Sorry for the quiet blog lately -- but I'm on vacation until Sept. 4th! I'll be gathering tons of blogging stuff during that time, though, and will return with a veritable cornucopia of weirdness.

Enjoy the heat!

In recent months, I've written a couple of times about online poetry generators. But now I've found a physical computational device -- a poetry calculator called the Verse-O-Matic. The prototype was created by James Robinson, a student at the Interactive Technologies Program at New York University, and as Robinson describes on his site, it works like this:

The Verse-O-Matic looks almost exactly like a regular printing calculator, although the digits are replaced by nine themes (love, happiness, beauty, humor, age, nature, separation, sadness, and despair). When a key is pressed, the calculator searches its memory to select all of the 70 poems in memory that refer to that theme. Additional themes can be added ("+" = AND) or subtracted ("-" = AND NOT) from the poetic equation simply by pressing the appropriate keys. When the user presses "=", the equation is completed and the calculator prints a poem that fulfills all of the thematic boundaries that the user has set.

For instance:

Love + Separation - Sadness = "This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath, May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet." [William Shakespeare]

As you may recall, I wrote a piece last month for the Boston Globe about an artificial-intelligence program that can tell whether a piece of anonymous writing was composed by a woman or a man. The New York Times Magazine ran a short essay on the subject, and within days, a very cool blogger named Rich rendered the program on a web page called The Gender Genie. Go there, input in some text, and it'll tell you whether it was written by a man or a woman!

Interestingly, I fed this very entry into the Gender Genie and found out that it was indeed written by ... a man!

I'm strangely relieved.

(Thanks to Misha for finding this one!)

A few months ago, I published an essay in THIS, a superb magazine of alternative politics. It was my defense of envy -- and a critique of what I'm calling today's "backlash against envy." It's online at the magazine's site, but here's a permanent copy for reference:

Confessions of a Playa Hata Conservatives have mounted a war against envy—blasting anyone who questions CEO pay or tax cuts as a jealous, green-eyed wannabe. What are they so scared of?

by Clive Thompson

Martha Stewart was searching for the perfect word.

She was trying to describe her disastrous year to Jeffrey Toobin from the New Yorker. It began last summer, when Stewart was accused of insider trading, and her good friend, ImClone CEO Samuel Waksal, was hauled off to jail. While the government investigated Stewart herself, the media piled on—mercilessly mocking her, questioning her ethics, and making the obligatory “Martha Stewart Living in Jail” jokes. Investors dumped her stock, shaving $400 million off her net worth. As she told Toobin her story, she wandered through her sprawling mansion, showed off her collection of china, had her personal cook serve a five-course meal, described the in-flight caviar she’d served some friends on her personal jet, and fretted over why everyone seemed to have it in for her. “My business is about homemaking. And that I have been turned into or vilified openly as something other than what I really am has been really confusing,” she said. “I mean, we’ve produced a lot of good stuff for a lot of good people.”

Is it schadenfreude? Toobin asked. “That’s the word,” she replied. “I hear that, like, every day.”

Stewart isn’t alone. In the past year, the wealthy—and their political friends—have been enduring regular blasts of ill-will from an increasingly testy public. It’s not hard to see why. While the recession has blindsided most of the working world, the rich have continued to joyfully grind their good fortune in everyone’s faces. When Enron collapsed, senior executives cashed out big; one top earner, Lou Pai, pocketed a stratospheric $994 million. Even as Dennis Kozlowski was approving Tyco’s voodoo accounting, his handlers were buying him $10,000 shower curtains and a $2,500 trash bin. And in December, just as the U.S. labour board announced grimly that over 50,000 jobs had vanished from the economy that month alone, George W. Bush was heatedly defending a tax cut that would hand $80 billion over to the richest one percent of the population.

Rarely has the P.R. for the rich been so bleak. And the heat isn’t coming just from bitter proles. Even federal bank honcho—and former Ayn Rand acolyte—Alan Greenspan delivered a speech bemoaning the “infectious greed” of America’s rich. Meanwhile, writers at Fortune magazine, hardly the sort you’d expect to find storming the Bastille, devoted an entire issue last fall to keelhauling the titans of industry. “The public,” they fulminated, “has been treated to an ever-lengthening parade of corporate villains, each seemingly more rapacious than the last.” Ouch. Where’s the love?

Yet the most curious part of this trend is the reaction of the wealthy. Faced with this blizzard of venom, they have begun to mount a curious counterattack: for the rich and their supporters, “envious” is now the insult of choice. Want to defend that bloated tax handout? Or your interstellar pay package? Or maybe that humungous inheritance from dear old dad? Tell your critics that they’re envious wannabes—jealous of your brilliant, well-merited success.

“Today a religion of hate, of envy and of anti-greed, using an unjust set of antitrust and insider-trading laws, punishes innocents. The innocents are successful American entrepreneurs” raged Mark Da Cunha, editor of Capitalism magazine, in an editorial in the National Post. George W. Bush has wholeheartedly joined the backlash, claiming those fighting his tax cuts are fuelled by “organized envy.” Meanwhile, Jack Kemp mutters darkly in the Washington Post about “liberal class warriors who practice the politics of envy.” Ralph Klein in Alberta castigates the “envious” folks who crave his oil. And as for Martha Stewart—The Wall Street Journal published an entire editorial devoted to “Martha Envy,” explicitly pegging Stewart’s woes on the green-eyed monster. Even the enemies of North America are blasted as vessels of unimaginably huge envy; global conflict is not ideological, but emotional. When the terrorists hit the World Trade Center, it was because they envy our freedom; when Europe refuses to unleash daisy-cutters on Iraq, it’s because—as conservative pundit Josef Joffe sniffed in a recent Foreign Policy article entitled “The Axis of Envy”—they’re jealous of the U.S.’s massive economic might.

Consider this our newest cultural battle—The War On Envy. We have, it seems, become a nation of nasty little playa hatas, and the playas are none too pleased about it.

All of which suggests a rather intriguing political question. What, precisely, are the elites so afraid of? When a continent’s power brokers are so unified in their panic, maybe it’s time we looked more closely at this unsettling emotion. Is it possible that envy is a lot more politically important—and useful—than we think?

IN JULY OF 1998, the British economists Daniel John Zizzo and Andrew Oswald conducted an unsual experiment. They took a group of subjects and gave each one 100 units of an imaginary currency. The subjects then played a computer gambling game, in an attempt to increase their virtual wealth. On screen, players were able to see not only their own wealth level, but the wealth of every other player. But soon things changed: after the first round was over, the economists picked a few players at random—and gave them 500 extra pieces of currency. When the gambling resumed, the other players were astonished to observe the sudden, new riches of their opponents.

And here’s where things got interesting. The economists gave the players the option of “burning” each other’s wealth. They could pay their own money to destroy another player’s wealth.

The result? The poorer players all ganged up on the few who’d become suddenly wealthy—and began furiously burning their riches. By the time the dust settled, almost two-thirds of the players had burned someone else’s money, and one-fifth of the overall money pool was destroyed.

“Our subjects gave up large amounts of cash to hurt others in the laboratory,” noted the mildly stunned economists. “The extent of burning was a surprise to us.” One could scarcely imagine a result more likely to horrify the rich. Not only will the envious poor pillage the rich—but hey, scientists can prove it! Marxism may have died in the Soviet Union, but you can bring it back to life in a petri dish.

The experiment is a spectacular illustration of the main reason envy is traditionally so distressing: it is a singularly destructive emotion. It’s not merely about craving someone else’s good fortune; it’s about wrecking it, and bringing others down to your level. Some of the most famous acts of retribution in history have been envy-driven. It’s particularly bad among artists, who are renowned for cherishing minute grievances. In the Renaissance, for example, the Italian painter Baccio concluded that Michaelango was so superior in his skill and fame that he broke into a temple and shredded one of Michaelango’s murals. Another artist, Domenico Veneziano, actually murdered a successful rival by beating him with “leaden weights.” In medieval Germany, wealthy urban residents would tweak the envy of neighbours by constructing enormous buildings that they didn’t even need; it got so bad that they had to pass a regulation about it.

When Adam Smith was writing Wealth of Nations, he was painfully aware that great wealth would inspire great conflict. “The affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions,” he wrote. “It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security.”

Given that the wealth gap in North America is now as howlingly wide as it was during the original Gilded Age, no wonder the affluent are scared witless about envy. They must feel like pinatas. Cooped up in their paramilitary Hummers and hunkered behind the poured-concrete barriers that surrounded the recent Davos World Economic Forum, today’s super-rich behave as if they are constantly holding a global lynch mob at bay.

The powerful have always painted those who covet their wealth as crazed, irrational freaks. But this isn’t quite fair. Envy may be corrosive, but it does have a logic. Consider that British study again: when the economists analyzed the data, they found that the burning was more complex than meets the eye. It concentrated on those who had gotten their riches randomly—those who hadn’t done anything to deserve it. Other players who’d increased their wealth in a “justified” way—by winning at the gambling game—were not as frequently targets of the money-burners. Which is to say, the attackers were concerned not merely with destroying wealth, but with imposing integrity on the game. The burning, the researchers surmised, “appears to be strong evidence for the existence of some kind of envy or concern for fairness ... Many people are not burning rich people more because they are rich, but rather because, and to the extent that, they got the money undeservedly.”

When you look at it this way, the burning seems weirdly wholesome. What could be more classically progressive than levelling the playing field—and correcting unearned privilege? Envy may not be a terribly upbeat emotion; you would hardly want to drive all your actions by its bitter fuel. But as philosophers like John Rawls have long noted, there’s a link between envy and a concern for justice. In A Theory of Justice, he argued that envy can function as a sort of canary in a mine-shaft, alerting us to the presence of genuine unfairness—and making us scrutinize the world more carefully. If the richest in society are alarmed about mass envy, it’s possible they’re nervous about the lessons from Enron, Global Crossing, and Tyco; perhaps their fortunes could not stand the scrutiny either.

DURING THE LAST WINTER HOLIDAYS, I was having drinks with a friend who was flipping through the business pages. He hit upon a story about Jack Welch—the outgoing CEO of General Electric. Welch was in the middle of a nasty divorce, and as a result, his entire financial life was being made public. As it turns out, his GE retirement package includes a stunning $10 million annually—and includes the free use of corporate jets, helicopters, and a palatial Manhattan apartment with an infinite supply of wine. My friend snorted. “What in hell did this guy do to earn that?”

This is, of course, the $64,000 question: what precisely constitutes “deserved” wealth? That’s really What We Talk About When We Talk About Envy. Have the super-rich really earned their super-riches? Ask Martha Stewart, and she’ll tell you she worked hard for her corporate success. Ask George W. Bush; he’s argued that he became a millionaire—and president—solely on his own merits. The fact that Bush Sr. held the same office, and got dozens of former cia spook cronies to hurl public funds at his son’s half-cocked business plans and presidential campaign? No impact. All joking aside, though, “merit” is easily the most complex yet unresolved question in Western economics, so forgive me when I tell you I’m not going to resolve it here. Reasonable people can reasonably debate whether a $4-million-a-year CEO has actually earned his way, or gotten it on the backs of others.

Yet this is what’s so striking about the new backlash against envy: there is no such debate. The hue and cry about “the politics of envy” has become a judo move, letting our elites neatly sidestep any questions about the moral dimensions of capitalism. This is particularly odd when you consider how many CEOs lately have been carted away in handcuffs. But it’s true: if you’re rich, the consensus is that you must have done something to deserve it—and if anyone says different, it’s because, dude, they suck.

Last year, Jennifer Lopez’s handlers became worried that her ballooning wealth—and her increasingly disconnected-from-reality diva behaviour, including her demand that every single item in her backstage rooms be white—were alienating her working-class fan base. So they rushed out “Jenny From the Block,” in which Lopez meticulously catalogues her fame, proclaims her down-to-earth soul ... and then lashes out at her critics for being envious. “Everybody mad at the rocks that I wear,” she protests. “Nothin phony, don’t hate on me.” This cynical pose is, of course, by now practically a lizard-brain reflex in bling-bling hip hop. But what’s kind of hilarious is how similar the protestations of the mainstream right-wing sound. Don’t like my rocks? Or my wildly over-the-top pay? Or my million-dollar anti-labour lobbying budget? Hata. “Typical class warfare rhetoric,” Bush sneered when opponents began criticizing his tax handout for the rich. Who’s writing this guy’s speeches? P. Diddy?

But you know what? That name-calling works quite well. Labelling someone an “envious” loser is a uniquely efficient way of shutting them up. Because even if you feel perfectly justified in your resentment, nobody wants to be known as envious. It is one of our most massive social no-nos. People will excuse many ugly emotions: greed, spite and, given the right circumstances, even murderous rage. But envy is the sin no one will defend. When’s the last time you openly admitted you were envious of someone? “Did ever anybody seriously confess to envy?” Herman Melville once wondered. “Something there is in it universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime.”

Back in the sixties, George M. Foster, a professor of anthropology at the University of Berkeley, began polling his students about their levels of envy. One half declared themselves to be “virtually without envy,” and another 40% said they were envious only very occasionally. Barely 10% would admit to being “very envious.” “Moreover,” Foster noted, “the 90% who deny major envy tend to be vociferous and argumentative; it is a personal affront to them to suggest that they are much more envious than they care to believe.”

In the late 1980s, the Boston University professor Richard Smith shed even more light on the matter, with a different “burning” experiment. He presented a group of students with a hypothetical unfair situation, in which they got the short end of the stick. They were offered the opportunity to even the odds by hacking away at the winner’s earnings. In one test, they were allowed to retaliate anonymously; in another, they had to do it publicly. When they were allowed to do so anonymously, 30% burned the winner. But when they were required to be public about their envious actions—and have the winner know who was attacking them—only 6.7% did so. Social censure, Smith concluded, is so powerful that it can stop people from acting on their envy, no matter how justified they might feel. “Despite a degree of ill will often directed at the person who is envied, social prohibitions prevent the expression of this ill will,” he noted.

There are some very good reasons for this social censure. After all, philosophers have long noted that our economic envy is frequently directed not at powerful, nasty overlords, but at our close friends and family. When we compare ourselves to those most similar to us, even niggling differences in rank and privilege can become nasty grievances. (As Gore Vidal famously wrote, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”) Since wishing ill on our intimates seems awfully creepy, we understandably worry whether envy is not, in all cases, a sort of subhuman emotion. If it can drive us to dislike even our friends, what good could there possibly be in it? In Of Envy, Sir Francis Bacon concluded that envious people were “deformed persons, and eunuchs, and old men, and bastards.” Count me in!

BACK IN 1891, WHEN AMERICANS were awash in the Gilded Age, and the fabulous clothes and houses of the elites were paraded in endless, fawning articles, Edward Bok, editor of the conservative Ladies’ Home Journal, decided that his readership had become too envious. In an editorial, he proclaimed that it was unhealthy to care so much about what others had. “If you do not possess all the things you would like to have, it is very poor policy to idly wish for them,” he wrote. “A woman is happy just in proportion as she is content ... Contentment is a wonderful thing to cultivate.”

Obviously, this sentiment seems pretty naive and Victorian (to say nothing of wildly condescending to women). But throughout the ages, it has been the traditional response to envy: chill out. Practice some zen, man. Don’t worry about what others have; be happy with what you’ve got! This message comes from all political quarters, from conservative churches to crunchy-granola co-ops. Your mother probably told you the same thing over the dinner table. And sure, disavowing envy is probably good for your soul, to say nothing of your blood pressure. But what if it’s bad for you in other ways?

Consider one final envy experiment. Recently, economists at Harvard and the University of Miami asked 257 test subjects for their thoughts on income. They gave subjects two different scenarios, and asked them which they’d prefer. In Scenario A, they would make $50,000 a year, in a society where everyone else makes $25,000. In Scenario B, they would make much more—$100,000 a year—but everyone else in society would make $200,000. When the economists tallied the results, they found 56% of people opted for Scenario A. In other words, a majority of people would prefer to have considerably less money, so long as they were ahead of the pack. It didn’t matter that everyone, on balance, would be poorer. As the authors dryly noted: “Many seemed to see life as an ongoing competition, in which not being ahead means falling behind.”

The really weird thing is, this completely violates traditional economic theory. According to classical economics, we are all supposed to be rational actors—who care only about maximizing our own personal wealth. What our neighbours do is supposedly of no concern to us. By this logic, the vast majority of people ought to pick Scenario B, where they enjoy twice as much cash.

But most people didn’t pick B, and for a very good reason: when we are relatively poorer than others in society, we tend to get screwed. As the economist Robert Frank argued in his 1999 book Luxury Fever, we cannot ignore the existence of higher earners even if we try, because their spending affects us. For example, if you live in a city where everyone else becomes suddenly richer, housing prices go up—and drive you out of the city, consigning you to a one-hour commute from a cheaper suburb. Likewise, if other parents hire expensive private tutors to increase their kid’s chances of getting into a preferred university, they might take your kid’s slot. And if everyone shows up to the job interview wearing expensive clothes, so must you—even if you can’t afford it as easily. Their spending will drive you into debt.

“To the extent that wearing the right watch, driving the right car, wearing the right suit, or living in the right neighbourhood may help someone land the right job or a big contract, these expenditures are more like investments than like true consumption,” Frank argues. “And this suggests yet another reason that people often feel uneasy when in the presence of others who have conspicuously more.” It is a lovely irony of the marketplace: while actual wealth may not trickle down, the pressure to spend like the wealthy does.

Frank is on the cutting edge of what’s called “positional” economics. In the last few decades, he and his colleagues have accomplished something quite remarkable: they have created economic theory that, for the first time, reflects the powerful role of envy in our lives. As positional economists are now finding, envy is sometimes an extremely rational impulse upon which to act. It can indeed be rational to be resentful of, say, the cosmic pay scales of CEOs, or the passing on of massive inherited wealth—even if these don’t appear at first blush to be any of your business. Even The Economist, when it editorialized on the famous British “burning” study, was forced to conclude that while the results didn’t conform to neoclassical economics, they made a hell of a lot of sense.

LET ME BE CLEAR ABOUT ONE THING: I am not trying to “reclaim” economic envy. I don’t entirely trust envy as a motivation. I certainly don’t like it when I feel it (which is pretty often; writers are among the most bitter, envious people you’ll ever meet).

And of course, personalized envy doesn’t always work in the service of justice. For example, envy has arguably helped wreck several progressive groups—when the leader becomes famous, manages to gain access to power brokers, and is promptly ripped to shreds by footsoldiers who accuse him or her of “hogging the spotlight.” Envy delights in tearing down the prominent, even if the prominent are doing good work. Back when Gloria Steinem was helping to kickstart second-wave feminism, she was pilloried by other feminists who felt her blonde good looks gave her too much power in the media.

Recently, the anti-globalization movement has been hit with this type of rancour—including sniping about the egotism of activists like Jaggi Singh. Back in January, Singh was arrested by Israeli police after refusing to abide by their order to stay out of the occupied territories. Within days, a series of posts appeared on the activist rabble.ca discussion boards, mocking Singh as a narcissist. “A legend in his own mind,” sniped one; “Another pointless performance in the ongoing Jaggi Singh Show,” another chimed in. “Mr. Media Star Singh,” sighed a third. All this because the guy accepted an invitation to visit a social-justice group in the occupied terrorities?

There’s got to be some difference between getting angry at an unfair world, and simply giving vent to the spleen of personal envy. What freaks the elites out, ultimately, is the sense that envy might break out of personal animus and turn into an organized force. Who knows when the great unwashed are going to stop whining and start lighting political fires? Still, as I logged off the rabble boards, I began to sympathize with poor Martha Stewart.

Well, almost. At one point during his visit, the New Yorker’s Toobin commented on the silver chopsticks she’d laid out for their lunch. “You know, in China they say, ‘The thinner the chopsticks, the higher the social status.’ Of course, I got the thinnest I could find,” Stewart said. “That’s why people hate me.”

Here's an item that manages to seem both incredibly cool -- and incredibly gross. Mark Frauenfelder, one of the bloggers at BoingBoing, recently moved to the remote Pacific island of Rarotonga. This week, he developed a strange sore, and since there are no dermatologists on the tiny island, he scanned the sore and put it online -- to see if any readers could diagnose what it is.

Consider this the first case of "distributed medicine". Geeks have used the technique for years to diagnose computer problems; they'll use bulletin boards to post error messages that they're getting from code, and see if anyone can help them out. Invariably, the infinite-monkeys approach of the Internet can solve the problem -- when you toss out a question to an audience of millions, odds are good that someone will instantly know the answer. So Mark's experience is an interesting experiment. Could we apply the same approach to diagnosing illnesses?

So far, he's received several diagnoses on BoingBoing's comment boards, including:

"in guam we got those - never knew if it was a bug bite or what - but being sweaty, maybe not too clean, in the ocean (everyday/all day), they just never healed well. what we did: scrubbed them with bristle brush first - bleeds, but cleans it out (we were camping...maybe you're in better conditions) - dressed them with HP and kept them dry - in a couple of days all was well..."

"this looks just like something I had last month. it was a staph infected insect bite. the nurse said there had many here recently and the staph was highly antibiotic resistant. Very important to treat with the correct antibiotic. have a culture made if possible to determine the correct meds. if this is a resistant bug, treatment can be difficult if not caught in time."

Then again, as one reader posted, it might be ringworm -- but "I'd think we should let the medical personnel over there have their chance before we diagnose via Internet."

You know, there is just nothing wrong with the concept of a high-quality, drinkable two-dollar bottle of wine.

(Thanks to Howard Sherman for finding this one!)

I've babbled on before about the wonderful creative freedom of online Flash games. Because they're cheap and quick to make, and can be designed by a single individual, they don't have to fall into the same categories as typical, buy-in-a-box video games like Quake or Half-Life or The Sims. Which is to say, Flash games can exist for a reason that isn't just about getting you addicted. They can serve another purpose. For example, as I argued last year in Slate, Flash games be harnessed as a form of political commentary -- a game you play once or twice to absorb a political argument.

They can also be quite deeply artistic. I've recently been playing a bunch of games created by Ferry Halim, an artist in Fresno, Calif. They're online here, and I urge you with cattle-prod intensity to go visit and play them now. They're a perfect example of games that aim to be artistic, and not merely addictive. Each game is like a tiny hallucination-dream, done in dreamy pastels -- like a children's book brought to life.

A few of my favorites: "Summer Walk" -- which is in the top left-handed corner of Halim's game grid (sorry, it's impossible to link to an invidual game.) Or the one that's one column over and two rows down -- illustrated by a kite. This stuff is just beyond superb.

Dig this: David Bryne has released a book of art he created using PowerPoint. There's a great story in the New York Times today about it, which quotes Bryne on the genesis of the project:

It started as a parody. "I was doing mock sell presentations, using mock PowerPoint slides as visual aids," he says. "That's how I learned the program originally. But then it evolved into something else. It was no longer enough to make fun of the corporate stuff. I realized that PowerPoint was a limited but a valid medium."

To view the medium creatively, he says, "You have to try to think like the guy in Redmond or Silicon Valley. You feel that your mind is suddenly molded by the thinking of some unknown programmer. It's a collaboration, but it's not reciprocal."

Starting with parody, he adds, even incompetent imitations, is a legitimate first step. Eventually, if you persevere, the obsessive nature of the process yields unexpectedly beautiful results. For him, then, the challenge became "taking a form that's purportedly logic and rational and making it poetic."

I think he's on to something here. Recall Edward Tufte's recent pamphlet The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, in which he savages the program -- claiming it is so blunt and useless a tool that it forces presenters to mangle their data. That mangling might be problematic in any situation where you're trying to make a rational decision. But what if you're aiming at the irrational? Presto: Maybe PowerPoint would be an even better artistic canvas than Photoshop, heh.

In fact, maybe this explains why businesses are so devoted to PowerPoint. After all, rationality isn't always good for business. For all their pretensions to being empirical and hard-nosed, most business decisions are guided by pure intuition and wild hunches. As the old advertising joke goes, "I know half my advertising money is wasted -- I just don't know which half." Everyday, American businesspeople arrive at work faced with an enduring paradox: Needing to appear rational, while in reality being guided by faith-healing and intellectual finger-painting. So maybe PowerPoint is, for businesspeople, the most appropriate technology around: Something that appears to be about cool, calm data-presentation, but which in reality is a device of surreality worthy of Dada.

Today, the Boston Globe published a piece I wrote about a new scientific study arguing that scientists peak in the early 30s. The reason? Marriage -- and evolutionary psychology. The piece is online at the Globe site, but here's a permanent copy archived:

Do scientists age badly? A researcher says marriage ruins a beautiful mind By Clive Thompson

Is science a game for the young?

The stereotype of the brilliant young turk has been around for years, and it's not hard to see why. Physics and mathematics are filled with prodigies who erupted with ideas in their 20s, only to spend the rest of their lives failing to replicate their early strokes of genius. A 26-year-old Einstein revolutionized physics with three barn-burning papers published in a single year but spent his final decades trying, and failing, to develop his "unified theory.'' James Watson co-discovered the double helix of DNA at 25 but never had another major breakthrough. John von Neumann, a founder of modern computer science, once claimed that the intellectual powers of mathematicians peaked at the tender age of 26.

Armchair theorists have offered plenty of reasons why. Perhaps younger minds are more unformed, and thus inclined to the sort of kooky risk-taking necessary for major discoveries. Or maybe it's just that back in the late 19th and early 20th century, there was simply less science -- making it easier for a researcher to strike it big while young.

But earlier this summer, a brash new study claimed to discover the real culprit, and a rather unlikely one: Marriage. In a paper for the Journal of Research in Personality, Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, declared that evolutionary psychology explains why male scientists, at least, lose steam as they age. Scientists achieve great things, he argued, because, like rams butting heads on the African veldt, they're attempting to woo mates and ensure their genetic heritage. Once they marry, their drive to achieve declines.

"We've evolved these big brains partly to attract mates,'' Kanazawa says. "And science is one part of what we do to attract mates.''

It sounds almost too pat -- or too weird -- to be true. And in fact, Kanazawa came to his unusual theory through a circuitous path. He was studying the behavior of male criminals, and musing on the well-documented fact that their criminal activity increases sharply in adolescence, peaks in the late teens and early 20s, and then drops. Evolutionary psychologists have believed for some time that this spike in criminal behavior was in fact a mate-attracting device, since crime provided men with the wealth and "success'' to set them off from their peers. Kanazawa knew about the stereotype of the early-blooming scientist; could it follow the same pattern?

To test his notion out, he selected 280 scientists at random from the 1994 edition of Oxford University Press's Biographical Dictionary of Scientists. (More than 97 percent of them were male.) He took the date of the main discovery for which the scientist was listed, surmising that it would represent the commonly accepted "peak'' of his career. When Kanazawa crunched the data, he found that almost one-quarter of the scientists made their biggest discovery roughly between the ages of 27 and 32, and two-thirds had done so by their mid-30s. By their early 40s, a total of 80 percent had made their breakthrough.

What's more, if a guy did make it big later in life -- a rare event -- he often wasn't married. Half as many unmarried scientists made their major contribution in their late 50s as in their 20s. Married scientists, however, were only 4.25 percent as likely to hit it big in their 50s as in their 20s. For Kanazawa, it was proof that our evolutionary urges are governing our science. (He added pointedly that some studies show testosterone levels drop "precipitously'' in new fathers.)

Kanazawa's paper made headlines in several countries. Older scientists scrambled to declare that they were still alive, kicking, and, for that matter, innovating. Nigel Forteath, a 59-year-old marine biologist in Australia, noted in an interview with a local paper that he didn't become a world leader in his field -- seahorses -- until quite later in life. "We've just bred half a million of these animals in captivity, having been told it was impossible,'' he says. "This idea of needing to attract a mate is just crazy.''

Others pointed out that Kanazawa ignored much more mundane reasons for declining productivity. Saddled with administrative tasks, older tenured academics sometimes barely set foot in the lab, argues Spencer Weart, a historian at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Md.

"They're the ones who get dragooned into the committee, doing the work in Washington to get funds,'' he says. "If they had a good idea, they'd be handing it off to their grad students and saying, 'Here -- go check this out!''' (One might add that the tenure system itself, which requires that researchers make a significant discovery early but doesn't penalize them for resting on their laurels later, may also be a factor.)

Critics of evolutionary psychology were perhaps the most withering of all. "This isn't a theory based on data, it's a political idea,'' says Brown University biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling scornfully. "The really good biologists, the serious sociobiologists, don't make these ridiculously broad claims anymore,'' she adds.

More subtly, the idea of the young "prodigy scientist'' may be a historic relic. Universities faculties in the 19th and early 20th centuries -- heavily represented in Kanazawa's study -- were much younger than they are now, and this fact has continuing demographic implications today. As Weart points out, in the 100 years leading up to 1970, the number of scientists doubled every 10 years. So for every scientist who was in his 50s, there were two in their 40s, and four in their 30s. By sheer odds, you'd wind up with more younger stars than older ones.

Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psychology at UC-Davis who studies age and achievement, was asked to review Kanazawa's paper before publication and recommended that it not be published. For one thing, he explains, Kanazawa didn't control for life expectancy: By conflating the achievements of those who died young and those who lived to a ripe old age, Kanazawa's approach artificially lowers the average age at which achievement peaks.

In his own studies, Simonton has found results that are far more soothing to the late bloomer: On average, scientists produce their first breakthrough in their 20s, another one -- their biggest -- in their late 30s and early 40s, and one final one in their 50s.

Other theorists suggest that patterns of achievement may have less to do with age than with intellectual style. In his book "Painting Outside the Lines'' (2002), the University of Chicago economist David Galenson studied the careers of 100 artists and concluded that their peak was determined by whether they were a "finder'' or a "seeker'' of their aesthetic. Finders -- Picasso, Seurat -- usually stumble upon their idea early in life, and thus are labeled prodigies. Seekers-- Cezanne, Kandinsky -- hunt their ideas down slowly.

In science, Galenson says, different disciplines showcase different styles. Math and physics are highly theoretical and reward "a-ha'' thinking, so they attract finders; biology and archaeology are more empirical and reward a lifetime of field work, so they attract seekers -- and thus produce older success stories.

Quite apart from the merits of Kanazawa's theories, though, this debate is unlikely to go away. In our youth-addled culture, nearly everyone is terrified of losing their edge -- which is probably why so many people thrilled, or panicked, at Kanazawa's theory. "The bottom line is, people want to know when they're over the hill,'' Simonton notes. "And they're asking the question, well, I haven't done anything yet -- but do I still have a chance?''

And Kanazawa himself? He just turned 40, and has a wedding ring on his finger. "Here's hoping,'' he says ruefully, "that I'm an exception to my own rule.''

Clive Thompson covers science, culture, and politics for The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Details, and other publications.

During the recent blackout, you might have suffered some rather annoying inconveniences. Maybe your TV shut off during a good show, or the fridge melted your favorite dish. But you know what? Just thank god you weren't one of the luckless souls who decided to board the Cedar Point roller coaster -- because when the power went off, they were stranded three-quarters of the way up the first hill. After almost half an hour, they had to walk down the rails.

This news actually pleased me, because I'm too chicken to ride rollercoasters and am continually looking for excuses to explain my terror. Though really, if you want arguments against roller coasters, one need look no further than the Saferparks watchdog group and their report on "Amusement Ride Passenger Containment Failures", which is precisely as ghastly as the title suggests. A few examples:

"Sidewinder", Darien Lake Theme Park, 10-Aug-98 Child ejected from car due to centrifugal force. Child's parents said he fell from between the lap bar and the side of the car.

"Gyroscope/Spiroscop", Carnival Services, 18-Jun-00
Victim came out of waist and ankle restraints, was struck by spinning bar, and ejected from the ride, striking the ground.

"Flying Dragons," Jersey Shore Beach & Boardwalk Co., 22-May-99
While buckling patron in ride child began to cry, operator asked dad if he wanted to remove him, dad said no. For 15 mins. into ride child cried, op stopped ride dad removed belt while ride still moved. Lifted scared child over fence & fell.

Mangled limbs, blinding-force blows to the head, small infants hurled like meaty cannonballs off into space by centripal force ... oh, yes, amusement-park rides sound like a blast. Read that third entry again, and note how wonderfully it captures the gorgeous family dynamics of park rides: A cackling father forcing his terrified child to ride some rusting torture device, probably to "toughen him up" or something. Lovely stuff, alright.

It reminds me of the horrible and fatal accident that happened at the West Edmonton Mall in 1986. Three people died when the wheel assembly of a roller-coaster car came off and the car smashed into a concrete pillar. During investigations into how it all happened, the government discovered that -- among other deliquencies -- the mall hadn't bothered to have the roller coaster's operations manual translated from German.

The folks at Trivial Pursuit have decided to put out a new video-game version of the game. According to USA Today, they've hired a few celebrities to be the voices asking the questions:

Among the celebrities whose voices grace Trivial Pursuit Unhinged, a video game being developed by Atari, are Whoopi Goldberg, who will deliver arts & entertainment questions; Fox NFL Sunday analyst Terry Bradshaw, sports; cover girl Brooke Burke, people & places; former Monty Pythonite John Cleese, history; Bill Nye "The Science Guy," science; and actor John Ratzenberger, wild card. The categories differ slightly from the original game, which has sold more than 70 million copies since its launch in 1982.

Okay, most of these make generic sense: Whoopi Goldberg is an entertainer, hence "entertainment"; Terry Bradshaw's a sports analyst, hence "sports". But what's up with John Cleese doing history? What cultural algorithm is at work here? As far as I can tell, he has a British accent, which connotes, uh, old-ness, and maybe his ironic delivery will enhance the fact that the Americans playing the game think history is sort of weird and irrelevant to everyday life. Far weirder is using Brooke Burke, Photoshopped bimbette du jour of the Maxim crowd, for "people and places". What possible semantic connection can one forge between Burke and the category of "people"?

So, I'm still in Philadelphia -- stuck here while Amtrak gets power going. Since I want to go online, and also want a coffee, I head over to the downtown Starbucks. I figure, what the heck, I'll spent six bucks on their usuriously-priced daily wifi.

But whoops -- the wifi isn't turned on at this location. The staff haven't been trained at all in dealing with data requests, so they're clueless. So I buy a coffee and leave to go back to ...

... Rittenhouse Square, the park where I found free wifi spilling out the windows of nearby citizens. This time, I'm logged on via a node called "marcie". So, two points come to mind:

i) Does anyone reading this know who "marcie" might be? I'd like to write a thank-you note -- she saved my butt today!

ii) Starbucks really ought to figure this wifi thing out. First off, as the folks at Boing Boing and Techdirt Wireless News have been arguing eloquently for weeks now, Starbucks ought to realize that they shouldn't be selling wifi -- they should be giving it away. Selling wifi is like charging for the lights in your restaurant. Moreover, they should train staff in making sure the wifi's on. I mean, the staff is trained to make sure the lights are on, aren't they? This stuff, I might point out, is also not rocket science. Half of today's wifi nodes work perfectly when you simply plug them in; a staff of rhesus monkeys could keep the data flowing at a Starbucks.

And why should they be giving it away? Because of the enormous number of clients they're losing by not doing so. I actually don't like sitting out here in the sunny park. I'm a geek -- generally horrified by the outside world, much happier in a dank, dark cafe. (I mean, there are people suntanning out here. What the hell, people? There's no freakin' ozone layer. There are like cosmic rays and shit pounding down on you. Go inside and play a video game, for chrissake.) I'm also a caffeine addict. So I would infinitely rather sit in a Starbucks and spent $10 on coffee for the morning while I surf. If they'd had their wifi running, they'd have sold several cups of coffee to me. In one single morning, I -- one single customer -- would have paid about 1/4 of the entire monthly cost of providinig wifi. But they didn't have their act together, so I bailed, and now I'm buying coffee from a greasy spoon near the park.

The logic of this argument is so screamingly obvious that I would imagine even the dimmest executive is going to pick up on it soon.

This is neat -- within hours of the blackout beginning, someone set up a photoblog to archive pictures of a dark New York shot using cameraphones.

(Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!)

I was in Philadelphia today on a journalism assignment, and it was a typical digital moment: I was simultaneously talking to my girlfriend Emily, who was in New York, on the phone, and instant-messaging with a few friends on my Danger Hiptop. In the middle of a sentence, her phone went dead. Then, a minute later, all the New-York-based people on my instant-messaging buddy list went offline.

The moment was a creepy echo of 9/11 -- everyone in New York suddenly vanishing. Thankfully, my non-New-York friends were still online, so I quickly IMed with them and found out what was happening; they were getting the news off CNN.com. I began to realize I was probably stranded in Philly, because Amtrak was also shut down. But I wanted to know more, and surfing via the Hiptop isn't great when you're in a big rush. So I got my IM friend to do a quick hunt for hotels with wifi, figuring I'd check into one.

As it turns out, I walked by Rittenhouse Square -- a downtown Philly park -- and figured it might have some free wifi nearby. Bingo: No sooner than I turned my laptop on than I had about four different strong signals. None had WEP turned on, but all had customized access-point names, which suggests they were left open intentionally for others to share. Once online, I got filled in on all my travel options (bleak, of course) and booked a nearby hotel. When I got to the hotel, I found it had ethernet, but the drivers for my ethernet card were busted. No problem: I wandered down to the park and quickly downloaded the 2.5-meg driver database, thanks to the fine philanthropic wifi sharers of Philadelphia. Then I headed back to my hotel room, where I am right now.

A nice day to illustrate a few of my favorite memes-du-jour: The wonderful crisis-value of portable Hiptop-style phones, and of open community wifi.

First there was Friendster. Then came the various parodies thereof -- such as Fiendster and Enemyster. My new personal favorite is Introvertster, which has wickedly hilarious text:

Introvertster is an online community that prevents stupid people and friends from harrassing you online. You can use Introvertster to:

Avoid invites to chat, filter out annoying invitations for Meetup, birthday parties, or after-hours get togethers.

Packet flood a friends Internet connection making it impossible for them to send you an instant message.

Help your friends get a clue that you really don't like people or care for idle chit-chat.

Create your own barrier to protect yourself against interaction with people. It's easy and fun!

Okay. I've got a bottle of Oban scotch sitting here on my desk. It's very nice stuff -- not too peaty, but with enough bite to make it tasty. It's a reasonably expensive scotch, probably about $50 a bottle. I love Oban, would prefer to drink this bottle myself.

But you know what? I'll gladly give to anyone can prove, with documented evidence, that anyone on the planet has ever actually bought a Segway. One. Single. Segway. Has anyone in the known or unknown universe bought one of these supremely useless, blisteringly overhyped, rideable vacuum cleaners? I mean, I keep on seeing news stories about it. Alaska cops have bought a bunch of Segways to use on patrol; Buy.com announces a winner in its Segway giveaway contest; a few students at LA Tech are using them to pick up chicks. But you know what? They all have the distinct whiff of stories planted by the inventor, Dean Kamen, in a desperate attempt to pretend this quintessence of lameosity is actually selling.

And hell, he ought to be desperate. The guy built a factory in Bedford, N.H., that's capable of cranking out 40,000 Segways per month -- and yet which right now is probably alive with the sound of crickets.

It's a fascinating paean to what can be wrought by the whiplash interia of hype. Remember the hype around the Segway? How Jeff Bezos sank millions of his own investment cash into it? How venture capitlalist John Doerr salivated at the sight of the gyroscopic wonder, and said it would be "as big as the Internet, as far as making a difference"? How author Steve Kemper got a quarter-million-dollar book advance to describe Kamen's brilliant work on the Segway?

So anyway. That bottle of Oban is sitting here. And I will give it to the first person to prove -- I mean prove, with, like, pieces of paper and shit -- that anyone has actually used their own hard-earned cash to buy one single Segway.

And hey! While I'm in such a weirdly nasty mood, let's revisit a column I wrote two and a half years ago about the Segway, back when I was doing a weekly gig for Newsday. I love a good "told you so" moment:

It's a new Internet! A new gold rush! It's "Ginger"! by Clive Thompson

You have to pity high-tech boosters these days. Their fondest dreams have gone bust. E-commerce tanked; the "wireless web" is a non-starter; and according to some recent reports, some long-time Internet users are actually abandoning the Web. Swell. Andrew Wyeth could scarcely have sketched a bleaker picture of modern life.

So I spent the first few weeks of 2001 calling around various high-tech analysts and dot-com braniacs, the folks who own Etoys.com stock that's now worth 53 cents. They craved a new dream. They needed to find religion again. "We need a new revolution," said one, morosely. "There's gotta be something out there!"

Presto.

(NOTE: in addition to reading the full text of this entry, check out the commments area at the end! A couple of Segway owners have already written in. Woo!)

A few days later, some hot news broke! Really hot! A story on Inside.com reported on an upcoming book -- about a top-secret new invention by Dean Kamen. Kamen has plenty of high-tech street cred -- he created the first portable dialysis pump, and a gyroscopic wheelchair that can climb stairs. But now, the story said, he's working on a much bigger new thing -- an invention code-named "Ginger."

But the details were shrouded in mystery! The book proposal wouldn't say precisely what Ginger is. Still, all the important people had seen it, and were raving about it! Apple CEO Steve Jobs was quoted as saying that Ginger's impact would be so huge, people would "architect cities around it." Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos said Ginger was "revolutionary". And Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr said it was destined to be bigger than the World Wide Web.

Hot damn! Instantly, the high-tech punditocracy was in a mad lather, with stories about Ginger appearing everywhere. The dream was alive! Ginger would be a new silicon gold-rush! Ginger would be bigger than the Net! Techies and investors flocked to the phones and online discussion boards, puzzling over the really important questions, such as: What could Ginger be? How does it work? And more importantly -- HOW CAN IT MAKE ME BUCKETS OF CASH?

So it was with some surprise when, a few days later, a few journalists announced they'd figured out what Ginger probably was. They'd checked patents filed by Kamen, and concluded that Ginger was ... a motorized scooter. Maybe a one-wheeled scooter, but still -- a scooter. "I have a feeling that someone is out there having a big laugh over this," mused futurist Paul Saffo.

Granted, it's possible that Ginger is still quite innovative. It may be propelled by a Stirling engine, an age-old device which consumes little power and produces miniscule emissions, but which no-one has ever figured out how to mass produce cheaply. Stirling engines are cool, but still -- you could pretty much hear the air hissing out of the balloon. Even Kamen came out of hiding to protest to Inside.com: "We have a promising project, but nothing of the earth-shattering nature that people are conjuring up."

Ah.

So everyone calmed down. They got their heart rates back below 100. And they eventually went back to sleep.

Because as everyone knows in high-tech -- if you aren't asleep, you can't dream.

The Washington Post asked me to review Black Ice: The Invisible Threat of Cyber-Terrorism, a new book about, uh, the invisible threat of cyber-terrorism. The review appeared yesterday and is online -- but since they take it down after a week or so, here's permanent copy below.

Note: The author, Dan Verton, has posted a response in the comment fields for this blog item! Check it out here, or at the end of the item.

Digital Doomsday
Black Ice: The Invisible Threat of Cyber-Terrorism By Dan Verton
McGraw-Hill/Osborne. 312 pp. $24.99

Not long ago, cyber-terrorists were Public Enemy Number One. In the summer of 2000, a malicious, reclusive hacker released a computer virus called "I Love You" that raced around the globe, destroying $10 billion worth of data. Spies worldwide scrambled to hunt him down, and newspapers ran horrified above-the-fold coverage. Cyberspace seemed like the scariest place on Earth.

Then two planes flew into the World Trade Center -- and the real, physical world became instantly scarier. Terrorists were real, but they weren't invading our desktops, and they weren't even very technologically innovative. On the contrary, their tools of choice -- box cutters -- were so savage and low-fi they wouldn't have been out of place in an invasion of a suburban home.

Explosions, destroyed buildings -- that's the stuff that scares the pants off America. So ever since Sept. 11, it's been hard to get worked up about hackers, viruses and digital mayhem. It all seems like a narcissistic indulgence of the dot-com era, when the Internet was the biggest thing going. When a Manhattan friend recently saw me reading a copy of Black Ice, he scoffed: "That stuff is crap. They're not gonna attack us on the 'Net. They're going to set off car bombs in Times Square. They want dead bodies."

This, in a nutshell, is what the book's author, Dan Verton, is up against. Because he argues that terrorists are indeed developing a new generation of cyberattacks -- and they'll be far worse than anything we could imagine, precisely because we aren't guarding against them. Verton is as credible a digital Cassandra as you can get; he is a former intelligence officer, and his superb investigative journalism for Computerworld magazine recently forced American Airlines to clamp down on its lax wireless technology, which left bag-checking devices open to be messed with.

Some of the examples Verton unearths are certainly spooky. Back in 1996, a Swedish teenager remotely generated so many calls to 911 in southern Florida that he tied up the system. Another hacker today is developing a virus that can commandeer mobile phones and have them similarly flood 911 with phantom calls. Or consider the power grid: In the six months following the World Trade Center attacks, security companies logged 129,000 intrusions, many of which "appeared to be sponsored by governments or organizations in the Middle East," as Verton darkly notes. Imagine no electricity for, say, an entire week: food rotting, crime surging, no phones, and business ground to a halt.

Which is Verton's point: Genuine cyberterrorism will be as physical as a punch to the gut. Who cares about teenage hackers defacing Web sites with misspelled taunts and pictures of porn stars? Let 'er rip, kids. You're only hurting our browsers. Al Qaeda, Verton suggests, would use the virtual world merely as a vehicle with which to attack the real one, and leave plenty of dead bodies. Verton envisions "swarming attacks," combinations of virtual and physical blows: A dirty bomb blows up in Washington, D.C., while a cyberattack wreaks havoc at the nearby hospitals.

And whoops -- as Verton discovers, those hospital computers aren't terribly well guarded. Neither are those of banks, airline systems and most utilities. This is because they're for-profit concerns, and, frankly, security is expensive and inefficient and cuts down on profits. This is a weird turning point in national security. In the old days, the government controlled the important borders of sea, air and land. But now, folks like Merrill Lynch and Verizon -- and, for that matter, you sitting there at your computer -- control the data borders. For the first time, a big part of national security is at the mercy of a rather indifferent free market. This is not to suggest that massive government regulation would be a necessarily better answer; it was, after all, the Bush administration that out-Orwelled Orwell by patching together the Total Information Awareness program. Just imagine the government's paranoid clampdown after the first big terrorist cyberstrike takes place.

Or, should I say, if it takes place. In the end, Verton never offers up a smoking gun. There may well be Al Qaeda hackers out there perfecting evil ways to commandeer air-traffic-control systems. But if there are, we never meet them via any first-hand reporting. Verton doesn't wear out his shoe leather hunting through Afghanistan and Pakistan for these guys; indeed, he rarely seems to leave his desk. Rather, he relies hawkishly on government reports that nervously prophesy cyberchaos. And these reports are, unfortunately, maddeningly hypothetical: This terribly-bad-thing might happen; that even-more-awful-thing could take place. This makes them somewhat hard to trust, in the wake of our "Where's Waldo?" hunt for Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. Trumping up threats to keep defense budgets fat is the oldest game played by Pentagon insiders.

Still, as a longtime computer geek, I've seen how brittle, complex and friable computer systems can be. It's possible that Verton is simply wrong. But if he's right . . . we'll pine for the days when the worst thing a virus could do was waste $10 billion.

Clive Thompson writes for Wired, the New York Times Magazine and Details. He can be reached at clive@clivethompson.net.

Check it out. Programmer Paul Slocum is working on a Homestar Runner game -- for the Atari 2600! You can check out the details here, but the project makes a weird sort of sense. After all, Homestar Runner is a web cartoon designed in Flash, a vector-based animation engine -- which gives it a sort of ontological provenance in the world of computerized simulations. Plus, Homestar Runner is intentionally low-fi, making it exquisitely translatable to the chunky graphics of the Atari 2600. Porting web 'toons to early gaming platforms: I think this guy has discovered a sort of Rosetta Stone for digital content!

Actually, Slocum is one of the most prominent artists in a strange subculture -- programmers who create new games for the Atari 2600, and sell them in old-school cartridge format. There's a host of these games for sale at Atari Age, including Solcum's earlier masterpiece, Marble Craze. In that game, you use both paddle-wheels at once -- giving you an extraordinarily high degree of control over a marble, as you attempt to wend it through a series of mazes and puzzles. Atari Age reviewers went faintly berserk with praise for the game, which also makes sense: By abjuring high-end graphics, Slocum imposed a sort of sonnet-like restriction upon his design that forced him to focus on the nature of play. I actually think every game designer on the planet should be required to produce a fun, addictive game for the Atari 2600 before they're allowed to produce a game for the Xbox, Playstation or computer. That way, they'd actually learn how to come up with things that make for good play, not merely good eye candy.

Actually, some of these homebrew games look pretty cool. Consider the description for "SCSIcide":

If you're a fan of fast-paced paddle games like Kaboom!, then you'll love SCSIcide. In SCSIcide you play the role of a hard drive read head. As the different colored bits scroll by on the hard drive platter, you need to quickly read them in the correct order before you suffer a buffer underflow. As you complete each level, the data scrolls by more and more quickly! How far can you go?

This reminds me of a neat argument about games I once read. Back in the late 80s, the American Museum of the Moving Image held an exhibit devoted to early-80s video games. In an essay commissioned for the show, the author (sorry, I can't remember who it was) argued that because early video games were a) severely limited by memory and graphics, and b) programmed by geeks who were fascinated by the internal mechanics of chips and code, the games were essentially metaphoric projections of the internal life of computers. And it's actually kind of true. Consider the language of early games: They were all about navigating mazes (file systems), figuring out how to open doors (files and drive sectors), "saving" things, etc. As I later joked, "video games are what computers think about when we're not using them." So this SCSIcide game forms a neatly recursive loop. It's a game that is based on the dynamics of a modern computer drive, yet played on game system so old that it formed the inspiration for millions of kid geeks to get into programming.

Ever go to the Louvre and wonder how the hell Caravaggio made his faces so crazily lifelike? A controversial book suggests that the Old Masters were quietly getting some technological help on the side. Artist David Hockney has a new book -- Secret Knowledge -- that claims da Vinci and his contemporaries were using camera obscuras and mirrors to project their real-life subjects onto the canvas, and then simply tracing the images. As CBS reports:

Hockney says it started in Bruges, Belgium, one of Europe's great 15th century commercial centers, where that optical look, a photographic look, first appeared in the works of Flemish masters like Jan van Eyck.

“[He was] a painter who knew about optical projections and had looked at them,” says Hockney. “One thing the mirror projections do is project surfaces quite amazingly, especially shiny surfaces. And there's lots of shiny surfaces.”

As Hockney points out, plenty of artists like Leonardo da Vinci were keenly aware of the camera obscura -- hell, they practically invented and refined the device. And the "smoking gun," Hockney argues, is that as soon as Old Masters art became hyperrealistic, there was a profusion of paintings of left-handed people. That would seem to support the idea that the artists were tracing right-handed figures that had been reversed in a camera obscura.

Art critics argue, quite rightly, that there is no written evidence proving Hockney's theory; no artist of the period has ever discussed using optics and tracing. But there may be a reason for that:

Even today, he says, the artists wouldn’t tell: “They're very secretive. Remember, they're competing in business as well.”

It was also the time of the Inquisition, when mirrors and lenses were associated with witchcraft.

“When Caravaggio is painting in Rome, around the corner in the square, they're burning Claudio Bruni for looking through lenses,” says Hockney.

If you're intrigued by this, check out an exhibit the New York Institute for the Humanities held in late 2001 to evaluate Hockney's claims. It's fascinating stuff, and there's an archive of other stories that have been written about it here.

Personally, I doubt the tracing thesis, for one simple reason: I simply don't think the Mona Lisa looks particularly lifelike at all. Truth be told, she creeps the hell out of me. That weird pointy chin. Yeeee.

(Thanks to Plastic for finding this one!)

Apparently, they take their crime news pretty seriously over at the Star Courier in Kewanee, Illinois (population 12,944). They print an exhaustive "police blotter" that lets no malfeasance go unreported. A sampling of events from today's listing includes:

A subject reported losing a wallet somewhere in the city. Junk titles were issued to a business on Sixth Street. A tall grass complaint was received from the 300 block of Beach Avenue. A complaint of a neighbor draining water from a washing machine out a window into a next-door yard was investigated at Reecy's East Trailer Park. Tall weeds were the source of complaint at Beach and South Streets. Suspicious activity was reported in the 100 block of East McClure Street. Domestic problems were handled in the 600 block of Stokes Street and at Lake Village Apartments.

That prose is so dry I'm surprised it doesn't catch fire. Who's writing this stuff? James Joyce?

According to a new book by Harvard English professor Daniel Donoghue, Lady Godiva never existed. According to the legend, Godiva was the wife of Leofric, the lord of Coventry England. He was sticking the serfs for exorbitant taxes, and Godiva continually pleaded for him to show mercy. He told her he'd lower taxes if she rode through the streets naked -- so she did.

Or, actually, didn't. As the Harvard Magazine reports:

"The story," he notes, "was based on the life of Godifu, a real woman who lived in Coventry in the latter part of the eleventh century and was married to one of the most powerful men in England" ... But Donoghue points out that "two centuries after her death, chroniclers in the Benedictine abbey of St. Albans inserted a fully developed narrative into their Latin histories" and the legend of Lady Godiva was born. "Nobody knows quite why the legend was invented and attached to her name," he says, "but it does seem to function as a kind of myth of origin for the town of Coventry. At the end, Count Leofric seals the agreement about taxes with his own seal."

Can you do computing with plants?

Back in the 18th century, the Swedish botanist Carolinus Linneaus created the Horologium Florae, or "sundial of plants." It's described on this web site:

It consisted of flowers that opened or closed at specific times every day. For example, morning glory is appropriately named for its tendency to open in the very early morning. The plants were arranged by the hours that their flowers opened or closed and was laid out like a clock.

Linnaeus studied the opening and closing times to design his "sundial of plants." The daylily closes between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. Cat's ear opens at 6 a.m. and closes between 4 and 5 p.m. So you see, if you study the habits of enough plants, most hours can be accounted for by such a natural timepiece.

Reading this got me to thinking: Wouldn't it be cool to create a computational logic gate out of flowers? You could rig several different flowers with a set of lights, and set of sensors to determine whether the flowers were open or shut. Under the proper lighting a flower would open (or close, if it were a night flower). And when the flower opened (or closed) it would trigger a sensor that would, in turn, control the lights on a different set of flowers. You could thus set up sets of flowers that would open or shut other sets of flowers, and vice versa.

Seems to me that you could thus pretty easily create the basic logic switches that drive computer chips -- like AND, OR, NOR, or XOR switches. Of course, given how slowly flowers open and close, they'd be the most glacial computer processors on the planet. You could set up a circuit to, say, add two binary numbers -- and then sit back and watch as it takes, like, three hours for the flowers to open and close enough times to do the calculation.

But that'd be the cool part about it! As my friend Greg said when I told him this idea, "it's like a crazy version of the Clock of the Long Now" -- a clock that a bunch of geeks are building that will tick once a year, to remind us humans of how long time is, and how brief our lives actually are. The planet "thinks" awfully slowly, which is precisely what a circuit made of flowers would also illustrate.

It'd also potentially generate some weirdly odd results. After all, computer circuits are designed to be precise and regular. Live things like flowers aren't -- they might open or close unpredictably. A flower computer would thus occasionally produce some wonderfully cock-eyed results. Even better, imagine what would happen when the flowers began to pollinate and grow and spread -- "growing" new switches in the circuit and producing new logic that the planter/builder didn't intend.

Damn, now I wish I had a back yard.

(Thanks to Greg for pointing this one out!)

Apparently, the ink in your inkjet printer is seven times more expensive than Dom Perignon, by volume. According to a story in the Chicago Sun-Times:

"I remember how someone once put it," said Tricia Judge, editorial director of Imaging Spectrum magazine, a printing industry journal.

"Pound for pound, forget gold, forget diamonds. There is nothing more valuable on Earth than an inkjet cartridge."

If the ink were gasoline, it would cost you $175,000 to fill your gas tank.

The story goes on to note something rather funny that's happening: The backlash against the inkjet-printer industrial complex. Ever wonder why such a wonderfully high-quality inkjet printer can be bought for 99 bucks? It's a loss leader. The printer companies lose money on the printers -- but make money hand over first with the cartridges, which cost less than $3 to make, and often sell for ten times that. Various mom-and-pop shops have begun to sell "refilled" cartridges for about 1/4 the price of a new one, which has prompted a David-and-Goliath battle -- with the big printer companies hurling lawsuits all over the place to protect their lucrative business. Lexmark recently won an injunction to prevent anyone else from making cartridges that work in their printers.

What's more, it turns out that "empty" printer cartridges may not be empty after all. When your printer says it's out of ink, it may still be up to 38% full, according to some recent studies. Nice.

(Thanks to The Shifted Librarian for this one!)

Man, Japan just keeps on getting weirder and weirder.

So. It's the future now. We've got cameraphones. We've got Internet-enabled fridges. And we've got Matsushita, the company that has realized these are two great tastes that taste great together. Dig this new project they're working on:

The system consists primarily of an Internet-connected digital camera that will take a series of photographs of the inside of a refrigerator each time the appliance's door is closed. The pictures are then uploaded to a server, where users can access them over any Web-connected computer or a WAP-enabled mobile phone.

The idea behind the system is to allow consumers who are out shopping, or who may head to the supermarket on the way home from work, to have a better idea of what they need to buy.

"One of the needs of customers is to know what's inside their fridge when they are not at home," said Claudio Cenedese, manager primary electronics at Electolux's Core Technologies and Innovation. "This is something that can help solve that problem."

I should point out that this story contains my all-time-favorite quote in any news story, ever, in all recorded history: "Cenedese acknowledged that other technologies had already been launched to help people remember what is in their fridge."

Ah yes. Technologies like, say, your freakin' brain, or maybe a piece of paper and a crayon.

(Thanks to Techdirt Wireless News for this one!)

Now that it's impossible to smoke in most bars in New York, a new trend has emerged: "Nicotinis." They're martinis that are spiked with nicotine -- so you can get your nicotine buzz while perched atop your barstool. As the Sun-Sentinel reports:

The regular nicotini has more bite than a martini and leaves a noticeable aftertaste in the throat. The menthol variety contains crème de menthe and has a cough drop taste, while the "Black Lung" includes Kahlua and has a coffee flavor.

"It tastes like a cross between vodka and chewing tobacco," said Fort Lauderdale resident Jonathan Cook after trying his first nicotini. "That's not necessarily a bad thing."

I don't smoke but, given that I have an addictive personality, I empathize strongly with smoking addicts. I've wondered about other ways to let people get their nicotine hit in bars -- including, say, chewing tobacco. Sure, it's kinda gross, but you could instal spittoons and give all those upscale Manhattan bars a nicely Wild West feel.

This isn't entirely fanciful, by the way. A couple of years ago, I was interviewing a major young American novelist, and he spent the entire hour-long talk sipping from a styrofoam cup. I assumed he was drinking a coffee, but no: He was actually chewing tobacco the entire time, and raising the cup to discreetly spit in it. "It's great for transatlantic flights," he said. "All the smokers are jonesing like mad and dragging their nails across their faces. Meanwhile, I'm happily sitting here chewing and spitting." We reminisced a bit about "chaw". Back when I was in the Boy Scouts, we used to buy it to take on camps, whereupon we'd all get insanely stoned -- since none of were old enough yet to smoke -- and then throw up. Anyway, the novelist offered me some of his chewing tobacco. Since I still don't smoke, I again got instantly baked out of my mind (it's amazing how powerful nicotine's effect is on the untrained lung). When I came to spit it out, he offered me the cup, so I was was forced to expectorate into a three-inch deep slurry of chewing tobacco and Major American Novelist Spit.

"Dude," I said. "That is the most revolting thing I've ever seen in my life."

For the record ... no, I can't tell you who the novelist was, because he threatened to punch me.

TDK Systems, which makes Bluetooth chips, decided to conduct a survey and find out whether people give nicknames to their mobiles. They do, as the company note on its press release for the results:

“There were quite a few Bluetooth devices that transcended the obvious and mundane names of the users,” said Dave Curl, head of public relations at TDK Systems. “We found ‘Predator’, ‘BluePower’ and ‘Boss 6310i’ but are still wondering about ‘Mike’s Smokin’ BT Machine’ and the curious ‘Sheep Shagger’ who took time away from his beloved flock to visit the show.”

(Thanks to Techdirt Wireless News for this one!)

Well, not quite. But a couple of brainiacs in Europe have developed a cool technique: They use a non-turbulent airflow to shoot a thin layer of fog vertically. Then you project a video image onto it and -- voila! A screen that you can walk through.

Very cool -- except that, as I read on their website:

The famous Finnish mime actor Markku Laitinen had his premiere of "Pierrot in Globalisation" in Joensuu, Finland on June 7th, 2003. He is the world's first artist, who has integrated the fog screen into his performance (a sample video).

I love this technological idea. But ... mimes? That just ain't right.

(Thanks to Wired News for this one!)

Back last year, I blogged about a little freeware game called "Stair Dismount". Programmed by the incredibly cool programmer Jetro Lauha, it was a neat little physics sim, in which the goal was to cause the most damage possible to a small human figure -- by figuring out innovative ways to shove him down the stairs. It was so queasily addictive that geeks soon began trading secrets on different ways to apply force -- a push to the shoulder, a push to the legs -- to produce the most heinously crumpled body.

Anyway, Jetro has a new game out -- and this time, the goal is to cause the most damage as you crash a truck into a wall. I've downloaded it from his site, and am already totally addicted. And, I might point out, this neatly falls into my favorite argument about games: That what is most game-like about them is their ability to run interesting simulations of cool things you couldn't or wouldn't ordinarily do.

Unless, of course, you already happen to push people down the stairs a lot, in which case stay the hell away from me.

(Thanks to El Rey for this one!)

Okay space cadets, dig this: Music made from dot-matrix printers. A friend of mine recently pointed me towards the Symphony For Dot Matrix Printers, by the Montreal art-duo The User. Yes, that's right -- they hooked up a bunch of printers to a computer MIDI interface and scripted tunes from it. As they describe it on their web site:

The Symphony for dot matrix printers is a work which transforms obsolete office technology into an instrument for musical performance. The Symphony focuses the listener's attention on a nearly forgotten technology: the dot-matrix printer. Specifically, it employs the noises the printers make as the sole sound source for a musical composition. Leaving the constituent elements untouched, the process imposes a new order upon them, reorganizing the sounds along a musical structure.

Dot matrix printers are thus turned into musical 'instruments', while a computer network system, typical of a contemporary office, is employed as the 'orchestra' used to play them. The orchestra is 'conducted' by a network server which reads from a composed 'score'. Each of the printers plays from a different 'part' comprised of rhythms and pitches made up of letters of the alphabet, punctuation marks and other characters ... The audience is also presented with live images of the sound sources: the motions of the mechanisms, rollers and gears are captured using miniature video cameras installed inside the printers and projected onto large screens.

Check out some sample MP3s of the music here! If you're like me, you'll find it strangely mesmerizing. The User have realized something quite neat about modern life -- which is that office machinery has become the acoustic soundscape to most of our waking lives. Indeed, the hum of photocopies, faxes and phones in our lives is almost like the drone-note on a bagpipe or a sitar -- the base sound against which compose all other of life's melodies.

I'm not really kidding. I've always been fascinated particularly by the sound of photocopiers; with several hundred moving parts, they're usually the most mechanically complex things in any office -- a sort of throwback to the industrial age. And if you listen to them closely, each has a really quite cool rhythm. They wouldn't be out of place in a piece of good electronica.

There is even, dare I say, a trend emerging in this area of art. Recall two years ago, when Golan Levin created the first symphony played by calling the mobile phones in the audience member's pockets.

(Thanks to Maura for this one!)

My friend, the artist El Rey, is holding a poll at his site -- to figure out which of his paintings to use as a t-shirt icon. Go to his site and vote! And while I'm at it, let me urge you to vote for his Space Invaders print, about which I've blogged before.