Why Does the USA Depend on Russian Rockets to Get Us Into Space?

“After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest to the USA to bring their astronauts to the International Space Station using a trampoline.”

That was an April 29 tweet from Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who is head of Russia’s space program and who is also individually targeted by U.S. sanctions imposed due to the Ukraine unpleasantness.

He sounds irked. Possibly Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed Rogozin to be irked. Possibly Rogozin is irked that he’s individually targeted by U.S. sanctions because the U.S. didn’t have the guts to target individuals of real importance at the Kremlin, and Rogozin’s feelings are hurt.

Here is an April 3 tweet from Rogozin about Russian-made rocket engines used to launch U.S. satellites: “A Russian broom for an American witch.”

We’re Glinda, the Good Witch of the Free World. And we’re embarrassed about needing Russian flying monkeys to get us into space.

It didn’t have to be this way. United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, puts U.S. satellites into orbit aboard all-American Delta IV rockets. ULA presented a paper to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics detailing how quickly the Delta IV-Heavy could be “human-rated” (Washington politician-speak for “safer than sending Christa McAuliffe up in the Space Shuttle Challenger”). ULA said 4 1/2 years. The paper was published in 2009.

International diplomacy is a big bordello. “I won’t sell it!” “I won’t buy it!” Is this any way to run a whorehouse?

But leadership of the U.S. space program has been lacking. Don’t blame NASA. Every NASA official I’ve talked to, including its present chief, Maj. Gen. Charles Bolden Jr., and the head of NASA under George W. Bush, Dr. Michael Griffin, is eager to put the astro back in astronaut.

However, President Bush said we were going to Mars, and we went to Iraq instead. And U.S. lack of space capabilities took President Obama by surprise, like everything else has—opposition to Obamacare, Tea Party, NSA snooping, IRS targeting of conservative nonprofits, Crimea, VA screw-ups, ISIS fanatics pushing toward Baghdad.

And we’re a democracy. So we the people share blame for Russia finally winning the space race. (Tortoise disqualified for technical reasons, first place awarded to Sputnik hare.)

Just at a moment when we’re all making telephone calls to remote places, getting weather forecasts for July 4 weekend, looking at Google Earth to see if our neighbor’s new addition violates zoning ordinances, watching DirecTV, listening to SiriusXM radio, and unable to find our way home from our local bar without GPS, we’ve lost interest in space.

That we’re unable, for the time being, get to space personally is one thing. The more important thing is our ability to get stuff into space—stuff that keeps the CIA informed, connects and positions our defense forces, and helps us get home from the bar. Much of our ability is dependent on two rocket engines, the RD-180 and the NK-33/AJ26. These are made in Russia.

On April 11, the Space Foundation issued a “Fact Sheet: Russian Rocket Engines Used by the United States.” The Space Foundation is a non-profit international organization that has, for more than 30 years, been the foremost “advocate for all sectors of space.” Its mission is “to advance space-related endeavors to inspire, enable, and propel humanity.” Its Fact Sheet, released nearly a month after The Daily Beast’s Christopher Dickey reported on U.S. satellites using Russian rocket engines, is just the facts.

(I’m a member of SF’s board. Because, I guess, every institution needs a class clown—in which capacity I got to talk to Charles Bolden and Michael Griffin. But I do not speak here, in any way, officially or unofficially, for the Space Foundation. I don’t speak for anyone, not even, sometimes, as my wife and children have pointed out, for myself.)

The factual situation is that ULA’s workhorse Atlas V rocket (more than three dozen launches vs. Delta IV-Heavy’s seven) was built around the RD-180 engine. Atlas V missions include, per the SF Fact Sheet, “military communications, intelligence collection, missile warning, planetary exploration…earth science payloads, a few commercial satellites, and possible human spaceflights in the future.”

The NK-33 engine, designated AJ26 after modification by America’s Aerojet Rocketdyne company, is key to the design of Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Antares rocket. Fact Sheet: “The primary mission of the Antares…[is] to service the International Space Station. Orbital is pursuing future commercial satellite launches and possible military satellite launches using Antares.”

A month after the Space Foundation published the Fact Sheet, the ever-twittering Dmitry Rogozin tweeted: “Russia is ready to continue deliveries of RD-180 engines to the US only under the guarantee that they won’t be used in the interests of the Pentagon.”

Rogozin also announced that Russia will call it quits with the International Space Station in 2020. That is four years before the U.S. plans to leave.

The ISS, launched in 1998, is the most expensive thing ever built—$150 billion and counting. The U.S. has provided more than $100 billion of that. There’s no astronomic reason the ISS can’t stay in use for another 10 to 14 years or longer. But it needs to be “reboosted” from time to time to lift it back into proper low earth orbit. Otherwise the ISS becomes a 357-foot million-pound surprise for earthlings. (Don’t worry too much. While the meteor that injured 1,000 people in Chelyabinsk last year was only 55 feet wide, it was 20 times as heavy.) Currently only Russian rocket engines, fitted with the Russian ISS docking system, can reboost the Space Station.

To these Russian nose-thumbings, one finger salutes, and social media bullyings, we do have alternatives.

The Delta IV can carry a larger payload into low earth orbit than the Atlas V, 60,779 lbs. vs. 41,478 lbs. But a Delta launch is much more expensive.

Plus, the Delta IV is—strange thing to say about an enormous rocket—very fast and noisy. According to Aviation Week, “There is some concern that the acoustic environment and acceleration profiles in the Delta IV nosecone could be too violent [for some Air Force and Navy satellite payloads].” Getting payloads “dual manifested” so that they can fly on either the Atlas or the Delta “requires detailed engineering work,” says AV, meaning “is slow as hell.”

Also Made in the U.S.A. is Orbital Science Corporation’s air-launched Pegasus. But it can carry a payload of only 977 lbs. The company’s Minotaur V can carry 1,390 lbs. but has flown just once. And its Taurus XL, now designated Minotaur-C, has been trouble-plagued, with three of nine launches ending in failure and the loss of $700 million worth of items supposed to go into orbit.

The SpaceX Falcon 9v1.1, all privately funded, all domestically sourced, can carry 28,990 lbs. It’s made three cargo deliveries to the International Space Station. But the Falcon is not yet Air Force certified for military and intelligence payloads. SpaceX is suing the Air Force over the slowness of this certification, although going to the U.S. court system is not a famous way of speeding things up.

U.S. Air Force four-star Gen. William Shelton, commandeer of Air Force Space Command and a guy who knows about these matters, said during a keynote address at the Space Foundation’s May 2014 Space Symposium that he would prefer the U.S. to develop its own equivalent to the RD-180. But he noted that would cost more than $1 billion and take between five and eight years.

So we have alternatives, sort of like the veggie burger alternatives we have on the backyard grill.

We’re dependent on the RD-180, which has flown 50 times on U.S. missions with 100 percent success. And to a lesser extent, we’re dependent on the NK33/AJ26 engine, which we’ve used six times with 100 percent success.

Plus, of course, there are U.S. political as well as U.S. technological headaches. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2015, passed by the Senate Armed Services Committee and now going to the full Senate, contains an amendment from Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) forbidding purchase of Russian RD-180 engines for national security missions after fiscal year 2017. The amendment is expected to survive the House-Senate conference and be in the bill signed by the president.

As Marcia Smith of SpacePolicyOnline.com put it, “While one part of official Washington worries that Russia will follow through on a recent threat to prohibit use of RD-180 engines for U.S. national security space launches, another part is working to ensure exactly that outcome.”

International diplomacy is a big bordello. “I won’t sell it!” “I won’t buy it!” Is this any way to run a whorehouse?

What’s interesting is how we got into the red light district with Russia. It was the result of a chain of good decisions—wise, prudent, long-sighted, or, at the least, expedient choices.

When the Soviet Union fell apart, President George H.W. Bush was anxious that the USSR rocket expertise, especially the nuke-tipped ICBM kind, didn’t get sold to the highest bidder—China, Iran, North Korea, Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry. President Bush and, after him, President Clinton urged U.S. aerospace executives to look for Russian rocket business partnerships that made sense.

They did make sense. The Russians had developed a very powerful, very reliable, and relatively simple liquid oxygen/kerosene engine. The U.S. had stopped most research and development on this kind of engine after the Saturn V moon rocket was retired.

The RD-171, which would become the RD-180, was a more advanced liquid fuel rocket engine than anything we had.

That was a surprise. I talked to several U.S. aerospace engineers who were involved with Russia from the beginning. “There were cats all over the factory,” said one. “I asked, ‘What’s with the cats?’ The Russians said, ‘The mice.’ I asked, ‘What’s with the mice?’ ‘They gnaw the wiring harnesses.’”

This engineer told me about the Soyuz booster engines, similar in design to the RD-180, and how, when it was time for the four boosters to be attached to the rocket, an old man would arrive carrying his own toolbox. He was the original expert on booster attachment. He was retired, but came in, unpaid, to make sure the boosters were attached right.

“The Soviet-era factories look like hell,” said another engineer. The Russian attitude is, ‘Why wash factory walls? They just get dirty again.’ But you go look at their machine tools and everything’s pristine.”

Part of the reason for the RD-180’s superiority is Russian skill with titanium. They have a lot of titanium in Russia. They’re adept at making titanium alloys. A third engineer I talked to called the alloys “unobtainium.”

We had trouble reverse engineering the alloys. “The Russians are amazing metallurgists,” said the third engineer. “But it’s an artisanal process. The Russians themselves may not know how it works.”

“Extraordinary what you can do when OSHA’s not around,” said yet another American engineer.

In 1995 Lockheed Martin conducted an open competition for the next generation Atlas rocket’s first stage engine. The RD-180 won on both performance and cost.

The idea was that the RD-180 would be co-produced, built in Russia for commercial satellite launches and built in America for U.S. government launches.

Lockheed Martin and ULA spent more than $120 million on the American part of the RD-180 co-production program. But budget constrictions trumped expansion of the U.S. industrial base. Russian-built RD-180s cost only about $10 million apiece.

With all due respect, the American aerospace industry can’t build a rider mower for $10 million. (Though it would mow your lawn at International Space Station orbital speed—17,000 mph.) Every RD-180 engine has been imported from Russia.

Given All of the Above, the Conclusion Is That We Should Go Ahead and Keep Using the Damned Russian Rocket Engines. Screw Russia.

We have a stockpile of RD-180s and AJ26s that will last two years. If the Russians don’t want their engines “used in the interests of the Pentagon,” we should employ the time-honored technique of international diplomacy and lie about it.

Will the Russians let the ISS fall out of the sky? That would move them from being the fourth least popular nation on earth—behind North Korea, Iran, and Syria—right to the top of the list.

Do we really need $1 billion and five to eight years, as Gen. Shelton says, to replace the RD-180? I asked a senior executive in a private sector space company. He said, “Only if you insist on doing the Air Force way.”

We possess all the RD-180 blueprints and specifications. We have, I’ve been told by a metallurgist, figured out the metallurgy. What’s Russia going to do? Haul us into International Patent Court in The Hague?

No nation was ever destroyed by embarrassment. And the RD-180 can assist the U.S. military in destroying all sorts of things, including Russians if necessary.

The McCain amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act contains exceptions for crisis situations—holes you could fly a Delta IV through.

And Russia, with its economy in recession and energy prices falling, needs the money and the continued production to keep its own space program going.

I’ve been told on deep background by a highly placed source (I’ve been waiting all my journalistic life to use the phrase “told on deep background by a highly placed source”) that Putin said Rogozin should put a sock in it.

And on-the-record in the foreground there is Gen. Shelton, quoted in the May 21 issue of SpaceNews, “Speaking to reporters here at the 30th Space Symposium, Shelton said that there are ‘indications’ that the [RD-180] will remain available on a ‘business as usual’ basis, though he declined to be specific.”

Russia can claim it’s taking its ball home, but Russia can’t quit playing.

“All-natural” labels on food are meaningless. Let’s get rid of them.

Walk down the aisle of a grocery store and you’re bound to see all sorts of bizarre foods labeled as “natural” or “all-natural.” There are “natural” Cheetos and “natural” cookies. There are “all-natural” fruit drinks that contain high-fructose corn syrup.

THE ‘NATURAL’ LABEL IS MEANINGLESS — BUT MANY SHOPPERS TAKE IT SERIOUSLY

The “natural” label is basically meaningless — there are very few rules for how it’s used and companies will slap it on all sorts of things.

And yet a lot of shoppers seem to take the label seriously, assuming it means the food is somehow better for you or healthier. Over at Grist, Nathanael Johnson points to a new Consumer Reports survey finding that 59 percent of those polled check for a “natural” label when shopping for food. As he laments, “When will the vague ‘natural’ food label die?”

It’s worth expanding on Johnson’s point. There aren’t really any clear definitions for what counts as “natural” food, which is one reason why you see it pop up in so many odd places. But that’s partly because the word itself is inapt — very little about modern agriculture is “natural,” and it’s just not a good way of assessing the health or sustainability of our food system.

There’s no clear definition for “natural” food

But is it natural? BSIP/UIG/Getty Images

The Food and Drug Administration has no official definition of “natural food” — in part, they say, because a great many foods in the grocery store have usually been processed or altered in some way and so it’s difficult to draw a clear line.

THE FDA TRIED TO FIND A PRECISE DEFINITION OF ‘NATURAL’ IN THE EARLY 1990S AND GAVE UP

Back in 1991, the FDA actually tried to come up with a more precise standard. But after two years of trying, the agency gave up. “It’s too complex,” one FDA official lamented in 2008.

(By the way, this is in contrast to the term “organic,” a term that is more precisely defined and regulated by the US Department of Agriculture.)

By and large, the FDA doesn’t regulate most uses of “natural” labels, though it will occasionally send warning letters — if, say, a product is labeled “all-natural” but contains citric acid or calcium chloride or potassium sorbate. (Though, as one investigation by the Center for Science in the Public Interest found, those warning letters often go ignored.)

Things are a little different with fresh meat, which is regulated by the Department of Agriculture. There, “natural” is defined as meaning the meat contains no artificial ingredients and is minimally processed. But even here, some artificial additives are allowed (such as chicken flavored with a salt broth). And meat from animals raised on antibiotics or hormones can still be called “natural.”

Consumer groups have often complained that the lack of a clear definition means that lots of odd things get misleadingly labeled “all-natural” or “100% natural” even when they include chemical ingredients. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has a long list of oddities over the years, including a Hunt’s “100% Natural” tomato sauce that contained citric acid or a Minute Maid “All-Natural” cranberry cocktail that contained high-fructose corn syrup.

 

That group called for stricter definitions and regulations on the practice, arguing that the label misleads consumers. But even that’s not as easy as it sounds. A more precise definition would still be fairly misleading — in part because the word “natural” isn’t a very helpful way to think about food.

Our food system isn’t “natural” to begin with

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Underlying this broader issue is the widespread belief that “anything natural is good, and anything unnatural is bad,” as Cambridge geneticist Ottoline Leyser put it.

‘THE CEREAL CROPS WE EAT BEAR LITTLE RESEMBLANCE TO THEIR NATURALLY SELECTED ANCESTORS’

In a recent essay in PLOS Biology, Leyser argues that it’s time to kill this mistaken idea once and for all. Basically everything in modern agriculture is unnatural. “The cereal crops we eat bear little resemblance to their naturally selected ancestors, and the environments in which we grow them are equally highly manipulated and engineered by us,” she writes. “We have, over the last 10,000 years, bred out of our main food plants all kinds of survival strategies that natural selection put in. ”

There’s more along these lines. “Agriculture is the invention of humans,” she adds. “It is the deliberate manipulation of plants (and animals) and the environment in which they grow to provide food for us. The imperative is not that we should stop interfering with nature, but that we should interfere in the best way possible to provide a reliable, sustainable, equitable supply of nutritious food.”

In her essay, Leyser is making a specific point about genetically modified foods — she argues that the line between crops whose genes have been altered through conventional breeding and crops whose genes have been altered through more modern techniques isn’t as significant as many people make it out to be. Yes, there are all sorts of issues and debates around GM foods, but the fact that it’s somehow “unnatural” doesn’t tell us all that much.

That point could be applied more broadly. There are plenty of real issues and questions around food. Can we produce enough food to feed a growing population without ravaging our environment? Are we using too many antibiotics in our farms and accelerating the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria? Should we eat healthier? Is our food system safe?

But labeling foods “natural” or “unnatural” sheds basically no light on any of these questions. It’s a goofy marketing term that says nothing.

Further reading: 40 maps that explain food in America

CARD 3 OF 16LAUNCH CARDS

How is GMO food different from regular food?

It might help to distinguish genetic engineering from traditional techniques for producing food.

Humans have been selectively breeding plants and animals for tens of thousands of years to get certain desired traits. Over time, for example, farmers (and scientists) have bred corn to become larger, to hold more kernels on an ear, and to flourish in different climates. That process has certainly altered corn’s genes. But it’s not usually considered “genetic engineering.”

Genetic engineering, by contrast, involves the direct manipulation of DNA, and only really became possible in the 1970s. It often takes two different forms: There’s “cisgenesis,” which involves directly swapping genes between two organisms that could otherwise breed — say, from wheat to wheat. Or there’s”transgenesis,” which involves taking well-characterized genes from a different species (say, bacteria) and transplanting them into a crop (say, corn) to produce certain desired traits.

Ultimately, genetic engineering tries to accomplish the same goals as traditional breeding — create plants and animals with desired characteristics. But genetic engineering allows even more fine-tuning. It can be faster than traditional breeding and it allows engineers to transfer specific genes from one species to another. In theory, that allows for a much greater array of traits.

Here’s a diagram from the Food and Drug Administration:

FDA

How amusement parks hijack your brain

THE ANTICIPATION KICKS in before you’ve even parked the car, just looking out the open window at the winding, towering roller coaster track. With the sun shining down from above, the scent of fried dough in the air, and a whole day ahead dedicated to nothing but pleasure, you’ve arrived at a place that is all but synonymous with summer in America.

 

An amusement park is like no other patch of land on earth. Full of bright colors, tantalizing games, infinite ice cream, and of course, amazing thrill rides that give you the power to speed or fly, they open every year to teeming crowds on a quest for fun. Lights flash everywhere; high-tech steel rides sit alongside old-fashioned diversions like face-painting stations and strength-testing machines; the laughter of children mingles with carnival music and happy screams of terror.

“You walk in and you sort of just go, ‘Whoa,’” said British historian Josephine Kane, the author of a 2013 book on early amusement park design called “The Architecture of Pleasure.” “There’s an immediate sense of sensory overload and chaos.”

But if the scene feels anarchic to you, there’s another way to think about the experience. The people who designed the rides, set up the games, and decided where to put the churro stands didn’t do it at random. The modern amusement park is, beneath the flash and the chaos, a carefully tuned psychological machine—a creation honed for more than a century to perfectly deliver a huge range of cognitive and physiological delights, pushing buttons you didn’t even know you had.

Related

• Graphic: Take the tour

When the first amusement parks sprouted up during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were often set up by people from the world of theater, with deep experience in the mystical arts of making people feel things. “There’s a very particular way that [parks] were designed,” said Kane, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Westminster, “[so that] you’d come off one ride and sort of float through the crowd, in a kind of swirling motion, and get sucked into another ride or another stall or booth.”

Today, as designs have evolved and improved—and modern psychology has unlocked more and more insights into what our bodies and brains crave—the amusement park has become almost a handbook to the ways the human brain can be switched on. It is “a whole system designed to manipulate you into experiencing different kinds of pleasure,” said David Linden, a neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the author of the book “The Compass of Pleasure,” about how the brain processes the things that make us feel good.

The tricks an amusement park plays on you don’t always happen the way you’d think. Games are designed to play on the appeal of almost, but not quite, winning; thrill rides like the Giant Drop tap into the strange mechanism in your brain that allows you to enjoy the rush of a simulated near-death experience. Even some aspects of the park that you’d never list as “fun” are gears in the machine: the maps that tell you where to go, the throngs around the food stands, the lines you have to endure to get to the more popular rides.

To understand the amusement park is to understand your own brain in ways you haven’t before—an almost unique window into the range of things that create that feeling we call “fun.” So step right up and enjoy the ride, as we take you inside the anatomy of a typical amusement park: a machine engineered for your conscious and subliminal delight, surprise, and excitement, right up until it’s time to head back to the real world.

 

Take the tour: 9 ways amusement parks hijack your brain

 

 

The Jumbo Jets Boeing and Airbus Turn Into Posh Private Planes

The $65 million Gulfstream G650 may be the pinnacle of the private jet market, but it just doesn’t do the job for billionaires who prefer to fly with more than a dozen or so passengers.

For that, the uber wealthy turn to Airbus and Boeing, who are more than happy to customize their jets — even the widebodies that can carry hundreds of people — for private use.

Commercial jet manufacturers have been replacing the rows of economy seats in their aircraft with sofas and entertainment centers since the late 1990s. A recent influx of billionaires from Russia, the Middle East, and China has led to a new focus on this part of the business. Since opening the private jet branch in 1997, Airbus has sold over 170 aircraft. Boeing got started in 1996, and has delivered on 195 of 217 total orders received.

The main reason to go with an Airbus A380 or a Boeing 747 over a puny Gulfstream or Bombardier? According a “Billionaires Study” commissioned by Airbus, the wealthiest among us like to travel with family members and business associates. (This, apparently, is particularly true for Middle Eastern oil magnates.)

That’s not to say outfitting a jumbo jet for personal use is always a rational economic decision. For some, the bigger and more luxurious the plane, the better. That’s why Airbus and Boeing don’t just sell their planes, they offer a wide variety of customization options to give customers exactly what they want.

So how much does a personalized widebody plane cost? The manufacturers don’t exactly publish price lists, but we’ve seen figures between $80 million for a Boeing 737, $280 million for a Boeing 747-8, and up to $300 million for an A380.

Here’s a look at what’s available for billionaires ready to spend that big a pile of dough.

Hack ‘N’ Slash is the Double Fine adventure that deconstructs and rewires the genre

The title may be Hack ’N’ Slash, but it’s clear from the opening moments of Double Fine’s inventive action-adventure that you won’t be doing much of the latter. Alice, a young elf, immediately breaks her sword on the bars of her cell, revealing a USB connector beneath the blade. Plug it into the door’s slot and you can access its code. Luckily, there’s just one command, ‘Open: false’. Change the answer to ‘true’, and it swings ajar so her quest can begin in earnest.

Hack ’N’ Slash was officially conceived during Double Fine’s Amnesia Fortnight, an annual event where employees form small groups to create game prototypes. Yet for Brandon Dillon, the game’s project lead, the idea had been brewing for much longer. Dillon played games on an emulator when he was young, and was struck by the discovery of the reverse-engineering tools built into the software. “It felt really empowering to open up the hex menu to figure out how to use those tools, find whichever value I wanted to tweak within the game, and do whatever I wanted to with it,” he tells us. “I didn’t really have the emotional maturity to deal with games that were as difficult as NES games were. With something like Contra, I couldn’t appreciate the game they were trying to present to me. But I could bring it into an emulator, tweak values and make it a little bit more humane. It felt like I had made the game my own, and that way I got to really enjoy it.”

Hack ’N’ Slash is about cheating, then, but crucially it’s creative cheating. Take one of the first enemies you’ll encounter: a spiked turtle affected by the corruption blighting this fantasy world. It will charge at you, but flips onto its shell when dodged, exposing its USB port. Plug in and you can set its health to zero, slow its movement speed, turn it into an ally, or even get it to explode after charging. You can have it spit out dozens of health-restoring hearts upon death, adjust its perception sensors so it can’t see you, or even get a little more adventurous and play around with its AI routines, getting it to walk around in circles. Soon after, you’re asked to tackle a boss. Dillon says that some players create chaos by spawning dozens of turtles from a nearby nest in the hope that the crowd will hurt it. We opt instead to play matador: we vastly increase a single turtle’s damage output, invite it to charge us (at a reduced speed, of course) and then dodge at the last moment, finishing the job in a single strike.

As Alice collects more items, she’s able to see the inner workings of her world, revealing hidden symbols, invisible platforms and the vision cones of armed guards. The puzzles steadily increase in complexity until, by Act 4, you’re looking at the game’s code in order to reverse-engineer solutions. “I always thought it would be cool to make a game that would allow people to have those really insightful and empowering moments that I had throughout my history of learning to become a better programmer,” Dillon says.

As a result, the game’s progression feels strangely educational, although that’s a happy accident, as Dillon freely admits. “It does have a kind of curriculum,” he says. “The way I designed the game is [to give you] all the cool hacking tools and principles, and order them based on complexity. So it accidentally wound up [being] educational, because that was the way to work out the puzzle progression.” That unintentional progression curve has already had unforeseen benefits: since the game launched on Steam Early Access, Double Fine has had requests for educational licences, to allow the game’s mechanics to be used as a learning tool.

A full release is not too far off, but already  Hack ’N’ Slash shows great promise. It’s rare to find an adventure game that’s prepared to let its players get stuck, but Hack ’N’ Slash is all the more rewarding as a result. “It needs to feel a little bit mysterious and weird and difficult to grapple with,” Dillon explains. “Actually, this is something Tim [Schafer, Double Fine’s founder] has talked about within the context of the adventure game. Being stuck is part of it, because getting unstuck is what makes you feel smart.”

During playtesting, Dillon and the rest of the development team would watch players struggle and wonder if they should make the game easier. The answer was almost always no, however. “You have to [retreat] from those modern game design instincts, hang back and let it simmer for a little bit, and let the player have the insight for themselves,” he says. “Don’t take that away from them.”

The Strange Link Between Your Digital Music and Napoleon’s Invasion of Egypt

In 1798 Joseph Fourier, a 30-year-old professor at the École Polytechnique in Paris, received an urgent message from the minister of the interior informing him that his country required his services, and that he should “be ready to depart at the first order.” Two months later, Fourier set sail from Toulon as part of a 25,000-strong military fleet under the command of General Napoleon Bonaparte, whose unannounced objective was the invasion of Egypt.

Fourier was one of 167 eminent scholars, the savants, assembled for the Egyptian expedition. Their presence reflected the French Revolution’s ideology of scientific progress, and Napoleon, a keen amateur mathematician, liked to surround himself with colleagues who shared his interests.

It is said that when the French troops reached the Great Pyramid at Giza, Napoleon sat in the shade underneath, scribbled a few notes in his jotter and announced that there was enough stone in the pyramid to build a wall 3 meters high and a third of a meter thick that would almost perfectly encircle France.

Gaspard Monge, his chief mathematician, confirmed that the General’s estimate was indeed correct. The Great Pyramid has sides of length 751 feet and a height of 479 feet. France is roughly a rectangle 480 miles north to south by 435 miles east to west. With these figures, Napoleon’s estimate is only 3 percent off.

On Fourier’s return from Egypt, Napoleon appointed him prefect of the Alpine department of Isère, based in Grenoble. Always a man of fragile health, with extreme sensitivity to cold, Fourier never left home

On Fourier’s return from Egypt, Napoleon appointed him prefect of the Alpine department of Isère, based in Grenoble. Always a man of fragile health, with extreme sensitivity to cold, Fourier never left home without an overcoat, even in the summer, often making sure a servant carried a second coat for him in reserve. He kept his rooms baking hot at all times.

In Grenoble, his academic research was also preoccupied with heat. In 1807 he published a groundbreaking paper, On the Propagation of Heat in Solid Bodies. In it he revealed a remarkable finding about sinusoids.

What’s So Special About Sinusoids?

The sinusoid is what’s called a “periodic wave,” an entity in which a curve repeats itself again and again along the horizontal axis. The sinusoid is the simplest type of periodic wave because the circle, which generates it, is the simplest geometrical shape. Yet even though it is such a basic concept, the wave models many physical phenomena. The world is a carnival of sinusoids.

Fourier’s famous theorem states that every periodic wave can be built up by adding sinusoids together. The result is surprising. Fourier’s contemporaries met it with disbelief. Many waves look nothing at all like sinusoids, such as the square wave, illustrated below. The square wave is made up of straight lines, whereas the sinusoid is continuously curved. Yet Fourier was right: We can build a square wave with only sinusoids.

Here’s how. In the illustration below there are three sine waves: the basic wave, a smaller sine wave with three times the frequency and a third of the amplitude, and an even smaller sine wave with five times the frequency and a fifth of the amplitude. We can write these three waves as sin x, sin 3x/3, and sin 5x/5.

In the illustration below, I have started to add these waves together. We see the basic wave, sin x. The sum sin x + sin 3x/3 is a wave that looks like a row of molar teeth. The sum sin x + sin 3x/3 + sin 5x/5 is a wave that looks like the filaments of a light bulb. If we carry on adding terms of the series: sin x + sin 3x/3 + sin 5x/5 + sin 7x/7 + … we will get closer and closer to the square wave. At the limit, adding an infinity of terms, we will have the square wave.

It is stunning that such a rigid shape can be constructed using only undulating wiggles. Any periodic wave consisting of jagged lines, smooth curves, or even a combination, can be built up with sinusoids.

The horizontal axis represents the frequencies of the constituent sinusoids, and the vertical axis their amplitudes. Each bar stands for a sinusoid, and the leftmost bar is the sinusoid that has the “fundamental” frequency. This type of graph is known as the “frequency spectrum,” or “Fourier transform,” of the wave.

Fourier’s theorem was one of the most significant mathematical results of the 19th century because phenomena in many fields—from optics to quantum mechanics, and from seismology to electrical engineering—can be modeled by periodic waves. Often, the best way to investigate these waves is to break them down into simple sinusoids.

How You Could Play a Symphony Using Only Tuning Forks

The science of acoustics, for example, is essentially an application of Fourier’s discoveries. Sound is the vibration of air molecules. The molecules oscillate in the direction of travel of the sound, forming alternate areas of compression and rarefaction. The variation in air pressure at any point over time is a periodic wave.

As you can see in the illustration to the right, the clarinet wave is jagged and complicated. Fourier’s theorem tells us, however, that we can break it down into a sum of sinusoids, whose frequencies are all multiples of the “fundamental” frequency of the first term. In other words, the wave can be represented as a spectrum of frequencies with different amplitudes.

Remember, the jagged wave and the bar chart in the illustration represent exactly the same sound, but in each image the information is encoded differently. For the wave, the horizontal axis is time, whereas on the bar chart the horizontal axis is frequency. Sound engineers say that the wave is in the “time domain,” and the transform is in the “frequency domain.”

The frequency domain also provides us with all the information we need to re-create the sound of a clarinet using only tuning forks. Each bar in the bar chart represents a sinusoid oscillating at a fixed frequency. The sound wave made by a tuning fork is a sinusoid. So, in order to re-create the sound of a clarinet, all that is required is to play a selection of tuning forks at the correct frequencies and amplitudes described by the bar chart.

Likewise, the frequency spectrum of a violin would provide us with instructions on how to use tuning forks to produce the sound of a violin. The difference in timbre between middle C played on the clarinet and the same pitch played on the violin is the result of the same set of tuning forks oscillating with different relative amplitudes.

A consequence of Fourier’s theorem is that it is theoretically possible to play the symphonies of Beethoven with tuning forks, in a way that is audibly indistinguishable from an orchestra.

Why a Harmonica Is Like a Picket Fence

When a fire engine passes Dolby Laboratories in San Francisco, employees clasp their ears—especially the “golden ears,” those members of the staff with exceptional hearing—hoping to protect their auditory faculties. Dolby built its reputation on noise reduction systems for the music and film industries, and it now creates sound quality software for consumer electronic devices, using technology based entirely on sinusoids.

The benefit of being able to switch a sound wave from the time domain to the frequency domain is that some jobs that are really difficult in one domain become much simpler in the other. All sound played out of digital devices—such as your TV, phone and computer—is stored as data in the frequency domain, rather than the time domain.

“The wave form is like a noodle,” Brett Crockett, senior director of research sound technology, told me. “You can’t grab it.” Frequencies are much easier to store because they are a set of discrete values. It also helps that our ears cannot hear all frequencies. “[Ears] don’t need the whole picture,” Crockett added.

Dolby’s software turns sound waves into sinusoids, and then strips out nonessential sinusoids so that the best possible sound can be recorded and stored with the least possible information. When the information is played back as sound, the spectrum of remaining frequencies is reconverted into a wave in the time domain.

It sounds easy, but in practice the task of filleting sinusoids from the frequency spectrum is exceedingly complex. One of the hardest sounds to get right is the harmonica, because its frequency spectrum looks like a picket fence—the amplitudes of the different frequencies are at the same height, forcing you to delete frequencies you can hear.

For all Dolby’s state-of-the-art know-how, the piece of music its software struggles most to re-create faithfully is “Moon River,” Henry Mancini’s hauntingly beautiful 1961 song. Brett Crockett’s golden ears judge new Dolby technology based on how faithfully it plays a harmonica riff recorded more than half a century ago.

We’re losing all our Strong Female Characters to Trinity Syndrome

DreamWorks’ How To Train Your Dragon 2 considerably expands the world introduced in the first film, and that expansion includes a significant new presence: Valka, the long-lost mother of dragon-riding protagonist Hiccup, voiced by Cate Blanchett. The film devotes much of its sweet, sensitive middle act to introducing her, and building her up into a complicated, nuanced character. She’s mysterious and formidable, capable of taking Hiccup and his dragon partner Toothless out of the sky with casual ease. She’s knowledgable: Two decades of studying dragons means she knows Toothless’ anatomy better than he does. She’s wise. She’s principled. She’s joyous. She’s divided. She’s damaged. She’s vulnerable. She’s something female characters so often aren’t in action/adventure films with male protagonists: She’s interesting.

Too bad the story gives her absolutely nothing to do.

There’s been a cultural push going on for years now to get female characters in mainstream films some agency, self-respect, confidence, and capability, to make them more than the cringing victims and eventual trophies of 1980s action films, or the grunting, glowering, sexless-yet-sexualized types that followed, modeled on the groundbreaking badass Vasquez in Aliens. The idea of the Strong Female Character—someone with her own identity, agenda, and story purpose—has thoroughly pervaded the conversation about what’s wrong with the way women are often perceived and portrayed today, incomics, videogames, and film especially. Sophia McDougall hasintelligently dissected and dismissed the phrase, and artists Kate Beaton, Carly Monardo, Meredith Gran have hilariously lampoonedwhat it often becomes in comics. “Strong Female Character” is just as often used derisively as descriptively, because it’s such a simplistic, low bar to vault, and it’s more a marketing term than a meaningful goal. But just as it remains frustratingly uncommon for films to pass the simple, low-bar Bechdel Test, it’s still rare to see films in the mainstream action/horror/science-fiction/fantasy realm introduce women with any kind of meaningful strength, or women who go past a few simple stereotypes.

And even when they do, the writers often seem lost after that point. Bringing in a Strong Female Character™ isn’t actually a feminist statement, or an inclusionary statement, or even a basic equality statement, if the character doesn’t have any reason to be in the story except to let filmmakers point at her on the poster and say “See? This film totally respects strong women!”

Valka is just the latest example of the Superfluous, Flimsy Character disguised as a Strong Female Character. And possibly she’s the most depressing, considering Dragon 2’s other fine qualities, and considering how impressive she is in the abstract. The film spends so much time on making her first awe-inducing, then sympathetic, and just a little heartbreakingly pathetic in her isolation and awkwardness at meeting another human being. But once the introductions are finally done, and the battle starts, she immediately becomes useless, both to the rest of the cast and to the rapidly moving narrative. She faces the villain (the villain she’s apparently been successfully resisting alone for years!) and she’s instantly, summarily defeated. Her husband and son utterly overshadow her; they need to rescue her twice in maybe five minutes. Her biggest contribution to the narrative is in giving Hiccup a brief, rote “You are the Chosen One” pep talk. Then she all but disappears from the film, raising the question of why the story spent so much time on her in the first place. It may be because writer-director Dean DeBlois originally planned for her to be the film’s villain, then discarded that idea in later drafts. But those later drafts give her the setup of a complicated antagonist… and the resolution of no one at all. (Meanwhile, the actual villain gets virtually no backstory—which is fine, in a way—but it leaves the film unbalanced.)

And Valka’s type—the Strong Female Character With Nothing To Do—is becoming more and more common. The Lego Movie is the year’s other most egregious and frustrating example. It introduces its female lead, Elizabeth Banks’ Wyldstyle, as a beautiful, super-powered, super-smart, ultra-confident heroine who’s appalled by how dumb and hapless protagonist Emmet is. Then the rest of the movie laughs at her and marginalizes her as she turns into a sullen, disapproving nag and a wet blanket. One joke has Emmet tuning her out entirely when she tries to catch him up on her group’s fate-of-the-world struggle; he replaces her words with “Blah blah blah, I’m so pretty.” Her only post-introduction story purpose is to be rescued, repeatedly, and to eventually confer the cool-girl approval that seals Emmet’s transformation from loser to winner. After a terrific story and a powerful ending, the movie undermines its triumph with a tag where WyldStyle actually turns to her current boyfriend for permission to dump him so she can give herself to Emmet as a reward for his success. For the ordinary dude to be triumphant, the Strong Female Character has to entirely disappear into Subservient Trophy Character mode. This is Trinity Syndrome à la The Matrix: the hugely capable woman who never once becomes as independent, significant, and exciting as she is in her introductory scene. (Director Chris McKay sorta-acknowledged the problem in a DailyMail interview presented as “The Lego Movie filmmaker promises more ‘strong females’ in the sequel,” though his actual quotes do nothing of the sort.)

And even when strong, confident female characters do manage to contribute to a male-led action story, their contributions are still more likely to be marginal, or relegated entirely to nurturer roles, or victim roles, or romantic roles. Consider Tauriel in The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug, a wholly invented Strong Female Character ostensibly created to add a little gender balance to an all-male adventure. She’s capable of killing approximately a billion spiders and orcs with elven archery kung-fu, but she only shows any actual personality when she’s swooning over the dwarf Kili, and being swooned over in return by Legolas, in a wearyingly familiar Twilight-esque love triangle. Consider Katee Sackhoff’s Dahl in Riddick, introduced as a tough second-in-command who proclaims early on that she’s no man’s sexual object—unlike the movie’s only other woman, a brutalized, chained rape victim, casually killed to make a point—but given no particular plot relevance. Despite what Dahl says, she’s just sexual spice for the film: She strips for the camera, fights off a rape attempt, smirks through the antihero’s graphically crude come-ons, then decides at the end that she would like to be his sexual object. Consider Alice Eve’s Carol Marcus in Star Trek: Into Darkness, introduced as a defiant, iconoclastic rules-breaker exactly like James Kirk, but ultimately winding up in the story largely so she can strip onscreen and present herself as an embarrassingly ineffectual hostage. Rinko Kikuchi’s Mako Mori in Pacific Rim is weak next to Charlie Hunnam’s Raleigh—her past trauma blocks her from being effective in mecha combat, and endangers everyone around her—but even when she proves her strength, he still has to assert himself by knocking her out and dumping her limp body as he heads off to save the day at the end. Ditto with Tom Cruise’s Jack in Oblivion, who pulls the same move on Julia (Olga Kurylenko), his capable partner.

It’s hard for any action movie to have two or more equal heroes, and the ensemble approach doesn’t work for every story. It’s understandable that for a Hero’s Journey plot to entirely resolve, the hero sometimes has to take the last steps alone. For male heroes, that often means putting independence and self-sacrifice before any other consideration. But for decades, action movies have found ways to let male sidekicks drop back at the climax of a story without dying, disappearing, or waiting at home to offer themselves to the hero to celebrate his victory. Female characters don’t have to dominate the story to come across as self-reliant, but they do have to have some sense of purpose. Valka’s is, apparently, to deliver some heartening information and a little inspiration to Hiccup, and nothing else. It’s a bafflingly piddly role for someone whom the narrative seems to care about passionately… until it’s time for her to do something.

So here’s a quick questionnaire for filmmakers who’ve created a female character who isn’t a dishrag, a harpy, a McGuffin to be passed around, or a sex toy. Congratulations, you have a Strong Female Character. That’s a great start! But now what? Screenwriters, producers, directors, consider this:

1. After being introduced, does your Strong Female Character then fail to do anything fundamentally significant to the outcome of the plot? Anything at all?
2. If she does accomplish something plot-significant, is it primarily getting raped, beaten, or killed to motivate a male hero? Or deciding to have sex with/not have sex with/agreeing to date/deciding to break up with a male hero? Or nagging a male hero into growing up, or nagging him to stop being so heroic? Basically, does she only exist to service the male hero’s needs, development, or motivations?
3. Could your Strong Female Character be seamlessly replaced with a floor lamp with some useful information written on it to help a male hero?
4. Is a fundamental point of your plot that your Strong Female Character is the strongest, smartest, meanest, toughest, or most experienced character in the story—until the protagonist arrives?
5. …or worse, does he enter the story as a bumbling fuck-up, but spend the whole movie rapidly evolving past her, while she stays entirely static, and even cheers him on? Does your Strong Female Character exist primarily so the protagonist can impress her?
6. It’s nice if she’s hyper-cool, but does she only start off that way so a male hero will look even cooler by comparison when he rescues or surpasses her?
7. Is she so strong and capable that she’s never needed rescuing before now, but once the plot kicks into gear, she’s suddenly captured or threatened by the villain, and needs the hero’s intervention? Is breaking down her pride a fundamental part of the story?
8. Does she disappear entirely for the second half/third act of the film, for any reason other than because she’s doing something significant to the plot (besides being a hostage, or dying)?

If you can honestly answer “no” to every one of these questions, you might actually have a Strong Female Character worthy of the name. Congratulations!

But there are exceptions to every rule. Edge Of Tomorrow features Emily Blunt as Rita, an ultra-tough female character who dies to motivate the male protagonist.(Repeatedly!) She starts off as the biggest bad-ass in her world, but is eventually surpassed by hero William Cage (Tom Cruise), who starts off as a bumbling fuck-up. She mostly exists in the story to provide Cage with information and cheer him on, and eventually validates him with a brief romantic moment. And yet the story doesn’t degrade, devalue, weaken, or dismiss her. It sends the hero on without her at the end—but only at the very end, after she’s proved her worth again and again. She’s tough. She’s confident. She’s desperate. She’s funny. In short, she’s aspirational and inspirational, and just as exciting at the end of the movie as she is at the beginning.

So maybe all the questions can boil down to this: Looking at a so-called Strong Female Character, would you—the writer, the director, the actor, the viewer—want to be her? Not want to prove you’re better than her, or to have her praise you or acknowledge your superiority. Action movies are all about wish-fulfillment. Does she fulfill any wishes for herself, rather than for other characters? When female characters are routinely “strong” enough to manage that, maybe they’ll make the “Strong Female Characters” term meaningful enough that it isn’t so often said sarcastically.

Rejected Licences Plates

D3N1ED PL8S

In 2012 the website GovernmentAttic.org, citing open-records laws, requested that each U.S. state provide a list of the vanity license plates it has prohibited. Not all states were forthcoming. Wyoming sounded downright embarrassed. “I am not comfortable providing our list of prohibited personalized license plate combinations,” wrote a representative from the state’s department of transportation. “The list contains common 3 and 4 letter words or abbreviations that should not be spoken in mixed company.”

Utah, by contrast, complied with the request, sending along a list of nearly 1,000 plates that have been rejected over the years. Like many states, Utah reserves the right not to issue plates that its Division of Motor Vehicles deems inappropriate, either because the plate is obscene, offensive, or otherwise untoward.

Of course, obscenity is famously difficult to define, and some aspects of Utah’s personalized plate laws are easier to interpret than others. The state has issued a more-or-less blanket ban on the number 69, unless “used in a combination with the vehicle make, model, style.” This rule triggered the rejection of at least 39 license plate requests—including 69METS, a seemingly innocuous nod to the New York Mets’ first World Series championship in 1969. But most of the rules are a bit vaguer, leaving it to state officials to know an offensive plate when they see one. Often, the obscenity is plain as day, as in the cases of CARGASM, SKISLUT, and NAZI. Other applicants are cleverer, though not cleverer than the DMV’s watchdogs, who caught MLHICLB, FAHQUU and TIH2TA3 (read that last one backwards).

Most people whose risqué vanity plate applications are denied probably shrug and get on with their lives. But some drivers have fought back. In 2012 a citizen in North Dakota who had previously held the plate HONKY made an official appeal to the North Dakota Department of Transportation after being denied the plate when trying to reregister it. The appeal was successful on the grounds that it was in reference to honky-tonk music. A man in New Mexico argued, through his attorney, that his rejected plate IB6UB9 was not sexual innuendo but an inside joke, about gambling. “The phrase originated when Mr. Anaya was at a casino with an acquaintance playing roulette, and during the course of the roulette game the comment was made by Mr. Anaya to his acquaintance; ‘I be six, you be nine.’ ”

Like Utah, most states rely heavily on loose guidelines. Some, like Wisconsin, provide DMV employees a checklist of tricks to be on the lookout for (“1. Does the message contain FU?”; “7. Check for foreign words”). Michigan’s guidelines recommend that its guardians of public decency rely on a series of websites, includingUrbanDictionary.com, to help them find alternate, unsavory meanings. New Mexico even checks the binary translation of plates with several 0’s and 1’s.

The sample of 995 plates denied by Utah for nonadministrative reasons—that is, not because they were too long, or already taken—was released in 2012, and it has some unknown qualities to it. For instance, the document doesn’t specify how far back the list of banned plates goes. Citing a computer system upgrade since the list was generated, a representative from the state told me it was not possible to determine the dates the document covers.

Utah’s rejected plates are sorted into a handful of categories that are meant to convey why the plate was denied. But several of the categories would seem to overlap. The state does not specify the differences between the Vulgar, Profane, Obscene, and Sex Reference categories, for example, and plates seem to be sorted into them in arbitrary fashion: BEAVER was marked as a Sex Reference while BEAVERS was marked as Obscene; WOODY was labeled Obscene while WOODIE, WOODSY, WOODY56, and WOODY63 were all marked as Sex Reference.

Though not ideal for analysis, the categories do provide a general sense of the kinds of mischief Utah drivers have tried (and failed) to get into:

Of course, these statistics only tell us how many plates of each type were actuallycaught; there is no way of knowing how many uncouth plates in each category weresubmitted. Only with complete license plate records (which are not public information) could we know how many plates with drug references slipped by the workers in the Utah state government. All we know for sure is that every standard Utah license plate bears the state’s unambiguous tourism slogan: “Life Elevated.”

High-School Dropouts and College Grads Are Moving to Very Different Places

The ability to attract skilled workers is a key factor, if not the key factor, in the growth of cities and metro regions. Cities themselves are understandably keen to tout when their populations are growing, but just tracking overall population can mask the underlying trends that will truly shape the future of our metro areas.

A few weeks ago, I looked at the different places both recent immigrants and U.S.-born Americans are moving since the recession began. But, as I noted then, even these big-picture figures tell us little about the educational levels and skills of the people that are moving and staying.  Writing in The Atlantic several years ago, I pointed out that the “means migration”—the movement of highly educated and highly skilled people—is a key factor that shapes which cities will thrive and which will struggle.

What the United States has been seeing is, so to speak, a big talent sort. There have been very different patterns of migration by education and skill, with the highly educated and highly skilled going some places and the less educated and less skilled going to others.

With the help of my Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) research team, I’ve dug into the numbers on the net migration of Americans by education level, a set of data that tells us about where people of different skill levels have been moving and staying. Karen King, a demographer, broke down American Community Survey data, tracking “net domestic migration” from 2011 to 2012 for several key educational categories: adults that did not complete high school; those with a high school degree or equivalency; those with some college or an associate’s degree; adults who hold a bachelor’s degree; and those with a professional or graduate degree. These data show only one year, rather than longer-term trends, but they effectively track the current net flow of people—that is, the ability of metros to both attract and retain American workers. (Keep in mind that net domestic migration tells only part of the story of population change, as the influx of immigrants and natural growth through births and deaths also affect overall numbers.)

The interactive map below, which MPI’S Zara Matheson made with support from ESRI, lets you click through and explore migration by educational attainment for each metro. The size and color of the overall bubbles shows the magnitude of net domestic migration, and the breakdown by education level is available when you click.

 

 

The chart below breaks out the net migration patterns by education levels in the 20 largest U.S. metros.

Zara Matheson

The chart shows the very different patterns of migration occurring across America’s metros. Keep in mind that many of the country’s biggest metros are still gaining overall population, as immigrants continue to flow into places like New York and Los Angeles. But these places are seeing a net loss of Americans of all education levels.

The metros that are attracting educated workers include knowledge and tech hubs like San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, and Denver, and also Sunbelt metros like Phoenix, Charlotte, and Miami.

When we look at just those with professional and graduate degrees, the pattern comes into sharper focus. There have been significant net inflows of educated workers to the true meccas of knowledge work: Seattle, San Francisco, D.C., Denver, San Jose, Austin, and Portland, as well as the banking hub of Charlotte.

Larger metros have the edge in attracting and retaining college grads.

These metros, particularly ones with higher costs of living, have been able to attract and retain skilled workers, even while the less-skilled have departed. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Miami all saw their ranks of educated residents grow and less educated residents shrink. Lower-paid workers are being priced out, and the jobs that can attract new residents are reserved for the most educated. Boston is one of the few places attracting and retaining more unskilled workers than skilled ones, a perhaps unexpected trend, given its reputation as a center of education and knowledge work.

The pattern for the less educated looks substantially different. The top ten metros that saw the largest net gains among those with just a high school degree were all in the Sunbelt, including Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Florida’s Fort Myers, Tampa, and Sarasota. And when we consider those without a high school degree or equivalent, the places with the largest net gains were mainly Sunbelt tourist destinations with thriving service economies like Fort Myers and Daytona Beach, Florida, and Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

The chart below provides a summary of the five metros that saw the largest net growth in population by level of education.

To better understand which factors are associated with the migrations of highly versus less educated people, my MPI colleague Charlotta Mellander ran a correlation analysis on several key demographic characteristics. She excluded the greater New York metro from her analysis because its unique migration pattern is an extreme outlier. Here are some of the most interesting findings:

• Larger metros have the edge in attracting and retaining college grads. The size of the population was positively correlated to the net growth in the number of college grads (.30)
• College grads also tend to be drawn to wealthier metros. The net migration of college grads is positively associated with both per capita income (.28) and economic output per capita (.24).
• College grads are also moving to and staying in metros with larger concentrations of high-tech industry and venture capital, two key indicators of robust knowledge and tech hubs. The net migration of college grads was positively associated with high-tech industry concentration (.26) and even more so with venture capital investment (.31).  While much has been made of the economic advantages of meds and eds, the net growth in the number of college grads was negatively associated with the share of the economy made up of educational and medical institutions (-.25).
• While some economists argue that college grads are attracted to places with large concentrations of other college grads, we find this to be less the case. The net migration of those with at least a bachelor’s degree was only modestly positively associated with the percentage of the population made up of their educated peers (.15) and the proportion of the metro’s workers who are members of the creative class (.12).
• And while economists have also pointed to warmer, sunnier climates as a driving factor in where Americans are heading, we find only a modest correlation between mean January temperature and the net migration of college grads (.20).
• College grads are moving to and staying in places with larger concentrations of artists and cultural creatives and higher levels of diversity and tolerance. The net migration of college grads was positively associated with the share of artists, designers and cultural creative (.24). This was the strongest association of any high-skill occupation group, including science and tech workers and professional and management positions, and thus suggests that college-educated workers are drawn to metros with abundant cultural offerings as well as job opportunities. The net migration of college grads was even more closely associated with the concentration of gay and lesbian people (.38). In fact, this correlation was the strongest of any in our analysis. This suggests that open-mindedness, tolerance, and diversity continue to play a substantial role in the migration of highly educated people.

In contrast, our analysis finds that the places where the number of workers without a high school degree is growing are at the opposite end of the economic spectrum: smaller places with lower wages, less robust economies, fewer cultural amenities, less high tech industry, and less tolerance. The net migration of those without a high school degree is negatively correlated to population size (-.24), economic output per capita (-.22), high tech concentration (-.24), artists and cultural creatives (-.32) and tolerance toward gays and lesbians (-.12). And we find no correlation between the net migration of the less educated and climate, measured as mean January temperature.

This analysis points to an ongoing and very real sorting process. Overall, larger and more vibrant metros with strong knowledge economies, abundant artistic and cultural amenities, and open-minded attitudes are the ones that are attracting and retaining the most college graduates. On the flip side, these metros are losing less-educated residents who are increasingly unable to make ends meet. They are instead moving to smaller, less affluent, lower-cost places. In fact, we found no statistical association whatsoever between the movement of college grads and the net movement of those who did not finish high school. These very different migration patterns reinforce the ongoing economic and social bifurcation of the United States.

The Secret to Getting Top-Secret Secrets

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Jason Leopold tells me to pull up a chair in his home office. It’s a weekday morning in March, and he’s working out of his clean, quiet two-bedroom house in Beverly Hills. The office, next to the kitchen, feels like some kind of resonating chamber for his mania, a tiny room with a window that looks out onto a twisty canyon road. A poster of I.F. Stone, the independent journalist and muckraker, hangs on the wall, along with a small, framed piece of paper that Leopold recently found sitting on a table at the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay. It’s one of his favorite document scores ever: a “Public Affairs Smart Card” created for the military’s PR folks, telling them to “Own the Interview” and “Stay in your Lane” and listing the many topics they’re not allowed to discuss, including “Investigations or their Results,” “Suicide,” “Construction,” “Presidential Remarks,” and “Attorney Allegations.” (To Leopold, this one scrap of paper made the whole trip worthwhile because it revealed how the government tries to control information. “I’m like, you idiots, why did you leave that lying around?”) And everywhere, stacked on bookshelves and on his desk, are piles of paper from every imaginable government agency, state and federal, topped by response letters: Dear Mr. Leopold… Dear Mr. Leopold…

I first learned about Leopold’s work from Twitter. His profile picture showed him standing in front of the entrance to Guantánamo wearing a T-shirt from the punk band Black Flag. He called himself a “FOIA terrorist”—FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act. I started following him. The range of stuff that zips by on his feed is staggering and kind of thrilling: 140-character dispatches about guards and prisoners, spies and secrets, corporate intrigue, torture and war. Many of his tweets link to government documents he’s dug up. The documents regularly supply ammo to left and libertarian causes (curtailing NSA surveillance, closing Guantánamo), but Leopold doesn’t present as an activist. He comes off more like a stonecutter chipping away at the base of a mountain, sometimes getting pebbles, sometimes boulders.

A single day of FOIA mail for Jason Leopold; like acceptance letters from colleges, the bigger the envelope, the better the news. (Courtesy Jason Leopold)

Today there’s a small stack of recent FOIA responses next to his iMac. When I ask about them, Leopold starts flipping through the pile, page by page, with a mixture of irritation and amusement. He says he asked for all documents from the Department of Homeland Security about how it monitors the Tea Party movement. “This is really frankly fucking annoying as hell,” he says, looking at the letter from the government. The agency took a year to respond to his request, and now it has given him exactly three pages of documents, “redacted to the point where I don’t really know what it’s about,” he says. So he appealed the decision. (He appeals every response as a matter of principle: “I don’t care if they’re like, ‘Here’s a bunch of documents.’ Still appeal. There may be something left. Have them perform another search. Because they’re just terrible at it.”) He asked for all white papers, PowerPoints, and policy summaries on the use of drones in U.S. airspace and internationally for the purposes of engaging in lethal force against terrorist targets. He asked for “all draft talking points prepared by the NSA following the leaks of classified material about NSA surveillance programs”; he already got the final versions of the talking points, but he wants the drafts, too, for insight into the government’s thought process. “This is great,” he says, grinning at the NSA letter. “They identified 156 pages of draft talking points but they classified every single page as top secret.” Leopold shoots me a deadpan look: “The draft talking points.” He asked for all CIA files on the folk singer and activist Pete Seeger. The agency sent him a “Glomar response,” a kind of evasive maneuver in which an agency neither confirms nor denies that the information exists, and says that if it does exist, it’s classified. “Everyone wants to get a Glomar every now and then,” Leopold tells me. “It’s just kind of like: You hit something. You achieved a Glomar: one point!” (Though his request was rejected by the CIA, Leopold obtained Seeger documents from the FBI that show one agent investigating a complaint from a government employee about his “feelings of revulsion” after listening to a “highly inflammatory” Seeger tape.)

Leopold picks up a piece of paper, squints, frowns. It’s a letter from the Postal Inspection Service. He asked them for… something. “To be honest with you, I don’t remember,” he says. “This was not even that long ago. Um.”

We’re not even through half the pile.

The Freedom of Information Act, passed in 1966 to increase trust in government by encouraging transparency, has always been a pain in the ass. You write to an uncaring bureaucracy, you wait for months or years only to be denied or redacted into oblivion, and even if you do get lucky and extract some useful information, the world has already moved on to other topics. But for more and more people in the past few years, FOIA is becoming worth the trouble. There’s a whole segment of the tech community, for example, that wants to improve how cities and governments function by sharing data openly, and sometimes FOIA is the only way to get the right data. Activists are using it to investigate the views and ties of university professors. And journalists are turning to FOIA as the profession changes in ways that make the law more necessary.

For one thing, it’s getting harder for national security reporters to obtain government secrets the old-fashioned way, by coaxing them from sources. Even before Edward Snowden, the Obama administration was pursuing leakers of classified information with unprecedented aggression, going so far as to seize journalists’ phone records. Now, fearing another Snowden, the government has intensified its crackdown. “People are just not willing to give shit up,” Leopold says. “It’s like, ‘I’ll go to jail.’” With FOIA, though, you don’t have to imperil a source: Instead of asking a vulnerable human to spill government secrets, you ask the government for those secrets directly.

There’s also simple opportunism behind the FOIA boomlet in journalism: Primary source documents play well on the Web. They add heft to posts, building trust in young sites. The data work of Nate Silver, the Snowden-sped muckraking of Glenn Greenwald and colleagues, the exposés of Gawker and even TMZ—all of this ravenous digital journalism is trying to trap some external source of truth, to develop some pipeline of facts that can better withstand reader skepticism, and FOIA happens to be a set of pipes that’s already there.

Leopold has shown that it’s possible to build an entire working method around FOIA. Over and over, by demanding information more creatively and more persistently than anyone else, he gets documents no one else gets, like the military’s horrifyingly clinical description of how guards at Guantánamo are force-feeding prisoners on hunger strikes, and manuals describing how the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring Twitter for terrorist threats, and FBI records about the late investigative journalist Michael Hastings. (Leopold got the Hastings records by suing the bureau along withRyan Shapiro, a friend and fellow FOIA obsessive; the documents showed that the bureau opened a file on Hastings to “memorialize controversial reporting” by him, including a story in Rolling Stone about the American prisoner of war Bowe Bergdahl, captured in 2009 by the Taliban and released in May.)

Leopold’s FOIA requests also play a role in larger battles for some of the most highly contested documents in the land. In late May, the government decided to release a legal memo about the 2011 “targeted killing” of the U.S. citizen and jihadist cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki, who was killed by a drone in Yemen. A lot of people have demanded to see this memo; the ACLU and The New York Times sued to force its release. The government argued that releasing it would harm national security. But a panel of appeals-court judge ruled that this argument didn’t make sense. Why? One big reason: Leopoldalready had the memo, in essence. He’d put in a FOIA request for a sixteen-page white paper that contained a lot of the same legal reasoning. It argued that the U.S. could kill a “senior operational leader” or “an associated force” of Al Qaeda without the need for “clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”

Leopold’s FOIA successes have allowed him to make a living as a freelancer, writing news stories for Al-Jazeera America, Vice News, and other publications. He also publishes stories at Beacon Reader, a crowdfunding website that lets freelancers sell subscriptions to their work; there he offers “Lessons in FOIA Terrorism,” plus a “FOIA Terrorist” T-shirt, for ninety dollars a year. One reason Leopold has been able to build a following is that he’s a master of the law at a time when a lot of people want to learn it. Unlike many of his disciples, though, he has embraced FOIA for deeply idiosyncratic reasons. He isn’t just using it to dig up documents. He’s using it, in part, to atone for past sins. He’s using it to transform himself.

He’s pretty open about what happened. Writing about Leopold means reckoning with a uniquely full-disclosure human. Early in our conversations, I asked him what a national security reporter was doing in Beverly Hills. Most of those writers live on the East Coast, to be close to government sources. He said he used to live in New York, but he had to get out. Then he told me the story in what seemed like one unbroken breath.

It started with cocaine, which he discovered as a twenty-year-old, working in the music business. As he fell into addiction, a number of bad things happened in quick succession. He failed out of New York University. He tried to kill himself. He spent a month in a mental hospital. He started stealing promotional CDs at the music label he worked for and sold them at record stores to buy coke. He got caught and arrested, and eventually had to plead guilty to a felony theft charge to avoid jail time.

Leopold, at left, and friends gather around the axeman for the metal band Overkill at the old Ritz in New York City. (Courtesy Jason Leopold)

He thought maybe he could get off drugs by moving to a new city, so he left New York for Los Angeles, where he’d met someone on a previous trip—Lisa Brown, a calm, steady woman who worked as a music executive at a children’s TV network. He wanted to marry her. But he didn’t know how he’d make a living. He took stock of his skills. In New York, for a brief time, he’d written obituaries for a small newspaper. “The only thing I knew how to do was write,” he says. So in L.A., he joined the Whittier Daily News as a cops and courts reporter.

His plan to get sober in L.A. didn’t work. Within six months, he was using again. He moved from the paper to a small wire service, which fired him after an attorney threatened to sue for libel over a quote in one of his stories. The quote was legitimate, but the wire service couldn’t afford a lawsuit, and Leopold’s editor didn’t back him.

Not long afterward, in 1997, Lisa, now his wife, confronted Leopold about his drug use. He spent a month in rehab and began to attend 12-step meetings. But he wasn’t in therapy, wasn’t at peace. He spent the next several years chasing stories, winning scoops, and trailing debris through various California newsrooms, never telling anyone about his criminal past. Editors always loved Leopold at the start. He had real talent, an instinct for novelty coupled to an electric aggression, and his stories won lots of internal praise and even some awards. But he tended to bungle quotes and make spelling mistakes, and he was willing to bend or break ethical norms to get stories, sometimes lying to sources to get interviews and breaking agreements he made about what information should be on and off the record. “My whole thing was, I wanted to get at the truth by any means necessary,” he says.

He got fired from the Los Angeles Times after another reporter complained that he was playing music too loud and Leopold threatened to “rip your fucking head off your shoulders, you little prick.” Instead of stepping back, he pushed harder. In 2002, after reporting for a time at Dow Jones Newswires and covering the Enron beat, Leopold published a long investigative piece inSalon about the role of a key Enron figure named Thomas White. Leopold botched it. For one thing, he relied on a particularly damning email from White that he couldn’t prove was authentic. (He says he shared the email with his Salon editors, and they agreed he should use it.) Worse, he plagiarized seven paragraphs of the piece from an earlier Enron story in theFinancial Times. Leopold says the plagiarism was a mistake made in haste; he credited the FT in the story, though no amount of credit could have justified that much lifted material. “There’s nothing I can say that will explain it,” he says. “It was completely fucked up.” Salon apologized to its readers, and the media reporter David Carr pointed out Leopold’s mistakes in The New York Times: “Web Article Is Removed; Flaws Cited.”

Leopold revealed all of this in News Junkie, a memoir he published in 2006, with a cover featuring a keyboard, a coffee ring, and a line of coke. News Junkie is a dark book that rides on long passages of dialogue (Leopold says he kept journals) and potboiled prose. Typical sentence: “Hellbent on living the life of a rock star, I drank a half bottle of straight whiskey and snorted eightballs of cocaine nearly every day.” It feels like the outpouring of a guy who realizes he’s been destroyed by the secrets he’s kept and vows to never keep one again. Leopold failed to disclose, so here’s an orgy of disclosure to compensate. He writes that his father, a blue-collar New Yorker with a panther tattoo on his arm, used to beat him. He writes about wanting to smash a particular lawyer’s head with a baseball bat, and deciding to send David Carr a gift-wrapped box of elephant shit, “two big logs,” before losing his nerve. After Carr’s article, Leopold panicked that he would never be able to work in journalism again: “It felt like my arms had been amputated.”

Still, his wife stuck with him. “The thing that I was really drawn to was his honesty,” Lisa says, “which seems so ironic, but he was so real, and honest. He’s very honest with his emotions…. Through the drug-use phase, I still ultimately felt he was honest about how he felt about me. Like, that has never—I have never doubted that.” But if anyone else was going to see what Lisa saw in him, he needed to start over.

One afternoon in L.A., Leopold lets me tag along to a meeting with a source so I can see how he operates now. Leopold’s been talking to the guy for a year, but has never met him in person. The guy says he has some information about misconduct and incompetence in the part of the government that performs background checks on potential employees—the same part that failed to flag Edward Snowden as a security risk. Leopold says he’s asked the source if I can observe their meeting, and the source has agreed.

We walk out Leopold’s front door and hop into his black Mercedes C250. There’s a child seat in the back, and on top of the seat, a stack of rock and punk CDs. (Leopold owns a massive collection of rock-concert T-shirts that takes up almost three full closets in his bedroom and spills into the room proper. “I gave it all up—the drugs, the alcohol,” he says. “I gotta havesomething.”) I ask how he can afford a Benz. “It’s actually not that expensive,” he says. “Same price as a Prius. My wife drives a Prius.” He pauses. “I’m still fakin’ it, I guess.”

We drive toward Redondo Beach, listening to The Fall and talking about his fascination with Guantánamo Bay. It’s such a strange, dark world, he says, and there aren’t a lot of people reporting on it.

Maybe the biggest story of Leopold’s career came from Guantánamo. Last year, he received an encrypted email from a source. It contained the government’s translation of six handwritten notebooks belonging to a Saudi prisoner named Abu Zubaydah. George W. Bush called Zubaydah “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States,” and the CIA used him as a guinea pig for its torture program, flying him overseas and waterboarding him repeatedly. But in a four-part series for Al-Jazeera America, Leopold pointed out that while Zubaydah was clearly a man of “hard-core anti-Western sentiments and a willingness to embrace violence and death for the cause,” he wasn’t the high-level leader the U.S. government had said he was. A functionary, not a mastermind. Leopold used the diaries to humanize Zubaydah. He quoted the jihadist on his fondness for elements of Western culture: “The Lady in Red” songwriter Chris de Burgh;Rambo III (“I watched this movie and I laughed loudly… My eyes became teary because of the deep laugh”); Pepsi (“Five chilled bottles of Pepsi Cola… is a very amazing thing—especially when you drink the bottle as one shot”). “It almost makes me think about myself,” Leopold says. “What made me make the choices that I made in my own life? And is there such a thing as redemption?…. What does it mean, what does it look like?”

Leopold is a jittery driver, checking his phone at every light. He’s afraid he’ll miss something: an email from his lawyer about documents on the way, a note from an editor or a source, a tweet on a breaking story. We eventually come to a coffee shop in a strip mall and get a table outside. A few minutes later, the source shows up and shakes Leopold’s hand. He sees my tape recorder and asks if it’s on; I tell him no. On the other side of the coffee shop’s window, a guy in a Jimi Hendrix shirt is typing on a laptop. “Is he with you?” the source says.

He starts talking at high speed about the nuances of government procedures, jabbing his finger at Leopold’s reporter’s notebook, giving him names and dates but no quotes for the record. Leopold asks a series of simple, basic questions, trying to get the guy to slow down and walk him through the material; the guy asks in a worried tone if Leopold got the documents he sent, irritated that Leopold doesn’t seem to recall every detail. There’s a lot at stake here: If either guy misjudges the other, they could both end up screwed.

Leopold keeps telling the source that he’s okay, that no one is listening to their conversation, but when a random dude in an NPR T-shirt begins to loiter outside the coffee shop behind him, the source clams up until the dude walks away: “He’s wearing an NPR T-shirt.” Leopold is confused by this statement.

After an hour of tense back-and-forth, Leopold shakes the source’s hand and says goodbye, and we climb back into the Benz. Whistleblowers are “a very very unique breed,” he says. He understands and shares their passion for exposing injustice, but at the same time, you “have to really vet them.” The meeting has left Leopold a bit wary. The source’s paranoia, he says, may be a notch against his credibility. It’s hard to know what might be real and what might be generated by the guy’s own fear.

Leopold got burned by a source once. It happened in May 2006, just as News Junkie was rolling off the presses.

Here’s how he tells the story. His phone rang on a Saturday afternoon when he was in the car with Lisa. The call was from an FBI source he trusted implicitly, a guy who had come through for him on multiple stories. Now the source gave Leopold huge news: Karl Rove, the conservative political strategist and deputy White House chief of staff, had been indicted in the Valerie Plame leak investigation.

Plame, an undercover CIA agent, was married to a high-profile former ambassador who had written a New York Times op-ed that angered the Bush administration. Someone with knowledge of her secret identity had leaked it to journalists, apparently as retribution. Leopold felt like this was “the most unbelievable injustice,” and he had been pursuing the story for the liberal news site Truthout. If Rove had truly been indicted, it could reroute American politics. “I was like, ‘Holy fucking shit!’” Leopold recalls. “I pulled over. I was like, ‘Lisa, I gotta go, here, bye.’” Leopold called another source that he and the FBI guy both knew, and the second source confirmed that Rove had been indicted. Next, Leopold called the spokesman for special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and left a message. He didn’t immediately hear back. Then he called his editor, Marc Ash, who interviewed one of Leopold’s sources on the phone “at significant length,” Ash recalls. “I walked away with the impression that I was talking to someone who was in fact qualified, and was providing solid information.”

Leopold and Ash decided to publish the story without any caveats, without saying it was a rumor. Leopold wrote in Truthout that “Rove’s indictment was imminent.” He was trying to beat the Times and the Washington Post. He did beat them—with a false story. Rove hadn’t been indicted and never would be. In his 2010 memoir, Rove called Leopold “a nut with Internet access.”

The timing, for Leopold, couldn’t have been worse: He had just published a memoir portraying himself as addict, liar, and thief, and now he had blown one of the biggest stories in the country. Other journalists chewed over Leopold’s mistake on blogs, in newspaper columns, and on radio. TheColumbia Journalism Review, in an article that still comes up on the first page of Google results for “Jason Leopold,” called Leopold a “serial fabulist” and compared him to Stephen Glass, one of the most prolific liars in modern journalism history. Leopold’s attorney sent CJR a letter saying the statements were false and defamatory: There was a difference between getting a story wrong and making a story up. “I mean, I was a crazy guy,” he says, “but I’m not that crazy.”

Leopold is apologetic and horrified when he talks about the Rove story. “It’s like, what the fuck was I thinking?” he says. Were his sources lying to him? “I really just don’t know.” (Scooter Libby, a close advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, had discussed Plame with reporters, and was later convicted of four felony counts for lying about it. Rove’s attorney later admitted that Rove had disclosed Plame’s covert identity to a Time reporter but didn’t identify her by name.) The investigative reporter and blogger Marcy Wheeler, who covered the Plame leak and is now known for her work on civil liberties and national security, offers a plausible explanation: “I basically think Leopold got used by FBI sources. He published that Rove was being indicted as a means to pressure Fitzgerald into indicting him, and it didn’t happen, and he didn’t burn his sources, and as a result, he took egg in the face.” Leopold is still trying to figure out what went wrong; earlier this year, he filed FOIAs with the George W. Bush Presidential Library for records on Rove and Plame to see if he could find any clues.

What do you do as a journalist when you run short? The next couple of years were hard for Leopold, and they would have been harder if not for the birth of his son, Hill, in 2008. “I just didn’t care about anything else,” he says.

Despite the perception in some parts of the profession that he was done for, Leopold continued to report. He wanted to make up for the Rove story, and he couldn’t do that without producing new work. He remained on staff at Truthout. He interviewed Valerie Plame on video. (Plame has long supported Leopold; she recently messaged him and one of his Al-Jazeera Americacolleagues on Twitter and said she was “proud to know you both & call you friends.”) He wrote about veterans and post-traumatic stress disorder for an obscure site. He started his own site and posted the odd document there.

Eventually he caught a break. In 2010, a military source gave him a set of documents he’d obtained through FOIA showing how the Air Force trained young officers in the ethics of launching nuclear weapons. The jewel in the pile was a forty-three-slide PowerPoint presentation in which the Air Force quoted from the Bible (“Jesus Christ is the mighty warrior”), St. Augustine, and Wernher von Braun, the ex-Nazi who helped America launch its space program. (“We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through,” the von Braun quote read, “and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.”) Leopold wrote a story for Truthout—“Jesus Loves Nukes,” the headline began—and linked to the raw documents in the text. The story spread quickly, shared by readers and by other reporters, maybe because no one sharing it had to worry about whether they could trust the person who had unearthed the documents; they only had to trust the documents themselves.

For Leopold, it was a lightbulb moment; he wanted to do more work with that kind of impact and reach. He asked the military source to help him better understand FOIA, and the source obliged. He explained how to write an effective request. You had to send the request to exactly the right place, and you had to tell the FOIA analyst on the other end which keywords to use and even which databases to search. The trick was to let them know you knew as much about FOIA as they did, if not more.

The great thing about FOIA, for Leopold, was that it didn’t care about his past. It was just a law, an impersonal series of rules and procedures, inputs and outputs. Anyone could make a request: a good person, a bad person, a person who had done something bad and was trying to be good. There was hope in that.

Slowly, letter by letter, Leopold discovered the power of FOIA. The main thing was a simple mental shift, an epiphany that filled him with a glee that never really went away.

According to the law, Leopold could ask the U.S. government for anything, as long as it was an agency record. They didn’t have to give it to him, but he could ask: for emails and schedules and meeting minutes, for reports and standard operating procedures, for PowerPoints and white papers, even for lists of other people’s FOIAs—and not just for these things but also for the things that the government was saying to itself as it decided whether to give him these things. He could ask for the “processing notes” of his own FOIAs. (In one set of processing notes from the Department of Justice, an agency employee jokes that Leopold is part of a “FOIA posse”; a DOJ colleague shoots back that he should start a band.) He could ask for stuff so outlandishly secret and high-level that even he had a hard time believing the government would cough it up, stuff like the emails of Keith Alexander, former director of the NSA—but he got them. This dude who was reading all these other people’s emails? Leopold could get his emails. “Just give them to me! They’re government records, give them to me!” (Leopold recently published emails between Alexander and high-level executives at Google, and the NSA folks have told him that more emails from Alexander are on the way. “The intelligence folks are really nice,” Leopold says. “Even though they’re doing all these allegedly terrible things, they’re really nice.”)

As he investigated the machinery of FOIA, he found the hidden gears and tricks that made the machine work faster. Like expedited processing: If he could demonstrate a “compelling need” for information that must be released urgently, it could move his request to the top of the pile. And at every step, Leopold learned, if the answer was no, he could appeal. Appeal the denial of expedited processing. Appeal the integrity of the search. Appeal the redactions. Sue. Yes, he could sue the government to get the documents he wanted. “Going to court completely changes the process,” Leopold says. “It forces them into action.” With an activist attorney in D.C. named Jeffrey Light, who works pro bono, Leopold has sued the government eleven times in the past two years. For perspective, his ten open FOIA lawsuits is nine more than the entire staff of The Wall Street Journal has right now, and it’s more than The New York Times has opened or concluded in the past year.

“It becomes almost like an addiction, you know?” Leopold says. “It’s not a secret. I have a totally addictive personality. And I think it’s healthy, because I’m taking advantage of the democratic process…. I’m doing everything by the book.” He makes the process transparent, too. He shares not just the documents but the journey toward them. When the government denies him, or heavily redacts, he publishes the government’s explanation, which is often revealing in itself. There’s almost no way for him to lose. Within the FOIA world, anyway. The journalism world is another story.

Leopold is not forgiven. He is followed, he is read, he is respected, and he even has his fans: According to former L.A. Timesreporter Terry McDermott, who has written two books about 9/11 and its aftermath, “If [Leopold] were working for the New York Times, every journalist in the country would know who he was.” But because of Leopold’s mistakes on the Rove story, and maybe also the Enron story, he’s still a little bit toxic. I had a hard time getting prominent national security reporters to weigh in on Leopold, even ones who had written about his recent work in a positive light. They’re “sort of caught,” says Allen McDuffee, who covers national security for Wired and used to work with Leopold at Truthout. “They definitely have to recognize the work that he’s done, but they don’t want to give him credit as a journalist for doing it.”

Stories that praise Leopold’s FOIA scoops often refer to him not as a journalist but as an “activist.” Last month, he got into a Twitter exchange with Spencer Ackerman, the national security editor for the Guardian US and a widely respected reporter. Ackerman tweeted, “There is video evidence of Guantánamo Bay force-feedings…. So today, I filed a FOIA for it. We’ll see what they do.” Leopold replied, “Beat u to it. I filed FOIA for it last July & it’s now part of my wide-ranging Gitmo FOIA lawsuit.” Leopold linked to a PDF of his legal complaint. Ackerman tweeted back, “uh, good for you?” Leopold’s whole approach was right there in microcosm, and his problem, too: his pride in being first, his eager self-promotion, his ache for validation from his peers, his peers’ uncertainty about who the fuck this guy is. (In an email to me, Ackerman writes that he and Leopold have “never met, never had any sort of relationship, and so I found it an odd & random thing to tweet at me.”)

(Courtesy Jason Leopold)

Leopold’s crimes against journalism were serious. But it’s hard to think of any journalist who has worked harder to show that he’s changed. Some miscreants don’t visibly change at all and are forgiven anyway. Leopold is different. He’s been sober 17 years, he says. He has made his work part of his rehabilitation; he has slowly rebuilt journalistic trust by circumventing the usual idea of it. “He’s always trying to prove that what people have been saying about him is wrong,” Lisa Leopold says. How many years of good work does he have to produce before he will be forgiven? He already has eight years. So is it ten years? Twenty? Last month, he conducted the first interview in seven years with James Mitchell, the Florida psychologist who helped the CIA design its torture regime, and published it in the Guardian, his first byline there. He followed it up on May 22 with his second Guardian piece, based on a classified Pentagon report he won through a FOIA lawsuit; the report described “staggering” and “grave” damage to U.S. intelligence capabilities as a result of the Snowden disclosures, but provided no details of specific damage. Does the fact that he’s writing for the Guardian mean he’s back in the club? No one will tell him; forgiveness doesn’t work like that. Which is why he fantasizes sometimes about The Document.

One day at lunch—a Greek place in Beverly Hills—he tells me he dreams of discovering the ultimate document, some kind of tape or report “where I look at it and it’s like, ‘This is it. This is what I’m waiting for for ten years.” Maybe it’s a videotape of terror suspects being waterboarded by the CIA—a squirreled-away copy of one of the tapes they famously destroyed. Maybe it’s something else. The Document. A record of such clear and deep injustice that it will upend trust in the powerful at the same time it restores trust in him. A thing he can show not just to the public but to the journalism community, to his peers, and say, “Okay, are we good now?”

It’s out there. He may have a filed a request for it a month ago, or a year. And when it suddenly appears, in his mailbox or in his Dropbox, he will know he has to move quickly, carefully but quickly, to push the news into the world before he gets scooped.

4 Training Techniques For Building A Bigger Chest

Eccentric lifts

The only way your chest will become bigger is by becoming stronger.When you stretch the chest while lowering the weight, you create potential energy in the pecs.When you release the stretch as you begin to lift the weight, that energy is transferred to the contracting muscle fibers.
You can use a spotter that will push the bar as you lower it or you can use elastic bands for this technique.

Explosive lifts

When performed with light to moderate weight, explosive lifts will activate more fast twitch fibers in you chest.Explosive lifts will also build strength and power because you only push the weight and you don’t use your energy to slow down the bar on its way down.You can use ballistic bench press for explosive reps.Right after your regular bench press set, go to the smith machine and do 5-6 ballistic reps.You should use around 50-60% lighter weight for the explosive reps.

Push the bar off your chest as fast as possible, letting it go at the top.As you catch it on its descent, immediately move into the next rep by bringing the bar to your chest and exploding back up.

Max out reps

This is probably the best known technique for building power and a bigger chest.The idea is to choose a weight that you can only lift 3-4 times and do just one or two reps.This set is followed by another set, but this time the weight is lower and reps are higher (8-10 reps). Doing only 1-2 reps with an extremely heavy weight forces your nervous system to recruit the maximal amount of muscle fibers in your chest.When you do the set with lighter weight, the nervous system still recruits the same amount of muscle fibers as for the heavy weight.This will make the weight much easier so you can get several more reps.

Partial repetitions

Partial repetitions are repetitions that stop short of the full range of motion.When doing press exercises for chest it is very likely that your triceps and shoulders will fail first and your chest will not get the stimulation it needs for new growth.By doing reps in the lower half of your full bench range of motion, you minimize the role of the triceps and shoulders and give your pecs a taxing set.
When you can no longer complete full reps continue with partial reps until you reach a complete muscular failure.Use this technique on your last set only and use a spotter.

Scream Queens

Why censor a scream? In January 1932, a letter was dispatched from the office of Jason Joy, administrator of the then incipient, now infamous Hollywood Code. Joy was writing to Universal’s Carl Laemmle Jr. following a screening of the studio’s forthcoming Bela Lugosi picture Murders in the Rue Morgue. Early on in the film, we hear a woman’s scream: a helpless Parisian girl (Arlene Francis) is witnessing a knife fight between two men. In swoops Lugosi, offering the woman comfort in his carriage. With them we depart the foggy street and fade—not to silence but to a shadow and another scream: The girl in silhouette, her legs and hands bound to a cross, is writhing in agony. Lugosi is Dr. Mirakle, a mad scientist on the loose in the city, and the young girl is his latest experiment.

In his letter to Laemmle, Joy wrote, “Our feeling is that the screaming of the woman … is overstressed.” But it is not the woman’s first scream—emitted as a witness to ­violence—that disturbed Joy; what prompted the letter is her second scream—when she is a target of violence. “Because the victim is a woman in this instance, which has not heretofore been the case in other so-called ‘horror’ pictures recently produced.” Joy suggests “making a new soundtrack for this scene, reducing the constant loud shrieking to lower moans and an occasional modified shriek.” Laemmle complied, and the letter has since served as an illustration of censorship’s preoccupation with screen violence.

But is the scream violence? If the eye of horror prises open the human body, what interior worlds does the cinematic scream open up that need to be occluded from the range of hearing (and seeing)? In other words, what do we hear when a woman screams for the camera?

Stills from Psycho, 1960

Perhaps the single most famous scream in cinema is a man’s—the Wilhelm scream, first used in the 1950s and since then ripped off for high-profile franchises like Star Wars andIndiana Jones, it now circulates among gleeful sound-effects technicians and movie nerds. Instantly recognizable yet still unidentified (we don’t know, despite some efforts, who recorded the original), the Wilhelm scream is a great joke but a bad scream: brief, boring, and bodiless. By contrast, when a woman screams on screen, it tends to be sustained and staged, unabashedly addressed to the technological capture of cinema, a kind of fetishistic elaboration of the woman’s voicein extremis.

The scream is part of a larger range of bodily emissions through which sexual difference is literally enunciated in the cinema: women scream, men yawn and so forth. The image of the scream queen is very much like any other “image of exploited female labor” that Mal Ahern observes Hollywood continuously offering its audiences. Yet what the scream queen produces is both sound and image, or sound as image.

Stills from The Lost World, 1997

Women screamed in the silents too: Rhona Berenstein, looking at a sequence of Christine from the 1925 silent film version of Phantom of the Opera, notes that the sight of a woman screaming—usually a close-cropped image of her face—indulges and shapes a cultural fascination, the ability to extract from women’s bodies a visible testament of their subjection to the awesome powers of men, whether as filmmakers or film monsters.

Stills from The Phantom of the Opera, 1925

But Christine’s scream is visible, not audible—the silent film scream has no grain, to use Roland Barthes’s term for “the body in the voice as it sings.” I am interested in the body in the voice as it screams. The cinematic scream is a particularly grainy catchment area of onscreen and off-screen affects.

For inspiration therefore I use not the silent version ofPhantom of the Opera but a moment in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s 1980s shlocky stage-musical version. I’m talking about that moment in the musical’s famous title song, in which the phantom menacingly implores Christine to “Sing! Sing For Me!” For sopranos who have played the part (including superstars like Sarah Brightman), this has meant venturing higher and higher in live performance, forcing the soprano to scale a series of notes that begin at the top of her range and climax with an E6, the first note in the highest register of the human voice. Entering this so-called whistle register, the female voice appears to be vaporizing under pressure, a kind of sublimation of the woman’s body under the sadistic tutelage of her master.

In his book Nuns Behaving Badly, about subcultures in Italian convents in the 17th century, Craig Monson uncovered evidence of all-female choirs that sang bass just as well as they did the part of soprano. The work of producing the high female voice is thus as much physiognomic and muscular as it is historical and cultural: what you hear is the sound of air passing through a matrix of sexual and social prescriptions. Like the singing soprano, the screaming actress joins a transmedia, centuries-long public archive of women’s voices trained to surge, to skirt the edges of the audible and the acceptable, pitched to explode into the air and leave the body behind.

But even as a mechanical recording subject to technological control, the cinematic scream bears the traces of something involuntary, unplanned, excessive—something alive. The scream perversely indexes the minutest secrets of the body from which it departs. The onscreen scream not only serves as an index of visual terror—that is, as an accompanying expression of a woman’s suffering—it is also violence itself, a very idiosyncratic irruption from her insides. In the same way that one can’t predict the exact splatter from a bursting blood squib when producing action cinema, the scream in the horror film, even when scripted and storyboarded and filmed in take after take, is an unseemly profusion of tone, timber, vibration. It is gestural, guttural, grainy affect that cannot be controlled for. Cutting off the scream—censoring it—is a way to render inaudible that which threatens to become audible on the soundtrack: the inside of the woman’s body—her vocal cords, larynx, and lungs at full power, a pornography of pure voice.

Like pornography, horror is what Linda Williams so usefully terms a “body genre,” a cinematic configuration that operates by visceral mimesis, shuttling bodily pleasure and performance between screen and spectator. Insofar as the filmed scream in Murders in the Rue Morgue cues audiences to scream, the request to censor it is a response to that response. Jason Joy is effectively troubled by a scream that alighted not from the screen but from his own body in the screening room: an unexpected echo, an uncanny reverberation of the death rattle. The censor’s is the first in a series of screams that every horror film elicits: Everywhere it goes after it demands and draws more, its screams are often doubled and sometimes, quite strangely, dubbed.

 

II.

Why dub a scream? Take, for example, the case of I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). The prolix and much parodied title of the slasher film refers to a note received by four teenagers in a small fishing town informing them that someone knows what they did, well, last summer. Soon, this surprise witness has begun picking them off one by one. But who could possibly know? Whose breath do we hear on the soundtrack and whose silhouette do we see in a hooded slicker? He can hear their conversations and watch their movements, but they cannot see or hear him. At one point in the film, one of the exasperated teenagers (Jennifer Love Hewitt) looks heavenward and screams: “What do you want from us, what do you want?” All-seeing, all-­hearing, the killer is a slight incarnation of the omniscient acousmêtre that Michael Chion speaks of in the opening pages of his bookVoice in Cinema: a figure whose presence pulsates in off-screen space and ranges over the screen, a godlike eye and ear, himself unseen but able to emerge and extract life—and screams—at will.

Chion develops the idea of the acousmêtre first in relation to the plot of Murnau’s early sound film Testament of Mabuse, in which a booming and disembodied voice speaks to other characters from behind a curtain. When the film’s protagonists finally make it past the curtain, they discover not the person of Mabuse but only a loudspeaker from which his voice issues. For Chion, this revelation of the loudspeaker instructively suggests the ways in which the coming of sound effectively originated off-screen space in cinema by exploiting that which is heard but not seen. I want to make a metaphor of the hidden loudspeaker as ­incarnating a different kind ofacousmêtre—the dubbing artist in the recording studio, whose voice we hear but whose body we never see.

In 1998, Columbia Pictures brought I Know What You Did Last Summer to India, and it was released in both English and a Hindi-language “dub.” Historically, notes Nitin Govil, the dubbing of Hollywood pictures into Indian languages has faced heavy resistance from the country’s domestic film industries, and film producers in Bombay and elsewhere have spent much of the last century informally lobbying for quotas, stringent censorship, and other curbs on the circulation of international film product in India. Thus it is that the dubbing of Steven Speilberg’s Jurassic Park into Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu in the early 1990s serves as an emblem of a significant moment in the history of media globalization. “The sight of dinosaurs running amok and their victims screeching in a local language,” observes Nandini Ramnath, broke new ground and box-office records, sparking a concerted effort to “open up” the world’s most impenetrable film market.

Around the same time that I Know What You Did Last Summer was being dubbed in Hindi, the first convention was held for Bombay’s voice artistes. The Voice Artistes Association was formed in the late 1990s with the aims of enforcing payment of dues by film producers, overseeing contracts, and regulating working conditions and remuneration. For the first time, a wage list was made available in print, which standardized the cost of hiring a voice artist to dub a film by language, budget, and character type (hero, heroine, parallel hero, villain, supporting character, and so on). For dubbing an actress’s part in I Know What You Did Last Summer, a voice artist could expect to be paid approximately 5,000 rupees (about $85). In the dub, these artists can today be heard screaming for their lives (and livelihoods), their voices interlaced with the film’s original score and soundtrack.

Temporally and spatially removed from the throats of the film’s “scream queens” (actresses Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar), such out-of-sync, out-of-body voices generate a grain that interlaces the sexual division of labor with its global division. When Elsa (Michelle Gellar), on the run from the film’s slasher-killer in the aisles of a department store, chances upon the body of her sister, her throat slit, she lets out a full- bodied scream.

Stills from I Know What You Did Last Summer, 1997

But whose voice do we hear? The wage forms printed in Bombay required that “Names of all the Voice Artistes should feature in the End Credits of Feature Films,” but I couldn’t find them anywhere. I cannot put a name, face, or body to that screaming voice: What remains of the dubbing artist is thus a corporeal trace of her craft. She is, one might argue, the ultimate acousmêtre (or mêtress): heard but not seen, her voice produced onscreen only in its ­technological mediation, a kind of bodiless presence ranging across the surface of the screen, emerging not from its on-screen diegetic fiction but from its off-screen distributive circuits.

In his work on film sound, Rick Altman has compared sound cinema to ventriloquism, glossing its origins in the Greekventri, for the belly, the body voice. Just as the ventriloquist asks you to believe that sounds are coming from where your visual attention is focused rather than elsewhere, so “pointing the camera at the speaker disguises the source of the words, dissembling the work of production and technology.” But in the case of the dubbed scream, it is precisely the fact of having the camera pointed at the onscreen screaming subject that disaggregates cinema, bringing into view the unlikely agents of film work. And in I Know What You Did Last Summer this disaggregation is immediate and obvious, in that the “Hindi” scream is tinny, metallic and perhaps too shrill, full of reverb and overlaid echoes, a body obviously screaming inside a Bombay recording booth nested inside a body ­being hunted down the aisles of a department store in Nowhere, America.

These wordless translations of terror raise further questions: As she watches the film in playback and records for it, is our nameless dubbing artist a spectator or film worker? Does she scream at the screen or for it? To watch her alter ego onscreen is to see a woman fall, rise, run, crouch, cower—a full-blown somatic performance of a scream that now must be intimated by a body and voice proximate only to a recording mike. To watch the scream onscreen is also to see something else: one woman screaming at the sight of another’s slit throat, blood oozing from where her voice should. The slasher film is traditionally preoccupied with serializing women’s bodies as dead waste, creating a deadly sisterhood of scream queens. But as she produces new cinematic materialities and outlives everyone onscreen, the dubbing artist is also the final final girl, perched beyond the frame of the film, her throat, voice, and body intact.

Poachers kill one of the world’s largest elephants in Kenya

One of Africa’s last ‘great tuskers’, elephants with ivory weighing over 100lbs, has been poisoned to death by poachers in Kenya after years of adapting his behaviour to hide himself from humans.

The bull, named Satao and likely born in the late 1960s, succumbed to wounds from poison darts in a remote corner of Tsavo National Park where he had migrated to find fresh water after recent storms.

His carcass yesterday lay with its face and great tusks hacked off, four legs splayed where he fell with his last breath, left only for the vultures and the scavengers.

Conservationists told how he moved from bush to bush always keeping his ivory hidden amongst the foliage.

“I’m convinced he did that to hide his tusks from humans, he had an awareness that they were a danger to him,” said Mark Deeble, a British documentary filmmaker who has spent long periods of time filming Satao.

The elephant’s killing is the latest in a massive surge of poaching of the mammals for their ivory across Africa.

Richard Moller, of The Tsavo Trust, who had been monitoring Satao for several months confirmed that the elephant found dead on May 30 was indeed Satao, whom he called “an icon”.

“There is no doubt that Satao is dead, killed by an ivory poacher’s poisoned arrow to feed the seemingly insatiable demand for ivory in far off countries,” Mr Moller said.

“A great life lost so that someone far away can have a trinket on their mantelpiece.”

A soaring demand for ivory in a number of Asian nations has seen poaching reach levels that were last seen in the 1980s before the ivory trade was banned.

“The loss of such an iconic elephant is the most visible and heart-rending tip of this iceberg, this tragedy that is unfolding across the continent,” added Frank Pope of Save The Elephants in Nairobi.

The street value of elephant ivory is now greater than gold, running to tens of thousands of pounds per tusk. Organised criminals are increasingly running poaching gangs and networks, officials have said.

More than 20,000 African elephants were slaughtered in 2013, according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) has documented the killing of 97 elephants so far this year, but experts dispute the official figures.

Dr Paula Kahumbu, who leads the Hands Off Our Elephants campaign, wrote that – based on the reports she has seen – “elephant poaching in Kenya is at least 10 times the official figures”.

In March this year, renowned conservationist Richard Leakey described poaching in Kenya as a “national disaster” and that poachers were operating with “outrageous impunity”.

“They could not operate with the impunity we are seeing if you did not have some form of protection from law enforcement agencies,” he said, likening the crisis to the mass poaching of the late 1980s.

Mr Leakey disputes official statistics that claim that the number of elephants that have been killed has declined. KWS recorded that 302 elephants were poached in 2013 down from 384 the previous year, of a total estimated population of 38,000 in Kenya.

Earlier this month, police seized more than 200 elephant tusks in a warehouse in the port city of Mombasa, weighing over 4,400lb.

Two men have been charged in connection with the haul.

Nelson Marwa, Mombasa county commissioner, said that the ivory find was linked to terrorism and drug barons in the city.

Mr Leakey cited the Indian Ocean port as a “staging post” for ivory smuggled from countries across the region.

Until recently, poachers in Kenya faced lenient sentences and few were successfully prosecuted.

A study by WildlifeDirect, a Nairobi-based charity that Dr Kahumbu heads, found that over the past five years just four per cent of those convicted of wildlife crimes in 18 of the country’s courts were sent to jail.

There is hope that tough new legislation passed earlier this year will lead to higher conviction rates and tougher sentences.

“Satao was probably one of half a dozen of Kenya’s great tuskers, possibly the largest,” said Mr Deeble, who flew over the elephant’s carcass on Friday.

“It’s a devastating situation. Kenya’s last great tuskers need presidential protection. If Satao’s death can galvanise the focus on what’s actually happening here in terms of poaching, then he won’t have died in vain.”

Why America Doesn’t Love Soccer (Yet): A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast

With the 2014 World Cup getting underway in Brazil, we’ve just released an episode called “Why America Doesn’t Love Soccer (Yet).” (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript, which includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.) The episode tries to answer a few questions:

1. Why doesn’t America love soccer the way the rest of the world does? 2. Would that change if the U.S. ever managed to win a World Cup? 3. Is No. 2 possible without No. 1?

It’s no secret that soccer continues to lag behind other U.S. sports in viewership and enthusiasm. For instance, 111.5 million Americans sat down to watch Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014. Meanwhile, only 24.3 million watched the 2010 World Cup Final, which was actually a record.

To put this in global perspective, total Super Bowl viewership is roughly 90 percent American while viewership of the biggest soccer event is roughly 3 percent American. And relatively few people in the States rank soccer as their favorite sport.

To address these disparities, Stephen Dubner turns to a real-life football superstar of the American variety: Indianapolis Colts Quarterback Andrew Luck. Luck was selected first in the 2012 NFL Draft and has become one of the best quarterbacks in America’s favorite sport. He also happens to be a huge soccer fan. What does Luck think it would take for U.S. soccer to take off in popularity?

LUCK: I think…a Pied Piper would be a U.S. national team, you know, winning the World Cup. As we know, we love winners in this country. … It’s sort of ingrained in our society. So I don’t know if there’s one player that would be a Pied Piper that would bring everything with him, be a Tiger Woods. I do think our national team winning the World Cup would be unbelievable.

Dubner also interviews Sunil Gulati, an economist at Columbia who also is the president of the U.S. Soccer Federation and on the FIFA Executive Committee:

GULATI: [T]here aren’t many countries that have qualified for the last seven World Cups like we’ve just done. There are some. But unlike some of the other sports in which the U.S. is dominant in, this sport is played in every country in the world, and it’s the number one sport in probably 95 percent of those countries….. So this is a real world champion…In this case there are 208 countries that play. We’re not a newcomer, we’ve been doing this a long time, but other countries have taken it far more seriously at a much earlier stage. And it’s not just down to the fact that we’ve got 320 million people and are a relatively affluent country because then China would be good in some of those areas and some of the European countries which haven’t done as well would also be at the top. So we’ve made a lot of improvements, and if we could replicate the progress that we’ve made both on and off the field over the last quarter century then I think we will be where we want to be in the next quarter century, which is one of the elite powers in the world.

The U.S., of course, is an elite power when it comes women’s soccer. Our national team has won the World Cup twice and is currently ranked No. 1 in the world. In the podcast, Gulati explains why the U.S. women have performed so much better than the U.S. men.

Jonathan Wilson, a Tufts professor who is the author of Kick and Run: Memoir with Soccer Ball (Bloomsbury Reader), explains why culture around soccer is so different in the U.S. But he, like Luck and Gulati, believes that immigration and other factors are already changing this.

You’ll also hear from Solomon Dubner, a 13-year-old aspiring soccer journalist who has written for World Soccer Talk and maintains a blog called  Solomon on Footy. Coincidentally, he is also the son of Stephen Dubner, and his papa is proud.

The Ugly Past of Comic Book Sidekicks

In the 1940s, comic books experienced a golden age. The archetype for the superhero — a big, muscular, white do-gooder — was set in place by Superman (1938), and followed by a lineage of similar characters like Batman, Captain America, and Captain Marvel. Fueled by wartime patriotism, these superheroes were tropes for Western benevolence; they battled the Nazis and the Japanese, and fought to preserve America’s dominance on an international level.

Comic books emerged as a legitimate mainstream art form and the industry exploded; millions of copies were sold per issue, and they not only became a rhetoric for the World Ward II landscape, but a guiding voice for America’s youth. But early comics, touted for telling tales of “good triumphing over evil,” were also riddled with racial stereotypes, insensitive dialogues, and portrayals of Eurocentric ideals — typically through the role of the sidekick.

Sidekicks as Subordinates

Wherever there is a hero, there is a sidekick; for thousands of years, these subordinates have graced the pages of literature. Biblically, for instance, Moses’ brother Aaron serves as a sidekick: while he accomplishes several amazing feats and is beloved, he’s also a bumbling bonehead who makes grave mistakes and is a martyr for moral lessons. This is typical: often, a sidekick acts as a subdued, under-spoken counterpoint to the story’s hero.

In comic book form, the sidekick dates back to the inception of the genre, where the role was often used as a basis for comic relief. While several respectable sidekicks did exist in the 1940s (ie. Batman’s Robin), they were largely lovable fools who sought nothing more than to please their masters — the superheroes they served.

As such, sidekicks during the era were sometimes written as minorities — largely Asians and African-Americans — who were generally treated as inferiors in society. Late 19th century Jim Crow ideals still pervaded America: blacks were segregated, and seen as sub-equals. At the same time, the onset of World War II rejuvenated racist ideologies toward Asians; after the attack of Pearl Harbor in 1941, all Asians became targets for humiliation and comedic relief in the media.

While minorities were excluded as superheroes, they did play a role in comic books as subordinated sidekicks — often as the worst stereotypes.

Wing (The Crimson Avenger)

In an October 1938 issue of Detective Comics (later DC Comics), the Crimson Avenger was debuted. A masked crime fighter, the pre-Batman character fit the superhero trope: dominant chin, angular jaw, and a subservient sidekick who did his dirty work. In this case, the sidekick was a racialized Chinese chauffeur named Wing.

At first, Wing’s appearances in Detective Comics were limited — he was hardly ever seen — and the writers were somewhat graceful in his portrayal. He was usually in the heat of battle with an enemy, and carried with him the contrived ideals of a “model minority:” loyalty, unquestioning faith, and an impermeable work ethic. Then, just before 1940, Wing was re-branded.

Suddenly, he appeared in a garish yellow onesie, equipped with a “shark fin,” and ill-fitting red shorts. Consistent with racist Asian-American media representations at the time, his features were highly characterized: his teeth — in need of serious dental manicuring — were splayed out like a deck of cards; his body was small and thin, juxtaposed beside the avenger’s bulky frame. Though he perennially wore an open face-mask, his eyes were so slanted they were not even visible (the Avenger, who wears the same mask, has clear, round eyes).

Whereas he was once a distinguished grown man, he was now infantilized and dumbed down. His dialogue was “ching-chonged:” he lost his ability to pronounce certain syllables, and spoke in a highly stereotypical, oft-uneducated manner. Before, he’d referred to his boss as “Crimson Avenger;” this morphed into “Mist’ Climson.” Often, Wing’s dialogues degenerated into an incomprehensible mess — “Lemembel, gills! No folget buy US Wal Bonds! And when get plegnant, thlow the gill ones away!” — and the reader (in the 1940s, presumably a teen boy) would have to work hard just to discern what the character was saying.

Wing’s roots stemmed from a lineage of racialized Asian characters in comics — most notablyKato, sidekick of public radio’s The Green Hornet series. Kato, represented as a Japanese-American, premiered in 1936, and enjoyed a few years as an “honorable sidekick.” Then, following the invasion of China by the Empire of Japan in 1939, the character’s name was rescinded; he was henceforth known solely as “faithful valet,” and felled his enemies with a swift karate chop.

In The New 52, a 2011 revamp of old DC Comics, Wing is reborn as a young Asian-American cameraman. Respectable, well-spoken, and attractive, he is a far cry from 1940s Wing. To ice their political correctness cake, DC also racebends The Crimson Avenger into an African-American woman.

Chop-Chop (Blackhawk)

Will Eisner was one of the early pioneers of the comic book genre; in 1941, with Quality Comics, he penned Blackhawk, which went on outsell every comic but Superman. Billed as “stories of the Army and Navy” and “a modern version of the Robin Hood story,” the comic followed the exploits of World War II pilot Blackhawk and his troupe of seven fighters.

Several years into the comic’s run, Chop-Chop made his debut as Blackhawk’s incapable, comic sidekick. Obese, yellow-skinned, buck-toothed, and short, Chop-Chop’s depiction, like Wing’s, bore semblance to most Asian representations in American media during the period. To cap off his unflattering aesthetics, he was drawn with a bald head (save for a small, red-bowed ponytail), spoke in severely broken English, and was dressed in colorful “traditional” garb.

Though he possessed ingenuity and resourcefulness (he even built his own plane in one strip), he never ascended his subordinate role, and was relegated to Blackhawk’s co-pilot in every mission. Instead of a gun, grenade, or more modern weapon, he was depicted waving around a cleaver, and appeared more prepared to butcher a pig than go into battle.

It took Blackhawk ten years to finally acknowledge Chop-Chop as a full member of the team, and by the mid-50s, the artists finally began drawing him in the same style as the other characters (he’d previously been far more “cartoonish”); his traditional garb is exchanged for the blue-and-black uniform worn by his partners. By the 1980s, opinions towards Asian-Americans had shifted, and Chop-Chop was storyboarded as an entirely different man. He is no longer complacent, and now seeks recognition for his feats, and equal treatment. In return, his friends (read: the comic book authors) bestow him with a “grand ceremony” to make up for his past maltreatment.

Ebony White (The Spirit)

The Spirit, also penned by Will Eisner, was known for its groundbreaking content and form. The strip’s title character, Denny Colt, is a masked vigilante who fights crime in gritty New York City — much of which is based on 1940s noir movies and fiction. The comic is also remembered for its racist portrayal of the protagonist’s sidekick, Ebony White.

First appearing in print on June 2, 1940, Ebony White was a black taxi driver, and Colt’s accomplice; frequently, he maneuvered the superhero through dangerous situations at his own expense.

With large white eyes and thick, rotund lips, Ebony White resembles the stereotypicalpickaninny: though he’s a grown man, he’s diminutive in stature and lacks intellectual development. His devout loyalty to The Spirit, in conjunction with his pun of a name, pins him as an excessively subservient “Uncle Tom” character. Despite White’s obviously exaggerated features and apish demeanor, Eisner didn’t receive much pushback against his character, as such representations were already so ingrained as a norm in society. His former manager, Marilyn Mercer elaborated on this in a 1966 New York Herald Tribune feature:

“Ebony never drew criticism from Negro groups (in fact, Eisner was commended by some for using him), perhaps because, although his speech pattern was early Minstrel Show, he himself derived from another literary tradition: he was a combination of Tom Sawyer and Penrod, with a touch of Horatio Alger hero, and color didn’t really come into it.”

Eisner himself later expressed nonchalance over the creation of Ebony White, admitting that while he was knowledgeable of his employment of racial stereotypes, that was just a product of the era, and was thus justified. “At the time, humor consisted of bad English and physical difference in identity,” he told the Time in 2003. “I attempted to depart from it by having a black character…who spoke proper English.”

Indeed, years later, when DC Comics rebooted The Spirit, Ebony White was resurrected as “a much more intelligent and streetwise character:” he’s well-read, well-spoken, and often carefully analyzes the minutia of details overlooked by the protagonist. At the same time, it is highly implied that he stole the taxi he drives, has no home, and is essentially a ne’er-do-well street thug.

Whitewash Jones (The Young Allies)

In December 1940 — a full year into World War II, and a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor — two young artists at Timely Comics (later Atlas Comics) created Captain America.

A “consciously political creation,” Captain America was intended to serve as an anti-axis power hero: the comic’s first cover pictured the protagonist punching Hitler in the face, and subsequent story lines pitted him up against Nazis, Japanese soldiers, and other perceived threats to the United States. The comic became so immensely popular, that the artists capitalized on it by producing a swing-off — “The Young Allies” — branded as a “multiracial group of patriotic kids” fighting the axis evil.

“Multiracial” was used quite generously: The Young Allies were composed of four friends — three of them white, and one black — but the dynamics of this team were highly problematic. While the three white friends were generally useful and pragmatic, the black character, “Whitewash Jones,” was portrayed as a bumbling, watermelon-loving dimwit.

As the three white characters were are sidekicks to other superheroes, Whitewash served as the “sidekick to a team of sidekicks” — the ultimate junior role. Each character was written with a special skill — one was an expert puncher, another a master inventor, and the third an intimidating presence — and then there was Whitewash, devoid of any redeeming qualities.

Drawn in a completely different style than his compatriots, Whitewash Jones, like Wing, was presented as a highly stylized, inhumane characterization of an African American male. Whitewash had massive protruding lips, prominent ears, and tiny eyes, and was often depicted wearing a straw hat (reminiscent of slave depictions in the 19th century). As comic book historian Darren R. Reid puts it, Whitewash was a “perfect celebration of racist iconography.”

The character’s dialogue only further enforced this. Since he lacked any clear directive, Whitewash took on the mantle of comic relief; his traits — inept, blundering, awkward, and cowardly — painted an image eerily similar to that of a pre-Civil War era depictions of African Americans. In Young Allies #1 (the series’ debut), Whitewash is seen bragging about his watermelon playing abilities:

Another clip features the gang in a graveyard, where Whitewash is spooked by the tombstones around him. “I ain’t goin’ in der,” he says, cowering with fear. “Ah just ‘membered — ah got run an er’rand for muh mommy!” A few frames later, he proclaims his undying love for America:

“I sho am glad ah lives in America — where dey ain’t no headhutin’! Yassuh! Ah sho glad dey ain’t no headless bodies around ol’ whitewash!”

Rife with deliberate misspellings and grammatical anomalies, Whitewash’s dialogue is a far cry from the pure, polite narratives of his blonde, blue eyed friend (above): “I am honored to make your acquaintance!”

And who were the creators of this unapologetically racist character? None other than Jack Kirby (co-creator of the Hulk, and X-Men), and Joe Simon (who’d go on to enjoy an illustrious career and be inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame). But they received some help along the way: Stan Lee, who’d later create spiderman, wrote much of Whitewash’s dialogue. All three men are legends today.

However egregious Whitewash’s representation was, it should be contextualized that the U.S. Military was segregated at the time; his mere presence in a troupe of white crime fighters could be viewed as progressive. But others claim that any attempt at equality is negated by the artists’ execution and approach.

In every modern history of Marvel Comics, Whitewash, along with any implication of racism, is completely overlooked. Jordan Raphael’s “Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book” barely mentions The Young Allies; Sean Howe’s “Marvel Comics: The Untold Story” entirely dismisses the topic. In 2009, Marvel re-wrote and revived the series in an attempt to “retroactively redeem” it, rather than acknowledging its hairy past. Whitewash was reborn as “Washington Carver Jones,” an “affluent, distinguished African-American”

Social Landscape

In the arena of 1940s comic books, no minority was the star. Instead, they filled a role they were more predisposed to in pre-Civil Rights America: that of the subordinate sidekick. In consciously writing in some of their characters this way, comic books — the literature of the “innocent” — propagated minorities as unequals. It wouldn’t be until the 1960s that the first African-American superhero emerged, but this came with its own set of issues: he was cast as the “Black Panther,” star of a series called Jungle Action. It was short-lived.

One could argue this was “just part of the times,” or that this type of imagery was pervasive in most American media at the time (wartime propaganda films, newspapers, magazines, Disney), but in a genre dominated by burly white men in tight-fitting costumes, the ostracization of minorities seems especially present.

Stan Lee, who helped create Whitewash’s character, later shared a different experience during the creation of his X-Men characters:

“It occurred to me that instead of them just being heroes that everybody admired, what if I made other people fear and suspect and actually hate them because they were different? I loved that idea; it not only made them different, but it was a good metaphor for what was happening with the civil rights movement in the country at that time.”

But the characters we see here are not made differently with the intention of scoring the admiration of Americans. Rather, the creation of the comic book sidekick — a weak jester foil with limited redeeming qualities — left an opening for racial minorities to be included, but in a way that indulged the worst racial stereotypes of the time.

Earth may have underground ‘ocean’ three times that on surface

After decades of searching scientists have discovered that a vast reservoir of water, enough to fill the Earth’s oceans three times over, may be trapped hundreds of miles beneath the surface, potentially transforming our understanding of how the planet was formed.

The water is locked up in a mineral called ringwoodite about 660km (400 miles) beneath the crust of the Earth, researchers say. Geophysicist Steve Jacobsen from Northwestern University in the US co-authored the studypublished in the journal Science and said the discovery suggested Earth’s water may have come from within, driven to the surface by geological activity, rather than being deposited by icy comets hitting the forming planet as held by the prevailing theories.

“Geological processes on the Earth’s surface, such as earthquakes or erupting volcanoes, are an expression of what is going on inside the Earth, out of our sight,” Jacobsen said.

“I think we are finally seeing evidence for a whole-Earth water cycle, which may help explain the vast amount of liquid water on the surface of our habitable planet. Scientists have been looking for this missing deep water for decades.”

Jacobsen and his colleagues are the first to provide direct evidence that there may be water in an area of the Earth’s mantle known as the transition zone. They based their findings on a study of a vast underground region extending across most of the interior of the US.

Ringwoodite acts like a sponge due to a crystal structure that makes it attract hydrogen and trap water.

If just 1% of the weight of mantle rock located in the transition zone was water it would be equivalent to nearly three times the amount of water in our oceans, Jacobsen said.

The study used data from the USArray, a network of seismometers across the US that measure the vibrations of earthquakes, combined with Jacobsen’s lab experiments on rocks simulating the high pressures found more than 600km underground.

It produced evidence that melting and movement of rock in the transition zone – hundreds of kilometres down, between the upper and lower mantles – led to a process where water could become fused and trapped in the rock.

The discovery is remarkable because most melting in the mantle was previously thought to occur at a much shallower distance, about 80km below the Earth’s surface.

Jacobsen told the New Scientist that the hidden water might also act as a buffer for the oceans on the surface, explaining why they have stayed the same size for millions of years. “If [the stored water] wasn’t there, it would be on the surface of the Earth, and mountaintops would be the only land poking out,” he said.

Earth may have underground ‘ocean’ three times that on surface

After decades of searching scientists have discovered that a vast reservoir of water, enough to fill the Earth’s oceans three times over, may be trapped hundreds of miles beneath the surface, potentially transforming our understanding of how the planet was formed.

The water is locked up in a mineral called ringwoodite about 660km (400 miles) beneath the crust of the Earth, researchers say. Geophysicist Steve Jacobsen from Northwestern University in the US co-authored the studypublished in the journal Science and said the discovery suggested Earth’s water may have come from within, driven to the surface by geological activity, rather than being deposited by icy comets hitting the forming planet as held by the prevailing theories.

“Geological processes on the Earth’s surface, such as earthquakes or erupting volcanoes, are an expression of what is going on inside the Earth, out of our sight,” Jacobsen said.

“I think we are finally seeing evidence for a whole-Earth water cycle, which may help explain the vast amount of liquid water on the surface of our habitable planet. Scientists have been looking for this missing deep water for decades.”

Jacobsen and his colleagues are the first to provide direct evidence that there may be water in an area of the Earth’s mantle known as the transition zone. They based their findings on a study of a vast underground region extending across most of the interior of the US.

Ringwoodite acts like a sponge due to a crystal structure that makes it attract hydrogen and trap water.

If just 1% of the weight of mantle rock located in the transition zone was water it would be equivalent to nearly three times the amount of water in our oceans, Jacobsen said.

The study used data from the USArray, a network of seismometers across the US that measure the vibrations of earthquakes, combined with Jacobsen’s lab experiments on rocks simulating the high pressures found more than 600km underground.

It produced evidence that melting and movement of rock in the transition zone – hundreds of kilometres down, between the upper and lower mantles – led to a process where water could become fused and trapped in the rock.

The discovery is remarkable because most melting in the mantle was previously thought to occur at a much shallower distance, about 80km below the Earth’s surface.

Jacobsen told the New Scientist that the hidden water might also act as a buffer for the oceans on the surface, explaining why they have stayed the same size for millions of years. “If [the stored water] wasn’t there, it would be on the surface of the Earth, and mountaintops would be the only land poking out,” he said.

How Much Physical Activity Do You Really Need?

Physical activity has recently come to be seen as one of the best forms of medicine available. Studies have shown that simply getting on your feet can ward off all manner of ill health, from cancers to cardiovascular diseases. But how much do you need to do to reap the benefits?

For a start, there’s no need to be doing vigorous exercise if you don’t want to. Exercise is just one form of physical activity, says I-Min Lee, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. “We used to think you used to have to go out for a run, or swim for an hour without stopping – but we’ve realised now from the body of research that we have that any movement is good.”

Instead, a brisk walk is enough, says Lee – the kind of pace you might achieve if you were late to meet a friend for lunch.

Government recommendations tend to be for people to do 150 minutes of this level of moderate physical activity per week. Those who prefer vigorous workouts need only do half that amount to get the same health effects. Many governments are now also beginning to recognise that there are huge benefits to doing resistance training – lifting moderate amounts of weight (like the sand in a bottle used in Brazil’s academias) – particularly for older people.

The idea of a brisk half-hour walk five times a week might not sound too much of a challenge, but even that seems to be a struggle for many of the world’s population – a third of adults and 80 per cent of teens fail to reach these recommendations. And in light of some recent findings, even those recommendations are being called into question.

Chi Pang Wen at Taiwan’s National Health Research Institutes and colleagues wanted to find out the minimum amount of activity you could do to get these health benefits. They conducted astudy looking at the physical activity levels of more than 400,000 Taiwanese people over eight years.

The researchers found that those who exercised for a total of just 15 minutes per day were 14 per cent less likely to die in the follow-up period than those who were inactive, and had a life expectancy on average three years longer. There was good news on cancer, too – the statistics imply that one in every nine cancer deaths in the inactive group could have been avoided, leading the authors to concluded that those 15 minutes of moderate exercise a day were enough to reap significant health benefits. “It first looked to me that it was too good to be true,” says Wen. Moreover, each additional 15 minutes a day brought added benefits, though Wen says it was the first 15 minutes that seemed to make the biggest difference.

Perhaps those more active people just generally had a healthier lifestyle? Not so. Wen’s team has analysed the data, independently taking into account different lifestyle factors such as smoking and drinking, and diabetes and hypertension. The health benefits were still there.

In light of this, he thinks that changes to government recommendations are “urgently needed” – reducing them to a more manageable-sounding 15 minutes a day would encourage those who are already put off by the current advice of 150 minutes a week, he says.

And of course, there are other benefits to being active – it’s better for the environment, one’s mental health, and social connectedness. The key is to find something you enjoy doing. “A little bit is good, more is better,” says Lee, “If you like ballroom dancing, do it. If you like playing with your grandchildren do it. If you like walking the dog, do it. It isn’t that you have to go out for a run.”

In The Future, Everything Is a Game

“The future is now,” video games companies want us to believe. But if “now” is just the present, shouldnt the real future be more impressive than Xboxes and PlayStations and Wiis? During Los Angeles’s annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, Echo Park gallery iam8bit launched an exhibition exploring “The Future of Gaming,” as illuminated by some of the medium’s brightest thinkers and creators. The gallery’s owners, Jon Gibson and Amanda White, solicited theories from the likes of The Secret of Monkey Island designer Tim Schafer and Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune, among many others. Then they had artists bring those theories to life.

Schafer’s is a highlight: “In the future, we will play games while floating naked in a tank of warm, sensory-depriving gelatin. Games will be distributed chemically, into the gelatin, and absorbed into the player’s skin. The gelatin will be Lingonberry-flavored, and the games will encourage good citizenship.” He’s probably at least half kidding, but who can say for sure?

“Getting so many luminaries from the gaming industry involved was really humbling and special for us,” White told ANIMAL after the exhibition’s opening. “We were lucky enough to get pretty quick and enthusiastic responses from the people we approached with the idea.”

“The Future of Gaming” was born when LA’s Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences challenged iam8bit last fall to spice up the D.I.C.E. 2014 summit’s attendee lounge. The event’s theme was “The New Golden Age of Gaming,” but White and Gibson decided to look past the present into the “distant future,” White explained. “The reception for the show was positive, so we thought, why not make this into a bigger exhibition for public consumption?” she said.

The theories on display are as varied as their progenitors. Game designer, TED Talker and Carnegie Mellon Professor Jesse Schell predicted that “we will learn about our ancestors by talking to the avatars we inherited from them.”

Schell’s artist, Travis Chen, crafted a flowing, layered woodcut. Game Developer Conference General Manager Meggan Scavio wrote that “people will be ranked on public leaderboards by the types of games they play, how well that play them, and the frequency of play (the more the better), thus allowing for the proper vetting of job applicants, business partners, and even personal relationships.” Seattle-based Kelice Penney made a necktie sewn with real-life power-ups to go with.

Philadelphia artist and designer Jude Buffum relished the chance to use pixel art to visualize a quote from Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning about the blurring of the lines between games and real life.

“You are the game of the future, where every bit of energy exerted thru your digital daily life will be captured toward more real world incentives,” Lanning predicted. “Each beat of our heart, calorie we eat, footstep we make, and mile gained thru our day will be captured, converted, and gamified into cost saving incentives that just ‘can’t be beat.’ Our decreasing privacies increasingly offered as the willing sacrifices made at the altar of savings, incentives, and reward points. Three billion years of progress will have finally evolved us into the hairless walking coupon.”

Buffum’s imagery is bursting with timers, high scores, fuel gauges, and fast food logos. A figure—hairless, evidently said “walking coupon”—fights its way through the piece, shrieking at the center. “[Gaming] started out very innocent, which is where I go to with my art,” Buffum told ANIMAL at the show’s opening. “But I like sort of running that through a filter of more modern times.”

He believes the turmoil Lanning anticipates might really come to pass. “Everything is becoming gamified. It’s not just our games — it’s our lives, it’s our commerce, it’s corporations. Everything is being quantified, coded, scored, and people are just giving up,” Buffum said. “It’s powerful technology and it could take society to a very bad place.”

Particle physicist and game designer Seamus Blackley, who helped create Microsoft’s Xbox around the turn of the century, imagines games of the future being just as omnipresent, but somehow more benign.

“The future of games is ubiquity,” Blackley hypothesized for the exhibit. “Every device and interface will need to entertain or be ignored. From supermarket checkout to your tax filing, we are training people already to ignore the boring. So. Games on everything all the time. As tech pervades, games follow. Do we control everything with smartphones? Then the games go everywhere from the phones. Do we have network computers in every object in the home? Then the games will follow. Just as games flowed into televisions and then computers and then mobile, they will be central to it all.”

Illustrator Kevin Stanton drew flowers, bees and butterflies with Xbox and PlayStation symbols on them to accompany Blackley’s quote. “Old guys like me, who started out in games when it was seen as a negative career choice, and people thought that it was just some sort of fad, feel hugely vindicated by the fact that games are so mainstream now and everybody expects everything to be a game,” Blackley said. But will the gamified, dystopian future envisioned by Lanning and others in iam8bit’s exhibit come to pass? Blackley doesn’t think so, because life is a game, and there’s always someone watching to make sure you’re following the rules.

“At the end of the day, morality becomes crowdsourced because everybody knows what everybody else is doing,” Blackley said, and that applies to companies as much as individuals. “Good and evil have always been gamified,” he continued. “That’s what good and evil are: good and evil are rules in a game.”

White said “The Future of Gaming” is part of iam8bit’s “bigger, grander mission” of “making the world a better place by giving people experiences that expand and open their minds.” The exhibit runs through June 22nd. (Lead Image: Naomi White x Seth Killian)

How Ant Colonies Foreshadow the Future of Facebook

They call it “the anternet.”

In 2012, Stanford biologist Deborah Gordon, Ph.D., discovered that the behavior of harvester ant colonies mirrors the fundamental Internet technology known as Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP.

SEE ALSO: 10 Tips and Tricks for the Facebook iPhone App

TCP controls the flow of information online by preventing data transmission bottlenecks and the Internet from coming to a mighty, screeching halt. Basically, when fewer people are online, information return is faster. When more people are online, it slows.

Upon observing the scavenging habits of harvester ants, Gordon found that ant colonies are controlled by the same concept. After discovering a large supply of food, more ants leave the colony. When food is scarce, the number of foragers is restricted.

In his New York Times bestseller, Breakpoint, author Jeff Stibel reflects upon the similarities between the Internet and biological networks like ant colonies to make predictions about the future of social networks like Facebook.

“When you look at the most powerful things in biology, in nature and in technology, they’re always networks of things. They’re not individuals,” Stibel tells Mashable. 

“Biology is technology. It’s notlike technology, it istechnology.”

“Biology is technology. It’s not like technology, it is technology.”

 

Stibel, a neuroscientist and entrepreneur, knows his way around biological processes and the web. Like an ant colony, he believes, Facebook succeeds only through the combined interaction of individuals. As an ant’s survival depends on its colony, a Facebook user’s social experience is dependent on his friend network.

According to Stibel, all networks — natural or digital — share very similar life cycles. They begin with what’s called “hypergrowth.”

“In nature, all species multiply as much as resources allow,” Stibel writes in Breakpoint. “The same is true of technology and business: If you don’t dominate a market, you give potential upstarts an opportunity to grow and eventually compete with you.”

SEE ALSO: I’m 13 and None of My Friends Use Facebook

As Facebook strives to grow as much of a user base as possible — now with over 1.15 billion active monthly visitors — ant colonies rapidly lay eggs and consume their environment’s resources. And both networks have the same motivation: keeping others from taking their place.

“In hypergrowth, you want to grow as fast as you can and let nothing stand in your way,” says Stibel. “Don’t charge, don’t encumber, do nothing to hinder your growth. Because if you do, a competitor’s going to jump in and steal it.”

Harvester ant colonies grow to about 12,000 to 15,000 individuals during hypergrowth. At this point, the sheer amount of ants in the colony begins to inhibit communication. The network can no longer operate efficiently. This stage, Stibel says, is known as the breakpoint.

According to Stibel, networks face two choices during the breakpoint: keep growing or allow the breakpoint to force them down.

“The paradox is that forcing yourself to continue to grow will do more damage than allowing the breakpoint to take effect,” says Stibel. 

“All breakpoints are elastic. The further you go beyond the breakpoint, the harder your collapse.”

“All breakpoints are elastic. The further you go beyond the breakpoint, the harder your collapse.”

 

In response to hitting their breakpoint, ant colonies shrink down to 10,000 individuals around their fifth year. Other ants are sent off to begin new colonies in new locations. This colony shedding prevents the larger loss that result from starvation and overcrowding, if the network didn’t brace for its breakpoint.

According to Stibel, failed web and social networks are just like ant colonies that didn’t brace for the impact.

“The number of networks that make it to a breakpoint, out of hypergrowth, are virtually zero. Every one of these networks — Friendster, Myspace, Classmates.com — they all collapsed. They’re all fractions of their former selves or they’re out of business.”

Halting growth and allowing users to leave seems adverse to the basic idea of social networking and Metcalfe’s law: a cardinal Internet belief system which states, basically, that bigger is better.

“Bigger is better, up to a point. And that point is the breakpoint, where you hit this critical mass. Where you’ve consumed, effectively, all of the oxygen that can be consumed,” says Stibel. “If you’re Facebook, you’ve got all the people on the network starting to intertwine and get tangled. If you’re an ant colony, you’ve got about 10,000 to 12,000 ants in the colony before all of a sudden they start interfering with each other. At some point, in both examples, the communication just becomes noise.”

After breakpoint comes equilibrium. According to Stibel, successful networks see only a small collapse after reaching their breakpoint, through which a more optimized network with faster communication emerges.

Image: Flickr, BBMexplorer

“It seems paradoxical, but equilibrium is where the real magic happens,”

“It seems paradoxical, but equilibrium is where the real magic happens,” says Stibel. “It’s where intelligent networks get smart, and where business networks start making a lot of money.”

 

A business network in equilibrium boasts a captive audience. The network is so robust and interwoven in users’ lives that they can’t help but stay on. In equilibrium, the network can begin charging, promoting more advertisements or even selling users’ data — if it chooses. The majority of users will likely be willing to comply in order to stay connected.

“You can do all manner of things because the benefits so far outweigh the negatives that we’re willing to risk privacy to go on the web,” says Stibel. “We’re willing to risk someone listening to our calls to use a cellphone.”

Stibel applies the breakpoint theory to the most popular social network: Facebook.

“I think Facebook is at its breakpoint in many, many markets,” he says. “In the markets that they’ve penetrated, they have saturated. We’ve gotten to a point where there are too many users, there are too many connections between users, and something has to be done to cull it.”

Zuckerberg, says Stibel, understands this. The growth of Facebook looks very similar to that of Gordon’s ant colony.

“They started in Harvard, got about 80% penetration, then they moved to MIT. Then to just the Ivy league schools, then all colleges. It took them three years to open up to the world, each time dominating the market,” he says. “Now that they’ve opened up to the world, they have to make a decision about whether they want to keep pushing past the breakpoint — which is dangerous as all hell — or reap the benefits of a network in equilibrium.”

In equilibrium, says Stibel, Facebook would optimally offer a smaller number of connections, allowing users to more dynamically know what’s going on in their closest friends’ lives. Rather than be bombarded with information from hundreds of users that you don’t know well, relationships would be weighted, giving users the information they want, when they want it.

Facebook should be listening to those users who say, “I don’t like Facebook anymore,” he adds. Those might be the ones who realize the system is breaking.

“In the United States — and I can’t say this more directly — Facebook has to shrink. It has to shrink in terms of connections and in terms of users, or it will implode.”

Stibel can’t predict what direction Facebook will take, but he does offer up some advice for social networks of the future: Look to nature, not to the web.

“We forget that the original engineering is biology; it’s evolution. And we have a lot more to learn from this biology — whether it’s us, ants, termites, whatever — than we could hope to learn from the Facebooks and the Myspaces and the Yahoos of the world. Because they’ve only been around for what, a dozen years?”

Folding Cardboard Stools Only Make It Look Like You’re a Hoarder

If you’re a student who knows you’ll only be living in a cheap apartment for a couple of semesters, what’s the point of buying and moving heavy furniture? Especially when there are so many flat-packed, lightweight cardboard options to choose from, like these wonderful stoolsdesigned to look like stacks of pizza boxes, records, and even boxes of beer.

You’d assume that a foosball table made from 100 percent renewable materials—cardboard and…Read more

Apparently the hoarder look is particularly fashionable when it comes to home decor this season, and while you could simply make your own stool from a month’s worth of empty pizza boxes, this $34 version is engineered for stability and strength—and it also won’t smell like moldy pizza crust.

Lift Your June Gloom With This Weekend’s Playlist

When June arrives in San Francisco, it brings with it a very particular brand of gray morning (and sometimes afternoon). While that grayness generally dissipates when the sun breaks through, it gives most mornings an otherworldly feel. Fitting, then, that so much of this week’s best new music mirrors that Yay Area summertime progression from gloom to bliss. Start out chill with new tracks from Real Lies and Sinkane, then turn up the tempo until the Ting Tings go disco and legend Giorgio Morodor brings it home with a high-energy tour de force.

As usual, we’ve added the tracks to our ongoing Spotify playlist of great new music, and created a standalone YouTube playlist for this week. Keep the recommendations coming.

The tracks:
Real Lies, “North Circular”
The Antlers, “Hotel”
Chet Faker, “Talk is Cheap (Ta-ku Remix)”
Sinkane, “Hold Tight”
SBTRKT feat. Sampha, “Temporary View”
Jo Mersa, “Rock and Swing”
Santigold, “Kicking Down Doors”
The Ting Tings, “Wrong Club”
Lana del Rey, “West Coast (ZHU Remix)”
Giorgio Moroder, “Giorgio’s Theme”

YouTube

Right Said Fred Went Activist and Dave Chappelle Teased Us in This Week’s Best TV

For the second week in a row, John Oliver leads our recap of essential television. He’s a clever, astute comedian to be sure, but he practically resorted to cheat codes when he pulled the Right Said Fred revival card on Sunday. To that we say: Well played, Mr. Oliver. But even though he came in first, Seth Meyers came on strongest, having a banner recap week with three segments in the mix! Then again, he kind of pulled an Oliver and hit the easy button by inviting Sia, Natasha Lyonne, and Aidy Bryant onto the show. Yes, he’s friendly and welcoming, but these guests didn’t need anything more than an introduction to shine on stage. Still, we thank you for a killer line-up, Seth. Keep up the good work. Elsewhere, the elusive Dave Chappelle opened up on David Letterman, and Audra McDonald put another jewel in her Queen of Broadway crown. It was a good week for comediennes and comedians, which means it was a good week for the viewing public. Now fire up that Sia clip and immerse yourself in WIRED’s favorite finds.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver — iTunes, Assad, and Right Said Fred

John Oliver had HBO fly in Right Said Fred from England to perform their hit “I’m Too Sexy” as a political protest song against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. This is 100 percent not an elaborate joke set up.

Late Night With Seth Meyers — Sia Performance: “Chandelier” Feat. Lena Dunham

Singer and songwriter Sia Furler is famously, cripplingly shy. Last month, she performed her new track “Chandelier” on The Ellen Show with her back to the crowd the entire time, preferring instead to let the music video’s star, 11-year-old Maddie Ziegler, perform an interpretive dance. We’re not mad. The video and Ellenperformance were equally captivating and awesome. But the point is: This whole faceless stage show thing is no gimmick for Sia. It’s an act of protest she directly declared last October when she appeared on the cover of Billboard magazine with a bag over her head. Within that issue you will find an article by Furler entitled “My Anti-Fame Manifesto”. Fortunately for us, this unique stance on public exposure makes for some very interesting TV! Sia was “on” Late Night this week to perform “Chandeliers” again, and this time it was Lena Dunham donning the platinum bob and thrashing around the stage. Sia was on set, but she was facedown on the top level of a bunk bed the entire time. Whatever! The song is beautiful and if this means we get to see a dozen different performance variations while it blows up the network TV circuit, then consider us stoked on all the great weirdness yet to come.

Late Night With Seth Meyers — Natasha Lyonne Interview

Natasha Lyonne is way underappreciated. Yes, she’s a very talented actress, but she’s also a survivor. She’s survived child stardom, heroin addiction, and about 10 years of professional obscurity plopped right in the middle of her career. Lyonne has always been an indie darling and we get that staying under-the-radar is totally a cool-kid move. But unless you were keeping up with a Natasha Newsletter or saw that one episode of The New Girl in 2011, she was easy to lose track of betweenBlade: Trinity in 2004 and Season 1 of Orange Is the New Black last year. The weathered starlet even admits as much, telling Vulture last August that “I didn’t have a 28-day drug problem. I had a take-five-years-off drug problem … there was many years I couldn’t get work.” No longer, though! Of all the gifts bestowed upon us by OINTB—Kate Mulgrew as a Russian mobster, Laverne Cox, something that isn’t Weeds from Jenji Kohan—Natasha Lyonne may be the best of them all. Her hard-living, complex class clown character Nicky Nichols at times seems borrowed straight from a sure-to-be-riveting autobiography of Lyonne we didn’t know we needed until she came back to us. And to see her vibrant, healthy, and making jokes about stealing her friends dog and how people proposition her in Instagram comments makes us forget all about the Lost Years. If Nicky gets her own show, we’re totally following her to a new prison.

Game of Thrones — The Watchers on the Wall

This is where we wanted to put an interesting and plot-advancing scene from Game of Thrones‘s penultimate Season 4 episode. Instead, we went back to the Wall. The whole time.

 

Take a Trip Through the Strange Worlds Within Gemstones

For all the infinite vastness of the universe we’ve seen through telescopes, the world seen under a microscope also reveals some pretty alien-looking vistas. Like the tiny cosmos hidden inside gemstones, a realm that photomicrographer Danny Sanchez captures in striking photographs.

“When I first started looking through the microscope at gemstones, it was all space to me,” says Sanchez, who’s spent the last eight years learning to examine and photograph gemological interiors. “It was all the limitless imagination of outer space.”

Sanchez’s images reflect an awe for the cosmos, and the aesthetic influence of science fiction. Shattered remnants of a doomed planet emerge from microscopic rubite embedded in sapphire; the pyramidal pyrite shell of some ancient being drifts in geological time; a mountainous horizon hidden in a nugget of quartz looks absolutely extraterrestrial. The photos recall sci-fi visionary John Berkey.

At the center of most of Sanchez’s pictures are the random bits of minerals stuck in a larger gem–what are called intrusions. To collectors, they’re imperfections that reduce the value of the stone–to Sanchez, they are things of beauty.

He digs through bin upon bin of gemstones at trade shows, searching for the subject of his next image. He examines the stones and intrusions with a 10x microscope loop and fiber optic light he carries with him, gathering a sense for their inner worlds.

“I’ve got to hit all the gem shows and all the local events,” he says. “I like the ones that are flawed. They’ve got the stuff inside them. I’m actually lucky in that regard because people don’t want them, so I get to pay less for them.”

Depth of a Field

Sanchez’s images fall under the category of photomicrography–pictures of very, very small things taken through a microscope. It’s a broad field in which his images are at least partially unique.

The bulk of photomicrographic imagery comes out of academic research. Insects, microbes, circulatory systems, the vast majority focus on organic subject matter. Gemological intrusions are generally a less common subject, and certainly not the object of most photomicrographers’ fascination.

“They’re interested in documenting, ‘Oh this material is found in conjunction with this material, how interesting–we should document that,’” he says. “There’s only so much conversation that someone like that can have with me before we just totally diverge on our technique.”

To Sanchez, the most relevant distinction is the effort to create images at the standard of a fine art. He’s working more to convey a sense of sublimity he feels rather than to categorize or document what he photographs in a scientific way.

“It’s really tricky, and I wish I had someone I could just call up and ask why is this not working? How do I get this better, how do I get it cleaner? But there’s not, so I’m just sort of feeling around.”

What’s He Building in There

Without an institutional budget to throw at gear, Sanchez had to build his shooting rig piecemeal. It took almost ten years of scouring eBay before he could produce images at the level of quality he wanted. For shooting at the microscopic level, gear always comes first.

“There were so many obstacles … if you don’t have the right equipment you can’t overcome them,” he says. “There’s only so good an image you can make.”

Sanchez lights the gems with fiber optic tubes and a main light. He adjusts the light and controls shadow with teensy reflector cards and black foil. The image is captured by a specially adapted Wild Heerbrugg m450 microscope, with a light path streamlined so that it travels almost directly into a Canon 5D. A host of custom optical and stabilizing segments hold the rig together, and it’s all mounted to a vibration resistant platform.

An integral part of this process is called “stacking,” which means shooting the same subject at varying depths of field and then recombining the layers into a single sharp image. An ever present risk is over-stacking (often Sanchez will layer dozens of shots in a single image), which can force in too much color and depth information to produce the subtler sense of space he’s aiming for.

Stacking a crazy precise process that requires a step motor that can move the focus by microns at a time, allowing for super fast exposures at different points along the inclusions.

All the equipment and precision allows Sanchez to chart a course through gemological innerspace. When he comes upon a striking scene, he can drop anchor and start shooting. The experience can be pretty otherworldly, even though the whole rig resides in a small room in his house.

“I have to turn the lights off in this room, and then turn the fiber optic lights on, so it’s very much this laboratory vibe because it’s so dark and mysterious. And I’m staring into a window, seeing something totally different than the reality around me.”

The Big Picture

Sanchez is not just an admirer, he’s also an expert on the gems themselves. By looking at the stones he can tell you if they’re natural or synthetic, if they’ve been exposed to extreme heat, where in the world they might have come from. He’s as interested in making photographs as in the phenomenology of what he’s observing.

“I really try hard not to do anything false, like use false colors. I comp my images, sure, but it’s just as you see it through the microscope. It’s mostly Lightroom, and a little bit of Photoshop dodging and that’s it. That’s not to say I don’t spend a tremendous amount of time staring at it in Lightroom day after day to make sure it’s right.”

The ultimate goal is to present an exhibition of the photos, printed large next to the stones they came from so that the vast scale suggested in the images can be experienced right next to the tiny reality of them.

That’s part of the reason Sanchez keeps the stones he photographs. In any case there’s certainly not much of a financial incentive for keeping them–their “flawed” nature makes them unfit for most collectors. For him the true excitement comes from the singular instant when a photo emerges from the development process to reveal something never seen before.

“It’s that moment when you look at it and gasp,” he says. “You can’t believe that it looks like that.”

All photos by Danny Sanchez

The First Americans

Until recently, the reigning theory on who the first Homo sapiens in North America were pointed to the Clovis people, evidence of whose culture was discovered in the American Southwest. That theory has been powerfully challenged by, among others, Meadowcroft, an archaeological dig in western Pennsylvania that began in the 1970s.

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In the 1970s, college students in archaeology such as myself learned that the first human beings to arrive in North America had come over a land bridge from Asia and Siberia approximately 13,000 to 13,500 years ago. These people, the first North Americans, were known collectively as Clovis people. Their journey was made possible, according to archaeologists far and wide, by a corridor that had opened up between giant ice sheets covering what is now Alaska and Alberta. Thus did the Clovis people move down through the North American continent, carrying their distinctive tools to various sites in the Plains States and the Southwest and then moving eastward. And all of this they did very quickly.

Significant evidence of Clovis culture had been discovered in New Mexico. In 1908, a rancher riding along an arroyo on his property near Folsom noticed what looked like large bones embedded in the embankment. They turned out to be from gigantic Ice Age bison and other late Pleistocene megafauna, such as mammoths, and they had cut marks that had clearly been made by humans. South of there, in Blackwater Draw, elegantly fashioned spear points, some about the size of the palm of your hand, turned up in the 1930s. The spear points had fluting and were large enough to fell Ice Age animals.

Clovis First, as it was called, was the one and only accepted explanation of initial human arrival and subsequent expansion throughout North and South America. To be taken seriously, any artifact of human culture had to be dated after those found at Clovis.

I remember learning all this in introductory archaeology at a college in southeastern Pennsylvania. Little did I or my professors know that a couple hundred miles away, at a place called Meadowcroft, not far from Pittsburgh, an archaeological dig led by James Adovasio was finding evidence that would cast the primacy of Clovis Man completely in doubt and produce major challenges for existing theories of how the first human beings arrived in North America.

The oldest findings at Meadowcroft predated by thousands of years the time when many believed that giant sheets of glacial ice had shifted to make it possible for humans to cross the land bridge from Asia.

It all started one day in 1955 when Albert Miller, a farmer, conservationist, and amateur historian was out hiking on his property. While passing a steep cliffside aerie with a distinctive rock overhang that yielded a naturally occurring shelter, he noticed a groundhog slip down a hole. Upon closer inspection, Miller found bones near the entrance of the hole. More than likely, the groundhog had dug up the bones and deposited them there.

Miller wondered what else lay beneath that patch of soil. He fetched a shovel and a screen, then started digging. Very quickly he unearthed a flint knife and some burned bones. Already familiar with rock shelters in western Pennsylvania, he knew to expect Indian artifacts. His own interests and experiences had trained him to look for such things.

As a young man, he had been a pilot and an accomplished aerial photographer. An interest in conservation led to a project in which he planted trees on land that had been disrupted by mining. His own farm he turned into a wildlife habitat. Yet he was also fascinated by man-made things such as antiques, but not in the usual way. “Some people are interested in that chair,” he once said of an antique. “I’m interested in the people who sat in it.”

Miller quickly realized that the land around the rock shelter was possibly significant, so he stopped digging. Instead of exploiting the site, he selflessly became its protector. The rock overhang, he realized, might easily attract hikers looking for shelter, who might happen onto evidence of something going on here, just as he had, and feel compelled to dig. To ward off potential looters, he covered the hole and hid it from view.

The site called for professional attention, and he was willing to wait until the right archaeologists came along. For almost 20 years, the discovery remained a closely guarded secret. When Miller encountered someone he thought trustworthy who might be able to connect him to the right archaeologists, he took that person into his confidence. One such person was Phil Jack, a historian of colonial America at the state college in California, Pennsylvania.

In the meantime, Miller pursued another project of historical interest, founding the Meadowcroft Museum of Rural Life on land near the rock shelter. For this reconstructed 19th-century village, he and his brother Delvin—a legend in harness racing—restored old cabins, a schoolhouse, a church, a barbershop, a covered bridge, and a railroad car. The museum, which was run by a board, came to own the land with the rock shelter.

In the early ’70s, a young archaeologist named James Adovasio was hired by the University of Pittsburgh. He put out the word among colleagues that he would be interested in hearing about any sites near the Iron City that might be appropriate for teaching students the meticulous techniques needed to excavate archaeological digs. He got a call from Jack, the historian at the state college, who told him about Meadowcroft.

Adovasio visited Albert Miller, and they hit it off. Miller realized he had found the archaeologist with the appropriate skills to dig below the rock shelter. After Adovasio received permission from Meadowcroft’s board, he and his students began working at the site. They were joined by teams of geologists, paleontologists, climatologists, and other experts in ancient plants, pollen, and seeds. They used trowels as if they were scalpels and even razor blades to ever so gently remove soil covering the floor of the rock shelter, layer by layer, or in the lingo of a dig, horizon by horizon. The strata beneath the spot where decades earlier Miller had spied the groundhog were uncommonly intact.

The crew chief was David T. Clark, a former U.S. marine and an “utter genius with a trowel,” writes Adovasio. Precise in his work and uncompromising in his standards, Clark was said to have taught his colleagues so well that they could hear it when their tools scratched another microlayer. Climate and stratigraphic expert Joel Gunn was another character in the line-up, someone the crew came to know and fear for his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personalities. The archaeologists liked to get their hands dirty. They were more comfortable, Adovasio once observed, sitting in a “front-end loader or a roadside saloon than at the Princeton Club in a Hepplewhite chair.”

When the project began in June of 1973, the team expected to dig for about three or four feet before hitting bedrock, which, of course, would be sterile in terms of human activity and thus mark the end of their work there. But, even so, students would get excellent experience, comparable to that offered by other western Pennsylvania rock shelters, going back in time perhaps 3,000 years. The first human artifacts they discovered were aluminum beer cans. Lower down they found steel cans, followed by glass beer bottles, and then colonial-era glass.

Meadowcraft and other Native American points of interest in southwestern Pennsylvania. (Map: Thomas Cool/Wikimedia Commons)

By the next summer, the team had gone through ever more successive layers of parallel stratification, reaching a depth of 10 feet. Surprised at being able to continue deeper, but not yet finding anything unexpected, the students cataloged every point encountered (early field use of computers assisted in this) and duly noted remains of ancient hearths. Archaic points unearthed that summer resembled others found in the same region, dating back 10,000 years.

What the archaeologists encountered next would have disheartened any amateur who had endeavored to dig this deep: rocks. But Adovasio and his team recognized this for what it was, a spall—boulders that had fallen from the rock shelter’s roof thousands of years ago. They dug onward. Breaking through the spall, they began encountering the unexpected and the unknown.

Because of the stability of the site—Meadowcroft Rockshelter is nestled in Morgantown-Connellsville sandstone about 300 million years old and held high above the constantly eroding waters from nearby Cross Creek—the team surmised from the undisturbed strata that they were finding artifacts more than 12,000 calendar years old. Even without radiocarbon dating (which was used later on), they knew they were entering the realm of pre-Clovis.

During the last ice age there was a brief window of opportunity for humans from Siberia to cross the land bridge, probably about 13,000 to 14,000 years ago.

Among the points they now encountered was one about three inches in length and lanceolate in shape, with no fluting. This was unlike any Clovis point and did not closely resemble anything previously discovered in North America. Later dubbed the Miller Lanceolate Projectile Point in honor of Albert Miller, it was proof that sophisticated toolmakers were in this region long before craftsmen at the Clovis site were fashioning their tools. The lesson was clear: Clovis was not first. One and all members of Adovasio’s team repaired to a nearby watering hole to discuss, celebrate, and allow it all to sink in.

Beneath the level where the Miller point was found, however, there was still more: fire pits, baskets, and cordage. While excavating the strata making up the “Deep Hole” they found a finished lithic tool later called the Mungai knife, which would be the oldest human artifact found at the site, dating back 16,000 years. The oldest findings at Meadowcroft, then, predated by thousands of years the time when many believed that giant sheets of glacial ice had shifted to make it possible for humans to cross the land bridge from Asia and descend through an ice-free corridor. Radiocarbon dating at the Smithsonian Institution confirmed their age.

Visitors to Meadowcroft today can peer into the dig site from a platform within the rock shelter. Tags on the boulders correspond to the horizons from which artifacts had been taken. There are 11 strata and many microlayers, covering the times of George Washington back to 16,000 years ago. Throughout antiquity and into modern times, the rock shelter was part of the marked landscape. Anyone traveling along Cross Creek would have immediately recognized it as a good place to camp for a few days or weeks.

Jim Ulery, a retired geologist, who helps interpret the NEH-funded public programs at Meadowcroft, and other knowledgeable guides at the rock shelter take visitors through the chronology of geologic events. Over a period of thousands of years the grain-by-grain attrition of the sandstone falling from the roof provided the stratification of the floor of the shelter, which consequently rose continuously. Those layers of stratification formed in a natural trough, oriented north to south, in the Birmingham shale making up the shelter’s floor, which kept the layers intact and protected them from any kind of water erosion. The north-south orientation of the natural trough also afforded further protection from prevailing east winds.

Some sense of the events of the later Pleistocene is definitely a big help during a visit to the site as you gaze across the valley sculpted by Cross Creek. About 70,000 years ago, the stream left the rock shelter high and dry as it continued shaping the valley below. Then sometime, perhaps 20,000 years ago, hunters, travelers, foragers, and collectors of chert and jasper started using the shelter regularly, a human rhythm there that continued until the moment Adovasio’s crew blocked off the area and removed their first trowel full of dirt. In all, 10,000 artifacts significant to human culture were recovered from the dig, as well as 956,000 animal bones and 1.4 million plant remains.

The findings at Meadowcroft had to be defended, however, long after the last artifact, soil sample, or molluscan remains were lifted from the Deep Hole. At conferences, in papers, and even a few drinking establishments, Adovasio has seen his team’s findings tested against professional criticism. With careers at stake, the debate has been, at times, quite heated. The esteemed archaeologist Vance Haynes, a committed Clovis Firster, argued that the cultural artifacts at Meadowcroft must have been contaminated by seepage from other strata, thereby giving them false pre-Clovis radiocarbon dates. Adovasio deflected this objection by explaining that the calcium carbonate signature—left from the remains of mollusks—was present in all strata behind the drip line, or the tip of the shelter’s roof. If there had been any groundwater seepage from any surrounding springs, the calcium carbonate signature would have been erased.

Ulery likes to remind visitors that a third of the shelter still needs to be worked on. Adovasio left a significant part of the pit unexcavated. This decision was both selfless and reminiscent of Albert Miller’s decision not to dig any further in 1955. Ulery casts a meaningful gaze at any children on the observation platform as he explains that Adovasio wanted to wait for better technology to be available before finishing the job, in hopes that future generations of archaeologists might learn even more from the site than his crew already has.

The question still nags, Who were the first humans to arrive on the continent and when did they come? During the last ice age there was a brief window of opportunity for humans from Siberia to cross the land bridge, probably about 13,000 to 14,000 years ago. Before that, closer to the glacial maximum, the icescape may have been a treacherous expanse of jagged frozen forms—unforgiving to man and beast. There would have been little for the nomads to hunt along the way, and any food they could have brought with them would have been depleted before they finished the trek. After that window, temperatures toward the end of the last ice age would have warmed enough for the land bridge to disappear beneath the sea.

So, for most of the time, it was either too dangerous or simply impossible to cross the land bridge. But there should have been a short window of opportunity between the too-cold and too-warm periods. Was it possible for the peopling of the continent to occur in such a short span of time? That is, would it have been possible for relatively small bands to cross the land bridge and within half a millennium or so reach the southern tip of South America? And what about the finds at Meadowcroft and elsewhere that pre-date the land bridge crossing in the first place?

Some Native Americans put little stock in what is often called archaeology’s greatest mystery. Aren’t they, they ask, the original inhabitants of North and South America? As it happens, many Indian creation myths describe the arrival of humans to the Western Hemisphere by sea, an idea that is increasingly gaining credence. Evidence found along the western coast, especially in California’s Channel Islands and a site in southern Chile—Monte Verde—appears to support the possibility that a “kelp highway” helped bring the first Americans to these continents. Another theory even speculates that the first arrivals came on the other side of the continent, at a time when frozen northern Atlantic waters would have been passable by foot and by boat from an overpopulated area in what is today southwestern France. This group was part of the Solutrean Culture there, and their spear points resemble Clovis points. Dennis Stanford, archaeologist at the National Museum of Natural History, has become the leading exponent of this theory. In fact, the three theories are not mutually exclusive. Discoveries at Meadowcroft and at other sites in Virginia, South Carolina, and Florida all compel further speculation.

On a recent chilly evening, as the light at Meadowcroft began to wane after the last tour of the rock shelter, Jim Ulery considered the possibilities, then shook his head inconclusively. A retired geologist, a scientist, he is loath to jump to conclusions. So, we stood there quietly, peering down the dark hole and wondering, like Albert Miller and Jim Adovasio before us, what lessons further digging might yield.

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This post originally appeared on Humanities as “The First Americans.” In 2007, Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Museum of Rural Life received a $15,000 grant to enhance the interpretation of two histories: that of human activity at the site 16,000 years ago and that of European settlement in western Pennsylvania in the 18th century.

What You Learn Driving The BMW M3 And M4 At A Great Race Track

The 2015 BMW M3 and M4 have a new, turbocharged inline six that’s more powerful and torquey than the high-revving V8 of the previous M3. But that’s not the whole story. They’re also lighter, tighter and just as much fun. Here are a few things I learned from driving the two Mers at a spectacular American race course.P

(Full disclosure: BMW wanted me to drive the new M3 and M4 so bad, they flew me to Wisconsin for a dinner comprising strategically placed local cheese and a day of scaring myself giddy at one of America’s most appealing, most fun racetracks, Road America.) 1P

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The Optional Carbon Ceramic Brakes Are FantasticP

“Come and drive the BMW M3 and M4 at Road America,” they said. P

Road America is a long, fast, gorgeous circuit cut into the rolling hills between Milwaukee and Green Bay. A car with 425 horsepower and the proper gearing can top 150 mph three times per lap here. There’s a steep, downhill 150-to-60 mph braking zone and similar gravity-fighting dives at several other corners. The force a car’s rotors generate at Road America could power a Milwaukee sports bar on Packers-Vikings day. P

A BMW M car on a fast, heavy braking course, all day long? Cue the dramatic strings.P

“No, no, no. Wait,” they said. “These have CARBON CERAMIC BRAKES. COME LOOK!” P

I did, and yes, CCBs are the difference between driving the potatoes off a fleet of M3s and M4s at Road America for a whole Tuesday, and having to stop for a shrimp-cocktail break every third lap. P

With the carbons, you get the six-piston calipers in the front (four in the rear). Massive stopping power and endurance. Although pedal feel turned a bit inconsistent as the hard laps piled up, there was always plenty of force when needed. And force was needed.P

With the standard-issue four-piston (front) compounds, it’s likely we’d have had a blast on the track for about an hour or two, and then gone off to see a puppet show or something while the cars rested. P

Clever choice of venue, BMW. Very clever. Not that I’m complaining. P

Granted, the CCBs cost an $8,150 extra and require one of the $1,200 uprated 19″ wheel packages (18″ wheels are standard). It’s a heavy expense, but an absolutely essential factory option for buyers who track their cars and would rather not deal with the aftermarket. And it’s heartening to see the downward cost slope CCBs have been on for the past five years. At this rate, they should be affordable for mortals by 2019.2P

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“That” Engine Is Really, Really GoodP

It’s true. The engine’s character no longer defines the car — at least to degree it once did. I don’t have to tell you the days of high-revving, naturally aspirated engines bred of motorsports development are ending. The M3/4’s new turbocharged I6 — sorry, I mean S55B30 — may not have drivers joyfully chasing the back of the tach, as the V8 did, but with acres of torque and flexibility and responsiveness and (yes) fuel economy when needed, there is remarkably little to complain about. P

It may not have the same racing pedigree as previous lumps like the E60 M5’s V10 or E92 M3’s V8. But from where I’m sitting, the turbo six is a fine and competent engine, owing in part to major reductions in rotating mass, compared to the standard N55 version. P

Everyday usability comes at the expense of sensory responses, but the turbo six is also going to blow minds. So it’s okay to let the argument rest, unless you’re in the middle of a fan-forum flame war, then knock yourself out. P

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It Doesn’t Feel FastP

Casual motorsports, thy name is M3/M4. It was always a shock to glance at the head-up display and see 148, 149, 150 ticking by, when nothing else in your body is saying “half way to 300.”4P

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It Is FASTP

Coming out of a corner, the extra coccyx clobber at low revs gives the M3/4 a whole new, fun thing for M drivers to enjoy. BMW says 0-60 in 3.9 seconds with launch control and the M-DCT. It’s probably quicker than that. We’ll see. P

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Ok, There’s The Engine Noise P

Imagine Dinty Moore beef stew, but as a sound. Oh forget it. It’s fine. And maybe it’ll get better when BMW turns out a new performance-package exhaust. For now, drive on, and just pretend the electronic comb-and-wax-paper synthesizer, which feeds faux-gine noise into the cabin, also provides vital anti-aging antioxidants. It’s not intrusive, and at least it sounds reasonable.6P

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That Carbon Fiber Boomerang Brace Looks Freaking Cool7P

What? It does.8P

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The Steering Is WAY Better Than I Expected 9P

This isn’t just a mildly tuned version of the standard EPAS now in use on the 3-Series. Albert Biermann, engineering head of M, says the betterment of this system comes down to four elements: the tightness of the front-end bits, overall tighter tolerances and a larger, lower-inertia electric motor to minimize the filtering effect that makes most EPAS systems feel numb. There’s a closer connection between the torque sensor and the EPS boost controller. What’s more, the system cuts out assist strategically, like when returning to center after a corner, making the unwinding a entirely mechanical proposition.P

It’s beautifully accurate and a vast improvement in feel over some other EPAS setups (fingers crossed that a future M2 gets this gear). It’s obvious M’s spent time and money getting this part right, and I suspect it matches or exceeds Porsche’s EPAS right now. That would be a good comparo to do. Apparently competition does improve the breed.P

Others have said the weighting in Sport and Sport Plus modes feels artificial. I actually thought the Comfort setting was too light, but that Sport loads up more naturally in hard cornering than Sport Plus. I’d love to see how the M engineers would set the parameters if there could only beone setting.P

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It’s Really About The ChassisP

Tremendous chassis balance. Great combination of poise and capability. A lot’s been done to tighten the whole package. The rear axle subframe is bolted straight to the body, without the use of typical rubber bushings. The extra rigidity shows every time it changes direction. This is where the Ms find the magic that more than makes up for having a less “special” engine. Good work.10P

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The Diff Makes A Difference11P

The rear diff — an electronically activated multi plate clutch pack — introduced in the most recent M5 and M6, is remarkably quick to react, especially on the lighter M3. The accuracy with which it puts power down to maximize cornering traction makes it one of the best out there now. P

Come in to a corner too hot, crank the wheel and it lends a hand. Come in too slow, add power and it responds with the right amount of engagement, all the way to full lockup. Able to adjust lines mid-corner and generally get an instant re-take most corner-entry mistakes. It’s like a bottle of Wite-Out for track days.P

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MDM Seemed To Be Happier With Dampers in “Comfort”P

I found the stability control, in the most aggressive setting, was slightly confounded when the adaptive dampers were set at their stiffest (Sport Plus). Setting the dampers to “Comfort,” and everything else to “Sport Plus” (except the steering, in Sport) seemed to be the best setup for Road America. The extra play apparently kept all the other systems more stable. More testing needed. Please.P

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The M3 and M4 Feel Slightly DifferentP

A few of us at the launch – Mike Musto, Tim Stevens, Alex Lloyd — went back and forth a few times during the day, trying to figure out whether or not we were experiencing some sort of psychosomatic response, or if the M3 really did feel different than the M4. P

But yes, the M3 feels just a touch more waggly during heavy braking at high speeds, and is just a bit less responsive in changing direction than the M4. We’re not sure how much higher the center of gravity is on the sedan, but it is higher. It’s in no way a knock on the car’s performance — I prefer the M3’s extra utility — just an answer to a bar quarrel.12P

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The M4 Has A Really Nice Looking ProfileP

Just look at it.1415P

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Hell, The M3 Looks Amazing TooP

I happen to be partial to the M3. With a narrower body than the M4, but the same track width, the aggressive fender flares give the sedan a sinister comportment. Either way, this generation of both coupe and sedan, to my eye, are the best looking M cars in years. P

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See Your GoPro’s POV On The Dash MonitorP

No more “slap it on and wing it.” BMW has allowed GoPro to hack into its in-car apps platform. Now, with the GoPro smartphone app acting as a go-between, a driver can control any WiFi-equipped GoPro camera from iDrive and see a preview of the camera’s POV on the console monitor. The system makes recording hot laps (or insane hijinks on Russian highways) as easy as using navigation. 16P

Sticker Shock, Perhaps

With everything you need for an M3 or M4 that can take serious track duty – the carbon stoppers and 19″ wheels (required), the adaptive dampers, the M-DCT — expect to pay around $76,000. (Base prices with destination are $62,950 for the M3, $65,150 for the M4.) You can of course cut the price by $2,900 and get a six-speed manual. You’d be happy with either one. Nav comes standard, but if you want the head-up display, you have to go for the $4,300 executive package.P

Google Open Sources Its Secret Weapon in Cloud Computing

When Google engineers John Sirois, Travis Crawford, and Bill Farner left the internet giant and went to work for Twitter, they missed Borg.

Borg was the sweeping software system that managed the thousands of computer servers underpinning Google’s online empire. With Borg, Google engineers could instantly grab enormous amounts of computing power from across the company’s data centers and apply it to whatever they were building–whether it was Google Search or Gmail or Google Maps. As Sirois, Crawford, and Farner created new web services at Twitter, they longed for the convenience of this massive computing engine.

Unfortunately, Borg was one of those creations Google was loath to share with the outside world–a technological trade secret it saw as an important competitive advantage. In the end, urged by that trio of engineers, Twitter went so far as build its own version of the tool. But now, the next wave of internet companies has another way of expanding their operations to Google-like sizes. This morning, Google open sourced a software tool that works much like Borg, freely sharing this new creation with the world at large.

Unveiled by Google cloud computing guru Eric Brewer at a conference in San Francisco, the tool is called Kubernetes–after the ancient Greek word for shipmaster or pilot–and basically, it’s a way of more easily and more efficiently running online software across a vast array of machines. In today’s world, that’s a vital thing. As the modern internet serves more and more people, it’s not just Google that needs hundreds or even thousands of machines to run its web software.

When Google engineers John Sirois, Travis Crawford, and Bill Farner left the internet giant and went to work for Twitter, they missed Borg.

Borg was the sweeping software system that managed the thousands of computer servers underpinning Google’s online empire. With Borg, Google engineers could instantly grab enormous amounts of computing power from across the company’s data centers and apply it to whatever they were building–whether it was Google Search or Gmail or Google Maps. As Sirois, Crawford, and Farner created new web services at Twitter, they longed for the convenience of this massive computing engine.

Unfortunately, Borg was one of those creations Google was loath to share with the outside world–a technological trade secret it saw as an important competitive advantage. In the end, urged by that trio of engineers, Twitter went so far as build its own version of the tool. But now, the next wave of internet companies has another way of expanding their operations to Google-like sizes. This morning, Google open sourced a software tool that works much like Borg, freely sharing this new creation with the world at large.

Unveiled by Google cloud computing guru Eric Brewer at a conference in San Francisco, the tool is called Kubernetes–after the ancient Greek word for shipmaster or pilot–and basically, it’s a way of more easily and more efficiently running online software across a vast array of machines. In today’s world, that’s a vital thing. As the modern internet serves more and more people, it’s not just Google that needs hundreds or even thousands of machines to run its web software.

‘IT’S A WAY OF STITCHING TOGETHER A COLLECTION OF MACHINES INTO, BASICALLY, A BIG COMPUTER.’

Google is now sharing this technology with the rest of the world because its business has evolved. In addition to creating its own web applications, it now offers cloud computing services–services that let outside companies build and run software without setting up their own machines. Releasing Kubernetes as a way of encouraging people to use these cloud computing services, known as Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine.

But the new tool isn’t limited to the Google universe. It also lets you oversee machines running on competing cloud services–from Amazon, say, or Rackspace–as well as inside private data centers. Yes, today’s cloud services already give you quick access to large numbers of virtual machines, but with Kubernetes, Google aims to help companies pool processing power more effectively from a wide variety of places. “It’s a way of stitching together a collection of machines into, basically, a big computer,” says Craig Mcluckie, a product manager for Google’s cloud services.

The key, Brewer says, is that a tool like this can help make the most of your available computing power. In essence, if one machine isn’t using all its computing power, Kubernetes can send another task its way. This can be particularly important for companies running their software on cloud services, Brewer explains, because they typically use only a portion of the processing power they’re paying for. “We know, from aggregate statistics, that utilization for the typical cloud customer is kinda low,” he says.

With Borg and its successor, Omega, Google has done this sort of thing inside its own data centers for years, squeezing as much as possible out of its massive array of machines. “Kubenetes emulates a lot of the patterns we use inside Google with Omega,” Mcluckie says. But in an effort to democratize this technology, Google has also reshaped the concepts behind Borg and Omega to work in tandem with anotheropen source technology called Docker. The increasingly popular Docker provides a way of packaging online software into a kind of digital shipping container you can deploy across many machines, and then Kubernetes offers a better way of juggling all those containers. As Brewer explains it, Kubernetes helps you squeeze multiple Docker containers onto the same machine so that you can get the most out of it.

This morning, Google also unveiled new tools that make it easier to merely run Docker containers on its cloud services, and other cloud companies–such as Amazon and Rackspace–have embraced Docker in similar fashion. Docker is one step towards a world where we can treat all cloud services like one giant computer, and a tool like Kubernetes is the next.

Kubernetes is similar to several other existing tools, including Mesos, the open source tool that Twitter now uses. The difference here is that Kubernetes comes from Google, the company that pioneered this breed of “orchestration” tool. “It’s part of an arms race. There are literally dozens of tools coming out,” says Solomon Hykes, the chief technology at Docker and the driving force behind the company’s software containers. “But Google joining that battle–with code that comes from their massive experience–helps show where this kind of thing will go.”

Salesforce Makes a Crafty Play to Bring Wearables to the Workplace

Salesforce.com wants you to wear a computer at work.

This week, the big-name internet software company released Salesforce Wear, an open source software development kit that lets coders build business applications for wearable computing devices such as the Google Glass digital eyewear and the Samsung Gear and Pebble smart watches. Glass, Gear, and Pebble are largely billed as consumer devices, but Salesforce is among the many companies and analyststhat hope to push such wearables into the workplace as well.

Marc Benioff and company also released the software code for six example apps, including a tool that can display business metrics on a Pebble watch and a gesture-based application that lets surgeons to pull up patient records without having to touch an unsterilized keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen. These apps aren’t ready for prime time, but at this point, says the company’s senior vice president of emerging technologies Daniel Debow, Salesforce just wants to provide some wearable inspiration for developers.

THESE INCLUDE A GESTURE-BASED APPLICATION THAT LETS SURGEONS TO PULL UP PATIENT RECORDS WITHOUT HAVING TO TOUCH AN UNSTERILIZED KEYBOARD, MOUSE, OR TOUCHSCREEN.

There are plenty of examples of wearable computers being used in the workplace already. Epson and Evena Medical built a smart glasses system that helps health care workers find patients’ veins. Looxcie’s Vidcie head-mounted camera enables technicians to get live support in the field, as does a Google Glass application built by solar panel installation company Sullivan Solar. And last year, The Independentnewspaper reported that UK grocery chain Tesco uses electronic armbands to monitor employee activities and give them scores based on how well they perform.

What Salesforce hopes to provide is an easier and faster way for companies to create their own wearable apps for their employees and customers. “People would have to build everything–like identity and security–from scratch,” Debow says. “But all of this is already built into Salesforce’s existing developer platform.” Salesforce Wear dovetails with this platform, a set of online service for building and running software that hooks into other Salesforce applications, and at least at this point, it doesn’t work with other development platforms. That means Salesforce also sees this new kit as a way of driving interest in its existing services, but whatever Salesforce’s own interests, Debow is adamant that wearable gear is the future.

He says there are many places that smartwatches or glasses could be preferable to using a smartphone. Sales people pull their smartphones out of their pockets between 100 and 150 times per day, he says, and wearables can change this. “For a sales person it’s not a great idea to pull a cell phone out in the middle of a meeting,” Debow says.

One of the company’s sample apps addresses exactly that. It’s a Samsung Gear 2 smartwatch app that displays a wide variety of information from the company’s flagship sales information management product. Using the app, you could not only check forthcoming calendar appointments, but also see profiles of the customers expecting to present at a particular meeting– complete with a photo to help you put a face to a name before or even during the meeting. It’s also interactive, letting you do things like warn everyone else at the meeting that you’re running late.

It’s still early days in the wearable field. But in addition to giving us an idea of where this market is headed, Salesforce is providing at least one way we might get there. We don’t just need wearables. We need ways of tying them into existing online services. Something like Salesforce Wear can help do that.

The Ultimate Dadcore Gift Guide for Father’s Day

Dadcore life is about more than just fashion or style. It’s an attitude. A way of being. It’s an ever-ready state of preparedness for what life throws at you—be that a flat tire, malfunctioning router during a Frozen marathon, or mushed up bananas. It’s carrying a multi-purpose backpack instead of a single-use diaper bag. It’s a cold cup of coffee served hot. It’s the enormous pleasure of a small speaker. A warm blanket. A knife. It’s power. So this Father’s Day, treat yourself. Dadcore, yo.

Tim Cook, Making Apple His Own

Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, was an adolescent boy in a small Alabama town in the early 1970s when he saw something he couldn’t forget.

Bicycling home on a new 10-speed, he passed a large cross in flames in front of a house — one that he knew belonged to a black family. Around the cross were Klansmen, dressed in white cloaks and hoods, chanting racial slurs. Mr. Cook heard glass break, maybe someone throwing something through a window. He yelled, “Stop!”

One of the men lifted his conical hood, and Mr. Cook recognized a deacon from a local church (not Mr. Cook’s). Startled, he pedaled away.

“This image was permanently imprinted in my brain, and it would change my life forever,” Mr. Cook said of the burning cross, in a speech he gave last December.

In the speech, he said his new awareness made him feel that no matter what you do in life, human rights and dignity are values that need to be acted upon. And then came the segue: His company, Apple, is one that believed deeply in “advancing humanity.”

Tim Cook Receiving the IQLA Lifetime Achievement Award Video by Auburn University

Mr. Cook, who is 53, took over leadership of Apple nearly three years ago, after the death of Steve Jobs, the company’s revered founder. Like Walt Disney and Henry Ford, Mr. Jobs was intertwined with his company. Mr. Jobs was Apple and Apple was Jobs.

At the time, Mr. Cook was well regarded as a behind-the-scenes operations guy, but he was a relatively unknown quantity outside the company. He can be intensely private; for instance, the details of the cross-burning episode, like his reaction and the appearance of the deacon, he has shared with friends but not publicly. Even offering the outlines of that story in front of an audience, however, indicates how he is slowly beginning to reveal his own personality and style, and to define Apple leadership in his own image.

This is happening as Mr. Cook, who declined to be interviewed for this article, finds himself not only in the limelight, but also under scrutiny. Of late, the company has hit a snag that was years in the making: Its sales now are so large that many investors worry that it can’t continue to match the growth that brought it from $65 billion in sales in the 2010 fiscal year to $171 billion in 2013. In fiscal 2013, sales grew a mere 9 percent, far below an average just shy of 40 percent a year from 2004 to 2013. Profits slimmed. And the stock price fell nearly in half from its 2012 peak to the middle of 2013, vastly underperforming the market.

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It is hard for all of us to be patient. It was hard for Steve. It is hard for Tim.

Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief

Investors have clamored for Apple wizardry — a much-anticipated iWatch or iTV, perhaps. To these critics, Mr. Cook is uninspiring, his social views window dressing, when what they want is magic.

“Where is the grand design?” asks Laurence I. Balter, chief market strategist at Oracle Investment Research. Mr. Balter credits Mr. Cook as having great skills in operations and in managing the supply chain, which entails getting the raw materials and machinery in place to build things — but not with having the vision to design them. “All we hear from Cook,” Mr. Balter says, “is there are some great products coming down the pike.”

Mr. Balter calls Apple a financial “Rock of Gibraltar”— it is sitting on $150.6 billion of cash — but he says he has serious questions about whether it can continue to be a hypergrowth company. Is it a stock for growth investors, he asks, “or widows?”

“Show me the product,” he says. “Show me the ingenuity.”

To shore up shareholder faith, Mr. Cook split the stock, increased the dividend and engineered a $90 billion buyback — steps that helped shares rebound almost entirely. He has taken other steps to strengthen the company, like pushing Apple products into China, a potentially huge market, and acquiring talent, most recently spending $3 billion to buy Beats, a music company that brings Apple two major music-industry shakers and deal makers, Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine.

Reflecting his personal views, Mr. Cook is trying to broaden Apple’s brand, too, taking to Twitter and other public venues to express support for environmentalism and gay rights (and for Auburn University football). He has also emphasized the use of sustainable products at the company. Early in his tenure, playing catch-up with other corporations, he established a program to match employee charitable contributions; he has upped the company’s own giving, too.

Jonathan Ive, the head of design at Apple and a name nearly as adored by its followers as Steve Jobs, says Mr. Cook has not neglected the company’s central mission: innovation. “Honestly, I don’t think anything’s changed,” he said. And that includes the clamor for some exciting new thing. “People felt exactly the same way when we were working on the iPhone,” Mr. Ive added.

“It is hard for all of us to be patient,” Mr. Ive said. “It was hard for Steve. It is hard for Tim.”

Spirit of Hardware Past

There is a mythology, with some part of truth, that Mr. Jobs was the soul of the design process, the company’s Innovator in Chief. For the original iPhone, Mr. Jobs checked in weekly with engineers, according to Francisco Tolmasky, a former Apple engineer who worked on the phone’s browser.

“Steve was really adamant,” Mr. Tolmasky reflected, adding that Mr. Jobs would say: “’This needs to be like magic. Go back, this isn’t magical enough!’”

Almost daily, employees would spot Mr. Jobs having lunch on Apple’s campus with Mr. Ive. These days, Mr. Ive said, he meets three days a week with Mr. Cook, generally in each other’s offices. But Mr. Ive said the design processes are essentially unchanged.

I think it’s going to be very difficult for them to come up with the next big thing. They’ve lost their heart and soul.

Michael A. Cusumano, M.I.T. professor

“Steve established a set of values and he established preoccupations and tones that are completely enduring,” Mr. Ive said. Chief among them is a reliance on small creative teams whose membership remains intact to this day. The philosophy that materials and products are intertwined also continues under Mr. Cook. For instance, when the company decided to use titanium to build a laptop, Mr. Ive said, he and Mr. Cook and Mr. Jobs thought about how to push the boundaries of the metal to get the look and feel they wanted. And Mr. Ive pointed to another enduring value: a complete focus on the product.

If Mr. Jobs was maniacal about design, Mr. Cook projects “quiet consideration,” Mr. Ive said. Mr. Cook digests things carefully, with time, which Mr. Ive said “testifies to the fact he knows it’s important.”

Lower-level employees praise Mr. Cook’s approachability and intellect. But some say he is less hands-on in developing products than his predecessor. They point to the development of the so-called iWatch — the “smartwatch” that Apple observers are eagerly awaiting as the next world-beating gadget. Mr. Cook is less involved in the minutiae of product engineering for the watch, and has instead delegated those duties to members of his executive cabinet, including Mr. Ive, according to people involved in the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to press. Apple declined to comment on the watch project.

Mr. Cook appears to be interested in the smartwatch’s broader implications — for instance, that a watch might monitor heart rate and other vital measures, thus improving health and limiting doctor visits, according to these people. The watch is expected to be released in the fourth quarter, these people said.

Mr. Cook has also looked outside of Apple for experienced talent. He has hired executives from multiple industries, including Angela Ahrendts, the former head of Burberry, to oversee the physical and online stores, and Paul Deneve, the former Yves Saint Laurent chief executive, to take on special projects. He also hired Kevin Lynch, the former chief technology officer of Adobe, and Michael O’Reilly, former medical officer of the Masimo Corporation, which makes health monitoring devices. Not to mention the music men of Beats.

Mr. Cook is amassing a creative brain trust, according to Bono, the lead singer of the band U2, who befriended Mr. Jobs and worked closely with him and Apple’s team on developing a U2-branded iPod, as well as on charitable work in Africa. Mr. Cook is not saying “I’m here to replace him,” said Bono, who is a managing director and co-founder of the venture capital firm Elevation Partners. “He’s saying, ‘I’ll try to replace him with five people.’ It explains the acquisition of Beats.”

Photo

Craig Federighi, head of Apple’s software engineering. Mr. Cook has assembled a team of creative people — and has given them center stage. CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times

That doesn’t mean Mr. Cook is uninvolved in product decisions. Since he took over, the company has released a number of upgrades, including a smaller tablet, the iPad Mini. Mr. Cook “thought the world would love a smaller and less expensive tablet,” said Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of Disney and a member of Apple’s board. It was a product that Mr. Jobs thought did not have a market, he said.

Sales of the iPad Mini quickly exceeded those of the normal-size iPad, according to analysts. Gartner and ABI Research estimated that within the first year the smaller tablet went on sale, it accounted for 60 percent of overall iPad sales.

Still, some product iterations have brought mixed results. Last year, Apple for the first time introduced two new iPhones instead of just one: the high-end iPhone 5S, which sold like gangbusters, and the lower-cost, plastic-covered iPhone 5C, which disappointed.

What makes Apple’s challenge particularly daunting is the law of large numbers. Its sales are so big that even another new strong product — unless it’s a gigantic hit on the order of the iPhone — won’t lead to the kind of growth to which some investors have grown accustomed, noted Toni Sacconaghi, a financial analyst who covers Apple for Bernstein Research. He put it this way: If Apple makes an iWatch and sells 10 million units in the first year, it would add a mere 50 cents to its earnings per share, barely a single percentage point.

“Most people would say, if you sell 10 million units of something that would be incredible,” Mr. Sacconaghi said. But not so with Apple. “There are very few things that could move the needle,” he added.

Michael A. Cusumano, a professor in the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., said he thought Apple no longer had the juice to create the world-beating product it needs. Professor Cusumano, who is working on a book about innovation, visited Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., last fall and has talked to a half-dozen current and former employees about the company culture. He concluded that Apple without Mr. Jobs lacks a visionary to synthesize disparate ideas into a magical whole.

“Jobs would figure out how to put the pieces together,” Professor Cusumano said. “Everything just filtered through his eyes.”

“I think it’s going to be very difficult for them to come up with the next big thing,” he added. “They’ve lost their heart and soul.”

‘Just and Right’

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Inevitably, Tim Cook draws contrasts to the high-profile, hands-on style of his predecessor.CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images

If Mr. Jobs was the heart and soul of the company, Mr. Cook seems to be trying to cast himself as a different sort of leader. His Twitter feed is a mash-up of Apple hoopla and cheerful promotion of human rights and environmentalism. He wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal in support of proposed federal legislation protecting gay, lesbian and transgender workers.

He often quotes Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy but doesn’t much talk about the origin of his political views. The speech he gave last December, in which Mr. Cook mentioned the cross-burning, started to give some hints. “Since these early days,” he said, “I have seen, and I have experienced, many other types of discrimination.” All of those, he continued, “were rooted in a fear of people that were different than the majority.” Apple declined to say what he meant by the reference to discrimination he experienced, but it did confirm the details of the cross-burning story.

The speech was given at the United Nations, where Mr. Cook was accepting a lifetime achievement award from Auburn, his alma mater. He graduated from the university in 1982 with a degree in industrial engineering. He worked at IBM while earning a graduate business degree at Duke, then went to Intelligent Electronics and Compaq. In 1998, he was approached by Mr. Jobs when Apple was struggling, but as Mr. Cook recounted later in a 2010 commencement speech at Auburn, he saw it as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work for the creative genius.”

He rose to become executive vice president for worldwide sales and operations in 2002. In the period after he became C.E.O. in 2011, the working conditions in Chinese factories used by major tech companies, including Apple, came under increasing scrutiny. By April 2012, after suicides and accidents among Chinese factory workers, a quarter of a million people had signed a petition on Change.org urging Apple to improve working conditions in the factories. Apple since 2006 had already commissioned public reports on troubling practices inside many factories. In 2012, it also began publishing an annual list of its major suppliers, their locations, and what is made at the major ones, as well as reporting the working hours for more than a million factory employees.

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Obama, said Mr. Cook’s building of a production plant in Arizona and a Texas factory for making high-end Mac computers domestically was “a tremendous vote of confidence for an iconic company that previously shipped jobs overseas.” (A majority of manufacturing is still done outside the United States — for instance, an estimated 90 percent of the iPhone’s hundreds of parts are made abroad.) Ms. Jarrett also praised Apple’s donation of $100 million to equip schools with technology, including iPads and high-speed Internet

Apple also made a quick transition to using 100 percent renewable energy sources in its data centers, which makes it “the most aggressive of the companies that we evaluated in getting renewables online,” said Gary Cook, a senior policy analyst at Greenpeace.

Ryan Scott, the chief executive of Causecast, a nonprofit that helps companies create volunteer and donation programs, called Mr. Cook’s charitable initiatives a “great start.” But Mr. Scott added that its programs are “not as significant as what other companies are doing.” Apple’s ambitions “could be much higher,” he said, given its money and talent. By comparison, Microsoft says that, on average, it donates $2 million a day in software to nonprofits, and its employees have donated over $1 billion, inclusive of the corporate match, since 1983. In the last two years, Apple employees have donated $50 million, including the match.

Apple, too, has faced accusations from government officials on a number of troubling issues, including strategies to minimize its corporate taxes. (On the tax issue, Mr. Cook, told a Senate panel last year that Apple is the nation’s largest taxpayer and pays what it owes.) Last July, a federal judge ruled that Apple had illegally conspired with publishers to try to raise prices in the e-books market; Apple is appealing.

Jobs was one of a kind and cannot be equaled — but he HAS been replaced.Only history will show whether Cook’s Apple can succeed in the most…

Mr. Cook’s public emphasis on social issues nonetheless puts him “on the cutting edge of an emerging new mind-set in corporate leadership about values and value creation,” said James E. Austin, an emeritus professor at the Harvard Business School. But Kellie McElhaney, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, said she “gets nervous” when C.E.O.s talk about doing what is “right” without making a business case.

“Right to whom?” she asked.

That’s a view shared by some investors. At a shareholder meeting on Apple’s campus in February, one shareholder — who later described himself as having free-market values — asked Mr. Cook whether Apple should avoid embracing environmental causes that lacked a clear profit motive.

Mr. Cook did not respond by saying, as many executives would, that environmentalism is pragmatic and good for the bottom line. His reasoning was moral.

“We do things because they’re just and right,” he said. He has a slight Alabama drawl and a cool delivery, but there was underlying pique in his voice when he rejected the idea that everything must be measured by return on investment. He concluded by telling shareholders, “If you want me to make decisions that have a clear R.O.I., then you should get out of the stock, just to be plain and simple.”

He received rousing applause from the crowd, which included Al Gore, a member of Apple’s board. But the shareholder who asked the question, Justin Danhof, mourned that “I’ve never had a C.E.O. react that way.” In the following days, some stock analysts echoed the dismay, with one columnist, Robert Weinstein of The Street, wondering whether Mr. Cook “is shifting Apple’s focus from an aggressive luxury tech innovator into more of an increasingly philanthropic-focused company.”

Lennon vs. Ringo

Two weeks ago, Mr. Cook stood on stage at the company’s annual developer’s conference in San Francisco in front of 5,000 enthralled software developers. These are the makers of apps for the iPhone and other gadgets, and Mr. Cook promised them something he called “the biggest release since the launch of the App Store.”

To tell the developers about it, Mr. Cook said, “I’d like to invite my colleague, Superman, back to the stage.”

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Mr. Cook watched with Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, and Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters as Nate Mendel, also from the band, tried out one of the phones at a company event.CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images

Of course, for years, the only Apple superhero was Mr. Jobs. As Mr. Cook walked toward the darkness, stage left, there was a moment of mystery. Then out sprang Craig Federighi, head of Apple’s software engineering. He passed Mr. Cook and headed into the limelight to describe the new release. It was not a new consumer product, but a set of software tools called a developer’s kit, which would help developers build better apps.

If the rest of the world yawned, the developers stood, and whooped.

Afterward, devotees like Jordan Brown, 25, and three of his colleagues, roamed the convention center.

The four men, who are with a health care app company called Orca Health, had traveled from Salt Lake City and had spent the previous night on the sidewalk to get a good seat at the keynote address. They were scruffy-faced and exhausted, but adrenaline-fueled. Mr. Brown said he viewed Mr. Cook “as someone making sure everything is clicking, but he’s not inspiring.” Mr. Federighi, on the other hand, “resembles Steve,” he said.

Mr. Brown’s colleague Chad Zeluff, 27, who saw Mr. Jobs deliver the keynote in 2007, put it this way: “Jobs is to Lennon what Cook is to Ringo.”

A floor away, Mr. Cook was surrounded by young developers, eagerly snagging selfies as the chief executive mingled post-keynote. Ringo is still a Beatle.

The Utah developers generally expressed support for Mr. Cook. It would be enough, they said, if he put the pieces together. And they said Apple was doing a good job in software innovation, which can add new features to existing devices even if Apple doesn’t produce a new gadget.

They hadn’t heard much about Mr. Cook’s social activism. “I was barely aware of it,” said Gary Robinson, 35, the oldest of the Utah developers. “It’s good, and important.

“But it’s not what matters to me,” he added. “It’s not why I’m here.”

As the conversation continued, though, the developers expressed some cracks in their confidence. For instance, their company has been building apps exclusively for the iPhone for three years, but in the last two months it has also started building apps for Android systems.

They found one thing particularly jarring in the keynote: Apple did not hew to its tradition of pairing hardware and software. Specifically, Apple introduced a program called Health — which helps consumers and doctors monitor health status, like heart rate or glucose levels — but did not also introduce a piece of hardware to measure those results. That is something the new smartwatch is rumored to do.

“They just released the software,” said Mr. Zeluff, sounding surprised.

“It’s something Steve wouldn’t have done,” Mr. Brown said. It’s an impossible comparison. But it’s the one that Mr. Cook is being held to, at least until he makes enough magic of his own.

Absurd Creature of the Week: The 120-Foot-Long Jellyfish That’s Loving Global Warming

In the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane,” our hero is strolling along a beach when he comes across a man in his death throes, staggering and screaming before shouting his last words: “The lion’s mane!” His name is Fitzroy McPherson, and all over his back are thin red lines—which Sherlock notices because he’s a detective and all—as though the man “had been terribly flogged by a thin wire scourge.”

McPherson’s colleague, a mercurial fellow named Ian Murdoch, becomes a person of interest. He had, after all, once thrown McPherson’s dog through a plate glass window. But that suspicion falls to pieces when the dog-hurler himself staggers into Sherlock’s home in comparable agony, all marked up with the same red lines.

And then the answer hits the great detective. With a police inspector and a guy named Stackhurst he hurries to the beach and finds the culprit: “Cyanea!” he cries. “Cyanea! Behold the Lion’s Mane!” It’s a great jellyfish among the rocks. Shouts Sherlock: “It has done mischief enough. Its day is over! Help me, Stackhurst! Let us end the murderer forever.” And with that they push a boulder into the water, crushing the critter.

That’s a whole lot of animal cruelty in a single short story, and the severity of a sting from a lion’s mane jellyfish, known scientifically as Cyanea capillata, is highly exaggerated here. But this critter is actually far more remarkable than its fanciful villainization. What Sherlock failed to mention is that this is the world’s largest jellyfish, with a bell that reaches a staggering 8 feet wide and tentacles that grow to 120 feet long, far longer than a blue whale. And this monster is really, reallyloving the whole global warming thing, conquering more and more of Earth’s oceans in massive blooms. So please, if you will, welcome our new giant gelatinous overlords.

It’s those seemingly endless tentacles, hundreds and hundreds of them, that make this incredible growth possible, according to Lisa-Ann Gershwin, a marine biologist with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. “They’ve got all of these fishing lures out there at the same time,” she said. “Every single tentacle is out there to catch something. They can find so much food simply by multitasking, really.”

Lion’s manes will take just about anything, from the tiniest zooplankton—little critters and fish larvae and such that drift in the open ocean—to smaller jelly species and even their own kind. Their mighty weapons are stinging cells known as nematocysts, which on contact fire poisonous barbs into the prey (think Scorpion from Mortal Kombat, only nematocysts didn’t used to get me in trouble for spending so much money in arcades).

Though nowhere near as powerful of the notoriously deadly box jellyfish, the sting of the lion’s mane is more than enough to incapacitate small critters—and dish out searing pain to humans. (Gershwin herself once had a lion’s mane sting her foot, which “went all red and puffy” and felt like it was being stabbed with “thousands of needles.”) Thoroughly ensnared by the tentacle’s innumerable spines and none too healthy on account of the poison, the prey is reeled in. The lion’s mane can do this a single tentacle at a time, contracting the muscles in each until the prey reaches its curtain-like “oral arms,” folds of tissue in its bell.

From here the prey passes into the jelly’s mouth, which is really just a hole in its body that also functions as its anus, and finally moves into the stomach. “And then they have a circulatory system of canals where the nutrients from the stomach are just dispersed out to the rest of the body through this network,” said Gershwin. “It’s really, really simple, but it works really well. I mean, they’ve been doing exactly that for 600 million years, and it works so well they haven’t needed to change it.”

That’s quite an evolutionary sweet spot. Such a sweet spot, in fact, that the lion’s mane never bothered to evolve true eyes. Instead, these jellies have extremely rudimentary eyespots and can do nothing more than detect light and dark—no shapes and certainly no colors (interestingly, box jellyfish have eyes more like our own, complete with lenses and such, presumably so they can observe the terror they strike in humans). And a brain? Not really necessary, as it turns out. They do have nerve bundles that essentially automate all of their processes, but these are nothing like a brain as we would recognize it.

“A brain is kinda overrated, really,” said Gershwin. “We find it kind of entertaining, and a little bit important, but they do all the stuff they need to do without a brain. But so do venus fly traps. Lots of things can actually do kind of sophisticated behaviors without a brain.”

Reproduction for the lion’s mane, though, is quite sophisticated. Males release sperm threads into the water, and females hoover them up with their mouth-anus thing, a totally unscientific term that I just made up. Her eggs are fertilized internally, and when they hatch, the larvae roam around a bit inside her, then drift off to settle on the seafloor.

But these larvae don’t turn right into what we would identify as jellies, in what is known as the medusa stage, named after the mythical lady with snakes for hair. Instead, they become little white tubes with frilly ends called polyps, which wait until conditions are just right to actually clone themselves hundreds of times over, releasing baby jellies into the water column. Though scientists have yet to do genetic testing on this, Gershwin suspects that huge blooms of lion’s mane jellies could in fact all be clones from a single tiny polyp. It’s a bit like Attack of the Clones, only interesting.

Sting Operation

And boy have they been blooming. Populations of jellyfish like the lion’s mane seem to be exploding in the world’s oceans—because, bluntly put, we’ve goofed. Global warming, overfishing, pollution, basically anything terrible we’ve done to the seas have been an absolute boon to jellyfish, according to Gershwin. Data on jellyfish populations is scarce, so nothing is yet definitive, but as Gershwin puts it, “we now find ourselves in the unexpected position of knowing that we have serious problems with stings to tourists and cloggings of power plants and salmon kills and whatnot, but really having little idea about the speed and trajectory in terms of long-term view.”

As humans, it’s clear we need to tackle the direness that is global warming, but the lion’s mane and its jelly comrades would really prefer that we didn’t. Not only do jellies grow faster in warmer waters, temperature is a pivotal factor in their reproduction. In some species, polyps will only develop as days grow longer in summer, but others instead wait until the water climbs to a certain temperature. Thus ever-hotter oceans in these times of global warming could make for more blooms.

In addition, global warming is monkeying with oxygen concentration in our seas, which is also great news for jellies. “Colder water holds more dissolved oxygen than warmer water,” said Gershwin. “So even a really slight warming—a degree, a half a degree, a quarter of a degree—we may not feel it, but it changes the amount of oxygen that the water can hold.”

And jellyfish are really good at living in oxygen-deprived water. Pretty much everything else in the sea? Not so much. “High-rate breathers,” such as beefy fish that need lots of oxygen to power their muscles, die off when jellyfish lazily cruise around, not the slightest bit fazed.

Then there’s the inflow of our sewage and fertilizers, nutrients that microscopic plants calledphytoplankton go ga-ga for. Their populations explode, and are then eaten by their animal counterparts, zooplankton, which are in turn eaten by jellies. But when blooming phytoplankton die and decompose, the bacteria that feed on them suck still more oxygen out of the water.

Add all of this to the fact that we’re overfishing the hell out of our oceans—eliminating not just jellyfish predators but also their competition—and we have a gelatinous, stingy mess on our hands. “It’s probably really tempting to think about jellyfish as these evil beings, we should extinct them because they’re bad,” said Gershwin. “But what they’re doing, whether it’s stinging us or eating all of the fish eggs and larvae or clogging up power plants or whatever, they’re just responding to what we’re doing.”

So we just may have unwittingly assembled an ever-growing army of jellies, led by the outsized lion’s manes, for all-out assault. And this time there won’t be a boulder-wielding Sherlock Holmes to come to the rescue. Which is just as well if his associates insist on throwing dogs through windows.

Browse the full Absurd Creature of the Week archive here. Have an animal you want me to write about? Email matthew_simon@wired.com or ping me on Twitter at @mrMattSimon.

On the ground with the London taxi drivers protesting Uber

“My light’s on. I’m looking for a fare. When the traffic moves, I’ll move.”

Paul’s black cab was parked lengthways across Northumberland Avenue, just off Trafalgar Square in central London. Just as cab drivers blocked the roads in Paris, Berlin, and Madrid, drivers of London’s historic black cabs brought the city’s streets to a standstill as a protest against car-sharing apps like Uberand Hailo.

 

 

“How would I get arrested?” said Paul, the 35-year veteran cab driver, after a talk with the police. “I don’t think they will.”

An estimaged 5,000 cabs and motorcycle couriers snared up the city of Westminster. Moving as slowly as possible, and adamant that driving on a sunny afternoon wasn’t a criminal offense, cabbies showed their contempt for London’s transport authority with signs mocking Transport for London (TFL) for failing to enforce a law that regulates who can pick up passengers and charge using a meter in the U.K. capital.

The agency is, according to the signs, “Totally Failing London.” Uber is “Under Boris” Johnson, the mayor of London who supports big business, “Exempt From Regulations.”

Later this year, England’s High Court will decide if the smartphone app that Uber drivers use to calculate fares is essentially a taxi meter, which could send the multibillion-dollar firm back to the drawing board—in London at least.

“It calculates the time and distance. That’s a meter to me,” said Glen Chapman, a cabbie from south London.

Drivers also poured scorn on Hailo, another booking app for black cabs, after the company’s “betrayal,” when it opened the app to minicabs.

Chapman is one of the few London cabbies to still use Hailo. He had just heard about UberTAXI, the firm’s new service for black cab drivers, which was launched on the same day as the protest.

“How much are they charging—5 percent? Yeah, I’ll probably use them.”

But in the meantime, Chapman thinks Uber is gaming the system. “What this protest is about is enforcing the law. If you have a law it has to be enforced.”

“Look at this cab. It’s got to have strenuous tests. I’ve got to buy this cab, have all these meters, the insurance is a lot of money. And yet you can go and get a Prius and do the same job now. You don’t need to have any knowledge of London. Either enforce the law or scrap it all together, have a free for all.”

The regulations giving black-cab drivers special use of meters is a privilege that many cabbies, however, are less willing to give up or share with their big American rival.

“It’s not a monopoly,” Paul insisted as the traffic around Trafalgar Square was being diverted by police. “We’re governed by transport regulations. We have a meter set by the government. If people want to get in a minicab and be charged whatever firms want to charge, that’s up to them.”

“We’ve done the Knowledge,” Paul referred to the notorious test that black cab drivers have to pass before they can get a licence.

“Name me a road in London and I’ll tell you where it is. Have you ever used GPS? Has it ever taken you the wrong way down a one-way street? That’s why. We don’t need that.”

When the Telegraph tested black cabs against Uber’s minicabs this week, it found black cabs to be quicker. Unlike the Uber drivers, they weren’t baffled by a dodgy GPS system. The fare on the meter was just under a third more for a trip across London, although cabbies say their meters are more transparent than Uber’s prices, which have been criticized for surging dramatically during busy times.

But John Kearns, a 53-year-old who happened to be passing through London, made it known that the knowledge isn’t everything nowadays, which is why he didn’t complete his training as a cabbie. “I could see these changes coming,” he said. “These changes are here to stay.”

At the stroke of 3pm, the cabbies jamming the Mall leading to Buckingham palace got back in their cabs, started their engines and began to disperse; their hour of allocated protest time was over, and as one cabbie said, “We’re not going to start a riot.”

At the end of this summer’s day in London, it may have been Uber, the firm backed by Google and Goldman Sachs, that had its day in the sun. “Today we’re seeing an 850 percent increase in sign-ups compared to last Wednesday,” Jo Bertram, the firm’s U.K. and Ireland general manager, said.

After claiming that London was “voting with its fingers” by installing the app after seeing the protests, Bertram accused the London Taxi Drivers Association, which organized the protests, of “being stuck in the dark ages” and “holding London to ransom.”

With Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) Union officials shouting loudest above the din of car horns, comparing the plight of cabbies to those of dockers and miners, London’s drivers feared their trade was becoming a museum piece.

“It will be sad to see the old black taxi as an icon disappear,” said John Kearns, warning cabbies blocking Trafalgar Square not to scorn technology. “In the same vein, you could use the old telephone boxes. Most of the old red telephone boxes got shipped abroad. But tourists still come over and like to go in them.”

For London’s cabbies, despite a day of gridlock, the traffic still appears to be moving around them.

All photos via Lewis Parker

Iraq’s crisis: Who’s involved and what can they do about it? (+video)

The specter of large-scale sectarian fighting that was put in motion by the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad within days of the US being kicked out of the country in 2011 is finally upon Iraq.

As Wayne White writes, the surprise is not that Iraq is once again coming apart at the seams, but that it took so long. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, from the Shiite Islamist Dawa Party, has spent much of the past year purging Sunni Arabs from the government’s ranks; pursuing a politically motivated terrorism prosecution of the country’s most senior Sunni Arab politician; and breakingup peaceful Sunni Arab protest encampments by force.

Though the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a jihadi group that until recently was focused on fighting in Syria’s civil war, has been credited with leading the assault, reports from the ground make it clear that other disaffected Iraqi Sunnis – former Baathists, other Islamist militias – participated in the fight. In Mosul, which fell Tuesday, the Iraqi Army was widely disliked andseen as occupiers from the Shiite south. Sunni insurgents are now pushing south.

Recommended: Sunni and Shiite Islam: Do you know the difference? Take our quiz.

ISIS has opened prisons, and residents of Mosul and towns like Tikrit have flocked to the fight against the central government. With the Iraqi military in disarray and Kurdish forces, probably the most capable in Iraq, focused on defending their territory and expanding it to oil-rich Kirkuk, it’s anyone’s guess how far the uprising will advance.

Starting in 2006, the US convinced Sunni-Arab tribes to fight jihadis in exchange for promises of money and jobs in the government. This Sahwa, or “Awakening,” fell apart after the US left: The Maliki government abandoned and harassed them. A recent ISIS propaganda video shows militants forcing a Sahwa commander and his son to dig their own graves. The chances of Maliki convincing the Sunni tribes to stick their necks out for him anytime soon are slim. More likely is that ISIS alienates Iraqi Sunnis who don’t share its harsh view of Islam, as its forerunner Al Qaeda in Iraq did in the middle of the last decade.

What are the options and likely responses of the key players, near and far, in the Iraqi crisis?

Iran and Hezbollah

In the 1980s, Iran waged a bloody war with Iraq that left an implacable enemy and rival in the form of Saddam Hussein on its doorstep until he was removed by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Now, almost 35 years on, it has a friendly government led by Shiite-Islamists in Baghdad. It has no desire to see a reassertion of Sunni Arab power in Iraq.

Persistent reports from Iraq suggest that members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are already in Baghdad advising Iraqi government troops. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani indicated on state television today that his country is ready to get into the thick of the fight.

“This is an extremist, terrorist group that is acting savagely,” Rouhani said of ISIS, adding that Iran would not “tolerate this violence and terror” in its neighbor. “For our part, as the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran we will combat violence, extremism and terrorism in the region and the world,” he said.

Then there’s Lebanese Shiite army Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran and has been fighting on the side of the Syrian government against ISIS and other rebels. Could it move into Iraq and help shore up Maliki? This would be a higher priority for Iran than defending Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But Hezbollah is tied up in Syria.

Moreover, ISIS and its allies have captured an array of US-supplied weapons from Iraqi forces, including tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery. Pictures have started to circulate of some of these weapons being moved into Syria, where ISIS has been battling other rebel groups for control of the oil-rich province of Deir Ezzor. If they can win there, and consolidate their position in Iraq’s Niniveh Province (of which Mosul is the capital), their ability to threaten Assad will grow.

The US

The United States spent roughly $2 trillion on the war in Iraq, and trained and equipped what US politicians and officers repeatedly said was a capable and professional army. That claim has been shown in recent days to have been, at best, overly optimistic. The US accelerated the delivery of helicopters and missiles to Baghdad earlier this year, but that aid has done little good.

In 2011, Maliki was glad to see the back of the US, as were his allies in Tehran. Now he seems to be turning to the US as a potential savior. The New York Times reports that Maliki asked the US to conduct airstrikes on insurgents last month but was rebuffed. Why? The Obama administration worried that any military support would be useless without a change in political course from Maliki, whose actions have consistently goaded the country’s Sunni Arab minority closer to insurrection.

Could the US help now? It’s certainly within American military abilities. But holding territory requires boots on the ground, and nobody is talking about US ground forces going in. Iraq’s military does not seem sufficiently organized for a counter-offensive at this point, with battles raging in Baiji, an oil-refining town north of Baghdad, and on the outskirts of the Shiite shrine city of Samarra. For now, Iraq’s security forces seem intent on holding what they still have, not retaking what they lost.

The Kurds

Kurdish forces are now in control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which they’d like to annex into their autonomous territory, and are also providing aid and shelter to refugees fleeing Mosul, a short distance from the area of Kurdish control. Kurdish leaders has been locked into a dispute with Baghdad for years over control of oil revenues in northern Iraq, and will likely demand concessions from Maliki in return for helping him to regain Mosul.

Those are concessions that Maliki is unlikely to make at the moment, with the next government still to be formed. And the Kurds, in the process of getting what they want, may be happy to see Baghdad weakened.

The Iraqi government and allies

Maliki has called for arming of civilians to fight ISIS – which probably means Shiite militias. The Iraqi parliament failed to reach a quorum for a planned vote on a state of emergency that would give Maliki almost unchecked power. Given that the government has routinely jailed and tortured political opponents with the powers it already has, alarm bells should be ringing. More power for Maliki could well mean more such abuses, and more fuel for the Sunni Arab uprising.

Other Shiite politicians and militia leaders appear to be in the process of mobilizing followers. In Baghdad’s sprawling Shiite Sadr City neighborhood, named after Muqtada al-Sadr’s father, residents have been stockpiling weapons and getting organized. Sadr, a fiery cleric whose Mahdi Army repeatedly confronted the US and engaged in attrocities against Sunni Arab insurgents and civilians during the occupation of Iraq, called yesterday for the creation of what he called “peace units” to defend Muslim and Christian shrines in the country.

The fear is that should Shiite militias, either aligned with Sadr or other groups, enter the fighting, they would engage in the kind of sectarian reprisal killings that drove Iraq’s conflict in 2006 and 2007, when tens of thousands were killed. But with each ISIS success, this scenario looks more likely.

Iraq’s government is also at the moment technically a lame duck. A bloc of Shiite parties behind Maliki won the most seats in parliamentary elections last April, but coalition building is needed before a government can be formed. When results were announced last month, Maliki seemed a shoo-in to retain the top spot.

But now, all bets are off in Iraq.

The hidden world under the sea: Photographers capture beautiful images of Great Whites, wrecked planes and huge clouds of fish

Mr Blake also picked up a silver for his atmospheric shot of Boo Windows, a natural phenomenon in Misool, Indonesia, and three runner up prizes, including one of a sunken jet plane at Capernwray Quay, Lancashire.

British snapper Leena Roy also got a gold medal for a spooky natural light shot of the ladder on the US submarine rescue vessel Kittiwake in Grand Cayman. The UK’s Elaine White got a silver for her image of the vessel’s stern.

Overall winner was Christian Vizl who became the first photographer to win gold, silver and bronze in a single category for his collection of stunning photographs

British photographer Nick Blake won gold for his amazing shot of a curious sea.

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American Jeri Curley won a bronze medal for her close focused and wide angled photograph

The optical illusion of a ‘strong beauty’ holding up a rock won a gold medal for Slovakian photographer Martin Ferak while the US’s Greg Zagaglia took silver for a close up of a Great White’s teeth. Both pictures were captured off the coast of Mexico.

Other winners included male elephant seals fighting for dominance on the Pacific coast, lillies under palm trees in Guam and the Laguna Beach shallows in the Pacific.

Website spokesman Benny Sutton said: ‘UK photographer Nick Blake becomes a Grand Master by building on his success in previous years with five placings including a Gold in temperate waters category and a silver in the “wide angle close focus”.

‘The latter was a tropical waters shot but we know Nick best for his temperate waters work shot whilst diving around the UK. His usual environment is therefore a difficult one to work in, yet he always delivers the goods’

Martin Ferak’s optical illusion photograph won a gold prize in the underwater photography competition.

Leena Roy’s creepy photograph of a ladder inside a US submarine rescue vessel Kittiwake in Grand Cayman

Christian Vizl submitted this unique photograph to the competition

But overall winner was Mexico’s Christian Vizl who became the first photographer to win gold, silver and bronze in a single category for his collection of stunning freshwater photographs.

Mr Sutton said: ‘This year’s World Champion and breakout star is without doubt Mexican underwater photographer Christian Vizl who has demonstrated consistently high quality over such a relatively short period of time.

‘He is the only underwater photographer in our history to take Gold, Silver and Bronze in one year.

‘He did this with three very different model shots that he entered in the Freshwater category.

‘These shots were so good they would have got medals in the Divers or Wide Angle categories. For good measure he also won a gold medal in the sharks category and a bronze in the Wide angle category.

Kip Nead won a silver medal for his striking above water action shot

Another of Christian Vizl’s award winning photographs, this time featuring a shark in his natural habitat.

‘He has demonstrated such a wide range of skills and mastery of a broad spectrum of subjects he stood out head and shoulders.

‘Christian describes himself as a photographer and artist, which is confirmed by his strong graphic sense exhibited in his entries.’

Mr Sutton added: ‘The UnderwaterPhotography.com photo contest is the longest running and most prestigious online, or off. If you want to make a name for yourself it is the place to do it.

‘One of our medals is the reward for all the hard work underwater photographers put in chasing those great shots in far flung destinations.

‘It is the industry’s most coveted prize because it says you succeeded in the most competitive environment there is, against the top talent of the moment.’

 

The Physics of Keeping Cool

Refrigeration: the process of decreasing the temperature of some thing (my definition). Air conditioning (AC) can be a form of refrigeration.

There are several ways to reduce the temperature of things – like a person or a beer. The history and physics of cooling things can be quite interesting. I’m not a historian, so I am only going to speculate on the timeline of events in the life of refrigeration. However, I feel comfortable explaining the physics in each method.

Humans Discover Sweat

Humans just can’t help it. Sometimes they get hot. But alas! Humans have a built in cooling systems. It’s called sweat. In order to understand how it works, maybe we should first look at temperature. You can measure the temperature in Celsius (°C) or Fahrenheit (°F), but what are you actually measuring?

If I were to give a simple definition of temperature, I would say that it is a measure of the average motion energy of the particles that make up that object. That’s not a perfect definition, but I think it will be fine for now. This means that when you cool something, you decrease the average motion energy (kinetic energy) of its particles.

How does sweat cool you off? It works through the evaporation of water. Let me explain. Suppose we have some water at room temperature (about 23°C). This means that the water molecules in this group of water has an average kinetic energy of some value (it doesn’t matter how much). But not all water molecules are the same. Instead there is a distribution of kinetic energies. Some molecules are moving quite slow and some are moving very fast. It’s possible that these very fast (and few) molecules can escape the liquid water and become gas water (we call it water vapor). What’s left is a water but now with a lower average kinetic energy since the highest KE molecules just left. Here is an older much more detailed post about evaporation.

If this water is a bead of sweat on the skin of a human, the water can be colder than the skin and cool it off through conduction (which I will talk about next).

This sweaty boy is hot and sweaty after soccer practice. Image: Rhett Allain

Oh, important thing to notice. If your body sweat is working correctly, all of this water-sweat your body produces will evaporate and you will be dry (but still stinky). In very humid regions, the sweat-water doesn’t completely evaporate and you are still stinky.

Cooling by evaporation isn’t just for living things. You can actually use something like this to cool off something in your house. Here is a video I made showing this effect with a wet cloth and water bottle. Oh, you can even use hot water on the wet cloth and it will still cool down the water bottle (or beer).

Really, you should try that experiment at home. It’s awesome.

Humans Learn to Store Ice

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that in the winter, there is ice on the lakes but not in the summer (unless you are in that movie my kids love – Frozen). What if we just take that ice and store it somewhere so it doesn’t melt so fast? Then, in the summer we can bring out out to make lemonade?

That’s pretty much exactly what happened.

Water is something else you can get cold, but it’s not as good as beer.Image: Rhett Allain

How does ice cool things down? This is called heat conduction. The basic idea is that when two objects are in contact, there will be a transfer of energy from the hotter object to the cooler object until the two reach the same temperature. This leads me to my favorite definition of temperature.

TEMPERATURE IS THE QUANTITY THAT IS THE SAME FOR TWO OBJECTS IN CONTACT FOR A LONG TIME.

That definition seems so obscure, but it’s actually a fine way to put it.

Back to ice. Ice doesn’t just cool by contact. Well, it does until it reaches it’s melting point at 0°C (32°F). In order for the water to make a phase transition from solid to liquid, it requires even more energy. Where does this energy come from? Yup. It comes from the surroundings.

Humans Create the Kegerator

What exactly is a kegerator? This is JUST like a refrigerator except you put a keg of beer in there. Oh, and you add a tap on the top or door so you can get cold beer without even opening the fridge door. Awesome, isn’t it? You might think I’m kidding about the kegerator, but I’m not. Keeping drinks (and beer) cold was a consideration for both cooling by ice and refrigerators.

But how does a refrigerator work? It’s all about compressing a gas and letting it turn into a liquid and then evaporate back into a gas. That might seem crazy, but here a demo you can do on your own to get an idea of how this would cool. All you need is a rubber band.

Take the rubber band and touch it to your lips to get a feeling of the temperature of the band (lips are more sensitive than your fingers). Now stretch the rubber band as far as you can without breaking it and touch it to your lips again (quickly). You should be able to feel the rubber band is now hotter than it was. Next, just hold it in a stretched position for a short time so that it can cool off to room temperature. Finally, let the rubber band compress back to its original size and feel it again. Guess what? It’s cooler than room temperature. Here’s the same thing in a video.

Your AC and refrigerator don’t use rubber bands. Instead, there is a gas (called a refrigerant). This gas is compressed and gets hot in the process. If you have ever pumped up a bike tire, you might have noticed that the tire gets hot – same idea here. Since this hot compressed gas is hotter than the surrounding air, it transfers (through conduction) energy to the air and decreases it’s temperature. This also causes the gas to condense into a liquid.

The next step is to take this liquid and allow it to expand into a gas. This phase transition and expansion into a gas takes energy. Of course the energy comes from the surroundings. This is the cooling part of the AC or refrigerator. The gas then goes back into the compressor and the cycle continues. Yes, I missed some details but that’s the basic idea.

The inside of a freezer can get quite cold. Image: Rhett Allain

I didn’t say anything about geothermal cooling. This basically just cooling by conduction expect that you want to make thermal contact with things underground. At some times, the ground temperature is colder than the air temperature and can be used to cool things off. Yes, there are also some other cooling methods. Maybe in the future we will have magnetic based refrigerators.

One final thought: Why is it so much easier to increase the temperature of something than it is to decrease the temperature?  Maybe this will be a future blog post.