Joe Nocera pens a Times op-ed piece on Howard Schultz’s attempt creating jobs:

Here we are two months later, and Schultz is back with Big Idea No. 2. It is every bit as idealistic as his first big idea, but far more practical. Starbucks is going to create a mechanism that will allow us citizens to do what the government and the banks won’t: lend money to small businesses. This mechanism is scheduled to be rolled out on Nov. 1. This time, Schultz is not tilting at windmills.

[...]

So am I. With the government and banks unwilling or unable, it’s time we took matters into our own hands. At this point, who else can we count on?

It’s a very interesting idea, and rather sad that we need the CEO of Starbucks to come up with it.

Update: The Create Jobs for USA website is now up.

Lytro is a new kind of camera.

Lytro lets you take pictures like never before. Unlike a conventional camera that captures a single plane of light, the Lytro camera captures the entire light field, which is all the light traveling in every direction in every point in space.

Very interesting technology, and some of the examples are very cool.

Booooooom & Adobe are teaming up with a photo contest where contestants remake famous works of art as photographs.

Some of the submissions are amazing. My personal favorites include “Café Terrace at Night” remake by Jonathan Pruc, “Creation of Adam” remake by Spencer Pidgeon, “Vase with 12 Sunflowers” remake by Qi Wei Fong, and “Automata” remake by Or Eitan.

The Onion reporting Steve Jobs death:

[...] President Barack Obama read in part, adding that Jobs will be remembered both for the life-changing products he created and for the fact that he was able to sit down, think clearly, and execute his ideas—attributes he shared with no other U.S. citizen.

It’s kinda sad when The Onion nails it.

The New York Times has a story about a hot dog war, of sorts, in front of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Since 2007, Mr. Rossi has been battling city authorities and clinging to a spot directly in front of the museum steps at Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street. It is regarded as perhaps the most lucrative location for selling hot dogs in Manhattan. It is so coveted that the city once charged more than half a million dollars a year for vending rights there.

OK, math time:

Assuming, as the article states, $2 per dog and $1 per water, and the average customer buys 1 dog and 1 water which would total $3 per “meal”.

To cover the $500,000 fee at $3 per “meal”, the vendor would need to sell 166,667 “meals” per year.

166,667 “meals” divided by 365 days in the year, means 457 “meals” need to be sold per day, every day of the year. However, the museum is closed Mondays, so we need to take 52 days off that number, which leaves 313 selling days. The museum is also closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years Day, so that leaves only 310 selling days per year.

So, 166,667 “meals” divided by 310 selling days per years means that the vendor needs to sell 538 “meals” per day.

Most days the Museum is open 9:30am-5:30pm, and I’m assuming no one is getting lunch before 11:00am, so that leaves about 6.5 hours to sell 538 “meals”, which would be 83 “meals” per hour, or 1.4 “meals” per minute.

And that’s JUST to break even on the cost of the license.

The City Hall station of the NYC Subway, the showpiece station of the 1904 subway system, has been closed since 1945, but is being restored and is now open for tours by the Transit Museum. Daniel J. Grinkevich took a tour and posted his photos to Flickr.

It’s almost like stepping back in time.

Due to hurricane Irene, there will be a pumpkin shortage in the Northeast US this year.

“I think there’s going to be an extreme shortage of pumpkins this year,” said Darcy Pray, owner of Pray’s Family Farms in Keeseville, in upstate New York. “I’ve tried buying from people down in the Pennsylvania area, I’ve tried locally here and I’ve tried reaching across the border to some farmers over in the Quebec area. There’s just none around.”

I hear Funkins are actually pretty good for carving, and you can buy roasted pumpkin seeds in grocery stores, so while it’s not the same thing, it’s not a total loss.

IHOP opened a location in New York’s hip West Village and, in anticipation of late-night munchie seeking bar patrons, have hired a bouncer to make sure everyone behaves.

“IHOP is bland and belongs in Times Square — it doesn’t make sense in the East Village,” said Niall Gibbons, a bar manager.

Agreed.

Here’s a simple rubber mat that allows you to easily stack beer bottles in a pyramid shape in your refrigerator.

Again, I am flummoxed about how we landed a man on the moon before we invented this.

Yelp reviewers in NYC review the recent earthquake. They were unimpressed. Some examples:

Huh? That was it? I fart harder then that.

I didn’t even feel it.  Earthquake fail.

I was on the subway so I didn’t even notice.  Going to the west coast for all my earthquakes from now on.

Malcolm Gladwell at Grantland takes a look at owning a professional sports franchise and ‘psychic benefits’:

The best illustration of psychic benefits is the art market. Art collectors buy paintings for two reasons. They are interested in the painting as an investment — the same way they would view buying stock in General Motors. And they are interested in the painting as a painting — as a beautiful object. In a recent paper in Economics Bulletin, the economists Erdal Atukeren and Aylin Seçkin used a variety of clever ways to figure out just how large the second psychic benefit is, and they put it at 28 percent. In other words, if you pay $100 million for a Van Gogh, $28 million of that is for the joy of looking at it every morning. If that seems like a lot, it shouldn’t. There aren’t many Van Goghs out there, and they are very beautiful. If you care passionately about art, paying that kind of premium makes perfect sense.