetan Trojan horse story were both about the same thing: hacking and hackers, although the hacking done by the Nexus 7 hackers—who contribute to an online website called Rootzwiki—was very different from that done by the crew homing in on the Tibetan activists. Hacking and hackers have become such inclusive, generic terms that their meaning, now, must almost always be derived from the context. Still, in the last few years, after the British phone-hacking scandal, after Anonymous and LulzSec, after Stuxnet, in which Americans and Israelis used a computer virus to break centrifuges and delay the Iranian nuclear project, after any number of identity thefts, that context has tended to accent the destructive side of hacking.

In February, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg observed in his letter to potential shareholders before taking the company public that Facebook embraced a philosophy called “The Hacker Way,” he was not being provocative but, rather, trying to tip the balance in the other direction. (He was also drawing on the words of the veteran technology reporter Steven Levy, whose 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution was the first serious attempt to understand the subculture that gave us Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Gates.) According to Zuckerberg:

In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world…. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it—often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Though it might seem neutral, the word “fix” turns out to be open to interpretation. Was the new Google Nexus 7 tablet broken before it was boxed up and shipped? Not to Google or to the vast majority of people who ordered it, but yes to those who saw its specifications and noticed, for instance, that it had a relatively small amount of built-in memory, and wanted to enable the machine to accept an external storage device that could greatly expand its memory. Similarly, there was nothing wrong with the original iPhone—it worked just fine. But for users hoping to load software that was not authored or vetted by Apple, and those who didn’t want to be restricted to a particular service provider (AT&T), and those who liked to tinker and considered it their right as owners to do so, the various “jailbreaks”—or ways of circumventing such restrictions—provided by hackers have addressed and, in Zuckerberg’s term, “fixed” these issues.1

Apple, on the other hand, did not see it this way and argued to the United States Copyright Office that modifying an iPhone’s operating system constituted copyright infringement and thus was illegal. In a ruling in 2010, the Copyright Office disagreed, stating that there was “no basis for copyright law to assist Apple in protecting its restrictive business model.” Copyright laws vary country to country, though, and already this year three people in Japan have been arrested under that country’s recently updated Unfair Competition Prevention Act for modifying—i.e., hacking—Nintendo game consoles. As for the Nexus 7 hackers, they need not worry: Google’s Android software is “open source,” meaning that it is released to the public, which is free to fiddle with it, to an extent.

The salient point of Mark Zuckerberg’s paean to hackers, and the reason he took the opportunity to inform potential shareholders, is that hacking can, and often does, improve products. It exposes vulnerabilities, supplies innovations, and demonstrates both what is possible and what consumers want. Still, as Zuckerberg also intimated, hacking has a dark side, one that has eclipsed its playful, sporty, creative side, especially in the popular imagination, and with good reason. Hacking has become the preferred tool for a certain kind of thief, one who lifts money from electronic bank accounts and sells personal information, particularly as it relates to credit cards and passwords, in a thriving international Internet underground. Hacking has also become a method used for extortion, public humiliation, business disruption, intellectual property theft, espionage, and, possibly, war.

by Sue Halpern, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Photo: Paul Grover/Rex Features/AP Images

Proportion Control

No other number attracts such a fevered following as the golden ratio. Approximately equal to 1.618 and denoted by the Greek letter phi, it’s been canonized as the “Divine Proportion.” Its devotees will tell you it’s ubiquitous in nature, art and architecture. And there are plastic surgeons and financial mavens who will tell you it’s the secret to pretty faces and handsome returns.

Not bad for the second-most famous irrational number. In your face, pi!

It even made a cameo appearance in “The Da Vinci Code.” While trying to decipher the clues left at the murder scene in the Louvre that opens the novel, the hero, Robert Langdon, “felt himself suddenly reeling back to Harvard, standing in front of his ‘Symbolism in Art’ class, writing his favorite number on the chalkboard. 1.618.”

Langdon tells his class that, among other astonishing things, da Vinci “was the first to show that the human body is literally made of building blocks whose proportional ratios always equal phi.”

“Don’t believe me?” Langdon challenged. “Next time you’re in the shower, take a tape measure.” 

A couple of football players snickered. 

“Not just you insecure jocks,” Langdon prompted. “All of you. Guys and girls. Try it. Measure the distance from the tip of your head to the floor. Then divide that by the distance from your belly button to the floor. Guess what number you get.” 

“Not phi!” one of the jocks blurted out in disbelief. 

“Yes, phi,” Langdon replied. “One-point-six-one-eight. [...] My friends, each of you is a walking tribute to the Divine Proportion.”

I tried it. I’m 6-foot-1, and my belly button is 44 inches from the floor. So my ratio is 73 inches divided by 44 inches, which is about 1.66. That’s about 2.5 percent bigger than 1.618. But then again, nobody ever mistook me for Apollo.

The golden ratio originated in the ideal world of geometry. The Pythagoreans discovered it in their studies of regular pentagons, pentagrams and other geometric figures. A few hundred years later, Euclid gave the first written description of the golden ratio in connection with the problem of dividing a line segment into two unequal parts, such that the whole is to the long part as the long is to the short.

Donald Duck in MathMagicLand

by Steven Strogatz, NY Times |  Read more:
Image via:

Avro Ko in the Steelworks Lofts, Brooklyn
via:

First beers handed out at Octoberfest
via:

Apple’s Scorched-Earth IPhone Fight With Google

In the article “Easter Island’s End,” Jared Diamond described the steps that led to the deforestation of a subtropical, fertile paradise.

Over a few hundred years, inhabitants used the gigantic palm trees around them as rolling surfaces on which to haul stones; they then used more trees to lever the stones into place on platforms. Competing chieftains built larger statues on larger platforms. Eventually, the last tree was gone and the island was covered only in grasses and shrubs, leading to starvation and even cannibalism. Diamond explains that there was no signal crisis:

“Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.”

The Easter Islanders’ incremental march toward disaster is an apt analogy for Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s decision to keep Google Maps off the newly released iPhone 5, the latest of a series of steps toward control by powerful actors over users’ online behavior. The question is whether the pattern is clear enough for regulatory authorities to take action.  (...)

Users of the iPhone whose maps application was swapped out when they upgraded to Apple’s iOS 6 platform have had a glimpse of what the carriers’ power could entail: Just as Apple chose to remove its reliable maps app that used Google (GOOG)’s data when the two companies’ business relationship became complicated, the cable companies can make services such as Netflix subject to data caps while exempting their own online video offerings. Users may be irritated, of course, but there’s nothing they can do about it.

Anil Dash, the co-founder of the media and technology consulting firm Activate.com, said last week that the move against Google Maps was the first time Apple had put “boxing out competitors” ahead of serving the interests of iPhone users. Similarly, a vertically integrated, market-dominating carrier such as Comcast could now employ its usage caps (which wouldn’t necessarily apply to its own or affiliated services) to effectively squeeze out competitors providing information, entertainment or connections that Comcast didn’t want to support.

by Susan P. Crawford, Bloomberg |  Read more:
Photo: CNET

Laura DeAngelis
via:

Virtual Diving with Google Maps

Millions of people will be able to take a virtual dive on the Great Barrier Reef via Google Maps on Wednesday as part of a pioneering underwater scientific expedition.

The Catlin Seaview Survey will allow internet users to share the discoveries of scientists who are using new technology to study the composition and health of the Great Barrier Reef.

Up to 50,000 high-definition panoramic images of the reef will be taken by the world's first tablet-operated underwater camera and geolocated. When the rapid-fire images are linked together, users will be able to choose a location along the reef, dip underwater and go for a viewer-controlled virtual dive using the street view feature of Google Maps.

Dives already completed at three islands on the Great Barrier Reef, as well as sites in Hawaii and the Philippines, will be available today, with more images virtual dive sites added as the scientists map 20 separate reefs along the 2,300km system to a depth of 100m.

by Jessica Aldred, The Guardian |  Read more: 

Photograph: Catlin Seaview Survey

Download, Print, Fire

[ed. Legal issues surrounding 3-D weapons printing technology.]

Imagine an America in which anyone can download and print a gun in their own home. They wouldn't need a license, a background check, or much technical knowledge, just a 3D printer. That's the vision a cadre of industrious libertarians are determined to turn into reality.

Last week, Wiki Weapon, a project to create the first fully printable plastic gun received the $20,000 in funding it needed to get off the ground. The project's goal is not to develop and sell a working gun, but rather to create an open-source schematic (or blueprint) that individuals could download and use to print their own weapons at home.

The technology that makes this possible is 3D printing, a process during which plastic resin is deposited layer by layer to create a three dimensional object. In the past few years 3D printers have become increasingly affordable, and just last week the first two retail stores selling 3D printers opened in the United States with models ranging from $600 to $2,199. (...)

According to Dave Kopel, the research director of the Independence Institute, it is legal to create pistols, revolvers and rifles at home, although some states are stricter than others. As long as an inventor isn't selling, sharing or trading the weapon, under federal law, a license isn't necessary. Homemade creations also don't need to be registered with the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and are legal for use by the individual who created the weapon.

But there are some exceptions to what can be printed legally. Military-grade weapons like machine guns, rocket launchers, sawed-off shotguns and explosives, as well as concealed firearms (like guns within phones or pens) need prior ATF approval before a manufacturer can create them. Federal law also requires "any other weapon, other than a pistol or revolver, from which a shot is discharged by an explosive if such weapon is capable of being concealed on the person" to be subject to ATF review. Since a potential Wiki Weapon would likely be "any other weapon", the ATF would probably have to approve a prototype, and the bureau has said as much.

Either way, if a fully functional plastic Wiki Weapon is printed, it may be illegal upon creation thanks to an obscure law from the late 1980s. In 1988, Congress passed the Undetectable Firearms Act after the Glock company provoked controversy by selling firearms made with plastic polymers. The technique, which was revolutionary at the time but is common in the industry today, alarmed many gun control advocates who were concerned that plastic guns wouldn't register in airport x-ray machines.

Gun rights advocates remember the uproar as hyperbolic because Glocks do contain metal, and x-ray machines don't even distinguish between metal and plastic. The legacy of the Glock controversy is a law that mandates that all US guns must contain at least 3.7 ounces of steel. However, the law is set to expire in December 2013. If Congress doesn't renew it, Wilson and company wouldn't have to worry about the legislation.

"I haven't felt any real heat yet, but I think it's very possible the project might happen outside of America or the files might be hosted outside of America," said Wilson who is cognizant of the statute. "The point of manufacture might also have to be outside of the United States."

Of course, even if a plastic gun is illegal, it would be incredibly easy to print if a schematic were available. Under US law there's nothing illegal about creating or sharing a schematic for a weapon unless that weapon is copyrighted or patented. Publications like the Anarchists Cookbook and nuclear bomb schematics are available online.

by Alexander Holz, The Guardian |  Read more:

It's Time to Break Up the Euro

Roger Bootle prides himself on being something of a modern-day Nostradamus -- with good reason. In 1999 the British economist predicted a bursting of the dotcom bubble, and in his 2003 book,Money for Nothing, he forecast a worldwide crash in housing that would prove dire for the financial system. A rigorous student of markets, Bootle, 60, is a onetime Oxford don and chief economist for HSBC (HBC) who now runs Capital Economics, a London consulting firm. Operating out of a 19th-century Victorian townhouse near Buckingham Palace, the bald, bespectacled son of a civil servant confidently advises major banks and hedge funds from New York to Beijing. But away from the office he isn't much of a risk-taker. Bootle likes to unwind at England's famous Ascot Racecourse, where he wagers no more than "five or 10 quid just so I have a horse to cheer home."

Today Bootle is betting his professional reputation on another bold contrarian call, one with long-term ramifications for the world economy and global stock markets: He strongly believes that at least a partial breakup of the eurozone is inevitable and that massive changes are coming for the euro, the currency now shared by 17 nations accounting for one-eighth of world GDP.

In July, Bootle and his team won the prestigious Wolfson Economics Prize for providing the best answer to the following question: "If member states leave the Economic and Monetary Union, what is the best way for the economic process to be managed?" In a 114-page report, "Leaving the Euro: A Practical Guide," Bootle delivered a blueprint for the steps a nation should take in exiting the common currency. He also went further, summoning a powerful argument for why an exodus of weak countries is the only solution for Europe's deep malaise.

Bootle is not shy about championing his highly unpopular view. "The euro is a depression-making machine," he tells Fortune. "The politicians keep throwing money to support the weaker nations' debt problem. They never talk about restoring growth. Far from a disaster, a breakup of the euro is the only way to bring back growth and get Europe out of this mess. It can't happen soon enough."

Policymakers continue to take a diametrically opposite approach. Almost without exception, Europe's political leaders and regulators strongly back the euro's survival and generally claim that a breakup would bring economic Armageddon. Optimism that the eurozone will hold rose on Sept. 6, when Mario Draghi, chief of the European Central Bank, announced a giant program for purchasing the sovereign debt of weak eurozone nations. Draghi further stated that "the euro is irreversible." Then, on Sept. 12, a German court approved the country's participation in the European Stability Mechanism, a rescue fund with a lending capacity of $645 billion. Over five trading sessions, the S&P 500 jumped 2.4% in a potent relief rally.

But the continued bailouts are just buying time. Even economists who dread a euro breakup admit that it will probably happen eventually unless Germany and other healthy nations provide far greater support to their weak neighbors. "Europe needs to create federal-style debt shared by all the eurozone members," says Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis. "If that doesn't happen, the eurozone will probably dissolve."

The bet here is that Bootle is right and that the euro will fracture in the next few years. The result will be extremely messy in the immediate aftermath, bringing severe hardship to the exiting countries -- a rash of bankruptcies, giant defaults on sovereign debt, and temporary panic in world stock markets. But the pain that a breakup compresses into a one-time shock will happen anyway if weak nations remain in the euro. It will simply stretch over a number of years and turn out far worse. As Bootle argues, Europe must choose growth, and a split in the euro will bring it back with surprising speed. Let's use his report as a guide for how a successful breakup could play out. (...)

Here's how the mechanics might work if, say, Spain decided to withdraw. The government would announce the decision on a Friday, shortly after the Prime Minister and cabinet reached the decision. It would state that by 12:01 a.m. Monday all wages, bank deposits, pensions, and prices would be reset in pesetas at a 1-to-1 ratio with the euro. Over the weekend, all ATMs and bank branches would be closed and no electronic transfers allowed, to prevent citizens from moving money to, say, Switzerland before the conversion. Bootle recommends that departing nations start printing notes and coins only after the announcement. In the interim all transactions would be via credit or prepaid cash cards. Euros would also be accepted for cash purposes for a fixed period. Starting on Monday morning, the euro would make its debut as a foreign currency. Its value would rise sharply against the new peseta. So a taxi fare priced at two pesetas might go for just one euro within days.

How about the debt issue? Bootle advises nations to re-denominate all sovereign bonds in local currency. The re-denomination really amounts to a default, since the foreign creditors would take big losses. Bootle advocates going further. He wants exiting nations to immediately cease all interest payments and demand a write-down bringing debt to a manageable 60% of GDP. Between the devaluation and the write-down, most creditors would lose 70% of the face value of the bonds. Bootle's argument is that their original value is a pure fiction anyway and a default of that magnitude is inevitable.

by Shaun Tully, CNN Money |  Read more:

Illustration: Shout

Hidden in a Nook, Mastery in Plain Sight

Tiny, hard-to-spot restaurants are a longstanding tradition in Japan, and Ichimura at Brushstroke is steeped in tradition. Mr. Ichimura, 58, practices the Edo-mae style of sushi that he learned decades ago in Tokyo. Developed in street stalls in the era before refrigeration, Edo-mae sushi was made with fish that had often been cured in salt or vinegar, or stored in soy sauce to keep it from spoiling.

Mr. Ichimura’s sushi is a direct descendant of this style, and while he has toned down his use of salt over the years, his fish still offers stronger flavors than are encountered in most New York sushi restaurants. Even the rice, seasoned with a blend of three vinegars, is unusually assertive; it may ruin other sushi for you.

In a phone interview translated by Jamie Graves, Brushstroke’s manager, Mr. Ichimura said he first went to work in a sushi restaurant 42 years ago as a dishwasher. Only after a few years was he permitted, under close supervision, to cut the heads off some fish.

“Nobody actually tells you how to press sushi,” Mr. Graves translated, “so he would do it at night based on watching the chefs do it during the day.” Mr. Ichimura kept a wad of paper in his pocket and when nobody was looking he would copy the motions he had seen: index finger laid over the paper, elbows flexed, he would extend his arms slightly to project a quick, even, gentle pressure. Eventually, still in secrecy, he began to practice after hours with actual fish instead of paper.

He learned the kobu-jime technique, layering fish with kelp, which pulls water from the flesh and leaves behind a umami flavor and a green color. One night, Mr. Ichimura served me fluke that had been prepared that way several days earlier, then carved off a slice of pure white fluke that had arrived just that morning. It was a concise refutation of those who say that sushi chefs don’t do any cooking.

That charge is especially untrue in Mr. Ichimura’s case. He makes the zensai and other cooked dishes that begin each meal. These may include salty fermented tuna, octopus suckers dabbed with wasabi and plum paste, or soy-marinated trout roe on top of tofu skins, so soft they barely hold together during the trip from bowl to mouth.

by Pete Wells, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Hiroko Masuike

via:

via:

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances... so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

via:

Limbolo
via:

A Modern Man

I'm a modern man. A man for the millenium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multicultural postmodern deconstructionist, politically, anatomically, and ecologically incorrect. I've been uplinked and downloaded, I've been inputted and outsourced. I know the upside of downsizing I know the downside of upgrading. I'm a high tech lo-life. A cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, bi-coastal multitasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond. I'm new wave but I'm old school and my inner child is outward bound. I'm a hotwired, heatseaking, warmhearted cool customer, voice activated and biodegradable. I interface with my database and my database is in cyberspace, so I'm interactive, I'm hyperactive, and from time to time I'm radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, riding the wave, dodging the bullet, and pushing the envelope. I'm on point, on task, on message, and off drugs. I got no need for coke and speed. I got no urge to binge and purge. I'm in the moment, on the edge, over the top, but under the radar. A high concept, low profile, medium range ballistic missionary. A streetwise smartbomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties; I tell power lies; I take power naps; I take victory laps. I'm a totally ongoing bigfoot, slamdunk rain maker with a pro-active outreach, a raging workaholic, a working rage-a-holic, out of rehab and in denial. I got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant, and a personal angenda. You can't shut me up, you can't dumb me down, cause I'm tireless and I'm wireless. I'm an alpha-male on beta-blockers. I'm a non-believer and an overacheiver, laid-back but fashion foward, up front, down home, low rent, high mantinence, supersize, long lasting, high definition, fast acting, oven ready, and built to last. I'm a hands on, footloose, knee-jerk headcase, prematurely postraumatic, and I have a love child who sends me hate mail. But I'm feeling; I'm caring; I'm healing; I'm sharing; a supportive, bonding, nurturing, primary caregiver. My output is down, but my income is up. I take a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash flow. I read junk-mail; I eat junk food; I buy junk bonds; I watch trash sports. I'm gender specific, captial intensive, user friendly, and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex; I like tough love; I use the f-word in my email, and the software on my hard drive is hardcore; no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a minimall; I bought a minivan at a megastore. I eat fast food in the slow lane. I'm toll free, bite size, ready to wear, and I come in all sizes; a fully equipped, factory authorized, hospital tested, clinically proven, scientifically formulated medical miracle. I've been pre-washed, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double wrapped, vacuum packed, and I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I'm a rude dude but I'm the real deal, lean and mean, cocked, locked, and ready to rock; rough, tough, and hard to bluff. I take it slow; I go with the flow; I ride with the tide; I got glide in my stride; driving and moving, sailing and spinning, jiving and grooving, wailing and winning. I don't snooze, so I don't lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hardy and lunchtime is crunchtime. I'm hanging in, there ain't no doubt, and I'm hanging tough, over and out.

~ George Carlin

Sometimes Formica Beats White Tablecloths

The last time I ate in a four-star white-tablecloth restaurant, I was frustrated and unhappy. (Bear with me; I’m not asking for sympathy.)

This wasn’t an isolated incident: It simply isn’t what I want anymore. It’s become painful, not in the visiting-the-dentist sense, but in the “you have to go to synagogue; it’s Yom Kippur” sense, a long, drawn-out affair in which even the obviously beautiful and enjoyable parts — the $10,000-a-week flower arrangements, the custom glassware and china and sometimes even the carefully prepared if almost always overly subtle (to my taste) food — were overwhelmed by the sheer tedium.

These are temples of ceremony, with (normally absent) chefs as priests; they’re circuses without clowns or trapezes.

Start with the obligatory greeting. Even done well, it can feel white-tooth phony; done badly, you feel slighted. Move on to the choices of water. Really? We have to talk about that?

The drink order. The presentation of the menus and then the wine list. The visit of the wine guy, if you appear as if you’ll open your wallet even further. The discussion of the menu. The waiting to order. The opening of the wine, the flourish, the tasting, the nod, the waiting for the wine guy to leave.

The waiting for the amuse-bouches, which were originally meant to keep you happy while you were waiting for those first few things to happen and now usually happen long after you’ve already become grumpy because, after all, it’s a restaurant and you’re hungry. (Whatever happened to a few pieces of salami and some olives sitting on the table, or a couple of pickles, even?)

Three hours later, there is no sense of wonder or excitement or even an attack on your hunger; your appetite simply diminishes and then gives up. Nor is there a single conversation between you and your companion(s) that is left uninterrupted for more than five minutes. All this for $200.

There are, I think, better entertainments. If the food isn’t mind-blowing, what’s the point?

Shame on me, I know, for failing to enjoy something so luxurious. But this isn’t the Grand Canyon; unless each time somehow surpasses the time before, it loses its luster.

by Mark Bittman, NY Times | Read more:

Illustration:  James Yang