In today's New York Times Magazine, I wrote a short essay arguing that the US ought to scrap all its buggy, untrustworthy, proprietary "closed source" voting machines made by private corporations -- and instead develop its own voting-machine software as an open-source project. The piece is online at the Times' site and will be for a week -- I've also archived a copy below:

A Really Open Election
By CLIVE THOMPSON

This fall, as many as 20 percent of American voters will be able to cast their ballots on A.T.M.-style electronic voting machines. But to put it mildly, these machines -- where you simply touch a screen and a computer registers your vote -- have not inspired much confidence lately. North Carolina officials recently learned that a software glitch destroyed 436 e-ballots in early voting for the 2002 general election. In a Florida state election this past January, 134 votes apparently weren't recorded -- and this was in a race decided by a margin of only 12 votes. Since most of the machines don't leave any paper trail, there's no way to determine what actually happened. Most alarmingly, perhaps, California's secretary of state recently charged that Diebold -- the industry leader -- had installed uncertified voting machines and then misled state officials about it.

Electronic voting has much to offer, but will we ever be able to trust these buggy machines? Yes, we will -- but only if we adopt the techniques of the ''open source'' geeks.

One reason it's difficult to trust the voting software of companies like Diebold is that the source code remains a trade secret. A few federally approved software experts are allowed to examine the code and verify that it works as intended, and in some cases, states are allowed to keep a copy in escrow. But the public has no access, and this is troublesome. When the Diebold source code was accidentally posted online last year, a computer-science professor looked at it and found it was dangerously hackable. Diebold may have fixed its bugs, but since the firm won't share the code publicly, there's no way of knowing. Just trust us, the company says.

But is the counting of votes -- a fundamental of democracy -- something you want to take on faith? No, this problem requires a more definitive solution: ending the secrecy around the machines.

First off, the government should ditch the private-sector software makers. Then it should hire a crack team of programmers to write new code. Then -- and this is the crucial part -- it should put the source code online publicly, where anyone can critique or debug it. This honors the genius of the open-source movement. If you show something to a large enough group of critics, they'll notice (and find a way to remove) almost any possible flaw. If tens of thousands of programmers are scrutinizing the country's voting software, it's highly unlikely a serious bug will go uncaught. The government's programming team would then take the recommendations, incorporate them into an improved code and put that online, too. This is how the famous programmer Linus Torvalds developed his Linux operating system, and that's precisely why it's so rock solid -- while Microsoft's secretly developed operating systems, Linux proponents say, crash far more often and are easier to hack. Already, Australians have used the open-source strategy to build voting software for a state election, and it ran like a well-oiled Chevy. A group of civic-minded programmers known as the Open Voting Consortium has written its own open-source code.

But if our code were open, wouldn't cyberterrorists or other outlaws be able to locate flaws and possibly rig an election? Well, theoretically -- except that it's highly unlikely that they could spot an error that escaped thousands and thousands of scrutineers. Indeed, it may be far easier to infiltrate a private-sector company and tamper with its software. Diebold, after all, kept quiet about the bugs it found in its programs -- including one that subtracted more than 16,000 votes from Al Gore in a single Florida country during the initial vote counting in the 2000 election. Open-source enthusiasts, by contrast, are precisely the sort of people you'd like to see inspecting the voting code; they're often libertarian freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power, and they'd scream to the high heavens if they found anything wrong.

From the classification of documents to the refusal to name detainees, the Bush administration's actions show a high regard for secrecy. In essence, it's hiding its code, too. Inside such closed systems, nasty things can happen, as we're learning to our chagrin. Perhaps a blast of open-source candor is exactly what America needs right now.

Clive Thompson writes frequently for the magazine about science and technology.

When you live in New York, you normally don't get to see the sunset -- because the huge buildings block all possible lines of sight.

Not tonight! Tonight, the sun will be perfectly lined up with the east-west streets of New York -- so they'll all be illuminated by the gorgeous spectacle you see in the photo above, where the sun appears to be touching down at the end of the road. According to NASA, this sort of precision lining-up only happens twice a year: May 28th and July 12th. Click over to NASA's site and you'll see a much bigger version of that picture, which was taken by Neil de Grasse Tyson.

(Thanks to Gwin for this one!)

Plenty of programmers create quickie online knock-offs of Breakout, the classic arcade game. But very few ever actually alter the gameplay in any way. The basic design of Breakout is so well-crafted that it's hard to improve. Indeed, this is one of the hallmarks of a truly superb game: The rules are so simple, well-balanced and intuitive that when you change any of them, the experience falls apart.

But now someone has actually managed to produce a genuinely new style of Breakout -- by making the playboard circular. Over at Playaholics, they've released Plastic Balls. In this game, there's a "drain" in the middle of the circle, protected by a paddle that revolves around it. The "drain" is magnetic -- or has some sort of gravitational pull -- so the ball falls toward it, and you have to continually bop it away and towards the circumference of the circle, to eliminate all the blocks.

This is utterly ingenious, for a couple of design reasons:

i) It allows for some weird new techniques and challenges in ball trajectory. In normal Breakout, you often had to use the walls intelligently, to try and reach difficult spots with your ball. But here the walls are curved, so you have to learn and master an entirely new style of bouncing. Plus, there are no "side" walls to collide off of. The ball can go 360 degrees around in a circle.

ii) The concept of making the center drain "magnetic" is lovely -- because it allows for powerups that mess with the idea of magnetism. One powerup reverses the polarity of attraction: For 30 seconds or so, your paddle repels the ball like two south poles on two magnets pushing away from one another. This allows for ever weirder ball-bouncing strategies.

iii) Since your paddle rotates in a tight circle around the drain, you can spin it around and use the back of the paddle for some even cooler bouncing tricks.

iv) Most importantly, this is the first Breakout clone to use the mouse in a style that is germane to the design of the game. I've always disliked online versions of Breakout done in the old-school style -- i.e. the paddle moves back and forth across the bottom of the screen -- because it's actually quite hard to control using a mouse. A mouse isn't really designed to have you track something on an X or a Y axis alone. It's designed to be pointer that fluently moves through both axes at once. With Plastic Balls, that's precisely what you're doing -- moving the mouse around in two dimensions to control the paddle.

Anyway, this entry probably makes no sense at all unless you've played the game. Go try out, then re-read this and see if I'm making any sense!

Ever wonder where spam comes from? In the old days, spammers would rent or buy their own Net access directly; the problem was, angry antispam geeks would track them down and complain to the ISPs, who would kick the spammers offline.

The next technique was to create "zombie" computers -- to send out worms and viruses that infect everyday computers and instal spam-sending relays. This way, a spammer can create thousands or millions of zombies which he or she can use to send spam. I heard a lot about this back when I was writing my feature on virus-writers for the New York Times Magazine; police told me the spammers were potentially linked to organized crime in China and Russia. But everyone wondered precisely how many "zombie" victim computers there were.

Finally someone's measuring it. Comcast, the Internet cable-access giant, has started tracking how many messages are sent out by their users. Sean Lutner, a network engineer, told CNET that Comcast users send out 800 million messages a day -- but only 100 million go through the company's official servers. The other 700 million other ones are thus probably spam sent out by Comcast users infected with spam relays. They probably don't even know they're doing it -- yet according to those stats, the average American family is sending out six to seven pieces of spam a day.

How did they generate these statistics?

"It's not rocket science," John Levine, co-chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force's antispam research group, said of this technique. "Basically, you count the mail, and you give everyone a quota. If Grandma usually sends six messages a day and now tries to send 10,000 messages a day, what are the odds that she made that many new friends?"

(Thanks to Slashdot for this one!)

Have you ever looked at your happy, well-adjusted three-year old child playing with a ball in the sunshine, and thought: Hmmmm. How do I turn this kid into a reclusive, pasty nerd who spends hours in the basement playing Dungeons and Dragons?

Why, with a set of plush 20-sided and 10-sided dice, of course!

The next time you go to see a doctor, check if he's wearing a necktie. If he is? RUN FOR YOUR LIFE. That's the conclusion of a clever study conducted by Steven Nurkin, who, while an intern doing surgical studies at the New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens, noticed something interesting: Men almost never dry-clean their ties.

The thing is, cloth is well-known to harbor zillions of infectious viruses and bacteria. That's why doctors regularly clean their medical coats and clothes, and change them between each shift: They don't want to cross-contaminate sick people within the hospital. They even clean their pagers and PDAs, actually, because studies have shown that those devices can play host to bugs also.

But neckties fall into an interesting cultural blank spot, because, almost alone amongst clothing items, they are rarely cleaned. As the Toronto Star reports, Nurkin decided to check them out:

So he and some colleagues from the hospital's infectious disease lab swabbed the ties of 42 doctors, physician assistants and medical students, and cultured the swabs to see what, if anything, would grow. They compared the results to swabs taken of the ties of 10 hospital security guards, who were used as a control because though they work in a similar environment, they rarely come in contact with patients.

Nearly half of the doctors' ties were positive for bugs like Staphylococcus aureus, which can cause wound infections, pneumonia, meningitis and food poisoning, among other things. Only one of the security guards' ties tested positive.

New York magazine just published a feature I wrote about Ely Sakhai, an art dealer who has been accused by the FBI with running an amazing forgery scheme. Sakhai, the FBI claims, would buy Impressionist paintings, make copies of them, then sell both the copy and the original. The story is online at New York's web site, but here's a taste of the opening few paragraphs:

How to Make a Fake
Buy a mid-level Gauguin. Duplicate it. Slap the original papers on the copy. Sell both paintings to gullible collectors, while the art world looks the other way.

By Clive Thompson

Vase de Fleurs (Lilas) is not one of Paul Gauguin’s greatest works. It’s a “middle market” painting, which means it changes hands usually for only a few hundred thousand dollars, and without much fanfare. But in May 2000, the painting proved it could still turn heads. When Christie’s and Sotheby’s released spring catalogues for their modern-art auctions, they were alarmed to discover that each was offering the painting -- and each house thought it had the original.

One of the paintings, clearly, was a fake. So the auction houses flew both paintings to Sylvie Crussard, a Gauguin expert at the Wildenstein Institute in Paris. She put them side by side and in a few minutes saw that Christie’s version was, in the delicate argot of the trade, “not right.” (The auction house just barely managed to yank its catalogue back from the printers in time.) Still, it was the best Gauguin counterfeit she’d ever seen. “This was a unique case of resemblance. You never see two works which are that similar,” Crussard marvels.

The rest of the piece is here! That picture above, by the way, is of Gauguin's Vase de Fleurs.

Every once in a while I read stories that remind me of just how deranged are the labor laws and markets in other countries. I'm not just talking about the obvious stuff: The unregulated sweatshops, the job-slave trade, the sexual bondage. I'm talking about the incredibly weird standards that thrive even in supposedly middle-class jobs.

Ever heard of Daksh? It's one of the biggest Indian outsourcers -- Amazon was one of the first customers back in the 90s, as it frantically pitchforked phone-service jobs across the Atlantic. IBM has been so impressed by Daksh's ability to keep prices down it decided to buy the company. But recently, a Slashdot user was poking around on the Daksh job boards and discovered that the company has "age requirements for job applicants [that] make Logan's Run seem progressive." On its Opportunities page, Daksh notes that Customer Care Specialists must be no older than 25, and team leaders no older than 27. Nice.

Meanwhile, over in China, the New York Times reports that the Communist party has been rejecting people for legal-affairs jobs because they're too short. That's only the tip of the iceberg: Apparently, the party is obsessed with hiring people for publicly prominent jobs only if they're, like, way hot:

In Hunan Province in central China, for example, women seeking any government jobs had to demonstrate that they had symmetrically shaped breasts. The requirement was dropped only in March, but only after a public outcry by women who had been denied jobs on those grounds.

When the government-run Nanchang Institute of Aeronautical Technology vets candidates for jobs as flight attendants for the national airlines, applicants are asked to parade on stage in swimwear.

Apparently, the scientists at AWAKE -- a British "sleep management consultancy" -- have developed an equation that predicts when you'll be most tired, depending on your average daily sleep and waking patterns. The equation is ...

CDA + CT + KF = TMT

... where CDA is the hour of our daily dip is alertness, CT is our "chronotype" (our personal daily rhythm), and KF is a set of influencing factors such as prior sleep quality and alcohol intake. The result, TMT, is the time of day that we're most likely to feel tired.

The web site KnackerFactor has created an online version of this algorithm, which asks you a bunch of questions and then spits out a chart showing how sleepy -- or alert -- you'll be throughout the day. I punched in my stats for last night, including the following data points: I'm generally a night owl; I generally struggle out of bed; however, last night I went to bed around 11:30; I had one glass of wine with dinner; and I woke up at 7:30 am.

The result? Check the chart above. Apparently, the first couple hours of my workday were supposed to be among my most alert and productive. Reader, allow me to express just how insanely wrong was that prediction. Sure, I managed to drag myself out of bed, but I moved around the office like a snail. I am really not a morning person. Interestingly, the chart also predicts that I'm supposed to be heading into a "noticeably sleepy" zone right now -- around 1 pm -- but since I'm on my second bucket of coffee, I'm actually feeling quite alert and efficient!

Of course, being a total idiot, I'm spending these high-productivity hours blogging instead of doing actual, paid work.

(Thanks to The J-Walk Blog for this one!)

Dig this incredibly cool clock -- the Coulheur. It's described on the web site of design firm Moco Loco:

“Bettina Dadon's clock takes the three primary colours, shades them off and divides them… on three transparent disks which are associated with the three time units respectively.”

Coulheur is, as the designers point out, a play on the words "color" and "hour" in French.

(Thanks to El Rey for this one!)

It is, by now, an official trend: Someone creates a do-it-yourself online tool, and then smartalecks like me come along to see how badly they can mess with it. I recently discovered that the PBS Kids site has a tool that lets you design a cereal box. It's extremely cool, actually, because it's intended to show kids how advertisers design products to lure them in.

But here's the thing: The tool seems to have no language filters at all -- not even for the most depraved profanity, it appears -- so whatever deranged cereal-name you come up it, it'll happily slap on the box. The box of "steroid flakes" above is my personal creation.

(Thanks to Michael for this one!)

Or the next best thing -- military planes with "airborne ray guns."

(Thanks to Joyce for this one!)

This is one of the more face-melting science stories I've encountered in a while. Over at Slate, Jim Holt wrote a terrific piece about Andrei Linde, a physicist with an unusual theory about the origins of the universe. He argues that a universe isn't terribly hard to create: Indeed, theoretically, one could create one in a lab, using only one hundred-thousandth of a gram of matter. Assuming all goes well, it would expand, but with such curved space that it would -- for all intents and purposes -- implode, vanishing from "our" reality while expanding in its own dimensionality.

Here's the fun part: According to Linde's theory, the creator of a universe would be able to determine the basic constituent elements of its reality, such as its level of gravity, the speed of light, etc. And in doing so, the creator could essentially communicate with her or his creation:

The creator, by manipulating the cosmic seed in the right way, has the power to ordain certain physical parameters of the universe he ushers into being. So says the theory. He can determine, for example, what the numerical ratio of the electron's mass to the proton's will be. Such ratios, called constants of nature, look like arbitrary numbers to us: There is no obvious reason they should take one value rather than another. (Why, for instance, is the strength of gravity in our universe determined by a number with the digits 6673?) But the creator, by fixing certain values for these dozens of constants, could write a subtle message into the very structure of the universe. And, as Linde hastened to point out, such a message would be legible only to physicists.

This is a really lovely thought. Maybe Earth phyicists will eventually piece together some grand pattern in the design of our universe, and discover a message encoded ... by a sessional grad student at Stanford.

Last year during the war, my friend Chris Allbritton raised over $13,000 in donations from readers of his blog -- Back To Iraq -- to pay for a reporting trip to Iraq. The idea was to provide for some truly independent journalism, since with no need to please a publisher or editor, he could write about whatever he wanted, without fear or favor. He produced some spectacular essays and snapshots of everyday life in Iraq under the invasion, which you can still read on his blog today (click on archives in the top right corner).

A few months ago his blog readers started asking him if he'd be willing to return to Iraq and file more stories about what everyday life is like, one year after the invasion. Once again, his readers poured in the donations, and he raised over $11,000. Last week, he left New York, and today he arrived in Baghdad.

Part of what's excellent about Chris' tales from Iraq is that they capture the ground-level aspects of life, including his own responses to the sheer weirdness of travelling in the region. It's blog journalism at its best. Here's his description of arriving on the flight -- which spirals down to the ground in a viciously steep corkscrew, to avoid shoulder-mounted missiles:

First of all, the flight from Amman to Baghdad was startingly normal. A couple of flight attendants served refreshments and vile airline food, just like a normal flight. Except this one was in an all-white South African-registered plane (the irony should be lost on no one, there) and populated by a bunch of Parsons, KBR and other assorted contractors. I’m not going to call them mercenaries at this point, since the guys I talked to were all there to work at oil refineries or on cellular services. Hardly the mercenary types.

The landing was anything but typical though. After a normal flight, we went into a tight, corkscrew dive that sent your stomach up into your throat — and in the case of two passengers, out their mouths and into their laps. It’s a vomit-comet experience. But if you like roller coasters in a sealed container where you can’t really see anything, it’s a lot of fun. Just don’t think about the very real threat of shoulder-mounted SAMs.

I also dig the fact that in discussion after this posting, Chris' mother posts to say she's glad he's still alive.

If you like his stuff, consider donating to the cause via Paypal! The more donations he gets, the longer he'll be able to stay abroad and file slices of life from one of the most fraught regions on Earth.

The Walrus -- a cool new political magazine up in Toronto -- just published a piece I wrote on Edward Castronova, a brilliant economist who pioneered the study of how money, value, and property flow inside online games like Everquest. It starts off talking about Castronova's well-known work on the Everquest economy, in which he realized that the game's annual GDP is almost as big as Russia's. Then the article goes on to talk about the ways in which different questions about economic fairness are reflected in these games.

It's already been Slashdotted, so you can read the discussion there if you want. While you're at it, also check out Terra Nova, an excellent blog on virtual-world economics that Castronova contributes to. (Castronova's personal site is here.)

The story is online at The Walrus, but since it's currently struggling under the enormous load from Slashdotters, I've mirrored the piece here:

Game Theories On-line fantasy games have booming economies and citizens who love their political systems. Are these virtual worlds the best place to study the real one?

By Clive Thompson

EDWARD CASTRONOVA HAD HIT BOTTOM. Three years ago, the thirty-eight-year-old economist was, by his own account, an academic failure. He had chosen an unpopular field -- welfare research -- and published only a handful of papers that, as far as he could tell, "had never influenced anybody." He'd scraped together a professorship at the Fullerton campus of California State University, a school that did not even grant Ph.D.s. He lived in a lunar, vacant suburb. He'd once dreamed of being a major economics thinker, but now faced the grim sense that he might already have hit his plateau. "I'm a schmo at a state school," he thought. And since his wife worked in another city, he was, on top of it all, lonely.

To fill his evenings, Castronova did what he'd always done: he played video games. In April, 2001, he paid a $10 monthly fee to a multiplayer on-line game called EverQuest. More than 450,000 players worldwide log into EverQuest's "virtual world." They each pick a medieval character to play, such as a warrior or a blacksmith or a "healer," then band together in errant quests to slay magical beasts; their avatars appear as tiny, inch-tall characters striding across a Tolkienesque land. Soon, Castronova was playing EverQuest several hours a night.

Then he noticed something curious: EverQuest had its own economy, a bustling trade in virtual goods. Players generate goods as they play, often by killing creatures for their treasure and trading it. The longer they play, the more powerful they get -- but everyone starts the game at Level 1, barely strong enough to kill rats or bunnies and harvest their fur. Castronova would sell his fur to other characters who'd pay him with "platinum pieces," the artificial currency inside the game. It was a tough slog, so he was always stunned by the opulence of the richest players. EverQuest had been launched in 1999, and some veteran players now owned entire castles filled with treasures from their quests.

Things got even more interesting when Castronova learned about the "player auctions." EverQuest players would sometimes tire of the game, and decide to sell off their characters orvirtual possessions at an on-line auction site such as eBay. When Castronova checked the auction sites, he saw that a Belt of the Great Turtle or a Robe of Primordial Waters might fetch forty dollars; powerful characters would go for several hundred or more. And sometimes people would sell off 500,000-fold bags of platinum pieces for as much as $1,000.

As Castronova stared at the auction listings, he recognized with a shock what he was looking at. It was a form of currency trading. Each item had a value in virtual "platinum pieces"; when it was sold on eBay, someone was paying cold hard American cash for it. That meant the platinum piece was worth something in real currency. EverQuest's economy actually had real-world value.

He began calculating frantically. He gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S. -- higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. Since players were killing monsters or skinning bunnies every day, they were, in effect, creating wealth. Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game -- the equivalent of $3.42 (U.S.) per hour. "That's higher than the minimum wage in most countries," he marvelled.

Then he performed one final analysis: The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia.

It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn't even exist.

Castronova sat back in his chair in his cramped home office, and the weird enormity of his findings dawned on him. Many economists define their careers by studying a country. He had discovered one.

I FIRST MET CASTRONOVA AT A PIANO LOUNGE last summer at the Caesar's Palace casino in Las Vegas, where he was attending a high-tech conference. We talked over a few drinks, though our conversation was soon drowned out by the bar's syrupy Frank Sinatra impersonator, belting out a version of "New York, New York." Castronova winced. "Where better in the world to talk about virtual worlds than Las Vegas?" he said. "This place invented the idea of virtual life."

Castronova is a natural role-player. He's a short, nebbishy guy with a neat goatee and horn-rimmed glasses. When he lectures he radiates charisma; he is the cool professor you wish you'd had when you were trying to grasp the dry mechanics of price theory. Until recently, he acted in a Shakespearean troupe, and in his spare time he explores the world of "multiple-user domains" -- Internet chat environments where people assume different personae as they hang out together.

Castronova suspects his eclectic background is why he never made the powerful connections necessary to secure a good academic job. "I've always been an outsider. I've just been floating around outside communities, sort of flitting from topic to topic," he said.

With virtual worlds, he had finally hit upon a subject that was exploding into the mainstream. Experimental online worlds had been kicking around for years, but they took a leap forward in 1997, when Ultima Online -- a medieval fantasy world similar to EverQuest -- launched, and quickly amassed a hundred thousand users. The idea of having a second life on-line suddenly didn't seem so geeky, or, at the very least, it seemed a profitable niche; companies like Sony and Microsoft swarmed on-line. Today there are more than fifty active games worldwide, and anywhere from two to three million people playing regularly in the U.S. The games range from Star Wars Galaxies (where you can wander around as a Wookie and fight the Dark Side) to There.com (where you can wander around Disneyfied islands as an attractive Gap-style model and admire your hot new body). In Korea, a single game called Lineage claims more than four million players.

To figure out precisely who was playing EverQuest, Castronova persuaded thirty-five hundred users to fill out a survey. As one might expect, the average age turned out to be twenty-four, and the players were overwhelmingly male. The amount of time spent "in game" was staggering: over twenty hours a week, with the most devoted players logging six hours daily. Twenty percent of players agreed with the cheeky (if alarming) statement "I live in Norrath but I travel outside of it regularly"; on average, each of these "residents" possessed virtual goods worth about $3,000 U.S. "When you consider that the average real-life income in America is only, like, thirty-seven thousand," Castronova tells me, "you realize these people have a non-trivial amount of wealth locked up inside the games."

When he finished his research, Castronova assembled it in a paper called "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier." He submitted it to an academic Web site, the Social Science Research Network, that distributes working papers, free for anyone to read. The site has 43,982 papers, by more than 37,000 authors. He didn't expect too much. "I thought maybe seventy-five people would read it," he recalls, "and that'd be great."

He was wrong. The paper sent a shock wave through the on-line world. EverQuest players pounced on it and wrote up excited descriptions on game-discussion boards. That led to a flurry of posts on popular blog sites. Soon, academics and pundits in Washington were rushing to read it. Barely a few months later, Castronova's paper became the most downloaded paper in the entire database -- beating out works by dozens of Nobel laureates. Today, it's still in the top three.

WHY THE RUSH OF INTEREST? What can a game filled with elves and warrior dwarves tell us about the real world?

Quite a lot, if you believe the economist Edward Chamberlin. In 1948, Chamberlin admitted that all economists face a critical problem: they have no clean "laboratory" in which to study behaviour. "The social scientist . . . cannot observe the actual operation of a real model under controlled circumstances," he wrote. "Economics is limited by the fact that resort cannot be had to the laboratory techniques of the natural sciences." Instead, classical economics tries to predict economic behaviour by theorizing about a completely fair marketplace in which people are rational actors and all things are equal.

The problem with this -- as plenty of left-wing critics have pointed out -- is that all things aren't equal. Some people are born into rich families, and blessed with great opportunities. Others are born into dirt-poor neighbourhoods where even the most brilliant mind coupled with hard work may not forge success. As a result, economists have warred for centuries over two diverging visions. Adam Smith argued that people inherently prefer a free market and the ability to rise above others; Karl Marx countered that capital was inherently unfair and those with power would abuse it. But no pristine world exists in which to test these theories -- there is no country with a truly level playing field.

Except, possibly, for EverQuest, the world's first truly egalitarian polity. Everyone begins the same way: with nothing. You enter with pathetic skills, no money, and only the clothes on your back. Wealth comes from working hard, honing your skills, and clever trading. It is a genuine meritocracy, which is precisely why players love the game, Castronova argues. "It undoes all the inequities in society. They're wiped away. Sir Thomas More would have dreamt about that possibility, that kind of utopia," he says.

Virtual worlds have produced some surreal rags-to-riches stories. When the on-line world Second Life launched, the players were impressed to see a female avatar industriously building a sprawling monster home. An in-game neighbour stopped by to say hello only to discover she was a homeless person in British Columbia, logging on using her single remaining possession, a laptop. Penniless in the real world, she belonged to a social elite in the fake one.

Not all social inequities are absent, of course. For instance, Castronova discovered that women in the game are worth less than men, in a very measurable way: when he compared the sale of male and female avatars, he found than female characters sold for 10 percent less than male ones at precisely the same power level. Players with female avatars also say it's harder to advance in the game, at least initially -- even though the female characters are often being played, in real life, by men. (A study by the game academic Nick Yee found that male players "cross-dress" as female characters at least one-third of the time.) Men play as women characters partly for the kinky thrill, but also because female characters are given random presents of free stuff by other players, a chivalric custom known as "gifting." "Personally, you receive a lot more stuff when you start out as a female," as one male cross-dresser wrote to Yee.

Ultimately, Castronova says, EverQuest supports one of Adam Smith's main points, which is that people actually prefer unequal outcomes. In fact, EverQuest eerily mirrors the state of modern free-market societies: only a small minority of players attain Level 65 power and own castles; most remain quite poor. When game companies offer socialist alternatives, players reject them. "They've tried to make games where you can't amass more property than someone else," says Castronova, "but everybody hated it. It seems that we definitely do not want everybody to have the same stuff all the time; people find it boring." It is a result that would warm the heart of a conservative.

Yet progressives, too, have been drawn to Castronova's research. Robert Shapiro, formerly an undersecretary of commerce for Bill Clinton, views the economist's findings as nothing less than a liberal call-to-arms. EverQuest players tolerate the massive split between the virtual rich and the poor, Shapiro tells me, only because they know that this is a level playing field. If you work hard enough, you'll eventually grow wealthy. In Shapiro's view, Castronova's research proves that the only way to create a truly free market is to support programs that give everyone a fair chance at success, such as good education and health care. "This may provide the most important lesson of all from the EverQuest experiment," he wrote in an essay. "Real equality can obviate much of a democratic government's intervention in a modern economy. . . . If EverQuest is any guide, the liberal dream of genuine equality would usher in the conservative vision of truly limited government." In other words, maybe the best way to save the real world is to make it more like EverQuest.

A FEW MONTHS AGO, A POWERFUL WARRIOR SHOWED UP on EverQuest. He was at Level 50, an indication that he was an experienced player. But when he tried to join a group of other similarly powerful players on a quest to kill a dragon, they quickly realized he had no idea what the hell he was doing. He didn't understand teamwork or even the basic language of the game. Then they discovered his secret: he was a thirteen-year-old kid whose parents had gone to PlayerAuctions.com and bought him the character for $500.

"He kept getting killed over and over and over again. People were like, Who is this idiot?" says Sean Stalzer, a thirty-three-year-old who is a five-year veteran of EverQuest. Stalzer runs The Syndicate, one of the game's most respected "guilds." Guilds are groups of powerful characters who co-operate to defeat the deadliest monsters (which provide the richest loot). The most elite guilds generally have a no-buying ethic. They accept only players who have "levelled up" their characters the old-fashioned way. "They put hours and hours into it," Stalzer says. "So when someone comes along to make a profit or buy a character, it makes a mockery of what they do. Why should you be better than me because you have more money?" His disdain is like that of a hardscrabble kid from the projects who works for years to get into Yale -- only to watch George W. Bush sail in because his daddy is a rich donor.

This culture war underscores the big irony of EverQuest politics. Sure, most players love a level playing field -- but they love a leg up even more. Adam Smith might smile at EverQuest's booming marketplace, but beneath the surface, Marx's bleaker vision of capital might be winning the day.

Of course, many people buy "pre-levelled" characters not to cheat at the game, but to save time. They're usually busy professionals who can't waste six numbing hours a day killing bunnies to make their warrior elf more powerful. Game companies frown on the selling of characters because they feel it destroys the meritocratic feel of their worlds. But because so many millions of players clearly want to buy their way to power, the companies have mostly turned a blind eye to the on-line auctions. Last year, Ultima Online caved in and began to sell "pre-levelled" characters to new players; demand was so high on the first day that their phone banks crashed.

Even the most stoic guild members are tempted by the booming market. Stalzer's guild was once offered $50,000 for all of its characters and loot. The members declined. But, sometimes, when individual guild members run into financial difficulties in the real world, they quietly pawn off virtual goods on the side. "One guy had an 'Enchanter' and he sold it for two thousand dollars," Stalzer tells me. "That happens a lot. You get a guy who says, 'Dude, I just graduated and I can't find a job, so I gotta sell this thing.' But I don't mind it when it's real financial need."

Guild members hesitate to sell their goods in part because they do not feel they are the sole owners. When a guild vanquishes a monster, it divides the loot among the members. Each player's booty winds up feeling more like a piece of communal property. At the Las Vegas computer conference, Castronova and I ran into a blue-haired nineteen-year-old who plays EverQuest as a Level 55 "cleric" in a powerful guild. "I've got dozens of reagents, these magical potions," she said. "And some of them are probably worth, like, a hundred bucks apiece. I could totally sell them. But I always think, damn, I only have this stuff because of how other people helped me get it. So they sort of own it, too. It's not my right to sell it." In EverQuest, even socialism finds a home.

WITHIN MONTHS OF ULTIMA ONLINE'S LAUNCH in 1997, the game spiralled into a currency crisis. The developers woke up one morning to discover that the value of their gold currency was plummeting. Why? A handful of sneaky players had discovered a bug in the code that allowed them to artificially duplicate gold pieces (called "duping"). The economy had been hit by a counterfeiting ring. Inflation soared, and for weeks, players would log in each day to find their assets worth less and less.

Ultima programmers soon fixed the bug. But then they had a new problem: How do you drain all the excess gold out of the economy and bring prices back to normal? They hit upon the idea of creating a rare type of red hair dye and offering it for sale in small quantities. It had no real use, but, because it was rare, it became instantly popular and commanded an enormous price -- which leached so much gold out of the system that inflation subsided. But the programmers had to meditate for hours on what possible side effects their "fix" might have.

Game designers are, in a sense, the government of their worlds, continually tweaking the system to try and keep it from ruining the lives of their "citizens." In essence, they face the political question that bedevils real-life politicians everywhere: How much should a government meddle in the marketplace?

In Ultima Online, players pick jobs and produce goods: blacksmiths make iron tools; tailors make shirts. In the early days, the players were forced to find other players to buy the stuff. They had to act like entrepreneurs and, as it turned out, few people really wanted to do that; they just wanted to do their jobs and get paid. So the game designers created "shopkeepers," robot characters that would automatically buy whatever goods the players made. This forced the designers to behave like Soviet central planners, micromanaging every aspect of the marketplace with arcane algorithms of supply and demand. How much would a chair be worth, compared to a rabbit skin? If horseshoes were suddenly in low supply, how would that affect the price of magical healing potions? How much inflation is too little, or too much?

Citizens, too, began to complain that the economic system was bafflingly arbitrary. One irate player pointed out that a spool of thread could be bought for two gold pieces, then instantly transformed by a tailor into a shirt worth twenty gold pieces -- a profit margin that massively overshot any other activity, for no apparent reason. Eventually the game designers mostly gave up, and built a system in which players could trade more easily among themselves. The Berlin Wall fell, and capitalism rushed in.

The free market made things more fluid, but also more unfair. Soon, rich players drove the price of basic goods so high that poor players became much poorer. Once again, the designers had to step in. They would "drop" objects in places where new players could easily scavenge them, giving them a chance to amass a bit of wealth. The designers also set up programs to buy the otherwise useless items generated by poor players (such as animal skins) to give them a chance to make money. In essence, they created handouts for the disadvantaged. Ultima Online had morphed into a modern welfare state, where a free market coexists uneasily with an activist government. "As a developer, I would love to leave it all as a free market," says Anthony Castoro, one of Ultima Online's first designers. "But people who are new to the game would have nothing, and the big players would have everything."

A YEAR AFTER CASTRONOVA BEGAN HIS WRITINGS ON THE FIELD, on-line games were sufficiently mainstream that he was a media celebrity, with CNN, National Public Radio, and endless newspapers calling him for comment. But economists at universities still weren't impressed. Castronova submitted his original EverQuest paper to a few economics journals. They rejected it instantly. One reviewer wrote a snippy note saying he preferred "to stick with things that are real rather than virtual."

One can appreciate the economists' confusion. Even the most highly valued virtual goods do not seem, in some essential way, real. An Axe of the Heavens may be great for killing virtual orcs, but it cannot be enjoyed in the physical world. You can't eat virtual food to stay alive. But that distinction shouldn't matter -- at least not in economics, which is, as Castronova never tires of pointing out, the study of the entirely arbitrary values that people ascribe to things. "Most of a diamond's value is virtual, too," he adds.

The ultimate proof of this idea is in the game world's emerging merchant class -- people who make their real-world income purely by "flipping" virtual goods. Much of their everyday jobs is conducted within the game.

One of these merchants is Robert Kiblinger, a thirty-three-year-old West Virginian. A commercial chemist by training, he worked for Febreze, the company that invented the popular cleaning agent, for which he still holds a couple of patents. ("I was basically selling perfumed water," he jokes.) But then he started playing Ultima Online, where he ran into a player who was tired of the game and wanted to sell his entire account. The player owned two houses and towers and oodles of rare items, and only wanted $500, which Kiblinger figured was a steal. He drove to Cincinnati to close the deal. "I met him in a Taco Bell parking lot and I gave him a cheque," he recalls. The next day, they met inside the game, and the seller handed over the virtual goods. Kiblinger turned around and resold the whole shebang a few days later to another player on eBay for $8,000, producing a tidy profit.

He was hooked. He began buying up items from anyone who was willing to sell, and set up a Web site -- UOTreasures -- to advertise his inventory. Today the site gets thirty-five thousand visitors a week. Kiblinger employs five hundred people inside the game, paying them a small stipend (in Ultima Gold and cash) to act as virtual couriers, scurrying around inside the game to deliver the goods to the players who've paid for them. A few elite customers have bought more than $20,000 of stuff from him. A couple of years ago, business was so good that Kiblinger quit his job as a research associate at Procter & Gamble to work full-time as a virtual vendor, though he won't tell me his exact income. "It's in the six figures," he says. "It's a decent living."

Kiblinger introduced me to one of his clients, Becky Ruttenbur, a thirty-seven-year-old woman in Montana. Outside the game she's a single mother; inside she is "married" to another virtual character, played by a soldier who is currently stationed in Iraq. Ruttenbur and the soldier have a joint house and property in the game, even though the soldier is married in real life. Such in-game polygamy is common; Ruttenbur has even met her cyberhusband's real-life wife, and says, "She thinks we're nuttier than you could imagine." After playing Ultima Online for five years, Ruttenbur has a huge estate of in-game property, including a set of potted plants that goes for an average of $75 in real U.S. dollars on an auction board. Her stash of on-line goods would fetch $15,000 if she sold it.

Now there's a company rich enough to buy the entire lot. Three years ago, a company called IGE, whose sole function is to buy and sell virtual goods, launched. I met one of the company's founders, Brock Pierce, at a gaming conference in New York. A fresh-faced, blond twenty-three-year-old who is based in Boca Raton, Florida, he said IGE has "thousands of suppliers" who scout the games all day long to find cut-rate goods. He has a hundred full-time staff members at an office in Hong Kong to handle customer service. On any given day, he says, they handle "several million dollars'" worth of virtual inventory.

Several million? "We're ten times the size of anyone else," Pierce bragged. Many players call IGE the Wal-Mart of virtual games. But it is more like a Morgan Stanley or a Long Term Capital Management, a company whose holdings are significant enough to singlehandedly affect the cash flow of the markets.

Of course, every booming economy has not only its white-shoe financiers but also its lowly offshore workers. A few years ago, a company called Black Snow Interactive opened up a "levelling" service for the game Dark Age of Camelot. It had a digital sweatshop in Mexico; there, ultra-low-wage workers would click away at computers, playing the characters twenty-four hours a day to level them up. Mythic, the company that runs Dark Age of Camelot, got wind of the scheme and closed down Black Snow's accounts and auctions. The operators vanished, and have not been heard of since.

An even more intriguing financial institution opened for business a few months ago: the Gaming Open Market. Based in Toronto, it is an on-line service that exists solely for trading the currencies of virtual games ? Gold/Silver from Horizons, Linden Dollars from Second Life, Therebucks from There.com. If you're a player who wants some quick virtual currency for your favourite game, you can buy it there using real-world U.S. cash. Sometimes people who play several different virtual games use the market to transfer money from one world to another, like travellers at an airport exchanging currencies.

As on Wall Street, the value of each game currency fluctuates wildly depending on how badly it's needed. "It's just supply and demand. If somebody really wants a currency, it can drive the price sky-high," says Jamie Hale, the thirty-year-old founder of the Gaming Open Market. The day I spoke to him, a single player had bought every Linden Dollar on the market, about $500 (U.S.) worth. It cleaned out the Market's entire stock and produced a sudden spike in the Linden Dollar's value. Sometimes Hale himself will jump in to do some quick currency trading if he spots a profitable spread. He admits he has no official training in finance; in fact, he's a programmer by trade, and his co-founder -- who helped write the Market's software -- is an astrophysicist. "We keep a bunch of economics texts on my shelf to appear smart," he jokes.

Hale's operation is still small, with only nine hundred users. But, as it grows, it could conceivably produce a virtual George Soros -- someone who amasses so many billions of units of a currency that he could provoke a crisis in that game's economy for the purposes of profiting off it, much as Soros destroyed the British pound in September, 1992. "The value of the currency would drop through the floor," Hale notes. "But that's the game company's problem."

AS VIRTUAL WORLDS INCREASINGLY MIRROR THE REAL ONE, game companies are already dealing with another problem: crime. Indeed, there's even organized crime in The Sims Online, the cyberspace version of the top-selling computer hit. In the game, players assume control of tiny suburbanites, build houses, and work at jobs to earn "Simoleans," the in-game currency. The Sim Mafia was founded by Jeremy Chase, a twenty-six-year-old in Sacramento. Players who want to destroy another character's reputation turn to the mob. The game has a system of black marks for punishing bad behaviour. If Chase is paid to "tag" someone, he gets his crime family -- a loose collection of a hundred players -- to place dozens and dozens of red tags on the victim. When they're done, other players will assume the character must have done something awful, and refuse to speak or trade with him.

Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, became fascinated by The Sims Online last year and founded a blog -- "The Alphaville Herald" -- that reports on interesting social situations inside the world. Last November, he discovered something truly strange: The game had a chain of cyber-brothels, run by a family of avatars, all played by a character named "Evangeline." Evangeline had organized a handful of Sim women to perform hot-sex chat inside the game for customers, who paid in Simoleans. "Girls set their own prices," she told Ludlow. "Bj's" were 20,000 Simoleans, the equivalent of roughly $4.50 (U.S.); Evangeline reserved the richest customers for herself, making up to $40 or $50 (U.S.) a trick. Ludlow later discovered that some of Evangeline's "girls" were underage girls in real life, and that Evangeline herself was a seventeen-year-old boy living in Florida. When he blogged about his findings, reporters nationwide snapped to attention, and soon The Sims Online was on the front page of The New York Times.

Maxis -- the company that runs the game -- struck back. They cancelled Ludlow's account, claiming he had broken the game's rules by advertising his blog inside the world. (Maxis prohibits anyone from advertising real-world services or goods inside the game.) Ludlow insists he never made a dime off "The Alphaville Herald," and that he was booted out solely because his research had embarrassed the game company.

Either way, Ludlow lost most of his goods. When game owners cancel your account, it's like having your house instantly destroyed in a fire: your property winks out of existence. Ludlow figures he had about two hundred dollars' worth of virtual goods deleted, including a pet cheetah ("which is like a fifteen-dollar animal") that he'd bought from a vendor on-line. Yet Maxis could not entirely delete his virtual wealth. A week before his account was deleted, Ludlow had deposited eight hundred thousand Simoleans into an account at the Gaming Open Market. And Maxis has no power over the Market; it cannot forcibly demand that Hale, the owner of the exchange, delete that money. In effect, Ludlow had parked his money in the virtual-world equivalent of an overseas bank, where no game government could touch it.

LUDLOW'S CASE POINTS TO THE ULTIMATE QUESTION, with enormous legal implications for the real world: What, precisely, is the legal status of virtual property? Does anyone actually "own" it?

Last November, I accompanied Castronova to a legal conference in New York devoted to this subject. There game-company executives argued that when a player joins a world such as Ultima Online, he or she agrees to a user licence that explicitly says the game company owns everything that happens on the servers. "It's a game, and what we're doing is inviting you in to play with the toys. But you don't own the toys. We do," said Richard Bartle, who pioneered the first virtual world back in the 1980s.

The problem is that people who play the games act as if their virtual castles were their own private property. And, when it comes to property issues, courts in the U.S., at least, have traditionally tended to take the view that if it quacks like a duck, it is a duck. If enough people treat their Robe of Primordial Waters as though it's genuine personal property, the law might respect that -- no matter what the game companies say.

This debate may appear rather abstract right now. But, sooner or later, one of these game companies will start losing money and decide it can't afford to keep its virtual world. (Many observers expect at least one major world to go bankrupt this year.) If a game shut down, it would instantly destroy hundreds of thousands -- perhaps even millions ? of dollars. The homeless woman with the virtual mansion, for instance, could probably sell her goods for several hundred dollars; she would lose her single most valuable possession.

For now, there is no clear precedent on how to deal with virtual property. Owning a virtual castle is not like owning other virtual things, such as stock in a company, because the value is not in an external, tangible object such as a corporation, but in the work and money invested in acquiring it.

With stakes like that, said Jack Balkin, a Yale law professor and a host of the legal conference, players will probably fight back with lawsuits, or by going right to politicians, demanding legislation to prevent worlds from closing down. Julian Dibbell, a journalist who began trading virtual goods himself last summer -- he aims to report "revenue from the sale of virtual goods" as the single biggest line-item on his 2004 tax return -- later suggested an even stranger scenario. He said that players could well band together and try to buy back the world at the company's bankruptcy hearing -- and then run it themselves as a breakaway republic. "Some renegade players have done things like that before, actually," he noted. "They've gotten access to the code of the game and then illicitly created their own duplicate world."

In a few years, these questions will creep into the mainstream, because online environments such as EverQuest are likely to become a significant way that people interact with the Internet. Only a small chunk of the population will ever go into a brooding medieval-fantasy such as EverQuest, but virtual worlds have emerged that are much friendlier, and do not use dungeons-and-dragons themes at all. Indeed, they're not even games: they have no goals, no "levels" to achieve, no points to score.

There.com, for example, is a 3-D world devoted to nothing but chatting and socializing, using avatars that look like seductive, attractive models. You'd probably prefer it to real life, because everything is just so much prettier in There. As in the real world, one of the main activities in There is shopping. The company created a currency, Therebucks, and tied it directly to the value of the American dollar to prevent inflation. Players spend a lot of time customizing their appearance (often for the purposes of flirting), so Nike and Levis have virtual clothes that they sell solely inside the game. Individual players, too, have become designers, creating outfits they sell to other There citizens. "One of the leading clothes designers is making $3,000 to $4,000 a month, which is a full-time job," says There's founder, Will Harvey.

A place like There is not so much a game as a platform for life. A large chunk of our everyday experiences -- meetings, conversation, music, shopping ? could port nicely to a 3-D space. There Inc. is already talking to companies about licensing "land" inside the game, so far-flung employees can conduct meetings there instead of on the old-fashioned Internet. It's not as far-fetched as it sounds. The U.S. military has already licensed a private chunk of There and created a simulation of the planet on it. The army is currently using the virtual Baghdad in There as a training space for American soldiers.

The prospect of life moving into an area such as There both amazes and terrifies Balkin. "So, what happens when people start doing therapy inside a virtual world?" he asked. "Or teaching? It's a convenient place to meet, but literally everything can be recorded. So what do you do when doctors are meeting to talk with patients in a virtual world?"

Castronova sighs. Though he has made his career out of studying these economies, he is dismayed by how the real world has bled into the virtual one. "I liked it better when they were just, you know, games," he says wistfully. He preferred the meritocratic feel of EverQuest, before all the duping and the auctions and the bidding wars for powerful avatars. He liked the idea of on-line worlds as a place you migrated to when, like an immigrant, you wanted a new lease on life -- just as three years ago, when, depressed and lonely, he first stumbled into EverQuest.

His own voyage had a good ending. A few months ago, the communications department at Indiana University in Bloomington called. They had read his work and wanted to talk. Weeks later, they offered him a fully tenured position in a new department. Castronova had still never published a single one of his EverQuest papers in print; all his analyses had been distributed on-line. "It's all PDFs and Web sites," he joked. Like an avatar in the game, he had levelled up.

Clive Thompson writes about science and technology for The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and Details, and runs the tech-culture blog collisiondetection.net.

Many, many bloggers have already posted about Friday's flight of SpaceShipOne -- the first privately-funded space ship to reach 40 miles in altitude, or 212,000 feet. It definitely looks like Burt Rutan, creator of the ship, has a good shot at claiming the X Prize, the $10 million award for the first private company that can send three people to 100 kilometers high, return them safely to Earth, then repeat the feat within two weeks.

So you've probably heard about this. But you may not have seen the utterly mind-frying video that was taken by a tiny webcam on the corner of the craft's wing. CNN has it online here (go halfway down the page), and I totally urge you to check it out. You see the ship's engine blasting away for 30 seconds or so, then shutting off, whereupon the craft spins around in an atmosphere so thin that you can see the blackness of space, and the sun looking more like a huge star than, well, the sun. Far down below you see the Earth, and though I suspect some of this effect is due to the webcam's fisheye lens, it looks awfully rounded -- precisely the sort of view you're accustomed to seeing from the Shuttle.

All of which is why this video so thoroughly blew me away. I've known about the X Prize for years, and expected someone to win it pretty soon. But it was only after seeing this video that I realized just how nutty it was that a private company would -- with a budget laughably tinier than NASA's Shuttle payments -- send people into space. This video has something of the emotional effect you get when you see the video from the Saturn V launch that blasted the first humans at the moon. It seemed so crazy and outlandish that, when I first clicked on the CNN footage, I thought I was looking at at CGI animation of the SpaceShipOne flight -- not the real thing.

Okay, conspiracy freaks, here's a fun new technology: A scientist has developed a way to spy on what you're typing -- by listening to the sound of your keystrokes. Every key on your keyboard produces a noise, and IBM research scientist Dmitri Asimov suspected that the sounds were probably quite distinct. As SearchSecurity.com reports, he recently decided to test his hypothesis. It succeeded beyond his wildest dreams:

Asonov found that by recording the same sound of a keystroke about 30 times and feeding it into a PC running standard neural networking software, he could decipher the keys with an 80% accuracy rate. He was also able to train the software on one keyboard to decipher the keystrokes on any other keyboard of the same make and model.

Good sound quality is not required to recognize the acoustic signature or frequency of the key. In fact, Asonov was able to extract the audio captured by a cellular phone and still decipher the signal.

Pretty mind-blowing, eh? The thing is, it reminded me of an old detective story I'd read as a kid. I was a fan of the "Thinking Machine" stories written by Jacques Futrelle. They detailed the adventures of Dr. Augustus S. F. X. Van Deusen (can you dig that crazy name?), an arrogant brainiac who liked to go around boasting about how he could solve any crime with his machinelike logic. Anyway, there's one story called "The Mystery of the Silver Box", in which Van Deusen is hired by a rich CEO -- "Mr. Grayson" -- to help figure out how his most important business plans are being leaked to his competitor. Grayson is particularly puzzled because the only person who ever hears his plans is his secretary, Miss Winthrop; he dictates his letters and she types 'em up. Since she sits at a desk within eyeshot of Grayson, the CEO knows that she doesn't call anyone to leak information. He can't figure out how the hell the information is getting out.

But Van Deusen, since he is The Thinking Machine, figures it out. He notices that Miss Winthrop keeps a little silver box on her desk next to her phone. He deduces her scheme: She uses it to prop the phone receiver up a little bit and open up a line to Grayson's competitor. Then, while she types one of Grayson's letters, she hits the keys in a rhythm that spells out the content of the letter in Morse code. The competitor deciphers the Morse code and, presto, learns of Grayson's secret plans. As Van Deusen notes at the end of the story:

"Miss Winthrop is a tremendously clever woman," replied The Thinking Machine. "She never told you that besides being a stenographer-typist she is also a telegraph operator. She is so expert in each of her jobs that she combined the two. In other words, in writing on the typewriter, she was clever enough to be able to tap her keys in a pattern that is exactly like the Morse telegraphic code. Any other telegraph operator at the other end of the phone could translate the clicks of the keys into words."

This completely fried my noodle when I read it back in grade four. And now some IBM scientist is using A.I. to do almost the same thing!

By the way, you can read "The Mystery of the Silver Box" here -- at a web site that has full-text copies of all of the "Thinking Machine" stories. While you're at it, check out "The Problem of Cell 13", the most famous of the tales. In it, Van Deusen escapes from a high-security prison in only four days. The stories were all written between 1905 and 1912, so there are some wonderfully dated moments; I just reread it myself and cracked up at this exchange:

"Nothing is impossible," declared The Thinking Machine with equal emphasis. He always spoke petulantly. "The mind is master of all things. When science fully recognizes that fact a great advance will have been made."

"How about the airship?" asked Dr. Ransome.

"That's not impossible at all," asserted The Thinking Machine. "It will be invented some time. I'd do it myself, but I'm busy."

(Thanks to Slashdot for this one!)

Motorized wheelchairs have come a long way. These days, you can get models that are so powerful and robust that you'll see people in them whipping down Manhattan streets, moving at speeds that outpace the gridlocked traffic. Of course, these people are not necessarily out in the streets by choice; often, they're stuck out there because curbside design prevents them from easily getting back onto the sidewalk. The wheelchairs may be awfully good, but they're still stymied by urban design that discriminates against people using the devices.

That's why I was so tickled to run across Permobil. It's a company that produces the most insanely hotrodded, tricked-out, powerful wheelchairs I've ever seen in my life. They're designed to be fearless with outdoor environments, particularly the TRAXCorpus -- the model pictured above. It's got a 22-to-31-mile range, with a top speed of 9 miles per hour. Damn.

(Thanks to Plastic for this one!)

Lemurs have gotten a bad rap for years. Like humans and animals, they're primates. But for years scientists have assumed they're basically pretty stupid: Friendly and social, but dumb. Duke University professor Elizabeth Brannon decided to test this thesis by offering the lemurs a computer test: If they could complete a pattern on a touch-screen, they'd get a sugar-pellet treat.

Whaddya know? They all started lining up and completing really complex patterns. As a story in Reuters notes:

Although lemurs are social, they would often stop what they were doing to play on the computer.

"Occasionally, one animal would come over and finish the sequence started by another to get the reward," said Brannon.

It appears that lemurs are indeed able to count -- it's just that normally they couldn't be bothered. But dangle a couple of sugar pellets in front of 'em and hell, they'll learn calculus. As Brannon notes, this may help explain how human intelligence evolved; at some point in the distant past, homo sapiens might have hit upon the sweet spot of challenge-and-reward that got our brains to wake up and start inventing fire, tools, and Melrose Place.

Representative Mike Oxley is pushing a new law that would throw people in jail for up to a year if they're caught using cameraphones for upskirting or voyeurism. As CNN reports:

The legislation also would make it illegal to sneak photos of a person's "private parts" when "their private parts would not be visible to the public, regardless of whether that person is in a public or private area."

Now, on the surface, this makes perfect sense: Voyeurcamming is a huge invasion of privacy. That's why it's already against the law to spy on people with hidden cameras, actually. So why the new law? Apparently the existing laws are a hodgepodge that change from state to state: "Victims will go to the police and be told that 'We'd love to arrest this person, but it's not technically against the law,'" said Susan Howley, public policy director at the National Center for Victims of Crime.

What I wonder, though, is about the abuses of such a law. I wrote a couple of days ago about the rise of "sousveillance" -- the use of cameraphones by individual citizens to record and publicize injustices by corporations, governments, and the powerful. If the new anti-peeping law is too broad, I could easily imagine it being used to shut down the use of cameraphones for activism and whistleblowing. I can just see a CEO, a security guard company, or a government agency getting pissed off when they see activists using cameraphones, and cracking down by claiming they were voyeuring the place.

There's a fun story over at Space.com about how NASA engineers bond emotionally with the Mars space probes they build. My favorite part? When the scientists muse over their individual temperaments:

Although the NASA robots are mechanized twins at birth, each has a distinct personality, Wallace observed.

Undergoing testing here on Earth prior to Mars sendoff, Wallace felt that Spirit exhibited a tendency to be less well-behaved, the more adventurous of the two vehicles. "Opportunity tended to kind of toe the line…a little more staying inside the lines," he related.

Not so crazy when you consider there are people out there who name their cars, of course.

(Thanks to Slashdot for this one!)

Back in 2001, the nanotechnologist Jim Gimzewski learned something interesting: When living heart cells are put in a petri dish with appropriate nutrients, they continue to beat. He started wondering if all cells might similarly pulsate -- and if so, would they make noise? After all, sound is nothing more than vibrations travelling through the air.

So Gimzewski decided to find out -- by building the tiniest amplifier on the planet. He took an "atomic force microscope", a device so precise it can measure the bumps on the outside of a cell's wall. Then he held it lightly against the membrane of a yeast cell, so that like a record needle, it would record any movement and translate it into sound.

The result? The cell wall rises and lowers a distance of three nanometers -- about 15 carbon atoms stacked up -- 1,000 times a second. When you amp that up to the level of human audibility, according to a report in the Smithstonian Magazine, here's what you get:

The frequency of the yeast cells the researchers tested has always been in the same high range, "about a C-sharp to D above middle C in terms of music," says Pelling. Sprinkling alcohol on a yeast cell to kill it raises the pitch, while dead cells give off a low, rumbling sound that Gimzewski says is probably the result of random atomic motions. The pair also found that yeast cells with genetic mutations make a slightly different sound than normal yeast cells; that insight has encouraged the hope that the technique might eventually be applied to diagnosing diseases such as cancer, which is believed to originate with changes in the genetic makeup of cells. The researchers have begun to test different kinds of mammalian cells, including bone cells, which have a lower pitch than yeast cells. The researchers don't know why.

Gimzewski calls his new science "sonocytology," though he freely admits he's not sure whether the cells are really making the noise; they could be absorbing vibrations from elsewhere, including the microscope itself. But if it's true that cells make distinct sounds, this could be a weird -- and neat -- new diagnostic tool.

Mexican air force pilots just filmed some totally crazy video of eleven UFOs. According to The Globe and Mail:

The lights were filmed March 5 by pilots using infrared equipment. They appeared to be flying at an altitude of about 3,500 metres and allegedly surrounded the air force jet as it conducted routine anti-drug trafficking vigilance in Campeche. Only three of the objects showed up on the plane's radar.

“Was I afraid? Yes,” said radar operator Lieutenant German Marin in a taped interview made public Tuesday.

Mexican UFO researchers -- and, yes, there are indeed Mexican UFO researchers -- were ecstatic, naturally. Though it all reminds me of how wonderfully vague the phrase UFO is. Since it means "unidentified flying object", the object merely needs to be "unidentified". The longer we can keep from identifying it, the longer it stays a UFO.

(Thanks to Gord Fynes for this one!)

Old-school gamers may recall the joys of Lunar Lander, one of the earliest arcade games ever. The basic concept was to tip your spacecraft in the right direction and press "thrust" to try and bring it to a gentle landing on the moon. It was a gorgeous moment of early digital culture -- a game composed of nothing but a war against physics. (There's an emulation of it here if you want to give it a whirl.)

If you liked that, try out Blob Lander -- an modern, hip update of that classic. This time, you have to pilot a blob in some sort of weird egg-craft around mazes, but the same basic rules apply: You're fighting gravity and the ruthless precision of Newton's rules of movement. It's oddly compelling.

This item is so surreal I don't need to comment on it. From U.S. News & World Report:

It was the lead item on the government's daily threat matrix one day last April. Don Emilio Fulci described by an FBI tipster as a reclusive but evil millionaire, had formed a terrorist group that was planning chemical attacks against London and Washington, D.C. That day even FBI director Robert Mueller was briefed on the Fulci matter. But as the day went on without incident, a White House staffer had a brainstorm: He Googled Fulci. His findings: Fulci is the crime boss in the popular video game Headhunter. "Stand down," came the order from embarrassed national security types.

(Thanks to Morgan for this one!)

I was just using AOL Instant Messenger when a stranger tried to IM me out of the blue. Since they weren't on my normal buddy list, IM popped up an approval request -- i.e. "do you want to accept this chat or not?"

The problem was, I was typing away madly in another window. When the approval box popped up, I was -- purely by coincidence -- typing an 'n', and so I accidentally declined to accept the chat invitation.

Whoever you were, if you're reading this, try to IM me again! Or, failing that, email me. I didn't mean to decline your invitation!

Actually, it also occurred to me that this is an unusually bad piece of design on the part of AOL's IM client. Since 'n' is the sixth-most-common letter in the English language, there's a high degree of likelihood that when the chat-approval box pops up, the user might be typing an 'n' -- and might thus accidentally decline a chat. (Indeed, there are 89 n's in this blog posting, and they comprise almost 7 per cent of the entire entry -- which means that if you sent me that chat invitation while I was writing this, I had a one in fourteen chance of accidentally declining you.) Worse, the IM client does not, as far as I can tell, keep a log of strangers who are sending you chat invitations. So if you accidentally decline an invitation, as I just did, you have no way of knowing who it was.

Slate just published my latest video-game column -- on the subject of "hard" games. As it begins:

Some video games are hard. Some are really hard. And some are so freakishly, spoon-bendingly difficult that they take 10 hours of solid play before you've even begun to master the basics. Whenever I slip one of these nasty little backbreakers into my game system, I usually discard them in frustration after a couple of hours and wonder: What's the point? What adult has the time to master this stuff? Could it ever be worth it?

Recently, I've decided the answer is yes, even if you're reduced to tears by a hellish game, it can be worth it to plug through. Why? For the same reason it's often worth struggling through many other pieces of art or entertainment that we consider "difficult." Anyone who's slogged through the experimental swamp of Ulysses knows that it seems like a pointless chore at first. But if you're patient, the literary payoff is powerful—er, so I've been told—perhaps all the more so because you've worked hard for it.

You can read the rest of it free over at Slate! And, as always, if you write any comments here, feel free to cut and paste 'em over at Slate's discussion board, The Fray, where intelligent comment is always welcome.

A while back I blogged about MJ Hibbett, a British geek who writes catchy tunes about programming, code, and computers. He just released an online Flash video for his latest tune, "Hey, hey, 16K", and it is just jaw-droppingly good -- intercut with surreal scenes from games on old Sinclair home computers. Watch it here!

But what cracks me up most are the hilariously ironic lyrics. It opens up with:

We bought it to help with your homework
We bought it to help with your homework
And the household accounts
If your dad ever works it all out

Of course, the rest of the song is about how he spent all his time writing crappy games. Hibbert has put his finger on that odd cultural moment back in the 70s and early 80s, when a family could only justify buying a personal computer if it served "serious" purposes, such as household budgeting. Countless advertisements for Commodore 64s and Vic 20s would talk about how your mother could use it for "organizing recipes". Even though a 70s-issue personal computer was just spectacularly unsuited to databasing recipes in kitchen, it didn't matter: We still needed to pretend that these damn things were good for something important.

That's because we all knew, secretly, that personal computers were really about games. Games were the reason young geeks pestered their folks to buy a computer; games were also the reason those geeks learned to program, so they could try to roll their own. Indeed, if it weren't for games, the computer revolution would never have moved at such a lightning pace.

Yet still, the idea of wasting all that computing power on games seemed kind of silly. We couldn't admit what we were doing with computers, even while we were doing it. There's something about play that seems so frivolous that we cannot take it seriously -- even when it's a driving force in society.

Ah, those playful creationists. They've begun to realize that debating evolutionary scientists in public forums and newspapers isn't really the way to go -- it's too "intellectual". No, the real way to convince people of your religio-scientific theories is to build a Disney-like theme park. And thus it was that minister Kent Hovind in 2001 created Dinosaur Adventure Land in Florida, offering dinosaur exhibits upon which kids can romp and read about how "God made dinosaurs on Day 6 of the creation as described in Genesis, 6,000 years ago."

The New York Times wrote a story about it yesterday, and it quotes a parent who was "bitterly disappointed" by her visit to a Disney dinosaur theme park last year, since it dated all the brachiosauruses and apatosauruses to prehistoric times:

"My kids kept recognizing flaws in the presentation," said Mrs. Passmore, of Jackson, Ala. "You know — the whole `millions of years ago dinosaurs ruled the earth' thing."

Dinosaur Adventure Land, on the other hand, offers no such pernicious liberal illusions about the duration of time and space:

At Dinosaur Adventure Land, visitors can make their own Grand Canyon replica with sand and read a sign deriding textbooks for teaching that the Colorado River formed the canyon over millions of years: "This is clearly not possible. The top of the Grand Canyon is 4,000 feet higher than where the river enters the canyon! Rivers do not flow up hill!"

You can't find stuff like this in The Onion. Indeed, I almost wondered if this were a Joey Skaggs media prank -- some deeply subtle attempt to discredit the creationist movement by pushing its already-ludicrous arguments right off the edge of the flat earth. But then I checked the Dinosaur Adventure Land web page, and I gotta say, it looks real. If you poke around the site, you'll find such gems as their page on "The Giant" -- a leg bone purportedly from a 12-foot-tall human of Biblical vintage:

Come and see this great big leg bone found in Egypt that belonged to a person who was almost 12ft tall! This is a great way to show that before the flood, people were living to be much larger and also much older. Many things have changed since the creation, this is an example of how much the world, and people have changed as a result to the fall of man. Goodness, we are so tiny now!

As it turns out, the founder Kent Hovind not only doesn't believe in prehistory -- he doesn't believe in taxes. Last week some IRS agents got a warrant to extract some documents from his home and offices, saying Hoving had stopped paying Uncle Sam.

When the construction worker Isidro Mejia was recently rushed to an L.A. hospital, doctors didn't expect him to live. His nailgun had accidentally gone off and embedded four nails in his skull and one in his spinal column. It took doctors five days to fully extract all the steel from his head.

And how, might you ask, did this poor guy wind up in this state? As the BBC reports:

"His colleagues said Isidro was using a nailgun that has both manual and fully automatic settings," said deputy sheriff Dan McPherson.

They make fully automatic nail guns? Good grief. Why not just outfit construction workers with AK-47s? Interestingly, a Google search for "automatic nail gun" mostly turns up pages that describe nail-gun fighting techniques in first-person shooter video games, as well as stories from The Journal of Light Construction discussing the troublesome industry regulations that are preventing nail-gun manufacturers from developing, you know, nuclear powered home-improvement weapons. Er, tools.