You're sitting in an air-conditioned trailer somewhere in Nevada, one hand clutching a joystick, the other tapping out commands on a keyboard. You're a US Air Force (or CIA) Predator drone pilot. You're about two hours into a 12-hour spy- and kill-sh…
Here's a warm blanket for you to nestle into this weekend. The Washington Post has been running an investigative report on the U.S. military's shadow wars throughout the Horn of Africa. These special operations have become the preserve of hulking, so…
How much gold could you cram into a pocket? Or into a briefcase?
China's largest and eminently loathable electronics manufacturer Foxconn is taking the fall for the iPhone 5 shortage that's annoyed consumers and worried investors in recent weeks. What's the holdup? They don't have enough parts? They're training ne…
For all the arguing over design minutiae in Apple's ongoing _thermonuclear patent war_ -- rounded corners this, unlock slider that -- you'd think the company would be obsessing internally over making sure any new product development is clean as a whi…
When I was younger I played soccer this time of year, every year. One of my earliest memories of the sport was being confined to playing indoors, where my brother and I shared a similar disdain for the sealed environment which was that, "Indoor socce…
If a man in a white coat put a camera-equipped helmet on your head and told you to trust everything you saw as reality, wouldn't you feel a little funny? And then wouldn't you be a little tripped out when they took it off and try to distinguish what
It's not news that technology is getting smaller, faster, but once things start happening on a molecular level, it starts to get kind of ridiculous. Scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology just published breakthrough research in Natur…
Up until now, multi-billion dollar electronics companies like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have dominated the video game industry. With the help of hundred-person video game studios and massive marketing campaigns, they've been consistently successfu…
It's sunny, 93 goddamned degrees, and in a matter of hours I, along with millions and millions of my fellow countrymen and women, get to cut loose and for 24 hours maybe not feel totally awful about being 'Mericans, for once. It'll be a whirlwind of
It's "never been a good look":http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/9/19/the-bad-omen-of-america-s-falling-drone-syndrome when American drones plummet, for reasons known or unknown, into remote, tribally held areas across the Middle East, or over the U.S…
Notice a pattern? The weak link in the next gen of manned military aircraft is invariably the man (or nowadays, woman). Pilots need oxygen. They need information fed to eyes that never stay in one place, in heads that come in a maddening array of sha…
“Digital sprawl” is guaranteed to lead to our doom.
Last year, a programmer from Japan and a 23- year old student from Northwestern "continued humanity's obsession":http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/10/26/occu-%CF%80-the-strange-history-of-counting-to-pi-3-14159265301 with _pi_ when they successfully c…
Contrary to popular belief, the first computer wasn't Philadelphia's ENIAC. It was the desk-size machine built by "John Vincent Atanasoff":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vincent_Atanasoff and Clifford Berry in the basement of the physics building
_by "Tobias Leingruber":https://twitter.com/tbx._ HTML, or Hyper Text Markup Language, is the basic code structure that create websites, and it consists of elements called tags. For example "" defines a new paragraph or "…
As a civilization speeding headlong into uncharted terrains, we get our kicks staring out the window at all the outmoded stuff going out of focus in our collective rearview. We obsess over the newly obsolete, the antiques of recent history. We consta…
Even including the weirdly-accessorized New Wave heyday, was there ever a band as assuredly from the future as Devo? It's doubtful. Between their attire, occasional on-stage antics and endless reel of synth-heavy astro jams, Devo has a loving place i…
Sometime yesterday afternoon, a colleague of mine, who’s based in Baltimore, had an incoming call from a number he didn’t recognize. Like many of us, Michael didn’t pick up. The area code, 710, looked strange. That’s because it is. Of the roughly…
…To get back to the "warning that I received":http://www.hark.com/clips/ygmhswwswk-brown-acid-warning. You may take it with however many grains of salt you wish. The brown capacitors that are circulating around us aren’t, specifically, too good. It i…
My computer, a decent-enough 2011 Lenovo laptop, sucks up about 20 watts of electricty during average use, about half the amount of electricty as my weak bedside lamp. ENIAC, born in 1946 and considered the first-ever general purpose computer, used a…
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a tidy person, I vacuum my house and of course keep myself clean, so and so forth. ‘Brush your hands and wash your teeth’ (is that how it goes?) and all that. But once you move out of your parent’s house, you no longer have…
