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How to Turn Anything Into a Screenplay
Posted: July 31st, 2008, 4:12pm EDT by How-To Wiki
You may fancy yourself a screenwriter, but have only your household pet as a muse. No problem. According to screenwriting guru Robert McKee, you can make any idea into a screenplay easily if you just follow some basic dramatic rules. Pull out a typewriter and some white paper and lets get started.
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The $46,616.47 Oil Change and Size-22 Carbon Footprint
Posted: July 31st, 2008, 2:38pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia
Someone with more money than sense flies his Lamborghini from Qatar to Britain for an oil change. Environmentalists want the guy's head, but Britain's Lamborghini club can't see what all the fuss is about.
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Cheap Catalyst Could Turn Sunlight, Water Into Fuel
Posted: July 31st, 2008, 2:33pm EDT by Alexis Madrigal
A new, cheap catalyst developed by MIT chemists could make storing the energy from solar panels feasible.
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Firefox 3.1 Alpha Previews Sleek New Features
Posted: July 31st, 2008, 2:30pm EDT by Scott Gilbertson
Firefox 3.1 alpha has been released, and the preview has more features than your typical x.1 release. The alpha features several multimedia embedding features, Photoshop-like styles and a coverflow-like tab browser. The alpha has some hidden surprises for web developers, too.
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Next-Gen Prius Is More of the Same, But Bigger
Posted: July 31st, 2008, 1:24pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia
Toyota abides by the old rule "don't fix it if it ain't broke" and makes the 2010 Prius a little bigger and a little quicker but otherwise the same as those it's selling today.
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Study Promises Benefits of Exercise in a Pill
Posted: July 31st, 2008, 11:02am EDT by Alexis Madrigal
Scientists say that a pill designed to mimic exercise's intracellular impacts increased the endurance of out-of-shape mice by 44 percent.
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Scrabulous -- er, 'Wordscraper' -- is Back
Posted: July 31st, 2008, 10:08am EDT by Associated Press
The game formerly known as Scrabulous is back on Facebook as "Wordscraper." And that isn't the only change its developers have made to avoid any unwelcome confusion with Scrabble: the squares are now circles. Scrabble is there too, of course. Let the games begin ...
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Project toRebuild Internet Gets $12M, Bandwidth
Posted: July 31st, 2008, 4:23am EDT by Associated Press
A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along. The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) has received $12 million in government funding (the five-year project is estimated to need $350 million) and donations of considerable network capacity by two major research organizations.
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What Do Small Open Source Projects Do With Money? Not Much
Posted: July 31st, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Scott Gilbertson
A coding blog donated a substantial amount to an open source project it liked. What did the project do with the money? Nothing. In many cases small projects like these need a developer's time, not more money, to succeed.
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Playlist: Thumpin' Rmxxology, Reebok's Monopoly Sneakers, Hitachi's Ultrathin HDTV
Posted: July 31st, 2008, 12:00am EDT
: Somewhere, chart guru Edward Tufte is squirming: This site's homages to pop culture come in the form of perverted infographics. From the map indicating which countries a Flock of Seagulls deem "so far away" (Iran) to a bar graph illustrating the possibilities at the Hotel California (checking out: 100 percent; leaving: 0) and a flowchart for deciding what game console to buy (pivotal question: Do you have any friends?), GraphJam will give you newfound respect for the awesome power of Microsoft Excel.
: The closest Chick-fil-A is 45 miles from Wired's offices, so we can't easily enjoy its superlative chicken sandwich. Good thing McDonald's has hatched the Southern Style Chicken Sandwich, a feat of culinary reverse engineering that astonished even staffers from below the Mason-Dixon line with its similarity to the Chick-fil-A original. And there's a Golden Arches right down the street. Yum.
: Bust it! Two decades after launching seminal rappers like Young MC, LA label Delicious Vinyl is back with this collection of old-school gems reworked by the likes of Eminem and Peaches — who electrifies Tone-Lôc party anthem "Wild Thing." Not feeling Hot Chip's take on the Pharcyde? Use the included instrumental tracks to make your own rmxx.
: All hail Anglo-Franco pop! Having endured the death of both bandmate Mary Hansen and the alt-rock '90s, the reigning royals of postmodern electrolounge return. Eschewing forays into droning avant interludes, Chemical Chords showcases Stereolab at its shortest and sweetest — as the purveyor of pure '60s-tinged bliss. Light up a Gitane, swoon with your sweetheart, and imagine you're drifting among Godard's nouveau stars.
: Normally a 47-inch LCD with full 1080p resolution and a 120-Hz refresh rate is thicker than Finnegans Wake. Not this $4,699 supermodel. At 1.5-inches, the UT47X902 is heroin-chic thin, with a video processor that boosts the frame rate from the standard 24 fps to a gorgeous 28 fps. But why does such a beauty have such an ugly moniker?
: Truly fit for a player, these '90s-style kicks are sure to be a hot property when they hit stores (and eBay) in late August. Advance to Go, drop $85, and you'll soon be walking on Park Place.
: Architect John Lautner's insane engineering, space-age designs, and Los Angeles backdrops have been catnip to filmmakers. Chemosphere, his 1960 flying- saucer house that sprouts out of the Hollywood Hills, played a supporting role in Body Double, while other Lautner homes stole scenes in Diamonds Are Forever and The Big Lebowski. Through October 12, these ingenious buildings get their close-up in this exhibition at LA's Hammer Museum.
: The bon mots from Cody, the Oscar-winning writer of Juno, keep coming, this time via Twitter. Her stream of consciousness — "I'm at the Denver airport eating a Pizza Hut grease mattress because I clearly hate myself" and "I went with 'That's a cut!' instead of just 'Cut'; I've always favored the conversational approach" — should tide you over until her next project, The United States of Tara, debuts on Showtime next year.
: Kids don't understand you? Send them to film summer school via these reissues of '80s cinematic essentials. Perhaps if they spend a weekend watching Airplane!, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Fatal Attraction (among others), they'll grok your familiarity with jive, nostalgia for "Twist and Shout," and fear of keeping a pet rabbit. Plus: Each disc includes a bonus CD with songs from A-ha and Erasure. Roger, roger.
: The Robot Chicken guys got carte blanche from George Lucas to make this 23-minute stop-animation spoof of the Star Wars trilogy. And for good reason: The DVD extras alone are worth the purchase price, with clips of show cocreator Seth Green acting out sketches and countless behind-the-scenes shots of the cast and crew goofing off.
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July 31, 1790: New Nation Issues First Patent
Posted: July 31st, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred
1790: Samuel Hopkins of Vermont gets the very first U.S. patent. It covers a process for making potash and pearl ash (potassium carbonate).
Under the Articles of Confederation, inventors had applied to state legislatures to obtain monopolies on the use of their inventions. But Article I, Section 8 of the new U.S. Constitution empowered Congress to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Many inventors petitioned and lobbied the first session of the First Congress in 1789 for patents and copyrights, but in the midst of setting up a whole new government, Congress took no action on any of them. At President Washington's urging, Congress passed a patent law the next year, and the president signed it into law April 10 -- seven weeks before Rhode Island ratified the Constitution to become the 13th state.
The new law directed patent applicants to file a petition with the secretary of state. He, with the secretary of war and attorney general would grant a patent if they found "the invention or discovery sufficiently useful and important." The application required a written description, drawings and, if practical, a model of the invention. These needed to be sufficient to allow a skilled workman to make and use the invention. Thus, the public would benefit when the patent expired after 14 years.
Complete application and document fees for a patent ran $4 to $5 (roughly $100 in today's money) depending how lengthy your specifications were: You had to pay a copying charge of 10 cents per 100 words, because the patents for carbon paper, photography, photocopying and optical scanning were yet to be applied for. (Today's U.S. patent fees, by the way, start at a bargain $75 for a basic application, but rapidly jump into the thousands with fees for search, examination, documents and maintenance.)
Hopkins got his patent at New York City (then the national capital) July 31, complete with signature of President Washington. It covered a method of making potash and pearl ash by burning wood ashes a second time before dissolving them to extract potash. Potash and pearl ash were important ingredients in making glass, china, soap and fertilizer.
The cabinet officers who made up the patent board, or Commissioners for the Promotion of the Useful Arts, were busy men. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, for one, found many applications to be of minor importance. The board, in fact, issued only two more patents in 1790: one to Joseph S. Sampson for manufacturing candles, and the other to Oliver Evans for flour-milling machinery.
The potash process also received the first Canadian patent. The Governor General in Council awarded the patent in 1791 to Hopkins and Angus MacDonnel, a Scottish soldier stationed in Quebec City.
Although Hopkins received the first U.S. patent, it wasn't Patent No. 1. That's because the government issued 9,957 patents before starting a numbering system July 13, 1836. On that occasion, U.S. Patent No. 1 went to John Ruggles of Maine for a traction wheel for steam locomotives. Ruggles happened to be chairman of the Senate Committee on Patents. Two years later, the Senate investigated him for alleged corruption regarding a different patent case. He was exonerated.
Source: The Patent Office Pony, by Kenneth W. Dobyns
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How American Youth Will Screw Viacom
Posted: July 30th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Betsy Schiffman
Viacom posts decent enough results, but tucked in there is evidence that youth-oriented networks VH1 and MTV were not carrying their weight. The fundamental problem could be that the youth demo Viacom has hotly chased after for the last couple decades is a bust.
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How to Stop a Fight
Posted: July 30th, 2008, 7:15pm EDT by How-To Wiki
Round one, fight! Unless you're Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris, the only thing to gain out of fighting is a black eye and a sore fist. Sure, two wrongs don't make a right, but how do you keep your friends and enemies from fighting? We take a level-headed approach.
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New YouTube Audio Compression Stymies Uploaders
Posted: July 30th, 2008, 5:21pm EDT by Eliot Van Buskirk
Google's wildly popular YouTube recently changed something about its audio-compression algorithm, making some newly uploaded music sound truly awful.
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South Park Studios Releases Uncensored 'Imaginationland'
Posted: July 30th, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Jenna Wortham
A new director's cut of the three-episode arc is available online for free.
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British UFO Hacker Gary McKinnon Is Coming to America
Posted: July 30th, 2008, 3:33pm EDT by Kevin Poulsen
The House of Lords shoots down the final appeal of a British hacker who penetrated U.S. military computers looking for a UFO coverup, despite his complaints that he might be sent to Guantanamo.
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First Look at Nintendo's Summer of Japanese Awesome
Posted: July 30th, 2008, 3:29pm EDT by Chris Kohler
A trio of games available now overseas -- Fatal Frame, Wario Land: Shake It and Rhythm Heaven -- bring the fun to Wii and the Nintendo DS.
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'FailWhale' Gives Frustrated Twitterers Something to Smile About
Posted: July 30th, 2008, 2:55pm EDT by Jenna Wortham
A symbol of failure turns into a cultural rallying cry for Twitter users.
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World's First Computer Displayed Olympic Calendar
Posted: July 30th, 2008, 2:53pm EDT by Brandon Keim
The ancient world's most complicated machine, the Antikythera Mechanism, plotted the movements of the stars -- and Greek athletes.
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Go to Space With Your Frequent Flier Miles
Posted: July 30th, 2008, 2:34pm EDT by Dave Demerjian
Virgin Atlantic is offering customers with truckloads of points to compete for a chance to go sub-orbital on SpaceShipTwo. Beats using your points to buy a bundt cake.
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Windows Mojave Gimmick Looks Like a Mirage
Posted: July 30th, 2008, 2:30pm EDT by Adam DuVander
Microsoft's Vista blind taste test releases its results in a series of recorded videos. The videos eagerly show people's prejudice with the unpopular Vista, then their delight with Vista under the name Mojave. However, the videos don't tell Vista's whole story.
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The New Arms Bazaar: From Russia, With No Love
Posted: July 30th, 2008, 2:25pm EDT by Sharon Weinberger
The Americans want to funnel Russian-built arms to Afghanistan and Iraq. But various sanctions make that illegal. So the government is in the awkward position of trying to evade its own laws.
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Think Your're Fast? Prove It With Your iPhone, Punk
Posted: July 30th, 2008, 1:44pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia
Two cool apps turn your iPhone into an "automotive performance meter" that will tell you whether you drive like Lewis Hamilton -- or his father.
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Air Force Looks to Laser-Proof Its Weapons
Posted: July 30th, 2008, 1:30pm EDT by Noah Schachtman
Real-life laser weapons aren't here, yet. But they're getting closer. Which is why the Air Force is starting to look for ways to laser-proof its bombs and missiles -- with spray-on coatings, no less.
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Why Richard Garriott Can't Play 'Tabula Rasa' in Space
Posted: July 30th, 2008, 11:22am EDT by Earnest Cavalli
When he visits the International Space Station, the game designer won't be booting up his his "Immortality Drive," which contains every avatar from his new MMO. But he will be toting some scientific gear and doing some pharmaceutical research.
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From Wall Street to the Secrets of Life
Posted: July 30th, 2008, 10:45am EDT by David Ewing Duncan, Portfolio.com
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Subscribe to Portfolio magazineSecretive and publicity shy, David E. Shaw made billions of dollars using fantastically complex computer algorithms to trade on Wall Street.
Now this former computer scientist at Columbia University-turned-tycoon is about to finish the most powerful supercomputer in history. Not to make a killing on the stock market, but to solve some of the trickiest problems in biology: How the molecules that comprise "life" function and interact at the most basic level.
It may seem like a James Bond movie: mysterious billionaire-genius designs megacomputer to probe life's secrets. Will he perhaps tinker with them, too, in a nefarious scheme to dominate the world by creating enhanced life forms or bio-silicon superbeings?
There's no sign that Shaw is going super-villain. Nor does he need to, considering the practical and potentially profitable uses for his megacomputer.
Knowing more about the complex interactions inside us could lead to better and more efficacious drugs, and to develop computer models that can simulate what happens even at the atomic level of life. It could lead to new ideas for developing computers and other machines based on cells and molecules.
Shaw's device, which he's named "Anton" in homage to pioneering microbiologist Anton van Leeuwenhoek, might also take humans several steps closer to having a schematic of how life works at its most elemental levels.
Several years ago, Shaw stepped down from the day-to-day management of his derivatives firm, D.E. Shaw and Company—which in June 2008 was managing upwards of $39 billion in investments.
He became chief scientist of his own computer laboratory, D.E. Shaw Research, home of the team making Anton.
Characteristically, Shaw has been mostly mum about Anton, referring the inquisitive to a technical paper on the project in the journal Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery.
His computer uses the massively parallel computing technology that Shaw helped develop at Columbia in the 1980s. Anton simultaneously runs 512 specialized processors called application-specific integrated circuits.
Unlike other supercomputers that have more general-use applications, including weather forecasting, these processors are specifically designed to calculate the three-dimensional characteristics of molecules.
Shaw's team could use Anton to solve one of the most perplexing mysteries of molecular life: how proteins, the building blocks of life, each acquire a distinctive three-dimensional shape that allows them to perform millions of functions in a living organism.
Proteins, which include enzymes, hormones, and the collagen in bones and skin, are made in cells according to instructions from DNA. They're strands of amino acids bunched up like wads of string into distinctive shapes and held together by subtle physical forces that are still poorly understood.
Current supercomputers, including IBM's BlueGene/L and Stanford University's Folding@home (which uses legions of idle laptops to increase computing power), can take thousands of hours to simulate the folding of a single protein. Even then, these computers can create simulations of functions in molecules that last only a billionth or a millionth of a second. Scientists must then validate the findings.
Anton could run simulations going up to 1,000 times longer, allowing scientists to get much closer to what really happens when, say, a protein folds. "If you can do a thousand times longer, real proteins come into play," Shaw reportedly said in a lecture at Stanford in 2006.
The more that scientists know about proteins and other critical molecules in the human body, the more precise they can be when developing drugs.
"He's making a big step forward with this," Benoit Roux, a biophysicist at the University of Chicago, told the New York Times.
Roger Brent, director of the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, suggested in the Times article that scientists may not know what such a powerful computer is capable of until they use it.
He pointed out that the original Anton—Van Leeuwenhoek, who perfected the microscope in Holland in the 17th century—didn't know that protozoa and other single-cell organisms existed in pond water until he trained his newfangled lenses on a sample.
Shaw also is a major investor in Schrödinger, a chemical and bio-physical simulation software business that could benefit from Anton's new technology.
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Dude -- Are You Going to Get a Dell MP3 Player?
Posted: July 30th, 2008, 10:32am EDT by Eliot Van Buskirk
Back when the MP3 market was young, Dell tried to be a player with the Dell DJ. Oprah liked it and, frankly, so did we. But it crashed and burned while Apple sewed things up to the point where even Microsoft's Zune is a distant also-ran. So, naturally, Dell wants back in now, five years later. We who are about to die salute you!