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Rants + Raves START PLAY POSTSSure, it looks like the giant death ray from Goldeneye. And sure, the same technology could someday help blast satellites out of orbit. But for now, the US Air Force’s Starfire Optical Range, perched on a hill in the New Mexico desert, is just trying to take some good pictures. Really.
Hot and cold pockets of air change the speed of light as it moves through the atmosphere. That makes stars appear to twinkle and creates a major challenge for researchers trying to get a clear view of objects in space. Starfire’s answer: Shoot a laser 56 miles into the mesosphere and measure the distortion. Then adjust the laser’s mirrors until the beam is back in focus. Whatever optical tweaks correct the beam will also focus a telescope.
The images from Starfire are 40 times sharper than uncorrected pics. Today, that aids astronomers; tomorrow, maybe generals. “We don’t hide the fact that it could help build an anti-satellite weapon,” says Colonel Gregory Vansuch, chief of the installation, “if you choose to do it.” Not that there are any plans for one – both the technology and the politics of space weapons are tricky. But if the military constructs Starfire II inside an extinct volcano, we’ll let you know.
Death Rays by the Numbers
Nonclassified satellites in orbit: 813
Countries that operate satellites: 41
Distance to low Earth orbit: 99 miles
Range of an anti-sat laser: 260 miles
Strength of the Death Star: 1,000
ships, with more firepower than
Han Solo has ever seen
- Noah Shachtman
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Rants + Raves START PLAY POSTSWhy haven’t killer drones replaced human soldiers?
John Arquilla
Professor of defense analysis, US Naval Postgraduate School
Infantry can go places (from casbahs to caves) that tele-operated machines can’t, and they cannot be hijacked by hackers or fried by electropulse weapons. Also, soldiers are far less affected by adverse weather and can win “hearts and minds” far better than any bag of bolts. However, this is not an either-or situation – machines can vastly improve human performance. Indeed, the best armed forces of the 21st century will be those that learn to blend both into a new strategic mix.
Sebastian Thrun
Director, Stanford AI Lab; Darpa Grand Challenge winner
Soldiers do so much more than a self-driving car could. People have this wonderful ability to look at, say, an urban intersection and be aware of cars, pedestrians, traffic signs, curbs. A soldier will quickly identify good places to hide, threats such as roadside bombs, and so on. Robots see lots of pixels, and attaching meaning to those pixels remains one of the hardest problems in AI.
Colby Buzzell
Author, My War: Killing Time in Iraq
Fighting without manpower is for sci-fi novels – we still need grunts because robots don’t have instincts. For example, when I was
in Iraq we avoided IEDs a couple of times because we noticed the street we were driving down, which was normally filled
with pedestrians, was suddenly empty.
All that unmanned crap is fine, but they’re only toys that are pretty much worthless by themselves. Then again, what the hell do I know – I was a lower enlisted infantry guy who didn’t go to war college.
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Rants + Raves START PLAY POSTSThe baseball fan’s annual end-of-season lament is supposed to be, “Wait till next year.” But most fans have no realistic hope that their boys of summer will ever win a pennant. Major-market titans like the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox dominate the sport, slugging out win after win while once-mighty franchises like the Kansas City Royals (who, not so long ago – OK, more than two decades ago – went to the playoffs six times in 10 years) remain perennial cellar dwellers. The culprit is competitive imbalance, Major League Baseball’s euphemism for an economic structure that gives teams in big media markets access to more money and, therefore, more resources to build a strong team. But that’s about to change, thanks to Internet video and the YouTube generation.
Most fans don’t realize that team inequality is essentially a consequence of technology. The rise of cable TV allowed the Yankees and Red Sox to reap huge amounts of revenue from local broadcasting rights and eventually to go into the TV business themselves, creating their own networks to generate even more cash. Cable networks and traditional media companies even bought their own teams to televise on their airwaves. Thanks to its acquisition of media mogul Ted Turner’s empire in 1996, Time Warner owns the Atlanta Braves. Baseball is ruled by a TV-powered oligarchy.
But the sport also has Major League Baseball Advanced Media, by far the most sophisticated Web operation of any pro athletic organization. The company runs MLB.com and splits the revenue from the site equally with all 30 teams. In fact, the league divvies up all new media revenue – from satellite radio and streaming video to online ticket sales and licensing for fantasy leagues – just as equitably. When the owners decided to play the game that way in 2000, commissioner Bud Selig compared the move to the NFL’s historic 1961 pact to distribute national TV revenue equally among all teams. That policy allowed the Green Bay Packers, with its tiny media market, to stay in existence.
MLB.com could do the same – even for sad sacks like the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Last year, the site’s subscription-only audio and video packages ($15 and $80 a season, respectively) generated $60 million. And as more fans follow the action via the Internet, teams like the Devil Rays and the Royals will enjoy just as much of the bigger pie as the Time Warner Braves of the world.
What’s astonishing is that as late as 2000, when you typed “www.mlb.com” into your browser, you got a Philadelphia law firm. But just half a decade later, MLB.com is so good at what it does that it has expanded beyond baseball. When the NCAA streamed its wildly popular men’s basketball tournament over the Net a few months ago, MLB.com’s pipes handled the traffic. MLB Advanced Media also manages Web sites for Major League Soccer and the World Track & Field Championships, and it recently signed an agreement to host online operations for a licensing and merchandising company that handles pop stars such as Madonna and Tom Petty. At this rate, it’s not far-fetched to believe that MLB Advanced Media could someday rival ESPN – and end competitive imbalance.
Sure, the number of people watching – much less willing to pay for – online video isn’t high enough yet to change the eco-nomics of the sport. Just wait till next year.
- Chris Suellentrop
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Rants + Raves START PLAY POSTSRiding a rocket into space is like riding a controlled explosion, as astronaut Mike Mullane famously put it. JP Aerospace has a gentler plan – lighter-than-air vehicles that lift people and cargo into orbit in three stages over the course of several days. First, a 175-foot-long Atmospheric Ascender (shown above and right) rises to a construction platform at 140,000 feet – the edge of space. Safe from balloon-shredding terrestrial winds, crew members assemble a larger, more buoyant craft and loft it into orbit. This summer, the Rancho Cordova, California-based firm plans to float its Ascender prototype higher than ever, up to 100,000 feet.
Company founder John Powell is confident his airship will make it. As head of this mostly volunteer, DIY space program, he understands slow, steady progress; limited funding has meant upgrading in baby steps, which translates to 27 years of transatmospheric flying. Can an outfit financed largely by selling hats, T-shirts, and high-altitude ads really outfly NASA? Powell thinks so. “There’s the whole myth about rocket science,” he says. “It’s really not that hard. It’s not brain surgery.”
- Kara Platoni
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Rants + Raves START PLAY POSTSTo decode da Vinci, you need a firm grasp of art. To learn from Archimedes, you need to get your hands on something a bit more sophisticated. Like a synchrotron that accelerates electrons to nearly the speed of light to produce x-rays. At least, that’s what scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center are using to reveal works by the ancient Greek mathematician that are hidden in 1,000-year-old parchment.
Archimedes, who lived in the third century BC, is credited with countless scientific breakthroughs, including developing the concept of pi and inventing an early form of calculus. Most of his works were lost to history until 1906, when scholar John Ludwig Heiberg found some of Archimedes’ treatises hidden in a medieval prayer book. The works had been painstakingly copied from an earlier text by a 10th-century scribe, but in 1229, the pages had been unbound, erased, and used to make the prayer book.
The synchrotron’s 50-micron-wide beam gives the Stanford physicists a way to see through the layers of information. The x-rays cause iron atoms in the original ink to fluoresce, giving off their own x-rays. By scanning the parchment and measuring the x-rays emitted, the researchers can build 600-dpi images of the text, including words hidden under paintings that were added by a forger in the early 20th century. Last year, researchers proved the process could work, and in July they’ll finally start copying pages. “We are reading text that no one has ever read,” says Uwe Bergmann, a staff scientist at SLAC. As Archimedes would have said: Eureka!
- Dylan Tweney
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Rants + Raves START PLAY POSTSYou started a blog. But after weeks of dutifully recording your daily goings on, you still haven’t gotten that book deal or a call to be on Oprah. What are you doing wrong? Melissa Lafsky – who under the nom de guerre Opinionista turned controversial rants about her mistreatment as an employee of a Manhattan law firm into media fame – offers this list of things that could be keeping your rocket ship to celebrity on the launchpad.
1. You aren’t kamikaze enough to risk your career by revealing the soul-crushing absurdity of your job.
2. You aren’t sufficiently vain or presumptuous to declare yourself a hot twentysomething female (even if it’s true).
3. You lack a diagnosed sleep disorder, minor substance abuse problem, mercurial temperament, and/or innate desire to alienate loved ones.
4. You’re not ready to declare on the Internet what you really think about the raging hypocrites nesting in your life.
5. You have yet to explore the wonders of shameless self-promotion, groveling, and media whoring. Profiles in The New York Times don’t always come free.
- Ruth Fowler
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Rants + Raves START PLAY POSTSBack in the day, an angler could spend a lifetime learning the ins and outs of his favorite fishing hole. Now he just needs to drop a sonar buoy, tie on a smart lure, and – bam! – hook an enormous bass. The new gear has fishermen embroiled in a heated debate: At what point is fishing too easy? Tackle makers argue that bigger catches are better for the sport. And it seems they’re winning: Pro-fishing competitions have embraced the tech. Here’s a few tools that enable even novices to land the big one.
REMOTE CONTROL
It’s hard to maneuver a boat and set a hook at the same time. Minn Kota Motors solves this problem with a remote control for the motor that
can be mounted on a fishing pole. The all-electric motor is painstakingly balanced during manufacturing to run silently.
SONAR BUOY
AND WATCH
Humminbird’s SmartCast watch uses an internal antenna to communicate with a sonar buoy attached to a fishing line. The buoy pings the depths to 120 feet and sends data to the watch, which uses it to map
the aquatic landscape. The software even recognizes the sonar signature of a fish, causing a cute icon to pop up on the display.
FISH CALL
The Fish Activator underwater speaker
uses six digitally mastered sounds to attract prey. Choose from tracks like “Distressed Bait” and “Shad Clicks.” They were all perfected by scientists from Louisiana-
based Biosonix Systems and recorded in
a 957-gallon tank. The audio was tested in lakes, where fish reaction was monitored
via underwater videocams.
LIGHT-
SENSITIVE LINE
Many modern fishing lines are made from Dyneema, a plastic used in bulletproof vests. The material yields ultrathin line
that fish can’t see. But humans have trouble spotting it, too. Berkley Fishing addresses this by embedding a UV-sensitive chemical that makes the line turn bright yellow in the sunlight above the water.
DIGITAL LURE
When the battery-powered SolarisFatshad lure is submerged, a chip tells 14 onboard LEDs to start flashing, simulating sunlight reflecting off scales. Simultaneously, a digital buzzer begins to chirp out electromagnetic pulses, emulating those emitted by an injured fish.
- Joshua Davis
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Rants + Raves START PLAY POSTSMr. Know-It-All remembers when all his parents had to worry about was his pen-and-paper diary. It would have been tough to read in any case – it was hidden under a stack of Green Lantern comics and written in secret code. But that was a gentler time.
Now things are more complicated. Odds are you’re worried about the public implications of your kid’s behavior online – such as whether your tween is passing herself off as a sultry 19-year-old on MySpace, or he’s nursing an outta-control Internet poker and porn habit. Or maybe you’re concerned that Google’s cache will cough up their explicit blog to a prospective employer in 2016. “In a teenage brain, impulse control is still under construction,” psychologist David Walsh says. “The job of the parent is to act as the surrogate prefrontal cortex.”
So by all means, yes – monitor their online behavior. It’s your duty. But there are degrees of onitoring, and you should go only as far as you need to. The first step is over-the-shoulder surfing. Put Johnny’s Mac out in the open so you can see what’s onscreen. While you’re at it, you old Luddite, educate yourself. Get MySpace, Flickr, and IM accounts. If your kid has a Web page, read it. The more genuinely informed pow-wows you have with them, the more they’ll grok your values.
But let’s say that despite your best Orwellian efforts, your kid seems seriously troubled, spends every minute online, and won’t or can’t talk about it. If you believe you have no option but to snoop, you can go high tech. Keylogging software such as the spooktastic Spector Pro can track their activity and automatically email you reports. Before you rush off to play Spy vs. Spy, though, here are a few caveats: First, don’t be clandestine. To preserve what trust you still have, you absolutely must tell your kids that you’re watching (and if they know you’re watching, they may begin to self-regulate). What’s more, even if you don’t like what they’re doing, don’t threaten to take away the Net permanently. One recent study showed this threat actually made teenage girls less candid about their online lives.
By the way, don’t bother with software that blocks illicit sites. Any half-competent teenager can easily subvert it.
My friends complain when I email them massive video files. I’m just trying to share the latest “This Week in God.” But how big is too big?Unfortunately, just by looking at people, you can’t tell how well-endowed their inboxes are (unless they’re using Gmail). Some inboxes are capped at a few megs to quash annoying “Dude, Check This Out!” attachments; that Daily Show clip might max out your friend’s account. Use this simple rule: If an attachment is 1 meg or less, send away. If it’s bigger, ask permission first.
- Clive Thompson
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Rants + Raves START PLAY POSTSHYPERTELESCOPE
n. A space-based telescope that would use mirror arrays spanning many miles to simulate observatories too massive to build. Designed to examine planets 10 or more light-years away.
WHITE SPACE
n. A potentially lucrative market for which no products
or services yet exist
– because nobody
has thought to make people desire those hypothetical products or services.
QUANTUM MALWARE
n. While prototypes of quantum computers struggle to make
even rudimentary calculations, early efforts to build an ultrafast quantum
Internet have already spawned the concept of quantum malware.
BLACK HAWKS
n. pl. Helicopter parents with an especially militant mentality. They hover over their kids’ lives through college, waging war to give them unfair advantages.
– Jonathon Keats (jargon@wiredmag.com)
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Rants + Raves START PLAY POSTSMost people are content to pimp their rides with chrome spinners and a turbo kit. Not Ron Patrick. He wanted something unique for his 2000 VW Beetle. So he mounted a $270,000, 26,000-rpm, 1,350-horsepower, Navy-surplus helicopter jet turbine in the trunk.
The Stanford PhD and car computer designer spent four years making the vehicle safe to drive, but now, when he needs a boost, he just switches on an afterburner (which shoots an 8-foot-long flame out the back). The intake draws air through the windows and sunroof, creating cabin noise that sounds, as Patrick puts it, “like Iraq.” And once it kicks in, “it feels like the finger of God is pushing the car.” The jet jumps the Bug’s speed from 80 to 140 mph in less than four seconds, at which point Patrick eases up on the throttle. He estimates that at 160, “the rear end would probably start to go airborne.”
Despite all the muscle, Patrick doesn’t race. “I’m 49, so frying some 16-year-old who just saw The Fast and the Furious doesn’t do anything for me,” he says. But he has been known to light up Northern California’s freeways on weekdays between 2 and 3 am. “More than one late-night truck driver on I-5 has been passed by a low-flying comet.” If you don’t see Patrick’s ride there, you may be out of luck – his hot rod is just too much for car shows. When he entered it in the Los Angeles Grand National Roadster Show in January, he was greeted with disparaging looks and scoffs from the gearhead elite. So when the winners started revving their V-8s, Patrick responded by firing up the jet and blasting out a 6-foot-long flame. Officials screamed at him to shut it down, and then banned him for life. Luckily, he’d already received a special prize for Best Compact Custom.
- Brian Lam
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Rants + Raves START PLAY POSTS1. October 5, 1960
Early Warning System radar
in Greenland mistakes a reflection
off the moon for a massive Soviet missile barrage. Catastrophe is
averted when radar operators catch
the error.
2. October 25, 1962
A guard at an Air Force base in Duluth, Minnesota, shoots someone climbing a fence (not knowing it’s
a bear), which triggers a miswired
alarm at an Air National Guard base
in Wisconsin. Nuclear-armed F-106 fighter jets scramble.
3. November 9, 1979
A training tape depicting a
Soviet attack is inadvertently played
on Norad computers. Senator Charles Percy (R-Illinois), visiting at the time, describes a scene of “panic.”
4. June 3, 1980
Phantom inbound missiles appear on computer screens at Strategic Air Command and, later, at the Pentagon.
Before the problem is discovered, SAC readies its B-52 bombers for takeoff.
5. September 26, 1983
Soviet systems report US ICBM launches. The colonel on duty, fearing
a false alarm, doesn’t recommend a counterstrike. The “missile plumes” turn out to be the glare of the sun, but Soviet high command reprimands him anyway.
6. November 1983
Able Archer 83 – a realistic NATO training exercise – includes rehearsing
for nukes. The edgy Soviets, who notice an increase in communications between the US and the UK before the drill, think it’s the real thing.
7. January 25, 1995
Russian radar interprets a NASA research rocket as a US submarine-based missile. President Boris Yeltsin puts his country on alert.
8. June 6, 2002
At the height of India-Pakistan
nuclear tensions, a 32-foot asteroid explodes over the Mediterranean. Had
it fallen to Earth hours earlier, it would have caused a blast over south Asia indistinguishable from a first strike.
- Patrick Di Justo
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Rants + Raves START PLAY POSTSFashion designer Marc Ecko isn’t new to graffiti culture. He built his multimillion-dollar Ecko Unlimited brand around the art form and even produced a videogame in which the main character paints pieces all over an urban landscape. Now you can add legal advocate to his résumé. He has recently lent his support to a suit to quash NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to make it illegal for anyone under 21 to carry broad-tipped markers and aerosol spray paint. Wired asked Ecko how to reconcile graffiti and the law.
WIRED: Removing unwanted graffiti in the US costs more than $8 billion each year.
ECKO: That’s called vandalism.
OK, but there’s obviously a problem. How do you suggest politicians deal with it?
Plenty of after-school programs could use
the billions of dollars we spend to clean
up graffiti (money that does nothing to solve
the problem anyway). In Philadelphia, there’s
the Mural Arts Program, which creates venues for legal graffiti walls. Statistically, it’s been successful in disrupting vandalism.
Given that both your clothing line and videogame celebrate graffiti culture, some might see your crusade as self-serving.
It’s completely self-serving. There’s nothing hidden about it. Why is it OK for Procter & Gamble, which owns the Pampers brand, to advocate for all things family and baby? I have commercial interests, too. Nike funds an after-school sports program. Is that self-serving?
Of course it is.
But it’s also the culture that represents them.
It upholds their values, and this upholds mine.
On your site, StillFree.com, you state that you’re advocating free speech. Is graffiti defensible on free speech grounds?
Listen, if something’s not yours and you don’t have the owner’s consent, you shouldn’t paint there. That’s the same as taking something
that’s not yours.
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Rants + Raves START PLAY POSTS| Wired | H-Prize | |
| Tired | H5N1 | |
| Expired | H-1B | |
| Wired | original Star Wars trilogy on DVD | |
| Tired | original Star Wars trilogy in Imax | |
| Expired | original Star Wars trilogy in theaters | |
| Wired | implantable tan | |
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| Expired | sunlight | |
| Wired | robot surgeons | |
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| Expired | robot pets | |
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