Wednesday, November 14, 2012
As Not Seen on TV
[ed. Ouch.]
Guy Fieri, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? Have you pulled up one of the 500 seats at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar and ordered a meal? Did you eat the food? Did it live up to your expectations?Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,” did your mind touch the void for a minute?
Did you notice that the menu was an unreliable predictor of what actually came to the table? Were the “bourbon butter crunch chips” missing from your Almond Joy cocktail, too? Was your deep-fried “boulder” of ice cream the size of a standard scoop?
What exactly about a small salad with four or five miniature croutons makes Guy’s Famous Big Bite Caesar (a) big (b) famous or (c) Guy’s, in any meaningful sense?
Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are? If you hadn’t come up with the recipe yourself, would you ever guess that the shiny tissue of breading that exudes grease onto the plate contains either pretzels or smoked almonds? Did you discern any buttermilk or brine in the white meat, or did you think it tasted like chewy air?
Why is one of the few things on your menu that can be eaten without fear or regret — a lunch-only sandwich of chopped soy-glazed pork with coleslaw and cucumbers — called a Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, when it resembles that item about as much as you resemble Emily Dickinson?
When you have a second, Mr. Fieri, would you see what happened to the black bean and roasted squash soup we ordered?
Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?
At your five Johnny Garlic’s restaurants in California, if servers arrive with main courses and find that the appetizers haven’t been cleared yet, do they try to find space for the new plates next to the dirty ones? Or does that just happen in Times Square, where people are used to crowding?
If a customer shows up with a reservation at one of your two Tex Wasabi’s outlets, and the rest of the party has already been seated, does the host say, “Why don’t you have a look around and see if you can find them?” and point in the general direction of about 200 seats?
What is going on at this new restaurant of yours, really?
by Pete Wells, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times
The Secret History of the Aeron Chair
The Aeron was a throne perfectly tailored to Silicon Valley’s vanities. With a frame of high-tech molded plastic, a skin of woven plastic fibers pulled taut, and mechanics that accommodated slouchy rebels, the chair flattered the people who bought it. It was the best engineering money could buy, and it seemed purpose-built for squeaky-voiced billionaires inventing the future in front of a computer. But the Aeron’s origin story isn’t so simple. The apotheosis of the office chair—and perhaps the only one ever to become a recognizable and coveted brand name among cubicle-dwellers—was actually the unexpected fruit of a 10-year effort to create better furniture for the elderly.
One the Aeron’s designers was Bill Stumpf, the son of a gerontology nurse and a preternaturally keen observer of human behavior. So he was well primed in the late 1970s, when the American furniture company Herman Miller began casting about for growth prospects and hired Stumpf and Don Chadwick—who had done several pieces for Herman Miller—to investigate the potential of furniture for the elderly. It seemed like a tantalizing market opportunity. The American populace was aging quickly,assisted living facilities were rare, and hospitals lacked ergonomic furniture suited to long-term care. In each environment, Stumpf and Chadwick observed the surest sign of an opportunity: furniture being used in unintended ways. The homely workhorse common in both medical and residential settings was the La-Z-Boy. In hospitals, the elderly often got dialysis in semireclined La-Z-Boys; at home they spent hours in them watching TV. “The chair becomes the center of one’s universe. These sorts of realizations at the time weren’t just overlooked, they weren’t [deemed] important,” says Clark Malcolm, who helped manage the project. Those observation studies and focus groups “made Bill and Don focus on seating, in a way they never had before.”
The La-Z-Boy was terribly suited to both settings. The elderly, with weakened legs, had to back up to the chair and simply fall backward. The lever for reclining was awkward to reach and hard to engage. And, worst of all, the foam stuffing, often upholstered in vinyl, spread the sitter’s weight unevenly while retaining body heat and moisture—potentially causing bedsores.
Stumpf and Chadwick addressed all of those problems with the Sarah chair, which was finally completed in 1988, as part of a larger study of in-home medical equipment dubbed Metaforms. To solve the falling-backward problem, they settled on a footrest that, when closed, folded in under the seat, leaving the sitter with room to curl her legs under the chair as she sat down, thus bracing herself. When a sitter was fully reclined, fins flipped up, supporting her feet—like the fins on a wheelchair—and keeping them from falling asleep. The lever was banished in favor of a pneumatic control inspired by the recline buttons found on airplane seats.
But the chair’s greatest innovation was hidden: Its foam cushions were supported not by an upholstered wooden box, as was typical at the time, but by a span of plastic fabric stretched across a plastic frame. The foam could thus be thinner and more able to mold to the body. And because the foam’s backing was exposed to air, the design mitigated heat build-up.
“People became emotionally attached to that chair,” says Gary Miller, who headed Herman Miller’s R&D department at the time and eventually oversaw the Aeron project. Everyone who sat in it seemed to mention a parent or a sibling who needed it. But Herman Miller’s management balked at how futuristic it was. No one could figure out how to sell it, since there weren’t any stores selling high-design furniture to the elderly. The company was in far greater need of high-margin office chairs, so they killed the Sarah.
Clive Thompson: The Folding Game
—Erika Anderson for Guernica
Guernica: How would you describe the evolution of video games?
Clive Thompson: When games started out, they were very, very simple affairs, and that was partly just technical—you couldn’t do very much. They had like 4K of memory. And so the games started off really not needing instructions at all. The first Pong game had one instruction. It was, “Avoid missing ball for high score.” So it was literally just that: don’t fail to hit the ball. I remember when I read it, it was actually a confusing construction: avoid missing ball for high score. It’s weirdly phrased, as if it were being translated from Swedish or something, you know? But they didn’t know what they were doing.
But what started happening very early on was that if you were in the arcades as I was—I’m 44 in October, so I was right at that age when these games were coming out—the games were really quite hard in a way, and because they were taking a quarter from you, their goal was to have you stop playing quickly because they need more money. They ramped up in difficulty very quickly, like the next wave is harder, and the third wave is unbelievably harder. And so you had to learn how to play them by trial and error with yourself but you only had so much money. And so what you started doing was you started observing other people and you started talking to all the other people. What you saw when you went to a game was one person playing and a semi-circle of people around them and they were all talking about what was going on, to try to figure out how to play the game. And they would learn all sorts of interesting strategy.
So the early stuff was literally strategy, and they discovered some very clever things, like in Asteroids, there was this strategy called lurking, whereby if you parked, if you got rid of almost all the asteroids except for one little one that would be sort of soaring through the air, you could hide in the corner of the screen and it would take a long time for it to come anywhere close to hitting. You could use this strategy to hunt for hours. You would sit there for hours getting more and more points.
So there are all these little strategies like that. But there was also like weird little bugs inside the game that weren’t intentionally put there, that people would discover. Like there were certain situations when you were being chased by the red ghosts of Pac-Man, certain places on the board where you could suddenly go racing right through the ghost without being hit. That was not intentional, that’s just a bug, and there are little bugs like that. And these are incredibly difficult things to notice, I mean the designers didn’t notice them. But if you have tens of thousands of kids in these arcades talking and observing and sharing notes, it’s a little bit like a scientific process whereby everyone notices one little fact and you slowly compile them into a theory of gravity or a theory of how cell biology works.
What started happening is that the game designers began to intentionally put secrets inside the games. The first one was Adventure, it was a game on the Atari 2600, and back then you didn’t know who had made the game, there were no credits anywhere. The designers would be hired for six months to produce a game and they were dispatched and it was this freelance economy, and they didn’t like not having any credit, so this guy decided to hide the credits inside the game. And he made a secret room inside Adventure and the only way to find it if you’re like stumbling around, trying to find something and get out without getting killed by these dragons, there’s a single pixel on one room—you might not even notice it, right?—but if you picked it up, you could go through a wall—an unmarked area in a wall—and get to this room, and inside the room it would have his name spelled out. It was incredible. There were no clues at all, but somehow kids started finding this. Someone would blunder through the wall, and they’d tell someone else and it just went through the grapevine and that’s the first example of an intentional secret put inside a game that was discovered by this sort of groupthink process that kids all playing and talking in school about what’s going on.
And that was sort of the beginning of what became an arms race, because essentially, as more kids started talking to each other and sharing information, any secrets inside the game would get discovered very quickly. And so the game designers started responding by putting more stuff inside the game that was harder to find, because they knew that kids were not just playing the game by themselves but playing it collectively, and so they weren’t just designing a game for one player, but for a 100 or 1,000 networked players, and a 100 or 1,000 people talking to each other is much smarter than one person individually.
by Clive Thompson, Guernica | Read more:
Image from Flickr via billmcclair
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Billionaire's Basements
Poking up at regular intervals, thrusting outwards from their moulded openings as if performing a salute to passers-by, are lines of angled conveyor belts. Slowly rumbling away, they reach high above the trees, pouring a continuous stream of rubble into the cradles of awaiting skips. You would be forgiven for thinking that the residents of the royal borough have established a kind of coal-mining cottage industry. Or maybe they're digging for gold?
"It is an absolute disgrace," says one elderly resident, out walking her freshly coiffed miniature poodle in between the rows of hoarded-off skips. "It feels like they've turned Kensington into a war zone."
The reason for all this quarrying is not the discovery of a coal-rich seam beneath the Wrenaissance streets, but the local enthusiasm for subterranean development. Over the past four years, this local authority alone has granted planning applications for more than 800 basement extensions, refused 90, and has a further 20 outstanding. It is the most densely populated borough in the country, with no room to build outwards, and no permission to build upwards – so the only way is down.
But this desire for digging isn't to everyone's liking. Last week a furore erupted when plans were released for a four-storey basement beneath a 19th-century schoolhouse in Knightsbridge, for Canadian former TV mogul David Graham.
Tripling the size of the property, this gargantuan pleasure cave would house a ballroom and swimming pool, with hot tub, sauna and massage room, as well as 15 bedrooms, seven bathrooms and 20 toilets, plunging deeper into the earth than the height of neighbouring homes.
"These plans are absolutely monstrous and unnecessary," said one neighbour, the Duchess of St Albans. "It's just absolute greed. No one needs that much space. Quite apart from that, the commotion is going to be dreadful."
"This is totally out of keeping with the relatively small size of other houses in the area," agreed a spokesman for the nearby Milner Street Area Residents Association. "Why should we all suffer just so one man can indulge his fantasy?"
Such fantasies are not restricted to this one man alone. The past five years have seen sprawling underground leisure lairs excavated across west London, from Knightsbridge to Belgravia, Fulham to Notting Hill. They contain playrooms and cinemas, bowling alleys and spas, wine cellars and gun rooms – and even a two-storey climbing wall. It is leading to a kind of iceberg architecture, a humble mansion on the surface just the visible peak of a gargantuan underworld, with subterranean possibilities only limited by the client's imagination.
"Houses in this part of London are trophy asset purchases," says Peter Preedy, associate director of residential property at Jones Lang LaSalle. "People don't want to move out, so they have to find a way of bringing everything they want into their homes. These mega basements are not about increasing the value of property – they are very personal things, which might in fact prove difficult to sell on."
One of the most personal plans – which itself set the precedent for this recent burrowing frenzy – dates back to 2008, when Foxtons founder Jon Hunt received permission for the most audacious basement of all, a colossal cellar to trump even the swankiest Beverley Hills crib.
Having bought a palatial villa on Kensington Palace Gardens, the most expensive street in the country, he was not to be outdone by his neighbours. Lakshmi Mittal's nearby "Taj Mittal" already featured an underground complex of Turkish baths and a pool lined with marble from the same quarry as the Taj Mahal. A few doors down, property mogul Leonard Blavatnik had bought up three former Russian Embassy buildings and since added an underground swimming pool, gym, private cinema and extensive garaging.
In a surreal competition of keeping up with the Joneses, billionaire-style, Hunt went one step further into the realms of fantasy. He proposed to dig a 22m-deep hole beneath his garden to house a tennis court, pool and gym, as well as a private museum for his collection of vintage Ferraris. The cavernous chamber would be illuminated from above, through the glass floor of a glistening rooftop infinity pool.
by Oliver Wainwright, The Guardian | Read more:
Illustration: Ben Hasler
The Surveillance State Takes Friendly Fire
For those of us who have been less bullish about the prospects of radical transparency, the serialized revelations that have unfolded since Friday—when Petraeus, who left the military as a four-star general, resigned from the C.I.A. because of an affair—are, to say the least, honeyed with irony. In the decade following September 11, 2001, the national-security establishment in this country devised a surveillance apparatus of genuinely diabolical creativity—a cross-hatch of legal and technical innovations that (in theory, at any rate) could furnish law enforcement and intelligence with a high-definition early-warning system on potential terror events. What it’s delivered, instead, is the tawdry, dismaying, and wildly entertaining spectacle that ensues when the national-security establishment inadvertently turns that surveillance apparatus on itself.
Of course, right now, the events and personages joined in a scandal that has already achieved an indelible Twitter moniker—#LovePentagon—are anything but transparent: we don’t yet know the name of the zealous, shirtless F.B.I. agent, or whether General John Allen sent thirty thousand pages of “inappropriate” e-mails to unpaid social liaison Jill Kelley, or merely several hundred “flirtatious” ones. But all this sordid laundry will come out soon enough, in part because of the Rottweiler tenacity of those of us in the press corps, but in part, also, because that is the nature of private affairs in a digital age. Eventually, they out—or, as Petraeus observed at the In-Q-Tel summit, “Every byte left behind reveals information.”
It would appear that Petraeus and his hagiographer-turned-running-mate-turned-mistress, Paula Broadwell, took precautions to avoid discovery of their relationship. They maintained multiple “alias” e-mail accounts and, according to the Associated Press, may have borrowed a bit of tradecraft from the Al Qaeda playbook—sharing an e-mail account, and saving messages for one another in a Draft folder, rather than running the risk of sending bytes across the ether.
But if we know that kind of subterfuge is being used by terrorists, then it’s almost axiomatically an inadequate counter-surveillance option. It’s not yet clear on precisely what legal authority the F.B.I. obtained access to Broadwell’s e-mail, but under the relevant federal statute, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the government need do little more than ask. Originally passed in 1986, the law is notoriously outdated, and considers any e-mail that is over a hundred and eighty days old to be “abandoned,” meaning that the author of the e-mail no longer has any reasonable expectation that it would remain private. So to obtain access to this e-mail, the F.B.I. doesn’t need a court order; it just needs to ask your e-mail provider. (To obtain more recent e-mail, authorities do need a warrant from a judge.) There is ample evidence that, in practice, this kind of broad authority has been abused. In a series of reports between 2007 and 2010, the F.B.I.’s inspector general has found that in seeking information from private communications providers, agents have often violated their own internal rules and guidelines, and have ensnared civilians who are only peripheral to their searches.
In this instance, the peripheral civilian was the director of the C.I.A. The picture of the F.B.I.’s investigation that emerges is one of a potential abuse of authority and conflict of interest, but also of a concept that would be quite familiar to Petraeus—mission creep. What began as a cyber-crime investigation, initiated at the behest of an F.B.I. agent who was a friend of Jill Kelley, morphs into a national-security investigation when it is discovered that Broadwell is the one sending menacing e-mails, and that she also happens to be consorting, sub-rosa, with America’s top spy.
by Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker | Read more:
If You Go Chasing Rabbits . . .
I knew Shari Basner in 1958 and 1959, in Miss Endler's second-grade classroom in PS 26 in the Bronx. I was a very small and very bashful little boy, and Shari was the loveliest girl on Earth. She had silken chestnut hair and eyes like a fawn and a guileless smile of Crayola Red. Her physical presence awakened in me urges and longings as overpowering as they were indecipherable. I knew certain things, however: that I wished to spend eternity with this person, that we would have children through some mysterious and frightening process, and -- I remember this specifically -- that she would call me "darling."
I was only 7, but not without savvy. And so I promptly developed a two-tiered strategy to deal with these feelings: flight, and paralysis. I never spoke to her unless it was unavoidable, and on those occasions I exhibited the conversational skills of a Pleistocene hominid.
I was relieved of this hideous burden after second grade, as I recalled, when Shari and her family moved away. I never saw her again.
And here she was, on my computer screen. A single hit, but a solid one -- nailed by an account of a conference she'd chaired in 1998. Shari appeared to be an expert in business communications: diversity awareness, team-building, consensus forming, that sort of crap. She is married with kids -- as I am. She lives in Columbia. And this gave me an idea.
I would call her up and invite her to dinner. A date.
Once we were together, I would 'fess up to my crush, 42 years late. We'd laugh and laugh.
And I'd write about it, for Valentine's Day. It would be a dispassionate examination of the origins of romance and the phenomenon of juvenile infatuation.
You know, for science.
I dialed Shari's phone number, but before the first ring, I hung up.
No, that's not why. I am a grown-up now, for cripes' sake.
I simply decided I had not done enough research. I wasn't . . . ready.
The emotional relationships between human males and females can be a complex and imperfect thing, a fact I discovered when I telephoned Prof. Robert Billingham at his home. His wife answered. When I told her that I wished to interview her husband as an expert on the subject of romantic love, she burst out laughing.
At Indiana University, Billingham teaches adolescent and preadolescent human behavior. My crush on Shari, he said, was completely normal and ordinary, even at age 7. This sort of behavior is a matter of evolution and adaptation.
As recently as the 1400s, Billingham said, the median life expectancy was 24 years. "As soon as sexual maturity was in place, it was time to reproduce, or humans would cease to exist. The problem is that human biology hasn't changed one iota since then." We are still genetically programmed to have intense sexual curiosity at 12 or 13. Ages 7 through 11, he said, are a "practice period. The biology is being primed."
But why is it so awkward?
"Have you ever primed a pump? The water doesn't come out in a rush. There are false starts -- gurgles and burps and hiccups."
Yep, that's me, at 7.
by Gene Weingarten, Washington Post (2011) | Read more:
To Birds, Storm Survival Is Only Natural
Yet biologists studying the hurricane’s aftermath say there is remarkably little evidence that birds, or any other countable, charismatic fauna for that matter, have suffered the sort of mass casualties seen in environmental disasters like the BP oil spill of 2010, when thousands of oil-slicked seabirds washed ashore, unable to fly, feed or stay warm.
“With an oil spill, the mortality is way more direct and evident,” said Andrew Farnsworth, a scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “And though it’s possible that thousands of birds were slammed into the ocean by this storm and we’ll never know about it, my gut tells me that didn’t happen.”
To the contrary, scientists said, powerful new satellite tracking studies of birds on the wing — including one that coincided with the height of Hurricane Sandy’s fury — reveal birds as the supreme masters of extreme weather management, able to skirt deftly around gale-force winds, correct course after being blown horribly astray, or even use a hurricane as a kind of slingshot to propel themselves forward at hyperspeed.
“We must remind ourselves that 40 to 50 percent of birds are migratory, often traveling thousands of miles a year between their summer and winter grounds,” said Gary Langham, chief scientist of the National Audubon Society in Washington. “The only way they can accomplish that is to have amazing abilities that are far beyond anything we can do.”
Humans may complain about climate change. Birds do something about it. “Migration, in its most basic sense, is a response to a changing climate,” Dr. Farnsworth said. “It’s finding some way to deal with a changing regime of temperature and food availability.” For birds, cyclones, squalls and other meteorological wild cards have always been a part of the itinerant’s package, and they have evolved stable strategies for dealing with instability.
“With an oil spill, the mortality is way more direct and evident,” said Andrew Farnsworth, a scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “And though it’s possible that thousands of birds were slammed into the ocean by this storm and we’ll never know about it, my gut tells me that didn’t happen.”
To the contrary, scientists said, powerful new satellite tracking studies of birds on the wing — including one that coincided with the height of Hurricane Sandy’s fury — reveal birds as the supreme masters of extreme weather management, able to skirt deftly around gale-force winds, correct course after being blown horribly astray, or even use a hurricane as a kind of slingshot to propel themselves forward at hyperspeed.
“We must remind ourselves that 40 to 50 percent of birds are migratory, often traveling thousands of miles a year between their summer and winter grounds,” said Gary Langham, chief scientist of the National Audubon Society in Washington. “The only way they can accomplish that is to have amazing abilities that are far beyond anything we can do.”
Humans may complain about climate change. Birds do something about it. “Migration, in its most basic sense, is a response to a changing climate,” Dr. Farnsworth said. “It’s finding some way to deal with a changing regime of temperature and food availability.” For birds, cyclones, squalls and other meteorological wild cards have always been a part of the itinerant’s package, and they have evolved stable strategies for dealing with instability.
by Natalie Angier, NY Times | Read more:
Movie Review
“Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets, and then teams up with three strangers to kill again."
~ Synopsis of a famous movie. You may have heard of it?
~ Synopsis of a famous movie. You may have heard of it?
via: Pacific Standard
Panic Attack Leads to Golfer's First PGA Victory
What happened next was one of the more frightening — and remarkable — rounds of golf ever caught on video. Beljan, 28, endured a five-hour stress test, staggering through 18 holes at the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals Classic in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. He sat down in the grass to catch his breath. Medical personnel in his gallery monitored his racing pulse. The fear of a possible heart attack dominated his thoughts.
He carded a 64, the second-lowest score of his rookie season, to take the lead, then left the grounds in an ambulance.
He spent the night in a hospital, with machines hooked up to his limbs and his golf shoes still on his feet. A battery of tests revealed nothing physically wrong with him. It was a panic attack.
And when Beljan was released on Saturday, he decided to put his nerves to the test for the final 36 holes.
When he returned to the course, he said, “I was crying on the range because I was so afraid these feelings would come back.”
For the next two rounds, Beljan fought bone-crushing fatigue and worry about his health to hang on for his first PGA Tour victory, a triumph over the most mental of games.
“I was just thinking about my health, one shot at a time, one hole at a time,” he said Monday in a telephone interview from his home in Mesa, Ariz. “And shoot, it worked out pretty well.”
Monday, November 12, 2012
Brad And Angie Go To Meet The African Pee Generator Girls
She put her pen down and thoughtfully chewed the silky inside of her left cheek. She stared hard at the photo on her iPod of those beautiful, strong young African women who had just invented this amazing generator that made electricity out of human urine. She shook her head. It was amazing the things that people did in the face of adversity. She continued shaking her head, trying to comprehend the humanity of humanity.
"Be careful shaking your head," said her son Maddox, who was sitting on the other side of the enormous bed, watching "Homeland" on his iPad. "A shard of your beauty just hit me in the face." She barely heard him. She let her eye cast around the room for a moment. All her children were here, Maddox, Zahara, Shiloh, Pax, each with his or her iPad. Maddox was next to her on the bed, Zahara was stretched out along the foot. Pax was on one corner of a pink velvet couch, Shiloh on the other. All four were staring at their iPads. In the bedroom foyer, Knox and Vivienne were making a cat out of wooden blocks.
***
Angelina traced a pointer finger, its perfect oval nail painted with the Essie new-for-fall dark grey hue called "Stylenomics" lovingly over her own iPad screen. She cleared her throat. "These girls," she said, out loud to no one in particular. "Look at these girls. What amazing, strong young women. They have been through so much, but they still made this amazing generator that creates electricity out of urine." (...)
The door to the man's master bath opened, and there stood Brad Pitt. In one hand was an iPad, in the other, a vaporizer.
“Oh Brad," Angie said, leaping up, running over to him, pulling at the sash of her red Galliano sweater with one hand, clutching her iPad with the other. "You have to look at these amazing inspiring young women. Look at them."
"Oh yeah. I read about that. Pretty cool."
Her face grew stern. "Brad, I need to understand that when you gaze at these girls, you see that their faces glow with fortitude, a stalwart commitment to dignity, and the resolve to create a better life for people everywhere.”
He looked at the photo for a second. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah. I…" Then he paused. He touched the pads of his fingers to his graying beard. “Wait, it says here that four girls created a generator that makes electricity outta pee. Well, there are only three girls in this here picture. Where’s the fourth one?”
"Oh my God," she said. "Brad. Where is she?"
"I don’t know, I was only joking. Hey, it’s okay."
"Brad, I don’t think this is okay. I think it’s not okay, okay?”
"Ange. I think she’s just… not in the picture. I think she just went to, I don’t know, get a soda or something."
She seemed reassured for a minute. She lay one finger on the rosy cushion of her lips, then let it trail down over her round, firm chin, down the length of her neck, and then to the hollow at the base of her throat, where it made worried circles. "Maybe that girl is okay, but if this is a true competitor to petroleum, those girls are in danger. We have to get to them."
The room was silent for a moment except for the sound of clicking.
"Brad," Angelina said. "We're going to Africa."
Fuck, he thought. "Okay," he said.
by Sarah Miller, The Awl | Read more:
3D Photo Booth
Of course, this "photo" booth isn't cheap – 3D printing is still a fairly expensive novelty, especially for prints of this quality. And you can forget about trying to scan fidgety children or pets, as the data would get all skewed from their movements. Check out the prices based on the sizes:
Small (Max. 10cm, 20g), US$264
Medium (Max. 15cm, 50g), US$403
Large (Max. 20cm, 200g), US$528
If that seems a bit steep, the company is offering discounts for couples and families. Before you leave, you'll also be given the chance to adjust the colors of the hair and clothing on the 3D model if you so desire.
Medium (Max. 15cm, 50g), US$403
Large (Max. 20cm, 200g), US$528
If that seems a bit steep, the company is offering discounts for couples and families. Before you leave, you'll also be given the chance to adjust the colors of the hair and clothing on the 3D model if you so desire.
by Jason Falconer, Gizmag | Read more:
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