Month: October 2018

Skibidi

Skibidi is the latest release by the Russian dance/rave/art/electro/satire Little Big. The band/collective have a reputation for their videos, which include the Disney-lawyer-baiting AK-47, Kim Jong Un tribute LollyBomb, the gangster culture Give me your money, to the retirement home Faradenza, the street life With Russia from love, the nightmare-inducing Hateful Love, and the unforgettable {definitely NSFW} piano-playing Big Dick.

Battle for the Home

While the home may be the current battleground in consumer technology, is it actually a distinct product area — a new epoch, if you will? When it came to mobile, it didn’t matter who had won in PCs; Microsoft ended up being an also-ran. The fortunes of Apple, in particular, depend on whether or not this is the case. If it is a truly new paradigm, then it is hard to see Apple succeeding. It has a very nice speaker, but everything else about its product is worse. On the other hand, the HomePod’s close connection to the iPhone and Apple’s overall ecosystem may be its saving grace: perhaps the smartphone is still what matters. More broadly, it may be the case that we are entering an era where there are new battles, the scale of which are closer to skirmishes than all-out wars a la smartphones. What made the smartphone more important than the PC was the fact they were with you all the time. Sure, we spend a lot of time at home, but we also spend time outside (AR?), entertaining ourselves (TV and VR), or on the go (self-driving cars); the one constant is the smartphone, and we may never see anything the scale of the smartphone wars again.

Village Cafe

In this week’s review, Times critic Pete Wells highlights Village Cafe — a restaurant in the back of a tiny Midwood parking lot with hearty Azerbaijani dishes that stand out among similar dining spots in the area. In the 2-star review, Wells commends several of the restaurant’s dishes from the qutab; a flatbread stuffed with minced chicken, lamb, or greens; to the kufta-bozbash soup, a lamb broth containing chickpeas and a single lamb-rice meatball.

NYC Street Tree Map

The NYC Parks department maintains an online map of the city’s street trees — currently 679K mapped trees from 422 different species. Our tree map includes every street tree in New York City as mapped by our TreesCount! 2015 volunteers, and is updated daily by our Forestry team. On the map, trees are represented by circles. The size of the circle represents the diameter of the tree, and the color of the circle reflects its species. You are welcome to browse our entire inventory of trees, or to select an individual tree for more information.

Data Factories

Facebook quite clearly isn’t an industrial site (although it operates multiple data centers with lots of buildings and machinery), but it most certainly processes data from its raw form to something uniquely valuable both to Facebook’s products (and by extension its users and content suppliers) and also advertisers (and again, all of this analysis applies to Google as well): Users are better able to connect with others, find content they are interested in, form groups and manage events, etc., thanks to Facebook’s data. Content providers are able to reach far more readers than they would on their own, most of whom would not even be aware said content provider exists, much less visit of their own volition. Advertisers are able to maximize the return on their advertising $ by only showing ads to individuals they believe are predisposed to like their product, making it more viable than ever before to target niches (to the benefit of their customers as well).

Swiss Finishing School

Neri added that one should plan to provide, among other things, 2 “surprise breads” and 600 hors d’œuvres. As for drinks, 30 bottles of champagne should suffice, but, along with some nonalcoholic options, one must also have on hand 4 bottles each of whiskey, gin, and vodka “for the men who don’t like champagne.” Neri then accelerated the slide show, presenting a procession of structurally unsound canapés and encouraging a discussion about whether each appeared too large to be eaten in a single bite, as a canapé should be. Most of the tightly cropped photographs did not include forks or wineglasses, so it required some imagination to assess their scale. Before class let out, Neri invited the students to come to the front of the classroom and practice holding, in 1 hand, a cocktail napkin, an appetizer plate, and a champagne flute. Mila, a 30-year-old who grew up in Guinea-Bissau, bravely volunteered. Neri showed her how to pinch the stem, palm up, between her ring finger and pinkie, slide the plate between her thumb, index finger, and middle finger, and then tuck the napkin under the plate and over her middle finger. All this was to be done with the left hand, leaving the right available for introductions. Mila absorbed the demonstration attentively and glanced up at Neri for a nod of encouragement before attempting the feat on her own. She aced it on the first try. “It looks more complicated than it is”.