History will record this week as having ushered in a particularly fabulous crop of giant-squid news. A few days ago, we saw the first ever live video of a giant squid. And now comes another study in which Spanish scientists examined several giant squid washed ashore -- and found that the males had been inseminated with sperm.

The explanation beggars the modesty of my otherwise PG-rated blog, but here we go: Apparently, male giant squid have these totally ginormous penises. They're nearly as long as their arms, and they possess the intensity "of a fire hose," as the scientists write. The squid evolved these massive members because female giant squid are about 1/3 bigger than the males, and they don't much like being inseminated, so they tend to fight back. The sizeable length allows the male to have sex from a safe distance and get the hell outta Dodge before being eaten alive. This is all the trickier because mating takes place during enormous, multisquid orgies.

But the result is that squid sex is pretty violent, and mistakes can happen. As the scientists told The Scotsman:

It seems that co-ordinating eight legs, two feeding tentacles and a huge penis, whilst fending off an irate female, is a bit too much to ask, and one of the two males stranded on the Spanish coast had accidentally injected himself with sperm packages in the legs and body. And this does not seem to have been an isolated incident since two of the eight males that had stranded in the north-east Atlantic before had also accidentally inseminated themselves.

Even better, some of the males appear to have inseminated each other. That's right: Gay giant-squid sex. Accidental gay giant-squid sex.

(Thanks to Brian Corcoran for this one!)

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One of first truly famous pieces of machinima -- that DIY art of using video-games to make animated movies -- was "Warthog Jump", a video in which Randy Glass placed explosives beneath Warthog vehicles in the game Halo and made them blow up real good: They'd pinwheel through the air, executing gorgeously synchronized pirouettes. Glass must have spent weeks practicing with grenades to figure out how many were needed to blow the jeeps in precisely the right directions. If you've never seen it, go check it out right now!

After you're done, go check out a little Flash game I just saw called Warthog Launch. The game is based on Glass' little video: You have to place grenades beneath a Warthog jeep, in the precise quantity and precise location so that they'll fly up and destroy a bunch of aliens. It's actually not a bad little puzzle game!

But more importantly, it's a media tribute of nearly autoerotic dimensions: A game based on a comedy show that was itself based on a game. My head hurts. To add one yet one more layer, astute game historians will note that the gameplay in Warthog Launch is an updating of the 1970s ur-game, Cannonball.

A while back, I blogged about how board-game maker Greg Stolze had pioneered a cool new publishing paradigm -- the "ransom model". It works like this: Stolze describes a new concept he has for a board game, and sets a ransom price for it, like maybe $600. Anyone can donate money to meet that goal. Once the goal is met, he designs the game -- and puts it up for anyone to download for free online. It's a win-win solution: Game-lovers get a new game (with a great "pay what you can" pricing scheme), Stolze gets paid for his work, the larger public can get a free ride off those who are juiced enough to donate money, and piracy is instantly rendered irrelevant.

He's done two successful ransoms in the past, but now he's doing a charitable one: Executive Decision, a game for which the ransom is $1,000, all of which will go to the Red Cross for Hurricane Katrina relief. I particularly love the interplay of the charitable focus with the gameplay: Since Katrina was a disaster created almost entirely by governmental bungling and delay, Executive Decision is about precisely the opposite. As Stolze describes:

Executive Decision is a white-knuckle game of political decisionmaking and brinksmanship set in the Oval Office. Players take on the roles of the President and his top advisors, then plunge into the middle of a crisis demanding leadership.

Events in Executive Decision are resolved without recourse to dice, bidding, cards or other random elements: It all boils down to your ability to argue and persuade. The fate of the nation may rest in your hands... if you can only sway the Chief Executive with your words.

I love it. The ransom deadline is Nov. 5, and he's raised 75% of the funds so far. If you want to throw him some money, here's the link!

Okay, prepare for the sheerly weirdest piece of news to emerge from the Katrina tragedy: Sources say the hurricane accidentally set free a handful of top-secret bottlenose dolphins that are equipped with toxic darts and trained to stun terrorists.

No, I'm not making this up, nor indeed could I. The dolphins are part of the Navy's "Cetacean Intelligence Mission", which was founded in 1989. They're outfitted with the darts, and are supposed to swim around Navy subs and keep them safe from terrorist attack by identifying any rogue frogmen and stunning them. Leo Sheridan, an accident specialist, told The Guardian he'd heard that the dolphins got loose during the hurricane, which raises the following specter:

"My concern is that they have learnt to shoot at divers in wetsuits who have simulated terrorists in exercises. If divers or windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber and if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they could fire," he said. "The darts are designed to put the target to sleep so they can be interrogated later, but what happens if the victim is not found for hours?"

Man, I would not want to be the surfer trying to catch some serious pipe when Flipper goes into 007 mode. Given the incredibly high intelligence of dolphins, I can imagine two scenarios here: i) The dolphins are wise enough to realize something is remiss, and they hold back on attacking anyone. ii) The dolphins are totally bored of serving their bipedal masters and revolt, in which case, as The Onion predicted a few years ago, we are screwed.

NOTE: According to Snopes, this is "probably" an urban legend. The Cetacean Intelligence Mission does indeed exist, but dolphins probably aren't outfitted with toxic darts.

(Thanks to Debbie Chachra for this one!)

In this week's New York Times Magazine, I wrote a story about the advent of high-performance hybrids -- cars that are good on gas but also wildly muscular. One of the is the Enigma, pictured above! The piece is online at the Times site, and I've also permanently archived it here:

The High-Performance Hybrids
Can a car that goes from 0 to 60 in 4.3 seconds be good for the earth?
by Clive Thompson

"Hold on to your hat!" Jim Burns shouted as he slammed the accelerator to the floor. With a high-pitched whine, the electric motor behind my seat burst into action, and "the Enigma" -- an experimental red sports car in which I was riding shotgun -- bolted forward, pressing me back into my leather seat. In about three seconds we were whipping through the San Diego State University campus at 50 miles an hour.

"We built her really low, so she totally hugs the ground," Burns said as we coasted to a stop at a large intersection near Highway 8. "Watch this." When the light turned green, he floored it again while yanking the steering wheel to the left so that in the middle of the intersection we performed two 360-degree doughnuts, complete with white smoke pouring off the shrieking back wheels. The nearby drivers stared. Giggling, Burns, a mechanical-engineering professor, straightened the wheel and roared out of the intersection; a stolen glance backward revealed that we had left a thick trail of burned rubber on the asphalt. We finally coasted to a halt near his campus laboratory, where a team of students was waiting with a video camera.

"Dude, that was awesome!" one of them blurted.

I had to agree: it was a heck of a ride. Yet this car, so sleek and aggressive on the outside, hides an earnest do-gooder secret beneath its hood. The Enigma is a hybrid, a distant cousin of the Hollywood environmentalist favorite, the Toyota Prius. It has both a normal fuel-burning engine (diesel, in this case) and an electric motor, which cooperate so the engine runs only at peak efficiency. Together, they give the Enigma an astounding fuel efficiency of 80 miles per gallon.

But the electric motor isn't merely for fuel efficiency. It also adds crucial horsepower, allowing the Enigma to go from 0 to 60 in a mere 4.3 seconds and to cruise at a top speed of over 100 miles per hour. The result is a seeming paradox: a car potent enough to please muscle-car buffs yet eco-friendly enough to thrill environmentalists.

"We call it lean muscle," Burns said. The Enigma is not yet for sale; it is a one-of-a-kind prototype, which Burns and his team have built at their campus lab, financed by themselves, the California Energy Commission and a few philanthropic donors. They are currently designing the next generation, which will have a top speed of 217 m.p.h. while getting 40 miles to the gallon or better. Burns has formed a corporation that plans to sell the new models for $185,000 -- expensive but, as he points out, still cheaper than a Lamborghini or a Ferrari "and with way, way better mileage."

This, Burns argues, is the future of hybrids. Americans will never accept them if they remain small, meek vehicles like the Toyota Prius or the Honda Insight, which have low top speeds and lackluster pulling power. No, if hybrids are going to appeal to red-meat drivers across the country, they'll need power and performance. "We've got to produce a car that gets a 14-year-old boy excited," Burns said, flashing a bucktoothed grin as he sweated beneath the sun in a loud Hawaiian shirt. "We got to have the smoking! The squealing! The tires popping off!"

Burns is not alone in this belief. Indeed, in the last year the auto industry has decided to drastically bulk up its hybrids. Carmakers are ditching the bumper-car designs that have thus far defined the genre, and in the next two years, every new hybrid that hits the showroom will be a lumbering truck, a thundering S.U.V. or a high-powered luxury car. There is nary a podlike bubble among them. Normally these sorts of boats are infamous for their abysmal fuel economy. But when tricked out with hybrid drivetrains, they can squeeze up to 50 percent more out of a tank of gas. In essence, they are a compromise -- nowhere near as good with fuel as a Prius but nowhere near as bad as a regular S.U.V. gas guzzler.

This past spring, Lexus released the RX 400h, an S.U.V. that contains a V-6 engine but uses two electric motors to help it perform like a V-8 -- giving it 268 horsepower and a 0 to 60 of 6.9 seconds. Next year the company will release a GS 450h luxury-car hybrid with more than 300 horsepower and "eye-watering acceleration," as one Lexus official puts it. (In fact, the hybrid GS will be more powerful than the existing nonhybrid GS.) Meanwhile, Dodge is planning a hybrid version of its famously muscular "Hemi" S.U.V., and Ford -- which last year released the first-ever hybrid S.U.V., the Escape Hybrid -- will follow up with the 2006 Mariner Hybrid, an S.U.V. so green it has won support from the Sierra Club. "It's sort of a 'get your cake and eat it too' experience," says Larry Nitz, executive director for global hybrid powertrain systems at General Motors.

The time may be ripe for a leaner power car. After Hurricane Katrina damaged the Gulf Coast's oil industry, gas rose to more than $3 a gallon in some parts of the country. Now even rock-ribbed conservatives are looking keenly at environmental technologies. Lean, or green, muscle thus has the potential to permanently shift the landscape of American oil politics by uniting two bitterly opposed fan bases: earnest liberal conservationists and truck-driving red staters. Could the future of hybrids lie not in tiny, futuristic-looking pods but in burly S.U.V.'s and sports cars?

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To understand how hybrid technology can produce a muscle car, it's helpful to consider the basic engineering behind hybrid drivetrains. A car like the Prius derives its superb mileage from an elegant ballet performed between the fuel engine and the electric motor. The goal is to let the gas engine work only when it is most efficient to do so, which is when the car is running at roughly 20 m.p.h. or higher. A gas engine is at its worst efficiency in two situations: when it's revving fiercely to get a car moving from a standstill and when the car is idling at a stoplight and going nowhere.

The central genius of a hybrid is that the electric engine steps in at these inefficient moments. An electric motor, as it turns out, is far better suited to accelerate from zero because of a quirk of physics -- when pushing off from a dead stop, an electric engine has much more torque than a gas engine. It's fundamentally suited to the task. Better yet, when a hybrid is stopped at a red light, the gas engine can shut down completely; it won't start up again until the electric engine has accelerated the car to that magic 20 m.p.h. point. The upshot is that a gas engine operates only in its near perfect window of efficiency, thereby burning substantially less fuel than normal. When a car brakes, the electric motors switch to "regenerative" mode, transforming the energy of braking into electricity that recharges the batteries. The fuel efficiency of this self-contained process in a Prius can be as high as 60 miles a gallon, or 66 miles a gallon in an Insight.

Yet as any physicist knows, efficiency can be flipped on its head. If a hybrid system can squeeze more energy out of a single unit of gas, then why not reverse the proposition? That is, instead of using the extra juice to increase fuel economy, employ it to propel the car faster and harder.

This is the logic behind Detroit's new hybrid muscle: take a relatively midpower gasoline engine, add electric power on top and produce the illusion of V-8 strength. After all, if you're no longer worried about maximizing mileage, those electric motors can offer drag-race-style acceleration, giving a regular gas engine the appearance of far more torque. Last fall, Toyota engineers decided to prove just this point by souping up a humble Prius to make it drive 130 m.p.h. on a dry lake bed in California. "If you've got a system designed to produce efficiency, all you need to do is run it in reverse to produce extra output," according to Aaron Robinson, an editor for Car & Driver who test-drove the souped-up Prius (proclaiming it "pretty cool").

Several other automakers began tinkering with this concept, creating concept cars to show just how hyperpowered a hybrid could be. In 2002, Acura produced the DN-X, which astonished car-show attendees by offering a remarkable 400 horsepower and up to 42 miles to the gallon. The next year, Mazda produced the Ibuki, a Miata-like concept vehicle with an estimated 180 horsepower.

The real head-turner came at last year's North American International Auto Show in Detroit when Mitsubishi rolled out its Concept-E, an experimental hybrid based on the well-known Eclipse sports car. The Concept-E had an electric motor located in the rear of the car. But it had not been engineered to help the gas motor the way that a normal hybrid does. Instead, it simply provided boost, delivering extra horsepower when the driver wanted to suddenly overcharge the engine -- rather like a high-tech version of a nitrous oxide boost. On its own, the Concept-E was powered by a regular Eclipse gas engine with a healthy 263 horsepower. When the extra electric motors engaged, the car had another 150 horsepower.

"So now we're talking, like, Viper territory or Corvette territory," says Dan Sims, the general manager of Mitsubishi's design studio in Cypress, Calif., who oversaw the construction of the Concept-E. "That's quite a different driving experience." When Sims took the car for a test drive on a nearby racetrack, the electric motor produced a whine that sounded like a sci-fi jet engine. "Remember the Batmobile in the 60's with that turbine sound?" Sims says. "That's what it sounds like! It was like when Captain Kirk puts it into overdrive, and the stars blur."

The Concept-E was geared for performance, not fuel efficiency. But as Sims points out, it did, technically, save fuel -- because getting the equivalent 400-plus horsepower out of a gas-only engine would have required burning considerably more gas. A regular sports car with comparable performance would get only about 10 miles to the gallon, Sims figures; in contrast, the Concept-E got as much as 25.

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As these experiments unfolded, the auto industry began to realize that high-performance hybrids were not only possible but might also be the answer to hybrids' enormous marketing problems. Sure, Leonardo DiCaprio and Harrison Ford were lining up to buy Toyota Priuses. But surveys showed that hybrids would never break into the mainstream because Middle America couldn't abide their feeble performance. "Skinny tires, little engines -- they looked arguably more like a science project than a car you'd want to drive," says Anthony Pratt, who covers hybrids for the car-industry analyst J. D. Power & Associates.

Indeed, Pratt's consumer surveys discovered recently that, even with rising gas prices, "performance" was still far and away the single most important factor in buying a car. J. D. Power polled people who owned their cars for 90 days and asked them what the most important part of their purchase was. Only 33 percent said gas mileage, and a mere 7.6 percent said "environmental impact." The No. 1 factor for 62 percent of the respondents was "reliability and durability."

To the extent that consumers worried about low fuel economy, it was as a matter of personal inconvenience: stopping to refuel every few days was a big hassle. Before Lexus began selling its 400h S.U.V. hybrid this spring, the company conducted a focus group to find out why would-be buyers wanted a hybrid. The reason: convenience. "The big deal was, I don't have to stop that much to fuel up. That was a primary purchasing factor!" says Dave Hermance, executive engineer for environmental engineering at Toyota's Technical Center. "It wasn't so much the fact that 'I'm going to save $600 a year in fuel savings.' Then there was the 'Oh, yeah, it makes me feel very, very good about the environment. When my kids come home from college, they don't chew on me as hard, because I'm doing something environmentally correct.' "

In this new generation of high-powered hybrids, you essentially get the same powerful S.U.V. drive you've always had -- but with slightly better mileage. For example, the Lexus 400h has a six-cylinder engine, so it attains mileage of up to 27 to 32 miles per gallon. But the electric motors endow it with the feel of a V-8, a car that would normally get a measly 13 miles to the gallon. Similarly, Ford's Escape S.U.V. has only four cylinders but drives like a V-6 and gets 36 miles to the gallon.

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When i slid behind the wheel of the Lexus 400h to give it a test drive, there was no doubt it was a luxury ride. The steering wheel robotically lowered into place; when I looked out the window, I was perched high above the plebes who scurried through the streets of Manhattan in their puny little compact cars.

So I turned the key in the ignition to start the car and … nothing. No sound, no shudder of the engine awakening. Then it hit me: of course there was no sound. The 400h uses its electric motors to push off from zero, so even though the gas engine hadn't come to life yet, the car was indeed "on." I gently stepped on the accelerator, and sure enough, the car drifted forward, silent as a ghost. Half a block later, the engine quietly began purring. I quickly discovered that the 400h really does perform as if it were a full V-8. When I suddenly hit the accelerator to dart out of a tight spot in traffic, the tires gave a satisfying squeal.

Yet in other ways, the experience felt subtly different from a regular S.U.V. When I quickly sped up to get onto a highway ramp, for example, the acceleration didn't push me back into my seat the way a normal car would. This, as it turned out, is due to some intriguing physics in the hybrid drivetrain. When a regular car accelerates, it goes through a "shift curve." Each time it shifts up a gear, the transmission needs to disengage for an instant, producing a moment of deceleration -- followed by a sudden fresh burst forward. It's that staggered, pulsed feeling that we typically associate with speeding up. But the hybrid 400h has a considerably more complicated "planetary" drivetrain, which organically weaves the efforts of the gas engine and the electric motors together. You don't feel any dead spots because whenever the gas engine is changing gears, the electric motors prevent those tiny temporary decelerations.

"It's deceptively smooth," Hermance says. When auto journalists first drove the vehicle, they were disappointed. "The initial response was, 'Darn it, I'm not getting the big G-shock.' "

The biggest engineering challenge in any high-performance hybrid is not really managing the drivetrain, however, or even the electric motors. It is the batteries. They are the linchpin of how a hybrid system performs, because they determine how long the electric motors will be able to function.

Consider, for comparison's sake, a laptop battery. It works very slowly, taking several hours to charge, then it holds the charge for weeks at a time and dispenses it in a slow trickle. In contrast, a battery for a hybrid needs to work in huge, rapid surges. It must rapidly blast out a very big charge -- the motors in the 400h require a heavy 150 kilowatts -- and then recharge just as quickly by capturing regenerative power while braking. If you could force the 400h to drive solely on batteries, with no gas engine at all, they would last for only a minute or two. But this never happens, because in reality the batteries are constantly inhaling and exhaling energy; a single drive across town might involve a dozen such cycles.

If you wanted to endow a hybrid with astonishingly high fuel efficiency, you'd charge the battery to its absolute peak; that way, it could spell the gas motor for the longest possible period. But a fully charged battery tends to swell with heat, and such wear and tear would significantly shorten its life span. You would have to do open-heart surgery on your hybrid, having a mechanic regularly install new batteries at a cost of several thousand dollars. Customers, Hermance realized, would never tolerate that. Indeed, surveys show they don't want to change the batteries for seven years or more. So with the 400h, Lexus did what most hybrid automakers do: they programmed the car's software to intentionally hobble the energy flow, ensuring that the regeneration would never fill the batteries more than 60 percent. This means the batteries will last years -- but potentially at the cost of significantly reducing the vehicle's fuel economy.

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At the end of my day driving the 400h, I checked the on-board computer to see what sort of mileage I had been getting. Technically, it should have been great. The stop-and-start traffic of a city like Manhattan is where a hybrid gets its best fuel economy, because when you're braking so frequently, the electric motors have many opportunities to replenish the batteries. The worst fuel economy comes from highway cruising because the gas engine is working full-time, with the electric motors doing comparatively little work.

Yet I discovered I got only 20.4 miles per gallon. That's a bit better than a comparable Lexus S.U.V.; the GX, for example, is rated at 15 miles per gallon in city driving. But compared with an ultraefficient hybrid like the tiny three-cylinder Honda Insight -- with its 66-miles-per-gallon range -- the 400h remains a prodigious gas guzzler.

With relatively small fuel numbers like these, many environmentalists are dismayed by the advent of green muscle. Sure, they admit these S.U.V.'s aren't quite as bad as the old ones. But is "marginally better" good enough for the environment? Isn't this a huge betrayal of the original promise of hybrid technology, which was supposed to help wean America off its gasoline addiction?

"It's incredibly unfortunate," John Coequyt, an energy-policy specialist for Greenpeace, says. "Hybrids are getting bigger and faster, and there's less and less concern about efficiency. They're setting such low targets." A spokeswoman for the Rainforest Action Network was even more blunt: "They're just not taking this technology seriously."

Indeed, the mileage picture is even worse than the automakers promise. In a dealer's room, a manufacturer will boast that its luxury hybrid gets 35 miles per gallon, based on testing done by the Environmental Protection Agency. But in actual road driving, hybrid owners frequently discover the mileage is far less. This disparity, critics say, derives from the fact that the E.P.A.'s laboratory tests do not match real-world driving. The E.P.A. runs cars on an 11-mile course of city driving, with an average speed of 24 m.p.h., followed by highway driving at an average speed of 45 m.p.h. A hybrid performs very well in a test like that, because it's heavily weighted with stop-and-go driving. In actual life, though, Americans do much more highway driving, where luxury hybrids barely outperform regular gasoline-only cars. "The E.P.A. tests are just not realistic," Anthony Pratt of J. D. Power says.

Still, some environmentalists are grudgingly pragmatic about the new trend. After Ford began work on its impending 2006 Mariner Hybrid S.U.V., promising around 33 miles per gallon, it approached the Sierra Club for an official stamp of approval to use in its advertising campaign. Surprisingly, the club agreed. "We're not jumping up and down with glee" over the Mariner's fuel efficiency, Daniel F. Becker, head of the Sierra Club's global warming department, admits. But if Americans are going to drive S.U.V.'s and luxury vehicles anyway, they might as well be driving models with possibly 50 percent better gas mileage, he figures.

Becker also worries, however, that he may be helping to create a monster. If the luxury hybrids are successful and profitable, they could metastasize to dominate the entire category of hybrids -- and automakers will abandon the goal of ultrahigh, Honda Insight-level fuel efficiency. "It would be a shame if they killed that goose that's laying the golden egg and make the hybrid just another muscle car with a different engine," he says.

Others argue that green muscle simply needs to flex further and that hybrid S.U.V.'s could more than double their mileage if only carmakers were willing to change some of their basic assumptions about car design.

Down at San Diego State, Jim Burns pointed to his Enigma sports car, which couples high performance with 80 miles to the gallon -- more than double that of these new S.U.V.'s and luxury cars. To achieve that superb mileage, he opted for a small three-cylinder Volkswagen engine that runs on diesel. To compensate for the horsepower lost by having such a small engine, Burns chose to push the electric motors extremely hard. He used "spiral wound" lead-acid batteries, which can store eight and a half times as much energy as normal hybrid batteries and discharge it more than twice as powerfully.

The catch is, the Enigma's workhorse batteries burn out more quickly. If an owner drove an Enigma at high speeds regularly, he could wind up spending thousands of dollars replacing the batteries every couple of years or so. Burns admits that only a small number of wealthy sports-car collectors could ever afford this sort of maintenance, which is why his cars will eventually be sold only to enthusiasts. Even in the world of green muscle, it seems, there's no free lunch.

But as battery technology improves in the years to come, he thinks hybrid muscle could eventually achieve the best of both worlds -- giving us S.U.V.'s with power that get nearly 100 miles per gallon. Next year, to prove that hybrids can go farther and faster, he intends to load the Enigma with a 35-gallon gasoline reservoir and drive from San Diego to Jacksonville, Fla., on a single tank of gas.

"It'll get people excited," he said. "We need to show them the cars they could have." Burns popped open the car's flaming red hood to show off the electric motor, cooling down from his drive. "We're going to put it in a package that no one can say no to, give them their cake and eat it too."

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the magazine.

I am beside myself with excitement. After hundreds of years of hunting, scientists have finally caught the elusive giant squid -- Architeuthis -- live on camera.

How did they pull off this historic feat? Well, a Japanese team sent a robotic camera down to 3,000 feet, just off the Bonin Islands. They also sent down a hook baited with a fresh Japanese Common Squid, as well as a mesh bag filled with "freshly mashed euphausid shrimps" -- mmmmmmmm -- as an odor lure. Then after days of waiting, pay dirt: They felt an enormous tug, as a 26-foot-long giant squid grabbed hold.

And hey -- you know all those supposedly crazy stories told by half-deranged sailors about giant squid attacking their boats? Maybe those aren't so half-cocked after all, because Architeuthis turns out to be one hell of a brawler. It struggled for four solid hours to get free, alternately jetting away at full speed, then zooming back in an attempt to subdue the robot. As the New York Times reports:

The giant squid, the researchers conclude, "appears to be a much more active predator than previously suspected, using its elongate feeding tentacles to strike and tangle prey." The tentacles could apparently coil into a ball, much as a python envelops its victims.

To truly fry your mind, check out the time-lapse-photography video of the squid in action posted at MSNBC. Keep in mind, while you're looking at it, that the span of those tentacles is larger than most people's front yards. Yiiiii! For additional fun, check out the paper written the scientists published today in The Proceedings of the Royal Society (PDF version here). The thing that cracks me up is that they actually don't have a whole lot of data to report; the main thing, I gather, is that they get the totally cosmic street-cred of being able to write a paper with the title "First-ever observation of a live giant squid in the wild".

I wonder if any other scientists will be able to copy this technique -- and catch another one? On the other hand, it might not be a good idea to piss these things off too much.

(As regular blog readers can tell by the fact that I've not posted in a week, I've been positively slammed by work. So a huge shout-out goes to all the folks who emailed me to make sure I'd heard the news -- including John Tinmouth, Andrew Griffin, Robin Sloan, Guillermito, Justin Yoshida, Tony Blow, Koutnik, Alexander Khost, Ian Daly, Peter Krekel, Rob Toole, Jeff MacIntyre, Joe Adiletta, Brian Corcoran, Lisa Fortin, Jonathan Korman, Andrew Rickard, Sam Feinson, and Bret Dawson!)

Dig this: An Ebola-like epidemic is raging in World of Warcraft, the enormously popular online game -- and it's killing players left and right. The trouble began when Blizzard, the company that runs World of Warcraft, introduced a new opponent called Hakkar, the "god of blood". When you fight him, as a defense he infects you with something called "Corrupted Blood", which shaves off your hit points so rapidly that your character dies very quickly. Problem is, the Blood is infectious -- get close enough to another player and you'll pass on the disease. As one player reports from inside the game:

The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have brought this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside of the instance. It starts spreading amongst the genral population including npcs, who can out generate the damage. Some servers have gotten so bad that you can't go into the major cities without getting the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die).

GM's even tried quarantining players in certain areas, but the players kept escaping the quarentine and infect other players.

Over at the superb game-theory blog Terra Nova, one player notes that the disaster has taken on Katrina-like proportions, complete with a fumbling bureaucracy. Some players feel Blizzard's executives didn't read up on their network-theory carefully enough to predict how badly things would rage out of control:

Deaths on Suramar numbered in the hundreds, I personally have screenshots of skeletons piled waist high in parts of the auction house. The biggest disappointment wasn't that it happened, but that Blizzard was so incapable when it came to dealing with it.

And the living shall envy the dead. Of course, this digital pandemic isn't all that awful, insofar as when you die in World of Warcraft you can just reanimate yourself. But the stories from witnesses to the in-game carnage are pretty amazing, and it makes me wonder: Maybe we should be using online games to study the effects of a real-world bioterror attack? Maybe FEMA and the government should hire Blizzard to build them an online world, and populate it with players by offering it for free. They researchers can test the effects of a contagious bioterror attack such as smallpox -- by releasing a virtual version of it, and seeing how players react.

(Thanks to Jacob for this one!)

In the Harry Potter universe, how precisely does one become a wizard? Well, if you've read the J. K. Rowling books, you'll know that the world is divided into magical peoples -- wizards and witches -- and normal, unmagical ones, the muggles. A wizard or witch can be born from two magical parents, two muggles, or a mixture thereof -- a half-blood.

This got a couple of genetic scientists in Britain wondering: What are the chromosonal implications here? They quickly set pen to paper and produced one of the more curious letters that has ever appeared in Nature: A Darwinian explanation of the Harry Potter's inheritance of magical abilities. To quote:

This suggests that wizarding ability is inherited in a mendelian fashion, with the wizard allele (W) being recessive to the muggle allele (M). According to this hypothesis, all wizards and witches therefore have two copies of the wizard allele (WW). Harry's friends Ron Weasley and Neville Longbottom and his arch-enemy Draco Malfoy are 'pure-blood' wizards: WW with WW ancestors for generations back. Harry's friend Hermione is a powerful muggle-born witch (WW with WM parents). Their classmate Seamus is a half-blood wizard, the son of a witch and a muggle (WW with one WW and one WM parent). Harry (WW with WW parents) is not considered a pure-blood, as his mother was muggle-born.

There may even be examples of incomplete penetrance (Neville has poor wizarding skills) and possible mutations or questionable paternity: Filch, the caretaker, is a 'squib', someone born into a wizarding family but with no wizarding powers of their own.

Cool enough. But even better is that three other scientists immediately dashed off a following letter that disputed the theory. Noting that "Hermoine's parents were muggle dentists who lack any family history of wizarding," they find "the assumption that wizarding has a genetic basis to be deterministic and unsupported by available evidence."

Finer tongue-in-cheek science cannot be had. Though they weren't merely being witty. The original scientists wrote their Nature letter as a "teachable moment": They noted that since genetics are difficult to teach to young children, Potter's universe offered a unique opportunity for science teachers to talk about DNA and inheritance. But this also, of course, implies the teaching of evolution, which makes you wonder which will be the bigger reason for the evangelical right to hate J. K. Rowling: Because she's indoctrinating kids in witchcraft -- or in Darwinian science?

(Thanks to Samuel Arbesman for this one!)

This just in: A German scientist has recently been forced to clarify that contrary to press reports, he has not invented a method of turning dead cats into automobile fuel.

Ahem. Apparently, the confusion stems from a story that the German newspaper Bild Tuesday wrote about Christian Koch. Koch holds a patent on "KDV 500", a technique that can turn waste -- such as paper, textiles, and plastic -- into crude oil. So Bild Tuesday published the following:

Bild Tuesday wrote a headline: "German inventor can turn cats into fuel -- for a tank he needs 20 cats." The paper on Wednesday followed up with a story entitled: "Can you really make fuel out of cats?" [snip]

"I drive my normal diesel-powered car with this mixture," Koch is quoted saying in Bild, next to a large picture of a kitten. "I have gone 170,000 km (106,000 miles) without a problem."

There's a saying we have in journalism: Too good to check. This means "the story is so incredibly weird and amazing that I don't want to check it, because if I find out it's not true, I won't be able to write it." Well, the dead-cat story was clearly way too good to check, such that typing "dead cats fuel" into Google News -- really the best search query ever -- shows that dozens of newspapers picked up this story and ran with it, ranging from CNN to the People's Daily Online. The upshot is that the poor scientist spent last week frantically sending out press releases denying that he was grinding kitties' bones to make his bread ... which of course resulted in an even more surreal slew of headlines, such as "Inventor Denies Dead Cat Fuel Ingredient".

Meow.

In any natural disaster -- or massive terrorist attack, like 9/11 -- the phone system tends to collapse. Isn't there any backup way to keep talking? Sure: Wifi meshes, as I argue in an essay that appeared this Sunday in the New York Times Magazine. The story is online here, and a full archived copy is below:

Talking in the Dark
by Clive Thompson

When was the last time you heard a "busy tone" on a telephone? Probably not for years. Our phone system is so robust, our mobile phones are so ubiquitous and voice mail and e-mail are such reliable backups that instant, unhindered access to friends, colleagues and relatives has come to seem a right and not a privilege. Indeed, if you include instant-messaging, blogs and cellphone text messages, you might think we're living in the golden age of communications.

Except when disaster hits. Two weeks ago, I tried calling a colleague down in New Orleans -- and found myself listening to the annoying honk of a busy signal and the static of a dead phone line. Katrina had disrupted the city's communications grid, and residents and emergency responders were grappling with the chaos that ensued. For a week, just about the only people with communications were those government officials and reporters lucky enough to have two-way radios or satellite phones with adequately charged batteries. Everyone else staggered around in blind ignorance -- which helped produce horrifying pandemonium. We saw a similar lesson in 9/11: When communications crumble, so does society.

Is there a way to prevent such breakdowns in the future? In fact, disaster-preparedness experts and high-tech inventors are already developing the idea of blanketing cities with what they call a "WiFi mesh." WiFi, of course, is the technology you may use at home or in a Starbucks to connect a laptop wirelessly to the Internet; a mesh is a vast, self-correcting network of WiFi antennas that could work together to provide crucial backup in a disaster.

To understand what makes WiFi useful in a catastrophe, consider some frailties of our regular phone-company communications. Phone systems are reliable on a day-to-day basis, but they have a key vulnerability: They're centralized. In any city, a handful of central "switches" handle the work of routing local phone calls. During 9/11, several important switches were located across the street from the World Trade Center and were damaged in the towers' collapse, blacking out parts of New York.

To make matters worse, phone systems are rarely designed to allow more than 10 percent of the population to talk simultaneously, and far more people than that rush to the telephone in an emergency. In the New York City blackout of 2003, while most land lines continued to function, the cellphone circuits were overjammed.

Katrina posed even worse problems. As phone traffic surged, the water was destroying a vast area, including underground phone lines. Mobile-phone networks, too, were ruined, because they're routed through communication towers that crumpled like paper in Katrina's 140-mile-an-hour winds. As a final insult, Katrina knocked out the power grid in swaths of the Gulf Coast -- which was fatal for phone systems that require thousands of watts of juice. The surviving mobile-phone sites in New Orleans could run on diesel-generator backup, but with just one tank of gas each, they were capable of operating for only a few days. Even the mayor nearly lost contact with the outside world. After their satellite phones ran out of power, employees of the mayor's office broke into an Office Depot and lifted phones, routers and the store's own computer server.

WiFi meshes elegantly dodge our phone system's central problems. They're low-power and ultracheap -- and decentralized like the Internet itself, which was initially conceived to withstand a nuclear attack. You can use WiFi to build a do-it-yourself phone system that is highly resistant to disaster.

In Chicago, the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a nonprofit organization, hooked up dozens of households in the neighborhoods of North Lawndale and Pilsen with WiFi nodes that form a mesh. Each node can communicate with its neighbor a few hundred feet away; by cooperating in this fashion, they form an enormous bucket brigade, each passing the data signal along until everyone is sharing it. If one single household connects to the Internet, all the other households can instantly dip in. Best of all, the WiFi mesh can handle not only data but also phone calls -- via the magic of "voice over IP," an increasingly popular technique for transmitting conversation over the Internet. Should the local phone lines suddenly collapse, the residents of these neighborhoods can still make calls to one another using headsets attached to their computers. In essence, they are their own backup phone company.

Unlike a normal land-line or mobile phone system, a WiFi mesh has no single weak point. Knock out any single node in one of the Chicago neighborhoods -- destroy an entire house, for that matter -- and the mesh has enough redundancy to work around the missing link. The nodes are also durable; they're tiny shoe-box-size devices, which means they're far less likely to be wiped out by hurricanes than enormous mobile-phone-company antennas. "We've been running these little Apollo 13 disaster scenarios where a bunch of our nodes get taken out, and the whole system just reconfigures itself automatically," said Paul Smith, who helped build the Chicago networks.

So why don't cities build their own WiFi meshes to help cope with the next disaster? Scatter enough nodes on rooftops citywide, and then if the phone system collapses, there will probably be a surviving mesh strong enough to serve as a rudimentary backup. Connect even a single satellite uplink to the mesh, and the entire town remains linked to the outside world. Best of all, each WiFi node uses extremely little power -- about 10 watts, barely a sixth of the average light bulb. Even if a city's power grid fails, a car battery or solar panel could keep a node running for days or weeks, filling the gap while the phone companies rebuild their land-line and mobile-phone structures.

These disaster experiments are already under way. When Katrina hit, Smith and other volunteer communications enthusiasts rushed down to Louisiana. In Rayville, his team of techies clambered up a local tower to blast WiFi signals 50 miles through the countryside; their signals reached refugees clustered in church basements with computers but no Internet connections. "We're trying to make sure families can contact each other, and get online to register with FEMA's Web site," Smith told me.

The cost is laughably small. City engineers could build a mesh using parts on sale at any Circuit City. (Smith's neighborhood mesh in Chicago cost $350 per node, and he figures it could take only $650 apiece to equip every node with an emergency battery.) Alternatively, a city could simply hire a mesh-networking company like Tropos Networks, which estimates a cost of $70,000 to cover a square mile with DSL-speed connections. These numbers are so low that they are virtually rounding errors in any city's budget.

WiFi does have its limitations. To begin with, an antenna can communicate with another antenna only if it has a clear line of sight. But because the system is so inexpensive, it wouldn't be difficult to address this problem by placing antennas closely together in congested areas. Of course, a WiFi mesh wouldn't work if its users had no supply of electricity. And emergency responders and the military will always need to rely on their own high-quality two-way radios and satellite phones. But for the rest of us, when disaster next strikes, WiFi meshes could be the clever system that keeps people in contact -- from house to house.

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the magazine.

Here's a really lovely piece of journalism: Paul and Michael Albert, a writing-and-photography team, went kayaking in the sea of Cortez to witness an enormous school of mobulidae breaching the surface -- and leaping into the air like dolphins. Mobulidae, a family that includes both manta rays and mobulas, grow several feet in width, so their aerial leaps were pretty stunning:

Whoosh! Without warning, a mobula emerges from below the surface, its long flat body glistening in the evening light and whip for a tail trailing behind. Flap, flap, flap, maybe a somersault or two, and then smack! It happened again and again. Single flips. Straight-up belly flops. Double flips. I see a single mobula leap a few times in succession; others leap only once and then disappear. I witness mobulas partially emerging from the water, one third of the wingtip still immersed, and rotate around that tip. Sometimes, I don't even see that. All that is visible is the swirl of water left behind. Notarbartolo di Sciara writes that when he was in the Sea of Cortez some twenty years ago, he even observed triple flips. According to him, some mobulas leap at heights of up to two times their disc width or up to six feet high.

Why precisely do mobulas jump out of the water? No-one's sure, but as the Alberts note, some scientists speculate that the jumps could be accidental -- artifacts of the creatures' feeding patterns, which involve swimming tight circles around their prey. Swim too close to the surface, and boom: Ya wind up in the air. Others suggest that it could be to dislodge other sea creatures that attach to their bodies. Perhaps most intriguing is the speculation that maybe it's just play -- because mobulas have extremely large brains for their bodies, and the ratio is nearly that of most mammals.

(Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!)

Slate runs a column called "The Explainer", which picks an interesting question every few days and offers a quick, succint answer. This week's question noted the preponderance of pictures of floating dead bodies in New Orleans, and asked: "Why are bodies in the water always facedown?" Because of some quirks of anatomy, chemistry and physics, as it turns out:

A cadaver in the water starts to sink as soon as the air in its lungs is replaced with water. Once submerged, the body stays underwater until the bacteria in the gut and chest cavity produce enough gas -- methane, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon dioxide -- to float it to the surface like a balloon. (The buildup of methane, hydrogen sulfide, and other gases can take days or weeks, depending on a number of factors.) At first, not all parts of the body inflate the same amount: The torso, which contains the most bacteria, bloats more than the head and limbs. The most buoyant body parts rise first, leaving the head and limbs to drag behind the chest and abdomen. Since arms, legs, and the head can only drape forward from the body, corpses tend to rotate such that the torso floats facedown, with arms and legs hanging beneath it.

That is both extremely interesting and thoroughly disgusting. Though it's a pale shadow of the following paragraph in that "Explainer", which discusses "refloats" -- a concept of sufficient grotesquerie that I'm totally not going to excerpt it. Click and read it yourself, assuming you've already eaten lunch.

In our fast-moving, email-pinging, mobile-phone-ringing world, privacy is a hard thing to come by. For those times when you desperately need to shut the world out, hie thee to an Ocula -- the ultimate in personal-boundaries technology! As the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue describes it:

This private relaxation theater is handmade of fiberglass and integrates advanced audio, visual, seating, and environment technologies, as well as your choice of Macintosh or PC computer, to create a space that allows you to relax completely. The Oculas has an electronic door that closes silently at a touch, coccooning a sitter inside the well-lit interior, which is upholste red with leather seating for comfort and completely ventilated for continual airflow that prevents stale air without compromising external noise reduction. An electronic controller allows the user to adjust the light through a complete spectrum of hues and brightness levels for optimal reading, video-watching, or relaxation and sleeping.

Only $45,000 apiece, earthlings. The mind boggles at the potential applications. Rather than have cubicles at work, wouldn't it rock to have your office filled with these things? Then every morning everyone shows up, says hello, grabs a coffee -- and seals themselves into an egg. Your company would look like one of the breeding-ground scenes from Alien. And man, I think about some of the programmers I know ... if you could instal some sort of built-in bathroom technology and a feeding-tube apparatus, hell, they'd sit there coding and wouldn't come out for a week.

(Thanks to the Book of Joe for this one!)

For my latest Wired video-game column, I wrote about a new booming cottage industry: Novels based on popular games. To quote:

Here are some details about Sam Fisher you probably didn't know: He's 47 years old, and his hottie martial-arts instructor has a major crush on him. He lives alone in a condo and struggles to figure out how to deal with his college-age daughter. His favorite pastime is gourmet cooking. He thinks the Iraq war is a bad idea.

Sam Fisher is, of course, the hero of the Splinter Cell video game. I've spent countless hours using my Xbox controller to sneak him past armed guards, scale walls and club enemies unconscious. But I didn't know much about his personal life until I wandered into an airport bookstore recently and encountered Splinter Cell -- the novel.

You can read the rest of the piece online here for free!

Who knew? Apparently, the superb documentary March of the Penguins has become a hit amongst creationists. Why? Because they think -- as the Science section of the New York Times reports today -- that the sheer tenacity of the penguins, and their ability to thrive in a hostile environment, points inexorably to the hand of God. As Andrew Coffin writes in his film review at World Magazine:

That any one of these eggs survives is a remarkable feat -- and, some might suppose, a strong case for intelligent design. It's sad that acknowledgment of a creator is absent in the examination of such strange and wonderful animals. But it's also a gap easily filled by family discussion after the film. Talk of evolution is minimal, as is much scientific discussion of onscreen events, with Mr. Freeman's narration focused more on the poetic than Discovery Channel -- style details.

It's a pitch-perfect example of the surreal tautologies that creationists use to explain away evolution: If something appears to have been designed, then it clearly must have been. It reminds me also of something a friend once said: That people who believe intensely in Providence, karma, or the hand of God in everyday affairs, are creepily similar to schizophrenics who believe that they can spot meaningful patterns in the white noise of daily life. ("Four traffic lights in a row all turned red just as I approached! I'm being warned not to complete my journey!")

One of the great gifts of science is that it helps us break through how reality appears to work, and lets us figure out how it actually does work. But Coffin would rather explore the workings of the universe via "family discusssion" than, oh, reading about the actual work of real scientists who carefully test their theories to make sure they fit the facts.

About ten years ago I was in a Toronto bookshop and found a copy of Infiltration. Subtitled "the zine about going places you're not supposed to go", it was devoted to the escapades of the author, Jeff Chapman -- or "Ninjalicious", to use his nom de plume -- as he explored the many off-limits areas in famous Toronto buildings such as the Royal York hotel, CN Tower, or St. Mike's Hospital. In each issue, Chapman would pick a new target and infiltrate it -- roaming curiously around, finding hilarious secrets, then describing it with effervescently witty delight. Chapman had the best prose of any zine author I've read anywhere. Many zinesters are clever, of course, but Chapman wrote with a 19th-century literary journalist's attention to detail; nothing escaped his notice, from the relative fluffiness of the towels in executive lounges to the color of the rust pools in a mysterious, hangar-sized room buried below Toronto's subway system.

It was like some postmodern version of Fodor's. Indeed, that was Chapman's genius: He approached the everyday world as if were filled with Narnia-like 'ports to hidden worlds of mystery. As he realized, when you walk down the sidewalk in your city, there are rooms and places barely twenty feet to your right and left that are so restricted -- being "private" areas of corporations, or even of public buildings -- that they are effectively as remote as an island in Fiji. To travel to them is like voyaging to the summit of Mount Everest. And of course, in the 15 years since he started the zine, private companies have taken over more and more formerly public space -- making Chapman's quest not only funny and engaging but somewhat political.

A few years after he started publishing, he'd inspired so many other people to follow in his footsteps -- in cities around the world -- that he had singlehandedly created the "urban exploration" movement. Though urban exploration involves trespassing, Chapman took the same attitude towards it that the Boy Scouts take towards the wilderness, as Eye Magazine wrote about him last week:

He was evangelical about the virtue and value of exploring cities, preaching ethics that encouraged trespassing but forbade theft, vandalism and even littering. Urban explorers in the Ninjalicious mould believed in leaving no sign of their tourism through the inner workings of urban life, and in taking nothing with them but photographs and a new appreciation for the world around them.

He also founded a web site for urban exploration, and documented his ongoing journeys not only in the zine but in gorgeous color pictures on his blog. A couple of my favorite recent entries: The snow-covered roof of Toronto's new art-college building; the enormous rooms under construction at the Eaton Center; and massive, corroded bins left behind in the abandoned Stelco factory.

Sadly, the reason Eye and I are writing about Chapman in the past tense is that he died of cancer last month -- and he was only 31. He'd apparently been struggling with cancer for years, and it was during his treatments at St. Mike's hospital in the early 90s that he became intrigued by the hidden areas in a supposedly public building.
Then he was off and running and thankfully never stopped. The world could use more brilliant obsessives like him.

Here's a brilliant bit of engineering: A straw that purifies water as you sip through it -- allowing people to drink directly from rivers and lakes that are otherwise fatally ridden with bacteria. A creation of Vestergaard Frandsen, a firm that specializes in "disease control textiles", the LifeStraw is aimed squarely at developing worlds plagued by bacteria such as Salmonella, Shigella, Enterococcus and Staphylococcus.

How precisely does it kill those bugs? As medGadget reports:

What first meets the water when sucked up is a pre-filter of PE filter textile with a mesh opening of 100 micron, shortly followed by a second textile filter in polyester with a mesh opening of 15 micron. In this way all big articles are filtered out, even clusters of bacteria are removed. Then the water is led into a chamber of iodine impregnated beads, where bacteria, viruses and parasites are killed. The second chamber is a void space, where the iodine being washed off the beads can maintain their killing effect. The last chamber consists of granulated active carbon, which role is to take the main part of the bad smell of iodine, and to take the parasites that have not been taken by the pre-filter or killed by the iodine. The biggest parasites will be taken by the pre-filter, the weakest will be killed by the iodine, and the medium range parasites will be picked up by the active carbon. The main interest to everyone is the killing of bacteria, and here our laboratory reading tells us that we have a log. 7 to log 8 kill of most bacteria. This is better than tap water in many developed countries.

That simply rocks.

(Thanks to Engadget for this one!)

What do you do with the rest of your life after you've been to the moon? This is the intriguing central question in Moondust, a book that tracks the later lives of the Apollo spacemen -- and which the The New York Times asked me to review. It was published today, and the review is online here; I'm also archived a permanent copy below!

Down to Earth
by Clive Thompson

Alan Bean rode the Apollo 12 mission all the way to the moon, and on the way back he made a promise to himself: "I'm going to live my life the way I want to." So he resigned from NASA, holed up in a tiny condo and became an oil painter. In the decades since, the only thing he has ever painted has been scenes from his celestial journey: the hyperreal sheen of sunlight on a space helmet, the lunar orbiter slicing through the void. Physically, Bean was back on earth -- but some part of him clearly never came home.

Can you blame him? Only 12 people in history have ever stood on the moon. They were treated like heroes upon departure, rock stars upon return; they've even been credited with helping end the cold war. NASA spent billions to give them the biggest rush any explorer has ever felt. So you can begin to appreciate the peculiarly cosmic dimensions of their eventual midlife crises: after you've been to the moon, whatever do you do with the rest of your life?

This is the question that Andrew Smith -- a British journalist with a predilection for gonzo prose -- tries to answer in "Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth." He hunts down the nine surviving moonwalkers and finds them all still grappling with the experience, in oddly divergent ways. While Bean turned to art, some embraced spirituality. Indeed, when Apollo 14's Edgar Mitchell touched the lunar soil, he experienced a "flash of understanding" that the universe was a huge matrix of information, and was promptly transformed into a new-age guru who to this day holds conferences where attendees discuss U.F.O.'s and biofeedback. In contrast, John Young of Apollo 16 became a NASA lifer, the pilot of the first Space Shuttle mission and an über-nerd so socially maladroit that he spends his entire interview with Smith speaking directly to a nearby wall. Some became beer-company executives; some became teachers; one, an alcoholic. And wherever they go, the astronauts face a public that still hungers, like Smith, for a profound explanation of What It's Like Up There.

Smith never really gets a clear answer. The astronauts are witty, but not, by their own admission, terribly cogent philosophers. ("You feel inadequate that you can't give people the answer they want," Gene Cernan says.) Yet Smith's book succeeds in spite of this, because he bungee-cords together so many intriguing digressions into Apollo minutiae, which are more poetically revealing than the loftiest of speeches. He discovers, for example, that the arch and reserved Neil Armstrong brought along a tape of eerie theremin music to play in the lunar capsule. Another astronaut notes that while the moon is gray, "until you've been there, you have no idea how many shades of gray there are."

Even more gripping are Smith's explorations of just how dangerous those voyages were. Virtually every one narrowly avoided catastrophe. During a Gemini spacewalk, Richard Gordon became so exhausted that his partner almost cut him loose to die. A Gemini capsule went into such a rapid spin it nearly "grayed out" the astronauts. And when Apollo 11 finally descended to the lunar surface, the onboard computer became so overloaded that the master alarm began shrieking, and Armstrong had to perform a hair-raising manual-stick landing that nearly crashed his lunar module into a crater.

Open up a paper these days, and you'll find critics slamming NASA for having a "broken safety culture." Sure, but as Smith documents, spaceflight is inherently dangerous, and the United States of yore -- the one that actually sent people into deep space, instead of financing a go-nowhere shuttle that runs pointless laps around the Earth -- was willing to tolerate levels of risk that today would be considered, pun intended, complete lunacy. Some of the astronauts initially gave the first moon landing a mere 50/50 chance of success. For space buffs like me, Smith's book is a bit depressing, because it's like reading about some long-lost mythical age of daring.

Indeed, it forces you to wonder anew: Why exactly was America so desperate to shoot the moon, anyway? Historians typically explain Apollo as a simple matter of beating the Soviets and proving American technological superiority. But Smith argues, with some persuasiveness, that the moon shot was not nearly so rational or calculated. It was less a feat of exploration than an awesome piece of public theater, a gesture "as primitive as song." The astronaut Joseph Allen once claimed that the most important part of going to the moon wasn't actually about the moon. It was the act of looking backward at the Earth -- a $24 billion moment of self-reflection, when we finally realized just how tiny our world was. The moment "that nobody foresaw: a unique opportunity to look at ourselves," Smith writes. "How madly, perfectly human."

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.

Back in 1999, the Harvard neuroscientist Garrett B. Stanley decided to see if he could capture the actual brain activity showing what someone was looking at. So he took cats -- which have very sharp vision -- and tapped into 177 cells in their lateral geniculate nuclei, a part of the brain that integrates sensory input. Then he reconstructed the signals into approximations of what the cats were actually looking at. The results, excerpted above, were eerily precise: The pictures on the top are camera captures of the direction the cats were looking, and the images below are the reconstructions. Nutty, eh? (A PDF of the paper is here.)

So yes, William Gibson, it apparently is possible to jack into someone's wetware and experience the world from their perspective. Chris McKinstry, a theoretical physicist in Chile, recently blogged about this experiment and said a) that it hasn't been written about enough, and b) that it's insanely important:

Now, we know what raw experience looks like inside the brain of another being, and thus entire philosophies of mind that were premised on internal experience forever being private, have been rendered obsolete.

I'm not so sure. This research is supercool, but merely knowing what someone's visual system is imbibing is a far pass from knowing what they're actually perceiving -- since, as psychologists and philosophers have long realized, two people can look at the same thing yet notice or infer entirely different things, depending on their pre-existing frames of reference and biases. Me, I look at a couple of children sitting on cots in the Houston Astrodome after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their homes and killed their friends and family, and what do I see? Grief and shock. Tom Delay looks at them and what does he see? A couple of kids having a ton of "fun."

Man, I'd love to know what's going on in his lateral geniculate nucleus.

(Thanks to El Rey for this one!)

I've blogged many times before about El Rey, my artist friend who produces -- among other things -- the Surly Squid line of paintings, one of which hangs in my office. Well, if you know El Rey's work, it tends to revolve around several icons: Squid, coffee cups, robots, pigs, monkeys wearing crowns. Today, I discovered that the web designer Ryan Masuga took all of these icons and produced El Rey Invaders, possibly the most mind-blowing Space Invaders port in history.

And: It's hard! The current high score is 42,672,000, but I got a mere 17,450,000. This despite the fact that I was actually reaching back into my early-80s arcade toolkit and employing l33t Space Invaders strategy: Clearing the board down to a pack of four slow-moving aliens, at which point you wait for the super-bonus top-of-the-screen ships to repeatedly spawn and pick 'em off.

Back in the 1980s, Stephen Wolfram began experimenting with cellular automata -- little rule-sets that govern the "growth" of a collection of dots on an infinitely-sized grid. He'd pick a simple rule, set down a single dot, and then watch to see what sort of colony grew out of it. He expected each rule to produce a simple, repeated pattern -- and was surprised when some of the rulesets produced seemingly chaotic, unpredictable shapes. Simple rules, it seems, can produce very complex results, an epiphany that Wolfram spun out into his masterwork A New Kind of Science.

Now he's turned his automata into something really trippy: Music. He takes a vertical slice of one of his enormous automata grids, lays it horizontal, and uses it as a musical score, with each filled-in cell representing a tone. He calls it WolframTones -- man, can anyone create a trademarked name these days that doesn't include a gratituous internal capitalization? -- and intriguingly, the resulting music is strangely tuneful. This, Wolfram says, is because ...

... in the computational universe it's easy to find rules that make complex forms. And that's how WolframTones manages to create so many different complex musical compositions. Each composition in a sense tells in music the story of some system in the computational universe. And because the system follows a definite consistent rule, the compositions inevitably have a certain internal consistency -- which is probably what makes them so effective as music.

Check out that page and you can hear an example. Then you can go to this page where Wolfram's team has set up a little generator: Pick a musical style -- from classical to rock/pop to latin -- and it generates an automata, dumps it into the template, and plays the tune. If you like what you've done, you can even turn it into a ringtone, which is just the most brilliant thing evah. Let your phone ring with math!

(Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!)

For a few years now, I've been arguing that iPods are a weird sort of snob technology. By which I mean: People use them mostly not to fulfil a utilitarian function -- i.e. to play music -- but rather to broadcast a message that they are true music aficionados. To walk around with the aery white earbuds jammed in your skull is to insist that you are the sort of person who not only needs to have music around you -- but needs to have 10,000 songs at your beck and call every second of the day, because nothing less would satisfy the subtle nuances of your all-encompassing taste: Cutting-edge German techno? Early Lomax folk blues recordings? Mozart? Your soul is on permanent shuffle. Mere labels cannot define you.

In reality, I've always suspected that iPod users are nowhere near so sophisticated. The average user of an iPod -- or any of those other 4,000-gig players that can hold the entire Library of Congress -- do not, I've claimed, listen to a wide range of music. No, they probably do what most people do: Plop on the Avril Lavigne for three months at a time on infinite repeat, until they get sick of it and move on to Usher. There's nothing wrong with listening to music in this obsessive fashion; indeed, one of the joys of pop music is getting addicted to a single album and massively overdosing on it for weeks on end. But what cracks me up about the iPod is the fetishization of size -- the insistence that you've got a simply massive record collection crammed in there. Indeed, so devoted are iPod owners to this cultivation of appearance that they've refused to replace the white earbuds with anonymous black ones, even when police recently began warning people that muggers were explicitly targetting the white ones. They'd rather risk having their iPod stolen than miss a chance to impress the proles.

The thing is, I've never really had any proof for my thesis. I've pretty much been pulling this one outta my hat.

That all changed today, when I read about a fascinating study done by wonks at the Solutions Research Group, a market-research firm. They polled 1,062 owners of digital-music players and asked them how many songs they have on their device.

The average? A mere 375 tunes. That's right -- despite regularly buying players that top out at 60 or even 80 gigs, with room for 20,000 songs, people are barely using a tiny sliver of their capacity. A PDF of the report is online here, and to quote it:

Despite a relatively high average of 375 songs per player, 50% of digital music players hold fewer than 100 songs -- suggesting a perfect target for limited capacity mobile phone/digital music hybrids. A quarter of digital music players have 100-499 songs, while the remaining 25% have more than 500 songs.

Interesting, eh? I should point out that I am an enormous hypocrite for making this argument, because when the battery in my wife's 10 gig iPod died last year and she upgraded to a new model, I took over her old one and used it for a few months. To layer on even more hypocrisy, she recently bought me an iPod Shuffle, which I've been using enthusiastically while travelling.

Though come to think of it, how many songs do I actually have on my Shuffle right now?

Hmmm. 145.

Right down there -- with everyone else.

The New York Times Book Review asked me to review The Man Behind the Microchip, a new biography of Robert Noyce, the guy who invented the integrated circuit and founded Intel. It turned out to be an interesting opportunity to meditate on the nature of fame and inventors! The piece is available on the Times' web site, and I've archived a complete copy below:

The Next Small Thing
by Clive Thompson

"If nearly any invention is examined closely enough, it almost immediately becomes apparent that the innovation was not the product of a single mind, even if it is attributed to one," Leslie Berlin writes. "Invention is best understood as a team effort."

Right. In America, we're conditioned to valorize the individual genius. To some extent we owe this caricature to biographies of famous inventors, because they play to the lone-gunman theory of brilliance. But many increasingly complex pieces of high-tech engineering -- the Apple computer, the mobile phone, the Web browser -- were the collaborative products of large teams, each person doing a small piece of work: less "eureka" than barn-raising.

This leads Berlin into a conundrum in her first book, "The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley." For the last 40 years, Noyce, a founder of Intel, has been famous as "the inventor of the integrated circuit," that infinitesimal sliver of silicon and metal that forms the core of a computer's brain. This achievement was so remarkable that Noyce (1927-90) was hailed in the press for decades, awarded a National Medal of Science by President Carter, and made wealthy.

An inspiring tale! Except for one thing: Noyce didn't singlehandedly invent the integrated circuit. Texas Instruments produced a working model years before Intel did; and even when Noyce's company finally released its rather superior chip, it was a team of Noyce's employees who did the hands-on and theoretical work, with Noyce serving mostly as inspiration and administration. "Noyce had almost nothing to do with building the device," Berlin herself concludes. This is not to say that Noyce is an unworthy subject of a book; he's quite intriguing. But trying to write a biography of a guy who didn't do what he's most famous for gently bedevils Berlin, and her book morphs inadvertently into a sort of detective story: precisely what did Robert Noyce actually do?

One thing is certain: Noyce was a prodigy in the study of transistors. Transistors, the first step in the modern computer age, were invented in 1947; and William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for the achievement. Transistors worked like little electronic off-on switches: put voltage in one way, and the transistor would amplify the signal; send it in the other way, and it would shut the flow down entirely. Everyone could see how useful these devices would be, but the physics of how transistors worked were poorly understood. At M.I.T., Noyce in his 20's became a groundbreaking expert.

He quickly drew the attention of Shockley, who hired him to help make specialized transistors for military and business-machine companies like I.B.M. This is where Berlin is best: she superbly evokes the hacker inventiveness of Shockley and his gang. Their work was more alchemy than science; they'd shove transistors in furnaces and bombard them with chemical fumes, with few clues as to what would work. (The engineers referred to these processes as "witches' brew" and "black magic.") Shockley was a character of almost necromantic strangeness: an egomaniac who insulted his staff ("Are you sure that you actually went to school?" Berlin paraphrases a characteristic assault) and at one point became convinced a competitor had planted a booby trap in his lab. After nearly two years in which Shockley was unable to forge a corporate direction, his brilliant central group left en masse to found Fairchild Semiconductor.

They picked Noyce to lead them. He radiated a mix of laid-back calm and confidence rare among engineers, which served him well in the commercial deal-cutting that made them all rich. Noyce hated confrontation: he preferred to give his brainy employees wide latitude to pursue oddball projects, convinced that smart nerds would always wind up doing something interesting and valuable. His distaste for conflict eventually destroyed his marriage; unable to grapple with the unhappiness of his wife, who, university educated and born to a wealthy New England family, was slowly driven mad with ennui by her child-centered suburban life, he retreated into a risky affair, which ended when one of his children actually found his mistress in bed with him. At work, though, Noyce's surfer disposition formed the perfect bridge between his prickly geeks and the bean-counting business world that relied on transistors. "Your charisma is scary," an assistant told him. "Use it wisely."

As for the integrated circuit? Noyce had a legitimate "aha" moment. In early 1959, a Fairchild engineer showed him a clever way to cram several transistors together on one silicon wafer. Inspired, Noyce sketched out an elegant design for a single chip that could add numbers. In a flash, he had developed the basic idea behind the microchip, a concept that to this day empowers every computer.

But then he jammed his notes in a drawer and forgot about them. He wasn't prodded to action until two months later, when Texas Instruments announced it had created a working prototype of an integrated circuit. Noyce's lawyers panicked; he quickly filed for a patent on the concept. And that is how Noyce wound up getting credit for the microchip, even though the courts awarded Texas Instruments four patents and Noyce one. Noyce, the most telegenic chip wizard, got the lion's share of the attention.

He rather charmingly professed hardly to care who got the glory. That is easy to believe; his eye was always on the next thing. He left Fairchild to found Intel, where he persuaded dubious colleagues to produce the first programmable computer chip for the mass market. Unfortunately, once the microchip drama is over, Berlin's spirited storytelling becomes bogged down in business minutiae, and the book fades.

Noyce fades, too. He slowly disconnects from Intel's everyday affairs, sublimating into a sort of Asimovian figure. Mostly, his role seemed to be giving blindingly sunny talks about the future -- a disposable computer! intelligent braking systems on cars! -- while leaving his Intel co-founders to figure out the messy details.

Perhaps that was his true genius. One could argue that Noyce was less important for pioneering the chip than for pioneering the psychology of Silicon Valley. Pick any cliché of today's high-tech C.E.O. behavior, and Noyce forged the template. He bought and flew his own planes; played the extreme sports of his age; handed out employee stock options while fighting unions; relished his instant wealth, yet continually nursed a Puritanical suspicion that nobody could ever deserve that much bling. His follow-your-bliss management style set the tone for many Valley success stories, most notably today's young founders of Google, who encourage their employees to tinker with projects that might seem simply goofy. As Noyce realized, it is those flights of fancy that leave the world a permanently different place, no matter who gets credit for that.

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.

Okay, so -- the Seattle aquarium had a couple of Giant Pacific Octopi, and for logistical reasons they had to temporarily put one of them in a tank holding several sharks. They figured the octopus would be okay because it can change color to conceal itself from predators. But over the next week, the marine scientists came into work to find sharks are lying dead on the floor of the aquarium. Whatever was going on? They stayed around one evening and trained a camera on the water to see.

The result? Behold live footage of an octopus kicking the living crap out of a shark. It's just mind-blowing: First, it skulks in the rocks, waits for the shark to swim by -- then jumps up, wraps its tentacles around, and totally wails on the fish. I mean, seriously, that shark got 0wned.

Man. When the cephalopods finally rise up? We are so not ready.

(Thanks to Majikthise for this one!)

No, that's not a typo. Over at her excellent Majikthese blog, Lindsay Beyerstein posted a piece of cephalopod spam she recently received:

Subject: Dried Squid Shred
Date: August 30, 2005 10:04:59 PM EDT
To: [Majikthise]

Dear Sirs,

We know your esteemed company from the web side. We would like to introduce us as one of the major exporters of seafood and Dried Fruits in China.and we have been in this business for over 8 years. We are very glad to take this opportunity to establish business with you. At present,we can supply you:

1> Dried Squid Shred,Yellow Stripe Trevally,Dried Anchovy,Dried Squid Ring, Horse Mackerel, Dried Octopus Piece

2> Dried Pear Halves;Apple Rings Dried red Small Chillis

We shall be very glad to give you our lowest quotations upon receipt of your detailed requirements.

Moving right along from the weighty (the post below) to the trivial (this post), allow me to publicly drool over the iMPAMP -- the world's smallest all-tube stereo amplifier. Ever wonder why the sound coming out of an iPod kinda sucks? It's not merely due to the much-maligned lossy compression of MP3s. Another big problem is that iPods -- indeed, all small handheld audio players -- have really cheap amplification circuitry. To get a really nice fat signal, you need a powerful amp, and ideally an analog one that uses vacuum tubes.

Ah, but how can you fit an entire tube amplifier in your man-purse? By getting a $545 iMPAMP, that's how! As the creator boasts on his web site:

Perfect for your office or recording environment...you can put the iMP AMP right on your desk with bookshelf speakers and have a mini tube hi-fi setup for your iPod!

Check out his video introduction to this thing. It's just insanely cute.

(Thanks to Andrew Hearst for this one!)

There's been plenty of superb blogging about the Hurricane Katrina disaster, but my all-time favorite so far is a rather unexpected one: A post today by writer John Scalzi entitled "Being Poor". It does not actually mention Katrina or New Orleans directly. It's simply a list of symptoms of what it's like being poor, including:

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.
Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.
Being poor is Goodwill underwear.
Being poor is making lunch for your kid when a cockroach skitters over the bread,