David Lidsky's Blog, page 4711

Grant Achatz's Next Restaurant: Dinner and a Movie, Combined

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Grant Achatz is a superstar. He's one of the few
chefs, like Ferran Adria of the recently shuttered El Bulli or Wylie
Dufresne of WD-50, for whom the term "molecular gastronomy" seems not so

much inaccurate as inadequate. His restaurant Alinea has helped make
Chicago one of, if not the most exciting food city in America, and it
was recently named the seventh
best
restaurant in the world by San Pellegrino. Add to all that an
amazing life story--Achatz announced in 2007 that he was...

Twitter to Debut Embeddable Pull Quotes

The pull quote is a
time-honored way of both luring readers in with an enticing statement
and taking up lots of room on a page with words you already wrote. But
they're static, and they don't provide any extra information or insight.
Twitter
posts have been used as a sort of new-age pull quote before; they're
about the right length, and can provide some extra insight too. But there hasn't
yet been a particularly good way of integrating tweets into an article.
Most writers will just...

Sustainable Fun at the Danish World Expo 2010 Pavilion

"Sustainability is often misunderstood as the neo-Protestant notion "that it has to hurt in order to be good," says Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. His goal in designing the Danish World Expo Pavilion: to show that a sustainable lifestyle can be fun.

Internet Explorer's Market Share Slips: The Beginning of the End?

Microsoft may be being all cocky about video codecs in Internet Explorer 9, but the reality is that the browser's share of the market is on the slide. Slowly, since it's just fallen below 60%, but it's still downwards. 

Net Applications, author of the study that reveals this news, says that it's the first time IE has fallen below 60% (since reasonable measures of market share began). The big MS browser's loss is someone else's gain though--and in this case it's the shiny speediness that is...

Lift Conference

Conventional wisdom -- and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg -- suggests privacy is no longer a social norm. But at last year's Lift, a conference on the social consequences of new technologies that hits Geneva this month, think tanker Daniel Kaplan presented a study showing that most users are actually very conservative online. They will exhibit only as much information as you might "display in your sitting room," he argued. "They are not just throwing out buckets of information without...

Finally, New Jersey Design That Doesn't Smell Like Axe Bodyspray

GRO Architects classes up the Garden State with a new sushi bar.

From the land of all things Snooki
comes a modern sushi restaurant just might lend Jersey some high-design
bona fides. About time.MoC
MoC (which means "hello" in Japanese) was designed by Nicole Robertson
and Richard Garber of the Manhattan firm GRO Architects. It's made almost entirely out of
CNC-milled mahogany slats, some painted high-gloss white. They curve
around the ceiling like a racetrack then slink down the walls and...

The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of Our Food Supply

Worst. Company. Ever. That's the inevitable conclusion in documentarian Marie-Monique Robin's perversely fascinating investigation of Monsanto, the chemical company turned $11.7 billion agribusiness giant. She details how the astounding list of controversial products and environmental scandals in Monsanto's history -- PCBs, dioxin, Agent Orange, DDT, bovine growth hormone -- is exacerbated by the company's repeated choice to preserve sales over the public health and employ its outsize...

Google Makes First Direct Investment in Utility-Scale Clean Energy

Google is no stranger to renewable energy. The search giant has previously invested in enhanced geothermal technology, smart grid ventures, electric cars, and wind power startups. But those investments all came from Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the company. Now, for the first time, Google Inc. has invested in renewable power as a way to "accelerate the deployment of the latest clean energy technology while
providing attractive returns to Google and more capital for developers
to...

How the Gulf Oil Spill Will Extend Far Beyond the Gulf

The recent BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast is shaping up to be a disaster of historical proportions--bigger, even, than the legendary 1989 Exxon Valdez incident, which saw 11 million gallons of oil dumped off the Alaska coast. And while news reports are pouring in about the immediate environmental and economic impacts, we will be feeling the effects of this spill far and wide for months--and years--to come.

Migratory birds will be among the hardest hit by the spill. Hundreds of species come...

Cisco, Ericcson Are Tops in Greenpeace's Cool IT Leaderboard

Greenpeace continues to unveil major company rankings in app-friendly form. This week we have the Cool IT Leaderboard, a scorecard that ranks companies based on their commitment to lower the environmental impact of IT solutions--i.e. telecom infrastructures and data centers.

Cisco and Ericcson take the lead in this version of the leaderboard thanks to policies that highlight smart grid technology, efficient office management, and carbon savings. Google, however, lags behind in sixth place...