Feeds
333445 items (307736 unread) in 109 feeds
- Dictionary.com Word of the Day (579 unread)
- Yahoo! News: Most Viewed (15678 unread)
Wired: Top Stories (10 unread)
-
Sun/IBM Tie-up Hits a Snag: Reports
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by John C Abell
Tags: [edit]
It ain't over until it's over, but there are several reports that the IBM/Sun Microsystems merger has hit the skids. Sun shares plummet, and Om Malik suggests that the company consider going private instead. -
Solar Plane Set to Soar Over Europe
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Dave Demerjian
Tags: [edit]
Eric Raymond takes to the air in the first trans-European flight in a manned solar plane to prove "electric airplane" isn't an oxymoron. -
Mod That Table: High-End Furniture Goes Open Source
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Tim McKeough
Tags: [edit]
Your next piece of designer furniture could cost less than an Ikea chair—as long as you're willing to make it yourself. Taking a cue from the Linux community and file-sharing services, Berlin-based design guru Ronen Kadushin has started a furniture free-for-all he calls Open Design. It allows crafty consumers to download the instructions, photos, and AutoCAD files needed to knock off his work.
Kadushin's tables, chairs, and shelves sell for upwards of $5,000 each, but he's as interested in sharing ideas as in making a profit. Everything on Kadushin's Web site (ronen-kadushin.com) is free for use under a Creative Commons license. And far from being an artistic tyrant, he hopes you'll customize his pieces. You'll just need access to a large computer-controlled router or laser cutter (depending on what you're building) to realize the digital forms in wood or metal. All Kadushin asks is that you be creative with your mods—oh, and maybe send him a picture of the finished product.
#st_d {list-style-type:none;}
#st_d li {padding-bottom:9px;}
- 1 // Download the AutoCAD file and the instructions for the Square Dance Table.
- 2 // Customize the AutoCAD file (perhaps your family crest would look good in the center) and source the necessary materials.
- 3 // Locate the nearest laser cutter. If you don't have one at work or at school, find a local machine shop—they're in the book. Cut the basic ninja-star form (shown at left) from 2-mm-thick stainless steel (Kadushin prefers a mirror finish).
- 4 // Put on gloves and kneel in the center of the cut sheet.
- 5 // Gradually bend the legs up toward you until they can be slotted together—like making a metal basket.
- 6 // Using padded pliers, bend down the rounded, precut feet and stick on felt glides to protect your floor.
- 7 // Flip the table over and press down on the top to lock in the arms.
- 8 // Top with your favorite cocktail glasses.
-
How to Run a Scam
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Mike Olson
Tags: [edit]
You don't have to be a big-time money manager like Bernie Madoff to execute a successful scam. They all start the same way: with one really good line of BS. -
Games Without Frontiers: 'MadWorld' Is Black and White and Awesome All Over
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Clive Thompson
Tags: [edit]
While visiting Bungie Studios as its developers finished work on Halo 3 two years ago, I saw something very interesting. Occasionally, to help debug the videogame, they'd play a level in wire-frame mode — where all the environments and characters were rendered onscreen as glowing outlines.
"Check this out," said one of the programmers as he called up a scene for me.
What he showed me was gorgeous. The enemies — two massive hunters — suddenly turned into glowing lattices of colored pentagons; the background became a bright spider web. I could still clearly see everything, but the visuals looked like a mashup of Halo and Tron.
I immediately wanted to play the game in this mode: I loved the idea of revisiting all the battles and scenes of Halo 3 in this altered state, where everything is familiar but somehow alien.
"Maybe we could include this as an Easter egg," the developer chuckled.
Alas, they didn't. But that experience made me hanker for a similar one — some game that took full, 3-D reality and gave it a surreal twist.
This week, I finally got the chance, when I uncorked MadWorld, a new hack-and-slash Wii game with its own bold aesthetic move: It's almost entirely black-and-white.
The upshot is a game that plays eerily like a comic book come to life. A Frank Miller comic book, to be precise: The designers have talked about Miller's influence on their game, which is obvious from the moment you meet the gruff, chain-smoking and chainsaw-wielding killer, who embodies a lot of Marv from Sin City. When he first wanders into the frame, all you see initially is the dancing plume of his cigarette smoke — a lovely bit of moody, and kitschy, chiaroscuro.
This heavy indebtedness to comic-book aesthetics neatly suits MadWorld's narrative, which is yet another one of those "most dangerous game" conceits: You're a contestant in a televised killfest! Killing, like, tons of people! And you'll be rewarded not only for slaughtering anyone around you, but for doing so in the most grisly fashion possible. Cut someone in half with a chainsaw, you might get 2,000 points. But if you ring them with a tire, impale them with a street sign and then hurl them onto a spiked wall? Hey, 50,000 points!
As you might imagine, the over-the-top gore has critics labeling MadWorld the "most violent computer game ever." But the game's visual style — including "Blam-o!"-type, written-word sound effects, and the fact that the copious spurting red blood is one of the few colors in the game — clearly marks it as part of the tradition of two-bit comic books, which have been tweaking prudes with Pavlovian precision for about 75 years. Many games unsettle me with their callous violence; this stuff unfailingly makes me giggle.
But the effect of playing in black-and-white isn't merely about creating a camp sensibility. It actually changed the way I looked at the world around me.
The sheer sense of contrast — the game is really black or white, since there's no gray — makes every detail in MadWorld pop out vividly. It's like playing beneath a bright moon, where the polarized light makes everything seem simultaneously super-real and oddly dreamlike. I'd find myself noticing little things that would, in a regular game, just blend into the background: The fins on the junked 1950s cars lying in piles; the way the glass scattered when I hurled a goon through a window. The buildings looked like the Platonic ideal of buildings.
What really makes MadWorld a breath of fresh air is how neatly it violates the tropes of modern 3-D realism. As today's graphics come closer to approaching photorealism, our "realistic" games have become steadily more similar in appearance: The same gritty gray-and-brown environments, the same light-infused bloom. Partly this is because most games use the same relicensed handful of graphics engines, but it's also an inherent limit of realism. If your goal is to make a dirty, war-torn road look realistic, well, there are only so many ways for something to look real. We know what the reference point is: reality.
This is why I've been heartened by the way many game designers have been actively trying to get away from pure realism in otherwise realistic 3-D games. I'm thinking of the many games that have employed cel-shaded cartoon styles or anime inflections, like in Goichi Suda's killer7 and No More Heroes. (I suspect Nintendo's inferior processing power is why these experiments are so often found on the Gamecube or Wii. If the processor can't do super-realism, then why not make a virtue of the limitation?)
Going black-and-white is an even more bold stylistic move, and I'm sort of surprised more designers haven't tried it. MadWorld isn't completely pioneering; there have been other full 3-D worlds done in black-and-white, such as the 2007 puzzler Vigil: Blood Bitterness, which is so much more surreal and stylized than even MadWorld that it feels like you're trapped inside a Salvador Dali experimental movie. (I mean that in a good way.)
Mind you, a monochromatic palette has its downsides. In MadWorld, sometimes it was a little hard to spot where I was supposed to go. With such high contrast and low-rez detail, everything in the environment seemed to be equally as important as everything else.
Plus, MadWorld's gameplay is more twitch than precision; this isn't a problem, but I half-wondered if working in black-and-white dices a designer out of creating a very precise, fine-motor-skill, 3-D play mechanic, because without color it's trickier to line things up — a headshot, a puzzle element — to a pixel-points' precision. It may be no surprise that the games that have most avidly embraced alt.aesthetics are also, in terms of gameplay, pretty much just button-mashers (as with the dazzling Chinese-art-style graphics of Okami).
Still, after a couple hours playing MadWorld, I wanted more. Not just more of this game, with its highly stylized violence. I want more black and white everywhere.
- - -
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.
-
DiggBar Digs up Bitter Nostalgia Among Critics
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Brian X Chenn
Tags: [edit]
The new Diggbar — a toolbar appearing at the top of a browser when users click a link at Digg — has some internet purists grumbling about what they see as a suffocating eyesore. "When you call it 'framing someone else's site,' everyone agrees it's bullshit," said John Gruber, writer of DaringFireball, on his Twitter. "When you call it 'The DiggBar,' it's Web 3.5 Awesome." -
Beating Somali Pirates at Their Own Game
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by David Axe
Tags: [edit]
After hitting the headlines last year, successful pirate attacks have been on the wane in the early months of 2009, despite a failed attack on a British cruise ship earlier this month. Experts disagree about what has led to the reduction, with some suggesting that bad weather had played its part, but Rear Adm. Terry McKnight of the U.S. Navy attributes the "dramatic" reduction in the number of attacks to the deployment of a British warship, the Royal Navy frigate HMS Northumberland, and the coordinated task force of which she is part.
To wage today's battles against pirates who took control of 42 ships and captured 815 sailors last year, the Royal Navy is combining machines and methods forged during the Cold War with centuries-old naval warfare skills. The Royal Navy is also hitting back at pirates by using some of the pirates' own tricks.
Fighting back
When Northumberland slipped out of Mombasa harbor in southern Kenya at the end of last year, a few reporters and gawkers stood on the banks. On the deck of the 460-foot frigate, a smattering of British sailors gazed back. As far as send-offs go, Northumberland's was low-key, but the understated nature of the departure belied the importance of her mission. On that hot December morning, Northumberland — one of just 17 such ships in the Royal Navy — opened up a new front in the unprecedented international war on Somali pirates.
Most of the other warships deployed to fight pirates in the region are concentrated north of Somalia, close to the Suez Canal, through which 10 percent of the world's sea trade passes. Northumberland was the first warship on the scene from a new European Union task force, charged with patrolling the southern flank of the 2-million-square-mile piracy zone, near Mombasa. It was here that pirates scored their biggest victory last autumn, seizing the supertanker Sirius Star, laden with $100 million in crude oil.
Besides Sirius Star, Somali sea bandits hijacked more than 40 large vessels last year, ransoming about 30 of them for a million U.S. dollars or more, according to the United Nations. Sirius Star was released in January after an estimated $3 million ransom was paid, but the other ships, and about 200 crew, remain in pirates' hands. The rise in piracy, and consequent rise in the cost of shipping insurance, drove up the cost of shipping petroleum, electronics and food.
Motherships
To beat pirates in potentially violent showdowns, the Navy has adopted the pirates' tactics of using "mother ships" carrying fast boats to spring on opponents.
In the early days of Somali piracy, in the 1990s, pirates ranged only a few miles from their hometowns and threatened just a few thousand square miles of ocean. The reason was simple: Most pirates were former fishermen and had only the tools of a typical fishermen. Their personal firearms and their small, motor-propelled wooden fishing boats, called skiffs. The skiffs were too slow and too flimsy to catch anything but the most rickety of vessels.
Then the pirates innovated. They began capturing trawlers and small freighters for use as motherships. Crewman Juma Mvita, from the Kenyan merchant ship Semlow, discovered this the hard way in 2005, when about a dozen armed Somalis intercepted his ship. Mvita said the pirates had no interest in Semlow's cargo. Instead, they commandeered the harmless-looking freighter to launch their next attack. It was more than three months before the pirates released Semlow and her crew.
Today, pirates use motherships for nearly all their attacks. "What we tend to see happen is a mothership will ... drag along a couple skiffs with it and have probably 10 or 15, 20 pirates on board, and then they'll send the skiffs out to go after a merchant vessel," McKnight said. He commands a new three-ship, counter-pirate task force.
Warships assigned to piracy patrols rarely engage pirates on their own. They deploy specialized search-and-seizure teams, which in the Royal Navy consist of marines armed with rifles and machine guns, traveling in raider craft. It was one such team from the frigate HMS Cumberland that killed three pirates in a firefight last November.
Boarding teams
Boarding teams have been a part of British warship crews for centuries, but in recent years they've become the best weapon against enemies such as pirates. The Cumberland's actions are "bound to have an impact on pirates," said Capt. Mike Davis-Marks, a Royal Navy spokesman. "Now suddenly there's the threat of death and this may force them to think again."
Cumberland's encounter was typical, if still rare in a conflict in which most navies are focused on deterrence rather than active fighting. A naval engagement with pirates often begins with a commercial ship reporting an attack, using a radio frequency set aside for emergency calls. Other times, a maritime patrol plane, usually flying from Djibouti, spots a potential mothership or pirate skiff, identifiable not by its appearance, but by its vector. A trawler speeding away from Somalia, toward a slow-moving tanker ship, just might have hostile intentions.
Digital deconfliction
Naval commanders, in touch with each other by phone, e-mail and satellite network, sort through the roster of warships in the region to figure out who might respond fastest. They call this "deconfliction." When the responding ship is close enough, it launches a helicopter to scout ahead and confirm that the suspect seafarers are indeed armed, while preparing to lower the boarding teams' boats into the water.
In Cumberland's case, "the ship's presence alone was often enough to prevent pirate attacks," the Ministry of Defense reported. Beyond that, the helicopter might deter pirates simply by "flying close to demonstrate the aircraft's machine gun and giving the pirates warning of their serious intentions."
If the pirates persist, the boarding teams deploy, flanking the pirates' boats to approach from both sides, moving fast with weapons at the ready. If the pirates lay down their weapons, they are taken into custody without a shot fired. If they shoot, the boarding teams fire back, then climb aboard.
The naval network
Deterring an attack, or winning a firefight, requires first that a warship be nearby when pirates strike. With pirates active on millions of square miles of ocean, blending in with harmless fishing boats, that's no easy task.
Today on the Indian Ocean there are 20 warships from 14 nations, all of them sent by their governments over the past six months to protect vital shipping from pirates. Coordinating these ships is key to providing the widest possible protection against pirates. In the beginning, it was a free-for-all. "It's encouraging that everyone is here," Lt. Nathan Christensen, a U.S. Navy spokesman, said last autumn, "but everyone's got their own rules of engagement ... their own commanders."
In time, the naval forces coalesced into four distinct entities plus some odds and ends. There was the U.S.-dominated Combined Task Forces 150 and 151, the latter commanded by McKnight. There was a NATO force sent on a temporary basis, and the EU flotilla intended eventually to replace the NATO one. On the fringes, there were warships from Russia, India and several other navies, sailing and fighting all on their own.
The four large, multi-ship formations had just one thing in common. Each one had a British warship assigned: Cumberland with NATO, Northumberland with the EU, the frigate HMS Portland in CTF-151 and, in CTF-150, a rotation of British frigates, destroyers and logistics ships.
That was no accident. In the last decade, the Royal Navy has mothballed nearly a third of its frigates and destroyers and canceled some new ships and technologies in a bid to save money, but the Royal Navy never cut back on its training and command capabilities.
"Our ships are not necessarily better than those of other navies," said Capt. Malcolm Cree, a commander for international naval forces in the Persian Gulf. "The one thing that we do have, the jewel in the crown of the Royal Navy, is our operational sea training.... As a result, Royal Navy ships and staffs provide a consistent level of professionalism capability that others know they can rely on."
It was that professionalism that the EU enlisted when it sent Northumberland to test the pirates' southern flank in December. And it was that professionalism that eventually helped tie together the tangle of naval forces threading the Indian Ocean to deter pirates.
By January, some order had been imposed on the chaos. McKnight's CTF-151 and the EU flotilla, under the command of British Rear Adm. Phillip Jones, were acting as the major nodes in a radio, e-mail and satellite communications network connecting most of the warships in the Indian Ocean. "My biggest concerns are coordination and deconfliction," McKnight said. "It appears that it's been working pretty fairly in the last couple of months."
The legal front
As boarding teams engaged pirates in firefights and commanders were sorting out the naval traffic jam in the Indian Ocean, a parallel battle was taking place on dry land. Late last year, there was "a lack in U.K. law of clear arrest and evidence-gathering powers for Royal Navy officers," the House of Commons recalled in a report in January. "If Royal Navy officers were to arrest pirates, there was a real risk that such prosecution would fail on procedural grounds if they were brought back to the U.K. for prosecution."
That legal loophole is one that pirates have exploited for years. After two decades of civil war, Somalia has no coast guard and no functional courts, and the only organizations in a position to intercept pirates — the world's navies — have no clear legal powers.
"The potentials for legal embarrassments are quite numerous," said Martin Murphy, a piracy analyst at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. So when they captured pirates, many navies simply deposited them on the nearest Somali beach. Needless to say, in those cases the pirates probably returned to their lives of crime.
What the world needed was a stable, democratic country in East Africa, with a stake in the piracy fight and the ability to detain, try and jail pirates. What the world needed, in fact, was Kenya. The United Kingdom, with close ties to its former colony, was the first to draw Kenya into the counter-piracy coalition in a legal capacity. Moses Wetang'ula, the Kenyan foreign minister, and Alan West, the British security minister, met at a piracy conference in Nairobi to initiate the agreement, and none too soon: Eight Somali pirates already were being held in a Kenyan jail, on soft legal grounds, after being captured by a British frigate.
The United States was quick to follow Britain's example. In January, the U.S. State Department signed a similar agreement with Kenya. "The lawyers are at work for the particulars," McKnight said, "and as soon as we get those mechanisms in place, then we will shift our operation." Instead of just reacting to pirates, McKnight's task force would go on the attack.
Aggressive action can't come too soon. "Pirates are winning," Murphy said late last year.
Back off the coast of Mombasa in December, Northumberland made final preparations for her mission. In the frigate's scrubbed and polished compartments, sailors calibrated their sensors and fueled up a gray-painted Merlin helicopter. Royal Marines checked the rifles and kit. The vessel veered northward, toward Somalia. "We remain ready," said Commander M.J. Simpson, Northumberland's skipper.
If pirates really are less aggressive this year, the world has the Royal Navy, in particular, to thank. If not, and if this most ancient form of lawlessness continues to sap the global economy, nations will keep looking to the United Kingdom to help fight piracy.
---
This article originally appeared on Wired.co.uk.
-
April 6, 1938: Teflon, an Invention That Sticks
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long
Tags: [edit]
1938: Fiddling around in the lab one day, Roy Plunkett accidentally discovers polytetrafluoroethylene, soon to be known as Teflon, a slippery substance that will have practical applications in everything from non-stick cookware to a presidential nickname.
Plunkett, a chemist at DuPont's Jackson research lab in New Jersey, made his discovery in the time-honored scientific way: as the result of a mistake, and with an assistant's help.
Plunkett and his assistant, Jack Rebok, were testing the chemical reactions of tetrafluoroethylene, a gas used in refrigeration. The gas was contained in some pressurized canisters, one of which failed to discharge properly when its valve was opened.
Rebok picked up the canister, only to find that it was heavier than an empty canister would be. He suggested cutting it open to see what had happened and, despite the risk of blowing the lab to kingdom come, Plunkett agreed.
Of course it was heavy: The gas hadn't accidentally escaped. It had solidified into a smooth, slippery white powder as the result of is molecules bonding, a process known as polymerization.
This new polymer was different from similar solids like graphite: It was more lubricant and extremely heat-resistant, due to the presence of dense fluorine atoms that shielded the compound's string of carbon atoms.
Setting other work aside, Plunkett began testing the possibilities of polytetrafluoroethylene, eventually figuring out how to reproduce the polymerization process that had occurred accidentally the first time.
DuPont patented the polymer in 1941, registering it under the trade name Teflon in 1944. The first products — most having military and industrial applications — came to market after World War II. It wouldn't be until the early 1960s that Teflon became a household word when it was used to produce the most effective, heat-resistant cookware yet seen.
The word gained a certain pop-culture notoriety in the 1980s when the media began referring to Ronald Reagan as the Teflon president, a reference to his infuriating ability to avoid being tarnished by the various scandals plaguing his administration.
Teflon cookware, however, remained as steadfast and reliable as ever.
Today, Teflon is found virtually everywhere, coating metals and fabrics from the aerospace industry to clothing to pharmaceuticals.
For his discovery, Plunkett, who retired from DuPont in 1975, was enshrined in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Source: About.com, Wikipedia
-
10 Best Geeky Last Words
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Katharine Gammon
Tags: [edit]
Now it is nothing but torture.
—Sigmund FreudGo away. I'm all right.
—H. G. WellsKHAQQ to Itasca. We are on the line 157 337. Will repeat message. We will repeat this on 6210 kilocycles. Wait. We are running on a north and south line.
—Amelia EarhartMay I not seem to have lived in vain.
—Tycho BraheHow were the circus receipts today at Madison Square Garden?
—P. T. BarnumI'd hate to die twice. It's so boring.
—Richard Feynman
Try LSD, 100 mm intramuscular.
—Aldous Huxley
(in a note to his wife)It is very beautiful over there.
—Thomas EdisonA dying man can do nothing easy.
—Benjamin Franklin01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000
—Mars Phoenix lander -
The Terminator as Metaphor for Life
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 11:00pm EST by Josh Friedman
Tags: [edit]
When I first started working on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the studio gave me a general idea: They wanted to do a show about John and Sarah Connor, set some time after Terminator 2. So, as I was sort of staring at the concept, trying to figure out how I would approach it, I realized that the thing that works about Terminator is the relationships.
But we needed a central relationship to anchor the story. The first Terminator movie was a romance, really, between Kyle and Sarah. The second movie is a father-son story between John and the Terminator. So I thought my show, at its core, would be a family drama, a relationship between a mother and a son who is coming of age. But if we're going to be about Sarah and John, there should be a girl. That's what usually breaks up that Oedipal relationship. And I decided to make the girl a Terminator.
But before I could actually start writing the show, I was diagnosed with kidney cancer. I had to have an operation to remove the tumor, which meant I couldn't write it for that season. So I had a couple of months when I couldn't do anything, and I was in pain. I had this crisis — I went to a therapist, and I said, "What am I doing? I'm going to write a fucking show about a scary robot? Who cares?"
But when she calmed me down, I started reflecting upon it, and I realized that this show really was about my life. It was about mortality. The first voiceover I ever wrote for the series started with "I will die. I will die, and so will you. Death gives no man a pass." That's what the Terminators are — they're death coming to get us.
I still go in every six months for a scan, so I'm constantly reminded of this. It's something we talk about a lot in the writers' room. You know, cancer is cell mutation, and the artificial intelligence Skynet is in some ways a mutation. But more metaphorically, it's about predestination. Can you change your future, or is it something inside you, unchangeable? I had this idea, taken from T3, that Sarah had cancer, but then on our show she time-travels forward, past her death date. So did she jump over her death or merely postpone it? When Sarah did all that exercise in T2, she was doing it to gird herself externally. But I thought it would be interesting if she was doing it to chase something inside herself as well. She has her own personal apocalypse out there in the future — could she exercise enough or take enough vitamins to make it go away?
To me, the show is about what you do with life in the face of death. I mean, yeah, it's a genre show. It's the Terminator, and it's kind of pulpy, and some people think it's past its prime. But you can find yourself in this show. I definitely found myself in it.
Josh Friedman, executive producer of the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, thought he was making a fun TV show. Then he got cancer — and found a metaphor for life. He told this story to Wired senior editor Adam Rogers.