Most social media campaigns stink on ice. I think the one exception to that ironclad fact was the recent I’m With Coco meme, which I’m not even sure you could call a social media campaign. This one, though, this one totally is. It’s called “Queremos
a Selecção de Bigode no Mundial!” It’s a growing movement to get the entire Portuguese national soccer team to grow mustaches for the World Cup. I’ve taken to calling the movement the Portuguese Mustache Federation, which, conveniently enough, doubles as a fantastic indie rock band name.

The movement began on Facebook with the founding of the group. Right now (as of 2:30pm EST), the group has 1,788 members. Portugal’s population is only around 10 million, so this group represents a huge portion of the Portuguese people.

The goal is simple: every single player on the team, from captain Cristiano Ronaldo right down to old man Nuno Gomes, is requested to grow a mustache, or bigode in Portuguese, for good luck during the big tournament. Let’s face it: the Portuguese team only barely qualified for the World Cup, and I can’t think of the last Portuguese player to rock a ’stache. Not even the manager, Carlos Queiroz, is man enough to let the whiskers fly.

Soccer is more known for people with dodgy haircuts rather than dodgy facial hair. Off the top of my head, crazy hair includes Carlos Valderrama, David Luiz, Florent Malouda, and Ronaldo. Why, Ronaldo, why?

All these people need now is a fun Twitter hash-tag (QSBM? PortStache?) and they’re golden.

When you live out in the country and have little else to do with your time, you need to make stuff. Take this self-cocking, automatic crossbow, for example. Made by a fellow called the Duckman, this sassy old man has some great facial hair and extremely inappropriate facial expressions as he ponderously loads and fires bolts into an unseen target.

Check out minute 1:57 when ducks cross his path as he hunches over his invention.

via Ubergizmo

I love coffee. Probably more than you do. But I’m not as obsessed as the people who devote their lives to coffee, forever searching for the perfect cup through practices that mingle science and voodoo. I want to be.

When I (or anyone) order a macchiato at either of Ninth St. Espresso‘s Alphabet City outposts, it’s always made by a dude in his 20s wearing a baseball hat and facial hair who appears to move with a level of enthusiasm rivaling that of an arthritic retiree working as a night-shift security guard at a library. It looks like he simply doesn’t care. At least, if you don’t watch closely.

After he presses the tamper into a mound of brown, almost velvet-like powder to compress it into a perfectly even puck of coffee for proper extraction, he gives the portafilter a fast twirl, proving the coffee is packed in tightly enough that gravity can’t wrestle it out. The steel pitcher holding the steamed milk is slammed into the counter once then swirled, twice and another swirl, three times—then half of its contents are dumped into a drain before they’re poured into a tiny cup with hand movements that slink back and forth so subtly they’re almost imperceptible, smoothly layering the milk into a triple shot of thick and rusty brown espresso, the drink topped with an arabesque mark of white in a small sea of tan foam. I wasn’t witnessing malaise, but the skillful, measured movements of a pro.

That’s merely what I can see—what I didn’t know before talking to Ninth St.’s owner, Ken Nye, is everything leading up to that. The $15,000 hand-built La Marzocco machine my drink was crafted with is the only one of its kind in the U.S., an “almost prototypish” model that stuffs the state-of-the-art in espresso-making technology into a retro body style that evokes fine Italian machinery as much as it does coffeeshop centerpiece (photos above). The heart of the machine is an electronic PID-controlled triple boiler system. Typical commercial machines have two boilers—one for the coffee, one for the steamer—but Ken’s machine has separate boilers for each group head (where the coffee comes out), each of which can adjusted to within a tenth of a degree.

Ken says that kind of temperature control really matters. He and others avow that taste begins to change within half a degree—as coffee gets hotter, it tends to be more bitter, while cooler coffee can be more sour. (How important is temperature to coffee? Ken keeps his shops at exactly 73 degrees year round—for the beans, not the customers.)

Older machines just couldn’t get that kind of precision. They had a typical variation of a few degrees either way—which is why Ken retired his 1970s machine, which it sits, gorgeous as a classic car, in the back of the shop. The new machine is a glimpse of what other top-of-the-line espresso machines will perform like a year from now, says Jacob Ellul-Blake from La Marzocco R&D—though they’ll have even more sophisticated, programmable controls for pressure, too, giving a barista exacting digital power over nearly every parameter of the coffee.

How those parameters are changed is where engineering meets art—it’s entirely based on taste. Artisan coffee-making may be at last trodding toward digital control en masse, making the production of a cup of coffee approximate voodoo-inflected mad science. Ninth St.’s relatively new $3000 Mazzer burr grinder is also electronically controlled, its older grinder relegated to pulverizing beans for decaf, while water filters run amok throughout the shop to ensure a mineral level of 100-150 PPM/TDS, lest the water be “lifeless” or too hard, and damaging to the equipment—but the very analog rituals of tasting, like cupping, prevail. After all, there’s only two elements in coffee: Coffee and water.

And despite all of the gear, what this bleeding edge of the coffee industry is attempting to imitate is the old-school wine industry. To see that, I had to step back a level, from coffeehouse to roaster, so Ken directed me to the current supplier of his beans, Chicago-based Intelligentsia Coffee.

Intelligentsia’s New York training lab, run by David Latourell (formerly of the Clover’s progenitor, the Coffee Equipment Company), is a large white space divided into two rooms. Two-thirds of the space is the lab, with two long steel tables pressed back against the wall, cluttered by nearly $50,000 worth of gear for making coffee: Chemex to vacuum pot, caffe solo to Clover. The other third of the space is a dedicated cupping room with a hydraulic table cut into a stage. Intelligentsia is one of the three big roasters, along with Portland-based Stumptown (who just opened a NY roastery) and North Carolina-based Counter Culture, currently spearheading the so-called third wave of coffee, the second wave being, in a nutshell, Starbucks.

The two big messages of the third wave, if you buy into it as a movement, are sustainability and coffee as a “culinary experience.”

By sustainability, that means environmentally accountable and fiscally beneficial to the farmers who grow the beans, long screwed over by Big Coffee. But the sourcing goes beyond just quality and fairness: These people are bringing wine’s notion of terroir into coffee—tasting precisely where coffee is from, not just down to the single-origin farm level, but down to blocks of a farm’s land. (By the way, David says that Starbucks’ sourcing practices are exceptionally solid, so no ill should be spoken of them in that regard.)

The incredibly nerdy and exacting methods developed lately for brewing coffee aren’t about convenience, like the drip pot. They’re designed to express and articulate the particular qualities and complexities inherent to a coffee, to make it possible to not simply taste coffee like wine, but to talk about it in a similar manner—”gilded by an orange and lime citrus acidity, the center of Itzamna radiates flavors of fruit punch and caramel”—and ascribing those qualities to a particular origin.

The feedback loop of the relationships with farmers that these roasters have been building for years now, David says, doesn’t just mean that coffee is more responsibly harvested, but that coffee is actually better now, and there are coffees that were never possible before, since farmers have been refining their practice to grow coffee that suits the tastes of roasters who will pay more for particular beans.

David is actually un-elitist as they come, despite being at the center of a movement that smacks of cultural and culinary elistism. For him, all the gear, all of the mechanical extravagance and precision, is all about taste and getting the flavor profile you want out of coffee. He refuses to judge even those who drink Folgers and like it (he just wishes they’d buy coffee from somewhere that practiced more ethical bean sourcing). But I mean, how much can you really taste the difference between various coffees, or hell, one coffee prepared different ways? To find out, David made us several cups of coffee, prepared using the Clover, Chemex and CafeSolo.

Clover is particular suited to experimentation, since nearly variable can be manipulated digitally and the process is easily repeatable, potentially turning every cup into a science project. The Chemex delivers the cleanest profile of any brew method, plainly exposing the bean’s flavor profile—there’s no muddling to hide it, like with a French press—and the Cafe Solo is kind of like a reverse French press, offering something a bit heavier and richer. (We explained most of the major ways to make coffee earlier with Ken and David’s help, if you’re curious.) We tried Intelligentsia’s La Soledad, from Guatemala, Flor Azul from Nicaragua, and La Maravilla, also from Guatemala.

Here’s where I’m coming from, going into this: I can tell the difference good coffee and shitty coffee. The latter, well, tastes like shit. The former, I can drink black and like, tasting something more simply coffee, but that I can’t define. In other words, the flowery descriptions adorning bags of coffee from most specialty houses haven’t actually played out like that on my tongue. It’s a rudimentary sophistication.

After an introductory cup of the Flor Azul, we try the La Soledad in the Clover with a 30 second brew time. It’s pleasant and fairly light. There’s a defining acidity to it, but it’s not bitter in any way. David adjusts the steep time to 60 seconds. The resulting cup is mellower, and loses a lot of its punch. He makes a third cup, this time upping the dose: Perfection. A happy medium of the first two, what people mean when they say a coffee is “juicy” suddenly makes sense to me. I can’t tell you if it was “pear” or “apple,” but the subtle bite of a tart fruit is there, then it dissolves into something smoother, almost “herbacious,” as David called it. Well, he also said it tasted very “green,” since for him, coffee has strong color connotations. This would prove to be our favorite cup.

Next, we go to the Chemex. The coffee is thinner than what came out of the Clover, and the taste has a lot more acidity to it. And, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I picked up a weird cinammon note that became a lot more pronounced than it was with the Clover. What. The. Fuck. Am I really starting to taste like the obsessives I’ve been talking to? The cup that came out of the Cafe Solo is initially a disappointment that seemed overextracted, though letting it cool longer made it better, rounding it out to something more balanced, though ultimately kind of forgettable (I know, because I forgot what it tasted like and apparently didn’t deem it worthy of taking notes on).

Beyond David’s advice to junk my albeit fancy drip coffeemaker for a French press or Chemex pot, I kind of wondered how much I learned would stick with me: I mean, I actually did taste a real difference between all of the coffees we drank, but I got to compare them one after another. I got a machiatto from Ninth St. on my way home the next day, and there it was: Juiciness. I remembered it. I understood it. It was still there. Not merely “this doesn’t taste thin and burnt and shitty” like a machiatto does from all but a handful of coffeehouses in New York, but layered on top the subtle sweetness of the milk and velvet mouthfeel is a tartness I can actually identify as “juicy.” Fuck, it might just be peach.

I guess there is no going back.

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

PopMech just interviewed the Mythbusters in their M5 headquarters in some strange corner of San Francisco where robots run wild and men have effusive, untamed facial hair.

Except for spooky robots guarding the stairs, M5’s second-floor offices could be those of any small company, with cluttered desks, a computer room and a small kitchen. Whiteboards are everywhere, crammed with top-of-the-brain doodles, rough technical drawings and the complex logistics of planning the MythBusters shooting schedule. In recent years, special-effects work has taken a back seat to the relentless demands of the show, and M5 today functions primarily as home base for the MythBusters production team. (The show’s secondary segments, involving the team of Kari Byron, Grant Imahara and Tory Belleci, are produced at a different location.)

The Mythbusters have truly redefined what it means to be an engineering geek for me and, I suspect, countless others. The guys are a little weird, a little funny, and they solve problems with aplomb and, most importantly, explosions. Good, good stuff.

Sony held a bit of a rah-rah song-and-dance event in the UK yesterday that revealed a few more details about the company’s motion controller. It was absolute mustard. Chief among them: software for the new camera, the PlayStation Eye, will be able to “detect gender and even the age of the face, separate facial features such as the nose, eyes and ears, and even detect whether you’re smiling or not.”

Sony’s also providing a whole bunch of middleware to developers (provided you’re an “approved” developer) to make developing actual, compelling less a technical challenge than a creative one. That is, devs don’t have to spend weeks coding for menial input tasks.

Sony summed it up with this: ”We can provide you will all of the tech. We want you to provide us great games.” Fair enough, sir. (Though I, like others, much prefer the classic controller to all this motion control tomfoolery.)

And here’s a quick aside, science-style: Just how will the PlayStation Eye be able to determine gender of someone based on their face alone? This site breaks down the physical difference between male and female faces. Skeletal structure is the biggie, so I assume the software will come pre-loaded with mathematical models of male/femal forehead size, jaw shape, etc.

And if you’re not fascinated by that, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s so amazing that you’re able to determine that that left face is a woman’s, and the right one is a man’s. There’s no facial hair there to throw you off, the woman doesn’t have long, flowing hair like how women wear. No, your DNA just knows, instantly, that’s a female face.

To science!