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GL Audio 230: Too Many Cookies

Gadget Lab Staff — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 22:00:00 +0000

The flood of new Nexus hardware finally abates! First the Player, then the tablet, and now finally, the phone. The hosts discuss. Also: the tyranny of product reviews, Twitter’s video plans, Apple’s iMessage debacle, and Mike’s memories of the power station at Battersea.

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John Cleese on the Black Knight and Douglas Adams’ High Heels

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 08 Nov 2014 11:30:22 +0000

Writer and comedian John Cleese is known worldwide as a member of the zany sketch comedy troupe Monty Python, as the laughably despicable hotel proprietor Basil Fawlty, and for countless other roles, including more recent appearances in the Harry Potter, James Bond, and Shrek films. His new memoir So Anyway… starts with his early childhood and focuses on the years leading up to the formation of Monty Python. One critic has branded the book “self-absorbed,” a charge Cleese dismisses.

“I sort of had the feeling that that was probably the point of an autobiography,” Cleese says in Episode 124 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Maybe when I write the next autobiography he wants me to write it about someone else.”

Cleese recounts his youth with brutal honesty, judging himself a wimp as a child, physically and socially awkward as a teen, and conspicuously lacking in talent and enthusiasm as a young performer. His saving grace was his quick wit and ability to make people laugh, which earned him a spot in the Footlights at Cambridge and eventually landed him his early jobs in television. The book covers Cleese’s first marriage and his difficult relationship with his mother, but the focus is firmly on his life as an entertainer.

“There’s a little bit in there about my emotional life, where I think it’s interesting,” he says. “Because I think most of life is relatively boring, and I do try very hard not to be boring.”

Relationships with media figures such as David Frost and Peter Sellers play a larger role, which means the book may appeal most to aspiring writers and comedians, who can learn from Cleese’s example that less talented performers can nevertheless excel if they think hard about what makes comedy work, as Cleese clearly has.

“The primary purpose of the book is to make people laugh,” he says. “And I think there are stories in there that are as funny as any I’ve told.”

Listen to our complete interview with John Cleese in Episode 124 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above), and read some highlights from the interview below.

John Cleese on meeting Douglas Adams:

“I met Douglas two or three times. I was introduced to him on one occasion, I remember, and I noticed how tall he was. About four days later I went to a party—Graham [Chapman] was there, I remember—and suddenly Douglas appeared, and we had a long chat. But what surprised me was that he was towering above me. Now, I’m six-four and a half, and I was quite surprised that he seemed to have grown. But I noticed after we’d been chatting for some time that he was wearing four inch high heels, and I was thinking that this was very bizarre. I’ve never met a very tall man who wore high heels before, but I didn’t like to ask him—I didn’t know if it was a joke or what. I subsequently knew him a bit. He asked me to do a voice for his computer game, for which he had great hopes. And apparently his friends in the computer business told him that the time of that type of game had passed, but he’d put an enormous amount of work into it—in fact, I think he’d done so much work that he was unable to pay me for doing the voice of the bomb, but I did it anyway, in exchange for a Chinese meal.”

John Cleese on discussing Life of Brian with Bible scholars:

“I was fascinated to find that the serious academics there—including guys whose books I’ve read, since I’m interested in the subject, like Bart Ehrman—they said that the movie itself had actually influenced academic thought, and I found that hard to credit, but they told me absolutely genuinely that that was the case. But I think that this is because people, whatever discipline they’re in, get slightly stuck in the accepted norms of that discipline, you know? And when I said to one very senior cleric that it seemed to me that the Sermon on the Mount was all about trying to reduce the power of one’s ego, which seems to me exactly what it’s about—it doesn’t say ‘blessed are the powerful’ or ‘blessed are the rich,’ it’s not about power, it’s about the opposite of power—and he found that quite revolutionary. So it’s stuff I’d like to get more interested in. But the fact is that anybody who thinks that the Bible was breathed into existence by God just hasn’t read about the history of the Bible, and how various conferences or synods or whatever you want to call them chose which books would be the definitive version by a vote, and certain books were excluded, like the Gospel of Thomas, which I think are rather more interesting than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”

John Cleese on Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

“There was a lovely guy named ‘Jumper’ Gee who died at the age of 101, and who managed to fight in both World Wars—I never came across anyone else who did that. He was a good teacher of English and I liked him enormously, and he would go off on these wonderful excursions where they were nothing to do with the subject he was teaching, and he told this story about a wrestling match that had taken place in ancient Rome. … There was a particularly tough contest in progress, and one of the wrestlers, his arm broke—the difficulty of the embrace was so great that his arm broke under the pressure—and he submitted because of the appalling pain he was in. And the referee sort of disentangled them and said to the other guy, ‘You won,’ and the other guy was rather unresponsive, and the referee realized the other guy was dead. And this was an example to ‘Jumper’ Gee of the fact that if you didn’t give up you couldn’t lose, and I always thought this was a very dodgy conclusion, but it stuck in my mind for years, and so probably 15 years later when I was writing for The Holy Grail with Graham, I told him about that, and that’s where the Black Knight sketch came from.”

John Cleese on creativity:

“I lecture on creativity, and I point out that if you could be creative by applying ordinary logic, then anyone who was logical could do it, and the fact is they can’t. There are some extraordinarily logical people who actually are not terribly good at being creative. Creativity comes from the unconscious, that’s where most of the really unusual and special ideas come from. … If you take someone like Edison, who was a pretty extraordinary scientist, he had a particular methodology to his inventions. He thought that he got his best inventions when he was on the verge of falling asleep, and he used to sit in a chair holding ball bearings in his hands, with a brass bowl under his hands, so that when he fell asleep he’d drop the ball bearings and the noise would wake him up, and in that way he could spend quite a long period of time in that twilight area between being very tired and actually falling asleep, and that’s when he said he got most of his ideas. Now that’s clearly not relying on logic.”

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GL Audio 229: There’s Android in my Mayonnaise!

Gadget Lab Staff — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 21:00:00 +0000

Today we’re giving thumbs down to the Amazon Echo, thumbs up to the Nexus line and its new “Lollipop” OS, and a tenuous ‘maybe’ to voice command tests on various platforms.

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Crowdfunded Magazines Take Aim at Sexism in Fantasy and Horror

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 01 Nov 2014 10:30:38 +0000

A perennial complaint among some fantasy and science fiction readers is that women are “destroying” the genre by contaminating it with romance and other girly stuff. Last year the staff of Lightspeed magazine, owned and operated by Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy producer John Joseph Adams, decided to push back, launching Women Destroy Science Fiction, a crowdfunded special issue of the magazine featuring fiction, art, and essays entirely by women. The campaign was so successful that it resulted in the creation of two companion issues, Women Destroy Fantasy, edited by author and editor Cat Rambo, and Women Destroy Horror, edited by renowned short fiction editor Ellen Datlow.

Episode 123: Women in Fantasy and Horror
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“The idea that women destroyed horror is ironic because they actually started horror, if anyone did,” Datlow says in Episode 123 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

She points out that the modern horror story traces its roots back to a novel written by a woman, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and that the modern ghost story was largely developed by female authors. Such authors are mostly forgotten today, a common fate for notable women throughout history, but Women Destroy Horror attempts to set the record straight. There’s no question though that most horror writers today are men, a fact that Datlow and Rambo attribute partly to the way that the term “horror” has become linked with slasher movies and “torture porn.”

“Some zombie movies and some horrific stuff can actually be kind of fun, in an awful sort of way,” says Rambo. “But when there is a stand-in for you on the screen, and that’s all that seems to be getting hurt, then I think that can be a real turn-off, and make you feel as though there’s not a place for you in the genre.”

Women in the fantasy and horror genres also have to endure hostile behavior both at live events and online. Internet commenters will complain that there are “too many women” in a book or magazine, even if the proportion of female authors is well below 50 percent. And hostility at conventions and conferences can range from sexual assault to more subtle forms of demeaning behavior, such as not allowing women to get a word in edgewise on a panel.

“I would argue that some of those men are doing it because they genuinely, at some level, don’t think women belong up there,” says Rambo.

Still, Rambo is quick to point out that most men she’s met in the field have been very helpful and welcoming, and that women in fantasy and horror have made great strides over the past few decades. Datlow hopes that trend continues, and that Women Destroy Fantasy and Women Destroy Horror can help play a role by raising awareness of the issues women face, and by highlighting the range and quality of work being produced by female authors.

“I did not want women’s issues to be the theme,” she says. “I didn’t want domesticity to be the theme. I wanted to make it clear that women can write all kinds of stories.”

Listen to our complete interview with Ellen Datlow, Cat Rambo, and John Joseph Adams in Episode 123 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Ellen Datlow on “the green girls from Vassar” :

“It was a few older white men who were complaining about the young women who were getting into the science fiction and fantasy field. The editors—Susan Allison, Beth Meacham, Shawna McCarthy, me, Betsy Mitchell. A lot of women came into science fiction in the editorial departments. Some men resented this, or felt it was hurting the field. … We started out inexperienced, but so did any editor. The thing is, with science fiction, don’t forget a lot of editors were writers—the early editors were writers who became editors. With us, most of us were not writers who became editors. … We came out of a different—they came out of fandom, we came out of, I’m not sure where. I don’t think any of us came out of Vassar, but what do I know? But it was more an older white man feeling that these young women who knew nothing about the field were taking it over.”

Cat Rambo on reviews of women writers:

“I can point to a lot of reviews where I think the review says much more about the writer’s dislike of women than the quality of anything they’re reviewing. … If you look at Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, which won all kinds of awards—no book has won quite as many in one year as that one—and that’s science fiction. And if you look at the reviews, a lot of the reviewers focus on one small part of it, which is the thing with the pronouns, and the fact that you literally don’t know what gender some of the characters are, because of the way the pronouns are structured. … Because not only is it, ‘Oh my god, here’s a woman in the boys’ science fictional clubhouse,’ but she’s also daring to do something that’s kind of overtly feminist. … Again, some [reviews] are not so much about the book itself.”

John Joseph Adams on assumptions about men and women:

“I married a writer, and occasionally you get people making these snarky comments, seeming to assume that I’m responsible for any of Christie’s success, which couldn’t be further from the truth. As soon as she heard the first whisper of that sort of thing, I wasn’t allowed to look at her stuff anymore, because she doesn’t want to have that perception. And it’s just so ridiculous, because if the genders were reversed, would anyone be saying that? Does anyone say that Robert Jordan only became the huge success he was because his wife edited all his stuff and made it amazing? No one’s ever said that. It’s hard not to see this as an extension of this same sort of unconscious misogyny that a lot of men seem to have. It’s really frustrating, even for me. I can hardly imagine what it’s like for women having to deal with that sort of thing.”

John Joseph Adams on representations of women’s bodies:

“So much horror art focuses on the female form, and maybe in a way that isn’t very conducive to a feminist issue. … For the Gemma Files story, the illustration that came in looked great, and it very accurately illustrated the scene in the story, but it was just showcasing women’s bodies in a way that I felt made it seem like it was for a male gaze or something. And that’s not OK for a feminist issue specifically—probably not OK just in general—and so we really had to get the artist to revise it, and hide some of those breasts and whatnot so it’s not putting them on display. I mean, the characters were naked in the story, so it was a very accurate depiction, it was just one of those lines we had to try to carefully tread, so that we don’t inadvertently do something that’s going to actually offend people, when we’re trying to do this celebration.”

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GL Audio 228: It’s Got Technology and Stuff!

Gadget Lab Staff — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:00:00 +0000

In local news, the Giants won. A meme was born, and died the next morning. In tech news, Microsoft announces its wearable, and it’s not really a “watch”. In news of the future, Project Ara, Lollipop, and Twitter’s Fabric seem poised to rule… while Windows and tablets in general are standing on shaky ground.

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Game|Life Podcast: Nintendo Downgrades Amiibo Figures Without Telling Fans

Chris Kohler — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 19:32:26 +0000

If you’ve been following the story of Nintendo’s Amiibo figurines, you may have seen the little mini-controversy: The recent builds of the figures shown to the press and in Nintendo’s new marketing video look downgraded from the ones displayed at the E3 Expo (and on the Amazon product pages, where fans have been able to pre-order the figures for some time).

On this week’s Game|Life podcast, I discuss why the Amiibo downgrade seems to have been the result of Nintendo ignoring its own best practices. Listen in to find out more!

WIRED’s Peter Rubin and Bo Moore join in the discussion of this, Nintendo’s recent financial results briefing, Sunset Overdrive and more.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 132

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Absurd Creatures of the Week: Disco Snails and Other Real-Life Zombies That’ll Blow Your Mind

Matt Simon — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 10:30:10 +0000

If you plan on going as a zombie for Halloween, I hate to break it to you but your costume is wildly inadequate. You don’t even have to show me, because I know that out in nature there are real-life zombies far more creatively horrifying than anything the human mind could ever muster. Also. You, Rob Zombie. You’re disappointing too. You aren’t even close to a real zombie.

Consider the fly larvae that makes its way into an ant’s head, mind-controls it out of the colony, then pops its head off and matures in that cozy noodle. Or the worm that invades snails, forcing them out into the open and turning their eyeballs into strobing targets that birds pluck right out.

A staggering number of creatures out there (and even some fungi) have figured out how to mind-control their unfortunate hosts. In Absurd Creature of the Week, I’ve covered quite a few of these. But today I present to you my five favorites: Real-Life Zombies That I’m Sorry to Say Are Cooler Than Your Zombie Halloween Costume That You Really Just Phoned In. First up…

The Cockroach Pet of the Jewel Wasp (Above)

“This isn’t brain surgery,” my high school journalism teacher used to tell us when we screwed something up, which admittedly was pretty often. Really, though, brain surgery isn’t all that complex, because the jewel wasp, with its own simple little brain, has figured out how to perform it on cockroaches.

The female jewel wasp begins by hunting down a cockroach, biting onto its exoskeleton and driving her stinger between its two front legs, paralyzing them with venom so the victim can’t struggle. It then jams its stinger into the roach’s brain, feeling around for two specific spots to inject venom. When it backs off, the cockroach stays stuck right in that spot, obsessively grooming itself, while the wasp flies off and prepares a burrow.

When the wasp returns, she bites down on the zombified roach’s antenna and leads it to the tomb, where she lays an egg on its leg and seals it inside. When the larva hatches, it burrows into the still-perfectly-content roach and consumes its guts. Once its host is dead, the wasp pupates for a month in its nice little corpse home before emerging as an adult wasp to make humans feel not even remotely bad about what they’ve done to cockroaches before.

Those are worm larvae in the snail’s eyes, just having a grand old time. GIF: Nurie Mohamed/Source: Gilles San Martin/Wikimedia

The Disco Snail and the Worm That Dances in Its Eyes

It’s safe to say the vast majority of animals on this planet would count not getting eaten as a substantial victory. But not the parasitic worm Leucochloridium, which practically begs to be eaten.

It’s all a part of its truly bizarre life cycle. The worms will reproduce in the guts of birds and make their way out in droppings, which snails gobble up. The worms proceed to develop in the liver of their new host, sending shoots up to its eyestalks. Here the larvae begin a sort of strobing dance—and their mind-controlling of the snail.

Now, snails tend to be nocturnal, on account of the predators and heat of the daytime. But the worms—which have no way of telling night from day, oddly enough—force the snail to become not only highly active in the daytime, but to venture out into the open. Ideally for the worm but not so much for the snail, a bird will notice those strobing eyes, mistake them for caterpillars, and pluck them out.

Thus does the whole strange cycle begin anew. All is not lost for the snail, though, as it will regrow those eyes and go about its business, muttering to itself something about just wanting to be allowed to die.

Home is where the heart is. Or, for the ant-decapitating fly, where an ant’s brain used to be. S.D. Porter, USDA-ARS

Zombie Ants That Get Their Heads Popped Off From the Inside

Human babies may take comfort in a cozy crib, but the larva of the ant-decapitating fly (yeah, that’s its real name) prefers to snooze in the heads of ants. Its mother begins by deftly stinging an ant, depositing an egg in its body cavity. When it hatches, it tunnels into the ant’s head, where it feeds on bodily juices.

But because ants have what is known as social immunity, in which they find and expel comrades that are acting sick, the ant-decapitators must take care to control their host away from the colony into the leaf litter, where it’s moist and relatively cool. Here, the larva releases a chemical that melts the ant’s tissues until its head pops right off, with the larva safely inside. It proceeds to eat the brain, then starts to pupate. After a few weeks, it emerges from the ant’s mouth and flies away to live a peaceful, uneventful life.

Nah, that’s not true at all. It’s gonna raise hell.

Unfortunately for the cricket, it survived giving painful birth to all of those worms. GIF: Nurie Mohamed/WIRED. Video: Ben Hanelt

The Kamikaze Cricket With a Serious Worm Problem

Intestinal worms like the tapeworm hold a certain vaunted position among the horrifying things that can happen to the human body, but crickets have it much, much worse. They’re attacked by the horsehair worm, which turns them into suicidal maniacs.

Like the snail’s Leucochloridium worm, the horsehair needs to get eaten, first by mosquito larvae, which mature into flying adults that in turn get eaten by crickets. Inside the cricket, the worm erupts through its intestines into the abdominal cavity, where it grows to a foot long.

Crickets tend to do their best to avoid bodies of water, on account of the threats of drowning and predation by fish. But not crickets under the control of the horsehair horm. The parasite mind-controls its host to be super-jazzed about water, even to be positively itching to take a swim. The worm will bore a hole through the exoskeleton, then order the cricket to dive into a pond, where the parasite erupts out of its host in a rather horrific fashion.

In the lab, as many as 32 worms have emerged simultaneously from a single cricket. In nature, if it doesn’t drown or get snagged by a fish, incredibly the cricket will survive the ordeal. Its dignity, however, will not make it out alive.

Read more: The Parasitic Worm That Turns Crickets Into Suicidal Maniacs

The Cephalotes ant is literally the butt of jokes. Stephen P. Yanoviak

The Skydiving Ants With Big, Red Zombie Butts

Cephalotes ants are immensely awesome due to their ability to skydive out of trees when in danger, only to steer right back to the trunk—plus they have heads shaped like doors that they use to block entrances to their colony. But they have a rather glaring weakness: They can’t keep their butts out of the air.

Well, that is, if they’re infected with a nematode worm, which makes its way into the ant’s bum and turns it a beautiful red. The idea, it seems, is to make it look like a tasty berry, and therefore irresistible to passing birds. The worm even instructs the ant to stick its booty in the air, just in case it isn’t conspicuous enough. That bird isn’t going to get a berry, but it sure will get a belly full of worm eggs.

Now, the worm doesn’t need the ant to complete its life cycle. But such a method does help it spread more efficiently around the rainforest—and maybe put those highfalutin skydiving ants in their place for once.

The post Absurd Creatures of the Week: Disco Snails and Other Real-Life Zombies That’ll Blow Your Mind appeared first on WIRED.

Best-Selling Author Warns ‘You Might Not Want to Buy’ His Book

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 25 Oct 2014 10:30:28 +0000

Patrick Rothfuss is the author of the mega-bestselling novels The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear, and is currently hard at work on The Doors of Stone, the final volume in his epic fantasy trilogy The Kingkiller Chronicle. His latest book, The Slow Regard of Silent Things, is a novella set in the same world. This new book is enough of a departure that Rothfuss took the unusual step of writing an author’s introduction that begins, “You might not want to buy this book.” That may cost him some sales, but will hopefully result in fewer disappointed readers.

Episode 122: Patrick Rothfuss
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“If only five percent of my readers end up reading this and hating it, that’s still kind of a lot of readers,” Rothfuss says in Episode 122 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I’ve got upwards of half a million here in the US alone, and pissing off five percent of those is kind of a lot of people.”

The Slow Regard of Silent Things delves into the mind of Auri, a quirky, mysterious character from the earlier books. Rothfuss warns that the story is likely to be confusing for new readers, like starting a movie in the middle. The book also lacks many of the qualities readers might expect from his writing, such as vivid action scenes or witty banter. In the afterword Rothfuss recounts how the story grew in its own peculiar way despite his best efforts to force it into a more conventional shape.

“This story is about who Auri is and what she’s like,” he says. “The people that are curious about Auri, and about this piece of my world, that’s who this story is for.”

Since Auri is such a peculiar character with such an unusual worldview, it took a great deal of time and energy to maintain her voice for the length of an entire book. Spending a lot of time on each project is something Rothfuss is known for. He did 80 drafts of The Slow Regard of Silent Things, and solicited feedback from about 50 beta readers. And he reports that most of them have liked it a lot, despite his fears to the contrary.

“Am I obsessive? Yes I’m absolutely obsessive,” he says. “It’s entirely possible that I am not a well person. I’m fully willing to admit that.”

Listen to our complete interview with Patrick Rothfuss in Episode 122 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Patrick Rothfuss on Tunnel Bob:

“Auri started from stories my father would tell me about a guy that he knew called Tunnel Bob. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and he’s just a little different from the rest of us, and he is constantly getting arrested for being in the steam tunnels underneath the university, you know, the access tunnels that every big city has. My dad used to run engineering for one of the hospitals down there, and so he had to learn how to deal with Tunnel Bob, like everyone in the city, because he gets into your tunnels. What do you do? And so my dad actually solved the problem by saying Tunnel Bob could volunteer there three hours a week, but the rest of the time he couldn’t be in there. And it worked like a charm. Suddenly they didn’t have to worry about him wandering around when he wasn’t allowed, because he would do anything to protect these three precious hours where he was officially sanctioned to be in their tunnels. … ‘So what do you do down there in the tunnels?’ my dad would ask, and he’d say, ‘Well, the first hour I walks around a bit, and the second hour I cleans up some, and the third hour, well, that’s just for me.'”

Patrick Rothfuss on childhood:

“I was a very good boy. I was not terribly rebellious. I was not terribly wild. I liked to stay at home and read books. I lived out in the country, and the only neighbor within any sort of walking distance was my grandpa, who lived up the hill. And then he moved out of that house and some other people moved in, and there was a kid who was exactly my age, and he kept coming to my house. He would come to my house and he’d knock on the door, and he’d say, ‘Do you want to do something?’ Because he came from a suburb where there were a ton of kids, and they were always playing and doing things together. And he’d come and he’d knock on my door, and I’d look at him like, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ because I’d never had anyone of my own age to play with before. And he’s like, ‘Let’s do something,’ and I’m thinking, ‘I am doing something. I’m reading a book, and you are interrupting me. Go away.'”

Patrick Rothfuss on Acquisitions, Inc.:

“I told my publisher, ‘Yeah, I’m going to go play D&D with the Penny Arcade guys,’ and she’s like, ‘You should probably stay at home and work on your book.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no. You don’t understand. I’m going to go play D&D on stage in front of two thousand people, and another twenty thousand are going to watch it live streaming, and then another couple hundred thousand are going to watch it online, after the fact. And she was just flabbergasted by that, in the same way that those of us who aren’t into sports just can’t understand why anyone would go to a football game. But it’s a little more understandable if, instead of ‘role-playing’ or ‘D&D,’ you say, ‘I’m going to watch a group of incredibly quick-witted, articulate, funny people engage in interactive, improvisational storytelling for two hours.’ And then suddenly you realize that what it really is is Whose Line Is It Anyway? with a strong narrative thread. … And as a bonus we get dragons and sword fights too.”

Patrick Rothfuss on Infocom games:

“They called it ‘interactive fiction,’ and it was absolutely interactive fiction. You read the text, and you took actions, and your actions influenced the games. And one of these games, Zork III, I played with my friend Chad, in like the sixth grade. We started in sixth grade and we played that game for two years before we solved it. … It was pre-internet. It was vastly pre-internet. We had no answers and no way to get them. … When I talk to the brilliant people in my generation — people doing things, telling stories, making things, they played Infocom games. Neil Gaiman played Infocom games, Terry Pratchett played Infocom games, Felicia Day played Infocom games, and they were all frustrated, and they all spent months trying to get the frickin’ Babel Fish in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And now it’s virtually impossible to write a game that successfully provides challenge and frustration, and that’s a shame. We are going to lose something that makes scientists, that makes doers, that makes hard-minded, witty, clever people, and I worry that those people aren’t being made these days.”

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Game|Life Podcast: Papers, Please Developer’s Stunning New Adventure

Chris Kohler — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

WIRED’s own Angry Nerd Chris Baker returns to the Game|Life podcast this week! He’s downloaded the demo version of Return of the Obra Dinn, the next game from Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope, and he wants to tell Peter Rubin and me all about it.

Also on the menu: My early impressions of Sunset Overdrive for Xbox One (look for the review next week), and some discussion of the rising prices of classic videogames—news from last weekend’s Portland Retro Gaming Expo and some interesting thoughts from a well-known Japanese retro game retailer.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 131

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Mac_OldStartup.mp3

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Hear the Evolution of Apple’s Iconic Startup Sound for the Mac

Joel Beckerman — Wed, 22 Oct 2014 10:30:02 +0000

Boot up your computer. If you’re the owner of one of the more than two hundred million Macs sold, what’s the first thing you hear when you start or restart your machine? That sound tells you you’ve held down the power button long enough to get things going. And the fact that it’s there means you don’t even have to look at your computer to know it’s working right.

Excerpted from The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy by Joel Beckerman with Tyler Gray

It’s not just executional feedback. What does that sound make you feel? Refreshed? At ease? Comforted, even? On your way to productivity? This is what I refer to as a brand-navigation sound. It’s a branded, ownable sound—it could only be a Mac—that is both functional and emotional and gives you a lot of valuable information in just a few seconds.

But Apple’s start-up sound wasn’t always so Zen. For a while, the sound of Apple was the sound of something going horribly wrong, a combination of notes that early-eighteenth-century music theorists and composers called the devil’s interval—a tritone. It’s any two tones that are three whole steps apart and played at the same time, like middle C plus the F# above it.

It’s disconcerting, provoking a feeling of agitation and anxiety. So irritating was this combination of notes that tritones were thought in Gregorian times to invoke evil incarnate. Tritones were all but banned in early religious music. And yet, there was a loud tritone, kicking off your experience with an early Macintosh. It wasn’t the experience a customer wanted. It wasn’t what Apple wanted to give them either.

The Original Mac Start-Up Sound

Jim Reekes, the guy who spotted this problem, is a big reason why you love your Mac, even after it crashes, and the first Macs crashed a lot. The son of an early Apple employee and an informal student of all sorts of uses of sound, Reekes started working at Apple as an engineer in 1988.

Steve Jobs had been ousted from Apple three years earlier, and Jim started his twelve-year career at Apple during the rudderless period that he calls a “turd sandwich.”

Reekes describes sound back then as “yet another fucked-up project at Apple.” There were a whole host of problems with sound, not the least of which was how it…sounded. “One of the things I wanted to do was replace all of the old sounds,” he says. He recorded his own car alarm for one project; he recorded a coworker saying quack for the famous sound that made its way to early Macs. And when he began rewriting the computer’s sound manager, he winced every time he heard that start-up sound.

The Quack

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Mac_Quack.mp3

“It’s not just me that thinks it’s bad. It’s bad,” he says of the sound he sought to supplant, the tritone. “It’s been bad throughout history. It’s literally the most dissonant sound you can make.”

And whether you realize it or not, your computer’s start-up sound frames the experience you go on to have with it. It’s a symbol of what’s to come—Reekes calls it an earcon (analogous to an icon). This tiny sound leads off all the connections that your computer enables—to other machines, to worlds of data and knowledge, to people. When a sound like this is played in the right situation at the right time, it’s incredibly potent. Reekes set out to design a Mac sound that would spark a magical experience.

“I thought, I gotta have this meditative sound,” Reekes says. “I used to joke about it being a palate cleanser for the ears.” He had to design it to fit a lot of different machines (Apple was considering many versions back then) and all of the various configurations where the sound would play—tiny speakers on the cheapest line of Macs, the beefier sound coming out of the (then) new Quadra series, even professional speakers in actual music studios hooked up to Macs.

He ended up with a big two-handed C-major chord. It’s in stereo. It fades back and forth, left to right. There’s a bit of reverb in it. It’s played by a bunch of string sounds and even what Jim describes as a “chiffy” bamboo chute sound. “It’s a calm sound. And I knew that people understood C major, even nonmusicians. And it’d still feel interesting to people who are in very good studios. I was trying to reach a very broad audience with the intent and type of emotion I was trying to evoke.”

The Start-Up Sound We Hear Today

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Mac_NewStartup.mp3

When Reekes put it on a few of the early prototype machines, his superiors balked. It’s a common reaction from people who don’t quite get the magnitude of the opportunity in sound—there are still a lot of innovative people who need convincing, even though they feel the impact of sound daily. “You don’t know what you’re asking for,” Reekes’s bosses told him. “No one would let me change it,” he says. “So I had to sneak it in at night.”

He went into the office in the wee hours, changed the code, inserted his sound, and eventually enlisted the support of one of his superiors, who looked the other way when others protested about the change. In the end, the computers shipped with Reekes’s sound. It was a coup at a company that’s since become known for its iron grip on design.

The Macintosh Quadra 700 came out in 1991. The reviewer of the machine in the now defunct computer bible Byte magazine wrote: “I knew I was in for something great when I heard it turn on.”

“I’m like, ‘Exactly! Victory!’ ” Reekes says. “That’s exactly what I was trying to do!”

Lots of people at Apple subsequently tried to change Jim’s start-up sound, he says, and he always argued against it. “It’s like a logo, you don’t keep changing it! Change isn’t bad, it’s just that it needs to be better.” Although no one has definite proof of this, Jim believes Steve Jobs himself finally fended off any alterations to it when he came back to Apple in 1996.

That sound has remained essentially unchanged since then. Only minor tweaks have been made, despite numerous operating system and feature alterations, lots of new hardware, and tons of icon and font changes. No matter what Apple innovations come up, the start-up sound stays mostly the same and brings its customers the same satisfying bong when they first turn on their new Macs.

Jim innately understood that this particular sound was a strategic imperative—it wasn’t just a tactical decision. It had to project the Apple brand personality, and because of consistent use over generations of the product, the sound is a lasting symbol of Apple’s “think different” philosophy. It’s synonymous with the entire product experience.

Excerpt from The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy. by Joel Beckerman with Tyler Gray to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on October 21, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Man Made Music, Inc. Used by permission of the author. All rights reserved.

For an interview with Joel Beckerman, click here.

The post Hear the Evolution of Apple’s Iconic Startup Sound for the Mac appeared first on WIRED.

What’s Scarier, Haunted Houses or Haunted People?

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 18 Oct 2014 10:30:51 +0000

Halloween season is the perfect time to watch horror movies, and a reliable standby of the genre is the haunted house story. Recent examples range from the understated (The Woman in Black) to the sensationalized (The Conjuring) to the crassly commercial (Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones). Such tales of domestic tranquility disrupted by malevolent spirits have been popular for over two centuries, tracing their lineage back to The Castle of Otranto, generally regarded as the first gothic novel.

“It specifically foregrounds the importance of the home, especially the ancestral home, the home with a certain amount of history to it,” says horror author and English professor John Langan. “Which does seem to have become one of the requirements for a haunted house setting.”

Later books and films have largely followed that lead, featuring houses whose dark histories are replete with slaughtered children and desecrated burial grounds. The idea that locations resonate with their collected history is one that appeals to South African author Lauren Beukes. Her new novel Broken Monsters is set amidst the blighted urban landscape of modern-day Detroit.

“You step into these places and there’s a vacancy,” she says. “And it’s what you bring to that vacancy—whether it’s your own baggage and malaise and malevolence and psychology, or whether there’s something there waiting to feed into it, is what makes it so interesting. And that dynamic of what rushes in to fill the vacuum is really the haunting.”

But author Grady Hendrix says that in his experience it’s not so much places that are haunted but people. His work with a parapsychology group taught him that pretty much everywhere feels haunted to someone.

“There were haunted novelty supply warehouses and medical record filing facilities and gardens and sidewalks and barns,” he says. “They were really subjective, very emotional experiences, like they were just for them.”

He points to The Amityville Horror as another example of haunted people. America’s most famously haunted house has been the subject of countless investigations, but in all that time no one ever saw the real horror, the abuse of the children living there, a tragic situation highlighted in the recent documentary My Amityville Horror.

“No one ever stopped to listen to them, no one ever did anything for those kids,” says Hendrix. “It was the people, it wasn’t the house.”

Listen to our complete discussion of haunted houses in Episode 121 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast—featuring Langan, Beukes, Hendrix, and David Barr Kirtley—above, and check out some highlights from the discussion below.

John Langan on materialism:

“One of Marx’s critiques of capitalism is that in capitalism things become more real than people are, and he talks about these moments where an object ‘hails’ you, as he puts it, the object gives you reality. I guess we would think about it in status terms—I’ve got my sports car, or whatever it is, and that makes me real, having this thing. … In The Amityville Horror you’re buying that house, you’re buying that house and it’s all full of horrible things. Oh my god, think about the money! Think about the bills! … And I do think the economics of haunted house stories are kind of interesting. You don’t see a lot of haunted house stories that are about a haunted shack or a haunted double-wide trailer or something like that. It’s almost as if it has to be opulent to be haunted.”

Grady Hendrix on rational explanations:

“There was a guy I knew a long time ago named Bill Roll who did a lot of research on electromagnetics and haunted houses and things like that, and a British TV crew brought him over to London to do a show. There was a guy who was living in SoHo over there, which had just been built up, and his house was an old warehouse, and they were like, ‘Look, even in this modern flat with all these modern appliances this guy’s got a ghost, and he hears children calling his name, and he feels cold spots, and his bed shakes at night.’ And so when they got there Bill Roll was looking at it, and he’s like, ‘Well, actually where the guy’s bed is … there’s the electrical transformer for the neighborhood right on the other side of that wall. … Can we just move his bed to the other side of the loft and see if this stuff persists?’ And none of it persisted. It all went away. And the TV crew was so pissed off.”

Lauren Beukes on haunted places:

“I think what’s also interesting is looking at the psychogeographies. … There are really horrible things that happen in the world all the time, or good things—I went to Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for forty years, and stepping into that cell, this tiny cell where he spent so much of his life, is very poignant. There’s something powerful there. And that’s powerful good, because good came out of it, but if you go to horrible places where bad things happened, these layers of history endure, and I think that we are haunted by the past in the way that we make mistakes over and over again, and that we have to acknowledge that, and that that kind of echoes into personal hauntings and things that we’ve done in our own lives.”

Grady Hendrix on labyrinths:

“Haunted houses are designed to produce one effect, and that’s the labyrinth. … It’s circuitous, and it takes you to the middle, and it’s almost like spinning someone around in blind man’s bluff. It’s designed to disorient you, and make you forget about your daily life, and cut you off from your day-to-day life. … Whether it’s the Overlook Hotel or in The Haunting of Hill House where they can never quite go to the same room by the same route. … That was one of the interesting things about writing a haunted house book set in an Ikea, because at Ikea the route you take is specifically designed to produce something called ‘the Gruen transfer,’ which is you disorient people when they come into a space—it’s the reason casinos have densely patterned carpets and no clocks—because what happens when people get disoriented in a new space is they walk slower, they pay more attention to their surroundings, and they’re a lot more suggestible. So labyrinths are what haunted houses are, they’re designed to disorient you.”

The post What’s Scarier, Haunted Houses or Haunted People? appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Software Sales Slump and Bayonetta Makes a Comeback

Chris Kohler — Fri, 17 Oct 2014 20:22:31 +0000

The NPD Group has released (some tiny amount of) data on the game industry’s September sales, and it’s not all good news, as we discuss on this week’s Game|Life podcast.

While hardware sales are up considerably over last year (thanks to the availability of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One), sales of new physical software took a big 35 percent hit versus last year. While NPD did point out that September 2013 was boosted considerably by the release of Grand Theft Auto V, this past month saw the release of Destiny.

I’ve been playing some Bayonetta 2 and have some brief thoughts on the range of review scores that we’ve seen (coupled with a memory about the last time I actually got annoyed at someone else’s game review, 10 years ago), a few early thoughts on Fantasy Life, the new Level-5 RPG for 3DS that Nintendo is about to publish here in the U.S., and Bo talks more about Shadow of Mordor.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 130

[dewplayer: “http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_130.mp3″]

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GL Audio 227: Golden Apples, Silver Tongues.

Gadget Lab Staff — Fri, 17 Oct 2014 15:00:00 +0000

“How much ‘innovation’ can you do to a rectangle that has a screen and a button?” Tim Moynihan, WIRED writer from New York, joins the conversation with Mat and Mike regarding iPad uses and etiquette, Apple’s newfound sense of humor, the Whisper location tracking controversy, the mysteries of Minecraft and Carcassonne, and having to explain “Mother” to the TSA.

The post GL Audio 227: Golden Apples, Silver Tongues. appeared first on WIRED.

Sci-Fi’s Hottest New Writer Won’t Tell You the Sex of Her Characters

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 11 Oct 2014 10:30:51 +0000

Last year Ann Leckie’s novel Ancillary Justice won almost every major award in science fiction. It’s the story of Breq, a hive mind consisting of a sentient starship and its crew of networked soldiers. When an act of betrayal destroys the ship and all but one member of its crew, Breq sets out in her last remaining body to seek revenge. Breq’s story is told against the backdrop of the Radsch empire, a delightfully complex and colorful milieu. Leckie worked hard to create a plausible future free of any incongruous modern trappings, a common pitfall of far-future sci-fi.

“It’s more easily noticeable in older science fiction,” says Leckie in Episode 120 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “We’ve got this future society and the technology’s all very different, but people are smoking cigarettes and using slide rules, and the social relationships are exactly like they would have been in the 50s. You know, the wife is bringing in coffee.”

Wives bringing in coffee is the last thing you’d find in the Radsch empire, where citizens are so indifferent to gender that men and women act and dress alike and are often hard to distinguish, especially for an AI like Breq. The Radsch language also makes no distinction between men and women, a fact that’s reflected in the text by the decision to use the pronouns “she” and “her” for every character regardless of gender. The fact that readers will never really know the genders of most of the major characters has created an interesting challenge for fan artists, who have to rely on personal impressions when it comes to depicting the characters.

“It’s clear that each of these artists who’ve done this have a very definite vision in their mind of what the characters look like,” says Leckie. “And they’re all very different from each other, and they’re all very different from my internal vision of the characters, and yet at the same time they all work.”

This also makes the book a bit of a Rorschach test for readers, who sometimes form strong opinions about the gender of different characters and become convinced that their guesses have been confirmed by the text. Mostly they’re wrong.

“There was one review where someone was saying that … the characters are straight who are involved in sexual relationships,” says Leckie. “And I was like, ‘How do they know that?'”

Listen to our complete interview with Ann Leckie in Episode 120 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Ann Leckie on the pitfalls of portraying music in fiction:

“I think a lot of times our culture has an attitude toward art and the production of art that separates artists from the rest of us, like making art or music or painting or whatever is some magical thing that you have to be inspired to do, and special people do it. Sometimes when somebody will write a character who’s musical there’ll be touches of that, there’ll be an almost Mary Sue-ish ‘they play and sing beautifully and all the animals stop and listen.’ I’m exaggerating, but that kind of fetishization of music and musical talent and singing, I’m not comfortable with myself. … I feel very strongly that art—and music in particular—is something that really everybody has some kind of ability to do, and that when you separate that out as something only special people can do, who are specially talented, you cut off that avenue of artistic expression for tons of people who would be able to enjoy it otherwise, but who think of it as something they can’t do, and I feel kind of strongly about that.”

Ann Leckie on writing from the point of view of Breq:

“Like a lot of writers, I’m a serious introvert, and talking to strangers, going out into a place—the grocery store or whatever—and talking to somebody I don’t know is really very difficult. … In college I got a job as a waitress, and in a lot of ways it was not a fun job, but in a lot of ways it was really very beneficial, because I didn’t know how those interactions were supposed to go with people I didn’t know well. But working for several years as a waitress you learn really quickly a couple of default scripts, so you know exactly what the interaction is going to be when the person sits down at the table. And then after a few months I’m like, ‘Oh, I can switch it up a bit. I can say, ‘Hey, it’s pretty rainy outside,’ and get a particular response to that. … And that’s something I found really very useful. But what it means is that I’m not the kind of person that those interactions come to naturally, and so when I’m thinking about Breq, I’m thinking about my own experience of, ‘Here I am talking to a person, now I need to pick a script.'”

Ann Leckie on criticism of her use of pronouns:

“I’ve been surprised at the number of people who were really angry that I tried to convey gender neutrality by using a gendered pronoun. Even if it was ‘she,’ which undercuts a masculine default, they feel as though it would have been much better if I had used an honest-to-goodness gender-neutral pronoun, and that would have conveyed it better. People have also been feeling angry that the male characters in the story are persistently mis-gendered, because they’re continually referred to as ‘she.’ I understand where that’s coming from, and it certainly wasn’t my intention to make anybody feel like they were being maliciously mis-gendered, and in some ways I share the frustration of folks about the third person neutral pronouns. I wish they were used more. … I think at the time I was working very strongly from an assumption … that in fact gender is a binary, and the implications of that do turn up in the text, and I know some people have pointed it out, and they’re right, it’s there, and had I been writing it now I probably would have handled those moments a little bit differently, but I think I would still have gone with ‘she,’ because I think it has a much stronger, more visceral effect.”

Ann Leckie on ancient religion:

“It’s a common part of the narrative of the history of Christianity that it was ‘real’ religion that involved real spirituality and real faith, and that’s why it’s completely superseded the more pagan polytheistic practices. I grew up Roman Catholic in a majority Roman Catholic city, and it wasn’t until I was about college age that I discovered some of the attitudes people who aren’t Catholic have toward Roman Catholicism—that it’s pagan superstition which has been superseded by true religiousness. … I’m not Catholic anymore, I’m an atheist, but I find that really offensive and hateful. If you look at anybody’s religious beliefs and practices that aren’t yours, they seem kind of shallow, and they don’t make sense, and they don’t have any resonance. … It’s really easy to look back, particularly with the way we’re taught in school about Greek and Roman paganism, that they’re just these stories, and these stories ‘explain’ why there’s lightning or why there’s winter and why there’s spring, because otherwise they didn’t understand it, they were just so ignorant, right? I think a lot of ancient polytheistic religions worked very differently from the way that Christianity works, but I do not think they were any less important to the people who lived those religions.”

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Game|Life Podcast: Why the Gold Rush for Videogame Kickstarters Is Over

Chris Kohler — Fri, 10 Oct 2014 19:56:37 +0000

Peter Rubin and Bo Moore are back in the studio with me to discuss all manner of things on this episode of the Game|Life podcast.

Peter recently hit up the Oculus Connect developer conference, at which a “mind-blowing” new prototype of the VR headset and a variety of new game demos were shown.

Bo’s been looking into the macro trends of gaming Kickstarters, and the news isn’t all good. The Black Glove is a clever idea from former BioShock talent that seems to be struggling in its early days of crowdfunding. But The Flame in the Flood, another BioShock baby, looks like a sure thing.

Me, I played some Shadow of Mordor.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 129

[dewplayer: “http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_129.mp3″]

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GL Audio 226: Life is a series of awful experiences.

Gadget Lab Staff — Fri, 10 Oct 2014 15:00:00 +0000

“What are we getting excited about here?” Well, Mike, let’s see: we’ve got Ello. And Tilde.club. Google Polar. Playbuzz. RE and the DesireEye. DATs at a concert. a Moto360 watch. And Guac Guns. Lots of excitement, but we’re not sure if it all makes sense…

The post GL Audio 226: Life is a series of awful experiences. appeared first on WIRED.

How the Klingon and Dothraki Languages Conquered Hollywood

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 10:30:55 +0000

One great strength of science fiction is that it creates new worlds. The downside is that creating new worlds is hard. Many science fiction films cut corners, falling back on convenient but scientifically dubious notions such as that faster-than-light travel is no big deal, or that aliens all look like (and can mate with) humans, or that everyone in the galaxy speaks English. For the most part science fiction fans have had to grit their teeth and suspend disbelief, but one recent trend offers hope: The rising use of constructed languages, or “conlangs,” for movie aliens.

“Not having them talk to you in a Brooklyn accent or use Valley slang from Southern California helps transport you into that world,” says Lawrence M. Schoen, director of the Klingon Language Institute. “And I think that Hollywood has seen that’s very effective, and is a lot cheaper than CGI.”

Klingon was the first Hollywood conlang to achieve widespread notice. It was invented on the set of Star Trek by actor James Doohan (“Scotty”) and developed into a full language by linguist Marc Okrand. But writers and directors of subsequent TV spinoffs were often careless about sticking to the established grammar and pronunciation, figuring no one cared. They were wrong.

“Paramount has learned, often to its regret, how rabid and enthusiastic Star Trek fans are,” says Schoen, who points out that digital recording and the internet have made it much easier for fans to notice and complain if an imaginary world doesn’t hold together.

This has led to a much greater attention to language on the part of Hollywood studios. When David Benioff and D.B. Weiss adapted George R. R. Martin’s novel A Game of Thrones for HBO, they were careful to get the conlangs right, hiring linguist David J. Peterson, co-founder of the Language Creation Society, to develop Dothraki and Valyrian into real, consistent languages. Peterson feels that Lord of the Rings and Avatar helped pave the way for the current trend of Hollywood conlangs, and also credits the success of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, which presented its dialogue in Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic.

“That’s kind of the nudge I think a lot of producers needed to say, this is not only something that audiences will tolerate, this is something that audiences will seek out and find interesting,” he says.

Listen to our complete interview with Lawrence M. Schoen and David J. Peterson in Episode 119 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above), and check out a few highlights from the discussion below.

Lawrence M. Schoen on writing aliens who are truly alien:

“By definition a truly alien language is going to be one you can’t comprehend. You can’t grok it, so to speak. I had a story where the aliens show up and they’re lumps of igneous rock, as far as we can tell. And they throw Earth’s best linguist in a room with one of these aliens, and they won’t let either of them out until they communicate. And it’s horrible, they’re making no progress at all. The rock every now and then emits a little ammonia, it paints colors on the wall or something. The guy is trying to talk to it, he’s doing dialects, he’s trying every different grammatical category he can think of, and finally after weeks of this he starts banging the walls in frustration. And the rock can relate to this, because it’s frustrated too. And now we have a common ground to build communication from.”

Lawrence M. Schoen on realistic nuance in conlangs:

“I don’t know a lot of people who have degrees [in linguistics] who are writing science fiction. They’re getting the physics right. They can tell you everything about the gravity of the planet and the density of the core and all that, but the aliens land and they all sound identical. I always say I want to hear alien speech impediments, I want to hear the Martian equivalent of ‘you know’ and ‘um.’ And I don’t want to talk to the officer on the bridge who’s gone to all the best schools, and had diction lessons and all this. I want to talk to the guy who’s scrubbing out the mess, who didn’t get that education, who has a different dialect. … And then I want to take it a step further and I want figurative language. I’ve been pushing for this in Klingon for 20 years. Because if you really are driving your conlang, then you should be able to use metaphors in that language and be understood.”

David J. Peterson on hostility toward conlangs:

“Linguistics is often under fire, and so I think anything that’s related to linguistics that could possibly diminish the field, linguists will sometimes react defensively, and they certainly did that over the years with constructed languages, especially when one of the most prominent examples of constructed languages was Esperanto, which carried with it a political agenda. But I think that many linguists—not all, certainly—but many linguists are really getting it now, that those who create languages and those who are interested in creating languages are really interested in language, period, and that interest in language is a good thing, because it leads you to interest in other natural languages, it sometimes leads you to the study of natural language, and it also just raises your level of understanding of language in general, which as Lawrence pointed out is pretty low in America specifically.”

David J. Peterson on authors and conlangers working together:

“There are literally thousands of people all over the world who spend the better part of their free time creating languages … and a lot of them would love to be in my position. And I think that it’s going to be tough to break into television for a conlanger, but I think it might be easier to break into fiction. … It would be wonderful if there were tons of conlangers working with fantasy authors, working with science fiction authors, where the author can spend their time on the story and the conlanger can spend their time on the language, so by the time it gets picked up and it becomes the next blockbuster, whether on film or television, they actually have a language there to go along with it. … And right now the place where both conlangers can go and people interested in getting languages created can go is the Language Creation Society’s jobs board.”

The post How the Klingon and Dothraki Languages Conquered Hollywood appeared first on WIRED.

GL Audio 225: Pull My Finger Protocol

Gadget Lab Staff — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 15:00:00 +0000

This week, everything old is suddenly new. Windows is exciting again. Social networking is hot. And everybody’s crazy about Unix servers with flat HTML files. Elon Musk is also hot, but for different reasons.

The post GL Audio 225: Pull My Finger Protocol appeared first on WIRED.

Futurama’s Resident Physics Nerd on Math Jokes and Richard Nixon

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 27 Sep 2014 10:30:01 +0000

David X. Cohen is one of the few TV writers who can thank a physics degree for his big break. As the resident science nerd on The Simpsons back in the late 1990s, he was tapped by series creator Matt Groening to help develop a new sci-fi show for Fox. The series they dreamed up, Futurama, was bursting at the seams with wild sci-fi antics and macabre humor. The network was perplexed.

“I think they thought it was going to be a little bit more of a family flying around on a sofa in space,” Cohen says in Episode 118 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Fox reluctantly gave Cohen and Groening the go-ahead for their new show, and though Futurama quickly earned a loyal following among sci-fi fans, it never achieved the broad mainstream popularity of The Simpsons. But one thing the shows do share is their large number of sly math jokes, many of which are catalogued in the new book The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh. The book includes four chapters on Cohen and Futurama.

“We’ve entered a surreal chapter in the history of these shows were I’m doing interviews about math suddenly that I haven’t thought about in 20 years,” says Cohen. “So don’t quiz me.”

He’s also busy contemplating his next project, following the fourth and possibly final cancellation of Futurama last year. Fans can look forward to a Simpsons crossover in November, but beyond that the show’s future is uncertain. Cohen believes that DVD sales will likely determine whether Futurama returns again, but also feels that fans have already done their part to keep the showing going for as long as they have.

“Our fans have helped us more than the fans of almost any other show,” he says. “Our fans don’t owe us anything. In fact, I feel like I owe all of our fans a free DVD set.”

For more on David X. Cohen and Futurama, listen to our complete interview in Episode 118 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above) and check out a few highlights from the discussion below.

David X. Cohen on the influence of Stanislaw Lem:

“My mom was a voracious science fiction reader, so actually that’s where I got my love of science fiction, and some of the books I found lying around when I was a kid were the Stanislaw Lem books like The Star Diaries, The Tales of Pirx the Pilot, and [Mortal Engines]. These are these really strange, surreal, and funny sci-fi short stories that I think did have a big influence on me, especially as far as the idea that robots could be characters. So Bender being kind of the most human character on Futurama I think does owe a little bit to Stanislaw Lem. I particularly remember this one story that had a huge influence on me … about a planet that was inhabited entirely by robots, and these humans crash-land on it, and the murderous robots are out to kill the humans, and the humans have to pretend to be robots to survive, and of course it turns out ultimately—spoiler alert here—it turns out that everybody on the planet are humans who crash-landed and are disguising themselves as robots, and are hiding out in desperation from each other. So that directly influenced Futurama.”

David X. Cohen on Richard Nixon:

“For those listening who don’t watch Futurama, Richard Nixon’s head—which is preserved in a jar of liquid, as many famous people’s heads are in the future—Richard Nixon’s head is president of the world in the future. … I remember Matt Groening saying, ‘If you had told me in the ’70s that I was going to be able to make fun of Richard Nixon 30 years later, I would have been so happy.’ It was just his longtime dream to continue kicking around Richard Nixon. … And early on in the show the network got a letter from the Richard Nixon Library saying they weren’t pleased with his portrayal and would we consider not doing it. … We didn’t really stop, however, because we liked it, but the strange thing is that … a few years later we got another letter from the Nixon Library saying can we provide some materials because they’re going to do an exhibit about Nixon in popular culture and they’d like to include Futurama, so they came around.”

David X. Cohen on the Futurama Theorem:

“The highlight of Futurama math for sure is this thing that’s now known as the ‘Futurama Theorem.’ I’m descending into hyper-nerdspace now. The writer of this episode was Ken Keeler, who I mentioned earlier, who has a PhD in applied math. … And he was writing this episode where the idea was the characters are all going to switch brains, with this brain-switching machine—sort of a standard sci-fi and cartoon idea. … And we came up with this complication: If the machine switches two people’s brains, it cannot switch those same two people’s brains back. … And we were just trying to make the plot more complicated, but we realized that we had accidentally created this math problem. … Ken comes in the next morning with a stack of paper and he said, ‘I’ve got the proof,’ and he had proven that no matter how mixed up people’s brains are, if you bring in two new people who have not had their brains switched, then everybody can always get their original brain back, including those two new people. So I was very excited about this, because you rarely get to see science, let alone math, be the hero of a comedy episode of TV.”

David X. Cohen on “The Un-Freeze of a Lifetime”:

“These Anthology of Interest episodes are ones where we do three mini-stories rather than one big story. This is sort of the format of the Simpsons Halloween episodes. So on Futurama we have these Anthology of Interests where we say, ‘What if blank?’ and it’s some alternate version of the future that we don’t normally show. We did one, which I wrote, where Fry asks, ‘What if I had never come to the future?’ And we see that because he was supposed to go into the future and the future changed, there’s an instability in the spacetime continuum, and the universe is going to collapse, and we then show Al Gore leading this team of super-nerds that must save the universe. The team consisted of him, Gary Gygax (the creator of Dungeons & Dragons), Nichelle Nichols from the original Star Trek, Deep Blue the chess-playing computer, and … did I forget anyone? Stephen Hawking, of course. Stephen Hawking, who also appeared three times on Futurama. So it was a nerd’s delight to work on this episode.”

The post Futurama’s Resident Physics Nerd on Math Jokes and Richard Nixon appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: You and Me Could Write a Bird Romance

Chris Kohler — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 20:35:25 +0000

A special treat for longtime fans of the Game|Life podcast: WIRED contributor Laura Hudson returns this week for a special guest appearance!

We talk Hatoful Boyfriend, the bird dating simulator that has hearts aflutter. And Destiny‘s dear departed Loot Cave. And Hyrule Warriors, and Smash Bros.. There’s a lot of talk.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 128

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_128.mp3″]

The post Game|Life Podcast: You and Me Could Write a Bird Romance appeared first on WIRED.

GL Audio 224: Digging Into the iPhone 6

Gadget Lab Staff — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 15:00:00 +0000

Michael and Mat dive into the iPhone 6 bendgate controversy, wondering whether it’s really that big of a deal? Plus, Mat gives some great insights into his most heartfelt hobby, birding.

The post GL Audio 224: Digging Into the iPhone 6 appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Destiny, Hyrule Warriors, Smash Bros, Minecraft

Chris Kohler — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 19:25:22 +0000

You know how sometimes on the Game|Life podcast we don’t really know what to talk about? No chance of that happening this week. Tune in to hear Bo Moore and me discuss Destiny, Hyrule Warriors, the Super Smash Bros. demo on Nintendo 3DS, and a bit about Microsoft buying Minecraft.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 126

The Anglerfish and the Absolute Worst Sex on Earth

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_127.mp3″]

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Absurd Creature of the Week: The Parasitic Worm That Turns Snails Into Disco Zombies

Matt Simon — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 10:30:03 +0000

One of the crueler tortures to bestow on a snail is the salt shower, as the behaviorally challenged kid who grew up down the street from you could attest. It’s a horrible death: The salt draws water out of the creature until it perishes from dehydration. Even if you live in Florida, which is overrun with giant foot-long snails that are devouring houses, please do not dispatch them with salt. Snails have enough problems as it is.

More absurd creatures:

The Zombie Ant and the Fungus That Controls Its Mind

Enormous Hermit Crab Tears Through Coconuts, Eats Kittens

Mother Nature, you see, has cooked up an even more sadistic punishment for the humble snail. It’s called Leucochloridium, and it’s a parasitic worm that invades a snail’s eyestalks, where it pulsates to imitate a caterpillar (in biology circles this is known as aggressive mimicry—an organism pretending to be another to lure prey or get itself eaten). The worm then mind-controls its host out into the open for hungry birds to pluck out its eyes. The worm breeds in the bird’s guts, releasing its eggs in the bird’s feces, which are happily eaten up by another snail to complete the whole bizarre life cycle.

It’s an existence that’s as brilliant as it is strange. But while science has known about Leucochloridium for more than a century, it was only in 2013 that biologist Tomasz Wesołowski of Poland’s Wrocław University confirmed the worm is indeed capable of manipulating its snail hosts. (Specifically, amber snails—like many other mind-controlling parasites, it’s highly species-specific, that is, it’s unable to manipulate the behavior of more than one species.)

Inside the snail, Wesołowski says, the whole grand show begins as the ingested egg develops into what is known as a sporocyst, “which looks like a bunch of whitish tissue, seated mostly in the liver of the snail. And then it grows like a tumor, more or less.” It doesn’t have a mouth, so like many parasitic worms, such as the horsehair worm that infects and mind-controls crickets, it simply sits around soaking up the snail’s hard-earned nutrients through its skin. Like a clubber downing vodka Red Bulls, it’s gonna need energy if it’s gonna dance.

As if it weren’t enough of a meany-head, Leucochloridium also castrates its host. This makes good evolutionary sense: Energy normally spent producing eggs and sperm (snails are hermaphrodites) goes toward sustaining the worm. So, pumped full of the requisite nutrition, the sporocyst sends out branches that tunnel through the snail’s body and into its eyestalks, also known as tentacles, where it forms a brood sac full of larvae. It’s these larvae that eventually go all disco.

Now, it’s worth talking for a moment about the physiology of snail peepers. At the tip of the tentacle sits a rudimentary eyespot, which is really only good for discerning light and dark. The snail can’t see color, and the eyestalk doesn’t have the muscles required to focus. But what the snail does have are muscles that retract the tentacles, which it can then redeploy by pumping them full of fluid.

Sketches of Leucochloridium. Notice the thin trailing bit, which would lead back to the sporocyst in the snail’s liver. Wikimedia

Not so fast, says the Leucochloridium. It so greatly swells the tentacle that the snail is no longer capable of retracting it, so the host is left with a massive strobing eye of larvae that looks mighty delicious to passerine birds. (These are the kinds of birds with three toes facing forward and another facing backward, what you’d typically find in your backyard, unless you live in Antarctica and your neighborhood is lousy with penguins.) And what the world looks like to a snail with wormy eyes is anyone’s guess, but I’m willing to bet it’s somewhat dizzying.

The worm, though, has a problem: Snails are largely nocturnal, and passerine birds, which hunt by sight, most certainly are not. So once the Leucochloridium has sufficiently developed in the eyestalk, it begins manipulating the behavior of its host, forcing it out into the many dangers of the light of day, where predators swarm and the sun rapidly desiccates. It’s probably using chemicals, but how it’s able to pull off this incredible feat remains a mystery, as do the chemical secrets of any number of other zombifying parasites (though scientists are making progress in decoding the compounds that the Ophiocordyceps fungus uses to assume control over ants).

So quite weirdly the Leucochloridium worms must themselves know the difference between night and day. “What is most amazing is that these brood sacs are pulsating only in daylight,” said Wesołowski. “They have no photosensitive anything—no trace of, say, any nervous system, no sense organs. Nothing. Still they recognize when it’s worth pulsating and when it’s not worth pulsating. So that’s very, very unusual. Nobody knows how it’s achieved.”

Wesołowski also found infected snails are up to three times as active as their non-zombified peers: He even observed one traveling a full 3 feet in just 15 minutes. That may not sound impressive to you, what with your fancy legs and all, but “for a snail, that’s a race,” he said. In addition, he found that the worms convinced their host to stay “on the upper parts of plants and higher elevated places. So all of this combined made them easier to be spotted by foraging birds.”

An amber snail wondering why it even bothers to get out of bed in the morning. Tomasz Wesołowski

And when the reckoning comes, the snail ends up with its eyes plucked out. But because birds don’t typically go after snails—only when their eyeballs look like caterpillars—they’ll take off without eating the rest of the body. (If the eyestalk happens to rupture on its own, the faux caterpillar will spill out onto a leaf and pulsate for some time before drying out. The worms really, really want to get eaten.) Mercifully, or perhaps horrifically, the snail will not only survive, but will regenerate the lost tentacles and eyespots and regain the ability to reproduce. That’s actually quite beneficial for these parasites, for the wounded snail eventually becomes another potential host capable of producing many more potential hosts.

And so the cycle begins anew as the worms grow and reproduce in the bird’s gut. Strangely, though, Leucochloridium and other so-called trematode worms (all of which are parasitic, though not necessarily zombifiers) seem to have figured out how to skip a step. They belong to the flatworm phylum, whose members typically go through two intermediate hosts on their way to their primary host, according to Wesołowski—the former for Leucochloridium just being the snail and the latter the bird. The intestinal worm Metagonimus yokogawai, for instance, starts in snails, which are eaten by fish, which if not cooked properly by humans ends up in our guts.

The lifestyle differences between such worms shows in rather creepy ways just how diverse and opportunistic parasites in the animal kingdom can be. If you can believe it, more than half of all creatures on Earth are in some way parasitic, so we humans are in the minority in the animal kingdom. But if that means not dancing in snail eyes or hanging out in bird intestines, then color me grateful.

Browse the full Absurd Creature of the Week archive here. Have an animal you want me to write about? Email matthew_simon@wired.com or ping me on Twitter at @mrMattSimon.

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WIRED Binge-Watching Guide: 24

Shirley Li — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 10:30:08 +0000

If you have never watched a single minute of 24, you can probably still give a succinct summary of any one of its seasons. It’s the kind of show that found a successful formula (“I’m federal agent Jack Bauer. This is the longest day of my life.”) and stuck with it—for eight seasons, a TV movie, and a “limited-run event series.”

24

Number of Seasons: 8 (192 episodes), plus a TV movie, and 24: Live Another Day (12 episodes)

Time Requirements: Let’s get really real: It’s daunting to binge-watch 24. You’re dealing with 146 hours of Jack Bauer (six days and two hours, in other words), and that’s not including Live Another Day. On top of that, the show likes to remind you how much time you’ve spent watching it with that pesky countdown clock.

Even so, if you shoot for three episodes a night (about two and a half hours), with a target of nine episodes over the weekend, you should get through a season a week. Persevere with this structure, and you could finish the whole series in two months. To cut down on this time, skip two seasons (more on that later), the TV movie 24: Redemption, and save Live Another Day for, well, another day. That way, you can finish in about six weeks.

Where to Get Your Fix: Amazon Prime

Best Character to Follow: Jack. Hands down. In a show that happily adds and removes (and sometimes revives) characters, he’s the only reliable character, as he appears in every episode, so you should default to caring about him. Aside from Jack, though, watch for Mary Lynn Rajskub’s Chloe O’Brian starting in Season 3—she’s dynamic, smart, and one of the few characters Jack trusts, and for good reason. Other than those two, you’ll encounter a slew of recognizable faces (Zachary Quinto, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Katee Sackhoff, etc.), but make sure to follow President Allison Taylor (she appears in the TV movie and Seasons 7 and 8). Cherry Jones’ performance as the politician made her instantly memorable and garnered Emmys for the show as it ran out its final seasons.

Seasons/Episodes You Can Skip: This one’s easy: Season 6. Just don’t bother. Sure, it’s got some of the wackiest Jack kills—at one point, he chest-kicks a suicide bomber off a subway train, right before the bomber’s vest goes off (!!!)—but it includes mind-numbing daddy-issues plotlines for Jack, among other missteps. It’s not worth your binge time.

Next, eliminate Season 8. It’s arguably the second-to-worst season, mostly because of its criminal misuse of Katee Sackhoff as Dana Walsh. Though the second half picked up, it’s best to just fast-forward your way through to the series finale.

Finally, there’s no need to squeeze 24: Redemption into your binge diet. It works well as a bridge between Seasons 6 and 7 (as mentioned above, it introduces Allison Taylor), but does little other than put Jack in another life-threatening situation, only this time in Africa.

If you have to cut even more out of your binge, skip the first act of Season 3. It’s good, but not rest-of-Season-3 good. Start at episode 9, “9:00 p.m. — 10:00 p.m.,” where the fun begins: A major character returns and Jack finally starts getting ahead of stopping the virus.

Then there’s the Episode Everyone Says You Should Skip But You Should Watch Anyway: Season 2, “6 p.m. — 7 p.m.” Yes, this is the one with the cougar. But you’ve heard of the cougar, haven’t you? When binging 24, skipping over the cougar episode is sacrilege—it’s a key moment in the show’s turn toward the ridiculous, and you’re not a true fan until you’ve sat through it. Besides, how will you understand that fantastic Happy Endings (RIP) reference until you’ve properly watched the episode?

Season/Episodes You Can’t Skip: Do not, under any circumstances, skip anything in Seasons 1, 2 (fine, you can fast forward through the Kim subplot), and 5. (That’s an order, dammit.) With that out of the way, definitely watch the following episodes as well.

Season 1: Episode 24, “11:00 p.m. — 12:00 a.m.” The Season 1 finale ends with the best twist in 24 history, just when Jack thinks he’s solved everything in his first Worst Day of His Life. If you haven’t been spoiled yet in the 12 years since the episode aired, savor those final moments in Season 1—they turned the show into something much darker than viewers expected.

Season 2: Episode 24, “7:00 a.m. — 8:00 a.m.” Yet, as dark as the show went (Jack goes through many iterations of Almost Dead trying to protect the country, including a stint with drug abuse), Bauer always doled out spectacular kills. The Season 2 finale saw Jack take on a stadium of terrorists, run up walls, and break a guy’s neck, making for what was arguably the most epic Jack killing spree in the series.

Season 3: Episode 14, “2:00 a.m. — 3:00 a.m.” This episode brings a painful arc (for Jack, at least) to a close with the death of a major character. It’s also a showcase for one of Jack’s harshest interrogations, and depicts how far he can be pushed.

Season 3: Episode 18, “6:00 a.m. — 7:00 a.m.” The early morning hours of Season 3 brought pivotal twists, and in this episode, it brought what I believe to be one of the best scenes in the series. But besides its heartbreaking climax, the hour demonstrated the outstanding quality of the third season in general as Jack raced against the clock to stop what appeared to be an impenetrable enemy.

Season 5: Episode 1, “7:00 a.m. — 8:00 a.m.” Watch the Season 5 premiere for its game-changing opening scene, when the show reminded viewers that anything could happen to anyone, and then marvel as it somehow manages to pick up the pieces and sprint forward in its action in less than an hour. Season 5 was the apex of 24, and it showed.

Season 5: Episode 23, “5:00 a.m. — 6:00 a.m.” The penultimate episode of Season 5 saw a desperate Jack carrying out an assault on a terrorist-controlled submarine during its suspenseful first act. Jack’s showdown against the ruthless Bierko is Classic Bauer, and a sequence you shouldn’t miss.

Season 7: Episode 14, “9:00 p.m. — 10:00 p.m.” Jack kills a guy with a screwdriver by throwing it into his chest. (I’m including this episode because it’s just one of the WTF-est kills in the series. Jack Bauer brings a screwdriver to a gunfight. Season 7, everybody!)

Why You Should Binge:

As crazy as 24 was, its use of split-screen and real-time storytelling influenced countless TV series that followed, and Jack Bauer became a blueprint for action heroes like Liam Neeson’s Bryan Mills in Taken. Plus, it was one of the first shows to invite binge-watching, releasing DVD box sets early after its first season to help viewers catch up. And if anything, the twists, kills, and epic Bauer speeches simply made for awesome TV.

Best Scene— “I’m Gonna Need a Hacksaw”

If you’re watching for the shock factor of the show, then the Season 2 premiere had it all: Jack, still grief-stricken, goes back to the Counter Terrorist Unit to murder a terrorist from a group planning to detonate a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles. The thing is, he does it in front of everyone, then announces, “I’m gonna need a hacksaw,” while looking at the corpse’s neck. Gross. We couldn’t find the clip online, but maybe you want to watch this supercut of Bauer kills instead?

The Takeaway:

Dammit, Chloe, I’m running out of time!

If You Liked 24 You’ll Love:

Homeland. Brought to you by the same producers (Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon), the Claire Danes starrer hits similar notes of terrorism and national security. It’s not as action-packed as 24 and has been criticized for venturing into unrealistic plots in its second and third seasons, but the Emmy-winning first season is one to watch.

The post WIRED Binge-Watching Guide: 24 appeared first on WIRED.

Leading a Double Life Turned This Woman Into a Best-Selling Author

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 13 Sep 2014 10:30:26 +0000

The Witch with No Name, out this month, is the 13th and final volume in Kim Harrison’s popular Hollows series, about a young witch from Cincinnati who battles demons and vampires. The books have landed Harrison on at the top of the New York Times best-seller list and attracted the interest of TV producers, but the path to success wasn’t easy. Harrison’s early novels—published under the name Dawn Cook—failed to reach a large audience, so at the behest of her publisher Harrison reinvented herself as a completely new author, going so far as to wear a long red wig so that no one would recognize her.

“My editor picked out the name she wanted,” Harrison says in Episode 117 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I was either going to be Kim Harrison or Lisa Harrison, because she wanted me shelved right next to Hamilton.”

With the success of the Hollows books, Harrison felt free in 2009 to reveal publicly that she is also Dawn Cook, and she says she may soon dispense with the red wig as well. Maintaining dual identities has gotten confusing at times—she has to remember who knows her as Dawn and who knows her as Kim—but it also has its advantages, especially when she was living in a highly religious town in South Carolina.

“I’d get weird looks just because I was out in my garden working on Sunday,” says Harrison. “If they knew I was writing witches and vampires, I’d have no friends at all.”

Listen to our complete interview with Kim Harrison in Episode 117 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks Paolo Bacigalupi, Tobias Buckell, and Ramez Naam join host David Barr Kirtley to discuss extreme weather in science fiction books and movies.

Kim Harrison on reading science fiction books as a child:

“I used it to keep people away. I was very introverted. You know, I had my close group of friends, but I really didn’t care what the cool kids were doing. And the weirder the cover, the weirder the name, the more far out it was, the more they left me alone. … My favorite one that I carried around was a collection of stories by Asimov called Tomorrow’s Children. And it was a big, thick, massive book, and I’m tempted to go back to the library and see if they still have it, because it would have my name on it, and then my name would check it out again, and then I’d check it out again, and I’d check it out again. I think I’m the only one who checked that thing out for the two years I worked in the library. ”

Kim Harrison on killer tomatoes:

“Dead Witch Walking is basically a modern-day witch living in Cincinnati. Now here comes the quirky part. At this point the human population has been decimated by a virus that was carried by [GMO] tomatoes. … I think we are doing a few dangerous things. You know, putting a beta-carotene gene into a rutabaga is fine, but when you start putting genes into your corn that they make their own toxins, that’s another story, and people are not being careful with what they’re doing. I mean, that toxin that they’ve engineered into the corn, that’s great, except that toxin is in the pollen, and we’re breathing the pollen, and insects are eating the pollen, and dying, and we’re upsetting our food chain. … And so that is one of the reasons why I did choose a GMO to be the end of humanity’s power, because if we’re not careful it’s going to be.”

Extreme Weather in Science Fiction Panel

Tobias Buckell on science fiction becoming science fact:

“When I started writing [Arctic Rising], I called it science fiction, because I thought the idea of completely eliminating the polar ice cap was science fictional, that’s pretty wild. A lot of the people who criticize climate change are like, ‘Oh, they’re way too pessimistic.’ And I’m like, ‘These guys are way too optimistic.’ IPCC was calling for possibly ice-free summers being like the wildest thing when I started writing. And so I started out with the science fictional scenario being ‘no polar ice cap.’ And by the time the book was in copy edits, IPCC was saying that they were willing to call a completely ice-free winter as well at some point in the human future, as their worst-case scenario. And it had gone from being completely science fictional—and scientists had it off the table—to being in their projections within the time I wrote that novel, and that’s just a year and a half.”

Ramez Naam on reasons for optimism:

“Carbon is something that we have relatively recently woken up to as a pollutant. Smog is a pollutant you can see and touch, and you’re immediately aware that something is wrong, with soot and smog or with something in the river. And we didn’t know that CFCs were a pollutant, so there was no correlation there, and once we did we started to act on it. … But you look at forests being protected, species being protected, those are phenomena that arise in societies when people feel like they have some sort of personal affluence. And then empathy does take hold, and human beings actually seem to have some desire to protect the natural world. So once they actually do get convinced—and I agree with you that it takes some effort to overcome the doubt industry—they do say, ‘Yeah, I do want the natural world to keep existing, and I’m willing to do something—if I understand that the cost is reasonable—to make that happen.'”

Paolo Bacigalupi on the doubt industry:

“Ramez brought up the fact that we stopped using CFCs, and there was actually a concerted industrial effort to prevent us from regulating CFCs, and we pushed past that, and we did regulate, and so, you know, hey great, we still have an ozone layer, that’s awesome. But I think the industries have become more disciplined and more effective in the ways that they slow down policy changes that affect their profits, and I think you saw that play out in the amount of time that it’s taken us in the United States even to come to grips with the idea that global warming—oh gosh—might exist. And that makes me a little worried and cynical that there are actually specifically people who profit every quarter from us doing nothing, and that they are partly holding the reins of government.”

The post Leading a Double Life Turned This Woman Into a Best-Selling Author appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Virtual Reality Is Almost Here

Chris Kohler — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 21:32:09 +0000

Between PAX and the latest Samsung press conference, there’s even more excitement bubbling up about VR. On this week’s episode of the Game|Life podcast we take a look at some of the more enticing new developments.

Having just returned from PAX, I’ve got a lot to say about various games I discovered at the show, not least of which is Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. Bo spent some time digging through the many, many game announcements for the Gear VR, which promises us a reasonably cool VR experience (if not quite what the Rift promises) before the end of this year.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 126

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_126.mp3″]

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Why Jumper Remains the Ultimate Sci-Fi Teleportation Adventure

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 30 Aug 2014 10:30:02 +0000

Steven Gould is the author of the classic 1992 novel Jumper, about a teenage boy who discovers that he can teleport or “jump.” Whereas the 2008 film adaptation discards most of the original story in order to focus instead on action and spectacle, the book uses jumping as a powerful metaphor for needing to escape from unbearable circumstances. Moreover, the story’s frank treatment of physical and sexual abuse have made it both one of the country’s most banned books and also a favorite among many readers who identify with its young protagonist, Davy.

“I’ve had kids with abusive home lives email me and say, ‘This book saved my life,'” Gould says in Episode 116 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Or, ‘This book let me get away, in a way that wasn’t physical, but it let me know there are other people who are having things happen that are comparable to mine, and that they got through them, and they survived, and they had a life afterward.'”

Another thing that sets Jumper apart is the rigor and consistency with which it explores the idea of teleportation. Why do Davy’s clothes come with him when he jumps? What happens if he jumps while chained to a wall? What happens to his orbital velocity when he jumps from one latitude to another? The rules laid down in Jumper form the basis for much of what happens in subsequent novels. The fourth Jumper book, Exo, explores the question of whether jumping can be used to travel into outer space. The answer is yes, which only leads to more questions, and presumably more books.

“I’m curious about where the energy comes from for jumping, for tearing holes open between various areas,” says Gould. “And if it comes from someplace, where is that, and what’s happening there?”

Listen to our complete interview with Gould in Episode 116 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks Alison Haislip, Matt London, and David Wexler join host David Barr Kirtley to discuss the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Steven Gould on Jumper being banned:

“The two most objectionable scenes, for a parent, are on page two and on page nine. So they’re able to just pick up this book that their child has brought home from the library and turn to something that they found awful. So on page two we have a scene of impending child abuse by a parent, and then on page nine we have a scene of impending sexual assault by a group of people on that same child, and so in both cases these are the impetus for jumping. But I don’t know, for some reason some parents look at something in a book, and see something awful happening, and think if their child reads that it’s going to happen to them, which to me just doesn’t make sense. In this case we’re reading about a kid who’s run away, and I think it’s a valuable thing for people to know that maybe if you run away as a young teen, you might be subject to predation, and so you might want to think about this.”

Steven Gould on working with James Cameron:

“I was hired to both be in the room while we worked on the plots for the next three Avatar films and then I am currently working on writing corresponding books for the four movies, which includes the first movie, which has never been made into a novel. … You know, there are 12 people who’ve walked on the moon, right? There are only three people who’ve been to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, and one of those was James Cameron, so it’s safe to say that there will be water, there will be oceans, as part of these movies. … We had a lot of conversations about space travel, among other things, and one of the things I noticed was that over and over again, you know, he was talking about the potential Mars stuff, and he never said ‘manned’ mission once. Whenever he was talking about a mission that involved humans on board he would call it a ‘piloted’ mission, and I found that impressive.”

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Panel

Matt London on the original Nintendo game:

“The weird thing about that game is that nothing in it except the characters of the turtles themselves have anything to do with the Ninja Turtles. You’re fighting flying robot bugs, and there are these giant steamrollers that are trying to kill you. It doesn’t make any sense at all. It was an incredibly challenging game. Some of the levels were just near-impossible. I’ve gone back and tried to play it, I still can’t beat that game. … Whoever was helping you on [the underwater bomb defusal] mission, whether it’s April or Splinter or someone, would give you hints, but the hints would always be like, ‘Yeah, you should disarm these bombs quickly,’ and it’s like, ‘Oh, thanks for your help. Appreciate it.’ … There is no reprieve in that game. It’s just punishment after punishment.”

David Wexler on toys and accessories:

“I loved the cartoons as well, clearly, but it was more than that. It was the bedsheets, the lunchboxes, it was just this mass thing. … What was cool about the Halloween costume was that it was just the armbands and the kneepads and then the nose/face mask thing, but it was kind of real. You didn’t have to wear the nose thing. You could kind of be just like a skateboarding ninja and put the kneepads over the rollerblade pads. It was kind of official. And then growing up in New York and skating around the manholes, it really felt like we were Ninja Turtles. You know, I would wear that stuff to school. … I’m embarrassed to say this, but I literally have about 40 of [the action figures] under my bed as we speak.”

David Barr Kirtley on Raphael:

“Did anyone else feel that Raphael really got the short end of the stick on that one? As a kid I always thought his weapon just seemed so much less effectual than all the other Turtles’ weapons. … I always wondered if that was why he was so angry, because he got the crummy weapon. Or if he just had to be so hyper-aggressive to compensate for his lack of range. … It was weird, when I watched the TMNT movie that came out in 2007, the computer-generated one, I walked out of that one and I was like, ‘Wow, I don’t remember Raphael being that much of a dick,’ and my friends were like, ‘No, he was.’ So I’d be curious to go back and watch the older stuff and see if Raphael was really that much of a dick.”

Alison Haislip on the new movie’s script issues:

“Remember there was that whole big controversy when Michael Bay came out and said, ‘They’re actually going to be aliens,’ and everyone’s like, ‘What do you mean they’re going to be aliens? They’re mutants. They’re not supposed to be aliens.’ So I think they shot most of the movie with the Turtles being aliens, and then had to re-adjust it so it’s like, ‘Oh no, they were mutants,’ and I think that’s why the whole backstory doesn’t quite make sense. … But the things that killed me were like, April O’Neil saves them from the lab fire and puts them in the sewer. Why would she put them in the sewer? They were her pets, kind of, and she loved those things. If I saved the four little turtles I would have just taken them home with me and kept them as pets.”

The post Why Jumper Remains the Ultimate Sci-Fi Teleportation Adventure appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Nintendo Announcements, Nintendo Leaks

Chris Kohler — Fri, 29 Aug 2014 19:58:00 +0000

Podcasts have a bit of a lead time, and sometimes things change between recording and release. In the case of this week’s Game|Life podcast, something that we discussed as a rumor—the hero of Xenoblade Chronicles appearing in Nintendo’s all-star fighting game Super Smash Bros.—came true this morning.

Additionally, although I mentioned on the podcast that we don’t yet have a price or release date for Nintendo’s Amiibo figurines, Nintendo has now announced… well, the price, anyway. ($12.99 each.)

But that’s cool! Join me, WIRED contributor Bo Moore and IT pro Josh Strom this week as we discuss these topics and things that did not get out from under us.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 125

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_125.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: Nintendo Announcements, Nintendo Leaks appeared first on WIRED.

GL Audio 222: Getting Angry with the Knee Defender

Gadget Lab Staff — Fri, 29 Aug 2014 13:00:00 +0000

Mat and Mike talk about the Knee Defender, that new device sure to spark brawls on airplanes everywhere. Plus, NFC payments, smartwatches, and that age-old Uber vs. Lyft debate.

The post GL Audio 222: Getting Angry with the Knee Defender appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Legal Pinball, Free Infinity, 10 Million PlayStation 4s

Chris Kohler — Fri, 22 Aug 2014 19:17:01 +0000

Wrapup and analysis of this week’s news is the order of the day on the latest Game|Life podcast.

Disney is giving Disney Infinity away for free on Wii U, and all you have to do is buy the base and a figure to play it. Sony’s sold 10 million PlayStation 4s, and nobody’s sure why. Pinball is finally legal in Oakland, California. Peter Rubin, Bo Moore and I tackle each of these in turn. Plus more!

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 124

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_124.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: Legal Pinball, Free Infinity, 10 Million PlayStation 4s appeared first on WIRED.

GL Audio 221: Give Me Twittering or Give Me Death!

Gadget Lab Staff — Fri, 22 Aug 2014 14:00:00 +0000

Mat and Mike reflect on how social media affects the real world, in good and bad ways. On one hand, Twitter empowers bystanders to become a multifaceted reporting force, as in the case of Ferguson, MO, and uses peer pressure to encourage doing good, as the Ice Bucket Challenge has proved. However, it can also run into the hard choice between hiding inappropriate content and censoring free speech, and can lose its power when it becomes a machine for advertising.

The post GL Audio 221: Give Me Twittering or Give Me Death! appeared first on WIRED.

How Hackers Could Mess With 911 Systems and Put You at Risk

Kim Zetter — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 10:30:30 +0000

The female caller was frantic. Why, she asked 911 dispatchers, hadn’t paramedics arrived to her home? She’d already called once to say her husband was writhing on the floor in pain. “Hurry up!,” she’d pleaded, as she gave the operator her address. And then she hung up and waited for help to arrive, but it never did. By the time she called back, her husband had turned blue. “He’s dying!” she cried helplessly into the phone.

But the paramedics had gone to the wrong address and couldn’t find her home. When the dispatcher cited the intersection they were currently passing, it was nowhere near her home.

When Christian Dameff and Jeff Tully set out four years ago to determine how to provide the best medical care to patients between the time a 911 call was made and the patient arrived to the emergency room, they were focused on things like the CPR coaching 911 operators sometimes provided over the phone. But as they listened to thousands of recordings of 911 calls, they discovered something equally critical to patient care: The 911 system itself. The system operates nationwide 24 hours a day, assuring the public that help is just a phone call away. But sometimes it doesn’t work as planned.

To direct first responders to a caller’s location, the emergency call system relies on a database of addresses tied to phone numbers or, in the case of wireless phones, to the location coordinates sent by the phone’s GPS chip and the cell phone tower that processes the call.

But Dameff and Tully discovered that the 911 system has several vulnerabilities that make it susceptible to failure. Dameff is an emergency room physician and Tully is a pediatric doctor. But they’re also white hat hackers who decided to team up with Peter Hefley, an IT security manager for Sunera, to identify problems within the 911 system. The trio recently presented their findings at the Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas.

Aside from software glitches that can sometimes prevent medical help from being dispatched on time, they were concerned about the security of the address databases, populated by subscriber information from telecoms, that first responders rely on to locate victims. If a hacker could obtain access to the databases, he could alter or delete critical information that could prevent help from arriving on time. They were also concerned that a hacker might launch a denial-of-service attack preventing calls from getting through at all. Earlier this year in Washington state, the 911 system inexplicably went down statewide for six hours, preventing more than 4,000 calls from reaching dispatchers. Although the the outage wasn’t caused by an intentional attack—just an overloaded system—the consequences of an intentional hack, they realized, would be the same.

“When [911] fails or doesn’t work as optimally as it should—either through glitches or something else—the demonstrable harm is that people die,” Dameff says. “This isn’t, ‘Oh my credit card got stolen and someone charged $600 at Target.’ These are systems … designed and implemented to save peoples’ lives. It’s the definition of a critical infrastructure system.”

The minutes between a 911 call and the arrival of help are particularly critical for people in cardiac arrest. Research shows it takes an average of six minutes for first responders to arrive after such a call is placed, during which time the victim has a 50 percent chance of survival without CPR. The survival rate drops drastically with each subsequent minute that passes without help.

“We could see that that patient didn’t get timely medical care because of the glitch,” Dameff says of the call from the woman whose husband collapsed. “During that window is the most impactful time … to save their life.”

911 Call From Woman Whose Husband Collapsed

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Call_1_1.mp3

Follow-up Call to 911

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Call_1_2.mp3

How 911 Works

When a call gets made to 911 from a landline, the caller’s telecom appends the phone number to the call data and forwards it on to a router that determines the nearest PSAP, or public safety answering point, based on the caller’s location. A dispatcher at the PSAP answers the call while a computer searches a database for the caller’s address. The database, which contains a billing address provided by the telecom, tells the dispatcher where to send help, and assists the operator in determining which first responders are closest to the location.

Although dispatchers are trained to also ask callers for their address, the person on the other end may not know the address, or may not be able to respond. In such cases, an outdated or altered database can prevent help from arriving on time.

But the problems that can occur with the system aren’t only about response times. Dameff and his team found that swatters could bypass the database lookup altogether to make a 911 operator believe he’s somewhere he’s not. Swatting calls often involve phoning 911 using a spoofed phone number or caller ID to make a bogus report of a home invasion or hostage threat, sending police—often with guns drawn—to the address of an enemy or other target. This is how a 12-year-old boy got SWAT teams dispatched to the homes of Ashton Kutcher and Justin Bieber last year and how a serial swatter in Los Angeles last week got police to lock down an elementary school while officers in tactical gear searched for a gunman who didn’t exist.

But a swatter doesn’t need to use the target’s phone number to get a SWAT team dispatched to the target’s address; he could simply call a PSAP directly instead of dialing 911, since calls made directly to PSAPs don’t use the address database to determine the caller’s location. Instead, the operator simply asks the caller for his address.

Swatter Call to 911 Center in Colorado

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Swatting.mp3

About 6,200 PSAPs are scattered nationwide, with about 4,000 of these serving as primary 911 call centers where operators dispatch police directly or redirect the call to another center where help can be dispatched or where operators can provide CPR and first aid instruction.

Phone numbers for PSAPs are tightly held and are generally available only to emergency agencies. But Dameff’s team found they could uncover the numbers by listening to recorded 911 calls obtained via public records requests. When dispatchers transfer a call, the push-button tone for the redirect number is recorded as well. So the researchers used DTMF tone extraction to enumerate the PSAP phone numbers.

Trey Forgety, director of government affairs for the National Emergency Number Association, told WIRED the association is trying to get these numbers protected on 911 recordings so they can’t be extracted. “Those tones are very sensitive and it wouldn’t be good for folks to be able to get at those lines and tie them up,” he says.

Wireless Calls to 911

Wireless calls work according to a similar principle as landlines. They pass through a mobile switching center, which parses location data before sending the call to the PSAP closest to the phone. Meanwhile, the location data is temporarily placed in the address database so 911 operators will see the phone’s current location, rather than the owner’s billing address. The location is presented in latitude and longitude coordinates, given that the caller may be in a remote location where a proper address is unavailable.

But the researchers found that callers can spoof this system by using a non-serviced burner, or pre-paid, phone to make the call. Non-serviced burner phones can be old phones or new ones that are not currently enabled and linked to a cellular account. Although such phones are not activated, federal law requires they still be able to call 911. Because there is no telecom account associated with the phone, however, there is no phone number for authorities to call back or to track. A swatter can make a credible call to 911 and have police dispatched to an address he provides as long as it’s near the cell tower that handled the call. The only location data authorities will see is that of the tower, and possibly data estimating the distance and direction of the phone from the tower. This is precisely the technique used by the serial swatter in LA last week who reported gunmen at an elementary school.

“That can make it very hard to locate someone making repeated harassing calls to 911,” says Forgety.

Beyond being a nuisance and a waste of resources—the FBI estimates that swatting calls cost about $10,000 each—such calls limit the ability of authorities to respond to true emergencies. There is also concern that they could be used by criminals or terrorists as a diversionary tactic to occupy authorities.

In addition to using non-serviced burner phones for swatting, an attacker could also use them to conduct a denial-of-service attack against the 911 system. A presentation at Def Con this year described how a hacker could alter the firmware in a burner phone to launch a denial-of-service attack against targeted phones; Dameff notes that someone could easily place modified phones strategically throughout a county or state to take down 911 call centers over large geographical areas.

Landlines and cell phones aren’t the only vulnerability when it comes to the 911 system. The researchers found that calls made from VoIP devices also have unique problems. In order to call 911, VoIP users have to manually place their address in a database maintained by their VoIP provider and configure their systems so that 911 calls are routed to a local PSAP, wherever they may be when they place the call. But if subscribers have the ability to alter these databases, Dameff suggests that others might be able to alter them as well, in order to direct calls to the wrong PSAP or have dispatchers send help to the wrong address. He and his team didn’t test this hypothesis, however, for fear of breaking any hacking laws.

But Forgety recalls a 2007 call that illustrates what can occur when the database isn’t correct. In March that year a PSAP in Illinois received a call from a woman who was screaming for help, after her husband went on a rampage and attacked her. Police arrived at the address listed in her VoIP provider’s database, only to find the house dark and vacant. It turned out the VoIP phone belonged to a military couple who had taken it with them when they deployed to South Korea. Because the VoIP database still listed their Illinois address, her call was routed to a public safety answering point near her old home.

Authorities recognize this is a problem, and are now trying to correct it. “VoIP phones rely right now solely on the registered address of the user,” says Forgety. “That’s the sort of thing that can be easily abused. We’re trying to change that with the next-generation 911 system [so that] we can query the device for its location.”

But the next-generation 911 system is slowly being deployed across the country and only exists in a few states so far. And while it may eventually address the VoIP problem once its deployed more broadly, it won’t solve some of the other shortcomings of the 911 system, particularly the problem with swatters. Dameff and his team have suggested other solutions that might resolve these issues, such as a system of red flags for suspicious call routing as well as developing security standards for call centers. Forgety, who flew to Las Vegas specifically to attend their Def Con talk, has been talking with them about ways to address the issues with 911.

“The good thing about [the researchers] is that they are interested in finding ways to fix the problems,” he says, not finding ways to exploit them.

The post How Hackers Could Mess With 911 Systems and Put You at Risk appeared first on WIRED.

Author Nick Harkaway on Improvised Grenades and ‘Existential Pulp’

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 16 Aug 2014 10:30:11 +0000

Nick Harkaway is the author of several popular books that straddle the border of realism and science fiction, particularly his debut novel The Gone-Away World, in which a scientific experiment gone wrong obliterates any firm sense of reality. Harkaway is fascinated by the ways in which reality is stranger than most people want to admit, and he’s frustrated that so much contemporary fiction fails to grapple with that strangeness. In particular he’s troubled that so many authors shy away from writing about new technology, even something as simple and familiar as cell phones.

“Quite a lot of the time you’re talking about an artificially constructed 1993, except with everything else being now,” Harkaway says in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “A lot of novels that people think of as being ‘real’ are actually basically alternative reality fiction, designed to be in an atechnological world.”

He admits that it can be a challenge to dramatize stories about people talking online, but feels that since our lives are bound inextricably with the technology that surrounds us, novelists can’t hope to probe the human condition unless they’re keeping pace with the latest science, such as experiments that network together the brains of rats.

“You could walk from one end of my country to the other without finding, as far as I know, anything being written as a consequence of that,” says Harkaway. “Certainly outside of science fiction you’re not going to hear a mention of it.”

Listen to our complete interview with Harkaway in Episode 115 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks John Joseph Adams, Matt London, and Rob Bland join host David Barr Kirtley to discuss the new Marvel movie Guardians of the Galaxy.

Nick Harkaway on writing existential pulp:

“There’s a taxonomical debate to be had about whether [my fiction] is classically science fiction, and io9 called it ‘existential pulp,’ which I love … Tigerman is definitely full of a sense of worry about what it means to be a dad, and how to be a good person, and all the rest of it, and so it belongs in that [existential] category. And then of course at the same time my pulp roots are showing. Here’s all this serious stuff about global geopolitics and the bad ways we behave overseas, and about being a father and trying to do the right thing, and how do you become a new person when your old life has come to an end. But the answer is you put on a superhero suit and you go fight crime. The thing is, though, I would do dumber things than that for my kids if that’s what they needed me to do. I think we all would.”

Nick Harkaway on improvised grenades:

“It’s true about a lot of powders with a very fine grain size—custard powder is one, pepper is another—that if you put a small amount of them in a box and shake it up, and then throw in a match, you get a big ‘whoomph’ … Certainly you would get a respectable flash and a bang out of that. Whether you’d get any serious percussive force I don’t know … I have a tendency with things like that to work something which is approximately possible under the right circumstances and just let it go, because the thing that I definitely am not is a hard science guru. My scientific qualifications are relatively scant. I like science, I try really hard to educate myself about it, but in the end if something has to go ‘boom’ and it would probably only go ‘fwoosh,’ I am relatively unconcerned about that, which is a sin, but not I think a grave one.”

Guardians of the Galaxy Panel

John Joseph Adams on the comic book backstory of Thanos:

“Basically the Infinity Gems—or as they’re called in the Marvel Cinematic Universe the ‘Infinity Stones’—they’re these six stones that have almost magical abilities, so there’s the Soul Gem and the Power Gem, and they all give a person godlike powers. And so Thanos goes around and collects them all … Thanos is doing this because he’s courting Death. And when I say ‘Death,’ I mean the actual personification of death, the character of Death in the Marvel universe, sort of like the goddess of death. And to try to impress her, he decides he’s going to exterminate half the sentient life in the universe … One of the things that really makes him a compelling villain is that he almost has this sense that he doesn’t deserve it, and so he sets up his own demise. Because the thing is he’s grabbing ultimate power in most of these cases, so they almost have to do that in order to give the heroes any chance to defeat him.”

Matt London on the generic nature of Guardians of the Galaxy:

“I am completely done with prison breaks in sci-fi movies … Just a couple months ago there was a prison break scene in a Marvel movie, in the new X-Men movie. Is this the only thing that we can do as our second act? It’s so boring and tedious. I’ve just seen it so many times now … And then the other thing—sorry to get all narrative structure on people—but as soon as they find the stone and realize that the stone is what it is, I’m like, ‘OK, so now the bad guys are going to show up, and they’re going to have a huge action sequence, and fifteen minutes from now the good guys are going to get beaten down, the bad guys are going to get the stone, and all hope is going to be lost. Watch.’ And then over the next twenty minutes that’s exactly what happened. Everything is so completely predictable and by-the-numbers. We’ve seen this movie before.”

The post Author Nick Harkaway on Improvised Grenades and ‘Existential Pulp’ appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Sony, Microsoft Trade Exclusives In Germany

Chris Kohler — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 22:32:07 +0000

We discuss Sony’s and Microsoft’s announcements at Gamescom, Europe’s big gaming trade and consumer show, on this week’s Game|Life Podcast.

Microsoft certainly riled up some fans with the news that Rise of the Tomb Raider, pictured above, would be exclusive to the Xbox One. Apparently, this will only be for a specified period of time, so it’s highly likely that PlayStation 4 will also be graced with Lara Croft’s presence at some point. But if you want to play her latest adventure the day it comes out, you’ll need to own an Xbox One. Console wars are tough things, kids. This is the topic of our discussion on the podcast, and Peter Rubin and Bo Moore join me to chat about exclusives and other announcements.

Bo gives us more thoughts on Firefall, and I talk about my recent piece on the Night Trap Kickstarter, too. Enjoy!

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 123

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_123.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: Sony, Microsoft Trade Exclusives In Germany appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Big Changes For Twitch

Chris Kohler — Fri, 08 Aug 2014 18:55:22 +0000

On this week’s Game|Life podcast, we discuss the recent changes that the game streaming service Twitch has announced.

Of course, since we recorded this episode yesterday, Twitch has already announced some significant changes to the policies. So we’re out of date already!

Peter Rubin chimes in with some thoughts on PlayStation Now, Bo Moore gives us more deets on Crypt of the NecroDancer, and I discuss more of my thoughts on Nintendo’s indie guy Dan Adelman striking out on his own.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 122

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_122.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: Big Changes For Twitch appeared first on WIRED.

GL Audio 220: Hour of Slack (and Flickr, and iPhone)

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

In light of Mat’s latest feature article about the creator of Flickr and Slack, he and Mike chat about forward-thinking integrated software, and a little bit about the rumored Big iPhone.

The post GL Audio 220: Hour of Slack (and Flickr, and iPhone) appeared first on WIRED.

This Sci-Fi Author Thinks Amazon Will Cause an Apocalypse

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 02 Aug 2014 10:30:54 +0000

Charles Stross is an award-winning science fiction author whose books include The Bloodline Feud, about timeline-hopping narco-terrorists, Halting State, a near-future crime thriller set in Scotland, and The Rapture of the Nerds, a humorous take on the technological singularity. He’s also the author of The Laundry Files series, which blends spy thrillers, Lovecraftian horror, and workplace humor. The latest Laundry novel, The Rhesus Chart, suggests that using a Kindle might make you susceptible to the malign sorcery of Jeff Bezos. It’s an idea inspired by Stross’s real-life experiences with Amazon.

“Don’t get me started on Amazon,” Stross says in Episode 114 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. “My books are published by Hachette. My books have been blacklisted and blocked on Amazon on multiple occasions.”

He’s in good company. Amazon’s habit of removing pre-order buttons from their store in order to pressure publishers into accepting its terms has affected lots of authors, and alienated such big names as Stephen King, John Grisham, and Jennifer Egan. And while the Lovecraftian armageddon codenamed Case Nightmare Green exists only in Stross’ novels, he thinks a very real apocalypse could befall the world if Amazon prevails.

“Let’s just say they want to be a monopoly as much as Google or Facebook want to be a monopoly,” he says, “and if they get their way it’s going to be a pretty scary contingency, since the internet as we know it will no longer exist.”

Listen to our complete interview with Stross in Episode 114 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as we discuss the original Nintendo Entertainment System with special guests Alison Haislip, an actress and TV personality recently featured in the documentary Video Games: The Movie, and Blake J. Harris, author of Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation.

Charles Stross on combining spy thrillers with Lovecraftian horror:

“‘A Colder War’ started when I was looking at At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, which had some moments of sublime horror in it—it’s one of his classic stories. However, Lovecraft’s horror has very much been devalued in recent decades. It’s reached the point where we have plush Cthulhu dolls and bedroom slippers, where it’s a suitable subject matter for jokes or comics. It lacks the level of cosmic horror that it originally came with. In 1992, shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, I was trying to think how to put the horror back into H.P. Lovecraft, and I suddenly realized you make it something that truly is horrifying. Nineteen ninety-two was just after the end of the Cold War, and if you were alive back then, you lived with the ever-present knowledge that vast cool intelligences thousands of miles away might at any moment be making decisions that would unleash the power of a thousand suns and basically melt the skin from your face, and kill everyone around you and destroy everything you hold dear, for entirely abstract reasons relating to an ideological struggle that never really touches you directly.”

Charles Stross on Edward Snowden:

“For a couple years after 1989 there was a queue of already-sold technothrillers in the pipeline about World War III in Europe between the Soviet Union and NATO, and you can just see the authors tearing their hair out as the books come dribbling out two years after the Warsaw Pact collapsed. You can imagine how their sales stunk. I think we may be seeing a much more subtle effect today from the Snowden revelations, because what has happened is they’ve massively eroded public faith in not merely the ability to function of the security services, but their very reason for existing. Now, I began writing the Laundry series in 1999, and back then the whole Snowden thing just wasn’t on the radar … I’m not sure actually how to address this in the Laundry series yet. I’m still digesting it. What I can say is I’m working on a different spy thriller trilogy set in my Merchant Princes universe, with publication in a year to 18 months, that is my definitive post-Edward Snowden spy thriller.”

Nintendo Entertainment System Panel

John Joseph Adams on his stolen Nintendo:

“[Zelda II:] The Adventure of Link is sort of my saddest memory from my videogame years when I was a kid, because I was playing the game and I was three-quarters of the way through, and my house got robbed. Our house actually got robbed three times in the span of a month or two, and the first time the robbers didn’t take my Nintendo or any of my games, but the second time they took it, and they took all my games, so I lost all my progress on The Adventure of Link … I lived in Florida, and we lived way out on the outskirts of town where it hadn’t really been developed yet, so my house was the only house on my street, and there were just a bunch of empty lots around us, and we were right next to I-95, so people could drive by and see that there were no cars in front of our house, so it wasn’t very secure … It wasn’t even that I had lost the Nintendo. It was that I had lost all my progress on The Adventure of Link.”

Blake Harris on how Console Wars is like Game of Thrones:

“There were all these things going on behind the scenes that I really had no idea about as a kid. There was this other Nintendo that wasn’t just the happy joyful one … I realized that there were no good guys or bad guys. It really was just all these different houses with their own philosophies, and they all thought they were entitled to be king of the mountain. So between Sony, Sega, Nintendo, and even the third parties, it really felt like Game of Thrones. When I wrote the Nintendo chapters I felt like I genuinely hated Sega, and when I wrote the Sega chapters I genuinely hated Nintendo, and it was just these great larger-than-life characters … Definitely Nintendo [is most like the Lannisters]. Nintendo has the best balance sheet and financials possible. Even though they’ve been doing terribly with the Wii U. … And Sega were more of these upstarts that I guess I liken more to the Stark family.”

The post This Sci-Fi Author Thinks Amazon Will Cause an Apocalypse appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Putting PlayStation’s Game Streaming Service to the Test

Chris Kohler — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 21:57:22 +0000

Could this be PlayStation Now’s toughest test?

WIRED’s Peter Rubin and Bo Moore join me in the studio as we discuss Sony’s new streaming-games service, which just entered open beta on PlayStation 4, and put it through the toughest test I can imagine. Then, somehow (you’ll have to listen to find out!) the Wii U comes into it and I discuss the hidden benefits and agonizing flaws of Wii Mode.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 121

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GL Audio 219: The Wild World Web

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Internet.org wants to bring the web to everyone in the world, and is bringing up some big questions. Is the Internet a human right? What would the Internet for Poor People look like? Meanwhile, people who are already logged on are angry because of abuse on Twitter, and yet another SnapChat competitor arises.

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Game|Life Podcast: Guardians of the Galaxy Blasts Into Disney Infinity

Chris Kohler — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Marvel’s upcoming film Guardians of the Galaxy will be well-represented in the upcoming Disney Infinity 2.0 Marvel Super Heroes game, Disney said this week.

On this episode of the Game|Life podcast, I’m joined by Bo Moore to discuss everything (well, almost) that we know so far about the upcoming sequel to Disney’s cross-franchise toys-to-life game, which is slated for September 23. Also note that I totally nail a prediction here, in saying that Disney’s upcoming feature film Big Hero 6 will likely be represented in the new game—and today, we got semi-confirmation of that at Comic-Con. (No word on if Big Hero 6 will be a full-fledged playset or just a few individual characters, but I still think the former is a lock.)

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 120

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_120.mp3]

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GL Audio 218: Smartphones are Eating the World

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The digital era is changing the way we buy stuff. Wave Amazon’s new Fire phone over a bottle of Tabasco at the store and one will show up at your door… unless Google Shopping Express gets there first. Mat and Mike cover the fight for your digital checkbook, Microsoft’s cheap phone strategy, and trolling Facebook’s facial recognition system with monkey butts.

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Game|Life Podcast: How Not to Announce That Your Kickstarter Failed

Chris Kohler — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 20:01:04 +0000

Have no choice but to cancel the project that you crowdfunded? Sometimes it can’t be helped, but make sure you don’t make matters worse when you make that announcement.

On this episode of the Game|Life podcast, we discuss the latest overambitious gaming Kickstarter that’s gone down the tubes — Yogventures, which was crowdfunded for $567,665 in May 2012, a few months after Double Fine’s smash success with what would become Broken Age. We look at how the failure of the Kickstarter was communicated to fans, compared to other problematic Kickstarter games.

Other topics: The Maze of Games (a Kickstarter success), Captain Toad for Wii U.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 119

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/best_brienomyrus_192kb.mp3

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_119.mp3]

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GL Audio 217: Never Get Involved in a Land War in Your Kitchen

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

While Microsoft lays off thousands, Facebook chases celebrities with “Mentions”, Secret takes a dive towards the trite, and Tim Draper tries to divide California by six. Listen to Mat and Mike’s musings on the Internet of Things, the all-knowing Google, and whether it’s still cool to like Wes Anderson.

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Why This Sci-Fi Author Doesn’t Want to Write Like George R. R. Martin

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 12 Jul 2014 10:30:36 +0000

Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham write the popular Expanse series of space adventure novels under the pen name James S. A. Corey. Franck originally dreamed up the setting as part of a failed videogame project, and later adapted it for use in a pen and paper role-playing game. Abraham was one of his players, as was superstar author George R. R. Martin. Franck went on to work for several years as Martin’s personal assistant, helping him manage his finances. People often assume that Martin had a major influence on Franck’s work, but in fact Franck never even tried to emulate Martin’s writing method, which involves a great deal of improvisation, false starts, and rewrites.

“I could not do that. I have to know where I’m going. I have to know what the next chapters are about,” Franck says in Episode 113 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “We just have very different brains for doing this work.”

Franck and Abraham recently released the fourth book in their Expanse series, Cibola Burn, which involves several factions fighting to control a deadly alien planet rich in natural resources. The series is also being adapted for television by Syfy, with Iron Man scribes Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby attached to the project. And while Martin played a limited role in shaping Franck as a writer, his advice was critical when it came to publishing contracts and film deals.

“The ways in which George was a really great mentor was on the business side,” says Franck. “He has enormous stores of experience on that stuff, so on that side he really was a good mentor.”

Listen to our complete interview with Franck in Episode 113 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks John Joseph Adams, Doug Cohen, and Theresa DeLucci join host David Barr Kirtley to review Season 4 of Game of Thrones and discuss the prospect of the show spoiling future books in the series.

Ty Franck on book titles:

“Daniel says our titles are designed to let our readers know that we’re pretentious, and there is an element of that in there. They’re all sort of mythological ideas that loosely tie in to what we’re doing. So with the first one, waking up the great monster that’s been sleeping, is Leviathan Wakes. For the second one, Caliban is the half-human, half-monster that lives on the same island as Prospero in The Tempest who resists being controlled, who Prospero attempts to control, and Caliban fights back against being controlled by the wizard. In Hebrew mythology, Abaddon is the angel who guards the gates to hell. And the Cibola is one of the cities of gold, the great treasure that you are willing to commit murder to find that doesn’t actually exist. … The tentative title for [the next book] is Nemesis Games. … [Our publisher] really likes ‘a mythological thing has or does something.’ … Nemesis is a Greek mythological character, so they should like that.”

Ty Franck on alien worlds:

“The thing that always drove both of us crazy is you get to the alien world and you catch an alien disease, like the Martians catching our diseases in The War of the Worlds. And of course H.G. Wells had a much more limited understanding than we do today, but even the idea that aliens would have DNA is totally unfounded. I mean, yeah, our version of life stumbled across RNA and DNA as a way to create stable replicators, but those are by no means the only possible version of that. … A scientist recently did an experiment where instead of potassium you can use—I believe it was cyanide as the basis for some of the protein building blocks. So you could have a lifeform where one of its primary building blocks is a deadly poison to us. And that should go the other way too. The things that are essential proteins to our biology could easily be deadly poisons to another biosphere, so you have things like the stinging insects that land on you, sting you, drink your blood, and then fall over dead.”

Game of Thrones Season 4 Panel

Doug Cohen on avoiding spoilers:

“Starting next year, when there’s a new episode each week, I’m not going to watch the episode. I’ll wait until the episode is over, at which point I’ll ask on my Facebook account, ‘Hey guys. Can I watch this episode?’ At which point people will tell me yea or nay. If it’s safe, great, I’m all in. If not, then I’m out, and then we start taking some precautions going forward for however many years necessary to avoid spoilers. … The first thing I’m going to do is Sunday night until Monday night, that’s social media blackout time, because that’s when people are going to be tweeting, Facebooking, linking about Game of Thrones more than any other time. … The second I can’t follow the show anymore, that means I immediately stop following Game of Thrones on Facebook and Twitter. You just pull back, you hold the line, and it’s just basically those ten weeks each season. My radar will have to be up every time I’m online, every time I’m at a convention. And thankfully my friends all know how fanatical I am about not getting spoiled about Game of Thrones.”

Theresa DeLucci on handsome men:

“As a heteronormative female, I feel like they keep killing off all the really hot men. Every year the cast of hot men on the show gets smaller and smaller. It started with Khal Drogo, and then Robb. I liked the original Daario. He was fine. He looked appropriately smug and douchey enough, like how I pictured him in the book. He didn’t need the blue beard and all that. The guy they have now just looks like—I see guys who look like that in Bushwick all the time. That is not Daario. That is just some lame, generic hipster knight. He looks like he comes from Westeros. He doesn’t look like a Second Son. He doesn’t have any swagger, he doesn’t have the costume right, so Oberyn was it for me. Unless they cast Viggo Mortensen as Damphair or something, there is nothing left for me. I was so sad to see Oberyn go, because he was absolutely perfect. I watched the season premiere at the Barclay Center—4,000 seats—to watch the premiere early on a big screen for a charity event. When Pedro Pascal came on screen, you just heard 2,500 women gasp all at the same time, because he was just so perfect, and just knowing what was going to happen to him, man, that made Season 4 really hard.”

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118: Game|Life –– BlueStreak, Tsum Tsum and Potato Salad

Chris Kohler — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Chris, Peter and Bo explore some unusual topics, from grass-fed butter to Peter’s new puppy. Along they way, they talk about a few games too.

The post 118: Game|Life –– BlueStreak, Tsum Tsum and Potato Salad appeared first on WIRED.

117: Game|Life –– Minisode

Chris Kohler — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

We’re alive — just taking a holiday break! We’ll be back next week with more games and a longer podcast!

The post 117: Game|Life –– Minisode appeared first on WIRED.

Outlander TV Adaptation Won’t Shy Away From Spanking

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 28 Jun 2014 10:30:47 +0000

Diana Gabaldon is the author of the wildly popular Outlander series, which tells the story of Claire Randall, a World War II-era nurse who finds herself transported to 18th-century Scotland, where she falls in love with a rugged highlander named Jamie. Battlestar Galactica’s Ronald Moore will bring the series to television in August, and Gabaldon promises that the show will not tone down any of the racy content of the first novel, which includes the hero whipping the heroine with his swordbelt, and a torture scene featuring what she calls “non-consensual buggery.”

“If it’s in the book, we’ll film it the way it is in the book,” Gabaldon says in Episode 112 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I couldn’t ask for better than that.”

The show is sure to raise eyebrows in much the same way as the wildly popular Game of Thrones, based on the book series by Gabaldon’s friend and fellow Santa Fe resident George R. R. Martin. That’s no accident. The success of Game of Thrones has sent studios scrambling to find another big fantasy book series with adult themes to adapt for TV. Still, as faithful as Outlander promises to be, fans of the books will have to accept that some changes will be made. Gabaldon has urged them to relax about small differences, such as Claire’s eyes being blue not brown.

“It’s the 18th century,” she says. “The lighting is such that 90 percent of the time you can’t even tell what color anybody’s eyes are.”

Listen to our complete interview with Gabaldon in Episode 112 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks John Joseph Adams, Christie Yant, and Wendy Wagner join host David Barr Kirtley to discuss Women Destroy Science Fiction, a special crowdfunded double issue of Lightspeed magazine written and edited entirely by women.

Diana Gabaldon on soldiers reading her books:

“The books are very popular with servicemen and women. A lot of them who are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan will go to a bookstore and pick up the biggest book they can find for the flight, which is often enough one of mine, and when they get to the other side they call their families and say, ‘Send the rest of the series.’ They empathize with Jamie Fraser, you know, he’s a warrior, as they are, and he’s fighting for the same things they are. … But beyond that they are surprisingly interested and involved in the relationships of the main characters. One of them said to me in a letter, you know, you get a weekly phone call, and usually half of it is taken up with just domestic inquiries … and it’s very stilted, and by the time you’re relaxed with each other again the phone call is over, so it’s kind of unsatisfying. He said with the books to talk about you can say, ‘Oh, I’m up to chapter so-and-so. Have you read this yet?’ And if she has then you can say, ‘Well, would you do what she did?’ And the conversation takes place on a much more immediately intimate level, because they can discuss their own relationship in the safe context of the relationship of these characters.”

Diana Gabaldon on historical fiction:

“Cultural concepts are one of the most fascinating things about historical fiction. There’s always a temptation, I think, among some historical writers to shade things toward the modern point of view. You know, they won’t show someone doing something that would have been perfectly normal for the time but that is considered reprehensible today. For instance women drinking alcohol while pregnant. I get a lot of people being just appalled that Claire drinks wine while she’s pregnant, and I’m saying, ‘It was 1743. Everyone drank wine regardless.’ And in fact while Claire comes from 1945, there was absolutely no idea in anyone’s head that drinking alcohol would cause any problems whatsoever. The thought that you ought not to drink while pregnant came much, much later. In fact, I had my first child in 1982, and I was still told by nurses and so forth, ‘Have a glass of wine with dinner. It’ll help you relax.'”

Women Destroy Science Fiction Panel

Christie Yant on reading J.R.R. Tolkien as a girl:

“I read Tolkien when I was 11. I read The Hobbit and the trilogy on a road trip with my family. I identified with the nonhumans in those books, and it never occurred to me why that was. It’s because none of the nonhumans were women, and I felt very nonhuman a lot of the time. … It never occurred to me that I wasn’t reading about girls. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t represented, because I didn’t think I was supposed to be. I was supposed to want to be a boy. … It’s really the internet that’s allowed me to connect with ideas that freed me from what I and others call ‘girl hate.’ I was a girl and a woman who didn’t want to be one, because I believed that we were inferior. I didn’t know the language for feminism. I certainly had never heard of Joanna Russ. I had never encountered these ideas before, and again, I came to it so late in life, I just feel kind of bad for that tiny Christie who would rather have been a hobbit than a person.”

Wendy Wagner on Women Destroy Science Fiction:

“Some of these essays just make you want to go out and be like, ‘If the patriarchy had a physical embodiment, I would break the patriarchy’s kneecaps today.’ … I really wanted to make the nonfiction be about inspiring and empowering women to read and write science fiction, because I love science fiction, it’s the bulk of what I write, and I just want everybody to feel inspired by it and as welcome within it as I want to be welcome. … There’s this essay by Nisi Shawl which is about how to help women writers. It’s just chock full of resources and encouragement and support, and it’s exactly what I wish someone had handed me when I was 19 and thinking, ‘Oh, I’m never going to be a great writer.’ … There’s a great reading list that Stina Leicht put together which is part personal essay about how science fiction helped her as a young person as well as recommendations of great feminist work. … I think there’s just so much positive energy in the reading list. I’m glad I got to put it together.”

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116: Game|Life –– A Look Back at E3, A Look Ahead to the Rest of 2014

Chris Kohler — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

We’re back, loyal listeners, and we’re sorry for the two-week hiatus. In this episode, Chris, Peter, and Bo talk the delightful ‘Shovel Knight’ and revisit the best of E3.

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GL Audio 215: Google I/O 2014 – Grand or Goofy?

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Calore and Mat Honan talk news out of this year’s Google I/O conference and speculate on the Android maker’s long term plan. Does the tech giant have an agenda or is this all experimentation? At least we know there won’t be killer robots.

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How Evolution Gave Some Fish Their Electric Powers

Nick Stockton — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 18:02:04 +0000

The electric eel is one of the many creatures Charles Darwin sliced up and examined in his years aboard the H.M.S. Beagle. When he cut it open, he found that 80 percent of the fish’s body was taken up by three organs made of what looked like muscle tissue, but not quite. This is where the animal makes electricity.

After finding similar organs in other fish, Darwin correctly deduced that the lineages—six in all—came to the same adaptive conclusion independent of one another. Until now, though, no one has known how similar they were. According to a paper published today in Science, at least three of the six lineages evolved their electric organs through the same genetic pathways.

Taxonomically, these lineages were too distantly related to have inherited the organ from a common ancestor. In Origin of Species Darwin wrote that “Natural selection, working for the good of each being and taking advantage of analogous variations, has sometimes modified in very nearly the same manner two parts in two organic beings.” Biologists call this convergent evolution.

“Imagine houses in built different parts of the country. The house in New Mexico may look different from a house in New England, but they’re built using the same basic structural parts,” said co-author Jason Gallant, a biologist at Michigan State University.

The team started with the electric eel—not actually an eel, but a type of knifefish. They took took DNA samples from cells in its electric organ—called electrocytes—and compared it to the DNA from other tissue, including its muscle, kidney, and nerve cells. From about 25,000 genes, about 100 stood out. In muscle cells, which electrocytes evolved from, these genes control the ability to contract. In the eel, these genes were highly suppressed. “We think these are the ones that turn off the ‘muscleness’ of a muscle cell and turn on the current-generating ability,” said co-author Michael Sussman, a geneticist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The electric organ discharge starts when the fish’s brain sends signals that release a neurotransmitter onto the electrocytes. This opens tiny molecular doors that allow positively-charged sodium ions to rush in, creating an electric current. Our brain cells operate by moving ions around in a similar way.

After they’d isolated the genes in electric eels, the researchers looked at the RNA—the acid that encodes genes from DNA—of two other lineages of electric fishes. They found that the same genes were similarly manipulated, all with the same effect: Tweaking the muscle cell genetic code as a blueprint for a little organic battery.

The researchers studied species of fish from the three lineages with black fish icons: elephantfish, catfish, and electric eels. Jason Gallant et al

Each electrocyte only turns out about 50 millivolts of electricity, but they are stacked end-to-end in the organ, so their charges accumulate like batteries in a Maglite. The eel’s electric organs (which take up about four-fifths of its body) can generate up to 600 volts. “There’s enough power in the eel’s electric organ to kill anything it wants,” said Sussman.

In each of the six electric fish lineages, there are several to hundreds of species. In Africa, there are over 200 species of electric elephantfish, and Gallant says that number has grown a lot in relatively recent evolutionary history. This is because they use their electric charge to communicate, in addition to helping them navigate the roots and rocks in their murky, river habitats. (Using electricity for predation, like the electric eel does, is a rarity among electric fish species.)

Each species of African elephantfish has its own specific frequency or pattern, a niche that helps it distinguish its own kind from the crowded, muddy water.

“What’s really interesting is that this diversity of electric discharges—really, the invention of new electric discharges—might be driving new species,” said Gallant.

The recording below is the amplified sound of the electrical frequency that the Brienomyrus brachyistus elephantfish uses during courtship.

Sussman believes this research might have practical applications. Someday, he says, scientists might be able to create electrocytes from human stem cells, which could power biomedical devices like pacemakers or insulin pumps. But this, he says, is probably years away.

“I’m not promising people that you’ll have electric organs and be able to charge your cell phones right away,” he said, “but I’m hoping that this paper might inspire research that will be able to create electrocytes.”

However, the air we live in doesn’t conduct electricity like water does, so you probably don’t have to worry about getting shocked by a bio-engineered super villain.

The post How Evolution Gave Some Fish Their Electric Powers appeared first on WIRED.

Squirrel Alarm Calls Are Surprisingly Complex

Mary Bates — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 13:55:36 +0000

Have you heard this sound in your backyard?

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/kuks5s.wav

Maybe you looked up to see a squirrel, chattering away while flicking its tail.

Both the vocalization and the tail flick are alarm signals produced by gray squirrels. It turns out they have a number of vocal and tail signals that have different meanings depending on how they are used.

Thaddeus McRae and Steven Green of the University of Miami looked at whether these different alarm signals were used by squirrels, either individually or in combination, in response to different kinds of threats.

Kuks, Quaas, Moans, Twitches, and Flags

Gray squirrels have three different vocal alarms, which they produce when they spot a potential predator nearby.

The kuk (heard in the example above) is short, sharp, broad-frequency sound. “Imagine a dog barking and then speed it up and shorten it down to squirrel-size,” says McRae.

The quaa is essentially a longer version of the kuk, but it can be varying lengths. Both kuks and quaas can be heard in the example below.

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/kuksand3quaas18s.wav

The moan, in contrast to kuks and quaas, is tonal, almost like a whistle.

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/moans12s.wav

In addition to these vocal alarms, squirrels have two types of tail signals. A twitch looks like a wave running through the tail. It’s a controlled movement in which the path of the tail tip usually forms a simple arc. A flag is a more conspicuous whipping motion. During a flag (see video below), the squirrel’s tail tip can move in arcs, figure eights, circles, and various squiggles.

Sound the Alarm

McRae and Green tested whether these different vocal and visual alarms were associated with particular types of predators. They studied a wild population of gray squirrels on the University of Miami campus. These squirrels have two main types of predators: aerial predators, such as hawks, and terrestrial predators, particularly domestic cats.

The researchers exposed the squirrels to five kinds of potentially threatening stimuli. They simulated a hawk approach by throwing a styrofoam glider painted to look like a hawk in the air. They simulated a cat attack with a remote-controlled model cat on wheels, driven toward the squirrel. To see if the manner of approach (terrestrial versus aerial) or physical resemblance to a predator affected the squirrels’ alarms, the researchers also presented the squirrels with an object that didn’t resemble any predators at all — a red ball — and either rolled it towards the squirrels or threw it overhead like the model hawk.

Thaddeus McRae, www.thaddeusmcrae.com

Overall, McRae and Green found the squirrels have an alarm system with different degrees of specificity. Some, but not all, of the alarm signals were associated with predator type, and combinations of tail signals and vocalizations were more strongly associated with threats than either type of signal alone.

Of the three vocalizations and two tail movements, only tail flags and moans were associated strongly with specific predators. Moans by themselves were specific to the aerially approaching model hawk. Tail flags showed a moderate association with the terrestrially approaching model cat.

Considered by themselves, kuks served as a generic alarm signal. “Whether or not they use kuks doesn’t really tell you much about what’s going on other than something is upsetting the squirrel,” says McRae.

Squirrels made quaas more often in response to terrestrial threats, but sometimes used them when an aerial threat approached, as well.

When McRae and Green looked at the two tail signals by themselves, the twitches were used in lots of different circumstances, sometimes even when there was no predator present.

Considering the vocal and tail alarms together drastically increased one’s ability to predict what was eliciting the calls. If terrestrial and aerial attacks are equally common, and a squirrel randomly guesses which type of threat is causing the alarm, it would be wrong about half the time. Looking at whether or not tail flags were used reduces that error rate by about 17%, while looking at whether moans are involved in the signal reduces the error rate by about 20%.

“But paying attention to whether or not they used moans and whether or not they used tail flags reduces the error of their guesses by about 52%,” says McRae. “So looking for tail flags while listening for moans reduces your error rate two and a half to three times more than paying attention to only one or the other. The moral is, it’s important to both look and listen if we want to know the whole story.”

Know Your Audience

The mixed specificity of these signals allows squirrels to adjust the specificity of their alarms and also their own risk of being detected by predators.

Using both auditory and visual alarms together might reinforce the signal, making the alarms more noticeable.

But who are these alarm signals meant for? One possibility is that they function to let other nearby squirrels know a predator is lurking. However, it’s also possible that the alarms are meant to let the predator itself know that the squirrel has spotted it.

Broadband sounds like kuks and quaas are easy to localize. These sounds, and conspicuous visual displays like tail flags, advertise the signaler’s location. If an ambush predator like a cat knows its potential prey has spotted it, it might give up and look elsewhere for prey it can take by surprise. One study showed leopards stalking monkeys in West Africa left the area more rapidly if the monkeys gave leopard-specific alarm calls. Domestic cats might also be deterred if they know they’ve been spotted by a squirrel.

Thaddeus McRae, www.thaddeusmcrae.com

The narrow-frequency moans are more difficult to localize. Given how specific the moans are to aerial threats, this might be a way for the squirrel to give an alarm call without advertising its location. Hawks can easily take squirrels off the ground or off the trunks and branches of trees, so advertising its location would not be good in the case of aerial predators.

Alerting the predator that the squirrel sees it may be the main function, but that doesn’t preclude other squirrels from hearing or seeing the signal and also responding. McRae says he is coming to the conclusion that these alarm calls are used both by other squirrels and to let predators know they’ve been seen.

Referential or Urgency-Based

McRae has shown that squirrels respond to other squirrels’ alarm calls by becoming more vigilant and retreating up trees. However, he doesn’t yet know if squirrels respond in unique ways to the different types of alarm signals.

If squirrels did respond differently to alarms that signaled terrestrial versus aerial predators, it might indicate that their alarm system is functionally referential. Functionally referential signals act as if the call refers to a specific object. The call is elicited by this object, and when other animals hear that call, they respond appropriately — as they would to that specific object. For example, if a squirrel consistently gives a particular call when a cat is present and that call elicits anti-cat behavior in other squirrels, then the call functions as if it refers to the cat. (The classic examples of functionally referential alarm signals are those of vervet monkeys, who have specific calls for three different types of predator that each elicit a different and appropriate anti-predator behavior in other monkeys).

Squirrel alarms could also be urgency-based, dependent on factors like how close the predator is and how rapidly it is approaching. McRae thinks it might not be an either/or situation, and the line between functionally referential and urgency-based alarm signals might be fuzzier than it’s made out to be.

McRae is currently working on playback experiments to see how squirrels react to alarm signals.

“If they do use different responses, then the signals are functionally referential and these squirrels are basically using these alarms to get predator-specific information and respond accordingly,” he says. “But if they don’t respond differently to the different alarm signals, that suggests the differences in these alarm calls isn’t about being an alarm call but might be directed at the predator.”

McRae’s research shows there is a lot we still don’t know about the behavior of an animal many of us see every day. What other secrets is the humble squirrel hiding?

Reference:

McRae, T. R. and Green, S. M. (2014). Joint tail and vocal alarm signals of gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis). Behaviour. doi: 10.1163/1568539X-00003194.

All photos, video, and audio kindly provided by Thaddeus McRae, www.thaddeusmcrae.com.

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Physicist Lawrence Krauss Believes in Star Trek, Not God

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 14 Jun 2014 10:30:59 +0000

The new documentary film The Unbelievers follows two top scientists, physicist Lawrence Krauss and biologist Richard Dawkins, as they travel the globe promoting atheism. The two men are now close allies, but their relationship got off to a rocky start when Krauss suggested that Dawkins’ frank critiques of religion were counterproductive. But lately Krauss has come to agree that you might as well be straightforward, since no amount of coddling will ever appease brittle religious sensibilities.

Episode 111: Lawrence Krauss
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“Just asking questions you get called strident,” Krauss says in Episode 111 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I guess I’ve come to appreciate that a lot more too, as I get condemned for the same heresies as him.”

The Unbelievers was directed by former musician Gus Holwerda, who wanted to create a movie about science that played like a rock and roll tour video. He and his brother Luke, who also worked on the film, grew up in a Christian fundamentalist family, and credit their love of science fiction for helping them break free of those beliefs. Their next film is a time travel story in which Krauss makes a cameo appearance. Krauss, whose books include The Physics of Star Trek, agrees that science fiction can help people expand their minds beyond the limits imposed by religion.

“I used to read a lot of science fiction when I was younger,” he says. “As Stephen Hawking says in the introduction for The Physics of Star Trek, science fiction encourages the imagination, like science, and it’s a wonderful thing for that reason.”

Listen to our complete interview with Lawrence Krauss in Episode 111 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks James Morrow and Tobias Buckell join host David Barr Kirtley to discuss writing and blogging as an atheist.

Lawrence Krauss on debating theologians and philosophers:

“I’ve done tons of debates with religious apologists and philosophers, and for the most part [their arguments] are incredibly weak, especially the philosophers. … There are some philosophers who think that philosophy is a substitute for science, and in my book I made a joke which perhaps infuriated that group. I talked about the fact that a number of philosophers and theologians take exception with my discussion of nothing, and as I said, ‘Well, you know, they’re experts at nothing.’ … To be a—I don’t know if this phrase is an oxymoron—but to be a sensible theologian, or at least one who has a pretense of being scholarly, you at least have to have some vague idea of what’s going on in science, how old the universe is, etc., etc. But to do science you don’t have to know anything about theology. Scientists don’t read theology, they don’t read philosophy, it doesn’t make any difference to what they’re doing—for better or worse, it may not be a value judgment, but it’s true.”

Lawrence Krauss on quantum mechanics and consciousness:

“Your brain is a complicated system with lots of particles interacting, and it’s unlikely to expect that quantum coherence is responsible for the nature of consciousness, because quantum coherence gets destroyed in most physical systems—because of the many particles interacting—in a small fraction of a second. … Anyone who makes a claim about consciousness is probably lying, because we don’t understand the nature of consciousness. And there are lots of people who try to make their living by being hucksters about this. In particular there are those awful people who promote things like that silly, nonsensical book The Secret, which suggests that if you think about it, it will happen. If you want it, it will happen. That somehow your desires can affect the universe, and that is the worst garbage, the worst misrepresentation of science mechanics. It’s fraudulent, it’s a lie, and people should ignore those people, and moreover ridicule them.”

Writing and Blogging as an Atheist Panel

James Morrow on his novel Only Begotten Daughter:

“I would trace it to the feminist movement of the early seventies. I just woke up one day and said, ‘You know, it’s a big problem that all the major monotheistic religions rank-order the genders, and men win.’ As that old Yiddish proverb goes, ‘The best thing a woman can hope for is to be her husband’s foot stool in Heaven.’ And I said, ‘Wow, what if there was a female Jesus? What if there was a Second Coming, but with the gender expectations reversed?’ … I just wanted to get away from that, you know, all the Hebrew prophets are guys, and God is a guy, and Jesus is a guy. And the Virgin Mary’s a big problem when you consider what a schizoid role model that is for women. You know, you’re supposed to be a mother and you’re also supposed to be a virgin. … I find it very reliable to ask the question, when we want to know how moral a behavior is, how moral a society is, how moral a particular strain of faith is, the question to ask is: How does it treat women?”

Tobias Buckell on science denial:

“Writing these novels actually exposes me to a great deal of right-wing religious lashing out, because of this weird conservatism-plus-evangelicalism thing where they’ve sort of wrapped around each other and convinced people that if they’re evangelical and right-wing that they’re basically against science right now in terms of the realizations about global warming and its impending problems. … You cannot have a functioning society that grapples with science and that grapples with rational stuff when you just have a large number of people that go, ‘Uh-uh, God said.’ … A lot of people will send the same links and the same arguments. … So I do have a template for responding to basic inquiries, because sometimes you can tell people, ‘Hey, you’re using really bad data. This is made up stuff. Scientists don’t actually believe that. Here’s a PLOS query you can run and look up the academic articles.’ … But if it’s someone who just sort of throws up their hands and says, ‘It can’t be real because I’m religious,’ that is so dangerous, I think, and it’s so perplexing.”

James Morrow on Proof of Heaven and Heaven Is for Real:

“How does God feel about the fact that his cover has been blown? How does he feel about this unequivocal proof? Because there’s not one syllable of doubt in either [book]. Here God has been messing with our heads for thousands and thousands of years. You know, he’s been hiding himself, declining to answer our prayers—at least not doing so reliably—declining to intervene at Auschwitz or Hiroshima. Suddenly the game is up and God has been unequivocally unmasked. Did he really want this to play out in that fashion? I mean, did he really want the ultimate revelation to take the form of a New York Times bestseller? That seems preposterous to me. … The other thing that so bewilders me about this genre [is the lack of] a single shred of substantive corroboration. I mean, if only one of these people would return from Heaven with a mathematical proof. I mean, for heaven’s sake, Eben Alexander saw the face of God. Could he exit with maybe a beautiful sonnet in his head now? Or something other than this New Age boilerplate that he lays on us in the second half of the book?”

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Game|Life Podcast: The Pre-E3 Predictions Show

Chris Kohler — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 17:28:34 +0000

Peter Rubin, Bo Moore and I break down what we think will and won’t happen with Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and Virtual Reality on this week’s Game|Life podcast.

If you read my story on E3 from this morning you know what I think. But what about other people? That is the mystery.

We’ll try to finagle a post-E3 podcast next week, but I can’t guarantee anything. Frankly I can’t guarantee that I’ll be alive after five straight 18-hour work days.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 115

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_115.mp3]

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GL Audio 214: AMAFON!

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Christina Bonnington is back with Gadget Lab regulars Michael Calore and Mat Honan to discuss everything that Apple revealed at WWDC 2014. Plus: is an Amazon phone round the corner?

The post GL Audio 214: AMAFON! appeared first on WIRED.

A Brilliant Horror Podcast That’ll Soothe Your Anxiety

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 31 May 2014 10:30:02 +0000

Since debuting two years ago, the quirky podcast Welcome to Night Vale has achieved staggering popularity, displacing This American Life in July 2013 as the top-ranked podcast on iTunes. This is all the more striking considering that the show is produced by three friends from New York using hobbyist-level equipment and resources. Actor Cecil Baldwin voices the show’s main character, Cecil Palmer, a community radio host who reports on the strange goings-on in the small desert town of Night Vale. You might think all the monsters and conspiracies would unsettle listeners, but actually the opposite seems to be true.

“A lot of people with anxiety disorders will use the show to help calm them down and get to sleep when their brains are racing and they have a hard time focusing,” Baldwin says in Episode 110 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

The show has also found a devoted following among the LGBT community, who have avidly followed Cecil Palmer’s budding relationship with Carlos, a handsome scientist trying to make sense of Night Vale’s many mysteries. A large fan community on Tumblr has produced countless visual interpretations of Cecil and Carlos, and the fact that the show is family-friendly and full of supernatural fun gives it unusual mainstream appeal for a story about gay romance.

“I’ve met quite a few young gay, lesbian, and transgender listeners who have listened to the show with their parents,” says Baldwin, “and have used that as a gateway to help their parents understand where they’re coming from. And I find that amazing.”

Listen to our complete interview with Cecil Baldwin in Episode 110 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as Aaron James, author of the book Assholes: A Theory, joins us to discuss strategies for dealing with jerks and trolls.

Cecil Baldwin on the appeal of Welcome to Night Vale:

“The idea of a community of people where angels and conspiracy theories and shadowy government figures and dinosaurs randomly appearing in the middle of PTA meetings can be something that is completely commonplace, can be something that is just your average Tuesday afternoon, adds to a great deal of the comedy. I think what makes Night Vale particularly scary or provocative is the idea that we don’t spend a lot of time describing the horrible things that happen to the citizens of Night Vale. We leave a lot of that up to the audience’s imagination. Again, the podcast format for this is amazing, because it’s a disembodied voice that gets pumped in through your computer or your headphones and it forces the listener to create the horror for themselves. And to me, as an actor and a storyteller, this throws back to the idea of the campfire ghost story, where whatever is unexplainable and whatever is unknown is one of the scariest things. If you go into too much detail, if you do all the work for the listener, then they have a tendency to become disengaged by the story, because you’re providing all the answers for them.”

Cecil Baldwin on Welcome to Night Vale fan art:

“I think it’s really fascinating how people on Tumblr and all these other various websites have taken … characters who have very little physical description and have assigned physical descriptors to those characters … Cecil is deliberately not described in great physical detail. Now, this means that a lot of the ideas about what Cecil looks like have been developed by the fans—the ideas of the third eye, the purple vest, the sleeve tattoos, things like that are never mentioned in the show and have developed from the imaginations of the fans. … A lot of people have a tendency to depict him as sort of a dapper 1960s-style radio announcer who is white and blond-haired, and that is great. There are a lot of people who depict Cecil as African American or Native American or Asian, and that is great. I’ve also seen Welcome to Night Vale Cecil fan art where Cecil is a moth who sits on a microphone, and that as well is great, because it allows the artist to bring themselves to the show, and take the ideas and process it for themselves.”

Assholes and Trolls Panel

Aaron James on dealing with jerks:

“There is something you can do to be a little bit proactive about [asshole encounters], especially before they become tense and heightened, and that is to make a polite request, calmly, before you’re upset. Assholes are trading on the fact that it’s inconvenient or difficult for people to intervene. And then we often do it, but only after we’re already pretty pissed off. We respond in an angry way or an accusatory way, but a good way to preempt that whole dynamic is to quickly make a polite, calm, and maybe even respectful request, like you could say, very early on if the person’s checking [their phone during a movie], you could say, ‘Hey, I’m totally addicted to my phone too, but could we just make sure that we’re not checking the phone during the film?’ or whatever. You give them the opportunity to have a gracious out, as it were, rather than defending themselves and their righteousness.”

John Joseph Adams on asshole book reviewers:

“You see this a lot with book reviews too, and it’s kind of curious because sites like Amazon have made it so that anyone with a computer can post a review of a book, and they can actually be really damaging. Sometimes people post these reviews which are obviously criticizing a book—or whatever product—for being something it’s not intended to be. I edit anthologies, and a lot of the time you get people who are complaining that it’s a book of short stories and not a novel, and it’s like, ‘Well, I’m sorry, but that’s not what it is.’ … But that also brings up this thing I’ve seen from time to time where you get reviewers—not even just on Amazon, but actual professional reviewers who have a review in some publication somewhere—they’ll post a link to it on Facebook, and then they’ll tag the author, even though it’s a negative review. It’s like, ‘Hey buddy. Did you see this terrible review of your book I wrote? Aren’t you going to be very pleased with me that I pointed this out to you?’ … What are you doing? What an asshole thing to do.”

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Game|Life Podcast: Can E3 Ever Be Exciting Again?

Chris Kohler — Fri, 30 May 2014 21:25:25 +0000

As blockbuster videogames become more and more predictable, are we starting to lose the possibility of seeing announcements at E3 that are truly exciting? We tackle these thoughts on this episode of the Game|Life podcast.

Plus discussion of Mario Kart 8, Watch Dogs, Transistor, Oculus Rift and more. Peter Rubin and I wave a sad farewell to Laura Hudson, who will still continuously grace the pages of WIRED but is moving to Portland, Oregon, which precludes her regular participation on the Podcast. I think you’ll agree it was a magical time and an era that has come to a close far too soon.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 114

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_114.mp3]

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GL Audio 213: Pre-game: WWDC 2014

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There’s something in the air. What is it? It’s WWDC, Apple’s annual developer conference that’s happening at San Francisco’s Moscone West on June 2! Gadget Lab’s Michael Calore and Mat Honan are joined by Apple reporter Christina Bonnington to discuss iOS 8, the rumored Healthbook app, the next version of OS X and the $3 billion Apple-Beats deal.

The post GL Audio 213: Pre-game: WWDC 2014 appeared first on WIRED.

Arcadia, A Love Story

Chris Kohler — Fri, 30 May 2014 10:30:59 +0000

Arcadia, a Love Story

Chris Kooluris transformed his bedroom into a 1980s arcade—and altered the course of his life.

By Emily Dreyfuss

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Video: Andrew White / WIRED

THE GAME COLLECTOR

The Making of a Home Arcade

Kooluris spent six months and more than $32,000 putting together his shrine to video games.

- Donkey Kong: Kong Off Edition
- $3000
- Street Fighter II Champion Edition-Themed Dream Home Arcade Pedestal
- $3000
- Ms. Pac-Man
- $2000
- Tron
- $2500
- Fix It Felix Jr. Original Disney
- $6500
- Punch-Out
- $2100
- Lord of the Rings Limited Edition Pinball Machine
- $6900
- - + ACCESSORIES AND SHIPPING
  - $6725
- - SONY KDL55W900A 55-inch TV
  - $1,700
- - FLOR carpet tiles
  - $1,200
- - Transformers artwork by Tom Whalen
  - $350
- - Street Fighter SOTA action figures
  - $600
- - Rhino vending machine
- - Twin Galaxies vinyl wall decal
- - Video game marquees
  - $500
- - Convertible sofa bed
  - $750
- - Ninja Turtles comforter
  - $45
- - High-score board
  - $80
- - Stools
  - $300
- - Shipping
  - $1200
- Grand total

One of 12 games used at the first Kong Off in 2011. Former champion Steve Wiebe played this machine—and lost his record to Hank Chien. It’s signed by Wiebe and arcade videogame legend Billy Mitchell

A multiple-arcade-machine emulator, it plays 25,000 games using software called Hyperspin. This is a major taboo for arcade purists.

Kooluris had this machine custom-built. It can play 59 other games, including Frogger.

“I feel bad,” Kooluris says. “The kid who sold it to me has such seller’s remorse.”

An original cabinet in very good condition, Kooluris added new side art, a new control panel, and updated plastics.

Says Kooluris: “It’s perfection restored. Absolutely perfect. The whole thing is sanded down and painted—new control panel, new buttons, new everything.”

“I’ve already had complaints about it shaking the building,” Kooluris says.

For a guy who has spent six months and more than $32,000 turning the bedroom of his Manhattan apartment into an old-school video arcade, Chris Kooluris is very put together. He greets me at his Murray Hill flat dressed head to toe in designer casual wear—Ralph Lauren jeans, pristine white Y-3 Yohji Yamamoto sneakers, and a crisp Captain America T-shirt. He’s trim and athletic-looking, his shaven face boyish for a 37-year-old. This is not the obsessed nerd I was expecting. Then again, looks can be deceiving. He invites me in. The living room is bright and accented with brass everything—brass sconces, brass lamps, ornate brass mirrors. But I’m not here to see the living room. I came to see what Kooluris is hiding in the 180-square-foot bedroom. I look down the hallway: The door is closed, but from the other side I can hear a faint ting-ting-ting.

Chris Kooluris walks Oakley through his Murray Hill neighborhood. Amy Lombard

We make our way down the hall and he ceremoniously opens the door. It is a portal into the past. The first thing I see is a Donkey Kong cabinet, but then my eyes are drawn to a row of pristine gumball machines that look just like the ones at the Yellow Balloon where I got my first haircut on Ventura Boulevard in 1984.

Everyone who enters this room, Kooluris tells me, has the same reaction: They tell him about the part of their childhood it reminds them of.

Even the floor is fun—his girlfriend helped design it: multihued FLOR carpet tiles that bring out the colors of each machine. In the center of the room is a massive pedestal; inside is a PC running the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator software that’s mostly used to play Street Fighter II. It’s piped through a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall surrounded by 20 original game marquees.

He walks me through each game, explaining what makes it special. A refurbished Tron, one of the all-time greats. A brand new Ms. Pac-Man—‘really, just for the ladies,” he says. This Donkey Kong, he says, is the very one that former champion Steve Wiebe played in the first Kong Off competition in 2011.

But perhaps the pièce de resistance is the Fix-It Felix Jr., a custom-built arcade machine that plays a faux-retro game that was the centerpiece of the 2012 Disney animated movie Wreck-It Ralph. It’s an ’80s arcade game that didn’t even exist in the ’80s. Kooluris says it’s one of about 10 in private hands.

Over the sound of the clanging games, Kooluris tells me how awesome the Fix-It Felix is, how Disney distressed the cabinet so it would look like it really was 30 years old. All I can think is: Why is an adult man obsessed with a game made for a kids’ movie that came out only a few years ago?

The answer eventually reveals itself: The game is brilliant marketing, and Kooluris is a brilliant marketer. A vice president at Weber Shandwick, one of the world’s leading PR firms, Kooluris has been in the marketing and promotion business for 12 years. One of the highlights of his career involved his second love after gaming: Guns N’ Roses. He is an unabashed GNR fanatic, and he credits himself with getting Axl Rose to finally release the album Chinese Democracy. In early 2008, he persuaded his then-client Dr. Pepper to offer everyone in the US a coupon for a free soda if Rose released the long-delayed record. “Total guerrilla marketing,” he says.

Chinese Democracy was indeed released later that year, Dr. Pepper gave out lots of coupons for free sodas, and Kooluris got to meet his idol. “When I met Axl,” Kooluris says, “the first thing he said to me was, ‘Are you Kaneda?’” Kaneda is the handle Kooluris uses on message boards.

A Way of life

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Video: Andrew White / WIRED

One day in late 2013, Kooluris was on the street in front of his apartment, supervising the delivery of his new Donkey Kong machine. A boy and his father walked by. ¶“Dad, what’s that?” the child asked, pointing at the Donkey Kong cabinet. ¶“It’s like a big iPad,” his father said.

Kooluris shakes his head mournfully at this memory. “That is just sacrilege,” he says. Arcade games were not just big personal game machines. They were about community. They were a way of life.

Kooluris talks about his early immersion into arcade culture with an almost spiritual reverence. He grew up near Yonkers, New York, taking taxis to play the arcades at Nathan’s Famous with his twin brother Alex when they were too young to drive. He remembers the sweet smell of the place, the sound of the screaming and laughter when a kid was on a roll. If you were good enough, you could play for hours on one quarter.

Steve Wiebe’s autograph on the Donkey Kong cabinet. Amy Lombard

In 1992, when he and his brother were teenagers, his love of gaming got serious. “When Street Fighter II hit, it wasn’t like we knew that there was this new Street Fighter game coming. It was the ultimate surprise,” he says. “You only learned about something when it was physically right in front of your face. I remember I walked into the arcade in Nathan’s, and there was just a row of Street Fighter II Champion Editions, and I’m like, oh my God. It changes your world.”

Street Fighter competitions at Nathan’s got so tense that actual fights would break out, Kooluris says. At least when it came to playing the game, he had a considerable advantage over other kids: He and Alex had convinced their parents to buy them their own Street Fighter II cabinet so they could practice at home. It is conspicuous by its absence here in Kooluris’ bedroom arcade. His brother ended up with it. “I’ve been trying to pry it from his hands, but to no avail,” Kooluris says.

Living The Dream

A little over a year ago, Kooluris fell in love with a woman he met at work. Within six months, they got engaged, and he moved out of his Murray Hill apartment and into his fiancée’s bigger Brooklyn pad. ¶They began to adjust to living together: He tried her raw food diet, she started listening to GNR. In August 2013, they went on a vacation to the Grand Canyon. While on the trip, Kooluris read Ready Player One, a 2011 novel about a future world obsessed with the arcade game culture of the 1980s. “It awoke a monster in me,” he says. “I just had this revelation that, you know, why shouldn’t I—in this short time that we’re here—surround myself with the things I really enjoy?”

Kooluris had been an avid collector of games and action figures since he’d first had his own pocket money. Back in 1996 he bought the first Transformer figure for a collection that is now worth $15,000. All that stuff was stored in his bachelor pad uptown. “The Transformers collection, all the things I really loved, were just boxed away and off to the side,” he says. “My lifestyle was so devoid of all the things that I grew up with.”

Kooluris watches as friends play Street Fighter during a party at his apartment. Amy Lombard

Kooluris owned his old apartment, and he and his fiancée had decided months before that he should sell it. After all, they were getting married; it was time to let go of the trappings of bachelorhood and fully commit to this relationship. But the apartment had been on the market for months now, and Kooluris hadn’t gotten a single offer. His real estate agent begged him to lower the price, but now he had a better idea: Keep it and turn the bedroom into an arcade. That way, he reasoned, he could enjoy married life while still having a place to be surrounded by his prized possessions. He promised himself that he wouldn’t let the arcade spill outside the confines of the bedroom. The rest of the apartment would be reserved game-free for hanging out and entertaining.

“It wasn’t exactly like a joint decision,” he says. “It’s hard to sell that to the woman in your life, that this is a good financial decision.” But, to his surprise, his fiancée wasn’t totally against the idea. She loved him, and he loved arcade games, so she got involved. She convinced him to make the room colorful and bright, a happy place people would want to spend time in. (He had been planning a dark neon-dungeon motif.) Those authentic gumball dispensers? A Christmas present from her.

Whenever Kooluris had free time, he was uptown working on the arcade. Whenever he was at home, he was online browsing the Killer List of Videogames, the Internet’s foremost forum for collectors of arcade machines.

This went on for six months. His fiancée’s initial support began to wane. “There’s a fine line between a hobby and an obsession, and I think what happened is I just got so consumed by it all,” Kooluris says. “There probably should be therapists for hobbyists. It can take over.”

The KLOV community helped Kooluris restore his treasures accurately (should Tron’s black light be white or blue?), find obscure parts, and avoid getting ripped off as he built up his cabinet collection. “Online communities are awesome,” he says. “They become like another life for you.” As the weeks turned into months, one thing became clear: The members of KLOV shared Kooluris’ obsession in a way that his fiancée increasingly did not.

He thought he was sparing her, getting all his geeky thoughts off his chest online so she didn’t have to listen to him blabber on about it. “If you come home every night and want to talk to your girlfriend about arcade or pinball machines, that relationship is going to end really fast,” he says.

Instead, he realized too late, by not including her he was cutting her out of his life. “The arcade drove a wedge. It made clear everything that was wrong,” he says. “What happens in any relationship is that once you start to construct separate lives a little bit, it just becomes harder.”

His online friendships were souring, too. On KLOV, the haters outnumbered the supporters. They were certainly more vehement anyway. Some people hated his carpet. Some hated that he seemed to love Disney’s Fix-It Felix more than he loved actual ’80s arcade games. Some really hated that he paid $3,000 for an arcade-machine emulator pedestal. They made fun of him for overspending to restore his vintage Punch-Out!! cabinet. In fact, a lot of people just seemed to be ticked off that this stranger was essentially buying his way into their close-knit circle of longtime hobbyists.

When the room was ready to be revealed in February, Kooluris threw a launch party, but things were bad enough with his fiancée that she didn’t attend. “It was sad to not have her here,” he says, looking away.

In March, Kooluris’ fiancée gave him back the engagement ring. He hid it somewhere in the arcade; he won’t tell me exactly where. He moved out of her Brooklyn place and back to his old bachelor pad—only, of course, he’d sold the bed and turned the bedroom into an arcade. “This is not where I wanted to end up, just living in an arcade,” he says. One day when his ex came over to see the finished project, he showed her that he was sleeping on a convertible sofa bed with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bedspread. “Well, at least I don’t need to worry that this room will ever get another woman wet,” is how he recalls her reaction. (Kooluris’ ex-fiancée declined to participate in this story.)

The Reality of the Dream

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Video: Andrew White / WIRED

It’s hard to get ready for bed when you have to first individually unplug all your videogames. To make it easier, Kooluris rigged a single button that turns them all off. He tries not to play before bed. It gets him too hyped up. He bought a memory-foam topper for the fold-out couch to make it slightly less uncomfortable. ¶The games aren’t the only thing that keep him up at night. He’s been doing a lot of thinking about how to find true happiness. “A lot of times, once you get what you were chasing after, it’s not going to change your life,” he says. “It’s just sitting in your house, and then you sometimes can go through a depression,”

KLOV, he says, isn’t providing much support anymore. He posted pics of the finished arcade; they accused him of wanting attention. “I’ve seen your type before around here. So have a lot us who have been here for a while,” one wrote. “Your self-esteem is tied up in material possessions, your trophies.” Others were more succinct: “Poser.” But when I search through the forums I find plenty of people who came to his defense; in every thread he had a few allies. He just couldn’t see them anymore. “It got to the point where no matter what I said, I was vilified by the same bunch of people,” Kooluris says. “It’s a silly thing. No one owns this hobby. No one is more entitled to these games.”

Kooluris’ first pinball machine, Lord of the Rings, finds a home in his livingroom. Amy Lombard

Kooluris has had more social success in real life, inviting friends over to play in the arcade. Once a week he hosts arcade happy hours. He invites coworkers, friends, the guys he used to play Street Fighter II Champion Edition with at Nathan’s. He’s even invited some local KLOV guys but none have shown up so far. He thinks that if they ever met face to face, he’d get along with them.

He’s up for visits from strangers, too. “If there are any Street Fighter II players in the New York area,” he says, “they should come over and play here. I want this to be their hub.”

I ask: Do you still hope that you and your ex might work things out?

“I hope so,” he says. He’s still eating her raw food diet, to feel close to her.

A week later, on the phone, he’s not as hopeful. “It’s fucking perfect that the Lord of the Rings pinball is getting here the same night she’s going on her first date with someone else, which means I won.”

We ease off the subject and onto the unexpected news that he bought a pinball machine.

It won’t fit in the bedroom, so it’s going in the living room, over the boundary that he once promised would separate his hobby from the rest of his life. But there’s a silver lining: Now that the arbitrary limit has been crossed, Kooluris can start buying more pinball games and hanging out on pinball forums—Pinside, he tells me, is a really positive community.

“Arcades are a gateway drug for a pinball collection,” he says matter-of-factly, as if this had been the plan all along.

The post Arcadia, A Love Story appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Zelda‘s New Look, Transistor, Mario Kart

Chris Kohler — Sat, 24 May 2014 00:23:23 +0000

With Peter Rubin called away on an emergency meeting, it’s up to Laura Hudson and I to hold down the fort on this week’s Game|Life podcast.

We discuss the two big reveals in Nintendo’s new screenshots of Hyrule Warriors, slated for an August 14 release in Japan and later this year in the U.S. Laura talks about Transistor and we yell about Mario Kart 8.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 113

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_113.mp3]

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GL Audio 212: What’s Your Lapability Score?

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Is it a tablet? Is it a laptop? No, it’s the new Microsoft Surface Pro 3! Mat Honan and Michael Calore dive into the brand new device from Redmond and discuss what it means for the future of Microsoft. They also discuss the brand new Google+ Stories and the downfall of Metafilter. Stick around till the end to hear Mat channel Idina Menzel.

The post GL Audio 212: What’s Your Lapability Score? appeared first on WIRED.

109. Mary Robinette Kowal of Writing Excuses / Weird Western Books and Comics (with Fred Van Lente)

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Guest Geeks: Fred Van Lente, Rajan Khanna, John Joseph Adams

The post 109. Mary Robinette Kowal of Writing Excuses / Weird Western Books and Comics (with Fred Van Lente) appeared first on WIRED.

Doctor Who Is Even Better When You Add One of History’s Greatest Sexaholics

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 17 May 2014 10:30:32 +0000

Mary Robinette Kowal’s novel series The Glamourist Histories have been described as “Jane Austen with Magic.” For the latest volume, Valour and Vanity, Kowal sends her husband and wife protagonists to 19th-century Venice in search of glassmakers who can aid them in their sorcerous experiments. In the course of researching the book, Kowal made an exciting discovery—the famous English poet Lord Byron was actually living in Venice at the time.

Episode 109: Mary Robinette Kowal
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“As soon as I saw that I pretty much changed a lot of my plot on the spot,” Kowal says in Episode 109 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Because how can you not use Lord Byron? He’s an amazing historical figure.”

In one scene Kowal had Byron recite one of his poems. But further research revealed that she’d made a mistake, and the poem in question hadn’t yet been written in 1817, the year the novel takes place. She didn’t want to lose the scene, but none of Byron’s other poems seemed suitable replacements. So Kowal wrote her own Byronic poem, which necessitated a careful study of Byron’s word choice, punctuation, and sentence structure. She used his “The Prophecy of Dante” as a model, rewording many of its key phrases.

“I don’t normally work with poetry,” says Kowal, “so it was a really interesting exercise for me, and probably the hardest thing to write in the entire novel.”

That same talent for mimicry recently showed itself in “The Real Rothfuss” Twitter challenge. Over the years fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss had set up various Twitter accounts, but had never really used any of them. He decided to assign them at random to himself and five friends, and see if readers could identify which one was really him. Kowal was careful to mimic his style and sentiments by combing through his blog archives and adapting fragments of what she found there.

“I had 42 percent of the votes,” says Kowal. “The next closest was Pat himself with fifteen percent. I am unbearably smug about this.”

Listen to our complete interview with Mary Robinette Kowal in Episode 109 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks Fred Van Lente, Rajan Khanna, and John Joseph Adams join host David Barr Kirtley to discuss weird western books & comics.

Mary Robinette Kowal on her Doctor Who obsession:

“There’s a Doctor Who cameo in all of the [Glamourist] novels, because I am a giant geek. The one in Valour and Vanity is perhaps my most favorite, because it is so completely natural. Lord Byron had a traveling companion, Dr. Polidori … In his letters and journals he refers to Dr. Polidori frequently as just ‘the doctor.’ So it seems clear to me what’s going on here. Lord Byron wrote letters and journals all the time, but there’s a two week period in which they are more or less unaccounted for. And I’m like, ‘Well, obviously there is some time travel happening there.’ And then Dr. Polidori mysteriously dies. Oh, and Lord Byron’s father was ‘Captain Mad Jack.’ So I’m like, ‘Hello? Could we have some more references?’ … I’m friends with Paul Cornell, who’s actually written for the television show … and we had some joke about how he should tweak the dialogue for me … So I sent him those scenes, and in this particular incarnation the Doctor is an odd young man with a fez. And so he Matt Smithed him for me.”

Mary Robinette Kowal on the recent sexism in science fiction controversy:

“As someone who used to be a [Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America] officer, it frustrates me when I see SFWA’s name attached to things that have nothing to do with us. The fact that there is a science fiction and fantasy writer who had opinions about women in science fiction does not make it something that SFWA did … It wasn’t on our forums, it was not in a SFWA space. So it bothers me to see our name linked with it when the organization itself has been taking a lot of steps to become more inclusive, and to make the inclusivity more apparent … When you look at the history of science fiction, women have always played an important role. There have been a lot of issues with women not being able to identify themselves as women—James Tiptree Jr. being a prime example of that. … So you’ll see places where the sexism was apparent and kept the glass ceiling in place, and we’re seeing that change—there’s a higher percentage of women showing up in fiction, on ballots, as artists. … It is something that is a problem with the larger society … but it is certainly not something that is inherent to our genre, and I think our genre is actually doing a really good job of calling people out on problems and trying to make changes.”

Weird Western Books and Comics Panel

Rajan Khanna on Joe Lansdale:

“The first time I ever encountered Joe Lansdale was at a convention, I think it was World Fantasy in Austin, which was I don’t know how many years ago. I knew him from Jonah Hex, that’s why I went to hear him read his fiction. And I don’t remember which story he read, but I’m pretty sure it was one of the Jebediah Mercer stories. But just hearing him read—first of all, he’s from Texas, so he has that accent. But just that voice in the fiction came through also from him reading it. Certain people just write with that kind of authority of that time and that place, and he has that, I think. Even just the Jonah Hex stuff, which I just re-read before we did this, at least Two Gun Mojo. He gets the language, he gets the pacing. I think horror and westerns are a natural fit, and so his horror pedigree comes into play. It’s all the elements you want to see in a western but elevated to this place of … delight, I guess. Anyone could write zombies in the wild west and it wouldn’t be a Joe Lansdale story. I really think it’s his voice that distinguishes his stories from other people’s.”

Fred Van Lente on Cowboys & Aliens:

“In my [comic] book the aliens were characters, and they had dialogue, and they had factions among themselves, and we had a lot of Native American characters. And in the film I noticed they got rid of almost all the Indians, and the aliens were H.R. Giger-y nondescript aliens. They retained an idea that I threw out very early on that the aliens came to Earth after gold, which still seems nuts to me. In the book the aliens crash land, and the tick-tock of the story is they need to build a beacon to summon help from the homeworld—an invasion force—and they need the earth to revolve to the correct position before they can set up the beacon. … So it’s been kind of a bizarre experience. Because of Cowboys & Aliens I’ve gotten all sorts of wonderful opportunities … but it’s something that I personally am very alienated from, just because the process was such a huge clusterfuck.”

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112: Game|Life –– Minisode: Enter Console Wars

Chris Kohler — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Peter and Laura sit out the podcast this week, so Chris delivers a super short minisode to talk ‘Console Wars,’ the book on the story behind-the-scenes in the Sega vs. Nintendo saga of the 1990s.

The post 112: Game|Life –– Minisode: Enter Console Wars appeared first on WIRED.

GL Audio 211: Byrne It All Down

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a heat wave in California but that didn’t stop Gadget Lab’s Michael Calore and Mat Honan from huddling in the sweltering Gadget Lab studio and discussing this week’s top tech stories: how cheap phones are finally usable (well, almost), how iOS 8 may finally include split-screen multi-tasking, and how iMessage just plain blows.

The post GL Audio 211: Byrne It All Down appeared first on WIRED.

Happy Mother’s Day! Here Are the Best Mother-Approved WIRED Comments This Week

Emily Dreyfuss — Sun, 11 May 2014 16:38:54 +0000

“I read every comment people post to your Web site,” my mother said to me last week. I had to quickly remind her, Mom, WIRED isn’t technically my Web site. I’m just one of many editors. But, like any proud mother, she enjoys telling the checkout people at her grocery store that I am the president and chief of WIRED. Every morning, she logs in from her home in Idaho and “likes” the best comments on WIRED’s Facebook page. She calls me when she finds typos anywhere on the site. When you’re funny, she lets me know. When you’re mean, she calls to check in. When the readers of my brother’s magazine leave funnier comments, she calls to make fun of me. “Emily,” she says, “your brother’s readers beat you this week.”

What I’m saying is, my mother is the greatest, most supportive, hilarious human being on this planet (and I’m sure your mother is, too) and so this week, instead of picking my favorite comments, I handed the reins over to the woman who taught me everything. She has picked her favorite WIRED comments from you guys, across the site and Facebook. (Sorry, she isn’t on Google+ or Twitter)

Without further ado, here are your best comments this week, as curated by my mother–skip to the bottom for her top funny comment:

First, she loved how Facebook reader Christian Presley was able to synthesize the information in this article on a huge scientific breakthrough, “Biologists Create Cells With 6 DNA Letters Instead of Just 4.”

In layman’s terms, it means we could synthetically create cells that safely consume cancer cells. Or, it has the possibly to have cells that can regenerate themselves much more efficiently, such as reducing aging affects of the human body.

We ran a riveting excerpt from Sam Kean’s new book “The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons,” recounting the story of the most important contributor to our understanding of how memory works, HM.

My mother loved how Facebook reader Robert Kobus eloquently described the underlying scientific phenomena that explained H.M.’s strange condition:

You only have a memory that spans for a day, and every day you wake up thinking it’s the same day. 10 years could pass and you’d still think it was the first day after you got your hippocampus removed, as it is responsible for long-term memory creation.

As a proud resident of Blaine County, Idaho, my Mom loved that WIRED ran a story about an Idaho couple who has created a prototype for paving roades with solar panels. Check out the whole comment thread. She was incredibly impressed that the creators of the technology took to the comments to answer every question you guys were asking.

Oneduality impressed my Mom greatly by explaining why catching your own football is “easy.” We posed the question in our science blogs, “Can You Catch Your Own Football?” Oneduality answered, with video proof:

This is easy ..

1. He throws the ball up and to the right, looks obvious to me.. it flies safely out of camera view and lands at 0.27 seconds in somewhere off to the right of frame ( crank up your volume, you can HEAR it hit either the ground, or someone’s hands.. but it’s noticeable

2. He keeps running and someone else off camera throws a second football that he then catches.

This would be very easy to replicate.. all you need is two friends and two footballs .. one friend holds the camera while the other friend throws you the second football from off camera.. viola.. just remember to throw your football to the right and make sure the camera man stays tight on you so you don’t see the football landing off camera

I think they used some camera editing too so that they could do perhaps some fake zooming to crop out any chance of the footballs being seen unless it’s leaving his hands or being caught.

Edited to say another commenter posted a link to another video similar to this where it’s even more obvious..

“Gross and informative,” is how my Mom described this comment on our Absurd Creature article of the week, This Oceanic Nightmare Suffocates Foes With Clouds of Slime:

I’m from a small coastal hamlert close to Cape Town, during summer, when crayfishing, these guys come up in the net..no crayfish will enter it again..only remedy is to leave it in the sun..the slime turns hard like “pasta”..easy to break off then..locally known as a Snotslang\Snot snake.. –Haldane Muller

Anthony De Marco took issue with our article on “The Fastest Motorcycle in the World,” writing:

This article is gonna get someone killed. I am an Expert level ASRA/CCS roadracer, and track coach with Team Pro-Motion, and this article is just downright dangerous. Seriously believing that the electronics on a superbike are going to stop some new rider from sticking themselves into the ground like a golf tee because “Wired” said that a rookie could ride it like a pro is just insane. Look at WSBK, and see how often those real pros toss their Panigales (which have even better electronics than the street production Panigale) into the dirt, and you will change your tune I am sure.

My Mom couldn’t agree more, saying, “Hey, it’s Mother’s Day–SAFETY FIRST!”

I’m kind of shocked about this pick of my Mom’s. Posting on Facebook about our story, Disney Invents Robots That Swarm Into Colorful Animations, Tony Pepperoni delighted my flower-child Mother by saying:

This plus mushrooms equals mind blown.

Anthony Fonzarelli Girabaldi and my Mom would probably get along pretty well. In response to Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page saying we need to colonize Mars because “Earth has issues. We need to get started on Plan B,” Girabaldi corrected:

Humans have issues. It’s time Earth got started on a plan B

“The funniest comment of all–the whole week–was slightly off color so I thought it maybe wasn’t appropriate for a mother to pick for mother’s day. But the thing is, he’s right,” my mother said of this next comment.

Facebook reader James Gilmartin made an observation about this post:

Can I be immature for a sec? Ok…. So it looks like there’s a big drooping cock and balls shaded near the top right of the moon… Annnnd, back to adult mode.

Yes, James, you can be immature for a sec. In fact, your cock-and-balls comment is Mother-approved. Aren’t moms the best? Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!

The post Happy Mother’s Day! Here Are the Best Mother-Approved WIRED Comments This Week appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: PlayStation Vita Loses Some Weight

Bo Moore — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Laura Hudson and I discuss the merits of the PlayStation Vita and its new, slimmed-down iteration that Sony shipped in the U.S. this week, on today’s Game|Life podcast.

We also get into Nintendo’s new Skylandersy interactive figurine business, and the question of same-sex marriage in its upcoming game Tomodachi Life. (We recorded this podcast before Nintendo issued its latest statement on the matter.)

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 111

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_111.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: PlayStation Vita Loses Some Weight appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: The Dust Settles After the Big Atari Dig

Chris Kohler — Fri, 02 May 2014 21:13:21 +0000

Having just returned from New Mexico and finally washed all of the dirt out of my various body orifices, I chat with Peter Rubin and Laura Hudson about my adventures watching people excavate Atari games out of an old landfill on this week’s Game|Life Podcast.

Additionally, Laura has some things to say about the new Ubisoft role-playing game Child of Light. And poetry.

Finally, we do talk about Game of Thrones, which is not a videogame, but as a compromise we put it at the end of the podcast separated from everything else. When you hear the “Peter Dinklage” song, that is the cue to stop listening if you don’t want to hear none of this stuff.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 110

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_110.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: The Dust Settles After the Big Atari Dig appeared first on WIRED.

GL Audio 210: Move Fast And Stable Infra

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Facebook is suddenly firing on all fronts, Twitter debuts a new sign-up experience and there’s a brand new Android phone that’s making modders drool. Gadget Lab’s Mat Honan and Michael Calore dive into the thick of things.

The post GL Audio 210: Move Fast And Stable Infra appeared first on WIRED.

Finally, a Book That Blends Shakespeare With Monster Bondage Sex

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 26 Apr 2014 10:30:57 +0000

Christopher Moore is the bestselling author of a dozen comic novels, including Lamb, a retelling of the Gospel story from the point of view of Christ’s childhood pal Biff, and Fool, which retells Shakespeare’s King Lear from the point of view of the foul-mouthed court jester Pocket. Pocket returns in Moore’s latest book The Serpent of Venice, which blends The Merchant of Venice with Othello. The opening chapter also features a scene straight out of Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” in which we find Pocket chained to a dungeon wall. In Moore’s version though, a strange aquatic creature appears from the darkness to perform sex acts on the helpless Pocket.

Episode 108: Christopher Moore
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“It’s as tastefully done as you can do inter-species bondage porn,” says Christopher Moore in Episode 108 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “There’s no graphic description of what’s going on. You just know that something really bizarre has gone on.”

Moore’s been capitalizing on the comic potential of monster sex for years. His 1999 novel The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove centers on the relationship between a 100-foot-long sea monster and an aging B-movie actress. Moore concedes that such hijinks may cost him a few readers, but he doesn’t care. It’s worth it to be able to write about a woman stimulating her monstrous lover with the aid of a weed-whacker.

“That was way weirder than what goes on in this book,” says Moore. “So I already lost those people a long time ago.”

Fortunately Moore finds himself in a cultural landscape increasingly receptive to monster sex. His trilogy of vampire books (Bloodsucking Fiends, You Suck, and Bite Me) were intended as straight comedies exploring the peculiarities of dating a vampire. Unexpectedly they also found a home among Romance readers, who are increasingly hungry for monster stories.

“There’s really a genre now, that I had to be told there was, of monster sex,” says Moore. “In that whole Paranormal Romance thing, there’s a whole lot of inter-monster boning going on.”

Listen to our complete interview with Christopher Moore in Episode 108 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as Bible scholars Robert M. Price and Richard Carrier join host David Barr Kirtley to discuss the recent Darren Aronofsky film Noah.

Christopher Moore on bawdiness in Shakespeare:

“Shakespeare is basically writing at a time when there are pilgrims becoming a dominant political force in England, and they’re going to be so straight-laced and so freaked out by everything that they’re going to get thrown out of the straightest, most Christian nation in the world at that point, and sent to the U.S. where they can turn into school boards in Mississippi … Shakespeare was working within a pretty strict format—his practices and standards people were tougher probably than they are at NBC—and yet he got away with a lot. There are a couple of scenes in Love’s Labour’s Lost where [Rosaline] just keeps going on about, ‘A fool needs to hit it, hit it good,’ and clearly they’re talking about spanking and bawdy, light S&M sex and so forth. It’s clear that’s what’s going on. And it’s only if you had closed your mind to that possibility at all that you would miss that as part of what Shakespeare’s having fun with.”

Christopher Moore on Shylock’s motivation:

“The characters in The Merchant of Venice are real dicks to Shylock, and that’s happening almost 300 years after my book takes place, so I wanted to give details to that. I wanted to show that even in those times the Jews were forced to wear yellow stars sewn on their clothes—this thing we think originated with the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazis didn’t. It originated in the Middle Ages. And Jews were often accused of poisoning wells. In England Jews were not allowed to own property, and so one of the reasons that you have the prefix ‘gold’ in a lot of people’s Jewish names is that they became jewelers and held gold because they couldn’t hold real estate, and they became money lenders because they couldn’t hold real estate. I didn’t know that until I did research on this, and despite that it’s a comic novel and the biggest concern is I want to entertain and make people laugh, I thought it would be interesting to them—how did Shylock become a money lender? Well, he became a money lender because he didn’t have any choice.”

From our panel on Darren Aronofsky’s Noah:

Robert M. Price on the victims of the flood:

“I mean, was every one of them bad? Were they like the orc army in Lord of the Rings? … I remember once when I was a pastor … the youth choir sang this grotesque song about the flood story, and it centered on God putting the rainbow in the sky, and the song was titled ‘Rainbow Valentine.’ I shouldn’t have said this, but I got up and said, ‘With all these people getting killed, they should have called it “Rainbow Epitaph” or something.’ Like the way the whole flood story is dealt with in this terrible book The Purpose-Driven Life … It just does not occur to [the author] that this entailed the horrible deaths of all these people, and I think most people don’t either, which to me indicates that they are reading it as a myth, even though consciously they think it’s history. The fact that as a myth you’re not really supposed to worry about all those people, they’re just ‘the bad guys.’ Period. They’re not really thinking of it as some kind of Auschwitz-like horror, which it is.”

Richard Carrier on his upcoming book On the Historicity of Jesus:

“When I was interviewed for [The God Who Wasn’t There], I wasn’t really convinced of the thesis at the time, but since then I’ve had fans support my work and I’ve done a lot of research, and I am now pretty convinced that Jesus didn’t exist, that in fact the idea of a historical Jesus walking around Galilee was a later invention … If we look at all the evidence, it really is better explained by supposing that Christianity originated with Jesus being an angelic figure that people knew only through revelations, and that this idea of making him a man walking around Galilee was something they did to allegorize their actual soteriology, their actual theory of salvation. This actually makes more sense of a lot of the odd features of the evidence that otherwise are really hard to explain on the traditional theory of how the Gospels developed, or how Christianity developed … I’m not the first one to do this. There are many people who have written about it … It just hasn’t been getting the attention that it should have gotten.”

The post Finally, a Book That Blends Shakespeare With Monster Bondage Sex appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Skylanders vs Infinity, Round 2

Chris Kohler — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 19:32:35 +0000

The battle of the games that come with toys is about to heat up this fall. Activision and Disney have announced the newest installments in the Skylanders and Disney Infinity lines, and we discuss both on this episode of the Game|Life podcast.

Laura Hudson, Peter Rubin and I also get around to talking about what we’ve been playing, which includes Super Bro Force, NES Remix 2 and more.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 109

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_109.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: Skylanders vs Infinity, Round 2 appeared first on WIRED.

GL Audio 209: Rewind The Tape!

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Should you spend your money on the Samsung Galaxy S5? Are tablets dead? What’s the future of Google Plus? So many questions, so little time. Gadget Lab’s Mat Honan and Michael Calore bring you this week’s biggest tech stories.

The post GL Audio 209: Rewind The Tape! appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: President Dirtbike

Chris Kohler — Sat, 19 Apr 2014 00:05:54 +0000

We talk Trials Fusion, PAX East and more on this week’s Game|Life podcast. WIRED’s Peter Rubin and Laura Hudson join me once again to dream up an incredible new game idea that we ask that you please not steal.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 108

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_108.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: President Dirtbike appeared first on WIRED.

GL Audio 208: Gap, Khaki and Weed

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Silicon valley entrepreneurs are rushing in to cash in on the latest craze since the Gold Rush – cannabis. Gadget Lab’s Michael Calore and Mat Honan discuss high-tech vaporizers, modular smartphones and more in this week’s, er, potcast. New: outtakes!

The post GL Audio 208: Gap, Khaki and Weed appeared first on WIRED.

8 Years Later, Fantasy Writer Elizabeth Bear Apologizes to George R. R. Martin

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 12 Apr 2014 10:30:37 +0000

These days Elizabeth Bear is one of the hottest fantasy writers around, having recently completed her Eternal Sky trilogy, which Tor.com calls “the most significant epic fantasy published in the last decade.” But nine years ago Bear was a struggling young writer who’d recently joined SFWA, a trade organization for science fiction professionals. After making her way onto the group’s famously contentious message boards, Bear ventured her opinion that the organization had an image problem among young writers, many of whom viewed SFWA as hostile to women and minorities. Some members responded graciously, but many others did not.

“There were a whole bunch of people who basically just didn’t want to hear it,” says Elizabeth Bear in Episode 107 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “And I engaged in the traditional science fiction writer pastime of quitting SFWA in a huff.”

A year later she visited the Livejournal of legendary author and former SFWA vice president George R. R. Martin, who was urging writers to join the group. Bear, still smarting from her experience on the message boards, responded by outlining many of her problems with SFWA. Martin made the case that the organization does a lot of good, and that the way to address its shortcomings is to get involved. Bear was unpersuaded, but in the intervening years she’s come around to his point of view. She recently rejoined SFWA, and is pleased with some of the changes that are being made.

“It took me eight years to grow up enough to make a public apology,” says Bear. “But oh well, live and learn.”

Listen to our complete interview with Elizabeth Bear in Episode 107 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks John Joseph Adams and Daniel H. Wilson join host David Barr Kirtley to discuss robot uprisings in science fiction.

Elizabeth Bear on how anthropology inspired her Eternal Sky trilogy:

“My training is as an anthropologist, and … in the Victorian era and the Edwardian era anthropology made many horrible, horrible mistakes, and was used as a justification for just incredibly awful human rights abuses. The discipline and the science these days is profoundly self-conscious of those mistakes, and in attempting to inculcate in its students this idea of ‘ethnocentrism’ and ‘cultural relativism’ … and basically teaching people that what they were raised to believe are sacred and inviolable truths are actually just the habits of your tribe. And I thought it would be really neat to create a world in which not only is magic real and there are actual gods who have actual sway over various spheres of influence and various geographical areas, but that there was an external physical manifestation of that. So literally when you move from the sphere of influence of one god to the sphere of influence of another, the sky changes. The sky is a different color in this world.”

Elizabeth Bear on neutering yourself to gain magic:

“The way you come into your power as a wizard in this particular tradition is by giving up your power to generate life, to have children. So spay or neuter your wizard, essentially … We were talking about the idea of magic through sacrifice, and one of the common tropes is that magicians, especially female magicians, have to preserve their virginity or chastity in order to create magic. And we were like, ‘What would be the biggest reasonable gamble somebody would take?’ Because the way this initiation works is that they go through the training, and then they have the neutering surgery, and then they have to go through an initiation to see if they actually get any power. So even if they survive the surgery there’s no guarantee that they’re going to gain magic, and that seemed like one of the biggest gambles you could possibly take. But also if you were trying to get out of a dynastic situation, which Samarkar, the female protagonist, is trying to do—she’s trying to remove herself from the succession so that she won’t be a royal pawn—then getting rid of your ability to have children is convenient.”

Elizabeth Bear on writing horses:

“All of the other domestic animals with which we have real partnerships, like dogs and cats, are predators—or at least omnivores in the case of dogs—and the psychology of an herbivore is very different from the psychology of a scavenger or an omnivore. Their entire brains are structured differently. And Beth Meacham, my editor, would point out, ‘The horse is acting like a dog here. You need to fix that and have her act like a horse.’ … Having worked around horses, horses do have a sense of humor. … Horses really delight in pranks and pratfalls and making the monkey look stupid. We had one mare at the stable I worked at where you had to be very careful about walking behind her stall, because she wouldn’t kick but she liked to pee on people. And mares pee backward, like cats, and they can get some actual distance. That is not a splash zone you want to be in!”

From our panel on robot uprisings:

Daniel H. Wilson: “In [Terminator: Salvation] there’s a scene where … the guy shows up at Skynet, which is in an office building, and there are chairs everywhere. Come on! Who at Skynet is sitting in chairs? It’s just a complete disrespect and lack of attention to any kind of detail … [Skynet] wouldn’t exist in an office with frickin’ chairs after it’s decimated humanity years ago. The other thing is in The Matrix, when Agent Smith—who I love—says, ‘You humans are not mammals because you overpopulate.’ And it’s like, you’re a robot! You have logic. Don’t you know the definition of a mammal? Can’t you check that against the stupid shit you’re saying right now? Don’t you have like a direct feed to Wikipedia? What the fuck do you think animals do? They overpopulate all the time! That’s basic, basic biology. So whenever you see some kind of omniscient robot do something really stupid or just say something that’s just factually, obviously not correct, that really disappoints me. And it happens a lot, I feel like, in movies especially.”

Daniel H. Wilson: “One story I’m super-excited about in [Robot Uprisings] was written by Dr. John McCarthy, who is the guy who coined the term ‘artificial intelligence’ in the ’50s. He’s widely considered the father of the field, and he wrote the programming language LISP way back in the ’60s, a programming language that I learned in college. So this guy’s just a hero. He passed away in 2011, but I knew he always had this one short story on his website at Stanford, and they left it up for posterity, and it’s unedited and it’s just really thrown together, and then at the bottom there’s this wry note that says, ‘Maybe someday I’ll even try to get this published.’ So we dug it up and we read it, and we realized this is a great story … We contacted his surviving relatives and got the rights to the story, and then I found myself editing John McCarthy. And even better—and this is where I really geek out, so excuse me&madsh;but his story actually has LISP code in it! And not only did I have to edit his story and fix the grammatical stuff, I had to debug his code and actually match up all the parentheses and stuff like that. So for me that was just so ridiculous and funny and awesome.”

The post 8 Years Later, Fantasy Writer Elizabeth Bear Apologizes to George R. R. Martin appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: FTL FTW

Chris Kohler — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 20:45:20 +0000

On this week’s episode of the Game|Life podcast, Laura Hudson and Peter Rubin return to discuss Faster Than Light, Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball, Kinect Sports Rivals and more. (Two of those games are good.)

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

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GameLife Reboot:
Episode 107

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_107.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: FTL FTW appeared first on WIRED.

GL Audio 207: The Heart-Shaped Hole In The Internet

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The internet’s bleeding – change your passwords now! Gadget Lab’s Michael Calore and Mat Honan discuss Heartbleed, review the Samsung Galaxy S5, try on the Gear Fit and take a spin on Dropbox’s Carousel.

The post GL Audio 207: The Heart-Shaped Hole In The Internet appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Amazon Fire TV, Mario Kart 8, and More

Chris Kohler — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 21:34:19 +0000

Laura Hudson and I discuss the week in gaming, from the Amazon Fire TV announcement to our impressions of Mario Kart 8 on Wii U, Monument Valley on iOS, Elder Scrolls Online on PC and probably other stuff I’m forgetting.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 106

The post Game|Life Podcast: Amazon Fire TV, Mario Kart 8, and More appeared first on WIRED.

GL Audio 206: Siri, Show Me Pizza!

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Gadget Lab team picks apart Microsoft’s BUILD conference and discusses Windows Phone 8.1, Cortana, the all-new voice assistant, updates to Windows 8.1 and the future of Microsoft. Also, just who is the new Amazon Fire TV for? Michael Calore and Mat Honan rack their brains.

The post GL Audio 206: Siri, Show Me Pizza! appeared first on WIRED.

At 90, Freeman Dyson Ponders His Next Challenge

Thomas Lin, Quanta Magazine — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 16:44:55 +0000

Freeman Dyson — the world-renowned mathematical physicist who helped found quantum electrodynamics with the bongo-playing, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and others, devised numerous mathematical techniques, led the team that designed a low-power nuclear reactor that produces medical isotopes for research hospitals, dreamed of exploring the solar system in spaceships propelled by nuclear bombs, wrote technical and popular science books, penned dozens of reviews for The New York Review of Books, and turned 90 in December — is pondering a new math problem.

“There’s a class of problem that Freeman just lights up on,” said the physicist and computational biologist William Press, a longtime colleague and friend. “It has to be unsolved and well-posed and have something in it that admits to his particular kind of genius.” That genius, he said, represents a kind of “ingenuity and a spark” that most physicists lack: “The ability to see further in the mathematical world of concepts and instantly grasp a path to the distant horizon that’s the solution.”

Press said he’s posed a number of problems to Dyson that didn’t “measure up.” Months and years went by, with no response. But when Press asked a question about the “iterated prisoner’s dilemma,” a variation of the classic game theory scenario pitting cooperation against betrayal, Dyson replied the next day. “It probably only took him a minute to grasp the solution,” Press said, “and half an hour to write it out.”

Together, they published a much-cited 2012 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The next year, Press traveled to Princeton, N.J., for a two-day celebration of Dyson at the Institute for Advanced Study, Dyson’s intellectual home for the past six decades. In honor of Dyson’s 90th birthday, there was seemingly boundless cake, a forest of long, white candles, 350 guests — including his 16 grandchildren — and lectures recognizing his eclectic achievements in math, physics, astronomy and public affairs.H. T. Yau of Harvard University commenced the math section, launching into Dyson’s work on the universality of random matrices. George Andrews of Pennsylvania State University and Kathrin Bringmann of the University of Cologne followed with the implications of Dyson’s early contributions to number theory, which he began contemplating in high school. William Happer, a physicist at Princeton University and a fellow skeptic of the perils of anthropogenic climate change, closed day one with a talk provocatively titled “Why Has Global Warming Paused?”

Dyson’s unfinished science fiction story, “Sir Phillip Roberts’s Erolunar Collision,” written in the early 1930s when he was 8 or 9. Image courtesy of the Dyson Family Collection

Dyson admits to being controversial when it comes to climate science. But during an hour-long interview with Quanta Magazine in December, he said: “Generally speaking, I’m much more of a conformist.” Still, he has written fondly of science as an act of rebellion. In his 2006 anthology of essays and reviews, “The Scientist as Rebel,” Dyson writes, “I was lucky to be introduced to science at school as a subversive activity of the younger boys.” With characteristic concern for social issues, he goes on to advise parents: “We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.”

On the second day of the 2013 celebration in Princeton, after numerous speakers had recounted past collaborations with Dyson, alternately feting and roasting his brilliance, Press took a different tack. Referring to their collaboration on the prisoner’s dilemma, Press — a professor at the University of Texas, Austin — said he “thought it would be a little extreme to reminisce with Freeman about a paper that was just published.” Instead, he described his own recent result on safer “adaptive” clinical trials, adding that although he had solid computational data, the mathematical analysis proved too formidable. “I wish I had worked on it with Freeman — and maybe still will get the chance to do so,” he said slyly.

Press’ comment proved prescient. After the celebration, Dyson began mulling over the problem — unbeknownst to Press, who didn’t find out until Quanta contacted him in March about the new “collaboration.” “I’m glad to know it’s on his stack of things to do!” he said. “I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.”

Quanta Magazine interviewed Dyson at the institute, just days after his 90th birthday. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows.

QUANTA MAGAZINE: Technically, you retired from the Institute for Advanced Study 20 years ago. What are you working on now?

FREEMAN DYSON: I used to be a scientist and did a lot of calculations. It was a competitive world, and when I got older, I decided I wouldn’t compete with the bright, young people anymore, so I write books instead. And now I’ve become a book reviewer for The New York Review of Books. About once a month, I write a review, and then I get a lot of response and correspondence, people who are finding things I said which aren’t true.

What did you do prior to writing book reviews?

I was trained as a mathematician, and I remain a mathematician. That’s really my skill, just doing calculations and applying mathematics to all kinds of problems, and that led me into physics first and also other fields, such as engineering and even a bit of biology, sometimes a little bit of chemistry. Mathematics applies to all kinds of things. That’s one of the joys of being a mathematician.

Why math?

I think the decisive moment was reading the book “Men of Mathematics” by Eric Temple Bell. Bell was a professor at Caltech, and he wrote this book, which is actually just a wonderful collection of biographies of mathematicians. Historians condemn it as romanticized. But what was wonderful about this book is that he showed the mathematicians as being mostly crooks and people of very mixed kinds of qualities, not at all saints, and many of them quite unscrupulous and not very clever, and still they managed to do great mathematics. So it told a kid that “if they can do it, why can’t you?”

What are some of the big questions that have guided your career?

I’m not a person for big questions. I look for puzzles. I look for interesting problems that I can solve. I don’t care whether they’re important or not, and so I’m definitely not obsessed with solving some big mystery. That’s not my style.

What kinds of puzzles first intrigued you?

I started out as a pure mathematician and found problems that just arise out of the very nature of numbers, which are amazingly subtle and difficult and beautiful. That was when I was about 17 or so, just at the end of high school. I was interested in numbers before I was interested in the real world.

What is it about numbers that made you want to figure them out?

It’s just like asking, “Why does a violinist like to play the violin?” I had this skill with mathematical tools, and I played these tools as well as I could just because it was beautiful, rather in the same way a musician plays the violin, not expecting to change the world but just because he loves the instrument.

You’re known for your work in quantum electrodynamics — which describes interactions between light, matter and charged particles — and in solving the renormalization problem — which helped rid the mathematics of unwanted infinities. How did that work come about?

When I arrived in Cornell in 1947, there just had been done a beautiful experiment at Columbia on the hydrogen atom. The hydrogen atom is the simplest atom, and you ought to be able to understand it if you understand atoms at all. So, these experiments were done by Willis Lamb and his student Robert Retherford at Columbia, observing for the first time the very fine behavior of hydrogen using microwaves to examine the hydrogen atoms, and Lamb got very precise results. The problem was the quantum theory wasn’t good enough to explain his results. Dick Feynman, who was an absolute genius, had understood more or less how to explain it but couldn’t translate his ideas into ordinary mathematics. I came along and had the mathematical skill, making it possible to calculate precisely what the hydrogen atom was doing, and the amazing thing was that my calculations all agreed with the experiment, so it turns out the theory was right.

I didn’t invent anything new — I translated Feynman’s ideas into mathematics so it became more accessible to the world, and, as a result, I became famous, but it all happened within about six months.

Did it lead to other questions that you wanted to explore?

I got job offers from everywhere in America and also in England, but the problem was that I didn’t actually want to settle down yet and become an overburdened professor with lots of students. So I escaped to England and had two happy years at Birmingham without any responsibilities and continued working on other problems.

I was very much interested in space travel, and so the next exciting thing I did was to work with a company in California called General Atomics for a couple of years building a spaceship. In those days, people were willing to take all kinds of risks, and all kinds of crazy schemes got supported. So there was this bunch of crazy, young people — the leader was Freddie de Hoffmann, who had been at Los Alamos [National Laboratory] and knew all about nuclear bombs — and we decided we would go around the solar system with a spaceship driven by nuclear bombs. We would launch the ship into space — “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb,” about four bombs per second — going up all the way to Mars and then afterwards to Jupiter and Saturn, and we intended to go ourselves.

Freeman and Imme Dyson traveled to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in March 2009 for Charles Simonyi’s second trip to the International Space Station. Photo: George Dyson

What happened to Project Orion?

I spent two wonderful years in San Diego having grand dreams of spaceships. We not only did calculations, we also flew little models about a meter in diameter with chemical explosives, which actually went “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb” a few times a few hundred feet up. It was amazing we never got hurt. I think we didn’t even have to buy the explosives. We had some Navy friend who stole it from the Navy. Anyhow, we certainly borrowed the test stand from the Navy where we did these little flight tests. That lasted for two years. By that time, it was clear that the competition was actually going to win, the competition being Wernher von Braun and the Apollo program, which was going to go with ordinary rockets to the moon.

The Orion spaceship sounds like something a child might dream up. How disappointed were you that this “grand dream” wasn’t realized?

Of course we were very disappointed when it turned out that the Orion never flew, but it was clear that it would make a horrible mess of the landscape. These bombs were producing radioactive fallout as they went up through the atmosphere, and although at that time we were exploding bombs in the atmosphere for military purposes, which were much bigger than the ones we proposed to use, still we would have made a contribution to the general contamination, and that was the reason why the project failed, and I think it was a good reason.

You’ve developed a reputation as a maverick scientist with contrarian views. Where do you think that comes from?

I think the notion that I always like to oppose the consensus in science is totally wrong. The fact is there’s only one subject that I’ve been controversial, which is climate. I spend maybe 1 percent of my time on climate, and that’s the only field in which I’m opposed to the majority. Generally speaking, I’m much more of a conformist, but it happens I have strong views about climate because I think the majority is badly wrong, and you have to make sure if the majority is saying something that they’re not talking nonsense.

With a majority of scientists on the other side of this issue, what would it take to convince you to switch sides?

What I’m convinced of is that we don’t understand climate, and so that’s sort of a neutral position. I’m not saying the majority is necessarily wrong. I’m saying that they don’t understand what they’re seeing. It will take a lot of very hard work before that question is settled, so I shall remain neutral until something very different happens.

You became a professor at Cornell without ever having received a Ph.D. You seem almost proud of that fact.

Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.

In the summer of 1955, below Yosemite Falls in Tuolumne Meadows, California. Photo: Verena Huber-Dyson

I was lucky because I got educated in World War II and everything was screwed up so that I could get through without a Ph.D. and finish up as a professor. Now that’s quite impossible. So, I’m very proud that I don’t have a Ph.D. and I raised six children and none of them has a Ph.D., so that’s my contribution.

Looking back at your career, how has your approach to science changed over the decades?

I’ve now been active for something like 70 years, and still I use the same mathematics. I think the main thing that’s changed as a result of computers is the magnitude of databases. We now have these huge amounts of data and very little understanding. So what we have now — I forget who it was who said this — are small islands of understanding in a sea of information. The problem is to enlarge the islands of understanding.

What scientific advance do you see on the horizon that will have a big impact on society?

People are often asking me what’s going to happen next in science that’s important, and of course, the whole point is that if it’s important, it’s something we didn’t expect. All the really important things come as a big surprise. There are many examples of this, of course, dark energy being the latest example. Anything I mention will be something that, obviously, is not a surprise.

Are you currently working on a math problem?

The question of what I do with my time is a delicate one. I’m not really doing science competitively, but I like to have a problem to work on. I’m very lucky to have a friend, Bill Press, who is an expert on clinical trials, which actually turns out to be an interesting mathematical problem.

He published a paper explaining how to do clinical trials in a really effective way with a minimum loss of life. He’s a computer expert, so everything he does is worked out just with numbers, and so I have taken on as my next task to translate what he did into equations, the same way I did with Feynman. I’m not sure whether it will work, but that’s what I’m thinking about at the moment.

What does it mean for someone with so many intellectual pursuits to be retired?

When I retired as a professor of the institute, I kept all the privileges. The only thing that changed is the paychecks stopped coming. I still have an office and all the secretarial help I need, plus a place at the lunch table. One more advantage is not having to go to faculty meetings.

The post At 90, Freeman Dyson Ponders His Next Challenge appeared first on WIRED.

A Futurist on Why Lawyers Will Start Becoming Obsolete This Year

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Fri, 28 Mar 2014 23:45:44 +0000

Karl Schroeder is one of the best of the current generation of hard science fiction writers. He’s also an accomplished futurist who works for the design firm Idea Couture. In his new novel Lockstep, he presents the idea of a civilization that uses synchronized cryonics to maintain a thriving interplanetary society without the need for faster-than-light travel. This far future civilization has also replaced their entire legal system with all-knowing AIs. But we won’t have to wait thousands of years for technology to start replacing lawyers.

“We’re headed there in about six months in terms of contract law,” says Karl Schroeder in Episode 106 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “So if I’m claiming in Lockstep that at some point legal apparatus might be replaced by computerized systems, I’m only barely avoiding being out of date.”

Schroeder points to efforts like the Ethereum project, which uses block chains—the technology behind bitcoin—to create smart contracts. Such contracts live online, beyond the control of any single entity, and anyone can check their operating parameters at any time.

“It’s a kind of automaton,” says Schroeder. “It will follow the rules that have been laid down for it to the letter. It will never cheat.”

Listen to our complete interview with Karl Schroeder in Episode 106 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks D.E. Wittkower and Ashley Shew join host David Barr Kirtley to discuss Ender’s Game and Philosophy.

Karl Schroeder on why a lot of sci-fi is impossible:

“Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, these are great stories. They only suffer from one problem—they’re all impossible. As far as we know, Einstein discovered a rule that’s ironclad across the cosmos—you cannot travel faster than light. If you cannot travel faster than light, then all of these stories become fantasies … It’s all very well to say that [FTL] could be invented, and in fact I will freely admit that we don’t know that it can’t be invented. You can’t prove that faster-than-light travel will never be invented, but you also can’t prove that Santa Claus doesn’t exist … And you can spend the rest of your life dreaming and wishing that faster-than-light travel could be invented—and I certainly think we should try to see if it can be—or you can actually get the same results that you would get from faster-than-light travel by other means.”

Karl Schroeder on backing up human civilization:

“Because the Lockstep’s always there, it’s developed into a kind of backup for human civilization. Some catastrophe will happen—rogue AIs become godlike and devour everything, or human civilizations fight wars and blow up each other’s planets, and everyone gets knocked back to the Stone Age. And then the Lockstep wakes up, they look around, and say, ‘Oh, it happened again,’ and they send their people in and they rebuild the civilization. And over tens of thousands of years this happens repeatedly, and they’re always there to pick up the pieces. So they literally do a backup and restore on human civilization repeatedly. One of the reasons they can do this is because they’re so insignificant as far as everyone else is concerned. They’re in suspended animation nearly all the time, and they’re in these places that no one else wants to go to, these little worlds between the stars, so no one has any incentive to go after them.”

Karl Schroeder on reconciling AI with creating a civilization:

“I encountered a problem—and I’ve encountered this with most of my books, actually—which Frank Herbert encountered when he was writing Dune, which of course is that he wanted to have a particular kind of civilization, but that civilization would be essentially ridiculous or impossible if AIs and robots existed, so in the case of Dune he used the ‘Butlerian Jihad,’ this holy war to destroy AIs … Basically a political reason why there would not be AIs in that particular universe. I did something similar with the technology in Lockstep … Even though technology advances spectacularly quickly around them, [the Lockstep] just basically draws a line in the sand and says, ‘If you’re going to live here, you’re going to live this way.’ The robot economy itself is essentially based on Rome. Rather than having hundreds of slaves, each person in the Lockstep has a number of robots. It’s illegal for corporations to own robots—they can only own single-purpose machines … So what people do is they send their robots out as a workforce—essentially as their slaves—to do their work for them, and they reap the profits.”

From our panel on Ender’s Game and Philosophy:

D.E. Wittkower: “I think [Peter Wiggin] is the worst person, and in some sense that’s not his fault. He kind of got a bad draw in terms of moral character. And what he does with that is actually really praiseworthy. It actually gets us into another weird issue in Kantian moral theory, where for Kant what’s morally praiseworthy is when you do the right thing because it’s the right thing. And so somebody who is just all smiles and sweetness and light, and just instinctually stops to help others because that’s what you do, is not actually terribly morally praiseworthy. Somebody who’s morally praiseworthy—for Kant—is somebody whose instincts are to be cruel and miserly, and who cares for others because it’s the right thing to do, rather than because it’s just instinctual … In saying Peter is the worst person, at the same time we might want to call him really morally praiseworthy, because not just [the consequences of his actions] are the best, but what he does with his horrible moral instincts is really transformative of himself ultimately, too.”

Ashley Shew: “I am made so angry in knowing about [Orson Scott Card’s] hate. I wish I had never known any of that … After reading [his books] I was really high on the idea that if you could love another that you don’t know, if you could know them, then you’re forced to love them. So Ender gets to know the hive queen and can’t help but love her and help her. I mean, Card has it all wrapped together—love, hate, war, peace, reconciliation. The idea of the Speaker for the Dead is that if you can tell a person’s life story as it happened, with all of the horrible parts included as well, that you can understand them and you are forced to love that person. I mean, this is part of what makes up all of Orson Scott Card’s novels in the Enderverse, the idea that knowledge is love. Forget this ‘children at war’ thing, the Ender books are about love and understanding and acceptance, and you can encounter something completely foreign to yourself, a true Other, and once you understand it, the love is there. That Orson Scott Card could be so hateful at all just makes no sense. If he reads his own books I think he’ll understand better what I mean here.”

The post A Futurist on Why Lawyers Will Start Becoming Obsolete This Year appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Oculus, Facebook, 2048, and BioShock

ChrisKohler — Fri, 28 Mar 2014 21:43:27 +0000

Peter Rubin and Laura Hudson return to the podcast this week and we talk about a whole lot of stuff for a few minutes at a time.

I rant a little more about Game Center CX 3 (yeah, I know I said we should just forget it exists). We discuss, with a minimum of spoilers, BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea‘s second episode. We talk about Threes ripoff 2048 and the version I made with my dog’s face in it.

Then we talk a great deal about the Oculus Rift acquisition by Facebook. I yell a little! Apparently I have some opinions!

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_105.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 105

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_105.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: Oculus, Facebook, 2048, and BioShock appeared first on WIRED.

GL Audio 205: Clipped By Clippy

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

HTC launches the HTC One (again!), Facebook buys Oculus VR (WTF!), Microsoft Office is now available on iPad (Yay!) and the Gadget Lab team gets punked by an imaginary paperclip (Hah!). This week’s craziness brought to you by Gadget Lab’s Michael Calore and Mat Honan.

The post GL Audio 205: Clipped By Clippy appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Chris, Ryan and Bo Go to GDC

ChrisKohler — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 17:32:38 +0000

Special edition of the Game|Life podcast this week! While Peter Rubin and Laura Hudson continue to explore the Game Developers Conference, I invite Game|Life contributors Ryan Rigney and Bo Moore into the studio for a bizarro world version of the show.

We talk about all kinds of GDC stuff. It is an eclectic and energetic episode.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_104.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 104

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_104.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: Chris, Ryan and Bo Go to GDC appeared first on WIRED.

GL Audio 204: Good Guys Wear Android

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There’s high drama in the world of tech as Microsoft prosecutes a former employee, Apple’s Healthbook is revealed, and Google ushers in the wearable era with Android Wear. Michael Calore and Mat Honan discuss this week’s hottest stories.

The post GL Audio 204: Good Guys Wear Android appeared first on WIRED.

Creator of Ultima on His Next Great RPG and Getting Disowned

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 10:30:31 +0000

Richard Garriott’s Akalabeth, which he programmed in high school, is one of the first computer role-playing games ever published. Garriott went on to create the Ultima series, considered by many the high-water mark of interactive entertainment, as well as Ultima Online, the world’s first MMO. Financial pressures forced Garriott to partner with Electronic Arts, which led to the demise of the Ultima series. Last year Garriott turned to Kickstarter to help fund Shroud of the Avatar, a spiritual successor to Ultima. Since EA still owns the rights to Ultima, Garriott was forced to create an entirely new backstory for his game, for which he enlisted the aid of Tracy Hickman, co-author of the bestselling Dragonlance novels.

Episode 105: Richard Garriott
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[dewplayer:http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/underwire/geeksguide105final.mp3″]

“We got the project going to not only have him help us internally with the story for Shroud of the Avatar, but also to write a book of the backstory that we’ve been working on together, called Blade of the Avatar,” Garriott says in Episode 105 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Blade of the Avatar tells the story of Aren Bennis, an army officer in service to the sinister Obsidian Empire, whose life changes forever when he stumbles across a magic sword, a relic of a forgotten age. We’re told that this ancient world, in which Avatars walked the earth promoting the Virtues, was destroyed in an epic cataclysm called the Fall. Fans will recognize this ancient world as the golden age of Ultima, and the Fall as Garriott’s disastrous partnership with EA. Fortunately one trace of the beloved franchise remains, Garriott’s alter-ego Lord British.

“The one piece of continuity that we will bring back, that we do own, is Lord British,” says Garriott. “And so Lord British and the virtues which I personally espouse will continue into the new world.”

Listen to our complete interview with Richard Garriott in Episode 105 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks James Sutter and Wendy Wagner join host David Barr Kirtley to discuss Dungeons & Dragons tie-in novels.

Richard Garriott on using Ultima IV to teach ethics:

“When I was building that game, my team and my family were fairly skeptical. They thought that trying to make a ‘preachy’ type of game, as they would say, might actually hurt its possibility of success. But when that game came out, it was actually my first No. 1 bestselling Ultima, and I think really put the series on the map. And I received a letter shortly thereafter from the mother of a young girl … She wrote me a letter that basically said, ‘Hey, Mr. Garriott. I felt compelled to reach out to you, because I have to tell you that my daughter has had a problem with lying and stealing … But then I noticed how your game brought those behaviors full circle, and my daughter was forced to face the ramifications of that behavior, and she learned to re-evaluate her own behavior, not only in the game, but in the real world.’ And so she was extremely thankful and happy that she had bought Ultima IV for her child, because she felt that it really did have that sincere, positive impact on her child’s life.”

Richard Garriott on being disowned by a fundamentalist relative:

“When I was in high school, within one year, my sister-in-law gave me Lord of the Rings, the game Dungeons & Dragons was published, and the personal computer was invented, the Apple II computer. And those three things obviously melded in my mind deeply, and I immediately began to manifest these fantasy games. So my sister-in-law was thrilled that I loved the book she gave me, and then she was horrified that I began to make games based on the book she gave me, so horrified that literally she believes that I am doing the devil’s work and converting children to devil-worship. She disowned me, and then slowly she disowned the rest of the family, so she actually doesn’t speak with any of the rest of the family — the rest of the family has all worked with me or had some other association down through time. And so my oldest brother and his wife, my sister-in-law, are now almost completely estranged from the rest of the family — by their choice — largely over the fact that they think that fantasy role-playing games are doing the devil’s work.”

James Sutter on writing fiction for role-playing games:

“It’s both manacles and an incredible support team. You don’t get to say, ‘He can just do that because … magic.’ If there’s a magic system in place you need to stay within the bounds of that magic system or your readers will know and they’ll call you on it … But at the same time, how many authors get to have essentially a huge support team doing their world-building for them? … I think that most worlds benefit from having multiple imaginations working at the same time. One of the things I love about my job is getting to play with all of these things that my co-workers have created. I’m fascinated by Hell, and my co-worker Wes is like ‘the Hell guy,’ and I love seeing what he comes up with, and then I can steal it and put it in my own books and that’s OK. It’s one of the few times that creative plagiarism is encouraged rather than discouraged.”

James Sutter on good and evil in role-playing games:

“One of my favorite things I’ve put in the [Pathfinder] campaign setting is there’s this island called Hermea, where there’s a gold dragon — and gold dragons are always presented as ‘lawful good’ — running what’s essentially a giant eugenics experiment, because he feels like humans aren’t living up to their potential — they’re always killing each other and being nasty. And so he runs this thing where he invites the best and the brightest to his island, to come make a utopia, except that you have to agree to basically defer to his judgment in all things … So is he lawful good or not? Or is that actually evil? And I’m not in the business of telling people one or the other, but I think that the debate itself is really useful, and that moral ambiguity is one of the ways the game can really help us have conversations that we maybe wouldn’t have in our normal lives.”

The post Creator of Ultima on His Next Great RPG and Getting Disowned appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: We Don an Oculus and Scale Game of Thrones’ Castle Black

ChrisKohler — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 19:36:35 +0000

Sometimes even I am surprised at what transpires on the Game|Life podcast.

After running down the recent release of the NPD sales numbers for the U.S. game industry, and talking about Titanfall (yay) and Yoshi’s New Island (meh) for a few minutes each, I ask Peter Rubin and Laura Hudson what they got up to at South By Southwest, and it turns out they got to scale the Wall from Game of Thrones using the Oculus Rift virtual reality system.

It’s a crazier story than I expected. Listen in to hear what it was like for superfan Laura to step into Westeros almost-for-real, and what made her freak out and almost fall out of the HBO booth.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

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GameLife Reboot:
Episode 103

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Game|Life Podcast: South Park, Walking Dead Games Kick Some Serious Ass

ChrisKohler — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 20:32:55 +0000

Which TV show do you like more, South Park or The Walking Dead? No matter what your answer, there’s a great videogame based on the series that you should play. Heck, you should probably play the other one too.

This week on the Game|Life podcast, we discuss both. I’ve been playing South Park: The Stick of Truth. Even after spending quite a while in development hell, it turned out great — it’s a potent combination of Western RPG mechanics and Paper Mario‘s battle system. If you find South Park funny you will go through this game with a permagrin on your face and have to occasionally pause just to get the laughs out.

I should certainly say that it’s on the short side for an RPG (my Steam clock says 19 hours, and that includes some extended pauses) and rarely puts up much of a challenge if you’re diligent about leveling up and completing side quests. But it is a fast-paced adventure that’s quite a bit of fun.

Laura Hudson’s all caught up on the latest episode of Telltale’s Walking Dead season two, and she discusses what makes it different from the first critically acclaimed season. Peter Rubin hasn’t played anything but he does what he can.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_102.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 102

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GL Audio 203: South by Southwest

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Calore and Mat Honan discuss Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, Apple’s CarPlay, the rise of nerd phone culture and, of course, South by Southwest, which kicks off today.

The post GL Audio 203: South by Southwest appeared first on WIRED.

Futurist Says We’ll Use Lasers to Beam Our Minds Into Space Someday Soon

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 11:30:55 +0000

The idea of erasing and implanting memories is a common feature of science fiction films such as Total Recall and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Modern science can already erase and implant memories in rats, and in the future such techniques might be used on humans as well. Such experiments are the subject of the new book The Future of the Mind by famed physicist and futurist Michio Kaku. But one obstacle facing human trials is resistance from bioethicists, who argue that our memories make us who we are. Kaku rejects this idea when it comes to traumatic memories, such as soldiers suffering from PTSD.

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“We’re talking about basically an injury to the brain, in the form of a memory that’s so traumatic it paralyzes you,” says Michio Kaku in Episode 104 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “And I think this whole philosophy that we should be natural, that we should live with disease or live with traumatic memories, is taking things too far.”

Kaku is a lifelong science fiction fan whose books and TV shows often deal with the intersection of science and science fiction. He thinks science fiction is an important tool for expanding creativity and embracing possibilities, and he feels many bioethicists could benefit from reading more science fiction, which might help reduce their excessive attachment to the familiar.

“Science fiction is way past bioethicists, who are simply responding to what’s happening in laboratories today, not responding to what will happen in the laboratory a few decades from now,” says Kaku.

Listen to our complete interview with Michio Kaku in Episode 104 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as former co-host John Joseph Adams returns to the show to discuss his recent projects with his longtime agent Joe Monti and host David Barr Kirtley.

Michio Kaku on not fearing ‘super-brains':

“In so many comic books and movies, we have the super-genius becoming the villain, like Lex Luthor. Or all the movies where you see super-brains take over the world. But we actually do have super-brains, they actually do exist, some of them are my friends, they’re Nobel Prize winners in theoretical physics, and their incomes are very low, a fraction of what Zuckerberg makes, the founder of Facebook. Having a super-brain does not suddenly make you a dictator of the world. So we don’t have to fear the scenarios of science fiction where the Lex Luthors of the world take over. People with exceptional ability, they don’t become politicians, they don’t become multi-millionaires, some of them just become professors like me, making a measly income.”

Michio Kaku on using lasers to project our minds into outer space:

“In the book I mention perhaps one of the greatest science fiction short stories, written by Isaac Asimov. His favorite science fiction story was way in the future when pure consciousness zips across the universe … And this is a possibility. If I have a CD-ROM with all the [neural] connections on a disk, I can put that on a laser beam, and I can shoot that into outer space at the speed of light … And then at the other end there’s a relay station which absorbs the laser beam and puts all these memories into a robot, and so you can then begin to feel, and live on another star system … So this idea was inspired by Isaac Asimov and other science fiction writers, but now we think it could be possible.”

Michio Kaku on how science fiction can help Chinese scientists:

“In Asia we have the expression ‘The nail that sticks out gets hammered down’ … And that in a nutshell typifies one of the major defects of the Asian educational system. There’s a program called CUSPEA which selects the top university students in physics and sends them to the United States … And I can see these Chinese physicists close up, and I realized that they’re very good at taking orders … But when you ask them to come up with a new idea, that’s where they get paralyzed … And so I think that the Asian system has to learn this, and science fiction has a definite role to play. Some of the greatest scientists of all time were inspired by science fiction.”

John Joseph Adams on the Women Destroy Science Fiction Kickstarter:

“Somebody posted this review, and it was really stupid, very dismissive of women, and more or less the review was saying, ‘I’m sick of women destroying science fiction with their girl cooties.’ … A lot of people online had seen that and were upset about it, so on Twitter my wife joked, ‘Hey ladies, I’m ready to destroy science fiction today. Who’s with me?’ … So I said, ‘What if we did a special issue of Lightspeed called ‘Women Destroy Science Fiction,’ and just really embraced that idea and turned it over entirely to the women of Lightspeed … We launched the Kickstarter and were only asking for $5,000, and we ended up with over $53,000 … On the last day of the Kickstarter we announced what we’re going to do in the future, so next year we’re going to do ‘Queers Destroy Science Fiction’ … You know, we’re going to keep doing it as long as people keep being idiots about this kind of stuff … If everyone became reasonable about human rights and respect for people, we wouldn’t have to do this kind of special issue.”

Joe Monti on science fiction and literary ghettos:

“The past couple years we’ve seen the success of imprints like William Morrow and Crown … You see these books coming from places that are not fantasy and science fiction homes, and I think there’s a value in that, but I think there’s also a statement, and that statement is that, ‘Yeah, this can be mainstream’ … I think in some ways, not all, the science fiction publishing industry has ghettoized itself and limited what its potential can be … I think a lot of it’s packaging, honestly … Take a look at a book like The Windup Girl. Initially it has this cover which is interesting, it’s got a giant mastodon going through Southeast Asia. It’s a weird juxtaposition, and OK, that could be attractive to some readers. But once Paolo [Bacigalupi] started getting all the awards and attention, and the Time magazine review that said ‘this is one of the ten best books of the year period,’ that should have been repackaged, and it never has been, and I think the book could have sold a lot more.”

The post Futurist Says We’ll Use Lasers to Beam Our Minds Into Space Someday Soon appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: A Very Puzzly Episode

ChrisKohler — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 20:58:39 +0000

We’re putting on our thinking caps this week on the Game|Life podcast. Laura Hudson’s been playing Threes, a new iOS puzzle game, and she got Peter Rubin so instantly addicted to it that he forgot to stop playing for a while after we turned the microphones on.

Meanwhile, he’s got another puzzle obsession — the latest Professor Layton game for Nintendo 3DS, and the Azran Legacy, is available today.

And I apparently am the dumb one this week as I’m still slashing through Strider. No thinking for me!

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_101.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 101

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GL Audio 202: The Return of the Podcast and Mobile World Congress

Gadget Lab Staff — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Wired’s Gadget Lab podcast is back! This week, Michael Calore and Mat Honan discuss the hottest smartphones at Mobile World Congress.

The post GL Audio 202: The Return of the Podcast and Mobile World Congress appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Left Behind, Titanfall, Jazzpunk and More

ChrisKohler — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 23:43:00 +0000

For today’s Game|Life podcast — our 100th episode since we rebooted the show back in 2011! — we just go nuts talking about all kinds of fun games we’ve played over the past week.

After a bit of discussion last week about Left Behind, the new downloadable episode for The Last of Us, we go into a spoiler-filled segment about it today. And we talk about the Titanfall beta. And about Jazzpunk. (That part is spoiler-free, awkwardly so!) And then just a bunch of rapid-fire stuff towards the end. Lots and lots of game discussion, with zero news! Have at it.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_100.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 100

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The Terrifying Dream That Inspired Jeff VanderMeer’s New Novel

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 15 Feb 2014 11:30:47 +0000

Jeff VanderMeer knows weirdness. His 2009 novel Finch is a detective story set in a city ruled by evil mushroom-men, and along with his wife Ann he edited the 2012 anthology The Weird, a massive book that catalogs a century’s worth of peculiar fiction. As you might imagine, spending all that time exploring weirdness can lead to some pretty strange dreams, like the one that inspired his latest novel, Annihilation. VanderMeer dreamed he was descending into a subterranean tower, following along behind a monster that was writing eerie sermons on the wall in bioluminescent fungus. He used the monster’s words in his novel.

Episode 103: Jeff VanderMeer
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“The creepiest thing for me is that those words were actually in my head after the dream,” says Jeff VanderMeer in Episode 103 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “And they have not changed since that point. I have been kind of superstitious about editing them.”

Annihilation is the first book in the Southern Reach trilogy, which concerns the troubled attempts of a secret government agency to unravel the mysteries of Area X, a stretch of coastline that’s been invaded by some inscrutable otherworldly power. All three books will be released this year, and film rights to the series have already been sold to Paramount Pictures. Fans of the uncanny are sure to find plenty to like here. Not only was the series inspired by a strange dream, but the entire first novel was written while VanderMeer was sick with bronchitis. He says there are stretches of the book he definitely doesn’t remember writing. Fortunately he was very pleased with most of it.

“And then every once in a while I’d be like, ‘I wrote that and that definitely doesn’t belong,'” says VanderMeer. “‘That was bad, whoever the other person was who came to my computer and wrote that.'”

Listen to our complete interview with Jeff VanderMeer in Episode 103 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks Eric Smith, Bones Rodriguez, and Marjorie Liu join host David Barr Kirtley for a special Valentine’s Day discussion on dating for geeks.

Jeff VanderMeer on confronting a wild boar:

“It charged us from a very long way away … I was out there with a guy who had told me he was ex-military, and so we’re standing there with a godawfully long time to think about what we were going to do about this boar charging, which is not something I would have expected if you’d told me I was going to be charged by a boar. So I took out my little gutting knife, which is very useful if you want to stab something that’s already gored you, and my friend had his walking stick, which he was twirling around like nunchucks, which was not inspiring any confidence in me whatsoever, and we just had this very casual conversation — because we couldn’t really run, because there was water to both sides — about this thing that was the size of a large German Shepherd that was charging toward us. We finally got to a point where I said, ‘Um, have you ever been in this situation before?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Well, what did you do about it?’ And he said, ‘Well, I was in a tank at the time.’ And I said, ‘Well, that helps not at all.'”

Jeff VanderMeer on dysfunctional workplaces:

“Over the last thirty years the Southern Reach, this secret government agency, has been sending in expeditions with varying degrees of success, trying to figure out what’s going on. And as you find out in Book 2, this has had really interesting effects on the secret agency itself, because if you can imagine [an organization] that — even with turnover in personnel and whatnot — has tried for thirty years unsuccessfully to solve a problem, you’re going to have some devolution of command and control going on … Toxic work environments are incredibly stressful, and I think the more we learn about stress and how it affects the body, the more [we see] that those psychological things and even slightly dysfunctional workplaces are really affecting people’s health, and are much more dangerous than we think about, so that’s just kind of amplified in a way in Authority.”

Marjorie Liu on meeting dates at book events:

“My partner originally introduced himself via email … and this was his pickup — the most successful pickup ever — was the fact that he agreed to meet me at the Romance Writers of America convention … He picked a place that’s my home base, a place where I was comfortable, and it was absolutely fantastic. And I think if part of your geek orientation is books, book events are amazing places. There’s plenty of room to have a conversation while waiting in line to have a book signed … You never know who you’re going to encounter. I know people who look like total squares, but push a button and they can talk to you in Klingon and Elvish, and you would never know that.”

Bones Rodriguez on why Captain Kirk is no womanizer:

“He just loves life, and if you watch the show with that in mind it’s different than the stereotype that we know. He definitely uses sexuality to get out of jail a number of times, but generally speaking he always fell in love. And there were a few times that he absolutely, absolutely fell head over heels … I don’t think anybody that was left in the five years was mad at him. In fact, he even got used once. He got used for his diseases. In one of the episodes a woman sleeps with him just because her planet doesn’t have any diseases, so they’re overpopulated, so she sleeps with him just to get a disease from him.”

Eric Smith on his personal essay “Master Grief”:

“Back in 2011 I thought I was going to get engaged, I thought I had met the one, and I didn’t, and I ended up selling the engagement ring that I’d purchased and using that money to purchase a set of Master Chief armor from the video game Halo, as one does. And I felt like each piece I bought I got a piece of myself back, and it was just a really great, cathartic experience … And [my new fiancee] likes the armor. It’s great. When I realized she was the one, that I was going to marry her, was when she bought me a mannequin to put the armor on and display it in my apartment.”

The post The Terrifying Dream That Inspired Jeff VanderMeer’s New Novel appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Octodads and Flappy Birds Left Behind in a Tropical Freeze

ChrisKohler — Fri, 14 Feb 2014 20:17:55 +0000

For this week’s Game|Life podcast, we all played videogames. For the most part we all played different videogames, though, so it’s pretty much us trying to explain them all to each other without spoilers.

I talk about my time with Octodad: Dadliest Catch. Laura loved Left Behind, the new single-player downloadable episode for The Last of Us. And Peter finally played some Bravely Default, plus Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze.

We also discuss yesterday’s Nintendo Direct announcements, plus our feelings on the saga of Flappy Bird. Good times.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

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GameLife Reboot:
Episode 099

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Game|Life Podcast: Videogames Are Too Damn Long

Peter Rubin — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 22:01:18 +0000

On the docket? Game demos—specifically, the length thereof and how Laura feels a burned by sinking six hours into the Bravely Default demo, then having none of her progress carry over to the full game. I chime in, she chimes back, then we all head down the street for a tasty Big Mac. (That last part isn’t true. Just the chiming part.)

GameLife’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 098

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_098.mp3]

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Judges Poised to Hand U.S. Spies the Keys to the Internet

Kevin Poulsen — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 11:30:24 +0000

How does the NSA get the private crypto keys that allow it to bulk eavesdrop on some email providers and social networking sites? It’s one of the mysteries yet unanswered by the Edward Snowden leaks. But we know that so-called SSL keys are prized by the NSA – understandably, since one tiny 256 byte key can expose millions of people to intelligence collection. And we know that the agency has a specialized group that collects such keys by hook or by crook. That’s about it.

Which is why the appellate court challenge pitting encrypted email provider Lavabit against the Justice Department is so important: It’s the only publicly documented case where a district judge has ordered an internet company to hand over its SSL key to the U.S. government — in this case, the FBI.

If the practice — which may well have happened in secret before — is given the imprimatur of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, it opens a new avenue for U.S. spies to expand their surveillance against users of U.S. internet services like Gmail and Dropbox. Since the FBI is known to work hand in hand with intelligence agencies, it potentially turns the judiciary into an arm of the NSA’s Key Recovery Service. Call it COURTINT.

Oral arguments in the Lavabit appeal were heard by a three-judge panel in Richmond, Virginia last week. The audio (.mp3) is available online (and PC World covered it from the courtroom). It’s clear that the judges weren’t much interested in the full implications of Lavabit’s crypto key breach, which one of the judges termed “a red herring.”

“My fear is that they won’t address the substantive argument about whether the government can get these keys,” Lavabit founder Ladar Levison told WIRED after the hearing.

The case began in June, when Texas-based Lavabit was served with a “pen register” order requiring it to give the government a live feed of the email activity on a particular account. The feed would include metadata like the “from” and “to” lines on every message, and the IP addresses used to access the mailbox.

Because pen register orders provide only metadata, they can be obtained without probable cause that the target has committed a crime. But in this case the court filings suggest strongly that the target was indicted NSA-leaker Edward Snowden, Lavabit’s most famous user.

Levison resisted the order on the grounds that he couldn’t comply without reprogramming the elaborate encryption system he’d built to protect his users’ privacy. He eventually relented and offered to gather up the email metadata and transmit it to the government after 60 days. Later he offered to engineer a faster solution. But by then, weeks had passed, and the FBI was determined to get what it wanted directly and in real time.

So in July it served Levison with a search warrant striking at the Achilles heel of his system: the private SSL key that would allow the FBI to decrypt traffic to and from the site, and collect Snowden’s metadata directly. The government promised it wouldn’t use the key to spy on Lavabit’s other 400,000 users, which the key would technically enable them to do.

The FBI attached a Carnivore-like monitoring system at Lavabit’s upstream provider in anticipation of getting the key, but Levison continued to resist, and even flew from Texas to Virginia to unsuccessfully challenge the order before U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton.

Levison turned over the keys as a nearly illegible computer printout in 4-point type. In early August, Hilton – who once served on the top-secret FISA court – ordered Levison again to provide them in the industry-standard electronic format, and began fining him $5,000 a day for noncompliance. After two days, Levison complied, but then immediately shuttered Lavabit altogether. Levison is appealing the contempt order.

The SSL key is a small file of inestimable importance for the integrity of a website and the privacy of its users. In the wrong hands, it would allow malefactors to impersonate a website, or, more relevantly in this case, permit snoops to eavesdrop on traffic to and from the site. Levison says he was concerned that once the government had his SSL key, it would obtain more secret warrants to spy on his users, and he would have no opportunity to review or potentially challenge those warrants.

“The problem I had is that the government’s interpretation of what’s legal and what isn’t is currently at its apex, in terms of authority and scope,” Levison says. “My concern is that they could get a warrant – maybe a classified warrant – that I wouldn’t even have knowledge of, much less the opportunity to object to … My responsibility was to ensure that everybody else’s privacy was protected.”

That was Levison’s thinking even before Snowden’s revelations showed us how pervasive and ambitious the NSA’s internet monitoring has become.

The judges in last week’s 4th Circuit hearing, though, weren’t interested in hearing about encryption keys. At one point, Judge Paul Niemeyer apologetically interrupted Levison’s attorney as soon as raised the subject, and made it clear that he accepted the government’s position that the FBI was only going to use the key to spy on the user targeted by the pen register order.

“The encryption key comes in only after your client is refusing to give them the unencrypted data,” Niemeyer said. “They don’t want the key as an object. They want this data with respect to a target that they’re investigating. And it seems to me that that’s all this case is about and its been blown out of proportion by all these contentions that the government is seeking keys to access others people’s data and so forth.”

“There was never an order to provide keys until later on, when [Levison] resisted,” Niemeyer added later in the hearing. “Even then, the government was authorized to use the key only with respect to a particular target.”

On that last point, Judge Niemeyer is mistaken. Neither the July 16 search warrant nor the August 5 order imposing sanctions placed any restrictions on what the government could do with the key. Without such a protective order, there are no barriers to the FBI handing the key over to the NSA, says a former senior Justice Department attorney, speaking to WIRED on condition of anonymity.

“You sometimes see limitations, or what’s referred to as minimization procedures: The government can only use this for the following purpose. There’s nothing like that here,” says the former official. “I’d say this is a very broad order. Nothing in it would prevent the government from sharing that key with intelligence services.”

Lavabit Orders (PDF)Lavabit Orders (Text)

The FBI’s relationship with the NSA is close – the FBI receives 1,000 tips a year from the NSA’s bulk telephone metadata collection; the bureau’s Data Intercept Technology Unit in Quantico, Virginia channels PRISM data to NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade from Silicon Valley. Presumably the two agencies are even closer on the matter that brought the FBI to Lavabit.

By shutting down Lavabit, Levison obviously thwarted prospective surveillance efforts. But we know – again, thanks to Snowden – that the agency sometimes collects encrypted data that it can’t crack, in the hope of getting the key later.

“We know from the minimization rules that are out that if they collect encrypted information they’re allowed to keep it indefinitely,” says Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. “That’s exactly why the Lavabit case is so important.”

If NSA did collect Lavabit traffic, users who checked their email using Safari or Internet Explorer are theoretically compromised now. That’s because Lavabit failed to preference the full suite of encryption algorithms that provide “perfect forward secrecy,” which generates a temporary key for every session, making both passive eavesdropping and retrospective cryptanalysis unlikely. Firefox and Chrome users should not be similarly vulnerable.

If it wasn’t collecting Lavabit traffic already, it’s safe to assume the NSA began doing so when Snowden revealed himself as the NSA leaker in early June.

The NSA could not legally target U.S. citizens or legal residents without first getting a specific warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But non-U.S. Lavabit users would be fair game.

Levison flew back to Texas on Friday to await the 4th Circuit’s ruling and continue work on his new initiative: a surveillance-resistant email infrastructure called Dark Mail. He notes that one possible – even likely – outcome of the case is that the appeals court rules against him on a technicality. Some of his lawyer’s arguments weren’t clearly raised below in front of Judge Hilton. The court could find that those arguments are forfeit now, and leave the substantive issues undecided.

Pragmatically, that could be the best outcome, given the panel’s hostility to the encryption question and its faith in the government’s honesty. But Levison would prefer to lose on the substantive issue and continue the fight all the way to the Supreme Court. If the 4th Circuit doesn’t decide one way or the other, other U.S. internet companies won’t know where they stand when the government comes for their keys. The cloud of distrust that’s gathered over U.S. companies in the contrail of the NSA revelations will grow even darker.

“It’ll leave this issue completely in limbo, with no end in sight,” Levison says. “So how is the industry going to handle that? They’ll have to wait years for somebody else to come along who’s willing to stand up and say, ‘no,’ and take the government back to court.”

Lavabit founder Ladar Levison. Image: Gage Skidmore/Flickr

The post Judges Poised to Hand U.S. Spies the Keys to the Internet appeared first on WIRED.

In Pandemic, Humanity’s Biggest Threats are Killer Mutants and Anti-Vaxxers

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 11:30:35 +0000

Scott Sigler is a new media star, who leveraged the online success of his debut novel EarthCore — the world’s first podcast novel — into a career that’s included a six-figure deal with Crown/Random House and development deals with Lloyd Levin, producer of Hellboy and Watchmen, and Carl Beverly and Sarah Timberman, producers of Justified and Elementary. His latest novel, Pandemic, about a virus that turns ordinary people into killers and monsters, stands out from a crowded field of post-disaster tales thanks to extensive research and careful attention to real-world detail. For example, the book recognizes that inventing a miracle cure for a zombie virus is one thing, but getting everyone to take it is a whole other issue.

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“The anti-vax movement within Pandemic becomes a major part of the plot,” says Scott Sigler in Episode 102 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I really wanted to show the potential damage of this anti-Big Pharma, anti-government conspiracy theory.”

Like the real-world anti-vaccine movement, whose opposition to immunization has led to measles outbreaks, anti-vaccine proponents in Pandemic create opportunities for the virus to spread. And though Sigler does stand firmly on the side of immunization, he’s careful not to paint any of his characters as one-dimensional villains.

“There are people who are smart, and who I talk to on a regular basis, who are totally against this particular branch of science,” says Sigler. “And it was sort of a wake-up call to me that I could write characters that have that anti-vax mentality, and not make them caricatures, and not make them dummies, and not make them excessively violent, and not portray them to be some kind of monster.”

Listen to our complete interview with Scott Sigler in Episode 102 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above). Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks P.W. Singer and Myke Cole join host David Barr Kirtley to discuss the myths and realities of hackers.

Scott Sigler on working with military advisors to get the details right:

“The Air Force colonel was very helpful in Situation Room incidents … Who has to make the important decisions that have to be made on the spot? Do we attack this city, yes or no? And every second you wait more people are becoming infected … Those critical, real-time mission decisions, if the president or the vice president or the secretary of state isn’t available, who has to make that call? And I would have had no idea how that works. And then the other thing that was very helpful was, what equipment is actually on what Air Force bases? How many troops are available? … What is the response time? … A large number of troops being ready to deploy to another area in the states is way more complicated than you think.”

Scott Sigler on creating his future history the Siglerverse:

“I’ve had this plan in my head for 20 years now where I was going to create a realistic spread of novels that cover seven centuries, so that I could write the modern-day horror thrillers that I love so much as a reader and a viewer. I could then write 500 years from now that military SF … Different alien races fighting like cats and dogs, eating each other, complete disrespect for cultures; it’s a really dirty, dark era. And then 700 years in the future, where it’s more of the Roddenberry vision where races get along so well together that they actually join each other on an athletic field … And knowing that somebody who’s five years old right now, 10 years from now they’re going to pick up one of my books from the far future and read and enjoy it, and then when they’re in their twenties maybe they’ll go back and read the older books, and there’ll be that moment as a fan where you say, ‘Wait a minute. This is that character all the way into the future, and this is that company. Holy cow, all of this stuff connects!’ And then watch them have to tear through all the novels and get that joy of discovery in finding all the different pieces and linking them together.”

P.W. Singer on cyber hygiene:

“The most important outside penetration of secure U.S. military networks by a foreign intelligence agency … happened when they did what’s known as a ‘candy drop.’ They dropped memory sticks in parking lots, and a soldier found one and thought it was interesting, and took it inside and plugged it into his computer, whereupon it downloaded malware … There are very basic steps to defend ourselves that would go a very long way … and in many ways they follow the sorts of lessons we learn in preschool — don’t take candy from strangers, five-second rule. You know, clicking on links where you don’t know the sender. And my favorite story on that from last year was that top diplomats at the G20 conference — the most important international conference of the year — received an email that gave them a very special offer. It said if they clicked this link they would be able to see nude photos of the French first lady, and of course several of them clicked the link and didn’t get the nude photos, but it did download spyware into their computers. I mean, those are the kinds of things that go on again and again.”

Myke Cole on foreign hacker gangs:

“Youth groups are a big thing. You’ve got to remember that the Boy Scouts in the United States are really not comparable to the sort of youth groups that support Vladimir Putin. The Basij in Iran is a really good example of this, and the Passive Defense Organization in Iran. The thing that’s interesting to see there is that it’s generational … You have a senior echelon of officers now that recognize the need, even if they themselves have not grown up with it, and they’re reaching out to a younger generation to do it. The other cool thing about youth groups is that they give plausible deniability. Hostile regimes can say, ‘Well, we didn’t tell them to do this. They were so energized with anti-American fervor and pro-whatever-our-regime-is fervor that they went off and did it on their own, and we’re so sorry it happened.’ And that puts us in a tough spot … Attribution is one of the biggest challenges that face cyber defenders today, because it’s really difficult to make adversaries change their behavior when you can’t even pin the attack on them in the first place.”

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Game|Life Podcast: Why You Should Go Play Bravely Default This Instant

ChrisKohler — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 19:04:51 +0000

On this week’s episode of the Game|Life podcast, WIRED senior editors Peter Rubin and Laura Hudson join me to talk about Nintendo and Square Enix’s new 3DS role-playing game Bravely Default, then about what Nintendo plans to do to get itself out of the red.

GameLife’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

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GameLife Reboot:
Episode 097

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The post Game|Life Podcast: Why You Should Go Play Bravely Default This Instant appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Is Mario Doomed?

Peter Rubin — Fri, 24 Jan 2014 20:14:44 +0000

Alas, poor Ninty, we knew you well.

It’s not that Nintendo can’t eventually rebound from its doomsday forecast last week—they’ve pulled their bacon out of the fire more than once before—but it’s certainly going to need a little magic this time. And who better than the Game|Life crew to discuss what that magic might be? Of course, just dwelling on the negatives does not a fun podcast make, so the conversation also turns to King.com’s zealous trademark lawyers, as well as what might be a tidy little pay-for-play situation over at some of Machinima’s more popular gamer-run channels. Which of course means that we have a very strange definition of “not dwelling on the negatives,” but hey.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly, and is embedded below.

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GameLife Reboot:
Episode 096

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The post Game|Life Podcast: Is Mario Doomed? appeared first on WIRED.

Why the Future of War Will Be Even Bloodier

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 18 Jan 2014 11:30:19 +0000

Joe Haldeman is a leading science fiction author with dozens of novels to his name. He’s also an Army veteran who was drafted to fight in Vietnam, where he was wounded in combat. The theme of war recurs throughout his work, from early novels like The Forever War, an acknowledged classic of the field, to his most recent novel Work Done for Hire, the near-future story of a soldier who returns from war in the Middle East only to find himself ensnared in a deadly game. And though Haldeman has spent a lifetime railing against the folly of war, he’s not optimistic that things will change any time soon.

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“I suspect that war will become obsolete only when something worse supercedes it,” says Joe Haldeman in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I’m thinking in terms of weapons that don’t look like weapons. I’m thinking of ways you could win a war without obviously declaring war in the first place.”

Increasingly sophisticated biological and nanotech weapons are one direction war might go, he says, along with advanced forms of propaganda and mind control that would persuade enemy soldiers to switch sides or compel foreign governments to accede to their rivals’ demands. It’s a prospect he finds chilling.

The post Why the Future of War Will Be Even Bloodier appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Broken Age and Steam’s Mysterious Developer Conference

ChrisKohler — Fri, 17 Jan 2014 21:46:53 +0000

This week on the Game|Life podcast, we discuss the only two things that happened this week. Valve hosted Steam Dev Days, at which it spilled a bunch of details about Steam Machines and the associated products.

To wit: The Steam Controller will undergo a significant design change, losing the touchscreen and adding the traditional diamond-shaped array of action buttons. Furthermore, Valve also let developers go face-on with its own virtual reality technology, which differs from what Oculus is doing in some significant ways. WIRED senior editor Peter Rubin has tried this technology, so he talks a little bit about the experience.

Additionally: WIRED senior editor and new podcast cast member Laura Hudson has played all of half of Broken Age, as have I, and Peter has played some of it, so we talk about Broken Age.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

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GameLife Reboot:
Episode 095

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The post Game|Life Podcast: Broken Age and Steam’s Mysterious Developer Conference appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Oculus VR Just Keeps Getting More Awesome

ChrisKohler — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 20:46:14 +0000

The podcast is back! For 2014, we are thrilled to announce that we are adding WIRED senior editor Laura Hudson as a permanent cast member. We begin our first show of the new year with a brain dump of what games we played over the holidays, on everything from iPad to 3DS. Or actually I guess it’s just those two devices.

We move on to a discussion (of course!) of the recent Consumer Electronics Show announcements: Steam Machines, PlayStation Now and the new Oculus “Crystal Cove” prototype. The podcast’s own Peter Rubin has been reporting on Oculus for quite some time now, and had the first face-on demo of Crystal Cove a few days ago. So we pick his brain about how the virtual reality headset just keeps getting better and better every time we see it, and get a sense of what Oculus is shooting for before it’s finally ready to release the Rift to the public.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

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GameLife Reboot:
Episode 094

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The post Game|Life Podcast: Oculus VR Just Keeps Getting More Awesome appeared first on WIRED.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield on Why Gravity Needed More Adult Diapers

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 28 Dec 2013 11:30:49 +0000

Astronaut Chris Hadfield is the first Canadian to walk in space, and also the first Canadian to command the International Space Station. A YouTube video of him singing the David Bowie song “Space Oddity” in zero-g has been viewed almost 20 million times. He’s also the author of the bestselling new memoir An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. But before all that, he was just a kid reading science fiction.

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“I read it all kind of voraciously,” Hadfield says in Episode 100 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Just letting those good writers help my imagination stretch and soar.”

Early pulp adventures taught him that desperate astronauts might achieve vectored thrust by venting their water tanks into space, an idea he kept in the back of his mind on his own missions. And he’s always delighted when film and television portrayals capture the reality of space travel, such as the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey when an astronaut goes on a space walk.

“In 2001 they guessed right,” says Hadfield. “They did an accurate portrayal of the sense of aloneness, and the sounds, and what it would really be like. And it helped it be slightly more familiar.”

The post Astronaut Chris Hadfield on Why Gravity Needed More Adult Diapers appeared first on WIRED.

Dean Koontz on His Strange New Supernatural Thriller Innocence

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 14 Dec 2013 11:30:54 +0000

Dean Koontz is the author of countless novels, over a dozen of which have been No. 1 New York Times bestsellers. His newest book, Innocence, is about a strange young man named Addison who makes his home in the sewers, and who must hide his face at all times because just the sight of him drives ordinary people into a murderous rage.

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“It was probably the most fun writing experience I’ve ever had,” says Dean Koontz in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I never had a moment in it where I was beating my head against the wall, which is the usual process.”

The story opens with Addison meeting a teenage goth named Gwyneth, who’s being pursued by a vicious killer. Gwyneth and Addison form an unlikely bond, but this is far from the “Beauty and the Beast” love story you might expect. Many readers think of Koontz as a horror writer, but this novel goes in a completely different direction, which prompted Kirkus Reviews to note, “Something different this way comes from Mr. Koontz’s imagination.”

The post Dean Koontz on His Strange New Supernatural Thriller Innocence appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Breaking Down November’s New Console Sales

ChrisKohler — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 21:29:06 +0000

On this week’s episode of the Game|Life podcast, WIRED senior editor Peter Rubin and I get a hold of the early data from the NPD Group’s report on November game hardware and software sales in the U.S. — which include the first weeks of sales for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One — and do some analysis. As best we can with incomplete numbers, that is.

And with that, we are done with the podcast for 2013 and we will see you in the new year!

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

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GameLife Reboot:
Episode 093

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The post Game|Life Podcast: Breaking Down November’s New Console Sales appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Can Wii Go On Without U?

ChrisKohler — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 20:57:02 +0000

If Nintendo could separate the expensive GamePad controller from the Wii U hardware to get the price down, would it take such a radical step?

WIRED senior editor Peter Rubin and I discuss this possibility, and the Wii U in general, on today’s Game|Life podcast. I address some of the main responses to the piece.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

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GameLife Reboot:
Episode 092

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The post Game|Life Podcast: Can Wii Go On Without U? appeared first on WIRED.

Novelist Doug Dorst on Teaming With J.J. Abrams for the Mysterious Book S.

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 30 Nov 2013 11:30:01 +0000

J.J. Abrams is the driving force behind many of today’s hottest sci-fi films, from Super 8 to Cloverfield to the recent Star Trek reboot. But his latest project is something completely different — a book. Though as you might expect from Abrams, it’s a very puzzling sort of book. The underlying text is a surreal political novel written in the forties by one V.M. Straka, but the real story unfolds in the margins of that text, as two modern-day college students scribble notes back and forth in an attempt to unravel the author’s true identity. The challenge of fleshing out such an ambitious, multi-layered work prompted Abrams to recruit a collaborator, novelist and three-time Jeopardy! champ Doug Dorst.

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“When I heard the proposal, all those circuits lit up, the puzzle part of my mind, the game-playing part of my mind just lit up,” Dorst says in Episode 98 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Dorst is best known for his quirky debut novel Alive in Necropolis, about a rookie cop who must contend with suspects both living and dead. Many of the book’s key paranormal events are recounted in realistically dry police reports, and that affinity for thinking beyond the text was a key reason why Dorst was chosen to help create S., a book package that would eventually include handwritten letters, a code wheel, and a map drawn on a napkin. That’s in addition to the text itself, which grew ever more byzantine as Dorst added new layers of complexity, including a mysterious translator who may be altering the story and inserting secret messages.

The post Novelist Doug Dorst on Teaming With J.J. Abrams for the Mysterious Book S. appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast Answers Your Xbox One Questions

ChrisKohler — Fri, 22 Nov 2013 20:24:16 +0000

Happy Xbox One Day! On this episode of the Game|Life audio podcast show, WIRED senior editor Peter Rubin and I are finally allowed to say whatever we gosh darn well please about the new console.

Peter solicited some of your questions on Twitter earlier this week, and we run them down in this episode. Hopefully we are a help.

Of course, as we point out, it’s not just Xbone today. It’s also the release date of Super Mario 3D World on Wii U, Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds on 3DS, and Tearaway on PlayStation Vita. That’s a lot of stuff to deal with! And we spend a little bit of time on each of those games, too.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below. (We’re going to take a break next week for Thanksgiving, and we’ll see you in December!)

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GameLife Reboot:
Episode 091

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Explore the Nerdy Side of Hyperbole and a Half’s Allie Brosh

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 16 Nov 2013 11:30:30 +0000

Even if you’ve never heard of Allie Brosh or her wildly popular webcomic Hyperbole and a Half, there’s a good chance you’ll recognize the strip’s crudely drawn, oddly fish-eyed protagonist, thanks to the rampant proliferation of memes featuring the character, which have appeared — without permission — everywhere from bus ads to pro-life campaigns to 7-Eleven billboards in Mexico. And while the humorous comic focuses mostly on true stories from the author’s childhood, scattered references to time travel and horror movies clearly hint at her geekier side.

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“I read a lot of Tolkien growing up,” says Brosh in Episode 97 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I was very into the Aragorn-type characters. Those were my idols. I very much wanted to be a fearsome warrior.”

Fearsome warriors feature prominently in Brosh’s childhood writings, which mostly revolve around an endless succession of battles with fierce monsters. And if her more recent work has become somewhat less violent, her combative spirit remains alive and well in her ambition to crush all opponents at Magic: The Gathering, which she often plays online for nine hours at a stretch.

The post Explore the Nerdy Side of Hyperbole and a Half’s Allie Brosh appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Happy PlayStation 4 Day

ChrisKohler — Sat, 16 Nov 2013 01:15:35 +0000

It’s PlayStation 4 day! So we begin this podcast by of course discussing The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. But then we discuss PlayStation 4, mostly my experience running a gameplay livestream yesterday. WIRED senior editor Peter Rubin joins me for a brain dump of epic proportions.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

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GameLife Reboot:
Episode 090

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The post Game|Life Podcast: Happy PlayStation 4 Day appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Hands On With Xbox One, Steam Machines and Mario 3D World

ChrisKohler — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 21:51:35 +0000

No matter how you plan to play videogames on your TV in the near future, we’ve got you covered on this week’s Game|Life podcast.

(Except Ouya. Sorry, Ouya.)

WIRED senior editor Peter Rubin and I kick today off by discussing Steam Machines and my hands-on experience with same. We move on to discussions of the Xbox One, particularly the dashboard and extra features. Then the PlayStation 4. And then we chat about Super Mario 3D World, Nintendo’s biggest attempt at distracting from all those other consoles, which I’ve also been playing. It’s a packed week!

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

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GameLife Reboot:
Episode 089

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Mass Killings Can Haunt Elephants for Decades

Virginia Morell, ScienceNOW — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 16:00:27 +0000

African elephants that have lived through the trauma of a cull—or selected killing of their kin—may look normal enough to the casual observer, but socially they are a mess. That’s the conclusion of a new study, the first to show that human activities can disrupt the social skills of large-brained mammals that live in complex societies for decades. The finding, experts say, has implications for conservation management, which often solely focuses on the number of animals in a population, and may extend to chimpanzees, dolphins, whales, and other species.

“It is a groundbreaking study, because it is the first to demonstrate, experimentally, a direct connection between the effects of culling and specific psychosocial harms,” says Lori Marino, a neuroscientist and expert on dolphin behavior at Emory University in Atlanta, who was not involved with the research. “It shows unequivocally that elephants are psychologically damaged by culling.”

Wildlife officials often used culling as a conservation tool in South Africa from the 1960s to the 1990s. (It is still reserved as a management tool there.) At the time, wildlife managers worried that if there were too many elephants in a fenced reserve, like the famed Kruger National Park, the behemoths would ultimately destroy the habitat, eating or trampling all the vegetation and uprooting the trees. During a cull, a helicopter pilot herds an elephant family into a tight bunch. Professional hunters on the ground then shoot the animals as quickly as possible. Only young elephants ranging from about 4 to 10 years old are saved. Park officials typically shipped them to other parks that lacked elephants or had smaller populations to increase the herds, because elephants are popular with tourists.

“Some of these elephants ended up in Pilanesberg National Park,” in South Africa’s North West Province where part of the new study was carried out, says Graeme Shannon, a behavioral ecologist at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, and the lead author of the new study. “Twenty to 30 years have passed since the actual cull and relocation.”

Scientists have known since the late 1990s that many of these elephants were psychologically affected by their experiences during the culling. Other studies have described these effects as akin to posttraumatic stress disorder. For instance, the orphaned male elephants at Pilanesberg and another reserve made headlines for attacking and killing 107 rhinoceroses over a 10-year period, something that elephants had never been reported to do. Other researchers who study male elephants attributed the young males’ abnormal behavior to their surging hormones and lack of social learning—both of which were controlled after older male elephants were introduced. In some instances, the orphaned female elephants were also hyperaggressive and attacked tourist vehicles. But they, too, apparently recovered and went on to form family groups, although these groups sometimes include unrelated individuals, which is unusual in elephants.

“On the surface, they look like they’re now getting on okay,” says Karen McComb, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom and a co-author of the study. “But we found a way to go deeper into their minds, and that’s how we found the deficits in the social decisions that they make.”

From studies of the relatively undisturbed population of elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, scientists know that social learning is important to these animals. In their family groups, the oldest female is the guiding matriarch, and she passes on to younger members behaviors such as how to greet family members and how to react to the calls of strange females.

The researchers compared the reactions of 14 Pilanesberg elephant families and 39 elephant families in Amboseli to different levels of social threats. For each test, they positioned their Land Rover 100 meters away from a family group and broadcast an elephant’s deep-throated greeting call for 10 to 20 seconds. The calls were from familiar or unfamiliar elephants or were resynthesized calls that were made to sound like individuals of specific age classes. (You can listen to examples here.) These tests gauged the elephants’ ability to make the best decision when faced with what could be a major threat: an older, dominant, strange female. Such animals can pose a danger to a family by forcing them, for instance, to leave areas where they are feeding, McComb says.

The scientists video-recorded the families’ reactions to the various calls and measured certain key behaviors, such as whether the elephants defensively bunched together, whether they listened and smelled for the stranger, and how much time they spent doing these activities.

When the researchers played the calls to the Amboseli elephants, almost every family responded appropriately to the rumbles of the older, unfamiliar female. Typically, the entire family froze in place. The members raised their ears to listen and their trunks to sniff for the invader. They turned toward the vehicle and bunched together, forming a fortress of elephant flesh with the matriarch in front. Sometimes, they charged past the scientist’s vehicle, searching for the alien hussy. “You get the feeling they really know what they’re doing,” McComb says. “They have very coordinated responses.”

In contrast, the Pilanesberg elephants never seemed to know what to do. “The pattern there was no pattern at all; their reactions were completely random,” McComb says. In one extreme instance, a family left the area at once, traveling more than a kilometer before they came to a halt—but they did so in response to the call of an elephant they all knew. “Yet when they heard the call of the older, strange female, they did nothing at all; they just stayed completely relaxed,” Shannon says.

“You might think because of their history that they were just more accepting of strangers,” McComb says. “But it wasn’t that. They simply failed at picking out the calls of older, socially dominant animals.”

Because the Pilanesberg elephants grew up without the social knowledge of their original families, they will likely never properly respond to social threats and may even pass on their inappropriate behaviors to the next generation, the team concludes in the current issue of Frontiers in Zoology. And it may be that elephant populations that are heavily poached or otherwise adversely affected by human activities are similarly socially damaged, they say.

All of this matters because poor decision-making can affect the elephants’ reproductive success, McComb says. A previous study that she and others carried out in Amboseli compared the decision-making abilities of younger and older matriarchs. Those families led by the oldest individuals with the most experience also had the most calves. Exactly how the poor decisions of the Pilanesberg elephants will affect them in the future is as yet unknown. “What we now know is that their social understanding is most certainly impaired,” McComb says.

The team’s findings “may also apply to other species, such as cetaceans and nonhuman primates” that have been and, in some cases, continue to be heavily managed, Marino says. They also show “unequivocally that conservation that is only based on numbers,” that is, on how many animals are in a population, “and which does not take into account the individual ends in disaster.”

Richard Connor, a cetacean biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, adds: “It is difficult to not conclude that the legal killing or illegal poaching of elephants is not only inhumane, it is barbaric.”

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

The post Mass Killings Can Haunt Elephants for Decades appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast Dissects The Stanley Parable

ChrisKohler — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 19:37:51 +0000

Two weeks in a row with a Game|Life podcast? Are we smoking drugs or something? Yes, WIRED senior editor Peter Rubin and I are back with another burst of talking to fill your earholes.

Today, we talk about some of the bad news that’s been coming out this week, which always happens in the runup to new game consoles. Xbox One games are running at 720p! PS4 won’t play MP3s! Are these problems going to haunt Microsoft and Sony for the next 10 years, or will they get resolved quickly?

After the news recap, we discuss one of the great indie games of the year, The Stanley Parable. This is a pretty spoilery discussion, so feel free to turn the podcast off at the halfway point (we warn you during the show).

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_088.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 088

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_088.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast Dissects The Stanley Parable appeared first on WIRED.

Insane Baby Stroller Sports LCD Display, Headlights, Phone Charger

Tim Moynihan — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 13:30:35 +0000

It’s hard to say whether the 4moms Origami is a high-end stroller built with babies in mind or whether it’s more of a treat for the person pushing it. Its specs read more like those of a high-end car than a baby buggy.

The stroller has two sets of front-mounted lights: A set of headlights and a set of downward-firing pathway lamps that turn on automatically when it gets dark. It has an LCD screen above the handle that displays the temperature, your walking speed, and the distance traveled. Oh, and there’s an add-on phone charger that rejuvenates your mobile device’s battery as you push the stroller. This is the ultimate luxury vehicle for the eating-raw-Cheerios-with-their-fingers crowd.

Image courtesy 4moms

But the pièce de résistance is the Origami’s ability to collapse into itself with a power-folding system that activates once you turn a knob and hit a button. The stroller has Transformer DNA, as you can see by the videos on the 4moms site.

If you’re worried about your baby getting jammed up in the cogs of an auto-folding stroller, rest assured that a sensor in the seat stops the folding if it detects someone sitting in it. If that doesn’t work, the stroller’s folding action basically squeezes the baby lightly rather than ejecting it into orbit or swallowing it whole.

A stroller this high-tech needs to be charged, and there’s a clever solution built into the Origami so that you don’t have to plug it in all the time. Its back wheels act as generators as you push it, and you only need to top off the battery via a wall-outlet charge every couple of weeks.

It’s priced in line with other high-end baby strollers. The full-size Origami costs $850 through the 4moms site and retailers such as Buy Buy Baby and Babies R Us. It’s pretty bulky at around 30 pounds, but there’s a smaller, lighter version called the Origami Mini that’s due out in late 2014.

The post Insane Baby Stroller Sports LCD Display, Headlights, Phone Charger appeared first on WIRED.

Duetting Wrens Make Beautiful Music Together

Mary Bates — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 21:11:18 +0000

Songbirds, of course, are known for their singing. This is usually limited to the males, but certain songbirds sing duets with their mates. Especially impressive among these duos are those birds that sing antiphonal duets, in which the male and female sing alternating phrases back and forth. These duets can sound so seamless that the human ear may mistake them for a single bird.

Listen to this example:

The sonogram shows that what you’re listening to is actually an antiphonal duet; the contributions of the two birds are shown in red and blue.

When Chris Templeton of the University of St. Andrews listens to such duets, he wonders how the birds are able to coordinate their separate songs into such a complex duet. In a recent study, Templeton and colleagues tested duet integration in happy wrens, a duetting species native to the forests of western Mexico.

Singing perfectly timed antiphonal duets is perceptually and cognitively challenging. Each happy wren has a repertoire of about 40 different sex-specific song phrases, which can be combined and repeated to form a song. Different phrase types vary in length and pairs sing duets even when separated by several meters distance. What’s more, each pair has its own rules about how to combine phrases. In one pair, the male may reply to the female’s phrase A with his own phrase X and to her phrase B with his phrase Y. But a different pair might combine these same phrase types as duets AY and BX. Thus, this coordination requires both selecting the appropriate phrase and timing it exactly right, all in less than half a second.

Templeton and his colleagues caught male happy wrens and played back pieces of their mate’s song to them. These birds were from a population the researchers have been studying for years: mapping their territories, recording their songs, and marking the birds with plastic identifying rings. The playback consisted of a single phrase type from each male’s mate, repeated at various intervals. The researchers varied the distance of the recording and the tempo of the female’s song to see how the males coordinate their songs to produce duets.

Templeton and his colleagues report the males’ responses to the playback were surprisingly rapid. None of the male wrens sang before the playback started, and five of eleven responded immediately to the very first female song phrase, just a fraction of a second after its start. This suggests that almost instantly, the male wrens were able to recognize the playback as a happy wren song, and specifically as their own mate’s song.

Males were also good at matching their tempos to that of the playback, even as the researchers manipulated the playback rate. The male wrens were more likely to respond to closer playbacks than more distant ones. Since the purpose of the happy wren’s duet is thought to be territorial defense against intruders, Templeton and his colleagues suggest males may be reluctant to sing when their mate is further away. This could be because it is more difficult to maintain duet precision at greater distances, or the male may not want to advertise to intruders that he is far away from his mate.

The males also tended to reply with the correct phrase from their own repertoire, although they didn’t follow their duet code exclusively. All males sang the correct phrase at least once, and eight of eleven used the correct phrase most frequently, but the birds tried other phrases, as well. Templeton and his colleagues suggest this could be an attempt by the male to lead the female in the duet. Males generally lead duets, so when he changes the phrase type, she normally follows. In this case, the recording, of course, did not follow his lead. During the experiment, several males switched back to using the original, correct phrase type after their simulated mate failed to follow their lead, implying that while the male generally leads, he is also attentive to his mate’s singing.

Templeton says much of the research on duetting has focused on their function, while very little is known about how duetting birds coordinate their songs. “Our work has demonstrated that happy wrens achieve the remarkable precision in duetting through constant and careful attention to their mates,” he says.

That kind of devotion is enough to make any girl happy.

All images by Chris Templeton.

Reference:
Templeton, C. N., Mann, N. I., Ríos-Chelén, A. A., Quiros-Guerrero, E., Macías Garcia, C., and Slater, P. J. B. (2013). An experimental study of duet integration in the happy wren, Pheugopedius felix. Animal Behaviour 86: 821-827. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2013.07.022

The post Duetting Wrens Make Beautiful Music Together appeared first on WIRED.

Sci-Fi Writer Dan Simmons Explores the Horror of Frozen Landscapes

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 10:30:57 +0000

Dan Simmons is best known for his far-future science fiction series the Hyperion Cantos, but he’s also published popular books in a wide range of other genres, including horror, fantasy, and historicals. His 2007 bestseller The Terror, which explores the disappearance of a real-life Arctic expedition, is currently in development at AMC, with Ridley Scott attached to direct. Simmons’ new book The Abominable also deals with the hazards that befall an expedition making their way across a frozen landscape, though in this case that landscape is the slopes of Mount Everest.

[dewplayer:http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/underwire/geeksguide96final.mp3″]

“When people ask if there’s a scary, hairy abominable snowman in the book, I tell them there’s something much worse,” says Dan Simmons in Episode 96 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Indeed, The Abominable contains enough mayhem and dread to satisfy any horror fan, though some of the book’s most macabre moments are drawn straight from real life, such as a climber whose body was so battered after falling thousands of feet that only his jawbone was ever found, or a Tibetan funeral in which the deceased is hacked apart with knives and fed to vultures. That dark edge combined with the book’s fine writing, well-drawn characters, and carefully researched historical detail make it a worthy successor to The Terror.

“Some reviewer — they could have been European — said this is Dan Simmons’ other ‘cold book,'” says Simmons. “I like that. ‘Cold book.’ So The Terror was first, and The Abominable is also pretty cold for much of the novel.”

The post Sci-Fi Writer Dan Simmons Explores the Horror of Frozen Landscapes appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Here Come the Next-Gen Game Machines

ChrisKohler — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 21:20:20 +0000

We’re back! A series of unfortunate and fortunate events kept WIRED senior editor Peter Rubin and I from recording our podcasts over the past few weeks, but we have returned to the studio this week to talk about… well, we can’t really talk about much because Peter hadn’t played The Stanley Parable yet.

Next week, though.

For now, we spend a while discussing the upcoming launches of the next-generation game consoles and what we think might happen.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_087.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 087

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_087.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: Here Come the Next-Gen Game Machines appeared first on WIRED.

86: Game|Life –– Minisode: Why There’s No Podcast This Week

Chris Kohler — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Chris shares the set of (totally valid!) reasons that Game|Life has been lax lately.

The post 86: Game|Life –– Minisode: Why There’s No Podcast This Week appeared first on WIRED.

Scott Lynch’s Third Locke Lamora Adventure Is Finally Here

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 12 Oct 2013 10:30:18 +0000

Scott Lynch’s novel The Lies of Locke Lamora was one of the most celebrated fantasy debuts of the past decade. A sequel, Red Seas Under Red Skies, was released the following year, but then five long years passed with no new books. During that time Lynch spoke openly about his divorce and his battles with depression and writer’s block. The past few years have been challenging for him, but now things seem to be looking up. He’s being treated for his depression, is in a relationship with fellow fantasy author Elizabeth Bear, and recently released the long-awaited third volume in his Gentlemen Bastards series, The Republic of Thieves.

[dewplayer:http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/underwire/geeksguide95final.mp3″]

“The Republic of Thieves was a distinctly different animal when I began writing it than it is now,” says Scott Lynch in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “My view of some things in the world has shifted significantly, and I think it makes for a better book.”

Indeed, The Republic of Thieves has all the colorful action, witty repartee, and devious scheming that fans of the series have come to expect, but goes deeper into the emotional lives of the characters, particularly when it comes to Locke’s complicated relationship with the girl that got away, the red-haired, iron-willed thief Sabetha. Their relationship develops against the backdrop of two parallel storylines. In the present Locke must engineer a winning election strategy, while in flashback chapters he and his friends must put on a play under high-stakes circumstances. Such escapades might seem somewhat outside the expertise of a thief and con artist, but Lynch feels these new adventures fall squarely within Locke’s purview.

“There are obvious metaphorical parallels to the life of crime and the life of false-facing that the protagonists tend to lead,” says Lynch. “It’s in some respects totally congruent with both politics and with acting.”

The post Scott Lynch’s Third Locke Lamora Adventure Is Finally Here appeared first on WIRED.

Welcome to Charismatic Minifauna

Gwen Pearson — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 16:40:33 +0000

I’ll admit pandas and otters are adorable. They’re a great example of what’s known as “charismatic megafauna”: cute (usually fluffy) animals used to interest humans in ecosystem conservation. But there are many charming insects, spiders, and arthropods that are just as worthy of love and attention as a baby sloth.

This blog will be a celebration of the diversity of all things tiny and crawly that run our planet, written by a professional bug dork.

Who the heck am I, and what’s an entomologist?

I trained as an agricultural entomologist, or insect scientist, at North Carolina State University (MS and PhD), and then spent some time as a faculty member. I jumped off the tenure track to work at a dot.com, in higher education and research administration, and I’m now a web consultant and writer full time. I blogged under the pseudonym “Bug Girl” for many years.

What’s being an entomologist like?

When I first became an entomologist, my grandmother, so very proud of her PhD offspring, sent me every single insect she found for identification. In a stamped envelope through US Mail. Weekly.

I never found a good way to explain that by the time the Postal Service was finished spindling, stamping, and mutilating her mail, all I ever got was an envelope full of colored dust and legs.

Grandma’s care packages of insect parts were an introduction to the single greatest hazard of being an entomologist: I became The Bug Girl. Any and all insect (or creepy crawly questions) were now referred to me.

“Oh, you’re an entomologist? Great! Can you look at this for me?”

That phrase is both exciting and stomach dropping. Exciting, because I love insects, and I’m always keen to have a conversation with someone about my life’s passion. Stomach dropping, because I am often asked to identify an insect from the description “it was little and black and it flew.”

Explaining that over one million insect species have been identified to date, and >50% of them are little black flying things, is rarely a satisfactory answer. Everyone who is NOT an entomologist is convinced you know what each damn one of those species looks like, and can identify it on sight.

I learned at parties it was better to say that I was a teacher or a manager than to confess that I was an entomologist. People have dropped their pants so I can look at “bug bites” on their thighs. They’ve whipped out cell phones to show me blurry photos of something that could be a moth, their baby, or perhaps Sasquatch. And now that there is the Internet, they email me.

Dear God, the emails.

I get at least two emails a day, and they all have the same format:

“Dear Bug Girl: I think I’ve had a blow fly living in my left buttock for the last 14 years. I’ve attached 15 photos of my scabby, scrofulous behind. Should I see a doctor?”

I never diagnose anyone over the Internet. Just putting that out there now, since this new venue may bring even more pictures of…well. If you have a medical condition that is causing you enough distress to contact a random person on the internet and tell them details about your bodily orifices, it’s time to visit the doctor.

If you’d like to get to know me better, you can listen to me talk about one particular letter that I got online: Listen to the (Slightly NSFW!) Story (mp3) via The Monti

Everything I said is true; there are even photos. (Think carefully before you click this link. You’ve been warned.) Also, crab lice are not going extinct, despite media claims to the contrary.

You should now be: (a) horrified; (b) itchy; and (c) curious. You’re ready for the Charismatic Minifauna experience.

The post Welcome to Charismatic Minifauna appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast Digs Into Grand Theft Auto V and SteamOS

ChrisKohler — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 18:05:15 +0000

There’s a lot to talk about with Grand Theft Auto V, and we attempt to at least scratch the surface on this week’s Game|Life podcast.

With Peter Rubin still away, I am joined by one of our favorite recurring guest stars, WIRED IT pro Josh Strom. He’s also been playing GTA V and we share some of our most amusing tales with each other. We also talk about the recent Steam news (although we did record this podcast prior to the Steam Controller announcement).

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_085.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 085

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_085.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast Digs Into Grand Theft Auto V and SteamOS appeared first on WIRED.

Margaret Atwood on Science Fiction, Dystopias, and Intestinal Parasites

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 10:30:16 +0000

Canadian author Margaret Atwood is one of the world’s most celebrated living writers. Among her many books are a handful that some might call science fiction, notably The Handmaid’s Tale, about a future America ruled by religious fundamentalists, and the Oryx and Crake trilogy, about a mad scientist who attempts to replace humanity with a genetically engineered race of his own creation. Atwood has sometimes provoked the ire of science fiction fans by declining to label these works as “science fiction.”

[dewplayer:http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/underwire/geeksguide94final.mp3″]

“It’s a matter of truth in labeling,” says Margaret Atwood in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I like there to be some resemblance between what is promised on the outside and what you get on the inside, and if it says ‘science fiction,’ I want there to be something that doesn’t already exist.”

For her own books, she prefers the term “speculative fiction,” which she defines as stories set on Earth and employing elements that already exist in some form, like genetic engineering, as opposed to more wildly hypothetical science fiction ideas like time travel, faster-than-light drives, and transporters. The problem is that science fiction writers have long used “speculative fiction” as an umbrella term for a wide range of non-realistic stories. Atwood and her friend Ursula K. Le Guin have engaged in a long-running debate over such differences in terminology.

“We did in fact do an on-stage conversation,” says Atwood, “when I published In Other Worlds, and in the preface to that book you can find that matter discussed. She was a naughty Ursula.”

The post Margaret Atwood on Science Fiction, Dystopias, and Intestinal Parasites appeared first on WIRED.

84: Game|Life –– Mini-Episode

Chris Kohler — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Chris presents a highly concentrated digest of this week’s gaming news.

The post 84: Game|Life –– Mini-Episode appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Wherefore Art Thou, Microconsoles?

ChrisKohler — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 21:02:45 +0000

Between Ouya’s Kickstarter problem, GameStick’s release date and the surprise announcement of PlayStation Vita TV, all the news this week seems to be about microconsoles — the low-powered, inexpensive gaming devices looking to disrupt the television game business.

Are machines like these (and the long-rumored but as-yet-unannounced Apple TV gaming device) going to be the tortoise to high-end consoles’ hare? Can they win the living room bit by bit, as Gamasutra editor-in-chief Kris Graft suspects? Or are they attempting to fill a need that doesn’t exist and won’t ever exist? WIRED senior editor Peter Rubin and I hash it all out, reaching no conclusion whatsoever, on this week’s podcast.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_083.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 083

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_083.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: Wherefore Art Thou, Microconsoles? appeared first on WIRED.

These Guys Made a Rock Opera About Mega Man — And It’s Awesome

Rachel Edidin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 20:28:00 +0000

SEATTLE — It’s a Monday night at El Corazon here, and the Protomen are trying to figure out their set list. There are few recent standbys — they’ve been playing “Princes of the Universe” a lot on this tour — and the new song they debuted at PAX for an encore, but mostly they’ll stick with their signature work: a gritty post-apocalyptic rock opera about Mega Man.

By the time the Protomen take the stage, the audience is chanting and clapping, stomping in rhythm. Kilroy (the members of the Protomen perform under stage names, and although their actual identities are, at this point, something of an open secret we’ve agreed to stick with official titles for this article) comes on first, lit by a single spotlight. “Good evening, El Corazon,” he said, his voice tinny and warped behind a robot mask. “Good evening, Seattle, Washington.” The crowd roars. He banters about PAX for a moment, then pauses. His voice shifts to a dark growl.

“Seattle, Washington,” he said, “you know that we’re only here for one reason, and it ain’t face-melting rock’n’roll. Tonight, we come here to do battle. We’re here to fight tonight, Seattle, and we’re not gonna go at it alone. Seattle, Washington, will you fight with us this night?” More cheers, a sea of raised fists, yells resolving into a chant of Kilroy’s name. He continues: “Seattle, once again, will you fight with us?” The crowd explodes, again, louder.

The post These Guys Made a Rock Opera About Mega Man — And It’s Awesome appeared first on WIRED.

V. Vale RE/Search newsletter #118

Bruce Sterling — Sat, 07 Sep 2013 13:51:05 +0000

*Hey, I read ‘em. Despite the typography experiments.

WELCOME TO V. VALE’s RE/SEARCH NEWSLETTER #118, SEPTEMBER 2013 Add Us to Your Address Book! You are Receiving this Email because You or Someone You Know Signed Up to Our Newsletter in the Past. Scroll to the Bottom of this Email to UNSUBSCRIBE. Are you receiving this newsletter (annoyingly) TWICE? (((Yes I am, but I rather ENJOY that actually))) PLEASE tell us which address to delete.

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Here is a link to read the enews newletter online.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:
1D. MESSAGE FROM YOUR EDITOR: San Francisco Zine Fest
1B. Pranks 2, now available for epub (ipad), Kindle Fire, and online “cloud” reading!
1C. MESSAGE FROM V. VALE: GEORGE KUCHAR, LYDIA LUNCH and HENRY ROLLINS: New Pocketbooks – Order Now!
2. Counter Culture Hour Sat Sept 14, 2013 – 6:00 PM PACIFIC TIME – SF cable channel 29, also simulcast on-line (see below): Penny Rimbaud, Part 2
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6. MEDITATION SPACE No. 2
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1A. Pranks 2, now available for epub (ipad), Kindle Fire, and online “cloud” reading!
“Check it out!” — and let us know what you think. Somewhat still in BETA, but available now.
http://aerbook.com/maker/webview.html?book_id=3230 (((Really a cool book, although practicing
these “pranks” would likely get you hauled to Guantanamo nowadays)))

1B. BURROUGHS & BALLARD are dead, but we still have RUDY RUCKER with us! (((Really? Wow, etc)))
We interviewed him for our weekly TV show, The Counter Culture Hour (see below) and in preparation for the intv thoroughly enjoyed reading his autobiography, NESTED SCROLLS (www.rudyrucker.com) and appreciating his paintings in his BETTER WORLDS (100 PAINTINGS in color) book. A kind of Renaissance Man, Rudy is an oblique role model. For example, he met his wife at age 17, had 3 kids, and is STILL WITH HER! How rare is that?! Think of the vast scope of memories they share…

1C. We’re working on “Ed Hardy”, 4th in the series after our George Kuchar, Lydia Lunch and Henry Rollins pocketbooks. Order direct from http://www.researchpubs.com – order ALL FOUR and we’ll send you a rare “Goals of Life” w-i-p. (but you must REQUEST it). The shipping cost will be the same for you, buying one or all.

1D. S.F. Zine Fest, Sat Aug 31, Sun Sept 1, 2013. Life goes by so fast that we rarely miss a great yearly event (or great punk club) until it’s gone forever. For example, even though we have enjoyed the San Francisco Anarchist Book Fair for, what, 17 years in a row, we’ve heard that it’s OVER. Forever. Did many of the thousands who attended even know who put it on? We think it was spearheaded by one “Joey” from Bound Together Books on Haight St near Masonic, and when Joey finally “resigned,” well, there goes the Anarchist Book Fair! Somebody throw Joey a huge party or something, right?! Or do a book or zine on him. Hmm…

This year’s San Francisco Zine Fest seemed particularly poignant in that more people than ever before came up to yours truly and gave him (that is, me) their zines. Plus looked me full on in the eye. Now in this day where so-called virtual reality has replaced so-called real life, the above is not to be under-rated. About 150 years ago if you wanted to hear a real human speaking to you, you would have to be in the same room (or at least nearby). Therefore you could note their total physiognomy, body language, gestural vocabulary, nuances of vocal inflection, eye movements, smell (if any) and a thousand other subtleties (and obvious-ities) telling you WHO THE PERSON REALLY WAS. (Unless the person is a skilled psychopath; the kind Burroughs talks about who can con you super-fast out of anything you have.)

Monday morning I became ill-therefore a perfect excuse to lie in bed and read all the zines. By luck, the first one I read had a fire to it so contagious I am forced to share it with you NOW (excerpt follows):
“[I] discovered ‘Ex-Animation,’ a photo-copied monstrosity that sh-t all over the glorified desktop publication that I had just created. I mean, this thing was rough! Most of the text was written on a typewriter with a few broken keys. The rest was hand-written and pasted half-assed onto the page. The collages and line drawings were primitive at best. The images were oversaturated, as if the creator had made copies with the Xerox machine lid open. And the staples were bent in half from using the wrong kind of stapler and then bending them in half with pliers or something.

“Not only was this self-described ‘zine’ the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in print, the writing was poignant and personal. There were short pieces about traveling to England, working as a stripper and getting molested as a kid. Even a few poems. I was blown away. The writing wasn’t polished or stylized. It was just raw. Obviously written without drafts or revisions. Just straight words from the soul. It was apparent that this hot mess existed because it had no other choice but to exist. Which was what made it so compelling. But what astonished me most was the candor. At that time, honesty was very difficult for me. I was all about facades, living in a fortress of fantasy. I wanted to write without reservation, but I was afraid to go deep, in case I exposed the hidden wounds from a f-cked-up childhood and spending my teenage years in institutions and foster homes. Besides, I figured nobody wanted to read about those kinds of experiences anyway. So I kept writing about what was safe: the lost years of my twenties, wasted in a constant state of inebriation, chasing drugs and alcohol with dysfunctional and abusive relationships. And I never used my real name. I put out several more zines before I moved on to chapbooks and then eventually started publishing paperbacks by other writers. In the spirit of DIY ethics, I handled all the aspects of publishing myself, from design to distribution. But I was going nuts from the pressure. And it’s not like I ever had any money. After a while I realized that drive and determination were not enough when the walls were crashing down. So I threw in the towel.

“I never lost the itch to put words and images on paper, but I always swore that if I were to start publishing again I would only do a hand-made photocopied labor of love. I hadn’t forgotten about ‘Ex-Animation’ and how I felt when I realized that the glory of publishing wasn’t in competing with the newsstand. It was about raw honesty. Truth. Conviction. All the things I was still struggling with. I’d always believed that my past experiences were a disease and that sharing them would infect others with my trauma. Mine was a story I never wanted to tell. I’d kept it buried so deep, for so long, that I figured it would eventually drift from my memory. But twenty-five years later, it still follows me. Even today, I may have given up the drugs (the f-cked-up relationships were harder to kick), but I am still just as lost as when I was in my twenties. The past may never make sense to me. But if I’m ever going to be whole again, I have to purge these m! emories by embracing the pain. A few years ago, I started writing everything down. As honestly as possible. Every day I wrote. Once I’d opened the flood gates I couldn’t contain the deluge. The process was like draining an abscess… When I was finished, I had over a thousand pages. Most of it crap. But I figured I was ready to do what I’ve wanted to do since that fateful day when I picked up my first zine…” [end of excerpt]

I ended up reading every word of this zine, titled “The Nasty Oh-Dear,” aka “Piltdownlad” issue #4. The author also gave me #1, “The Guero Chingon Stories – Five short tales about growing up a whiteboy in East L.A.”, and #3 “Junior Careers: Adventures of a Teenage Door-to-Door Salesman – Trying to make a buck selling candy in the San Gabriel Valley.” These were completely fascinating and felt like they had been written back at the time they were LIVED; I’m guessing the author kept journals or-? Then I tackled the perfectbound 5″x8″ 307-page BOOK titled “A Masque of Infamy” and it was hypnotizing. I thought **I** had had a bit of a “challenging” childhood, but compared to THIS narrative, I felt I had totally “lucked out.” Finished the book this morning. Understood why he called this “a novel” rather than an “autobiography”-America is far too litigious a society to permit a **true*! * autobiography from ever being published!

Then I read his zine #6 “Institutionalized” containing legal documentation for what had happened, small narratives from four points of view, etc. This total experience-zines plus “novel”-combined to give possibly the richest “autobiography” I’ve ever read: complex, multi-faceted, uncensored, honest-yet “creatively (and invisibly) engineered” to provide a compelling narrative that I didn’t want to put down…
I recommend this book and ALL the zines that this author, “Kelly Dessaint,” has produced-order from Phony Lid Books, POB 86714, Los Angeles CA 90086. www.phonylid.com – essential 21st century noir reading…. Oh yes, Punk Rock plays a “beacon”-like role here…

Uh oh-six more zines to discuss…

How can a “cartoonist” do great work for many years and not get national recognition? This is what I wondered after reading the zines of JAIME CRESPO which combine 4-panel and 6-panel “comics” plus some short (but scarring-for-life) narratives. Read every word of the 5 zines he gave me and I want more! Classic. “There are back issues of comic books available as well as original art. Oh, yeah…T-shirts are coming real soon. Just go to” www.jaimecrespo.com – I read “Last Slice: The Best of the Last Slices Strips” (4-panel comics) and “Slices: Selected Favorites from the Weekly Strip ‘Slice O’ Life” (6-panel comics), then read “Tortilla #1,2,3″ – yes, I highly recommend them ALL…

() Teenage Issue No. 1. Fascinated by the brief but revelatory interview with Andrew Loog Oldham, early Rolling Stones producer (I think he recently wrote a memoir, too). Syl Sylvain of the New York Dolls-I interviewed him in Search & Destroy #8 back in 1978. I did a brief e-mail interview with the editor, Gus Bernadicou, which is scheduled to appear in Teenage Issue No. 2. Beautiful photos, some excellent questions, plus, frankly, a number of interviews I’ll have to read later as I simply am not that familiar with the likes of Mott the Hoople, Cherry Vanilla, Jellyfish, Cheap Trick, et al. But, that doesn’t mean the interviews aren’t good!

() A young woman, Liz Hansen, came up to me and said, “I gave you this zine at the L.A. Zine Fest at The Last Bookstore [when Henry Rollins did a live interview with V. Vale] but here’s another copy.” This is another of the uber-honest zines, focusing on a practically-unmentionable topic: “sh-t.” The name is “Scoop: Special Edition” and it contains a selection of contributions from earlier editions of the zine 2000-2004. Available from www.scoopzine.com – At first I thought it might be a tough “read” but before I knew it I had finished the entire publication. I thought of John Fante and Charles Bukowski writing about the dark side of Los Angeles, but this was somehow even more extreme…

() Another young woman named Courtney Fellion gave me Canyon Cinemazine #1 and #2, #303 of 400 copies (#1, that is). Color xerox, 7″x8.3″, stapled. Number One had probably the last “visit” with George Kuchar at the Coming Home Hospice before he expired: a kind of must-have for Kuchar Brothers fans; it included a color drawing by George. A number of other experimental filmmakers are included. Issue #2 included Gerry Fialka (disclosure: I usually play piano for his San Francisco events), a Sally Cruikshank (animator) interview, plus a host of other articles on, frankly, independent filmmakers I’ve never heard of. So, there’s more reading ahead… Order from POBox 16163, Oakland CA 94610. www.cinemagazine.net email: thecinemazine@gmail.com

() One of the saddest zines I’ve ever read was given to me by a woman dressed like Rosie the Riveteer: Elizabeth Dunn (what style!). She worked at the Jabberjaw, apparently a great small Punk club/coffee house/art gallery run by Michelle Carr and Gary Dent in Los Angeles, 3711 W. Pico Blvd, 1991-94? The zine consists of recollections, interviews, and photos from people who “hung out” at the Jabberjaw, and they make me wish I had gone to the club at least ONCE (Iggy Pop and Kurt Cobain went there, among others). It sounded like an L.A. equivalent of San Francisco’s Mabuhay Gardens-but different, and later. As contrasted with the Masque (only went there once; it was a basement labyrinth of tiny rooms) the Jabberjaw had one large room, like the Mab. Again, most people don’t even know who made clubs like this “happen”-yet: no club, no counter-culture “scene” or “community” or “sub-culture.” The walls were decorated with thrift store ! “Keane painting” scores (that reminds me; someone just filmed scenes for an upcoming biopic of Margaret Keane, a block away from RE/Search headquarters, only last week). The enigmatic name of this zine is “You Said ‘I Love You’, I Guess You Did.” I searched all over and couldn’t find an address or website, but write us here at RE/Search and we’ll do our best to put you in touch with Elizabeth Dunn so you can get your own copy.

() DEGENERATE #12, by Sam Lefebvre, 8.5X11″ B&W stapled zine with 7″ 33rpm red flexidisc-vinyl included! Cover proclaims: “Post/punk iconoclasm”, Rank/Xerox, Scraper/*negative* D.T.G.M.A.S., “Psychedelia is dead/long live psychedelia.” This is a very thought-provoking zine, featuring not just music “criticism” but texts descrying “micro-apartments” being constructed in San Francisco (what a real-estate scam), the phenomenon of “parklets,” [WTF?] plus poems, tiny hard-to-read texts, collages, illustrations, and a huge essay on Post/Punk ideology and the new post-punk “establishment.” Now we here at RE/Search have a problem with the phrase “Post-Punk” in that we feel Punk is STILL the philosophy of life best suited for surviving the coming apocalypse (D.I.Y., Black Humor, Anti-Authority/Anti-Authoritarian, Mutual Aid) and we remind people that in the earliest Punk days in San Francisco, it took two years to form a “community” of no! t more than 200 people who totally adopted the “Punk LIFE” (not “lifestyle”), and who, because the “scene” was so small, basically had to “help” each other, not f-ck each other over (as is so liberally depicted in corporate punk “memoirs” like Please Kill Me). San Francisco didn’t have the cheap heroin (imported from Turkey) that NYC had, etc. Our scene happened later, included a lot more “gay” people, was all-ages, and was centered on just one club (which made life easier), The Mab. ‘Nuff said…

Again, you don’t miss your water ’til the well runs dry. And today, the only “clubs” I like are free, within walking distance of RE/Search headquarters (as was the Mab, one block away!): Caffe Trieste, Live Worms Gallery, and our new local treasure, Emerald Tablet. Nothing is more precious than being able to be with REAL people in a real space on a local level, so you can form REAL relationships with people you can appreciate in person, unscripted and unrehearsed. As Lydia Lunch put it, “I want to be able to SMELL someone” (we add: “for better or worse!”) Words alone convey just a fraction of what an original human may be truly “about.” It takes a long time to get to know anybody, so… As the ancient Chinese proverb said, “New Clothes/Old Friends-not the reverse!” Old friends may be, next to our own bodies, the most important “possession” we may ever have…-V. Vale, your editor

2. Counter Culture Hour – Sat Sept 14, 2013 6pm: Penny Rimbaud of CRASS, Part 2 (sorry, it didn’t show last month due to a station mishap)

The Counter Culture Hour (aka RE/SEARCH TV) is also simulcast ON-LINE as well as on cable access San Francisco Channel 29 — 6pm Pacific Time, Sat July 13, 2013
– see this link at broadcast time:

http://www.bavc.org/public-access-tv/live-stream/channel-29-stream

You need a fairly decent internet connection and computer to “get it.”
USA west coast: 6:00 PM Saturday, Sept 14, 2013
USA east coast: 9:00 PM Sunday, Sept 15, 2013
Tokyo: 10:00 AM Sunday, Sept 15, 2013
If you cannot get this online email us at info@researchpubs.com

See RE/Search channel on youtube: “researchpubs”

3. This is blank space a la John Cage aka “Meditation Space”!

4. FORTHCOMING EVENTS (San Francisco unless Otherwise Noted)

() NEW YORK $ Thurs, Aug 29 7:30pm. Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Ave, New York, NY 10003 Our pal MICHAEL H. SHAMBERG – TURTLE, AN ANARCHIC SALON Though perhaps best known for his work as a producer of music videos – in particular for his work with Patti Smith, R.E.M., and above all New Order, and with directors such as Robert Frank, Robert Breer, Kathryn Bigelow, and Jonathan Demme – Michael H. Shamberg’s career is astonishingly multi-faceted and category-defying. In addition to directing his own highly personal and provocative short films and a unique and formally adventurous feature, Shamberg presides over a profoundly ambitious, ongoing, interdisciplinary virtual salon entitled ‘turtle’, described as “an open and chaotic network of diverse but interconnecting ideas, people, projects, events, and venues.” Though this evening will focus on Shamberg’s own films (including SOUVENIR, a collaboration with actors Kristin Scott Tho! mas and Christina Ricci, cinematographer James Herbert, and filmmaker Chris Marker), it is presented under the umbrella of ‘turtle’, and is sure to involve a stimulating and unpredictable dialogue between Shamberg, special guests, and audience members. Stanton Miranda, the lead, will join Shamberg in person! Cinematographer James Herbert will also join. Special thanks to Tom Jarmusch.

P.S. BEIRUT – CHAPTERS 1 + 2 2012, 26 min, digital video “Shamberg is a legendary producer of music videos [as well as] a filmmaker and impresario who’s been struggling valiantly to keep connecting since being afflicted with mitochondrial disease. This fragile and intense film concerns his own corporeal civil war, bombings in Lebanon, Romanesque churches, and life trying to make sense of itself. Music by Markus Acher of The Notwist, Electrelane, and New Order.” -VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

SOUVENIR 1998, 78 min, 35mm. With Adam Hann-Byrd, Kristin Scott Thomas, Melvil Poupaud, Stanton Miranda, and the voices of Hugues Quester and Christina Ricci; cinematography by James Herbert; computer graphics by Irit Batsry and Chris Marker. “SOUVENIR is the adventure – in many voices – of Orlando (Miranda), an American woman in Paris. The film explores how memory, history, environment, chance, and displacement contribute to senses of ourselves and our place in the world. The rich, multi-layered narrative recollects and reconstructs Orlando’s past relations with her family, and their indelible mark on her life. Mixing film, video and digital (computer graphics by Chris Marker), SOUVENIR proudly reflects the influence of groundbreaking filmmakers like Godard and Marker.” -CORNERHOUSE
Plus, a selection of Shamberg’s music videos!

() FREE. Sat-Sun Aug 31-Sept 1, 11-5pm San Francisco Zine Fest, S.F. County Fair Building, 9th Ave/Lincoln Way (in Golden Gate Park). RE/Search will have a table with Charles Gatewood!www.sfzinefest.org

() FREE Sat Aug 31 to Sept 22, next 4 weekends, both Sat & Sun 2pm: MacBeth at S.F. Shakespeare Festival http://sfshakes.org/park/index.html
San Francisco’s Presidio – Main Post Parade Ground Lawn (between Graham St & Keyes Ave) Aug 31 – September 15, 2013. Saturdays, Sundays & Labor Day Monday All shows at 2:00 pm There will be no intermission during the performance. The play lasts only 100 minutes, so please keep your seats and enjoy every spell-binding minute.
() San Francisco’s Mclaren Park – Jerry Garcia Amphitheater (40 John F Shelley Dr, 94134) Sept 21 & 22, 2013 Saturday & Sunday Both shows at 2:00 pm
There will be no intermission during the performance.

() FREE Thur Sept 5, 6-9pm Opening Reception for Body Electric (group art show on the human body) at Emerald Tablet, 80 Fresno/Grant Ave.

() FREE Fri Sept 6, 6-8pm, OPENING: Ryan McGinley – YEARBOOK at Ratio 3, 2831A Mission St/24th-25th Sts, SF.

() FREE Fri Sept 6, 5pm-2am, 21+ ONLY: 111 Minna Gallery, Last Gasp Present 20 Years Celebration. Many artists will be present! RE/Search plans to attend!

() FREE Fri Sept 6, 730pm: North Beach First Fridays: Emerald Tablet, 80 Fresno/Grant, free chamber music concert by Classical Revolution www.emtab.org

() FREE Sat Sept 7, 3-5pm: Charles Gatewood 50 Year Photo Retrospective at Robert Tat Gallery, 49 Geary St. RE/Search will attend, so meet us there… (Thur Sept 5 this show opens, 5:30pm-7:30pm as part of First Thursdays…)

() FREE Sat Sept 7, 1-3pm: William Farley “Fog at Night” Color Photography Opening. Building A, Fort Mason

() FREE Sat Sept 7, 3pm: The New Catharine Clark Gallery Opening featuring Anthony Discenza giving a walk-through of the show. 248 Utah St/16th St, a block east of Potrero, San Francisco, CA 94103

() $ Sun Sept 8, 7pm, early show: Cafe du Nord, Market St: Jill Tracy. http://cafedunord.com/

() **OAKLAND** $ Tue Sept 10, 8pm, Uptown, 1928 Telegraph Av: The Weirdos (’77 Punk Band from L.A.), Sharp Objects, Neutral Boy. http://www.uptownnightclub.com/events/the-weirdos-plus-special-guests/

() $10 Sun, Sept 8/13/14/18 (check website for time): 4 performances of a play based upon the life of painter/Mail Art Authority/Author/SFAQ interviewer John Held Jr: With Held By Jeremy Greco. Playwright & monologist Jeremy Greco traces Held’s career & art-making. SF Fringe Festival, Exit Theater Stage Left, 156 Eddy St/Mason-Taylor, above Market St http://events.sfgate.com/san_francisco_ca/events/show/339684783-with-held

() FREE Thur, Sept 12, 7-10pm: SFAI McBean Gallery, 800 Chestnut St: Mission School: Chris Johanson, Margaret Kilgallen, Alicia McCarthy, Barry McGee, Ruby Neri Featuring live musical performances by Sun Foot (Chris Johanson, Ron Burns, Brian Mumford), Virgil Shaw (Dieselhed), and special guests

() $ **OAKLAND** Tue Sept 17, 8pm: Uptown: The Vibrators. http://www.uptownnightclub.com/event-calendar/

() FREE. Fri, Sept 20, 630-830pm: Club Foot Orchestra w/Richard Marriott & Pamela Z plays de Young Museum, GG Park. http://deyoung.famsf.org/deyoung/events/calendar/2013-09-20

() $ SAT-SUN 9/21-22 2pm-midnite or 10pm: VERDI CLUB, 2424 Mariposa/Potrero, SF – SF Punk Homecoming 2013. Sat Sept. 21 – 2 pm to Midnight. Sun Sept. 22 – 2 pm to 10 pm http://sfpunkhomecoming.com/Suggest getting tickets NOW as they will sell out! RE/Search will have a table – meet V. Vale and buy his original 1977-78 Search&Destroy tabloids direct from him – he’ll autograph ‘em!

Performances by:
The Mutants
Frightwig
Penelope Houston
Roy Loney & The Phantom Movers
Factrix (((you’re kidding me, Factrix is performing, wow, etc)))
Winston Tong (with LX Rudis)
Nervous Gender
Rampage (with Randy Rampage & Zippy Pinhead)
The Alley Cats
The Offs
Rubber City Rebels
White Trash Debutantes
Patrick O’Neil & Peter Urban
Thrill Of The Pull
Impatient Youth
The Guverment (with Greg Ingraham, Avengers guitarist)
The Blowdryers
Death Valley Girls (with Patty Schemel)
Dave D Og Swan (with Ronnie Guitar & Petunia)
Jack Grisham
Iris Berry
Silke Berlinn
Elliot Schneider & The Big Bang
Brendan Earley (Solo; Mutants guitarist)
The Job (with Marc Olmsted)
The Legendary T.B. Slick Revue
Gimme Danger (Iggy Tribute)
Siobhan (Shamama) Lowe
Joe Rees / Target Video 77
MC: Raymond Ernest Andre III – http://sfpunkhomecoming.com/

() $5 Wed, Sept 25: Dorkbot (google SF Dorkbot to confirm this!) RE/Search will have a table; come meet us!

() $ Thur Sept 26 on The Hypnodrome, 575 10th Street (bet. Bryant & Division): www.thrillpeddlers.com 415-377-4202 Shocktoberfest 14: Jack the Ripper: Horror, Madness, Spanking and Song! Thurs – Saturdays, September 26 – November 23, 8:00 pm Added Preview on Mon, Sept 30, 8:00 pm.

() $ **SAN JOSE** Thur-Sun Sept 26-29: Iggy & the Stooges! James Williamson gives keynote address! Rudy Rucker moderates 1 or 2 panels! c2sv.com/tickets – C2SV Technology Conference + Music Festival. 70 bands, many speakers, etc – 4 days in San Jose! Win tickets (?) at metrogiveaways.com

() FREE Fri-Sun, Oct 4-6: Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in GG Park: Dave Alvin, Chris Isaak, etc http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/2013/09/hardly_strictly_bluegrass_2013_1.php

() FREE (?) Feb 14-16, 2014: International San Francisco Mail Art Conference titled Ex Postal Facto Conference – go to www.expostalfacto.wordpress.com, email inquiriers if you wish to participate to: redletterdayzine@gmail.com – RE/SEARCH will have a table at this gala! You are welcome to submit artwork, but please do not expect compensation – this is MAIL ART!!!

5. What We’ve Attended or WANTED to Attend/What We’ve Been Reading/Seeing/Listening to/What We’ve Been Sent/Given, or Seen

() We WANTED to see this Tom Marioni event at EverGold Gallery (put on by Andrew McKinley/Gregory Ito, SFAQ publishers; sfaqonline.com) 8/24/13, but fell ill at the last moment. Our friend Jessica H sent this review, however
“Hey Vale, Regarding the Tom Marioni performance: the opening act was a Peruvian man, now residing in SF, performing boisterous stunts by repetitively chopping onions into halves with a butcher knife then squeezing and pressing them against both of his eyes. He spoke in a slapstick manner-I can’t remember much of what was said, but can recall most of it wasn’t interesting. He ended his act by tempting the audience into daring him to swallow fire (a can of kerosene, lighter, and rod were displayed). He dangled the ~1.5ft kerosene soaked rod above his mouth with his right hand, and held the lighter in lighting position underneath the rod with his left. Tom Marioni objected to the action which transitioned into Marioni’s performance.

“Marioni’s performance was called “Name-dropping Stories Off the Top of My Head,” and if the stories of his relations and encounters with famous artists and celebrities were true, he must have surely tasted the life of art stardom; moreover, he was part of the “in” crowd. Marioni talked about partying with Bruce Nauman, meeting Andy Warhol, having Eleanor Coppola as his student, owning the space prior to it becoming SF MOMA, etc.
“However, I believe the performance was largely a commentary on the art world’s (people in general, really) institutionalized and naive disposition to validate one’s significance based on his/her networks. He started the performance by saying he was going to sell one autographed copy of his book: The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art. At the end of his name-dropping rant, he reminded everyone of the book, which was immediately claimed by a member of the audience. I’ve never heard of Marioni, but I felt obligated to research him.

“The two consecutive acts functioned cohesively as senseless (or is “predisposed” a better word?) captivation of the audience-the opening which was triggered through exaggerated gestures and actions, and the main through buzzwords/famous names. When performed, criticality was not immediately activated to the audience.
“So there! Some thought on the performances. Anyway, Chris and I had a really good time…” – Jessica H. from L.A.

6. MEDITATION SPACE No. 2 (((best things in the mag)))

7. RECOMMENDED LINKS (send some!)

() Aldona Watts did a radio interview: “Transmissions from RE/Search headquarters, AKA information Overload Palace: Punks, Pranks, and the Counterculture Continuum in a Media-Sedated Age,” featuring V. VALE of RE/Search and Search & Destroy. Try to find it at http://www.noahvenezia.com/CC/CC_062613.html

() The CLEAREST (& FUNNIEST) INTRO to ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: RE/SEARCH’s DATING AI, written by Dr. Alex Z.! http://prezi.com/zmgq5tizxnfy/dating-ai-for-researchpubs/?auth_key=60e67d8b57d9a22b5f3db997515c62d51ff6d601 … … – order from http://www.researchpubs.com/shop/dating-ai-by-dr-alex-z-2/ …

() from Phil G: funny: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/im-sick-of-pretending-i-dont-get-art? fb_comment_id=fbc_10150301717875000_26918204_10151627796600000#f268d3d48f55a18
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/cool-for-sale/ (Beatnik wanton)

() from Steve Taylor-Ramírez, singer-songwriter whose mix of folk, Latin, Americana and blues crosses boundaries. http://berkeley.patch.com/articles/steve-taylor-ramirez-plays-cal-dayhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uriwk9VYMCU&list=UUU02Xy907cquTF_F2Weltvw&index=7&feature=plcp

() from Amy J: http://flavorwire.com/395275/10-artists-who-destroyed-their-own-work/view-all “lick & lather”

() from Sandra D: http://www.courierpress.com/news/2013/aug/13/1700lt-ap-eu-britain-spy-cans473ltngtuk-bars-wi/

() from Diane di Prima: Actress Amber Tamblyn has set up a link to raise funds for the 1st Generation Beat Poet with Parkinsons: https://www.giveforward.com/fundraiser/g8r2/poetesswithparkinsons

() from Graham R: http://www.theaterofguts.com/https://www.facebook.com/RaeWrites

() from Mike Dingle: ” www.clowncrack.com This is the site of Mr. Fish … one of my favorite political cartoonists. I came upon him through the Harper’s Weekly Review, still one of my favorite compilations of anecdotes from around the world. A few months back, Harper’s changed their format and Mr. Fish was no longer a feature I could click on after reading the weekly review at Harpers.org … when I found him a couple of weeks ago on the news site Truthdig, I sent an email asking why he wasn’t on Harpers anymore … he actually wrote me a very interesting reply, telling me that he’d been fired by Harpers for being too harsh on Obama and the progressive left (is there really such a thing these days?). If you have a moment or three, scroll back a bunch and check out his offerings … he doesn’t pull a! ny punches… hopefully some of you will appreciate Mr. Fish’s uncompromising stances on the issues of our times.”

() from V in London: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-murphy/william-burroughs-scientology_b_3750756.html (Burroughs: Scientology)
http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/dial_a_poem_poets/nova/Nova-Convention_16_conversation.mp3 (Burroughs: Nova Convention)

() from Steven Gray: http://litseen.com/?p=14718

() from Phil W: http://www.japantrendshop.com/kuwaete-sukkiri-tongue-exerciser-p-1463.html

() from Gail T: http://www.messynessychic.com/2013/07/25/the-lost-victorian-mansions-of-downtown-la/

() from Vordo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS0aC36j1ec

() from Regan K: 20 of the Greatest Silent Horror Films You Can Watch Right Now

http://flavorwire.com/412888/20-of-the-greatest-silent-horror-films-you-can-watch-right-now

() http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=38616 clip from “Kill Your Darlings” film

() Stephen Holman intv: http://vimeo.com/73699416

() Charles Gatewood intv by John Held Jr in SFAQ: http://www.sfaqonline.com/2013/08/in-conversation-with-charles-gatewood/

() Photo of V. Vale in SF WEEKLY online column by Sam Lefebvre: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/2013/09/san_francisco_zine_fest_we_rev.php

() from Greg L: http://youtu.be/MMwaOPnkiMc

() from James Mc: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c6B7VKfdW4 Bauhaus

() http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XogCT2e0Vp4&feature=youtu.be – this is the first time I’ve heard myself (V. Vale) playing organ with Blue Cheer, thanks to Ben Van Meter’s sound recording! (& collage 8mm film, of course). THANKS, BEN – hope you’re alive! – V. Vale

8. QUOTES

() from Thelonious Monk, sent by Tyler:

() Just because you’re not a DRUMMER, doesn’t mean that you don’t have to KEEP TIME.
() Pat your foot & SING THE MELODY in your Head, When You Play.
() Stop playing all that BULLSHIT/Those Weird Notes, Play the MELODY!
() Make the Drummer Sound GOOD.
() DISCRIMINATION Is Important.
() You’ve Got to Dig It to Dig It, You Dig?
() Don’t Play the Piano Part-I’m Playing That. Don’t Listen to ME, I’m Supposed to be Accompanying YOU!
() The INSIDE of the Tune (the Bridge) is the part that makes the OUTSIDE Sound Good.
() Don’t Play EVERYTHING (or EVERY TIME); Let Some Things GO BY. Some Music is Better Just IMAGINED.
() What You DON’T PLAY Can Be More Important Than What You DO PLAY.
() A Note can be as small as a pin or as Big as the World, It depends on your IMAGINATION.
() Stay In Shape! Sometimes a Musician Waits for a Gig, & When it comes, He’s Out of Shape & Can’t Make It.
() When you’re SWINGING, Swing Some MORE!
() Always Leave Them Wanting MORE.
() Don’t Sound ANYBODY for a Gig, Just be ON THE SCENE.
() Those Pieces were written so as to Have Something to Play, & to Get Cats INTERESTED Enough to Come to REHEARSAL.
() You’ve Got it! If you don’t want to Play, Tell a Joke or Dance, but in any case. YOU GOT IT! [To a Drummer Who Didn’t Want to Solo.]
() Whatever you think CAN’T be done, Somebody will come along & DO IT. A Genius is the one MOST LIKE HIMSELF.
() They tried to get me to Hate White People, but Someone Would Always Come Along & Spoil It!

() from Fred Giannelli: “DEATH !!! What is it ??? The greatest marketing opportunity known to mankind !!!”

() from truthout.org: “The sentencing of Chelsea Manning (formerly known as Bradley) is a harsh reminder that honesty is not a quality currently rewarded by the powers that be in America – in fact, it’s punished. Meanwhile, there’s been no punishment for politicians who lied to drag us into wars and bankers who profited from crashing the American economy – they’re doing just fine, thank you. This systemic injustice can only be overcome by a renewed commitment to telling the truth – and holding those in power accountable when they lie. As National Lawyers Guild executive director Heidi Boghosian recently told Truthout, we must “harness our collective power to curb a mass surveillance state that infringes on our privacy and our constitutional rights” and “demand transparency and accountability from government agencies.”

() from codepink: “”As a retired Army colonel and former US diplomat who resigned because of the war in the Iraq, I deeply appreciate the courage of Bradley Manning to reveal the truth about the war, the number of civilian casualties, the illegal criminal acts as represented by the video Collateral Murder, and the diplomatic interactions that show the duplicity of the US government and the harm it caused to people around the world. Now that Bradley has been sentenced to prison, it is so important that we continue to show him how much we appreciate his courage.” ~Colonel Ann Wright,”

9. LETTERS FROM READERS:

() “My favorite part of your new RE/Search Pocketbook on HENRY ROLLINS was when he talks about how he (ideally) likes to spend New Year’s Eve…”-Emily R.

() “Can’t believe George Kuchar is dead. I just was introduced to him in film class. I’m buying your George Kuchar book for my film teacher.”-Young Man at S.F. Zine Fest, Sun Sept 1, 2013

10. **SPONSORS** (Without them you would NOT be receiving this newsletter – Please go to their websites!)
If you would like to subscribe, we ask for a 6-month minimum of $66.
1. 47 Canal Street (Gallery w/events, NYC) – 47CanalStreet.com go visit & say RE/Search sent you!
2. Emerald Tablet (Gallery w/events), Fresno Alley (100 feet from RE/Search! in North Beach). emtab.org – lots of free or low cost local community events; check out their schedule! http://emtab.org/ – they’re open during First Fridays North Beach Art Walk…
3. Mrs Dalloway’s Catering (Bay Area) – We at RE/Search are fans of Mrs Dalloway’s delicious appetizers, which we have been lucky enough to have eaten many times! Low prices! Willing to do small events! Call to get specialty appetizers for your next party or event! www.mrsdallowayscatering.com
4. METASONIX: Since 1999, the world’s only maker of vacuum-tube music synthesizers. metasonix.com
5. From our friends Amy and Brian – they have a new software in the works, watch for it! tastysnakes.com
6. V. Vale’s RE/Search Newsletter is cordially sponsored by “Beyond the Beyond.”
Information Wants To Be Free WE MEAN IT MAN! $0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0 http://blog.wired.com/sterling
7. www.SOPHIAGASPARIAN.com “fine art about equal human rights worldwide”
8. Philip Lenihan. A founder of Sluggo magazine from Austin, Texas. Find him on Facebook?
9. Mal Sharpe, Jennifer Sharpe. Mal’s band plays the Savoy Tivoli Saturday & Sunday afternoons on Grant St. in S.F.
10. Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company – Penelope Rosemont, Chicago Surrealist Group founder.
11. Kevin O’Malley+Christie Dames, the High-Heeled Anarchist: TechTalk/Studio: http://techtalkstudio.com + Commonwealth Club, San Francisco.
12. Emily Armstrong/Pat Ivers’ pioneering 1st generation NYC 1975-80 punk videos! http://gonightclubbing.com see ‘em yourself @ NYU Fales Library Downtown Collection, debut: Oct 2013

SEPTEMBER 2013 RE/Search eNewsletter #118 written by V. Vale & other contributors. RE/Search website powered by http://www.laughingsquid.com. Add us (“info@researchpubs.com”) to Your Address Book
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The post V. Vale RE/Search newsletter #118 appeared first on WIRED.

Ryan North on Unleashing His New, Improved, Record-Breaking Hamlet Tale

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 07 Sep 2013 10:30:43 +0000

Ryan North has a knack for attracting an audience to his ideas. His long-running Dinosaur Comics has roughly 70,000 readers, despite the fact that every issue features the exact same panel layout and crude dinosaur clip art. One of the most popular installments introduced the idea of a “machine of death,” a device that can accurately predict the manner of your demise. But when North and friends tried to interest publishers in a machine of death book, they were told it would never sell. Yet the volume, which they published themselves, hit No. 1 on Amazon.com the day of its release.

[dewplayer:http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/underwire/geeksguide93final.mp3″]

“You can have an idea that everyone else thinks is dumb, and it’s still a good idea,” says Ryan North in Episode 93 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

His latest idea is To Be or Not to Be, a new version of Hamlet modeled after the popular Choose Your Own Adventure series. The story includes such innovations as a kick-ass Ophelia, a choose-your-own-adventure-style book within the book, and a massive pirate battle. (The original story alludes to Hamlet’s encounter with pirates, though they never appear on stage.) A Kickstarter to print the book raised over half a million dollars late last year, at the time making it the most successful publishing-related Kickstarter ever (it has since been surpassed by a Planet Money campaign).

“It helped that I have ten years of producing work behind me,” says North, whose Kickstarter backers have been receiving their To Be or Not to Be goodies over the last few weeks (it hits stores on Tuesday). “So I can say, ‘Hey, we’ve had this relationship for years. Here’s a new thing I’m doing. Maybe you want to check it out.'”

The post Ryan North on Unleashing His New, Improved, Record-Breaking Hamlet Tale appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast Presents the Games of PAX Prime 2013

ChrisKohler — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 18:13:54 +0000

We run down the best games we found at Penny Arcade Expo last weekend on this week’s Game|Life Podcast.

Wired senior editor Peter Rubin joins me as I ramble on about a variety of topics, including:

And probably more.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_082.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 082

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_082.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast Presents the Games of PAX Prime 2013 appeared first on WIRED.

81: Game|Life –– PAX Preview and Nintendo 2DS Impressions

Chris Kohler — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Chris and Peter discuss happenings at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle; Days of Wonder and tablets as gaming platforms; the weirdness of Nintendo’s new handheld 2DS; and new output for the Wii U and other Nintendo consoles.

The post 81: Game|Life –– PAX Preview and Nintendo 2DS Impressions appeared first on WIRED.

Chris Kluwe Is the NFL’s Geek Hero

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 10:30:06 +0000

NFL punter Chris Kluwe played eight seasons with the Minnesota Vikings and is currently an Oakland Raider. But to him that’s just a job. His real passion is for gaming and science fiction. He owns his own tabletop gaming store, was a member of a top-ranked World of Warcraft guild, and is hard at work on his own sci-fi trilogy. He’s also reached the highest levels of Guitar Hero mastery, and has characters named after him in both X-Com: Enemy Unknown and Shadowrun Returns, all of which may make him the geekiest man in pro sports.

[dewplayer:http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/underwire/geeksguide92final.mp3″]

“I don’t know anyone that comes close,” says Chris Kluwe in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I haven’t met anyone that’s into tabletop gaming and pen and paper gaming and just the variety of interests that I have.”

Kluwe has made headlines in recent years for his outspoken support of marriage equality. His attention-grabbing letter to Maryland state delegate Emmett C. Burns Jr. was full of the sort of colorful invective that Kluwe honed over years on the World of Warcraft message boards. Fans of that letter will want to go pick up Kluwe’s new book, Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies, a collection of essays focused around his commitment to rational empathy and social justice. Kluwe credits science fiction with helping him outgrow some of the bullying tendencies that often plague other athletes.

The post Chris Kluwe Is the NFL’s Geek Hero appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: You Can Go Home Again

ChrisKohler — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 19:11:36 +0000

Of course, we’re talking about Gone Home on this week’s Game|Life podcast.

Wired senior editor and Underwire big cheese Laura Hudson fills in for an absent Peter Rubin for an in-depth, spoiler-filled discussion of this groundbreaking game.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_080.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 080

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_080.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: You Can Go Home Again appeared first on WIRED.

Prison Computer ‘Glitch’ Blamed for Opening Cell Doors in Maximum-Security Wing

Kim Zetter — Fri, 16 Aug 2013 10:30:55 +0000

Florida prison officials say a computer “glitch” may be to blame for opening all of the doors at a maximum security wing simultaneously, setting prisoners free and allowing gang members to pursue a rival with weapons.

But a surveillance video released this week (see above) suggests that the doors may have been opened intentionally — either by a staff member or remotely by someone else inside or outside the prison who triggered a “group release” button in the computerized system. The video raises the possibility that some prisoners knew in advance that the doors were going to open.

It’s the second time in two months that all of the doors in the wing opened at once, officials say, raising questions about whether the first incident was a trial-run to see how long it would take guards to respond.

The most recent incident occurred on the night of June 13 at the maximum security wing of Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center in Miami, Florida, but surveillance footage only became available this week after the Miami Herald filed a public records request. The Center holds about 1,300 prisoners – male and female – but the security breach only opened the doors of K-81, the maximum-security wing. Guards at the prison say they did not open the doors.

According to a written account by one of the guards on duty that night, which WIRED obtained, the incident occurred around 7:04 p.m. just after a shift change. A guard who identified himself only as Officer G. Summons in the report, said he had just relieved another officer for a break at 7 p.m. when “the control panel shutdown and all cell doors opened.” At that point “all inmates came out of their cells.” Officer Summons called for backup, and at 7:07 p.m. the guard he had relieved a few minutes earlier, along with a second guard, entered the booth to assist. Other guards began corralling inmates back to their cells.

But according to the video, not all of the inmates exited their rooms, as Summons reports. As soon as the doors opened, surveillance cameras captured one prisoner in particular immediately leaving his cell, as if he had anticipated the door opening, and walking down a passageway toward another prisoner, with whom he reportedly exchanged a shank or homemade prison knife. They and two other inmates then closed-in on 27-year-old Kenneth Williams, who leapt over a second-floor balcony railing to escape his would-be assailants and suffered a broken ankle and fractured vertebrae in the fall.

Within minutes after the doors opened, guards report that they were in the hallway yelling at other inmates to remain in their rooms as they attempted to secure the area and lock the doors.

The assailants were reportedly rival gang members of Williams. He and a twin brother allegedly lead a violent drug gang and are believed to have ordered a hit against a rival in December 2008 that resulted in a 10-month-old boy being killed in the spray of gunfire. Two teenagers were convicted of the boy’s murder, and Williams and his brother were arrested for allegedly threatening one of the key witnesses in the case. Williams is scheduled to go to trial next week on the witness tampering charge.

In his own account of the prison incident, quoted here verbatim, Williams writes: “I was seting in my cell room 9111 when the door’s open and I seen 4 inmate come in 2 my room with something in there hands at the sometime I had something to but I jump off the 2th floor becuz I was scary for my life. I want 2 know why the door’s keep open.”

The surveillance video doesn’t show the inmates entering his room but appears to show them encountering him in the hallway after he left the room. The other prisoners involved in the incident have been identified as Junior Pascal, Jay Stubbs, Quincy Taylor, and Richard Holt, who are all in their twenties. Guards confiscated several shanks during and after the incident, including one later found in a shower stall where the inmates were taken after the incident.

Miami-Dade Corrections Director Tim Ryan acknowledged to the Herald that the circumstances around the door-release were “suspicious,” and said officials were investigating whether any staff members were responsible for opening the doors or if a problem lay with the computerized system that controls the doors. The latter system is reportedly part of a $1.4 million security upgrade installed at the prison by a company in Alabama named Black Creek Integrated Systems.

The control panel for the system generally features a group-release button that allows guards in minimum-security facilities to release inmates simultaneously for a head count, the Herald reports. But it’s generally not used in maximum-security settings, since inmates are kept one-to-a-cell and aren’t allowed to interact with one another in common areas.

It’s not the first time that an apparent glitch with the release occurred. A month earlier on May 20, the group-release feature also got mysteriously activated. Officers said at that time, as well, that they had not pressed the release button, which raised the possibility that one of them might have activated it accidentally. Unfortunately, no surveillance camera was installed in the control room to determine if that occurred. So as a precaution, technicians added a security feature that was supposed to prevent accidental activation. Any time a guard touches the release feature now, a prompt is supposed to appear onscreen asking the guard to confirm the intention to open all of the cell doors.

But this didn’t appear to help a month later when the problem with the doors recurred.

Ryan told WIRED that the incident is being investigated by the Miami-Dade police department, but a report isn’t expected to be completed for a month or two. He said that an initial review of the computer logs indicated that an “operator error” had occurred, but they don’t know what exactly this means.

“The software in the computer has only one kind of thing, operator error, and we don’t know what triggers that, so part of the inquiry is to find out what the software is saying,” he said.

But the correctional facility in Florida isn’t the only one to experience a problem with its electronic doors. Last April, just a month before the first Florida incident occurred, a correctional facility in Maryland had a similar problem when the locks on 500 cell doors disengaged simultaneously at around 12:20 a.m. on a Saturday morning.

A computer malfunction was also blamed for this failure. Officials at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility where it occurred said no inmates tried to escape, but about 20 police cars were called in to secure the perimeter of the facility during the hour it took to fix the glitch and secure the doors. Three days later, however, the locks on the cell doors disengaged again. It’s not clear if Black Creek’s system is also installed at that facility. Officials in Maryland did not respond to a call for comment.

J.C. Dugue, Williams’s attorney, told WIRED that it’s hard to imagine the doors in Florida opened without an assist from guards or some other accomplice on the inside.

But a trio of security researchers — John Strauchs, Teague Newman, and Tiffany Rad — say that many prison systems have vulnerabilities that can be exploited remotely by hackers or accomplices from inside or outside a prison. They have examined systems at a number of facilities and two years ago presented their findings at the DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas.

Some of the vulnerabilities exist in the architecture and configuration of the systems, causing them to be accessible via the internet. Other vulnerabilities exist in the programmable logic controllers that are used to control not only prison doors, but surveillance cameras and other prison systems. Many PLCs use Ladder Logic programming and a communications protocol that have no security protections built into them. There are also vulnerabilities in the Windows-based desktop machines that are used to monitor and program the PLCs. Anyone who gains access to these computers can control the PLCs and the operations they monitor, the researchers say.

According to Strauchs, a hacker could install malware to gain control of prison computers either by getting a corrupt insider to install it via an infected USB stick — and programming the attack to kick in at 2 a.m. on someone else’s shift — or by sending it to a worker via a phishing attack aimed at tricking the staffer into clicking on a malicious attachment or link. Though control systems at prisons shouldn’t be connected to the internet, Strauchs says his team once toured a prison control room in the Rocky Mountain region and found a staffer reading his Gmail account on a control system connected to the internet. There are also computers in non-essential parts of prisons, such as in the commissaries or laundry rooms, that are sometimes connected to the networks that control critical functions, allowing someone to remotely hijack the control room system from another location in the prison.

“Bear in mind, a prison security electronic system has many parts beyond door control such as intercoms, lighting control, video surveillance, water and shower control, and so forth,” the researchers wrote in a paper they released in 2011. “Access to any part, such as a remote intercom station, might provide access to all parts.”

Prison systems have a cascading release function so that in an emergency, such as a fire, when hundreds of prisoners need to be released quickly, the system will cycle through groups of doors at a time to avoid overloading the system by releasing them all at once. But a hacker could design an attack to override the cascade release to open all of the doors at once and overload the system.

The researchers say they can’t tell from the information available about the incident in Florida whether it involved operator error or an insider or outsider attack. Judging from what is available, they say the company that installed the system seems to have done some things right while failing to do other things it could have done to secure the system better.

According to the web site for Black Creek Integrated Systems, the company responsible for installing the digital management system at the Florida prison, its sole customers are corrections facilities. It has installed systems in “jails, prisons, courthouses and government facilities across the nation.”

In addition to the door security systems, it sells and installs video surveillance systems and RFID prisoner-tracking systems, as well as an IP-based video visitation system that allows inmates to visit with their families remotely via computer. It’s not clear how securely those systems are built.

Diagram published on Black Creek’s web site showing the general network architecture of its system.

A video posted on the company’s web site shows how its management system can be integrated to control any electronic or electric device at a prison — including door locks, card readers, water and electricity, intercoms, surveillance cameras, and inmate phones — all from a single touchscreen monitor. The so-called Super Display system “utilizes a highly secure, gigabit security LAN which provides high bandwidth utilizing standard TCP/IP communication between all system major components,” according to the company.

A diagram posted on the company’s site showing the system architecture (.pdf) lists PLC’s, wireless access points and remote access as some of its features, which could potentially be vulnerable, depending on their configuration.

Newman told WIRED that the diagram seems to indicate that control systems for doors are properly segmented and are not immediately accessible from the internet. The wireless access points and remote access workstation also appear to be connected only to internal networks. But he says there is still a potential for vulnerabilities, depending on how the system is actually configured at each facility and whether the software installed on them is secure. After all, it’s not only hackers from outside the prison that are a danger, but anyone with access to a computer on the internal network.

Strauchs says he’s surprised that Black Creek only installed a prompt on the system to prevent an accidental activation of doors after there was already a problem. He has installed systems at prisons himself and says that any time he did, he made sure the all-release function for opening doors could only be activated with a key that the senior officer on a shift possessed — a solution that is much more secure than a prompt.

“Every design I did, it was impossible to enable the all-release button unless you activated the key so that it was a consciously positive action,” he says. “Without the key, that button wouldn’t work. I can’t believe Black Creek wouldn’t have had that safeguard. Just a prompt makes no sense to me.”

Black Creek refused to answer any questions from WIRED about its systems, including the number of prisons in the country that use them.

Ryan told WIRED he had never considered the possibility that the system might have been hacked — either from an insider or an outsider — but said investigators would now look into that.

The post Prison Computer ‘Glitch’ Blamed for Opening Cell Doors in Maximum-Security Wing appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: Disney Infinity, Oculus and Carmack, Mario and Luigi

ChrisKohler — Mon, 12 Aug 2013 19:07:15 +0000

Did nothing happen last week, or was the course of the very future of videogames laid out for us? John Carmack joining the team at Oculus VR as chief technological officer might be just one multimillionaire embarking on a new passion project or the decision that changes the trajectory of the whole gaming industry. Who knows! WIRED senior editor Peter Rubin and I discuss on this episode of the Game|Life podcast. (This episode went up on iTunes at the end of last week.)

We also get into what we think might happen with Disney’s upcoming Infinity game, now that it’s on the verge of being released. Also we talk a lot about driving between San Francisco and Los Angeles, which I did over the weekend for the D23 Expo.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_079.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 079

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_079.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: Disney Infinity, Oculus and Carmack, Mario and Luigi appeared first on WIRED.

Felicia Day Issues a Geek Call to Arms

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 10 Aug 2013 10:30:46 +0000

Felicia Day is one of the internet’s highest-profile geeks. She’s appeared as an actress in Joss Whedon‘s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and also wrote and starred in the popular web series The Guild, about a group of online gamers. Her latest project, the Geek and Sundry YouTube channel, offers a wide range of videos for the Comic-Con crowd. But in a rallying cry to geeks issued on her blog, she argues that being a geek is about more than just playing games or reading comics.

[dewplayer:http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/underwire/geeksguide91final.mp3″]

“We have to mean something ourselves, and not just get trapped into, ‘Hey, everything’s just a mashup T-shirt,'” Day says in Episode 91 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “The substance of what it means to be a geek is essentially someone who’s brave enough to love something against judgment. The heart of being a geek is a little bit of rejection.”

Day is no stranger to judgment. As a struggling actress in Hollywood she was told she’d need plastic surgery to land larger roles. Instead she eked out a career as a quirky character actor, but found herself frustrated at the shallow way that geeks were portrayed on television. To remedy that she wrote The Guild, but soon found herself facing accusations that she was too pretty to be a “real” geek, a charge she brushes off.

“At no point am I ever threatened by people who question who I am, or why I like the things I do, or my legitimacy,” says Day. “Because I know who I am very strongly, and I think that’s what geek culture can reinforce.”

Listen to our complete interview with Felicia Day in Episode 91 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), in which she laments the lack of porn-free sets in L.A., reminisces about writing Ultima fan poetry, and reveals what lies ahead for Geek and Sundry. Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks Matt London and Cate Matthews join hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley to discuss YouTube for geeks.

Felicia Day on promoting The Guild:

“I would carry a stack of about a hundred bookmarks around with me every single place I went, and I would leave a lot of bookmarks in bathrooms, because, hey, you have nothing else to do in there, really. I would leave them at coffee shops, I would leave them at auditions. To me there was nothing too small, there was no venue or effort that was not worth my time, because when you’re starting from zero, every single person involved in your project is a person that wouldn’t have been involved otherwise.”

Felicia Day on Hollywood and the internet:

“Still to this day, people in mainstream Hollywood don’t really understand or acknowledge the web as being anywhere near on par with what traditional Hollywood makes … so that mentality kind of accompanies me with everything I do, because I still have my foot in a world that doesn’t see the net and what I do as something legitimate. Now, from the creators’ side, a lot of the creators do love the idea of working on the web, working without the gatekeepers and all the business and all the cookie-cutter parameters that people are forced to work in to make things in Hollywood. So on the creator end, what we’ve done with the show has been recognized by a lot of writers and actors and creatives, but from the business side — the gatekeepers — they don’t see the stakes as being high enough for them to acknowledge them and give credence. Though that’s changing, but very slowly.”

Matt London on video editing:

“I learned this term for the first time this week that’s amazing. It’s called ‘the frankenbite.’ Anyone who’s ever edited audio and watches a reality television show will be familiar with this phenomenon, even if they don’t know the term itself. It’s when a testimonial interview with a reality show contestant is hacked to pieces to the point where the original statement is completely indecipherable, but the editor has sculpted a new statement to better fit the narrative of the show. So you’ll hear something that sounds like this: ‘I think … Dave … is a … jerk.’ Now, ‘jerk’ is from one sentence, and ‘I think’ is from a sentence three episodes ago, and it all just gets mashed together to create the story that they want to.”

Matt London on YouTube comments:

“YouTube video comments are the worst comments in the world. One of my all-time favorite YouTube videos is ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ … It’s an amazing video, and it deserves the 180 million views that it has. But if you go to YouTube right now — right this second, as you’re listening to this — and type in ‘Charlie bit my finger,’ and look at the first five comments, they will all be profanity-laden, pornographic, or advertisements, just super-critical, disgusting, filthy, horrendous stuff. And I know that because the top five comments on that video are always that … And it’s just because people are always on it, being offensive, selling their own stuff, trying to draw attention to themselves.”

The post Felicia Day Issues a Geek Call to Arms appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast Runs Down the Week’s News

ChrisKohler — Fri, 02 Aug 2013 20:45:02 +0000

Hey, stuff is starting to happen in videogames again! We’re safely far enough away from E3 that actual announcements are beginning to occur, some good and some probably bad.

On this episode of the Game|Life podcast, WIRED senior editor Peter Rubin and I discuss:

The downloadable side stories for BioShock Infinite, which will bring Booker and Elizabeth into the city of Rapture
The gorgeous Elder Scrolls Anthology box set and other QuakeCon news
Final Fantasy: Breast Physics Edition
Breath of Fire is deader even than Final Fantasy
Pikmin 3 embargo is up: My impressions and thoughts on the Wii U’s sales

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_078.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 078

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_078.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast Runs Down the Week’s News appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: A More Developer-Friendly Xbox One?

ChrisKohler — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 19:52:54 +0000

On this week’s Game|Life podcast, we break down the latest gaming industry buzz:

Game Informer‘s report (and Microsoft’s confirmation) that Xbox One will allow self-publishing and that in fact every Xbox One console can be used for game creation
Nintendo fans’ elation that EarthBound has at last appeared on Virtual Console, and the chances that the rest of the series may finally come to America
The relaunched Kickstarter for the Eternal Darkness spiritual successor Shadow of the Eternals, and
Electronic Arts’ announcement that over 50 percent of its last quarterly revenue came from digital, not physical, games.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_077.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 077

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_077.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: A More Developer-Friendly Xbox One? appeared first on WIRED.

Where ‘Nightmare Bacteria’ Came From, And How Our Inattention Helped Them Emerge

Maryn McKenna — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 20:31:20 +0000

Cast your minds back a few months ago, to when the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced, “We have a very serious problem” with “nightmare bacteria,” and the chief medical officer of the United Kingdom backed him up a few days later, describing a “ticking time bomb” that threatens national security as seriously as terrorism.
(more…)

The post Where ‘Nightmare Bacteria’ Came From, And How Our Inattention Helped Them Emerge appeared first on WIRED.

The Arrivals May Be the Weirdest Western Yet

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 20 Jul 2013 10:30:43 +0000

“Weird Westerns” are stories that combine classic Western tropes with elements of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. High-profile Hollywood treatments of the idea have a checkered history, with films mostly ranging from the lackluster — Cowboys and Aliens — to the positively reviled — Wild Wild West. But the form is thriving in fiction and comics. A recent example is Melissa Marr’s new novel The Arrivals, in which strangers from throughout American history find themselves battling monsters in a Western-inspired alternate world.

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“This is honestly the most fun I’ve ever had writing,” says Melissa Marr in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “This was the book I wrote just for me. It’s possibly the weirdest thing I’ve ever done.”

Marr is best known for her Wicked Lovely books, a series of YA paranormal romance novels that draw heavily on her knowledge of folklore. Folkloric references also find their way into The Arrivals, but the book is more strongly influenced by the interests of her husband — a film major, comic book geek, and former marine — and her father, to whom the book is dedicated.

“Westerns were all daddy liked to watch,” says Marr. “Give me some Clint Eastwood, some Charles Bronson, and I was a happy girl. It was our father-daughter bonding.”

Listen to our complete interview with Melissa Marr in Episode 90 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), in which she discusses the merits of brothels, describes using a snorkel as part of her writing process, and explains the allure of Neil Gaiman‘s voice. Then stick around after the interview as guest geek Rajan Khanna joins hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley to discuss Weird Western movies.

Melissa Marr on science and magic:

“The Victorians was one of my areas in graduate school, and in the Victorian era they were very fascinated with Egyptology, and they’d have these parties at which there’d be a sarcophagus that you’d unwrap and there’s different things that come with it, and there are these things called ‘coffin texts,’ which are these little pieces of text that would be included, and there’s one in particular that talks about not fearing death and facing death. And this particular text has this tendency to seem like it’s a spell for opening a portal. And when I was reading it, it made a connection for me with physics, with the idea of timespace travel and wormholes. So I consulted with a physicist friend and went and understood the idea of timespace and wormholes a little bit more completely, and then basically put fantasy and science together, and suddenly there’s a passage that instead of being a reference to what death is like, it’s actually instructions for opening a hole that takes you to another place and time.”

Melissa Marr on meeting Vince Vaughn:

“I watch comic book movies. Give me The Avengers, give me Thor, those are my area. But I don’t watch comedies. So my agent called and said, ‘Vince Vaughn wants to buy your book.’ I’m not sure I’m allowed cussing on here, so I’ll just say my answer was, ‘Who the —- is Vince Vaughn?’ And my agent said, ‘Type it in the computer,’ and I looked him up and I was like, ‘Okay, so he’s an actor. Why can’t he go to a bookstore? Do you have author copies?’ And she’s like, ‘No, honey. He wants to buy the book. For the purposes of making a movie’ … The first time I went out there, Vince comes in the room, and all the other people knew what I’d said when they called me. So they waited until he was in the room and said, ‘So tell Vince what you said,’ and I was like, ‘Uh, no.’ And so they tell him, and he laughs … And I’m like, ‘No, I’ve never seen any of your movies, but I can if it’ll make you feel better.'”

David Barr Kirtley on Cowboys and Aliens:

“That’s my big thing with Hollywood aliens. They never wear clothes. They can invent interstellar travel, but not clothes. Seriously, think about it — Signs, War of the Worlds. I couldn’t even say when’s the last time I saw some aliens in a blockbuster movie wearing clothes … This should be Cowboys and Monsters. The aliens aren’t aliens really at all. I like the premise of ‘some cowboys have to fight some aliens,’ but the aliens should have advanced technology, there should just be a couple of them — they’re on a prospecting mission, maybe they’re the alien equivalent of just thugs and lowlife criminals — and the humans have to prevail by overwhelming them with superior numbers and clever tactics. But why do super-advanced aliens run around with no clothes on and fight with their claws? It just makes no sense at all.”

David Barr Kirtley on the lack of imagination in Weird Western movies:

“Do you not feel like movies just do the same things over and over again? I mean, I mentioned that three of these movies use the completion of the Transcontinental railway, and you just see the same characters and the same situations come up over and over again. And I just have to believe that there’s all sorts of stuff that happened in the Old West that’s interesting that’s not making it into the movies. It seems like all these filmmakers just go and watch a bunch of old Westerns, and just take bits and pieces out of them and stick them together, rather than researching the actual Old West and finding interesting things that actually happened, and using those, and presenting something new and different.”

The post The Arrivals May Be the Weirdest Western Yet appeared first on WIRED.

Chris Baker Returns to the Game|Life Podcast

ChrisKohler — Fri, 12 Jul 2013 20:18:14 +0000

We have a special treat for all of you longtime Game|Life Podcast listeners today! Our erstwhile co-host Chris Baker — now better known as Wired’s Angry Nerd — joins us to discuss the week in gaming once again. Like old times!

Don Mattrick quits Microsoft to head up Zynga! Grand Theft Auto V gameplay trailer! Sure, maybe there’s a bit of a lull in the news now that E3 is over, but we’ve got plenty to discuss amongst ourselves.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 076

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Former Valve Employee: ‘It Felt a Lot Like High School’

Philippa Warr, Wired UK — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 21:43:36 +0000

Former Valve employee Jeri Ellsworth has spoken of the company’s famous flat management structure, calling out several shortcomings as part of an interview for the Grey Area podcast.

Because of Valve’s success and profitability, the unconventional management structure — or, more accurately, the lack of one — has achieved a kind of legendary status. The much-circulated Valve employee handbook (PDF) explains: “Nobody ‘reports to’ anybody else. We do have a founder/president, but even he isn’t your manager. This company is yours to steer — toward opportunities and away from risks.”

[partner id=”wireduk”]It’s an idealized presentation (well, it is a handbook designed to enthuse and welcome new employees) and Ellsworth says as much. But she goes on to describe in greater detail shortcomings she observed during her time at Valve.

“It is a pseudo-flat structure where, at least in small groups, you’re all peers and make decisions together,” she said. “But the one thing I found out the hard way is that there is actually a hidden layer of powerful management structure in the company and it felt a lot like high school. There are popular kids that have acquired power in the company, then there’s the trouble makers, and everyone in between.”

One of the most frustrating aspects for Ellsworth was the hiring process. “I was struggling in the company to make a difference and to make the hardware group move forward. We were having a difficult time recruiting folks. We would interview very talented people but they would be rejected by the old timers at Valve as not fitting the culture.”

“Valve promised me the world and then backstabbed me.”

The hiring process in Valve’s flat structure is a curious one and is described in detail as part of an Econtalk podcast interview with Yanis Varoufakis, Valve’s former economist-in-residence. Varoufakis’ explanation is lengthy, but it makes it easy to see how problems might arise if the need being filled is contentious:

“Let’s say you and I have a chat in the corridor or the conference room and the result of this chat is that we converge to the view that we need an additional software engineer or animator or artist or hardware person. Or several of them. What we can do is we can send an email to the rest of our colleagues at Valve inviting them to join us, forming a subcommittee that actually looks for these people. Without seeking anyone’s permission in the hierarchies, because there is no hierarchy.

“Then we form spontaneously the search committee and we interview people, first by Skype; then we bring them, if they pass that test, to the company for a sort of face-to-face, personalized interview. Anyone who wants to participate does participate and then during that day — usually a day-long event — emails are fired all over the place with views whether this person should be hired or not, until some consensus is reached where there is effectively no one vetoing the hiring of that person.”

Asked whether these problems arose as part of a company desire to move away from hardware she responded: “I have no definitive proof on that but they pretty much killed off our project.” That project was CastAR — augmented reality glasses which Ellsworth is now working on as a separate project, having been handed the legal rights to do so by Valve. Referring to a press release saying that no projects were being cancelled she added, “I guess it was cancelled by proxy of none of us being there.”

Ellsworth’s experiences have not put her off flat management entirely, however. According to the interview, it works well for small groups like her hardware team. The problem as she sees it is one of scalability. What works for five or 20 people doesn’t necessarily support 300.

Ellsworth prefaces her remarks with praise for a number of her colleagues: “I have a lot of friends at Valve, there are some great people there, especially in my team, the hardware team. We were really close knit.” But the disparity between the handbook and her experience has left a bitter taste. “[Valve] promised me the world and then backstabbed me.”

You can listen to the entire interview on the Grey Area podcast.

The post Former Valve Employee: ‘It Felt a Lot Like High School’ appeared first on WIRED.

Revamping the Volcanic Explosivity Index (Or Tiny Eruptions Need Love, Too)

Erik Klemetti — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 12:27:41 +0000

Much of the discussion of volcanic eruptions tends to center on the big ones — those monstrous eruptions that really capture everyone’s attention, potentially plunging parts of the planet into a cool spell that could last years. Those eruptions are relatively rare, coming a few times a decade for the smaller ones and a few times a century (or longer) for the real colossal blasts. It is true that those are important events to understand, especially because humanity will need to face life after a giant eruption like Tambora or Taupo someday in the future. However, all this focus on the enormous eruptions ends up leaving those “everyday” events in the cold. Even if they are small, they can have a profound effect on local areas, especially if they are places that are highly frequented by tourists.

Some background on the scale of volcanic eruptions: The Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI; see below) was devised as a way compare eruptions (mainly explosive eruptions) much in the same way we compare earthquake magnitude using the Richter Scale. It was developed mainly to discuss eruptions that have an impact on global climate (that is, the big eruptions). The VEI is based on the volume of volcanic tephra (debris of explosive eruptions, like ash and bombs) that the eruption produces, so VEI 0-1 eruptions produce small amounts of tephra, only ~10,000 m³ (picture a cube with ~21.5 meter / 70 foot sides) while the VEI 7-8 eruptions produce a remarkable 1,000,000,000,000 m³ (take that cube and make it 10 km / 6.2 miles on each side). A VEI 7-8 eruption is actually 10 million times more productive than a VEI 0-1, however across the Holocene (the last 10,000 years), there have been only 6 eruptions that make it into into the heady VEI 7-8 territory while there have been at least 2215 VEI 0-1 eruptions that we know of. I emphasize this idea because a VEI 0-1 eruptions leaves little to be preserved in the geologic record — maybe a mere dusting of ash or a small lava flow — so this value is minimum value for these eruptions*.

The post Revamping the Volcanic Explosivity Index (Or Tiny Eruptions Need Love, Too) appeared first on WIRED.

The Shining Girls Is The Time Traveler’s Wife, Plus Stabbing

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 29 Jun 2013 10:30:14 +0000

The Shining Girls by South African author Lauren Beukes is one of this summer’s hottest books, and was recently optioned for television by Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company Appian Way. The story centers around a violent drifter named Harper Curtis, who stumbles on a house that travels through time. Harper then embarks on a killing spree, murdering women in Chicago throughout the twentieth century. But in contrast to suave Hollywood psychopaths like Hannibal Lecter and Patrick Bateman, Harper is more pathetic than debonair, which Beukes feels is closer to reality when it comes to serial killers.

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“A lot of them have major issues with impotence — whether that’s actual sexual dysfunction or just feelings of powerlessness,” says Lauren Beukes in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “They’re actually just violent losers.”

She also wanted to push back against the tendency of crime stories to present murdered women as sex objects. Each of the victims in The Shining Girls is a unique, well-developed character, and together they convey a fascinating portrait of the lives of strong-willed women. It’s that very promise that puts them in the sights of Harper, who’s drawn to their sense of potential. The murder scenes are gritty and visceral, and all are written from the point of view of the victims, focusing on their horror and outrage.

“I specifically tried to avoid writing torture porn,” says Beukes. “And actually, my editor is one of the leading experts on violence against women in South Africa, so if she said a scene was OK and passed muster, I felt like it was probably OK.”

The post The Shining Girls Is The Time Traveler’s Wife, Plus Stabbing appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast Talks Xbox 180 and E3 Impressions

ChrisKohler — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 20:01:17 +0000

On this week’s episode of the Game|Life podcast, Wired senior editor Peter Rubin and I really thought we’d have a whole hour to jaw over our impressions of last week’s E3 Expo. But no: Microsoft had to go and announce the total reversal of everything it had said up to that point, and this sucked up half the time.

So it’s a rip-roaring, no-holds-barred podcast today! Never a dull moment as we go into the bizarre story of the Xbox 180, then run down what blew us away at everybody else’s booth at E3.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_075.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 075

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Humans May Become Tentacled Monsters, and That’s OK

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 10:30:46 +0000

Characters in sci-fi films like Star Trek and Alien may have access to amazing futuristic technology, but basically they’re people just like us. But io9 editor Annalee Newitz thinks the real future may be far stranger. Taking her cue from books like Lilith’s Brood, she imagines a world in which humanity has evolved into lifeforms that to us would seem like monsters.

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“We might become tentacled aliens in the end,” says Annalee Newitz in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “And that’s okay. That’s a win, if we do that. Because it means we survived, and we changed to meet changing environmental conditions.”

Changing environmental conditions are something she’s given a lot of thought to lately. Her new book, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, chronicles the history of extinction-level events on the planet Earth, and examines ways we might prevent or weather the next one, though many of the most interesting survival strategies are currently considered too unorthodox by most scientists.

“Scientists have to really focus on the here and now,” says Newitz. “They can’t say wacky stuff like, ‘We’re going to change the germ line and make humans who can live on Titan.’ But science fiction writers can, and they can really think in long-term ways about how science will impact culture, so thank goodness for science fiction.”

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Game|Life Podcast Minisode: Our E3 Wish List

ChrisKohler — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 21:08:19 +0000

We’re so busy with preparations for the Electronic Entertainment Expo next week that we didn’t have time to record much of a podcast! Wired IT guru Josh Strom and I sit down for 12 minutes in the podcast room to discuss the three things (each!) that we’re hoping to hear more about at this year’s E3.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_074.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 074

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Game of Thrones Recap: It’s a Nice Day for a Red Wedding

Laura Hudson and Erik Henriksen — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 13:30:29 +0000

The third season of Game of Thrones is here, and we’re chronicling the TV adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s world of Westeros—and how it differs from the books—in a series of letters between Wired writers (and Game of Thrones fanatics) Laura Hudson and Erik Henriksen.

And for the first time ever, our Game of Thrones recap comes with a soundtrack, courtesy of emcee Adam WarRock who gave us an exclusive look at “The Rains of Castamere” (above), his latest track inspired by last night’s episode of the HBO medieval drama. WarRock, who previously released an entire mixtape of Game of Thrones-inspired hip hop songs, has made the song downloadable for free here. And now on to the TV versus book recap of “The Rains of Castamere,” easily the most shocking episode yet.

WARNING: The following includes spoilers for A Song of Ice and Fire Books 3-5 which have been redacted for your convenience with black bars. You can toggle spoilers on at your own risk by clicking the button to the left or highlighting. IF YOU CAN SEE THIS SENTENCE, YOU WILL BE ABLE TO SEE THE SPOILERS.

Daenerys: To the great irritation of Ser Jorah, Daario Naharis continues to pique Dany’s interest with his good looks, smoldering glances, and ever-so-noble convictions about not sleeping with sex slaves. Daario says he knows about a back way into Yunkai, and suggests he, Jorah, and Grey Worm sneak in and open the gates for Dany’s army. Grey Worm, for some reason I cannot discern, decides that he is trustworthy, so the plan is go. They end up facing more resistance than expected after entering the city, which means a fight scene where we get to see the three warriors–and their distinct fighting styles–in action. Soon enough, a bloodied Jorah and Grey Worm return to the tent with the news that they have taken Yunkai. Jorah is ecstatic, although his joy fades heartbreakingly to jealousy when the first question out of Dany’s mouth is about Daario, who strolls up moments later unharmed. In the books: Slight tactical differences: there were two mercenary armies, and Daario’s Stormcrows joined the Unsullied to surround both the Yunkish slave army and the Second Sons mercenary group, who were drunk on the wine Daenerys gave them and unable to fight.

Samwell: As they continue their journey to the Wall, Sam tells Gilly the story of a secret passage to south he knows about thanks to his fancy book-learnin’. Gilly is astonished at Sam’s ability to glean such amazing knowledge from marks on paper, an incredible power that leads her to call him a “wizard.” This should probably make him feel pity for her tragically narrow life of incest and ignorance in the wilds of frozen north, but instead it just makes him feel good about himself, which I think is probably also worth pitying. In the books: After being attacked by wights, they were saved and lead back to the Wall by a mysterious cloaked figure known as Coldhands, not Sam’s knowledge of obscure books.

Bran & Jon: As Samwell heads south to the Wall, Bran heads north to it. After thunderstorms roll in, they end up crashing at a castle abandoned because of Wildling attacks–just as Jon and his new Wildling buddies head by, en route to (you guessed it) attack people. The sound of thunder freaks out Hodor, who starts screaming so loudly that he attracts the attention of Orell–until Bran wargs into Hodor’s mind and shuts him down. The Wildlings rob an old man who breeds horses for the Watch, and Orell decides that Jon needs to be the one to kill him, which, predictably, he cannot do. It’s easy to see Orell as a dick, but here’s the thing: He’s been 100% right since day one about Jon, who was in fact playing them and getting ready to betray them. Jon uses the ensuing fight to make a break for it with an assist from direwolves controlled by Bran, because apparently warging into things is like eating Pringles for him today. It’s the first time this episode when two Starks who haven’t seen each other since season one come tantalizingly close to a reunion, but of course it’s not the last. Ultimately Bran heads north with Jojen and Meera to explore his cool new abilities, while Osha takes Rickon south. In the books: Lots of things happening now that happened earlier: Osha took Rickon south after the sack of Winterfell, and Jon killed Orell before joining the Wildlings; the Orell-as-eagle attack on Jon took place later, but before they crossed the Wall. Also, the direwolves preemptively attacked the Wildlings before they actually tried to kill Jon, and Ygritte didn’t defend him in the battle–she may even have shot an arrow into his leg as he escaped.

Arya: In order to bring Arya to the wedding incognito, the Hound steals a wagon full of salt pork from a merchant headed in that direction–and intends to kill him, until Arya talks him out of it. The Hound subsequently decides to sit around eating pig’s feet for a while and mocking Arya’s anxiety rather than reuniting her with the family she’s been trying to find for years, so she decides to screw with him right back by calling out his kryptonite: his fear of fire and the traumatic childhood incident that caused it. When the Hound makes a nasty comment about her father’s death, Arya makes him a promise in return. “Someday,” she says quietly, “I’m going to put a sword through your eye and out the back of your skull.” The best part is that I believe her, and so does the Hound. In the books: Arya never confronts the Hound to save the merchant, nor does she see the death of Robb’s direwolf, Grey Wind. But the Hound’s comment that “there’s no point hiding behind that face” is another pointed (but appreciated) nod to her future role as an acolyte of the Faceless Men.

Robb: The King in the North continues to plan for an assault on Casterly Rock, the ancestral home of the Lannisters. He just needs one thing to make it happen: the forces of Lord Walder Frey, so they’re off to Edmure’s conciliatory wedding to one of the Frey daughters. Robb offers his apologies to the odious Lord Frey, who immediately tries to humiliate Talisa (and Robb) with crude sexual commments. The bride ends up being far prettier than expected, which pleases Edmure, but after a jovial bedding ceremony, things take a turn when someone shuts the doors to the hall and the musicians begin playing “The Rains of Castamere,” a song about the Lannisters and their boundless enthusiasm for destroying their enemies.

That’s when Lord Frey tells Robb that he has a wedding gift for his new queen, and a man behind Talisa pulls out a knife and stabs her over and over in the stomach. Suddenly more soldiers appear from above with crossbows, raining arrows on both Robb and Catelyn, while others massacre the remaining Stark men in the room. Arya watches them kill a captive Grey Wind outside the castle and tries to run inside to her family, but the Hound wisely knocks her out and carries her away before the Stark body count can get any higher. Talisa is already very dead, along with Robb’s unborn son, but an injured Robb seems to be doing marginally better as he cradles her body. Catelyn takes Lord Frey’s wife hostage, swearing she’ll kill her unless he lets Robb go, but Frey just laughs that he’ll find another wife. Lord Bolton says the Lannisters send their regards, and stabs his young king in the chest, ending it. Catelyn screams, cuts the Frey woman’s throat, and stands there for a long moment with dead eyes until someone steps up behind her and cuts open her throat in return. Cue the credits, a long, long silence, and me walking to the kitchen for a strong drink.

In the books: Talisa doesn’t die because she doesn’t exist; Robb married Jeyne Westerling, the daughter of a Lannister bannerman, but she does not attend the wedding. (Sadly, this also kills my previous theory that Talisa’s pregnancy might indicate a more important future role for Jeyne.) Catelyn initially notes that the musicians at the wedding are awful, which we later learn is because many of them were actually soldiers. Also, Robb’s ultimate murderer–who is implied but not stated to be Lord Bolton–says that Jaime Lannister specifically sends his regards, echoing Jaime’s off-hand comment to Bolton when leaving Harrenhal. The Blackfish wasn’t at the wedding (but conveniently escapes the massacre on the show thanks to a call of nature), and Catelyn threatens (and kills) Frey’s mentally handicapped son Jinglebell rather than his wife. She also shreds her own face with her nails in grief before her death; without those wounds, Lady Stoneheart may look a little bit different later when she comes looking for vengeance.

—Laura

Last season, we saw Winterfell burn. The season before that, we saw Ned die. In case you hadn’t noticed, Game of Thrones is a story about how your life won’t live up to your expectations, about how bad guys don’t pull their punches, and about how those who dare to dream are the ones with the biggest targets on their foreheads. It’s in Game of Thrones‘ key moments–like Ned’s death, like the Red Wedding–that the series’ vicious and unsentimental pragmatism shines through with brutal, bloody clarity: This isn’t a story that’s going to end like its characters want it to. And it isn’t a story that’s going to end like the books’ readers or the show’s viewers want it to, either.

I actually know a few people who, angry and disheartened, stopped reading the books after the Red Wedding happened in A Storm of Swords. (I also know somebody who wisely noted that the Red Wedding chapter probably coincided with George R.R. Martin throwing up his hands and being all, “Whoops! Silly me! I’ve got waaaaay too many characters!”)

And if the internet is any indication, some people will have the same reaction to this episode. My favorite pasttime last night was reading @RedWeddingTears, which retweeted viewers’ anguished tweets (“I’ve never cried so hard. I hate Game of Thrones right now. I don’t know if I’ll ever recover from this”), and Gamer of Thrones, which highlighted some of the most furious comments left on Game of Thrones‘ Facebook wall (“THAT EPISODE JUST KILLED THE SERIES!!!!!!!IM DONE!”) It’s worth noting, though, that viewers had similar reactions to Ned’s death, when some fans vowed “to never watch the program again.”
—Erik

I mean, I get it. I know the Red Wedding backwards and forwards–as well as its real-life historical inspiration, the Black Dinner–and I still felt gutted as I watched the silent credits roll. (And frankly, if they decide to actually show us Grey Wind’s head sewn on to Robb’s body next episode, I might need to tap out for a while myself.) Regardless, it’s a testament to the power of the episode (and the limits of spoilers) that it affected me as profoundly as it did even though I knew exactly what to expect. This is a moment that book readers have been waiting for since the show began, and for better or worse it lived up to expectations–all the dread, all the agony. That dawning look of horror on Catelyn’s face when they close the doors to the banquet hall and the musicians start to play “The Rains of Castamere” is so chilling, especially because it’s exactly how you’re feeling too if you know the story.

The only true surprise for book readers was the death of Talisa, a creation of the show who somehow manages to make the Red Wedding even more painful than it was in the novel. Her brutal, sudden stabbing is shocking not only because it occurs moments after a tender exchange with Robb about naming their future child Eddard, but because the soldiers stab her–not accidentally, I think–in the stomach.

Robb and Talisa are the great love story of the show–its Cinderella/Sleeping Beauty romance–and their deaths are the ultimate undermining of the medieval fairy tale. It’s a beautiful and not entirely unfamiliar story, where a king meets a girl covered in mud on a battlefield and falls so in love with her that he’s willing to risk everything to make her his queen. Which makes a great fairy tale tagline, but instead of happily ever after, Game of Thrones gives us with the ugly, unromantic reality: that risking everything for emotional, politically foolish reasons (read: love) in the middle of a brutal war is unlikely to end with animated birds hanging ribbons around the nursery of your future baby. You’re probably just going to die, and so are all the people who loved and trusted you.

The true emotional core of the show–the one that gets well and truly gutted in this episode–has always been the idyllic family portrait of the Starks we glimpsed briefly back the first episode, before everything fractured and scattered and went to hell. Since Ned left for Kings Landing, every one of the Starks have been trying to find their way back to the way things used to be: Ned was going to take the throne back from the Lannisters and right their wrongs, but he got beheaded; Sansa was going to marry Loras and finally get her dashing knight, but she got pawned off onto Tyrion; Arya was finally going to reunite with her family after years of searching, and arrived just in time for their massacre; Robb was ready to take Casterly Rock and get vengeance, but instead he got the Red Wedding. Winterfell is burned, and there is no going home.

Image: HBO/Helen Sloan

Remember when one of Robb’s bannermen told him the war was lost the moment he married Talisa? It was. Talisa imagines a little scenario during the wedding: the alternate universe where she’d gone back to Volantis, and Robb was the one eating blackberries from a pretty Frey girl’s fingers. That would have been the smart move, the responsible move, the right one for a king to make for his family and his subjects. And if he’d made that choice, Robb would likely be marching west to Casterly Rock to take the Lannister stronghold, instead of lying dead on the floor along with his wife, mother, and the hopes of the northern rebellion.

At least When Ned died, you could imagine, narratively, that it happened for a reason: so that Robb could avenge him. When Robb dies, however, that’s the real knife twist, because you realize that he won’t, that he’s not the hero either, and that none of it “meant” anything. You see the same grim, hollow realization on Cat’s face the moment she gives up. The question isn’t, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” The question is, “Why wouldn’t they?”

In a recent EW interview, George R. R. Martin said, “People read books for different reasons. Some read for comfort. And some of my former readers have said their life is hard, their mother is sick, their dog died, and they read fiction to escape. They don’t want to get hit in the mouth with something horrible. And you read that certain kind of fiction where the guy will always get the girl and the good guys win and it reaffirms to you that life is fair. We all want that at times. There’s a certain vicarious release to that. So I’m not dismissive of people who want that. But that’s not the kind of fiction I write, in most cases.”

Hey, if you want fantasy, go read Anne McCaffrey. I hear her books have dragons too.

—Laura

Yeah. All the characters–well, all the Starks–are basically Charlie Browns who are really excited to kick that football that Lucy’s got all set up for them. Which means all of of us readers and viewers are Charlie Browns, too. George R.R. Martin is a really good Lucy.

The biggest moment of this episode for me was that moment you just mentioned, Laura, where you see Cat die before she really dies. It doesn’t happen when her throat is cut, but rather the instant right before. The instant she realizes Robb is dead, so is the Catelyn we know; the thing that’s left standing there, slack-faced, is an empty, defeated shell. It’s a powerful moment, even though Cat hasn’t had much to do this season; her character, more than any other, has suffered in comparison to the books, where we learn a great deal more through her internal monologues.

But this is the episode where Cat tried to restore that sense of normalcy, that sense of what life was like for the Starks before King Robert showed up at Winterfell and ruined everything for everyone. Yeah, her dumbass son didn’t do what she told him to, but there she is anyway: giving it a shot, trying to like Talisa, trying to believe this super-dour wedding will make everything right again for her family. And right up until she realizes that Bolton’s wearing chainmail under his clothes, she does believe it. “Look at us Starks!” Cat’s thinking. “We’re gonna kick the hell out of that football!”

The question, as suggested by the many distraught fans on social media last night, becomes how much anguish you can put your characters–and your viewers–through before they give up. (Like, really give up, not just leave melodramatic statements on Facebook walls.) But I think just as fans ended up sticking with Game of Thrones after Ned’s death, they’ll stick around now: In an era of Kardashians, any story that can unleash this much power and surprise is a story that’s rare and remarkable. Even though we know Game of Thrones will eventually break our hearts, we keep coming back for more.

If this were any other week, Laura, you and I would be ranting and raving and squabbling and high-fiving about all the other big things that happened in this episode, from Bran going all Geordi LaForge, to Jon bailing on Ygritte (YOU FOOL), to Daenerys getting all swoony over Legolas, to Arya scaring the hell out of the Hound. Those threads were utterly, completely overwhelmed by the Red Wedding this week, but next week (and next season) they won’t be, and each of those plots has enough narrative drive to make viewers hope that things might work out differently for those people than they did for Robb, Cat, and Talisa. So they’ll be back, and we’ll be back, even though we should know better—and even though the Starks should sure as hell know better.

Like I said: George R.R. Martin is a really good Lucy. See you guys next week.

—Erik

Follow Laura (@laura_hudson) and Erik (@erik_henriksen) on Twitter.

The post Game of Thrones Recap: It’s a Nice Day for a Red Wedding appeared first on WIRED.

Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Summer Prince Blends Human Sacrifice, Samba

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 10:30:50 +0000

One of the most distinctive YA novels of the season is Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Summer Prince. The overstuffed Wikipedia description — “set on a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk Brazilian arcology ruled by a nanotech-empowered matriarchy” — is suggestive of the novel’s wide-ranging subject matter, which includes everything from algae-powered fuel cells to contemporary MPB music. But perhaps the most striking feature of this future world is its political system, in which a ruling class of ageless women ritually sacrifice their king every five years. Such a society is presented in a surprisingly positive light.

Episode 87: Alaya Dawn Johnson
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[dewplayer:http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/underwire/geeksguide87final.mp3″]

“I wanted to have a matriarchy that wasn’t also a horrible place to live,” says Alaya Dawn Johnson in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “The book is about [the protagonist] June discovering the ugly underbelly of her supposedly perfect city, but despite all that I honestly think that Palmares Tres is probably a better place to live than modern America.”

Like many popular young adult novels, The Summer Prince features a love triangle, but Twilight this isn’t. In this story the young female protagonist June and her male best friend Gil both fall for the same young man, the doomed summer king Enki, who intends to spend the rest of his short life pursuing as many sexual conquests as possible.

“Maybe I’m wrong,” says Johnson, “but I felt that a matriarchy would have much less interest than a patriarchy in enforcing social and gender norms in the same way.”

The post Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Summer Prince Blends Human Sacrifice, Samba appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast Talks E3 Rumors, Nintendo Announcements and PR Disasters

ChrisKohler — Fri, 31 May 2013 19:12:12 +0000

What’s gonna happen at E3? We have no idea. In fact there aren’t really many rumors circulating prior to this year’s big show, but Wired senior editor Peter Rubin and I tackle a couple of the ones out there on this week’s Game|Life podcast. Is Far Cry 4 really in the cards for next spring? Who knows!

We also talk about Konami’s disastrous 2010 press briefing (which is surely the reason it now makes its E3 announcements via pre-recorded programs), Nintendo’s recent announcements of a rechargeable battery pack for Wii remotes (yes, about 7 years too late) and more.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_073.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 073

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_073.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast Talks E3 Rumors, Nintendo Announcements and PR Disasters appeared first on WIRED.

Best of Neuron Culture #2 – Kill Whitey, It’s the Right Thing to Do

David Dobbs — Fri, 31 May 2013 11:30:57 +0000

This is #2 in my Best of Neuron Culture Moving Party here at Wired — a run of 10 of my favorite posts from the blog’s stay here on the eve of my departure to another site on June 8. (Details on my upcoming move are at bottom of this post). In this one, “Kill Whitey,” I look at a playful but ingeniously fresh look at a popular social science approach to studying decision-making and ethics, the so-called trolley problem. This was among my first posts at Neuron Culture’s WIRED venue and remains the most popular post I ever ran.

Kill Whitey. It’s the Right Thing to Do.

Originally posted 15 September, 2010

[Sept 10, 2010] A couple years ago, David Pizarro, a young research psychologist at Cornell, brewed up a devious variation on the classic trolley problem. The trolley problem is that staple of moral psychology studies at dinner parties in which you ask someone to decide under what conditions it’s morally permissible to kill one person to save others. Here, via Wikipedia, is its most basic template:

A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?

This has generated scores of studies that pose all kinds of variations. (You can take a version of the test yourself at Should You Kill the Fat Man?) Perhaps the richest has been the footbridge problem. The footbridge scenario puts the subject in a more active hypothetical role: You’re on a footbridge over the trolley track, and next to you, leaning perilously over the rail to see what happens, stands a very large man — a man large enough, in fact, to stop the train. Is it moral to push the guy over the rail to stop the train?

Researchers generally use these scenarios to see whether people hold a) an absolutist or so-called “deontological” moral code or b) a utilitarian or “consequentialist” moral code. In an absolutist code, an act’s morality virtually never depends on context or secondary consequences. A utilitarian code allows that an act’s morality can depend on context and secondary consequences, such as whether taking one life can save two or three or a thousand.

In most studies, people start out insisting they have absolute codes. But when researchers tweak the settings, many people decide morality is relative after all: Propose, for instance, that the fat man is known to be dying, or was contemplating jumping off the bridge anyway — and the passengers are all children — and for some people, that makes it different. Or the guy is a murderer and the passengers nuns. In other scenarios the man might be slipping, and will fall and die if you don’t grab him: Do you save him … even if it means all those kids will die? By tweaking these settings, researchers can squeeze an absolutist pretty hard, but they usually find a mix of absolutists and consequentialists.

As a grad student, Pizarro liked trolleyology. Yet it struck him that these studies, in their targeting of an absolutist versus consequentialist spectrum, seemed to assume that most people would hold firm to their particular spots on that spectrum — that individuals generally held a roughly consistent moral compass. The compass needle might wobble, but it would generally point in the same direction.

Pizarro wasn’t so sure. He suspected we might be more fickle. That perhaps we act first and scramble for morality afterward, or something along those lines, and that we choose our rule set according to how well it fits our desires.

To test this, he and some colleagues devised some mischievous variations on the footbridge problem. They detail these in a recent paper (pdf download; web), and Pizarro recently described them more accessibly at the recent Edge conference on morality. (The talk is on video, or you can download the audio.)

As Pizarro describes, the variations are all of a piece: All explore how the political and racial prejudices — and guilt — of both liberals and conservatives might affect where they stand on the absolutist-consequentialist spectrum.

Perhaps most revealing is what Pizarro calls the “Kill Whitey” study. This was a footbridge problem — two variations on a footbridge problem in one, actually — that the team presented to 238 California undergrads. The undergrads were of mixed race, ethnicity and political leanings. Before they faced the problem, 87 percent of them said they did not consider race or nationality a relevant factor in moral decisions. Here the paper‘s (.pdf) description of the problem they faced:

Participants received one of two scenarios involving an individual who has to decide whether or not to throw a large man in the path of a trolley (described as large enough that he would stop the progress of the trolley) in order to prevent the trolley from killing 100 innocent individuals trapped in a bus.

Half of the participants received a version of the scenario where the agent could choose to sacrifice an individual named “Tyrone Payton” to save 100 members of the New York Philharmonic, and the other half received a version where the agent could choose to sacrifice “Chip Ellsworth III” to save 100 members of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra. In both scenarios the individual decides to throw the person onto the trolley tracks.

Tyrone and Chip. Just in case you’re missing what Pizarro is up to:

While we did not provide specific information about the race of the individuals in the scenario, we reasoned that Chip and Tyrone were stereotypically associated with White American and Black American individuals respectively, and that the New York Philharmonic would be assumed to be majority White, and the Harlem Jazz Orchestra would be assumed to be majority Black.

So the guy on the bridge kills either Tyrone to save the New York Philharmonic or Chip to save the Harlem Jazz Orchestra. How, Pizarro asked the students, did they feel about that? Was sacrificing Chip/Tyrone to save the Jazz Orchestra/Philharmonic justified? Was it moral? Was it sometimes necessary to allow the death of one innocent to save others? Should we ever violate core principles, regardless of outcome? Is it sometimes “necessary” to allow the death of a few to promote a greater good?

Turned out the racial identities did indeed color peoples’ judgments — but it colored them differently depending on their political bent. Pizarro, who describes himself as a person who “would probably be graded a liberal on tests,” roughly expected that liberals would be more consistent. Yet liberals proved just as prejudiced here as conservatives were, but in reverse: While self-described conservatives more readily accepted the sacrifice of Tyrone than they did killing Chip, the liberals were easier about seeing Chip sacrificed than Tyrone.

But this was just college students. Perhaps they were morally mushier than most people. So the team went further afield. As Pizarro describes in the talk:

We wanted to find a sample of more sort of, you know, real people. So we went in Orange County out to a mall and we got people who are actually Republicans and actually Democrats, not wishy-washy college students. The effect just got stronger. (This time it was using a “lifeboat” dilemma where one person has to be thrown off the edge of a lifeboat in order to save everybody, again using the names “Tyrone Payton” or “Chip Ellsworth III”.) We replicated the finding, but this time it was even stronger.

If you’re wondering whether this is just because conservatives are racist—well, it may well be that conservatives are more racist. But it appears in these studies that the effect is driven [primarily] by liberals saying that they’re more likely to agree with pushing the white man and [more likely to] disagree with pushing the black man.

So we used to refer to this as the “kill whitey” study.

They offered some other scenarios too, about collateral damage in military situations, for instance, and found similar differences: Conservatives accepted collateral damage more easily if the dead were Iraqis than if they were Americans, while liberals accepted civilian deaths more readily if the dead were Americans rather than Iraqis.

What did this say about people’s morals? Not that they don’t have any. It suggests that they had more than one set of morals, one more consequentialist than another, and choose to fit the situation. Again, from the talk:

It’s not that people have a natural bias toward deontology or a natural bias toward consequentialism. What appears to be happening here is that there’s a motivated endorsement of one or the other whenever it’s convenient.

Or as Pizarro told me on the phone, “The idea is not that people are or are not utilitarian; it’s that they will cite being utilitarian when it behooves them. People are aren’t using these principles and then applying them. They arrive at a judgment and seek a principle.”

So we’ll tell a child on one day, as Pizarro’s parents told him, that ends should never justify means, then explain the next day that while it was horrible to bomb Hiroshima, it was morally acceptable because it shortened the war. We act — and then cite whichever moral system fits best, the relative or the absolute.

Pizarro says this isn’t necessarily bad. It’s just different. It means we draw not so much on consistent moral principles as on a moral toolbox. And if these studies show we’re not entirely consistent, they also show we’re at least determined — really determined, perhaps, given the gyrations we go through to try to justify our actions — to behave morally. We may choose from a toolbox — but the tools are clean. As Pizarro puts it at the end of his talk,

I am still an optimist about rationality, and I cling to the one finding that I talked about, which is that when you point out people’s inconsistencies, they really are embarrassed.

___

Image: Flickr/Heath Brandon

Over the next week I’ll be leaving WIRED’s Science Blogs, moving Neuron Culture on June 7 to a self-hosted location at at http://neuronculture.com — a domain name that on June 7 , 2013, will switch from one pointing to WIRED to one pointing to the blog’s new, self-hosted home elsewhere. Please join me there. And you can always follow me at The Twitter as well.

To celebrate and mark the end of Neuron Culture’s 2.75-year run at WIRED, I’m posting a “Best of Neuron Culture” over its final 10 days, spotlighting each day a post from the past that I feel embodies the best of Neuron Culture’s WIRED tenure. (Neuron Culture was previously at Seed’s ScienceBlogs as well as at my own site on TypePad.) These posts, among the stronger and more popular ones I’ve done here, also characterize the sorts of possibilities that a hosted blog has offered in this period’s strange transitional time of writing, publishing, and journalism.

Why leave Wired? I’m folding the blog tent here so I can focus more steadily for a time on finishing my book, tentatively titled The Orchid and the Dandelion, that I’ve often mentioned here. I know some people manage it, but I’ve found it hard to reconcile the demands of blogging at a venue like Wired and of writing a serious book that requires deep immersion: a matter of not just the time needed for each venture, but of the mindset and what you might call the focal length of one’s mental lens. A venue like this requires, methinks, either an unrelenting focus on a particular beat or a fairly steady tour through many fields; I can’t seem to mesh either with the sort of time and focus needed for a book. The move also frees me up to experiment a bit more. I hope to see what sort of more Tumblr-like approach I can take at Neuron Culture once it’s in a self-hosted venue.

But it has been a fun run here at WIRED. I want to thank WIRED.com, and especially Betsy Mason, Evan Hansen, Brandon Keim, Dave Mosher, Adam Rogers, and the rest of the WIRED team, present and past, for giving me a productive blogging platform here since September 2010; my fellow bloggers for their support, good cheer, and many fabulous posts; and most of all, my readers, whom I hope will come along and follow me at my new home, starting June 7, 2013, you can find at http://neuronculture.com — a domain name that on June 7 will switch from one pointing to WIRED to one pointing to the blog’s new, self-hosted home elsewhere. Please join me there. And you can always follow me at The Twitter as well.

The post Best of Neuron Culture #2 – Kill Whitey, It’s the Right Thing to Do appeared first on WIRED.

Google Erects Fake Brain With … Graphics Chips?

Cade Metz — Wed, 29 May 2013 10:30:47 +0000

Your brain is a collection of neurons — tiny cells that use electro-chemical signals to send and receive information. But as Google builds an artificial brain that will help drive everything from its web search engine to Google Street View to the voice-recognition app on Android smartphones, it’s using very different materials. Among them: graphics microprocessors, the same sort of silicon chips that were first designed to process images and videos on your desktop computer.

That’s the word from Geoffrey Hinton, the artificial intelligence guru who was recently hired by the search giant to continue work on the so-called Google Brain. When we spoke to Hinton just after his “deep learning” operation was acquired by Larry Page and company, he didn’t provide specifics, but he said that Google is now using graphics processing units, or GPUs, to help power its brain-mimicking neural networks.

It’s a counter-intuitive arrangement. Though GPUs were designed for processing images and video and games, Google is using them in a more general way, as you would normally use a machine’s main microprocessor, or CPU. But because they’re so good at processing large amounts of information in parallel, completing many small tasks at the same time, GPUs can be applied to almost any computing task that require some hefty horse power.

“I can’t comment on what Google is doing. But it’s a natural fit. GPUs love big problems,” says Ian Buck, a engineer at graphics chip maker Nvidia who founded the CUDA project, a software platform that helps developers build applications for GPUs. “They’re designed to process huge amounts of information in parallel. Mimicking the human brain — where you have billions of neurons all firing at the same time — is really just one big parallel simulation.”

‘GPUs love big problems. They’re designed to process huge amounts of information in parallel. Mimicking the human brain — where you have billions of neurons all firing at the same time — is really just one big parallel simulation.’

— Ian Buck

Google is just one of many companies that are now using GPUs for all sorts of tasks inside the modern data center. The London-based Shazam is using GPUs to help identify songs and artists that match your particular music tastes. Salesforce has installed GPUs to analyze information streaming across millions of Twitter feeds. Amazon has long offered a cloud service that provides instant GPU power to anyone who wants it. And a San Francisco startup called imgix now provides an GPU-based online service that lets virtually any website rejigger images as they’re served onto user PCs and mobile devices.

“The graphics processor is almost like a misnomer now,” says imgix CEO and co-founder Chris Zacharias, who cut his teeth as a software engineer at Google and YouTube. “A GPU is just something that does a kind of mathematics, and those mathematics can be applied to many, many fields.”

GPUs have long lent their parallel processing power to a decent chunk of the world’s supercomputers, those massive machines that run specialized scientific applications across tens of thousands of chips. These chips are ideal for, say, building a simulation of the world’s weather patterns. About 50 of the planet’s 500 fastest supercomputers now rely on GPUs, including the Oak Ridge National Laboratory machine that sits atop the list.

But these chips have only recently moved into the data centers that help drive the web. Amazon launched its GPU cloud service in 2010, and this spring, Nvidia revealed that Salesforce and Shazam were using Nvidia GPUs to power their online services. But Google’s project takes the trend even further, potentially moving GPUs into some of the web’s most widely used services, including the primary Google search engine.

Salesforce declined to comment on its use of GPUs. And Shazam wasn’t immediately available to discuss its GPU work. But according to Nvidia and public documents discussing these two projects, both are tapping GPU for their raw parallel processing power. In a public presentation, Salesforce engineer Brendan Wood says the company uses GPUs to search vast numbers of Tweets and other social networking posts for certain keywords. The company’s “Marketing Cloud” analyzes about 500 million incoming tweets a day, looking for about a million different keywords.

This has nothing to do with graphics processing. But if need be, these chips can certainly be applied to graphics services, the sort of thing they were originally designed for. imgix has built up a GPU-powered infrastructure that can re-crop and re-format web images in real-time, as they’re served onto end-user machines. If someone visits your site with an Apple iPad, for instance, imgix can instantly resize the image for the tablet’s Retina display. The company plans to eventually rejig videos in similar ways.

Nvidia, one of the world’s leading graphics chip makers, has spent years trumpeting the GPU as the future of massively parallel processing. But now it appears that this future is finally here. Where Google goes, the rest of the web follows.

Additional reporting by Robert McMillan

The post Google Erects Fake Brain With … Graphics Chips? appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast Ponders the Cloud-Based Future of Xbox One

ChrisKohler — Fri, 24 May 2013 19:49:29 +0000

We’ve already done a Game|Life podcast about Microsoft’s new Xbox One console, but we promised you two, and here it is. Now that more details have emerged about the console, many of them contradictory and partially obscured, Wired senior editor Peter Rubin and I relish the opportunity to get back into the studio and discuss the new news.

Somewhere in the middle, I bring up this article from Anandtech, a hardware-based evaluation of what we know about Xbox One so far. I found this bit at the end to be most intriguing:

Arguably the most interesting thing in all of this is the dual-OS + hypervisor software setup behind the Xbox One. With the Windows kernel running alongside the Xbox OS, I wonder how much of a stretch it would be to one day bring the same setup to PCs. Well before the Xbox One hits the end of its life, mainstream PC APUs will likely be capable of delivering similar performance. Imagine a future Surface tablet capable of doing everything your Xbox One can do. That’s really the trump card in all of this. The day Microsoft treats Xbox as a platform and not a console is the day that Apple and Google have a much more formidable competitor. Xbox One at least gets the software architecture in order, then we need PC/mobile hardware to follow suit and finally for Microsoft to come to this realization and actually make it happen. We already have the Windows kernel running on phones, tablets, PCs and the Xbox, now we just need the Xbox OS across all platforms as well.

In other words: Developers have to create games for the Xbox operating system. Microsoft sacrificed backward compatibility to make Xbox One based on an x86 architecture, meaning it’s similar to the processors in a standard PC or the Surface Pro tablet. Microsoft is requiring every Xbox One game to be installed to the hard drive, where it’s tied to your account and downloadable to any Xbox One device that you log in to.

What if the next step in the process is to release the Xbox One operating system on a future tablet, once it becomes powerful enough? At that point, you’ve got all your games saved to your account, you log in to your x86 tablet running Xbox One OS, sync your controller and you have access to everything. Or you just run the Xbox OS on your PC. Then, a few years later, what if the same thing becomes possible on your phone?

Am I crazy for thinking this would be possible? Those who know more about computers than I do are invited to comment.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_072.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 072

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_072.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast Ponders the Cloud-Based Future of Xbox One appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast Goes In-Depth on Xbox One

ChrisKohler — Tue, 21 May 2013 18:16:35 +0000

Have questions about Microsoft’s new console, Xbox One? Hopefully we have some answers. Wired senior editor Peter Rubin spent a few days in Redmond, Washington getting the inside scoop on the new console, and we sat down to discuss all the news and what it means for you.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays (except for today’s special edition!), is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_xbox.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Special Episode: XBox Reveal

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_xbox.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast Goes In-Depth on Xbox One appeared first on WIRED.

71: Game|Life SPECIAL –– XBox Reveal

Chris Kohler — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The moment you’ve been waiting for –– the XBox reveal. Peter and Chris discuss.

The post 71: Game|Life SPECIAL –– XBox Reveal appeared first on WIRED.

Penguin Bets Big That The 5th Wave Will Be the Next Hunger Games

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy — Sat, 18 May 2013 10:30:42 +0000

Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave is a gripping new novel about a teenage girl struggling to find her brother in the wake of an alien attack. The book features many elements that have proven popular in other books like Ender’s Game and The Hunger Games — a desperate struggle for survival, children trained for war, and a pair of handsome young men for our heroine to choose between. In fact, the book’s publisher Penguin is so confident they’ve got a hit on their hands that they’ve already committed $750,000 to marketing the book, including big publicity items such as a full-page ad in the New York Times and no less than four book trailers, which will run before upcoming films like Man of Steel.

[dewplayer:http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/underwire/geeksguide86final.mp3″]

“Everyone from the publisher himself down to the editorial assistant is so excited,” says Rick Yancey on this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It’s very exciting, and also very humbling, because as the person who wrote it, I know all its flaws. It’s kind of like being a parent.”

The 5th Wave has also been optioned for film by Sony Pictures, with Toby Maguire reportedly attached to the project. Yancey has been warned not to reveal too much about the movie, but confirms that filmmakers are currently selecting a screenwriter. Yancey himself is mainly focused on the upcoming sequels to The 5th Wave, which will focus on the thorny problem of how humanity can possibly survive against such canny, technologically superior aliens.

“Maybe it’s not so much about watching the mothership crash to earth, like in Independence Day,” says Yancey. “Maybe it’s more about what [William] Faulkner called ‘enduring.’ That that’s the most human, most inspiring thing about our species, that somehow we endure.”

The post Penguin Bets Big That The 5th Wave Will Be the Next Hunger Games appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: EA Ditches Online Passes and Wii U, But Mostly Wii U

ChrisKohler — Fri, 17 May 2013 20:04:36 +0000

A lot of weird news this week to discuss on the ol’ Game|Life podcast. Wired senior editor Peter Rubin joins me to explore two Electronic Arts announcements that might prove quite telling for gaming’s future. The publishing giant is ditching its controversial Online Pass program, but could this just be because next-generation consoles will introduce a similar counter-punch to the used game market? And EA has now also said that it has no games in development at all for Nintendo’s beleaguered Wii U console.

Meanwhile, Nintendo says it’ll go after the ad revenue generated by YouTube video makers. As I said: Lots to talk about, none of it particularly enthusing.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_070.mp3]

GameLife Reboot:
Episode 070

[dewplayer: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_070.mp3]

The post Game|Life Podcast: EA Ditches Online Passes and Wii U, But Mostly Wii U appeared first on WIRED.

Nintendo 64’s Music Maestro Unleashes His Hit Chiptunes for Free

Ryan Rigney — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:08:15 +0000

Any kid who owned a Nintendo 64 was probably familiar with the shiny golden logo of Rare, the British videogame studio that produced six of the Nintendo 64’s top 20 best-selling games.

Rare established a reputation for making games that were as fun to listen to as they were to play. Composer Grant Kirkhope has recently made the soundtracks for three of its most famous titles—Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie and Perfect Dark—available to download for free.

Listen to “Click Clock Wood” from Banjo-Kazooie:

[dewplayer:http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gamelife/2013/05/Grant-Kirkhope-Banjo-Kazooie-12-Click-Clock-Wood.mp3]

Kirkhope, 50, has a résumé that looks suspiciously like a list of the best games of the late 90s. The Edinburgh, Scotland native scored five of Rare’s N64 games, including megahits Goldeneye 007 and Donkey Kong 64.

He’d spent his university years studying the trumpet at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and spent the ensuing decade playing in various U.K. rock bands like Little Angels. When Rare hired Kirkhope in 1995, it had already established itself as a maker of great videogames, and Nintendo had recently purchased a 49 percent share in the company.

“I was at the bottom of the ladder,” Kirkhope says. “I was the last one in.”

Kirkhope’s first job was to convert the soundtrack for Donkey Kong Country 2, a Super Nintendo game, to the Game Boy. Soon after, fellow Rare composer Graeme Norgate asked him to take over work on the score for GoldenEye.

The entirety of GoldenEye‘s soundtrack was memorable, but one of the most interesting pieces was the theme for the “Bunker” level. The song is filled with strange, echoing noises that lent incredible tension to Bond’s polygonal spy missions. The second half of the song adds a catchy, hip-hop style beat and a swelling theme that makes Kirkhope’s work fit perfectly into the Bond soundtrack lexicon while simultaneously sounding totally new.

Listen to “Bunker” from Goldeneye 007:

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There’s one particular sound in the Bunker song, a distant clang of some unidentifiable object against another, that Kirkhope says he’s been asked about repeatedly over the years.

Kirkhope says he discovered the noise while listening to the official soundtrack for the 1995 Goldeneye movie, by French composer Éric Serra. He describes it as sounding like a submarine sonar. Eventually, he imitated the sound using a simple Proteus FX synthesizer. “It was just a high symbol or a tambourine tuned right down,” Kirkhope says.

Goldeneye went on to sell over 8 million copies and gross $250 million worldwide.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts for Xbox 360. Image: Microsoft

Kirkhope’s next game with Rare would also turn out to be a classic. Banjo-Kazooie was Super Mario 64 with a sense of humor, bigger worlds and more style. The game’s score, composed entirely by Kirkhope, sounded like a street production of Looney Tunes themes performed by people with whatever instrument they could get their hands on. Banjos and kazoos were there, of course, but so were fiddles, xylophones, flutes and trombones.

Banjo‘s main theme was so absurd and wonderful that other Rare staffers decided to make a music video to accompany it that would serve as the game’s introductory menu scene.

Writing music for the Nintendo 64, with the system’s extremely limited memory, was difficult, Kirkhope says. While CD-quality music is generally formatted at around 44.100hz, music and sound in Rare’s games in the mid-90s era often had to be sampled down to 16hz or even 8hz. Numerous sound files were reused in creative ways. Many characters in Banjo-Kazooie have voices which are distorted version of the Banjo character’s voice.

“I’m amazed that it sounds as good as it does now,” Kirkhope says. “The limitations at the time made it hard to get it to sound even half decent.”

Since being purchased by Microsoft, Rare has primarily created games for the Xbox 360. One of these, Viva Piñata, was an imaginative gardening game about raising a host of living piñatas. It was also Kirkhope’s first shot at composing for a full orchestra. Kirkhope’s score for Piñata evolved the same whimsical feel he’d developed for the Banjo games.

When Rare published a Banjo spin-off called Nuts & Bolts in 2008, Kirkhope once again got to work with a full orchestra. The score (which, along with the Viva Piñata soundtrack, is available for free on Spotify) is a triumphant revisiting of Kirkhope’s nutty old songs. The song that plays during the ultimate battle against Banjo nemesis Gruntilda, titled “The Final Fight,” is a beautiful, crystal clear film-quality piece that does justice to the vision of the original N64 game.

Listen to “Fight!” from Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning:

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Kirkhope left Rare in 2008, but has continued focusing on game soundtracks. His epic score for 2012’s Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was well-reviewed, and Kirkhope has since gotten gigs scoring upcoming numerous games including Capcom’s remake of Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse and Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z. He’s also working alongside Canabalt composer Danny Baranowsky on the currently in-beta Desktop Dungeons.

Before Kirkhope released the Banjo and Perfect Dark soundtracks on Bandcamp at the end of April, he says that he’d occasionally receive letters from people begging for ways to listen to the music he created for Rare in those days. The last straw was seeing a physical copy of the Perfect Dark soundtrack go for $500 on eBay.

Kirkhope figured “people who want to get to it will get to it,” and threw the albums up for download. Within hours, they’d been downloaded over 15,000 times, temporarily making them the most popular albums on all of Bandcamp.

The post Nintendo 64’s Music Maestro Unleashes His Hit Chiptunes for Free appeared first on WIRED.

Game|Life Podcast: EA’s Star Wars Exclusive, Ouya’s $15M Cash Infusion

ChrisKohler — Fri, 10 May 2013 19:09:06 +0000

You know how some weeks we have to admit that not much news has happened? Well, not on this week’s Game|Life audio podcast.

With Peter Rubin out of the office, Wired editorial fellow Jensen Toperzer joins me in the studio again to discuss the week in news: Precursor Games’ crowdfunding effort for a spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness, Electronic Arts’ exclusive license to make Star Wars games and Ouya’s $15 million in new funding.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

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GameLife Reboot:
Episode 069