I spill a dribble of liquid nitrogen onto the bar as I try to pour it from a steel vat into a coffee thermos for Dave Arnold, in a scene that vaguely reminds me of this image of Jesus turning water into wine, except that the splash turns into smoke and tiny beads, which skitter across the bar like insects. This is not good, because interrupting the steady supply of liquid nitrogen to the rotary evaporator Arnold's tending to—which practically sits on top of a cash register—means I'll have single-handedly fucked up that night's supply of horseradish distillate, destined for a drink called the Lady of the Night. Fortunately, I don't. After nearly 20 minutes, a half kilo stalk of horseradish is transmogrified into a vial of pure horseradish flavor. It's the best vial he's made yet.

It's Friday afternoon, you've made it through the long week, and it's time for Happy Hour, Gizmodo's weekly booze column. A cocktail shaker full of innovation, science, and alcohol. Cheers, to the future.

"Molecular gastronomy" is a dirty word. At least around the very culinary geniuses that are held up as the pinnacle of state-of-the-art cooking. Geniuses like Dave Arnold, the head of culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute, and one of two Daves behind Booker & Dax, a quiet little revolution in imbibing that's tucked behind David Chang's Momofuku Ssam Bar. So I know not to breathe a syllable of it when I step inside, even as the first thing my eyes lock onto is the 1500-degree hot poker that transforms frigid concoctions into piping hot cocktails by literally setting them on fire.

There's a good reason for that, though. The phrase is a little bit like the word hipster, in that there is a certain irony to its application: Most of the newer chefs who tell you they practice molecular gastronomy aren't very good at it, in the same way that anybody who tells you that they are a hipster is probably not. Conversely, most anybody who is good at applying technology to cooking, like Dave Arnold's friend and occasional co-conspirator, wd-50's Wylie Dufresne, disavows the term: It cheapens their art, reducing it to chemistry set parlor tricks. The thing is, the technology isn't the point. The point is to "find our own path to deliciousness," as Arnold puts it.

Booker & Dax is the path that he's been seemingly working toward for the last several years, if you glance at any of the several profiles written about his work—a platonic gin & tonic here, a habanero vodka there. The path at Booker & Dax is totally littered with technology, though: A centrifuge that Arnold picked up for $150 on ebay; the aforementioned rotovap, powered by a vacuum system of Arnold's own design; the also aforementioned hot poker, again designed by Arnold; a new a la minute carbonation system I'm not allowed to tell you about; oh, and buckets and buckets of liquid nitrogen, used for everything from chilling every single glass in the bar to bottling Manhattans to muddling herbs for the most refreshing daiquiri you've ever had (and they're working on a julep version).

But if you glance at the menu, you might think it looks like any other relatively fashionable cocktail bar: sections for bubbles, stirred, shaken, on the rock, and red hot poker ("becauase we didn't know what the hell else to call it"), with simple lists of ingredients.

It doesn't tell you, for instance, that the banana justino—"the simplest drink in the world," according to Arnold, and listed merely as rum and bananas—is made with rum and bananas that have been blended with the enzymes chitosan and kieselsol, and spun in a centrifuge at thousands of times the force of gravity, producing an ultra-clarified, clear banana potion. The resulting drink is remarkably pure, like drinking the platonic ideal of sitting on a beach in the Carribbean, even though it's 22 degrees and miserable outside because you're in New York in the middle of February. Which is the whole point. Magic and taste, not physics.

You could maybe say all of this started with seltzer. Just carbonated water. "I was going through case after case after case of the stuff and I used to hate when a friend would come over and crack up a full liter of seltzer and they'd take a swig out of the bottle, and now it's ruined for me." So "I've had a commercial carbonation system in house for 12 or 13 years," explains Arnold. This was before SodaStream, obviously.

Or maybe you could go back further. "Tech is in the blood. I was supposed to be a science guy, but I got sucked in by the liberal arts, by my general kind of laziness." And throughout the day I don't think Arnold beams as much as when he talks about his dad, an electrical engineer. "For the new equipment company, I hope some day to hire my dad to build something because he's really good. Really good. One of the last old school people who's trained in full, real, analog double E."

While B&D seemingly rejects much of the pre-Prohibition recipe rennaissance that has been so very much in vogue at your average excellent cocktail bar, perhaps its most famous implement, the red hot poker, actually has fairly historic roots, going back to the pre-Civil War era: See the flip, a drink made by mixing a high proof spirit with a beer or ale, then sticking a poker from the fire into it. That was how you made a hot drink.

Arnold worked on the poker for years at the FCI, experimenting with heating different materials, like copper (too acidic), iron (gag) and stainless steel ("not enough of a wallop" before he hit on the idea of a self-heating element using a cartridge heater like this one. It's not about the pyrotechnics, though: Because it burns off alcohol, "it allows us to use more base spirit in our drink" which delivers a stronger flavor without an overpowering alcohol sensation, explains Arnold. "The flame makes a slightly better drink, so what am I going to do?"

You are probably not going to walk into your local bar tomorrow and find the bartender tossing limes into a centrifuge, looking to divine the perfect clarified lime juice for a miraculous gin cocktail. For one, Arnold knows of a single bar—one—that has a centrifuge that isn't attached a restaurant. Even perhaps the most accessible technique, liquid nitrogen muddling, which Arnold says any bar can do tomorrow without any special training or technique—just a supply of liquid nitrogen—probably isn't going to storm into the local watering hole in the immediate future. "But even the knife was a new technology at one point."

In the meantime, if you want to sample these drinks for yourself and you're in NYC, stroll over to 207 2nd Avenue in the East Village and give Booker and Dax a visit.

See you next week for another episode of Happy Hour.

Videos by Woody Allen Jang

There's something fundamentally broken in the world of PC laptops: Machines designed nearly four years ago still provide the basic model for how to build one correctly today. The Razer Blade is, in some ways, one of the best Windows laptops I've used in a long time. But I can't decide if it's merely ironic or outright depressing that a PC designed to reinvigorate PCs is ultimately most interesting because it steals something from Apple that most PC makers only wish they could grasp:

How to steal like Apple.

If you don't buy a PC at Best Buy, the process of purchasing one is often something like this: Pick one model out of dozen or so made by your company of choice (or a small handful if you're shopping for gaming PCs) then configure a dozen specifications to your liking. It's an ocean of choice, even if your choices are mostly terrible. Razer makes one computer. The Blade. It has one configuration. That's it.

The idea is fairly seductive: reinventing the PC as a new kind of platform. One that's more homogenous, in a way—console-like, even—but which promises to ultimately take PCs forward again by more aggressively evolving the platform, leaving the legacy cruft like optical drives behind. (The Blade does not have an optical drive.) This in a world where HP contemplated selling its PC business and Dell says it's no longer a PC company, but an IT company. Well, we need another PC company.

Oh, and the Blade's multitouch glass trackpad is a screen (!).

If you were to don a blindfold and grasp the Blade—touch the aluminum unibody, try-but-fai to make it bend and creek—you'd probably think it was a MacBook Pro. And even if you managed to peek out from under your mask, you'd probably still think it was a MacBook Pro, just eviler. It's just about as thin as the 17-inch Pro—so like, actually portable!—though the 7 roughly six-and-a-half pounds of heft make lugging it anywhere a commitment.

The last PC laptop to feel this way, to feel this special when you opened the box, was Dell's ill-fated design dream Adamo. This is an exciting piece of kit. So when you boot up the Blade for the first time, it's almost disappointing that what awaits you is a basically vanilla build of Windows 7 Home Premium. And then you have to install a bunch of Windows updates and new drivers and update the cloud-connected Razer Synapse software. It feels like the Blade deserves something more. But the Synapse software is nice—it syncs and carries your Razer settings for custom key bindings and peripherals from machine to machine to machine. Handy, since setting up custom icons and macros/commands for the 10 much-ballyhooed Switchblade interface keys, while not an exercise in total misery, is something you won't really want to do ever again.

You would expect a company that got its start making ludicrously expensive keyboards and mice to produce a laptop with an appropriately decent keyboard. It is pretty nice. So's the multitouch glass trackpad—two-finger scrolling doesn't make you want to kill yourself, as PC trackpads typically do. That said, the screen aspect feels like a gimmick—albeit a very good one—more than a game-changer right now. Mobile Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and even Internet Explorer are too small and stunted to be truly useful, even if the game mode and other settings are indeed handy. The great white hope is cool software from devs interested in scribbling magic for the screen, but I wouldn't hold my breath too long waiting for those killer apps to arrive.

Okay, so real talk: The Blade is nearly $3000. The first true gaming laptop, according to Razer. What's the performance like? Keep in mind these numbers are using the Nvidia drivers that shipped with the system we tested, which are due to be updated right quick. (Update: They're out now.) Wellll, with maxed settings running at the full 1920x1080 res, I was seeing an average of 65 frames per second in Team Fortress 2, and around 60 in Left 4 Dead 2. In Rage, with 2x AA and the anisotropic filter set to low at full resolution, I was getting around 35-40fps. And for the big test, Battlefield 3? With all medium settings, and resolution set to 1600x900, I was getting 25-27 frames per second, though on low settings at 1920x1080, I could get 30-32fps. Battery life? In one test, we got 49 minutes of Team Fortress 2 with the screen at 50 percent brightness and backlit keys on. Running simply Netflix got 2 hours and 5 minutes.

So you're not buying a gaming monster, so much as a very capable vision of something more.

There's a lot to love, largely because you can feel how much love went into the Blade. It's put together. The design, the materials, the construction. There aren't many machines like this. The 1920x1080 screen is pretty solid. The tiny power brick is the size power bricks should be. The Blade makes the case that laptops should never be over an inch thick again. You can see how the cloud-connected Razer Synapse software is the start of something more. And how can you not like the batshit-craziness of a trackpad display?

The super polished end-to-end experience is diminished over and over again by some of the quirks in Windows: The updates, and in particular, driver pains, which made me stroke out more than once. It's one of those painful reminders that as much as Razer wants to deliver something like the seamless experience of a console, the software technology they're bound to isn't there yet.

And while Razer isn't trying to sell performance here in the way that say, the cats at Origin are with their gaming PCs, it's still hard to not want something slightly more out of machine that costs nearly three thousand dollars and isn't really upgradeable, even if niceties like the SSD make everyday computing plenty fast. Oh, and while it's a tiny thing, the placement of the trackpad—to the right of the keyboard—was something I never quite got used to. That or the very squishy mouse buttons, which I thought needed some more click to them.

I want to buy Razer's vision of a new kind of gaming PC very, very badly. I'm not so sure I'd buy the Blade though, even if it is very clearly the first step toward that vision. It's not that the Blade is bad, either. I just have a gut feeling that the next version is going to be so much better you're going to feel kind of sad if you buy this one.

Razer Blade Specs

OS: Windows 7 Home Premium
Processor: 2.8GHz Intel Core i7 2640M Processor
RAM: 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 RAM
Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GT 555M, 2GB GDDR5 video memory
Screen: 17.3-inch, 1920x1080 LED display
Storage: 256GB SSD
Weight: 6.4 pounds
Battery: 60Wh
Price: $2800
Giz Rank: 3.5 Stars

View gallery »

Gizmodo is not objective. It never has been, I don't think. And I hope it never will be. Because the point isn't to be something as meaningless—and frankly, false—as objective. The point is to tell the truth.

And sometimes, the truth comes with a point of view. A widespread, mealy-mouthed obsession with the appearance of objectivity is why the public editor of the New York Times asked, straight faced, "whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about" in response to readers who are "fed up with the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, [and] look to The Times to set the record straight." The Times is so concerned with appearing objective—particularly in the realm of politics—that it dare not correct a "fact" that is a lie, just to avoid looking like it's taking sides. Even if one of the sides is dead wrong.

It's why sometimes even the truth sometimes gets represented as lie, why the ridiculous ravings of Donald Trump about birth certificates are presented with the same credibility as real public figures. To seem objective.

But objectivity, very often, is bullshit. Even science, which proclaims to be objective more than any other discipline, is very often not, unable to decide whether or not coffee will kill you—or more tragically, has been systematically deployed over and over in history in the service of racism and misogyny. Objectively speaking, the earth was flat and the center of the universe, for a very long time.

Oh, and then there's "bias." What we hear about the most. That we're biased about one product or another. What is an "unbiased" review of technology, or assessment of anything? A list of specifications, numbers jammed together with acronyms? What good does that do anybody?

We have feelings about the things we do, the tools we use. We're humans. And an opinion isn't "bias." When it comes to technology, we make judgments based on experience. We have a fair amount of it. And we're willing to give something—anything, really—a chance. To tell you the truth, we want to love everything or as much as possible, because we've used so so so much bad technology. And if we were to tell you anything but how we felt about something, that would be a lie. The most honest thing we can do is tell you exactly how we feel. If we were to pretend that we didn't absolutely loathe a stupid phone or a dumb tablet, that it merely didn't stack up enough points on a scale, or check enough boxes, that would be a lie.

We'll always tell you the truth, but if you're just looking for a site to give you a list of specs and "both sides" of the story, you've come to the wrong place. We don't promise a whole lot—what you see is what you get—but that is one thing that will always be true. You know, objectively.

Original Image: ER_09/Shutterstock.com