Pop!Tech is one of the most interesting conferences devoted to new ideas -- it fried my brain the year I attended. And that guy Hasan Elahi, who I profiled? I heard about it because he did a presentation on his photoblogging work at last year's conference. This year's three-day conference begins tomorrow morning, and they're streaming the entire conference live on this page, so you can attend Pop!Tech virtually, while never leaving the comfort of your joyless cubicle.

Personally, I plan to tune in to the session on "The Creative Instinct", tomorrow from 5 pm to 6:30 pm. The four presenters include Caleb Chung -- the incredibly smart robotics inventor who created the Furby, and who I wrote about for Wired last year -- and Jessica Hagy, who has made an art form out of drawing faux-corporate flow-charts.

During my Great Blogging Drought of summer 2007, I actually published a dozen or so articles that, bien sur, I didn't blog about because I wasn't blogging. So I'm going to slowly post 'em over the next month or so.

This piece was particularly fun to write: A short profile of Hasan Elahi, an artist guy who accidentally got put on the feds' watchlists. He realized the best way to keep the FBI off his back was to go totally transparent -- so he started photoblogging everything he does, all day long, to establish a constant alibi.

Wired published the piece back in May, so it's on their site, and a permanently archived copy is below!

The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online
by Clive Thompson

Hasan Elahi whips out his Samsung Pocket PC phone and shows me how he's keeping himself out of Guantanamo. He swivels the camera lens around and snaps a picture of the Manhattan Starbucks where we're drinking coffee. Then he squints and pecks at the phone's touchscreen. "OK! It's uploading now," says the cheery, 35-year-old artist and Rutgers professor, whose bleached-blond hair complements his fluorescent-green pants. "It'll go public in a few seconds." Sure enough, a moment later the shot appears on the front page of his Web site, TrackingTransience.net.

There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today -- the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffees he ordered. Poke around his site and you'll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi's site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list -- and once you're on, it's hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he's doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.

The globe-hopping prof says his overexposed life began in 2002, when he stepped off a flight from the Netherlands and was detained at the Detroit airport. He says FBI agents later told him they'd been tipped off that he was hoarding explosives in a Florida storage unit; subsequent lie detector tests convinced them he wasn't their man. But with his frequent travel -- Elahi logs more than 70,000 air miles a year exhibiting his art work and attending conferences -- he figured it was only a matter of time before he got hauled in again. He might even be shipped off to Gitmo before anyone realized their mistake. The FBI agents had given him their phone number, so he decided to call before each trip; that way, they could alert the field offices. He hasn't been detained since.

So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? "I've discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away," he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there's a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. "It's economics," he says. "I flood the market."

Elahi says his students get it immediately. They've grown up spilling their guts online -- posting Flickr photo sets and confessing secrets on MySpace. He figures the day is coming when so many people shove so much personal data online that it will put Big Brother out of business.

For now, though, Big Brother is still on the case. At least according to Elahi's server logs. "It's really weird watching the government watch me," he says. But it sure beats Guantanamo.

Behold the majestic Strix varia -- otherwise known as the Barred Owl. Possessed of a three-and-a-half-foot wingspan and a particularly gnarly hoot, the Barred Owl historically was known to thrive only in old-growth forests. Why? Because it hunts by sitting on a branch and waiting for something to move, a technique that doesn't work in a younger forest with smaller trees and dense, tall underbrush. It craves the cathedral-like openness of superold trees. And so back in the 60s and 70s, ornithologists feared that as old-growth forests across the US were cut down, the Barred Owl would eventually and tragically vanish.

But that hasn't happened. The Barred Owl is thriving -- because, interestingly, it has migrated to urban and suburban settings. Rob Bierregaard, an ornithologist at the University of North Carolina, had noticed that the suburbs of Charlotte were home to tons of Barred Owls. So he began a six-year-long study to ask the question: Why do Barred Owls thrive in the 'burbs?

The answer, it turns out, is delightfully ironic: As far as the owls are concerned, the suburbs actually resemble old-growth forest. As Bierregaard puts it in this press release:

"When you look at suburban Charlotte, what do we have? We've got giant old willow oak trees with plenty of holes in them and we've got mowed lawns and azalea bushes, which is a very open understory, so they can see a long way. The habitat is an 'uber' old growth forest for owls because the understory is so open and there are plenty of birdfeeders to attract prey."

Apparently, the only serious hazard the Charlotte owls face is the same one that threatens suburban humans: Automobiles. Collisions with cars are the leading cause of owl death. (Though it's possible that cars are also helping to cull the owls, preventing the population from exploding and starving itself.)

Last week, Wired News published my latest video-game column -- and this one is about Portal, an incredibly weird and cool teleportation game that, as I discover, winds up playing some nifty tricks with physics.

The column is online here, and a permanent copy is below!

In Portal, Violating Physics Proves Weirdly Satisfying
by Clive Thompson

Fanboy warning: This column contains some mild gameplay spoilers.

Pretty much everyone who plays Portal, the new space-bending videogame, immediately tries a little physics experiment.

In Portal, you control a gun that can blast two connected oval portals on different surfaces -- floors, ceilings and walls. If you step through the first portal, you emerge immediately from the other, teleported instantaneously through space, as if you walked through a magic mirror.

This quickly leads any curious player to try a little stunt: You put a portal on the floor in front of you, and then one on the ceiling directly above it. Step into the first hole, and you instantly fall out of the hole in the ceiling -- whereupon you fall back into the hole on the ground. Woo hoo! You are now falling endlessly through the holes, over and over again, in a dreamlike, self-created infinite loop.

Let me tell you: It is awesomely fun. And it's only the beginning of the seriously weird things you can do inside Portal, a game that neatly blows open the way you'll think about the space inside games.

At heart, Portal is a puzzle game that adheres religiously to the traditions of the genre. You must navigate blocky 3-D obstacle courses while avoiding various hazards and tripping switches with weights -- often in cunningly difficult sequences -- while trying all the time to keep from falling off a ledge into the fatal muck below. This is quite standard puzzle gruel.

It's the teleportation that transforms the game, because it allows the designers to craft challenges that seem, at first, flatly impossible -- until you grasp some of the deeply odd tricks the portals let you accomplish.

For example, one stunt I used frequently involved setting up a portal somewhere high above me on a wall. Then I'd jump off a cliff, start falling -- and then open a portal precisely at the spot where I was due to hit the ground. My momentum would blast me out the portal high above the ground, shooting me like a bullet through the air to a far-off ledge I couldn't otherwise reach.

The game constantly challenges you to invent ever more paradoxical feats of self-propulsion. I used the same momentum-gathering technique to bounce myself vertically upward out of a hole in the ground, and then, while flying through the air, shoot another portal in a nearby piece of ground. (Think of a groundhog popping in and out of his hole, except the holes keep moving.)

The upshot is that Portal, perhaps inadvertently, makes for a hell of an educational game -- because you're constantly mentally calculating the vectors of force and direction you'll generate by falling through and out of strategically placed holes. Physics teachers could have an absolute field day with this thing -- using it to help kids grasp, in a really visceral way, how Newtonian laws of motion work.

Extreme physics-geek warning here: A decent teacher would have to point out that teleportation violates the law of conservation of energy. When you teleport yourself up high on a ledge, you're effectively "creating" potential energy out of nothing -- which is impossible in the real world. Yet this, really, is the genius of the game. The game designers produce their coolest tricks by ruthlessly adhering to most of Newtonian physics but then cleverly violate one key rule -- thus allowing you, the gamer, to explore what happens in such a world.

This is precisely the sort of mental thought-experiment that really well-designed games can provide.

Indeed, as I played, I experienced a ton of other delightful "aha" moments, as I deduced clever new ways to use the portals. I'd coax an enemy to fire at me, then use a set of portals to reroute his bullets back at him. (Insanely satisfying.) In another situation, I was trying unsuccessfully to crane my neck to get a view of a remote upper level. Then I realized I could open a portal high on the wall, and use it to simply peer through. Presto: the portal as a surveillance device.

Personally, I hope Valve -- or some other game designer -- takes this concept up a notch. Why not use this game mechanic to shake up other well-worn genres? Imagine a first-person shooter where you can trigger portals on the fly, popping through them to snipe an enemy. Or think how weird a Mario racing game would be if you could shoot portals that wreak havoc on the racetrack? (And hey -- since I find pro sports kind of dull, I suspect football, basketball and soccer videogames could all be awesomely torqued if you allowed players or coaches to generate a few portals.)

Extending the conceit to other forms of gameplay would also give the concept of portals new life. Because as much fun as Portal is, it's not really something you're going to want to play for more than five or six hours. It's more an object lesson in breakthrough game design. Tweak one part of a well-worn game mechanic, and presto -- you can open a door to something really new.

Video technology has transformed the way athletes train for sports, because they can review their performance -- and that of their opponents -- in nuanced, frame-by-frame detail. But most athletes can only do this after or before a game is over.

The exception is David Ortiz -- who studies video in near real-time, while a game is still ongoing. Ortiz is a designated hitter for the Red Sox, and each time he bats, he heads back to the clubhouse, cracks open his laptop, and studies the pitches that were being thrown at him mere minutes earlier. Better yet, according to this piece in the New York Times, he's apparently got a huge database of every pitch he's ever faced:

With one click, Ortiz can also watch every at-bat that he has ever had against Sabathia in case he wants to search for a specific pitch. The batter-pitcher history compiled by the team is condensed to only include the pitches, not any tosses to first or visits from the pitching coach. It is all meat, no filler.

As the game progresses into the later innings and Ortiz speculates that he might oppose a left-handed reliever like Rafael Perez, he will study the at-bats that he has had off Perez. To Ortiz, knowledge equals power.

"That's the real deal," Ortiz said. "That's the view of what you want to do differently from what you did before. If you see something good, you want to stick with it. If you do something wrong, you want to fix it."

Personally, I think it'd be interesting to just blow things open completely and let pro sports athletes don wearable computers with craploads of telemetry: 360-degree radar, infrared vision, instant playback, voice messaging. Just imagine the sick plays they could pull off!

This clip went around the blogosphere a few months ago, but it's new to me, and if you haven't seen it -- you really must. It's video of some tunnel in Russia that becomes iced over, and when cars and trucks hit the icy patches, things go completely and nonlinearly berserk.

I really shouldn't laugh while I watch this stuff -- people are probably being hurt in some of these collisions -- but man alive, it's demented. I have played video games in which the whole goal is to engineer car collisions and never achieved wreckage like this.

I think part of what makes it so gripping is how the cars' skidding comes completely outta nowhere. One minute, they're trundling along in a perfectly straight line; then next minute, zing, they're sliding along in a perfect, Tsuchiyan drift.

(Thanks to AllanDuke1 for this!)

Dig this: A couple of chemists have discovered new breeds of extremophiles -- organisms that survive incredibly caustic environments -- living at the bottom of an acidic copper-mine pit.

The Berkeley Pit is a copper mine that was abandoned in 1982; it's 1,780 feet deep and a mile and a half wide. In the last twenty-five years, it has filled with water, and as the water has soaked up the residual arsenic, aluminum, cadmium and zinc, the pond has turned as acidic as vinegar. In 1995, a couple hundred geese landed on the water and instantly died. Nice.

Nonetheless, Don and Andrea Stierl -- two chemists who live nearby -- wondered if any lifeforms could endure such grim surroundings, so they pulled out some of the pond's goo and cultured it in Petri dishes. Whaddya know: They've found 142 organisms in the muck, and have isolated 80 chemical compounds that exist nowhere else. Better yet, it looks as though some of those compounds might be useful in killing tumors!

As a terrific story in last week's New York Times pointed out:

Microbes react to harsh conditions in the Berkeley Pit by switching on genes that otherwise lay dormant or by evolving through mutation and natural selection, Mr. Stierle said. Either way, they produce new chemical compounds, which the Stierles hope may benefit human health.

The couple have become intimately acquainted with the personalities of these new microorganisms. The pit's strain of mycobacterium is a slimy, obstinate fungus that smells bad and is difficult to cultivate in a laboratory. But it has shown initial success in fighting some pathogens, Ms. Stierle said.

Then there is Penicillium rubrum, which is fuzzy and green like bread mold. "It's sweet, it grows, and this little guy produces large amounts of interesting compounds," she said. "It's one of the loveliest microbes we've ever worked with."

This story is a bouquet of all the things I love about science. It offers: a) A couple of total outsiders making discoveries by looking off the beaten path; b) proof once again that, quite apart from the sheer intellectual pleasures of exploring extreme environments, there's often enormous practical benefits in doing so; c) more evidence that we probably ought to preserve environmentally untouched zones of the Earth, because they probably harbor weird, cool and useful lifeforms; d) an even cooler suggestion that we also ought to be carefully studying the total toxic wreck-dumps left behind by industrial pollution, because, man, who knows, eh?

And best of all, e): Yet more experimental proof that the principle of evolution works precisely as it's been described for decades.

That picture above, by Lynn Donaldson, beautifully illustrated the Times piece. Go check it out in full-size.

Quick: Can you do long division? Probably, though you'd have to concentrate to remember how. Odds are you learned this years ago in grade school, but in a modern world filled with Excel and calculators, who needs to actually perform long division by pencil? Almost no-one. And if you stop practicing long division, maybe eventually you sort of forget how to do it. You've outsourced it to the machines around you.

This is subject of my latest column in the current issue of Wired magazine: The fate of human memory in a world where we're increasingly reliant on machine memory. The piece is online for free at Wired's site, and a copy is also permanently archived below:

Your outboard brain knows all
by Clive Thompson

We're running out of memory.

I don't mean computer memory. That stuff's half-price at Costco these days. No, I'm talking about human memory, stored by the gray matter inside our heads. According to recent research, we're remembering fewer and fewer basic facts these days.

This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative's birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.

That reflexive gesture -- reaching into your pocket for the answer -- tells the story in a nutshell. Mobile phones can store 500 numbers in their memory, so why would you bother trying to cram the same info into your own memory? Younger Americans today are the first generation to grow up with go-everywhere gadgets and services that exist specifically to remember things so that we don't have to: BlackBerrys, phones, thumb drives, Gmail.

I've long noticed this phenomenon in my own life. I can't remember a single friend's email address. Hell, sometimes I have to search my inbox to remember an associate's last name. Friends of mine space out on lunch dates unless Outlook pings them. And when it comes to cultural trivia -- celebrity names, song lyrics -- I've almost given up making an effort to remember anything, because I can instantly retrieve the information online.

In fact, the line between where my memory leaves off and Google picks up is getting blurrier by the second. Often when I'm talking on the phone, I hit Wikipedia and search engines to explore the subject at hand, harnessing the results to buttress my arguments.

My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we've outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.

And frankly, I kind of like it. I feel much smarter when I'm using the Internet as a mental plug-in during my daily chitchat. Say you mention the movie Once: I've never seen it, but in 10 seconds I'll have reviewed a summary of the plot, the actors, and its cultural impact. Machine memory even changes the way I communicate, because I continually stud my IMs with links, essentially impregnating my very words with extra intelligence.

You could argue that by offloading data onto silicon, we free our own gray matter for more germanely "human" tasks like brainstorming and daydreaming. What's more, the perfect recall of silicon memory can be an enormous boon to thinking. For example, I've been blogging for four years, which means I've poured out about a million words' worth of my thoughts online. This regularly produces the surreal and delightful experience of Googling a topic only to unearth an old post that I don't even remember writing. The machine helps me rediscover things I'd forgotten I knew -- it's what author Cory Doctorow refers to as an "outboard brain."

Still, I have nagging worries. Sure, I'm a veritable genius when I'm on the grid, but am I mentally crippled when I'm not? Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?

There's another type of intelligence that comes not from rapid-fire pattern recognition but from slowly ingesting and retaining a lifetime's worth of facts. You read about the discoveries of Madame Curie and the history of the countries bordering Iraq. You read War and Peace. Then you let it all ferment in the back of your mind for decades, until, bang, it suddenly coalesces into a brilliant insight. (If Afghanistan had stores of uranium, the Russians would've discovered nuclear energy before 1917!)

We've come to think of human intelligence as being like an Intel processor, able to quickly analyze data and spot patterns. Maybe there's just as much value in the ability to marinate in the seemingly trivial.

Of course, it's probably not an either/or proposition. I want both: I want my organic brain to contain vast stores of knowledge and my silicon overmind to contain a stupidly huge amount more.

At the very least, I'd like to be able to remember my own phone number.

Posted by Clive Thompson at 05:39 PM

A Wired magazine reader checked out my latest column on the fate of human memory -- in a world where are brains are increasingly reliant upon silicon smarts -- and emailed me an excellent anecdote. Check it out:

Your article reminds me of a funny thing that happened when we were on vacation.

We rented a beach home with a few other families and the Moms declared that it would be an Internet-Free Week.

Well, it rained...and rained...and rained...and rained.

So on the forth straight day of rain, we all agreed that we needed to rent videos. But none of us remembered how to use a phone book properly.

"What do you think it would be under? Movie rental or Video Rental"

"how about you look up Blockbuster?"

"Is that in the yellow or white part"

You get so used to the online experience, it's almost funny.

Heh. It reminds me of a moment back in December of 2002, when I was so busy trying using my Sidekick to locate a Supercuts haircut salon in my neighborhood that I failed to simply look up and notice that I was ... sitting right in front of it.