Month: September 2018

Silicone dish scrubbers

silicone scrubbers work fantastically. They have not worn out, they have not become so fouled or toxic that I’ve had to toss one. There are still 3 others in my kitchen drawer waiting to be employed. The only trick I find to cleaning with these, is that silicone scrubbers don’t hold soap like a sponge does, so I’m either applying soap several times during a big wash-up, or I capture a bowl of soapy water at the beginning of cleaning.

Final Offer

In Mark Slutsky’s short scifi film “Final Offer”, a traffic ticket lawyer awakens in a doorless room and discovers he’s there to make a deal with an interstellar attorney that could affect all life on Earth.

Fixing Facebook

In some sense, the “Mark Zuckerberg production”—as he called Facebook in its early years—has only just begun. Zuckerberg is not yet 35, and the ambition with which he built his empire could well be directed toward shoring up his company, his country, and his name. The question is not whether Zuckerberg has the power to fix Facebook but whether he has the will; whether he will kick people out of his office—with the gusto that he once mustered for the pivot to mobile—if they don’t bring him ideas for preventing violence in Myanmar, or protecting privacy, or mitigating the toxicity of social media. He succeeded, long ago, in making Facebook great. The challenge before him now is to make it good.

Gentrification Is in the Stars

You know it when you see it, or perhaps smell it. Gentrification is that new dog park. It’s the Starbucks on the corner, the yoga studio, and the gradual rise in police presence. But it’s surprisingly hard to track the exact moment when a critical mass of more affluent people move into a neighborhood and tip property values up—the simplest, if not the most universally agreed upon, definition of the “G” word. Traditional public data sources can fail to pick up the rapid transformation that can occur in a community, since their records are usually updated on multi-year cycles. And government registries usually catalogue businesses in broad categories—you’re not going to find artisanal donut parlors or motorcycle lifestyle shops grouped together by the Census Bureau. A new working paper shows how review data can be used to quantify and track neighborhood change, putting a hard spine on what can otherwise be a soft science. Matching up a massive trove of business and service listings from the uber-popular reviews site against changes in housing prices and demographics, they found that reviews appears to work as a real-time forecaster of neighborhood change. You just have to look at the right types of listings.

DARPA $2B AI Campaign

To address the limitations of the first and second wave AI technologies, DARPA seeks to explore new theories and applications that could make it possible for machines to adapt to changing situations. DARPA sees this next generation of AI as a third wave of technological advance, one of contextual adaptation. To better define a path forward, DARPA is announcing today a multi-year investment of more than $2B in new and existing programs called the “AI Next” campaign.

Prime Numbers Patterns

A new analysis has uncovered patterns in primes that are similar to those found in the positions of atoms inside certain crystal-like materials. The discovery may aid research in both mathematics and materials science. “Prime numbers have beautiful structural properties, including unexpected order, hyperuniformity and effective limit-periodic behavior. The primes teach us about a completely new state of matter.”

Extreme Bussing

Othea Loggan came to Chicago and got a job bussing tables and washing dishes at Walker Bros. Original Pancake House in Wilmette. One of his brothers-in-law was the chef. Loggan lived on the South Side but he didn’t mind the long, early morning commute to the North Shore, clear across downtown Chicago and Cook County. He was just happy to be free of Mississippi, where he had grown up poor, one of 10 kids. Walker Bros. was relatively new then, and a fast success, establishing itself in less than 4 years as a breakfast staple for businessmen from Glencoe and hungover graduate students from Northwestern alike. Loggan himself had been in Chicago only 2 weeks. He started March 30, 1964.

Stale Spices

“We’re so used to thinking of spices as powders in our kitchen cabinet, not something that comes from a plant grown by a farmer. Freshness and origin aren’t things that people consider, and I don’t have a good explanation for why that is except to say because that’s the way it’s always been.”

Hoping to change that, in 2017, he launched Burlap & Barrel, a single-origin spice company based in New York City. Frisch works directly with farmers to source the freshest and most interesting local spice varietals around the world, from lip-smackingly tart cured sumac from Gaziantep, Turkey, to Egyptian desert fennel so licoricey-sweet it tastes like candy. His spices, which sometimes sell out days after going on sale online, are now used in kitchens run by the likes of Daniel Humm, Danny Bowien and David Chang.

BoJack Horseman history

The email from Raphael Bob-Waksberg to Lisa Hanawalt on March 22, 2010, was to the point: “Hey, do you have a picture of one of your horse guys, by himself? I came up with this idea for a show I’d like to pitch. Tell me what you think: BoJack the Depressed Talking Horse.” Lisa Hanawalt: I was like, “That sounds too depressing. Can you make something more fun and whimsical?” And he’s like, “What about The Spruce Moose and the Juice Caboose?” And I said, “Oh great, they can have cocktail waitresses called the Spicy Mice.” I think we should still make that show. For kids.