Wired: Top Stories (27 unread)
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Build a Green Roof
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Adrienne So
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You can't get much greener than photosynthesis, and if you own a house you can take advantage of it. Plant some greens on your roof and you'll have a rich harvest, an insulated (and better looking) roof -- not to mention a cleaner environment. Stop wasting sunlight and green your roof.
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Alt Text: A Wistful Geek Heads for Sweet iPhone Hell
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Lore Sjöberg
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I do not, as of yet, own an iPhone. However, soon my cellphone provider will be unlocking the door, shooing away the rats, taking off my shackles and releasing me from my contract.
At that point I will be buying an iPhone. Not because it's a shiny new Jobs-job, not because several of my friends have it and keep waving it at me, but because I clearly need it. I require its functionality for such important business purposes as having an iPhone.
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In the past, technology has often taken me by surprise. I go over to a friend's house to see this new "TiVo" device they've got ("It's what? Like a VCR? I already have a VCR.") and before I know it, I'm refusing to watch television shows during their scheduled time slots just on principle. I find out about geocaching, pick up a GPS to give it a go, and in no time a stoic, computerized voice is telling me to drive through a 6-foot-wide alleyway on the way to San Diego's only In-N-Out Burger.
This time, though, I'm not going to be taken by surprise. These are my last few weeks before I have an iPhone, and I'm going to make sure I cherish my ignorance.
Right now, I can have a thought like, "I wonder who had a hit first, Chuck Berry or Little Richard?" and allow that question to wander around in my head. Maybe I'll remember it and look it up when I get the chance; maybe I'll just let it go. I suspect that this time next month I'll be pulling over to the side of the road -- I hope I'll pull over to the side of the road -- to get the answer immediately.
Right now, my friends are not subjected to photos of every "witty" stop sign annotation I encounter. In fact, they can actually hang out with me with no fear of showing up in my Flickr stream with basil in their teeth.
Right now, I do not post to Twitter every time I see a dachshund.
While I long ago surrendered my right to stride the world undistracted by phone calls, right now I at least do not compulsively grab for my cellphone whenever someone friends me on Facebook.
Right now, sometimes I have ideas for columns, and they slip my mind before I can write them down. I like to think they go to Idea Heaven, where they become a much better essay than they would have been if they had been brought to life by my mortal fingers. Once I have my iPhone, none will escape.
Right now, I am capable of referring to my cellphone without actually telling people what brand it is.
Right now, although I sometimes regale my long-suffering non-gamer friends with tales of the latest gear to drop from Kara, I do not actually pull up The World of Warcraft Armory and force them to look at my Cyclone Helm.
Right now, I do not appear to bystanders to be speaking into an ice cream sandwich.
Right now, I rarely, if ever, use the phrase "awesome new app."
Right now, I would be surprised if using the phrase "awesome new app" in public did not result in mob justice.
Right now, I understand that there is absolutely no reason for me to watch an episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter in the bathroom. In fact, I realize that the very fact that this is an option is, in some indefinable way, a sign that our civilization is doomed to collapse in flame and sorrow.
So goodbye, non-iPhone Lore. It's nice having been you in a simpler world. These were the days.
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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a telecommunicator, a telecommuter and a teleconverter.
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Do RIAA Snoops Need P.I. Licenses?
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 8:59pm EDT by David Kravets
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The American Bar Association, the nation's largest lawyer advocacy group, says investigators like those from the Recording Industry Association of America don't need private investigator licenses from the states. Several states are demanding such licenses from the investigators who detect file sharers sharing unauthorized copyrighted material. The ABA said judges, not state licensing boards, are more than adequate to determine an expert's credentials.
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Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by Kim Zetter
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Researchers demonstrate a serious eavesdropping risk in the internet's fundamental infrastructure, putting proof to a theory that's long been whispered about in national security circles.
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Little Yellow Lego Guys Turn 30
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by John Baichtal
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This week marks the 30th anniversary of Lego's introduction of the "minifig," the friendly yellow characters that add a human element to those iconic, plastic bricks.
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RIAA, MPAA Converging on Political Conventions
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 5:09pm EDT by David Kravets
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The Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America are well-known for their thousands of copyright infringement lawsuits. But they're also Hollywood's biggest lobbying organizations. The pair have descended upon Denver for the Democratic National Convention and are headed to the Republican's convention next week in Minnesota -- in a likely move to bolster proposed legislation creating a cabinet-level copyright czar.
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Your Parents (and Kids) Will Love Adobe's New Photo and Video Tools
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 4:50pm EDT by Scott Gilbertson
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Adobe announced new versions of its Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements suites for editing, cataloging and sharing digital photos and home videos on Tuesday. The tools are aimed squarely at novice users and budding hobbyists, yet they deliver much of what's available in more powerful, pro-level applications.
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The Internet Gets a New Command Line With Firefox's Ubiquity
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 4:20pm EDT by Michael Calore
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Mozilla released a new, experimental add-on for Firefox Tuesday which adds a human-language text interface to the web browser. Now users can manipulate web services by typing one line of text, setting a whole new paradigm for how we interact with applications on the open web.
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Review: Phantom Lapboard Wasn't Worth the Wait
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 3:41pm EDT by Nate Ralph
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Vaporware becomes corporeal at last, but this supposedly liberating keyboard-and-mouse combo for gamers fails on a variety of levels.
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DTV Upgrade Proves Costly, Headachy
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 2:50pm EDT by Betsy Schiffman
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As the FCC pushes $40 coupons for digital TV converter boxes, complaints about the boxes have grown loud -- for many Americans, the device hasn't delivered an acceptable quality of television reception.
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Wounded G.I.s' New Rehab: Wii Sports, Guitar Hero
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 2:35pm EDT by Noah Shachtman
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Army medic Matt Bell couldn't even tie his own shoes, after he was shot by a sniper, just above the left clavicle. Now he has a great deal of his mobility back -- thanks, in part, to his Nintendo Wii.
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Your Parents (and Kids) Will Love Adobe's New Photo and Video Tools
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 2:30pm EDT by Scott Gilbertson
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Adobe announced new versions of its Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements suites for editing, cataloging and sharing digital photos and home videos on Tuesday. The tools are aimed squarely at novice users and budding hobbyists, yet they deliver much of what's available in more powerful, pro-level applications.
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Virus Infects Space Station Laptops (Again)
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 2:22pm EDT by Ryan Singel
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A password-stealing virus infected laptops on the international space station, though NASA says no mission critical equipment was affected. It's also not the first time a computer virus has made its way into space.
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Google Earth Reveals Sixth Sense of Cattle, Deer
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by Wired Science
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If you lose your compass, you could use a cow instead: scientists say cattle and deer have a magnetic sense.
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Graphic Evidence Against Steroid Abuse
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 1:30pm EDT by Brandon Keim
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Photos of an amateur German bodybuilder's withdrawal from anabolic-androgenic steroids should be enough for anyone not to use the muscle enhancing substance.
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Jeff Han: We're Just Scratching the Surface of Multitouch
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 1:30pm EDT by Bryan Gardiner
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SAN JOSE, California -- Jeff Han has some simple advice for companies thinking about how to integrate the latest interface technology into their products: Start over.
"It's like Yoda said, you must unlearn what you've learned," he says, referring to the 40 years that the mouse and keyboard have dictated how we interact with computers.
Admittedly, that's no easy task, so the multitouch pioneer and his company, Perceptive Pixel, have devoted the better part of two years to building an entirely new multitouch framework from the ground up. Instead of simply mapping multitouch technology to familiar interfaces and devices, Han's goal is far more sweeping: To use the technology as a foundation for an entirely new operating system.
That would be an ambitious goal for anyone, but it might be within reach for Han, who until two years ago was virtually unknown outside of academia. His demonstration of a multitouch display, which was sensitive not just to one finger (or a stylus) but to each of a user's ten digits, wowed the crowd at TED in 2006 and put multitouch on the map. Since then, Han's company has put multitouch screens on CNN and the Democratic National Convention, among other places. Microsoft's multitouch-enabled table, the Surface, has been showing up in Las Vegas casinos. And Apple's iPhone has shown that multitouch can be wildly popular, leading many other companies to try adding multitouch and other innovative interfaces to their own products.
Wired.com caught up with Han shortly after he joined Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang onstage at the inaugural Nvision visual-computing conference on Monday.
Wired.com: You mentioned it in your TED talk two years ago and you brought it up again today: We've been tethered to the keyboard and mouse for close to 40 years. So how far has multitouch technology really come over the past couple years? And is it any closer to freeing us from the tyranny of the mouse and keyboard?
Jeff Han: Well, the reason why multitouch is really exciting is because … we realized immediately it's really an undiscovered country. We knew there was a lot of mileage to be had by entering this field. So, really, on a high level, I can honestly tell you we're just scratching the surface with multitouch.
The progress we've been making, and the progress other research groups and companies out there have been making, that's still seminal stuff. There's a lot more we have to figure out. Some of the really trivial things -- like taking two fingers and zooming into a picture -- that's done. But the kind of stuff we really think will unlock this technology is not just simple extensions to the keyboard and mouse stuff.
I see companies out there starting to do some multitouch stuff -- and all they do is remap to the standard way we interact with computers.
Wired.com: Yeah, it seems like today multitouch is really more of a technology that's just slapped on top of the normal interfaces we're all accustomed to.
Han: Well, there are two reasons for that. One, it's really hard to unlearn the mouse. When you've grown up and have been living and breathing the GUI and the WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointing) interface, it's actually really hard to think differently. Two -- and this is why our company has been spending a lot of time and energy on the software side of things -- it turns out that no operating system right now really understands multitouch at a fundamental level.
What we've been really spending our energy on is this framework. We even have to throw away the traditional event model … and dispense with some of that lower-level machinery and pull it out. Right now, no operating system will work that way except in a graft-on format.
What we've done is essentially rebuilt that entire stack. We did it because there was enough stuff to actually pull out. We didn't want to. Frankly, nobody really wants to rebuild something like that, but we knew there would be some payoffs. It took a lot of time, but since the TED 2006 talk, that's what we've been doing -- just the fundamental behind-the-scenes stuff, the foundational work.
Wired.com: During your demos, you tend to use pretty beefy screens. You also talk a lot about how multitouch is also fundamentally about being multi-user. For the types of interfaces and user experiences you envision, are these bigger screens going to be a necessity?
Han: The thing to keep in mind with all of our work is that we're not really advocating replacements. Multitouch is natural and useful for different modes [of computing] that may be inappropriate for the keyboard and the mouse. But there's always going to be things that the keyboard and mouse excel at.
That said, we really see multitouch's potential being unlocked when you make it large. When you think of multitouch as "ubiquitous" or "pervasive" computing -- words that have been thrown around a lot in the past ten years -- ironically, there are really two ways to do such computing: Giant wall displays and personal ones that you carry with you all the time. [They are] totally different spectrums though.
Wired.com: At the time of your 2006 TED talk, you said there was very little investment flowing into multitouch. We now have a hugely successful product that has captured the attention of consumers and the tech industry alike. How does the multitouch landscape evolve from here?
Han: I think there's going to be an ecosystem out there. I don't think there's going to be one dominant player.
There's a danger, however, in that it's a bit of a gold rush land grab at the moment. It took a long time to make a GUI out of the elements of a mouse: The dropdown menus, the buttons, the dialogue box and everything else associated with it. It's going to be dangerous having multiple parties all doing this with multitouch on their own, saying we think this three-point gesture should be interpreted this way, and so on.
Wired.com: We've actually already explored whether there could be a coming patent battle over multitouch gestures as the technology gets more pervasive. So, based on those dangers you just highlighted, do you yourself patent your own gestures?
Han: A lot of our research is coming up with gestures or manipulation metaphors. We have a general framework that a lot of the stuff shakes out of, actually. In terms of patents, as a small company, it's very important for us to protect our IP. So we do actively file patents both on hardware and software sides.
Wired.com: But for the technology to become truly pervasive isn't it important to have, say, a universal series of gestures that everyone can agree on?
Han: That's a great question. In order for this ecosystem to survive, there's going to have to be some standards bodies that say even though we're competitors, let's agree on some terminology, let's agree on some sub-gestures that none of us technically own.
The problem is, multitouch is such a hyped field right now, it's very, very tempting for companies to start saying: Oh, we have multitouch, too. Now multitouch is starting to have all these different meanings that all of us don't necessarily agree on.
Our definition of multitouch -- and we're starting to use the term true multitouch -- means an arbitrary number of finger points at the same time, or styluses, or any other object really. But there are other companies that take a more constrained view. Multi means more than one in English, right? So there's a two-touch system that is out there. And they're calling it multitouch. That's terrible because those are the kind of unsynchronized efforts by different players that can really cause a lot of harm for the rest of the industry.
Wired.com: So if we're just scratching the surface with multitouch, where do you see things going? Obviously we have one very popular multitouch device: the iPhone. But the technology is also migrating to the desktop, although multitouch capable PCs seem like awkward hybrid devices. They seem sort of gimmicky.
Han: One of the things that makes us a little different from the other players out there is that we're not trying to go right to the home. Because there's still so much unknown stuff in the multitouch space, we're trying to figure out how this technology is useful for things like productivity first -- how is it useful in specialized markets. And then we hopefully learn a lot there and see how it's applicable to the rest of the consumer market.
I actually think it's very important to start using these systems not as gimmicks or for doing things like, say, ordering drinks at a restaurant. Instead, let's see how useful this will be for helping collaboration in a creative company or for info visualization or presentation.
Wired.com: Like the "Magic Wall" you built for CNN.
Han: Right. But stuff where the technology really impacts a lot of people. Honestly, those are the application areas that we're learning the most from. How does a CAD designer manipulate multiple parts of a building or engine with only his hands? Those are the tough questions. That's why we chose to go after those markets for now. Plus, by the time we get to the consumer, we won't be experimenting anymore. We'll know that this is the way to do things.
Wired.com So, aside from building a new multitouch OS from the ground up, what else have you been working on? And long term, will multitouch simply give way to multi-gesture, as in Minority Report?
Han: One of the things we're working on that we're really excited about is the fact that our devices use pressure information. They actually know how hard you're pressing on them with each of your fingers. So there's a neat thing we're going to show off in a couple months where we're using the pressure information to actually help you manage those 2D objects on the screen. You'll be able to push things and slip things underneath each other. It's extremely elegant and it actually works on single touch too.
The answer to the second question is: I hate Minority Report. I hate pure gestural interfaces because they actually work very poorly. It's been proven. The human body really needs that kind of tactile feedback. However, combining it with touch, I do believe that for a future far out there, integrating the two together may actually be more successful that each one on its own.
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Dem Convention: Live Audio of Denver Police
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 1:20pm EDT by Kevin Poulsen
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Bored with the speeches? Scanner buffs set up a live feed of the Denver police dispatch frequency. You can almost taste the pepper spray.
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Reddit Expands Personalization Features With Skinning, Custom URLs
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 1:00pm EDT by Scott Gilbertson
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Social news site -- and Wired.com team member -- Reddit.com has rolled out some new customization features which allow users to build entire, personalized websites around its link sharing and commenting platform.
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5 Ways to Survive After Muxtape
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 11:25am EDT by Eliot Van Buskirk
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It's been a week since we started asking (and initially got the OK for) an interview with Justin Oullette, founder of the online mix sharing site, Muxtape, to find out about the site's still-cryptic RIAA-induced outage. We're hoping for the best, but just in case, here are five alternative services to help fill the gaping void in your soul where Muxtape used to be.
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Amazon Relies on Customers to Pimp the Kindle
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 11:15am EDT by Edmund Lee, Portfolio.com
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Subscribe to Portfolio magazineMike Pfeffer, a 26-year-old IT professional, was thinking about buying a Kindle, Amazon's pricey new digital book reader, but he wanted to look at the screen and touch the buttons before shelling out $359 for it.
So he went to the Amazon site and, through the See a Kindle in Your City message board, found a current Kindle owner in Manhattan who was willing to meet up. The woman worked in the building across the street from him and enthusiastically showed him everything from how the screen looked to how to turn pages on the device.
"I told her she should go work for Amazon," says Pfeffer, who wound up buying a Kindle the very next day.
To help sell its high-priced digital reading device, Amazon is relying more than ever on its tried-and-true sales strategies of word of mouth and customer reviews, and it appears to be working, although the total market for the device is questionable.
In August, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney projected that Amazon would sell 380,000 Kindles this year, up from an earlier estimate of 190,000, adding in a report that "Kindle is becoming the iPod of the book world" since its release in November 2007. (However, Mahaney's estimate that about 240,000 Kindles have been sold so far this year was, by his own admission, based on fuzzy numbers since Amazon hasn't released any sales numbers for the Kindle, and Amazon has reportedly sought to distance itself from those numbers.) Another analyst, Tim Bueneman from McAdams Wright Ragen, reported last week that several new versions of the device are in development, including a textbook model.
Amazon says its approach to selling the Kindle—no outside advertising and just relying on the Kindle community and stumping by Jeff Bezos to drive sales—is deliberate. The Kindle currently has over 4,200 customer reviews on the Amazon website, more than for any other top-selling item in Amazon's electronics category, and the vast majority are positive.
"Customer reviews of Kindle have been terrific—that tends to help sell the product," says Ian Freed, the Amazon executive in charge of the Kindle. More than three quarters of the reviewers give the Kindle at least four stars out of five, with many using words like fabulous, must-have, and changed my life.
The See a Kindle in Your City program, which was started in May, is just another extension of that idea. Freed and members of his group saw that people were especially curious when they saw one in public and decided to capitalize on the phenomenon.
"We tapped right into that, allowing customers to create a space where potential customers could physically meet, like at a coffee shop or a restaurant, and show each other Kindles," says Freed. Since the Kindle is an expensive new technology, selling the device at retail outlets where customers could see and touch it would seem to make sense, but Freed says that would diminish the community-based marketing that's propelling sales. But there may be another reason for See a Kindle in Your City—it could be that stores just don't want to carry the device.
"Kindle is actually a tough product to sell at retail," says Michael Gartenberg, vice president of mobile strategy at Jupitermedia. Sony's e-book reader, a similar product, may have set the tone. It was released earlier than the Kindle in September 2006 and uses the same E Ink technology for its screen—and doesn't seem to have sold particularly well as a retail product at either Sony's own stores or at Borders, although Sony, like Amazon, has not released any kind of sales figures for its device. "It's going to take a fair amount of evangelizing to explain the product, and the best people to evangelize are the users of the products," says Gartenberg of the Kindle.
Among the features that Kindle users have been most enthusiastic about is the wireless-downloading feature that differentiates it from Sony's reader, which requires a computer to first receive the books. Digital books can be delivered almost anywhere to users in less than a minute using Sprint's nationwide high-speed wireless network, fulfilling users' desires for instant gratification. Indeed, instead of cannibalizing sales of physical books, Freed says Amazon's statistics show that Kindle owners more than doubled their overall number of book purchases after getting the device, and that they still bought just as many physical books after getting one as they had before.
Those avid Kindle users have become effective proselytizers, often talking up the device with the zeal of religious converts. Citigroup's Mahaney raves about the ease of taking e-books with him when he travels, and one journalist (who wished to remain anonymous) says that he was initially skeptical about the whole notion of e-books and only got a review copy of it to trash it. "But I love it," he says. "I couldn't find anything bad about it. I use it all the time."
Though the idea of Kindle get-togethers may sound suspiciously like Tupperware parties, Gartenberg thinks Amazon's strategy is different.
"There's a difference between selling and evangelizing," he explains. "Amazon is not asking its customers to sell, it's asking its fans to sell. And they're not making any commission on those sales."
To be sure, Amazon's call to Kindle fans to push the product has had its detractors.
"What an outrageous request from Amazon!" one respondent wrote when Amazon introduced its See a Kindle in Your City message forum. "Take your time, go out in public with your Kindle, and help us sell more Kindles and make more money. I appreciate the offer to become an unpaid pimp for the Kindle, but no thanks, Amazon."
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China Reinstates iTunes Access -- Minus Songs for Tibet
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 9:20am EDT by Eliot Van Buskirk
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China has lifted its general block on Apple's iTunes store, now that authorities have apparently figured out how to block one specific album -- Songs for Tibet -- without cutting access to the rest of the store.
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Michelle Obama's Monday Speech Has Supporters, and Even a Republican, Atwitter
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 9:00am EDT by Sarah Lai Stirland
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Michelle Obama's speech on the opening night of the Democratic Convention on Monday meets mostly with praise on Twitter. A few see the event as too staged.
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Comic Books on the iPhone? No Thanks
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 8:18am EDT by Charlie Sorrel
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Wired.com's Gadget Lab looks at two applications for reading comics and graphic novels on Apple's iPhone, and finds both wanting.
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Facebook Cuts Off Scrabulous After Legal Complaint
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 4:02am EDT by Associated Press
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Facebook pulled scrabulous from its sites throughout most of the world over the weekend. It was already banished from the United States and Canada. Scrabulous remains available in India, where its developers live and where Mattel has filed a lawsuit claiming violations of intellectual property.
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O. J. Simpson and Wired's Photoshop Experiment
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Mathew Honan
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Wired's Photoshop Experiment authorName= Mathew Honan -->Would society have reacted differently to the O. J. Simpson trial had he been white? That was the question John Plunkett, Wired's founding creative codirector, wanted to raise with the September 1995 cover — a photo altered to make Simpson appear Caucasian. "At the time," Plunkett recalls, "Photoshopped imagery still had the capacity to surprise in a way that's difficult to imagine today."
The picture was widely mistaken for a critique of the infamous Time cover that darkened Simpson's face, but that wasn't Wired's intent. Rather, we hoped to make readers examine their assumptions about race.
To the staff's chagrin, the manipulated image caused little stir: "It struck us that technology had rendered that debate moot," Plunkett says. "All images are manufactured to one degree or another."
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Extreme X-Rays: Photographer Nick Veasey Takes You Inside ... Everything
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Lucas Graves
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Veasey is one of the few people who know how hard it is to get a crisp x-ray of a vacuum tube.1 For starters, the object has very little mass to absorb the radiation. And because the edges of the tube curve away from the film, the x-rays get scattered about, causing distortion. So Veasey shot this tube in a series of 10-second bursts. The succession of blasts builds up the energy necessary to capture the fine details, while their short duration keeps background radiation from clouding the picture.
Not many photographers need a linear accelerator. But Nick Veasey isn't your average shutterbug. Instead of tweaking f-stops and light boxes, he fine-tunes the speed and frequency of energy pulses emitted by a Russian-made tabletop particle turbocharger. That's because Veasey doesn't work with traditional cameras and film — he works with x-rays.
The 46-year-old Englishman estimates that over the past decade or so he's x-rayed more than 4,000 objects: flowers, football players, alarm clocks, tractors, even a 777. "I'm interested in how things work, and x-rays show what's happening under the surface," he says. "Plus, they look cool." To get his pictures, Veasey uses industrial x-ray machines typically employed in art restoration (to examine oil paintings), electronics manufacturing (to inspect circuit boards), and the military (to check tanks for stress fractures).
Working with high doses of radiation isn't always easy. To minimize a patient's radiation exposure, medical x-ray techs grab their blurry stills in a fraction of a second; Veasey needs to bombard his subjects with ionizing radiation for as long as 12 minutes to get crisp shots. So to capture human forms, Veasey works with either skeletons in rubber suits (normally used to train radiologists) or cadavers that have been donated to science. When a corpse becomes available, he has at most eight hours to pose and shoot before rigor mortis sets in.
Veasey's images have brought him fine-art commissions, big-name commercial clients, and a long list of professional honors. Now he also has a book-length collection called X-ray coming out in October. But Veasey says he's just getting started. He is currently building his own $200,000 studio with 35-inch-thick, lead-lined concrete walls. In there, he'll be able to see through anything.
img {display:block;} .f1 {float:left;margin:0px;width:550px;} .caption {font-family:arial;font-size:0.9em;color:#6487a9;padding:6px;background-color:#EFEFEF;line-height:1.3em;border-right-style:solid;border-right-width:18px;border-right-color:#6487a9;} To assemble this office building scene, which includes everything from a potted plant to steel elevator cogs, Veasey employed all three of his x-ray machines. Each item was captured individually (he used only one skeleton "model," which he set in different poses) and then composited onto a master image. It took 200 x-rays to create the entire scene, including 26 shots just to depict the skeletons shaking hands.
.nImg {display:block;width:630px;} .f1 {float:left;margin:0px;width:630px;} .caption {font-family:arial;font-size:0.9em;color:#6487a9;padding:6px;background-color:#EFEFEF;line-height:1.3em;border-right-style:solid;border-right-width:18px;border-right-color:#6487a9;} The largest x-ray film is only 14 inches wide, so to capture items bigger than that — like this pair of DJ decks measuring 4 feet across — Veasey stitches together several shots in Photoshop. That's also where he adds color to the black-and-white images for "technical grace." The challenge with electronics, Veasey says, is the way the chaotic interiors complicate the image.
.nImg {display:block;width:630px;} .f1 {float:left;margin:0px;width:630px;} .caption {font-family:arial;font-size:0.9em;color:#6487a9;padding:6px;background-color:#EFEFEF;line-height:1.3em;border-right-style:solid;border-right-width:18px;border-right-color:#6487a9;position:relative;top:-19px;}
Veasey borrowed a cargo x-ray scanner normally used to search trucks crossing into the US from Mexico to create this image. Once he scanned the vehicle, Veasey used Photoshop to populate it with skeletons and objects he shot separately (yes, he x-rayed a fedora). A hospital in White Plains, New York, commissioned the piece to celebrate the opening of its new orthopedic facility. The medical center's PR team had a promotional bus wrapped in the image drive around White Plains for nearly two months.
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Aug. 26, 1883: Krakatau Erupts, Changes World ... Again
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred
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1883: Krakatau volcano in the Dutch East Indies roars to life with a volley of ever-increasing explosions. It will culminate the next morning with the loudest explosion in human history.
Krakatau (aka Krakatoa) had been rumbling and sending up puffs of ash since May 1883. The eruption turned deadly on the afternoon of Aug. 26, with the first explosion coming at 1 p.m. A column of black ash soon rose 17 miles into the sky above the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra. Earth around and under the volcano continued to move, sending a tsunami out around 5 p.m. Others would follow.
Explosions continued at night, and lightning jumped between the ash column and the island. St. Elmo's Fire played on a ship's yardarms and rigging 25 miles away, ash fell on its deck and explosions deafened its crew.
Just after 10 a.m. on the morning of the Aug. 27 came the final, cataclysmic explosion with 26 times the power of the biggest H-bomb test. As Krakatau's underground magma chamber emptied, the sea rushed in, at first sucking ships toward it in an inbound current. Then the 2,600-foot-high volcanic cone collapsed into the center, leaving little of the island above water and sending out a truly colossal tsunami.
Hundred-foot tidal waves (up to 130 feet in some places) scoured nearby coasts, obliterating hundreds of villages and taking more than 36,000 lives. Much reduced, the sea wave swept past the Cape of Good Hope into the Atlantic Ocean and even caused a measurable ripple in the English Channel.
The noise was heard at Alice Springs in the middle of Australia. Four hours after the massive explosion, 3,000 miles away on the island of Rodrigues in the western Indian Ocean, it was recorded as the "roar of heavy guns." The sound was audible over 1/13 the surface of the globe, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. The shockwave registered on a barometer in London.
The final eruption also threw pumice an estimated 34 to 50 miles into the sky. Dust fell more than 3,000 miles away 10 days later. Islands of pumice floated on the oceans for months. Sulfur in the ash reacted with atmospheric ozone to scatter sunlight, causing vivid red sunsets around the world. Global temperatures dropped, and climate disruptions lasted five years.
The Dutch government and Britain's Royal Society both launched investigations into the natural history of the eruption and its effects. These helped lay the foundations of modern volcanology.
Krakatau also exploded violently in 1115, opening the Sunda Strait and eradicating the isthmus that once connected the huge islands of Java and Sumatra. A half-century after its 1883 explosion, Anak Krakatau, or "child of Krakatau," emerged from the sea and now grows 20 feet a year. Its work in shaping our planet may not be over.
Source: Volcano (Time-Life Books); others