THURSDAY, JUNE 30, 2011
YouTube a ‘Bad’ habit
Video-sharing drug users inspire Aaron Paul’s meth-pushing TV character
To prepare for his role as a meth-head on AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” Aaron Paul became addicted ... to YouTube.
“A lot of stuff I’ve found helpful I saw on YouTube,” Paul told Flash at the show’s season 4 premiere at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood. “Addicts actually upload videos of themselves using and you can see the drug take effect almost instantly. I think it’s the truest, most honest form of research.”
Paul’s on-screen dealing partner, three-time Emmy winner Bryan Cranston, was asked about Frankie Muniz, his son from “Malcolm in the Middle,” who recently Tweeted plans to run for public office.
“I could be his campaign manager,” Cranston said. And what party would Muniz represent? “Party Hearty!” Cranston replied.
The “Breaking Bad” gang was also joined by “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner and “The Vampire Diaries” star Kat Graham, who commented on the remarkable resemblance of CW heartthrobs Ian Somerhalder, her co-star, and Chace Crawford, his “Gossip Girl” doppelganger.
“I feel like it’s the same factory where they made Zac Efron, actually,” Graham cracked.
Graham’s “Vampire Diaries” love interest is Steven R. McQueen, grandson of Hollywood legend Steve McQueen.
Asked which McQueen is cooler, she unsurprisingly stood by her man. “Steven R. McQueen is the king of cool,” Graham said.
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Chocolate, down to a science
Aerospace whiz kid decides to distill the dark stuff – with sublime results
BY JOE RAY
The mysterious voicemail from a well-informed friend arrived at the last minute. “Dude, we’re meeting in Red Hook in an hour and going to this bar that’s never open to taste homemade chocolate and drink homemade hootch. Wanna come?”
I arched an eyebrow, checked on clearing my schedule and called back.
“The guy designed one of those James Bond-style jet packs. That’s all I know. This is New York — are you coming or not?”
How do you say no? I hailed a cab and headed to Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, ending up in an empty bar where a man in a bowler hat poured a mean whiskey-based drink called a Blood and Sand. Nearby rooms, which have just been unveiled, house both one of the largest distilling apparatuses in New York state and a serious-looking chocolate manufacturing line. The whole complex is called Cacao Prieto.
The project is the brainchild of Daniel Preston, 40, a man of many brainchildren.
At 18, he started a glass company that improved neon sign electrodes. Later, he founded an aerospace company that worked for NASA and the Department of Defense. Now, his life is chocolate.
“The last grade I officially graduated from was fifth,” said Preston, who began unsuccessfully dabbling with college at age 12 and estimates the number of patents he holds at “about 100.”
Preston designed custom light bulbs and was flown around the world to design automating machines and assembly lines, ending up working on a gig with the European nuclear research organization, CERN. Soon after, he received a call from an American government agency he’d never heard of telling him he was in trouble for designing something that qualified as a nuclear trigger.
Unfazed and found innocent, Preston’s firm got a new gig, this time with PerkinElmer, the analytical equipment mega-corporation brought in to investigate the CERN case. PerkinElmer bought Preston Glass for a hefty sum.
“All of a sudden, I had nothing to do, so I took up skydiving,” he says. He eventually racked up thousands of jumps, but ended up breaking his C-6 vertebrae due to a design defect in one particular chute. His response? “I started making parachutes.”
His parachute project became Atair Aerospace, which broke records for the smallest chute that could be landed by a person and longest drift ratio (the run versus the rise of a jump).
Eventually, Preston went after bigger guns, winning grants from the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program, as well as the Army, Navy and NASA, running projects like designing wheeled and winged vehicles with two-day autonomy, coming up with satellite-guided parachutes and creating algorithms to drop a “swarm” of parachutes, each loaded with military supplies, to a precise point on the ground. The math for the latter was “based on the way starlings flock.”
The jet pack story makes its way in here. Originally a winged suit he “designed for fun,” he wore it into the DARPA offices where, “they paid me to put turbines on it.”
Preston was bought out again in 2009 by William E. Conway Jr., founder of the Carlyle Group, and the agreement came with a five-year non-compete clause.
Again, all of a sudden, Preston had some free time on his hands. This time he turned to the bottle, opening the Red Hook bar Botanica in the summer of 2009 to highlight herbal liquors, especially those from northern Italy. He modeled the bar’s design on the bar at Hotel Gritti Palace in Venice.
The New York City-born Preston also reconnected with his family in the Dominican Republic, noting that the great farms his family owned and barely held onto through a revolution and civil war in 1965 were eventually whittled down to a couple of small cacao plantations used mostly for ecotourism.
He was captivated by the plantations, explaining the otherworldly colors and peculiar sprouting capabilities of the cacao plants as if describing a scene from the jungles of “Avatar.”
As a scientist and a bit of a neat freak, however, he was driven bonkers by the fermentation process typically used in the Dominican Republic, where cacao pods are essentially left on the ground or in bags for days.
“You wouldn’t find a winemaker who’d thrown his grapes down in the field, stomp them right there and come back in a week hoping it all tastes good,” he said, wide-eyed with exasperation. “This is the process that makes chocolate taste like chocolate, but people have left it entirely up to chance.”
“As a scientist, I want to control variables, but nobody cared. The farmers just wanted disease resistance and high yields. The nursery didn’t care what the root stock was as long as it grew. It goes on an on — there’s no alignment of interest,” he says. “So we decided to do it all ourselves.”
For the fermentation, that meant cracking the cacao pods into stainless steel fermenters and experimenting with different yeasts, controlling inoculations to create different flavor profiles.
“By choosing the ‘bugs,’” he said, referring to the yeast, “you can drastically influence the flavors coming out of the beans.”
Food traditionalists might shudder at the thought of stripping the romance from the production process, but Preston leans toward the scientific.
“We try to control everything,” he said. “It’s only called an art when you don’t know what you’re doing.”
As he got further into the process, side industries began popping up like well-tended plants in a Dominican hothouse.
Preston started Cacao Biotechnologies, a company that bills itself as the “world’s preeminent expert on cacao biotechnologies and genetics,” which, among other things, creates cacao strains for the chocolate industry and phytonutrients for pharmaceutical companies. Or, as he mentions in an aside, “we sequenced the genome of cacao.”
In addition, Preston saw a need for production equipment geared for the rising numbers of artisanal producers. The only equipment out there not made for giant corporations was flimsy stuff made for hobbyists.
Calling on his industrial and aeronautical past, Preston began designing, building and selling his own machines to fill that need. On the Cacao Prieto plant floor, his “vortex winnower” is a glamorous-looking cousin to the vacuum cleaner that separates the skin from roast cacao nibs. On a computer in his office, there’s a design for a new style of bean roaster that looks like a chest-high, vertically mounted jet engine. The “vortex roaster” roasts beans — as they float on a cushion of hot air.
Some of the other equipment on the line includes parts from the now-closed American Scharffen Berger chocolate plant line (the whole thing) and Nestlé’s shuttered chocolate facility in Fulton, N.Y.
At this point, Preston put me in the hands of his master chocolatier, Damion Badalamenti, who ran me through their production process. We started next to two great rolling buckets loaded with whole cacao beans that were roasted that morning. With Badalamenti’s permission, I popped one in my mouth, revealing the bean’s crunchy, earthy and occasionally barnyard-y characteristics. Underneath it all, there were hints of the final product and I grabbed more from the bucket and scarfed them whenever he turned his back.
The beans were run through a “cracker” to crush them, a separator to sift out nibs of the right size, and then the vortex winnower to remove the skin. The nibs passed through a first grinder known as a mélangeur and a second where sugar and cocoa butter were added, creating a sort of rough-textured hot chocolate of the gods, with a toasty acidity most mortals would clamber over one another to taste.
After aging for a top-secret amount of time, the mixture was cooled and mixed in a machine that diminishes the size of the chocolate crystals, until it reached the shiny, optimal condition known to chefs and chocoholics as the “fifth state.”
Incidentally, the sixth state is seen in the odd, mottled and pale-colored chocolate bar that has suffered poor storage and likely been melted and reconstituted inside the wrapper.
This was their baby: smooth and acidic, dark and pleasingly bitter.
Their chocolates include 72 percent cacao squares, 66 percent bars and bonbons laced with the liquor that is made in the adjacent room. This is big-league chocolate that could go toe to toe with a European rival, and it is the alcohol that is Preston’s final spinoff.
To create a line of cacao-based rums and chocolate liquors, Preston takes the residual wine from the cacao fermentation process and runs it through a still. He began with a 1-liter rotary evaporator coveted by high-end bartenders and chefs favoring molecular gastronomy, then moved on to a 50-liter version he designed himself before moving on to a German-built 1,000-liter copper still — tied with New York Distilling Company’s for the title of largest in the state — and waiting to be fired up as soon as the labels for his liquor bottles are government-approved.
Preston is hoping to have the still fired up by Labor Day. Preston refers to most other cacao-based liquors as “Yoo-hoo with neutral spirit,” but his version, aged for a year with American oak, smells of pure cacao nibs and is liquid chocolate in the mouth. Botanica’s signature drink is 3 ounces of the liquor shaken with three raspberries that bring out its earthiness: a liquid bonbon for grownups.
Preston headed back to his office, and I asked how long a lifetime career-switcher would stay with such a project. He appeared surprised by his own response.
“Who knows?” he said. “So far it’s held my attention.”
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New Twenty-Six Mile Long Chinese Sea Bridge is World’s Longest
BY EDW LYNCH
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Staying at grandma’s
Census finds more U.S. children being raised by grandparents
BY PATRICK GARRITY
More and more Americans’ golden years are being spent raising grandchildren.
The Census Bureau yesterday released a report, “Living Arrangements of Children 2009,” showing that the number of children living with their grandparents and not their parents grew by 67 percent in two decades.
Of the 74.1 million children under 18 in the country in 2009, 1.8 million are being raised by a grandparent.
— Patrick Garrity
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The late, late show
HP’s TouchPad – finally! – goes toe to toe with the iPad
BY PETER HA
It’s one thing to be fashionably late to a party — then there’s the webOS-powered TouchPad from HP. More than a year after the launch of the iPad and several months after the release of Google’s first Android Honeycomb tablet and even RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook, the TouchPad is finally coming to market.
Some might argue that it’s too little, too late. But like any party crasher, HP’s TouchPad has a few party tricks.
Start with webOS. Originally conceived and developed by Palm for its smartphone platform, the operating system showed great promise, but it’s languished since it was first introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2009. The hardware simply couldn’t keep up with such a robust operating system. Palm’s savior was quickly turning into a bust.
But a renewed hope and vigor arose both internally and outside the company after Palm was acquired by HP last year.
WebOS is the working man’s mobile operating system. Other platforms tout multitasking as a key differentiator but webOS was the first to actually deliver on that promise and it simply shines on the TouchPad. You could say that webOS is better suited for tablets than smartphones.
Rather than opening and closing apps one after the next, webOS allows users to have multiple “cards” open at once on the homescreen making it easier to truly multitask. I’m actually writing this review on the TouchPad using a wireless keyboard, all while answering emails, checking Facebook (don’t tell my boss!) and browsing the Web. Notifications are nothing more than small icons that appear in the upper right corner alerting you to a new message. It almost feels as though I’m working on a desktop or laptop computer.
In webOS 3.0, a new feature called “Card Stacking” allows you to stack virtual cards on top of each other to help manage tasks. For instance, you can stack a new email message on top of Maps (powered by Microsoft’s Bing) in the event you need to find an address for a friend. Cards and stacks can be rearranged as you see fit.
Just Type is a handy feature on the homescreen that acts as a universal search tool that scours the Web (Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, Maps, etc.) and your device (new memos, emails, Facebook status updates) to get things done a little bit faster.
Another neat feature of webOS is Synergy, which seamlessly integrates your Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo! and other accounts to reduce redundancy. So, for example, you can pick up where you left off with your best friend whether you’ve been communicating over IM or texting in a unified inbox. And rather than having multiple entries for one person in your contacts list, Synergy actively links them together. It should be noted that Synergy is not a new feature and has been around since the beginning. It’s great for folks with active business and social calendars and hardcore social networkers.
Like any other newly hyped gadget, the key to the TouchPad’s success is the relationship between software and hardware. Fortunately for HP, webOS can finally spread its proverbial wings and fly thanks to a dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm. Flipping between apps (aka, cards) is fairly quick with hardly any noticeable lag. However, opening up email, for example, is a tad faster on the iPad 2.
The TouchPad has all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a tablet that’s priced at $499.99 (16GB, $599.99 for 32GB): 9.7-inch capacitive touchscreen (1024x768), front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera for Skype video chats, sensors galore (gyroscope, compass, accelerometer, light sensor), Wi-Fi 802.11 a/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and a set of bangin’ stereo speakers with Beats Audio.
It weighs roughly 1.6 pounds (the same as the first-generation iPad) and feels pretty good in the hands. Weight is distributed evenly (unlike with the Motorola Xoom). Browsing the Web in either portrait or landscape mode is equally enjoyable. Speaking of Web browsers, the hardware-accelerated browser on the TouchPad is fantastic. Support for Flash is baked in and of all the tablets that tout Flash support, the TouchPad actually works — and it works well.
What I really like about the browser is the fact that it navigates to the full desktop versions of websites and not the mobile versions, like Android Honeycomb tablets do. Without the use of benchmarking tools, I’d say the webOS browser is just as good as the Safari browser on iOS devices. During normal day-to-day use, I found it to be quite pleasant. Tapping a column of text to zoom in for easier reading works just like it does on the iPad.
By now you’ve probably seen one or more ads for HP’s vast array of printers, right? Seeing as how the TouchPad is now under the HP brand, it, too, works seamlessly with HP printers over Wi-Fi.
What really has me psyched on the TouchPad is its ability to communicate with other webOS devices like the unreleased Pre 3, which HP provided to test out the “Touch to Share” feature. This allows those with both devices to tap one against the other to share web pages that immediately open up on other device.
How many times have you been reading something on your smartphone and wished you could beam that page over to your iPad? Or vice versa? With the TouchPad and Pre 3 (and eventually the Veer), you can do that now. Connected over Bluetooth, you can even take phone calls and receive/send text messages from your TouchPad in case your Pre 3 is charging in the other room. It’s by far my most favorite feature.
But what about the apps?
Apps for the TouchPad are pretty scarce, save for Facebook’s. A lot of folks said Android would be doomed because of the lack of apps, but Google’s Andy Rubin tweeted this week that over 500,000 Android devices are being activated every day. Seems like Android is doing just fine, if you ask me.
Ramping up the number of apps available for all webOS devices will continue to be a challenge for HP, but these devices don’t rely on apps to function like Android or even the iPad. The services that Palm integrated into webOS (see Synergy) from the beginning will continue to make this platform appealing for consumers.
The TouchPad isn’t as sexy as the iPad — but what it lacks in looks, it makes up for just about everywhere else.
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The History Page: The first pinball wizard
Inventor of penny game strikes it rich in throes of Depression
BY SWATI PANDEY
When David Gottlieb landed in Chicago in 1927, a penny was a powerful thing. A cent could buy candy or gum. Four pennies afforded a pound of sugar, and a pocketful could make a meal.
But the humble cent had particular strength in America’s second city, where it propelled the pre-digital-age gaming industry. Made in Chicago and shipped across the country, mechanical countertop diversions — games like Test Your Grip, Draw Poker and Fortune-Tellers — hit drugstores, gas stations, bars, Laundromats and barbershops everywhere. A turn cost a penny.
Texan Gottlieb, 27, was producing Test Your Grip games when he decided he wanted in on the bagatelle business. Bagatelle — a miniaturized, tabletop version of billiards in which players hit balls past pins into holes — had been popular for decades, and Gottlieb had purchased the rights to manufacture a particular bagatelle called Bingo (no relation to the lottery-style game played at churches and charities).
When Bingo proved too heavy and expensive to sell widely, Gottlieb created a new version, no larger than 3 square feet and made of luxurious but light walnut. Rather than wooden pegs, metal pins dotted the board. Instead of a cue, a spring plunger shot the ball. And Gottlieb placed the playing field at an incline, so the force from a shot of the plunger was enough to keep the ball in play until it sank into a hole or rolled to the bottom of the board. The game’s wholesale price was $16.50, and it cost a penny to play seven balls. Gottlieb named his creation Baffle Ball, but the country came to know it, and its many successors, by a word that combined the game’s two basic parts: pinball.
Between Gottlieb’s arrival in Chicago and the release of Baffle Ball in December 1931, the country had sunk into the Great Depression. Nearly one in five men were unemployed, a figure that continued to rise for years. The anthem “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” summed up the popular mood.
It might have seemed like a bad time to ask Americans for their pocket change. But Baffle Ball sold over 50,000 units in a year, making it the fastest-selling game of the time. Competitors arose immediately. The Bally company offered a slightly less expensive, attractively decorated pinball called Ballyhoo, which also sold tens of thousands. Even as demand exceeded what D. Gottlieb & Co.’s 30-odd employees could produce working overtime, Gottlieb put his earnings into government bonds instead of investing in his company, since he was certain that pinball was a passing craze.
But pinball won fans everywhere people gathered. Commercial establishments rung with the sound of glass balls rolling, dropping and pinging pins, with the plunger’s alluring windup and blastoff. There were still no flippers, bells or flashing lights. New games with fresh designs arrived each month. It was a simple pleasure for anyone with time, boredom and very little money, which included many in the 1930s.
Unlike Test Your Grip or Fortune-Tellers, pinball made no verdict on the strength or fate of players already laid low by the economy. Pinball offered an avenue toward success, however minutely defined, at a time of narrowing opportunity.
In the midst of its rise, pinball came under government scrutiny over whether it qualified as gambling, because some pinball machines, or their owners, offered free games, cash or other prizes for high scores. While Bally courted the association with sin, Gottlieb tried to keep his machines clean, labeling them “For Amusement Only.”
Still, cities around the country, even Chicago, banned public pinball, and courts and editorial pages blamed the game for childhood delinquency and adult perversion. Gottlieb’s company kept improving pinball for markets where it was allowed, or for any place with a curtain in the back.
In 1947, Gottlieb made an addition most critical to pinball’s enduring success: the flipper. With a mechanism to keep the ball in play, pinball transformed from a brief, chance amusement to an enduring game of skill. The length of the average game doubled; expert players, dubbed “wizards,” exerted a seemingly divine control over the field, playing for ages on a single coin.
A decade later, Gottlieb created a function to randomly offer a player a free game, again elevating the role of chance. Then in 1965, he added pinball’s runaround feature that splits the path of a downward-bound ball and — depending on physics, barometric pressure or answered prayers — either tips the ball toward the flipper or drops it out of play.
By the time anti-pinball laws eased in the 1970s — primarily because the machines were accepted as games of skill and therefore not gambling devices — pinball was primed for a boom. Pinball machines had grown larger and entered well-trafficked arcades and shopping malls. They were glamorous enough to win celebrity acolytes.
The Who’s 1969 rock opera “Tommy” took as its subject a deaf, mute and blind kid who played pinball by intuition. Emmylou Harris sang on a 1975 track about losing a lover to pinball. Sammy Davis Jr., Ann-Margret, Hugh Hefner and Leonard Cohen were avowed fans. Brooke Shields, wearing a T-shirt that read “Trouble,” starred as a runaway wizard in the movie “Tilt,” named after pinball’s most daring and dodgy play: moving the table itself, risking an automatic “Game Over.”
New TV games, the forerunners of today’s vast video gaming industry, weren’t yet seen as competition; they simply drew more people to gaming. In any case, next to the likes of Pong, one of the earliest video games, pinball was a visual marvel, ornamented with gaudy art, glowing gold plastic pins, smooth shoots, snappy flippers, gleaming steel balls and ringing bells that created an enveloping world of play.
After a lifetime of keeping a close personal watch on his operation, Gottlieb suffered a stroke that kept him away from the office. He died in 1974, two years after Pong’s arrival and two years before his company, then exploring video gaming, was sold for $55 million to Columbia Pictures Industries. Over the next two decades, the old gaming industry gave way to the new: Machines were replaced by consoles, flippers by joysticks, balls by “lives.” But pinball has managed to survive in arcades throughout the world, preserving under glass the vestiges of another age.
Swati Pandey is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.
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Texting is non-addictive
Motivational messages inspire smokers to quit, study finds
BY MARA GAY
Annoying text messages may help smokers kick the habit, a new study has found.
Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have found that cigarette smokers who receive “motivational text messages” while trying to quit are twice as likely to stop smoking as those who don’t get such messages.
According to the new study, published in the Lancet medical journal, inspirational text messages tailored to specific moments in the quitting process can actually help smokers kick the unhealthy habit. “Cravings last less than 5 minutes on average,” one of the text messages reads. “To help distract yourself, try sipping a drink slowly until the craving is over.”
More than 10 percent of the 2,915 participants in the “txt2stop” study who received the texts quit smoking over six months. But 2,885 smokers in a control group received the so-called “placebo texts,” however, which offered no such encouragement, and didn’t fare as well. Just under 5 percent were able to quit, leading researchers to suggest that the text message — a form of communication some say is a bad habit in its own right — may be a useful tool in the battle to quit smoking.
Caroline Free, one of the study’s authors, said the text messages seemed to work. “People described txt2stop as like having a ‘friend’ encouraging them or an ‘angel on their shoulder.’”
Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)
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