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.

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.”

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

Image: White House

Considering that every new image of Obama doing anything remotely unusual is typically transformed into a tumblr-traversing meme, isn't it a little strange that the objectively wonderful photo featured above isn't all over the internet?

I mean, the thing barely spread beyond the audience at the White House correspondent's dinner. The image was a prop in a joke about how everyone thought that PR photo of Obama shooting skeet had to be Photoshopped—this was the real one, get it? (Okay, it's actually a pretty good joke). But the internet somehow missed it altogether.

It may simply be that members of the media (who don't get invited) loathe that smarmy self-congratulating tribute to the super-powerful so much that anything produced therein is ignored on principle. But seriously—there wasn't a single Buzzfeed blogger in the crowd?

Of all the presidential images that journey across our Facebook walls, racking up thousands of likes and shares, this is the one that gets a pass? The one with cats and laser beams and rainbows? The one that's full-on Seapunk? This thing is tailor-made for the internet. How is it not still on the top of Reddit? 

I mean, I'd rather look at this than some photo of Obama fist-bumping the janitor any day. In fact, maybe I'll print this thing out. Maybe I'll crumple the edges and burn them, like we did in second grade to make printer paper look old, and then maybe I'll frame it. Who knows, maybe in this majestic era of artistic remixing and reproduction, that counts as actual art. I am an artist. And I shall call my first work The Presidential Meme That Never Was. 

Image via

Okay, prepare yourself for some pretty dense internet jargon, all in the name of safety. Originally used as a form of online protest, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks – basically where you bombard a website with traffic until it has a meltdown – are becoming increasingly malicious as people realize they can use them to fuck with large companies who have websites, a.k.a. every large company in the world. In 2012, DDoS attacks increased by a pretty ridiculous 200 percent, and 35 percent of businesses experienced some kind of disruptive DDoS attack.

For a powerful DDoS attack, hackers use botnets, which is essentially turning computers into an automated army that amplifies the traffic you're hurling at websites and works like this. If enough computers are used in an attack, you can end up doing some serious financial damage, like the time Anonymous left Paypal dealing with a hefty $5.3 million loss in a DDoS attack that paralyzed the company's computer systems.

I was maybe a little over-worried about the future of internet terrorism, so I caught up with Dragon and PhäntömZ – two very experienced programmers who run a stresser/booter company called Agony – to find out a little more. In case you didn't know (which is incredibly likely), a "stresser/booter" is normally a software or service that allows the user to flood the network of their target. As in, the kind of thing you'd use to help you carry out a DDoS attack.

Photo via

VICE: Hey guys. Talk to me about botnets.
PhäntömZ: We stay away from botnets at all costs. The same goes for shells and black hat hackers.

What's a black hat hacker?
Black hat hacking is an internet term for someone violating computer or internet security maliciously or for illegal personal gain, as opposed to "white hat", which is ethical hacking.

How can you hack ethically?
Oh, it's where a computer security expert who specializes in penetration testing and will try to hack an organization's information in order to ensure that it's safe.

Ah, OK. What do you think about people who DDoS maliciously for a personal or political agenda?
Dragon: I personally think that they're internet terrorists. The point of the internet was originally freedom of information, and most of the time that's not what people are using DDoS attacks for. Many of the attacks nowadays come from political parties or people trying to take out businesses.

What's your opinion on CISPA?
CISPA is just the government trying to spy on everyone, in my honest opinion. CISPA would waive every single privacy law ever enacted in the name of cyber security.

Would CISPA affect you?
Yes, CISPA would affect both of us. In fact, it would affect everyone. The issue is, when I want to do something anonymous online, I can't anymore – well, not without a ton of work. After CISPA, if a state agency like the police says, "We want records on this person," everyone has to release them.

Could CISPA shut down your business?
If it grows into a more controlling bill, then it could have the potential to. I doubt it will, though.

Photo via

What do you think of Anonymous?
They’re just a bunch of kids – 99 percent of them are under 20.
PhäntömZ: They’re online terrorist groups. I've had a few of them try to recruit me, but I keep turning them away. The way those groups run is just helping the government have more reasons to put cyber laws into play.

How does a DDoS attack work, exactly?
You either type a command into a server and it executes a program that attacks the target, or you use a GUI – otherwise known as a booter. [See these visualizations too - Ed.]

Are DDoS attacks becoming a threat?
Dragon: DDoS attacks are becoming a real threat to some online businesses and individuals. Say you’re on a fun game online. A kid who doesn’t like you sees that you're having fun. With access to a booter, they can knock your entire house offline with the click of a button.

Have you been the victims of DDoS attacks?
We were hit by an attack for an entire week. I diagnosed it and managed to divert it and notified everyone I could to help get it discovered and healed.

What do you think of TOR and the Deepweb?
It's 99 percent bad; there's no purpose for it. It's expanded into a huge amount of illegal content that's mostly very disgusting and has no real purpose.

Don't you think it helps with internet privacy to some extent?
Privacy over the internet is overrated. Most of the time, if someone wants to find you or knows who you are, they can find out what you're doing. It’s like my friend used to say – "A lock is to keep honest people honest."

What do you know about the Reddit attack?
Reddit isn't that large of a website, so many different booter services could have been capable of an attack like that. Even our service, if tuned the correct way, could be capable of it.

Illustration of a DDoS via

Do Stressing/DDoS companies work as a business?
They do, but they don't make much unless they have a large clientele, like us, or do illegal things. There are many services on hacking forums that offer to do that kind of thing for you, but most people would rather be able to do it themselves using a program or a website that sells subscriptions.

How would they go about doing that?
The only way someone would be able to make it themselves is if they had the appropriate programming knowledge and the server resources to create enough packets to stress whatever they were trying to stress.

Follow Will on Twitter: @Hypothesising

This post first appeared appeared at VICE UK

Read more about DDoS attacks and internet warfare:

Is DDoS the New "Sit In"?

The Shady Geeks Hiding in Bunkers Trying to Nuke the Internet

The Syrian Electronic Army are at Cyber War with Anonymous

Anonymous Calls Bullshit on the Future of Cyber Warfare

Image via Wikipedia Commons

Chris Gill, Motherboard's shooter-at-large, as seen from a tactical surveillance drone at roughly 300 feet (via)

Later today, a congressional hearing will convene on domestic drone use--the second such hearing in three months. The hearing will continue teasing out the privacy implications of aerial surveillance systems, a sign that an increasing number of US citizens and policy makers alike are losing sleep over the thought potentially thousands of small-fry drones soon taking to American airspace. 

To see you, overly-paranoid human, through today's hearing, we've gone ahead and collected a few choice tracks about the perils of being watched--or stalking, depending on where you fall. Look out. 

BLACK SABBATH, "PARANOID"

TONER LOW, "DEVILBOTS DESIGNED TO ASSIMILATE"

JUDAS PRIEST, "ELECTRIC EYE"

MASSIVE ATTACK, "SPYING GLASS"

HALL AND OATS, "PRIVATE EYES"

SERGE GAINSBOURG, "LAISSEZ MOI TRANQUILLE"

THE CURE, "PICTURES OF YOU"

CAN, "OUTSIDE MY DOOR"

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

Images: BSC

Building tall things is among our human-est proclivities. The divine collapse of Babel didn't stop us, so taller and taller we go, often for little other reason than we can. Governments, corporations, and architects have long built record-breaking skyscrapers simply to bask in the glory of the feat itself (and the attendant press frenzy, of course). Hell, the world's tallest building at the moment is the Burj Khalifa, and that thing isn't even hooked up to a proper sewage system.

But there's something particularly remarkable about the next World's Tallest Building—it will be erected in just over half a year, and, if it pans out, it's going to be replicable and mass producable. Before long, in fact, there may be dozens of the next world's tallest building.

The Broad Sustainable Construction company has announced that it plans to break ground on Sky City, a 220-story, 2,750-foot skyscraper in a remote field in Changsha, China in June this year—and aims to finish erecting the final story by December.

That may sound insane—and it kind of is. But BSC's building, Sky City, isn't like other skyscrapers. It's a prefab building—soon to be the world's biggest—which means all of its parts are manufactured to spec and pre-packaged for (relatively) easy assembly. The component parts are mass produced in modular factories, so yeah—BSC is hoping that this Sky City will merely be the first of many. 

So, should we cheer or jeer the prospect of mass-produced biggest-ever skyscrapers? And also: why mass-produce ginormous skyscrapers in the first place?

Well, if the specs BSC provides are to be believed, mass-manufacturing prefab skyscrapers is much more efficient than our more traditional towers. It's five times more energy efficient, can be built at half the cost, and packs a lot more people into a smaller space. BSC is going to stuff 30,000 people into these self-contained skyscraper communities—a resident of Sky City will use up 1/100th of the land used by a typical Chinese citizen. 

And it really is a city in and of itself—4,450 apartments, nearly 100,000 square feet of indoor vertical farms, 250 hotel rooms, 92 elevators, 30 foot courtyards for athletics, and a six mile ramp that can be used to walk or run around the entire city. 

Once again, BSC intends to build this thing in seven months. How will that work? Treehugger's Lloyd Alter explains: "16,000 part-time and 3,000 full-time workers will prefabricate the building for four months and assemble on site in three months." (For a closer look at all of the design specs, see Alter's in-depth piece on the project.)

That's right. The parts will be built in a factory, and then this thing will fly up in just three months. Three months. Remember how long it took to build the Freedom Tower? Like ten years. BSC thinks it can build the tallest building in the world in a single season.

If it succeeds, it will be a loaded feat indeed: Made-to-order skyscrapers bigger than any the world's ever seen–that's resource- and energy-efficient to boot–may well become a hot commodity in our quickly urbanizing world—remember, by 2030, the UN expects 5 billion people to live in cities. And once they're there, we're going to need space to live. Cheap, massive skyscrapers may be a viable option. 

Obviously, there are concerns aplenty, and not just with the structural soundness; the reliablity of a 2,500 foot city manufactured in 3 months. There's a more distant concern that this may not be the most pleasant way to live; stacked atop one another, separated from open air and nature. Plus, that cookie cutter aesthetic could eventually sap the architectural diversity of the cities of the future, and turn our most notable population hubs into towering Levittowns. 

Or maybe it's exactly what we need, with resource consumption and energy use spiraling out of control. Maybe our best hope is to churn out a host of massive, identical, self-contained Sky Cities to house the booming population—maybe this is the future of how we'll live on a teeming planet. 

A wood engraving of this evil instrument from La Nature, 1883.

If you're like me, you're a slightly overweight, devastatingly charming Jew who’s been diagnosed with ADHD before entering kindergarten. To cope with your “behavioral problems” and “short attention span,” you’ve run the pharmaceutical gamut from Ritalin and Wellbutrin to Adderall and Vyvanse.

If only 19^th century German psychiatrist Johann Christian Reil was still around to treat today's hyperactive youth. In an 1803 manual on the treatment of mental disorders, Dr. Reil prescribed that the “oft-distracted” be forced to watch a concert preformed on the Katzenclavier (translation: “cat piano”) as therapy. Here’s Reil’s description of the machine:

"An octave's worth of cats arranged in a row with their tails stretched behind them. And a keyboard fitted out with sharpened nails would be set over them. The struck cats would provide the sound. A fugue played on this instrument--when the ill person is so placed that he cannot miss the expression on their faces and the play of these animals--must bring Lot's wife herself from her fixed state into conscious awareness..."

This "sadist's synth" was invented by the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher some three hundred years before Kraftwerk. Kircher believed the harmony of music reflected the divine proportions of the universe. He had a bunch of other crazy and sometimes brilliant ideas about music - he invented the Aeolian Harp, which is sort of a complicated wind chime, and worked on early theories about transmitting music to remote places. So in a way, he sort of invented satellite radio too.

As far as anyone knows, nobody's ever constructed a true Cat Piano, but British sound sculptor Henry Dagg put together a humane version using squeaky toys. At a 2010 garden party, his performance of  “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” made Prince Charles chuckle like a fat-cat nobleman, check out this video:

This story originally appeared at our sister site, Noisey.

(via)

When it comes to celebrating the history of computers, it’s important to mark all binary anniversaries. In this spirit, we celebrate the 111th anniversary of the discovery of the oldest known computer.

While some people call the Atanasoff-Berry computer the first, and some people point back further to Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, those who know give the crown to the Antikythera Mechanism, which scholars now think was built around 87 B.C.E.

The Antikythera Mechanism was taken out of a sunken ship discovered in 1900 just off the tiny island of Antikythera, just north of Crete in the Mediterranean. After sitting in storage at Greece’s National Museum among other unidentified lumps of bronze, the archeologist Valerios Stais discovered it was, in fact, a mechanical object, on May 17, 1902.

Granted, when most people say “computer” they don’t mean things like the slide rule or the abacus, but that’s what the term meant before—and concurrently—computers were electrified and digitalized. Technically the Antikythera Mechanism is analog, which makes the whole binary date thing seem a little dubious, but whatevs.

Consisting of a box with dials on the outside and a very complex assembly of gear wheels mounted within, the Antikythera Mechanism must have looked like an old clock when Stais first deduced he was looking at something mechanical. What makes it all the more surprising is that it employs technology that would go unused in Europe until the 14th Century.

A modern attempt to reconstruct the Antikythera Mechanism, which is like someone trying to rebuild an iPhone in the year 4026 (via)

The Antikythera Mechanism is thought to be an astronomical mechanism, capable of predicting both solar eclipses and the Olympiad, which makes it sort of like NBC, but with solar eclipses and no Bob Costas. One dial indicates the Sun against the Zodiac, and some of the missing pieces might also indicate the position of the planets.

Contemporary scientists used tomography to find the months etched onto the back. The month names surprisingly were “of Corinthian origins.” This is especially confusing, given that the ship it was found in was Roman.

Classical literature mentions things like the Antikythera Mechanism, leading some to link it to Archimedes, but scientists just don’t know. It’s both an incredible find and an intriguing mystery, but people are pretty sure it is also the oldest known computer. On this day, 111 years ago, an archeologist in Athens discovered the Antikythera Mechanism and also that the Greeks knew even more than we gave them credit for. 

Photo via

One of the world's oldest and biggest species of flowering plants bloomed in Ohio yesterday: the extremely rare Titan Arum. The plant, which was grown by the Biological Sciences Greenhouse at Ohio State University, is endemic only to rainforests in Sumatra, where it was first discovered in 1878. Today, it's colloquially known as the "corpse flower" because of its pungent stench—it smells like decomposing flesh.

Wednesday's feat was part of an ongoing effort to save the rare species, led in part by Ohio State molecular geneticist Joan Leonard, who planted the seed for this now-49-pound Titan Arum back in 2001. Worldwide, the species has bloomed fewer than 150 times since it was discovered over a hundred years ago, according to Sandi Rutkowski, communications director at OSU's College of Arts and Sciences.

Because of booming population growth, the corpse flower's only natural habitat is rapidly diminishing. About 70 percent of its endemic habit in Sumatran rainforests have already been destroyed, said Leonard, coordinator of the campus's Biological Sciences Greenhouse.

On Wednesday, Ohio State's greenhouse again became one of the few who've gotten a successful bloom out of the unwonted, diffident flower. In order to save the species, conservationists must get the plant's putrid flower to bloom, as that's the only way botanists can obtain and share pollen and seed to propagate the species, Rutkowski said.

"Sumatran islands have an exploding population, so in order to feed their people they're clearing out Titan Arum's habitat. Pretty soon its natural habitat is going to be gone, and it only grows in one place in the world. The only way to save it is for plant scientists and conservatories to preserve it. That's why conservation botanists and conservatories around the world have been trying to grow them," she said.

Although yesterday's bloom has closed, more flowers should bloom soon, according to Leonard. 

"The bloom that just finished; we collected pollen off of it yesterday and we will use that pollen to pollinate the next bloom. Today we pulled in the second bud that's coming up, and it's going to bloom in about 10 days."

The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies the disappearing rainforest species as "vulnerable," which is one step away from being classified as endangered.

You can watch a live stream of the plant's unsavory redolence (and subsequent blooms) here.

All images credited to Wim L. Noorduin, Harvard University.

If you’re stuck inside on the Internet on a beautiful spring day, like us, please accept our condolences and this gallery of pictures of crystals induced to grow into beautiful, microscopic flowers. By manipulating the conditions where the crystals were forming, researchers were able to get the crystals to self-assemble as stems, leaves and buds, all on the tinest of scales.

Wim L. Noorduin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and his colleagues dissolved barium chloride  (a salt) and sodium silicate (also known as waterglass) into a beaker of water. Carbon dioxide from the air dissolved naturally into the water, fomenting a reaction to form barium carbonate crystals. In response to the crystals the pH of the solution surrounding them lowers, triggering a reaction with the dissolved waterglass, and adding a layer of silica to the growing structure. This reaction uses up acid from the solution and allows the barium carbonate crystals to continue to form.

As this process takes place, the shape the crystals take can be manipulated through changes to the solution–increases in carbon dioxide levels in the water creates “broad-leafed” structures. Reversing the pH gradient at the right moment can create curved, ruffled structures. "You can really collaborate with the self-assembly process," said Noorduin.

Noorduin and his team grew fields of the floral-looking crystals on glass slides, razor blades and even a penny they submerged in the solution. Then Noorduin took pictures of the crystals using an electron microscope to produce these false color images of the “flowers” after they assemble molecule by molecule. The black and white images aren’t quite as charming.

"When you look through the electron microscope, it really feels a bit like you’re diving in the ocean, seeing huge fields of coral and sponges," Noorduin said. "Sometimes I forget to take images because it's so nice to explore."’

Noorduin’s paper on the crystal manipulation is the May 17 issue of Science’s cover story.

Happy spring, anyway.

Hours after a highly-anticipated album gets leaked online, what can possibly be said about it? 

Not long after the stream for Daft Punk's Random Access Memories went live on Monday (following a leak on BitTorrent), a DJ tweeted his review, a widely-retweeted sentiment that would be echoed in some form or another, in quips across the web.

This wasn’t going to sit well with Daft Punk’s fans. But even indifferent listeners had reason for skepticism. At Pigeons and Planes, someone wrote an article called, “Why It's Too Early to Judge Daft Punk's New Album”:

The new Daft Punk album is here. It has arrived. Sit with it for a minute. Let it sink in. Play it at your next party. Let it spin at 3 a.m. when you’re high/drunk/sober/happy/ alone/with friends/depressed/whatever. Give it a little time. Let this album live. Music isn’t a science—it breathes and moves, it adjusts to its surroundings. We know that everyone wants to figure this out as quickly as possible, but that’s not the way to take in music, and an album release like this one just shows more clearly than ever how unhealthy the state of music really is. We are literally trying to review albums—no, album leaks—within 24 hours. When it’s something with as much history, anticipation, and relevance as the new Daft Punk project, is that really how we want to handle it?

What I know after listening to the new record for a couple of days: critics—and especially critics on social media, offering their first quick impressions—really don't know what the hell they're talking about when they talk about Random Access Memories.

This time, however, it's not because Daft Punk supposedly failed to live up to Homework and Discovery (depending on one's preference between the two). Instead, I'm going to blame the internet. It's turned into a disintegrating force in music. Piracy really isn't at fault; jackasses with opinions and platforms and itchy Twitter fingers are. And when would-be critics race to opine about a new song, video or album, whether it's through established music outlets, blogs, Facebook, or YouTube, they do a disservice to the audience. 

Everything is about velocity. The internet has virtually zero patience for thoughtful, reasoned critique. It can't wait. Much of this, obviously, has to do with the money imperative behind site traffic. The hits are the commodity that pays for the entire operation. Except in rare circumstances, the later one publishes a review of any given album, the less chance there is of social interaction. In other words, your shit won't sell if the post doesn't go live that day, and more usually, that hour. The new operating principle is this: to sell its shit, the Internet pumps out shit. So it goes.

There is, as one friend noted, very little interest in letting Random Access Memories live as a record and as an experience, whatever that may be. But any serious music fan knows that, like a good wine, like good fine art, like an idea, music needs to breathe. It has to have an atmosphere in which it can fully bloom, be tasted, and be discussed. For all the good technology has brought to the music listener, it has an unparalleled capability of burying good music (or hyping bad music) in a micro-second. It only takes one critic's impression to trigger a meme, a hive opinion, and so unmake the critical experience of a record for thousands of people. Think of it like the spread of a rumor, an information virus, the sort that can destabilize markets in seconds with false data, except with brains and musical taste. Disposable media begets disposable content. 

Granted, this phenomenon isn't new. It's a problem with criticism in general in an era of countless distractions. Hysteria or hyperbole is an excellent way to attract attention. But online, that kind of criticism gets taken to the nth degree.

Consider My Bloody Valentine's latest album, m b v. No one could possibly have spent the time required to pick up on every nuance, every shade and morsel of white noise and beautiful dissonance. And, yet, YouTube and Google searches were quickly polluted with reactionary opinions. The commenters may have been trolls; but they were also critics, turned by their sheer reach into arbiters of mass taste.

I almost fell victim to this hyper-criticism myself with m b v. After the sublime notes of “You Found Now” faded, my excitement dissipated with each successive track. Even so, I fell asleep with headphones on listening to the album. Days later, after I'd digested the album at full volume on my living room speakers, I sat down to write my review of m b v.

The Quietus, which typically balances solid criticism with more sensationalist or provocative editorials, took a slightly different tack. On May 1, writer Paul Smith reviewed Random Access Memories track-by-track. But he didn't jump to conclusions: “Random Access Memories is a gut-busting 75 minutes long. While too ambitious to evaluate after one listen, it’s a record that constantly surprises.”

Lauren Martin of FACT was much more succinct with the tweet: “Maybe lots of people are hating on RAM right now because it’s not very good … It’s not great or even god awful. Just, pish.” Again, this is a mere day after the stream was launched. Martin's opinion may ultimately represent a general consensus that RAM is middling, but it is still a rush to judgment. Something is very amiss in the world when Daft Punk is relegated to "pish," while unabashed praise is heaped on the overhyped Charlie XCX, who is, according to Martin, a “young pop star to be reckoned with." The hype is something to be reckoned with, but Charlie XCX's music could never be mistaken for earth-shattering.

Diplo's Twitter review isn’t even worth quoting. But one should read his tweets if only to understand that even famed producers can and do talk out of their asses, especially on Twitter.

Insta-critics, hyper-critics, or whatever they should be called, might write off any positive criticism of Random Access Memories as a byproduct of too much investment in Daft Punk. That may be fair, but passing a hastily definitive judgment two or three days after Daft Punk made the stream available is not. The dominance of this insta-criticism raises a serious question: is Daft Punk's album stream to blame here (to say nothing of its marketing strategy)? Or is that the internet is just not the right medium for serious, thoughtful music reviews, or criticism in general, for that matter?

The internet is how most of us experience music these days. But with the good, comes the bad. We can tour an entire genre in the space of an hour. But our demand for new music from the bands we love can turn an album leak viral in minutes. Post-leak, Daft Punk tried to soak up listeners with their own full album stream; but their giant squid-like promotion machine also set them up for fast, reactionary criticism.

Given its wildly successful viral marketing campaign, it's fair to say that even grandmothers and rubes have probably seen traces of the hype surrounding Daft Punk's new album Random Access Memories. It's understandable. Daft Punk have, over the years (and despite claims that the masks focused attention on the music) carefully and masterfully crafted a unique cult of personality for more than just the club kids. Kraftwerk is an obvious parallel, but perhaps Daft Punk borrowed more heavily from Space, a French electronic group whose members dressed in astronaut suits way back in the late '70s. Kiss is another analogue, albeit a creatively groan-worthy one.

The disguises, in fact, were an interesting postmodern touch, a meta-commentary on the alienation of digital music. When they managed to penetrate the mainstream in the early '90s, DJs and electronic music producers were largely faceless. The robot helmets, preceded by more primitive attempts (face paint, for instance, or paper masks), looked like an attempt to take the faceless, robotic DJ to its absurd conclusion. Around the same time, Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, Orbital, Underworld, and several other acts were putting a "face" on electronic music. Daft Punk's move was an odd one by comparison, but it certainly worked as a marketing tactic.

Daft Punk, circa 1996

With Random Access Memories, the mask motif and the whole Daft Punk brand reaches its absolute apex. Where else do Bangalter and Homem-Christo go from here? If the Alive tour was the height of Daft Punk in live format, Electroma their cinematic opus, and TRON: Legacy the duo's debut as film composers; then the whole Random Access Memories experience feels like the synthesis of the total Daft Punk mythos, an album three years in the making, with an impressive list of collaborators, a limited use of electronics, and a sound caught between visions of the future and nostalgia for the disco.

For years they've celebrated their robot alter egos and electronic music production, even though the music has always had a distinctive human element. They didn't just offer circuitry, but a complete nervous system—a full range of emotional response. Discovery was incredibly organic, while Human After All morphed into something less mechanistic and more elastic on the Alive tour. It was sublime vindication— especially for those who initially dug Human After All—when Daft Punk silenced the critics from atop their laser-lined psychedelic pyramid.

Now, seven years later, the insta-criticism seems unavoidable. One way or another RAM was going to make its way onto the internet, and be experienced in a less-than-ideal way. Perhaps they could have anticipated this, and preempted it. Given all of Daft Punk's talk about analog recording, vintage synthesizers, and going back to the past to find the future, did they think that perhaps the proper listening experience, like their apparently meticulous recording process, was best enjoyed slowly and in high-fidelity, in a way that mp3 files on computer speakers simply don’t allow? Did they ever consider releasing only an actual, touch-able record?

Daft Punk is, if anything, not daft. Surely they must have considered that their retro approach on Random Access Memories would meet head-on the kaleidoscopic ADHD, Tumblred version of the internet in which we all, for better or for worse, now live. If Daft Punk really wanted to be bold, they should have made Random Access Memories a vinyl-only release. It would have forced a degree of patience on both their fans and all curious individuals that we don't see much anymore.

And what is more, it might have helped to silence and save us all from all that traffic-baiting criticism. Including, even, my particular bit of it.

Read more DJ and Daft Punk

Did Boards of Canada Create the Weirdest Musical Rabbit Hole Ever? 

How Science Fiction Has Kept Daft Punk in Our Ears

Daft Punk Is the Apple of Dance Music

GIF courtesy Pitchfork

Caleb "Kai" Lawrence McGillvary with Jimmy Kimmel (via Facebook)

Remember Kai? The hatchet-wielding hobo of SMASHH!! SMAAASSHHH!! SAAAMAASHHH!! fame? The guy who made headlines after stopping some psycho who claimed he was Jesus Christ and ran over a bystander before attacking a group of women? Well, now Kai's wanted for murder.

ABC Local is reporting that an arrest warrant is out for Lawrence in connection to the murder of one Joseph Galry, who was found dead in his home on May 13. Reports are spotty, but authorities are considering Lawrence, last seen on Tuesday, to be armed and dangerous. He was last seen at a rail yard near Haddonfield, New Jersey. No matter the outcome, it's a truly bizarre and tragic twist to the "homefree" tale of everyone's favorite hatchet-wielding hobo, who it's been said harbors a bit of a violent streak. As he told told VICE last month, recalling stopping another dude after the Jesus incident: 

He was on a trip of dominance and control. I think he had a poisoned psyche. I've heard some of the research that people have been doing about his life and apparently he was a high school basketball coach for girls. That is fucked up. That truly sickens me. When I hear stuff about him getting jumped by six guys in a Fresno County jail and getting his jaw broken, I'm not going to lie to you, I celebrate that. People like that need to be fucking stopped.

For now, all we have are these words, which Lawrence put on Facebook two days ago:

what would you do if you woke up with a groggy head, metallic taste in your mouth, in a strangers house... walked to the mirror and seen come dripping from the side of your face from your mouth, and started wretching, realizing that someone had drugged, raped, and blown their fuckin load in you? what would you do?

We'll continue to follow this one. But what the fuck?

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson

From Vice UK

Deep within a mountain somewhere in west Texas, The Long Now Foundation are hard at work building a 500-foot clock that's been designed to run for 10,000 years. I know that sounds a bit like the folly of a Lone Star oil billionaire, but apparently this massive clock is going to adjust the manner in which we understand time itself, so I suppose that counts as having a purpose.

The team behind the construction—boasting names like Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine and, somewhat bizarrely, Brian Eno—want the clock to help destroy the short-term thinking they believe is plaguing society. Their aim is to engage the population so we all properly consider the ways we should be preparing for the future.

The giant clock might seem a slightly excessive way to do that, but when you've got Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos investing $42 million in your project, you don't really need to worry about excess.

Executive director Alexander Rose talked me through the concept.

VICE: Hey. So what's up with this gigantic clock?
Alexander Rose: The clock is an iconic project to inspire other people to get the conversation going about long-term thinking. I was once giving a tour to some IBM engineers and one gentleman said, "You know, this is never going to work. In 3,000 years, they're going to be sacrificing virgins on this thing and all the blood is going to drip into it and it's not going to work." And I said, "That may be, but before you walked in the door here, you weren't thinking 3,000 years in advance, so it's already working."

Sneaky.
Well, what we hope to do is make something so mythic and crazy that people want to tell stories about it and it becomes a meme that can be called upon. When people tell you that you can't do long term things, there will always be the 10,000 year clock.

I guess so—at least until the 10,001th year. What inspired the clock, Alexander?
"The Millennium Clock," a clock that ticked once a year, bonged once a century, and the cuckoo would come out once a millennium. If you make it "forever" or of an astronomic time scale of millions and billions of years it dwarfs the human experience and it doesn't feel like there's anything you can do that's important in that time scale. So we thought, What is the human civilizational moment? If you look back to the last ice age, when agriculture started, that's when large parts of the planet started having what we now call civilization. So that was chosen. If we can look back 10,000 years, then we can look forward 10,000 years.

I kind of see what you mean. Why Texas?
The current location was one that came as part of the funding from Jeff Bezos. When Jeff offered the property in west Texas, it was all private and allowed us to get going much faster. It had the attributes of being high in the desert, which is a great preservation environment away from cities—good for something lasting, away from the churn of cities and wars. We also wanted that distance so that people would have to travel to it, and while traveling they would have some conversations about it. Then, on their way back, they'll hopefully have changed a little bit.

You’re building a giant alarm clock, aren’t you? The future is going to be so pissed.
There are elements of the clock that we're leaving undone for future generations and anniversary events. The idea is that there will be a cool mechanical thing that happens on a year, a decade, a century, a millennium, and then a tenth millennium. We'll only build the year and decade ones, then the others would be left for other people to build in the future.

How are they going to know how to program it? Is there a manual?
Over 10,000 years, the platform dependence goes all the way back to the fundamentals of language, so we started looking at ways of making a modern Rosetta Stone by micro-etching silicone and then casting that into long lasting metal, like nickel. We've created a Rosetta disk, which has thousands of languages with parallel information on them so that anyone who found the disk could hopefully understand as many of the languages on the disk as possible. The later steps may be including some of the documentation alongside the clock and other projects that have several major world languages as part of that.

That’s cool.
With the Rosetta Project, we created the broadest language database and archive in the world. We literally had to collect stuff out of shoeboxes in Papua New Guinea, and we now have documentation of over 2,500 to 3,000 languages. We etched that into silicone using a gallium ion beam and casted that onto nickel so that it could last for a very long time.

That’s pretty amazing. So how long do you think it will be until the giant clock is finished?
I'm not sure.

Do you have an estimate?
Nope.

Really?
No.

Do you know how much it will cost overall?
No.

Well, this interview seems to have drawn to a natural close. Thanks Alexander.

All images by Rolfe Horn.

Follow Camille on Twitter: @camstanden

Image: Google

If the sprawling opening day at Google's I/O 2013 conference made one thing clear, it’s that Google knows everything about everything.

To stay competitive in today’s tech market, Google is brandishing its biggest weapon: Data. Massive amounts of data. The company knows so much about us it can serve as a cross between a personal assistant and a brain extension. The major product announcements from the opening day of Google’s annual developer conference reflect that, all trending toward the founders’ dream of artificial intelligence. Basically, Google is reading our data so that it will be able to read our minds.

All this personalized information has the potential to be transformative—so long as you’re not concerned with things like privacy or corporate world domination. It all depends on how much creepy we’re willing to put up with in exchange for usefulness.

In that spirit, here's a look at some of the magical and unnerving features announced at I/O:

“SEARCH AS WE KNOW IT IS OVER”

The world’s leading search engine admitted that search is totally antiquated. Google is inching closer towards the dream of the semantic web. It has updated the Knowledge Graph, which launched a year ago today, and is a mechanism to add contextual meaning to information in order to understand the intent behind a query and provide a better answer.

"Finding things is tricky, and so you really want intelligence,” Brin and Page said in their 2008 TED Talk. “And in fact, the ultimate search engine would be smart. It would be artificial intelligence.”

Now you can literally have a conversation with your computer. Google’s voice search/Siri counterpart called “hot wording” is available now on desktop. Say “OK Google,” and ask a question, request a reminder, pull up dinner reservations, and so on, and the computer will respond.

GOOGLE+ WILL SUCK A LITTLE LESS

Google is still pushing its social network, laboriously trying and failing to take on Facebook. Its big advantage? Again, intelligence. When you upload photos to Google+, it automatically highlights the photos it “thinks” are the best, based on whether or not people are smiling, if there are major landmarks in the shot and other data. “Your darkroom is now a data center,” the slogan goes.

Google will also smooth out wrinkles, perfect skin blemishes and automatically enhance the photos. (That is, unless you feel weird about this and turn it off.) For a little pizazz, a new feature called “Auto Awesome” takes a string of shots snapped in a sequence and automatically creates a short video with them—Google’s version of the GIF.

Also, Google+ got a redesign, so it’s prettier. Thank god.

REVAMPED MAPS

Google Maps for desktop got a total overhaul. The new user interface brings the full Google brain to the map experience; the goal is creating a personalized map for every user. Again the company is playing with anticipation and discovery here. When you search for places, it also makes recommendations based on Zagat reviews, what your Google+ contacts like, other places you’ve been. The map’s behavior morphs as you use it, remembering what you like, where you live and work, where you recently went. Creeped out yet?

It integrates info about flights, public transit, live incident reports, re-routes for traffic, and offers 360-degree tours inside local businesses. Google Earth and Street View are built in (no plug in or download needed) so you can transition to the third dimension instantly while you navigate. Google Earth zooms all the way out to space, where you can see Earth with real-time clouds. Real-time clouds, people!

Sign up to try it out here.

MUSIC

I was fully prepared to be underwhelmed by Google’s unfortunately named subscription music service--Google Play Music All Access--especially since I’m not the target audience, which is clearly Android users; the product was introduced by Chris Yerga, Android's engineering director. But now I must admit I found myself up until 2 a.m. playing around with it.

Google Play does what Spotify, Rdio and Pandora do, but nothing new—except, once again, it embraces Google’s ability to read your mind. You pull in your music library—automatically from your Google Play music locker, for anyone that actually has one—and it mixes with Google’s library of “millions” of songs. (They didn’t specify; Spotify has some 20 million.) Then based on what you own, have played recently, thumbed up and thumbed down, it will—yet again—make recommendations. And here’s a funny thing: There are curated playlists from Google's "music experts,” like introductions to emo (I know) or top tracks in down-tempo electro-pop.

I’m guessing that, for people not already living within the Google ecosystem, it’ll be a hard sell to steal users away from Spotify or Rdio, particularly since there’s no “freemium” option ($9.99/month or $7.99 for early adopters), though the 30-day free trial will help. Time will tell.

My best wager? If there's a second thing Day 1 of I/O made clear it's that the ecosystem Google is building is going get harder to resist.

Image via Youtube.

If you’re a horrible hell-demon who is summoned when someone reads an ancient parchment aloud, it must be devastating to see your grimoire become old, fragile and illegible. That’s the end of your haunting career, isn’t it? Maybe not anymore!

Developers at Cardiff University and Queen Mary, University of London, have developed a technique they call “microtomography,” that can read the text of rolled scrolls or folded documents without the potential for distress that opening them allows.

“The conservation community is rightly very protective of old documents and isn’t prepared to risk damaging them by opening them,” Tim Wess, professor at Cardiff University said. “Our breakthrough means they won’t have to. Across the world, literally thousands of previously unusable documents up to around a thousand years old could now become available for historical research. It really will be possible to read the unreadable.”

Parchment scrolls are especially susceptible to drying, cracking when they’re unrolled, as they’re literally made of skin. Being able to read a document without having to flatten it out opens documents to research that was heretofore impossible.

Microtomography works by taking an X-Ray of the document. The standard ink on medieval parchments was iron gall ink, made from tannins and iron, and it shows up on well in the series of “X-ray slices” taken by a tomography scanner that the researchers used at the Institute of Dentistry at Queen Mary, University of London, presumably because it was in England and therefore always available.  

And while tomography isn’t exactly new—CT and CAT scans operate via this principle—its combination with the software produces extremely legible and detailed page, which excites the developers. “What makes the technique stand out from other methods is the unprecedented high-contrast resolution it provides to clearly distinguish between text and parchment, meaning the text is much clearer and much more readable,” the audio slideshow voice over explains.

As a test case, the developers successfully scanned a medieval legal scroll provided by the Norfolk Record Office, but they also claim the technique has potential outside of discovering long lost, 12th century lamb recipes  and the like. “High-contrast microtomography has the potential to help opthamologists investigate problems relating to glaucoma,” the video says.



The developers next goal is making it faster and maybe even portable. My only request is that they read what they find silently to themselves at least once before saying it aloud and ruining a perfectly nice weekend in the woods.

 
 

via Flickr

By now you've maybe heard about one Ryan Fogle, an American detained recently by the Russian Federal Security Service. The FSB claims Fogle is a spy. The giveaway? All the goofball shit Fogle had on his person. To wit: two fluffy, Austin Powers-y wigs (blonde and black), sunglasses, piles of cash, a map of Moscow, compass, flashlight, an old cellphone, SIM cards, pocket knife, pepper gas canister, keyholder, alkaline batteries, a notebook, RFID shield, and a lighter. 

The things Ryan Fogle carried

And that's all well and good. Often it's archaic gadgets--not today's shiny new gadgets--that are best suited for cruising below the radar, or evade the gaze of CCTV cameras. But it would've been way fucking cooler, if entirely impractical, if Fogle toted around the following items, crowdsourced by Motherboard contributors 568, 771, and 420. 

1. Black turtleneck sweater

via

2. Fake mustache / facial hair

via

3. Eye patch (bonus points for fake 'stache)

via

4. Small-fry drone with mounted imager

via

5. Chutes and Ladders (diversion is crucial)

via

6. 3D-printed gum (in case of panic attack)

via

7. Google glasses

via

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson

NASA went out of its way to make sure Wednesday's status update on Kepler, the agency's planet-finding space telescope, wasn't seen as a funeral. But if I'm ever in the hospital and people start talking about me like this, kill me.

If Kepler's not dead, it's certainly a vegetable.

Scientists controlling the spacecraft went to check on it Tuesday and found that one of its four reaction wheels, which let the telescope point at things it wants to see, wasn't responding. NASA went through the same thing last year, and hasn't been able to get that reactor wheel working. It needs at least three to function, and John Grunsfeld, who runs NASA's science mission directorate, said the telescope "is not in a place where I or any other astronaut can go up and rescue it."

The other Kepler scientists aren't ready to take it off life support yet, but it seems like they're ready for the inevitable. In what seemed like a series of eulogies given by people whose careers are in danger of getting sequestered away (NASA is on the verge of canceling its Kepler Science Conference in November), Paul Hertz, astrophysics director at NASA HQ and Bill Borucki, Kepler's principal investigator, reminisced on the good times.

"I'm delighted that the mission gave us four years of excellent data," Borucki said. "On the other hand, I would have been even happier if it had continued for another four years. That would have been the frosting on the cake, but we do have an excellent cake."

He's got a point there: Kepler never gave us the ridiculously gorgeous images we get from Hubble, but it gave us the best evidence--at least if you use your imagination--that we're probably not alone in this big thing we call the universe. 

Artist rendering of Kepler-47, the first solar system discovered with multiple planets orbiting a pair of stars. Photo via.

Kepler's mission in life was to stare out into the night sky, monitoring approximately 150,000 star sequences constantly and looking for faint flickers. Those flickers, astronomers suggested, could be caused by planets passing in front of their stars during orbit. Take a look at the size and spot of the shadow the planets cast, and you've got a reasonable estimate of a planet's size and distance from its star. Find one that's in the "habitable zone"--far enough away so that you wouldn't be melted to death if you're a humanoid alien, but close enough to still have liquid water--then send our greetings to its (maybe) inhabitants when we develop a warp drive.

Kepler scientists were hoping to find a couple "Earth-like" planets--instead, they've found 132 confirmed planets, another 2,740 planet "candidates," and they still have at least two years worth of data to comb through. Scientists have also found "binary systems," a new, pretty common class of solar system with planets that orbit two stars.

Just last month, a Notre Dame astronomer found two planets in a five-planet solar system that are "the closest thing ever found to Earth." They are just 1.41 and 1.61 times the size of Earth, and are roughly as far away from their star as we are.

"Before we flew Kepler, we didn't know that Earth-sized planets in habitable zones were common throughout our galaxy," Hertz said. "We didn't know that virtually every star has planets."

If Kepler goes out like this, and it sounds like it probably will, it didn't have the best of timing. 

Just last week, the House Subcommittee on Space held a hearing called "Exoplanet Discoveries: Have We Found Other Earths?" in which Republicans Lamar Smith and Steven Palazzo heaped praised on Kepler and its discoveries. 

Palazzo said the discovery of planets in the habitable zone "has broad implications not only for the scientific community, but for all mankind." Smith said the "discovery of life outside our solar system would alter our priorities for space exploration and how we view our place in the universe."

Kind of a bummer, then, that Kepler is being put into a fuel-saving "Point Rest State," where it won't be able to do much besides sit there and hope someone can rescue it. The team is still exploring whether Kepler can be used to do some other sort of astronomy, but without being able to point it at a specific spot, that seems unlikely. 

There's still the off chance that NASA gets Kepler's wheel started again. But the wheels are known to have a limited lifetime, and Kepler's mission was only supposed to be three and a half years. When scientists saw the quality of information they were getting back, the mission was extended until at least 2016. Recent indications suggested that the wheel would be breaking soon, and it seems like NASA was trying to squeeze every last bit of data out of it.

"We do not know how much longer it will be able to maintain the very precise pointing required for its exoplanet mission, but we do know that Kepler's legacy is secure," Grunsfeld testified at the Congressional hearing last week. Consider these staggering numbers:

Thanks to the Kepler mission, we now know that when you go outside and look up at the night sky, virtually every star you see has at least one planet around it. Based on the latest Kepler results, scientists estimate that at least 17 percent of all the stars out there have rocky planets orbiting them. Of even greater interest, the results suggest that 15 percent of M stars–the smallest, coolest class of stars, but also by far the most common type of star in the galaxy–have rocky planets in the habitable zone. This number tells us that the nearest potentially habitable planet could be only 15 light-years away.Moreover, if that trend holds for other classes of stars, it would mean that there are approximately 50 billion potentially habitable rocky planets spread throughout our own galaxy.

NASA has the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite launching in 2017 and the James Webb Space Telescope launching in 2018--both missions will attempt to find planets located closer to Earth. Until then, scientists will parse through two more years worth of data, looking for a planet that looks like ours.

"People are saddened; it's definitely not good news for a mission that's been performing so well," Hertz said. "But after we've answered the questions [a mission] was built to answer, as Kepler has done, we move on to additional questions."

If old crippled Kepler's ready to kick the bucket, it's had a hell of a life.

Okay, so it won't be that bad. Yet. Image: Flickr

It already ranks as one of the grimmest measurements ever taken. Climate scientists found that for the first time in approximately three million years, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached 400 parts per million. The reason that figure was splashed across the front page of the New York Times—and why top White House advisors find it "truly frightening"—should be well understood by now. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas, and the more that accumulates in the atmosphere, the more sunlight it traps—and the more the globe warms. 

We've now added enough CO2 to the atmosphere to change the lives of every human on the planet. This isn't an exaggeration. An increasingly large portion of the CO2 clogging our atmosphere comes from human activity—from our coal-fired power plants, our petroleum burning cars, our factories. Before we had any of those, carbon dioxide accounted for just 280 ppm. That means we've already turned up the dial on the planet's central heating by some 42 percent.

As with most heating units, it will take a little time for the temperatures to catch up with the new setting. But many of those changes are already under way. Life in a world where carbon accounts for 400 ppm is going to be quite different from the old 280 ppm world. The climate is now fundamentally different than it was 40, 30, even 20 years ago. 

When I was born, in the mid-1980s, the amount of CO2 that had accumulated in the atmosphere was just enough to account for 350 ppm—the amount climatologists like NASA's Dr. James Hansen have identified as the threshold between a stable climate and an unpredictable, potentially volatile one. Between the 1800s and then, humans—mostly the United States and Europe—had built enough carbon-belching power plants and factories to add 70 ppm to the atmosphere.

Yet in my short life alone, human activity has pumped enough carbon pollution into our skies to raise the bar a full 50 ppm more. That's a huge change—out of the 120 ppm humans have added in total, nearly half of it has occurred in just under 30 years. That's the rest of the world following suit, building fossil fueled power plants and industrializing; the same way the U.S. did.

And that's enough carbon to transform our climate to the point that it better resembles another geologic era entirely: The Pliocene. That era, which took place from 5.8 to 2.6 million years ago, was the last time there was so much CO2 was blanketing the planet. According to the geological record, the CO2 levels of 360-400 ppm that marked the Pliocene made the world a drastically different place than the one that you and I grew up in.

Here are some characteristics of the 400 ppm world then—and those that are likely to be reprised in coming years:

-Sea levels were, on average, between 50 and 82 feet higher. 

-Temperatures were 2-3˚C higher, or about 4-6 ˚F, than they are today.

-Arctic temperatures were between 10-20 ˚C hotter. 

-Many species of both plants and animals existed several hundred kilometers north of where their nearest relatives exist today.

-Vast swaths of land turned into swamps. 

Image: Liverpool University

This is our 400 ppm world. Hotter, nastier, even less predictable than the one you got comfortable with. This is the world that your kids are going to be growing up in. And some of the irrevocable damage has already been done.

"We've taken one of the largest physical features on earth--the Arctic--and we've broken it; new data shows 80 percent of the ice that was there 40 years ago is gone. So now we'll find out what disappears between here and 450," Bill McKibben, the environmentalist and author of Eaarth: Life on a Strange New Planet, told me in an email.

What seems like pessimism is actually gloomy pragmatism. McKibben knows that if we keep our factories humming, our cars guzzling, and coal plants firing, we'll hit 450 ppm in less time than we hit 400.

"Sadly, we're shooting right past 400 ppm and likely to commit to at least 450 ppm within a matter of years if we don't begin ramping down our greenhouse gas emissions," the preeminent climatologist Michael E. Mann told me.

And if there's one thing that's worse than a 400 ppm world, it's a 450 ppm world.

"If we cross 450 ppm we likely commit to just under 4˚ F warming of the globe relative to preindustrial," Mann continued. "That's a world where the most extreme summers we've ever seen, like last summer, with its record heat and drought, decimated crops, unprecedented wildfires, and devastating Superstorm Sandy, will be the typical summer. And the extreme summers? There is no analog in our past for what that would look like."

That world is just decades, even years away. I won't recite a full list of dangers a world like this holds—the one that includes displaced climate refugees, tensions over diminishing resources, increased reach of tropical diseases, battered coastal populations—but suffice to say that the 400 ppm world and its successors can be ugly places. 

The Arctic is already melted. Sea levels are rapidly rising. We've seen a full 1˚ F of temperature rise since mid-century. Scientists are predicting that climate change is indeed going to devastate plant and animal habitats worldwide, much as it did in the Pliocene. This is the 400 ppm world, and it's upon us. The only question now is if we're going to keep cranking the central heat—are we going to turn this sauna into an inferno? We'd have to embrace a whiplash transition away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy—otherwise we can say hello to planet hotbox.

"Fortunately, there is still time to avoid that future," Mann says. "But not a whole lot of time. Breaching the sobering milestone of 400 ppm simply puts an exclamation mark on that."

Online piracy is so widespread that it's taken for granted as much as it's fought and denounced. A windfall for consumers and a major thorn in the side of the entertainment industry, illegal downloading has become a nice ripe hot-button issue used by politicians to ingratiate themselves with Hollywood. But just how major of a thorn is it really?

Digital piracy is deeply pervasive. It disrupts multibillion-dollar industries, and it's virtually un-studied--a trifecta that affords people on all sides of the debate the luxury of vaguery. You can say piracy costs the entertainment sector billions in lost revenue each month and no one would be in a position to argue.

In fact, a few industry associations have already offered estimates of downloading rates and revenue losses. For example, the Entertainment Software Association claims there were 9.8 million illegal downloads of 200 games in December 2009. But why would anyone trust those figures? Such groups aren't transparent about their methodologies and have every incentive to overestimate the rates and the costs.

This absence of credible data is a prop wielded by both sides of the debate over the causes and effects of digital piracy. A new study out this month is a good first whack aimed to chip away at that absence and give the digital piracy landscape some shape.

A team of researchers at universities in Denmark and Canada conducted what they call the first "large-scale" analysis of video game downloads executed via BitTorrent. During three months from late 2010 to early 2011, the team tracked 173 games of all kinds--racing games, first-person shooters, RPGs and others--across 14 popular platforms, including Xbox 360, Play Station 3, PC, iOS/Mac, Wii, Nintendo DS and PSP.

To gather the data, the researchers built a web crawler that queried BitTorrent for metadata containing server uniform resource identifiers. The data provided IP addresses of the people involved.

In observing the dissemination within the decentralized file-sharing network, researchers found that BitTorrent's downloader "swarm" for those 173 games tallied 12.7 million unique users from 250 countries. As it turns out, there are a ton of download-happy gamers in Eastern Europe--Romania, Croatia, Ukraine, Poland, Serbia and Armenia. There are a bunch more in Greece, Italy, Israel, Portugal and Qatar.

This is definitely not a case of developing countries vs. industrial countries but much more diverse," coauthor Anders Drachen told Wired. In a press release he said that "the numbers in our investigation suggest that previously reported magnitudes in game piracy are too high. It also appears that some common myths are wrong, e.g. that it is only shooters that get pirated, as we see a lot of activity for children's and family games on BitTorrent for the period we investigated."

Not surprisingly, the 10 most popular games were highly ranked on game review websites and accounted for more than 40 percent of the downloading. Each one garnered shares from more than 536,000 unique peers. They were: 

1. Fallout: New Vegas
2. Darksiders
3. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
4. NBA 2k11
5. TRON Evolution
6. Call of Duty: Black Ops
7. Starcraft 2
8. Star Wars the Force Unleashed 2
9. Two Worlds II
10. The Sims: Late Night

But the question of what these numbers mean to the industry is still up in the air. "How the number of unique peers translates into lost sales is a contested issue," the authors say, "and one that future research will investigate."

via NASA

News on the exoplanet front has been pretty excellent as of late. NASA's Kepler space telescope has found 132 confirmed exoplanets and a further 2,740 candidates. But the winning streak was broken over the weekend when Kepler suffered a critical hardware malfunction. The failure is certainly putting a damper on the mission, but it doesn’t mean the mission is over--or that we won’t find more exoplanets from Kepler. It just means the mission might be about to change. 

Kepler doesn’t find exoplanets directly. It doesn’t look at a star, see the telltale dip in light, and declare “planet, ho!” Rather, Kepler looks at starlight, focussing on one specific star to gather data about the light coming from that star. The information is then sent down to Earth where astronomers “read” it, looking specifically for dips in the star’s brightness, a telltale sign that a planet is crossing between the star and Kepler. The regularity of these dips tell astronomers about the planet’s orbit, and the change of light with every dip gives information on its size and possible type. 

Artwork of the Kepler spacecaft showing it's field of view (via)

The hard part for Kepler is staying still enough to capture subtle changes in a star’s light across incredibly large distances--we’re talking lightyears here. If the telescope moves at all, a subtle dip will be lost. To stay steady, Kepler relies on four reaction wheels driven by electric motors powered by the spacecraft’s own power supply.  The wheels spin, imparting a physical change on the spacecraft’s orientation (what's know as "attitude") based on the principle of angular momentum transfer and Newton’s Third Law, which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The computer knows just where to point Kepler and the wheels spin to get it in the right orientation. And it needs three of these reaction wheels for a pinpoint orientation. Just like pilots use three axes to orient themselves in flight--pitch (nose up and down), yaw (turning left and right), and roll (tilting wings) axes--so does Kepler. 

Reaction wheels are common. Mars orbiters use them. The Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting the Saturnian system uses them. And NASA knows they fail. That’s why Kepler launched with four. If one failed, there was a backup. And one did fail. Last July, wheel No. 2 went offline. But the spare was brought online and Kepler's stargazing business proceeded as usual.

What Kepler data--exoplanet Kepler 5-b, specifically--looks like (via)

And here’s where the problem is. Now wheel No. 4 is stuck leaving Kepler with only two axis for orientation. That's not enough to lock on to a target. 

The trouble started on Sunday. Kepler’s computer brain noticed it was drifting from its programmed position and immediately went into safe mode. When the Kepler team did their regularly scheduled check-in with the telescope on Tuesday they noticed the problem immediately. They soon realized one of the remaining wheels was stuck. At the moment, the team suspects the culprit is "a structural failure of the wheel bearing."

But the mission isn’t over. Aside from the stuck wheel, the spacecraft is stable and healthy, which means engineers can keep it in safe mode while they work the problem and figure out what the hell to do next. They need to run a series of tests to find out what’s good on the spacecraft and what else, if anything, might be malfunctioning as a result of the stuck wheel. They’re planning to try and unstick the wheel by running it backwards and then back and forth, like a car rocking out of a snowbank. They might try bringing wheel No. 2 back online; it’s a long shot but there’s a chance, somehow, that when they turn it back on after eight months' rest it will spring back to life. 

The team needs to see exactly what they’re working with before writing off the mission entirely. Once’s they’ve taken stock of the situation, they’ll start considering their options. If it looks like the wheel is damaged beyond repair and Kepler indeed won’t be able to lock on to one point in the sky for detailed images ever again, they might find a secondary use for the telescope. If everything else is working, it would be in NASA’s best interest to use all the systems they can while they can. But the team can’t even speculate on what those other applications might be before running the necessary tests. 

An artist's concept of potential habitable exoplanets as of July 2012 (via)

And unfortunately sending a crew to replace the wheel isn’t an option. Even if we still had the space shuttles up and running, Kepler orbits about 40 million miles away from the Earth; the International Space Station, the shuttle’s main target in its life, is only 200 miles away.  

In the meantime, while engineers figure out how to move forward with Kepler, the hunt for exoplanets is still on. There’s a backlog of data downloaded from Kepler, terabytes of data, that the team is confident will keep them and interested citizen scientists busy for at least a decade. 

As we wait for news on Kepler fate, it’s worth remembering that Kepler’s been working on borrowed time since its three-and-a-half year mission ended in November. And the mission will never be for naught. Not only has the telescope changed the way we look at the Universe--before it launched on March 7, 2009, we didn’t know there were planets around other stars in the sky. The lessons we've learned from mission will help scientists design better missions in the future. TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope, and future exoplanet hunters will be better designed to hone in on the right kind of exoplanets. 

And the team remains not only optimistic but thrilled at the mission as it’s happened so far. Kepler was born decades ago as an idea few thought would work and now it’s a worldwide favorite. No matter what happens now, Kepler will always be a success.   

To put it in pirate terms, prosecutors want the Swedish court of appeals to give a black spot to the domain registrar for aiding the scallywags of Pirate Bay. But ye olde registrar, .SE, feels like it only be granting passage to the Pirate Bay, and took to the Internet to say, “Avast! Don’t make us dance the hempen jig for that!”

Just as The Pirate Bay feared a month ago, when the site unsuccessfully tried emigrate from its native Swedish domain name (.se) to one in Greenland (.gl), the prosecutors are trying to cut off the file-sharing torrent site at its domain name.

To cut off those using The Pirate Bay for free music and movies, the prosecutors went to the District Court and the domain registrar to forfeit control of the domain names “piratebay.se” and “thepiratebay.se.” The domain registrar calls itself the Internet Infrastructure Foundation, but it goes by .SE for short, and it is Sweden’s largest. Danny Aerts, .SE’s CEO, explained that .SE doesn’t really see what it has to do with this.

“So, what have we done?” Aerts wrote. “[W]e administer nearly 1.3 million .se domain names. We provide a search and cataloging function, and assist in the translation from domain names to the actual address on the Internet – the IP address.”

The prosecution has decided to implicate .SE for doing exactly that. “They have been used as a means to commit crime," prosecutor Fredrik Inglad said, according to Reuters. "There is a significant criminal copyright infringement which causes a great deal of damage to many."

Through a somewhat idiosyncratically translated post on .SE’s own website, Aerts said that .SE “would naturally respond to the prosecutor’s perspective.” However, .SE’s position is that by going after The Pirate Bay’s domain name—and by extension .SE—no resolution will be reached. The Pirate Bay will live on, if not at piratebay.se, then somewhere else.

If history is any indication, he’s definitely right. Pirate Bay already transitioned from a “.org” domain in February 2012, to distance itself further from grasping American laws, and just got an Icelandic domain (.is). In fact, the prosecutors are already one step behind, because at this point the .se domain only redirects you to Pirate Bay’s newest home, piratebay.sx, registered appropriately enough, in the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten.

“Removing domain names from the address sphere is like removing the sign for a store in the city,” said Aert. “It will be harder for customers to locate the store, but the store nevertheless remains in place and customers who manage to get there can still shop there.”

Taking down the .se sites at this point only be a gesture, and it would be the mildest inconvenience, which is a price habitual torrent downloaders have proven they’re willing to pay.

In .SE’s own estimation, they’re not any more culpable for piracy at the Bay than Google is for helping you find the domain, and no one’s going after Google. “This is also my point,” said Aert, “where should the line be drawn for legal processes and matters of liability?”

The prosecution, chasing a website that claims it isn’t responsible for what peers share with other peers, actually probably wants an answer to that same question. Setting aside questions about what the act says about how the Internet will be legislated, clamping down on domain names is just treating a symptom and delaying a conversation that is probably overdue. 

Yup. That's the frothy shit that rose to the top. Image via

You know that awful moment you need to use a bathroom at a city park? You walk into that shady anti-oasis, turn its Fisher-Price-style-lock and try to avoid a few things: a) Breathing through your nose b) touching anything, or c) peering through that ring into the "bucket" of magenta soup and other people's darkest moments shit. Of course, it's not going to kill you, but it seems like it might.

According to a presentation by agricultural researchers at the University of Minnesota, there's quicker, tangible ways for shit to kill us. Layers of noxious foam–up to four feet thick–collect atop vats of manure at hog farms. Working as an airseal, the foam can capture large amounts of flammable methane beneath its bubbly surface. A stray spark from a welder, a mechanical heat element, or a worker's cigarette can create flash-fires and incredible blasts, capable of mass destruction.

While reports in the past have labeled farm explosions as "mysterious," awaiting evidence to link them to the shit bubbles, U of M's research offers some best practices for dealing with the fast-growing foam. Ventilation is key, and agitation of the stew is helpful. There is also talk of using monesin, an antibiotic generally given to cattle to help them grow faster, to treat the pits of dispair. Twenty-five pounds of monesin is effective in preventing half million-gallon tanks from foaming.

As research from schools in the Midwest continue to explore other treatment and management procedures, a worry lingers, like stink above a hog farm in July: That the explosive manure foam could become just another widely-acknowledged-yet-dismissed hazard of negligence and cost cutting, hissing in the background of the American food industry. But perhaps mass-scale loss of the Other White Meat will have farms and regulating agencies adopting a way to cut the shit, and remove these sudden-death suds.

@DanStuckey

ABC's Austin newsroom, via Trey Ratcliff/Flickr

In an attempt to cater to the changing habits of TV viewers, ABC will now live stream its programming on mobile devices. The Watch ABC app is now available in New York and Philadelphia, with expansions planned for coming months, and offers national, local and some on-demand channels, The New York Times reported yesterday.

In reality, ABC’s move is less about adapting to the future of television than it is about trying to prevent it, by stopping viewers from cord cutting—severing ties with oppressive and expensive cable packages (which of course include the broadcast networks)—which is becoming more popular in a world with Netflix, Hulu, and premium YouTube. After a free trial period through June, the live stream will only be available to dish or cable subscribers. 

But let me back up. The idea that traditional, linear TV is dead and dying comes as no great shock. We expect—we demand—to watch shows anytime, anywhere, and on any device. And free, or at least really cheap. Streaming sites like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon dangled this possibility in front of us, and now hope to lure people away from the cable bundle. And they’re doing a pretty good job; House of Cards helped Netflix soar to 30 million subscribers this year.

The cable companies fired back by giving viewers a little more of what we want with the “TV everywhere” approach—think HBO Go, or the ability to watch network shows online after they've aired. (To its credit, ABC was ahead of the other networks on this front, too.)

But when it comes down to the numbers, viewers are pretty damn hooked on old-school, live television, watching nearly 35 hours of TV a week, according to Nielsen. This is why Aereo is so interesting as a cable alternative. It still offers live programming from some 30 broadcast channels, via the internet and on mobile, at just $8-12 per month. That's quite a drop from, say, Time Warner Cable’s soul-crushing $60 per month package.

Personally, I couldn't be less excited about live streaming ABC shows. The shows are already available to watch on Hulu or ABC.com, and they aren’t even any good. Not being a huge sports fan, little is lost if I watch a program an hour or even a week after it first aired at my convenience.

If you ask me, the company that will conquer the future of the industry and collect its multi-billion-dollar prize will be the one that finally cracks a la carte. The biggest problem with TV today isn’t that we want to watch it on our smartphone, it’s that we’re force-fed cable packages with hundreds of channels we don’t want to watch at all.

This would totally disrupt the powerful cable model, which is largely why it hasn't gained momentum yet despite obvious consumer demand. (Remember the Take My Money, HBO campaign?) But the media giants are inching closer. Apple TV and Google’s YouTube are slowly making their way toward the a la carte model.

The trick could be simple consolidation. If you cobble together all the streaming options available now—a few key YouTube channels, Aereo for network TV, ABC’s live app, a Netflix account—you can probably get almost all the TV you want for still way less money than a cable package. But who has the time? (Has anyone tried?) Someone needs to step in and make it convenient, user-friendly and slick.

In the meantime, ABC's decision to live stream its programs on mobile won’t revolutionize the TV industry, but it is likely it’ll keep the 70-year-old television network in the game a bit longer.

Photo via

With deference to Paul Simon, these are the days of lasers in the jungles, lasers in the jungle, somewhere. Using absurdly futuristic-sounding laser technology, researchers have discovered what looks to be an ancient lost city in the Honduran jungle, possibly untouched by humans for thousands of years.

Flying high above the malaria, coral snakes and dense vegetation, which prohibit venturing into the jungles of the La Mosquitia region of Eastern Honduras on foot, American researchers created three-dimensional maps of the forest floor using “light detection and imaging," a type of optical radar called LiDAR.

LiDAR works by shooting 125,000 laser pulses per second at the ground and measuring the speed at which they bounce back. The technology is so sensitive that it can pick up changes in height smaller than four inches. And while outfitting an airplane with LiDAR can cost $1.5 million, it holds the potential to replace costly, blind and groping expeditions into the jungle.

That’s what Steve Elkins, an independent filmmaker and amateur archeologist, had planned on doing in Honduras before his expedition was washed out by Hurricane Mitch. Elkins had dreamed of searching for the legendary, lost Ciudad Blanca, the White City, for 20 years.

People have searched for the Ciudad Blanca and its legendary gold, dating back to Hernán Cortés. One form of the legend—and there are legendary lost cities spanning mythologies of Mesoamerica—says the indiginous Pech people of Honduras lived in the Ciudad Blanca until they mistreated a Tawaka Indian man, who cursed the place while leaving. The curse led to disease and catastrophes and the Pechs had to clear out, reliquishing the city to the forest and legend.

A scientist at NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory pointed out unusual features of this valley in La Mosquitia that might be hiding a city about 15 years ago. The valley was too remote for anyone to follow up on this lead until Elkins convinced the new National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping to give it a LiDAR scan.

Researchers from the NCALM flew Cessna airplanes outfitted with LiDAR above a 60 square mile area of jungle over several days in 2012. “99 percent of what's reflected comes off leaves,” Douglas Preston, who covered the expedition for The New Yorker, told NPR. “But here and there, there are tiny gaps in the canopy where a laser beam can reach the ground, bounce off and go back up to the plane. And then with massive software processing, they're able to remove all the reflections from leaves, leaving only the ground.”

The data was collected and sent to the University of Houston engineer Bill Carter, in West Virginia, to be analyzed. Within five minutes of looking at the data, Carter saw right angles and straight lines, telltale signs of human habitation. “He was thunderstruck,” Preston said. Carter “saw in this valley pyramids, structures, buildings, plazas, terracing, roads. He saw this incredible amount of archaeological features that he recognized immediately even though he's not an archaeologist.”

Photo via the University of Houston

The network of plazas and pyramids spans three sites, the largest of which, T3, is a massive five square kilometers. The lead archeologists on the project, Christopher Fisher and Stephen Leisz of Colorado State University, told The Independent that the hidden city “was probably home to a sophisticated Mesoamerican society, with paved streets, parks, pyramids and an advanced irrigation system.”

To discourage looting or to keep ahead of would-be Indiana Joneses, researchers remain tight-lipped about where the site is exactly. After being untouched for a dozen centuries or so, scientists are eager to get to the sites before the loggers and looters do. Preston’s New Yorker piece notes that scientist might not reach the sites before the people who are illegally logging massive mahogany trees in La Mosquitia do. So they are planning to helicopter into the site in early 2014, although Elkins mentioned returning in the fall.

While Peru has transformed re-discovered lost cities (found cities?) into tourist attractions, the inhospitable La Mosquitia jungle surrounding the sites makes casts doubt on future vacations to the White City—if that’s even what this is.

Image: EFF, CC

Remember SOPA? Remember how when we the people finally defeated SOPA everyone got so stoked that confetti poured out of their eyeballs and its opponents downloaded films and albums and pirated video games in celebration? Well, shortly after SOPA there was CISPA—the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act—a bill that is both scarier than Zombies and much less well known than SOPA .

On April 18, three days after the Boston Marathon bombing, CISPA passed in the House of Representatives. Obama’s White House has expressed “fundamental concerns” about CISPA. They are justifiably a bit turned off by how CISPA doesn’t specify precisely how it intends to spy on the internet—and when it is ok to spy on internet users—and that is a terrifying prospect.

As a Canadian, these American “fuck up the internet” bills have always been disconcerting. While Canadian sovereignty would ideally save anyone who lives in this country and errs on the wrong side of a SOPA or a CISPA—with so much internet traffic filtering through American-owned web servers—it is not out of the question that American jurisdiction could be called against an international cyber-offender. The state of Virginia, for example, claimed jurisdiction against the Hong Kong-owned Megaupload who was hosting their website in that state.

But now it appears that it’s going to be even easier for international copyright offenders to be tried in court by the interests–and lobbying power–of Hollywood. Starting today, 11 countries—Canada, America, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, Brunei, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand—are having a secret (no members of the public and no press) meeting in Lima, Peru to figure out what can be done about copyright offenders who transmit Hollywood’s precious content over the interweb’s tubes without paying for it.

The meeting is held under the banner of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement. They’re looking to sign an international treaty that will create world government-esque laws to handle anyone who downloads an early leak of Iron Man 3 illegally.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling this the “biggest global threat to the internet since ACTA.” If you remember, ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is an international, internet-policing treaty that was shut down by the European Parliament with a 92 percent nay vote. Luckily for Europeans, no EU country is anywhere near the TPP negotiations in Peru right now—and European politicians are now quick to distance themselves from the policies that ACTA is trying to ram down the world's throat.

But in North America, the ACTA movement is still very much alive. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government passed a bill in March that makes Canada more ACTA-friendly by allowing customs officers to destroy counterfeit goods and ratcheting up the criminal penalties against copyright offenders. And the United States has seized hip-hop blog domains without warning or trial, because they were alleged to host pirated material.

A leaked chapter outlining some preliminary discussion to re-examine intellectual property has revealed that TPP wants to add further checks and balances to restrict fair use. Those behind TPP want to make sure that if a teacher is trying to show some copyrighted material in their class for the purpose of education, or if a humorist using copyrighted material in an article for the purpose of satire, they’re doing so under what TPP calls a “good faith activity.”

The language in this leaked TPP chapter is incredibly dense and dates back to February 2011—so not only is it a confusing bit of writing, but it will also likely be revised over and over during this meeting in Peru. As it stands, the EFF is worried that “the United States is trying to export the worst parts of its intellectual property law without bringing any of the [fair use] protections.” And just like SOPA or CISPA, many people are concerned that the broad language in new legal terms like “good faith activity” will potentially lead to unjust prosecutions.

It may take a while before the results of this TPP meeting in Peru filter out to the press, but it’s crystal clear that even though SOPA died, the Hollywood lobby is more than willing to generate new legislation and international partnerships to protect its interests. SOPA, for a combination of reasons, incited the ire of the public. We saw SOPA blackouts where websites like Reddit and Wikipedia went offline for a day, celebrities spoke out against it on Twitter; there was a bona fide cultural movement.

But now, the language behind international efforts like ACTA or TPP is getting more and more obscure, the reporting on such efforts less and less frequent, and the meetings being held to define these treaties are being held behind closed doors. The wheels of government are moving quickly to restrict international copyright online as much as possible—with the lobby of Hollywood thrusting it forward—in order to preserve the profits of content gatekeepers like the RIAA and MPAA.

Everyone, including you and me, is using Facebook and Twitter more and more at work. In many cases, we expect that we should be able to. But we often forget that, in doing so, we're opening up our social media to the prying eyes of our employers.

Chances are one of the first things you do upon arrival at the office is check up on at least one of your social media platforms. It’s probably not in your job description, but it’s part of your morning ritual and it's a way to stay plugged in to (ir)relevant news.

But for many, using social media is not just a routine. People increasingly feel entitled to be able to stay connected. It's not a bad thing; social media has become so important to our lives that a lot people consider Instagram a workplace right. If your boss all the sudden announced a new policy banning personal email or social media at work, you might feel a little oppressed, and you’re not alone.

The reality is that employees spend a lot of time on social media sites during work hours. A recent study shows that a third of employees spend an hour or more a day at work on social media sites. A full quarter of the study’s subjects, which included 1,000 employees in the United States and Canada, indicated that they would not work for a company that did not allow them to use social media at work.

The results of the study performed by Intelligent Office seem to suggest that employees are beginning to see social media use as a right, rather than a luxury or business tool. But think about this: whenever your eyes are locked onto your Facebook account at work, your boss’s may be too.

Every email you send at work (including private ones) that goes through the company’s server is accessible to your employer.

We often forget that when we are at work the door is open for our employers to scrutinize our activity. Your employer can (and probably is) monitoring your work computer. In the office, unlike at home, you should have a devastatingly low expectation of privacy, and you can be certain that you have essentially no privacy rights to social media communications from work computers.

In this new study, just one third of employees admitted to using social networks for an hour or more per day, but in actuality, just about everyone in an office is probably checking some personal network or email at some point. Even way back in 2009 studies showed that 77 percent of Facebook users used the site at work. And “one hour a day” is likely a veiled way of saying “almost my entire work day,” because I know plenty of friends who are wasting spending two or more hours a day just on Gchat.

With everyone going hog-wild with social media on the clock, they fail to remember that if you do it from your work computer, you are waiving certain privacy rights with respect to that online activity. Your boss has access to every click. They can use keystroke trackers and your monitor your internet history. They can look at downloads, stored files, and internet messaging and chats. And while the specific laws will vary state to state, it should be apparent that you should have no expectation of privacy on your work computer. It goes all the way to the top: an employer isn’t barred by the 4th Amendment, which only stops the government from unlawful searches. (Occasionally.)

Every email you send at work (including private ones) that goes through the company’s server is accessible to your employer. The same principle applies to messages within social media platforms. Even under federal law, an employer can listen to your phone calls until they figure out that it is personal in nature. Likewise, all your text messages from your work phone are just as searchable, because as the Supreme Court held in Ontario v. Quon, you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy on your work phone.

Depending how you use it, social media is either a valuable business tool or a steamy dump of mindless blather. In either case, we feel entitled to be able to login and post while at work; for many of us, it’s the only way we can make it through an eight hour day. Whether we use it to be productive, or out of boredom, laziness, or pure insubordination, we have forgotten that working hours aren’t personal or private. Every time you log in at work, it’s like letting your boss log in as well.

In the end, you’ll have to choose which right is more important: privacy or social media. Since employers want to limit their liabilities (e.g. harassment suits, disclosure of trade secrets, theft of company time), it has historically been rare to find an employer who actively allows employees to use social networks on their own computers.

But with companies seeking new ways to remain relevant and productive, they may ask employees to pursue leads and sales through social media platforms. Just remember that logging in at work, even at the boss’s behest, may waive your right to privacy.

Top image via pursuethepassion/Flickr

via Flickr

The world's oldest water has the properties necessary to support life, a development that scientists think bodes well for the possibility of life on Mars and in other extreme environments.

Found seeping out of a borehole from an Ontario mine about a mile and a half below ground, the water is believed to have been isolated for at least 1.5 billion years, according to a study published Wednesday in Nature. 

Researchers found "abundant chemicals known to support life," such as hydrogen, methane, and isotopes of helium, neon, and argon in the water. The water is still being studied by researchers at Toronto University to see if there is any evidence of life or remnants of life.

The study is the latest to look for life in the unlikeliest of places--and more often than not, microbes seem to find a way to get their, umm, living on. 

Last year, an American team found all sorts of bacteria in Antarctica's Lake Vida, which is covered in more than 30 feet of ice, reaches temperatures of just 8.6 degrees Fahrenheit and is six times saltier than sea water. Life has also been found in deep sea hydrothermal vents, in storm clouds and in the Trinidad and Tobago's hydrocarbon Pitch Lake (which mimics conditions seen on Saturn's moon Titan). Meanwhile, Russian scientists studying samples from Antarctica's Lake Vostok--which remained untouched for 15 million years beneath 2.5 miles of ice--are still trying to get their shit together as they decide whether their samples are contaminated or not.   

The water discovered by researchers working on this latest study is believed to be the oldest isolated water ever discovered on Earth. Previously, super-old water incapable of supporting life had been discovered in bubbles formed in rock samples. 

"We've found an interconnected fluid system in the deep Canadian crystalline basement that is billions of years old, and capable of supporting life," Chris Ballentine, a professor at the University of Manchester and a coauthor of the study, said. He added that the finding is "central to the whole question of the origin of life, the sustainability of life, and life in extreme environments and on other planets."

The Canadian water is believed to have originated from the Precambrian Period, which dates from the birth of the world until the first complex organisms started developing about 541 million years ago. At the time, the only life Earth supported is believed to be microbial, so if the water supports any life, it'll almost definitely be bacterial. They'd also probably have noticed anything visible to the naked eye by now. 

Ballentine says that the water's makeup is similar to water found in a similar system in South Africa that supports life. Of course, the finding has researchers excited for what might one day be found on Mars and on other planets, if we ever decide to you know, actually go there. 

"What we can be sure of is that we have identified a way in which planets can create and preserve an environment friendly to microbial life for billions of years," Greg Holland, lead author of the study, said. "This is regardless of how inhospitable the surface might be, opening up the possibility of similar environments in the subsurface of Mars."

Start drilling, Curiosity Rover.

Photo: Blind Nomad/Flickr

Hunger is a well-known side effect smoking marijuana, and all those burritos, ice cream, and Bagel Bites have to take a toll on your waistline, right? Well, according to new research published in the The American Journal of Medicine, cannabis enthusiasts may very well be overweight, but weed isn't to blame.

Researchers found that people who regularly smoke marijuana actually have lower levels of fasting insulin and are less likely to be insulin resistant. What's more, the study found that current marijuana smokers are likely to have smaller waist circumferences than non-smokers. All of these are factors in diabetes risk, with pot smoking lowering that risk. 

Looking at data from over 4,600 patients—roughly 45 percent of which had never smoked or ingested pot, 43 percent had smoked pot in the past but didn't currently, and 12 percent were regular smokers—the study found that those people who had smoked in the past month had 16 percent lower fasting insulin levels than people who had never smoked pot. They also had lower levels of HOMA-IR (insulin resistance), along with higher levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol ("good" cholesterol). 

As for the part about smaller waists, this research found similar results to previous research that has found that even though regular marijuana users have, on average, higher levels of caloric intake—yes, if you didn't already know, the stereotype is backed up with research—there is an association with smoking pot and lower body mass index. 

The researchers note that all the data on frequency of marijuana use is self-reported, which may mean that people underestimate their use of pot or deny using it at all, but underestimation would tend to skew the results toward a lower association between more pot use and lower fasting insulin levels. 

Study co-author Elizabeth Penner comments,

It is possible that the inverse association in fasting insulin levels and insulin resistance seen among current marijuana users could be in part due to changes in usage patterns among those with a diagnosis of diabetes. However, after we excluded those subjects with a diagnosis of diabetes, the associations between marijuana use and insulin levels, HOMA-IR, waist circumference, and HDL-C were similar and remained statistically significant.

In other recent pot-isn't-nearly-as-bad-for-you-as-you-were-told news, The Oncology Report writes that a new survey of pot smokers in the US, Canada, UK, and New Zealand shows that regular marijuana smokers "are no more likely to develop lung cancer than are more likely to develop lung cancer than are people who indulge occasionally." 

Furthermore, 

In an analysis of marijuana smokers that excluded tobacco smokers, there were no significant differences in any of the comparisons, including habitual versus non-habitual use; number of joints smoked per day; duration of up to 20 years or a duration of more than 20 years.

That said, one of the report's authors, Dr Michael Alberts, reminds us that smoking anything isn't particularly good for the respiratory system. And before you start to argue that smoking weed is a viable diet plan, be forewarned that a combination of a good diet and regular exercise is probably a better idea.

The dawn of Google-fueled augmented reality is nigh. A legion of fan boys now anxiously awaits each Glass announcement, and speculating about the tech and mocking its wearers are both already well-established pastimes. 

A new bit of design fiction from Playground Labs feeds both fires. The group's video, which imagines what using Google Glass 2.0 will be like, climbed the front page of Reddit today. It has been viewed some 90,000 times. In Playground's own words, the aim of the video is to "think beyond version one. We wanted to visualize how heads up displays can affect our interactions with information, each other and the world."

Here's what they visualize, mostly: More and more efficient transactions. More personal getting up close and personal with products and price tags. More commodification of the user's time, and a more intimate relationship with your now-omnipresent bank account. 

That products like Glass may turn daily life into a neurotic consumerist hellscape isn't a new concern—to this day, my favorite Glass-related design fiction is the ad-filled parody of the original teaser—but I was nonetheless struck by how obsessed the designers were with having Google keep tabs on what we're buying and how much everything costs. 

In this future, augmented reality will tally your shopping lists, scan bar codes, price lattes, keep tabs of your video game scores, and tell you what time your advertisement-laden television show is coming on. It sounds exhausting and mind-numbing. Some of the ideas are neat—hands-free navigation for biking, in-depth instruction for musical instruments—but the majority of the "new interactions" are purely transactional. If this is indeed where Glass goes, it's going to be even worse than the haters thought.

This should be our chief worry about Glass; those cheap shots at how it looks silly are just distracting from the actual concerns about the deployment of reality-altering tech. Augmented reality is an intriguing prospect, one that's gaining traction with the public, and sure, there may be novel applications that make the world a more interesting and navigable place.

But we should be preparing to brace ourselves for that reality to eventually be infused with ads (Google's thankfully keeping them out for now, but don't expect that to last) and visual reccomendations mined from personal data collected from the things we look at all day. We should probably be questioning whether all that's worth getting slightly more efficent directions. Do we actually want to see our bank account hovering in the corner of our periphery all day? Do we want everything we experience to be broken down, harvested by algorithms, and commoditized? How badly do we need to improve our ability to comparison shop? This isn't just a phone in our pocket now—it's our eyeballs.

Some, at least, may agree with the top-voted YouTube comment on PlayGroundLabs' video: "I don't want any of that shit." 

When you get to the very bottom of the mysteries of the universe, it might be tempting to stop early. Quantum physics is weird and difficult enough without having to explain not just what it is--"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," Richard Feynman famously said--but why it is as well. Why did nature write rules for the very, very small world of particles differently than for relatively big things, like bedbugs and human beings? So, an electron or photon can be in more than one place at once, or even interact with another particle instantaneously across space-time, yet here we are in the macro world tied to the speed of light and definite positions. What the hell kind of deal is that?

A gut reaction might be that it seems totally unreasonable for the universe to be otherwise and still deliver life and, eventually, us. This is called the anthropic principle and it kind of just means that everything is like it is because it had to be to deliver us to observe it. Which is not a very good answer to any "why?" and it also happens to be way too general–sort of a bedrock "why?" and less a "why?" that specifically explains particles being in two places at once. Or, more accurately, why it has to be so that a particle can be in two places at once.

Here is one answer proposed by researchers in the new issue of Nature Communications. It's not a particularly easy answer, but it sums up well. First note that answers or reasons in science come in the form of principles, fundamental rules that all the other rules and junk come from. So what's being proposed is a new principle governing the universe and making quantum mechanics so.

A principle of 'accepting the facts' implies that a quantum bit (typically pictured as a 'Bloch ball') can look like a sphere but not like a polyhedron. Polyhedral bits have been linked to theories of discrete spacetime. By ruling out various alternative theories of nature, the principle may help to explain why the world is quantum/Timothy Yeo / CQT, National University of Singapore

It's basically a formalised version of "accepting the facts," according to the University of Singapore's Stephanie Wehne. It goes like this: the only way to get information from something (a system, properly) is to disturb it. Which actually sounds just like a restatement of what we always say about quantum mechanics: you can't observe a particle without changing it. This is the property that lies at the heart of quantum encryption–an eavesdropper can't look at a message without changing it and alerting the sender. The above principle is different, however, in that it demands the reverse. That is, if you get no information from an observation, there is no way you could have observed it.

Now that is actually something to let bounce around your skull a bit: if a thing is entirely the same before and after the observation, there was no observation. Or at least there was no useful, or new, observation. You could still convince yourself otherwise, however: say, in the case of Schrodinger's cat, existing in a superposition of alive and dead until someone opens the box and makes a determination either way. If you opened the box and found a dead cat, closed the box, and opened the box again to find the same dead cat, you didn't actually observe the cat because the cat has already been disturbed (by the first opening of the box), according to the new principle. On the second opening, you have gained no new information. Same dead cat.

Here is how co-author Corsin Pfister explained it in an email: "The principle that we suggest could, roughly speaking, be rephrased as follows: Every measurement for which you know the outcome in advance can be performed in a way such that it does not lead to disturbance. This is what we assume in our paper. From this assumption, we derive that a physical state space cannot be discrete in the sense that it only has finitely many states. This impossibility of discreteness is a consequence of the principle, not the principle itself."

As to how this actually might be tested in the future, Pfister was kind of enough to provide an explanation:

Scientists try to explain things that seem counterintuitive at first as logical consequences of things that they do find reasonable. The latter is what is called a "postulate." A postulate is, by its very definition, something for which no further justification is provided. It is a starting point of logical reasoning. On a theoretical level, you can accept it, or reject it. If you accept it, then you will also accept its consequences, because they can be derived from the postulate by nothing but logical reasoning. Our principle is a postulate, and as such, it can be accepted by theoretical physicists--or not. The importance of our work is to show the strong consequences of this innocent-looking principle.

 

Let me give you some motivation for why this principle is reasonable. First of all, our everyday life experience is completely in accordance with the principle. This is because everyday life is governed by classical physics, which perfectly respects our postulate. Quantum theory also satisfies the principle. Even more, it satisfies it in a much stronger form: If you know the outcome of a measurement with high probability, then you can perform the measurement such that it causes only little disturbance; the higher the probability, the lower the disturbance. Summarized, the "reasonable" theories of nature that we have respect the principle. 

 

Experimental physicists, however, don't just accept physical assumptions, they test them. When it comes to testing our postulate, there are two things to be mentioned. First, our principle is universal in its character, meaning that it doesn't rely on a particular physical system or quantity, but instead applies to all physical systems. Thus, falsification of our postulate is not restricted to a particular experiment.

I'm going to go think about this for a while on a rock with weed, and I suggest you do the same. Maybe ponder how your relationship to the world, or your ability to have a relationship to the world, is dependent on being able to exchange new information with it. That's less "well, duh" than it seems.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv. 

The US government has shutdown a key source of dollar funding for MtGox, the largest bitcoin exchange.

Dwolla, a Paypal clone popular among bitcoin users, confirmed that the online payment network had received a seizure warrant from the Department of Homeland Security.

"The Department of Homeland Security and US District Court for the District of Maryland issued a ‘Seizure Warrant’ for the funds associated with Mutum Sigillum’s Dwolla account (a.k.a. Mt. Gox)," a Dwolla spokesperson told BetaBeat. "Dwolla has ceased all account activities... for Mutum Sigillum while Dwolla’s holding partner transferred Mutum Sigillum’s balance, per the warrant."

Dwolla didn't say why the seizure happened. MtGox seems to be even more in the dark.

“Like many who have contacted us, MtGox has read on the Internet that the United States Department of Homeland Security had a court order and/or warrant issued from the United States District Court in Maryland which it served upon the Dwolla mobile payment service with respect to accounts used for trading with MtGox,” the company stated in a post on Facebook.

In other words, they have no idea what’s going on. “However, as of this time we have not been provided with a copy of the court order and/or warrant, and do not know its scope and/or the reasons for its issuance.”

We can only assume that the US believes some sort of crime is being committed.

This fresh development comes two weeks after CoinLab, another bitcoin exchange, sued MtGox for $75 million over a breached partnership agreement announced just three months ago. According to the contract, MtGox was supposed to transition all North American customers onto CoinLab’s systems by March 22, a deadline the company missed. CoinLab founder Peter Vessenes, who is also the executive chairman and treasurer of the Bitcoin Foundation, defended the suit in a company statement.

“Bitcoiners have, on average, lost more money due to technology difficulties, frozen / lost banking relationships and shady characters like pirateat40 than due to any part of Bitcoin's fundamental economics,” Vessenes wrote. “I hate this fact, passionately. I have a vision in which high quality service and technology and ethics can be delivered to you, me, my kids, everyone who has a stake in Bitcoin.”

Vessenes was less polite in an interview last week. “You've got to remember that just six to nine months ago there were just people living in their basements who were running, essentially, banks,” he told Wired, ignoring the fact that numerous successful startups have had similarly humble beginnings. (Apple comes to mind.)

“And they're kinda like 'my brother and my people, let's do this thing together,' and then they're like ‘oh, I erased the file,’ or, ‘oh, I don't know what happened to those coins, sorry I'm leaving now -- you never knew my real name.’ I feel terrible that that happens, even though it's not me that does it, or it's not me that sends those guys money. Someone gullible sent them money and I fucking hate that.”

Vessenes is, of course, biased, but MtGox has done itself few favors.

MtGox stands for Magic the Gathering Online Exchange. That’s right, the company was initially created to trade Magic cards online. The current infrastructure still relies on this outdated platform and it’s why the exchange has struggled to deal with rising volume. When the most recent bubble popped, MtGox was forced to suspend trading for an entire day, adding to the chaos of the crash. The company has never been known for its customer service.

Still, the very public squabble is a bad look for bitcoin as two of the community’s biggest power players fight for marketshare. This is pure greed. The CEOs of both firms are board members of the Bitcoin Foundation.

Ironically, if MtGox had followed the partnership agreement, this latest government seizure could have been avoided. With CoinLab managing US and Canadian exchanges, the Tokyo-based MtGox may have skirted US jurisdictions. But such disputes are never black and white. We don’t yet know MtGox’s side of the story.

In any case, this one-two punch could prove a bitter blow for a company that, at last check, handles 66 percent of all bitcoin trades with estimated revenues of $22 million a year, according to the Verge's estimates. Now that it’s lost it’s largest conduit of American dollars, MtGox’s days could be numbered, pending an investigation by the DHS -- not that many within the community would complain too loudly. Given its spotty service record, MtGox’s demise could help pave the way for mainstream adoption, as more professional companies ultimately take its place.

The whole ordeal proves two points. The battle for supremacy within the bitcoin ecosystem is becoming serious business. And it doesn’t matter if your company is based in Japan, you won’t get very far if you don’t follow the rules. Does that mean bitcoin is growing up?

Image: Bloom Energy

Fuel cells are a tough sell. So much so that GreenTech Media has a running joke: it opens its fuel cell articles with a list of the top three profitable companies in the field. Inevitably, all three are slots are blank. Get it? Despite the fact that the basic technology has existed for decades now, not a single major company has managed to make a fuel cell product viable.

Until now-ish, maybe. The biggest fuel cell concern running, Bloom Energy, is edging perilously close to profitability. Its 100 kilowatt solid oxide fuel cells, called Bloom Boxes, have now been installed at Google, Bank of America, Walmart, and beyond, for around $700,000 a pop. 

The company just received another round of investment, which pushed the total to upwards of $1.1 billion dollars, making Bloom Silicon Valley's biggest bet on fuel cell tech. The Bloom Boxes work "like a battery that always runs," as the company describes it. The boxes are made of "stacks" consisting of an electrolyte, an anode, and a cathode. In the Bloom Box, the "anode and cathode are made from special inks that coat the electrolyte. Unlike other types of fuel cells, no precious metals, corrosive acids, or molten materials are required."

So it's pretty safe, too. And because the fuel cell is super-hot, it's very efficient at converting air and fuel into electricity (no combustion required). But what do we want these things for again? It's pretty expensive and rather fragile for a relatively small power supply, after all.

Well, it's clean, if natural gas is the fuel input—cleaner than, say, a diesel generator. And, as Michael Graham Richards points out, these Boxes could prove ideal for supplementing clean energy sources like wind or solar that can only provide intermittent power. If the tech ends up working as well as Bloom says they do, they could very well be cheaper than batteries. So adding a natural gas-fed fuel cell to a solar setup could feasibly guarantee 24-hr power with truly negligible carbon emissions. 

That's a worthy prospect. And if Bloom can turn a out a reliable product, and then profit, it can ramp up production and get costs down further. Then the billion dollar fuel cell just might pay off. 

The start of work on the Belo Monte dam project, via minplanpac/Flickr

That the output of hydropower projects is likely to decline in most regions as our climate changes is a given. A new piece in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paints a fuller picture of how localized changes in weather in Brazil brought about by deforestation could dramatically slash the output of the highly controversial 11.2 gigawatt Belo Monte Dam. 

Taking into account both the direct and indirect effects of deforestation in the Xingu River basin of the Amazon, the researchers found that under business-as-usual scenarios for deforestation through 2050, the power generation of Belo Monte could just be 25 percent of its total installed capacity due to changes in water availability. 

Even under current conditions output of the dam is likely to be under 50 percent of installed capacity in all but three to five months of the year, the study found.

It's generally thought (somewhat sadly, considering its greater impact) that deforestation in a watershed will increase the output of a hydroelectric project, due to declines in evapotranspiration, resulting from lower forest cover, outweighing any declines in precipitation associated with with forest loss. 

This research confirmed that deforestation in the Xingu basin would increase water discharge by four to eight percent (assuming 20 percent deforestation) or 10 to 12 percent (assuming 40 percent deforestation). However, taking into account the decreased precipitation resulting from that deforestation, the balance tipped strongly in the other direction, with river discharge decreasing anywhere from six to 36 percent.

Study co-author Marcos Costa notes, 

These results are extremely important for long-term energy planning. We are investing billions of dollars in hydropower plants around the world. The more rainforests are left standing, the more water we'll have in the rivers, and the more electricity we'll be able to get from these projects.

Though this report looks at one specific region in the Amazon, it does also note that similar relationships between forest cover and rainfall exists across the Amazon, as well as in rainforests in Central Africa and Southeast Asia. In all three locations there is a considerable push to expand hydropower. 

In general, the report reminds us that, "The potential of regional deforestation to inhibit rainfall sufficiently to constrain energy generation is greatest where rainfall seasonality is already pronounced, and where deforestation is expected to be the greatest."

Over 90 percent of the electricity consumed in Brazil comes from hydropower, with roughly 1000 GW of untapped hydropower potential outside of areas set aside for conservation or otherwise off-limits. But even if they're outside of protected areas, tapping into those hydropower reserves isn't necessarily a good idea, considering the significant environmental and climate change effects of building large dams, particularly in tropical forests. Additionally, this new study suggests that estimates of hydropower potential might be optimistic. 

A screencap from Canipre's website

As you may already know, Voltage Pictures, the company responsible for the movie The Hurt Locker, (as well as a million movies you've never heard of) is currently in court, attempting to get an Ontario-based internet service provider to release the names associated with over 1000 IP addresses that they claim belong to people who illegally downloaded their copyrighted material. 

These IP addresses were gathered by an extraordinarily douchey company called Canipre, the only antipiracy enforcement firm currently offering services in Canada. 

Canipre, as a company, offers to track down people who are illegally downloading copyrighted material from record companies and film studios. According to their website, they have issued more than 3,500,000 takedown notices, and their work has led to multimillion dollar damages awards, injunctions, seizure of assets, and even incarceration.

But it's not like Canipre is doing this just to get rich. In a recent interview, Canipre's managing director Barry Logan explained that it's about much more than just money—he's hoping to teach the Canadian public a moral lesson:

 "[We want to] change social attitudes toward downloading. Many people know it is illegal but they continue to do it... Our collective goal is not to sue everybody… but to change the sense of entitlement that people have, regarding Internet-based theft of property.”

Here is a screenshot of the front page of the Canipre website as it appeared when I visited it this morning. 

The image you see in the background is this self portrait, by Steve Houk.

I contacted Steve and asked if they had sought permission to use the picture. Steve said, "No. In no way have I authorized or licensed this image to anyone in any way."

Oh, dear. 

Read the rest over at VICE.com.

The Skylab Space Station launched on May 14, 1973. It was the last time a Saturn V rocket flew. Via Wikipedia

Today marks 40 years since NASA’s first space station, Skylab, was launched into orbit. It was very nearly a disaster. 

Skylab began life as the Apollo Applications Program. AAP was a multistage program designed to build on the lessons learned during Apollo with the ultimate goal of establishing a firm and lasting human presence in space.

At the core of AAP was a so-called “wet workshop.” After riding a Saturn V rocket into orbit, astronauts would refurbish the spent SIV-B upper stage into a workspace, turning it into the first space station module. Subsequent launches on Saturn Vs and smaller Saturn 1B rockets would add habitat modules, more hardware, and more workshops to this first module to create a massive orbiting installation. The plan was to start AAP right on the heels of Apollo. NASA wouldn’t miss a beat. 

But the budget cuts that killed the last three lunar Apollo missions—Apollos 18, 19, and 20—took their toll on AAP. There was suddenly no room in the budget for a long-term, multistage orbital installation project. NASA could launch a single module into orbit or do nothing. It chose the single launch, and named this heavily revised program Skylab. 

With the name change came a change of design: the Skylab workstation would be built on Earth and launched ready for work. The “wet” workshop became a “dry” one, or one that was ready to at launch. But the core of the station remained the same, still made of an unused SIV-B upper stage of the Saturn V, and it would still use solar panels as its main power source.

Luckily, the cancelation of three lunar Apollo missions meant there was a spare Saturn V to launch the large station into orbit. It also meant NASA could tack on hardware to the station on Earth rather than launching it separately. Specifically, this included a solar observatory called the Apollo Telescope Mount.

Skylab as seen by the last crew to leave it in 1974, via Wikipedia

The Skylab space station was launched, without a crew, on May 14, 1973. Almost immediately the problems started. Vibrations from the Saturn V rocket in the early stages of the launch shook Skylab enough that one of its micrometeoroid shields ripped off, taking one of the station’s solar panels with it.

The damaged station reached orbit a few minutes later and the full extent of the problems became known. Not only had the micrometeorite shied sheared off one of the solar panels, debris had wrapped around the other preventing it from deploying fully. The station was in orbit, but severely crippled. 

For the crew that was meant to follow the station into orbit the next day—Apollo veteran and Moonwalker Pete Conrad, Joe Kerwin, and Paul Weitz—the station’s problems were maddening. NASA postponed the Skylab 2 launch to give engineers and technicians time to develop some kind of repair procedures. Conrad grew increasingly anxious as the delay wore on. He knew the best way to fix the problem was to send his crew up to survey the damage and report on what they saw, but NASA was wary of taking chances.

Instead, the agency remotely maneuvered Skylab so the Apollo Telescope Mount’s solar panels faced the sun. It was an attempt to harness as much solar power as possible, but there was a catch. The loss of the meteoroid shield meant that in this orientation the workshop was exposed to untempered sunlight. Temperatures inside the workstation rose to 126 degrees Fahrenheit. But at least it had some power. 

Finally, the Skylab 2 crew launched ten days later on May 25, 1973. They carried several solar shades into orbit to shield the workspace from the Sun’s glare as well as a variety of tools that they hoped would help them free the jammed solar array.  

A cutaway illustration of Skylab, via Wikipedia

When the crew arrived, they found the heat inside Skylab so intense they could only work for short periods at a time, so they addressed that problem first. On their second day in orbit, the crew deployed one of the solar shades through an airlock in the workshop’s side. Measuring 22 by 24 feet and composed of woven nylon, mylar, and aluminum, the shade reflected enough solar energy to lower the internal temperatures to tolerable levels.

The crew then set to work on freeing the jammed solar array. The first try failed, but on their second attempt they managed to release to panel. With the panels deployed and the shade in place, Skylab was a working space station. The Skylab 2 crew had saved the program, and when they splashed down on June 22 after spending a little over 28 days in orbit, they left behind behind a fully functional orbital space station. It was only the first chapter of space drama for Skylab—the Skylab 4 mission saw mutiny—but the short-lived program stands as a lasting success for NASA's efforts to extend man's presence in orbit.

Image via mbsurf/Flickr

There are few drugs more readily available to 21st century Americans than caffeine. It long ago made the jump from coffee and sodas into energy drinks and guarana-infused shots, and now the leg-jiggling alkaloid is worming its way out of your drinks and into your food via "energized” sunflower seeds and “extreme sport” jelly beans. The myriad marriages of snack and psychostimulant have become so widespread that the FDA announced earlier this month they would be investigating the “very disturbing” trend and its potential effects on children.

And now, documents suggest caffeine could show up somewhere even farther from the coffee cup: your toothbrush.

A patent application that recently became public record reveals the Colgate-Palmolive Company is researching technology that would allow chemicals to be embedded into the heads of standard toothbrushes and slowly released during use.

A three-month supply of caffeine could be embedded into the tongue-scraper on the back of a toothbrush, the application reads. So could doses of aspirin. Or benzocaine, for teething babies. Or, it expressly states, appetite suppressants. Colgate wants to patent a diet toothbrush.

The toothbrushes would be delineated by differently shaped tongue cleaners: An apple shape means apple flavor, a snowflake means a cooling sensation. A toothbrush featuring a warming sensation would be indicated by a candle, the Sun, or, the application proposes, “a flamethrower.”

Sriracha-infused toothbrush, anybody?

While Colgate could not be reached for comment about the potential for bringing the product to market, it shows startling innovation for a company selling a dental-cleaning implement that has gone conceptually unchanged for more than 500 years.

But this innovation comes at a turbulent time for the “caffeinate everything” movement. Wrigley just announced that it would be pulling their new “Alert” caffeine gum off the market until the FDA has some time to do its research, and the agency has so far not provided any timeline for a ruling, if there will even be one.

“The gum is just one more unfortunate example of the trend to add caffeine to food,” said FDA deputy commissioner Michael R. Taylor, in a statement that also warned against both energy drinks being marketed to children and caffeinated waffles even existing. Taylor indicated plans to investigate caffeine’s effects on adolescents and “address the types of products that are appropriate for the addition of caffeine,” which could lead to regulation against “some in the food industry” that seem to be “on a dubious, potentially dangerous path.”

If the FDA could stomp the caffeinated malt beverage in its tracks, they could surely take on caffeinated marshmallows.

One day, your tongue cleaner may have an appetite suppressant reservoir built in.

The FDA's potential stance on the proposed caffeinated toothbrushes is unclear, and trying to find someone at the organization to speculate proved to be less than fruitful. Standard toothbrushes don’t need to wait for FDA approval to be sold, so long as their design is submitted to the agency.

But if the experience of Beam Technologies is any indication, caffeinated toothbrushes would face some serious head winds. When the company released a Bluetooth-enabled toothbrush last year, the FDA stepped in immediately, according to GigaOM, saying that the new toothbrush was essentially a new medical device, meaning the FDA needed to clear it before it went to market. They’d likely have something to say about a toothbrush that replaced music and an iPhone app with drugs.

Another group that will likely want to jump into the fray is the Colgate marketing department: In addition to the flamethrower-shaped tongue cleaner, the application also suggests that a toothbrush featuring “a floral material might be communicated by a representation of a female figure, while a musk scent might be communicated by a representation of a male figure.” Appeal of a musky toothbrush aside, the labels could get interesting.

So, too, when it comes to combining sensations: A cooling/lemon combo might feature “a snowflake within a lemon,” for example, and one can only imagine what convoluted hieroglyphs would surface on a combination cheeseburger/caffeine toothbrush; ditto the toothbrushes containing “active materials designed for sporting activities, such as, for example, energy boosting materials, vitamins, minerals and the like.”

Really, supplement-infused toothbrushes shouldn't come as much of a surprise in a world where Vitamin Water exists. People love any health or food technology that offers perceived added benefits, and aside from adding Bluetooth and lasers, how else are firms going to disrupt the toothbrush game? By adding musky vitamin strips, of course.

Image: Flickr

For decades, the automobile has reigned supreme over the hearts and minds of America's youth. But sometime over the last decade, the car's dominance finally began to slip—and its twin killers aren't high gas prices, or another shinier transit contraption. They're Facebook and Brooklyn.

Since the 1940s, there has been no rite of passage more fraught with symbolism for a middle class kid than The Acquiring of the Driver's License. It was certainly a momentous occasion for me: Finally, I could go anywhere I wanted. I was high on adrenaline for days. I could drive. 

But it never really occurred to me that the reason that moment felt so infused with a sense of freedom was because the built environment I'd grown up in had taken that freedom away in the first place. In my teens and preteens, I lived in a woodsy suburb that left great distances between myself and a social hub of any kind. It took me ten minutes to ride my bike to the closest dusty sandwich shop. I could walk to my best friend's house, who lived in a neighboring development, but it meant hopping a fence and facing down and/or frantically eluding a pair of nasty dogs—often deterrent enough to keep the both of us home. 

Everything else—parks where we played soccer, the pizza place where we played arcade games, and, mostly, other friends across town—was simply unreachable by anything but a major, time intensive bike trip. Or getting dropped off by Mom. In effect, suburban development itself was withholding most of the stuff I wanted to do as a teenager. No wonder it felt like such a liberating release when I could finally go spend time with my friends whenever I felt like it.

With all that in mind, it's interesting to note a new trend uncovered by the public advocacy research group U.S. Pirg—young people have officially begun to lose interest in driving. After six consecutive decades of unimpeded growth in driving rates, they began to stagnate in the mid '00s. 

As the New York Times reports today, "the number of miles driven — both over all and per capita — began to drop" at precisely that time. But the drop was most pronounced among young people. In fact, the Pirg report shows that "Young people aged 16 to 34 drove 23 percent fewer miles on average in 2009 than they did in 2001—a greater decline in driving than any other age group."

There are likely two separate engines motivating this trend. The first is that the upper and middle class youth in their twenties and early thirties, those most likely to be able to afford a car (or to come from families that can afford to buy them one), are moving into cities where they're unnecessary. Much digital ink has been spilled over these "Millennials" and their predilection for moving to hip, Brooklyn-esque communities where they can walk everywhere and ditch the SUVs of their forebears. But the data, collected by the U.S. Department of Transportation, pretty much bears it out.

I'm evidence, I guess—once one of those wide-eyed car lovers, I moved to Brooklyn from car-heavy southern California and sold my Ford. I haven't regretted ditching it at all. Brooklyn certainly isn't the only model, but it has become a "global brand" for hip urbanity (the New York Times told me so, in about 3,000 different trend pieces). Young, affluent people now overwhelmingly want to be able to walk or bike to artisanal restaurants, sweaty music venues, and bars stocked with organic beers. That's partly why places like Charlotte are focusing on walkability. That's in no small part Brooklyn's doing/fault.

But the other explanation for the decline in driving is more interesting: the rise in internet use amongst the same demographic that used to be so eager to hop behind the wheel. A study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan discovered that "a higher proportion of internet users was associated with a lower licensure rate," which they found to be "consistent with the hypothesis that access to virtual contact reduces the need for actual contact among young people."

More time on Facebook, less driver's licenses. It might seem like an absurd sort of zero sum game to play, but it actually makes a good deal of sense. Thinking back to my own early car-driving days, I recall exactly what I did after exiting the DMV: I drove to my friend's house who lived across town. Then to another friend's. I beamed, I probably tried to act cool, maybe I awkwardly leaned up against my parents' Subaru. Then I went home. 

Both were friends who I'd previously had to get rides from Mom to visit, and both were girls, so that used to be embarrassing. Now I could talk to them without anyone cramping my style, on my own terms—the way tens of millions of teenagers are currently Facebook chatting their friends right now.

I grew up right in the midst of the proto-social media boom. Some of my friends used AOL Instant Messenger, some didn't. I had an account, but never took to it. Those that did had access to a conduit that allowed for robust, private personal communication with groups of friends at a time. In other words, there's less of a burning incentive to drive on over to that friend's house if you've gotten entirely comfortable chatting, playing games, and so forth from your own room.

Studies bear this out, too. Just look at the driving rates in 1983 (the year I was born, coincidentally) and 2008, as mapped out by the U of M study:

And we know from the Pirg study that the trend is holding—those researchers think the declining in driving will continue until at least 2040. Which seems eminently plausible. As more folks from the affluent 18-34 demographic settle in cities, the need for cars will diminish. More parents simply won't own them. Which means the physical barriers to socializing erected by the suburbs will thus never be put in place, and teens won't need to overcome them to feel liberated. Meanwhile, social media will still be providing alternative channels for interaction.

These two colliding factors may indeed wear down the allure car. The prospect of driving, after all, is only exciting if there are places you're dying to go. Growing up in a place where all of your friends and activities are already within walking distance, and being able to bridge the rest of the gaps online—gaming, gossiping, etc—may hopelessly antiquate that four-cylinder headrush. 

Which is great, really. That "liberation" you get from the car is fleeting—it quickly fades, first into schlepping your buddies around town, then into speeding tickets, and eventually into brain-numbing commutes across smoggy, congested highways. You realize that cars are ultimately confined to roads clogged with other cars, running on the same limiting rails—like trains, just more dangerous, and no drinking.

Yet I can see why conservatives are so protective of their automobiles, which they so consistently associate cars with "freedom" (and also why many seem to hate trains so much). There's a deeply psychological association that was forged in those early years: getting access to the car keys was in some ways like getting access to a giant chat room. That liberating sense of being able to go wherever you want, to talk to whoever you want. 

Image: Allen Ginsberg

Again, much has been written about our fading romance with cars; the high mythology of American Graffiti and On the Road and every car commercial ever giving way to other, less transit-related and more digitally-oriented fantasies. But especially in those searching road narratives and teenage car porn films, an argument can be made that everyone's really just driving around looking for someone to talk to, someone who'll listen up. The pages of On the Road are filled with whirlwind dialog, but the great irony is of course that none of it really sinks in; Dean is crazy and poetic, but he can't figure out how to listen to anyone. Sal is lonely as hell. None of them can articulate what it is they're looking for out there; the need to drive is a need to connect (I just earned my lit major stripes there, right?). 

But ultimately, it didn't work. Cars didn't end up awarding us freedom, nor did they serve to better connect us to our friends and communities. On the contrary: they turned out to be temporarily exciting engines of isolation that sort of despoiled the environment along the way. So we're in the process of moving on; we're sussing out new routes by which to connect, through which to move around our communities. Maybe walkable neighborhoods and social media won't prove to be ideal, either; maybe it will be Google Cars and ride-sharing, or light rail and Skype. Who knows. The only thing that's certain is that the American romance with driving is dying off, and the kids are looking for a more sustainable way to move their brains around.

Photo: Göran Höglund/Flickr

Here's another piece of the picture of the Himalayan glaciers melting: Researchers from the University of Milan have documented the extent of glacier retreat on Mount Everest and in the surrounding Sagarmatha National Park, showing that in the past fifty years glaciers in the vicinity of world's highest mountain have decreased in size overall by 13 percent. In the same time period, the end of glaciers have retreated 400 meters (roughly 1300 feet) on average.

This amount of melting is roughly similar to other glaciers in the eastern and central Himalaya—and if Everest is similar to other glaciers in the region much of this melting has taken place in the past decade and a half or so. 

That 13 percent average figure hides some far more dramatic declines in snow and ice cover though. The survey found that glaciers smaller than one square kilometer (247 acres) in size have melted back 43 percent.

Accompanying the glacier melting, the snow line on Everest has ascended 180 meters (590 feet) since 1962. 

As for the causes of this, the researchers note that in since the early 1990s the region has experienced both a decrease in precipitation and an increase in temperature. Since 1992 the region on the Nepal-China border has experienced a 0.6°C temperature rise. Precipitation outside of the monsoon season and in winter has decreased by 100 millimeters (3.9"). 

Though lead researcher Sudeep Thakuri was careful to point out that they have yet to establish a firm connection between climate change and the glacier melting in the Everest region, it appears to be scientific caution. Plenty of other researchers have made this firm connection, as well as a connection with the effects of black carbon pollution on the region of the world often called the world's Third Pole, due to the massive amount of ice and snow stored there. 

On the black carbon connection with glacier melting first: Research carried out by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2010 found that roughly 90 percent of glacier melting is being caused by aerosol pollution, with at least 30 percent caused by black carbon pollution. When black carbon (that is, soot from cooking stoves and diesel engines) falls on the glaciers it changes the reflectivity of the snow and ice, allowing it to absorb more sunlight, causing it to melt more quickly. Black soot is also contributes to warming more broadly. 

The US Geological Survey places the blame for Himalayan glacier melting squarely on climate change, noting that though some glaciers in the western Himalayas are actually advancing (due to highly localized conditions), many are in retreat, impacting "water supplies to millions of people, [increasing] the likelihood of outburst floods that threaten the life and property in nearby areas, and [contributing] to sea level rise." 

Thakuri hits a similar point: "The Himalayan glaciers and ice caps are considered a water tower for Asia since they store and supply water downstream during the dry season. Downstream populations are dependent on the melt water for agriculture, drinking, and power production." 

Two of the main rivers of South Asia, the Indus and the Ganges, get about 40 percent of their water from glacial runoff. As glaciers continue to melt there will be an initial increase in water flow, but over time this will decrease markedly, potentially to the point that many rivers would become seasonal, dependent on monsoon rains for their flow.

The Infowars folks aren't taking government ammo hoarding lightly.

Last month, conservative blogger Matt Drudge tweeted that he predicts 2013 will be the "year of Alex Jones," the conspiracy theorist extraordinaire who most recently made headlines by suggesting that the Boston Marathon bombings were a "false flag" attack perpetrated by the FBI.

Drudge has a point. As the leading purveyor of New World Order conspiracies, Jones has a growing Internet following of casual fearmongers who see nefarious government intrigue in the most mundane bureaucratic chores (e.g. water fluoridation), and believe it's only a matter of time before we are all living in FEMA concentration camps.

To the average person, this looks like lunacy. But is it all just conspiratorial blather? Or is there any truth to what Alex Jones and his fanboys are selling?

Mostly, the ideas are just nuts. But the most recent conspiracy theory du jour—that the government is stockpiling ammunition for an eventual showdown with the American people—has been surprisingly resilient.

The theory first began circulating last year, when the Infowars crowd noticed that the Department of Homeland Security had put in a procurement request for 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition—a surprisingly large number of bullets, even by a normal person's estimation. 

DHS has tried to quell the rumor-mongering, assuring Congress that the bullets are primarily used for training purposes. A DHS spokesman told Republican House investigators last month that the department wasn't actually planning on buying all 1.6 billion bullets, and that the ammo would be spread over 70,000 agents over five years. In a letter to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) last November, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that DHS plans to buy around $37 million worth of ammo in 2013, which, based on past year’s expenses, would amount to around 100 million rounds. She also pointed out that the department has actually marginally decreased its ammunitions purchases over the last few years.

As bullets fly off the shelves, Alex Jones has warned his audience that the ammo shortage is a sign that the federal government is gearing up for widespread civic unrest.

Still, that does seem like a lot of ammo for a non-defense agency. In 2012, DHS purchased more than 103 million rounds of ammo, an average of about 1,500 bullets per DHS officer. According to Napolitano, DHS had over 263 million rounds of ammunition in its inventory at the end of 2012.

Coupled with a recent nationwide ammunitions shortage, the apparent government stockpiling has sent the conspiracy theory mill into overdrive. As bullets fly off the shelves, Alex Jones has warned his audience that the ammo shortage is a sign that the federal government is gearing up for widespread civic unrest, and engaging in an "arms race against the American people."

That as-yet unfounded fear is underscored by an interesting nationwide trend: A recent poll found that a full 29 percent of Americans—including 44 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of independents—believe a revolution to protect their liberties might be necessary in the next few years.

If more than a quarter of the population, and nearly half of Republicans, believes that an armed confrontation with the government is imminent—and they are buying up weapons and ammo to prepare for the struggle—then it would only be logical for the federal government, and the Department of Homeland Security in particular, to prepare for this contingency.

But is the US government and the hundreds of billions of dollars of yearly military spending really trying to incite an "arms race" with citizens? Until US citizens start equipping themselves with Predator drones and aircraft carriers, the government will always have the upper hand when it comes to the use of force.

With that in mind, the idea that Homeland Security is trying to buy up all the bullets so civilians can't have any is silly. Who cares how much ammo anti-government citizens buy when they're facing an opposition with the largest budgets on Earth? So while it is true that there are currently off-and-on ammo shortages being reported around the country, Homeland Security purchasing plans (for the future, mind you) aren't to blame. 

"Shortages have happened before but this seems to be a little more pronounced," said Mike Bazinet, a spokesperson for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry lobbying group. "Ammunition manufacturers are working their facilities 24/7 to meet the demand, they are loading them up on trucks and putting them on the shelves, but they are moving very quickly once they get to retailers."

Bazinet dismissed the conspiracy theories, and said that the ammo shortage is primarily attributable to the recent increase in gun sales, a trend documented by the rise in FBI background checks for gun purchases.

“We've obviously seen the reports that the shortage is due to government stockpiling, but they are not accurate,” he said. "Government purchases are not the cause for shortages of retail product.”

But some members of Congress aren't buying it. To that end, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) and Rep. Frank Lucas (R-OK) recently introduced the AMMO Act, which would restrict non-defense agencies from purchasing ammo above the monthly average bought from 2000-2009, before the Obama administration took office. The law would also require the federal government to conduct a report auditing its ammunition purchase and their effect on the retail ammunition supply.

Is this going to be suburban America in five years? Well, no, but all of those bullets have to be used somewhere, right? Via the Defense Department

Inhofe, for one, has suggested that the government stockpiling is a backdoor effort by Democrats to implement gun control measures that couldn't pass the Senate.

"President Obama has been adamant about curbing law-abiding Americans’ access and opportunities to exercise their Second Amendment rights," he said in a press release. "One way the Obama Administration is able to do this is by limiting what’s available in the market with federal agencies purchasing unnecessary stockpiles of ammunition."

In a recent interview, Lucas was a little more measured. He told me that he wasn't sure why the government needed so much ammunition, but that the perceived government stockpiling was sparking "fear" among average gun owners.

"There is a great suspicion in the countryside," Lucas said. "Part of it is that the actions of this administration have caused so much fear among people that ammunition might not be available in the future."

As a result, he added, “people are stockpiling in a way that they never have before."

More than a quarter of the population, and nearly half of Republicans, believes that an armed confrontation with the government is imminent.

So far, there is no hard evidence to link the government’s ammo purchases to the rise in conspiratorial right-wing dissent. And obviously, it seems like a stretch to say that the government is in an “arms race” to deprive Americans of bullets.  

But as New World Order conspiracy theories increasingly permeate civic life, right-wing conspiracy theorists appear to be taking concrete steps to prepare for what they see as an inevitable showdown, even if those steps often amount to showing off personal arsenals on the web.

What is for certain is that government conspiracy theories are gaining traction. We're already seeing the results of this on a small scale with the sovereign citizen movement, and the Southern Poverty Law Center has recently noted an "explosive growth" of radical antigovernment groups, just to name a couple.

So regardless of whether or not the government is stockpiling ammunition to keep people from revolting, a sizeable portion of the nation thinks that's the case. And now that members of Congress appear to be on board, the sticky conspiracy theory is causing real trouble on Capitol Hill. But rest assured that for the majority of people that "believe" armed confrontation is imminent, actually rounding up a militia to carry it out is a much larger stretch.