Wired: Top Stories (41 unread)
-
Sun/IBM Tie-up Hits a Snag: Reports
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by John C Abell
Tags: [edit]
It ain't over until it's over, but there are several reports that the IBM/Sun Microsystems merger has hit the skids. Sun shares plummet, and Om Malik suggests that the company consider going private instead. -
Solar Plane Set to Soar Over Europe
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Dave Demerjian
Tags: [edit]
Eric Raymond takes to the air in the first trans-European flight in a manned solar plane to prove "electric airplane" isn't an oxymoron. -
Mod That Table: High-End Furniture Goes Open Source
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Tim McKeough
Tags: [edit]
Your next piece of designer furniture could cost less than an Ikea chair—as long as you're willing to make it yourself. Taking a cue from the Linux community and file-sharing services, Berlin-based design guru Ronen Kadushin has started a furniture free-for-all he calls Open Design. It allows crafty consumers to download the instructions, photos, and AutoCAD files needed to knock off his work.
Kadushin's tables, chairs, and shelves sell for upwards of $5,000 each, but he's as interested in sharing ideas as in making a profit. Everything on Kadushin's Web site (ronen-kadushin.com) is free for use under a Creative Commons license. And far from being an artistic tyrant, he hopes you'll customize his pieces. You'll just need access to a large computer-controlled router or laser cutter (depending on what you're building) to realize the digital forms in wood or metal. All Kadushin asks is that you be creative with your mods—oh, and maybe send him a picture of the finished product.
#st_d {list-style-type:none;}
#st_d li {padding-bottom:9px;}
- 1 // Download the AutoCAD file and the instructions for the Square Dance Table.
- 2 // Customize the AutoCAD file (perhaps your family crest would look good in the center) and source the necessary materials.
- 3 // Locate the nearest laser cutter. If you don't have one at work or at school, find a local machine shop—they're in the book. Cut the basic ninja-star form (shown at left) from 2-mm-thick stainless steel (Kadushin prefers a mirror finish).
- 4 // Put on gloves and kneel in the center of the cut sheet.
- 5 // Gradually bend the legs up toward you until they can be slotted together—like making a metal basket.
- 6 // Using padded pliers, bend down the rounded, precut feet and stick on felt glides to protect your floor.
- 7 // Flip the table over and press down on the top to lock in the arms.
- 8 // Top with your favorite cocktail glasses.
-
How to Run a Scam
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Mike Olson
Tags: [edit]
You don't have to be a big-time money manager like Bernie Madoff to execute a successful scam. They all start the same way: with one really good line of BS. -
Games Without Frontiers: 'MadWorld' Is Black and White and Awesome All Over
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Clive Thompson
Tags: [edit]
While visiting Bungie Studios as its developers finished work on Halo 3 two years ago, I saw something very interesting. Occasionally, to help debug the videogame, they'd play a level in wire-frame mode — where all the environments and characters were rendered onscreen as glowing outlines.
"Check this out," said one of the programmers as he called up a scene for me.
What he showed me was gorgeous. The enemies — two massive hunters — suddenly turned into glowing lattices of colored pentagons; the background became a bright spider web. I could still clearly see everything, but the visuals looked like a mashup of Halo and Tron.
I immediately wanted to play the game in this mode: I loved the idea of revisiting all the battles and scenes of Halo 3 in this altered state, where everything is familiar but somehow alien.
"Maybe we could include this as an Easter egg," the developer chuckled.
Alas, they didn't. But that experience made me hanker for a similar one — some game that took full, 3-D reality and gave it a surreal twist.
This week, I finally got the chance, when I uncorked MadWorld, a new hack-and-slash Wii game with its own bold aesthetic move: It's almost entirely black-and-white.
The upshot is a game that plays eerily like a comic book come to life. A Frank Miller comic book, to be precise: The designers have talked about Miller's influence on their game, which is obvious from the moment you meet the gruff, chain-smoking and chainsaw-wielding killer, who embodies a lot of Marv from Sin City. When he first wanders into the frame, all you see initially is the dancing plume of his cigarette smoke — a lovely bit of moody, and kitschy, chiaroscuro.
This heavy indebtedness to comic-book aesthetics neatly suits MadWorld's narrative, which is yet another one of those "most dangerous game" conceits: You're a contestant in a televised killfest! Killing, like, tons of people! And you'll be rewarded not only for slaughtering anyone around you, but for doing so in the most grisly fashion possible. Cut someone in half with a chainsaw, you might get 2,000 points. But if you ring them with a tire, impale them with a street sign and then hurl them onto a spiked wall? Hey, 50,000 points!
As you might imagine, the over-the-top gore has critics labeling MadWorld the "most violent computer game ever." But the game's visual style — including "Blam-o!"-type, written-word sound effects, and the fact that the copious spurting red blood is one of the few colors in the game — clearly marks it as part of the tradition of two-bit comic books, which have been tweaking prudes with Pavlovian precision for about 75 years. Many games unsettle me with their callous violence; this stuff unfailingly makes me giggle.
But the effect of playing in black-and-white isn't merely about creating a camp sensibility. It actually changed the way I looked at the world around me.
The sheer sense of contrast — the game is really black or white, since there's no gray — makes every detail in MadWorld pop out vividly. It's like playing beneath a bright moon, where the polarized light makes everything seem simultaneously super-real and oddly dreamlike. I'd find myself noticing little things that would, in a regular game, just blend into the background: The fins on the junked 1950s cars lying in piles; the way the glass scattered when I hurled a goon through a window. The buildings looked like the Platonic ideal of buildings.
What really makes MadWorld a breath of fresh air is how neatly it violates the tropes of modern 3-D realism. As today's graphics come closer to approaching photorealism, our "realistic" games have become steadily more similar in appearance: The same gritty gray-and-brown environments, the same light-infused bloom. Partly this is because most games use the same relicensed handful of graphics engines, but it's also an inherent limit of realism. If your goal is to make a dirty, war-torn road look realistic, well, there are only so many ways for something to look real. We know what the reference point is: reality.
This is why I've been heartened by the way many game designers have been actively trying to get away from pure realism in otherwise realistic 3-D games. I'm thinking of the many games that have employed cel-shaded cartoon styles or anime inflections, like in Goichi Suda's killer7 and No More Heroes. (I suspect Nintendo's inferior processing power is why these experiments are so often found on the Gamecube or Wii. If the processor can't do super-realism, then why not make a virtue of the limitation?)
Going black-and-white is an even more bold stylistic move, and I'm sort of surprised more designers haven't tried it. MadWorld isn't completely pioneering; there have been other full 3-D worlds done in black-and-white, such as the 2007 puzzler Vigil: Blood Bitterness, which is so much more surreal and stylized than even MadWorld that it feels like you're trapped inside a Salvador Dali experimental movie. (I mean that in a good way.)
Mind you, a monochromatic palette has its downsides. In MadWorld, sometimes it was a little hard to spot where I was supposed to go. With such high contrast and low-rez detail, everything in the environment seemed to be equally as important as everything else.
Plus, MadWorld's gameplay is more twitch than precision; this isn't a problem, but I half-wondered if working in black-and-white dices a designer out of creating a very precise, fine-motor-skill, 3-D play mechanic, because without color it's trickier to line things up — a headshot, a puzzle element — to a pixel-points' precision. It may be no surprise that the games that have most avidly embraced alt.aesthetics are also, in terms of gameplay, pretty much just button-mashers (as with the dazzling Chinese-art-style graphics of Okami).
Still, after a couple hours playing MadWorld, I wanted more. Not just more of this game, with its highly stylized violence. I want more black and white everywhere.
- - -
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.
-
DiggBar Digs up Bitter Nostalgia Among Critics
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Brian X Chenn
Tags: [edit]
The new Diggbar — a toolbar appearing at the top of a browser when users click a link at Digg — has some internet purists grumbling about what they see as a suffocating eyesore. "When you call it 'framing someone else's site,' everyone agrees it's bullshit," said John Gruber, writer of DaringFireball, on his Twitter. "When you call it 'The DiggBar,' it's Web 3.5 Awesome." -
Beating Somali Pirates at Their Own Game
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by David Axe
Tags: [edit]
After hitting the headlines last year, successful pirate attacks have been on the wane in the early months of 2009, despite a failed attack on a British cruise ship earlier this month. Experts disagree about what has led to the reduction, with some suggesting that bad weather had played its part, but Rear Adm. Terry McKnight of the U.S. Navy attributes the "dramatic" reduction in the number of attacks to the deployment of a British warship, the Royal Navy frigate HMS Northumberland, and the coordinated task force of which she is part.
To wage today's battles against pirates who took control of 42 ships and captured 815 sailors last year, the Royal Navy is combining machines and methods forged during the Cold War with centuries-old naval warfare skills. The Royal Navy is also hitting back at pirates by using some of the pirates' own tricks.
Fighting back
When Northumberland slipped out of Mombasa harbor in southern Kenya at the end of last year, a few reporters and gawkers stood on the banks. On the deck of the 460-foot frigate, a smattering of British sailors gazed back. As far as send-offs go, Northumberland's was low-key, but the understated nature of the departure belied the importance of her mission. On that hot December morning, Northumberland — one of just 17 such ships in the Royal Navy — opened up a new front in the unprecedented international war on Somali pirates.
Most of the other warships deployed to fight pirates in the region are concentrated north of Somalia, close to the Suez Canal, through which 10 percent of the world's sea trade passes. Northumberland was the first warship on the scene from a new European Union task force, charged with patrolling the southern flank of the 2-million-square-mile piracy zone, near Mombasa. It was here that pirates scored their biggest victory last autumn, seizing the supertanker Sirius Star, laden with $100 million in crude oil.
Besides Sirius Star, Somali sea bandits hijacked more than 40 large vessels last year, ransoming about 30 of them for a million U.S. dollars or more, according to the United Nations. Sirius Star was released in January after an estimated $3 million ransom was paid, but the other ships, and about 200 crew, remain in pirates' hands. The rise in piracy, and consequent rise in the cost of shipping insurance, drove up the cost of shipping petroleum, electronics and food.
Motherships
To beat pirates in potentially violent showdowns, the Navy has adopted the pirates' tactics of using "mother ships" carrying fast boats to spring on opponents.
In the early days of Somali piracy, in the 1990s, pirates ranged only a few miles from their hometowns and threatened just a few thousand square miles of ocean. The reason was simple: Most pirates were former fishermen and had only the tools of a typical fishermen. Their personal firearms and their small, motor-propelled wooden fishing boats, called skiffs. The skiffs were too slow and too flimsy to catch anything but the most rickety of vessels.
Then the pirates innovated. They began capturing trawlers and small freighters for use as motherships. Crewman Juma Mvita, from the Kenyan merchant ship Semlow, discovered this the hard way in 2005, when about a dozen armed Somalis intercepted his ship. Mvita said the pirates had no interest in Semlow's cargo. Instead, they commandeered the harmless-looking freighter to launch their next attack. It was more than three months before the pirates released Semlow and her crew.
Today, pirates use motherships for nearly all their attacks. "What we tend to see happen is a mothership will ... drag along a couple skiffs with it and have probably 10 or 15, 20 pirates on board, and then they'll send the skiffs out to go after a merchant vessel," McKnight said. He commands a new three-ship, counter-pirate task force.
Warships assigned to piracy patrols rarely engage pirates on their own. They deploy specialized search-and-seizure teams, which in the Royal Navy consist of marines armed with rifles and machine guns, traveling in raider craft. It was one such team from the frigate HMS Cumberland that killed three pirates in a firefight last November.
Boarding teams
Boarding teams have been a part of British warship crews for centuries, but in recent years they've become the best weapon against enemies such as pirates. The Cumberland's actions are "bound to have an impact on pirates," said Capt. Mike Davis-Marks, a Royal Navy spokesman. "Now suddenly there's the threat of death and this may force them to think again."
Cumberland's encounter was typical, if still rare in a conflict in which most navies are focused on deterrence rather than active fighting. A naval engagement with pirates often begins with a commercial ship reporting an attack, using a radio frequency set aside for emergency calls. Other times, a maritime patrol plane, usually flying from Djibouti, spots a potential mothership or pirate skiff, identifiable not by its appearance, but by its vector. A trawler speeding away from Somalia, toward a slow-moving tanker ship, just might have hostile intentions.
Digital deconfliction
Naval commanders, in touch with each other by phone, e-mail and satellite network, sort through the roster of warships in the region to figure out who might respond fastest. They call this "deconfliction." When the responding ship is close enough, it launches a helicopter to scout ahead and confirm that the suspect seafarers are indeed armed, while preparing to lower the boarding teams' boats into the water.
In Cumberland's case, "the ship's presence alone was often enough to prevent pirate attacks," the Ministry of Defense reported. Beyond that, the helicopter might deter pirates simply by "flying close to demonstrate the aircraft's machine gun and giving the pirates warning of their serious intentions."
If the pirates persist, the boarding teams deploy, flanking the pirates' boats to approach from both sides, moving fast with weapons at the ready. If the pirates lay down their weapons, they are taken into custody without a shot fired. If they shoot, the boarding teams fire back, then climb aboard.
The naval network
Deterring an attack, or winning a firefight, requires first that a warship be nearby when pirates strike. With pirates active on millions of square miles of ocean, blending in with harmless fishing boats, that's no easy task.
Today on the Indian Ocean there are 20 warships from 14 nations, all of them sent by their governments over the past six months to protect vital shipping from pirates. Coordinating these ships is key to providing the widest possible protection against pirates. In the beginning, it was a free-for-all. "It's encouraging that everyone is here," Lt. Nathan Christensen, a U.S. Navy spokesman, said last autumn, "but everyone's got their own rules of engagement ... their own commanders."
In time, the naval forces coalesced into four distinct entities plus some odds and ends. There was the U.S.-dominated Combined Task Forces 150 and 151, the latter commanded by McKnight. There was a NATO force sent on a temporary basis, and the EU flotilla intended eventually to replace the NATO one. On the fringes, there were warships from Russia, India and several other navies, sailing and fighting all on their own.
The four large, multi-ship formations had just one thing in common. Each one had a British warship assigned: Cumberland with NATO, Northumberland with the EU, the frigate HMS Portland in CTF-151 and, in CTF-150, a rotation of British frigates, destroyers and logistics ships.
That was no accident. In the last decade, the Royal Navy has mothballed nearly a third of its frigates and destroyers and canceled some new ships and technologies in a bid to save money, but the Royal Navy never cut back on its training and command capabilities.
"Our ships are not necessarily better than those of other navies," said Capt. Malcolm Cree, a commander for international naval forces in the Persian Gulf. "The one thing that we do have, the jewel in the crown of the Royal Navy, is our operational sea training.... As a result, Royal Navy ships and staffs provide a consistent level of professionalism capability that others know they can rely on."
It was that professionalism that the EU enlisted when it sent Northumberland to test the pirates' southern flank in December. And it was that professionalism that eventually helped tie together the tangle of naval forces threading the Indian Ocean to deter pirates.
By January, some order had been imposed on the chaos. McKnight's CTF-151 and the EU flotilla, under the command of British Rear Adm. Phillip Jones, were acting as the major nodes in a radio, e-mail and satellite communications network connecting most of the warships in the Indian Ocean. "My biggest concerns are coordination and deconfliction," McKnight said. "It appears that it's been working pretty fairly in the last couple of months."
The legal front
As boarding teams engaged pirates in firefights and commanders were sorting out the naval traffic jam in the Indian Ocean, a parallel battle was taking place on dry land. Late last year, there was "a lack in U.K. law of clear arrest and evidence-gathering powers for Royal Navy officers," the House of Commons recalled in a report in January. "If Royal Navy officers were to arrest pirates, there was a real risk that such prosecution would fail on procedural grounds if they were brought back to the U.K. for prosecution."
That legal loophole is one that pirates have exploited for years. After two decades of civil war, Somalia has no coast guard and no functional courts, and the only organizations in a position to intercept pirates — the world's navies — have no clear legal powers.
"The potentials for legal embarrassments are quite numerous," said Martin Murphy, a piracy analyst at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. So when they captured pirates, many navies simply deposited them on the nearest Somali beach. Needless to say, in those cases the pirates probably returned to their lives of crime.
What the world needed was a stable, democratic country in East Africa, with a stake in the piracy fight and the ability to detain, try and jail pirates. What the world needed, in fact, was Kenya. The United Kingdom, with close ties to its former colony, was the first to draw Kenya into the counter-piracy coalition in a legal capacity. Moses Wetang'ula, the Kenyan foreign minister, and Alan West, the British security minister, met at a piracy conference in Nairobi to initiate the agreement, and none too soon: Eight Somali pirates already were being held in a Kenyan jail, on soft legal grounds, after being captured by a British frigate.
The United States was quick to follow Britain's example. In January, the U.S. State Department signed a similar agreement with Kenya. "The lawyers are at work for the particulars," McKnight said, "and as soon as we get those mechanisms in place, then we will shift our operation." Instead of just reacting to pirates, McKnight's task force would go on the attack.
Aggressive action can't come too soon. "Pirates are winning," Murphy said late last year.
Back off the coast of Mombasa in December, Northumberland made final preparations for her mission. In the frigate's scrubbed and polished compartments, sailors calibrated their sensors and fueled up a gray-painted Merlin helicopter. Royal Marines checked the rifles and kit. The vessel veered northward, toward Somalia. "We remain ready," said Commander M.J. Simpson, Northumberland's skipper.
If pirates really are less aggressive this year, the world has the Royal Navy, in particular, to thank. If not, and if this most ancient form of lawlessness continues to sap the global economy, nations will keep looking to the United Kingdom to help fight piracy.
---
This article originally appeared on Wired.co.uk.
-
April 6, 1938: Teflon, an Invention That Sticks
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long
Tags: [edit]
1938: Fiddling around in the lab one day, Roy Plunkett accidentally discovers polytetrafluoroethylene, soon to be known as Teflon, a slippery substance that will have practical applications in everything from non-stick cookware to a presidential nickname.
Plunkett, a chemist at DuPont's Jackson research lab in New Jersey, made his discovery in the time-honored scientific way: as the result of a mistake, and with an assistant's help.
Plunkett and his assistant, Jack Rebok, were testing the chemical reactions of tetrafluoroethylene, a gas used in refrigeration. The gas was contained in some pressurized canisters, one of which failed to discharge properly when its valve was opened.
Rebok picked up the canister, only to find that it was heavier than an empty canister would be. He suggested cutting it open to see what had happened and, despite the risk of blowing the lab to kingdom come, Plunkett agreed.
Of course it was heavy: The gas hadn't accidentally escaped. It had solidified into a smooth, slippery white powder as the result of is molecules bonding, a process known as polymerization.
This new polymer was different from similar solids like graphite: It was more lubricant and extremely heat-resistant, due to the presence of dense fluorine atoms that shielded the compound's string of carbon atoms.
Setting other work aside, Plunkett began testing the possibilities of polytetrafluoroethylene, eventually figuring out how to reproduce the polymerization process that had occurred accidentally the first time.
DuPont patented the polymer in 1941, registering it under the trade name Teflon in 1944. The first products — most having military and industrial applications — came to market after World War II. It wouldn't be until the early 1960s that Teflon became a household word when it was used to produce the most effective, heat-resistant cookware yet seen.
The word gained a certain pop-culture notoriety in the 1980s when the media began referring to Ronald Reagan as the Teflon president, a reference to his infuriating ability to avoid being tarnished by the various scandals plaguing his administration.
Teflon cookware, however, remained as steadfast and reliable as ever.
Today, Teflon is found virtually everywhere, coating metals and fabrics from the aerospace industry to clothing to pharmaceuticals.
For his discovery, Plunkett, who retired from DuPont in 1975, was enshrined in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Source: About.com, Wikipedia
-
10 Best Geeky Last Words
Posted: April 6th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Katharine Gammon
Tags: [edit]
Now it is nothing but torture.
—Sigmund FreudGo away. I'm all right.
—H. G. WellsKHAQQ to Itasca. We are on the line 157 337. Will repeat message. We will repeat this on 6210 kilocycles. Wait. We are running on a north and south line.
—Amelia EarhartMay I not seem to have lived in vain.
—Tycho BraheHow were the circus receipts today at Madison Square Garden?
—P. T. BarnumI'd hate to die twice. It's so boring.
—Richard Feynman
Try LSD, 100 mm intramuscular.
—Aldous Huxley
(in a note to his wife)It is very beautiful over there.
—Thomas EdisonA dying man can do nothing easy.
—Benjamin Franklin01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000
—Mars Phoenix lander -
The Terminator as Metaphor for Life
Posted: April 4th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Josh Friedman
Tags: [edit]
When I first started working on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the studio gave me a general idea: They wanted to do a show about John and Sarah Connor, set some time after Terminator 2. So, as I was sort of staring at the concept, trying to figure out how I would approach it, I realized that the thing that works about Terminator is the relationships.
But we needed a central relationship to anchor the story. The first Terminator movie was a romance, really, between Kyle and Sarah. The second movie is a father-son story between John and the Terminator. So I thought my show, at its core, would be a family drama, a relationship between a mother and a son who is coming of age. But if we're going to be about Sarah and John, there should be a girl. That's what usually breaks up that Oedipal relationship. And I decided to make the girl a Terminator.
But before I could actually start writing the show, I was diagnosed with kidney cancer. I had to have an operation to remove the tumor, which meant I couldn't write it for that season. So I had a couple of months when I couldn't do anything, and I was in pain. I had this crisis — I went to a therapist, and I said, "What am I doing? I'm going to write a fucking show about a scary robot? Who cares?"
But when she calmed me down, I started reflecting upon it, and I realized that this show really was about my life. It was about mortality. The first voiceover I ever wrote for the series started with "I will die. I will die, and so will you. Death gives no man a pass." That's what the Terminators are — they're death coming to get us.
I still go in every six months for a scan, so I'm constantly reminded of this. It's something we talk about a lot in the writers' room. You know, cancer is cell mutation, and the artificial intelligence Skynet is in some ways a mutation. But more metaphorically, it's about predestination. Can you change your future, or is it something inside you, unchangeable? I had this idea, taken from T3, that Sarah had cancer, but then on our show she time-travels forward, past her death date. So did she jump over her death or merely postpone it? When Sarah did all that exercise in T2, she was doing it to gird herself externally. But I thought it would be interesting if she was doing it to chase something inside herself as well. She has her own personal apocalypse out there in the future — could she exercise enough or take enough vitamins to make it go away?
To me, the show is about what you do with life in the face of death. I mean, yeah, it's a genre show. It's the Terminator, and it's kind of pulpy, and some people think it's past its prime. But you can find yourself in this show. I definitely found myself in it.
Josh Friedman, executive producer of the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, thought he was making a fun TV show. Then he got cancer — and found a metaphor for life. He told this story to Wired senior editor Adam Rogers.
-
It's Back -- Why the Terminator Is Unstoppable
Posted: April 4th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Scott Brown
Tags: [edit]
It's back. Naturally. That's what Terminators do, after all: They come back. You shoot them. They get up. They're dependable that way, even honorable. Gumpishly innocent, too—they kill dutifully, dispassionately, without malice. (And they run like Forrest: flat-out and stiff-armed.) They're even kind of old-fashioned—or as old-fashioned as cybernetic assassins from the future can be. These new-model droids they've got nowadays—the Cylons from Sci Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica, the sentient programs from The Matrix—they're practically indistinguishable from humans. But Terminators are more like '50s robots: prone to speaking in monotone, strangely unable to master normal human neck-swiveling, and adept at the thousand-yard stare. These are union-made, working-class killing machines. They just punch in and whatever happens happens.
Illustration: John Ritter
T3: It's Not That Bad
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines has long been derided as a pump-priming political exercise for the then-future Governator, cleverly disguised as a 109-minute Toyota commercial. But c'mon, a campy Arnie and rampant product placement aren't new to this franchise. (There was more Pepsi flowing in T2 than in the theater lobby.) Sure,The Terminator and its follow-up are solid, but T3 deserves some love, too. For starters, it stars the best actors in the trilogy. (Nick Stahl and Claire Danes, as predestined lovebird rebels John Connor and Kate Brewster, can at least claim careers outside of T3.) Then there are the key robot upgrades, specifically a Terminatrix with enlargeable cyborg breasts. (Thank you, Kristanna Loken!)
Plus, T3 hits its crowd-pleasing marks: Silly clothing-acquisition scenario? Check. Sassy catchphrases? Talk to the hand! Killer special f/x? The best of the franchise. But director Jonathan Mostow shows elegant restraint in his vision of Judgment Day, a scene we'd been waiting nearly 20 years to see. When the nukes fly, our view is of a red barn, framed by the smoke trails of Earth-bound missiles, then a shot from space. It's a moment of quiet awe and, in retrospect, eerily similar to the robot attack on planet Caprica in BSG. But don't get me started on those gods damn toasters.—Scott Dadich
Photo: Warner Bros/Everett
The same could be said for the 25-year-old Terminator franchise, a science-fiction workhorse jerry-rigged from used but sturdy parts (a Harlan Ellison concept here, a Phil Dick theme there) and beloved by bazillions for its unfussiness, its jeeplike versatility, and its simple trudging perseverance in the face of plot holes, cast changes, and long years between installments. In May, a fourth movie, aptly subtitled Salvation, promises to reboot the whole darned robocalypse and lay the groundwork for two more films that should take us through at least 2013.
We'll never turn up our nose at a brand-new, planned-out Terminator trilogy—fresh helpings of crushed skulls and battling bots, huzzah! But a word to the film's mono-monikered director, McG: It's the saga's lack of a mapped-out, multiplatform, multipicture mythos (à la Star Wars) that's actually Terminator's greatest strength.
Abandoned by its creator after two smashing yet ideologically divergent chapters (the first a Reagan-era meditation on the inevitability of human self-destruction, the second a post-Cold War adventure where there's "no fate but what we make") and eventually auctioned in the wake of its producers' bankruptcy, Terminator survived to spawn yet another film, a TV series, books, comics, heaps of merch, and an attraction at Universal Studios theme parks. All of this with no blueprint or business plan, in a media jungle so complex nothing can be left to chance—there's no fate but what we make. How is that possible?
It's possible because of Terminators themselves. They're the draw here. Like many beloved phenomena—penicillin, the Internet, Letterman—they're not planned. They just happen, and they are awesome. Their programming is refreshingly simple: Destroy. Occasionally protect. And, when necessary, quip. These basic directives trump everything, even the time-tangled narrative, a story so contorted and paradox-laden it could induce scoliosis in a Möbius loop: In a not-so-distant future, where civilization has been nuked by intelligent machines, the leader of the human resistance, John Connor, sends a fellow soldier back through time to 1984 to protect his future mother, Sarah, from a robotic assassin—a Terminator programmed to eliminate Connor before he's even born. (Dick Cheney wasn't the first cyborg to devise a doctrine of preemptive defense.) But that's just half the soldier's mission; the other half, the half Connor doesn't tell him about, is to sire Connor by having sweaty terror sex with Sarah in a grungy motel. (Pimping your best friend to your once-and-future mom, from across time, to engineer your own birth—that is so awesome.) Meanwhile, the Terminator sent back by the globe-killing AI is also on self-fathering duty: It unwittingly leaves a bread-crumb trail of super-sophisticated scrap that leads human engineers directly to the creation of ... the globe-killing AI. "God," sighs Sarah at the end of T1, "a person could go crazy thinking about this." That's the principal lesson from The Terminator: Don't think. Run. "Come with me," goes another trademark line, "if you want to live!"
Yes, it's all pretty clunky if you stop to think about it. (Which you absolutely should not, at the risk of insanity.) But, hey, we like the clunk. We like the cheesy demon-red eyes, sunk into that gleaming metal skull. We like the lumbering. We like the pre-CG, John Carpenter-esque, irreplaceably physical heft of it all. If we're gonna fight machines, let's fight machines, big shiny ones, and let's fight 'em for real, here on the physical plane. And if we're gonna travel through time, let's do it naked. (Don't worry! The laws of time and space dictate that we will land near a leather jacket—and in our size, too!)
Trailer: Terminator Salvation For more, visit wired.com/video.When an obsolete design sticks around, it's for a reason. Sure, we marvel at the new models—the liquid-metal T-1000 from T2, more mercurial than Jeremy Piven and a certified visual wonder in 1991; Kristanna Loken's slinky, Transformer-ish T-X in T3, who wreaked the same carnage Arnold did in his prime, only backward and in heels; Summer Glau's Cameron in TV's The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the first cyborg to look like she could credibly front a Canadian indie-rock band. But the secret of their success is the same as Arnold's: implacability. Bells and missiles aside, we want the same unblinking Asperger's case—the flesh of the face half-ripped away to reveal the silvery endoskeleton beneath—shooting its way calmly through a mall in steady pursuit of a target or jerking expressionlessly as the LAPD pesters it with yet another fruitless fusillade. Terminator Salvation aims to dispense with the fleshy sheath and show us the Full Clunky, but the principle is the same: Dodging bullets is fine for a while, but in the long run aren't you more interested in (and terrified by) the guy who just takes it? Who. Just. Keeps. On. Coming? Maybe that's why we like 'em so damn much. Maybe that's why Terminator is so hard to kill.
Christian Bale plays John Connor, leader of the human resistance, in the upcoming Terminator Salvation.
Photo: Richard Foreman
-
Inside Terminator Salvation's Bleak World
Posted: April 4th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Hugh Hart
Tags: [edit]
The Terminator is a multibillion-dollar global enterprise that includes every type of media and merchandise imaginable — from roller coasters to boxer shorts. How'd it happen? -
Evolution of a Killer Franchise -- The Terminator (1984-????)
Posted: April 4th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Erik Malinowski
Tags: [edit]
In October 1984, a low-budget techno-thriller starring that funny-accented bodybuilder from Conan the Barbarian became a runaway hit. The Terminator has since morphed into a multibillion-dollar global enterprise that includes every type of media and merchandise imaginable—from roller coasters to boxer shorts. Here's how a killing machine evolved into a killer franchise.
.headerDivOuter {width:250px;clear:both;float:left;margin-right:12px;} .headerDiv {padding:6px;color:#fff;background-color:#000;font-size:2em;} .headerDiv2 {color:#A3A3A3} .nImg {clear:left;display:block;float:left;margin-right:12px;margin-bottom:18px;} .n_cont {margin-bottom:26px;} 1984
The Terminator debuts, directed by James Cameron and coproduced by his future wife, Gale Anne Hurd, and Hemdale Films. Made for $6.4 million, the film pulls in $78 million worldwide. Meanwhile, the first wave of novelizations hits bookstores, and a franchise is born.
1988
The first Terminator-based comic—a 17-issue run by NOW Comics—is published. Some of the series' subplots are silly—a village filled with T-800 bakers, cops, and nuns?—but NOW later releases Terminator: The Burning Earth, award-winning artist Alex Ross' first published work.
1990
The first Terminator videogame for PCs hits the streets, sparking more than two dozen iterations across a wide array of consoles. Flush with Rambo dough, indie film studio Carolco Pictures acquires Hemdale's rights for a film follow-up. Cameron signs on to direct.
1991
Terminator 2: Judgment Day—at $100 million, then the most expensive production in Hollywood history—is the top-grossing movie of the year, eclipsing $200 million in the US and $520 million worldwide.
1992
T2-mania is in full swing. Metallic T-800 skulls show up on backpacks, boxer shorts, lunch boxes, and cubicle walls as licensees like Kenner and MacFarlane Toys see total sales for Terminator-related merchandise climb into the nine-digit range.
1995
Thanks to pricey flops like Cutthroat Island and Showgirls, Carolco files for bankruptcy. Because the company owns half the Terminator rights, suddenly the franchise's future is uncertain.
1996
T2 3-D: Battle Across Time, a 12-minute theme-park attraction, opens at Universal Studios in Orlando. One of the priciest ($60 million) and most complex attractions ever, it's codirected and written by Cameron and features original performances by all of T2's principal actors.
1997
Producers Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar pay $8 million at auction for Carolco's half of the rights to Terminator and, later, fork out an additional $7 million to acquire Hurd's half. The third installment of Terminator lurches forward—minus Cameron, who passes on directing.
2003
Director Jonathan Mostow spends a whopping $187 million to make Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. It makes a modest $44 million on opening weekend, but its ultimate box-office gross lifts the film franchise's total to $1 billion worldwide.
2007
Privately owned Halcyon buys all Terminator rights from Vajna and Kassar for an undisclosed amount. After suing MGM for holding up production on a sequel, it signs a deal with Warner Bros. Charlie's Angels director McG is tapped to helm T4, the first installment of a new trilogy.
2008
Fox's The Sarah Connor Chronicles, starring Lena Headey, Thomas Dekker, and Summer Glau, debuts to 18.3 million viewers. It's a critical darling but struggles for ratings and is hobbled by the Writers Guild strike. Nonetheless, Fox renews the series for another season.
2009
Warner Bros. is set to release the $200 million, postapocalyptic Terminator Salvation, starring Christian Bale, in nearly 4,000 theaters on Memorial Day weekend. A battalion of next-gen videogames is in the works, and a $10 million, 2,850-foot-long Terminator roller coaster opens at Six Flags Magic Mountain.
Illustrations: John Ritter; Photos: 1984: Everett; 1992: Allen Shope/Treasure-cove; 1995: Getty; Furlong: Everett; 1997: Getty; 2003: Warner Bros/Everett; 2008: Michael Desmond/Fox
-
Creator James Cameron on Terminator's Origins, Arnold as Robot, Machine Wars
Posted: April 4th, 2009, 12:00am EDT by James Cameron
Tags: [edit]
Terminator's Origins, Arnold as Robot, Machine Wars authorName= Steve Daly creditType= illustration credit= John Ritter -->I first remember being aware of geopolitics during the Cuban missile crisis. When I was 7 or 8, I found a pamphlet for fallout shelters on the coffee table in my family's house in Ontario, and I remember thinking, "What's this about?" I had the sudden sensation that my coddled existence was a facade. Something dark and terrifying lurked behind it.
I've been fascinated ever since by our human propensity for dancing on the edge of the apocalypse. So when I wrote the first Terminator outline around 1982, I was just working out my childhood stuff. It was also born out of the science fiction movies and literature I grew up with. For the most part, they were warnings—about technology, about science, about the military and the government. You couldn't escape those themes or the fear of nuclear holocaust.
Illustration: John Ritter
T4: Please Don't Suck
Full disclosure: We're on the fence about Terminator Salvation —the trailers look great, but McG as director? Really? Herewith, a few reasons to be hopeful ... and to be afraid, very afraid.
Cast
Pro Christian Bale is a rare breed: an A-list actor with total nerd cred. The Dark Knight. The Prestige. Equilibrium. Gun kata, baby!
Con Bale almost totally terminated T4's distracting director of photography.Script
Pro Screen-writer Jonathan Nolan (Christopher's brother) of The Dark Knight, The Prestige, and Memento fame pitched in on the script.
Con So did TV scribe Shawn Ryan of Nash Bridges and My Two Dads.F/X
Pro Industrial Light & Magic, the f/x house behind the butt-kicking bots in Transformers.
Con ILM also did Poseidon and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift—even the best CG can't save a bad movie.Director
Pro In Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, Joseph "McG" McGinty Nichol showed a facility with lively musical numbers featuring Cameron Diaz's rear end.
Con Wait, T4 doesn't have that?Photos: (left to right): Getty; Transformer: Paramount/Everett
The idea of a hit man from the future trying to change past events was certainly not new. What I thought was cutting-edge was deciding to not have the Terminator be a guy in a robot suit. That's how it was typically done. But a flesh-covered endoskeleton? That was new. So for me it was all about how we could develop stop-motion animation and puppetry to create a true robotic endoskeleton. The team at visual-effects house Stan Winston Studio jumped into it and made it work.
Casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as our Terminator, on the other hand, shouldn't have worked. The guy is supposed to be an infiltration unit, and there's no way you wouldn't spot a Terminator in a crowd instantly if they all looked like Arnold. It made no sense whatsoever. But the beauty of movies is that they don't have to be logical. They just have to have plausibility. If there's a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don't care if it goes against what's likely.
I don't think anything resembling The Terminator is really going to happen. There certainly aren't going to be genocidal wars waged by machines a few generations from now. The stories function more on a symbolic level, and that's why people key into them. They're about us fighting our own tendency toward dehumanization. When a cop has no compassion, when a shrink has no empathy, they've become machines in human form. Technology is changing the whole fabric of social interaction. We're absorbing our machines in a symbiotic way, evolving to become one with our own devices, and that's going to continue indefinitely.
I kind of turned my back on the Terminator world when there was early talk about a third film. I'd evolved beyond it. I don't regret that, but I have to live with the consequence, which is that I keep seeing it resurrected. I'm not involved in Terminator Salvation. I've never read the script. I'm sure I'll be paying 10 bucks to see it like everybody else.
Meanwhile, the original film was recently selected for preservation by the National Film Registry. So there's a good possibility that when the machines actually do take over someday, The Terminator will still be in existence. And the machines can have a good electronic laugh about that.
-- As told to Wired writer Steve Daly.
-
Nintendo's Fils-Aime Talks DSi, Wii and Everything in Between
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 6:22pm EDT by Chris Kohler
Tags: [edit]
On the eve of the DSi's U.S. launch, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime talks about portability, personalization and the future of casual gaming. -
Wikia Death Proves Google Is Search-Startup Killer
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 6:00pm EDT by Ryan Singel
Tags: [edit]
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales kills off his year-old, crowdsourced attempt to challenge Google's search box. Its death shows that Google won't be overthrown the way it took over search in the 1990s. -
Are Google, Yahoo Copyright Thieves?
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 5:00pm EDT by David Kravets
Tags: [edit]
Media magnate Rupert Murdoch says Google's and Yahoo's aggregation services are stealing the news media's content. While the search engine's news sections are commonplace, whether they violate U.S. copyright law is unclear. -
Review: 'Rhythm Heaven' Is Portable Musical Brilliance
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 3:59pm EDT by Chris Kohler
Tags: [edit]
A surprisingly rich and complex game turns the Nintendo DS into a music machine. -
Q&A: Robyn Hitchcock Dreams of 'Oslo,' Synesthesia, Snow
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 2:00pm EDT by Scott Thill
Tags: [edit]
From climate change to endangered vinyl, the veteran British rocker weathers one world-changing storm after another. -
Future of Music: Record Labels Get Real
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 1:00pm EDT by Sara Clemence
Tags: [edit]
After years of blaming the internet and light-fingered listeners, the recording industry might finally be looking in the mirror when it comes to assessing its woes. -
Apply Net Neutrality to Skype on Smartphones, Group Asks Feds
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 11:50am EDT by Ryan Singel
Tags: [edit]
After Skype hobbles its new iPhone application to please Apple and AT&T, a rights group is asking the federal government to make it clear that wireless networks have to be as open as the broadband pipes to American's houses. -
Watermarking Could Lead to X-Men Uploader
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 11:10am EDT by David Kravets
Tags: [edit]
Forensic codes embedded on the pre-release X-Men movie making the rounds on the latest BitTorrent trackers could help authorities nab the uploader. Movie and music companies are embracing such watermarking to cut down on piracy. -
Movies: 'Adventureland' Comedy Crashes Into 'Fast & Furious'
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 11:00am EDT by Hugh Hart
Tags: [edit]
Also opening this week in some cities: Alien Trespass, a faithful homage to '50s sci-fi flicks, complete with a giant, jiggling rubber monster. -
Apple, Stanford Teaching iPhone Development for Free
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 11:00am EDT by Brian X. Chen
Tags: [edit]
The secrets to developing applications for the iPhone are now publicly available and free — courtesy of Stanford University and Apple, who offer programming lessons through iTunes. -
'Sexting' Hysteria Falsely Brands Educator as Child Pornographer
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 10:45am EDT by Kim Zetter
Tags: [edit]
An assistant principal in Virginia begins piecing his life back together after being cleared of child pornography charges this week -- ending a year-long legal nightmare that started with a mysterious photograph of a partially-clothed student circulating in his school. -
Jack Black Destroys Demons With Power of Rock in 'Brutal Legend'
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 10:00am EDT by Chris Kohler
Tags: [edit]
You play the ultimate roadie in this upcoming videogame, which deftly mixes heavy metal and humor. A sneak peek leaves us wanting more. -
Google Reported Sniffing At Twitter, But to What End?
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 9:35am EDT by John C Abell
Tags: [edit]
Google and Twitter — seems like a natural fit. Techcrunch says they are talking merger, but other reports say no. -
Video: This Is Devo-lution
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Wired.com Video Team
Tags: [edit]
Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale of Devo admit they failed to save the world from backward decline. Music devolves as music tech evolves, so artists no longer need to make decisions. -
Scott Brown on Stand-Up Comedy, Lingua Franca of the Wired World
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Scott Brown
Tags: [edit]
Once, billions of giggles ago, humans sat in dark rooms sipping watered-down mai tais while a person onstage—usually with a mic, usually with "issues," sometimes with a watermelon and a sledgehammer—attempted to amuse us. Heckling was discouraged; if it happened, a good comedian had methods of smacking it down. But that comfy, one-way, single-stream, comic-to-audience model is about as cutting-edge as Blockbuster. Or something funnier than Blockbuster. Betamax? The George Burns-Gracie Allen sex tape? Coolidgenomics? Help me out here, folks. And, hey, if you're reading this on the Internet, you can help me out. Chances are, you will. You probably already have—I'll go check the comments.
We've heard a lot about how Google is making us dumber and more distracted and lazier. We've heard less about how it's making us—maybe even forcing us to be—funnier. For today, thanks to the digital hive mind, comedy is colloquy, everything is "material," and life is one big writer's room, a massive clusterchuckle of witty one- upsmanship—on blogs, on social-networking sites, in tweets, in funny video shorts, in Lolcats and talkbacks. Humor saturates the infosphere, for at least two reasons: First, a successful joke implies insight, and insight, especially if it's pithy and self-explanatory, is the basic currency of a high-speed information economy. Second, the fundamental tools and techniques of that economy—memory, annotation, contrast, collage—are also the fundamental tools of comedy. They facilitate ironic linkages, unexpected resonances across genres and media, and anarchic twists on established, institutional forms. That's how you get 50,000 mashups of a Christian Bale tirade inside of 36 hours; that's how you have the day's headlines pureed into music videos and montages hours before The Daily Show hits the air. Behold, the unleashed energies of millions of amateur comedians.
Thanks to market forces, the creation and purveyance of humor have become decentralized and deregulated. The class clown's little monopoly is smashed: Laffs have gone laissez-faire. Obviously, some people are simply funnier than others, and there will always be a comedy aristocracy, either natural or appointed. (Dane Cook, most believe, was groomed by the Illuminati.) But the implication here is that everyone can be funny. More than that: Everyone must be funny.
Because "funny" is becoming a language unto itself, the lingua franca of the wired world. You can't update your Facebook status without a self-deprecating quip. You can't respond to a Gawker post unless you've got something equally snarky to add. Snark, of course, is Web comedy's most renewable resource. A recent Gawker post about Bernie Madoff's '80s-era office furnishings drew no less than three pages of commenter sass, including "Oh look, you can see where Bud Fox was waiting for his big interview," "This is worse than Nagel. This is practically Less Than Zero," and "Which one is James Spader's desk?" If the references are flying over your head, no worries: You can zip over to Wikipedia and be back in time for the punch line.
And if you're still worried about bombing in what is, basically, the world's biggest, cruelest comedy club, don't be. I assure you, you're getting funnier all the time, simply by dint of being plugged into the collective e-conscious and keeping up with the high-bandwidth badinage. Remember the Zen saying: "Like pebbles in a bag, the monks polish each other." (If you can't hit that low, fat pitch out of the park, then brother, no one can help you.) I envision a future where humans communicate only in jokes. Of course, by then we'll have taken to the stars, in great space arks full of comedians, looking to colonize a planet populated entirely by straight men. And yes, that is, indeed, what she said.
Email scott4wired@yahoo.com.
-
How to Jailbreak an iPhone 3G
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Daniel Dumas
Tags: [edit]
We would never advocate hacking your iPhone. However, if you wanted to, here are a few tips. -
How to Get a No-Bid Contract for Russian Choppers
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Sharon Weinberger
Tags: [edit]
The Pentagon can't explain how a company best known for its communications gear got a $322 million, no-bid contract to supply the Iraqi military with Russian helicopters. -
Gameboyz in the Hood: Test Your Gadget Street Cred
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Steven Leckart
Tags: [edit]
Long before nerdcore MCs established a niche by name-checking gear as geeky as the Commodore 64, hip hop artists were stocking their rhymes with more gadgets than a Best Buy. We submit: Back in 1988, Ice Cube bragged about his "little bit of gold and a pager" in N.W.A.'s "Fuck Tha Police." In 1991, De La Soul screened booty calls via answering machine in "Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)." In 1998, Tupac claimed that his foes were jealous of his mobile phone in "Changes." And there's plenty more where that came from. Test your street cred by selecting the right device to complete the lyrics below.
Drop the right product into the rhyme.
1 // "The 'S' in ??? really stands for sex / Beeper's goin off like Don Trump gets checks"
"Skypager," A Tribe Called Quest (1991)2 // "Tearin' up my coupe lookin' for the chronic / Goddamn, nobody got a ??? "
"Who Got the Camera," Ice Cube (1992)3 // "Only way to roll, Jigga and two ladies / I'm too cold, ??? two-way page me, c'mon"
"I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me)," Jay-Z (2000)4 // "Last month I spent two weeks on a vacation / I had a dream that I was inside of my ??? "
"Rap 2k1," Masta Ace (2001)5 // "Daddy need Pirellis to look mean on 22s / Stash box, ??? , laptop, fax machine, phone / Bulletproof this bitch and I'm gone"
"High All the Time," 50 Cent (2003)6 // "Out the country but the ??? still connect"
"Encore," Jay-Z (2003)7 // "Meth Man's left hand ??? / Def Jam's employee of the month, now let's dance"
"Let's Do It," Method Man featuring Redman (2004)8 // "Put away change for Ibiza / And check your credit on your new ??? "
Untitled, M.I.A. (2005)9 // "Befo' Steve Jobs made the ??? / Was getting head, jobs, we call that intimate"
"The Prelude," Jay-Z (2006)10 // "When his majesty speaks, speech defy gravity / ??? nigga but I don't have any cavities"
"Hold Up," P. Diddy (2006)11 // "I'm cool, I'm cool, Westside representative / All me, no ghost no 16-bit like ??? "
"Go Go Gadget Flow," Lupe Fiasco (2007)12 // "Pulled out the ??? is on deck / So much ice hanging off my neck"
"Sidekick," Soulja Boy (2007)
Roll Over the ??? to reveal the answers.Track 1 //
SkyPage (L)'" onmouseout="this.innerHTML = 'Track 1 //
???'">Track 1 //
???Track 2 //
Panasonic (H)'" onmouseout="this.innerHTML = 'Track 2 //
???'">Track 2 //
???Track 3 //
Motorola (F)'" onmouseout="this.innerHTML = 'Track 3 //
???'">Track 3 //
???Track 4 //
PlayStation (I)'" onmouseout="this.innerHTML = 'Track 4 //
???'">Track 4 //
???Track 5 //
Xbox (K)'" onmouseout="this.innerHTML = 'Track 5 //
???'">Track 5 //
???Track 6 //
Blue Berry (G)'" onmouseout="this.innerHTML = 'Track 6 //
???'">Track 6 //
???Track 7 //
Gameboy Advance (B)'" onmouseout="this.innerHTML = 'Track 7 //
???'">Track 7 //
???Track 8 //
Nokia (E)'" onmouseout="this.innerHTML = 'Track 8 //
???'">Track 8 //
???Track 9 //
iPod (C)'" onmouseout="this.innerHTML = 'Track 9 //
???'">Track 9 //
???Track 10 //
Bluetooth (A)'" onmouseout="this.innerHTML = 'Track 10 //
???'">Track 10 //
???Track 11 //
Sega Genesis (D)'" onmouseout="this.innerHTML = 'Track 11 //
???'">Track 11 //
???Track 12 //
Sidekick 3 (J)'" onmouseout="this.innerHTML = 'Track 12 //
???'">Track 12 //
??? -
Dear Pentagon: Please Give Me All Your Secrets
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Nick Thompson
Tags: [edit]
Hazing videos. Hillary's mail to the Pentagon. The military's ESP research. Those are just a few of the requests for the Defense Department's documents, filed under the Freedom of Information Act. What else is buried inside? -
April 3, 1892: Ice Cream Puts On Its Sundae Best
Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred
Tags: [edit]
1892: A druggist in upstate New York adds a candied cherry and some cherry syrup to two dishes of vanilla ice cream. He and his guest, the local parson, enjoy the concoction so much they name it the Cherry Sunday. A treat is born.
Church treasurer Chester Platt often took Rev. John Scott to confer after Sunday worship at the Platt & Colt drugstore in downtown Ithaca, New York. On this particular Sunday, druggist Platt fancied up a simple dish and started an American tradition.
The new dessert gained instant popularity, and the store was soon selling it in strawberry, pineapple, chocolate and other variations. Students at Ithaca's Cornell University spread the idea as they returned to their homes around the country. Platt and Cole tried to patent the name Sunday, to no avail, but fruit-syrup manufacturers hedged their bets by changing the spelling to sundae, sundai, sundi and even sondhi.
Documentation for this tale is abundant. The drugstore was advertising the Cherry Sunday for 10 cents (equal to about $2.50 today) in the Ithaca Daily Journal as early as Oct. 5, 1892. The store's ledger books show it was selling ice cream at the time, that it had the ingredients on hand to create the new taste treat, and that the soda clerk who witnessed the creation was indeed employed there at the time. In fact, Deforest Christiance got a raise just two weeks later ... from $2 a week to $4.50 (from $50 to $110 in today's dough). There's also 1894 correspondence from a patent attorney on the subject.
Other tales place the origin of the dessert and its spelling in Marshall or Evanston, Illinois, or Manitowoc or Two Rivers, Wisconsin. The story goes that local preachers objected to the serving — and sucking — of fizzy ice cream sodas on the Sabbath, so a local genius merchant just took the soda water out of the confection and, voilà, a sundae that wasn't too sinful to slurp on a Sunday. Journalist H.L. Mencken reported this as folklore in The American Language in 1919 and 1945.
Two Rivers, Wisconsin, has vigorously pressed its claim that Ed Berners created the first sundae in the ice cream parlor he owned in that town in 1881. The problem with this story is that records show that Berners was only 17 in 1881, and that he was employed in Chicago as a millworker in 1884. Berners did eventually own and operate an ice cream parlor in Two Rivers, but the only attribution of the supposed act of culinary wizardry was his own recollection in a local newspaper article in 1929, some 48 years after the purported event.
As for the origins of the ice cream cone, that's another story for another 'dae.
Source: What's Cooking America
-
We Drive Nissan's Electric Car, and It's Sweet
Posted: April 2nd, 2009, 6:52pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia
Tags: [edit]
Nissan's poised to spring an electric car on us by the end of next year, and it might just propel the Japanese automaker to the head of the EV pack. -
10 Gory Surgical Triumphs on YouTube
Posted: April 2nd, 2009, 6:21pm EDT by Alexis Madrigal
Tags: [edit]
Not for the squeamish! And some of it is NSFW. These 10 videos contain some of the most grisly, graphic and gripping minutes on the internet. From a leg amputation to a sex-change operation, step into the operating room and watch surgeons at work. -
Robot Makes Scientific Discovery All by Itself
Posted: April 2nd, 2009, 5:00pm EDT by Lizzie Buchen
Tags: [edit]
Scientists create a robot that was able to make a scientific discovery about brewer's yeast enzymes without help from humans. Science still needs a human touch, but robots could play a bigger role in automating parts of the process. -
Computer Program Self-Discovers Laws of Physics
Posted: April 2nd, 2009, 5:00pm EDT by Brandon Keim
Tags: [edit]
A new computer program can glean laws of physics from raw data about the swing of a pendulum, a feat once considered only achievable by humans. Though the computer can't replace the scientist yet, it could be a welcome ally as researchers attempt to handle ever larger datasets. -
This Ride Makes Bullet Trains Look Slow
Posted: April 1st, 2009, 11:15am EDT by Dave Demerjian
Tags: [edit]
The E-5 train that Japan wants to build is to Amtrak as the Concorde is to a Piper Cub. -
Conficker: How a Buffer Overflow Works
Posted: April 1st, 2009, 11:00am EDT by Kevin Poulsen
Tags: [edit]
How does the Conficker worm sneak into Windows machines? Play the evil hacker in our interactive Flash game to find out. -
Drone Attack Kills 12 After Taliban Threatens DC
Posted: April 1st, 2009, 8:32am EDT by Noah Shachtman
Tags: [edit]
An American drone once again struck a suspected militant camp in Pakistan, killing 12. The attack comes on the heels of Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud taking credit for this week's slaughter in a Lahore police training compound. "It's revenge for the drone attacks in Pakistan," he said. "Soon, we will launch an attack in Washington."