Posts Tagged ‘Really’

Which City Really Does Have The Most Restaurants Per Capita

Travel to most city websites around the net and you’ll be surprised by how many purport to have more restaurants per capita than anywhere else. This is claimed by San Francisco; Madison, Wisconsin; Washington DC; and Shreveport, Louisiana. At least Canadian cities stake the same claim.

So which cities do have a legitimate claim to the title of “Most Restaurants Per Capita?” The National Restaurant Association (NRA) does publish a list of restaurants per capita per state. According to the Association, California has by far the most restaurants with a staggering 87,225 dining establishments. New York State comes in at a paltry 58,027. The top five is rounded out by Texas (53,631), Florida (41,901) Pennsylvania (31,466).

Kansas State

In terms of per capita per state, Washington DC tops the list according to NRA. The US capital region boosts some 0.4 restaurants per 100 people. Second is, surprisingly, Montana at .354 restaurants per 100 people. Rounding out the NRA’s top five are Rhode Island (0.304 per 100) Vermont (.303 per 100) New York (.301 per 100). If you are a little hungry you might want avoid the three states with the fewest restaurants Mississippi, Kentucky and Utah.

In terms of North American cities, it is a little harder to ascertain who can claim the title of city with most restaurants per capita.

Here are ten cities with more than 100,000 people that have made the claim. But who has the real claim? Who offers the cuisine searcher or just plain hungry shopper the most choice? Who can claim the title of The Restaurant City.

The city of San Francisco is a city of 744,230 people and claims to have 2,662 restaurants within the city boundaries. There is no doubt that the standard of restaurants in the city of the bay is exceptional. If you just include San Francisco properly your density is 279 people per restaurant. But because costs of housing the number of people living in the city proper has declined while the number of businesses including restaurants, San Francisco is a distorted number. If you count the metro area, the number of restaurants climbs to 4,300 restaurants (we won’t include hundreds more in the nearby wine country of Napa and Sonoma). If you consider the metro area population of 7,168,176 and divide by 4,300 you get a per capita density of 1,667 people per restaurant.

Winnipeg is a city on the edge of the Canadian prairies that boasts a broad cross section of immigrant communities all of whom have their local ethnic cuisines. If you want French toast for breakfast, perogies and sauerkraut for lunch , and Vietnamese imperial rolls for dinner then this is the place to come. This city regularly claims to have more restaurants per capita than any other city. Some websites claim the city has 900 restaurants but in reality there are just 478. With a population of 619,544 Winnipeg can claim only one restaurant per 1,296 snow-bound Canadian.

Victoria. This city on Vancouver Island and capital city of British Columbia, Canada regularly makes the claim that it has the “second highest number of restaurants per capita,” which is perhaps clever psychology as the city has never indicted which is top. With a population of 335,000 the city claims to have 265 Italian, French, Greek, East Indian, Vegetarian, German, Dutch, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Thai eateries. That means Victoria has a restaurant per 1,264 people. But with its spectacular location halfway between Vancouver and Seattle, you’d hardly care if its claim is a little off.

In New York City no one cooks at home and by the time you’ve heard of a restaurant it has probably closed. Restaurants open and close with alarming alacrity in the Big Apple. On average, the city of New York can claim 6,650 dining places from the chic Lespinasse to the greasiest corner diner — the most restaurants in any one place on the continent. Yet with 8,168,338 people, New York can only claim to have 1, 228 people per restaurant. It might seem that every second building in New York is a restaurant but they have to cater to a lot of vertically housed residents. That explains why it is hard to find a table some nights.

The one Canadian city that can make a great claim to have the most restaurants per capita is Montreal in the province of Quebec. With just over 5,000 restaurants in the metro island area, is appears there are at least one restaurant on every street corner. With its diverse immigrant population and French majority, the city has every type of cuisine available from Lebanese to continental French to native Canadian. Some 3,720,000 Quebecois live in the metro area making Montreal the second largest French speaking city in the world. Giving it a restaurant per capita number of 744.

When you leave Austin you enter Texas so the saying goes. This funky city in central Texas has 1,088 eating places to enhance its reputation as Music City USA. That list includes 128 establishments in or around the University of Texas alone. Austin’s burgeoning population is currently 690, 252 making their people to restaurant ratio 634.

Louisville, home to the Kentucky Derby, is a small city of just over half a million people. Pap John’s Pizza and Yum Brands, the parent company of A&W, KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, both make Louisville their corporate home so it is not surprising that that this city on the Ohio River has 1,089 restaurants. That makes for 510 people per restaurant.

Madison owns the rights to the title of “city with the most restaurants per capita” and the capital makes the claim throughout its literature. However, pining down the actual number of restaurants is pretty hard. The best list available points to 437 restaurants that caters to 221,551 people in the Wisconsin city. But that makes for only 506 people for each restaurant. Good for only third on this list.

Wichita, Kansas is not usually a city that leaps to mind when one thinks of cuisine. But with an ethnically diverse work force, the largest city in Kansas has a reputation for cultural diversity and is located in the breadbasket of America. The 739 restaurants in town have only to cater to 360, 715 people. That translates into 488 people per restaurant, good for second on our list.

Dallas. This Lone Star State city has a population of 1,250,950 and a selection of restaurants that add up to 2,666. While the city is known for its BBQ and steak houses there is a surprising mix of great eateries from chic to basic. That means every restaurant, fast food place and steak house in Texas’ third largest city can boast an potential pool of just 469 people. Making this city the winner of the title “City With The Most Restaurants per Capita.”

Which City Really Does Have The Most Restaurants Per Capita

LCD TVs and LED TVs: Are They Really Different?

Nowadays, you can see a lot of people spending hours and hours together shopping for a perfect television which would occupy the center-stage of their respective living rooms. With the ubiquitous presence of ever-confusing marketers of the television-manufacturing companies, the decision is becoming all the more difficult. So, let us understand the technologies before you splurge your hard-earned money on them.

Earlier, you used to find televisions with only one kind of technology. They were called ‘CRT TVs’ (Cathode Ray Tube). With the help of electron guns, coils and a fluorescent screen, the CRT TV was able to produce a viewable image. Now, there were problems with this technology:

Led Lcd

1. A number of components were used to manufacture the television which made the processes of production, repair and maintenance difficult

2. The individual components were also bulky which made the television quite heavy

3. Some of these televisions had a problem of ‘Image burn-in’ (Permanent discoloration of areas on electronic display) and a problem of ‘Image Loss’ at the boundaries of the display

4. These televisions produced noticeable flicker at low refresh rates

5. They consumed high power and generated a lot of heat

To overcome the drawbacks of this technology, manufacturers started producing LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) televisions. An LCD is a flat-panel display that makes use of light modulating properties of liquid crystals. Now, these liquid crystals do not emit light by themselves, so a backlighting source is required in cases where there is higher power consumption. To understand this, you need to take note that there are two kinds of LCDs: ‘Passive Matrix LCDs’ and ‘Active Matrix LCDs’. In ‘Passive Matrix LCDs’ like ‘Alarm Clocks’ and ‘Calculators’ where the power consumption is less, a backlighting source is usually not required. Contrast this with ‘Active Matrix LCDs’, where some sort of backlighting mechanism is required. Now, this backlighting has been traditionally achieved with a ‘Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp’ (CCFL) in an LCD Television. So, the ‘CCFL backlit LCD’ television overcomes the problems of CRT in the following fashion

1. They don’t use phosphor. So, the problem of ‘Image burn-in’ is eliminated

2. They can be configured to run at high refresh rates. So, the problem of flicker is eliminated

3. When compared to the CRT television, the components used are lighter in weight, so the heaviness of the television is reduced

4. They consume lesser power and generate lesser heat while lighting the entire screen uniformly

5. There is no ‘Image-Loss’ at the boundaries and the entire screen is viewable

Consequently, manufacturers found out that they could improve upon these televisions too by changing the backlighting mechanism. They found that they could bring about the following changes

1. Reduce the power consumption even further

2. Reduce the thickness of the display even further

3. Increase the image quality even further

4. Increase the brightness of the display even further

5. Reduce the weight of the display even further

The manufacturers used LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) as a backlighting source instead of the conventional CCFL sources and were able to achieve all-the-above stated objectives. So, this gave birth to the ‘LED backlit LCD’ televisions. Currently, if you go shopping for an LCD television, you won’t find a true LED TV. The only things you will find are ‘LED backlit LCDs’. So, don’t expect to see a radically different picture altogether as compared to a ‘CCFL backlit LCD’, albeit the images produced by the ‘LED backlit LCD’ televisions is in fact much better. Even these televisions can be further classified into 4 different categories.

Currently, ‘LED backlit LCDs’ are available in the market in 2 varieties: ‘Edge-Lit’ and ‘Full-Array’. In an ‘Edge-Lit LED backlit LCD’, LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) are present in the entire perimeter (periphery) of the television. The backlighting of the screen is achieved with the help of what are called ‘Light Guides’. These ‘Light Guides’ direct the glow towards the center of the screen.

The following are the advantages of these kinds of televisions:

1. They are very thin (as much as 40% thinner) when compared to ‘CCFL backlit LCDs’

2. They consume much less power (as compared to the ‘CCFL backlit LCDs’)

3. They are also very much lighter in weight (In fact, most of them could be wall mounted)

4. They can produce a bright image with very nice colors and deep blacks

The following are the disadvantages:

1. The entire screen may not be lit uniformly (The edge of the screen may be brighter than the middle of the screen)

2. True blacks may not be achieved consistently across the entire screen

In fact, both the varieties: ‘Edge-Lit’ and ‘Full-Array’ LED backlit LCDs have the capacity to produce deep blacks as the LEDs could be simply turned off when no color is being reproduced on the screen.

Now, for the ‘Full-Array LED backlit LCDs’: In these kinds of televisions, several rows of LEDs are placed behind the entire surface of the screen.

The following are the advantages of these kinds of televisions:

1. They are thinner (as compared to the ‘CCFL backlit LCD’ variety)

2. They consume much less power (as compared to the ‘CCFL backlit LCD’ variety)

3. They are lighter in weight (Again, as compared to the ‘CCFL backlit LCD’ variety)

4. They can produce ‘True Deep Blacks’ (as compared to both ‘CCFL backlit LCD’ and ‘Edge-Lit LED backlit LCD’)

5. The brightness and colors are better (as compared to both ‘CCFL backlit LCD’ and ‘Edge-Lit LED backlit LCD’)

The following are the disadvantages of these kinds of televisions:

1. ‘Blooming Effect’ (described below) affects the picture quality a little bit

2. Slightly thicker and heavier (as compared to the ‘Edge-Lit LED backlit LCD’)

The reason that ‘Full-Array LED backlit LCD’ can achieve truer blacks is because whenever blacks have to be reproduced on a significant portion of the display, an entire section of LEDs can be turned off without affecting the display properties of the other LEDs. This property is widely known by the name: ‘Local Dimming’. So, local dimming leads to better blacks but also leads to an effect called ‘Blooming’. If a bright color (LEDs turned on) is being displayed inside a black section (LEDs turned off – Local Dimming), the bright color creeps slightly into the adjacent black portion (like a halo). This effect is called ‘Blooming’. But hey, it is ever-so-slightly-noticeable.

So, there are 4 kinds of ‘LED backlit LCDs’:

1. ‘Edge-Lit LED backlit LCD’ without ‘Local Dimming’

2. ‘Edge-Lit LED backlit LCD’ with ‘Local Dimming’

3. ‘Full-Array LED backlit LCD’ without ‘Local Dimming’

4. ‘Full-Array LED backlit LCD’ with ‘Local Dimming’ (Usually, the best of the lot)

I’ll again reiterate. There is no ‘True LED TV’ available commercially in the market right now. A True LED TV can be defined as follows:

“Each and every individual pixel should have the capability of being independently brightened or turned off. For this to be achieved, an LED has to be present for each and every pixel. Currently in the market, a ‘Full-Array LED backlit LCD’ with ‘Full HD’ (having a resolution of ’1920 * 1080′), has only a maximum of 2000 LEDs. If it has to qualify for being a ‘True LED TV’ there should be 2073600 LEDs.”

So, go get your TV right now.

Stay Tuned!

LCD TVs and LED TVs: Are They Really Different?