Literally virtual shopping

(Alex Eben Meyer/The New York Times)

In a multilayered bit of bad grammar, a young woman in a television commercial tells viewers, "So I go on vehix.com and you can literally take a test drive."

Neither she nor you, of course, can drive a car at vehix.com. Not literally, anyway. Vehix is one of many websites that purport to replicate real-world experiences online. The latest site to do so, StarbucksCoffeeAtHome.com, claims to help coffee drinkers figure out what they'd enjoy most. It is, according to AdAge.com, a "kind of virtual barista who helps demystify the chain's myriad blends."

How can a website do this without allowing consumers to taste or smell the coffee? It takes users through a series of steps, asking questions like whether their tastes run more toward earthy or spicy. Once the series is completed, the user supposedly knows what kind of coffee to order on the next Starbucks visit.

The site is meant to "mimic the experience" consumers would have "if they went to the barista and said, 'I want to try Starbucks, but I don't know where to start,' " Wendy Pinero, vice president for global consumer products, told AdAge.com.

Because the site is built with Flash programming, with its often slow-loading pages, it can also mimic the experience of waiting in line at a Starbucks.

JUST A BUSINESS: Increasingly, the business of illicitly selling materials and technologies for nuclear bombs looks like just that: a business. "Business of the Bomb: The Modern Nuclear Marketplace," an hourlong public radio documentary by the Center for Investigative Reporting and American RadioWorks, describes the "increasingly white-collar nature of the nuclear bomb business." The documentary, available at americanradioworks.publicradio.org, takes listeners through industrial parks and offices from Johannesburg to Stockholm, where deals have been struck. Centering on the activities of Abdul Qadeer Khan, now under house arrest in Pakistan, the show makes clear that the most dangerous players are often not desperate terrorists but rather successful businessmen who may live in suburbs and belong to country clubs.

ZERO SUM: Solving the world's food crisis is not difficult, according to Blairo Maggi, whose company, Grupo Andre Maggi, operates huge soybean farms in Brazil. It comes down to "whether we preserve the environment or produce more food." There is "no way to produce more food without occupying more land and taking down more trees," he told the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo. Maggi, Brazil's largest soy producer, is governor of Mato Grosso, the state where he does much of his farming. That state is, for now, about half covered by rain forest. "Sure, we could blot out more chunks of the 'world's lungs,' our biggest and most important carbon sponge," responded Tom Philpott of the environmental site . "On the other hand, we could also stop converting food crops to biofuel." Dan Mitchell writes for The New York Times.