Jalsa

The city has plenty of Bangladesh restaurants, but few that represent for the food of West Bengal, India, just across the border. That’s one reason Jalsa Grill & Gravy was so welcome when it opened. Owner Nowshin Ali lived in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, “But I grew up in Uttar Pradesh, and had to learn several languages as I grew up, including Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, English, and Bengali”. The halal food at Jalsa features several West Bengal dishes from a menu of northern Indian fare.

One highlight was a chaat featuring slices of slender eggplant fried with a coating of spiced chickpea flour, dusted with shredded coconut, and arrayed on a hump of sweet and sour potatoes. It was irresistible. Cooked in the tandoor, the outsize lamb tikka kebabs were juicy and smoky, but the ghost chicken tikka was not as spicy as the name promised. Of the West Bengal dishes, there was a chingri malaikari (butter shrimp) with plenty of creamy pink gravy, accompanied by a dish of mustard-laced chickpeas. The dum biryani came with chicken and was pleasingly subtle. “That biryani’s from Lucknow, not as spicy as the one from Hyderabad.”

Assistant Parasite

Alias is a teachable “parasite” that is designed to give users more control over their smart assistants, both when it comes to customization and privacy. Through a simple app the user can train Alias to react on a custom wake-word/sound, and once trained, Alias can take control over your home assistant by activating it for you. When you don’t use it, Alias will make sure the assistant is paralyzed and unable to listen by interrupting its microphones.

Larissa MacFarquhar

COWEN: If you’re an extreme altruist, are you too subject to manipulation by others? If you care so much about so many other people, and those people actually can be harmed pretty easily at low cost, does this mean that you, the extreme altruist, you just go through life being manipulated?

MACFARQUHAR It’s funny you say that because one thing that I have noticed about the extreme altruist . . . You know what? I don’t want to call them extreme altruists. I think they’re people with a very strong sense of duty. The people I met were very, very different from each other, but one thing they had in common is they really, really barely cared about what other people thought. They had to feel that way because almost everyone they met thought they were at best weirdos, and at worst dangerous megalomaniacs. So they were unconventional in their degree of duty but also in many other ways.

on extreme altruists

Scale can weigh a proton

Ricci’s sensor can achieve ~1% accuracy. 1 goal for such precise sensors is to create high-resolution images of individual proteins and other molecules. Bachtold is developing similar sensors made of carbon nanotubes. You could place a single molecule in a magnetic field, which rotates the molecule’s constituent atoms. Because distinct elements rotate at different rates, a nearby force sensor could detect the rate of rotation of the atoms to identify them.

Libratus

Libratus’s poker technique suggests Strategy Robot might deliver military personnel some surprising recommendations. Pro players who took on the bot found that it flipped unnervingly between tame and hyper-aggressive tactics, all the while relentlessly notching up wins as it calculated paths to victory. “It’s weird because it doesn’t seem that it overwhelms you, but then you look at the score and you realize what’s happened”.

Kitakata Ramen Ban Nai

When talking about “Big 3” regional styles of ramen, most people outside of Japan have heard of Hakata and Sapporo styles, both having evolved from large metropolitan areas with many vendors and varieties. But a third lesser known style was developed in northern Honshu in the small village of Kitakata which gives it its name. Known for its storehouses full of soy sauce, Kitakata-style ramen uses this as its base, a type of shoyu. The bowl itself appears simple, a broth full of noodles and topped with chashu and some thinly sliced spring onion, but do not let this fool you. This broth has been extracting pure umami from pork bones for “long hours” which gives it an almost smoky and toasted taste, full of earth and charcoal. Ban Nai is the most famous source of this style of ramen, with 62 locations around Japan. Here in the United States there are now 2 in Orange County, California, 1 outside of Chicago, and now 1 tucked into a grocery store in Jersey City.

Zooba

Nolita will soon be home to a popular Egyptian fast-casual restaurant serving street food — making it one of the few Manhattan restaurants dedicated to staples from the country. Zooba, which launched in Cairo and now has 6 locations, will be opening this summer at 100 Kenmare St