You know MREs? The army's dreaded, tasteless "meals ready to eat"? It seems the army is now trying to develop a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich MRE.

But, you ask, isn't a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich already ready to eat? Sure, but according to Defense Department food expert Jerry Darsch, a military MRE has to be edible even after enduring some extremely messed up conditions:

Darsch said his sandwiches are designed to be as resilient as the troops they feed. "This bad boy will last a minimum of three years at 80 degrees, six months at 100 degrees. They will travel to the swampiest swamp, the highest mountain, the most arid desert."

Still, soldiers aren't likely to take a bite until 2006 because more research is needed -- principally, the researchers confessed, on PB&J, the sandwich most demanded by troops in focus groups. Other sandwiches in the works include pizza-flavored and ham and cheese.

Food science takes time, Darsch said -- "I don't even want to tell you how long it took to develop the McNugget."

Certainly not after reading the real-life restaurant horror stories recounted in this issue of the Philadelphia Weekly.

I am going to throw up right now.

Googlism.com is a brilliant new wacky app built on top of Google's search engine. Punch in your name, and it generates a list of things Google "knows" about you.

Here's what you get, in part, for "Clive":

clive is reluctantly happy clive is a person clive is better looking and at least your office doesnt smell clive is so much better than drew clive is reluctantly happy michael aylwin sunday march 24 clive is better looking and at least your office doesnt smell like gas clive is currently developing 1 clive is not sure which one he will do first clive is currently working on the second book of the abarat quartet clive is filming the oliver stone drama beyond borders in which he will dr clive is a marmite tester clive is sensitive to the flow of various forms of energy; he can sense radio waves clive is looking for a suitable venue for a major one clive is now taking up a two year research readership funded by the british academy to complete his trilogy of palaeolithic titles clive is currently employed in the department of geography as a pdra clive is incredible to work with clive is rumoured to be joining the cast of young & the restless as a mystery man whom clive is a graduate of trinity college clive is blurry

"This paper is, to the best of our knowledge, the first consideration of the complexity of playing Tetris."

Thus begins a genuinely excellent piece of academic research: Official proof that Tetris is "NP-complete". That's geekspeak for saying there is no way to develop an algorithm to "solve" Tetris, to play it infinitely without losing. You could play it forever just flying by the seat of your pants, but there's no way to program a system to do this. The search for NP-complete problems is, actually, a very big deal in computational science, which is what makes this paper rock so hard.

That, and the fact that scientists developed all these truly excellent terms to describe problematic Tetris brick layouts -- like "Unfillable Buckets", "Unapproachable Buckets", "Spurned Notches", and "Balconied Buckets".

A good discussion of this is currently ongoing at Plastic, from whence I got this item. One poster pointed to other bits of Tetris science, including a friend who put an experimental version of Tetris online -- it just throws the same brick at you, one after another, to see how long you can survive.

Even cooler Tetris science: You know how, if you play it for hours and hours, you can see the bricks falling when you close your eyes at night in bed? (That nearly drove me insane in college.) Anyway, some doctors did an experiment where they had amnesiacs play Tetris. Later, the amnesiacs reported dreams about falling Tetris bricks -- even though they could not conciously remember ever having played the game. (More proof, apparently, that memory happens in unpredictable parts of our brains.)

I really had no idea bra engineering was so complex.

But as this piece in the New York Times -- devoted to recent bra-technology patents -- points out:

Bodies differ vastly. Breasts can be pear-shaped, apple-shaped or melon-shaped. They can be asymmetrical. They can be spaced close together or far apart. And breast tissue can range from as little as 8 ounces in one woman to as much as 10 pounds in another.

And so a bra design can pose engineering challenges as formidable as those encountered in building a bridge or a skyscraper. This is why the bra continues to benefit from small, incremental improvements, Professor Farrell-Beck said.

Last week, for example, S & S Industries, a Bronx company, received United States patent 6,468,130 for a new type of underwire — one that is supposed not to poke through fabric, even under stress from laundering. S & S, which says it is the largest supplier of underwire for the brassiere industry, has solved that problem by designing a plastic tip for the ends of the underwire that sits on a little spring, according to Ajit Thakur, a vice president at the company who is a co-inventor of the tip, along with Joseph Horta.

"Poke-through has been a problem forever," Mr. Thakur said. "Everyone has been trying to solve this. We may have found the holy grail."

This guy at MIT has created a combination X/OR and AND gate -- using water. This guy rules.

And dig this:

In fact, Fluidics is a very important field of study that is widely used in aerospace or mission-critical applications, where eletcronic control devices don't offer the reliability or cannot support the environment. Also, military technologies use Fluidics in order to prevent malfunction in a nuclear war, when eletric devices cease to work.

(This item comes courtesy the folks at Slashdot, and a great discussion is ongoing. "Should have great floating point performance." Geek humor.)

This site is freaking me out big-time. The photographer Eric Myer has created an amazing Exquisite Corpse application -- you mix and match parts of different people's faces together, to create new faces. Really just super-weird and compelling.

(This comes to you via the magic of Shift.com's fine online Filter.)

Here's what I want to know. What crack were they smoking over at the P.R. department of the London police, when they decided to plaster the city with these posters?

Given that London has installed 1.5 million public-surveillance cameras -- one for every 5.3 residents of the city -- I suppose the police are beginning to get paranoid about their Big Brother image. They should be, particularly because, what do you know, these cameras aren't even preventing crime. As the United Press recently noted, "murder is going on at a record pace," and "street robbery, the very crime that CCTV is supposed to be best at deterring, will reach 50,000 this year." Even more hilariously, studies have shown that camera operators tend to enjoy focussing in nice and close on women in tight clothing: One in ten women were scrutinized by male operators for "entirely voyeuristic reasons" that had nothing to do with law enforcement. Nice stuff.

Mind you, this hasn't stopped the London police from pushing ahead with even more demented surveillance devices -- including "Cromatica" software that will attempt to predict when a crime is about to take place, by analyzing the activity on screen.

But who in god's name thought this "Watchful Eyes" poster would make the public feel better? As Corey Doctorow at boing boing wrote about them, "It's like the cover of an old Ace Double paperback about watchful, tyrannical aliens."

The new Fox sci-fi show Firefly is apparently fairly embattled. Though it rocks the house with furious vengeance, it was released on the Friday night "death slot", and apparently Fox execs are already gunning for its dismissal. The show is a Western-style space soap-opera with very neat and subtle philosophical underpinnings; Fox, I'm afraid, is more enamored of its car-tastic chix-and-drag-racing fare like Fast Lane.

Help stop the madness by signing the petition to keep Firely on the air! Then, why not download a Fox-approved skin of your favorite Firefly cast member for Unreal, and show up after tonight's episode and have some fun killing other fans in a deathmatch?

Like I said in that post a while ago about Cybracero, telepresence work is already here -- with foreign workers effectively "existing" on national soil. When you call customer-service for American Express or General Electric, chances are you're talking to somebody in Mumbai, India. And, according to this lovely story at Wired online, those workers are told to pretend they're calling from a U.S. city. For the customer, anyway, the illusion is entirely of work being done on U.S. soil -- since part of service work takes place, as it were, in the the mind of the customer.

The call-center companies are so keen to appear American that they've begun using Ally McBeal episodes and Sylvester Stallone movies to instruct their Indian employees:

Their training includes a smattering of U.S. history and geography, along with speech therapy so that they will sound "American." Some call centers are adorned with American flags to give a cultural feel to the place.

Along the way, these employees are exposed to a way of life that can come into direct conflict with their conservative values and, sometimes, their sanity.

Partho Banerjee, a 24-year-old employee at a call center in Mumbai for TransWorks, a computer outsourcing company, blushes when he recalls a sales pitch that he made to a 45-year-old American woman.

"She asked me to marry her," he said.

On another occasion, Partho let his accent slip and had to confess after being pointedly questioned that he was, in fact, an Indian sitting next to a telephone in Mumbai.

"The man told me, 'You guys blew up the WTC,'" he said. "I tried to explain India had nothing to do with it, but he just banged the phone down."

It's a grand old flag.

I love the fact that in the latest edition of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game, the hot new tweak is the addition of a new ability ... the "Spinal Transfer".

The main gameplay change is the addition of spine transfers. This lets you reorient your skater in midair so that you can go up one side of a quarterpipe and down the other. It also works for getting out of pools and halfpipes, getting up onto high ledges, and, much like the bail button in Aggressive Inline, saving yourself from wrecking when you accidentally fly off the side of a ramp.

No wonder most parents haven't got the vaguest clue what the hell their teenage kids are talking about.

Apparently, a bunch of libertarian geeks are now so angry at the U.S. government -- mostly over gun-control and anti-marijuana laws -- that they've decided to secede. They've started the Free State Project, where they're trying to get 20,000 people to agree to move to a state in the U.S., then use their voting-bloc power to overtake the state government and leave the U.S. There's a great discussion of this going on over at Slashdot (which is where I found the item), and interestingly, given Slashdot's geekoid audience, only about 20% are in favor of the scheme.

What's really weird is not how far-out this idea is, but how common it is. Poke around online a bit, and you'll soon realize that just about every libertarian headcase on the planet has, at some point, tried to form a sovereign state. Remember those guys who founded Sealand on an abandoned oil rig off the coast of Britain, planning to turn it into a superencrypted shelter for the rich? Or how about that Eric Klien dude who kept on threatening to build a floating ship-island called Oceania, where the rich could escape taxes? (That failed, so he's working on a space station called The Lifeboat Foundation, now.)

But the granddaddy of all these, apparently, is the Hutt River Province in Australia. It was founded in 1970 by a farmer named Leonard Casley, after the Australian government slapped him with a wheat quota that would have starved him. So he seceded, temporarily declared war on Australia, "accepted" their surrender, and ever since has run his province -- with a living population of 150, and another 13,000 worldwide who've become official citizens of the 75-square-mile "country." (You can apply for citizenship yourself by emailing Hutt River here.)

Australia has never recognized Hutt River, but that hasn't stopped Casley from officially proclaiming himself "Prince Leonard" and minting a crapload of stamps; apparently, Hutt River stamps comprise the bulk of the revenues for the, ah, nation. According to at least one academic, Hutt River might actually quality for state status under U.N. rules. And dig the totally berserk outfits the founders use on ceremonial occasions.

Mind you, when you consider what a hack job the establishment of the United States was in the first place, this doesn't seem quite as loony as it might, I suppose.

iRobot has finally released its new vacuum-cleaning droid -- the Roomba. I could not imagine a finer addition to my home. Dig: Not only does it clean your room, but it cleans it using an algorithm originally developed to sweep minefields.

That is possibly the most demented "technology transfer" from the military I've ever heard of in my life. I can just imagine the gorgeous Republican logic the Roomba could provoke. "Hell, men, we need to pay for secret black-ops counterinsurgency forces in North Korea, so that they'll lay tons of mines all over the place, so that we'll have to develop minesweeping technology for humanitarian reasons, so that we can have eventually port it over to vacuuming robots."

Heh. Whatever. I am just totally going to get one of these things. I mean, I've owned a very nice regular Hoover since 1998, and how many times have I vacuumed my apartment? Like, maybe seven times? So the idea of a little robot scurrying around doing my vacuuming and freaking the shit out of my cats is perfect.

I love living in the future.

(This piece comes courtesy of Plastic, where there is a nice little discussion going on about it as we speak. "Not only does it clean carpets, but it can also beat your ass at chess.")

According to a story in Business 2.0, the Half-Life game mod Counterstrike has 1.7 million players, who collectively spend 2.4 billion minutes playing it each month. In comparison, Friends generates 2.9 billion viewer minutes each month.

Location-based tech takes another big leap forward: The folks at Ekahau have released software that lets Wifi networks triangulate your location down to one-meter precision. As they told Cnet:

Petri Virsunen, Ekahau's senior strategic business development director, outlined several ways the location-based software can be used. For example, in a supermarket shoppers could use network-connected baskets which notify them of aisles with special offers, or shop assistants and warehouse staff could be shown the nearest person able to carry out a task.

(This item comes to you via the fine folks of slashdot.)

Dig this -- some skull-kings at Cornell have created a tiny battery that could run for 50 years off a small piece of Nickel-63.

The decaying Nickel-63 shoots a stream of electrons up at a strip of copper, giving it a negative charge. After a while, the negative charge is so strong the copper strip bends downwards to touch the Nickel-63 -- discharging a tiny current. The copper strip bends back upwards again, and the whole process repeats itself. The result? A battery that could be made as small as one cubic millimeter, perfect for powering tiny robots. Tiny robots, people!!

Check out the way-kewl comic-strip illustrating the process here.

The phrase "trip hop" appears twice, in two separate stories, on a single page of today's New York Times -- B13.

There's a piece in the New York Times today about online fan culture -- and how it's started to actually affect how TV is made. It profiles TelevisionWithoutPity.com, a site that where TV producers regularly, and rather nervously, check what their audience has to say -- and then often adapt their shows to the critiques. (My girlfriend Emily Nussbaum also had an excellent piece about this on Slate.) This is, as the Times points out, a rather new relationship between TV and its audience:

J.J. Abrams, show runner of the very Net-friendly spy show ''Alias,'' sees the boards as a real measure of the audience's pulse and rates their members as nothing less than ''an integral part of the process.'' That could never have been said five years ago.

''If the Internet is your audience, TV is quite like a play,'' Abrams says. ''Movies are a done deal -- there's no give and take -- but in a play, you listen to the applause, the missing laughs, the boos. It's the same with the Internet. If you ignore that sort of response, you probably shouldn't be working in TV right now.''

Precisely. What digital culture is doing is turning all art into live art: You throw out a riff, see what the response is like, and respond accordingly. TV producers are going to have to start operating more like DJs, whose entire act consists of running small Skinnerian experiments on the audience -- tossing out a beat for a few seconds, seeing if it gets any action, then either discarding it or mixing in.

Indeed, this whole cybernetic loop is becoming more and more powerful online. Anyone who's done culture online -- blogs, online columns, games, animation -- has known for years what the folks in TV, movies and other sealed-off art are just now slowly finding out. Back when I wrote a column for Shift online in 1997, I covered anti-spam activists; at one point, when they mistakenly thought the magazine itself was issuing spam, they complained to our ISP and nearly got our T1 line shut down. How's that for a flame war? Today's Internet technologies -- from Google's Pagerank (ranking sites by popularity) to Trackback in Movable Type (which instantly alerts me when someone links to my blog) to Ebay's reputation rankings -- are moving increasingly in this direction. You can't avoid scrutiny, and you shouldn't want to; in the online world, the scrutiny is partly why you do things. Rep is everything.

Indeed, this idea is the governing metaphor in Corey Doctorow's extremely cool sci-fi novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In his book, citizens have constant, head-chip-implanted Net connections, and they each have a ranking of "Whuffie" -- a sort of Trackback-like or Google-like score that rises or falls based on whether other people admire or despise them. Everyone is constantly pinging everyone else's Whuffie, and there are the inevitable amplication effects: People who are really admired become more admirable because, well, people admire them.

For good or ill, that's precisely what happens these days with Google, and with the neatly incestuous interlinking of blogs. So it's probably no surprise that Doctorow, a blogger extraordinaire, hit upon this terrific and thought-provoking metaphor. The book is, among other things, a fantastic meditation on the pros and cons of constant reputation scrutiny -- which is beginning to happen all around us.

TV better get used to it.

There's an excellent debate today in the New York Times over waging war against Iraq. It's a review of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq; written by Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA operative who oversaw intelligence in the Persian Gulf, the book is a straight-ahead endorsement of war. Pollack argues that there are only three things to do with Saddam Hussein: containment (sanctions, weapons inspections), deterrence (threatening him with retaliation), and regime change. He argues that containment hasn't worked, and deterrence won't either because Hussein is power-mad and will stop at nothing to dominate his neighboring countries. That, of course, leaves invasion -- spending billions on a land war to topple Hussein -- as the only option.

The reviewer disagrees -- and since he's Jack Matlock, who used to be the United States ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, the guy knows a fair bit about totalitarian states with access to nukes:

As I was reading Pollack's dismissal of deterrence as a viable strategy, I could not help reflecting that in 1947 a stronger case than his could have been made that the least risky course for dealing with Stalin following World War II would have been to invade the Soviet Union and depose the tyrant before he could acquire nuclear weapons. Yet deterrence worked, even though the danger to the United States from a nuclear-armed Soviet Union was incomparably greater than the one that could be posed by a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein may be more inclined to risk taking than the Soviet leaders were, but his means for making mischief in the world are much more limited. His passion is to stay in power and, if possible, to dominate the region. If he had nuclear weapons, he would step up blackmail attempts against his neighbors. But his bluff could be called, since he would avoid using nuclear weapons or supplying them to terrorists unless he was attacked directly and was convinced that his end was imminent. Soviet leaders before Gorbachev also would probably have used nuclear weapons if they had faced military defeat. This is one of several reasons the United States avoided making ''regime change'' an avowed element of cold war deterrence.

Okay, enough dour stuff about the war and international racism. It's time for some upbeat stuff here at Collision Detection.

Here's a photo of a pomeranian. I love these silly little dogs. My grandmother used to have one on her farm, for some reason. I got the photos from this site.

John Perry Barlow has just written a set of excellent, superb essays decrying the impending war. It's terrific, fantastic rhetoric -- he's an amazing writer when he feels strongly about something, and he's bang on. Everyone should read these pieces.

But then read a bit further down, because Barlow writes something remarkable:

It pains me deeply to say this, but I think that part of the problem may be the Internet.

A lot of what's wrong may be the very sort of thing you're reading right now.

The Internet, has, as expected, provided a global podium to everyone with an opinion. Cyberspace has become an infinite set of street corners, each with its lonely pamphleteer, howling his rage to a multitude all too busy howling their own to listen.

All of our energy goes into things like this BarlowSpam, energies that might be better spent in creating traditional blocs like the NRA, or the AARP, or some large group capable of either buying Congress or scaring the shit out of them. This screed won't scare an elected official anywhere. And it wouldn't generate enough money to elect or defeat a dogcatcher.

As much as I loathe organizations, we need to organize.

Bingo. I couldn't have said it better myself. As any professional writer knows, and as millions of bloggers are now finding out, words aren't really that powerful. At best, they're catalytic -- inspiring people to action. But it's the action that matters, when it comes to politics. We can scribble all our brilliant ideas all we want, but the world is truly changed by people in grey suits faxing documents for like 17 hours on end. Hell, that's how the Christian Coalition does it. And that's how the progressive, left-wing groups I've been supporting for years do it.

But you know, I can't resist a big, juicy "I told you so". Because though it's great for Barlow to come to this realization ... remember his fierce dismissal of government back in 1996, when Barlow wrote the "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace"? Remember how ludicrous and naive it was? How he went on and on about how government was slow, government was weak, nuthin' ever gets done in Washington, how all the kewl stuff was happening online and nobody should bother paying attention to this boring old industrial-age government stuff? And how everyone, including otherwise smart people like Declan McCullagh lapped it up?

Oops.

As I wrote in Shift magazine last month (which I'll quote, just so I can even more smugly shove the knife in deeper here) Barlow's Declaration helped prove "the grim law of cyberpolitics: Smart coders can make idiotic citizens."

Most people in America agree on one thing: Nuclear weapons are most dangerous when they're in the hands of Third World leaders.

The paradigm goes like this: Western countries are reasonably stable, responsible, rational, respectful of human life, and secular; Third World countries are unstable, irresponsible, irrational, bloodthirsty, and governed by crazed religiosity. Even otherwise liberal people who disapprove of American foreign policy seem to pretty much agree with this worldview, when it comes to nukes.

Which is why I enjoyed reading a fantastic essay by Hugh Gusterson, an MIT anthropologist, that soundly debunks these ideas about Third World nuclear powers. It's not, he suggests, that Third World leaders and military bigwigs are not frequently stupid, irrational, governed by passions, willing to abuse their power, and quite frankly incompetent. That's sometimes true, for sure. But it's equally as true for Western countries that have bombs.

Indeed, the more you learn about the U.S.'s history of maintaining its own "weapons of mass destruction," the more we seem like the global Keystone Kops:

There have, for example, been at least twenty-four occasions when U.S. aircraft have accidentally released nuclear weapons and at least eight incidents in which U.S. nuclear weapons were involved in plane crashes or fires. In 1980s, during routine maintenance of a Titan II missile in Arkansas, an accident with a wrench caused a conventional explosion that sent the nuclear warhead 600 feet through the air. In another incident an H-bomb was accidentally dropped over North Carolina; only one safety switch worked, preventing the bomb from detonating. In 1966 two U.S. planes collided over Palomares, Spain, and four nuclear weapons fell to the ground, causing a conventional explosion that contaminated a large, populated area with plutonium. One hydrogen bomb was lost for three months. In 1968 a U.S. plane carrying four H-bombs caught fire over Greenland. The crew ejected, and there was a conventional explosion that scattered plutonium over a wide area.

How precisely we managed to have nuclear weapons for so long and not kill massive amounts of people, not by malice, but merely by fucking up really badly, I have no idea.

Gusterson published this essay ("Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination") back in 1999 in the journal Cultural Anthropology, and apparently it caused an enormous brouhaha. In a way, the analysis reminds of the way economists apply ruthless double standards to Third World countries -- as Paul Krugman has pointed out multiple times, the IMF (and Washington) won't let developing countries protect their currencies, impose basic controls on the flow of capital, or subsidize growing industries ... precisely the same stuff that every Western nation did to help its economy grow to sustainability in the 19th and 20th centuries.

I hardly believe that it's a good idea for Third World nations to have nuclear weapons; but then again, I hardly believe it's a good idea for First World ones to have them either, and I don't buy the idea that "our" having them is helping deter the rest of the world from doing singularly nasty stuff. Our attitudes towards those uppity foreigners in India and Pakistan and Iraq who want their own bombs reveals more about our disdain for the rest of the world than we'd imagine. I wish to hell this essay of Gusterson's was online for general reading, but it's not.

I could have seen this one coming a mile away. Someone's made a pornographic web site designed specifically for the new geek mobile-phone-and-data tool, the Danger Hiptop.

Welcome to DangerPorn!

This is the world's first and only (as far as I know) site made exclusively for the Danger Sidekick.

And, yeah -- no, I'm not gonna post any sample pictures.

(This item courtesy the fine folks at Metafilter.)

I was just on the BBC, talking about a story I wrote -- in which I shot a gun for the first time, to find out whether all my years of playing shoot-em-up video games has trained me to be a killer. In case you were listening and wanted to read the piece, here it is! (Click "more" when you get to the bottom to see the rest of the piece ...)

GOOD CLEAN FUN

I’ve played videogames all my life. And for just as long, I’ve defended their merits against the public outcry over everything from maladjusted teens to the killings at Columbine. Then I met Dave Grossman, an army lieutenant-colonel with a psychology degree. In the backwoods of Mississippi, he handed me a gun. This is what happened next.

by Clive Thompson
Originally in Shift magazine

The sun beats down like a hammer on the Mississippi firing range as Lt.-Col. Dave Grossman crouches on the ground. The heat is furious and he’s beginning to sweat a bit, his army crew cut glistening as he punches in the combination to open his safety box. Inside are two guns. Grossman pulls out a .22-caliber pistol.

This, he tells me, is the same model that fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal stole from his neighbor’s house in Paducah, Kentucky, on December 1, 1997. Carneal took the gun to a high-school prayer meeting and opened fire on the group. "He fired eight shots and got eight hits on eight different kids. He killed three and paralyzed one for life," Grossman notes grimly in his slight Arkansas accent. It was an astonishing piece of marksmanship—a hit ratio that many highly trained police officers can’t achieve. Last year, for example, four experienced New York City cops shot at unarmed Amadou Diallo, firing forty-one bullets from barely fifteen feet away; fewer than half hit their mark.

But perhaps more startling about Carneal is another salient fact: He’d never shot a handgun before. "So how did he get such incredible aim?" Grossman asks. "Where did he get that killing ability?"

His answer: videogames. In his controversial book, "Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill," Grossman details how Carneal had trained for hours and hours on point-and-shoot games. The teenager had practiced killing literally thousands of people virtually; he’d learned to aim for the head in order to dispatch each victim with just one shot.

Videogames have long been blamed for provoking violence, but rarely by someone of Grossman’s background and expertise. A military man and Pulitzer-nominated authority on the psychology of killing, Grossman shot to prominence after the Columbine school massacre. In countless media appearances, he has argued that modern videogames are eerily similar to the training tools that military and law enforcement agencies use to teach soldiers and officers to kill. Kids learn these skills, he writes in his book, "much the same way as the astronauts on Apollo 11 learned how to fly to the moon without ever leaving the ground." The proof, he argues, is in the profusion of mass high-school shootings in recent years, where kids with limited experience in using guns have displayed excellent aim and tactical maneuvers, not to mention a view of murder as fun.

I am here to test Grossman’s theory. I have never even held a gun, let alone fired one. But for two decades, I’ve been avidly playing videogames, including the wickedly violent arcade shooters that Grossman considers the most military-like "murder simulators." I’m particularly good at these—I can usually finish Area 51 or Time Crisis for only about three bucks in quarters. If Grossman is right, I should be as deadly as Michael Carneal.

I look down the range at my target, a human-shaped silhouette. It’s twenty feet away, roughly the same distance from which Carneal shot his victims. In the blazing heat sweat drips slowly down the small of my back.

I raise the barrel of the gun.

[break]

The videogame debate has been going on for years, but Grossman has arguably brought it to a new level. He is a peculiar combination of ultra-pundit (known for his crisp sound bites on violence) and career soldier. Unlike other critics, who typically hail from the media-literacy or family-values camps, he has direct experience in the domain of killing. During his twenty-three-year stint in the army (from which he retired in 1998), he participated in the Panama invasion. He has taught the psychology of killing ("killology") at the West Point military academy and the University of Arkansas. Today, as founder and director of the Killology Research Group in Arkansas, he works full time training police officers—and remains an enthusiastic ambassador of military culture. He says "roger" and "check" instead of "OK," and calls everyone "brother."

Grossman’s epiphany about videogames came through a circuitous route. Research for his psychology PhD eventually became the source of his 1995 book On Killing, which examines a little-known aspect of war: that soldiers, even highly trained ones, are profoundly resistant to shooting people.

As Grossman points out, surveys of World War II veterans show that eighty percent of riflemen never once fired a gun during active combat, even when enemy bullets were flying around them. During the American Civil War, according to data collected after battles, many soldiers only pretended to fire their weapons, loading them again and again without actually discharging a shot. On some level, it seems, they simply couldn’t bear the prospect of shooting other human beings. Had they done so, casualties would have obviously been much higher.

Faced with armies full of reluctant gunners, the U.S. military began devising new techniques to definitively train men to shoot—and shoot to kill. The answer lay in classic "operant conditioning" methods made famous by American psychologist B.F. Skinner in the fifties. In a series of experiments, Skinner trained rats to push on a bar, after which they were rewarded with food. Positive or negative reinforcement, he argued, could make any form of activity virtually automatic, overriding conscious objections.

For the military, this meant setting up realistic shooting simulations. Soldiers were put into mock combat situations, filled with noise and riot; they were taught to fire at pop-up silhouettes until it became a twitch instinct. The conditioning worked well. By the Korean War, Grossman found, such training brought the firing ratio up to fifty-five percent. In Vietnam, the number skyrocketed to ninety-five percent.

In the eighties, the armed forces began using an even more powerful and cheaper training tool: video- and computer-graphics-ased simulations. Many were modeled directly on videogames. One popular military sim was a barely-modified version of the early Nintendo game Duck Hunt.

Which is when Grossman began to look away from the battlefields and into the arcades. If the army was using game-like sims to train its killers, were the arcades doing the same thing, inadvertently, to youth?

An incendiary chapter in his 1995 book blames Hollywood violence and the rise of super-realistic videogames for the seismic increase of "serious assault" cases in the U.S.—which had nearly doubled between 1977 and 1993, from 240 to 440 incidents per 100,000 people. In Grossman’s analysis, different forms of entertainment provide different elements of violence training. Hollywood and TV desensitize youth to the consequences of violence, a proposition generally backed by study after study. More controversial is the role he assigns to videogames as teachers of gun-handling skills. It is a theory supported by scant scientific evidence; Grossman bases his claims entirely on military research and his personal experience. In his own pistol-training classes at West Point, he says, some recruits displayed an uncanny facility with weapons. "Out of every class of about twenty kids, you’ll often get one or two that are extraordinary shots but who’d never fired a gun before. And almost without fail, if you ask them, Where did you get to be such a good pistol shot?, they’ll look you in the eye and say, Duck Hunt. Or Time Crisis. The skills transfer over immediately."

Still, for all their explosiveness, Grossman’s ideas would probably languish in obscurity if not for the Michael Carneals of the world.

High-school shootings in the U.S. have been going on for years. In fact, the 1992 to 1993 academic year was the worst in sheer numbers, with nearly fifty deaths. But they were almost all one-on-one incidents, either revenge- or gang-related. In 1997, however, the peculiarly large-scale shootings began, during which the killers fired indiscriminately at groups of people they barely knew. Consider a partial list: In October 1997, Luke Woodham shot up his high school in Pearl, Mississippi, killing two and injuring seven. A few months later, Carneal went on his prayer-group rampage. In March 1998, two kids opened fire on a school in Jonesboro, Arkansas, killing five and injuring ten. Not long after, a student in Springfield, Oregon, cut loose in a crowded cafeteria, murdering two and injuring eighteen. And then came Columbine, which left a stunning thirteen dead and twenty injured.

Grossman figured his prophecy was coming true. It had also hit home. In a brutal coincidence, he actually lives in Jonesboro, across town from where its school shootings occurred; he was even summoned to the middle school to help counsel traumatized teachers. The ensuing weeks and months saw Grossman appear regularly in the media, from 60 Minutes to The New York Times. An expert strategist, he decided the time was ripe to strike. This summer, he and co-author Gloria DeGaetano (a media literacy consultant) quickly completed work on Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, which slams iolent games, movies and TV, and demands that they be legally restricted to adults only. Grossman has also trained lawyers nationwide in how to launch class-action suits against videogame companies on behalf of families whose children are killed in school shootings, as well as consulting on draft laws for videogames. The ripple effects are already here: This spring, the parents of three of Michael Carneal’s victims sued, among others, several videogame companies that they felt had incited the rampage.

Now, as the media prepare for still more shootings, Grossman has arguably become the most prominent player in the videogame debate. "This whole industry is going down, and going down hard," he says with conviction.

But a question remains: Is he right?

[break]

I take a deep breath and start firing like mad, squeezing the trigger again and again until my finger aches, blasting round after round. Things are looking good: My aim is steady, my heart rate low. As I fire, bodies drop on impact—chunks of flesh flying off in all directions.

It’s the day before my meeting with Grossman, and I’ve decided to go for a warm-up at a local arcade in Pearl, the Mississippi town I’ve come to to speak with him. I’m holding a plastic pistol in front of Midway’s House of the Dead, blowing away endless platoons of zombies. A few days before, over the phone, Grossman spoke about the sheer physicality of guns like this one—arguing that they make games like House of the Dead preternaturally similar to a Fire Arms Training Simulator, which police officers use to hone their twitch-shooting instincts. Warming up on this stuff, he’d figured, would get me "really fired up" for the main event.

Indeed, from the time I first suggested this experiment, Grossman has displayed an almost perverse enthusiasm for it. He urged me to fly down from New York the following weekend to join him in Pearl, where he was due to guest-lecture at a police sharpshooter conference (taking place just a few miles from the high school that had its own shooting in 1997).

When we meet for lunch, he pulls out ads he has collected for various videogame companies, gleefully poking fun at them. One, for Quake, features a photo of a human foot with a toe tag; the caption says, HE PRACTICED ON A PC. Another, an ad for a force-feedback joystick, reads, "Psychiatrists say it is important to feel something when you kill." He slaps his thigh. "These things are mass-murder simulators—and in their own ads, they’re saying so!"

I’m not so sure. I’ve been a long-time defender of videogames, on TV panels and in radio debates. Games need defending, I’ve always felt, simply because they’re the chief pastime of the young, unathletic geek, a cohort with whom I feel a personal sympathy. For these kids, gaming is a crucial refuge in a teenage world that glorifies physical power and beauty. Videogame critics frequently come from outside this geek demographic—as does Grossman—and thus inevitably err in their analysis of it. They ignore, for example, the social aspect of games—the robust culture of camaraderie and information-swapping that surrounds them. Or they focus on a few gory games that comprise a small portion of the market, such as Quake. During the Columbine coverage, clueless journalists cited Doom as if it were actually a current game, when nobody I know had played it for about four years.

Perhaps most problematically, critics assume that players are hopeless dupes of the videogame experience—that they are unable to critically assess what they play and are doomed only to be "influenced" by it. These critics rarely look at games as pieces of a living, breathing culture. In fact, you could argue that the tongue-in-cheek irony so prevalent in shooting games, and their cartoonishly over-the-top gore, are more of a comment on violence than a true enactment of it. Indeed, as gaming critic J.C. Herz once noted, the gun-toting protagonists of videogames are inevitably policemen, marines or soldiers—not mercenaries or lawless killers. What sort of social comment is that? As I sit here blowing away zombies in House of the Dead, my primary reaction is, as always, to giggle. Part of the fun is simply the deep surreality of the action.

To his credit, Grossman gives these arguments their due. Sure, games are useful socially, which is why he doesn’t have any problem with non-violent ones. He also sees the irony of the gorier titles. But he doesn’t think young children do. "They accept it on a different level," he says.

I was skeptical of Grossman’s theory, but something happened at the Pearl arcade that gave me pause. I’m halfway through a round of L.A. Machinegunners when I notice a young man in fatigues watching me. I introduce myself, and discover that he’s Sgt. Scott Sargent, a U.S. military reservist out recruiting. A recruiter in an arcade? I ask him if he wants to join me for a game.

Soon, Sargent and I are merrily annihilating virtual terrorists on the streets of L.A., using throbbing, simulated machine guns. Watching him, I see that Grossman’s theory seems to apply in reverse. Sargent has had extensive training on real-life weaponry, but he’s never played Machinegunners until now. Nonetheless, he’s astonishingly good. And Machinegunners is one of the most difficult shooters to play—my wife becomes nauseated just watching the vertiginous, rapidly shifting angles. Despite my long experience playing this game, Sargent is better than I am, racking up more kills and sustaining fewer injuries.

As the round ends, I ask him how the game compares to real life. He pauses for a second, fingering the machine-gun controls that have a simulated recoil when you fire. I’ve always assumed the game recoil is a pale shadow of a real one. Apparently, this isn't so. "It’s actually very similar to the kick of an M-16," Sargent says. "I’ve trained with those things for years. It feels almost exactly the same."

[break]

The next day, training is over. I’m at the range, holding one of Grossman’s pistols.

Several National Rifle Association officials and five police officers, here for a sharpshooting competition, stand in a semicircle behind me, eyeing me worriedly. I can hardly blame them: The prospect of a neophyte blasting away is clearly unsettling. It’s obvious that I don’t even know how to correctly hold the thing; one officer has to gently suggest a two-handed approach. He stands next to me to make sure I keep the gun pointed down-range and to tell me when to fire. Grossman looks on with excitement. "Imagine it’s House of the Dead," he calls out.

After everyone is safely a few paces back, the officer gives the nod. He leans over and touches a lever on my pistol. "The safety is down," he announces. "It’s ready to fire."

For a second, I feel an odd sensation of danger, as if I’m only now realizing how deadly this thing really is. It’s like driving along the edge of a cliff and suddenly visualizing yourself veering off into space. I have a brief, unbidden thought that at any moment I could swivel around and shoot three or four of the cops in the gut. I banish the notion immediately, then grip the gun more firmly and focus.

I think: Guns are a peculiarly modernist combination of form and function, which is part of their allure. They have no extraneous elements -- just point and shoot. I squint down the range at the silhouette target.

I squeeze the trigger.

Bang.

A hole appears in the upper left shoulder of the target. Whoa: I’ve hit it squarely, though I aimed too high. I fire again, and again. I’m nervous, far more than I expected, and trembling like a leaf. Perhaps it’s because five cops are staring at me. Perhaps it’s because I’m trying to fire as quickly as possible, to emulate the speed of Carneal and the other teen killers, who had little time to line up their shots.

Yet for all my panic, it’s quickly become apparent that I’m actually doing quite well. After only a few shots, I have learned to correct my high aim. Within thirty seconds I’ve fired off every round and reloaded. Grossman urges me to try some head shots. This is harder, but again, after an initial error, I can see the holes popping in the head of the silhouette and the sun peeking through.

By now it’s clear that whatever else about his theories I might question, Grossman’s right about one thing: The .22-caliber pistol is remarkably similar in feel to an arcade gun—the kick is miniscule and it’s only slightly heavier. In fact, arcade guns have a heavy cord dangling from them, so after hours of playing, you feel an added weight. You tend to develop muscles that can clearly hold a .22 quite steady.

We decide to take things up a notch. "Now," Grossman says, "I want you to try something with a bit more kick to it." He hands me a much bigger gun—his .45-caliber Springfield pistol, the weapon carried by the FBI. A .22 is a potentially lethal gun, as Michael Carneal proved, but ultimately it’s pretty lightweight stuff. A .45, however, can really mess someone up.

Including me. The first shot shocks me with the power of its kick, and the bullet flies harmlessly over the top of the target. I swallow deeply. My hands are shaking badly. Far more than the .22, this gun is very, very real, and nothing like an arcade toy. The way it kicks around, it’s like it has a mind of its own.

Still, what happens next is revealing. Despite my nervousness, I automatically compensate for my panic. Even as my hands tremble, even as I sweat under the gaze of the cops, even as my mind races, my aim instantly improves. Some subconscious part of my brain takes over, and by the second shot I’m again hitting perfectly in the chest area. Shot after shot rips through the target, and I realize in a flash that, of course, this is what training is supposed to do—allow you to perform well even under great stress, or when your mind is occupied with other details. Some form of Skinner’s operant conditioning, it seems, is in effect.

Then the trigger clicks after the final bullet; the last shot has been fired. I hand the gun back to Grossman, and he races off to examine my targets.

According to Grossman, the accuracy of neophyte soldiers in training is relatively low. After one week of pistol training, fifty percent of recruits can hit the man-shaped silhouette "with some regularity," and one-quarter can concentrate their shots in the central chest area. Only five percent can place their shots in a small, silver-dollar–sized area. I’ve checked these stats with other police trainers; they agree the estimates are sound.

As for me? Grossman brings my targets. The shots are all in the center-chest area, the "9" and "10" scoring rings. It’s unsettling, yet riveting to look at these close up. The bullet holes are clustered in what seems to be a shockingly tight radius. If this were a real person, hell, I’d have blown their torso to shreds with the first few shots alone.

Grossman seems thrilled. "I would say it was head-and-shoulders above the average first-time shooter." I’m not on par with the best he’s seen, he says, but I’m shooting as well as a trainee would at the end of a week of training—a week. He gestures to the target. "That would be an A. You’re scholarship material. You were rocking and rolling!"

Now comes the inevitable question. Grossman grins at me. "To shoot like you did with that .45 is truly extraordinary. And you’ve never fired a gun before. Where did you learn to do that?"

[break]

On the flight back from Mississippi, my shooting targets crammed into a garment bag, I replay the experience in my head—what it means, what it doesn’t. I’m still relatively unsettled by my aptitude with deadly force, and impressed by how well Grossman’s theory has played out. But I’m also disappointed. On some level, I realize, I didn’t want to prove him even partially right. Too frequently, critics assume all gamers are sociopathic freaks. I hardly wanted to push that stereotype further.

But even if Grossman’s idea about gun training is correct, it still can’t explain what’s going on in American high schools—specifically, the motivations of the killers. Hand-eye co-ordination is one thing; seething rage is quite another. Sure, kids may be able to go on mass rampages, but why would they want to?

Investigators studying the Columbine shooting admitted that they were still baffled by what motivated Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. The killers’ hatred, it seems, was freefloating in the traditional manner of persecuted teens. Jocks, gays, other nerds, popular kids, minorities, racists—everyone was up for grabs. None of this would shock anyone who went through an even mildly bad adolescence—they know that high school is, socially and psychologically, a shark tank, pitting clique against clique. In that context, it’s hard to finger House of the Dead as a singular cause of teen angst. On the contrary, teensploitation fare like Bring it On or Popular—with their phalanxes of glossy, milk-fed socialites and ugly, brainy losers—is probably more likely to blur your sense of reality. And though largely devoid of physical violence, shows like that are quite capable of training you in the art of teen psychological warfare, a battle in which no gun license is necessary.

Guns themselves, of course, are another obvious issue in recent shootings—and another wrinkle that makes Grossman’s theory seem overly pat. Videogame guns don’t kill people; real ones do. Yet Grossman, a soldier who wholeheartedly supports the NRA, isn’t out there fighting for enhanced gun-control laws. Rather, he thinks current laws are adequate. He also claims kids’ access to guns hasn’t increased, so guns can’t solely be responsible for the rise in shootings. "I grew up with a twelve-gauge shotgun in my bedroom," he notes.

Perhaps most damaging to Grossman’s case, however, are academic videogame researchers, some of whom say he has no science to back up his theories. A recent survey by media think-tank Mediascope found that only sixteen studies exist that probe the relationship between videogames and aggression, and their results are mixed. Even if every study agreed that games are homicidal in their impact, sixteen studies is a scientifically insignificant number, say the scientists. It doesn’t yet prove anything.

Jeanne Funk, author of several videogame studies and a respected psychologist from the University of Toledo, sighs when I mention Grossman’s name. She admires On Killing, but thinks his videogame theories have no serious scientific foundation. "He says things have been proven when they haven’t," she says. "The fact is, we’re just beginning to examine this issue. We don’t know. The data are so thin." In pushing his ideas, Grossman relies instead on the thousands of studies that successfully link violent TV shows with aggression, and on the military’s experience using simulators. But neither, Funk argues, are easily applicable to gaming. Videogames could have benevolent effects; on the other hand, that could be far, far worse than Grossman’s worst nightmares. "But we have nothing to go on right now," she insists.

This, ultimately, is the most frustrating part of the issue. Surrounded by all the firing guns, panicked parents and the media frenzy, simple answers are more seductive than further debate. But every time I’m tempted to dismiss Grossman, I open my closet and pull out those silhouette targets. I check out the cluster of holes in the chest. I remember the jolt of the .45.

You know how service-sector work is vanishing offshores -- with call centers in India or Indonesia answering the line for companies here in the U.S.? When you call or email Amazon asking for help, odds are you're not talking to someone in Iowa or Washington. Two years ago they relocated a chunk of their help services to labor in New Delhi, at one-tenth the cost of American labor.

But what if we extended this idea to manual labor -- by having remote workers operate robots on American soil? That's the so-crazy-it's-probably-going-to-happen idea behind Cybracero, this new company run by a guy named Roger Buck. He quite adroitly realized that Amazon's far-flung email answerers are, in essence, telepresence workers: They do work offshore that effectively "happens" here -- insofar as the customer is receiving the assistance in America.

So Cyberacero's trying to do this in the physical world. Their goal: To create an army of telepresence robots controlled remotely by dirt-cheap workers in foreign lands. A super-cheap Mexican or Indonesian worker would sit down at a computer, take control of a robot in California, and guide it around to pick fruit.

In a strictly capitalist sense, it could work. For years, American fruit-growers have tried to highly automate their fruit-picking operations. But they've failed. Robots aren't good enough. You can't yet get robots to do sophisticated tasks -- like visual recognition, as in identifying randomly located, oddly shaped pieces of fruit hanging in 3D on trees. That's why farmers are still relying on often-illegal Mexican workers to pick it.

But who says the Mexican workers actually have to physically be on American soil? Only the robots need to be here. In essence, it's a paradigm like the one I outlined in last month's Wired, where a human becomes a mere chip in a robotic machine. In this case, companies would be using inexpensive foreign workers to provide a uniquely human ability -- shape recognition and terrain management -- to robots here in the U.S.

But still, this idea is just seething with potential for nightmarish abuse of labor. One of the problems with offloading work onto foreign soil is that workers there can't unionize, have horrifically bad health care, and virtually no workplace health and safety standards. I can only imagine the gruesome workplaces that would emerge in the Phillippines from telepresence. I suppose it could provide better jobs than currently exist in sweatshops -- you could argue that a foreign worker might get paid better for this telepresence stuff, or that it would allow them to work in a more highly scrutinized situation, etc. But you know, judging by how the marketplace has been treating the lowest workers in the planet of late, I'm betting nope: It'd just be an even grimmer labor situation than currently exists. I gather this Cyberacero dude is suggesting this because he honestly hopes it could make things better for far-off workers, but global capitalism has a way of doing innovatively nasty shit with even the best of ideas.

Right now, Cyberacero doesn't even have prototypes up and running, so it's still just an idea. But I'll bet someone does this, or something like it, within five to ten years.

And don't even get me started on the Cartesian mind/body split stuff going on here. Yikes. Multi-million-dollar robots robots safely on American soil, being operated by the brains of 30-cent-an-hour workers in Chiapas: It's almost some Philip K. Dick parody of north-south relations.

Bonus: Check out the way-nutsoid promotional video for the company. It's all faked, of course -- but when the Mexican worker logs on to do his telepresence work, he uses a Commodore 64 and an Atari 2600 joystick to control the robot. I'm beginning to wonder if this is a Joey Skaggs media prank.

Monetary policy is so freaking obtuse almost no-one really understands it. I mean, do you understand what the Fed actually does? Of course you don't. Neither do I, half the time, and I'm a freakin' business writer.

Which is why I've really been enjoying reading Paul Krugman's book of last year, The Return of Depression Economics. In it, he uses a metaphor he often uses to explain monetary policy: The Washington Babysitting Co-op.

A few years ago, 150 families in Washington decided to start a babysitting co-op that would work kind of like those "green money" barter systems. If a couple babysat for another couple, they'd get a coupon. They could later use that coupon to pay another couple to babysit, in turn, for them. The coupons were, in effect, a type of currency: Upon joining the co-op, a couple would be issued 10 coupons or so to start them off, and would pay them back if they ever left. Since there were 150 couples, one could reasonably assume there'd always be someone willing to pay you coupons for work (i.e. by babysitting for them), or a way to work for your coupons (i.e. to babysit for you.) It was a perfect model of an economy.

Except -- one season, everyone decided they want to save coupons. They all decided, for some reason, that they wanted a nest egg of coupons in case of emergencies. As a result, the supply of people willing to hire babysitters slowly dried up. Nobody could get work. "The economy," Krugman writes, "fell into recession."

In one way, it's a beautifully simple metaphor -- it neatly explains why an otherwise healthy economy, equipped with a nice stable currency and a prosperous people, can suddenly start to slow down. And, more importantly, it explains how to fix that problem. The co-op eventually decided to print more money and put it in circulation: To create a bunch of new coupons and hand them out freely. Thus, everyone suddenly had a little nest egg and wasn't so worried about saving anymore, and began to spend, hiring other couples to babysit. Soon, the economy was rolling again -- which neatly illustrates how monetary policy (printing dough, or, in the more modern parlance, adjusting the interest rates) can help start, or stop, an economy. (There's a longer discussion of this online at Krugman's old site at MIT.)

But here's the fun thing. While surfing online for the original academic paper that outlined this co-op fable (it actually, really existed), I ran across a rather searing review of Krugman's book at the Socialist Viewpoint magazine. In a way, it cracked me up. It's such an ossified, cookie-cutter marxist analysis that the language alone is a total hoot. Hell, I'm a card-carrying union member and reasonably hard-left economic freak, it's incredibly clear that this sort of calcified writing -- and thinking -- ain't gonna convince anyone anymore.

Butl, still ... the writer did raise one extremely perceptive critique of Krugman's metaphor.

To wit: The problem with almost all economics is that, in explaining the marketplace, it uses models that not only simplify the world -- but oversimplify it. Krugman's model assumes that everyone in the market is pretty much equal in social power, education, and starting point (i.e. everyone enters the system with the same amount of coupons).

Of course, this does not bear even a glancing resemblance to reality. Or, as the Socialist Viewpoint critic put it:

If the co-op analogy is really going to help illuminate capitalist economic relations, it will have to undergo a few changes in order to provide a more accurate model for the system it purports to reflect. For example, we would have to stipulate that a small minority of the co-op members, through some accident of history, controls almost all the coupons. And because of their vast fortune, the members of this minority actually rule the “co-op” and operate it in their own interests. Other members of the co-op are transformed into mere means to enhance the status of the minority, but they are assured that this system is operating equally in everyone’s interests. Members of the wealthy minority never baby-sit, of course, but enjoy watching the other couples, the vast majority, who are in desperate need of coupons, compete against one another for babysitting positions for the minority. Finally, members of the wealthy minority offer weekly lectures to the other members of the co-op in which they explain in pompous and ponderous tones that the disparity of wealth in the co-op community is entirely a function of each individual’s personal intelligence, industry, and moral fiber.

You know, despite those hoary left-wing cliches, I couldn't have said it better myself.

Recently, the Washington police created this composite picture of a white van, which they suspect the sniper is using.

I couldn't figure out whether to laugh or get creeped out by the text on the side of the truck.

You know, life has really got to suck right now for the webmasters of the Sniper Country web site. As the staff noted in a recent "open letter":

In light of the recent murders in the Metropolitan DC area, Sniper Country has received, as expected, a certain amount of email traffic from those who appear to be misinformed in their understanding of the purpose of this site.

"A certain amount of email traffic."

Dig this: A corporation has patented a new gun that imprints a tiny barcode on every bullet it fires. The barcode is only 50 microns wide, barely the length of a human hair. But it thus leaves an indelible calling card of who fired the weapons. This is a gun that fires information.

Of course, guns already leave distinct traces on bullets, so forensics experts have for years been mostly successful in matching bullets to a gun. But the inventors say barcodes on guns would massively improve law enforcement:

Except for its beveled tip, the entire girth and length of a bullet fired through a bar-code barrel would be inscribed with several copies of the code. According to Mr. Lawson, this will make it easier to identify bullets even if they fragment into many pieces, as they often do if fired from high-velocity rifles, like the one used by the sniper around Washington.

The weird thing is, the Washington sniper is already in a strange sort of information dance with the media and the police:

Television reporters daily ask police investigators to face the camera and address the sniper personally.

"The message remains the same," Chief Moose said. "Think about what you're doing and turn yourself into law enforcement."

The long-standing, deconstructionist puns about "shooting" and the media here are almost too easy. We use cameras to fire information at the sniper; he does the same thing with bullets.

I learned today that NASA has a guy whose actual job title is "Planetary Protection Officer."

His name is John Rummel, and his task is to make sure that space probes we send to other planets don't accidentally contaminate them with Earth microbes -- and, more freakily, vice versa. After all, it would suck rather badly to finally have a probe discover life on Mars ... only to kill the entire planet dead when a flu microbe that accidentally stowed away infects the place. Vice versa: NASA's working on a probe that will go to Mars, grab some soil, and come back. Here's hoping it doesn't come back with some really hideous interplanetary version of Montezuma's Revenge. NASA dudes delicately refer to these little holocausts as "forward contamination" and "backward contamination".

Thus, it's Rummel's job to carefully inspect every single nut and bolt that goes into a planetary space probe, and make sure somebody hasn't sneezed on it. Hell, or even touched it with their bare hands! This can involve some pretty intense stuff: To satisfy the dictates of the Planetary Protection Office, NASA had to take the entire 1975 Viking Mars probe and bake it in a 400 degree kiln.

Can you imagine how cool this guy must feel when he's at a cocktail party and someone asks, "So what do you do for a living?" As he notes in a recent op-ed piece:

There are days when I ask myself, "Is it worth it?" After all, given the heightened awareness about Earth organisms and their newfound capabilities in extreme environments-to say nothing of the troubles that immune-compromised patients face with normally benign microbes-I figure the need for back contamination controls for missions to places possibly harboring life should be obvious. So I sometimes wonder if I, as Planetary Protection Officer, can really make a difference.

Nice, though, that we seemed to have learned something from our last experience of "contact," back when the Spanish -- whoops -- liquidated the American indigenous population with European microbes. Rummel's next big mission is making sure we don't accidentally give Jupiter's moon Europa a huge case of the sniffles when we hit it with a probe in the next decade. Apparently, it's got a really nice juicy atmosphere and icy surface, which is very suitable for life -- and, thus, also, for killin'.

I just stumbled upon the extremely cool Ludology.org -- named after the philosophy of play, and devoted to blogging about video-game theory.

Given that the vast majority of game criticism still hasn't evolved beyond the precambrian five-stars-rating this-sucks-no-it-doesn't mode, the blogger here (Gonzales Frasca, a game designer for the Cartoon Network) is doing an incredible service. It collects together the smartest game writing online: Everything from Henry Jenkin's erudite ideas about narrative game design to a nutzoid British boycott of overly-expensive games (they have apparently declared Dec. 1 to 8 "Don't Buy Videogames Week").

This rocks.

You know, I think he actually is.

Sure, it's fun playing football video games. They've got all the major players scanned in, like, say, David Carr of the Houston Texans. So when you boot up your favorite PS2 NFL sim, presto -- you can pretend to be David Carr for an evening.

But what's it actually like for David Carr himself to play the game?

"The first time I saw myself in a video game was in college (at Fresno State) when I walked into a Best Buy store and some kid was playing with me," says Carr. "That kind of trips you out a little bit."

Excellent piece by University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds (and Instapundit guy) on how bots are being used increasingly for law enforcement. This ranges from automated speed-trap bots (which take a snapshot of your car if they detect you speeding) to bots created by record companies to crawl the Net looking for supposedly illegal warez and bootlegs.

The problem is -- as almost any AI scientist could tell you -- that bot intelligence is still far too crappy to be a basis for law enforcement. Recently, the Internet Service Provider Association filed a brief complaining about bots that the Recording Industry Association of America has turned loose. Some of the stuff these 'bots have fingered is berserk:

The brief also identifies a file entitled "harry potter book report.rtf" whose name and tiny size (1K) make obvious that it is not an illegal copy of the Harry Potter movie. Obvious to anyone who looks, anyway. But why should the record and movie companies bother to look? They're unlikely to suffer any damages if ISPs take down the wrong files, and the consumers involved are unlikely to sue them. (In filing with the Internet Service Providers, a company representative even certified in writing "that we have a good faith belief that use of the material ... is not authorized by Warner Bros. ... or the law." Puhleez.)

Much like the operators of rigged traffic cameras, they're relying on their own institutional power -- and the hassle of opposing them -- to let them get away with near-criminal sloppiness. It's bad enough that you might lose your Internet connection because of such carelessness -- but you could wind up in even worse trouble.

For months, I've been hunting for video games controlled by only one button -- like Pacman, or the other ones I've written about before (Loop and the Palm game Hot Snake.) (I'm talking about good games, by the way. There are plenty of lame games with only one controller.)

I found another one -- "the helicopter game", programmed by this British dude named Duncan Donaldo. There is only one button, and only one instruction:

You think it's easy flying a radio-controlled helicopter into somebody's head. My hi-score is 2148. See if you can beat it.

I blew like half an hour playing this. Either it's really fun or I'm really easy to entertain -- hard to tell.

You know how penniless students save money by buying used textbooks? And you know how those textbooks are often filled with tons of highlighting -- relics of the previous owners?

Researchers have known for a while that highlighting has a strong cognitive effect on readers. People tend to pay attention to highlighting -- even when it's not their own. That's why pre-owned textbooks can have a certain pedagogical appeal. I remember friends of mine who preferred to buy pre-highlighted textbooks because it would "save them time"; the previous student had already done all the work of identifying the relevant passages, right?

Except -- what if the previous owner was a moron?

In that case, reading the textbook turns you into a moron too. According to a study by the academics Vicki Silver and David Kreiner, students who were given textbooks with "inappropriate highlighting" wound up scoring worse on tests than students who were allowed to do the highlighting themselves. (The study isn't online, but an abstract of it is here, about three-quarters of the way down the page.)

Silver and Kreiner won an Ig Nobel Prize this year for their study. I was at the ceremony, and in her acceptance speech, Silver summed up the results of their research neatly: "Don't buy textbooks from dumb people."

Well, Chris McManus thinks so. In his new book Left Hand, Right Hand, he argues that asymmetry is the key to understanding virtually every mystery of the universe -- from sub-atomic behavior (the lefthanded spin of neutrinos) to psychology (why most cultures regard "right" as more normal and correct than "left") to human physiology: Ever wonder what it means that almost everyone's heart is on the left side of our bodies? (Unless you're one of the rare people McManus locates who have a heart on their right side; or unless you're a Time Lord and you have two.)

Most mindblowingly, McManus argues that our preference for right-handedness is a direct result of interstellar lifeforms brought to Earth by crashing meteors about a jillion years ago. I am not making this up. There's an excellent piece about the book in last weekend's Ideas section of the Boston Globe, written by my gal Emily Nussbaum, who also writes the Summary Judgment column for Slate:

According to McManus, all life forms possess some variation on handedness, from the molecular level on up. Neutrinos are lefties, DNA twists to the right, and conch shells spin both ways. Mechanical objects from spiral staircases to corkscrews are notable for their asymmetrical swirls, while the human brain's right and left hemispheres famously work together in a peculiarly lopsided vaudeville act. McManus further suggests that the asymmetry of molecules may trigger asymmetry all the way up the evolutionary ladder. Indeed, the seemingly symmetrical human body is in fact a Rube Goldberg machine of asymmetry, with tiny clockwise swirling cilia triggering the development of our typically left-sided heart, and the heart likewise knocking the rest of the internal organs into their efficient, unbalanced tangle of tubes and sacks. The left testicle, for instance, droops lower not because (as the ancient Greeks suspected) it is heavier, but because the snarl of inner tubes dictated by the heart simply makes that position more efficient.

Ouch.

Bloggers are freaking out, it seems. Last week, Google changed some of the weighting in its supermysterious PageRank technology -- and it has apparently made many popular blogs less likely to be a search result.

Up until now, blogs had it good. They were the answer to which Google had been a question. Google favors results that are well-linked-to -- if you have a lot of links to your site, you're obviously considered valuable in the online wor