SEATTLE, Washington -- What is a "gamer?" Ask ten different Penny Arcade Expo attendees and you'll get ten different answers. Around 50,000 videogame fans have descended on downtown Seattle for this weekend's Penny Arcade Expo, all looking for a different experience.

Some are here to show off their hand-crafted costumes of videogame characters. Some are here to compete in tournaments for thousands of dollars in cash prizes. Some are here to perform videogame music and some are looking to hook up with game publishers and score the job of their dreams. All are here to meet up with like-minded peers from all over the world.

Click through the gallery to see the zaniness of PAX so far. Also check out Wired.com's entire PAX 2008 coverage.

Left: Victor Carino poses for a photograph as Captain Falcon from the game F-Zero on the first day of the Penny Arcade Exposition at the Washington State Visitor and Convention Center in Seattle, Washington, Friday, Aug. 29, 2008.

Jack Waterman, left, and Paul Owens perform "chip tunes," using their Nintendo Game Boy systems as electronic instruments on the first day of the Penny Arcade Expo. Owens directed "Reformat the Planet," a documentary about chip tune artists who create original music using ancient videogame hardware, which is being screened at PAX.

You don't see as much cosplay on the PAX show floor as you do at events like Comic-Con, but there are still plenty of gamers in disguise. Kristopher Benson, left, of Seattle dressed up as Pit, aka Kid Icarus, from the game Super Smash Brothers Brawl. His friend, Hilary Kotzke of Seattle, is dressed as Yuffie -- she's a character from the Final Fantasy series of games, but this particular costume is how she appeared in the Disney/Final Fantasy crossover Kingdom Hearts. Cosplayers are a very specific sort.

The "Omegathon" is one of the most brutal videogame tournaments ever devised. A pool of twenty competitors is slowly whittled down to just two finalists, over six grueling rounds spanning the three days of the show. "Omeganaut" Jo Urbanksy of Litchfield, Ohio, awaits his fate while playing Boom Blox on the Nintendo Wii (during the final match of round two of the Omegathon competition). Urbansky's aim was true, and he moved on to the next round.

Dana White, left, of Seattle says she dressed up as a ninja because she is a ninja. Conversely, Megan Cummings, of Seattle, dressed up as a pirate because she wanted to fight the ninja. (Are they thinking about this game?)

Dungeon Master Sage Kurtz of Portland, Oregon, presides over a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Some gamers come to PAX just to game for three days, whether sprawled on a beanbag chair playing Nintendo DS and trading Pokemon with new friends, or holed up in the tabletop gaming rooms waging pen-and-paper campaigns.

The first two nights of PAX play host to the nerdiest concerts ever. The OneUps, a videogame music cover band, kicked off Friday night's show, which was headlined by Jonathan Coulton, a singer/songwriter who penned "Still Alive," the theme song to last year's cult hit game Portal. Pictured: OneUps guitarist Tim Yarbrough, left, and violinist Greg Kennedy.

Warmachine player Matt Birdsall of Arlington, Washington, rolls the dice while playing Hordes at the Privateer Press exhibit.

Tim Riggs of Spokane, Washington, competes in a Starcraft tournament. PAX's PC gaming room is the stuff of legend: It's sponsored by Intel, and Penny Arcade says it's one of the largest LANs in America. There are 330 computers that attendees can play on, and 300 spots where attendees can set up their own custom rigs. All of those spots had sold out before PAX even began.

As so many years of E3 proved, gamers will do almost anything for swag. To win a the newest version of Brothers in Arms, Kenny Repine of Tumwater, Washington, shaved his head and allowed "HELL" to be painted on his scalp.

There's no Dark Knight videogame that we know of, but that didn't stop Stephanie Lindner and Scott Falkner of Renton, Washington, from dressing up as Harley Quinn and the Joker.

Daniel Smolentsev, right, of Portland, Oregon, and teammate Robert Bosch of Gresham, Oregon, celebrate winning a match in a Team Fortress 2 tournament.

Freezepop vocalist Liz Enthusiasm performs. Freezepop isn't a videogame band per se, but member Kasson Crooker is a senior producer at Harmonix, the creators of Rock Band, and Freezepop's songs have appeared in many of the company's games.

BLACK ROCK CITY, Nevada -- From mind-bending art cars to crazy, tricked-out bicycles, there's more than one way to get around at Burning Man. And sometimes the journey's all in your head.

Left: Adrian Selkowitz rides shotgun as Anela Bence drives Boss Hog across the playa. They're just two of the five creators of the huge hog. There's a fine line between a good acid trip and a bad one, and Boss Hog snorts that line up for breakfast.

Bikes of all shapes and sizes grace the avenues at Burning Man. The amount of energy people waste trying to figure out why someone would build these bikes actually makes them less fuel-efficient than a Hummer.

Maya Peer peers through a kaleidoscope created by "Ivan Idea" while Micha Biterman takes a snapshot of her multiple images. The sign is both instructive and a cry for help.

A forklift is brought in to move The Beast from Camp Apocalypse after the monstrous machine's hydraulics failed, causing a mammoth roadblock in the streets of Black Rock City.

In accordance with Burning Man's archaically inhumane robot policy, The Beast will be put to sleep and thrown in a Dumpster out back, and its creators will be told that it was for the best.

A burner turns heads as she cruises through the streets of Black Rock City on a motorized skateboard. Not pictured are the thousands of angry 13-year-olds from whose fantasies she just escaped.

After a blazing day on the playa, burners Adam Al-Harbi (left) from California and Loren Geenberg (center) from New York come out to play in the Zorb, a hamster-wheel-type contraption powered by Logan Jackson and "Dr. Dave" from camp And Then There Is Only Love.

Shortly after this photo, the Zorb became what one onlooker described as a "vomit washing-machine."

It's love at fur sight: A playa moment between "friends."

Lighting the night on fire, Katrina McFerrin, a fire dancer from Albuquerque, New Mexico, shows off her talent for the Crazy Horse Camp. McFerrin later suffered minor burns when she remembered she hadn't set up her out-of-office auto-reply and lost concentration. (Just kidding.)

A spectacular, pedal-powered, fire-spouting vehicle operated by burners from Camp Department of Spontaneous Combustion blazes a trail up the esplanade. And they say cars are dangerous.

Burners dance to sounds spun by Doug LePre, aka Big Daddy Doug, at Big Puffy Yellow Camp beneath the "air star" by Jim McGuire. Four 50-watt bulbs and helium create the full-moon effect, but there can be no explanation for the mumu.

What it's used for: Revealing damage deep inside city pipes

You go, you flush: out of sight, out of mind. Not for city maintenance crews. With 850 billion gallons of sewer and storm water leaking into watersheds around the country every year, the Environmental Protection Agency is cracking down on cracked pipes. And the SuperVision 250 is riding that great, stinky wave of demand. Placed in pipes 10 to 72 inches in diameter, this little guy will track down splits, debris, corrosion, and breaks. Operators can watch the video feed from the 10X optical-zoom autofocus camera and use a joystick to pan and tilt. A ring of high-intensity, shadowless LEDs illuminates the scene; dual lasers help size up defects. A sapphire window shields the camera lens, while hardened stainless steel parts protect the crawler from the harsh sewer environment. And thanks to an ultrathin, Kevlar-reinforced tether (sorry, no wireless), the bot can crawl up to 1,640 feet through even heavily obstructed pipes. Just make sure to hose it off when it comes back.

Samsung LN52A750
$3,700, samsung.com
This 52-inch Samsung chewed up stuttering 60-Hz video and spit out glass-smooth motion, leaving few visual artifacts. It sailed through most of our processing challenges, proving especially effective at recombining interlaced video. The set also delivered vibrant color — if a bit more saturated, and thus less natural, than the Sony's — after only minor calibration tweaks, which Samsung's simple menus made painless. The subtle, red-hued "touch of color" bezel imparts a reserved style — think Armani, not Elton John.
Wired: InfoLink system displays news, weather, and RSS feeds via Ethernet connection. Side-mounted HDMI/USB ports make for easy gaming and photo viewing. Eight HD and three standard-def inputs.
Tired: Room lighting + glossy screen = disco reflections. Only one color option, and it might not work for everyone.

Sony Bravia KDL-46W4100
$2,400, sonystyle.com
We loved the color right out of this 46-incher's box, and the video processors aced our tests, removing jaggies and scrubbing noise — even from standard-def sources — with little loss of detail. Plus, the motion enhancer smoothed out movement while introducing fewer visual artifacts than any other TV in this batch. (Purists can turn it off for a true filmlike experience.) One gripe: With great features come overstuffed menus. Time to RTFM.
Wired: Elegant silver and black bezel. Tons of video inputs — seven HD and five standard-def — plus distinct color profiles for each. Add-on lets you watch select clips via the Net.
Tired: Internet add-on is $300! Attention Sony: YouTube is free; you can't charge three bills for an inferior version. PS3-style menus will appeal to gamers but may confuse others.

Sharp Aquos LC-65SE94U
$8,500, sharpusa.com
This 65-inch monster "five-ups" the previous standard for a large LCD set, but you'll pay for bragging rights. Thankfully, that price buys more than just 5 extra inches of screen. The set produced very dark blacks and a picture bright enough to see even in strong sunlight. But it's time to join the 21st century with your interface, Sharp; we're running out of Atari jokes.
Wired: Trumps your neighbor's 60-incher and cranks out enough lumens to let you watch football in the backyard ... just to rub it in. Great-looking narrow-bezel case — important when your TV takes up half a wall. Excellent default picture quality means you can have green Astroturf without taking a course in color calibration.
Tired: No bonus features like USB pictures and music. The array of tiny, identical buttons on the remote probably spells "annoying" in braille.

LG Scarlet 47LG60
$2,500, lge.com
The bulky, shiny case and visible-from-space power button mark a bold departure from most manufacturers' minimalist styling. And while LG's TruMotion removes stutter, we saw more artifacts than on other LCDs we tested. Default settings produced harsh, oversaturated color — correctable using the bevy of adjustment options but disappointing for a TV of this price.
Wired: Straightforward menus simplify navigation and configuration. Separate color adjustment for each input. This 47-inch set boasts one of the few alternatives to picture-frame bezels that isn't designed for a 14-year-old Japanese girl (cough cough, Hannspree, cough).
Tired: You'll need expert help — or a lot of time — to dial in good color. No S-video jacks and only one composite input, so forget most of your non-HD sources.

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Bob Rice has had many careers. He was an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, a partner at law firm Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy, C.E.O. of a tech startup, and now runs merchant bank Tangent Capital, which he founded in 2005.

In his spare time, Rice managed to write Three Moves Ahead: What Chess Can Teach You About Business, one of the more interesting business reads to come down the pike this year, in which he uses the tried-and-true strategies of chess for insight into running a business.

Today, he's squeezing in some blogging. One day. One place: Portfolio.com.

Ah, those Sand Hill Road visionaries, the venture capital guys who finance the future and dictate the trends. It must be fun out there, getting the first glimpses of tomorrow. But suddenly there's a wonderful irony at work: That very future is destroying their industry.

Newspapers are rife with stories about the decline of big V.C. investments, pointing to the trend as a sign of a more conservative investment environment. But I don't think that's really the issue.

Instead, something much more profound is going on: The basic V.C. model is broken. And new technology is driving a much more efficient system for capital allocation to startups.

In fact, technology is largely at fault both for what's wrong with the V.C. world and for what's replacing it. The problem with the industry is this--it's just too cheap to start new companies these days.

Virtual offices allow talent to gather from around the country to work on a new idea without having to quit full-time jobs too early. Servers, computers, and bandwidth are essentially free, and a robust telecommunications platform can be rented for a few tens of dollars a month. Software development can be outsourced without taking on big fixed costs. There are countless programs to manage customer relations, mine contacts, handle the books, and plan and monitor projects. And of course, the internet has reduced the costs of finding customers and testing new concepts to nearly nothing.

Okay, so what? Well, the classic V.C.'s simply have too much money under management, and too expensive a talent pool, to waste time looking at investing anything less than $10 million in a project. Meantime, no entrepreneur wants to give up equity by taking in more money than he absolutely needs. So, when it only costs a few million to get a serious new company off the ground, how can the V.C.'s really play? They have to find places to make gigantic gambles, usually overpaying because the other big V.C.'s are also trying to invest in the few really big-dollar opportunities out there. It has become a system doomed to failure.

The flip side of the story is the rise of angel investor groups. These investment consortiums have always been ideally positioned to provide $500,000 to $5 million equity injections; but until recently, that wasn't enough to get a serious effort off the ground. More fundamentally, however, they have historically not been terribly investor-friendly, largely because the individual members have other occupations.

The individual members didn't work in the same place or even at the same times, so angels were terribly inefficient at evaluating transactions, sharing information, and negotiating and documenting deals.

Those days are over, thanks to software developed by David Rose, founder of the New York Angels (yes, I belong). Angelsoft is a wonderful collaboration platform that manages deal flow, helps match talent and expertise to projects, provides easy-to-use data rooms for potential investors, and generally drives the investment process. It combines project management and social networking in a way that, for the first time, makes the angel process efficient for both the company seeking capital and the potential investors.

The big news now is that, in a period of just a couple of years, over 400 angel groups around the globe have standardized on the platform. That means, of course, that they will also be able to share deals between themselves, vastly expanding the capital and expertise available for any given project.

And entrepreneurs can now create one submission to get access, literally, to a world of sophisticated, organized investors. It sounds like a revolution to me. Check it out at the group's website.

And so, once again, technology is driving a paradigm shift. But this time, it's France in 1789: The progenitors of change are becoming the victims.

Although we'd never condone breaking the law with these five gadgets, we can't deny our morbid fascination with them. Just remember: If misused, these gizmos could get you slapped with a set of handcuffs along with a criminal record.

1. The WASP Knife

A vicious double-whammy of sharpened steel and freezing gas menaces watermelons everywhere.

Designed to quickly dispatch marauding undersea predators, this 5.25-inch hunting/tactical blade conceals a catastrophic one-two punch. After you shank say, a Great White Shark, a flick of a button injects the beast with an 800-psi blast of compressed air. This basketball-sized sphere of freezing gas decimates the interior of whatever it's injected into; whatever's left simply floats to the surface. It works great on watermelons, too.

Why It'd Get You Arrested:

Stabbing random objects on dry land (and then making them explode) is the fast track to a vandalism charge. Turning the WASP Knife on an innocent creature for non-defense purposes, though? Depending on the state, you're looking at aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, animal cruelty or even the rarely used "mayhem" charge.

2. Sonar II Burner

The Sonar II can burn through garbage bags and retinas with equal aplomb.

Look, everyone wants a lightsaber. But we can't have them because: A) midi-chlorians don't exist and, B) law enforcement agencies are already less-than-enthused over high-power handheld lasers. Consider for a moment, Wicked Lasers' Sonar II Burner. Essentially a more powerful version of the lasers found in Blu-ray players, this six-inch tool doesn't have to compensate for anything; it can light matches, burn holes through paper and melt plastic.

Why It'd Get You Arrested:

Where to begin? At 60mW, the Sonar II is totally capable of starting fires (arson), burning retinas (assault) and disorienting airline pilots (Gitmo).

3. EMT Paintball Sentry Turret

Fires 30 rounds per second. Fully automated. Illegal in virtually all forms of competitive paintball.

May the Flying Spaghetti Monster's noodley appendage help the poor schmoe who ends up in the cross hairs of the Sentry Turret. This remote-controlled, tripod-mounted paintball cannon unleashes oil-based vengeance at 30 rounds per second on full-auto. And all you paint-balling pros take note: The EMT is not some glorified sloppy-shot Brass Eagle. Integrated-vibration dampeners plus rotation/tilt mechanisms make rounds fired from this gadget highly accurate.

Why It'd Get You Arrested:

With the amount of paint the Sentry is capable of unloading, you'd definitely be facing accusations of assault, disturbing the peace and any other charges your welt-covered victims care to press.

4. Fiber Laser Marking System

It may not look menacing, but this portable laser can sear images into rock, glass and metal.

If you're going to deface public property, you might as well get an assist from technology. Laser Photonic's unintentional contribution to this practice is the "Handheld Fiber Laser Marking System." This portable, high-power laser was originally designed for etching graphics into industrial surfaces like metal, glass and stone. Sure, it lacks the DIY charm of spray paint. But it makes up for this by running off a car battery, and being able to etch almost any graphic you can load on a multimedia card.

Why It'd Get You Arrested:

Tagging public property with such creativity and zeal is likely to bump up the charge. A number of states reserve the right to boost vandalism charges to the felonious level if the damage exceeds $400, is especially malicious or is performed by a repeat offender.

5. Lil' Buttie LB110

Don’t let the name fool you; this gadget is not your friend … if you get caught illegally tapping a phone line with it.

You don't have to work for the NSA to listen to other people's phone calls. A nifty lineman's handset like the Lil' Buttie LB110 is enough to do the trick. This cheap, easy-to-find gadget is the cornerstone of tapping a phone line. All it really takes is hooking the handset's alligator clamps to a set of exposed telephone wires and syncing up the handset. Once you're on the line, you can snoop on conversations, record them or even dial out at your leisure.

Why It'd Get You Arrested:

Despite what you may think, owning a "butt set" isn't illegal. Don't be fooled though -- unless you're using it for running diagnostics on your own phone line, someone's bound to drop the hammer. Getting caught using (or even installing) an unauthorized line is the express lane to a felonious wiretapping charge, and/or a lifetime of government scrutiny. Trust us on this one.

Astronaut Gordon Cooper, orbiting the Earth with Pete Conrad in Gemini 5, hooked up by radiotelephone with an old pal, astronaut-turned-aquanaut Scott Carpenter, who was living and working 205 feet beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean near La Jolla, California, aboard Sealab II.

The two men had known each other since 1959, when they were among the seven pilots chosen by NASA to be America's first Project Mercury astronauts. Carpenter, a former Navy pilot, had already been in space, the solo astronaut on a mistake-plagued, three-orbit flight aboard Aurora 7 that resulted in his being effectively grounded.

He was on leave from the space agency when he joined the Navy's Sealab II project as training officer. Carpenter eventually resigned from NASA in 1967. He retired from the Navy in 1969.

Cooper and Conrad, meanwhile, were nearing the end of an eight-day orbital mission to test human endurance in space. Eight days was recognized as the time needed to travel to the moon and back. (Five days was the longest Soviet space flight before then, and the American record was four days. By years' end, American astronauts would complete a 14-day mission in space.)

The radio hookup was partly a gimmick, to take advantage of Carpenter's astronaut status to publicize the Sealab II project. But it was also a method of testing the effectiveness of an underwater electronics lab installed aboard the submersible.

Gemini 5 was not the only long-distance call made from Sealab II. The Navy aquanauts also spoke with President Johnson at the White House and with Jacques Cousteau's Conshelf 3 team, French colleagues conducting a similar underwater-habitat test off Cap Ferrat in the Mediterranean Sea.

Following their chat with Carpenter, Cooper and Conrad readied Gemini 5 for its return to Earth and splashed down in the very same Pacific Ocean later that day.

Thirty years later, in 1995, Carpenter recreated his seabed-to-space call, chatting with astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavor while staying at Jules' Undersea Lodge off Key Largo, Florida.

Source: Various

BLACK ROCK CITY, Nevada -- Wild rides, fireworks and letting it all hang out. That's the updated American dream at Burning Man 2008.

The annual desert gathering always celebrates that most-American ideal: freedom. Freedom to ride a giant red, white and blue tricycle across the playa; freedom to blow your mind however you want; freedom to traipse around wearing nothing but body paint.

That kind of ingrained whimsy, rather than politics, seems to be the point of this year's American Dream art theme at Burning Man. "What has America achieved that you admire?" is the event's official statement. "What has it done or failed to do that fills you with dismay? What is laudable? What is ludicrous?"

Groovy, man. Let's get it on.

Left: Red, white and blue abounds at the festival this year.

Red, white and blue abounds at the festival this year.

A stagecoach rolls up the esplanade on Tuesday evening.

Duane Flatmo from Eureka, California, steers his fire-breathing dragon around the esplanade Tuesday.

After hunkering down during Monday's sandstorm, burners break out their colorful costumes Tuesday -- including some that are just painted on. Robin Bowles, right, and her friend Cowboy Curtis chill on the playa on a "fuzzy bunny." The Man can be seen far off in the distance on the left.

A group of burners break out a desert "boat" to parade across the playa.

Black Rock City is humming Thursday.

Lamp Lighters walk down the esplanade Tuesday.

A panel van decked out with a lit-up Golden Gate Bridge makes its way across the sand Tuesday.

Tutu-wearing burner Diana Zanelli of Texas delights in the swirl of lights from inside artist Crispell Wagner's "modern version of the dream machine," an interactive piece of light art.

Home is where the art is at Burning Man.

The Man glows with neon as Helen Corley from San Ramon, California, twirls her flow lights below the festival's namesake icon in Black Rock City.

A giant duck lights up the night Tuesday as it rolls across the dusty desert floor.

Wired: What was the inspiration for Mr. Impossible?

Starck: The speed of evolution of our civilization and the dematerialization that rules all our production. Take the computer: It was the size of a room, then a briefcase. Now it's a credit card. You cannot dematerialize a chair completely, because you must continue to sit on it. But you can make it invisible. That's why I made the Mr. Impossible with a double shell — it's basically made of air.

Wired: Recently, you have begun to look at the environmental impact of your designs. How does a plastic chair fit in?

Starck: The stupidity of the ecological movement is that people kill trees for wood. It's ridiculous. The best ecological strategy is to make products of a very high creative quality, so you can keep them for three generations. I prefer to make a very good chair in the best polycarbonate than make any shit in wood that will be in the trash one year later.

Wired: Why not use recycled plastic?

Starck: It's a little joke of a material. You can do almost nothing with it. And I also refuse bioplastic, which comes from something that people can eat. Scientists agree that we have a real food problem, a famine approaching. It's a crime against humanity to take something you can eat and make a chair — or use it as gas for your SUV.

Wired: How do you reconcile those principles with your position as creative director for Virgin Galactic?

Starck: Every project should fit the big image of evolution. You can consider Virgin Galactic as something only for rich people, but you can also analyze the incredible help that it will give us. The exploration of space is a vital part of our evolution. We don't have any future if we don't go into space. This world will explode in 4 billion years. We have time, but not so much.

But he's not suggesting a new Manhattan Project. "Twelve guys and gals going off to Los Alamos won't solve this problem," Friedman says. "We need 100,000 people in 100,000 garages trying 100,000 things — in the hope that five of them break through."

Our current efforts are not only inadequate, they're hopelessly haphazard and piecemeal. Friedman argues it'll take a coordinated, top-to-bottom approach, from the White House to corporations to consumers. "Without a systems approach, what do you end up with?" he asks. "Corn ethanol in Iowa."

The New York Times columnist, who keeps up a punishing travel schedule, is just back from the Middle East and London. "If you don't go, you don't know," he says. Such wanderings provided the material for his 2005 best seller, The World Is Flat. Now he has added two new terms to his diagnosis of global ills: the intertwined problems of climate change and population growth — "too many carbon copies," as he puts it.

In this new world, governments and companies that take the lead will find themselves with the single most valuable competitive advantage of our time.

To illustrate, Friedman tells the story of a Marine Corps general in Iraq who requested solar panels to power his bases. Asked why, he explained that he wanted to win his region by "out-greening al Qaeda." Instead of trucking in gas from Kuwait at $20 a gallon — money that fuels oppressive petro-dictatorships — in convoys that are vulnerable to roadside bombs, why not beat the insurgents by taking away their targets and their funding?

Coming out months before the presidential election, Crowded is sure to bigfoot its way into the campaign. "McCain and Obama come from the right side of this debate," Friedman says. "They have the right instincts, but neither is quite there yet. They haven't yet thought it through fully." The battle over "green," he believes, will define the early 21st century just as the battle over "red" (Communism) defined the last half of the 20th.

Pontoon bridges have been around since ancient times. Lash some boats together side-by-side in a stream or river, put some planks across them, and you've got a serviceable bridge. Armies love 'em because they can be deployed quickly so troops and equipment can be deployed quickly.

For a large, permanent bridge, the concept is scalable, but not easily. However, if you need to bridge a deep body of water that has a soft bed, a more conventional design might not be feasible. That's what faced Washington state engineers who set out to bridge Lake Washington. And they'd done it before, with the shorter Lake Washington Floating Bridge, opened in 1940. (A few miles south of the Evergreen Point bridge, it now carries the eastbound lanes of I-90.)

Starting in August 1960, construction crews ashore built 33 hollow, concrete boxes, each 15- or 16-feet high and about the length of a football field. These huge pontoons were floated and then towed into position, where they were linked by thick steel cables to anchors to hold them in place. The 62 anchors, buried deep in the lake bed, weigh about 77 tons each. Building the bridge cost a relatively modest $21 million ($154 million in today's money).

The bridge has a retractable drawspan in the middle that is raised to protect the structure from strong winds. But at 7,578 feet, the floating portion is essentially a 1.42-mile barge with a road on top of it.

That road is state Route 520, which links Seattle with Bellevue and Redmond, where a somewhat well-known software company later made its headquarters.

Seattle's growth, of which the tech boom is no small part, has put a huge load on the bridge. Designed to carry 65,000 vehicles a day, it now carries 115,000. That wear and tear, coupled with storm damage, has led to costly repairs.

Crews have patched more than 30,000 linear feet of cracks in the concrete pontoons since a huge storm on the day President Clinton was inaugurated in 1993. The drawbridge section got stuck in the open position for a while in March 1999.

The Washington State Department of Transportation says if the bridge were to sink, the average commute between Seattle and Redmond would increase from its current 33 minutes to 55. WSDOT has determined that retrofitting the Evergreen Point Bridge to current seismic and safety standards would be more expensive than building a new one.

So, it plans to construct a new floating bridge just north of the current one, starting next year. The new Evergreen Point bridge would have six lanes (plus a bike and pedestrian path) instead of four, cost about $4 billion, and open in 2014.

Perhaps they'll call it Evergreen 2.0, or Evergreen 2-Pont-0.

Source: Various

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Will bloodmobiles soon be a thing of the past, like vacuum-tube televisions and glass milk bottles delivered daily?

More important: Will the use of embryonic stem cells, which became a heated issue during the 2004 presidential election, finally produce a breakout product? One that will squelch the controversy for all but a few die-hards who still prefer their milk in glass bottles?

Researchers at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts, announced the breakthrough a few days ago. Working with scientists from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and the University of Chicago, A.C.T.'s team says it has developed a method for making potentially unlimited and scalable supplies of synthetic blood from embryonic stem cells.

The findings are published in Blood, a scientific journal. A.C.T.'s chief scientific officer Robert Lanza led the team.

If the claim holds up to scrutiny, it would be a huge boon for humankind, which until now has had to collectively open its veins to provide tons of this basic stuff of life for people who need extra blood because of injuries, surgeries or disease.

The discovery also would remove the danger of blood being tainted by pathogens that cause hepatitis, H.I.V. and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, among other viruses and bacteria.

But will this promise become reality?

Advanced Cell Technology has made incredible claims before. Under recently departed C.E.O. Michael West—whom some critics compared with the circus promoter P.T. Barnum—the company routinely asserted that stem-cell therapies were likely to reverse the aging process and grow replacement body parts, while most scientists were talking a more cautious line.

The company was the first to clone an endangered species, an Asian bovine called a gaur, which died soon after—possibly from causes unrelated to the cloning. A.C.T. also claimed it had cloned the first human embryo, attracting worldwide attention, though the embryos grew to only a few cells in size.

Some blame the company's over-enthusiasm for playing into the hands of stem-cell opponents in the Bush administration and elsewhere who were bent on squelching this new therapy. President Bush severely restricted federal funding for stem-cell research in 2001—restrictions that remain today, and are likely to until the next administration takes office.

Under Lanza, the company may not have fulfilled all of the promises made by West, but it has produced a string of solid discoveries and observations—though none have proved to be commercially viable. Most recently, Lanza's team has also induced stem cells to grow into retinal cells in eyes.

Creating synthetic blood has proved difficult; decades of efforts have so far been in vain. Several potential products are being tested in human clinical trials, most of them focusing on the critical function that blood plays in transporting oxygen. Other products, however, have been abandoned when they either didn't work, or proved to have dangerous or deadly side effects.

Blood created by stem cells is very similar to the real thing, and may avoid the pitfalls with other, more artificial techniques. If further tests confirm A.C.T.'s discovery—and, critically, show that the process is scalable and affordable—stem-cell blood may make the company more attractive to investors as it desperately seeks cash to carry on.

In July, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that A.C.T. had $17 million in current liabilities, but only $1 million in cash and other current assets, the Boston Globe reported. A.C.T.'s stock has been trading at 6 cents per share, down from $8 per share three years ago.

It's hard to know what the new techniques will cost once scaled up, or what revenues the discovery will bring in; Lanza says that he expects the company to know within two years if the processes will work.

Independent scientists are hopeful that the discovery will pan out. "The problem with relying on donated blood is that there are always shortages," Professor Alex Medvinsky, a blood stem-cell expert at the University of Edinburgh, told the Times of London. "The ability to generate red blood cells in very large numbers would be a very big thing."

Fairbanks' remote location and sub-Arctic climate makes supplying reliable power to the city of 32,000 difficult. In deep winter, the temperature in Fairbanks is almost constantly subzero, dropping as low as minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit The situation is complicated by the fact that Alaska isn't connected to the power grid that keeps the lower 48 humming.

As a result, Fairbanks used to experience a serious, "cascading" blackout every two or three years, along with a number of smaller failures every month. Since the mountain couldn't come to Muhammad, it was necessary to devise another source of reliable local power.

The answer turned out to be a massive battery, the largest ever built, that now sits in a warehouse on the outskirts of Fairbanks. According to ABB Communications Services, the power-components specialist that built it, the battery can generate up to 40 megawatts of power -- enough to keep 12,000 people supplied with electricity -- for seven minutes. That's long enough to fire up the city's backup diesel generators and restore the power supply.

The battery energy-storage system, or BESS, which cost $35 million to build, contains 13,760 nickel-cadmium cells weighing a total of 1,400 tons and covering more than 10,000 square feet.

BESS is controlled by a Pentium PC-based platform programmed to provide all the essential services, including a complicated temperature-control system designed to withstand the rigors of the Alaskan winter.

In its first two years of operation, BESS reportedly prevented at least 81 power failures, an average of more than three per month. In a hostile environment like the area around Fairbanks, that can mean the difference between life and death.

Source: Various

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.

- - -

Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a telecommunicator, a telecommuter and a teleconverter.

"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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Mike 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."

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."

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.

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

PEBBLE BEACH, California -- Nowhere is the old saying "there's nothing new under the sun" more true than in the auto industry, where "innovations" often are updated takes on old ideas. From the wind-cheating aerodynamics that make today's cars more efficient to the navigation systems that fill every dashboard, it's all been done before -- usually in a car that represented some designer's vision of the future.

Wired.com takes a walk through the greens at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance to bring you a look at some cars of futures past that influenced that new hunk of metal currently sitting in your driveway.

Left:

1956 Buick Centurion

You think the backup camera on your Tahoe makes it modern? Think again. This concept car had one when General Motors rolled it out 52 years ago. It also sported a bubble-shaped cockpit inspired by jetfighters and a body made of lightweight fiberglass -- something else your Tahoe could use.

The three-wheeled Benz Velo was the first commercially available motorcar when it went on sale in 1886. Eight years later, Karl Benz released his update of the revolutionary design -- four wheels! It was the first standard-configuration car to tear up the road, and it set the standard just about everyone's followed since.

Constructed out of lightweight aluminum and magnesium -- two materials now common in high-performance cars -- and sporting the first wraparound windshield, the LeSabre was years ahead of its time. Despite the exotic materials and futuristic design, it was practical. Design demigod Harley J. Earl not only oversaw its design, he drove it to work every day.

Fifty years later and this car is still fully loaded with high-tech gadgetry. Not only does it sport a whopping seven fins, it offers ultrasonic keyless entry and a navigation system. Top it off with a control stick in place of a steering wheel and it's still ahead of its time.

This concept car was the first and only automobile made entirely of ultra-lightweight -- and ultra-expensive -- titanium. It had a 200-horsepower gas turbine engine and air conditioning, which was a big deal in 1956. Yeah, it's ugly as sin, but so was the Pontiac Aztek.

This baby's a one-of-a-kind, built to be aerodynamic and fast. Though it had a normal engine when it debuted at the Turin Auto Show in 1955, the current owner followed Ghia's original plan and dropped in a gas turbine when he restored it. Not that the Ghia needs an engine at all -- she looks fast sitting still.

The first Porsche designed by company founder Ferdinand “Ferry” Porsche may be one of the most influential cars in history. Not only did it influence the lines of the original Beetle and 911-series cars, but current iterations -- up to and including the amazing 911 GT3 RS -- can trace their lineage back to the 356.

Cheetahs were built around the simple idea of stuffing powerful Corvette engines into lightweight cars to produce something faster than the Shelby Cobras. It worked. This particular car hit 215 mph at Daytona Speedway. The state-of-the-art Corvette ZR1 can "only" muster 205.

This one's all about the engine: a 27-liter Rolls Royce V12 out of a WWII-era British Spitfire airplane. It produces 1,600 horsepower -- almost 500 more than the SSC Ultimate Aero, the world's fastest production car -- and has hit 150 mph in third gear. No one's tried seeing what she'll do in fourth.

This steam-powered racer, lovingly referred to as "Old Number 16," was the first American car to win an international race, the 1906 Vanderbuilt Cup. Tire failures foiled later attempts and the car was retired to the Henry Ford Museum, where it still resides, unrestored and perfectly operational. No one's brought steam power back, but with the push toward alternative fuels, who knows?

Perhaps no car is more widely cited as an influence by car designers, and understandably so: The Miura is beautiful. Its cutting-edge design placed the engine behind the driver and in front of the axle, something widely used in racing at the time but almost unheard of in road cars. Just about every exotic supercar on the road today uses the same layout.

Before he started his own company, Ferdinand Porsche designed cars for other marques, creating rides like this Mercedes drop-top. This particular model is even more special, having been modified by custom coachbuilder Armbruster. Think of it as an old-time SLK 55 that took a trip through Rhys Millen’s shop.

The Countach epitomized the supercar through much of the 1980s and was idolized by countless teenage boys who hung posters of it on their bedroom walls. Everything about the Countach was over the top, but with its angular lines, gun-slit windows and scissor doors, it looked like a car straight out of the future. You know what? It still does.

Long before we had any real understanding of aerodynamics, the Albany Coachwork Company was doing its best to build custom streamlined autos. This beaut', based on a 1927 Lancia Lambda body, is one of three attempts at a wind-cheating design. It sports an airspeed indicator, which somehow seems cooler than a speedometer.

The four-day 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver this week is not just a political event -- it's a celebration of social media, high-definition video and really kick-ass internet connectivity.

"This is America's convention, and we're using new technology this time, like text messaging and Google and YouTube, to really break down these walls to make this [convention] more open and interactive," says Brook Colangelo, the DNCC's director of technology.

This year's convention sees multiple firsts in technological innovations for the quadrennial political party gathering. For starters, the Democratic National Convention Committee is providing bloggers (and floor delegates) with "video-upload booths" where they can upload their footage to YouTube or any other online-video platform.

The DNC is using text messaging and streaming video to keep delegates (and those following along at home) up to date.

Separately, an alliance of groups, including progressive group blog the DailyKos, ProgressNow and the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, are hosting and sponsoring an 8,000-square-foot "bloggers tent," where attending bloggers, vloggers and podcasters will have a place to work with a high-bandwidth internet connection.

Here's a look at some of the tech inside the Pepsi Convention Center, where the event is taking place.

The convention committee hired top talent to design its futuristic-looking stage: Designer Bruce Rodgers came up with the idea for the Democrats' flashy podium. Rodgers' other clients include Madonna, Mötley Crüe, the Dave Matthews Band and the National Football League. The DNC convention setup features 8,000 square feet of video-projection surfaces, and that includes three 103-inch Panasonic LCD HD screens, the largest of their kind.

The screens will project daily themes of the convention and other relevant pictures as events unfold.

The DNCC says that more than 50 technicians and 70 local stagehands have worked more than 25,000 hours to create the 70-foot-wide and 60-feet-high stage and podium.

Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark is blogging and vlogging about the Democratic National Convention for his personal blog cnewmark.com, Reuters and The Huffington Post. He's one of more than 120 bloggers who have been credentialed to "cover" the convention.

On Monday, Newmark worked in The Big Tent, an 8,000-square-foot space for bloggers. His gear: A Lenovo ThinkPad x300, an iPhone 3G, a Flip Video, a Nokia n95, a Nikon P80 and a pedometer.

He plans on streaming and shooting video during the convention, as well as writing, and he has plans to attend tech round tables taking place at the convention, as well as several parties with celebrities.

"I've never been to a convention, and I've never done anything political before," he says.

Newmark is a surrogate for Obama and speaks about technology issues.

CNN chief national correspondent John King, at the "Mini Magic Wall." The touchscreen is a smaller version of the "Magic Wall" that CNN has used in election coverage. It is produced by Perceptive Pixel, a company founded by multitouch pioneer Jeff Han.

Josh Braun, CNN Producer of New Media, works on a map of the convention floor, which will be geo-referenced to real-time voting data. His computer is connected to the nearby giant touchscreen used by John King.

CNN uses a "Polecam" system on one corner of the floor for correspondent Candy Crowley. The monitor and controller at the opposite end of the pole holding the camera are shown here.

A state-delegation voting kiosk with internet connectivity for bloggers is shown here. There are a total of 56 of these kiosks in the convention hall. The foreground computer is used to tally delegate votes. The monitor at right is for those who are sight- or hearing-impaired. A phone is on each side of the voting computer: one connected to Obama for America and one to the DNC secretary, both used to coordinate issues on the floor. The connection is hardwired so as not to compete with RF devices (such as video cameras) from the news media. The yellow cable gives internet access to bloggers.

In background is the DNC network hardware and in foreground is an OC-192 circuit, providing 10 Gbps of bandwidth -- enough, convention organizers say, to connect 220,000 homes to the internet.

With 56 blogging kiosks, a massive OC-192 internet connection, blogger-friendly amenities, streaming video and 8,000 square feet for bloggers nearby, the Pepsi Center is about to host the most-blogged event ever.

DNC Committee technology director Brook Colangelo holds a cable at a state-delegation voting kiosk. The connection is hardwired so as not to compete with RF devices (such as video cameras) from the news media -- plus, it will provide a more reliable connection than WiFi could in an environment where so many people want internet access.

Joe Silber and Lysandra Nelson from San Francisco mug at the podium for a photo op. Behind them are three Panasonic 103-inch HDTV displays; 8,000 square feet of video projection area is behind that.

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The type of vehicles America makes best are, unfortunately, not the type of vehicles that people really want anymore. Nobody builds better trucks than the Americans do. Not even the Japanese build as good a truck as the Ford F-150 or the Chevy Silverado. It's the same with performance cars. The Corvette Z06 has 505 horsepower, comes with a big warranty, and can hit 200 miles per hour. It weighs almost exactly the same as a half-million-dollar Porsche Carrera GT and gets higher mileage—26 miles per gallon.

Where we seem to lose it is in the low-bucks econocar. I used to be able to identify any American car from 25 yards. Now they all have this jellybean look. It’s a mystery to me, because the one thing we used to do better than anybody else was build cheap, extremely high-quality cars. We did it for decades, all the way back to the beginning of the industry. There was no better car for the money than the Model T. It was a basic car, but it used the finest materials available. There are still almost a million of them out there.

When you get into a high-priced, well-made American car today and the key is in the ignition, you hear a melodic bong, bong. But when you get in a cheap American car, like a rental, and the key is left in, it goes plink, plink, plink. It’s just horrible. Every time you use the turn signal, it's like breaking a chicken leg. In order to make the more expensive car more appealing, U.S. companies feel as though they have to dumb down the cheaper car.

I believe that, all things being equal, Americans will buy American. It just has to be as good as the competition; it doesn’t have to be better. The classic example is Harley-Davidson. Throughout the '70s, the motorcycle maker had huge quality-control problems. Then Harley-Davidson said, "Look, let's take our time. Let's build fewer bikes. Let’s build them properly, so they don’t leak oil and they’ll run forever." Harley-Davidson won back the market share it had lost, and it continues to dominate today. Even though the bikes might not be technically superior, they're bulletproof and they're American. People will buy American if given the chance.

The automakers are starting to think like Harley and understand that when you get into an automobile, everything should be appealing to you. If you see stitching that's out of line on the dashboard, you're going to get madder and madder every time you see it. That's one place where the American car companies dropped the ball. Thankfully, in the past couple of years, they have gotten better. If you look at the new line of G.M. cars, they are almost as good as what the Europeans are doing, especially when you compare interiors. Cadillac has a line of small four-door sedans that are, if not quite the rival of Audi or Mercedes, pretty darn close for quite a bit less money.

The problem with what's happened over the past few decades is that you have a whole generation of kids who have no brand loyalty. They've grown up on Honda, Hyundai, Kia and Toyota. To lure them to the American brand, you’ve got to give them something exciting, something bold, something different. America does technology well, and I think this is how the companies will bring those buyers back. I think cars like the Chevy Volt, which is entirely battery-powered, or hydrogen cars from Chrysler, Ford, and G.M. will take off.

Looking into my crystal ball, I predict that Toyota will probably become the dominant force, and the other companies will have to become leaner to survive. They’ll start reining in some of the more unprofitable models. The overhead at most of the U.S. firms is crazy, and they'll have to figure out a way to fix that. They'll ultimately survive, but I think that they'll need to change how they do business. And in the future, you'll see smaller companies doing more boutique manufacturing, as BMW has with the Mini.

One last thing: No matter what happens, do not expect all American cars to go Eurosize. American buttocks are not getting any smaller.

In the Cold War '60s, as the space race heated up, another race began: to the center of the earth.

Well, perhaps the Soviets and Americans couldn't drill quite that deep, but they could try to get to the so-called Moho, more formally the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, the theorized but much-disputed boundary between the mostly solid crust and the magma-filled mantle.

After the launch of an American drilling program to reach the boundary, the Russians joined the race to drill the deepest hole in the world.

"Between 1960 and 1962, the combination of economic interest and national pride during the Space Race period inspired scientists of the Soviet Union to plan drilling a "Russian Mohole" whose objective was to reach the Mohorovicic Discontinuity before the American drilling program," Dean Dunn writing in the book, Science of the Earth.

The original goal was soon subsumed by the desire to learn more about how valuable ores formed, so the hopes of the Russian effort eventually landed in the middle-of-nowhere mining region, Pachenga. There, the Soviets drilled the deepest hole in the history of the world, more than 7 miles deep.

At the Kola Institute, pictured, the Russians drilled for more than 15 years to reach a crust depth of 40,226 feet, a record that's never been broken. But however successful the mission was as an exploration, the geological findings from the site remain murky and obscured by the way they emanated out of the fading Soviet scientific machine.

Stanford geologist and drilling expert, Mark Zoback, said that the Kola borehole was "an anomaly" even within the rather grandiose field of superdeep drilling projects.

Photo: Kola Institute

The process for drilling a borehole is conceptually simple. A rotary drill bit, like this one, is placed into a shaft. When it reaches the bottom, a powerful motor destroys the bottom of the hole and the hole grows deeper. Fluids are circulated into and out of the hole to cool the drill and maintain the stability of the borehole. When a bit is worn out, it's swapped out.

Though the basics are well-known, superdeep drilling is a difficult enterprise. The Soviets encountered a host of technical problems drilling so deep into the earth's surface. Foremost is the high heat that deep in the crust. The Kola engineers, working with limited resources, came up with cooling processes and dozens of special bits that could work at temperatures of over 600 degrees Fahrenheit.

Photo: Kola Institute

The Soviet drilling program began in the early '60s and continued all the way through the slow dissolution of the USSR. But the geopolitical circumstances of the day have kept much of the work shrouded in mystery. Despite the publication of a now out-of-print and hard-to-obtain book, The Superdeep Well of the Kola Peninsula, edited by Yevgeny Kozlovsky, a Soviet minister of geology, little of the project's data has ever made it out of Russia.

Photo: Kola Institute

The workers of Kola, like those pictured here with a piece of the drill, also had to live in the remote region. In fact, a sort of company town sprung up around the superdeep hole. As described in the Kozlovsky-edited tome:

"Sanitary facilities and shower rooms, a first-aid station, a canteen to cater for staff day and night, a meeting hall and rooms for preventative medical aid provide normal living conditions for the operating personnel of the rig."

Photo: Kola Institute

Here we see the Kola Institute's technological control room. The computers you see were the hub for data coming up from miles below. As computer technology advanced and the drilling became more complex, the Soviets began to monitor dozens of data points ranging from simple depth measures to a variety of measures for how hard the drill was working.

Photo: Kola Institute

While drilling programs were being conducted across the globe -- notably in Germany -- the Soviet team created their own custom tools, like these alloy drill pipes. Because they were literally boring to unseen depths, the method they usually employed was trial and error. That goes a long way toward explaining how unusually long the project took.

Still, Kozlovksy bragged, "The complex scientific-technological experiment of the Kola superdeep drilling was accomplished solely by Soviet technology and technique."

Photo: Kola Institute

The deep drilling programs were part of a concerted effort by some geologists to get funding for the large-scale facilities, like Kola's Byzantine machinery, that were delivering such spectacular results for astronomers. As recorded in the book, Super-Deep Continental Drilling and Deep Geophysical Sounding, Karl Fuchs made the space analogy explicit in his opening remarks to a conference on Kola and superdeep drilling.

"Earth science have [sic] a telescope: deep drilling and deep geophysical probing!" Fuchs said. "Are we dedicated enough to use this telescope to go beyond our present limitations, to reach for new frontiers of the earth sciences."

Photo: Kola Institute

Kola's engineers could swap out drill bits depending on the type of rocks they were trying to move through. They describe a dozen types of core heads such as the KC-212.7/60 TKZ-NU, which "is designed for low rpm drilling in hard rock interbedded with extremely hard rocks." Most of the bits had four roller-cones, like this one, while some had six.

Photo: Kola Institute

Even though drilling deeper became impossible, the Kola well remains open and structurally intact. Rocks from the hole -- known as cores -- are even still stored at the institute. Instruments still take seismic and other measurements, but state resources have ebbed away from the institute to other geologists who have helped build Russia's oil and gas production. The country now produces about 9.7 million barrels of oil a day, up from 6.1 million back in 1998.

Photo: Kola Institute

The Kola borehole produced a wealth of seismic measurements, cores from deep within the Earth, and intriguing results that there might be liquid water in the depths of the earth.

Yet for all the effort and years of drilling, modern American and European geologists don't often reference or use Kola data, preferring the more tightly regulated information generated by Germany's KTB deep-coring program. Findings from Kola were just never systematically presented enough for Western scientists.

It raises the question: Why put all that effort in to ultimately produce little of value to global science? Zoback, the Stanford geologist, said Kola's goals weren't as defined as those of some other projects, perhaps because the project was more about the triumph of just doing than about a particular scientific objective.

"You have to acknowledge the fact that it may have been the sense of discovery, the idea that they might discover something [that drove them]," he said.

Or maybe, as the old minister of geology, Kozlovsky, explained in the introduction to the book on Kola, perhaps geology was just a Russian thing.

"The Soviet Union has always been more consistent in carrying out large-scale studies of the structure and regularities of the evolution of the continental crust than other countries," he wrote. "This is a deeply rooted tradition in our country, and it is still very much alive."

Photo: Kola Institute

All comic book fans dig ink. Some of them just take their superhero obsessions a little further than others.

Michael Boyce (left) wears his love of comics on his sleeves. A thirtysomething artist who runs On Comic Ground, a comics shop in San Diego, his arms are covered with tattoos of all the superheroines he grew up with: fightin' females like Wonder Woman, Batgirl, Supergirl and Wonder Girl.

"Once I started getting one girl, I had to get 'em all," Boyce said.

With flesh forever marked with the comics and sci-fi characters they know and love, geeks like Boyce would give a pack of hard-core bikers a run for their money in the tattoo department.

Wonder Woman struts her stuff on Boyce's right bicep, but his tattoos cover both of his arms.

"I want to have arms that look like comic book pages with the girls bursting out," said Boyce, who got the work done over a three-year period by Willie King Clover in Lemon Grove, California. Boyce also wears a wicked Wonder Woman belt buckle.

When getting Venom's spider logo added to his left calf, Aaron Hamilton went with stark black ink.

"I wanted something big and bold that just said, 'This is who I am. This is what I like,'" said Hamilton, 30, of Birmingham, Alabama. He says he got the tattoo done 10 years ago by Justin Kontzen of Aerochild Tattoos in Birmingham.

Tim Burton's animated movie The Nightmare Before Christmas got Coley Suicide into tattoos. Now it's Halloween every day of the year on her arm, where "Pumpkin King" Jack Skellington, his girlfriend Sally and ghost dog Zero have taken up permanent residence.

"I've always kinda been obsessed with Tim Burton," said Suicide, 20, of Long Beach, California. "I figured I'd start out with my favorite."

The tattoos took 28 hours, she said, and were done by Nathan Menske in Yakima, Washington.

Chaos Comics characters Lady Death and Purgatori face-off eternally on the back of Chris "Cybian" Kneeland, 39, of San Diego.

"Everything I have (tattoo-wise) is kind of like good and evil," said Kneeland, who works as a website coder and analyst.

The back piece, which was done by Bob Vessells at Funny Farm Tattoos in Los Angeles, was started five years ago, with 20 to 25 hours of needling so far, said Kneeland. He's gained some weight in the interim, and swears he'll get the piece finished when he drops the pounds.

Images of The Thing (pictured), Image Comics' Maxx and other superheroes decorate Sean Brunle's body. The 31-year-old bartender, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, says he chose those characters because he "was physically attracted to them."

The tattoos, done by Rodney Raines at Ace Custom Tattoo in Charlotte, took 15 or 20 hours to finish, Brunle said.

X-Men badass Wolverine is another of Brunle's favorites.

"They're basically hard on the outside and soft on the inside," Brunle said of the characters indelibly inked on his arms. "Strong men with good hearts, I guess."

"Does it ever make sense to us?" asks Jeff Walker, 27, of San Diego. The custodian wears a stark image of a dead bird with a philosophical quote from Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes comic strip on his arm.

"I've just always loved the artwork," Walker said by way of explanation. The tattoo was inked by Chris Walkin at Avalon Tattoo II in San Diego.

Leona the lizard girl from Katherine Dunn's sideshow stunner Geek Love earned a permanent spot on one of Odette Suicide's legs, right next to a living shrine to the Virgin de Guacamole.

Suicide, 27, lives in Ventura, California, and calls herself a "baker with brains." She has a bachelor's degree in psychology (and neurons tattooed on her right arm).

Leona was inked in nine hours by Tim Kern at Tribulation Tattoo in New York City, she said. Nathan Kostechko did the avocado-faced Virgin.

Steve Thompson works as a toy designer for Disney, but Sci Fi Channel's rebooted space opera Battlestar Galactica motivated him to get this skin art. He has Starbuck's tattoo on his arm, courtesy of two hours under the needle at Body Electric Tattoo in Hollywood.

"I'm just a huge fan of the show," said Thompson, 34, of Los Angeles.

Shaz Nolan wears the Dark Mark of the Death Eaters from the Harry Potter books on her left forearm. That fits nicely with the 32-year-old seamstress' cosplay role -- she dresses as Bellatrix Lestrange.

When she saw the image, she couldn't live without it. "And it's fun," said Nolan, who lives in Fullerton, California. She says the tattoo took one hour at Deep Blue Tattoo in Grover Beach, California.

"I've been a comic book fan my entire life," said Chad Bacon, 34, of Huntington Beach, California.

It shows. On his right forearm, the strip-club manager sports Captain America, done by Vance O'Rourke of 723 Tattoo in Fullerton, California. Bacon's into the "whole patriotic thing," he said.

Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Wasp, Spider-Man and Spawn cover other parts of his body, and for extra geek effect, he's got an image of Albert Einstein on his upper left arm.

Steven Miller has a bold panel from a comic on his right forearm. "I just thought it was cool looking," said Miller, 27, of Los Angeles.

The director of Automaton Transfusion said he is working on a movie called Ink about -- what else? -- tattoos.

I know it's possible. Hell, I've watched and rewatched the YouTube videos of the 14-year-olds who've done it in Sid Meier's new game, Civilization Revolution. The guttural roar of the ICBM taking off, the flare of the missile as it arcs slowly across the sky, the terrifying rumble in your Xbox 360 controller as the nuke pulverizes the target: It's awesome. I can't sleep until I've rained that sort of death on the world.

What the hell is wrong with me? There are a lot of ways to win at Civilization Revolution that do not involve taking a happy, peaceful city and reducing it to a smoldering gravesite filled with radioactive trinitite. I could, for example, train my country in brilliant artistry, building Wonders of the World -- a "cultural victory," as it's called. Or I could win by becoming a great economic power, enriching my citizens and the global community.

But no. Every time I plunge into a game, I inevitably choose the most Cro-Magnon, "Hulk smash, Hulk destroy" strategy possible. Or maybe I geek out and try to discover spaceflight before anyone else, so I can outfit my hermetically sealed, glassed-in astronaut city with interstellar warp drives, blur the stars into hyperspace, arrive at Alpha Centauri, encounter alien worlds ... and then try to kill them. Ooooh, you guys back home wanna spend your time carefully building the Hanging Gardens, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Alexandrian Library? Fine. Go for it. Hippies. Me, I'm gonna reach for the goddamn stars, built some kickass mechs, flatten anybody in my way with a molten avalanche of plasma.

I repeat: What's wrong with me? One of the classic highbrow defenses of videogames is that they allow you to experience new personalities -- to, in the words of Sherry Turkle, create a "second self." This is considered supremely healthy, because self-exploration is generally a good thing.

But what happens if the second self you create inside videogames turns out to be a total dick?

Sometimes I think the best way to get a grip on my true inner self would be just to list all the people I choose to be inside games.

For example:

• In racing games, I never want gearhead realism that replicates the precise feel of a Porsche 911. No, I want cartoon, Tex Avery physics and fishtailing insanity -- pedestrians screaming and diving out of the way and not quite making it.
• In first-person shooters, I hate, hate, hate any complexity or nuance -- like protecting innocents, avoiding friendly fire or figuring out which stupid door to open. I don't even like games that don't give me unlimited ammo.
• In MMOs, I inevitably play as a class that can work solo -- like a Paladin, balanced between skull-crushing might and self-healing magic.

"OK, so, deep inside you're a frustrated geek with serious masculinity issues who doesn't like authority," said a gamer friend of mine when we talked about this over drinks. "And you're a loner who can't handle complexity."

Except, except ... wait a minute, that's not even vaguely what I'm like in real life. In meatspace, I'm a total people-pleaser who avoids all conflict (to the point where I often get completely doormatted in my professional life). And I have a superhighly tuned, sensitive-boi EQ. Christ, I cry at weddings. What's going on?

Nothing weird, said Ian Bogost, a friend of mine who's one of the smartest game academics and game designers around. The whole reason my in-game choices are so divergent from my wussy-ass actual self is because I'm using games to see life from a different perspective; the Walter Mitty effect, as it were. Nothing wrong with that. And, he added, I'm imprisoned by a lack of options. Too many mainstream games are predicated on loony macho conflict because it's easy to model, and because the industry is focused on the power fantasies of 14-year-olds. I shouldn't blame myself for getting sucked into their poor choices.

Fair enough. Except ... there's been a huge growth in alternative forms of gaming in recent years, and the sad truth is that I rarely get as excited by them. All those "click management" games, like Diner Dash or Cooking Mama -- the ones that model the chaos of real life in a charming, witty way, and let you deal with it? That stuff puts me to sleep. Hell, I don't even have the patience for computer golf. When offered a choice inside games like Civilization, given the option of picking amongst different types of personalities, I choose to play as a complete douchebag. (In Halo 3, as you may recall, I wound up embracing suicide-bomber tactics.)

Now, I'll issue my usual caveats here. I don't mean to suggest that I, or anyone else, should police their fantasy lives. Games are -- at least partly -- an exercise of the imagination, and it's always a perspective-broadening experiment to visit the dark or creepy places of the mind.

But interestingly, the rest of the world is beginning to realize that one's game preferences can be regarded as a Myers-Briggs personality type for the digital age. Plenty of college kids list their most-played games on their Facebook pages, under the presumption that this speaks as clearly about their inner lives as their religion or political stances.

And in the last few years, Silicon Valley companies have begun actively recruiting the leaders of major World of Warcraft guilds, under the assumption that people who choose those roles are good at being leaders, motivating teams and defusing interpersonal drama.

Just imagine what things will look like 10 years from now. "Hmmm, this job applicant has a kind of cool Alliance-Mage thing going on, so she'd be good in the legal support department, eh? Yeah, but her team-killing stats in Gears of War 4 are really troubling."

Or in the world of dating: "I just don't know if I can go out with someone who never plays any of the side missions in Grand Theft Auto!"

Maybe, for the sake of my social reputation, I should start playing some Diner Dash. Who knows: If I play it enough, I might get really into it. Yeah, I think I'll head out to the GameStop and get a copy.

Right after I nuke Athens.

- - -

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.

Originally known as a CAT scan -- for computed (or computerized) axial tomography, or computer-aided (or assisted) tomography -- the process uses a series of X-rays to create sequential images of virtual slices of body tissue. Those can be integrated into a 3-D X-ray, so doctors know the precise position of diseased or otherwise abnormal tissue.

In Medford, Massachusetts, in the 1960s, Tufts University physics professor Allan Cormack's main field was particle physics, but he laid the foundation for computerized tomography in his spare time. He theorized that you could take X-rays from varying angles; account for differences in the density of bone, muscle and organs; and program a computer to assemble 3-D images.

Electrical engineer Godfrey Hounsfield was working on a similar line of research at the EMI Central Research Laboratories in England. (Yes, that's the same EMI as the record label, and massive profits from The Beatles' 1960s hits funded development of the CT scanner.) Hounsfield developed a CT machine that could perform brain scans. He began testing it in 1971 -- sometimes carrying bull's brains across London on public transit. His announcement of the invention at a series of British scientific meetings in 1972 created a stir.

Hounsfield's prototype took five minutes to make a scan, and two-and-half hours for the computer to process an image. The first production-model EMI-Scanner took four minutes to scan, and its Data General Nova minicomputer needed seven minutes to compute each picture.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, dentist-physicist Robert Ledley developed a whole-body scanner at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in 1973. It saved its first life while still in development, when a pediatric neurosurgeon used it one weekend while Ledley was off-duty.

The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, claims to be the first U.S. medical institution to install the CT, but Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston also began using the CT scanner in August 1973.

Hounsfield and Cormack shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ledley was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1990. (Among other achievements, he also devised the image processor and wrote a seminal paper on medical informatics, or computer-aided diagnosis.)

CT scanners today are faster -- four to eight images a second -- and more agile. Instead of taking discrete, individual "slices" as images, they use spiral, or helical, tomography, like a virtual Honeybaked ham.

That's a lot of progress in 35 years ... which is, after all, 245 in cat years.

Source: Various

The tent is home to Red Digital Cinema and its revolutionary motion picture camera, the Red One. Standing nearby is the man who developed it—a handsome guy with a neatly trimmed goatee and a pair of sunglasses perched atop his clean-shaven head. He clutches a can of Diet Coke in his left hand, an unlit Montecristo jutting from between his fingers.

Jim Jannard, 59, is the billionaire founder of Red. In 1975 he spent $300 to make a batch of custom motocross handlebar grips, which he sold from the back of a van. He named his company Oakley, after his English setter, and eventually expanded into sci-fi-style sunglasses, bags, and shoes. In November of last year he sold the business to Luxottica, the owner of Ray-Ban, for a reported $2.1 billion.

Jannard won't say how much money he has poured into Red, but his target market clearly appreciates the investment. Supplicants swarm the tent, many of them with offerings—fine wine, gourmet coffee, single-malt whiskey—all to thank Jannard for building the Red One. "I guess they just like me," he says with a wry smile.

An example of video shot on the Red One. For a better look, watch it in HD.

It's more than that: His team of engineers and scientists have created the first digital movie camera that matches the detail and richness of analog film. The Red One records motion in a whopping 4,096 lines of horizontal resolution—"4K" in filmmaker lingo—and 2,304 of vertical. For comparison, hi-def digital movies like Sin City and the Star Wars prequels top out at 1,920 by 1,080, just like your HDTV. (There's also a slightly higher-resolution option called 2K that reaches 2,048 lines by 1,080.) Film doesn't have pixels, but the industry-standard 35-millimeter stock has a visual resolution roughly equivalent to 4K. And that's what makes the Red so exciting: It delivers all the dazzle of analog, but it's easier to use and cheaper—by orders of magnitude—than a film camera. In other words, Jannard's creation threatens to make 35-mm movie film obsolete.

Two years ago, Jannard brought a spec sheet and a mock-up of a camera—not much more than an aluminum box about the size of a loaf of bread—to NAB 2006. Even though it wasn't a working product, more than 500 people plunked down a $1,000 deposit to get their names on a waiting list. For months, industry watchers wondered if the company was for real. Today, there's no question. The Red One is being used on at least 40 features. Steven Soderbergh, the Oscar-winning director, borrowed two prototypes to shoot his Che Guevara biopics, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and later purchased three for his film The Informant. Peter Jackson, the Lord of the Rings himself, bought four. Director Doug Liman used a Red on Jumper. Peter Hyams used one on his upcoming Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. Digital cinema that's all but indistinguishable from film is finally coming to a theater near you.

The Red headquarters is in Lake Forest, California, a sprawling Orange County exurb consisting mainly of strip malls and office parks. The 32,000-square-foot facility, which Jannard recently bought for a reported $7.7 million, has a stark white exterior unbroken by windows except at the entrance, where a winged human skull is painted on the glass. Jannard, wearing blue jeans, black slip-on sandals, and a lime-green short-sleeve shirt, greets me in the lobby and ushers me through a set of gray metal doors. On the way into the workspace, there is a sign:

1) Please knock.
2) Take two steps back.
3) Kneel.

Since I'm getting a tour from the wizard himself, I'm apparently excused from genuflecting.

Behind the doors, the walls are festooned with camouflage netting—a nod, perhaps, to the postapocalyptic design of the steel-clad Oakley headquarters half a mile away.

"I had been thinking about this project for a long time," Jannard says. "As a camera fanatic and a product builder, this was something I seemed destined to do." When businesspeople talk destiny, it can sound like bullshit. But at Oakley, Jannard not only ran the company, he personally shot one of its two TV spots and all of its print ads from 1975 to 1995. He owns more than 1,000 cameras, both still and motion picture, several dating back almost a century. "I have a Bolex, Aaton, Arriflex, Eyemo, Filmo, Mitchell, Photosonic, Beaulieu, Keystone—just about every movie camera you can think of."

C A M E R A	Film (Example: Panavision Millennium XL-2)	2K and HD Digital (Example: Sony F23)	4K Digital (Example: Red One)
R M E E C D O I R U D M I   N   G	Film	Tape deck or disk	CompactFlash and RAID
I C M A A P G T E U   R   E	Silver halide emulsion on plastic	3 sensors with colors split by prism	1 propietary sensor
L R I E N S E O S L   U O T F I   O   N	No lines, but comparable to 4k	HD: 1,920(h) x 1,080(v) 2K: 2.048(h) x 1,080(v)	4,096(h) x 2,304(v)
R N E E L G A A T T I I V V E E       S   I   Z   E

In 2004, Jannard bought a Sony HDR-FX1—the first hi-def videocam for consumers. When he found he couldn't use the files it produced without translation software from a company called Lumiere, he telephoned Lumiere's owner, filmmaker Frederic Haubrich. "I told Frederic that I couldn't even view my footage on a Mac and that this had pissed me off enough that I wanted to build my own camera. And he said, 'Jim, I know guys in the industry who can help.'" Haubrich introduced Jannard to interface designer Ted Schilowitz.

Schilowitz, Haubrich, and Jannard spent a year trying to design that dream camera, one that would combine the practical advantages of digital moviemaking with the image quality of analog film. They recruited mathematicians, programmers, digital imaging experts, hardware engineers, and physicists. "We needed a bunch of guys who were inventors to come up with entirely new ways of getting to the finish line," Jannard says. He kept the project quiet until his team could determine whether building the device was even feasible, but rumors swirled through Hollywood about some kind of mysterious supercamera in the works. "I didn't know who Jim was," Soderbergh says. "But I heard about Red because they were canvassing filmmakers and cinematographers, asking, 'If you could wave a magic wand, what camera would you design?'"

Most of the work took place in what employees call Jim's garage, a 20,000-square-foot warehouse across the street from Red's massive headquarters. The team quickly concluded that existing technology was inadequate. The guts of the camera—the image sensor and all the accompanying circuitry—would have to be created from scratch. It was a daunting challenge, but the fact that Jannard's management style falls somewhere between Mr. T and Steve Jobs on the autocracy scale helped. "What separates us from other camera companies is that the vision guy is the decisionmaker," he says. "That was one of my biggest advantages at Oakley, and it's the same at Red—I'm in the trenches, in the product development, and I make the final call. Red is a benevolent dictatorship."

The video revolution has been on pause in Hollywood. Just as digital still cameras now rule the photography market, hi-def digital movie cameras were supposed to replace film. But moviemakers never fully bought in. Typical digital videocams use prisms to split incoming light by color and send it to three separate sensors, which tends to soften images. Onboard software sharpens the footage but also introduces halos and exaggerated edges. Worse, the small sensors put too much of the picture in focus, giving it a canned look. Cinematographers hate that; the ability to guide the viewer's eye by selectively blurring focal planes is one of their favorite techniques. "That's a storytelling tool," says Pierre de Lespinois, a producer and director who spent three weeks in April filming a feature in the Mojave Desert with two Red Ones. "In HD, what's right in front of the lens and what's 20 feet away are both sharp, so the image looks flat."

To compete with celluloid, a digital cine-camera would need an image sensor identical in size and shape to a single frame of 35-mm motion picture film. Without that, the Red couldn't give filmmakers the control over depth of field, color saturation, tonality, and a half dozen other factors that 35-mm film provides.

C A M E R A	Film (Example: Panavision Millennium XL-2)	2K and HD Digital (Example: Sony F23)	4K Digital (Example: Red One)
C   O   S   T	Rents for about $25,000/month	$150,000	$17,500
L   E   N   S   E   S	Proprietary or standard mount	Proprietary mount	Standard mount
C D O I S G T I   T T I O Z   E	$300,000 and up	$0 (already digital)	$0 (already digital)
E S D O I F T T I W N A G R   E

You'll find that kind of full-frame sensor at the core of any high-end digital single-lens reflex camera. But they're designed to shoot no more than 10 frames per second. That's warp speed for still photographers but barely first gear for filmmakers. Movies are shot at a minimum of 24 frames per second, with some scenes topping out at 120 fps for slow-motion effects. The Red's sensor would have to do everything a DSLR sensor does—and do it significantly faster.

The camera also had to be able to record in the same bulky file format that DSLRs use—called raw. The format preserves picture data in essentially unprocessed form, which gives photographers more latitude to tweak images with software the way they once did in a darkroom. (Cinematographers do the same thing with 35-mm film, but it's a complicated, expensive process: The film must be scanned into digital to be manipulated, then converted back to analog for projection.) Since a movie is just a long sequence of still pictures, using the raw format presented bandwidth and data-storage problems. A two-hour feature could run up to 7 terabytes. The Red engineers built a workaround, a lossless compression codec they call Redcode Raw.

Finally, in August 2006, Jannard's team flipped the switch on Red's first prototype, codenamed Frankie. It wasn't really a camera at all, just a mechanical test bed containing the new sensor. "Our whole business was predicated on this sensor," Jannard says. "If it didn't work, we'd be cooked. When it did, it was like giving birth and counting all the fingers and toes to make sure everything was there. It was phenomenal. Everybody went nuts." Schilowitz remembers that moment, which camera makers call first light, as mind-blowing: "Everyone started screaming like little kids, 'First light! First light! It's alive!' The thing actually worked."

Two weeks later, at an industry event in Amsterdam, Jannard showed test footage taken with Frankie—a clip of two perky women in '50s garb chugging milk from glass bottles—on a 60-foot screen. "People were stunned," Schilowitz says. "They were standing around scratching their heads. That moment made a lot of people into believers." Filmmakers didn't care how the Red One worked, but they liked what they saw. "The Red camera is the closest thing to film I've seen," says Tristan Whitman, a cinematography lecturer at USC.

By March 2007, Red had assembled two additional prototypes, named Boris and Natasha. But now, with three weeks to go before NAB 2007, Jannard wanted new footage to show what the camera could do. He emailed Jackson, asking if the director could recommend a good cinematographer in Los Angeles to help create a Red promo spot. Not long after, Jackson telephoned. "Jim, why don't you fly down here to New Zealand, and I'll shoot the footage for you," he said.

"Don't tease me," Jannard replied.

"No, I'm serious," Jackson said. "Bring the cameras down."

Jannard packed up Boris and Natasha, still crude machines with no features other than a run/stop button and a shutter, and headed south. When he got to Wellington, Jackson was ready. "Peter had put together an army," Jannard says. "He was going to shoot a mini-movie to put the cameras through their paces, using them on helicopters and Steadicams, crawling on the ground with them—and I'm thinking, 'Oh my gosh, I just hope they keep working through the weekend.'" Boris and Natasha performed flawlessly. "We stayed at Peter's house, and he was just beaming because he was having so much fun." Jackson delivered his 12-minute featurette, titled Crossing the Line, the night before the NAB Show opened.

Jannard shows me the film at Red headquarters. His desk is in an open workspace that he shares with six staffers and his puppy. Next to his computer there's a box of the Montecristos he favors and a pinewood crate from Napa Valley Reserve, the world's most exclusive wine club. Members reportedly pay up to $145,000 to join, in exchange for which they can partake in grape harvests and create their own blends. There's something oddly honorable about a billionaire with insanely expensive taste in wine but no office.

I watch Crossing the Line on Jannard's 30-inch HD display while he stands behind me. The film, set on the front lines of World War I, alternates between aerial dogfights and bloody ground combat. The screen resolution is about half what it would be in a theater. Nevertheless, it's like looking through a window onto a battlefield. I can barely discern a single pixel. The detail is stupefying; the colors are rich and sensual.

After NAB 2007, Jannard showed Crossing the Line at the Directors Guild in LA. "I rearranged my travel plans to be there," Soderbergh says. After he saw the film, he called Jannard.

"Jim, I'm all in. I have to shoot with this."

"OK, great," Jannard said. "But what does that mean?"

"I'm making two movies with Benicio del Toro. Come to my house, and we'll do a test. If it looks as good as what I saw in Peter's film, I want these cameras for my movies."

Soderbergh took two prototypes into the Spanish wilderness. "It felt like someone crawled inside my head when they designed the Red," he says. What impressed him most was the cameras' sturdiness. Movie sets are often a flurry of crashes and explosions, which can vibrate sensitive electronics, introducing visual noise known as microphonics into images. "A lot of cameras with electronics in them, if you fired a 50-caliber automatic weapon a few inches away—which we did—you'd get microphonics all over the place," Soderbergh says. "We beat the shit out of the Reds on the Che films, and they never skipped a beat."

Then there's the economics: The Red One sells for $17,500—almost 90 percent less than its nearest HD competitor. The savings are even greater relative to a conventional film camera. Not that anyone buys those; filmmakers rent them, usually from Panavision, an industry stalwart in Woodland Hills, California. Panavision doesn't publicize its rates, but a Panavision New Zealand rental catalog quotes $25,296 for a four-week shoot—more than the cost of purchasing a Red. "It's clearly the future of cinematography," Peter Hyams says. "You can buy this camera. You can own it. That's why people are excited."

Even so, traditionalists cling to film's reliability. Film is tangible. Hard drives crash; files get corrupted. "You put film in a can and stick it on a shelf, and it costs $1,000 a year to store," says Stephen Lighthill, who teaches cinematography at the American Film Institute. "With a project that starts as data, you have it on a hard drive, which has to be nursed and upgraded. It's an electronic, mechanical device that can't be left unplugged." Preserving a 4K digital master of a feature film would cost $12,000 a year, according to a report by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And that doesn't address the reliability of the camera itself. "In the slammin', jammin' world of production, you want a really tough machine that takes very simple approaches to problems," Lighthill says. "I'm not sure Red is the way to go. It's a supercomputer with a lens on it."

Proponents dismiss such criticism as Luddite drivel. "Hollywood is just used to shooting on film," says Bengt Jan Jönsson, cinematographer on the Fox TV show Bones. "Honestly, if you proposed the film work-flow today, you'd be taken to the city square and hung. Imagine I told you we're going to shoot on superexpensive cameras, using rolls of celluloid made in China that are a one-time-use product susceptible to scratches and that can't be exposed to light. And you can't even be sure you got the image until they're developed. And you have to dip them in a special fluid that can ruin them if it's mixed wrong. People would think I was crazy."

As Reds infiltrate Hollywood, the typical filmgoer might not notice much difference at first. After all, once they're projected onto a cineplex screen, movies shot with Jannard's camera will look like the analog movies audiences are used to. But the camera's ease of use and lower cost are sure to change the industry. "There's talent on the streets, kids with ideas who have stories to tell and never get a chance," Jannard says. "Up to now, they've been limited to tools that confine their stories to YouTube." Access to this kind of tech will make it easier for aspiring auteurs to break in and could ultimately expand the range and variety of films that get made.

Of course, most theaters still show movies the old-fashioned way, running analog film in front of a bright light. For now, pictures shot with the Red must be transferred to celluloid for distribution. It's a cumbersome system: A full-length feature might take as many as five (heavy, expensive to print) reels. A major release goes to at least 3,500 theaters. Plus, the celluloid stock gets damaged and dirty and has to be sent in for cleaning and repair after every few dozen screenings.

Luckily, analog projection seems to be on the way out. In March, four big Hollywood studios announced plans to retrofit 10,000 screens—about a quarter of the US total—for digital projection at 2K. Movies shot with Red's 4K camera will look every bit as good as those shot on film, and they'll all be ads for the company's next camera, the Epic, with more than 5,000 lines of resolution. That's a knockout pixel punch. I ask Jannard if Red plans to develop a 4K projector or perhaps even a 5K that it would market to theater owners. He's cagey. "I will say that the future of motion-capture will be digital," he says, "and I think you can extend that to say the future of presentation will be digital."

Jannard is doing his best to fulfill that prophecy. He spends nights on the company's Internet user forums sifting through customer feedback, answering technical questions, and addressing rumors about upcoming products. "I'm passionate about this because I'm building the camera I've always wanted to shoot with," he says. "When my grandkids and great-grandkids look back, they're going to say I was a camera builder. I did handgrips and then goggles and then sunglasses to prepare myself. But cameras are magic."

Michael Behar (michael@michaelbehar.com) wrote about computer graphics guru Jos Stam in issue 16.01.

Also on Portfolio

Google Extends Web Search Lead

Political Fundraiser: 'I'm the Biggest, or Forget It'

Cartooning the Week That Was

Have Google and Verizon Communications finally kissed and made up?

The two heavyweights, last seen sparring over opening up the wireless spectrum, are in talks over a deal that would make Google the default search on Verizon devices and give the search giant a piece of the ad revenue, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A deal could eventually cover Verizon's web portal and its FiOS TV service, the Journal says.

Any agreement would be a turnaround from their public clashes after Google lobbied the government to open up access to the wireless spectrum. Verizon fiercely fought back that effort.

In June, Russ Mitchell noted that with the acquisition of Alltel and with an agreement with the Federal Communications Commission, Verizon looked prepared to keep throwing its weight around.

Wireless providers are looking for an edge in services amid fierce competition. Verizon Wireless—a joint venture between Verizon Communications and Vodafone of Britain—has talked to other possible search partners in the past, including Microsoft, the Journal says.

A deal is equally important to Google.

"Google wants closer integration with carriers like Verizon so it can enhance the relevance of the ads it shows—for example, by making them sensitive to a user's location," the Journal says.

Rival Yahoo has deals with several wireless providers.

But Rafat Ali on mocoNews.net says that such deals offer only short-term gains: "As phones open up, users will be able to use whichever search engine they desire, not the ones deemed official by the carriers."

And for those who are worried about Google's crushing dominance in search and its inroads into media, there is now a modified search engine that lets you search without getting results from Google sites like Knol, Blogger, and YouTube.

Yes, it's Google minus Google.

On September 16, LucasArts will release Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, the latest addition to George Lucas' science fiction universe. Set between the events of episodes III and IV, the videogame promises to fill the gaps between the two film trilogies, a time period that saw the Empire cement its hold over the galaxy.

In The Force Unleashed, players take on the role of Darth Vader's secret apprentice, Starkiller. Found as a child by Vader on the Wookiee home world Kashyyyk, Starkiller is trained to aid Vader in his quest to destroy the Jedi Order, and together with Vader supplant Emperor Palpatine. The game is set in the nether region between the trilogies and features many entirely new characters, so the game designers had some freedom to establish new events in the Star Wars timeline. But the major events had to be cleared with Star Wars creator George Lucas, and every detail had to be vetted by the Lucas Licensing department of Lucasfilm to ensure that it fits into the continuity.

The Secret Apprentice's appearance is crucial to the character's ethos. He wields the signature red lightsaber of the dark side, and his gaunt, sinister look—complete with tattered clothing, scars—shows that Darth Vader wasn't a particularly nurturing father figure. The character is voiced by the actor Sam Witwer, who bears an uncanny resemblance to his in-game alter ego.

As a Jedi, you'll be equipped with a lightsaber and a growing knowledge of Jedi powers. To put it bluntly, Unleashed is all about the ancient, primal art of kicking ass with the Force. Restrained feelings and a code of honor are fine and dandy for Jedi following the light side of the Force, but Dark Jedi get to have a bit more fun. As the title suggests, Starkiller's strength comes from reveling in bad vibes and unleashing energy with very little restraint. The end result? The glorious obliteration of your enemies.

Rather than relying on prescripted sequences and events, The Force Unleashed utilizes technologies that create on-the-fly reactions from characters and materials. Something called Euphoria grants characters biomechanical AI, allowing them to react to changes in their surroundings: Force Push a pack of Stormtroopers, and they'll stumble, or attempt to grab a railing or each other for support. Another technology, Digital Molecular Matter, applies that idea to inanimate objects: Force Throw a Wookiee against an object and it will deform or break in a lifelike manner, whether it's a tree, a hunk of metal, or a pane of glass.

You are Darth Vader's secret apprentice: And that means leaving no witnesses. Whether that's a sign of Vader's paranoia or a handy way to introduce a previously unknown character, this means that you'll be eliminating Imperial troops in addition to Jedi. Not a bad way to maintain continuity—and amp up the body count to God of War levels, giving players a chance to try out a range of increasingly powerful Force attacks. Killing everyone guarantees that the secret apprentice Starkiller maintains a low profile. It also explains why he wasn't invited to the Life Day celebration in the Star Wars Holiday Special.

New characters abound: Serving as a sidekick and a bit of comic relief is the droid Proxy, designed to accompany and train the Secret Apprentice. Proxy is equipped with advanced hologram technology and a body that can change shape—taking on the form of enemies, other Jedi, and even Vader himself.

The kid's room at the Lucas Licensing department is jam-packed with merchandise offered by Lucasfilm. “It's every parent's worst nightmare,” jokes Leland Chee, continuity database administrator in the licensing department, who is also known as the Keeper of the Holocron. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there existed a Jedi device called the Holocron: a Force-powered hard drive capable of storing vast quantities of information. In our own time, that Holocron exists as a FileMaker database with more than 30,000 entries, and Leland Chee of Lucas Licensing is its Keeper. His job is to ensure that additions to the Star Wars canon adhere strictly to the continuity established by works that have come before it. Unleashed will be joining a book, a graphic novel, and several lines of toys when it arrives, and the licensing department is tasked with adding all of the new lore to the growing compendium of Star Wars knowledge and ensuring that it all fits.

In keeping with the Star Wars saga, The Force Unleashed is ultimately a tale of redemption. Under Order 66 at the end of Episode III, Emperor Palpatine orders the extermination of all Jedi officers in the Grand Army of the Republic. The Secret Apprentice must carry out assassinations, and he eventually encounters General Rahm Kota, a cold, honorable Jedi Master dedicated to the Force. Having survived the Jedi Purge (several Jedi have slipped through the cracks), Kota stirs up trouble by relentlessly attacking Imperial facilities. Their meeting will play an important role in the ultimate formation of the Rebellion.

In Episode IV, Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine are alive and on amicable terms. There's also no mention of Starkiller or a Secret Apprentice among the Rebels or the Imperials, so how does a Jedi this powerful go unnoticed? The Force Unleashed will be released on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii, PlayStation 2, DS, and PSP, so no matter your console of choice, you'll be able to figure that one out for yourself.

In a world terrified by the prospect of nuclear war, the Savannah was meant to demonstrate the peaceful use and positive potential of nuclear power. President Eisenhower conceived the idea as part of his "Atoms for Peace" program in 1955, a time when the United States and Soviet Union were routinely testing increasingly powerful nuclear weapons.

Four nuclear-powered merchant ships were eventually built.

The Savannah, named for the first steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean in 1819, was in every sense of the word a showcase. The ship was given a sleek, streamlined design that wasn't really compatible with stowing large amounts of cargo, a fact that would eventually shorten its career.

Passenger accommodation was comparable to many conventional liners of the day. There were 30 air-conditioned staterooms, a dining room for 100 people, a swimming pool, a library and a lounge that could be converted into a cinema.

But the heart of the Savannah was its nuclear propulsion system, which at $28 million ($203 million in today's money) cost more than the ship itself, a mere $18.5 million ($134 million today). The Babcock and Wilcox nuclear reactor drove Savannah's two steam-turbine engines cheaply and efficiently.

In the end, though, it wasn't economical enough to offset the tight forward cargo area and other deficiencies that made the ship too expensive to operate commercially. Its tapered bow not only limited the cargo capacity to 8,500 tons -- well below that of contemporary vessels -- but also made loading difficult, especially as ports became more automated.

The Savannah also required a crew of 124, one-third again as large as conventionally powered ships, and those crew members required additional training to work with the propulsion system.

The Maritime Administration, which owned Savannah, leased her in 1965 to American Export-Isbrandtsen Lines for cargo-passenger service. But the ship never turned a profit and was laid up in January 1972. The Savannah spent most of the 1970s tied up in Galveston, Texas, where it underwent regular inspections of its nuclear plant.

Since then, the ship, which has been designated a National Historic Landmark, has become a museum piece in search of a home. Following decommissioning, the nuclear fuel was removed; the process of cleaning out all remaining nuclear contamination continues in a Baltimore shipyard.

When that job is completed sometime in 2011, the Maritime Administration hopes to see Savannah converted into a floating museum. So far, there have been no takers.

Source: Various

The National Institutes for Health seem to think regenerating human muscle and bone using a person's own adult stem cells is nearly ready for prime time. Last week, the NIH announced to its staff that it's creating a bone marrow-stem cell transplant center within the National Institute for Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.

Researchers at the NIH labs in Bethesda, Maryland, are already growing human muscle, cartilage and spinal disks in vitro. The tissue isn't mechanically sound yet, says lead researcher Rocky Tuan, but that will come with further work.

"I have a piece of tissue that looks like a spinal disc, a sand bag, tough as nails on the outside and like sand on the inside," says Tuan, a Ph.D. and the senior investigator in the Cartilage and Orthopedics branch of the NIAMS. "The mechanical properties are lousy, but it's a beginning."

While the use of stem cells harvested from human embryos has been getting the most media attention, scientists and doctors have also been working with adult stem cells that also have the ability to become one with their environment and to replicate as cells of their adopted tissue. Using adult stem cells -- grown inside the body or in the lab -- has become accepted in the veterinary community, and horses have benefited greatly. Researchers are working to bring those same benefits to humans, but there are still hurdles left to clear.

The NIH project comes in part from what veterinarians have learned from injecting adult stem cells into valuable horses who've suffered injuries. In many cases, those horses' careers were saved when the stem cells regrew damaged tendons and ligaments.

Rodrigo Vazquez, a Southern California veterinarian, has been using adult stem cells to regrow damaged muscles in horses for several years. It's a fairly common procedure in the veterinary arena, and the results are impressive: One of Vazquez's patients is participating in this year's Olympics Dressage events; another is a prize-winning jumper.

The procedure is simple and straightforward. Inside a surgical suite at his equine hospital, Vazquez removes blood full of adult stem cells from the sternum of the anesthetized horse.

Then he rolls his stool to the other end of the horse, where ultrasound data has helped guide needles into the exact areas on the rear leg where the beautiful horse's ligaments are torn. He injects the stem cells into those spots.

"A few years ago, these injuries were career-ending," Vazquez says. Not any more. "In a month, the torn tissue will be completely regrown and healed."

Vazquez would like to put himself in his patients' place. He has had surgery several times for spinal injuries he incurred while lifting horses. Human medicine, unable to regrow or heal the injured spine, simply fuses the bone and tissue through a surgical procedure. At best, the surgery relieves some of the pain and restores some mobility. But it's not a true repair.

"I wish I could have had a procedure like this," Vazquez says of the treatment he gives horses. "This will lead to human treatments, but they can't move as fast as we can."

Tuan, who is using stem cells to cultivate experimental tendons and disks in his lab, thinks it's about time to look to treating humans.

An emerging body of scientific studies from all over the world -- including a cardiac study under way in Miami and a pediatric ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) study at the Harvard-affiliated Children's Hospital of Boston -- is showing that using a patient's own stem cells can prompt the growth of new muscle, from the knee to the heart. And the precursor step, using platelet-rich plasma for injuries, is on the verge of becoming mainstream.

Adult stem cells, particularly mesenchymal cells that come from muscle, bone and fat, are cells with a powerful ability to replicate and not a lot of personal identity. They easily take on the characteristics of surrounding cells and they tend to grow quickly once they get there. Ultrasounds of Vazquez's horses, for example, show regeneration of muscle in four to six weeks.

Adult stem cells can be found all over the body, in bone and marrow. Tuan says they're also found in tonsils and in the placenta and umbilical cord, which suggest that the discarded body parts can be stored for later use.

Because researchers are using autologous cells -- from the patient's own body -- the research is not controversial. No one has challenged the ethics or funding of adult stem cell research the way embryonic stem cell studies have been challenged. And because adult stem cells are native to the patient's own body, the chances of a patient rejecting them are slim to none.

Tuan and his team have been able to coach adult stem cells to form muscle and disks using goo from the small intestine and a polymer scaffold to tell cells how to grow. But, he cautions, the primitive structures aren't ready to go into humans.

"After a few weeks (of lab growth), it will turn into something that resembles a tendon, but it has to be the mechanical equivalent and we don't know that we're there," Tuan says. "Stem cells are very promising, but what they do for horses may not work so well for humans because humans are the hardest animal to rebuild."

Once they're perfected, Tuan sees a day when the tendons will change the dreaded surgery for torn anterior cruciate ligaments that sideline up to a quarter-million people in the United States and Canada every year.

"Often, that injury is a complete tear -- the ligament is snapped in two and the ends ball up and even if you untangle them and pull them together, they won't heal," he says. "So they take part of the patella tendon, which is short and tough, and stretch it and staple it to the bones. So not only is your ACL not working too well and you have to stretch it out, but your knee hurts like crazy."

"If we can learn to grow a tendon that works right, or figure out how to make the ACL heal back together, we can save a lot of people a lot of pain," he says.

In fact, doctors are already treating people with adult stem cells. Bone marrow transplants for cancer patients are basically stem cell therapy. But the marrow often comes from other people, and its primary purpose is to boost a weakened immune system, not to generate tissue.

And treating with platelet-rich plasma -- a blood product made by spinning a patient's blood in a centrifuge to concentrate the platelets -- is already in limited use and is becoming more widely accepted as a safe therapy. PRP is routinely used in cardiac surgery, where applying it to a cut sternum before closing has been shown to cut the infection rate in half. The plasma has growth factors that also promote healing.

"PRP helps recruit stem cells to the injury," says Dr. Allan Mishra, who has used PRP on its own and as part of surgery in sports injuries -- including treating tennis elbow and getting Stanford football player James McGillicuddy's patellar tendon to heal after his second surgery. "The body knows how to heal itself -- we're speeding up and concentrating the process."

Last year, Mishra wrapped up a study where he used platelet-rich plasma to treat the 20 worst tennis-elbow injuries he'd culled from more than 100 volunteers. "Ninety-three percent got better with a single injection and stayed better for two years," Mishra says.

The treatments are about one-tenth of the cost of surgery, or about $2,000 to $2,500, he says. The patient's blood is drawn, centrifuged by a specialist called a perfusionist, and injected, all in one visit. "I will guess that five years from now, insurance companies won't authorize surgery until the patient has tried and failed at PRP."

The obvious next step is to isolate the stem cells and send them to work, both inside and outside the body, researchers say. "PRP is reparative. Stem cells are regenerative," says Angela Nava, a perfusionist who processes both animal and human blood for PRP, stem cell and other procedures.

But getting from animals to humans is going to take a lot more research, according to Dr. Thomas Rando, an associate professor of neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Rando studies the body's signaling systems that tell stem cells what to do.

"We don't always know how stem cells, when injected into some tissues, work their magic," Rando said. "Veterinarians don't go back and study the horse's tendons to figure out what the stem cells did to promote healing."

"There are all kinds of ways stem cells could work. If we could understand how they are actually promoting better function of the tissue, we might be able to further improve their therapeutic effects," he adds.

Stem cell treatment is not without risks, researchers say. The worst-case scenario is that the stem cells could cause cancer -- or become cancerous themselves.

"You're putting in cells that want to grow. That has to be under control," Rando says. "Or we can end up with cancer."

Tuan also says that researchers don't entirely trust stem cells and their ability to adapt and grow.

"There's a nagging feeling that there's a cancer stem cell, that when it's agitated by exposure to carcinogens or radiation or something, it goes nuts, and that we can't identify it from the other stem cells," he says. "How do you find this bad boy and pull him out?

"And there's a nagging worry it's the same cell. We only know these cells by what they've done, and by the time they've become cancer, it's too late."

Plenty of rock bands have come out of garages, and Jobs and Wozniak noodled around in one with their goofy little computer, too, but Hewlett-Packard must be considered the mother of all garage productions.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard met as engineering students at Stanford back in the early '30s and cemented their lifelong friendship during a post-graduation camping trip. Packard went off to take a job with General Electric, while Hewlett went on to postgraduate studies. They were reunited by Stanford prof Fred Terman, who encouraged the two to "make a run for it."

With a nut of $500 in cash, borrowed from Terman, plus a used Sears, Roebuck drill press, Hewlett-Packard swung into action in the small shed behind Packard's modest house at 367 Addison Ave. The company's first product, released in 1938, was an audio oscillator used for testing sound equipment. When the Walt Disney Company bought eight of them to develop the technically advanced movie Fantasia, HP was off-and-running.

Packard and Hewlett (and that's the last time you'll see the names in that order) made the partnership permanent Jan. 1, 1939. The formal name was determined by the gracious winner of a coin toss. Even though Packard won the toss, he apparently liked the way "Hewlett-Packard" sounded, so they went with that. He never had reason to regret the choice.

Hewlett-Packard's rise as a tech powerhouse is a story that's been told ad nauseam. The electronics products were first-rate and eagerly embraced. Want became need with the coming of World War II, and HP quickly grew, moving out of Packard's garage in 1940.

But the company was innovative in another, perhaps less-known way, that's equally important. Thanks to the humanistic sensibilities of Messrs. Hewlett and Packard, HP also demonstrated a new type of management technique, one that placed a premium on the workers and their happiness. This open-management style was the prototype for how many technology companies, particularly in Silicon Valley, would operate decades later.

Packard, especially, was interested in fostering a relaxed working atmosphere. In practicing "management by walking around," he devised what became known as his 11 simple rules. He also practiced what he preached. Once, when an engineer defied his direct order to stop work on an oscilloscope that later became a commercial success, Packard had a special medal struck -- "Extraordinary Contempt and Defiance Beyond the Usual Call of Engineering" -- for the man.

HP further softened the hierarchy by establishing open cubicles and not putting doors on management offices. It also provided medical coverage to its employees at a time when that was not generally done.

Source: Hewlett-Packard

Lego fanboy and amateur photographer Mike Stimpson found a way to combine his two loves: He recreates scenes from historic photographs using the plastic bricks, then snaps his own photos.

The British videogame programmer first began assembling his Lego duplications in October 2007 as a way to pay homage to his favorite lensers: French street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, World War II-era shooter Robert Capa, American landscape photographer Ansel Adams.

Stimpson, 34, has used Lego bricks to duplicate everything from Buzz Aldrin's first steps on the moon to '60s antiwar protesters, but he has yet to produce a plastic version of an Ansel image. "Recreating large sections of Yosemite National Park is a little beyond my skills," he said.

Left:

Charles Ebbets' Lunch Atop a Skyscraper served as the inspiration for Stimpson's first Lego duplication. The original was shot during construction of Rockefeller Center in 1932. To stock up for the shoot, Stimpson says he bought more than 30 Lego minifigures to ensure he'd have enough variety to imitate the men in Ebbets' photo.

Recreating Ian Bradshaw's famous 1974 photograph of streaker Michael O'Brien during a rugby match wasn't easy for Stimpson, who struggled with figuring out how to undress the stock figurine.

"He's actually made up of a yellow Lego spaceman with his body on backwards so you can't see the space insignia," Stimpson said. It's one of the few recreations without a smiling mug: "I tried, but he looked too much like a woman. The face I chose seemed to fit with the 'Jesus' look of the original."

Stimpson cites Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, the celebrated 1932 image by French street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, as one of his favorites. For this blocky recreation of Cartier-Bresson's legendary snapshot of a man leaping over a puddle behind a train station, Stimpson tied a Lego figurine to a piece of thread and suspended it above a baking tray that held a few millimeters of water.

Although Stimpson Photoshopped the string out, the reflection is real -- he used a foam board to help reflect the Lego man in the light. "It took a long time to get all of the elements to work together," said Stimpson. "[There was] a lot of scenery that really liked to float away!"

War photographer Robert Capa became famous in 1936 for his image of a soldier collapsing after a fatal gunshot during the Spanish Civil War. Stimpson used towels and jumpers to create the backdrop of the photograph, then added a Lego character to mimic the dying militiaman.

Although nowadays Lego manufactures plastic characters with a range of facial expressions, Stimpson elected to use one with a simple smile to offset the severity of the original image. "It's a similar effect to [the] Lego versions of Darth Vader or the stormtroopers," he said. "Taking something serious and menacing, and replacing that with something cute, harmless and funny."

Stimpson special-ordered a miniature Lego firearm to complete this blocky rendition of a Pulitzer Prize-winning picture by Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams.

At first, Stimpson wasn't sure how to represent the graveness captured in the 1968 image -- which shows a Viet Cong prisoner being executed -- but in the end he arranged a Lego-ized U.S. soldier and civilian on a Lego roadway and took the shot.

"Some people find it funny," said Stimpson. "Some people find it a bit disturbing."

Stimpson subbed Lego figurines of an airline pilot and a nurse to stage Alfred Eisenstaedt's celebrated image of an American soldier dipping a young woman into a kiss in New York's Times Square in 1945.

"This was a difficult one," said Stimpson. "Lego don't make sailor figures as far as I can tell."

Stimpson made a few modifications for this version of an iconic 1967 image showing a hippie holding a flower out to a line of armed soldiers.

The original was taken by French photographer Marc Riboud at a Vietnam War protest in Washington, D.C. Stimpson swapped the antiwar activist in the image for Star Wars hero Han Solo, then used Imperial stormtroopers for his creation, dubbed Anti-Empire Protest.

"My normal working practice if something doesn't work is to add more Lego stormtroopers," he said. "I think it worked."

After requests flooded Stimpson's inbox asking for a toy edition of Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, the historic 1945 image by Joe Rosenthal, he knew he had to recreate it.

He hung a white sheet for the backdrop, gathered rocks and pebbles for the landscape and had custom figures made by BrickArms, a company that specializes in Lego weaponry.

Stimpson even carefully printed an American flag for the Marines to plant, but forgot one detail -- the correct number of stars. "I'm English," he admitted sheepishly. "That's my excuse."

How did Stimpson reproduce American journalist Malcolm Brown's 1963 shot of Thick Quang Duc's self-immolation to protest the persecution of Buddhists in Vietnam? With an oilcan, Lego fire purchased on eBay and X-wing pilot Legos wearing red Imperial Guard capes.

"It took weeks to find all those Lego flames," said Stimpson. "I was going to set a Lego figure on fire for this, but I couldn't bring myself to destroy Lego."

Stimpson stuck with his decision to keep facial expressions consistent among his photographs, and said he thinks the soft smile on the burning monk's face reflects inner peace attained through Buddhism.

The reenactment of a 1969 photograph of U.S. astronaut Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon didn't require much -- just a base plate of Lego turf, a sheet of black paper to resemble space and a Lego astronaut.

"Unfortunately, my '80s 'classic' spacemen were a bit too broken and chewed to use for that shot," Stimpson said. He hunted down a space-suited figure from a set, although he worried it looked too modern.

Although Stimpson says he has more Lego sets and parts than he can count, he often mixes and matches parts to get the right look. The biggest challenge is finding proper Lego-ized attire for the figures in his recreations, he said.

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Apple is worth more than Google. Huh? This doesn't make sense to me.

Let's start with the obvious: Google makes more money than Apple does. It had earnings of $10 billion over the past 12 months, compared to $8 billion for Apple. And while both companies' earnings are growing fast, Google's are growing faster.

But here's the clincher: Google's earnings were on less than $20 billion of revenue -- that's what I call a profit margin. Apple, by contrast, needed more than $30 billion of revenue to get its $8 billion of gross profit.

Of course, when it comes to stock valuations, the present doesn't matter nearly as much as the future. So what does the future hold for these two franchises?

They're both strong technology giants with very large "moats." But Google is stronger, and its moat is bigger. It owns search, certainly in Europe and the Americas, and it's making strong inroads into display advertising as well. Sam Gustin might be kvetching about "the toll being inflicted on Web advertising by the slowing economy," but the growth rates are still pretty torrid for what is now a reasonably mature industry: Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC, told Bloomberg that online ad spending grew 18.9 percent in the second quarter, a growth rate 7 percentage points lower than a year ago. Were it not for the slumping economy, web ad spending would have grown by more than 20 percent, she said.

19% market growth? I think Apple would be very happy with that. And remember that Google is increasing, not decreasing, its share of total online ad spending. Over at Apple, by contrast, the iPod/iTunes duopoly can't help but see its market share eroded going forwards, as DRM-free online music stores start competing on price, the record labels try to cut Apple down to size, and the marginal utility from buying your fourth or fifth iPod starts to decline.

Apple's phone business looks great right now, but the industry is notoriously cutthroat, Apple doesn't have the degree of control it's used to elsewhere, and in any case handset margins are never going to be as big as margins on iPods or MacBooks. Yes, the iPhone app store is a very promising business model -- but it's going to be quite some time, if ever, before it makes a significant contribution to Apple's bottom line.

And then there's the computer business. Macs are selling well, at very high margins. But Google's muscling in on the computing business too: over the long term, it makes sense to do all your computing in an ever-improving cloud than it does on specific, individually-owned pieces of hardware which always, eventually, break. The more important the cloud, the less important the computer, and the less important the computer's operating system, too.

Howard Lindzon, by contrast, thinks the stock market is right, and that Apple should be worth more than Google. Two of his arguments are weak: that "social search" will make Google obsolete (I'll believe it when I see it), and that "MacBooks are getting cheaper" (no they're not: Apple's entry-level laptop has been priced between $1,000 and $1,100 for years, and it's going to stay there).

Howards best argument is that a falling Google share price could become self-fulfilling: "if the stock lingers between $500 or worse yet, drifts lower, you will see a brain drain of epic proportions," he says. Google's competitive advantage has long been that it was smarter and richer and one or two steps ahead of the competition. As it matures, it might not have the same ability to attract the very best and the brightest.

But if Google has job risks, Apple has Jobs risk -- which is much bigger and probably just as imminent. No one at Google is even as important to the company as Jonathan Ive is to Apple, let alone Steve Jobs. If I'm holding a stock as a long-term investment (which is the only sensible way to hold a stock) then I don't want to run the risk that the company will founder the minute the CEO exits.

And talking of the long term, the option value of all those crazy Google projects which never make any money is huge. There's a good chance that, eventually, one of them will take off in a big way, and if it's energy-related, it could make Google's present business look positively puny.

Google stock is volatile, just as the founders said it would be in their prospectus. But if I was going to sleep today to wake up in ten years' time, I'd be much happier with Google stock under my mattress than Apple.

Apple released its first iMac on Aug. 15, 1998. The cute, translucent blue, all-in-one PC was easily the most influential personal computer of the 1990s, heralding a return to simplicity and ease of use and briefly sparking an industrial design fad around clear, colored plastic.

It also marked the return of Steve Jobs as the visionary, design-obsessed leader that Apple desperately needed. Its strong sales reversed Apple's dire mid-1990s financial situation and enabled the company to get back on the road to relevance.

Over the years, the iMac's trendsetting arc has continued, with a total of four distinct models (and a close family member), some of which shipped in a handful of flavors.

Here's a look at the evolution of the iMac: past, present and future.

Left: The iMac wasn't Apple's first PC to feature a display and motherboard integrated into the same case; the original 1984 Macintosh (top center) shared a similar form factor. Apple resurrected its quiet, appliance-like qualities 14 years later.

The Power Mac G3 all-in-one (lower left) was the closest Apple ever came to a beige iMac. Released in early 1998, its specs were similar to the iMac's, but were available only to educational institutions.

The haughty design of the 20th Anniversary Macintosh (1997, lower right), foreshadowed later LCD-display iMacs. With a $7,499 price tag ($10,277 in today's money) and limited-edition status, it stood conceptually opposite the universally accessible iMac.

Released in August 1998, the original "Bondi blue" iMac (its color reportedly named after the waters off an Australian beach) blew beige boxes out of the water. Among its novel technical features, the iMac ditched the then-ubiquitous floppy drive in favor of built-in home networking. It also introduced USB to the masses. But the G3-powered computer's greatest innovation lay in its eye-catching appearance. Apple designer Jonathan Ive took PC industrial design to new heights with the iMac's colorful teardrop case. Amazingly, much of the consumer design world came along for the ride.

Bondi blue wasn't good enough. In 1999, Apple introduced five new color schemes for the iMac: blueberry, strawberry, lime, tangerine and grape.

The next time you see an appliance with a translucent plastic case, or available in multiple candy colors, you can thank Apple. Everything from vacuum cleaners to paper towel dispensers to George Foreman grills stole a page from the iMac's design playbook. Apple has since moved on to new design motifs, but the early iMac's influence still echoes in the industrial design world.

Never content to stand still, Apple continued to cycle through various iMac colors until the end of the G3 line in 2003. Along the way, the iMac gained a few significant external changes. While the original iMac contained a fan, later iMacs were convection-cooled -- making them blessedly silent. Apple also replaced the iMac's tray-loading optical drive with a slot-loading model in 1999.

Seen here are two of Apple's most-whimsical designs (top), called "flower power" and "blue dalmatian" (2001). Stretched across, below, is a line of new colors released in 2000: indigo, ruby, sage, graphite and snow.

After revolutionizing the PC design world with the original iMac, Apple struck again: this time with a PC that bore an uncanny resemblance to a table lamp. The company unveiled the radically novel iMac G4 in 2002. It featured a flat-panel LCD display mounted on an adjustable metal arm, which, in turn, connected to a sturdy base containing the computer's other components. Somehow, the design actually worked, though it was not without controversy.

Tiring of the multicolor iMac parade (by then widely imitated), Apple chose a clean, frosty white color scheme for this new PC. Through its lifetime, the iMac G4 was available in three different display sizes (seen here from left to right): 15-inch, 17-inch and 20-inch.

The iMac G4's flat-panel display bumped the computer's price just beyond the reach of the educational market in which Apple traditionally flourished. Apple's solution was to place the iMac G4's guts into an all-in-one PC with a less-expensive CRT monitor. The result was the eMac ("e" for "education"), a critically acclaimed Mac released in 2002.

The eMac shipped in two slightly different cases: The original 2002 design (left), and a 2003-on version (right) with a milky-white appearance and white speaker grilles. Apple sold the eMac until 2006.

With the long-awaited iMac G5 (2004), Apple turned back the clock to a time before swing-arms and released a monolithic flat-panel PC that mimicked the traditionally white iPod in appearance. It was, by far, Apple's most minimalist computer design to date, and it sold in two display sizes, 17-inch and 20-inch (bottom).

The iMac G5 later included a built-in iSight camera, although that model was indistinguishable from the one you'll see next.

In early 2006, Steve Jobs dropped a bombshell: Apple would be migrating to Intel processors across its entire computer line. The switch was shocking enough without any major exterior design changes, so Apple stuck with what worked: a white enclosure nearly identical to the iMac G5 before it. And unlike the original iMac G5, these models contained built-in iSight cameras above the display.

The iMac Core Duo was available in three display sizes (bottom): 17-inch, 20-inch and the iMac's largest display yet, a monster 24-inch LCD.

As 2007 rolled around, Mac fans speculated on what sort of wild new iMac design Apple would unveil next. Then Apple raised the curtain on the iPhone in June, which quickly stole the spotlight from any potential iMac upgrades.

In August 2007, Apple announced a new iMac design sporting an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a thinner form factor, aluminum and glass construction, and a black and gray color scheme similar to that of the iPhone. It's currently the latest in the iMac line, and it's available only in 20-inch and 24-inch display sizes (bottom).

What does the future hold for the iMac? Frankly, no one knows but Apple. The company's notorious love of secrecy means that it's left to the imaginations of Apple fans to fill in the gaps. And fill the gaps they do -- many with photorealistic computer renderings of Mac concepts; new ones tend to proliferate just before Apple product announcements every year.

Seen here is a fanciful design dubbed the iView by its creator, Nuno Teixeira. It imagines an iMac with a large curved display that would envelop the user and eliminate the need for disjointed dual-display setups.

Strawberry, tangerine, grape, lime, Bondi Blue -- no, we're not talking about Lifesavers, but rather the iMac's 1999 lineup of G3 computers. Sporting a 15-inch screen and 333MHz processor, the 40-pound boxes of colorful joy were more popular in school computer labs than people's homes.

When the iMac adopted the G4 chip in 2002, it ditched its fruity color scheme for a more widely approved silver-and-white aesthetic, looking something like a sexy desk lamp. The iMac G4's most distinguished feature was its highly adjustable swivel flat screen, allowing you to angle it however you wished.

Edison invented a lot of things, for sure, but one thing he didn't invent was the telephone. The brass ring for that one goes to Alexander Graham Bell, although Elisha Gray filed his patent for a similar device the same day. But they never called it Ma Gray, did they?

Edison's contribution to the "improvement in telegraphy" was giving us the salutation now used the world over, in one form or another. Bell's famous first words spoken over what we now call the telephone -- "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you." -- were delivered without any greeting at all.

When he did weigh in on the subject, Bell proposed using "ahoy, ahoy," the age-old seafarer's hail. And, in fact, ahoy was the first greeting used, until Edison suggested hello.

At the time, the phone was conceived of as a business machine that would connect two offices with a permanently open line. Some people toyed with the idea of an alarm bell at each end to alert one office that the other office wanted to speak. On Aug. 15, 1877, Edison wrote to a friend who was setting up a phone system in Pittsburgh: "I don't think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What do you think?"

Contrary to some accounts, Edison did not coin the word. Halloo and variants had been used for ages to urge on hunting hounds and to shout to people at a distance. Edison was tinkering with a prototype phonograph in 1877 and used a shouted halloo! for testing. Early gramophones and telephones alike had pretty low signal-to-noise ratios.

Hello itself turns up in a number of places prior to 1877, including Mark Twain's travelogue, Roughing It, published four years before Bell called Mr. Watson. Earlier references to the word also exist, one dating back to at least 1826.

In any case, hello caught on quickly and entered the dictionary in 1883, and when was the last time you had to look up that spelling?

Source: Various

Most of the positive doping tests in Beijing -- and the IOC president estimates there will be as many as 40 -- will likely be for steroids and the blood-boosting hormone erythropoietin, known as EPO.

But the future of doping could get a lot more complicated. Here are some of the most promising -- or threatening, if you're the World Anti-Doping Agency -- candidates for the next Olympics.

Use your genes to grow more muscle

Manipulating genes to block naturally occurring muscle-growth inhibitors could allow athletes to boost their muscle mass. A lot.

In tests on mice, blocking the protein myostatin gave the mice up to 60 percent more lean muscle mass. Even more promising, Johns Hopkins' Se-Jin Lee recently found that overproduction of one myostatin inhibitor pumps the mice up even more: up to 81 percent in females and a whopping 116 percent in males. Results of human clinical trials are pending.

Complicating the picture, particularly for WADA, is a small number of people with naturally inhibited myostatin who will have to be distinguished from the dopers somehow.

Pop a blood-boosting pill

Who wouldn't love a pill that delivers the same record-breaking benefits of synthetic EPO without the hassle of injections or getting caught?

Clinical trials are under way for a pill that tricks the body into thinking blood-oxygen levels have dropped, causing it to produce more red blood cells, thus improving muscle endurance.

When blood-oxygen levels drop, hypoxia-inducible factor, or HIF, kicks in to stimulate red blood cell production. Once oxygen is back to normal, the HIF breaks down and cell formation stops. The drugs, known as HIF stabilizers, stop the breakdown and keep blood production up.

Some suspect athletes may already be using HIF stabilizers, but the health risks are unknown.

Grow more blood vessels

If you don't mind injections directly into your heart and limbs, vascular endothelial growth factor may be for you. VEGF causes new blood vessels to grow, which in theory could move more oxygen and nutrients between muscles, lungs and the heart with less effort. So more effort could be expended on athletic performance. VEGF gene therapy could potentially help patients with heart and arterial diseases form new blood vessels, keeping them alive and avoiding amputation. But it's not a simple hack, and a failed gene-doping test isn't the only risk. Unregulated VEGF-induced vessel growth appears to also promote tumor growth and metastasis.

Feel less pain, get more gain

Athletes know how to suffer. Raise an athlete's pain threshold, and suffering will occur at a higher level of exertion.

Tests on rats suggest that injecting the beta-endorphin gene into spinal fluid through a spinal tap causes the body to release its own painkilling endorphins. Pain signals get blocked before they reach the brain, without the sleepiness and cloudiness associated with morphine and other painkilling opioids.

Raising an athlete's pain threshold may improve performance, but it may also cause them to ignore warnings of overexertion and injury.

Beef up specific muscles

Say you're a cyclist who wants powerful legs but a light upper body so you don't have to haul the extra weight when riding uphill. Or a tennis player who needs a bit more shoulder muscle. Injecting insulin-like growth factor, or IGF-1, into specific muscles sparks those muscles to grow while avoiding the full-body muscle growth usually associated with IGF-1. Physiologist H. Lee Sweeney at the University of Pennsylvania discovered this while looking for a treatment for muscle-wasting that avoids side effects from unwanted growth, such as cancer and heart enlargement. The targeted therapy may also make IGF-1 harder to detect in a doping test. Sweeney estimates that since his research was published, half of his e-mails are from athletes. He has worked with WADA, but others developing similar techniques may not.

Get more muscles, fewer zits

Want the muscle-building benefits of steroids without the testicle-shrinking, moob-growing, acne-popping side effects? That's the promise of selective androgen receptor modulators.

SARMs bind to specific tissues, such as muscle and bone. Unlike some steroids, they don't indiscriminately also bind to prostate, liver and other tissues. And SARMs come in a pill. No needles or skin patches.

These pills could be a boon to people suffering from muscle-wasting diseases and for athletes concerned about health risks associated with steroids. Sound too good to be true? Perhaps: A test to detect SARMs may be ready before the drugs are widely available. WADA won't tell until they catch an athlete.

Fill up with new blood substitutes

With EPO and blood transfusions increasingly detectable, athletes could return to blood substitutes for an extra hit of oxygen. Several athletes reportedly used substitutes in the past, and one cyclist may have almost died as a result.

Some new substitutes could have similar problems. A report in the Journal of the American Medical Association in April criticized blood substitutes such as PolyHeme and Hemopure for causing heart attacks and deaths in test subjects. But there are alternatives. Oxygen Biotherapeutics claims their experimental substitute, Oxycyte, carries oxygen 50 times more efficiently than natural blood without the risks of older substitutes. And Dendritech patented a blood substitute built from 3-D nanoparticles that the company builds in precise oxygen-carrying shapes. At least some blood substitutes may be easy to detect, but there are rumors the test isn't regularly used.

Take a next-gen EPO

At the Tour de France in July, Ricardo Ricco got caught using a new EPO-like blood booster, CERA, recently released by Roche.

Before CERA was on the market, the pharmaceutical giant cooperated with WADA to have a test ready to trap cutting-edge dopers like Ricco, a sign that WADA is catching up to, and perhaps even staying ahead of, dopers.

Or it's a sign that WADA needs help developing tests to detect each EPO variant, a tall order considering EPO and related drugs make up a $12 billion market. There are also dozens of EPO-stimulating agents available or in the works around the world.

Pump up your muscle fiber

Athletes already have more fatigue-resistant muscle fibers than couch potatoes. But new research shows they may be able widen that gap further by boosting levels of the gene responsible for adding new fibers.

Recently, researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego found that an existing medication, called GW1516, raises the levels of this gene, resulting in a 68 percent endurance improvement in fit mice.

The Salk researchers are working with WADA on a test to detect use of GW1516. But several other drugs are known to manipulate the muscle-fiber genes, and others are believed to do the same. A test to detect this type of gene doping would need to cover a lot of uncharted territory.

Lastly, use mustard?

Athletes turned off by the latest biotech breakthroughs can try this recipe: Strip down and rub mustard oil all over your body.

While exploring the role skin plays in the production of red blood cells, Randy Johnson's team of researchers at UC San Diego found that rubbing mustard oil on mice caused spikes in natural EPO production, and that led to increased red blood cell levels.

It's unclear how much mustard oil a human athlete would need to enhance performance, or how much mustard oil could lead to strokes and heart attacks.

With all the crazy, complicated doping schemes out there could the journey to the top of the podium simply require a trip to the grocery store?

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For 20 years, Ted Harbert worked at ABC. He started there right out of college in 1977, when the network, along with CBS and NBC, was the only game in town and was the hit factory responsible for Happy Days; Charlie's Angels; Rich Man, Poor Man and Roots. By 1996, when Harbert was running ABC, those glory days were ending. All three networks were still colossal, but Fox had established its beachhead, and cable's market penetration was almost complete. The '80s had seen the rise of MTV. And CNN was by then a big deal, not just an incinerator for Ted Turner's extra cash. ESPN was competing aggressively. Individually, none of these channels got much of a rating most of the time, but the damage was starting to add up.

"People would say, 'Oh, they're nibbling away, they're nibbling away,'" Harbert recalls. "And we would always say, 'Well, they can nibble, but they're never gonna really take us.' And then they took us."

Today, Harbert is president and C.E.O. of the Comcast Entertainment Group. He oversees The Style Network, G4—a six-year-old channel aimed at young men who love videogames—and C.E.G.'s most recognizable offering, E!, which features celebrity news. E! ranks 31st among the most-watched basic-cable channels, which means that, in general, less than 1 percent of America's 112 million TV households are watching it during prime time. Yet Harbert is probably sleeping better these days than his former colleagues at the broadcast networks.

When Harbert talks about television, it's with the sober clarity of someone who has looked at life from both sides now and has seen that only one business model is working. Cable networks target just those viewers who want what they have to offer. Broadcast networks want everyone. And the business of wanting everyone has never been worse. At the end of last season, ABC, CBS, and NBC reported their smallest combined audience ever, an event that has become a gloomy yearly occurrence. Meanwhile, cable—counting both basic channels and pay services like HBO and Showtime—now receives 55 percent of the total viewership.

It may be time to perform an autopsy on network TV, which some have pronounced officially dead at age 60, the victim of a lifetime of big spending, hard living, and bad planning. Here's the coroner's report: The evening newscasts have been mowed down by cable's heat, spin, and round-the-clock immediacy. In prime time, nobody watches reruns anymore—and reruns, along with syndication, used to be the only way comedy and drama series, the heart of a network's prime-time business, made money. (The way they make money now is...well, the networks will get back to you as soon as they figure that out.)

Speaking of old-school, half-hour sitcoms: Once, 50 of them were on the air at a time. Today, they're all but gone. Suddenly, people just stopped liking them. Prime-time news magazines? Barely holding on. "Protected" time slots? Viewers accustomed to Web surfing and channel flipping at hyperspeed aren't going to watch a new show just because they're too lazy to change the channel after The Biggest Loser. The audience for daytime soaps, a profitable staple since TV's infancy, has shrunk so dramatically that the form may vanish within a few years. This is all very bad news for a medium that hasn't come up with a fresh format since 2000, when CBS launched Survivor, the gold rush in reality-TV competitions. (P.S.: Survivor isn’t what it used to be either.)

It's unlikely that a broadcast network is ever again going to create a megahit like The Cosby Show, which at its mid-’80s peak drew as many as 50 million viewers an episode. For several years now, TV's top event has been Fox's American Idol. Last season, it drew 28.8 million viewers a week.

Conversations about the future of television tend to vault way past next week or next year into a world where schedules don't exist and 10,000 programming options are all available at any moment, half of them fully interactive. (Not enjoying this episode of Law & Order: Moonbase? That's OK—you can change the plot!)

It sounds like fun. But in reality, the number of cable channels has topped out. And the number of households that subscribe to basic cable—about 65 million—hasn't budged for a decade. That's roughly 58 percent of all American TV households and it's a much higher percentage of the total households that advertisers actually care about. People who have something to sell are attracted to viewers who have already demonstrated their willingness to buy something (like cable TV). The cable business is booming: Annual advertising revenues have jumped from $8.1 billion in 1997 to a projected $28.6 billion this year.

So before the death knell tolls, let's consider some ways broadcast TV might be reborn.

1. Accept the fact that niche is the new normal.

The most popular cable networks average fewer than 3 million viewers a night. But add up all those little niches, and how much of an audience is left? Even TNT and USA, the two cable channels whose original programming most closely resembles that of broadcast networks, are carving out distinctive spaces for themselves. Turner Networks president Steve Koonin has successfully promoted TNT as a network for drama and TBS as a home for comedy—two old-school broadcast mainstays. But, he says, "Within the wide berth of comedy and drama as prospective brands, we're looking at where there are underserved audiences, and we're finding them in family viewers, African Americans, women, and action lovers."

When groups that vast are being won over by cable, broadcast's claim that it reaches for everyone starts to ring a little hollow, especially when cable networks are making shows that are just like broadcast series, except a little better. To be fair to the networks, the playing field isn't level: Small cable channels can impress advertisers simply by growing. Networks can't—so a show with a viewership of 4 million is a hit on USA and a flop on CBS. But the differences are diminishing. In the spring, Koonin took an aggressive gamble to make this clear: He scheduled Turner Networks' upfronts cheek-to-cheek with those of the broadcast networks.

"Koonin was brilliant," says Brian Terkelsen, of the brand consultancy MediaVest. "In my opinion, that was the turning point. We'll all look back and say the one riff that he did onstage that week shifted everything for cable and broadcasting. What he did was, he got up there and said, 'If I were to tell you the story of two networks, and one had a talking car and a steroid in a unitard who was beating up an average guy in a game show, and the other had an Academy Award-winning actress in her second season and a Golden Globe winner in her fourth season, which would you think was which?'" Koonin then unveiled slides of the cheesy shows—NBC's Knight Rider and American Gladiators—and the classy ones: TNT’s Saving Grace and The Closer. Point made, brutally. "If anybody in the room didn't think, 'Holy shit! It's all changed,'" Terkelsen says, "they’re morons."

2. Know your brand.

"There are an awful lot of channels available to people in the average digital home," says FX president John Landgraf. "So if you don’t stand for something, you stand for nothing." FX, he says, "appeals to people with a certain taste for edgy, innovative quality." He has established the brand with material that's positioned exactly halfway between what the networks and pay cable offer. Its signature shows—Rescue Me, The Shield, Damages, Nip/Tuck—tend to be hard-driving adult dramas that are one big step raunchier, bloodier, sexier, cooler, and rougher than the broadcast networks' cop/lawyer/doctor equivalents.

It wasn't a smooth road for the network, which was founded in 1994. "FX toyed, in its earlier incarnations, with various branding strategies," Landgraf recalls, "from live television—its original motto was 'TV made fresh daily'—to a time when it was much more explicitly appealing to men." Back then, it often looked like the NASCAR channel. To redefine itself, FX had to make casual viewers expendable in order to build its rep with committed ones. "We want to have somebody's favorite show," Landgraf says, "not everybody's 10th-favorite show."

Rebranding to that degree isn't without its risks. Several years ago, Bravo became a haven for young, hip, gay-friendly consumers with lots of disposable income. That meant walking away from the (few) viewers who knew it as a poor man's PBS, a repository for dusty filmed productions of Swan Lake. If the one-two punch of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Project Runway hadn't succeeded, the channel could well have gone down for the count. Similarly, at Turner, Koonin canceled TNT's most popular offering—wrestling—in order to make its metamorphosis into a drama-driven cable network credible.

Those gambles paid off because Bravo, FX, and TNT all followed through swiftly to build on their initial hits. Likewise, AMC, which specializes in old movies, didn't waste a minute after critics acclaimed the first season of its original show Mad Men: It began developing other dramas, knowing its newfound audience needed more reasons to stick around. Without moves like that, a rebranding effort can quickly give rise to skepticism. A&E spent big money to buy reruns of HBO's The Sopranos because it wanted to be seen as the kind of network that would air a show like The Sopranos. But it's not; it's the kind of network that would air reruns of The Sopranos and take out the bad words.

In many ways, the networks themselves already have specific brand identities; they just don't admit it. For decades, CBS has had the most elderly demographic among the major networks. ABC specializes in comedies and light dramas with strong female appeal, from Desperate Housewives to Grey's Anatomy to Ugly Betty. Fox—with the exception of American Idol—is largely aimed at guys, whether via action dramas like 24 and Prison Break, Sunday-night cartoons, or the never-ending, shaky-cam glimpse of night-shift squalor that is Cops. The fledgling CW is building on Gossip Girl and America’s Next Top Model to chase young women. NBC's struggles are not unrelated to the fact that it's still trying to be all things to all people: When you offer programming like 30 Rock to a smart, affluent audience but also rely on diet contests, game shows, and To Catch a Predator to fill prime time, you can't blame viewers for not knowing what to expect.

3. Don't count on "flow" unless all your programming is aimed at the same audience.

Zip through FX's schedule, and at some point, you will see an episode of Rescue Me, followed by another episode of Rescue Me, and another and another. And when Bravo is hard-selling one of its hits, the word overkill is not in its vocabulary. "The great thing about our shows is, people want to see them again," says Andy Cohen, Bravo's senior vice president for original programming. "A lot of times, we'll premiere an episode of Top Chef and then rerun the episode right when it's over. And people stay tuned! Some of our shows are really like crack," he laughs.

This practice makes sense in two ways: It's cost-efficient and it builds loyalty. The tactic used to be dismissed as killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, until people noticed that the goose kept on thriving. Now it's just a matter, as Cohen puts it, of "feeding the beast."

Since embracing the episode-marathon strategy several years ago—as a way to pump life into Project Runway, which was struggling in its first year—Bravo has seen ratings for its flagship shows grow every season. The fourth cycle of Top Chef, which aired in the spring, outperformed the third, which beat the second, which outdid the first.

The broadcast networks used to count on that kind of steady growth in the first few years of one of their hits. But recently, scripted series like Ugly Betty and Heroes have started losing viewers after just one season. Given that alarming turnabout, you'd think the networks would be doing everything in their power to build the equity of a potential new hit. But no. Their schedules, set in stone decades ago, remain inviolable: news and chitchat before noon, soaps and talk shows in the afternoon, local and national evening news and infotainment later in the day, talk shows at bedtime. Some of these programming blocks justify themselves economically, but others aren't as cost-effective. Daytime soaps occupy a large swath of airtime that could occasionally be used to repurpose a network's prime-time schedule cheaply and efficiently.

4. Content counts.

Discussions at the networks about what's depleting their viewership tend to focus on familiar culprits: YouTube. The internet. Xbox. The iPod. Too many options. (Capitalism can be so unfair!) This leads to brainstorming sessions about making TV more like the internet, resulting in a lot of overexcited press releases announcing how one-minute "minisodes" of your favorite shows will be exclusively available on a network website, or Twittered to you line by line as they're being written, or beamed directly into your cerebral cortex via Bluetooth.

Enough already. Competition from other media is real, but it's also a convenient excuse to not focus on programming. You don't hear American Idol's producers whining about how the internet is draining their audience, because they know that their audience is on the internet. Viewers go there to talk, read, kvetch, and gossip—about American Idol.

Creating substance-free shows because you think your audience has no attention span is a sucker's game. And streaming shows for free is, so far, doing a lot more for viewers than it is for a network's balance sheet. Instead, the networks should try to make TV shows for people who want to watch TV shows. There seems to be no shortage of viewers out there: For all the hand-wringing about how new media are sapping television's audience, the average viewer of online video in April watched fewer than eight minutes a day. By contrast, the average household has its TV on for eight hours and 14 minutes daily. That's a record. (One that should make all of us rear back in horror, but that's another story.)

5. When you say the TV season is 52 weeks, you have to mean it.

Madison Avenue is still fond of the old-fashioned idea of fall as a launchpad for a new TV season, and so are many viewers. But does that mean the networks should continue taking summers off? Sure, they run original programming in July and August, but "original" in this context generally means a series so odd that they couldn't find a place for it in the regular season, or Celebrity Circus, or 85 variations on foreign game shows (this summer's flavor of the moment).

It's a bind, since a real commitment to top-quality original programming during the summer costs money that the broadcast networks don't have right now, but a diet of reruns and cut-rate schlock may cost them viewers. According to Comcast's Harbert, when broadcast execs ask for new shows year-round, "the finance guys say, 'You're killing me!' And the programming guys say, 'Yeah, but if I put on repeats, they're going to have terrible ratings, and we'll have no promo base for fall.' And everybody's right."

But investing in shows—and thus in audience building—is a smarter long-term strategy. It's no accident that cable hits like Lifetime's Army Wives, USA's Burn Notice, and TNT's The Closer all launched in summer, allowing cable to perform its annual raid on broadcast viewers.

6. Don't break faith with your audience.

Broadcast networks routinely spend three months promoting a show that they then cancel after two airings. Or they get a few million viewers hooked on a serialized drama and then drop it midway through a season, leaving fans hanging. This simply never happens on cable, where if a series gets a 13-episode order, those 13 episodes are damn well going to air, even if it's just because there’s nothing else to take their place. Every time the networks reshuffle their grid in a spasm of quick-fix panic, they disenchant more viewers.

7. If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em.

Ben Silverman, NBC's head programmer, may fret when one of his network's shows struggles against a basic-cable hit like Bravo's Top Chef or the Sci Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica. But his boss, NBC Universal C.E.O. Jeff Zucker, will rest easy, because his company also owns Bravo. And the Sci Fi Channel. And a whole lot more. The notion that the "500-channel universe" is a pie being cut into ever-tinier slivers ignores the fact that the vast majority of what we watch fills the coffers of a small handful of megaliths, just as it always has.

Take a closer look at that pie:

• Besides Bravo and Sci Fi, NBC Universal also owns USA, the highest-rated ad-supported cable channel; MSNBC; CNBC; ShopNBC; Oxygen; Telemundo; and one-third of A&E Television, itself a conglomeration that includes A&E, the History Channel, and the Biography Channel.
• Disney owns ABC, ESPN, SoapNet, ABC Family, its own one-third share of A&E, and half of Lifetime. It also, of course, owns the Disney Channel, the top-rated basic-cable outlet of any kind.
• Viacom and CBS, though now traded separately on Wall Street, are both controlled by one man, Sumner Redstone. CBS owns Showtime, the Movie Channel, and half of the CW. Viacom’s list of properties includes MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Spike TV, BET, and Comedy Central.
• Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. owns Fox, Fox News, FX, and, well, everything with the word Fox in it, from Fox College Sports to the Fox Reality Channel.
• Time Warner owns the other half of the CW, as well as CNN, TNT, TBS, TCM, HBO, Cinemax, the Cartoon Network, and TruTV (formerly CourtTV).

So a half-dozen companies own not only five broadcast networks but also a majority of the cable channels that anyone actually watches—including all 10 of prime time's highest-rated cable networks, which together accounted for more than 18 million viewers a night last year. To anyone worried about where network viewers have gone: They may have left the building, but they haven’t escaped the compound.

8. Lowered expectations can be your best friend.

The current chaos in TV has a silver lining: In an era of on-demand options, streaming video, full-season DVD releases for latecomers, multiple airings of the same show, and the inexorable march of DVRs, the definition of success is more slippery than it used to be.

Eventually, a modernized ratings system will capture and aggregate all of these viewers, which will primarily help series that appeal to a young, I-want-it-when-I-want-it audience. By contrast, a show whose viewers could make up an AARP convention isn't going to benefit much from this brave new world. The ratings for 60 Minutes, for example, grow by only 3 percent when DVR use is factored in.

But until that's all sorted out, there's plenty of room for spin. In a TV universe without a center, if nothing is really a hit, then everything is. If you can't crack Nielsen's top 10, you can tell Madison Avenue that you wildly overperform among viewers with lots of disposable income—and you get as much as a 40 percent jump in audience when you take into account DVR use, as is the case with The Office. AMC's Mad Men counts as a hit because it's great, it wins awards and critical raves, and until recently, it was the only show of its kind on the channel, so there was nothing to compare it with.

The History Channel's Ice Road Truckers (a reality series devoted entirely to truckers driving across large expanses of ice) is a hit because it outperformed anything the History Channel had ever aired and demolished the image of the channel as a musty attic full of newsreel footage about Hitler. A show can even claim hit status because of the magazine covers, text-message traffic, and internet buzz it generates: From the amount of attention paid to the CW's teen soap Gossip Girl last season, one wouldn't know that it ranked 150th out of 161 shows and drew just 2.4 million viewers a week.

So the good news for networks is that it may be possible to stop the bleeding. The bad news is that the patient can't be cured. For 50 years, pop culture has moved in only one direction—toward more options, fewer mass phenomena, and greater consumer control. And there's no turning that around, especially with a generation of viewers that sees no meaningful distinction between a broadcast network and a cable channel.

What that means isn't just the end of a few old business models, but the end of TV as we've known it. America's most unifying cultural medium for the past 60 years has now followed music and movies in surrendering its mass appeal in order to cater to a populace organized entirely by self-defining niches. Welcome to the new era of post-popular culture, in which there's something for anyone, but nothing for everyone. What on earth will we all talk about tomorrow morning?

This article is about the renowned humorologist. For the sports figure, see Scott Brown (Scottish footballer).

Scott McClure Brown
(born March 2, 1976) is an American writer, journalist, and underwear model. [citation needed]

Brown was born in Alabama in 1976. He grew up white and male — which, he assures you, is harder than it looks. He learned sharecropping from his father and wine-pairing from his mother, but his greatest teacher was the streets: They taught him everything he knows about paving and resurfacing. HA! Yes, Brown is also a humorist, and thank you, America, for the laughter.

In 1998, Brown began writing for magazines and awaiting the creation of a free, crowdsourced online encyclopedia that would deliver the recognition denied him by his peers, his parents, and Who's Who Among American High School Students 1993/1994.

Famously, no one has ever created a Wikipedia page for Brown, an omission some attribute to a lack of Web savvy on the part of Brown's mother. Across Brown's apartment, the debate rages: How is it that a man can write stuff, put his name on it, and get published over and over again and not warrant a few lines in the world's de facto most-authoritative public record? Seriously, would it kill the world's de facto most-authoritative public record? You don't even have to upload a picture. (But if you do, please use one of the pre-bald ones.)

Some say Brown was simply too humble to promote himself properly. Others maintain Brown's ideas were too radical for the system, and the system retaliated by not noticing. Still others claim that "some," "others," and "still others" were all Brown, using various high-pitched voices.

Brown was often advised to secretly author his own Wiki entry, despite how this would violate the rules and juke the whole noble Wiki experiment. "Everyone does it!" Brown was told. What's the use of a free-market popularity contest if it's rigged and padded, he reasoned. Then it's just LinkedIn! For years, he maintained a serene faith in the wisdom of crowds, checking Wikipedia two or three times a day to discover that a) he wasn't there and b) crowds are stupid. And then one day, after a night of heavy drinking, an entry finally appeared.

Late in his Wikipedia entry, Brown was quoted as saying, "I didn't write this Wikipedia entry. It may look like I did, but I didn't. I'm a published writer, so it's not inconceivable that one of my many hot young fans [citation needed] wrote this. I'll look it over, though, just to make sure everything's accurate ... Yup, looks good!"

Toward the end of his life, Brown died. He died a hero, blowing up a Nazi asteroid that was either headed for Ohio or was the size of Ohio. (And he doesn't even have any friends in Ohio!) Anyway, the people have spoken. With a single voice. Which is not his. Make changes, but know this: The people check this page a lot, and they like it how it is.

- - - -

Scott Brown's Wikipedia page may (or may not) be here .

While New York City's summer waterfall art installation by Olafur Eliasson is impressive in its scope, its impact on observers is varied. We asked our readers to show us their take on the project by submitting their own photos. Some views are beautiful, others ordinary, but they all amount to an interesting experiment in crowdsourced photography.

Click through the gallery to see our selections from the reader's submissions, all of which can be viewed on the original submissions page along with more information. Let us know what you think in the comments section.

Left:

Five Elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water
Submitted by Oliver Valle

Photographer's comment:

"Image taken from Brooklyn side. The expressway is behind and Manhattan is in front."

NYC Waterfall with Sky
Submitted by JF

Photographer's comment:

"This shot was taken from the free ferry that takes you to see all the waterfalls. This is looking south."

Over the Falls
Submitted by JSJones

Photographer's comment:

"My view is from above looking down to the East River. I learned how to get access to this part of the Brooklyn Bridge when I was a teenager, finally a practical use for that info."

Picnic at Sunset in the Park Under the Bridge
Submitted by Anonymous

Photographer's comment:

"There was a picnic and screening of Stand by Me last night in the park under the bridge. Snapped this at sunset before the movie started."

Not Everyone Loves the Waterfalls ...
Submitted by Jason

Photographer's comment:

"Not everyone is a fan."

Untitled
Submitted by Alex K.

Photographer's comment:

"Walked along the piers to see all four falls yesterday. Nothing like saltwater in the face. :)"

Waterfall and Ferries
Submitted by Wanda McCrae

Photographer's comment:

"The Governors Island Ferry docks in front of the waterfall, as the Staten Island Ferry passes.”

Brooklyn Bridge Waterfall
Submitted by Adolfo Miranda

Photographer's comment:

None

Blowing Waterfall
Submitted by Simon Fondrie-Teitler

Photographer's comment:

"I took the ferry to Governors Island, and on the way back a thunderstorm came, with large gusts of wind. The waterfall started blowing onto the island, soaking the people waiting for the next ferry."

Up the East River
Submitted by Wanda McCrae

Photographer's comment:

"From Brooklyn Bridge Park you can see the waterfalls at the Brooklyn Bridge and just north of the Manhattan Bridge."

Brooklyn Bridge Falls
Submitted by Daniel Turkewitz

Photographer's comment:

"Taken July 19, from the South Street Seaport."

Wired.com photographer Bryan Derballa captures one visitor's displeasure with the waterfalls.

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

Even the hometown British Stainless Steel Association acknowledges that Brearley was not alone.

English and French researchers had learned as early as the 1820s that iron-chromium alloys resisted some acids. But they were restricted to low- rather than high-chromium-content alloys, because they hadn't yet figured out the necessity of lowering the carbon content.

Two Englishmen filed a patent for an acid-resistant steel with 30 to 35 percent chromium and 2 percent tungsten in 1872. But it was a French researcher named Brustlein who in 1875 detailed the importance of low carbon content. He determined that a high-chromium alloy would need carbon content below 0.15 percent or thereabouts.

The race was on. Very slowly. Many attempts produced many failures over the next 20 years.

Hans Goldschmidt of Germany broke the logjam in 1895 with the development of the aluminothermic reduction process for producing carbon-free chromium. French metallurgist Leon Guillet forged ahead, so to speak, with work on iron-nickel-chromium alloys in the first decade of the 20th century, but seemingly ignored their resistance to corrosion. Back in Germany, P. Monnartz and W. Borchers discovered in 1911 that having a minimum 10.5 percent chromium seriously increased steel's resistance to corrosion.

Enter Harry Brearley of Sheffield, England. He started working on a project in 1912 for a small-arms manufacturer that wanted to prevent its rifle barrels from eroding away quickly from the heat and friction of gunshot. Brearley needed to etch his steel-alloy samples to examine their granular structure under the microscope, but when he used nitric acid, the high-chromium samples resisted being dissolved. His focus shifted from erosion resistance to corrosion resistance.

After trying various combinations with 6 to 15 percent chromium and differing measures of carbon, he made a new alloy on Aug. 13, 1913, containing 12.8 percent chromium and 0.24 percent carbon. It resisted not only nitric acid, but lemon juice and vinegar as well.

So he took his discovery of "rustless steel" to Sheffield cutler R.F Mosley. A manager there, Ernest Stuart, renamed it "stainless steel."

But wait, there's more. Metallurgists at Germany's Krupp Iron Works were also working on high-chromium, corrosion-resistant steel alloys of various compositions between 1908 and 1914. Elwood Haynes and two other Americans were doing parallel work in the years 1908-1911, and Max Mauermann of Poland displayed something similar at the 1913 Adria exhibition in Vienna. And there's a Swedish claimant as well.

Brearley, however, did formulate the first alloy to be called stainless steel, and he recognized potential uses others had not seen. Today is the 95th anniversary of his discovery.

Source: British Stainless Steel Association

In a perfect world, the advent of the web would have sent literary scammers skittering back into their mucus-tube burrows. However, as I discover every time I search Google Images for any body part, this is not a perfect world. Many aspiring writers still react to supposedly professional interest with sparkling eyes and open wallets.

Alt Text Podcast

Download audio files and subscribe to the Alt Text podcast.

Here are a couple hints to help you distinguish the scammers from legitimate publishers.

First off, don't be afraid. Scammers can smell fear, and to them it smells like the still-living flesh strips that make up most of their diet. A lot of aspiring writers see publishers and agents as bored nobility, offering contracts in a whimsical attempt to inject some entertainment into an otherwise tedious existence. They suspect that even putting too long a delay between "yes" and "please" will cause the contract to be withdrawn and fed to a purebred Saluki.

This isn't true. If publishers or agents are taking the time to talk to you about your submission, it means they like you like you. Sure, it's possible that nothing will come of it, but the very fact that you're actually talking to a real human being rather than having your manuscript rejected with a terse form letter means that you're free to ask questions, make suggestions and receive clarifications. So, do it! If an editor gets huffy at you over questions, that's a good sign that he's an ichor-oozing arthropod dressed up in human skin for the purpose of draining your lifeblood to feed their brood.

Now, even if the editor initially appears to be a mammal, it's still possible to get scammed. There's a wonderful rule of thumb known as Yog's Law: "Money flows toward the writer."

I know that in a world filled with kickbacks and graft, this seems too good to be true. It seems perfectly logical that you might have to spread around some cash, grease some palms and lubricate the chassis of commerce with some crude currency in order to make publishing run smoothly. Scammers leap on this misapprehension like a cat on cantaloupe.

OK, maybe I have a weird cat. The point is that you, the writer, do not pay the agent. You do not pay the publisher. Not for reading the manuscript, not for offering suggestions and certainly not for printing. The agent gets a portion of the money you've already made. The publisher makes a profit from sales. You do not write checks to these people for doing their jobs.

As a writer, you're free to spend as much money as you want for your own purposes, like workshops and hand-stitched dream journals and magic feathers. You might even choose to spend some or all of your advance on publicity, once you have the cash in hand. But if an agent or publisher tells you that you need to shell out in order to make the deal happen, you should listen for telltale chittering and examine the person's spine for the subdermal squirming associated with literary scammers.

None of this should be taken as a slight against legitimate businesses catering to self-publishers. These businesses will tell you exactly what you get for each dollar, and promise nothing more. They will not attempt to convince you that you're the next Browning, Kipling, Fleming, Golding or Rowling.

I myself was once an aspiring writer, before I became famous and wealthy beyond the fever dreams of a thousand rajahs. I know how difficult it is, and how tempting attention can be. But if you follow these guidelines, you'll not only protect yourself, you'll also protect the Earth from invasion by insectoid parasites that depend on the cooperation of naive writers to supplant humans as the planet's dominant species and put us to work as blood-cows for their throbbing young.

- - -

Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a professional writer.

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From wind turbines to water purification systems, from solar panels to CO2 capture, suddenly, if you're an investor with money to burn, environmental technology has become the biggest game in town.

The problem: Venture capital firms and private equity shops are discovering that while dot-com startups are easily fashioned by mavericks and whiz kids, there are few rogue entrepreneurs with the chops to handle the complexities of environmental technology, much less to invent it.

The finance guys' big problem, however, is a potential gold mine for academia.

Take Potentia, a green tech startup conceived by University of Michigan PhD students Tzeno Galchev ad Ruba Borno in conjunction with MBA student Rishiraj Das, and facilitated by Michigan's Zell-Lurie Institute of Entrepreneurial Studies.

The Institute was founded to introduce engineering students to new venture opportunities and help them bring their inventions to market. In addition to offering a business curriculum, it serves as an umbrella organization for grants and competitions for the benefit of new startups -- such as last September's Clean Tech Forum for venture capitalists.

Potentia, which manufactures an environmental energy powered battery, was the runner-up in the center's 2008 Michigan Business Challenge. While still in the R&D phase, Potentia has already been in talks with potential investors.

"I would say that without getting the business background, it would have been fairly impossible to take an invention anywhere," Galchev said.

Michigan's not alone. Top engineering programs such as those at Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, and U.C. Berkeley are designing business-oriented programs, institutes, and curricula to turn bookish engineers into savvy entrepreneurs.

According to Bill Aulet, who created and teaches MIT's Energy Ventures class, the nature of alternative energy research poses unique challenges: Green tech innovations require extensive resources, a long time horizon, and a formidable education in engineering, as well as business skills.

"There aren't nearly enough energy entrepreneurs out there," says Aulet, who has seen interest from VCs skyrocket in the last few years. "So what we had to do is start teaching entrepreneurship to engineers."

The shortage of mature green tech startups can be attributed to the suddenness of widespread interest. Investments in companies working on green technology in North America totaled almost $4 billion in 2007, according to the CleanTech Group. And 2008 is on track to yield five times what was invested in 2004.

Of course, universities' eagerness to lend a hand is not free from self-interest. Typically, an invention by a university-employed inventor (e.g. faculty, staff, paid PhD students) with substantial use of university facilities is the property of the university, with the inventor getting exclusive licensing rights to the patent. If a licensed technology forms the basis of a successful venture, that could mean big money for the school.

But Peter Adriaens, a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan, says that the influx of interest is so new that until recently, the university didn't even have a comprehensive database of its clean tech-related inventions.

"Not so long ago, if an engineer had a small invention he would just hope that there would be someone on business side that would recognize brilliance and see the application," says Tim Falley, a colleague of Adriaens' and the managing director of Michigan's Zell-Lurie Institute. "Most of the time, it would have died right there."

Last year, MIT's Entrepreneurship Center launched a class called Energy Ventures, geared towards graduate students in engineering working on research applicable to the alternative energy market. It also now awards a Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize: $200,000 for first place, "to help develop and motivate the next generation of energy entrepreneurs."

Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program also provides resources for linking inventions to investments through the two-year old Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency. Its Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship serves as a boot camp for graduate students looking to commercialize their inventions.

"What we try to do in terms of the course is to give them the sense that there is a structure in place for how to present your ideas," says Margaret Neale, a professor in Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and SIE instructor. "We give them a framework for how to approach business situations."

An early business education give engineering types the “ability to analyze problems in a different way, by focusing on a need in the market and working backwards to an invention," says Susan Broderick, the program manager of U.C. Berkeley’s Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology.

With the proper training, engineers can avoid embarking down research paths that will be ultimate dead ends, from a commercial standpoint.

"Engineers need to understand that the best technology does not win – the best application wins," says MIT’s Aulet. "They need to think very early on about whether something will create value in the real world."

The dog days of summer are upon us and if you're anything like the crew here at Wired.com, you still haven't logged as many miles as you had hoped.

Well, there's no better motivator than new gear to get you back on track. After all, isn't that why you're a cyclist, not some sad-sack runner pounding the pavement in a pair of worn Adidas? You need something shiny and new to put you in the mood for a few late summer spins.

Look no further: We tested out a handful of trick toys to help you crank your way into fall.

Capoforma Signature Series Diavolo Jersey

Grunting up Kings Mountain Road in Woodside under the hot California sun, the top-end Capoforma Signature Series Diavolo jersey from Upland Sports Group kept me comfortable and dry. Pity it didn't do anything for my climbing. Costing a cool $150, you'd think it should.

The Capoforma is a snazzy piece of sport kit made from Capoforma Carbon, which, according to the company, is a dual-knit microfiber with a thread of carbon woven through it. Upland says the microfiber is quick drying, while the carbon thread makes it static resistant -- unlike many polyester jerseys.

The Capoforma fits well, with three roomy pockets in back. And the wicking worked, keeping me mostly dry even on the longest, hottest rides.

Best of all, it looks the bomb. The Caporforma makes you feel like Mario Cipollini -- even if you look more like a fat sausage. The first day I wore it, a hottie commented on what a nifty jersey it was -- and at my age, that's worth $150 right there.
-- Leander Kahney

The first thing you notice about Chris King ISO Singlespeed disk wheels are how unbelievably beautiful they are. The workmanship is flawless. Available in a vast range of colors, the metalwork is stunning, even in punky pink and black.

While other wheelsmiths keep trotting out new improvements like aero spokes and ceramic bearings, this cult company keeps things functional, not faddish. This $800 wheelset retains tradition wheel design, with regular rims, regular spokes.

Once they're mounted on your bike, you'll notice their noise: The hub has 72 teeth on the drive ring instead of the standard 24, making the rear wheel sound like a swarm of angry bees. There's nothing like riding up behind an unsuspecting biking partner and unleashing the bees -- it makes them nearly jump out of their shorts.

Being a big man, I also appreciated these wheels' bomb-proof construction. I'm confident these babies are not going to buckle under my 230-pound bulk, while making everyone around me jealous of my tricked-out ride. -- Jim Merithew

Who knew I needed a Heel Security System on my mountain bike shoes? For that matter, what is a Heel Security System?

Turns out it's an adjustable cinch that locks your heel firmly into the shoe. Result: no more floppy heel.

Trouble is, this is an expensive breakthrough in shoe-cinching technology. The Sidi Dragons that sport this feature cost $500, and who's going to pay such a premium to keep their heels snug?

After riding these -- that would be me. Heel security is a feature I never knew I needed. I had no idea that my heels were flopping around so much until they weren't flopping around any longer. Now, I don't know how I'll live without it.

I've always been crazy for Sidi's Euro aesthetic and vibe. I think Sidi consistently makes some of the hottest kicks on the market. The Dragon is no exception. My feet were as happy at the end of the ride as they were at the start.

And that $500 is actually a long-term investment: Almost every part on the shoe that can wear out is replaceable, from the stiff carbon inserts to the rubbery treads and optional toe spikes.

The only niggle is with the newly designed buckle, which is tougher to tighten while riding than my other mountain-bike shoes -- a pair of Sidi Dominators. -- Jim Merithew

If you're ready to break free from the big S's grip on your bicycle components, Crank Bros.' Acid 2 pedals are a good place to start.

Crank Bros. calls them enduro/gravity pedals, but since my days of "lift up, rocket down" are over, I just took them out for a couple of laps around Camp Tamarancho, in Marin, California.

Coming from Shimano's SPDs, there's a bit of a learning curve to use the cinching mechanism. The snap-in, snap-out is not as obvious as with SPDs. I found myself squirming around trying to determine whether I was firmly snapped into place or not. But the more miles I put in, the more confident I became with the ins and outs of this platform.

Also, despite being made of carbon fiber, these pedals are still a bit too heavy for the weight-obsessed, and their white-plastic trim is completely out of place on a mountain bike pedal.

The other problem is that, at $240, these pedals are total overkill for the type of riding I do (slow and labored), but the hipster factor cannot be overlooked. They are cooooool.
-- Jim Merithew

Keeping your hands happy is key to keeping your steed under control. With aging mitts like mine, it'd seem that keeping them happy would mean more padding. But beware: As is often the case with super-padded saddles, more padding sometimes means more chafing.

Ergon's GX1s are ergonomic grips designed for mountain-bike racing, and though there's little padding, these grips stay comfortable all day. The grips have a distinctive wing that is designed to relieve stress on your wrists. Though some people don't like the design of ergonomic grips, they certainly work for me.

Costing about $40, the Ergon GX1s are simple to install and clamp securely onto your bars, which is where they are staying on my bike.

And they look pretty sweet, too. -- Jim Merithew

Your bike can have all the high-end tech wares you can afford, but if the ol' tuckus isn't happy your cycling experience is going to rub you the wrong way.

Though my racing days are far behind me, I recently laid my hands -- er, buttocks -- on the new race-ready Fizik Tundra in bright white.

While I didn't love the Tundra, it's a pretty sharp design. It has a nice long nose with just enough padding to make hammering out a cross-country race a little more pleasant. Plus, it's light enough to make a weight weenie grin.

If you're looking to crush the competition at your next XC race and you want to look trick doing it, give the Tundra a go. But if you're looking to beat up on your buddies during your weekly run to the woods and keep your hiney happy doing it, you might want something a little less racy. -- Jim Merithew

Mountain bikers get a bad rap by almost everyone on multiuse trails. Flying down the trails, big smiles on our faces, we can be a pretty discourteous bunch. We often scare the crap out of hikers, horseback riders and just about everyone we come in contact with, including other mountain bikers.

The addition of a little noisemaker to your rig can go a long way to making friends on the trail. Just give a little tinkle when you come up behind -- or as you fly into a blind single-track corner.

My new personal favorite is the $18 Mirrycle Woodpecker (top left in this photo). Made from a bell-shaped piece of wood, the Woodpecker makes a pleasant clunk, clunk sound instead of the harsh ring-a-ding-ding of most bells. -- Jim Merithew

Pro bike racers know that the biggest mistake made by newbie riders is that they're never going hard enough when they think they're going full-out -- and that they're going too hard when they should be taking it easy.

One of the easiest ways to fix this is to become more in tune with your body via a heart-rate monitor. A good HRM will tell you when you need to go harder, and when to slow it down.

For years, veteran HRM-maker Polar has been helping athletes tune their bodies. The $420 Polar CS600 is their current top-of-the-line model.

For those who aren't fluent in their own body language, this little fella will translate. The CS600 gives you the usual bike computer functions -- speed, distance and time -- but also throws in dozens of functions, from an altimeter, barometer and compass to your BMI index, training programs, and enough heart data to give you palpitations.

Throw in the optional Power Output Sensor (for another $290), and the CS600 will measure the power output of your legs -- and it is sensitive enough to tell you which leg is doing most of the work.

I found the CS600 to be too much computer for me. Turns out I wasn't all that interested in defining my training zones. But if you're a gadget fiend who wants to track every conceivable data point of a workout regime, this computer will do it for you. -- Jim Merithew

Before 1980, IBM made only mini and mainframe computers. The old-line firm just wasn't sure that the fledgling microcomputer market would be at all profitable. But once the company decided to act, it developed the 5150 in less than a year at its Boca Raton, Florida, facility -- using existing off-the-shelf components. IBM selected Intel's 8-to-16-bit 8088 processor, because it thought both the Intel 8086 and Motorola MC68000 16-bit processors were too powerful.

For an operating system, IBM first went to Digital Research, which had developed CP/M. When Digital declined, IBM went to a small firm known for microcomputer adaptations of BASIC: Microsoft.

Microsoft bought the rights to Seattle Computer Products' QDOS (supposedly, "Quick and Dirty Operating System," itself a possible hack of CP/M). In Microsoft's hands, QDOS became PC-DOS and later MS-DOS. (The 5150 could also run the more-expensive CP/M-86 and UCSD D-Pascal operating systems, but the $40 price tag on PC-DOS 1.0 made it irresistible to most users.)

IBM unveiled its new baby in Boca Raton and at New York City's Waldorf Astoria hotel. It weighed a then-svelte 25 pounds with a 4.77-MHz Intel 8088 CPU that contained 29,000 transistors. Stripped, it had just 16 kB of RAM; standard 64 kB, expandable to 256 kB. It also featured a 40-kB ROM, a choice of zero, one or two 5.25-inch floppy drives, a monochromatic display and optional cassette drive.

The 16-kb base model, with no data-storage drives included, cost $1,565 ($3,770 in today's money). If you loaded a 64-kB box with all the standard features, that jumped to $2,880 ($6,930 today), and souped up with color graphics and 256 kB, it'd cost you about $6,000 ($14,400 today). Available software included the VisiCalc spreadsheet, Easywriter 1.0 and Adventure, Microsoft's first game.

IBM retailed the 5150 through ComputerLand and Sears, Roebuck. It sold 65,000 PCs in four months, with 100,000 orders taken by Christmas.

The 5150 was trouncing all the other microcomputers targeted for homes and small businesses. It established the dominance of the Microsoft operating system, pushing CP/M and proprietary operating systems out of the market. On the hardware side, its boxy design became the model for PC compatibles, and the ISA bus supplanted the old S-100 bus as standard.

It would be two-and-a-half years before the first real challenge appeared, when the original Apple Macintosh went on sale.

Source: Old Computers Online Museum

This week's city photo contest was perhaps our most far-reaching contest yet, with entries from all over the world. These are the 10 top-rated submissions and they definitely put the urban back in urbane. Giant Ginkgo takes the gold with a voyeuristic view of a dense office building. Ginkgo will be receiving a subscription to Wired magazine and a digital picture frame.

Since there were so many great photos that we thought should've received more votes, we've also compiled a Wired.com Editor's Choice City Photo Gallery.

Our next twice-monthly photo contest is parties. We want you to prove that Wired.com readers know how to throw down on the dance floor. Check out the contest page for more information.

Left:

Cubicles
Submitted by Giant Ginkgo

Photographer's comment:

"Another evening at work, in Chicago's loop. If you take a close look, you might even see a superhero or two."

Beyoğlu Backstreets
Submitted by Elyse Franko

Photographer's comment:

"Four floors down from Istanbul's trendy (and expensive!) Leb-i Derya restaurant, the streets of the Beyoğlu district seem untouched by modernity."

Crazy Sky Over Manhattan
Submitted by Patrick Bennett

Photographer's comment:

"Lower Manhattan under an ominous sky."

The North End
Submitted by Jenny Pegg

Photographer's comment:

"Little Italy, Boston."

Apartment Block
Submitted by Mark Wallace

Photographer's comment:

"A shot of an apartment block with an eerie sky. Taken in Newcastle Upon Tyne, U.K. Camera: Rolleiflex F."

Doomsday L.A.
Submitted by Tyler Andersen

Photographer's comment:

"Nikon D80. 18-200mm Nikkor."

Edinburgh
Submitted by C Ray Dancer

Photographer's comment:

"Edinburgh skyline from Calton Hill."

Jersey Noir
Submitted by Dana Underwood

Photographer's comment:

"Lower Manhattan on a rainy night, as viewed from across the Hudson in Jersey City."

Seattle, 3rd Avenue, 2004
Submitted by mooargyle

Photographer's comment:

"Taken with Nikkormat FT2 (film)."

Space Needle IR
Submitted by Derek Rak

Photographer's comment:

"Infrared picture of Space Needle in Seattle. Nikon D80, Hoya R72 @ f/8 30s."

It's the incongruity of the patent holders with their invention, as much as the invention itself, that is remarkable. Lamarr, a Viennese-born movie actress, would eventually be given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Antheil, an American avant-garde composer of orchestral music and opera, lived in Paris during the '20s and counted Ernest Hemingway and Igor Stravinsky among his friends.

Not exactly the kind of folks you picture tinkering with cutting-edge weapons of war. In fact, their device was way ahead of its time. Although it was patented at the height of World War II, frequency hopping relied on electronics technology that didn't exist yet. An updated version of the Lamarr-Antheil device finally appeared on U.S. Navy ships in 1962 (three years after their patent expired), and was first used during the Cuban missile crisis.

In 1942, though, Navy brass were unimpressed, dismissing the invention as too bulky to fit inside a torpedo. Antheil's arguments to the contrary were ignored, and he said later that comparing parts of the invention to the fundamental mechanism of a player piano in front of a bunch of naval officers had probably been a mistake.

"'My god,' I can see them saying, 'we shall put a player piano in a torpedo.'"

Lamarr and Antheil dropped the idea and turned to other things. In the end, their device was resurrected by engineers at Sylvania and proved to be one of the forerunners of spread-spectrum communications, which has applications in satellite systems and cellphone technology.

Lamarr was the quintessential beauty with brains. (She was contemptuous of many of her fellow actresses: "Any girl can be glamorous," she said. "All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.") She was mathematically gifted and became acquainted with the intricacies of modern weaponry while married to her first husband, an Austrian munitions manufacturer.

Having established herself acting in German films, Lamarr came in 1937 to the United States, where she signed with Louis B. Mayer and MGM. It was Mayer who got her to change her name, from Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler to Hedy Lamarr. She enjoyed a solid career in Hollywood, although other leading ladies of the day, such as Ingrid Bergman, eclipsed her as a box-office draw.

Then there was George Antheil.

Aside from his provocative compositions and eccentric skills as a pianist -- his jarring technique frequently agitated his audiences, to the point where he would lay a pistol on the piano as a warning to keep quiet -- Antheil was very much a Renaissance man. He wrote widely on a variety of subjects, penning a syndicated advice column to the lovelorn and writing about endocrinology for Esquire magazine. He also published a book on the subject, Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Endocrinology.

During World War II -- which he had accurately predicted would start in Europe with the German invasion of Poland -- Antheil served as a war correspondent.

It was Antheil's knowledge of endocrinology, in fact, that began the Lamarr-Antheil collaboration. Aware of his work in the field, Lamarr approached him at a Hollywood dinner party to talk about the possibility of increasing the size of her breasts. The next thing you know -- bang! -- a revolutionary torpedo-guidance system. We'll just leave it there.

Source: Various

Use the Reddit widget below to submit your best city photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. The 10 highest-ranked photos will appear in a gallery on the Wired.com homepage. So go crash a white wedding, find a foam-filled dance floor or join a psychedelic parade. Just make it your best non-obscene answer to the question: What does a party look like?

The photo must be your own, and by submitting it you are giving us permission to use it on Wired.com and in Wired magazine. Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800 to 1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. Please include a description of your photo, which may include exposure information, equipment used, etc.

We don't host the photos, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).

Please bookmark this page and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions!

Also, check out the winner's galleries from our previous contests: Holga, Red, Self-Portrait, Night, Macro, Transportation and Black and White.

Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated. Submit your party photo.

(No more than one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.)

Back to top

Though Wired.com readers selected 10 excellent photos in our city photo contest, we here at the photo department like to fight for the underdog. Here are our 10 favorite submissions that we think deserved more attention.

Our next twice-monthly photo contest is parties. We want you to prove that Wired.com readers know how to throw down on the dance floor. Check out the contest page for more information.

Left:

In The Medina -- Tunis
Submitted by quejaytee

Photographer's comment:

"In the Medina during Ramadan 2007.”

Southbound Red Line, Chicago
Submitted by Piper Kruse

Photographer's comment:

"I almost forgot to take the picture."

Bangkok Trains Run Late
Submitted by Iggy

Photographer's comment:

"Bangkok train station."

Bern from the Munster
Submitted by T Tourangeau

Photographer's comment:

"A Photograph of Bern, Switzerland from the top of the Munster Cathedral."

The Singapore Flyer
Submitted by Joan Leong

Photographer's comment:

"The view of Singapore City from The Singapore Flyer, on the night the latter opened."

Bike Parking at the Train Station, Haarlem, Amsterdam
Submitted by Eduardo Alomar

Photographer's comment:

"I spent some time in the Netherlands, mostly on a bike, the station in Amsterdam is even more packed."

Worries Left Behind
Submitted by getinet

Photographer's comment:

"this is my city. this is my san francisco"

Walking back home
Submitted by Sarasara

Photographer's comment:

"Took this one a while ago but I still love it. Still shows the craziness that is Tokyo."

Vienna
Submitted by quejaytee

Photographer's comment:

None

China Town off the Manhattan Bridge
Submitted by Andrew

Photographer's comment:

"China Town taken off the Manhattan bridge during a blizzard."

Why did Weight Watchers work so well? For a really fascinating reason: because it isn't a normal diet. It's something more. Something fun.

It's an RPG.

The Weight Watchers program is designed precisely like a role-playing dungeon crawler. That's why people love it, stick to it and have success with it. And it points to the way that we could use game design to make life's drudgery more bearable.

Let me unpack this a bit. When I asked my friend to see how Weight Watchers works, she showed me the ingenious system. "The best part is the web tool," she said, pulling it up on her laptop.

When you first log in to Weight Watchers, it determines how much food you'll be allowed to eat that day, expressed as a number of "points." My friend gets 23 points per day. Each time she eats a piece of food, she enters it into the online database, and it calculates how many points she's used. A small apple is one point; a piece of fried chicken is seven points.

When she first started the program, she was stunned at how quickly she burned through her daily points. A single bagel was six points -- more than 25 percent of her daily quota. "How the hell am I going to do this without starving?" she wondered.

But pretty soon she learned to hack her daily eating to suit the system. She snacked on vegetables that took zero points -- like bell peppers -- or only one or two points, like a tasty brand of microwave popcorn. Then she'd save up the big points for a really decent dinner. Better yet, Weight Watchers assigns her an extra 35 bonus points per week that she can use if she goes over her daily limit. Or she can bank them for a big blowout restaurant meal on the weekend.

What makes this point-counting possible is Weight Watchers' elegant online tool. Type in any food you can think of -- including brand-name snacks or boxed meals -- and Weight Watchers has already calculated the points for you. If she makes a special sandwich at home, she can calculate the ingredients, save it with a custom name, and then drag and drop it into her day every time she eats one.

As I watched her poke around on the screen, managing inventory, calculating points, staying within her range, it hit me:

Weight Watchers is an RPG.

Think about it. As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers' points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you've used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up -- by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren't apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I'll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat!

Even the Weight Watchers web tool is amazingly gamelike. It has the poke-around-and-see-what-happens elegance you see in really good RPG game screens. Accidentally snack on a candy bar and ruin your meal plan for the day? No worries: Just go into the database and see what spells -- whoops, I mean foods -- you can still use with your remaining points.

And those 35 extra points you get every week? They're like a special buff or potion -- a last-ditch save when you're on the ropes.

Indeed, I'm in awe of the sheer brilliance of Weight Watchers in adopting the word points as its metric for measuring food. The word immediately shoves the user into the semantics -- and fun -- of gameplay. You regard losing weight as an intriguing challenge, as opposed to a mere grind.

This puts me in mind of the talk that Jane McGonigal -- a brilliant and pioneering alternative-reality game designer -- gave at this year's South by Southwest conference. She argued that game designers ought to put their skills to use in the real world by reshaping dull, everyday activities into fun challenges. Why not a game that gives you points for walking your dog or jogging?

"Games are an incredible language and system. They should be everywhere," she said. "Why are we making games only for the bound pages for a computer screen or console? Why aren't we doing that to help people navigate and understand the world around us?"

She couldn't be more right. As McGonigal points out, there are already some witty attempts -- like Chore Wars, Wii Fit or Seriosity's system that tries to limit corporate e-mail overload by forcing people to "spend" virtual totems to send a message. I can think of tons of things I'd love to see turned into a game: doing my taxes, dealing with my inbox backlog, being stuck in traffic.

And this stuff is clearly possible, because if Weight Watchers can turn something as unpleasant as dieting into a playful activity, the sky's the limit.

Just ask my friend.

- - -

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.