Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts

Listen to David Bowie's First Album in 10 Years for Free Online (Legally)











You don’t have to wait until March 12 to find out whether David Bowie’s first album in a decade is more Tin Machine than Low; the long-awaited The Next Day is already available, streaming in full on iTunes for a limited period pre-release.


The stream continues Bowie’s current interest in previewing content from the album for free online before release; videos for both “Where Are We Now?” and “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” debuted on YouTube in the last month with little fanfare, like this stream. Although iTunes’ page for the stream lacks any information about the individual songs, The Next Day’s track listing is as follows:


01. The Next Day 3:51
02. Dirty Boys 2:58
03. The Stars (Are Out Tonight) 3:56
04. Love Is Lost 3:57
05. Where Are We Now? 4:08
06. Valentine’s Day 3:01
07. If You Can See Me 3:16
08. I’d Rather Be High 3:53
09. Boss Of Me 4:09
10. Dancing Out In Space 3:24
11. How Does The Grass Grow 4:33
12. (You Will) Set The World On Fire 3:30
13. You Feel So Lonely You Could Die 4:41
14. Heat 4:25


Deluxe version bonus tracks:
15. So She 2:31
16. Plan 2:34
17. I’ll Take You There 2:44


The stream will remain available until March 11.






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Feds Say Man Deserved Arrest Because Jacket Said 'Occupy Everything'



A Florida man deserved to be arrested inside the Supreme Court building last year for wearing a jacket painted with “Occupy Everything,” and is lucky he was only apprehended on unlawful entry charges, the Department of Justice says.


The President Barack Obama administration made that assertion in a legal filing in response to a lawsuit brought by Fitzgerald Scott, who is seeking $1 million in damages for his January 2012 arrest inside the Supreme Court building. He also wants his arrest record expunged.


What’s more, the authorities said the former Marine’s claim that he was protected by the First Amendment bolsters the government’s position (.pdf) because the Supreme Court building’s public interior is a First Amendment-free zone.


Fitzgerald was not disturbing anybody, but was repeatedly told by court staff to leave the building or remove the coat. Outside the building, about a dozen “Occupy” protesters were arrested.


Inside, Fitzgerald was handcuffed and arrested for unlawful entry as he was viewing an exhibit on slavery.


Here is the District of Columbia’s ‘unlawful entry’ statute:


Any person who, without lawful authority, shall enter, or attempt to enter, any public building, or other property, or part of such building, or other property, against the will of the lawful occupant or of the person lawfully in charge thereof or his or her agent, or being therein or thereon, without lawful authority to remain therein or thereon shall refuse to quit the same on the demand of the lawful occupant, or of the person lawfully in charge thereof or his or her agent, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not more than $1,000, imprisonment for not more than 6 months, or both.


Prosecutors eventually dismissed the charges, and he sued. (.pdf)


To be sure, the courts have upheld convictions of those wearing inappropriate clothing inside the high court’s building — once in 2011 for individuals wearing orange shirts that said “Shut Down Guantanamo” and in 2007 for protesters wearing orange jump suits and black hoods — all in violation of the so-called “Display Clause.”


The Obama administration said Wednesday that Scott could also have been arrested and charged with violating the Display Clause, which makes it “unlawful to parade, stand, or move in processions or assemblages in the Supreme Court Building or grounds, or to display in the Building and grounds a flag, banner, or device designed or adapted to bring into public notice a party, organization, or movement.”


“It also bears noting that, while plaintiff was initially charged with violating the unlawful entry statute, his conduct also violated the Display Clause of section 6135, and he could just as easily have been charged with an independent violation of that statute as well,” the Obama administration said.


Hat Tip: Mike Scarcella


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Resurrecting the Rainbow Colors of Insect Fossils



After squeezing and baking beetle wings, or soaking them in mud to let them decay, scientists think they’re closer to being able to reconstruct the original brilliant hues of some fossilized insects.


Some insects keep their colors after they become fossils, in some cases for millions of years. But others turn varying shades of brown and black. Scientists interested in the evolution of insect colors — and their role in things like camouflage, mating, and defense — want to better understand how colors change after fossilization.


What really turns a beetle brown, it turns out, is warm temperatures, a team of scientists reported Feb. 20 in Geology. “Temperature is the key to destroying the colors of fossils,” said paleontologist Maria McNamara, a study coauthor at the University of Bristol. McNamara and her colleagues based their conclusion on a battery of tests known as maturation experiments, during which scientists watched what happened when they subjected beetle bits to a variety of conditions that mimic those a dead insect might encounter after many millennia buried under dirt and debris.



“This opens potential pathways for recovering the color signature from specimens which have since lost their coloration,” said paleoentomologist Michael Engel of the University of Kansas. ”In time we may be able to look upon a drawer of fossils rendered black by preservation, but which we know were once colored, and reconstruct their lost hues and patterns.”


McNamara has been studying fossil insect colors for years. After identifying some trends in how fossil colors change, she decided to test some of the conditions that could produce color changes after a bug gets buried. To do this, McNamara and her colleagues took advantage of a Yale University lab equipped to do maturation experiments, a facility normally used by geochemists. Here, the high temperatures and pressures that can affect buried sediments are produced by autoclaves, instruments that heat- and pressure- sterilize lab equipment.


Except McNamara removed the forewings from jewel beetles and weevils and put them in the autoclave.


The shiny colors of the beetles’ outer cuticles come from microscopic structures. Some beetles, like the green jewel beetle (above left), get their shimmer from multiple layers of reflective compounds. Others, like the weevil (above right), derive their colors from tiny 3-D biophotonic crystals. These crystals, McNamara says, are among the most complex structures known – so complicated that scientists haven’t figured out how to replicate them artificially. Determining when the crystals showed up in the fossil record is a different question, since most fossils show no evidence for the structure.


The jewel beetle’s shiny covering fared well when subjected only to high pressure conditions, McNamara found. But turning up the heat as well as pressure produced a predictable color change, from green, to cyan, to blue, to indigo. And then, brown or black.



“Cook anything long enough and it’ll all end up black,” McNamara said.


The weevil’s outer layer responded similarly. Placing both types of insect cuticles in dirt and water for 18 months produced no color change, leading the team to conclude that post-burial temperatures are the most important factor in color change. High temperatures alter color-producing structures, shrinking layers and changing chemical compositions, which causes the tissue to bend light differently. “The color they produce is really dependent on how much the structure bends light,” McNamara said.


In support of her conclusion, McNamara points to fossils unearthed from various sites — buried at different depths and under different conditions — whose colors conform to the hypothesis.



Not everyone is convinced, though. Some scientists suggest McNamara is generalizing too much, and that color changes vary on a case-by-case basis, depending in part on species and precise post-burial conditions.


McNamara is working on resolving how these factors can influence a fossil’s color, and is planning on testing additional species and tissues. For now, she points to a tantalizing piece of evidence that emerged from her studies: Some of the black fossils she studied retain their original color-producing structures, which means that — with more information — scientists could eventually backtrack from those structures and determine what colors may have adorned paleo-insects.



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The Friendster Autopsy: How a Social Network Dies



What kills a social network? A group of internet archeologists have picked over the digital bones of Friendster — the pioneering social networking site that drowned in Facebook’s wake — and we now have a clearer picture of its epic collapse.


Friendster was once the hottest thing in social networking. Google wanted to buy it for $30 million back in 2003, but — burdened by technical glitches and a more nimble competitor in Facebook — it was pretty much dead in the U.S. by 2006. That said, it trudged along for a few more years, helped by a relatively strong following in southeast Asia. Then, around 2009, a site redesign crushed it.


It ended up being a kind of “controlled demolition,” with weakly connected chains of friends quickly disintegrating, says David Garcia, a professor with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and one of the authors of a recent paper analyzing Friendster’s demise.


Just before Friendster relaunched itself as a gaming site in 2011, the Internet Archive crawled the dead network, grabbing a snapshot. Garcia and his fellow researchers used that snapshot of that controlled demolition as the basis for their research, which they describe as both a work of internet archeology and an autopsy.


What they found was that by 2009, Friendster still had tens of millions of users, but the bonds linking the network weren’t particularly strong. Many of the users weren’t connected to a lot of other members, and the people they had befriended came with just a handful of their own connections. So they ended up being so loosely affiliated with the network, that the burden of dealing with a new user interface just wasn’t worth it.


“First the users in the outer cores start to leave, lowering the benefits of inner cores, cascading through the network towards the core users, and thus unraveling,” Garcia told us during an online chat.


You can see the hollowing out of Friendster in this diagram:



The researchers describe heart of successful networks in terms of what that they call K-cores. These are subset of users who not only have a lot of friends, but they have “resilience and social influence,” Garcia says. As these K-cores disintegrated, the whole Friendster thing fell apart.


If there’s a lesson to be learned from the data, it’s that it takes more than a lot of users to build a viable social network. They need to have strong connections too. So Facebook should be looking at the types of connections it users have and encourage them to connect to other strongly connected users, Garcia says.


In other words, strong networks are made up of strongly-linked people, not of stragglers.


Here’s the Onion, predicting this story from a few years back:



HT The Physics arXiv Blog


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Nissan Promises Electric Race Car for LeMans











Nissan is returning to the world’s greatest road race in 2014 — in an electric vehicle.


During the opening ceremony of Nissan’s motorsports headquarters in Yokohama, Japan, President and CEO Carlos Ghosn announced plans to return to the 24 Hours of LeMans next year, when the automaker will occupy the highly desirable “Garage 56″ slot that houses the world’s most innovative and experimental race cars.


“We will return to LeMans with a vehicle that will act as a high-speed test bed in the harshest of environments for both our road car and race car electric vehicle technology,” Ghosn said.


Nissan’s next stab at LeMans follows its 2012 campaign where its radical DeltaWing race car kept pace with the top prototype teams before being knocked off track by a Toyota and dragged to the pits.


Nissan hasn’t revealed what form its next-generation LeMans prototype will take, but sources indicate it will be a zero-emissions vehicle loosely based on the all-electric Leaf RC racer we drove last year. Current battery and charging technology isn’t up to rigors of a 24-hour race, so expect to see something innovative (battery swapping?) that could turn endurance racing on its head.






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Your Next Computer Will Live on Your Arm



Forget about robots rising up against humans for world domination. In the future we’re all going to be robot-human hybrids with the help of wearable computers. We’ve already seen Google Glass, the search giant’s augmented-reality glasses, and now the latest Y Combinator startup to come out of stealth, Thalmic Labs, is giving us a wrist cuff that will one day control computers, smartphones, gaming consoles, and remote-control devices with simple hand gestures.


Unlike voice-detecting Google Glass, and the camera-powered Kinect and Leap Motion controller, Thalmic Labs is going to the source of your hand and finger gestures – your forearm muscles. “In looking at wearable computers, we realized there are problems with input for augmented-reality devices,” says Thalmic Labs co-founder Stephen Lake. “You can use voice, but no one wants to be sitting on the subway talking to themselves, and cameras can’t follow wherever you go.”


I’d argue that thanks to Bluetooth headsets and Siri, we’ve already been talking to ourselves for the last decade, so talking to my glasses isn’t a huge stretch. But, I won’t deny that it looks cool to casually flick my hand to change the song on my MacBook, which is what Thalmic Labs is promising with its $149 forearm gadget called the Myo (a nod to the Greek prefix for muscle, but rhymes with Leo), which has an adjustable band that can accommodate almost anyone.



Using a technique called electromyography, which measures the electrical impulses produced by your muscles when you move them, the Myo’s sensors can detect when you make a gesture and translate that to a digital command for your computer, mobile device, or remote controlled vehicle. “When you go to move you hand, you’re using muscles in your forearm which, when they contract and activate, produce just a few microvolts of electrical activity,” says Lake. “Our sensors on the surface of the skin amplify that activity by thousands of times and plug it into a processor in the band, which is running machine learning algorithms.” Similar technology is found in high-tech arm and hand prosthetics, as well as the Necomimi Brainwave Controlled Cat Ears.


Since most humans activate the same muscles when they point their finger or wave their hand, Thalmic Labs was able to compile a set of specific electrical patterns based on our movements and translate them into thousands of digital commands. As you wear the Myo over time, Lake says, it begins to learn your unique electrical impulses and accuracy improves. The device also has haptic feedback – a small vibration – to tell you when you’ve completed a recognized gesture, such as a hand swipe or finger pinch. That helps shorten the learning curve, says Lake.


In a video showing off the Myo, the device controls video and audio playback, switches between screens on a computer, and directs remote-controlled devices, but Lake says there are many more ways to use it. “If you think about your daily life, you use your hands to interact with and manipulate just about everything you do, from pressing numbers on your phone to picking up your coffee,” says Lake. “Now think if we can take all those motions and actions and plug them into just about any computer or digital system, the possibilities are endless.” When the Myo ships in late 2013, Thalmic Labs will offer an open API so that developers can connect it to other systems or build their own programs.


Though the idea of a motion control wristband might only appeal to the hardest-core of wearable computer enthusiasts right now, Lake has high hopes that the trend will eventually reach the masses. ‘Right now we’re just on the cusp of a major shift in computing, and whether it’s a Google product or something else, at some point in the next couple years wearable computing devices are going to change how everyone will communicate and interact with technology,” he says. “Ultimately the line between us and our devices will start becoming a lot more blurred.”

Thalmic Lab’s timing is spot-on. Google finally pulling the curtain back on its Project Glass augmented reality glasses has spurred (mostly positive) chatter about wearable computers, and how they’ll change our relationship with technology. Though Glass and Myo have a few years to go before more than just a slice of population will want to have them, it’s easy to picture a future in which everyone is wearing a computer. And it’s not a stretch to imagine the same people who would don a pair of glass-less glasses that can record video and photos, send emails and text, and look up anything on Google, would also slide their arm into a muscle-sensing band that can control computers with a hand gesture. If you’re one of those people, pre-order for the Myo starts today.


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Wired Space Photo of the Day: Glowing Gas in Omega Nebula


This image is a colour composite of the Omega Nebula (M 17) made from exposures from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 (DSS2). The field of view is approximatelly 4.7 x 3.7 degrees.


Image: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin. [high-resolution]


Caption: ESO

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That Syncing Feeling



“Smart, or stylish?” That’s the question facing casual watch aficionados looking for a new, high-tech addition to their collection.

On one hand (er, wrist), you’ve got the Pebble and other smartwatch upstarts, which come with built-in smartphone connectivity, customizable screens, and burgeoning developer communities eager to feed their app ecosystems. They also, by and large, look like uninspired pieces of mass-produced Chinese plastic, and that’s because they are.


On the “stylish” end of the spectrum is … not much. Except this: Citizen’s Eco-Drive Proximity.


The Citizen learns the current time from your phone, and the watch’s hands spin around to the correct positions.


By all outward appearances, the Proximity looks like any another chronograph in a sea of handsome mechanical watches. It has all the features you’d expect, including a 24-hour dial, day and date, perpetual calendar and second time zone. But housed within its slightly oversized 46mm case is a Bluetooth 4.0 radio, so it’s capable of passing data over the new low-energy connectivity standard appearing in newer smartphones, including the iPhone 5 and 4S. And for now, the Promixity is only compatible with those Apple devices.


Initial pairing is relatively easy. After downloading Citizen’s notably low-rent iOS app, you can link the watch to your phone with a few turns and clicks on the crown.


The gee-whiz feature is the automatic time sync that takes place whenever you land in a different time zone. Once connected, the Citizen learns the current time from your phone, and the watch’s hands spin around to the correct positions — a welcome bit of easy magic, considering the initial setup is a tedious finger dance.



The watch can also notify you of incoming communications. Once you’ve configured the mail client (it only supports IMAP accounts), you’ll get notified whenever you get a new e-mail — there’s a slight vibration and the second hand sweeps over to the “mail” tab at the 10-o’clock position. If a phone call comes in, the second hand moves to the 11-o’clock marker. If the Bluetooth connection gets lost because the watch or phone is outside the 30-foot range, you get another vibration and the second hand moves to the “LL” indicator. And really, that’s the extent of the functionality around notifications.


But notable in its absence is the notification I’d like the most: text message alerts. And it’s not something Citizen will soon be rectifying because the dials and hardware aren’t upgradable.


I also experienced frequent connection losses, particularly when attending a press conference with scads of Mi-Fis and tethered smartphones around me. This caused dozens of jarring vibrations both on my wrist and in my pocket, followed by a raft of push notifications on my phone informing me of the issue. Reconnecting is easy (and generally happens automatically), but the lack of stability in certain environments matched with the limited capabilities of the notifications had me forgetting to reconnect and not even worrying about it later on.



But actually, I’m OK with that. I still like the fact that it never needs charging. Even though there aren’t any solar cells visible on the dial, the watch does have them. They’re hidden away beneath the dial, and yet they still work perfectly. And even when its flagship connectivity features aren’t behaving, it’s still a damn handsome watch. It feels solid, and it looks good at the office, out to dinner, or on the weekend — something very few other “smart” watches on the market can claim.


However, those things can be said of almost all of Citizen’s EcoDrive watches. The big distinguishing feature here is the Bluetooth syncing and notifications, and they just don’t work that well.


WIRED A smart watch you won’t be embarrassed to wear. Charges using light. Combines classic styling with cutting-edge connectivity. Subtle notifications keep you informed without dominating your attention.


TIRED Loses Bluetooth connection with disturbing frequency. Limited notification abilities. No text message alerts. Janky iPhone app.


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Engine Crack Grounds Pentagon's Entire Fleet of F-35 Stealth Fighters



The U.S. military’s entire fleet of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters has been grounded, owing to a crack in the engine of one jet. This is at least the fourth full or partial stand-down of the F-35, the Pentagon’s main future fighter, in just the last two and a half years.


“On Feb. 19, 2013, a routine engine inspection revealed a crack on a low pressure turbine blade of an F135 engine installed in a … test aircraft at Edwards Air Force Base, California,” Kyra Hawn, a program spokeswoman, wrote in a statement.


The damaged blade is being shipped to its manufacturer, Connecticut-based Pratt and Whitney, for “more thorough evaluation and root cause analysis,” Hawn continued. “It is too early to know the fleet-wide impact of this finding, however as a precautionary measure, all F-35 flight operations have been suspended until the investigation is complete.”


The F-35 previously had engine blade problems in 2008.


The grounding affects F-35 testing in Florida, California and New Jersey and initial pilot training in Florida and Arizona. The Pentagon possesses around 100 F-35s of three models: the Air Force’s lightweight A-model, the vertical-landing F-35B belonging to the Marine Corps and the Navy’s carrier-compatible F-35C. The military plans to buy a total of 2,400 F-35s over the next 30 years at a cost of more than $1 trillion, training and maintenance included.



Unprecedented in scale and ambition, the Lockheed Martin-run F-35 program has been beset by cost overruns, delays and design problems. The Pentagon has steadily downgraded the plane’s performance specs. Even so, it struggles to match its required blend of stealth, maneuverability, speed and range.


All F-35s were temporarily grounded in late 2010 and again in 2011 because of a faulty fuel pump. The Marines’ F-35Bs briefly stood down last month after an engine malfunctioned — a failure later tied to a poorly-made fluid line. Every grounding causes testing delays that could bump back the Joint Strike Fighter’s frontline debut, currently expected in 2018 or 2019.


The fact that the three Joint Strike Fighter models share a common engine design means a turbine crack in one F-35 could affect all the others.  The Pentagon at one time planned to have two different, but swappable, engines for the F-35 — one each from Pratt an Whitney and rival General Electric. But after a bitter political fight and with the military’s recommendation, Congress terminated the alternate engine two years ago on cost grounds.


If it lasts, the current grounding could very well revive that battle.


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Sony Circles the Wagons With PlayStation 4



The first words out of Sony Entertainment’s CEO Andrew House said it all: “The stakes are high.”


His words to the Hammerstein Ballroom last night – packed with journalists, stacked with deep-bass speakers and lit by a dense lattice of lasers – were, if anything, an understatement. Once-mighty Sony is struggling. The franchise most vital to its revival is PlayStation.


The history of the device is worth revisiting. PlayStation was launched in 1994, a fringe product created by renegade engineer Ken Kutaragi. His vision, he once told me, “was to create a new concept for computer entertainment — we wanted to include as much of the audience as possible, including females and seniors, East and West, North and South…. In our minds it was not a game machine, but a preparation for future entertainment.”


PlayStation 1 became a surprise hit, eventually selling 100 million, but the real game changer was PlayStation 2, released in 2006. That second iteration pushed the technology envelope with better graphics and faster chips than you’d find in a PC. It was also the first game machine with optical DVD storage. But Kutaragi’s larger vision was remaking and broadening entertainment. “Content itself is culture,” he said as he prepared to launch. That was part of the reason that he felt it imperative for new iterations of PlayStation to run previous software. “A new version PlayStation should create new forms of entertainment,” he said, but “we don’t want to throw away our history, it’s very, very clear that keeping compatibility is important.”


Powered by what Kutaragi called “the emotion engine,” PlayStation 2 became the best-selling videogame machine of all time, but Kutargi saw it as symbolic of a new era of broadband entertainment, something that would allow users to “jack into the Matrix world.”


By the time PlayStation 3 was released in 2006, Sony had helped make gaming a core activity for an entire generation. The new machine was also an ambitious technology reach, incorporating a then-exotic Blu-ray drive and an unusual architecture. Kutaragi’s idea was that PlayStation 3 would become a powerful media hub as well as a broad platform for consumer electronics. (By the time of PS3’s release, Kutaragi had lost a corporate political struggle and soon would retire from an active role in Sony.) But Sony’s competitors also had successful platforms, and though PlayStation 3 was successful, it did not sell as well as its predecessors.


Now, seven years after PlayStation 3, Sony was promising to finally reveal its new machine, slated for release at the end of the year. Speculation was all over the map about its abilities.


The point of the evening was to provide some answers — but not all. Sony said nothing about details like pricing and a specific release date. Most strikingly, the device itself never made an appearance. Not even a photo. But Sony did outline its vision, and filled in the gaps with a series of game demos from various developers.


As you’d expect, the PS4 is more powerful than its predecessor. But Sony is no longer interested in creating a unique proprietary computing platform. As lead architect Mark Cerny explained, the new model reverts to a traditional PC architecture albeit a “supercharged” one, with a heavy-duty processor and an enhanced graphics chip. Faced with a standard platform, developers can presumably produce games more quickly.


Sony executives talked about an enhanced game network that could stream content, and even begin playing a game before the download is completed. They said that games could easily be moved to the hand-held PlayStation Vita, or even other devices like smartphones or tablets. The new game controller they revealed is basically the same, but includes a few new features like a “share” button, and a colored light that can make it easier to identify multiple players. Another welcome change is that games will start more quickly, lending the devices the instant-on feel of tablet computing.


But most of the evening was taken with lengthy previews of the games developers were concocting for PlayStation 4. By and large, they appeared to be better-looking, smoother-playing and bloodier versions of games familiar in the console canon.


Remember, the hardware in these consoles is basically frozen until the next iteration. So in effect, Sony is making a bet that the themes and gameplay its customers like now are similar to what they’re going to eat up six or seven years hence. The PS4 is designed to improve those games, but not to reinvent gaming itself.


But look what’s happened in the seven years since Sony launched the PS3 — social gaming, casual smartphone gaming, and gesture-based interfaces like Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Kinect have generated new kinds of products and broadened the audience for gaming itself. The PS4 will make it easier to integrate social activities into its games — it’s now really simple to invite friends to play, to “spectate” other people’s games, or even ask a remote friend to take over the controls to get you to the next level. But for all that, Sony showed no signs of integrating social into its games in the way Zynga and other companies have. As for gesture-based control, Sony offers a hand-held camera peripheral, but has seemingly refrained from building a camera into the device itself.


I say “seemingly” because the device itself never made an appearance at the launch event. After the event, I asked Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Jack Tretton about that omission. “We didn’t think it was significant to show the box. he says. “When I think of a game system, I think about the games.”


Tretton also confirmed something not specified in the presentation: the PS4 is not backward compatible with previous games. (So much for Kutaragi’s contention that previous game content is vital history.) That means that new buyers lose their steep emotional and financial investment in software. Sony’s presumed solution is that at some point in the future, its game network might be able to stream those legacy games to run on the PS4 platform. But for the foreseeable future, adopting the PS4 means abandoning one’s current game library.


Tretton is frank when speaking about who will buy the PS4. (Of course, he predicts huge sales.) The gaming world is broad, he says, and ideally Sony will lure people who play on smartphones to consider a console. But he has a certain customer in mind. “We’re focusing on that core gamer, the gamer who wants the ultimate experience and lives for gaming. If you’re not a gamer, I don’t think you get it.”


In short, Sony is circling its wagons around the core gamer, hoping that the console gaming phenomenon is in effect preserved in amber, impervious to the next waves of technology and connectivity.


To be sure, the new games that will run on PlayStation 4 look amazing. The most interesting game previewed was something called Watchdog. It takes place in a dystopic version of Chicago where personal information about all citizens and locations can instantly be “hacked” by a flick of a controller button. Using that information, your character can make his way through the urban maze for good or ill.


But here’s the thing about that scary fictional world of Watchdog: It’s not too much different that the augmented reality that location-based smartphones are already creating. Instead of Sony’s ho-hum advances of making it easier to share games — or to “spectate” on someone’s else’s first-person shooter session, wouldn’t it have been more exciting to somehow create a new kind of game that drew upon the vast trove of locational and personal information we carry around with us?


Instead, Sony is betting that for the next seven years no new paradigms will lure the bulk of gamers away from their basements. That may be a decent bet. Year after year, the gamer population spends endless hours at their controls and spends endless loot on new games. (Though in recent years, sales aren’t as strong, maybe because the low price of mobile games are having an effect.) But in an area where platforms are fast evolving (think Google Glass and other wearables), is it really far-fetched to think that time is running out on traditional console gaming?


Improbable? Maybe. But it’s also improbable to attend a game console launch where the console never shows up.


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Darpa Wants to Help You Survive a Nuclear Disaster



If you’re near a nuclear disaster — either a detonated bomb or a malfunctioning reactor — you are probably going to die, and die unpleasantly. Unless the Pentagon’s mad scientists have anything to say about it.


Darpa doesn’t have a program in place for creating, say, a super-therapy or spray-on tan that stops nuclear radiation. But 2011′s Fukushima Daiichi reactor catastrophe in Japan got the blue-sky researchers thinking.


“In light of the diverse, persistent, and substantial threat posed by ionizing radiation from nuclear and/or radiological weapons,” the agency wrote in a request for information released Wednesday, “Darpa is requesting information on novel therapies, methods, devices, protocols, compounds, and/or systems to mitigate the dangers that ionizing radiation poses to human health.” The idea is to help inform “a potential new program focused on demonstrating novel methods for mitigating the susceptibility of victims exposed to large doses of ionizing radiation over a range of temporal scales.”



Darpa’s breaking down its interest in nuclear survival into three main research areas. One is “prophylactic” and “post-exposure” treatments that can neutralize ionizing radiation before it starts to cause serious cellular damage. Another looks at how to survive and/or mitigate the long-term effects of radiation exposure, to include cancers — effectively meaning Darpa wants to push the boundaries of surviving radiation-induced cancer. The third is to better understand and model the effects of radiation on the human body, from a molecular up to a systemic level, with an eye to “mitigation and repair of genetic and cellular damage.”


A particular area of interest: what nuclear radiation does to the very building blocks of life. “Emerging models of DNA damage dynamics, DNA damage response, signaling pathways and DNA repair mechanisms,” Darpa’s request reads, “may lead to the development of novel therapies for long-term radiation damage.”


Perhaps none of this research should come as a surprise, as it emerges from the agency that once dreamed of building a nuclear reactor the size of a microchip. And it’s ambitious, to say the least. But Darpa will truly be doing something revolutionary if it can figure out how to make the human body resilient against nuclear energy or fallout.


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Somersaulting Mini Makes an Epic Backflip











The Mini Cooper is a fun car that can do many, many things — including insane backflips in the snow. Just the thing for testing that suspension. And the heated seats.


Rally driver and former freestyle skiing champion Guerlain Chicherit went end-over-end off the ramp in a John Cooper Works Mini. The car, so highly modified as to be barely called a John Cooper Works Mini, pulled off the oh-my-God-are-you-kidding-me unassisted backflip in Tignes, France. Although Chicherit nailed the jump, the landing isn’t exactly perfect. The car lands pointing slightly to the right. But c’mon … backflip. In a car. In the snow.


How awesome is that?


Mini, after making the obligatory do not attempt this at home warning, swore this is the first time a vehicle has pulled off a backflip without a special ramp or moving elements to boost the car’s rotation. Chicherit did it all with nothing more elaborate than a ramp with the same angle you’d find on a standard quarter pipe.


No word on when the “somersault” package will be available on the Mini.


Photos and video: Mini








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New Whale Species Unearthed in California Highway Dig



By Carolyn Gramling, ScienceNOW


Chalk yet another fossil find up to roadcut science. Thanks to a highway-widening project in California’s Laguna Canyon, scientists have identified several new species of early toothed baleen whales. Paleontologist Meredith Rivin of the John D. Cooper Archaeological and Paleontological Center in Fullerton, California, presented the finds Feb. 17 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.


“In California, you need a paleontologist and an archaeologist on-site” during such projects, Rivin says. That was fortuitous: The Laguna Canyon outcrop, excavated between 2000 and 2005, turned out to be a treasure trove containing hundreds of marine mammals that lived 17 million to 19 million years ago. It included 30 cetacean skulls as well as an abundance of other ocean dwellers such as sharks, says Rivin, who studies the fossil record of toothed baleen whales. Among those finds, she says, were four newly identified species of toothed baleen whale—a type of whale that scientists thought had gone extinct 5 million years earlier.



Whales, the general term for the order Cetacea, comprise two suborders: Odontoceti, or toothed whales, which includes echolocators like dolphins, porpoises, and killer whales; and Mysticeti, or baleen whales, the filter-feeding giants of the deep such as blue whales and humpback whales.The two suborders share a common ancestor.


Mysticeti comes from the Greek for mustache, a reference to the baleen that hangs down from their jaw. But the earliest baleen whales actually had teeth (although they’re still called mysticetes). Those toothy remnants still appear in modern fin whale fetuses, which start to develop teeth in the womb that are later reabsorbed before the enamel actually forms.


The four new toothed baleen whale species were also four huge surprises, Rivin says. The new fossils date to 17 to 19 million years ago, or the early-mid Miocene epoch, making them the youngest known toothed whales. Three of the fossils belong to the genus Morawanocetus, which is familiar to paleontologists studying whale fossils from Japan, but hadn’t been seen before in California. These three, along with the fourth new species, which is of a different genus, represent the last known occurrence of aetiocetes, a family of mysticetes that coexisted with early baleen whales. Thus, they aren’t ancestral to any of the living whales, but they could represent transitional steps on the way tothe toothless mysticetes.


The fourth new species—dubbed “Willy”—has its own surprises, Rivin says. Although modern baleen whales are giants, that’s a fairly recent development (in the last 10 million years). But Willy was considerably bigger than the three Morawanocetus fossils. Its teeth were also surprisingly worn—and based on the pattern of wear as well as the other fossils found in the Laguna Canyon deposit, Rivin says, that may be because Willy’s favorite diet may have been sharks. Modern offshore killer whales, who also enjoy a meal of sharks, tend to have similar patterns of wear in their teeth due to the sharks’ rough skin.


The new fossils are a potentially exciting find, says paleobiologist Nick Pyenson of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Although it’s not yet clear what Rivin’s team has got and what the fossils will reveal about early baleen whale evolution, he says, “I’ll be excited to see what they come up with.” Pyenson himself is no stranger to roadcut science and the rush to preserve fossils on the brink of destruction: In 2011, he managed, within a week, to collect three-dimensional images of numerous whale fossils found by workers widening a highway running through Chile’s Atacama Desert.


Meanwhile, Rivin says her paper describing the fossils is still in preparation, and she hopes to have more data on the three Morawanocetus, at least, published by the end of the year. As for the fourth fossil, she says, it might take a bit longer: There’s still some more work to do to fully free Willy from the rock.


This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.


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<cite>Halo</cite> Creator Unveils Its Next Masterpiece, a Persistent Online World



BELLEVUE, Washington — Destiny, the new game from the creator of Halo, isn’t just another shooter. It’s a persistent online multiplayer adventure, designed on a galactic scale, that wants to become your new life.


“It isn’t a game,” went the oft-heard tagline at a preview event on Wednesday. “It’s a world where the most important stories are told by the players, not written by the developers.”


This week, Bungie Studios invited the press into its Seattle-area studio to get the first look at Destiny. Although the event was a little short on details — Bungie and Activision didn’t reveal the launch date, handed out concept art instead of screenshots, and dodged most of my questions — it gave an intriguing glimpse at what the creator of Halo believes is the future of shooters.


Bungie was acquired by Microsoft in 2000, and its insanely popular shooter was the killer app that put the original Xbox on the map. Bungie split off from its corporate parent in 2007, and Microsoft produced Halo 4 on its own last year. The development studio partnered up with mega-publisher Activision for its latest project, which was kept mostly secret until now.


Destiny, slated for release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, isn’t exactly an MMO. Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg called it a “shared-world shooter” — multiplayer and online, but something less than massive.


“We’re not doing this just because we have the tech,” Hirshberg said. “We have a great idea, and we’re letting the concept lead the tech.”



Built with new development software created specifically for Destiny, this new game is set in Earth’s solar system and takes place after a mysterious cataclysm wipes out most of humanity. The remaining survivors create a “safe zone” underneath a mysterious alien sphere called “The Traveler.”


The enigmatic sphere imparts players with potent weapons, magic-like powers and defensive technology. Thanks to these gifts, people have begun reclaiming the solar system from alien invaders that moved in while humanity was down.


Bungie fired off a list of design principles that guide Destiny’s creation: Create a world players want to be in. Make it enjoyable by players of all skill levels. Make it enjoyable by people who are “tired, impatient and distracted.” In other words, you don’t have to be loaded for bear and pumped for the firefight of your life every time you log on to Destiny.


After this brief overview, writer/director Joseph Staten used concept art and narration to outline an example of what a typical Destiny player’s experience might be.


Beginning in the “safe zone,” a player would start out from their in-game home and walk into a large common area. From here, the player would be able to explore their surroundings and meet up with friends. Then, they might board their starships and fly to another planet, let’s say Mars, in order to raid territory held by aliens.


During this raid, other real players who traveled to the same zone (like visiting a particular server on an MMO) would be free to come and go as they please. For example, a random participant could simply walk on by. They could stop and observe. Or they could get involved in the fight. In this instance, Staten suggested that a passerby would join the raid and then break off from the group after the spoils were divvied up without any user interface elements to fuss with. Walk away, and it’s done.


Bungie made a point of saying several times over that Destiny will not have any “lobby”-type interfaces, or menus from which to choose from a list of quests. Instead, players will simply immerse themselves in the world and organically choose to participate in whatever activities they stumble upon. Bungie promised solo content, cooperative content, and competitive content, though it provided no further examples of these.


The developer said that by employing very specialized artificial intelligence working entirely behind the scenes, players will encounter other real players who are best suited for them to interact with, based on their experience levels and other factors.


Staten didn’t say how many players would be able to exist in the world at the same time, but said that characters will be placed in proximity to each other based on very specific criteria, not simply to “fill the world up.”







Bungie showed off three distinct character classes throughout the day’s presentations: Hunter, Titan and Warlock. Although no differences were outlined between them apart from the Warlock being able to use a kind of techno-magic, the developer was keen to emphasize the idea that each character in Destiny would be highly customized and unique, and will grow with the player over an extended period of time.


While many games make the same promise, Destiny’s vision of “an extended period of time” isn’t 100 hours. It’s more like 10 years.


Bungie’s plan is for the Destiny story to unfold gradually over the course of 10 “books,” each with a beginning, middle and end. Through this will run an overarching story intended to span the entire decade’s worth of games, although like many other topics covered during the day, Bungie gave little detail about how this will work.


The developer spent a lot of time emphasizing its claim that no game has been made at this scale before. Bungie says it has a whopping 350 in-house developers working on Destiny.


Senior graphics architect Hao Chen gave examples of the sort of impenetrable mathematics formulas that allow Bungie to craft environments and worlds at a speed that it claims was previously impossible.


Bungie’s malleable team system was also said to increase its output. With the ability to co-locate designers, artists, and engineers at any time, Bungie says it can go through exceptionally rapid on-the-spot iteration and improvement for each facet of the game.


Apart from highly improved technology and the basic concept of humanity taking back the solar system, there’s just not a lot of hard information on Destiny at the moment. One thing that was made quite clear is that the game will not be subscription-based. Every presenter was clear in stating that players will not pay a monthly fee to participate in this persistent world.


While fees may not be required, a constant connection to the Internet will be. Since the core concept of Destiny is exploring a world that exists outside of the player’s console and is populated by real people at all times, it “will need to be connected in order for someone to play,” said Bungie chief operating officer Pete Parsons.


Representatives from both Bungie and Activision gave vague answers when Wired pressed for further details, often stating that they “were not ready” to discuss specifics. Whether that means those things are still being kept from the press, or whether they have not yet been determined by the development team, was unclear.


Questions currently unanswered: How will players communicate? How will players interact with each other outside of combat? What content exists in the non-combat “safe zones”? Subscriptions may be out, but what about in-app purchases? Will player versus player combat be available? Will the game ship on a disc or be download only? Will its persistent world allow Xbox and PlayStation gamers to play together? What content and interactions will be possible via smartphones and tablets (which Bungie alluded to)? Will the fancy new tools be licensed to other developers?


And so on.


For now, Bungie is asking us to take it for granted that it will execute on a bold 10-year plan for a very different sort of shooter. In the history of the always-changing gaming industry, no one’s ever been able to pull off a 10-year plan for anything. Can Bungie do it?


Hey… they made Halo, right?


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The Quirky World of Competitive Snow Carving Comes to California



The weekend at Northstar ski resort in Truckee, California, is beautiful, sunny, and in the 30s. For eight teams of snow carvers from around the world, though, it’s terrible — the melty snow is sloppy, hard to carve, and even dangerous.

Teams of three from Finland, Japan, Germany, Canada, and the U.S. were selected from more than 40 applicants for the inaugural Carve Tahoe, a five-day competition to hew works of art from 14-foot-high, 20-ton blocks of snow. But despite the bad snow, the teams rely on decades of experience, handcrafted tools, and creative techniques to fashion their massive sculptures. The team members are sculptors and artists and designers, but also doctors and lawyers. Though they spend weeks each year carving, nobody makes a living doing it.


“Everyone seems to have their own method of doing things,” says Team Wisconsin’s Mark Hargarten. “It’s amazing how different they are.”


The Wisconsin team uses a grid system for their carving — a Native American wearing an eagle costume, its feathers turning to flames, called “Dance of the Firebird.” The polyurethane model they built is scaled so 1/2 inch equals one foot on the finished snow sculpture. They cut a copy of the model in four, and covered each section with clay, sectioned in 1/2 inch increments. They etch corresponding lines in the snow, one foot to a side, and they peel off one piece of clay, carve the part of the sculpture they can see, and move on to the next.


“You never get lost using the method,” says Dan Ingebrigtson, a professional sculptor from Milwaukee. “Three or four guys can work from different angles, and meet in the middle.”


Wisconsin’s got several other strategies behind their carving as well. From the south, it looks like they haven’t even started; they left the southern side of the block intact to protect the rest of it from the sun, and the wall has been decimated by the heat. More than 20 percent of its thickness has melted by Sunday night, three days in. After the sun goes down, the team is hollowing out the interior of the structure, so it will freeze faster overnight.


Other teams are relying on nighttime freezing as well. A team partly from the U.S. and partly from Canada carves spires from blocks they removed from the sculpture, and plans to attach them to the top of their sculpture, “The Stand,” which incorporates four interwoven trees. They’ll use melty snow pulled from the middle of the block right when the sun goes down to cement the tops onto the trees, says team member Bob Fulks from the top of a stepladder as he cuts away at the sculpture with an ice chisel.


Fulks’ team is leaving Tahoe after the competition to go straight to Whitehorse, in the Yukon, for another competition, where he anticipates no problems with warm weather.


“It’s a good gig, you can travel all over the world doing it,” he says. “You go around and see the same people.”


Many of the carvers know each other from previous competitions.


“We’ve sculpted with almost everybody here before,” says Team Idaho-Dunham’s Mariah Dunham, who is working on “Sweet House (of Madness)” with her mother, Barb. The creation is a beehive, with the south side as the exterior, and the north side (intentionally placed out of the sun) as a representation of the comb, including hexagonal holds that perforate all the way to the hollow interior.


Though Carve Tahoe is new, snow carving is not. Many of the sculptors have been at it for more than 20 years, traveling around the world and meeting and competing against many of the same people — though each competition demands unique new designs from all the sculptors. Kathryn Keown discovered snow carving while Googling something completely different, and decided she wanted to host an international event.


“First we fell in love with the sculptures, then we fell in love with the sculptors,” says Keown, who founded the competition with Hub Strategy, the ad agency where she works.


Keown contacted several ski areas before Northstar, but the resort was on board right away; its owner, Vail Resorts also owns Breckenridge, where one of the biggest and most prestigious snow carving competitions is held.


But Keown wanted to commit to the design of the competition, not just the sculptures. Applicants submitted their designs last summer, and Keown enlisted Lawrence Noble, chair of the School of Fine Art at the Academy of Art University to help choose modern, complex, realist designs. She wanted no artsy, kitschy snowmen.


Then she chose a design-friendly logo and judges. In addition to Noble, the panel of judges features a sushi chef from Northstar, two interior designers, a photographer from nearby Squaw Valley, and Bryan Hyneck, vice president of design at Speck, which makes cases for mobile devices and was one of the event’s sponsors.


“The level of complexity and sophistication in this type of sculpture is just amazing,” says Hyneck, who has judged industrial and graphic design competitions, but never snow carving. “It’s amazing how organic some of the shapes can be.”


As a judge, Hyneck says he’ll focus on the craft and the execution of the sculptures, and how the sculptors use particular techniques to take advantage of the snow’s properties. But he adds that subject matter, point of view, message, and relationship to a theme are all important points as well.


“Anybody that is really going to push the limits of the capabilities of the media is going to get a lot of my attention,” he says.


For some, like the Germans, that means suspending massive structures made completely of snow. Their sculpture, titled “Four Elements”, features four large spires encircled by a tilted disc. Despite a trickle of melted snow dripping off the bottom edge, one — or even two — of the German carvers frequently stand atop the sculpture, using saws or chisels to shape the towers.


Sunday evening, after the sun has gone down and the temperature dropped, Josh Knaggs, bearded, with a cigarette in his mouth, is sitting in the curve made by the largest bear from the Team Idaho-Bonner’s Ferry sculpture, “Endangered Bears.” Wearing a blue event-issued jacket, he’s brushing out the hollow loop made by mama and papa bear.


Three days later, the judges award Knaggs and his team third prize, with Japan’s modern work, “Heart to Heart” coming in second and Germany’s gravity-defying “Four Elements” taking first. The teams disperse, and after a few more sunny days, Northstar tears down the structures before they get too soft and fall — all except the German piece, which can’t bear its own weight and collapses after judging is complete. But the ephemeral nature of the snow is part of what attracts the competitors.


“It’s for the moment, and it’s a beauty all in itself, creating something that’s gonna be disappearing, you know, it’s okay that it disappears,” says Team Truckee’s Ira Kessler. “We are making it for the moment.”


All Photos: Bryan Thayer/Speck


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Why Almost Everyone in Russia Has a Dash Cam



How is it possible that a dozen different motorists around the Russian city of Chelyabinsk were able to capture video of a massive meteor flying through the sky? Because almost everyone in Russia has a dash-mounted video camera in their car.


The sheer size of the country, combined with lax — and often corrupt — law enforcement, and a legal system that rarely favors first-hand accounts of traffic collisions has made dash cams all but a requirement for motorists.


“You can get into your car without your pants on, but never get into a car without a dash cam,” Aleksei Dozorov, a motorists’ rights activist in Russia told Radio Free Europe last year.



Do a search for “Russia dash cam crash” in YouTube — or even better, Yandex.ru, the county’s equivalent of Google — and you’ll find thousands of videos showing massive crashes, close calls and attempts at insurance fraud by both other drivers and pedestrians. And Russian drivers are accident prone. With 35,972 road deaths in 2007 (the latest stats available from the World Health Organization), Russia averages 25.2 traffic fatalities per 100,000 people. The U.S., by comparison, had 13.9 road deaths per 100,000 people in the same year, despite having six times more cars.


A combination of inexpensive cameras, flash memory and regulations passed by the Interior Ministry in 2009 that removed any legal hurdles for in-dash cameras has made it easy and cheap for drivers to install the equipment.


And it’s turned into an online phenomenon.


YouTube content policing means some of the most disturbing videos get pulled from U.S. video sites almost immediately, but as Marina Galperina reported at Animal New York last year, sites like the Ru CHP LiveJournal community are filled with disturbing videos of profanity-laden fist-fights, massive crashes and gruesome deaths, all captured on camera and shared for the world to see.


But then there are times like today, when dash cams catch a once-in-a-lifetime meteor falling from the sky, from every possible angle — something that couldn’t have happened just a few years ago.



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Animals' Love Lives Look a Lot Like Ours

For most of the 20th century, animals weren’t allowed to have emotions. Your dog didn’t actually love you—it (and it was an “it” back then) was just a stimulus–response machine conditioned to act a specific way in a specific situation. Scientists who said otherwise—that animals actually had minds capable of thoughts and emotions—were accused of “anthropomorphizing” and ridiculed by their peers. Even researchers as famous as chimp specialist Jane Goodall spent years sitting on evidence that animals could do more than just salivate at the sound of a bell.


But over time, that bias waned. Just consider the first sentence (and the title) of Virginia Morell’s new book, Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures: “Animals have minds.”


“Not so long ago,” she writes later, “I would have hedged these statements.” After six years of reporting in 11 different countries, the longtime science journalist arrived at the same conclusion that scientists like Goodall have known for a long while: that animals feel. And strongly, it turns out.


But how complex are these emotions? Fear and panic are one thing; but do animals lust, even love? We went to Morell for some answers. Animals might not celebrate Valentine’s Day, but their relationships still look a lot like ours. Here are some of her favorite examples.




Parrot porn, anyone? That’s what Morell was treated to in Venezuela, where scientists are studying the calls of green-rumped parrotlets. One of their racier findings? Little birds be bangin’ like mammals: pushing, clawing, clutching, thrusting. But that’s not all. These parrots lead soap opera–ready lives.


“They were very, very fun to watch,” Morell said.


In one of her favorite stories, a parrot widow gets remarried to a neighbor, only to have her new husband leave her a day later for his first wife. Bad General Parrotreus! All that drama is meticulously documented in a field log, which Morell calls “a parrotlet version of Desperate Housewives.”

Photo: Male (right) and female (left) green-rumped parrotlets. Ninoska Zamora/Flickr.

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Defense Nerds Strike Back: A Symposium on the Battle of Hoth



So. You guys have really, really strong opinions about the Battle of Hoth.


Many took issue with my argument that Hoth represented a military debacle for the Galactic Empire. Some questioned the (meta)factual premises of my case (are TIE Fighters even capable of in-atmospheric flight?). Others argued that Vader was deliberately trying to lose, rendering my essay myopic. Still others desired to travel back in time and physically accost my childhood self, so as to spare me the error of even thinking about Hoth. Anger, fear, aggression: the dark side are they.


My responses are less interesting than those that others can provide. So we at Danger Room widened the aperture and brought in six military nerds — soldiers, academics, bloggers — with a similarly abiding love for Star Wars. Some agree with me, most disagree with me, and all add keen insights, except for when they disagree with me. In any event, check out their thoughts on Hoth, for the Force is strong with them.



If Hoth was a defeat for Darth Vader, as Spencer Ackerman contends, it was a short-lived one at best. Thanks to well-conceived contingency plans, and a judicious use of nefarious private military contractors, Darth Vader was still well along the path to achieving his ultimate strategic objective: turning Luke Skywalker to the Dark Side of the Force, and finally overthrowing the Emperor. Of course, Vader’s agenda only tangentially marries up with that of the Imperial Forces at large, and is cross-purposes with that of the Emperor. Thus, Vader’s true objective in the attack on Hoth is not the destruction of the Rebel Alliance, but rather, capturing Luke. In many ways, Darth Vader is a one-man shadow government, who seeks to find and shelter the religious extremist responsible for the greatest terrorist act ever perpetrated against the Empire–all to further his own personal political agenda.


Luke Skywalker may have escaped to Dagobah, sure, but Yoda saves Vader the expense and hassle of having to train young Luke. In fact, Luke’s escape actually gives Vader plausible deniability when Emperor Palpatine confronts Vader via hologram on Luke’s paternity.


Vader’s true strategic failure comes not at Hoth, but at Bespin, when he fails to turn Luke to the Dark Side. By the next film, Vader’s been removed from field command, relegated to overseeing defense contractors working on yet another flawed and bloated acquisitions program. And of course, in Return of the Jedi, it’s Emperor Palpatine’s turn to take the offensive, using Luke to dispatch his weakened apprentice, and carry on the Sith legacy. In Star Wars, intergalactic civil war is little more than a vehicle to advance the grand plan of the Sith.


Major Crispin J. Burke is a US Army Aviator who blogs at Wings Over Iraq. Follow him on Twitter at @CrispinBurke.


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Tim Cook on Innovation, Retail and Whether We'll See a Cheap iPhone



Tim Cook has never been more bullish about Apple’s ability to innovate, and he sees the company continuing to produce great products that deliver a killer user experience, thanks to Apple’s ability to meld hardware, software, and services into a single package. And on those days when things aren’t going so well, he just takes a trip to the Apple Store, an experience he likened to taking Prozac.


Cook held forth on all things Apple during an unusual public appearance at the Goldman-Sachs Technology and Internet Conference on Tuesday morning, where he laid out an exceptionally bright picture of the company while responding to softball questions before an adoring audience. Not exactly the best place to glean any insights, but interesting nevertheless. During his hour-long chat, Cook discussed everything from the state of Apple retail, to the “Depression-era mentality” of maintaining mountains of cash to whether we’ll ever see an iPhone that’s actually affordable. While much of Cook’s statements were blatant cheerleading — an attempt to buoy investor confidence in his company after its dismal stock performance following its latest earnings call — he also let slide some telling tidbits.


Here are the five biggest takeaways from Cook’s interview, and why they matter.


This Is Tim Cook’s Apple


Perhaps the most notable thing about Cook’s interview was what wasn’t said. No one mentioned Steve Jobs. This is Tim Cook’s Apple now, and there’s no mistaking it.


When Cook spoke at the same event in 2012, just a few months had passed since the death of Steve Jobs, and so his role in the company and place in history was a hot topic. But Cook has been running the show for more than year now, leading one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world, while pushing its success to new heights. He is, at last, emerging from Jobs’ long shadow. And he’s definitely stoked about it.


“I’ve never been more bullish about innovation at Apple,” he said at one point, a theme he’d return to twice during the interview with comments like, “I’m incredibly bullish on our retail stores” and “I’m incredibly bullish about the future,” Cook iterated at different points throughout the talk.


This comes as a bit of a contrast to the Apple CEO’s typical demeanor. Cook often comes across as more reserved than his predecessor, but today Cook showed more passion, fire, and confidence than we’ve seen in past earnings calls or media events. This isn’t a CEO toiling under the shadow of his old boss. This is Apple’s fearless leader in his element.


It’s about time. Since taking over as CEO, every move Cook, and Apple, makes has been scrutinized perhaps even more microscopically than in the past as weary investors look for any indicator of Apple’s downfall. And with competitor Samsung threatening Apple’s dominance in the smartphone space at every turn, he’s got to prove Apple’s still the market leader to the public too. Cook has to show that Apple is at the top of its game, and this sort of chutzpa is certainly a step in the right direction.


On Creating More Affordable Products


One of Apple’s continued challenges is making more affordable products without making cheaper products. The biggest example of this, and reason it needs to be done, is the iPhone, which at a baseline price of $650 is way too high for emerging markets like China, India, and Brazil. Apple wants to — and, in fact, must — make inroads into these regions, which is why the company is believed to be hard at work on an affordable iPhone, possibly made of plastic.


Asked about this issue, Cook reiterated Apple’s focus on developing great products, and pointed out another product line that began with a single, expensive option, and expanded to encompass models at a wide range of prices and functionalities. The iPod launched at $399, and today, you can get an iPod shuffle for a mere $49.


“Instead of saying ‘how can we cheapen this iPod to get [the price] lower, we asked, how can we do a great product?’” Cook said. So the team developed a product that could “excel at a very low price of $49, and appeal to a lot more people.”


On a similar front, critics historically asked Apple why it didn’t offer a sub- $1,000 Mac. “Frankly, we worked on this, but we concluded we couldn’t do a great product,” Cook said. What did Apple do instead? Why, invent the iPad.


For now, the iPhone 4 is offered for free on contract as the company’s budget iPhone offering. But based on Cook’s statements, and what we’ve seen from Apple in the past, it seems highly likely that Apple will eventually flesh out its iPhone lineup to encompass options at a wider range of price points, including a cheaper option.



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Video Exclusive: Makers Help Cartoonist Keep His Kickstarter Promise to Explode



In a moment of Kickstarted exuberance, cartoonist Ryan North made a promise to explode. Makers Derek Quenneville and Lauren Archer made the explosion happen.


The uncut version of the video goes like this: We’re in an alley. A man in black places a blue plastic head on the ground among the snow before putting on safety goggles. “Safety third!” someone shouts. A woman in a hoodie runs up to the head, pours liquid into the hole on top and then screws on a purple cap before running away. Smoke begins pouring out around the cap, which is a problem. She scurries back in, secures the cap completely and then hurries out of frame.


And then nothing.


For seven minutes, the head just sits there. Occasionally, ominous cracking sounds occur, but not much else. People begin to worry that it isn’t working. There’s some discussion about whether someone should approach the head or not. “We’ve made a bomb we can’t turn off,” a man says. “With a fuse of unknown length,” adds a woman. We continue to wait.


“I think your forehead’s getting bigger,” someone else says.


BOOM. The head explodes. Everyone cheers.



It began as a joke.


Ryan North is a cartoonist. He writes Dinosaur Comics, a daily comic where the pictures never change. It’s 10 years old. North was running a Kickstarter for a book he’d written, a chooseable-path adventure book based on Hamlet. (A what? North explains: “‘Chooseable-path’ you may recognize as a trademark-skirting version of a phrase and book series you remember from childhood.  Remember?  Books in which… an adventure is chosen??”)


The base goal was for $20,000 to get the book printed, but as is increasingly common, North included stretch goals to help the project along. At $30,000 he’d hire nine artists to illustrate some of the deaths that occur in a few endings, and give everyone who backed the project an e-book. At $50,000 there would be an illustration for all 110 deaths. At $90,000 a whole new book based on the life of poor Yorick. As the number climbed, the rewards got bigger and weirder. There were new e-books and plush skulls and a stage performance where the internet votes on what happens next. At $225,000, North promised to send a total of 225 free books to schools and libraries. “Also I will… create a pizza that looks like Hamlet and… eat it?”


The $500,000 unlock said simply this: “I will literally explode (literally)”


The Kickstarter closed out at $580,905.


“Honestly when I made the promise, breaking $500,000 seemed really unlikely so I was willing to play fast and loose with what I would have to deliver,” says North, “Saying ‘I will literally explode’ seemed like a fun way to end the paragraph, you know?”



Derek Quenneville and Lauren Archer are makers. They’re both members of the Site 3 coLaboratory, a maker space in Toronto. Quenneville is a 3-D printing evangelist and digital fabrication artist who devotes a lot of his time to helping others learn to use these new tools. Archer is a heritage planner, high-energy craftsperson, and member of the Site 3 board. Quenneville is the man in the video; Archer, the woman.


Quenneville heard North talking about his ‘literally explode’ problem on the radio. “Since Site 3 has some experience with such things, I sent him an e-mail inviting him to be 3-D printed and exploded.”


“It was basically like the Bat signal,” says North, “I expressed my need publicly, and the next thing I know Derek and the rest of Site 3 are swooping in saying ‘Have no fear, citizen! How much fire do you want in the explosion?’”


Site 3 is located in a two-story building in a back alley in Toronto. It was opened in 2010, by a group of makers who’d been involved in other hacker spaces but needed a place where they could generate sawdust and run power tools without messing up someone’s computer.


Today, the site offers a rotating series of workshops, as well as a weekly open house night. There are industrial sewing machines, a laser cutter, 3-D printers, and a variety of soldering, wood- and metal-working tools. “Site 3 is an awesome enabler,” says Archer. “Anything you’ve ever wanted to make or do, but didn’t have the space or tools or the expertise or the confidence to try, you can probably do at Site 3.”


“It’s a very welcoming, friendly space,” says Quenneville.


Site 3 is best known for being the home of a series of pyrotechnic projects like Super Street Fire, where two contestants battle it out by controlling real flames with their minds. “We’re more about fire specifically than explosions, as we have a number of certified flame effects people, fire arts performers, and the like,” says Quenneville.


Fire is a theme that runs through Site 3′s workshop space. The bathroom even features a fire toilet, thanks to a lack of plumbing.


Yet despite all that, the answer to North’s problem turned out to involve no fire at all. “Lauren suggested that an embedded bottle of dry ice would be the safest way to go,” says Quenneville.


How often does Archer blow things up? “Not often enough! Or just often enough. It’s hard to tell,” she says, “I blew up a cake for my boyfriend’s birthday, and wasn’t really planning any more explosions any time soon. But when opportunity knocks!”



The plan was simple: Scan North’s head using a Microsoft Kinect and ReconstructMe to generate a 3-D model. Print that 3-D model in 14 parts so there would be natural seams, and assemble it around a plastic bottle. Fill the plastic bottle with dry ice and then add some water to speed up the reaction. Seal the lid and run away.


Archer says the project took only three or four days of planning. “I like the challenge and gratification of thinking up and implementing an idea really rapidly,” she says. “It limits you to what you can find and to using the resources of the community around you.”


The actual printing was performed on a modified MakerBot Cupcake printer, and took 35 hours.


The process of preparing the explosion was documented on the book’s Kickstarter page, and North’s head is available for download. North says excitement about the explosion from his fans has been high. “Some of them have forgotten there’s a book to go with it.”


If you are one of those fans, this is for you.



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