Photo of Ryan McGinley photo, courtesy of Downtown Traveler (CC/Flickr)

There used to be a restaurant in New York that served live brine shrimp swimming in broth, whole fish cooked and then set into gelatin, and entrees consisting of osso busco and frog legs after which the bones were cleaned and turned into jewelry for you to wear home. Food was a place run by a group of artists who took turns playing chef, and turned cooking into a performance.

The original Food restaurant was only open from 1971-1974, but the concept was revived this year at the Frieze Art Fair on New York's Randall’s Island. The suckling pig roasting on a spit in the sculpture park outside the fair next to a circle of hip high rubber tongue sculptures was, as it turns out, not just for show.

The menus at the Food 1971/2013 – created by a different artist each day – may not have been as peculiar as the original establishment, but then the NYC Health Department wasn’t handing out letter grades in rough and tumble SoHo back in the '70s.

Thursday’s Menu: Budae Jjigae soup; hardtack with smoked gouda, dried apricot and pineapple, and honey; red pepper beef jerky; hop pickles; TANG drink ($15) – courtesy of Matthew Day Jackson

Frieze touched down for the second time in New York a fortnight ago with its signature tent, on an island otherwise known for its stadium and its sanitarium. Over 180 galleries from around the world installed themselves inside, and weary but eager gallerists and their assistants put on their best impression of pigeons in the spring.

This year, there was a noticeable presence of art that evoked that idiom, “necessity as the mother of invention.” Like the original Food restaurant, which helped starving artists get together for a good feast, there were a number of projects that described innovations to help fulfill basic human needs created by a struggling underclass that is oppressed by or at odds with society at large.

So now you’ve had a little pork belly and some snout in the sun and some social consciousness, and you’re getting a little thirsty. You could hit the biergarten, but there is a special bar for you and your comrades who eschew the law.

A small number of safety deposit keys were handed out at random during the fair, directing you to an unmarked door that leads to a hidden room. Inside you find Liz Glynn’s Vault, a dark room decorated like a bank vault from the 1920s where you are treated to a drink and a cozy speakeasy-esque area to enjoy it in and a performance by the bartender.

After a long day of slumming around questionable eateries and lawless drinking holes, it’s important to get a good night’s rest. As Krzysztof Wodiczko demonstrates with The Homeless Vehicle, you don’t need a homeless shelter to be homeless with shelter.

Originally introduced to New York City in 1988, this shopping cart on steroids was on display at Frieze courtesy of the Parisian/New York Galerie Lelong. It is said to comfortably sleep an adult, and it compresses to 1/3 of its full length for easy meandering between parks. Also of note—though not on display—is Wodiczko’s Poliscar, a single-person survival vehicle for community activists.  

There was also art depicting more recent examples of underbelly innovators, such as Antek Walczak’s huge panels of lead silkscreened with the new language of the Internet – spam bots, Russian mail order brides, and 419 scammers.

My brain hurts from thinking about this: whether art based on spam is still spam—or still art.

Inside one anti-fracking brewery. Image: Flickr

In Germany, you don't mess with the beer. Europe's biggest beer maker is also home to 1,300 breweries and the world-renowned Oktoberfest. Beer isn't just business in Germany; it's a cultural institution. So when the nation's association of brewers talks, people listen. And right now, those brewers have a clear message: don't frack. 

The Brauer-Bund beer association, which represents the company that makes Budweiser (and hundreds of better ones), has called on the government to carry out more research on the natural gas extraction process before approving the practice. But Germany's brewers are just the latest beer hounds to speak out against fracking. They join the major breweries in New York, including the Brooklyn Brewery, in voicing concerns on the topic—some of which have even threatened to leave the state or close their doors if fracking commences. 

So why are brewers so outspoken about fracking? There are plenty of other industries that operate in the areas slated to be impacted by fracking—why are so many brewers sounding the alarm?

Well, because beer is usually about 92-94% water. And if that water is polluted, it ruins the beer. Hydraulic fracturing, you'll recall, is the process gas companies use to blast a chemical cocktail (which is often undisclosed to the public) deep into the earth's crust to get at the natural gas trapped there. That cocktail has been shown to sometimes leak into nearby water stores, and that's what has brewers worried. 

Larry Bennett runs the Ommegang brewery in Cooperstown, which happens to sit atop the Marcellus Shale, a huge natural gas reserve that industry is attempting to exploit. In an interview with NBC, Bennett explained why he might be forced to close up shop if fracking were to begin. 

"For beer, the biggest ingredient is water. When you drink an 8 percent alcohol beer, 92 percent of what you drink is water. For Ommegang, that means water from the ground beneath our brewery in Cooperstown," he said.

It's the same story in Germany, where brewers have all but sworn a sacred oath to use only the purest water to make beer. Reuters reports that the "Brauer-Bund beer association is worried that fracking for shale gas ... could pollute water used for brewing and break a 500-year-old industry rule on water purity."

That rule, Reinheitsgebot", apparently means "German purity law" and proclaims that beer must be made solely with malt, hops, yeast and water. Which means benzene or strontium or other toxic or radioactive elements commonly found in fracking fluids are strictly prohibited. 

A  Brauer-Bund spokesman told Reuters that the "water has to be pure and more than half Germany's brewers have their own wells which are situated outside areas that could be protected under the government's current planned legislation on fracking. You cannot be sure that the water won't be polluted by chemicals."

The message is simple, really: Don't frack with beer.

Image via Tesla's site

Just a month ago, Tesla Motors posted its first profitable quarter ever, which was a huge step towards proving the viability of electric cars. But now the young automaker has taken an even larger stride forward: yesterday, Tesla wired $451.8 million to the federal government to fully pay off Department of Energy loans aimed at spurring the electric car industry.

It would have seemed unfathomable just a few years ago, but an EV-only manufacturer has now become the only automaker to repay all of its federal loans awarded from the bailout onward. Using part of the nearly $1 billion it raised through a recent stock and note sale, Tesla has paid off every cent it received from the Department of Energy, simultaneously proving that electric vehicles and alternative energy loan programs can be a success.

Two major loan packages were given to automakers in the last five years: the automaker bailout package detailed in the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) signed into law by President Bush, and the 2010 Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program (ATVMP), which Congress approved to help boost alternative fuel auto manufacturing in the US.

TARP was the larger of the two, with GM and Chrysler receiving about $50.9 billion and $11 billion in taxpayer-guaranteed loans. Chrysler has since fulfilled its debt obligations, and it doing pretty well under new owner Fiat, an Italian conglomerate. That led the company to fire back at Tesla's claims that Tesla is the only company to have paid back its government loans. But fulfilling its obligations doesn't mean it's repaid the debt in full, as a number of terms were waived; all told, taxpayers lost billions on the deal.

The government, meanwhile, is still about $20 billion short on GM's deal. The US Treasury still owns about 32 percent of GM's stock, which it will sell off over time to recoup loan costs. But for the deal to break even, Treasury needs to sell its 500 million shares for close to $53 each. GM's stock is currently sitting at below $33. Unless the stock climbs appreciably before Treasury dumps it, the GM deal will wind up in a substantial loss for taxpayers.

In contrast, the ATVMP was worth only $8.8 billion, largely because alternative fuel vehicles are much smaller market. It was part of the same $34 billion Department of Energy portfolio that funded projects like Solyndra, which is still touted as an example of government waste and the inviability of alternative energy projects. But the DoE has said that only 2 percent of the portfolio has defaulted so far, and Tesla's success suggests that even a market as difficult to crack as electric vehicles can be done.

The bulk of the ATVMP loans went to Ford ($5.9 billion) and Nissan ($1.45 billion). To be fair, both automakers have years to pay off the loans, and the odds of DoE losing large amounts of money on either deal is low. It does stand a good chance of losing up to $171 million at Fisker, whose troubled luxo-barge electrics are leading it to bankruptcy, and $45 million from VPG, whose natural gas-powered wheelchair-accessible vans have not done well.

Paying off its loans nine years early is a potent move by Tesla, and it's no surprise that the DoE has used it to gush about how great its loan portfolio is. Neither gesture is hollow. Tesla has figured out exactly what it takes to make electric vehicles sell, and has acted on it. Meanwhile, the Energy Department has a shining example that funding projects on terms more favorable than available in the private sector can spur innovation and economic success.

Photo: Sustainable Initiatives Fund Trust/Flickr

Algae biofuels have for several years now seemed like they were just over the horizon of widespread commercial availability. Despite genuine large-scale potential, the horizon always seems to move just a bit farther away. One major concern has always been how much water growing algae takes. Indeed there have been some seriously harebrained proposals put forward to build algae biofuel plants in water-stressed areas. 

Now a new study, published in Environmental Science and Technology, has come up with a good estimate of how much algae fuel the United States may be able to produce without overly stressing the nation's land and water resources. 

How much pond scum will we be able to grow? 25 billion gallons a year, according to the DoE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. It's a large increase from the 4 billion gallons estimated in previous DoE analyses. Nevertheless, that's just one-twelfth of what's needed to get us off fossil fuels. 

This is based on growing algae in large manmade ponds, just 6-15 inches deep, and not in the bioreactor tubes being developed by some companies—a good thing considering that growing algae in bioreactors is far more carbon-intensive than outdoor ponds. It also assumes that watersheds would be able to divert 5 percent of their water towards algae farming.

That may not sound like a lot at first, but consider that it's a similar amount that the EPA allows power plants to use for cooling. In total it would be about one-quarter of all the water currently used for agriculture in the nation. In the plus category, the total amount doesn't all have to come exclusively from freshwater, with salty groundwater and seawater also being suitable. 

Set against a recent report from the US Geological Survey showing that we're depleting groundwater at the fastest rate on record, with agriculture and the energy industry being the prime culprits, the 5 percent figure seems, at least in many areas, optimistic. 

Indeed the DoE report notes, "In arid areas such as the Desert Southwest, 5 percent is probably an overstatement of the amount of water available, but in many other areas that are a lot wetter, such as much of the East, it's likely that much more water would be available."

Where are the ideal conditions? DoE hydrologist Mark Wigmosta says the Gulf Coast and the Southeastern seaboard are prime algae-growing regions, noting, "The Gulf Coast offers a good combination of warm temperatures, low evaporation, access to an abundance of water, and plenty of fuel-processing facilities." 

As is so often the case with algae biofuels, there's a lot of theoretical potential on tap. But unlocking that potential and bringing a product to market at a large scale, without water use issues, and at a price comparable to traditional fuels is a much taller task.

Image via the MIT Web Museum

For decades we humans have been certain that in the future, robots would either bring about a utopian society wherein machines do all the work and we cool our heels (Kevin Drum’s provocative Mother Jones article predicted this robot paradise will arrive as soon as 2040), or rise up against us, a la countless science fiction stories.

In fact, The New York Times pointed out that “even in 1920, when the playwright Karel Capek gave English speakers the Czech word "robot" (laborer) in his play "R.U.R.," the androids at Rossum's Universal Robots were bent on wiping out the human race.” And according to Motherboard's Ben Richmond, who recently saw "R.U.R." performed, the machine future may not be too far off.

Back in 1949—around the time the industrial age was giving way to a high tech era—the legendary MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener theorized that the direction the scale would tip would ultimately depend on how stupid or not stupid humans behaved during the rise of intelligent machines. He should know; Wiener was the founder of cybernetics, the scientific study of the relationship between humans and machines, which heavily influenced robotic engineers.

A half century ago Wiener famously wrote "The world of the future will not be a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.” This week The New York Times dug up an earlier essay titled “The Machine Age” in which he elaborates on this warning. (The essay was supposed to be published in 1949 but the Times somehow fumbled the whole thing, leaving it to gather dust at MIT for six decades.)

Here's an excerpt, via the Times:

Not even the brightest picture of an age in which man is the master, and in which we all have an excess of mechanical services will make up for the pains of transition, if we are not both humane and intelligent....There is general agreement among the sages of the peoples of the past ages, that if we are granted power commensurate with our will, we are more likely to use it wrongly than to use it rightly, more likely to use it stupidly than to use it intelligently...

Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be well disposed to us.

In short, it is only a humanity which is capable of awe, which will also be capable of controlling the new potentials which we are opening for ourselves. We can be humble and live a good life with the aid of the machines, or we can be arrogant and die.

The way Wiener saw it, if humans weren't careful to respect the potential consequences of our creations—something we're pretty terrible at doing—society could be headed for “an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty.” Six decades later, the warning seems perfectly timed.

Soylent, ready to ship. Image: Soylent

A couple months ago, 24-year-old software engineer Rob Rhinehart whipped up Soylent, a cocktail of "vitamins, minerals, and macro-nutrients," and started ingesting it instead of food. He purportedly ate nothing but the nutrient shake for 30 days, and he documented the process on his blog. We called him the Post-Food Man. The internet soon went nuts, and many post-food wannabes started bombarding Rhinehart with requests for some of the disgusting-sounding elixir.

So he did what anyone does with such a product nowadays—he crowdfunded an operation to start brewing up Soylent en masse. 

Rhinehart launched a campaign on Crowdhoster. And, despite doing his best to ward off investors by producing a video resembling an ad for a parody product in a sci-fi B-movie and apparently recording the audio at the bottom of a mine shaft, the project was funded within hours. And the cash keeps pouring in. As of this writing, Soylent had attracted over $220,000 in funds, and there's still a month to go.

Here's the pitch: 

For many people, on many occasions, food is a hassle, especially when trying to eat well. Suppose we had a default meal that was the nutritional equivalent of water: cheap, healthy, convenient and ubiquitous. Soylent will be personalized for different body types and customizable based on individual goals. It allows one to enjoy the health benefits of a well balanced diet with less effort and cost.

So yeah, that means they're actually going to start churning this stuff out—in an "FDA-approved facility"—and selling it on the market. It's all pretty incredible. I mean, I'd always thought that as far as unmarketable product ideas go, a grey-colored chemical drink named after processed human flesh wafers would sit right atop the list. (Rhinehart does point out that in the less-famous novel on which the cult film Soylent Green was based, soylent was made of soy, but everyone on the planet except maybe the book's author is thinking '... is people') 

Rhinehart and company do warn that "All scale production efforts have the potential for setbacks including supplier issues, manufacturing issues, sourcing, contaminants, and proper control." So all you post-foodies might not want to get too excited; Soylent may be a while off yet. 

Still, it's a fascinating prospect, and an attempt to realize one of the longstanding themes of sci-fi—the non-food food. Food scientists have been working on this front for decades—Tang, protein shakes, Power Bars; there's all sorts of stuff on the market that would look positively alien to a human eater a hundred years ago. Rhinehart's project embodies this ethos.

"I don't think we need fruits and veggies, though," he told us. "We need vitamins and minerals. We need carbs, not bread. Amino acids, not milk. It's still fine to eat these whenever you want, but not everyone can afford them or has the desire to eat them. Food should be optimized and personalized."

It's certainly that Soylent aspires to take it all the way, and aims to do away with traditional food altogether that it's earned such widespread intrigue. And it's funny that Soylent should mention the FDA, too, seeing as how federal inspectors are sure to be one of those freshly interested parties. It opens up the big question now: Will they allow Soylent to market its product as a food alternative? I guess we're going to find out.

Image via Armatix

We often talk about guns "falling into the wrong hands," an acknowledgement that weapons are as innocent as the people they kill and only as righteous as the people who use them. Stopping guns from ending up in the wrong hands is a monumental task, but what if only the right hands could actually fire them?

We've tried for decades to develop "smart guns" that discern the identities or the integrity of their handlers. But attempts to mix microchips and guns in the 1990s were hampered by dodgy, costly, and cumbersome technology.

Now, technologists and entrepreneurs are getting closer to creating personalized weapons that respond only to the proper touch or signal.

"Suppose you and your family are on vacation in Las Vegas, and your firearm is back at home.  Wouldn’t you want to know in real time if an intruder or worse, a child is handling your gun?" said Bob Stewart, CEO of San Francisco Bay Area company Yardarm Technologies.

Yardarm has developed a wireless controller that alerts gun owners when their weapons are being moved, and allows them to disable the guns remotely. With the push of a button—accessed through a laptop or smartphone app—the owner can activate the gun's trigger safety, rendering it useless. The company calls it the "Safety First solution."

Yardarm presented a prototype of its technology at an IT conference in Las Vegas this week. When the company is ready to roll out its service, gun owners can pay $50 to install special geo-locator microchips in their rifles and pistols. When the chip receives a signal from its owner, it activates a series of "antennas" wrapped around the gun's grip that lock the safety. Ta-dah! James Bond's palm-print-activated Walther PPK has nothing on a remote control on/off switch.

Speaking of which, that very same gadget is being pursued by researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology as we speak. Rather than reading a palm print, per se, the gun grip would analyze the holder's hand size and shape and grip strength.

"Only you can fire it," Bond's quartermaster tells him in the latest film. "Less of a random killing machine. More of a personal statement."

Two other companies, Armatix and Triggersmart, outfit guns with radio frequency sensors that unlock only if the handler is wearing a special wristwatch or bracelet and enters the right PIN code. Gun owners might one day have the option of getting little hand implants to avoid the burden of wearing a certain piece of jewelry any time they want to shoot something. The guns are already for sale in Asia and Europe.

Just beyond ensuring safety, smart guns present a political conundrum we haven't even begun to unravel. The NRA is, of course, skeptical that any kind of sensors or geo-locators in guns could be used by the feds to track gun owners into their living rooms and watch them in their sleep. The group says that any added cost associated with a safety device amounts to "a luxury tax on self-defense."

But with just about everything else in Barack Obama's 23-point gun violence reduction plan from January gun having failed, smart guns might be the safest step to take—personally and politically.

Photo: Christopher L/Flickr

Desertec, the massively sprawling project to tap into the considerable potential to produce renewable energy in the Sahara Desert and then send it to Europe, just hit a big bump in the road. While European leaders have been counting on the project supplying 20 percent of the continent's power by 2050, Saharan countries want to keep their solar power for themselves.

According to Deutsche Welle, after several highly publicized launches of large renewable energy programs across North Africa, the king of Morocco has just announced that his nation's first contribution, a concentrating solar power plant in Ouarzazate, will be producing electricity for Morocco, sending none to Europe. First announced in 2011, the 500 MW project will now go to chipping away at the 20 percent of electricity that Morocco has to import from its neighbors. 

Indeed, the DW piece quotes Klaus Schmidtke from Dii (representative of the 20 shareholders in Desertec) as already shifting the context of the project from export-first to local-first. "The Desertec idea is that there is a lot of energy in the deserts that can be channeled for the benefit of those who need electricity," he said.

It's a good bit of spin, considering that the original Desertec idea was solidly that the people who really need clean electricity are Europeans first—as the image below, still current as the concept document on the Desertec website, shows.While the deepest underlying concept behind Desertec isn't gone, it does certainly seem that the concept has firmly shifted to being more inward-looking. Meanwhile, Desertec has already revised its energy production estimates downward.

Image: Desertec

There's a certain techno-futuristic allure to piping solar energy from the Sahara into Europe via undersea transmission lines. But whether that clean power goes to Europe or to replace dirty power in North African nations first doesn't fully matter in a global context. Either way it's replacing carbon-spewing power plants or preventing their construction for added capacity. Providing for local needs before export needs is more in the spirit of ecological sustainability than does export-led renewable energy development with its air of neocolonialism (right or wrong as that may be). 

Particularly interesting to me in this latest news is a presentation I attended back in 2009 at the Copenhagen Climate Congress that outlined several risk factors that could hold up any plan to generate renewable power in the Sahara and then send it to Europe.

Among the points given were the incorrect perception that investing in renewable energy in North Africa is riskier than importing natural gas from places such as the former Soviet Union, the lack of coherent business plans in North African nations, and the lack of good policy in terms of actually feeding the North African electricity into the European grid, which is "really a collection of 27 different electricity systems," according to presenter Anthony Patt.

That's all to say that the Desertec project is supremely ambitious, and I suppose the King of Morocco deciding his people's electricity needs come before those of Europeans isn't surprising considering the transcontinental infrastructure that still needs sussing out. More than that, it's notable that nowhere in that 2009 discussion of Desertec risk factors was there specifically a category for a North African nation standing up for its own domestic interests over those of exports. 

You know those people that are still using Windows XP and AOL dialup? I'm going to be one of those people one day. The new version of New Gmail is still confusing, I got a new phone yesterday and the keyboard is so wacky I've given up on commas, and now we've got a sorely-needed refresh of Flickr that, at least to me, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's still going to do well.

I hate dealing with redesigned user interfaces because it seems like just when you get things working the way you want, it all changes. Technology is never, ever perfect out of the box, and as such it takes awhile to tweak a system and workflow to make it actually useful. And while Yahoo has been harangued for years for letting Flickr's stagnation kill off its social aspects, it remained—at least in my eyes—the best possible place to archive and host an unlimited number of photos for $25 bucks a year.

Sure, other sites are far prettier for sharing individuals photos and portfolios, and others have better monetization opportunities. But for simply dumping everything from your hard drives to access anywhere at anytime, there's nothing better than a Flickr Pro account. A quick perusal of my own bloated, crap-filled account will prove my point. But now we've got new Flickr, and users—very likely the same ones who've been complaining about Flickr needing updating, because only serial complainers write on complaint forums—are howling. Me? I think the changes are smart on Yahoo's part, but it'll take me awhile to come around to a lot of them. Here's why.

1. The design is so retromodern it hurts

There's been a lot of talk in UI and web design lately about transitioning to flat design, signaled by skeuomorph trend setter Apple's mention that it's going to ditch the shadows and pretend notepads. Microsoft, of all companies, jumped on the trend early with Windows 8 and all its offshoots, which I have to say are clean, easy to use designs.

Flickr's new user homepage is obviously jumping on the bandwagon, and it's unfortunate that they decided to create a retina-burning homage to Windows 95's high-contrast, black-and-neon skin. (Remember how much that made you feel like a hacker from the movies, by the way?) But Flickr's been hearing for years that it needs to focus more on being a social network, and now interactions take up a whopping 80 percent of the screen. I think it's removing all emphasis from the photos themselves, but hey, someone faved my photo four months ago! 

2. A terabyte is a lot of space!

I was intrigued by Zachary Seward's argument that offering a free terabyte of storage in new free Flickr accounts is better than advertising unlimited storage, because, in his eyes, a terabyte sounds a lot cooler and big than unlimited. But what, by definition, could be bigger than "unlimited"? Nothing. Don't get me wrong, Flickr offering a free terabyte of storage with unlimited monthly bandwidth is absolutely game changing. This, more than anything else, is going to make Flickr take off again, especially now that it's been hacked.

But new Flickr doesn't have anything that compares to old Pro accounts, which were $25 a year for unlimited everything. While old accounts will be grandfathered in for now and Flickr says Pro accounts will never be transitioned to Ad Free ($50 a year) or Doublr (two terabytes of storage, $500) accounts, it doesn't rule out Pro accounts being axed eventually. Again, a free terabyte with Flickr's archival tools is mind-melting. If you take photos, even casually, you should be putting them up on Flickr, like, today. But there's still no better deal for someone with a lot of pictures to back up than the old Pro account.

3. It's still a bit rough

One of the features that's really going to do well with new Flickr is its renewed emphasis on scrolling streams. People on this here internet love scrolling through hours of photos at a time, enjoying the pretty arrangements of pixels as their lives slide past in a haze of monotony. By at least giving a nod to our Pinteresty, feed-driven world, Flickr's scrolling pages make photos more fun to navigate—and favorite/Klout/socialize/whatever—which is a huge step towards regaining its vibrancy.

But the feeds go on forever (in the case of my home feed, I scrolled through my entire notification history), which means accessing the site's footer and other non-scrolling functions an exercise in sneak-attack scrolling. Also, the choices for your new cover image—which is in such a ridiculously stretched format to begin with—are limited to your most recent 50 or 100 uploaded pictures, which means you'll have to reupload an old picture to the top of your queue if you want to use it. 

There are other weird little things, like how I can't figure out why my name displays twice on my profile, and when I search for things now, I tend to get a lot more content from single sources, rather than a broad mix of photographers. They aren't dealbreakers, but for such a vaunted redesign, it still needs some polish.

4. Portraits are worthless

But god damn, Flickr's new photo feeds are a huge step up. The old days involved mindless clicking through slow-loading page after page, but now it's easy to zip through tons of photos (and hopefully activate them on other social networks, right?). More than the terabyte of space that the average user will never fill up, the feeds go a long way towards making the site more useable and surfable than it's ever been.

There's just one problem: the way it's designed means wide, narrow landscape-format shots get way more feed attention that portrait or square photos. Remember back in the old Facebook days when you could make a profile photo as long as you wanted? Flickr's basically going to become that, where cropped photos as wide as the page get way more visual attention than vertical-aspect ones. This is all part of larger web trend towards landscape format photos, which get more monitor and blog column real estate than portrait formats. But for a site with a serious base of photographers, shrinking portraits is a bummer.

5. The changes are skin deep

Flickr's hit a home run with its free plan, and its new design reflects an emphasis on easy content digestion that I, at the very least, think will help it rope in more social, casual users. At this point, that's the demographic Flickr needs to go after to try to grow in an Instagram world.

But below the surface, the site hasn't changed much. Groups are still annoying to navigate, and its message board format remains the same: a dated, weird to read layout that doesn't do much to inspire discussion. Flickr still has a long way to go to up its social abilities, and it'll likely never have the same ability for clean, simple interactions like Instagram does.

That's fine, as they're totally different sites, and I'm very glad that Flickr's best features—mainly its ability to process and archive large amounts of photos quickly—remain the same, and its emphasis on high-resolution photo and video is a step up. And, yes, its long-awaited update is visually appealing.

But if becoming more social, as many message board pundits have shouted about for years, was the goal, it's put forth no more than a token effort. For me, that doesn't matter, as I never cared about Flickr as a social tool anyway. All it means is that now I've got yet another new interface to figure out. Harrumph.

@derektmead

An axolotl salamander's limb in the process of regeneration. Image: Nature

I am a human, so if my limbs fall off, they stay off. This is unfortunate. It's also why Australian scientists are working to enable "salamander-like" limb repair in people. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers new insights into how salamanders self-repair, and holds clues as to how humans might learn from their example. 

Salamanders, you see, are one of the few vertebrates with full-fledged regenerative capabilities: they can repair their hearts, brains, and spines, and they regrow entire limbs. What makes all that regeneration possible are cells called macrophages. These cells not only kill off invasive bacteria and fungi, study author Dr. James Godwin, of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University, tells ABC Australia, they "actively determine repair." 

Image: Georgia Tech University

Humans have macrophages, too, but no limb repair. So Godwin and his team of researchers set out to study what makes the salamander's restorative cells different. They extracted the macrophages from an axolotl, an aquatic species of salamander, and discovered that without macrophages, limb regeneration shut down entirely—the salamanders became like us, with lost limbs turning into stumps. But the scientists found that "Full limb regenerative capacity of failed stumps was restored by reamputation once endogenous macrophage populations had been replenished."

The discovery led Godwin to believe that a chemical release accompanying the deployment of macrophages is essential to limb regeneration—and that it's entirely possible that by emulating that chemical release, we may be able to spur human limb regeneration. As he writes in the study's abstract: "Promotion of a regeneration-permissive environment by identification of macrophage-derived therapeutic molecules may ... aid in the regeneration of damaged body parts in adult mammals."

In other words, if he can identify which chemicals are driving that limb repair, he may be able to concoct a medicinal treatment that could actually help humans regrow limbs right in the emergency room.

"The long-term plan," he said, "is that we'll know exactly what cocktail to add to a wound site to allow salamander-like regeneration under hospital conditions."

The big news this week has been the revelation of Congressional investigators that Apple, one of the country’s most profitable companies, had avoided billions in taxes by exploiting loopholes in the system. Of course, tax avoidance has long been a luxury of international companies and the rich, armed with their squadrons of legal experts, bankers and accountants. Without the same kind of support, regular people like you and me have no other option than to pay up. But what if Bitcoin changed all that?

In fact, this kind of corporate “cost-cutting” behavior has been expected and accepted ever since The Economist detailed how News Corp. paid just six percent in taxes in 1999 by exploiting global tax havens with offshore subsidiaries. This isn’t just an American problem. European authorities are coming to the same conclusion, having exposed the strategies of Google, Starbucks, and Amazon in recent months.

Indeed, if the CEO of a major corporation were to shun such methods in the name of “patriotism,” he or she would be written off as naive and briskly fired. Such practices are now so commonplace, the lines of morality have blurred as initial anger has faded into general indifference, concluded The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson.

“Rather than a story about patriotic duty, or funding the social net, or corporate ethics, this is really a story about unrealistic expectations,” Thompson writes. “We wish we could tax American companies on their earnings from all around the world. And we can't. We just can't.”

Meanwhile, companies like Apple continue to stretch the limits of what’s possible, to the dismay of Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. “Apple successfully sought the holy grail of tax avoidance,” he told the Times. “It has created offshore entities holding tens of billions of dollars while claiming to be tax resident nowhere.” In other words, Apple has been able to effectively create stateless subsidiaries, shell companies that are wholly exempt from filing tax returns to, well, anywhere.

Having just returned from the libertarian fest otherwise known as the 2013 Bitcoin conference in San Jose, it suddenly sounds all too familiar. A stateless existence with minimal taxes? Multinational corporations like Apple are already living the libertarian dream! Moreover, society is beginning to accept this as business as usual.

It’s the same storyline Bitcoin ideologues sold all weekend. If you have the option to pay less taxes, you’ll take it. And if everyone is doing it, it will, over time, feel less and less morally reprehensible. Countries like Greece and Italy are prime examples. Once a society gets used to a culture of not paying taxes, especially since their neighbors aren’t either, it’s extremely difficult to reverse the trend.

Just like the (legal) strategies Apple has employed, there’s little the government could do to tax Bitcoin transactions and stashes it knows nothing about. People who are paid in cash are already well aware of this phenomenon. There’s no overt political, anti-government agenda here. People simply like more money than less money. And if CEOs aren’t being patriotic, why should others be?

To be perfectly clear, I am in no way promoting tax evasion. I'm merely pointing out the fact that, if given the option, most people, like corporations, will choose to pay less taxes if possible. And so on one end of the spectrum you have “cash only” small businesses. On the other end are the multinationals. Could Bitcoin fill in the gaps?

In some places, this is already happening. A Finnish software firm recently offered to pay a portion of employee salaries in bitcoins. In this case, the bitcoins paid are already tax deducted, but how long will it be before an enterprising employee discovers a novel loophole, just as Apple has? Or take it one step further. How long will it be before savvy employers start helping their employees exploit such loopholes?

If the employer can pay the employee less, even as the employee earns more, everyone wins. Except the government that is. But if governments are powerless to stop such “legal” activities, will anyone even care (outside of politicians)? Given what’s happening on a far grander scale, is such a reality really that ridiculous?

Perhaps most telling is Apple’s response in the form of a prepared testimony on Tuesday. The company said that it “welcomes an objective examination of the US corporate tax system, which has not kept pace with the advent of the digital age and the rapidly changing global economy.” Sound familiar?

@sfnuop

This could only have happened in Florida: 23-year-old Jason Leon spotted a python on the side of the road in the Everglades during an ATV trip with friends, and subsequently engaged in a 10-minute wrestling match with the snake before cutting its head off with a large knife. 

The python was 18 feet, 8 inches at a whopping 128 pounds, which NBC Miami said makes it the largest python ever captured in the State, with the previous record holder being 17 feet and 7 inches. 

Leon said he knew the snake "didn't belong" on the side of the road, and thus killed it out of sport. He later received a congratulatory email from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation, impressed by his "big hunt." Leon agreed to donate the skeleton, but is keeping the snakeskin for his apartment wall.  

Although, no one directly said that the snake's presence on the road was a genuine risk, Carli Segelson, a commission spokeswoman, told NBC Miami that "I would think a snake of that size could kill a very large animal...It could kill a deer, so a person would be comparable in size to that." 

Below is a video clip that includes footage of Leon fighting the snake, and photos of him holding the behemoth's body next to its decapitated head. Again, in what other state would something like this happen? 

When Steve Wilhite got up to accept his Lifetime Achievement Webby Award, everyone at my Webby party started spilling their champagne, tearing their sashes–just losing their shit.

"There he is!" one nerd exclaimed, "the inventor of the gif!"

"The inventor of the what?" said another, pausing midway through the naked baby dance.

"You know," the first said, "The graphics interchange format?"

"I know what he invented," said the second, being a real asshole. "I also know how to say it. Gif."

He nailed the soft 'g,' sending spittle into the first's eye. "Like the peanut butter."

"Aw, fuck off, man," said the first. "It's not 'jraphics,'"

And then, before a fist fight–or more likely a frantic, smart phone Googling–could break out, Wilhite settled the matter once and for all.

We sat back down, humbled.

"How is that the 'soft' g?" the first asked no one in particular. "Gossamer. Goose down. These are soft things."

Left to right, top to bottom: Gavin Andresen, Jed McCaleb, Shinichi Mochizuki, Zorro, "Satoshi," and Uncle Sam

For all of Bitcoin’s fabled transparency, a key piece of this bubblicious puzzle remains elusively opaque. Who the hell is Satoshi Nakamoto?

Like a frustrating episode of Lost, there’s one too many clues and few if any answers. Satoshi, of course, is the one who started it all, unleashing his concept of a cryptographic, self-regulating digital currency to the world in his now infamous whitepaper in 2008.

Three years later, he was gone.

Today, Bitcoin is a billion dollar idea being adopted across the globe, and yet little is known about its enigmatic creator. The result has been wild speculation. Ted Nelson, the American pioneer of information technology who coined the term “hypertext,” last week proposed that Satoshi was a well-known, reclusive Japanese mathematician. The New Yorker and Fast Company have conducted their own investigations. Various theories circulate on the web.

Given Satoshi’s paranoid preservation of his privacy, there are no conclusions, only educated guesses. But who doesn’t love a good conspiracy theory, especially when the topic is a disruptive technology that many believe has the potential to truly shakregistere things up?

What we know

Satoshi appeared seemingly out of nowhere in 2008 when he released a research paper on the Cryptography Mailing List, which laid the foundation for the Bitcoin protocol. He claimed to have been working on the idea for about two years, which, given the robustness of what was produced, implied an exhaustive amount of effort dedicated toward his work.

In January of 2009, he started mining, creating what is known as the “genesis block.” Bitcoin v0.1 was released six days later. By year-end, over 32,000 blocks had been added to this original block, producing a total of 1,624,250 bitcoins. Since all transactions are public on the blockchain, we know that only a quarter of those bitcoins have ever changed hands, leading some to speculate that Satoshi could be sitting on a stash of roughly one million bitcoins, worth ~$120 million at today’s exchange rate.

In the early days, Satoshi was active on the Bitcoin Forum and regularly responded to emails. Though Bitcoin is an open source project, most modifications to the source code were made by Satoshi himself in the first year, but his activity soon began to peter out.

His final programming contribution was made in mid-2010, after he had passed on the reins to Gavin Andresen, Bitcoin’s current lead developer. In April of 2011, when asked of his dwindling activity, Satoshi explained to one Bitcoin developer that he had “moved on to other things.” At some point, he stopped replying to emails altogether, including those of Andresen. The creator had disappeared.

An internet representation of Satoshi Nakamoto

The name Satoshi Nakamoto is believed to be a pseudonym for a person, a group, or even a larger, possibly governmental organization. In Japanese, Satoshi means “clear-thinking” or “wise.” Naka can mean “inside” or “relationship” and moto is used to describe “the origin” or “the foundation.” Put it all together and you get “thinking clearly inside the foundation.” There’s scant evidence that Nakamoto existed outside the context of Bitcoin.

According to his P2P foundation account details, Satoshi claimed to be a 37-year-old male living in Japan. His language of choice was English, but he would alternate between British and American spellings and colloquialisms, which could mean that he was trying to mask his nationality or that Satoshi is actually more than one person. He would post on the forums and respond to emails at random times with no discernible patterns that might indicate a primary time zone.

Based on his limited body of work, we know that Satoshi is highly intelligent and economically competent. He’s a brilliant mathematician, well-versed in cryptography, and a capable programmer, though his code indicates that he most likely wasn’t a professional.

While theoretically sound, his style belied his experience (or lack thereof), leading some, including Andresen, to believe that Satoshi is an academic. A prominent fear in the early days was that some exploitable flaw in the Bitcoin system would eventually surface, undermining the movement. Four years later, the protocol remains bulletproof, a testament to Satoshi’s genius, foresight, and thoroughness. It also suggests that, if he really is a single entity, Satoshi is a hell of a proofreader.

Though it appeared that Satoshi understood that the Bitcoin movement might attract its fair share of ideologues, such as anti-government libertarians, it’s unclear whether or not Satoshi was politically motivated himself. If at times he seemed eager to recruit such groups to the cause, his intent could be interpreted as pragmatic. Keenly aware of the potential social implications of his idea, he left the politicizing to others.

"[Bitcoin is] very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly,” he wrote. “I'm better with code than with words though.” We know, based on his writings, that he had qualms with the banking system and saw Bitcoin as a technological solution:

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.

A generation ago, multi-user time-sharing computer systems had a similar problem. Before strong encryption, users had to rely on password protection to secure their files, placing trust in the system administrator to keep their information private. Privacy could always be overridden by the admin based on his judgment call weighing the principle of privacy against other concerns, or at the behest of his superiors. Then strong encryption became available to the masses, and trust was no longer required. Data could be secured in a way that was physically impossible for others to access, no matter for what reason, no matter how good the excuse, no matter what. Its time we had the same thing for money. With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless."

The prime suspects

Analysis of Satoshi’s coding and writing style have been inconclusive. But with the facts available, a few prominent suspects have emerged, some more widely accepted than others.

Gavin Andresen: As the Bitcoin project’s lead developer, he is an obvious choice (though perhaps too obvious by Satoshi’s standards). Andresen serves as chief scientist on the board of the Bitcoin Foundation and equivalent of the Linux’s Linus Torvalds. Outside of Satoshi, Andresen has the most influence on Bitcoin’s direction. The mild-mannered programmer’s technical savvy and work ethic is universally admired within the community.

He has sometimes been referred to as Bitcoin’s “Batman” for his altruism and the nature of his often unrewarding role. One Bitcoin developer who has frequently corresponded with Andresen but wished to remain anonymous, claims conversational similarities between the two, though this has been disputed. Could Satoshi be hiding in plain sight?

Andresen denied being Satoshi when we broached the question over the weekend at the 2013 Bitcoin conference in San Jose, saying he has a different coding style than Satoshi does.

Michael Clear, Donal O’Mahony, Hitesh Tewari and Michael Peirce of Trinity College, Dublin: An investigation by Joshua Davis of the New Yorker ultimately led to Michael Clear, a then 23-year-old graduate student in cryptography at Trinity College. Despite his age, Clear appeared to check enough boxes to fit the bill. Named Trinity’s top computer science student in 2008, Clear had co-authored a paper on peer-to-peer cryptography. He was also British. Davis tracked Clear down at the Crytpo 2011 conference in Santa Barbara where Clear denied the allegations. “I'm not Satoshi,” he said. “But even if I was I wouldn't tell you.” (That refrain is common in the Satoshi search.)

Davis’s report prompted further digging among the community, which led to Donal O’Mahony, a professor at the university; Hitesh Tewari, a research assistant; and Michael Peirce, a student, because of various published materials connecting the four including this paper and this book. Along with Clear, the group has been called the Crypto Mano Group (mano is Irish for coin) or CMG. Perhaps coincidentally, none have publicly discussed Bitcoin in spite of their relevant body of work.

Neal J. King, Charles Bry, and Vladamir Oksman: The New Yorker piece prompted Adam L. Penenberg of Fast Company to conduct his own search for Bitcoin’s mysterious creator. A textual analysis of Satoshi’s whitepaper led Penenberg to a patent application, which shared the term "computationally impractical to reverse." To Penenberg’s surprise, the patent had been filed just three days before the domain Bitcoin.org was registered.

All three have filed patent applications that have to do with encryption, communication, networks, and nodes. All three have also denied being Satoshi, with King going as far as shooting down the concept. “It’s not a very good idea,” King told Penenberg. “Nakamoto’s algorithm is a solution in search of a problem.”

King has been consistent with his skepticism. His latest comment at the Economist continues his argument as to why Bitcoin won’t work: “It never makes contact with the physical world, except through the concepts of credulous dreamers that have not quite woken up.” Knowing Satoshi, however, it could be a ploy to cover his tracks.

Jed McCaleb: McCaleb’s name is often brought up during discussions of Satoshi’s identity. The UC Berkeley dropout co-founded Mt. Gox, which is based in Tokyo—a questionable decision given Japan’s high corporate tax rate and regulatory red tape. This has led some to cite this as evidence of a tenuous affinity for the country without McCaleb actually being Japanese. McCaleb also founded eDonkey in 2000, one of the largest (and technically revered) peer-to-peer file-sharing networks at the time.

He would later sell the highly profitable Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange, saying that while the service was “cool and needed to exist,” it was no longer “technically interesting.” Once an enthusiastic Bitcoin supporter, McCaleb had also become disillusioned by the protocol’s system of mining “because it wastes so much energy.” He would go on to develop Ripple, what he believes to be an improved iteration of the Bitcoin concept that addresses some of these flaws. Could this have been what Satoshi meant when he said he had “moved on”?

Shinichi Mochizuki: A recent feature on the Japanese mathematician has prompted Nelson, among others, to speculate that the eccentric genius had, while solving the famed ABC Conjecture, one of math world’s most complex problems, created Bitcoin in his spare time. It’s tough to question Mochizuki’s abilities and the patterns seem to fit.

Like Satoshi, Mochizuki released his ABC Conjecture proof on the internet (instead of established academic channels) and simply walked away, refusing to explain his potentially historic work to the great frustration of mathematicians everywhere. Mochizuki is also a native English speaker, though it’s unclear if he can code or is knowledgeable in cryptography. But given Mochizuki’s mathematics acumen and incredible smarts, it’s not impossible to believe he taught himself along the way.

Government: A conspiracy theorist’s wet dream, another idea that gets tossed around is that Bitcoin is the product of some government or governmental agency. From that vantage point, resources are no longer an issue. But why? The answer is more of an intellectual exercise than actual theory.

Bitcoin could be used as a weapon against the US dollar. It could be used to fund black ops, sort of like a currency version of onion routing, which was first developed by the Naval Research Laboratory. It could be used to strategically trim the overweight financial sector.

If governments believed a widely used digital currency was inevitable, Bitcoin could be a preemptive strike against a potentially malevolent iteration. From the US perspective, it could have been created as a hedge against the waning international power of the dollar, though given the Fed’s policies of quantitative easing, this seems unlikely. The same could be said about the EU and the flailing euro. Along these lines, some have pointed to EU directives on digital currencies that were implemented and voted for well before Bitcoin became widely known as a possible clue.

Perhaps the scariest theory of all is that Bitcoin is actually an Orwellian vehicle that would allow governments to monitor all financial transactions. Bitcoin is often touted for its anonymity, but the transparent nature of the blockchain means every transaction is potentially traceable. Even if each transaction is only associated with a key, armed with enough information, certain organizations would eventually be able to connect the dots. In theory, anyway. In reality, government involvement isn't likely, though by no means an impossibility.

What we don’t know

In the end, we’re right back where we started: a few theories, some circumstantial evidence, and nothing remotely conclusive. It takes only brief examination of his essentially perfect execution of the Bitcoin protocol to realize that Satoshi Nakamoto would treat his quest for privacy with the same level of comprehension. He is a master of the long game.

And no wonder. The creators of e-gold were charged with "conspiracy to engage in money laundering" and the "operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business" in July of 2008, just months before Satoshi unveiled Bitcoin. Given the treatment of guys like Julian Assange and Kim Dotcom, there’s little upside to being an internet hero when your platform has the potential to disrupt governments and big business.

"His word is pretty much bond, especially if he were to come out from reclusiveness after all those years."

There is the possibility that Satoshi could make a comeback at some point. Some within the community assume he is keeping an eye on things, but could re-emerge, if necessary, to right the ship.

“He could kind of step in and say, ‘This is bad.’ It could happen,” a Bitcoin developer told me. “And he would absolutely have enough sway. His word is pretty much bond, especially if he were to come out from reclusiveness after all those years.”

Satoshi could then verify it was him by signing a message to one of his keys from his genesis block. Until then, it’s clear he’s quite content keeping his identity a secret.

@sfnuop

More on Bitcoin:

Feds Seize Funds of Largest Bitcoin Exchange

Who's Building Bitcoin? An Inside Look at Bitcoin's Open Source Development

A Guide to Bitcoin Mining: Why Someone Bought a $1,500 Bitcoin Miner on eBay for $20,600

Image by Alan Levine/Creative Commons

My home doesn't have fire sprinklers or, I think, even a working smoke detector. I have no idea where the key to the front door is, and, if you looked not terribly close, you would find mouse shit in certain places you really don't want to find mouse shit. There is also a chipmunk that loves to claw and chew on the couch blanket—the blanket a guest would likely use if they happened to stay here. Needless to say, said home does not feature an evacuation plan. The closest I have to a security peephole is the full-on-daylight hole in the base of one of my walls.

Compared to some city apartments I've lived in and an abandoned motel I made a nest in circa 2002, this place is actually pretty nice. Given that the resort up the road from here charges in the neighborhood of $1,200 a night to say in a fucking tent, I could probably get at least $100 a night for our loft. Throw in a horseback ride, and make it $200. Given a rent of, well, about twice that, I would be making a good profit renting this place out on Airbnb. There's actually several Airbnb rentals listed on the site right now in the general area for a good deal more than that. 

My legal obligation with the site is adhering to local laws and regulations, which I'm fairly certain is just-check-the-box code for don't-ask-don't-tell. Surfing around Airbnb, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that a great many hosts don't spend too much time researching, let alone complying with those local laws. And many of those regulations exist to keep guests safe, particularly the ones pertaining to my situation above (fire and personal safety). Of course, many laws also exist to ensure that various municipalities are getting a tax cut, but you'll notice a couple of things that hotels/motels anywhere just do not fuck around with: locks and fire safety.

Airbnb is a tough question. I've been chewing on this ever since my first experience with the site renting a one-bedroom apartment in a beautiful building next to a leafy park in Inwood—for $70 or so a night. Inwood certainly isn't Williamsburg, but I've seldom been able to find a hotel room in New York City for twice that in far less desirable places (conventionally desirable, that is; I love Inwood). Point is that I'm poor and love Airbnb for giving me affordable options. I love having these options so much that I'm willing to forgo my serious misgivings about trusting strangers on the internet. 

It’s a conditional enthusiasm. Forcing some apartment owner to comply with hotel laws to rent their place for $100 seems pretty stupid. At the same time, Airbnb, a company valued in the billions, functions a lot like a hotel chain. Using the site, hosts are effectively branding their accommodations. You won’t find an “Airbnb” sign on any doors—I don’t think—but in a way, it does begin to look like a typical franchise/branding relationship. Where are you staying? “Oh, at some Airbnb in Inwood.” I think this makes a significant difference when arguing that this is just bunch of people renting out their apartments when they’re on vacation for some extra cash. The Airbnb name counts; it provides an implicit assurance.

There's a particular tone being used in the defense of a New York host recently fined $2,400 for renting his place out in violation of that city’s hotel laws, for running an illegal hotel, according to the city. This is the statement Airbnb gave to CNET, now widely in circulation: “Eighty-seven percent of Airbnb hosts in New York list just a home they live in—they are average New Yorkers trying to make ends meet, not illegal hotels that should be subject to the 2010 law." These aren't businesses, just some regular folks.

That’s problematic. The dichotomy between hotels and Airbnb hosts is at least somewhat artificial in real-life and totally artificial as stated by the company. In real life, you can say the same thing as in the above Airbnb quote about the guy running the Budget Host off I-5, or the couple running the bed and breakfast in the Poconos. They are individuals living on their properties trying to stay afloat, often barely doing so.

Not every hotel or motel is a corporately-owned chain, and many that are chain-branded are, again, also just people making ends meet as owner-franchisees. And a great many of them have been having a very difficult few years, given an economy that's been especially hard on travel. Yet these owners, many of which are taking home a whole lot less than it takes to have your own apartment in New York City, are following hotel laws and paying hotel taxes to their respective communities. Not doing so would mean not just losing some extra money on the side, but losing everything. There are actual stakes.

I paid Airbnb a $17 fee for my two-night stay in Inwood. That comes out to be over 10 percent of the nightly rate. It may be interesting to note that if I were staying in a Motel 6 instead, only 4 percent of my nightly rate would make its way to the actual corporate chain. That’s low, but motel franchise rates don’t go much higher than 11 or 12 percent. Best Western, which styles itself as a membership organization rather than a chain of motel franchises, doesn’t take anything from its motels’ nightly rates, collecting instead yearly dues and offering minimal branding and minimal corporate control. It does, however, require some minimum standards to carry the name.

The point is that when staying at an Airbnb rental you’re in at least one very real way more closely connected to a multi-billion dollar brand than you are with Motel 6. At the Motel 6 you could even pay the franchise owner directly in cash, whereas Airbnb requires an online payment to the company. Some portion of that Motel 6 money would, eventually, make its way toward safety features or taxes or the other things that legit hotels and motels have to do to stay legal and in business. Meanwhile, Airbnb is just, you know, connecting some individuals on the internet—a glorified Craigslist, right?

The Airbnb defense rests on that false opposition between networking individuals—a facilitator, barely a middleman—and hotels as embodied by faceless corporate chains. It’s not really an opposition at all but a continuum, a difference of scale. Regulation, too, should be a difference of scale, not a simple “is” or “isn’t.” And that’s everyone’s problem, from cities unwilling to update their regulations for the times to Brooklyn cool kids making weed money off tourists. No one gets to opt out.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

Photo courtesy of Union Docs

"Awesome job... that thing you did with the Manning's text was so personal, it worked really well, great job," I overheard John Leguizamo tell Alex Gibney in the carpeted stairwell of the Tribeca Grand Hotel after a screening a couple weeks ago. Leguizamo was congratulating Gibney on his latest documentary, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks. He was referring to a technique that Gibney used to moving and arresting effect inside his kaleidoscopic film: on-screen text to convey the chatroom conversations between Bradley Manning and his confidant Adrien Lamo. It manages to humanize Bradley Manning, who was not available for interviews, locked up as he is at Fort Leavanworth, awaiting trial next month.  

By some thematic coincidence, the last time I spotted Leguizamo was a few years ago, at an off-Broadway preview for Ethan Hawke's woodsy revamping of A Lie of the Mind, the Sam Shepard classic about the unraveling of familial dishonesties. All tabloid comments aside, it brought up things worth meditating on. The human addiction to cortisol. The perverse satisfaction of digging up the secrets we know will harm and disappoint us.

Between collecting and leaking large bodies of classified military secrets, is Julian Assange's saga of stubbornness to reveal his own shortcomings so incredulous? He's a veteran hacker with anarcho-political aspirations. You don't have to be a formidable bully like Nelson Muntz to dislike bleeding your own blood. But in the case of Bradley Manning, is it his vulnerable bloodiness that makes me long with sympathy for Manning?

In his style of circular storytelling, Alex Gibney went to punch this paradigm straight in the face, in the first major documentary to come about Assange, Manning, and Wikileaks (there will be more, along with a fiction film). On Sunday afternoon, I had the opportunity to chat with Alex about the film. We only had brief moment to chat over the phone, but that was perfect, appropriate even. If Michael Moore is obsessed with outrage, and Herzog is obsessed with dreams, Gibney is a master of moments.

Motherboard: I was wondering about your father, the journalist Frank Gibney, and how he may have influenced you.

He was a great guy, always very curious, that’s what he taught me more than anything else. He stayed very curious until the end of his life. He was a great journalist, that was what motivated him. I think he had trouble with authority which I maybe also have. So for all those reasons, I think he was a big influence on me. I think he was also somebody that just was not willing to accept simple versions of events; he’d always go deeper.

Bradley wasn't available for an interview and Julian denied your request. Was lack of access the most challenging part of making this film?

I think telling the story was the most challenging part. Access was certainly challenging, I couldn’t speak to my two main characters, at least on camera. But sometimes that ends up paying unexpected dividends from a filmmaking perspective. As somebody famous [Da Vinci] once said, “Art is born from constraint and dies from freedom,” so, in this case, when it came to interview access, we had a lot of constraints.

It looks like you end up obtaining something much more personal through Bradley’s chats than you might have gotten out of a live visit.

Because it was Bradley speaking, those were Bradley’s words. I think to be able to show them as words, rather than speaking to him in some way was really important.

What role do you see hackers playing in society? Both Manning and Assange are portrayed as hackers, but maybe they're different types?

The term 'hacker' is so vague in general, it can refer to so many different things. It’s hard to know exactly how to respond to that. I think the big point is that we live in this world where simple mechanisms have a way of shutting down, and hiding, and concealing important facts. And when that happens, when too much is kept secret, by necessity individuals have to find ways to reveal that material. That I think is the bigger picture here.

It’s an ongoing struggle and I think the great thing about the computer age is that even as governments and corporations assume more power, interestingly, individuals armed with computers end up having quite a bit of power as well. That provides an important countervailing force.

I guess it reminds me of Style Wars, or vandalism like graffiti becoming art, and seeing what Assange has done as heroic.

That’s where the whole idea of the hacker, you have to define what you mean by hacker because there are a lot of different definitions. If you're talking about someone who maliciously goes into a computer and spies on individuals, or destroys valuable information, or commits theft of somebody else’s money; these are serious issues that we don’t approve of. That’s why I think it’s a balance, it’s a funny area we’re dealing with that’s why I call the film We Steal Secrets.

That’s the phrase that’s said by Michael Hayden, and he’s acknowledging, “We steal secrets,” from other governments. And what does he say, “We can’t do that above board if we’re going to be successful." In other words, we have to be secret to steal secrets, so don’t bother us. (Laughs) But he’s saying he’s stealing secrets. We say we don’t approve of theft, but when our government does it to other governments it’s okay because it’s protecting our national security. So it gets into murkier areas of what is moral. At certain moments in time it’s that balance, which is a judgment call.

So, when people are stealing secrets to protect us, what expectations do we have of them?

Right. Who’s watching the watchers?

I guess I never had the opportunity to feel so infuriated about Assange until I saw your film. Quite simply, what is the dude’s problem? What has it become?

I think the seeds of whom Assange has become today were always there: In his childhood, in the way he approached the world through the computer, in his kind of solitism, in the way he kind of took to himself and also imagined himself to always be a grander figure than he necessarily was, a kind of self-regarding narcissism. These were always there, but they were balanced with a healthy sense of idealism, and a self-deprecating humor. The Julian Assange that Mark Davis captured just before the Afghan War logs is a more interesting figure.

I think in the late scene, and through much of the more vicious attacks on Wikileaks, his character flew out of balance, and now he’s something that’s closer to a human megaphone. If you look at the Wikileaks' twitter page, I think there’s something like 1.5 million followers. And then look at how many people that site is following. Two. And they’re both Wikileaks sites, so, you know (laughs), that’s kind of a grand metaphor. Lots to say, but not much to listen. Not much patience for listening, not much bandwidth for listening.

"The Julian Assange that Mark Davis captured just before the Afghan War logs is a more interesting figure... his character flew out of balance, and now he’s something that’s closer to a human megaphone."

As a journalist, how are you concerned about the protection of other whistleblowers out there? Have you seen the New Yorker’s own version of Wikileaks, Strongbox?

I haven’t been there, but I know about it, and I know that it was designed by Aaron Swartz. And it’s important, an important development particularly in the wake of revelations about AP. But I don’t think that electrical drop boxes will end up being a panacea–that’s part of what the film is about.

When we start thinking about leaks, a lot of it is about personal relationships and trust. And there are opportunities but there are also problems with a technical fix. Who has dropped that material? And why? And what is it? Is it truthful or is it not? Is it misinformation as well as information? Again, these things can be checked, but it’s not a perfect system, or a perfect solution. But still it’d be a necessary step when the government is trying to essentially criminalize journalism.

I’ve tried in my own futile attempts to talk to Julian. I’ve phoned the Ecuadorian Embassy a couple dozen times, almost as a game, in the past year. I was wondering what you'd have asked, if you had been given the chance to speak with him, without paying the million dollar ransom on an interview?

I just wanted to take the true story, it was that simple. I wanted to take him through the story and have him tell it from his perspective, that’s all. That’s what I told him. I want to drill down, step by step, beat by beat, and have you tell your story. He wasn’t interested.

I wondered about how absurd, but maybe fun it could be to get that funded. To pay him for an interview.

But it’s not like an interview with him was so precious. He never asked for a million dollars, he just said that, “The market rate for an interview with me is a million dollars.” And I had to take a second to think, what market is that? The fact is that everybody interviewed him. I joked with him at one point and said, “I’m the only person in the world who has not interviewed you.” So, by virtue of inflation the market was pretty well saturated. Julian has had no shortage of people to talk to. But I think what the problem is now, is the information he conveys now.

It’s not self-reflective, it’s a series of pronouncements, it’s a series of mega-statements. He’s like a guy constantly giving a speech, in his Evita-like way, on the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy. When you have a conversation with a politician you feel like “Is this a human being or a talking machine?” And I think that’s what Julian Assange has become. It’s bad, because I think that prior to being attacked and prior to being so famous, he was a more interesting person to talk to I suspect.

"He’s like a guy constantly giving a speech, in his Evita-like way, on the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy."

You know, I’ve interviewed athletes, very famous athletes, and they’re always talking about themselves in the third person. And you’re looking around to see what other person is in the room.

So, would you rather talk to Steve Bartman or Julian Assange?

Ha! Probably Steve Bartman. I mean, I say that in joking. I’m very interested, I’ve tried very hard to talk to Julian is the point, all kidding aside. I think what all I’ve wanted is for him to tell his story in an honest way.

What do you think about the cyberpunk movement, and the idea of data encryption methods to keep information outside of and locked away from state power?

I think it’s increasingly important.

What do you think moving on from this film, how do you find your next story?

I’m always working on more than one project at once, and now I’m finishing another film on a completely different kind of subject. In some ways, in some ways similar, which is a film on Lance Armstrong.

In terms of stories that got away, are there any others that kill you that they got away?

I guess I don’t think of it that way. There are a lot of stories out there.

I guess I was thinking back to that ESPN journalist in Catching Hell, who foiled his chance of an interview with Steve Bartman in that parking garage, and how it torments him to this day.

There are always moments where you have a job to do, and part of your job can mean digging into somebody else’s life. And that’s an uncomfortable position to be in, even though it’s sometimes necessary. Because stories about other people end up being important, for all of us to understand so that we can figure out how to go forward. That’s our life, passing and telling each other stories, and trying to figure out how to learn from them.

@DanStuckey

Image: Giger's rendering of House Harkonnen from Jodorowsky's Dune

In 1974, the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky set about turning the classic sci-fi novel Dune into a major motion picture. He recruited Orson Welles, Pink Floyd, H. R. Giger, David Carradine, Salvador Dali, and Mick Jagger to the project, completed 3,000 pieces of story art, and spent millions of dollars preparing for production. Investors balked when he asked for more—and when they realized the script would account for a meandering 14-hour film—and it was ultimately shelved. 

David Lynch would famously take up the mantle and go on to turn Dune into an epic flop. So today, Jodorowsky's effort remains one of the most famous movies never made. A documentary about the lost film debuted at Cannes, and it's getting rave reviews—it's essentially a prolonged bull session with Jodorowsky about the aborted project. 

But it's whetting sci-fi, Dune and Jodorowsky diehards' appetites for a glimpse of the fabled production. I mean, how insane was this thing going to be? Well, I have a bit of a spoiler here: the answer is "very." 

A few years back, Jodorowsky evidently published a piece in Metal Hurlant, a French comic/culture mag/inspiration for Heavy Metal called "Dune: Le Film Que Vous Ne Verrez Jamais"—that's "Dune: The Film You Will Never See." In the piece, he explains at length his ambitions and inspirations for turning Dune into an avante garde sci-fi carnival of insanity.

Here's a taste:

In film, the Duke Leto (father of Paul) would be a man castrated in a ritual combat in the arenas during a bullfight (emblem of the Atreides house being a crowned bull...) Jessica - nun of the Bene Gesserit -, sent as concubine at the Duke to create a girl which would be the mother of a Messiah, becomes so in love with Leto that she decides to jump a link in the chain and to create a son, Kwisatz Haderach, the saviour.

By using her capacities of Bene Gesserit - once that the Duke, insanely in love with her, entrusts her with his sad secret [that he's castrated, remember] - Jessica is inseminated by a drop of blood of this sterile man... The camera followed (in script) the red drop through the ovaries of the woman and sees its meeting with the ovule where, by a miraculous explosion, it fertilises it. Paul had been born from a virgin; and not of the sperm of his father but of his blood...

Not a sentence of that is in the original novel, of course. Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, notoriously disavowed Jodorowksy's project—which may have been part of the reason investors cut off funding. It's not hard to see why; Jodorowsky didn't just deviate from the source material—where there was no castration, no blood-Christs, no virgin births—he obliterated it, leaving only the names and, occasionally, some of the characters' thematic hallmarks intact. And H.R. Giger, the Swiss artist who would go on to achieve worldwide fame by designing the titular creature in Alien, admitted to not basing his art on the book at all.

And it only gets stranger from there. The main character of Jodorowsky's Dune wasn't even going to be Paul, in fact, but the Emperor; only a minor character in the novel. Bear in mind as you read Jodorowsky's thoughts, that he intended the Emperor to be played by Salvador Dali, for an alleged rate of $100,000 an hour. 

In my version of Dune, the Emperor of the galaxy is insane. He lives on an artificial gold planet, in a gold palace built according to not-laws of antilogical. He lives in symbiosis with a robot identical to him. The resemblance is so perfect that the citizens never know if they are opposite the man or the machine...

In my version, the spice is a blue drug with spongy consistency filled with a vegetable-animal life endowed with consciousness, the highest level of consciousness. It does not stop taking all kinds of forms, while stirring up unceasingly. The spice continuously produces the creation of the innumerable universes.

Imagine for a moment a God-Emperor Salvador Dali and his attendant robot clone taking spongy blue drugs on a planet made of gold, and you shall understand precisely what the world was robbed of when Dune came crashing down. 

The end of the film, would climax with Paul's throat getting cut and the hero announcing, "I am the collective man." Then Dune the desert planet is transmuted into a verdant paradise with "three columns of light" shining from on high, and rainbows, and forests. It ends with Dune "now a world illuminated, which crosses the galaxy, which leaves it, which gives it light - which is Consciousness - to all the universe."

And however did Jodorowsky come up with that ending? Glad you asked. 

To conceive this final sequence of transmutation of the matter, I was likely to come into contact with true alchemists... Mysterious beings (one of them seemed to be more than one hundred of years, advanced age which however enabled him to move with an energy of young teenager) which approached me because Dune could be a philosopher stone, the stone which changes into gold all other metals...

You're getting the point. Jodorowsky's Dune was a colossal undertaking by a wild, bizarre, and visionary director who had little regard for conventional narrative, studio demands, or staying faithful to a widely beloved sci-fi story. 

But his Dune wasn't a total loss. Jodorowsky salvaged some of the story, and turned it into a series of comics called the Incal with the French artist Moebius. That incarnation was on the verge of getting transformed into an animated feature, but it too was ultimately canned. Enough footage was left over to piece together this trailer:

Still, it's a pale shadow of what could have been a fantastic mind-fuck of a film—unlike any ever attempted and one unlikely to be attempted again. World-class surrealists, international rock stars, top-billed actors, and one of the most enigmatic directors of all time, all trying to adapt a space opera set on a desert planet loaded with drugs and man-eating worms. No wonder the saga of Jodorowski's Dune saga has captivated cinephiles and sci-fi aficionados for so long—and why we're actually anticipating a feature-length documentary about a movie that was never even shot.

Photo: Wikipedia

New research into human hearing suggests than humans have at least some ability to use echoes to locate their position in space, similar to the well-developed and well-known ability of bats. Though we're just in the preliminary stages of understanding it, it's a fascinating thing to consider. 

What we now know: Research coming out of the University of Southampton Institute of Sound and Vibration research, published in the journal Hearing Research, shows that as long as there is no hearing impairment—that is the ability to be able to hear sounds above 2 kHz (in the range of normal human conversation)—both sighted and blind people have the potential to use echoes to determine where nearby objects are located even if they can't see them, and even when other audio clues are eliminated.

"We also found that our ability to use echoes to locate an object gets rapidly worse with increasing distance from the object, especially when the object is not directly facing us," lead author Daniel Rowan said. "Furthermore, some echo-producing sounds are better for determining where an object is that others, and the best sounds for locating an object probably aren't the same as for detecting the object or determining what, and how far away, the object is."

As for future development of these abilities, the researchers say that this study offers insights into how training programs for the blind, as well as sighted people in low-vision situations, might be developed. Though it's pretty standard to say so at the end of any scientific paper, even more so here, more research is needed.

"Some people are better at this than others, and being blind doesn't automatically confer good echolocation ability," said Rowan. "Nevertheless, ability probably gets better with ability."

Echolocation is fairly common in the animal kingdom. It's known to be used by insect-eating bats, one species of fruit bat, toothed whales and dolphins, a few species of birds, and, in a simple form, by some shrews. It works by sensing the difference in timing between when a sound arrives in one ear and then the other, as well as the relative intensity of the sound. 

In the case of bats, sounds are generated specifically for this purpose. These sounds in the 14000-100,000 Hz range, mostly outside the range of human hearing. When searching for food clicks are made 10-20 times per second. Once prey is detected this can climb as high as 200 times per second, gradually decreasing as the insect is approached. 

All of which is to say that whatever potential ability humans have (and it does seem that there is some potential), we're not bats just yet. Training people to use it in a practical way, particularly in real-world settings and not the highly-specialized and controlled laboratory settings used here, is a long way off. 

Image: Wikimedia, CC

Is Airbnb illegal in New York? The answer to that question, which was already pretty cloudy, got even cloudier yesterday. A New York judge decided that a man who rented his East Village condo out for three nights during a trip to Colorado did, in fact, break the law. 

Nigel Warren was fined $2,400 for violating the "illegal hotels" law, which forbids property owners (Warren's landlord was actually the one cited, but Warren took the blame to avoid getting evicted) to rent out rooms to “transient” guests. The law—passed in 2010 and updated in 2011—cracks down on enterprising landlords that operate their buildings as unofficial hotels, without complying with fire codes and safety standards and so forth.

Unfortunately for the burgeoning sharing economy, this can be interpreted to apply to tenants who decide to open their home to travellers to make some cash on the side. At least half of Airbnb listings in NYC—thousands of listings—are illegal under the law, though much like jay walking, that hasn't stopped New Yorkers from doing it. At this moment there are 22,704 Airbnb listings in New York City, and growing fast; the 5-year-old startup is now worth billions of dollars.

This time, Airbnb, which had stayed mum on legality issues for years, decided to stick up for its customers. It said in a statement to press that “87 percent percent of Airbnb hosts in New York list just a home they live in—they are average New Yorkers trying to make ends meet...this decision makes it even more critical that New York law be clarified to make sure regular New Yorkers can occasionally rent out their own homes."

Until that day of clarity comes, here's some advice on how to use Airbnb without getting busted.

RENT FOR AT LEAST 30 DAYS, AND DON'T RENT OUT THE ENTIRE APARTMENT

That "entire apartment" box you can click while browsing listings? Criminal. The law defines “transient” as anything under 30 days; one month or longer counts as a permanent resident—totally legal. The law also makes an exception to the rule for guests staying in the home of the permanent resident if the permanent resident is also present. If you want to rent while you’re out of town, no money can change hands. The legaleese: 

Only the permanent occupants would be permitted to allow occupancy of the dwelling unit for less than 30 consecutive days and even then only by lawful boarders, roomers or lodgers or house guests living within the household of the permanent occupants or while the permanent occupant are temporarily absent for vacation or other personal reason if there is no monetary compensation for such use.

DON'T PISS OF THE NEIGHBORS

The only way to get caught Airbnbing is if someone files a complaint, and then officials discover an unlawful renter and issues a violation. Inspectors issued 1,897 violations of the illegal hotels law in 2011, WNYC reported. City officials aren’t out patrolling for air mattresses, but will respond to a 311 call from your neighbor that the music is too loud, or a series of foreigners are coming and going from your apartment in your absence. Keep a low profile, and be nice to the neighbors.

DON'T ASSUME AIRBNB IS PROTECTING YOU

Airbnb gets off scott free in all this, kicking responsibility back to its customers with a line in the site’s terms and conditions that states you must “understand and agree that you are solely responsible for compliance with any and all laws.”

Unfortunately for Warren—who told the judge he didn’t even read the terms and conditions page—Airbnb isn’t going out of its way to help people understand exactly what those laws are.

(via)

Comets are living glimpses of the solar system’s rumspringa. The European Space Agency says comets are “probably the most primitive bodies in the Solar System, preserving the earliest record of material from the nebula out of which our Sun and planets were formed.” While much of the solar system’s primordial swirling dust and gas got together into planets, settled into nice steady orbits, and maybe had a moon or two, comets never gave up the old whipping around.

Some comets have orbits that take them out to their homeland in the Oort Cloud–50,000 times farther away from the Sun than the Earth–over hundreds of thousands of years. Some comets come barreling through the inner solar system, smashing into planets and, scientists think, forming our oceans. Some comets, called Kreutz Sungrazers, plunge through the Suns corona. Some don’t make it back out.

Like all rebels, comets can’t keep it up forever. Some comets burn out and fade away, some just burn out and become asteroids. And while Neil Young’s chestnut of wisdom “Once you’re gone, you can’t come back” might be true in rock and roll, it turns out it isn’t true for comets.

A comet is defined by its coma—the hazy cloud of ice sublimating into gas and dust, that surrounds it and grows brighter as the comet gets closer to the Sun. It’s this coma, when hit with solar wind, that forms the comet’s tail. When a comet runs out of volatiles that form the coma, it falls dark, no better than an asteroid. In recent years, scientists have discovered that many asteroids were once bad-ass comets.  

Comet or asteroid? Comet Hartley 2, in fact. Look at the coma there at the back end (via)

But researchers from the University of Antioquia in Colombia have discovered that even comets who seemed done with the comet life can get their grooves back. In a study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers have found that dead-comets-gone-asteroid occasionally have second acts. It’s just a matter of getting closer to the Sun and getting those volatiles sublimating again.

The paper suggests that the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is positively a graveyard of old comets—some are extinct, which means they have no more gases left to sublimate. And some are merely dormant, meaning they have volatiles left, but the ice is deep under a layer of carbon compounds and dust and insulated from the solar energy that causes the characteristic glowing sublimation.

Given a chance to get closer to the Sun, radiation can reach that latent ice, and bring the comet back to life. All it takes is a fortuitous collision with an asteroid (or other extinct or dormant comet) that sends the dormant comet closer to the Sun.

The researchers looked at comets that had done this very thing, and what they found most interesting was that it wasn't the interplanetary collision knocking the insulating crust loose that kick-started the comets again; it was the proximity to the Sun. They cited a pair of examples of dormant comets that didn't turn back on until after making their closest pass by the Sun. Judging from how long the rejuvination took, they were able to calculate how deep down the volitales were buried.

The study's findings cast further doubt on just how different asteroids and comets are in essence, or if the distinction is more arbitrary than we thought.

The crew of Expedition 35. via

Last week, Chris Hadfield made his triumphant return to Earth. The first Canadian to command the International Space Station, Hadfield and his relentless social media efforts helped rekindle the public’s love affair with space.

He tweeted amazing pictures for orbit, recorded that brilliant rendition of "Space Oddity," and generally made space accessible to everyone. But NASA doesn’t launch crews just to create social media stars. Though we didn’t see it on YouTube, there was science done on the ISS while Hadfield was at the helm.

Part of the crew’s orbital work is routine maintenance. They have to make sure the station stays in the correct orbit, and be ready to adjust that orbit should the station be threatened by a rogue piece of space debris. The crew also has to make sure their life support system and cooling arrays are up and running. They also had to run experiments, many of which have important implications for the future of spaceflight, though they’re less YouTube friendly than a video of Hadfield wringing a towel out in microgravity.

During his five month sojourn in space, Hadfield himself conducted more than 130 experiments. He and his crew of five flight engineers – Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov, Alexander Misurkin, and Roman Romanenko; and two NASA astronauts, Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn – set a record by spending 71 hours in one week on scientific research.

One experiment called InSPACE—an acronym for “Investigating the Structure of Paramagnetic Aggregates from Colloidal Emulsions"—has engineering implications on Earth. At the heart of this experiment are fluids called magnetorheological suspensions, fluids containing ellipsoid shaped particles that change the physical properties of that fluid in response to magnetic fields.

Hadfield mixing colloids in test tubes and watching structures form. via

These fluids are classified as smart materials because they can transition into a solid-like state by forming a criss-cross microstructure in the presence of a magnetic field. Sort of like the one of Earth. These fluids are already used as vibration dampening systems that can be turned on or off (such as those used in high-end car suspensions), but the data gathered on the ISS will help engineers use the material to build building and bridges that can better withstand earthquakes. 

Looking ahead at human endeavors in space was the Sonographic Astronaut Vertebral Examination (or spinal ultrasound) experiment. We know microgravity takes its toll on the human body, and this experiment set out to characterize spinal changes during and after spaceflight. It's rather important work as long-term spaceflight comes closer to reality.

Pre- and post-flight MRIs and high fidelity ultrasounds, combined with in-flight ultrasounds, will give aerospace doctors the information they need to anticipate health risks in microgravity, including spinal alterations, back pain, and potential spinal injury. As a bonus, this research will also help determine just how accurate MRIs and musculoskeletal ultrasounds are in identifying spinal anatomy and might lead to novel imaging and training techniques in the future.

There was also a stem cell experiment on board, courtesy of the Japanese space agency JAXA. The goal behind this experiment wasn’t to learn about stem cells directly but to gather data on how space radiation affects the DNA repair gene response mechanism by studying the development of stem cells after have flown in space. Stem cells were launched frozen, and after months exposed to space radiation they will be microinjected into mouse-8-cell embryos.

As the mice grow, scientists will analyze what influence the space-exposed cells have on their development. Like the spinal ultrasound experiment, this one will help future astronauts. It will help scientists understand the effects of space radiation, particularly developmental issues stemming from long-duration mission, and protect space travelers from the adverse effects. 

The HICO experiment mounted outsie on the ISS. via

There was an environmental experiment on board, too, the HICO and RAIDS Experiment Payload. HICO—the Hyperspectral Imager for the Coastal Ocean—uses a specialized visible and near-infrared camera to detect, identify, and quantify coastal features from orbit. This included water depth and clarity, chlorophyll content, and seafloor composition, all relevant data for both civilian and naval purposes. The data gathered on the ISS can be matched with data collected on the ground to develop algorithms that will allow scientists to map indicators of water quality. 

Bringing science to the next generation was the Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites-Zero-Robotics (SPHERES-Zero-Robotics) experiment. This was a competition that gave high school student the opportunity to design research to be carried out on the station. As part of a competition, students wrote algorithms to direct SPHERES to accomplish tasks relevant to future missions. Each algorithm was tested by the SPHERES team, and the best designs were selected to operate the SPHERES satellites aboard the station. So while it might be overshadowed by viral videos, there is still science on the ISS. 

This weekend, I sat down with Tim Schafer, the prolific videogame designer and funny guy. You can read about games and fame and Kickstarter in Part 1, and then scroll down to read about new consoles, new business models, and new characters for a more inclusive videogame culture. We also made Vines. Check em' out.

MOTHERBOARD: Let’s talk about the new consoles. I don’t see a lot of enthusiasm for the big ones, but then there’s Ouya, and Steambox, these more open platforms.

It’s a really interesting time. The fact that we don’t know what the whole industry is going to look like next year, we don’t know who’s going to win, of these new Linux based consoles. The thing I’m excited about is the change in business models more than hardware--so far Nintendo and Sony have both really reached out to the indies to establish themselves on their platform with self publishing. I don’t know if that’s caused by Ouya or just part of that movement for a more open platform.

That’s the part that I’m more excited for more than a more specialized chipset, or new specs. What things will enable new original games? And then we’ll figure out new ways to deal with discoverability problems a lot of platforms have, so that new people who make a great game to have the same chance as someone more popular. There’s this continuum of allowing everything on the platform, and then no one sees anything because there’s so much crap, and then there’s the really curated ones where only the best things get through. But then you have to spend all this money to make a patch or your game doesn’t get approved. All that stuff. You want both ends to go away, so hopefully this is the generation we take care of all those issues.

Well Sony has been very aggressive with courting the indie developers with Pub Fund.

I’m really hoping Microsoft also. They’ve been pretty quiet so far. 

We’ll hopefully see on Tuesday, with that new console reveal. I’m a little fearful of what’s going to happen. I think some indie developers are unaware of what they’re getting into. I am a little worried the big boys will take advantage of these developers who are making games in their garage anyway. Do we need to have some kind of safeguard for indie devs?

I think the big industry needs a safeguard from Kickstarter. It’s not like Kickstarter games will wipe out AAA games all of the sudden, but it’s an option now that’s so much more attractive for indies than taking money from anywhere else. There’s money with no strings attached, your only boss is the fans you're making the games for anyway, and the numbers are increasing with every Kickstarter that goes out there.

Why would you take any other money? 'Cause any investor or company is giving you money strategically to either help their platform or to maximize their own profit. It’s not going to get rid of traditional publishing deals, but they are going to be forced to come up with better terms. Especially with an indie who’d be getting a small amount of money, like $500,000, you could definitely Kickstart that. So what other benefits are they going to give aside from money? Exposure, keeping your IP--hopefully developers will hang on to those and finally see royalties from day one instead of recouping costs three times over. I just hope it leads to better deals for indies because now they can walk away, and that’s the only way to get a better deal is if you’re willing and able to walk away from the negotiating table. And now they can.

Having been on the other end of that, do you feel like a lot of the big guys are coming back around asking to do another game? Do you see that as a symptom of them being nervous about Kickstarter, or losing relevancy?

I wonder what they’re thinking. Mostly they saw this phenomenon, and they said “How do we get a piece of that?” It’s hard for them, because they can’t as a big publisher do a Kickstarter. So often they’re just hiding behind a game, telling an indie studio, we won’t fund your game, but if you make it on Kickstarter then we’ll back it after the fact. Which is a little, ya know. It’s going to make some people angry because people thought they were backing an indie and they were really just backing an indie into a big publishing deal.

Well some indie games are going through these new streams, like Sony's Pub Fund, and the Kickstarter is about getting it developed, and then you'll have the big publishers waiting in the wings to put it on the platform, but the development costs are still on the devs.

It has to be carefully handled. I think if you’re honest about it and say in the Kickstarter “look, if we get this amount of money, then this publisher will publish us, and we’ll be able to get it on the platform,” then I don’t think anyone would think badly of it.

But it’s not as appealing of a story. The people who backed our Kickstarter liked that they were enabling something to bypass the system. If you’re backing project working within the system, then you’re really just funding something to help a company make a profit. I don’t think that appeals to most people using Kickstarter.

Right, it takes the heart out of it. Do you think this is the system adapting or just the same old tricks again?

There was a huge cultural movement when we moved to digital everything. If you look at the biggest four things you need from anyone, whether it’s a book publisher, or a music label, or a movie studio, or game publisher, you needed cost of goods funded, financing from them, manufacturing from them, core production, and then you need distribution, and sales and marketing. So when things went digital, you no longer had to worry about manufacturing in games. And then with digital distribution, that’s gone too. No more trucks. And with crowdfunding, now financing is about to be gone.

So now there’s sales and marketing, and then there’s expertise, I suppose. With Sales and Marketing, you can hire those people yourself through crowdfunding. But then there’s still that question of expertise, which is different on a case by case basis. But if you’re putting something on a mobile platform, it could be advantageous to work with a mobile publisher who’s cross platform, who can help with discoverability by plugging you into their network of existing players, then that’s a real thing.

When we did Brütal Legend, EA handled all the liscensing. That’s something that we definitely benefitted from. So I think companies will start to shift toward what they now have an exclusive on, things they’re very specialized in, like certain abilities to get eyeballs on your game. The problem was those companies thought they were experts on a lot of things they weren’t experts on, like game design. They’d give you lots of advice about game design. Some one who happened to have lunch with Miyamoto one day and now he’s an expert on game design. That kind of stuff was really frustrating and will hopefully go away.

Well it seems like the things that are being used, Kickstarter and Steam, are these separate limbs from the old days like you said. And if Kickstarter is taking financing to the masses, then what else could come about through social media and crowdfunding? What other limbs are waiting to fall off? Could we borrow some music label model ideas?

What is the music label model now? Those have changed too a lot. Madonna dumped her label and went to LiveNation.

Or like Radiohead and Humble Bundle.

Right. We’re doing our Humble Bundle right now--I’m wearing the t-shirt, only a couple more days. That kind of thing is exciting because it’s also a new model for… I really think the current, younger generation of entrepreneurs are a lot more flexible and a lot more charity driven, there’s more of an emphasis that charity is something you do on the way up and not just when you’re old and rich, and you’ve just got to give away your money for tax reasons. Or things like paying what you want, and you can only pay a dollar. But most people will pay more than that is really interesting. That people are learning they can make money by giving things away is a really positive and hopeful thing I think for the world.

Especially in combating piracy, just by giving people an option.

As we heard from a lot of our backers, paying for something they didn’t have to pay anything for, some of them gave $100. They felt good about that cause no one was screwing them with DRM or some horrible Statements of Mistrust the way they’re usually treated. I think that would be a great thing for the future, if people were paying for what they wanted to pay for. Basically I think we’re heading for some sort of utopian anarchy, which is what we were always promised. In science fiction, anyway.

Right! That would be nice.

Well in some ways it is that way. Some people of a certain age are taking the entertainment they want for free, and giving to things they feel are worthwhile and charging. It’ll be interesting to see how dominant that becomes.

It’s all changing so fast, like Kickstarter coming around, what? Three years ago? And the landscape of entertainment and videogames in particular are going to change drastically in the next few years. It’s a weird time. It’s exciting.

The interesting thing to me is, all the things we complain about, the gatekeepers of movie studios and game publishers, where you had to jump over this enormous hurdle to get inside the castle, and then once you were in, you’re taken care of and your movie gets made or your game gets made. But those walls are coming down and now everyone can make their own stuff. For a while, you’re going to have this super broad “Oh look, everyone has made a movie,” now I don’t know which one to watch cause I don’t know which ones are good. Someone will have to think of a way to let the good ones bubble up to the top.

You also don’t want to break the back of the beast you're fighting when you’re doing something creative. You want some opposition, some constraints. That’s what makes you come up with creative ideas to bypass it. Like your budget gets cut, and you figure out a clever way to get around it. I think that’s what makes you engaged. Cause with every creative thing that you do, it has to feel a little bit like a war, or a battle, cause that’s what makes you awake and alert and engaged. If it was all just too easy, it would feel like nothing, and you wouldn’t get up in the morning to fight. There’s already so many of these things that occur naturally, creator’s or writer’s block, that we definitely don’t need more imposed by an artificial system of gatekeepers.

It seems like there’s this animosity between the independent and the AAA businesses, albeit likely one-sided. At GDC I saw a rant that said “We can’t have these games made by robots; Make a game about cats ejaculating on shit! Cause we’re humans?” I just saw a lot of people talking about Twine games and comparing them directly to Bioshock Infinite, and declaring it was way more meaningful and special than it. But they’re two totally different things! You can’t really compare the two.

You see that relationship a lot, that “competition.” When I want to UC Santa Cruz we all griped about UC Berkeley. We thought they were the machine, a diploma mill. UC Santa Cruz is where you get evaluations and not grades, and we thought we were superior, and we thought there was this rivalry between Berkeley and us. Then I actually transferred there and they had never thought about Santa Cruz. There was no rivalry, it had never occurred to them to even think about Santa Cruz. So, I feel it’s a little like that, but it’s changed a lot this year because the indies were so present at the award shows and being intermingled, you know, Journey took a lot of awards that would have gone to…

You mean all the awards.

Yea! The awards that would have gone to FallOut 3 or something, and those teams would have been like, “wait a second, we worked really really hard on this, the size of our effort was so… epic. Where’s our award?” That might make some of that conflict go both ways.

I think some of the animosity comes from people being dissatisfied with what’s being offered on the AAA market, and also a lack of empathy toward people who are actually making them, because they aren’t made by robots. They’re made by people, people just like them who took a different path, or are in a different place, you know what I mean? I mean I worked for a big publisher, and I know people work just as hard as indies work on their games, but I do see what they’re talking about in that there’s something lacking in what AAA games are offering. But I still feel like we need both kinds of games in a way. I think both kinds of games have a lot to offer. In the same way that Sundance didn’t kill the movie industry, it just added more variety and health to it. And indie games do the same thing. There’s people who work in indie movies and go back and forth between Chris Nolan and understand both systems and games should be the same way.

The craft as a whole benefits from both sides. Some of the bigger indie games are just renditions of the same themes as AAA games. Hotline Miami comes to mind. It’s very stylized, but it’s very similar to what any number of popular gangster games do. And nobody would dare say, “Hotline Miami would be a lot better if it didn’t have guns in it.”

Anyway, girls are starting to get some recognition in development, and there’s been a lot of talk about characters and women in videogames, like in Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women in Videogames. How do we as white, bearded game developers… 

Shave our beards.

[laughs] Like making more interesting characters that are open to everybody. What are people missing that they’re not getting how to do this? How are they not seeing this as a good thing?

I think a lot of things that are good for a social progessive agenda are the same things that are good for a creative agenda, which are hearing from new voices. It’s good creatively, 'cause you heard from the same protagonist over and over again in games, the guy with a shotgun on his back and a half-tucked shirt. All of the things that those kind of characters do, it’s great to hear from someone that doesn’t fit that description, and that’s also good socially speaking.

I think when you watch Anita’s videos, like the first episode, I had not heard that story about Star Fox Adventures before, and I thought that was great. She’s speaking to it in terms of the damage that was done by having that repeated trope in games and the impact that has on young girls and boys, but also a reminder of what a cliché it is. I mean, I did it. Psychonauts had a damsel character, kind of--you’d like to hope it was creative or different, but I realize if I do that again, the reason I’d do it is 'cause it works. It sets up tension in a satisfying way, but if you do that everytime, it’s this creative crutch that would not be good. And it’s better to just break free of it and try something new. There’s other things that motivate people to play games other than rescue a princess.

It seems to, especially in the examples she pointed out, show how one dimensional the heroes are in these stories as well. That’s the relationship they have. It’s a point A, point B. It doesn’t really matter--they’re interchangeable and these savvy hacker dads have been illustrating this. Mario is just as one dimensional as Peach.

But we never really played Mario games for the character, or to save the princess for that matter. You’re playing it to beat the level.

They are primitive, but Donkey Kong is the early scratchings that lead to stories being in games.

Well to me, a lot of it was having a daughter and seeing the world. It’s this thing when you have a kid you relive your life in certain ways, you go through the same things again. Going through kindergarten again, I’m remembering my own childhood, and I’m reliving certain elements of my youth. Except now I’m a girl. And I’m seeing what it’s like to be a girl in different ways from watching her interact with boys on the playground, or sitting down and playing a game and hearing her say “I want to play as that girl” or Wonder Woman, in Lego Batman 2, only you can’t play as Wonderwoman. You can play as Batgirl, but you have to unlock her.

So you’re trying to explain all this game jargon-crap to her, so eventually I just found cheat codes on Twitter. Someone told me how to unlock Batgirl. And thinking about what a simple thing that is to miss, to not have a playable female character, no wonder games aren’t as appealing to young girls as they are boys. Basically it’s all about raising people’s consciousness, in the same way I think Anita’s videos are making people more aware of the simple things you’re ignoring. Like Louis C.K. says, “Now that’s a part of me,” a part of something that goes into what I’m thinking about when I’m making a game. So it would be much harder for me to a make a game without thinking about this now, and Broken Age has a playable female character, and it’ll be a lot harder not doing that in the future.

I remember growing up playing Mario Kart with my sisters when we were kids and they’d fight over who got to be Peach to the point where one of them would say “Well, I don’t even want to play then.”

Little kids especially, they will not play a game if they can’t be the gender of their choosing. Try and get a boy and a girl to play a make-believe game and it’s gotta be one that has a part for both of them to play, or they’ll be like, “No, I won’t play,” which is weird because little kids' minds aren’t thinking about dating or thinking sexually, so you wonder why it’s such a big identity thing to them.

It’s pretty interesting what you said about reliving your life through your daughter. Is that an empathy unique to parents or game designers, or both?

Well it’s both. You’re always thinking about what it’s like to play one of your games and see the world through the player’s eyes. So you’ll be watching someone play and you’ll look at what they’re looking at and you’ll be like, “Oh crap, I thought that start menu was super intuitive but now I realize they don’t know what to click on.” Or you know, I tried to play Kinectimals with my daughter. I thought she’d love brusingh the baby tigers, but then she had to stand in a circle and hold her hand while she’s waiting for a timer to wind down, and she’s two and a half years old and there’s no way I could get her to do that. It was so frustrating. And it did give me the idea to make Happy Action Theatre and Kinect Party, which didn’t have any of those barriers at all and it was more about age and accessability, and we made a game that it turns out your grandma can play, or little kids in wheel chairs.

We got videos of kids without arms playing it and just realizing how making it inclusive for some person, my daughter, made it inclusive for a whole bunch of people. And that was really rewarding. It’s funny because that game was probably the most unknown game we made amoung even our own fans. But it’s probably the one in the end that I’m most proud of, and you don’t really get it until you watch a whole room full of people playing that game. You see your grandma playing with a two year old and a dog and everybody’s laughing and jumping around, and using their imagination. I’ve never seen anyone enjoy anything I’ve made to that extend as those two games.

Follow Tim on Twitter at  @TimOfLegend, and Colin at @scallopdelion.

Image via DerrickT/Flickr

Announced by a push of air and a screeching sound reverberating through the tunnel, the 6 train arrives and passes. Through headphones you are listening to "Day In The Life" by The Beatles. The 6 accelerates to your left, fwoosh, fwoosh, fwoosh, and then it is gone, taking the air and sound with it.  As it recedes into the tunnel, you shift your gaze to a structural beam on on the platform. It wobbles slightly side to side.

After the beam appears motionless again, through your headphones you hear the start of the famous middle-eight in "Day In The Life", for which John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Martin instructed each member of an orchestra to start at the lowest note of their instrument and ascend to the highest note. As you listen, you return your gaze forward towards the empty track. When the middle-eight finishes, you happen to turn your gaze back again to the platform beam. This time it wobbles momentarily downwards. 

You think to yourself, I am not drunk, and even if I was, platform beams do not wobble. But how then do you explain what you saw?

"Our perception corresponds to a model of the world, not the world as it is," said Pascal Wallisch, a neuroscientist at New York University. "This model is constructed by the brain. Put differently, the eye is not a video camera and the brain does not just passively record its input.”

Wallisch and colleagues at the University of Chicago observed this based on experimental findings they published earlier this year in their paper “Music Can Elicit A Vision Motion Aftereffect.” The beam wobbling is a motion aftereffect (MAE).  Right after you look at a large moving scene, what you look at will move in the opposite direction. It's a subtle effect that affects our perception of the world around us, and according to research, it can be elicited by music.  

The familiar visual tricks you see all over the internet are basic examples of motion aftereffects at work.

Aristotle is credited with the first recording of an aftereffect when, after looking at a waterfall, he wrote, “Even when the external object of perception has departed, the impressions it has made persist." More than 1000 years later, Jan Evangelista Purkyně made the earliest known recorded observation of an opposite direction aftereffect after watching a cavalry parade, popular in those days. More recently, researchers in the 20^th century have published aftereffects elicited by subtle and even implied motion.

But Wallisch and colleagues are the first to report a disruption in people’s judgment of visual motion from listening to music. The experiment was simple.  Participants listened through headphones to ascending and descending piano scales for sixty seconds. Then they had to judge the direction of moving dots on a computer screen.  The authors found that subjects who listened to scales that moved “up” the piano perceived the dots to move down. Those who listened to scales that moved “down” perceived the dots to move up.

When I suggested that the same result might happen if they listened to the middle-eight of “Day In The Life," Wallisch agreed, though noted that they did not test this possibility experimentally. The experiment they did do highlights the fundamental truth that we are creatures collecting information about our physical and emotional surroundings to reconstruct reality. Yet on occasion we miss the mark. 

“This reconstruction is inherently imperfect, as the brain loses information up front; for example, the device that captures signals from the visual world, the retina, is a 2-dimensional,” said Wallisch. “But the spatial world, as well as our visual perception is 3-dimensional. One spatial dimension is lost right off the bat and has to be inferred from other information. To enhance the reconstruction, the brain takes advantage of cues in other modalities. Put differently, not only is the brain not a video camera, the audio feed is not even independent of the visual feed. It is inherently tangled up. Already on the frontend. In most cases, this is beneficial to disambiguate the world. We are simply taking advantage of this in this experiment.”

Wallisch, via his Google+ page

Neuroscientist Mark Changizi, who is not affiliated with the paper, said that the finding is consistent with the state of the art.

“A number of experiments, some going back nearly fifty years, have come to realize that visual cortex has auditory selective neurons in it, for example, brain uses whatever cues it can to figure out what the scene is,” said Changizi.

The main draw of the paper, he added, is that it explores what melody means to the brain. Most likely, effective melody loosely maps human movement—for example, the arrival or departure of footsteps—and the brain is confusing melody for true motion.

“If the brain is really coding it and thinking of it as movement, we should see an aftereffect," he said.

The finding not only informs us about the distance between our perceptions and reality. It also invites us to think about how we shape music and how music shapes us. To learn more, Wallisch invited me to the Center for Neural Science at NYU.

The center was once a trio of buildings housing garment factories, one block away from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where an infamous 1911 fire killed 146 garment workers in the deadliest industrial disaster in New York City. Today the three buildings are fused together into a veritable research complex where fashionable young scientists and some economists from around the country and around the world hunt data and find answers and drink beer and smoke cigarettes. Many play in bands too.

Wallisch, who I first met at the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans, is friendly and accommodating. If you could be the guinea pig for only one research study in your life, make it his. Once he gave each subject a copy of their brainscan to make Christmas cards. Peers agree that such bonhomie is rare in a competition as ruthless as science. He even indulged a tour of the facilities and discussed how researchers spread out across at least 15 laboratories compete for time at data collection machines like eye movement trackers and fMRI scanners, which, said the operator not affiliated with NYU, cost about $450 per hour during prime usage hours.

The music you put into your brain matters because it influences how you perceive reality.

Science lies in thoughtful methodology, not improvised explanations. As such, procedures in neuroscience experiments—the imaginative designs, the grizzly politics, the seizure-inducing power of machines—are best understood when thoroughly expounded upon by researchers. So we cut short the tour to get afternoon tea at department headquarters, where Wallisch expanded on the possible implications of motion aftereffects elicited by music.

“This ties in with a more general notion that what you do with your brain matters,” Wallisch said. “This is generally true for the brain, even in extreme cases. For instance, the brain won’t let brain regions lie fallow. So people who are congenitally blind reappropriate the visual cortex, where visual processing happens, for other functions, like hearing and language processing.”

This means that the music you put into your brain matters because it influences how you perceive reality. Mozart will not make you better a mathematician any more than Slipknot will make you a murderer, but listening regularly to either will influence the model of reality your brain is constructing for you.

What this could mean is that listening to classical music might improve your ability to suss patterns and the like, while listening to heavy metal will make you more aggressive than your baseline. Alongside difficulty making friends, your perception will be drastically different still if you never listen to music.

“In the time of Mozart, people didn't listen to music then unless you could go to a performance,” Changizi says.  “Some pieces may have been so famous that fiddlers on the street could be performing them, but the way they spread through culture, it was a once a year thing.”

Information dissemination creates possibilities for influence.  At an early age music is exposed to you; at a later age, you expose yourself to music. This suggests that your perception could be heavily influenced by other people, assuming for example you only let other people choose your music. And because minds inhabiting brains reconstruct reality, we probably underestimate how much other people influence us, or stated otherwise, how much other models of reality influence our personal model of reality. 

That said, raising yourself or your kids on Mozart instead of pop music doesn't guarantee development of enhanced and unique cognition. If that is your goal, listen to as much jazz as possible.

The motion aftereffect elicited by confusion between your brain’s audio and visual feeds results from your use of vertical motion to describe sonic movement. 

“Much of pop music has similar chord structure, and pop music is much more like Mozart than jazz, which blows away the principles and constraints of classical music,” said Changizi.

But why does your brain confuse melody with motion? The motion aftereffect elicited by confusion between your brain’s audio and visual feeds results from your use of vertical motion to describe sonic movement.  When you hear ascending scales, you say the music is going “up” the keyboard and “down” the keyboard when scales descend. But on a keyboard, hands playing scales move left and right, not up and down.

Composers have used this understanding to their advantage. Symphony No. 6 by Franz Joseph Haydn conveys sunrise through an ascending melody. Little Richard played the piano to imitate trains moving on tracks. Quechua Indians in Andean South America play the charrango to illustrate rain. Yet interpreting music in terms of movement is not true for all cultures, noted Wallisch.

“We believe that tribes who haven’t been expose to this wouldn’t show this effect,” he said.

“Some cultures have different associations with pitch,” Changizi added. “The main reason for pitch changes is Doppler shifts. Pitch modulations are not due to height in an individual field.  What pitch tells you is what direction an object is moving in.”

Changizi wrote a book, Harnessed, partly about music and your brain. He argues that music has culturally evolved to mimic human movement, because movement is, for evolutionary reasons, what your brain is good at listening to.

“You could have ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,' as the footsteps of the mover,” he said. “You can do a Mozart style of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ versus a hard rock version where the difference is in the personality of the gait you're describing with the tone of the instrument. You can make it sound like a soldier, or make it more fanciful, or put more bad attitude in it. In each case, you can describe the music on the basis of gait and other sounds made when people move.”

Music—through your headphones, in concert halls, from buskers—brings you to humanity. Interpreting music as movement helps you develop emotional connections.

“Music has evolved to be evocative storytelling of a human moving and doing emotional shit around you,” he said.  “It’s evolved to tap into people’s emotions, and the way to tap into people’s emotions is to sound or look like people who are like you or people you have sex with.”

Go back now to the subway.  You are on the 4 train.  Look up at the subway map. Each stop takes you somewhere different in the city of eight million models of reality.

“What you do—the experience you expose yourself to—changes your brain and effectively who you are,” said Wallisch.

Photo: brewbrooks/Flickr

A new study from the US Geological Survey reveals that groundwater aquifers in the United States have been depleted at record high levels over the first decade of the 21st century, resulting both in a long term threat to water availability, particularly in major agricultural areas of the nation, as well as being a surprising contributor to global sea level rise. 

The study examined groundwater depletion in the US from 1900-2008 (see image below), finding that there was a major increase in water withdrawal immediately after World War 2—the result of the rise of suburbia and national prosperity after the US was the last country standing. This was nothing in comparison to what happened from 2000-2008, though. 

Image: USGS

Since 2000 the average rate of groundwater depletion was 25 cubic kilometers per year, nearly 2.8 times higher than the 20th century average for the nation. Globally, groundwater depletion has been even more precipitous in the same time period, averaging 145 cubic kilometers per year. 

The USGS says the amount of groundwater depletion in the US from the start of this century alone can account for more than 2 percent of observed sea level rise since then. If that sounds bad, the global contribution of groundwater depletion to sea level rise from 2000-2008 has been about 13 percent of the total observed sea level rise.

Looking at the Ogallala Aquifer, under 440,300 square kilometers in the middle of the nation's prime agricultural land from South Dakota south to Texas, the groundwater depletion from 2000-2008 is roughly one-third of the entire depletion over the entire previous century. Since the 1940s, essentially since the beginning of what we'd now call industrial agriculture and intensive irrigation, the water table has fallen over 160 feet in places. 

Making things worse, this area is smack dab in the middle of the some of the most-affected areas of multi-year drought. According to the latest info from US Drought Monitor, much of the area which the Ogallala Aquifer is under is either in extreme or exceptional drought (the highest levels) lasting well over six months. It is also the very area where the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would pass through, creating a very real threat to water supplies when a spill occurs—note, the use of 'will' is very purposeful; as recent events have shown it is not a question of if a pipeline will have an accident, but rather when. 

What's causing the record levels of water withdrawal? Reuters quotes Leonard Konikow of the USGS, who places the blame on a variety of factors, all linked to rising population levels: Agriculture is a major culprit, as is the energy industry; precipitation declines in both summer and winter, linked to climate change, have failed to replenish aquifers.

Though outside the scope of this particular report, similar conditions exist globally. In the past decade alone the world population was increased by one billion people. Since 1950, when water use first started really climbing in the US, global population has increase by nearly 4.5 billion people. If water levels continue to be depleted at such a fast rate, it looks increasingly likely that water will be the commodity we war over in the future.

The tornado you are watching take shape would eventually become a mile wide. It would sweep through the town of Moore, Oklahoma, leveling everything in its path and killing at least 24 people. But before all that, one man sat in a parking lot and filmed its inception.

Charles Cook, an Oklahoma resident, happened to be training his smart phone on the gathering storm. His son posted the video to Reddit, where he describes how he got this footage: 

"He was out that way for work today and just happened to be in the right place at the right time. He was worried it was going to come back at him and was searching for a way to scoot out it's way once he was able to gauge how insanely close it was to him. He hung in there, though. Unbelievable."  

Yep. After it formed, this footage documents the behemoth tornado would eventually turn into—which didn't stop people from chasing after it.

And this is the aftermath it left in its wake.

Tragic, total destruction.

Is this what the changing of the guard looks like?

Maybe. That's why this video is so striking--it finds a long-standing, unblinking staple of public surveillance face to face with the new kid on the block. But it's more than that. It illustrates one of the great ironies of a spreading domestic drone fear: For many people, the presence of non-lethal drones is extremely uncomfortable despite the fact that street surveillance cameras, which do essentially the same thing (only stationary), outnumber flying spy planes by the millions. 

The drone seen here, the Phantom, is the same prosumer model Motherboard flew over Austin at this year's SXSW Interactive. Down there, at least, it seemed to be a hit.  

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson // @VICEdrone

Governor Pat Quinn (via)

Naturally, the city Nelson Algren said "that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness," would be the one to forge mayhem out of a singing and dancing, Internet trend. In response, Illinois governor Pat Quinn just signed a law that is designed to fight the ‘flash mobs’ of teenagers that have materialized and run amok Wild One-style on the city’s ritzy and tourist-laden Michigan Avenue.

The legislation doubled the maximum penalty for people who use social media or phones to organize “mob action” from one to three, to three to six years. The bill also legally enshrined the rights of law enforcement to demand information such as location data from Internet Service Providers without requiring a warrant or even a subpoena.

The words ‘flash mob’ conjure up the most innocent of images in most people’s heads and search fields—everyone showing up and doing a big coordinated dance together or whatever. But these kids today—from London to Philadelphia, to smaller towns like Germantown, Maryland--have used the flash mob to overrun convenience stores and donut shops, leaving only destruction and incriminating security cam footage in their wake.

In Chicago, police say young people have used Facebook and Twitter to join up to rob people on trains and form the unruly mobs that terrorized Michigan Avenue in March and perhaps even on Saturday itself. Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile is at the heart of Chicago’s tourism industry, the revenue from which Illinois lawmakers will fight to defend.

The law that governs the collection of data from cell phones and ISPs is from 1986, and was forged in a world where the iPhone—and the myriad types of data that it carries—was inconceivable. “It didn’t take into account what the modern cellphone has — your location, the content of communications that are easily readable, including Facebook posts, chats, texts and all that stuff,” Ohio State law professor Peter P. Swire told the New York Times. Thus, law enforcement and judges are left to wing it, without a clear standard of where legal protection ends, and where admissable evidence begins.

Illinois’s new legislation hardly feels up-to-date, using language like “electronic communication,” which, elsewhere, is defined by law as including pagers. It also continues the trend of giving law enforcement easier access to information on cell phones than their paper-based equivalents from days gone by.

The legislation states that an ISP must provide, “at a minimum, the name, e-mail address, internet service provider address, and location information (if available) of the person to which the communication identity is registered” upon request of a law enforcement officer who has probable cause to make that request. The language makes it seem inconsistent with federal law, which states that ISPs cannot disclose subscriber identifying information to government agents without at least a subpoena.

Help for those concerned for their civil liberties may come from that high-profile civil liberty violator: the Feds. On March 6, a bipartisan group of representatives introduced the Online Communications and Geolocation Protection Act, H.R. 983, which specifically addresses the question of geolocation data. “"When current law affords more protections for a letter in a filing cabinet than an email on a server, it's clear our policies are outdated,” said Rep. Suzan Delbene, one of the bill’s sponsors.  This bill will update privacy protections for consumers while resolving competing interests between innovation, international competitiveness, and public safety."

Momentum is building to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Protection Act. The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved a package in April that will protect email and other data stored in the cloud from government searches without a warrant. Maybe the bill, with supporters spanning from the ACLU to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, can ride a wave of anti-governement intrusion-backlash all the way into law. Until then, though, keep your emails clean, and stay out of flash mobs.

Denizens of the World Wide Web take note: Internet Week is upon us. (This is not to be confused with Internet week, which is just every week.) For five splendid days, we can avert our strained and bleary eyes from our laptops and venture out into the meatspace to fraternize with the internet's finest minds. These, after all, are the people who make it possible for all of us to only have to do this once a year. 

And like last year, Motherboard is going to be there. We're curating the "classroom" section going to be talking about the most important stuff on the internet—sex, drugs, drones, and code.

Our Future Sex columnist Kelly Bourdet and contributor Arikia Millikan will discuss the future of intimate times, our friend Daniel Pinchbeck, psychonaut extraordinaire and creator of Evolver.net, will talk the future of drugs, editors Brian Anderson and Alex Pasternack will talk drones with attorney Nabiha Syed and MuckRock editor Shawn Musgrave, and Colin Snyder, Motherboard's video games correspondent and the creator of Gameifesto, will get nasty with code on a panel with game designers Ivan Safrin and Shawn Alexander Allen and artist and curator Phoenix Perry.

For those of you so addicted to the internet that you'd rather not leave your house for any reason, a live feed is available for your viewing pleasure here. That's below; panels that have already happened will be archived below too.

Monday's session with Kelly Bourdet, Arikia Millikan, Joanna Angel, and Cindy Gallop on sex:

Tuesday's session with Daniel Pinchbeck on drugs:

Wednesday's session with Alex Pasternack, Brian Anderson, Nabiha Syed and Shawn Musgrave on drones:

Our friends at VICE are hosting a bunch of panels, too—get the details for those here. 

(via)

The Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, is up for a vote in the European Parliament this Wednesday, May 22. TAFTA is a free trade area proposal between the European Union and the United States. It aims to open up trade between the US's NAFTA bloc and the EU bloc (EFTA), boosting overall trade by up to 50 percent.

US and EU leaders claim that the trade agreement is vital to lift their respective economic zones out of recession. However, like ACTA, SOPA and PIPA before it, the negotiations, which were held in secret, resulted in more copyright and patent trade regulation—without public stakeholder input. In other words, US and EU citizens can neither see the text of nor vote on TAFTA. Many of the trade agreement's provisions apparently derive from ACTA, Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which was voted down last year in the EUP.

The operating principle of international copyright law might as well be this: never put all of your eggs in one basket. Dispersion is the key—multiple fronts of attack, one after another. Activists and critics will see the maneuvers; but, as with any war of attrition, the opposition's momentum dissipates. And the majority of the world's population are fully ignorant of international affairs, dazzled as they are by technological titillation, reality TV, political theater, etc.

In that ignorance lies the ability to pass trade agreements like TAFTA.

Indeed, there doesn't seem to be the oppositional inertia coming out of activist corners against TAFTA as there was with ACTA. Precious little online chatter is playing out on the subject, except on Twitter, where there is a vocal effort to raise awareness about the trade agreement's side effects.

Meanwhile, Le Quadrature du Net rallied 47 signatories for its Civil Society Declaration, “to exclude from the upcoming Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement any provisions related to patents, copyright, trademarks, data protection, geographical indications, or other forms of so-called 'intellectual property.'”

The Civil Society Declaration's signatories include European and international organizations such as EFF, Public Knowledge, Big Brother Watch, PLUS Coalition, Bits of Freedom, European Digital Rights, and others.

La Quadrature du Net's spokesperson, Jérémie Zimmermann, had this to say of TAFTA:

“The European Parliament is not ready to draw lessons from the massive citizen mobilization against ACTA last year. It has decided to stick to 'business as usual' by calling once again for a 'strong protection' of copyright and patent, whereas the US and the EU already suffer from the most maximalist regimes in this field. After the ACTA fight, the negotiators of this new trade agreement –and in particular EU Trade commissioner Karel de Gucht – may once again attempt to use undemocratic negotiations to impose online repression in the name of copyright enforcement. Citizens must remain vigilant to influence the negotiations at the national level, and be watchful of EU institutions so as to avoid the worst.”

The opposition, however, extends beyond civil liberties and internet freedom groups.

Here in the US, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) has been a vocal critic of the current round of secret TAFTA talks. Grayson sees in TAFTA an effort to deregulate the food industry, enriching corporations and putting people's health and safety at risk.

“The TTIP features 'investor-state' dispute resolution, which invites huge corporations to file lawsuits to prevent government actions that they just don't like, such as health and safety regulations,” wrote Rep. Grayson in a recent Huffington Post article. “Similar trade agreements have allowed the World Trade Organization to strike down country-of-origin meat labels , dolphin-safe tuna labels and limits on candy-flavored cigarettes marketed to kids.”

Another concern is that TAFTA will, instead of fostering free trade, create barriers of entry with its copyright and patent provisions. That is, the trade agreement would favor powerful corporations, reducing competition and stifling innovation in the process.

As noted in the Civil Society Declaration, “Past trade agreements negotiated by the US and EU have significantly increased the privileges of multinational corporations at the expense of society in general.” The declaration also warns that TAFTA's provisions have the potential to, “among many other concerns, limit free speech, constrain access to educational materials such as textbooks and academic journals, and, in the case of medicines, raise healthcare costs and contribute to preventable suffering and death.”

Peter Sunde , a candidate for a seat in European Parliament and co-founder of The Pirate Bay, is worried about what TAFTA would and could do, but isn't so sure TAFTA will pass.

“I am not sure that the EUP will be stupid enough to pass this,” Sunde told Motherboard. “However, there's been too little noise about TAFTA, mainly because people in general think that telling the politicians what they think should be enough (as with ACTA, SOPA, PIPA) to not simply re-name the legislation and try to pass it again. But it might be exactly what's going on.”

Sunde wagers that there is a 50/50 chance that TAFTA will pass, but noted that this doesn't mean it will become law in EU. It would, in his words, likely get tied up in “huge bureaucracy” before implementation.

“First, there is a vote for ratification by the commission; which, with a recommendation, goes over it, and then there can be hearings and so on,” said Sunde. “Next, every country needs to ratify it with the EU as well. At this stage, citizens can try to stop it before it gets ratified. Every step towards its total passage is bad, though, and it should be stopped.”

Parts of TAFTA's language made it out onto the internet in the form of leaks, but civil society still hasn't seen the full text of TAFTA. And this is a huge problem with with trade agreements like TAFTA and TPP—vested corporate interests working in concert with diplomats to regulate trade, and doing it all in secrecy.

“It's an ongoing issue that we don't have full transparency with these agreements,” said Sunde. “If the agreements can't see the light of day before they're voted on, they should not be allowed to vote on at all.”

Photo from a protest in Kunming, May 16, 2013, via Weibo

It should now come as no surprise that people in China, like people pretty much anywhere, get mad as hell about industrial pollution in their backyards, seeping into their water, obscuring their skies. What's different this time around is that increasingly they are not going to take it anymore. 

The numbers from a survey released earlier this month by the Public Opinion Research Center at Shanghai Jiao Tong University bear this out. According to the study, up to 80% of citizens believe that environmental protection should be a higher priority than economic development. And 78% of those surveyed (3,400 people from 34 cities) said that they will participate in protests if pollution facilities are built near their homes—even though public protest is generally outlawed by the authorities.

(As of publication, a May 9 article about this study on the website of state-run English-language China Daily loads only intermittently; a cached version is here.)

Over the past decade, pollution has become a flashpoint for popular protest in China, in part because ecology is seen as an apolitical issue, which makes it more tolerable to government censors, and in part because citizens have become better informed about the risks to their health, their farms, and their newly-rented or purchased homes. (Land seizures by government officials have also stirred up public rancor, but not like the environment has.)

New digital tools, and SMS and Weibo in particular, have been instrumental in organizing opposition to large industrial projects. At a meeting last year of the standing committee of the National People's Congress, Yang Chaofei, vice chairman of the Chinese Society of Environmental Sciences, told officials that between 1996 and 2011, the number of environmental 'mass incidents' grew an average of 29% every year. And between 2010 and 2011, the number of environmental protests rose by 120%.

Top: a protester being carried away by plainclothes policemen; a demonstrator's sign. Via Weibo and South China Morning Post

While these findings are being borne out in real time, everyday, in small gatherings across the country, few recent incidents have garnered as much attention as the recent protests in the city of Kunming, the famously laid-back capital of Yunnan province. An initial protest on May 4th, the anniversary of the 1989 student movement, brought residents onto the streets of the sun-kissed southwestern city to fight plans for two nearby petrochemical factories: a controversial petroleum refinery and a related chemical plant producing paraxylene, or PX—a chemical used for making fabrics and plastic bottles, and a suspected carcinogen. 

What makes the Yunnan protest so noteworthy is its scale and its timing, just as the realization is dawning on officials and citizens alike that public protest can be effective. Since 2007, all previous protests against PX plants— in the cities of Xiamen, Dalian and Ningbo— ended with local governments agreeing to either cancel or relocate the projects. 

Oftentimes, these relocations focus on the poorer, interior parts of China, where citizens are thought to be less likely to revolt. An abundance of cheaper labor and lower political consciousness helps explain why large manufacturers like Foxconn are also rapidly expanding in China's western provinces. 

Map by the New York Times, 2012

"[Officials and factory owners] make the false assumption that people living in or close to the poverty line will accept almost any kind of work, put up with the worst kind of environmental and health conditions," Ralph Litzinger, an anthropologist based at Duke University, told Dissent recently. "I think this is a highly suspect assumption. I suspect more and more industrial-related environmental protests will occur in the coming years in the western provinces of China, as the industrial manufacturing and chemical processing base is moved to the interior of the country."

In July, high school students in Shifang, in the western province of Sichuan, researched the possible deadly effects of a proposed molybdenum copper plant, then used social media like Weibo and WeChat to spread what they'd learned. Protests ensued, Photoshopped memes about aggressive police officers spread like wildfire across Weibo, and, after violent encounters between demonstrators and police, the project was reportedly cancelled.

The protests in Shifang, July 2012. Photo via Weibo

Though they are rarely used, legal remedies offer citizens another option for stopping polluters. Last year in Yunnan, the NGO Friends of Nature brought a lawsuit against a local chemical company for discharging 200,000 tons of waste into the Pearl River. While the case hasn't gone to trial yet, it has already set a precedent as the first time a grassroots group has succeeded in bringing a case against a polluter in China.

But court action or public consultation is still rare. Despite a 2012 law requiring public impact assessments for industrial projects, most of the time, local officials address environmental crises as they arise, rather than implement better methods for civic decision-making before new industrial projects begin, an approach that Elizabeth Economy points out "may contribute to far greater political challenges for the ruling government."

The recent torrent of civic excitement around the environment (or what some dismiss as mere NIMBYism) helps explain why when residents of Kunming planned a second protest last week, local officials were waiting to preempt them. Beforehand the city's mayor Li Wenrong had offered to hold town hall meetings in July, when feasibility studies for the plants are scheduled to be completed. He also called a press conference on May 10 and held two discussion sessions with small groups of residents, citing the plant's "strategic importance" for the region's economic development. The plants lie at the end of a massive natural gas pipeline, set to start operating this month, that links a port in Myanmar's Rakhine State with the Yunnan capital. 

Video by Al Jazeera

But by the time the second protest arrived on May 16th, a number of activists had already been invited to "drink tea" with police, sent threatening text messages, or been instructed to attend "study sessions" about the plant. The same day, the national government released a handy advisory to the editors of the country's news websites:

State Internet Information Office: All websites are asked to remove text, images, and video related to the protest of over 1,000 people in Kunming city center against the Anning PX construction plan. Interactive platforms must strictly monitor activity. 

That didn't disuade the protesters, hundreds of whom had gathered in the morning to march toward the city center. Despite thousands of police, the crowd would not be stopped. In one of the city's busiest intersections, with thousands of police present, mayor Li emerged for an unusual, impromptu face-to-face dialogue with citizens; for fifteen minutes he sought to quell their concerns and insisted they leave their contact information so that a public meeting could be organized. He promised to set up his own Weibo account so that he could take public critciisms, and he denied that any protesters had been detained.

"I don't think the police dare to detain people, and I expect the refinery to be eventually called off, because maintaining social stability is the government's priority now," one protester told the South China Morning Post. As some demonstrators were hauled away by uniformed and plainclothes police, some shouted, "Police officers are Kunming residents too! Police officers drink Kunming water too!"

"The people of Kunming are waking up now," one man told the Post, when asked why he had never protested in public before. That consciousness is hard to dismiss in far-away Beijing, where top officials have worried about aloud about public unrest—the seeds of tumult throughout Chinese history—and insisted on more stringent control of corrupt local politicians and on a more ecological approach to development, at least on paper. "We should adopt effective measures to prevent and control pollution," former premier Wen Jiabao said recently, "and change the way we work and live."

At around 3pm local time on Thursday, as protests in Kunming reached their fever pitch, "Kunming" was the third most discussed topic on Weibo. By evening, after the police had dispersed demonstrators, posts mentioning the protest had vanished. 

More on China's civil society and environment

All Eyes Are on WeChat, Including the Chinese Government's

China's Famous Fearless Bloggers: Steve Maing Explores the Netizen 'High Tech Low Life'

China Took the Clean Energy Lead in 2012, and Will Likely Stay There

Will Extreme Air Pollution Slow the Chinese Economy?

A casual survey reveals that approximately half of the interent is populated with porn, and another quarter with trolls. The rest is mostly Huffington Post reblogs. But here's the thing about those trolls back there—they skewed my casual survey, just by being louder and more obnoxious than everybody else. 

There are obviously all sorts of trolls, but as a reporter who's covered global warming for five years now, I can tell you that there are none more unpleasant than climate deniers. They are religious in their dedication to proving that global warming is a hoax concocted by Al Gore and the UN to initiate a New World Order wherein flourescent lightbulbs are foisted on an unwitting population. 

They leave long, venomous rebuttals on blog posts, they harass you on Twitter, they take to the YouTube comment section with the zeal of Kansan pro-lifers. There's no global warming, there's global cooling. There's warming, but it's sunspots. Carbon dioxide is good for plants. Al Gore has a big expensive house and he eats steak and jets around the world and will get rich off global warming. Also, Al Gore.

But the strangest thing about these people is that they are actually human people, almost always men, who choose to spend their time in this fashion. 

Hoyt Connell is one such man. After the good folks at the Climate Desk had endured years of his social media-fied derision, they decided that, instead of ignoring him or harassing him back, they'd interview him. So they did. And what followed is interesting on multiple levels—it sheds a little light on why people troll, as well as why people choose to deny science. 

Tim Schafer has lived many lives in the game industry.

He's the man behind your favorite old school LucasArts adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandango. In 2003, Tim founded Double Fine Productions, a game studio in San Francisco that's spearheaded major shifts in the game industry. Last year, Double Fine launched a Kickstarter project that opened the floodgates to game crowdfunding, which could prove to be a pivotal shift in how we make games.

In other words, Schafer is a living legend. I recently had the chance to sit down with him before he jetted off to keynote the Nordic Game 2013 Conference in Sweden.

MOTHERBOARD: You’ve been in town for the TwoFiveSix Conference, which is the 256^th games conference this year, right?

Yes, that’s [Kill Screen’s] Jamin Warren’s very first one, so hopefully it’ll turn into a big thing and he’ll ask me to return for the next one.

He did a great job, didn’t he?

I thought it was really neat how he paired up people and chose people I wouldn’t normally see. I wouldn’t walk across GDC [Game Developers Conference] for a talk on sports statistics, but you had a guy doing sports stats paired up with the Major League Gaming e-sports guy and it was fascinating. I thought it was really neat. And then him moderating it–-way more energy than a regular talk, where you’d tune out and fall asleep. But being interviewed--and Jamin doing a little improv--made the day go by quick.

I remember you said something about Jamin being the Ira Glass of videogames.

In his voice a little bit, and also his interview style when Ira does an interview on stage. Jamin was pretty similar. I’m glad we have him.

If Jamin is Ira Glass, who’s going to be our Ed Sullivan? With Jimmy Fallon taking over "The Tonight Show," that might have an impact on bringing new games to the mass audiences?

Isn’t Jimmy Fallon the Jimmy Fallon of games?

Fair point. But as far as really bringing about a videogame Beatlemania; realigning videogames to the center of popular culture–like we’re a part of it, but off to the side. The kid’s table.

It’s such a strange place! Anytime you meet someone who doesn’t play videogames they always say, “Oh yeah, you know, I used to love that… what’s it called? Pac-man!” It’s strange to think of how much cultural penetration there was when Pong and Pac-man came about and then, all of the sudden, everyone all at once didn’t care anymore, until the young Nintendo kids grew up. Now, it seems like it is everywhere, and everyone is playing, but maybe that’s because I just always deal with people who are in the industry and all my friends are in the industry. And of course, all of them are playing games and making games.

We always talk about how to “broaden the market” and it’s hard to imagine how all these people would be thinking, “Oh, I can’t wait to get home and play my game” and everyone thinks that’s going to happen, but people are reading books or watching shows that appeal to them. Maybe if they were going to play a game that was like the books they were reading, they would go home and play something.

So maybe Nicholas Sparks should make games?

Who’s Nicholas Sparks?

The Notebook.

[laughs] Well, maybe! That’s the thing--a lot of the genres people in games would make fun of are big in movies or novels. But even things as basic as comedy; it’s so huge in film but nowhere in games. There’s definitely more places to go.

I just played Guacamelee.

Haven’t played it yet! But I heard it has a lot of calaveras stuff in it.

Yeah, but it’s also rife with self-referential material--meme jokes and videogame culture references. And that seems to be where humor lies in videogames right now, with the exception of you, who's actually funny, in my opinion. But there’s this weird cannibalistic nostalgia loop going on and I think it’s a barrier for people outside of “gamer” culture to enjoy the work.

I think there’s just so many people who still really enjoy pressing that little gland in their brain that makes us feel like we’re twelve years old. Hearing chip-tunes music might give you that sensation of being a kid and playing Atari on a Saturday morning in the same way that I love watching Close Encounters or E.T. You get this comforting, “Oh my God, I’m eating cereal in my parents basement and I feel really cozy,” at least for those of us that had childhoods like that. Probably some people just don’t want to remember their childhood at all, so they play Call of Duty.

So that’s part of it. It’s those memories of nostalgia, and... I don’t know. I guess that’s why people harken back to things they love, things that are mostly not done anymore. But also there’s a lot of things I’m nostalgic for that aren’t being done still. Like stylized 3D character platformers, stuff like Super Mario 64--brightly colored, cheerful, stylized platformers.

When they made Jak and Daxter, I remember there was a feeling like Jak and Daxter was successful, but they wanted it to be more successful. And the frustration was that the kids they were aiming for still wanted to play Grand Theft Auto III with their older brother, even though they were like, 8, and you knew deep down they’d totally enjoy playing a cheerful platformer, but then they wanted to drive cars and shoot guns.

Nothing against killing guys, but it feels like there’s more than you could do.

Hence Jak II and III with assault rifles on the box cover. Oh, and then shadow selves were big for a while.

Shadow selves, that was awesome. Anyway, with all the big AAA games coming out this year, I’m super excited about Grand Theft Auto V. I just love playing all of those. I’d love to make a GTA game that was about something else than those things games usually are--just experiencing a city in a different way, in the same way that New York City is fun for me to come visit. It’s actually enhanced by Grand Theft Auto. Like, anytime I see a hot dog vendor with the umbrellas, I want to drive through it. Being in a location you’ve only seen in the game, and then being there in real life, there’s this weird “Oh, I think I know what’s around the corner, Oh, yep” feeling.

That’s how I felt when I moved here, which was surreal because I was working at Rockstar Games at the time. It was weird not having any bearings on where I was, but since I had played GTA IV I felt like I had already been there.

Right! That’s the fun part for me. But I’m not exactly sure how I would do that, and I’m not putting them down, but I feel like all I’m doing is following an arrow on the ground to a group of guys, shoot them, then follow another arrow to the next group of guys I’ve got to kill. Nothing against killing guys, but it feels like there’s more than you could do.

It feels like there’s this momentum to build things bigger. More elaborate action set pieces for just that: killing guys. What could be a different approach to a game like GTA?

It could be easy to just add a new set of things you need to achieve, another set of verbs than just guns and cars. I mean, keep the cars. 

I’m going to think of something really stupid and that’s gonna be the headline of the article isn’t it? “Tim Schafer Insists Grand Theft Auto Needs More Bunny Rabbits.”

At least when Kotaku reblogs the article.

[laughs] Then again, how would you make that game? How would you get the millions of dollars you need to make a GTA game without shooting or any of the things that have worked in the past, when you take out the thing that makes its core? I think you’d have to make a smaller one and do it on Kickstarter. Like I said, Kickstarter is always my answer.

But with all the engines out there now, ready to go engines like adventure game engines, maybe there will be an open-world city engine? “InstaCity” tools where you can make your own world to play in. Can you run around like GTA in the new SimCity?

I don’t think so.

Why hasn’t anyone done that? I guess making all of that procedural will make it hard to get the same fidelity of a GTA game. Then again, everything I thought was impossible is totally being done in the next five years I look forward to playing the InstaCity.

Thanks for the idea.

You’ll be rich! At least until you publish this article and someone else steals it.

Speaking of Kickstarter, how’s all the success being taken by the Double Fine crew? There’s a documentary, there’s the media attention, and then there’s the game in the works. Are you excited to get it out the door? Will you guys do another Kickstarter?

Yes and yes.  Everyone’s excited; the game looks great, it’s coming together great. I got so excited when all the money came in, I started designing a regular game. When it started with the limited budget, we were only planning on doing a simple project, like a flash game.

But then when we got the larger budget, like $4 million, so now we have to hone it down to get it done on the budget. The difference this time is that since the Kickstarter backers are watching us build the game, they keep getting upset when we cut stuff out of the game. “Don’t cut it! I paid for that!” But it’s such a normal process for making a game.

It’s not even bad; editing is good. But that’s just a painful part of the process. I write free-verse and then I try to make it semi-decent and cut out the bad stuff- you look smarter by editing. If you write twenty jokes and you pick the best three, it just seems like you're a genius. “Every joke he makes is great!” but really you just cut seventeen jokes. Did I get the math right? Luckily I don’t make a living from math.

So the editing process is normal, but having people observe the process–who will see stuff we took out of the game–might miss a certain room in the game. It’ll be interesting to see how people take it. That’s what we wanted to make the documentary for; to show people everything.  The painful meetings where someone wants to cut something and someone else doesn’t, and people get mad. That happens when you make a game.

Well you said you have a no jerks policy at Double Fine.

Well, mostly.

[laughter] So how heated and painful are those meetings?

Well the way it works is, you can have some heated arguments when you have so many creative, opinionated, passionate people. But what I’ve noticed over the years is they resolve well because, deep down, everybody just wants the game to be really great. So as long as that’s the goal, then we usually can resolve it.

But sometimes, you’ll be in a situation where that’s not the goal: where someone wants a promotion, or they want to get their name out there so it’s a fight to do things their way, or they just don’t like someone so they shoot down every idea they have. Those never get resolved, and usually someone gets fired or quits. Those are more political fights that I was talking about, that we try to weed out in the hiring proces–like if someone’s gripey about their past employers or little signs like that, or blaming other people for their troubles. Keeping people like that out keeps Double Fine focused on making the game great.

You’ve had some great collaborators over the years, Scott Campbell and Ron Gilbert for example. How did you form these relationships and who do you look for when you’re looking for someone to collaborate with?

Well a lot of us have worked together for twenty years–like Peter Chan, and Ron obviously was one of the first people I met in the industry, like in ’89. And Scott I met when he was at LucasArts making an educational Star Wars game with baby Star Wars characters. But I went to one of his gallery shows and his fine art was just amazing and I thought, “that’s something that would be good in games.” Same with Nathan Stapley; in that case, I was looking for outsiders whose art doesn’t look like it belongs in games. That was really easy, because games tend to look the same a lot.

Orange and blue light.

You forgot shiny! Indie games are branching out aesthetically, but there’s even things that indie games are gravitating toward–8-bit retro stuff for example–even while some of them are very experimental.

So anyway I’m just looking for experimental artists and pairing them with hardcore production people who can get things done. We’re really small and we don’t have a lot of turn over. Like right now, we’re not hiring anyone so I guess we’ll have to kill someone before another person comes on. But most of the time, it’s kind of what you’d expect. Looking at amazing portfolios, or if it’s an engineer we put them on the phone with the team and ask them all the tough engineering questions.  Then we bring them in to see if they’re tolerable to go to lunch with. [laughter]

We really value humility. People who brag a lot or who take credit for other people’s work aren’t good, but people who are really humble and positive and smart–and if they’re curious about how things work–that’s a good sign.

You’re probably the closest thing we have to a gaming “celebrity,” there are a lot of people who either can’t handle it or aren’t funny. How come you’re the only one?

Well it’s been really slow; it’s not like it was overnight. I’ve been around since ’89. It’s kind of like the story of the boiling frog; it’s not killing me; it’s pleasant. I really like it, every interaction I have as a result of being in the game industry is a positive one. People come up to me at conferences, and they’re always just the most happy, “I love your games, and I want to work on games!” It’s always just a love fest. Maybe it would be different if I made a game like Call of Duty, where you’d have fans that don’t love your stuff but play it anyway, or they like your game but they don’t love your game. Or they just don’t feel anything. All of our fans feel a personal connection to the games and the people who made it.

Plus I was really lucky to be around when there was no internet, so I could make all my mistakes offline. If I was 22, and Twitter was around, I would probably be flaming my fans or making mistakes and speaking up and saying obnoxious things I’d have to retract later, but I got all of that stuff out of my system at Lucasarts. I made tons of mistakes in my twenties and did stupid stuff, now all the stupid stuff you do is on Twitter.

The Blow/Fish effect.

[laughter] Wait, the blowfish?

John and Phil.

Oh! I wonder about that because I’ll read Phil’s tweets and say, “oh my God I can’t believe he said that” but I don’t think it’s cause he’s young and stupid. In a way I think it’s the public persona he’s choosing to adopt. I think he has some self-awareness about that, cause he gets a lot of attention for it–and look, we’re talking about him right now. So maybe it’s just totally working!

It’s such an interesting development in videogames, because public personas play a big part in popular culture and videogames haven’t really debuted to the mass media yet. It seems like the indies always get written as pretentious or bombastic, but then there’s a lot of silent developers as well. Is there a happy medium? How should developers be presenting themselves as videogame personalities?

I think you can get down the rabbit hole of like shadow boxing. Like on Twitter, you’re shouting into a canyon full of thousands of people, and you think they’re all thinking one thing because of one tweet, and so you need a response to that. But really no one is talking to you, and no one is really saying this to you, you’re almost just arguing with your own inner demons. Like when someone calls you a loser, it’s like it activates some thing in your head that tells you “you’re a loser” like you’re fighting with that thing, and you should really stop fighting in front of everybody, cause it’s embarrassing. Just get that under control.

It’s hard when you’re exposed to the public in a raw, internet way. If a news article comes out about your game, and there’s a bunch of positive stuff about it, but then there’s that one super testy, negative comment, and you’ll be tempted to respond to that.  “Hey, you didn’t think about this,” when really that’s like half of a percent of the people who responded, and it’s probably just someone trolling you anyway. Instead you should always spend your mental energy on the positive comments, who really like what you’re doing.

Also, remember you’re never really famous. Like, walk down the street, 'who’s the most famous person in games?' It’s gotta be like Will Wright or Miyamoto. People that everyone in the games industry would know. Anyway walk down the street and ask someone who their favorite game developer is. They wouldn’t even be able to pick one. They might know who Will is, if you went down and asked ten people in a row. But if you ask them about Brad Pitt or Angelina, people will know what you’re talking about. There’s a huge difference between actually being famous and being game-famous.

Gamous?

Gamous. And that’s an important thing to stay humble about; the most famous person in games is not famous at all.

Well hopefully someday, right? Don’t we want games in the spotlight?

Yeah, but probably not. The thing I think about is like, even among the most famous film directors, there’s only like a handful of recognizable names there too.  Scorcese or Spielberg, but that’s probably the maximum game developers could get. People that are really famous are glamorous or beautiful. But Spielberg is famous for what he is doing,

That’s a great analog to what’s going on. Didn’t Jamin and Robin Hunicke just talk about comparing videogames and designers to American New Wave cinema? Those film directors are still household names. Could that be good for games being recognized by the larger culture?

Yeah, except for the people doing level design or all of the hard stuff. Like the game designers and the people actually coming up with ideas and doing work.

But the best movies, most people don’t know a single screenwriter. That’s kind of the best we can hope for, is the level of those film directors. It’s funny, you read in science fiction about the future, there’s always some rockstar game developer, you know what I mean? Cause in the future there going to be like rockstars. They’re not. At the best they’ll be like those movie directors. Which is fine, that’d be great.

Well it keeps a good level of being relevant to the culture at large and not being obsessive or having videogame developers on TMZ. That’s such a weird thing anyway.

Well, maybe just the beautiful ones, like me.

Another example is people are always asking “how can we make our awards more like the Oscars” and I’m like, “until Brad Pitt is working in games, no one is going to watch our award shows on TV” The most we could hope to accomplish with our shows is the Director’s Guild Awards. Forget movies.

Check in later to hear about new consoles, new business models, AAA vs. indies, good guys, bad guys, damsels, daughters, and just plan old videogames.

Plus Tim and Colin will make Vine videos.

Part 2 is up here!

You can follow Tim on Twitter @TimOfLegend.

You can follow Colin on Twitter @scallopdelion.

Image: Flickr, CC

In its feeding frenzy of tech startups, Yahoo! just moved on from the appetizer menu to the main course. And it ordered the lobster.

CEO Marissa Mayer officially announced today that Yahoo! is acquiring Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash—roughly a third of what the once-great web company has in its wallet.

The "why" is pretty simple: Yahoo! is rebranding as a technology company, upping its social media game, and trying to woo the younger generation by "looking cool again." (From the CFO’s own lips.) 

How to pull it off without ruining everything will be another story—and one that Tumblr loyalists are watching intently, terrified Yahoo! will suck the cool out of their beloved haven of random, irreverent and awesome internet stuff. (The fear is warranted; Yahoo! has a history of bombing its startup acquisitions, a la Flickr and del.icio.us.) 

But Yahoo! has promised not to screw this up. Mayer posted this GIF on Tumblr to announce the deal:

First it will have to learn from its mistakes. When Yahoo! bought Flickr in 2005, the photo site was a rising star. Merging with Yahoo! was a hot mess for years. “They were forced to integrate instead of innovate,” Gizmodo writes in its great, in-depth look at the Flickr fail. I noticed the same thing firsthand when Aol bought HuffPost two years back. 

Which is probably why Mayer said, "Part of our strategy here is to let Tumblr be Tumblr.” That’s nice, but doesn’t change the fact that Yahoo! will have to find a way to monetize the 6-year-old microblogging site, which prior to this deal was generating little revenue ($13 million a year, according to most analysts). So what’s the other part of the strategy? 

There are parallels to draw between this deal and the Facebook-Instagram acquisition last April. In return for its $1 billion, Facebook got Instagram’s six employees, 50 million users, zero revenue, and wild popularity. 

Tumblr, by comparison, has 108 million blogs (via Quancat), 184 million unique visitors a month (via comScore) and like Instagram, an active, loyal and devout user base.

In both cases, the communities freaked out when they heard they were being bought out by the man. Angry users threatened to leave Instagram in droves. They didn’t; the photo app has almost twice as many users now, and four times the staff. Which means Facebook’s plan is falling right into place. Facebook’s M.O. is to grow a solid user base before sneaking eerily targeted ads into its platform.  Instagram is still ad-free, and as of this month Facebook said it has no official plan to change that. But it will. The social network has added features and updates—location data, hashtags and a new web feed—all partially designed to make room for an eventual infusion of advertising. 

Google took a similarly patient route in monetizing YouTube, after buying it for $1.65 billion in in 2006. Three years after the sale, YouTube still hadn’t made a dime, but was growing like gangbusters. In the last couple years, as surely you've noticed, Google started slapping ads on popular videos. Last year YouTube brought in over 3 billion in gross revenue. Gangnam Style alone earned $8 million from ad dollars. 

So will Yahoo!, too, take it slow? The company already has plans to boost revenue, possibly by putting more ads on Tumblr’s dashboard, the Wall Street Journal reports. But it will be especially tricky to sell ads on Tumblr, which is ripe with not-so-advertising-friendly content like, you know, pornography. And stuff like this.

Yahoo! will also have to risk not pissing off Tumblr’s users (any more than it already has), who are used to David Karp’s minimalist and independent way of doing things. 

That's the troubling Catch-22 here—for both companies. To make any money off Tumblr's cool factor, Yahoo! will have to make Tumblr decidedly less cool. 

Image: Deviant Art, CC

Yahoo!, the company that created the website your grandparents may still have as their home page because they haven't figured out how to change it, just ponied up $1.1 billion for the "micro-blogging" service Tumblr. That's a lot of money to spend on anything, especially a social media site that is basically Blogspot with a sexy design. 

Yes, $1.1 billion dollars. We hear about an awful lot of things that cost about that much, but I posit that we rarely take a minute to sit back and absorb just how much fucking money that is. So I'm going to try to put into perspective how much a popular micro-blogging platform is worth in 2013: 

There are about 25 sovereign nations whose gross domestic product is equal to Tumblr. Economically speaking, Tumblr is apparently worth more than a year's worth of work of every single person in Somalia, whose GDP is 1.06 billion (same goes for Grenada or Samoa or Zanzibar). 

With one Tumblr, you could purchase sixty-eight million seven hundred fifty thousand Brooklyn Nets-themed plastic cups from Tumbler.com.

Tumblr is worth 275 Super Bowl commercials, which were priced at about $4,000,000 per 30-second ad this year.

With one Tumblr, you could buy 251,716,247 Big Macs. Or pay Oprah's salary for 3-4 years. 

Tumblr is worth 6% of NASA's annual operating budget. $1.1 billion dollars is almost enough to buy you the Burj Khalifa. It would get you 73% of the world's tallest building to be exact. But Tumblr's worth enough to buy you almost all of 432 Park, the new ultraluxury tower by Raphael Vinoly that's rising on Park Avenue.

Or, instead of Tumblr, Yahoo! could buy 135,200,000,000 bitcoin. 

If any Burning Man is counting, the micro-blogging service is worth roughly as much as 16,369 lbs of MDMA, or 9 military grade combat drones from General Atomics. 

Finally, Tumblr = 733,333.333 pairs of Google Glasses. Which makes at least one deal where I'd rather have Tumblr. 

But let's get even realer for a second. Let's talk cash money. This packet of $100 bills you are looking at is about a half inch thick—and it's worth $10,000 in all:

Here, then, is what one billion U.S. dollars looks like:

Pull up another crate, and you've got enough cash to buy a micro-blogging site. 

With additional research from Erik Franco.

By now you are likely aware that carbon dioxide levels have reached 400 parts per million in Earth's atmosphere. It's been three million years since that last happened, but there were no humans around then to endure the epic sea level rise, crazy droughts, hotter temps, and the mass swampification of once-arable land. 

Scientists are just as certain as ever that this is the case—a recent study revealed that 97% of scientific papers that tackle climate change confirm it's caused by human activity—but many people remain unconvinced. Maybe that's because words are often boring, and a lot of them are written on the internet, where it is especially easy not to believe things.

Good thing then that we also have charts, visualizations, maps and graphs. Yes, charts are also posted on the internet. They are, however, arguably easier to not be distracted from. So, in the name of good data ecology, here is the story of our 400 ppm world told with fewer words, and more lines and numbers. Starting with the most important number of all:

The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as measured by the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, has climbed from under 320 to 400 ppm in just fifty years. That means CO2, a powerful greenhouse gas, is warming the globe a hell of a lot more than it was half a decade ago. Before we had factories and power plants—say, a century ago—the number was 280 ppm. The world has rapidly warmed since then, as NASA shows us in this animated map of temperatures over the last 130 years:

As average global air temperatures have risen, so too have those of the oceans. 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that the heat content of the world's oceans has skyrocketed alongside the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere—our oceans are warmer and warming still. They are also acidifying. Meanwhile, the Arctic is melting. Fast.

Source: National Snow & Ice Data Center

That orange line denotes the average Arctic ice extent in 1979. The white mass is where it was measured last year—the lowest extent on record; it is quite clearly melting away. 

Source: EPA

As was noted on the Arctic Sea Ice blog, this trend is nearly a perfect inversion of the previous two charts. Which makes sense—carbon spikes, the heat's cranked up, oceans warm, and the Arctic melts. 

All of this because humans have relied upon carbon-rich fossil fuels to power their lives and societies: decades of burning coal and oil have hot-boxed the planet. Those charts, graphs, and maps above tell a pretty straighforward story of what happened next—and what's going to keep happening if we don't keep the rest of that coal and oil in the ground. 

Photo via Flickr / CC

With Yahoo's acquisiton of Tumblr for $1.1 billion, we thought we'd dig up this interview with David Karp, the site's founder, from November 2009. - The eds.

David Karp is 23 and the founder and creator of Tumblr, and probably everyone but my editor (even though Vice has one and Motherboard too) knows what that is. He is also a millionaire. Which is hilarious, because when I was 23 I was running around with a rolled-up $20 bill up my nose, stealing day-old bagels from dumpsters, memorizing Nation of Ulysses lyrics, drinking midrange gin, and trying to sleep with art school girls. I was most certainly not flying around the world with my hot girlfriend being a genius. I called David up for an interview the other day to see just exactly how someone got the whole "being young and fucking smart" thing totally right.

VICE: So, first things first. It looks like you're giving the "early Prince album cover" look in almost every single picture taken of you. Why is this?

David Karp: I have like two different faces for photographs. I practice them. I've never heard the Prince thing before.

In all stories about you people like to mention how you dropped out of high school and moved to Japan at, what, 18? That's insane.

Yeah, I actually dropped out at 15 to work on my own business making websites for people. I grew up in New York, and you're very much spoiled living here, so I tried to think what other city was going to be totally different yet offer similar attributes. I picked Tokyo.

So not for the usual "I'm really into Anime" sort of thing?

I was actually still working tech and just had a Vonage account that they'd call me on. They thought I was in New York for the first eight months or so before I finally let it slip I was half way across the fucking world.

There's a certain stigma when someone names you Boy Wonder Of The Internet or what have you. A lot of the time it's some phony bullshit. How do you feel about the stigmas being attached to yourself and Tumblr so early on?

Hmm... I don't think I've actually accomplished all that much. More than anything I'm glad to have, by total dumb luck, been able to work with all these people [at Tumblr]. When I sit down with a blank sheet of paper I'm excited to figure out the problems. I mean, I get a kick out of it--the "Boy Wonder" stuff. Obviously.

Define "entrepreneur." Is it more along the lines of the 1985 Val Kilmer movie Real Genius or more like Warren Buffet in a suit and tie?

It's... someone who has a vision for something and a want to create. People creating.

Would you actually consider yourself an entrepreneur? Why do you think you've succeeded and other people who might have similar goals haven't succeeded?

I think I'm doing OK. It's a lot to do with the people around me. The idea behind it all is to keep it simple, and I think we've always looked for a place to express ourself as simply and honestly and expressly... like, being dragged over to our grandma's house to look at a family photo book... now there's a medium to see that or do that as it's being done and not be bombarded with seven photobooks every time you stop by. You can view it at your own pace, and they too, at their own pace. It's a new mechanism for people to express themselves.

So, social media and social networking are blurring the lines between public interaction and "internet" interaction. We are using them for the same reasons, almost.

Remember how much of an issue privacy online was, like, five years ago? And now it's totally gone. People our age aren't hung up on photos of themselves that people can Google and find, it's kind of a given now. It's become so socially accepted so quickly. Your online persona is now an extension of your actual persona--you can go to someone's blog and have an extension of them up there that's much more personable and customizable to fit YOU than, say, a Facebook or Myspace page. I think it's more cool that the photos online aren't just some crappy Facebook photos that someone tagged me in after a long night at a party... [on Tumblr] they're things that I've found, or taken right away to share. It's really me.

What about oversharing? Is this the Age Of Oversharing?

I hesitate to use the word overshare, because... well... it's more that our personalities are now able to reach out a lot further than they would ten years ago. Ten years ago there simply wasn't an option to find like-minded individuals so easily, but now if someone somehow get to your blog they can decide that you're like-minded and might want to get a drink with you next time they're in New York. Or get married. Or whatever.

So people from the site are meeting up and having babies. Do you own the rights to these babies? Are you going to make people call the babies "Reblog"?

Fuck! We should really change the Terms Of Service so that can happen. I thought it'd would be cool to be invited to a Tumblr wedding; never really thought about the baby aspect of it. Hmm. That's a good idea.

Where do you see the lines of public and internet interactions going in five years?

Everything should be more accessible. And the community and social stuff. I don't think the paradigm will jump that much, I think it'll focus more on the idea of identity, which is what we've been very careful about. Even Third World countries have high speed cell phone networks now.

While the site is designed to be incredibly user friendly, there's no denying that just under the surface there's a vast amount porn. How do you feel about that?

It's only about four percent.

Really?

We actually track it now. One of the first guy's original jobs was to troll Tumblr for porn. That was pretty much his job for a while.

That sounds AWESOME.

Yeah. Now it's the editorial staff's job to flag it.

Any favorite Tumblr porn blogs?

Me and my girlfriend have really gotten really into Dirtyrottenwhore, and ThingsThatExciteMe is really good. What about you?

Hmm, Syntheticpubes and Bedazzledblue aren't bad. I gotta keep it classy for when I do my work at the coffee shops.

Ah.

I hear that you think that robots are better than humans and that you want to have robot children.

I'm going to have one human baby and one robot baby.

So you do think robots are superior to humans?

I've always more than anything wanted to work with robots, and thought that working in media and information would be a good place to start. For example, I've always wanted to evolve Tumblr into this sort of giant AI that's built on top of all this information it gathers in real time, and then turn that into this giant army of machines that knows what everyone in the world is thinking. And the robots would be able to protect us from "bad." I trust the robots.

Why do you trust the robots?

I think we'd be stupid not to trust the machines.

OK, last question. I'm gonna ask a hard-hitting one. Tumblr. Why no "e"?

We checked the domain name for 'Tumbler.com' and it was this mom and pop store for tumbler glasses. We thought it'd be pretty fun one day, when we got enough money, to acquire their whole business. No joke! Actually, that's a joke.

This interview was published on November 23, 2009.

One of Samsung's recent arguments against the iPhone is that the iPhone is the phone of old people. But let's not assume that just because old people like a particular gadget, it must be bad. In any case, the only old person I associate with the iPhone is Lou Reed, who designed an elderly-friendly app called “Lou Zoom” that made text bigger—addressing a stereotypical complaint by the elderly—but he’s still Lou Motherfucking Reed and therefore cooler than some young dads trading videos by bumping Galaxys.

As America simultaneously ages and becomes more smartphone saturated, app developers are proving savvier than their advertising counterparts, with some positive, if unseemly results. For example, this app that helps you prepare for a colonoscopy, with tips and pictures.

Without going too deep into it, a colonoscopy is a routine procedure recommended for people over 50, to screen their bowels for signs of colorectal cancer, the second leading cause of cancer deaths in the US. 

Screen grab from the app in question.

(Lunch Spoilers Ahead, FYI)

The app, which is available for iPhone and Android, allows patients to select their procedure and get timed alerts on their phone as the big day approaches. It was developed and tested by doctors at Arizona Digestive Health, a physician group focused on gastroenterology. 

The procedure seems bad enough on its own—with a camera going up the anus to give the doctor a thorough gander of the colon—and on top of that, it involves an unpleasant-sounding preparation process, that climaxes with taking a bunch of laxatives and drinking 73 ounces of colon cleansing liquid. The PDF I looked at promises, “You will have diarrhea, which can be quite sudden. This is normal.” Getting old does sound like a drag sometimes.

Anyway, the preparation starts days before potentially sudden diarrhea sets in, and involves dietary restrictions and taking medication. The more thoroughly a patient prepares, the more effective the procedure is. And patients who used a smartphone app came in prepared at rates demonstrably higher than those who didn’t use them.

The results were made public at Digestive Disease Week, which exists. Apparently people who used the app scored “good” on the Boston Bowel Preparation Scale, which is something else that exists, about 84 percent of the time, versus only 56 percent for people who didn’t.

“We know that better prep means a better colonoscopy," said Nilay Kavathia, MD, a gastroenterology fellow at Phoenix VA, and one of the application's developers. "And now we know that this app improves prep. This finding has huge implications for treatment, patient satisfaction and further research in how the use of technology can impact healthy outcomes."

It might not look great in commercials, but it’s one of better uses for the smart phone we've found yet. Normally I think of my phone as just sort of a distracting pest, so it makes sense that if you need to be pestered to do something good for your health—ie, something that could kill you dead—it's the perfect tool.

Life isn't all homemade sex videos, selfies and graduations. There's going to be more apps like this as the smartphone integrates itself into our lives further and further (just imagine what disgusting things Google Glass will do). Let's just be honest, and admit that so far the best thing about the smartphone is how easy it makes it to use the internet and the toliet at the same time. The colonoscopy app seems as inevitable as getting older.

(via) 

It's not the first time a small-fry drone has spun up over the site of the doomed cruise liner. But it's certainly the most visually stunning.  

Which is something the makers of this video grapple with. Team Blacksheep, the drone collective behind stunts that  have buzzed the Statue of Liberty and harassed French cops, know this sort of this steers dangerously close to disaster porn. It explains their disclaimer: "This video is supposed to be a showcase for possible UAV applications." Presumably this means the potential for small, remotely-piloted aircraft to take search and rescue to new heights.   

Still: Too soon? 

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson // @VICEdrone

Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, who is currently serving jail time for exposing an AT&T security hole, got an in-person visit from his lawyer Tor Ekeland on Sunday. The four-hour-plus drive out to the Pennsylvanian penitentiary from his Brooklyn offices was mandatory for Ekeland, as the prison has denied him access to his client since he was placed in solitary confinement for unconfirmed reasons weeks ago.  

Ekeland, accompanied by two of weev’s female friends who tweeted the experience under #weevroadtrip, learned he was sharing a 10x10 cell in solitary with a cellmate, and is let out three times a week for a 15-minute shower. And that’s it. Ekeland called this treatment “odd for someone convicted of a non-violent computer crime” in a phone interview today, and “a bit draconian” as it appears “[weev] is being punished for his speech.”

Reasons for the “administrative detention”—what the prison is calling solitary confinement—are still unclear. Normally, inmates are put into housing like weev’s if they have started a fight in the prison, but weev did no such thing. Ekeland spoke to his client in a visitation booth separated by glass, with communication only audible through telephone, “like in the movies.”

The penitentiary also threatened to relocate weev regularly, in order to disrupt communications with friends, as well as rooming him with gang members and terrorists if he tries to communicate with the outside world via Internet again. weev tweeting and posting messages to SoundCloud is not illegal, but disrupts the federal government’s goal of weev quietly carrying out his prison sentence and thus fading from public memory.

Even more troubling than the “administrative detention,” threats, and limited access to letter-writing materials and stamps: the prison is not serving weev gluten-free meals. weev has special dietary needs as he has Celiac’s disease, an autoimmune disorder of the small intestine that causes him to have an adverse reaction to gluten. Ekeland learned his client has gone to see the prison doctor, but his diet has not changed. The food his friends brought weev was not allowed, nor was weev able to keep any of the notes his friends brought him.

Some highlights from  #weevroadtrip:

Nicole Powers, who was originally denied access to weev because she was not wearing a bra, eventually made one with the help of a stranger in the parking lot. The whole thing adds additional absurdity to an already absurd case. Ekeland called the prison’s actions“fanning the flames,” but internet folk would call it “feeding the trolls.”  

More on weev

Weev Has Been Placed in Solitary Confinement, Possibly for Tweeting

Lulz Seemed Terribly Fragile Next to Leg Irons: In the Courtroom with Weev

Swartz, Keys, Weev: Doing Hard Time for Hacking Doesn't Actually Require Any Hacking

Hose shot by Guian Bolisay

In 2010, heat killed approximately 55,000 people in Russia, dwarfing the total death toll of every American hurricane combined.  Daytime temperatures hit a cruising altitude of around 104°F and barely cooled at night; over 1 million hectares of land were swept by wildfires. The crop failure rate touched 25 percent, and total damages by the time the brutality let up came to $15 billion. In terms of spatial extent and deviation from normal, every temperature record for the region was shattered, beating even the 2003 European heat-wave, which claimed 70,000 lives. Both are extremes, but extremes that will become more likely as climate change makes its wrath felt.

Don’t ever doubt the power of a single-digit temperature variation. Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and floods get most of the natural disaster credit, but heat will fuck you up, and, what’s more, it will do it slowly. So, keep this in mind when I say that a new study out from researchers at Columbia University's Earth Institute and published in today’s Nature Climate Change suggests that Manhattan is about to go into the oven for the indefinite future. By the next decade, heat deaths could rise by nearly a quarter on the island, while, by the 2080s, deaths could almost double. What’s more, most of the increase won’t come during the usual mid-summer months, but during May and September. In other words, say farewell to pleasant or at least tolerable shoulder seasons.

Percentage change (average over 16 models) in monthly
temperature-related deaths in the 2080s versus the 1980s
for one scenario

First, the bare numbers. Between 1901 and 2001, the average monthly temperature rose in Central Park by 3.5°F, leaping ahead of preindustrial local and global trends. 2012 was the island’s warmest year on record, while each of the past three years has seen temps hitting 100°F. Future projections show an increase of between 3.3 and 4.2°F by the 2050s and 4.3 and 7.1°F by the 2080s. Just imagine Times Square after two weeks of 115°F weather, when the buildings and sidewalks have soaked up some much heat that even the deepest subway tunnel radiates it like a sauna filled with trash and dead rats.

Which brings us to the death part. The researchers, led by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Tiantian Li, who did his postdoc work at Columbia, took projections from 16 different global climate models and rescaled them down to Manhattan. They used two different backdrops, one in which population growth slows and efforts are made to curb greenhouse gases, and a worst-case in which population rises at current rates and little effort is made to quell GHGs. Compared to now, more people die in either situation, but, in the worst-case scenario, the estimated yearly death toll tops 1,000 people. This is extrapolating from 1980s death rates in the 300s.

Senior author Patrick Kinney notes that there is some hope for the island that’s not reflected in the study. Mainly, Manhattan is a global leader in mitigation strategies, like planting trees, using reflective surfaces on buildings, and the opening of public air-conditioning centers. In fact, while the area has gotten warmer over the past century, overall heat-related deaths have gone down, thanks to the development of individual air conditioning. "I think this points to the need for cities to look for ways to make themselves and their people more resilient to heat," Kinney says. Trees aren’t exactly going to bring the same 30 degree drop as your wall unit, but at a municipal scale, it doesn’t take all that much to make a big, life-saving impact.   

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

People that hate math bum me out. There are a lot of them, particularly in the subset of people I often interact with (20 to 40-year-olds that do art or music things). From a certain perspective, math is the perfect storm of pointless, norm-y, and, crucially, very hard. The whys of modern math hatred are actually pretty interesting (from algorithm phobias to many, many terrible math teachers), but the difficulty of math is pretty straight-forward. Math is highly convoluted, effort-intensive puzzlework involving strange symbols and high degrees of abstraction, where the only “good enough” is being 100 percent correct. This is different than most anything in our day to day lives.

Courtesy Thomas Weickert, Neuroscience Research Australia 

The last couple of sentences above could actually double for an explanation of why math is actually awesome, but hard is hard, for any brain. What if there was a way, an easy physical way, of making math less difficult? Like a pill or, say, zaps to the skull? The latter is a real possibility, uncovered through some recent research at the University of Oxford. The equipment for at least one of the techniques is cheaper than your average math textbook, and could begin testing in classrooms very soon.

The DC Stimulator Plus, one commercially available
TDCS device

Of course, we’re probably still a lot farther away from electric zaps not conjuring One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest associations of forced brutality, but a post at Nature assures the methods are painless. The first, announced to some fanfare in 2010, is called transcranial direct-current stimulation (TDCS). This method, reported to feel like a “baby tugging gently on your hair,” helped study volunteers “learn and remember a number system made up of unfamiliar symbols.” What’s more, the effect was still seen in subjects re-evaluated six months later.

The more recent technique, called transcranial random-noise stimulation (TRNS), is kind of just what it sounds: electrical pulses sent randomly into different parts of the brain, thus exciting them and leaving the subjects with better abilities for memorizing mathematical facts and for performing complex calculations. In the study, 13 volunteers got random zaps to the prefrontal cortices of their brains, the portions associated with higher cognitive abilities, and, indeed, they performed better on mathematical tasks than a control group. Brain imaging using near-infrared spectroscopy supports the general idea, finding that blood flow to the related portions of the brain peaked earlier in subjects that had received the treatment.

While the study appears in last week’s issue of Current Biology, it’s worth noting that 13 is an extremely small number of participants to be drawing huge conclusions from. Daniel Ansari, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario, also expressed to Nature some skepticism of the work: “The training used here is highly contrived and does not resemble the way in which math skills are typically acquired.”

One of dozens of do-it-yourself-TCDS videos on YouTube.

It’s true: people become “good” at math through intensive practice and repetition rather than just looking at a thing and suddently getting it a la Good Will Hunting. In that, math is a lot like most anything else worth doing: one becomes good at it. But, the catch is that different people start from different places: not every prefrontal cortex is created equal, nor is every math teacher. The idea of being able to level the playing field is intriguing, particularly in the cases of students with special difficulty in learning math. So, the idea is less math steroid than math prosthesis. That said, if I could have zapped my brains every morning before differential equations class, I’d be a piece of toast by now, but probably a bit better at inverse Laplace transformations.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

This nearly half-century-old commercial went viral (or at least Buzzfeed viral) a few years back, but it's got me thinking lately about how assimilated synthesizers eventually became. Even pop-country circa 2013 is rife with electronic tones, however brutally plain. Remember, in 1969, when this commercial aired, the technology was still brand new and faddish; Moog synths had been circulating in pop culture for only about two years and had yet to be even seen in live performance, though they were pushing themselves into studios with names like the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel.

You could consider the above commercial a snapshot of disruptive technology in action: a new thing, suddenly popular, but still uncertain enough to produce ... this.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

Image via Wikimedia

You likely already know how overcrowded and abusive the US prison system is, and you probably are also aware that the US has more people in prison than even China or Russia. In this age of privatization, of course, it’s also not surprising that many of the detention centers are not actually operated by the government, but by for-profit companies. So clearly, some people are making lots and lots of money off the booming business of keeping human beings in cages.   

But who are these people?

Using NASDAQ data, I looked through the long list of investors in Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, the two biggest corporations that operate detention centers in the US, to find out who was cashing in the most on prisons. When we say “prison-industrial complex,” this is who we’re talking about.

Henri Wedell
The individual who’s invested the most in private prisons is Henri Wedell, who started serving on CCA’s board of directors in 2000, when the company was struggling with scandals related to prisoner abuse and mismanagement. He now owns more than 650,000 shares in the company, which is far more successful these days. Those shares are worth more than $25 million.

I called Wedell to ask him what it was like to make a fortune from the incarceration of others, and whether it bothered him to profit off a system that puts more people in prison than any other country in the world.

“America is the freest country in the world,” he told me. “America allows more freedom than any other country in the world, much more than Russia and a whole lot more than Scandinavia, where they really aren’t free. So offering all this freedom to society, there’ll be a certain number of people, more in this country than elsewhere, who take advantage of that freedom, abuse it, and end up in prison. That happens because we are so free in this country.”

Presumably, when he’s referring to all the freedom Americans have, he’s not including the 80,000 inmates in 60 prisons operated by CCA.

George Zoley
Another prison profiteer who presumably has no moral qualms about the business is George Zoley, the CEO of GEO Group and the second-biggest investor in the incarceration industry. In fact, he’s so proud of his business, which has committed a laundry list of human rights abuses, he tried to get a college football stadium named after it.

Zoley made nearly $6 million last year through salary and bonuses alone, but the real money is in stocks—he owns more than 500,000 shares in GEO, and he has made $23 million in stock trades during one 18-month period. But you can’t accuse him of not earning his pay, exactly. GEO saw a 56 percent spike in profits in the first quarter of 2013, and the company’s executives reassured investors that the incarceration rate wouldn’t be dropping any time soon when announcing its earnings. Zoley will be mega rich for years to come.

Jeremy Mindich and Matt Sirovich
Both Wedell and Zoley are big donors to the Republican party, but that doesn’t mean those from the left side of the aisle can’t play their game. Matt Sirovich and Jeremy Mindich both donate to Democratic politicians and are involved with progressive-leaning organizations like Root Capital, a nonprofit lending company that offers loans to farmers in developing countries to alleviate poverty.

Their day job, however, is running Scopia Capital, a hedge fund that is the one of the largest shareholders of GEO Group. The fund owns about $300 million in shares in that company, which represents 12 percent of its entire portfolio. Like Zoley, they are good at what they do—their fund outperformed the market by 20 percentage points, and the State of New Jersey hired Scopia to manage $150 million worth of pensions.

I called them up to ask their thoughts about being politically liberal but heavily invested in private prisons, but Mindich refused to answer any questions and Sirovich was unavailable.

It should be pointed out that while being far to the left politically might seem incompatible with investing in prisons (or managing a hedge fund in the first place), the Democratic party is totally fine with the incarceration rate. Although Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are largely responsible for the drug-war policies that caused the prison population to skyrocket, Bill Clinton was a “tough on crime” president who continued their ideas. And Vice President Joe Biden was a principal player in the Clinton era’s crime policies—he wrote the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which, among other things, called for $9.7 billion in increased funding for prisons and stiffer penalties for drug offenders.

Though the US prison population is shrinking slightly, the number of inmates in federal lockup is increasing, and while Obama keeps saying he’s ending the war on drugs, he’s also proposed budgets that call for increasing the amount of money spent on the Bureau of Prisons. So it’s not such a stretch that a Democratic donor would also be in the men-in-cages industry.

Retired People and Probably You
The Vanguard Group and Fidelity Investments are America’s top two 401(k) providers. They are also two of the private prison industry’s biggest investors.

Together, they own about 20 percent of both CCA and GEO. That means if you have a 401(k) plan, there’s a good chance you benefit financially from private prisons. And even if you don’t, there are many more mutual funds, brokerage firms, and banks that invest in private prisons—it being a growth industry and all—so if you have money somewhere other than your wallet or your mattress, it’s a good bet you’re involved in some way with companies that are locking up and probably abusing inmates.

This is especially true for government employees like public school teachers because their retirement funds are some of the biggest investors in private prisons. According to NASDAQ data, the retirement funds for public employees and teachers in New York and California together have about $60 million ($30 million each) invested in CCA and GEO. Teacher retirement funds in Texas and Kentucky have $8.3 million and $4 million invested in prisons respectively, and public employees in Florida ($10.3 million), Ohio ($8.6 million), Texas ($5.6 million), Arizona ($5.3 million), and Colorado ($2.25 million) are also connected to the industry. Except for New York, which has only one privately run detention facility, each of these states has several prisons run by CCA and GEO Group facilities. And it’s not just Americans who have ties to prisons. Foreign investors have money in them as well, including the pension fund for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which recently sold off its $5.1 million worth of GEO Group stock.

Most of these employees are probably unaware that their pensions are tied to prisons—and it’s hard to say that these are “bad” investments from a purely capitalistic perspective, since these prisons are making money hand over fist. The private prison industry is entrenched in our society. And the only way to make sure that we’re not individually and collectively profiting off of it is to close these things.  

Follow Ray on Twitter: @RayDowns

This post originally appeared at VICE.

Image: Hisakazu Watanabe/Flickr

Thought your sexting habit could remain a secret? Unfortunately, a YouTube user named Nick Keck uploaded a video yesterday that proves Snapchat, the popular self-destructing video and photo messenger, doesn't really delete those nudes you sent a hook-up buddy, suggesting that anything sent among smartphones can't truly be ephemeral. 

The Daily Beast previously reported that a digital forensics company called Decipher was charging users $300-$500 to extract the Snapchat messages you thought were extinct by manipulating the file extention ".NOMEDIA" that had previously kept the images from being viewed. Thanks to Keck's video, though, you can save your money and still find your potentially-incriminating media. 

Without using data-mining or file extracting software, Keck was able to find his sent and received Snapchats without even using a computer. In the video, he uses an iPad and iPhone to send a video to himself (using two separate Snapchat accounts under his name). He then went into his iFile app to find the root of this data.

Keck clicks on "var" then "mobile" then "applications" and a series of folders appear, each with long, arbitrary titles. He opened each one until discovering the the storage facility of 'deleted' Snapchats. His was titled under "20D..." and then there was a folder called "tmp" that contained all his traded videos. Although he didn't have time to look for it, he said another folder must exist in "applications" that contains the Snapchat photos, too. 

Snapchat may be the most fun way to flirt, but don't think your information is private. It turns out the only way to truly show your penis without the risk of it later appearing on the internet is to flaunt your junk in real life, far away from iPhone cameras. 

Have you ever seen a quasi-stellar radio source (aka a quasar)? Of course not. You probably have never even heard the term before, which is affectionately used to describe mysterious hotbeds of electromagnetic energy that form around black holes out in space. But never fear--Jean-Michel Crettaz and Mark David Hosale, the two creators behind slap!HQ, are offering you the chance to observe a synthetic reproduction of one.

Scientists are still piecing together the little information we have about these naturally occurring phenomena, but what we do know is this: quasars are a compact region surrounding a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Though they are extremely bright and powerful, much more so than the sun, they remain difficult to detect. Weird, huh?

Quasar 2.0: Star Incubator. Jean Michel Crettaz and Mark-David Hosale with Duly Lee, Micaela Neus, F. Myles Sciotto, Marco Verde.

Jean-Michel Crettaz, an engineer and architect based in Los Angeles, and Mark David Hosale, a composer and media artist currently based in Toronto, are amongst those cosmos enthusiasts who enjoy decoding and contemplating outer space. Motivated by their interest in the quasar phenomenon, the two artists created an interactive light and sound installation, titled Quasar, which reproduces its astronomical properties on a smaller scale.

“The name Quasar is derived from more or less mysterious astronomical events understood as extremely ancient and highly luminous events that occur in the furthest known reaches in our known Universe," explain Crettaz and Hosale. "The significance of quasars to the work is that they represent the edge of what can be seen and known, they are a demarcation of our epistemological horizon.”

Quasar 2.0: Star Incubator. Jean Michel Crettaz and Mark-David Hosale with Duly Lee, Micaela Neus, F. Myles Sciotto, Marco Verde.

Slap!HQ will present the 4^th version of Quasar this September at the Land|Slide exhibition in Markham, Ontario. 

This post originally appeared at the Creator's Project.

Image: Flickr

Peter Sunde, one of the co-founders of the BitTorrent clearinghouse the Pirate Bay, is no stranger to the law. In 2009, after he was sentenced to nearly a year in prison and fined almost a million dollars in Sweden, he held a press conference. "Even if I had any money," he said, "I would rather burn everything I own and not even give them the ashes." Money, he believes, should flow not to corporations but to the people who are producing culture, which is why he founded Flattr, an app that allows users to send money directly to artists, activists, and designers. And as with information and money, he believes that citizens should be able to better influence the laws that govern the politics of technology and the technology of politics—which is why he's decided to seek a seat in the European Union Parliament.

A Swede with Finnish roots, Sunde will run as an MEP candidate for Finland's growing Pirate Party in the 2014 election. His aim is not one of simply advocating online piracy, though, which is probably how governments and corporate interests will spin his candidacy. Sunde has bigger aspirations: If it were up to him, there would be a total overhaul in how the international community handles intellectual property and copyright law. He also hopes to instigate a much larger revolution in how we view democracy and other systems. 

I spoke with Sunde by email about running for the European Union Parliament, the Pirate Party, his hatred of “faceless corporate lobbyists,” and why he wished Barack Obama would have lost the 2012 election. 

Motherboard: You're running for a seat because you want to create an alternative perspective in the European Union Parliament (EUP). Can you describe your platform for those unfamiliar with the Pirate Party?

Peter Sunde: Well, even though I'm a candidate for the Pirate Party, I'm not actually a member. The PP platform is based on transferring those liberties we have in the analog world into the future, which is much more dependent upon the digital. The party and I are very in sync here, but I also have other strong beliefs that are not part of the Pirate Party political platform. 

I am a lefty by European standards, in that I believe people should (through a government) own infrastructure jointly. I have strong opinions on how we treat animals, and I might be in favor of putting a higher tax on meat (or lowering the ones on veggies). I also believe we need to look at how we create power in the future, and lots of other things. I've been a member of the Swedish Green Party at the same time as the Swedish Socialist Party. Both are very progressive parties, though they're not always in sync with their other European counterparts.

If elected, what would be the first thing you'd do as an MEP?

I need to answer with something flamboyant or funny here, right? Honestly, I think it would be to send t-shirts to the Hollywood representatives with text like, "I bribed people all over the world to get my way in life, but all I got was this lousy t-shirt” or something like that. [Laughs]

If elected, how do you think a meeting with a corporate lobbyist might play out? These are the people who have led the charge against The Pirate Bay. Wouldn't it be a bit strange suddenly sitting across from them, trying to come to an agreement on patent and copyright laws?

I've met these people numerous times, but they're all faceless people you can't remember. They are lawyers and lobbyists that don't really care about the issue. They're only paid to do their work, and at 5 o'clock they go home and shop for a new car and some porn with their filthy paycheck. I would do as I've always done and tell them to go screw themselves. I think it might bite me in the ass to maintain my normal persona (not wearing a suit might be an issue in the EUP), but I won't change for anyone.

How are things going with Flattr?

Good! New features are popping up and we're seeing growth that we didn't expect. I'm happy about it, but always want more users to join. 

Are people using Flattr as a means of donating to your EU Parliament campaign?

I haven't asked for any contributions, and I try to do things without using money—it feels more real and honest. And since I'm running for a democratic seat, I'd prefer getting it without the money pushing me to a winning position. 

Via The Share Conference

You and many others feel that patent law, intellectual property and copyright laws need to be reformed, both internationally and on various domestic fronts. Do you feel that there are people in the EU Parliament with whom you could work? 

What I see is more of an age and cultural difference when it comes to these matters, rather than political background. Younger people (under 40ish) are usually quite understanding when it comes to these issues. The Green group and, to some extent, the Socialist group in the EU parliament are quite open to these ideas. The Swedish Pirate Party already have two elected politicians in the EU parliament. They joined the Green group and have been influencing them quite a lot. They've really done a great job, but more work needs to be done. 

I think that with some education, and a bit of focus on these issues media-wise (as we had with ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, and so on), we could influence the majority and make them understand that we can't just listen to monied interests in discussions about our future foundations.

You told TorrentFreak that you also tried to recruit Kim Dotcom to run for for an EUP seat in Finland. I assume he's just too busy with Mega now, but did you get the sense that he might run in the future?

We've talked a bit about things, in general. I think he's in a bubble of fighting, and I know what that means—you can't really do anything besides be angry. To focus on things that are more than a few months in the future might be really hard or even unthinkable. Like others, my feelings about Kim are mixed, so I'm not sure how well he'd do for any political party. He's got a great sense for PR, but he's also quite hated (especially in Germany), which might be a problem for him.

Most people think that people hate me, but I haven't really met a lot of people that dislike me at all. Maybe 10 people during the past 10 years. But, people assign a value to what I represent rather than to who I am. I'm not sure that's the case with Kim. And he has a family that he needs to focus on. Being away on the other side of the world for five years might not be the best solution for his family.

I haven't asked for any contributions, and I try to do things without using money—it feels more real and honest.

The Pirate Party is quite clearly interested in growing in Europe. Given that US politicians, lobbyists and corporate interests really drive the international debate on copyright, patents, and piracy, does the Pirate Party have plans to recruit candidates in the US?

The Pirate Party is (from what I hear) growing in the US as well, but you have much bigger issues than just copyright over there. From an outside perspective, we Europeans can't really understand how you can call it a democracy with only two parties that are so close to each other on the issues. Yes, the problem for us outside the US is, of course, that you have so much influence over us. But, I don't think it's going to last, and I don't think it will be Europe that takes over after that. So, for me, it's more important to start influencing the Asians on how to deal with these issues.

I hope that's not too arrogant from me :) I know that some US people might have issues with us snotty Europeans having views on your country for instance.

I think a lot of Americans might agree with you—even if, on occasion, our system allows for progress (gay marriage, for instance). But the way things are, politicians still respond quickest when money is at stake. Do you see democracy as the least worst government?

Yes. But by allowing people to believe that democracy solves all problems, we're not looking for anything better than that system. When Obama got elected (and then re-elected), I was almost hoping he'd lose. For the simple reason that the crash would come sooner, and things would have to improve. People would have to do something if Sarah Palin started running your country. It would finally be a revolution. 

I'm still waiting for the revolution against globalization in the rest of the world. The corruption that's eating away our systems; the false belief that democracy exists; and this idea of democracy actually being 'the solution' at all.

Photo via

E-waste remains a heaping problem. Just last week the New York Times reported, "Americans replace their cellphones every 22 months, junking some 150 million old phones in 2010 alone."

And if everyone I know has at least one superfluous cell phone in a drawer or closet, picture the stashes big companies with IT departments and IT budgets have lying around. All that so-called e-waste—batteries, laptops, monitors, whatever—all full of mercury and lead, and unlikely to disposed of responsibly.

This is especially true of New York City, which boasts the lowest electronics-recycling rate in its state, in spite of its reputation as a bastion of liberal treehuggers who can’t decide how much soda to drink on their own. While the city government is moving to make it easier for residents to recycle their electronics, John Kirsch remains skeptical that having collection bins in apartments is a viable proposition. Well, actually, what he said was, “Good luck with that.”

But Kirsch isn’t just another skeptical New Yorker; he’s partner and co-founder of the e-waste recycling company, 4th Bin. “We’ve picked up 2 million pounds and I’ve done over 2,000 pick-ups myself, both residential and business, there’s the argument that it’s just better not to do [have bins]. It’ll be very very difficult.”

With Intel, 4th Bin is collecting old laptops in exchange for a hundred bucks off a new Ultrabook, hoping to raise their profile and keep electronic detritus out of garbage dumps.

This IT guy-turned-electro-undertaker offered his perspective from the e-waste problem’s front lines, the Wild West world of so-called electronics recyclers, 4th Bin’s collaboration with Intel and how IT departments are producing waste just to prove their own worth.

MOTHERBOARD: Hi, John. What was the impetus behind 4th Bin? 

John Kirsch: Basically [4th Bin] was started by a bunch of IT professionals--myself included, and Michael Deutsch. We wanted to create a system of legitimate recycling especially for small to medium-sized businesses. We came from the industry so we knew there was a lack of recycling options that were really legitimate—meaning that if you’re a company and you have stuff and you really want to do the right thing, you don’t know who is collecting it and where the stuff goes. People will come and pick up your electronics, but where it ultimately ended up no one knows. Those types of questions weren’t getting answered.

So we wanted to do that—we wanted to find a way where we’ll come pick it up and it gets recycled and there’s no bullshit going on. We’re not shipping stuff to China, we’re not taking the metal and chucking the rest—which is really par for the course. That’s what’s happens.

[Ewaste recycling] really hasn’t been systematized at all. I know a lot of the bigger companies have vendors that are legitimate, but they’re for massive companies. They’ll come out and take away a thousand computers, but there wasn’t someone willing to come take away ten.

When did 4th Bin start in earnest?

In 2009, on September 11. The way we started was, we launched a design competition, giving out money to designers around the world to build a bin and a logo. The bins were supposed to be actual collection points and the logo would mean that anything put in a bin with this logo would be recycled to a standard above and beyond what we had then.

We did the competition not knowing that we’d actually start a company out of it, but then all these people contacted us and were like “We wish we had this.” And we were like, “Well... maybe this will work.”

So we had to figure out the logistics part, because I was an IT director and my partner was an IT director, we didn’t know about logistics or waste management. So we did a pilot of it, driving around and getting eWaste and figured out that it works better to not have an actual bin, but instead to have what we call a virtual bin. So they call us up and we price it and come. And it’s very very simple process. We get a lot of inquiries still that are like “can we get a bin?” and I’m like “we don’t have any!”

Bin is right in the name.

Well, it’s a concept. In New York City you already have the three bins and we’re the fourth. But there’s a lot of reasons that it didn’t work. I won’t bore you with the legal reasons—stuff breaking in the bin or leaking or people throwing non-electronics in the bin. And the bin that won the competition—by a firm called Springtime, from Amsterdam—to build that bin would cost beyond what’s feasible, from a cost and logistical perspective. Not to mention the threat of people stealing from it, or stuff breaking and leaking. There were enough arguments for the virtual bin then. Just tell us what you have. We’re happy to come out and pick it up and recycle it.

Well where does it go?

We have a process where people find us through our advertising, then we give them a quote for picking the stuff up. If we pick it up, we take it to a facility in Harlem. Some of the stuff is reused—the rates are around four to five percent and the rest is separated and taken to Long Island where a company called Ecotech then processes the stuff.

Everyone’s been fully audited, and we’re the only eSteward-certified company in New York City. The way I tell people about eStewards is that it’s like organic for the food industry. EStewards is very strict on stuff: who handles it, where it goes, with the goal of being all this stuff collected getting recycled. And we handle everything locally, which makes us different. When the equipment gets to Harlem we aren’t shipping it off to China or anywhere, and everyone, again has been fully audited. They’ve had to prove themselves and we’ve had to prove ourselves.

(via)

You mentioned your certification online.

I always tell people that we’re the only eSteward in New York City, the biggest tech market.

A lot of what happens is that no one knows where the stuff goes. By law, companies have to recycle, but they don’t, ultimately, know where it goes. I joke—and it’s not really a joke—but you and I could put up a website and then start collecting stuff tomorrow. There’s not enough knowledge in general from an educational perspective. Businesses know that they’ve got to recycle this stuff; they can’t just throw this stuff away. But they don’t know the definition of a recycler.

I think a lot of them work on price alone. So they’ll ask for a price and then be like, “We were a super green company until you gave us an estimate for recycling” and you discover how green they really are. I expected that to some degree as I got into this business. I wasn’t into waste management; I was a tech guy. We try to keep the costs low. The reaction from companies, a world I came from, kind of disappoints you sometimes. It was a shock. A lot of companies surprised me in good and bad ways.

But there are companies who I wouldn’t think would be into ethical recycling say, “That’s fine. We trust you with our data and our physical equipment.” And then other companies will give you every sustainability report they’ve ever had and you’ll chat with them and they’ll say they’ve cut their power consumption by X amount, and then when they get the bill—even if it isn’t a big bill—they don’t wanna hear it. “Either do it for free, or we’ll give it to the scrap guys down the block. They’re recyclers.” But not really.

Something on your website that caught my eye was “Data destruction.” I think some people who want to recycle their electronics only think about that negatively.

Data destruction is a big selling point. Sometimes you have to convince companies, “Whether its your phone or copy machine or computer or laptop, when it leaves your office, who are you really trusting to do this? Would you rather have a group of professionals collect them, or would you rather have a company who just hires day laborers to pick this stuff up? What insurance do you have that that stuff ever gets anywhere?”

It’s funny. A lot of people were like, “We used this company and they gave us this certificate of erasure” but it looks a little pathetic. It’s like, “anyone can open a Word document and make a certificate.” And I’ve seen some of these things, and some are really pretty pathetic. Some look more legitimate, but again, they may or may not be doing it. But the fact that someone is taking a thousand computers and erasing their hard drives to a high standard, they’re probably only clearing them. To erase a hard drive is actually pretty intensive.

So you know I think that the real thing is that it’s still new and it’s like the wild west. There’s not a lot of clear options for consumers. The best you can do is clarify what’s downstream for a vendor, but most people aren’t going to provide that. They’re not willing to put it out there where the stuff really goes. But I would want to know where it goes, who touched my computer and has my stuff. It’s really easy to fake it now, being a “recycler.”

Even without recycling.

There’s an incentive to the wrong thing, that’s the problem. No one is busting anyone for not recycling, and there’s a demand in China and other countries to get this stuff. They want the rare earth materials.

There’s just no control if you send stuff to China or Africa. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that it isn’t being recycled. You can look up the processing facilities in those countries and they basically take what they need and dump the rest of it. They’re not under any kind of environmental standard and they have to keep their costs down. In China they don’t have the regulations that exist in the West, and they need the stuff. They need the rare earth so they don’t need to mine it.

So how is business doing?

Yeah, I think a lot of that is increased awareness of e-waste. I’ve been in IT for fifteen years and e-waste was not part of anyone’s vocabulary even a few years ago. I think consumers are following this now. People kind of already knew that it was bad and that’s why they’d hoard stuff. Electronics are something that the average people has and knows that it’s bad to throw out but they don’t know what to do with that.

Unless it’s a TV. People just chuck those out.

The problem now is that a lot of the newer electronics just break. We get a lot of flat screen TVs. It’s amazing how many we get; it’s such a waste. Some people are upgrading their flat screens. I’ll give them credit, they’re willing to pay the premium cost to have us come get it out of the apartment and take it and disassemble it. But a lot of them are just broken. These are flat screens that are just junk. I won’t name any manufacturers, but you know about planned obsolescence. I don’t know if its pressure from the shareholders or what, but you just can’t have a TV for 25-30 years anymore like when we were kids.

I mean, I look at new TVs then mine from two years ago and it looks like its from the ‘80s. The picture is so much better and smart TVs are coming out. I’ve tended to sour on technology a little bit doing this business. It’s not that I don’t appreciate it but...

Running this business rather than doing IT, your take on the technology has changed?

Well I appreciate it, but I think a lot of companies and their technology is not needed. Okay, you’re pumping up your processing speed. There are watershed events that do happen—Windows 7, I consider a watershed event because it moved from 32 to 64 bit, yeah. Apple’s OS X and then adopting the Intel. Those are big changes. I hate to say the word, but game changers. Businesses and people adopted the technology really quickly.

But putting aside the gadgets and stuff, I mean how much do you really need them? I mean, I use my iPad for watching movies on Netflix, I don’t do any work on my iPad. But I think that they’re marketed better now and people feel the need to have them. Does a business need to swap out a thousand computers that are already on a 64 bit? I don’t know. I could make the argument, nah just wait. You can run the computer into the ground. The technology is that much better. Sure the Pentium, the new chips, are great, but I think IT drives it. The IT departments need to justify themselves. Your in-house IT guys have to show value and part of that is using the latest and greatest stuff. With the goal almost being themselves not going into obsolescence. I joke about it, because I was IT, but you’re not making money in the profit centers for the company. If you’re running the show you want to constantly be moving equipment in and out.

I think the trend for the last decade has been to run a more outsourced model of a separate company coming in to run IT, so the company can become leaner and leaner and they’re cutting in-house IT.

I think if you can introduce new stuff on the software side. The whole cloud trend has facilitated a move to less. We’re seeing more and more servers come out. We took 800 servers out a few weeks ago. The company was saying we’re consolidating, taking it down, and cutting out these servers. There’s more ewaste now, but with the goal of less. There’s more and more stuff and less hard drive space. I mean you still need the screen and computing power. I appreciate the smaller stuff, but people call the tablet the endgame, and I disagree.

@a_ben_richmond

Aleksandra Sima is part of a team of researchers in Norway using sophisticated octocopters to search for petroleum (via)

We've seen drones used to safely navigate oil thanks through thick ice flows, so it's not all too surprising to hear that small, relatively affordable unmanned systems are now being used to sniff out oil deposits. This sort of thing was bound to happen sooner rather than later. 

A team of researchers with Norway's Centre for Integrated Petroleum Research, a collaboration between the University of Bergen and Uni Research, is on it: 

But really, what is it with Nordic drones?

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson // @VICEdrone

iRobot, the company behind the adorable Roomba vacuum cleaner and some less-adorable military security bots, has developed a semi-autonomous hand that can do almost everything your hand can do, just better. Using a Kinect sensor, it can manipulate a key to open a locked door. It can grab all kinds of stuff. Its fingers can lift 50 lbs weights. 

Next, it's going to punch its semi-autonomous three-fingered fist right through the future. 

That's because the robot hand, which is being developed for DARPA with assistance from researchers at Yale and Harvard, will eventually be entirely autonomous. It's part of the Autonomous Robotic Manipulation project, which DARPA describes thusly: 

"Current robotic manipulation systems save lives and reduce casualties, but are limited when adapting to multiple mission environments and need burdensome human interaction and lengthy time durations for completing tasks."

Alas, that "burdensome human interaction" that's always getting in the way of more perfect robot performance may not be a burden for long.

"ARM seeks to enable autonomous manipulation systems to surpass the performance level of remote manipulation systems that are controlled directly by a human operator," DARPA explains. 

Right now, the machine's current setup "incorporates some autonomous capability," but "the hand still requires an operator for manipulation of objects in its fingers," according to the Singularity Hub.

The allure of a powerful, dextrous, and autonomous robot hand to police squads, the military, and security forces makes sense—if robots can open the locked doors perps and/or combatants are hiding behind, so much the better for the side that wants to get that door open. It also means that we're ceding one more inch of control over to a powerful, dextrous machine. 

But such is the future! Come hither, robot hand; I'd like to shake thee. 

via Flickr / Creative Commons

Just before he died, Aaron Swartz built a technology that let citizens securely and anonymously send tips and documents to journalists, without having to worry about leaving their digital fingerprints all over the web.  

The resulting program, called Strongbox, just launched on the New Yorker. Think of it as a hyper-secure inbox. It protects whistleblowers from being tracked, and also journalists from being pressured by the government to reveal sources—since they themselves have no earthly idea.

The technology powering Strongbox is called DeadDrop—a free, open-source web application built by Swartz. It launched one month before he died.

The app's readme on github describes how it works:

In operation, every source is given a unique "codename." The codename lets the source establish a relationship with the news organization without revealing her real identity or resorting to e-mail. She can enter the code name on a future visit to read any messages sent back from the journalist -- "Thanks for the Roswell photos! Got any more?? -- or submit additional documents or messages under the same persistent, but anonymous, identifier.

Innovations to track and locate people online have progressed much faster than innovations to protect privacy and anonymity. (You don't have to stretch your imagination too far to think why.) A brilliant civic hacker, Swartz of course understood this. His interest in free information, privacy and anonymity led him to rely on Tor, highly-encrypted software originally sponsored by the Navy for hosting and viewing websites totally anonymously. Sometimes we call the area it opens up the Darknet. 

Strongbox makes access to this area of the web easier than before. To submit documents to Strongbox, users first download and install software for Tor, then go to Strongbox at http://tnysbtbxsf356hiy.onion for further intructions. (To access Strongbox on mobile, you'll have to use the Guardian's Darknet browser Android app, Orweb. Happily, they've provided an interactive tutorial.)

In a 2008 blog post about a Tor hack, the Swartz shared his thoughts on the role of anonymous publishing in a free society:

In 1787, when America’s framers wanted to argue for its Constitution, they published their arguments (the Federalist Papers) anonymously. Whistleblowers have released everything from the Pentagon Papers to the Downing Street Memos. Anonymous speech is a First Amendment right.

And yet, on the supposedly Wild West frontier of the Internet, publishing anonymously is not so easy. Hosting providers require a name and credit card, which they have to hand over to the FBi at the drop of a National Security Letter. Free hosting sites zealously obey takedown requests and require publishers to reveal their identity if they want their stuff put back up (a tactic Scientologists have used). Luckily there are now services like Wikileaks, but they only publish a very narrow range of content.

But, talking with Virgil Griffith and others, I hit upon a new way of allowing for anonymous publishing. The amazing Tor project lets you use the Internet anonymously, by disguising your traffic thru a long series of relays. Less well-known is that it also allows for anonymous publishing, by running the system in reverse. Unfortunately, you need the Tor software to visit anonymously-published sites, but we realized there’s no reason this need be so.

So I dusted off some work I’d begun years and years ago and build a tor2web proxy. Now anyone with a web browser can visit an anonymous Tor URL like http://sexy36iscapohm7b.onion/ from any Web browser, without any special software, just by going to:

http://sexy36iscapohm7b.tor.theinfo.org/

Which means that publishing an anonymous website is now also fairly easy. 

So it stands to reason that fellow hacktivist-turned-journalist Kevin Poulsen, the news editor at WIRED who oversaw that website's Wikileaks coverage, approached Swartz two years ago (at that point he was already a rising star on the web) with his secure submission project. Poulsen recalls in his New Yorker article that Swartz learned he was being indicted on federal charges while they were working on DeadDrop. “By December, 2012, Aaron’s code was stable, and a squishy launch date had been set,” he writes. “Then, on January 11th, he killed himself. In the immediate aftermath, it was hard to think of anything but the loss and pain of his death. A launch, like so many things, was secondary." 

Strongbox is the first use of the DeadDrop technology. (The magazine was chosen for the debut because of its history of investigative reporting.) Since WikiLeaks shut down in 2010 a few other publications have tried to build similar secure submission programs but were plagued by security and legal problems.

Seeing as the Justice Department just spied on the Associated Press and seized two months’ worth of phone records, it seems it’s high time one of them works. Let’s hope Strongbox does. As Swartz wrote, "Here's to anonymity—and more tools protecting it."

See also

The FBI Is Coming for Your Gchats

The Motherboard Guide to Spy Kits

'Going Dark': What's So Wrong with the Government's Plan to Tap Our Internet

Assume Your Computer is Owned at All Times: A Chat with Cryptocat's Nadim Kobeissi