These days, it's become popular to talk about "influentials" -- people who are so charismatic and well-connected that they can start or accelerate trends. It was one of the big ideas in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, and it positively captivates marketers: The entire concept of "viral" marketing is based on the idea that if you get a cool product or idea into the right people's hands, those elite folk will tip the product into a nationwide trend. It's an intuitive picture of the world, because it matches our deep, unstated assumption that the grown-up world is basically like high school. Everyone wants to copy the cool kids.

But is this really how trends work?

Duncan Watts doesn't think so. He's a network scientist at Columbia University -- currently on leave at Yahoo -- and he's been doing a bunch of fascinating experiments that appear to debunk the idea of "influentials". I'd been reading his white papers for a long time, so I was excited when Fast Company asked me to write a profile of him. It appears in the current issue, so you can grab a paper copy on the newsstands now; it's also here on the Fast Company web site, and a copy is archived below! (It includes the excellent photography of Watts by Steven Pyke, a crop of which appears above.)

Is the Tipping Point Toast?
Marketers spend a billion dollars a year targeting influentials. Duncan Watts says they're wasting their money.
by Clive Thompson

Don't get Duncan Watts started on the Hush Puppies. "Oh, God," he groans when the subject comes up. "Not them." The Hush Puppies in question are the ones that kick off The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller about how trends work. As Gladwell tells it, the fuzzy footwear was a dying brand by late 1994 -- until a few New York hipsters brought it back from the brink. Other fashionistas followed suit, whereupon the cool kids copied them, the less-cool kids copied them, and so on, until, voila! Within two years, sales of Hush Puppies had exploded by a stunning 5,000%, without a penny spent on advertising. All because, as Gladwell puts it, a tiny number of superinfluential types ("Twenty? Fifty? One hundred -- at the most?") began wearing the shoes.

These tastemakers, Gladwell concluded, are the spark behind any successful trend. "What we are really saying," he writes, "is that in a given process or system, some people matter more than others." In modern marketing, this idea -- that a tiny cadre of connected people triggers trends -- is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful folks, and you'll reach everyone else through them, basically for free. Loosely, this is referred to as the Influentials theory, and while it has been a marketing touchstone for 50 years, it has recently reentered the mainstream imagination via thousands of marketing studies and a host of best-selling books. In addition to The Tipping Point, there was The Influentials, by marketing gurus Ed Keller and Jon Berry, as well as the gospel according to PR firms such as Burson-Marsteller, which claims "E-Fluentials" can "make or break a brand." According to MarketingVOX, an online marketing news journal, more than $1 billion is spent a year on word-of-mouth campaigns targeting Influentials, an amount growing at 36% a year, faster than any other part of marketing and advertising. That's on top of billions more in PR and ads leveled at the cognoscenti.

Yet, if you believe Watts, all that money and effort is being wasted. Because according to him, Influentials have no such effect. Indeed, they have no special role in trends at all.

In the past few years, Watts -- a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo -- has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

"It just doesn't work," Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. "A rare bunch of cool people just don't have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There's no there there."

And this is not, he argues, mere academic whimsy. He has developed a new technique for propagating ads virally, which can double or even quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign by harnessing the pass-around power of everyday people -- and ignoring Influentials altogether.

Not everyone appreciates the mind bomb Watts has tossed into their midst. He says one music executive pronounced his work "bullshit" on the spot. But a growing group of marketers believes Watts is radically altering the way companies attempt to produce trends. "He is changing the way people think about the way we communicate," raves Robert Barocci, president of the Advertising Research Foundation. "He's one of the best thinkers in the industry today." But is Watts right?

WATTS, IRONICALLY ENOUGH, is precisely the type of person you'd peg as an Influential: tall, gruff, and handsome; a jut-jawed Navy man who left the service to study engineering. A former rock-climbing addict, he solved his first big intellectual challenge after hanging from a cliff at Joshua Tree. He has written about his work in Harvard Business Review and The New York Times, as well as in his new book Six Degrees. His Australian accent is disarming, even when he's assuring you that everything you believe is probably crap.

Watts's journey into trend research began, improbably, with the snowy tree cricket. As a grad student in the mid-1990s, he was exploring the mystery of how crickets synchronize their chirping. Clearly, information about when to chirp spreads like a contagion through the cricket network; Watts began to wonder how information flowed through human networks.

So he began programming the first computer models of how influence spreads. Like a kid experimenting with The Sims, Watts created a virtual community of individuals, then "infected" one with a "virus" -- a virtual disease, or contagious idea -- to see how far it would spread. He fiddled with his models, varying the degree and frequency of "exposure" needed to pass along the virus. He noticed that the success of an epidemic varied dramatically with seemingly tiny changes in his virtual society.

Yet even as Watts was conducting his research, marketers were becoming increasingly convinced that trends were the product not of murky social forces, but of charismatic, connected social alphas. In truth, it was an old -- even hoary -- marketing concept, dating back to 1955, when the pioneering sociologists Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld wrote Personal Influence. They had argued that advertising affected society through a two-step process: Companies broadcast messages, which were then seized upon by "opinion leaders" who proselytized their peers. They weren't talking about celebrities like Oprah or even Paris Hilton, but about the rare everyday people who catalyze trends. Reach those opinion leaders, Katz and Lazarsfeld argued, and you'd quickly convert the masses.

Gladwell reanimated this concept in The Tipping Point. To help illustrate the cultural sway of his hypernetworked protagonists, he tapped the renowned 1967 "Six Degrees of Separation" study by sociologist Stanley Milgram. In that experiment, Milgram had given letters to 160 people in Nebraska, with instructions to ferry them to a particular stockbroker in Boston by passing the letters along to a colleague socially closer to the target. It famously took roughly six links to deliver each letter. But in a finding that particularly excited Gladwell, it was the same three friends of the stockbroker who provided the final link for half the letters that arrived successfully. They were the Connectors, as Gladwell dubbed them, who govern the flow of social information. If you wanted to get to that stockbroker, you couldn't approach just anyone. You had to go through those three friends. Possessed of huge Rolodexes, these folks are the gatekeepers, Gladwell wrote, "and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few."

Gladwell's book laid out many other factors that can "tip" a trend. He described other influential types: Mavens, who love to collect information and help others make decisions, and suave Salesmen of ideas. In order to spread, an idea or product had to be "sticky," and appear in a fertile social context. But as The Tipping Point climbed the charts, marketers fixated on Gladwell's Law of the Few, his suggestion that rare, highly connected people shape the world. For anyone involved in pitchmanship, it was an electrifying notion, one that took a highly complex phenomenon -- the spread of memes through society -- and made it simple. Reach the gatekeepers, and you reach the world.

But Watts, for one, didn't think the gatekeeper model was true. It certainly didn't match what he'd found studying networks. So he decided to test it in the real world by remounting the Milgram experiment on a massive scale. In 2001, Watts used a Web site to recruit about 61,000 people, then asked them to ferry messages to 18 targets worldwide. Sure enough, he found that Milgram was right: The average length of the chain was roughly six links. But when he examined these pathways, he found that "hubs" -- highly connected people -- weren't crucial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of the email messages passed through one of these superconnectors. The rest of the messages moved through society in much more democratic paths, zipping from one weakly connected individual to another, until they arrived at the target.

Why did Milgram get it wrong? Watts thinks it's simply because his sample was so small -- only a few dozen letters reached their mark. The dominance of the three friends could have been a statistical accident. "And since Milgram's finding sort of made sense, nobody even bothered to redo the experiment," Watts shrugs. But when you perform the experiment with hundreds of successfully completed letters, a different picture emerges: Influentials don't govern person-to-person communication. We all do.

THE MORE WATTS EXAMINED the theory of Influentials, the less sense it made to him. The problem, he explains over lunch in a Midtown restaurant, is that it's incredibly vague. None of its proponents ever clearly explain how an Influential actually influences.

"It sort of sounds cool," Watts says, tucking into his salad. "But it's wonderfully persuasive only for as long as you don't think about it." For example, in The Influentials, Keller and Berry argue that trendsetters draw their social power from being active in their communities. Their peers naturally turn to them for advice. Need to buy a new car or navigate city hall? Everyone knows whom to trust. Gladwell, for his part, argues that trends spread like diseases; Influentials are the vectors who amplify and propagate the infection.

Fair enough, as a top-down view. But it's murky, and for Watts, this is a critical flaw, because precision matters when you're trying to explain highly social epidemics. Merely arguing that influence spreads like a disease isn't enough, because, he says, diseases spread in very different ways. Some require multiple exposures; some don't. Some reward "superspreaders," and some don't. (SARS broke out in Hong Kong not because the first victim was a superspreader but because a doctor mistakenly hooked him up to an aspirator -- ventilating SARS-infected breath into the hospital air.)

As Watts argues, there are a lot of ways an Influential could convert the masses. Merely talking to a friend once could infect her with an idea. Or it might take several conversations. Or maybe Influentials are so persuasive they're like trend vampires, and each victim they bite becomes hyperpersuasive too. Depending on how you define the specific mechanics of influence, you'd get totally different types of epidemics -- or maybe none at all. But gurus of the Influentials theory never directly clarify these mechanics.

"All they'll ever say," Watts insists, is that a) there are people who are more influential than others, and b) they are disproportionately important in getting a trend going.

That may be oversimplifying it a bit, but last year, Watts decided to put the whole idea to the test by building another Sims-like computer simulation. He programmed a group of 10,000 people, all governed by a few simple interpersonal rules. Each was able to communicate with anyone nearby. With every contact, each had a small probability of "infecting" another. And each person also paid attention to what was happening around him: If lots of other people were adopting a trend, he would be more likely to join, and vice versa. The "people" in the virtual society had varying amounts of sociability -- some were more connected than others. Watts designated the top 10% most-connected as Influentials; they could affect four times as many people as the average Joe. In essence, it was a virtual society run -- in a very crude fashion -- according to the rules laid out by thinkers like Gladwell and Keller.

Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

Why didn't the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn't they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend's success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend -- not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone's odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.

"If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one -- and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an "accidental Influential."

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That's because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. "And nobody," Watts says wryly, "will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire."

IT SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE that marketers have not all warmed to Watts's work. In September, he presented his findings to a standing-room-only crowd at a meeting of the Advertising Research Foundation. Ed Keller -- The Influentials coauthor himself -- then gave a polite but heated rebuttal.

Watts's computer models are "interesting," Keller admitted, but too academic to reflect reality. In contrast, Keller argues, his firm has studied tens of thousands of Influentials by identifying people highly active in their communities, an elite 10% that engage in advice-giving conversation up to five times more frequently than the average American. "They're fonts of word of mouth," Keller insists. And ahead of the curve, too: In the 20 years he has been polling them, Keller has found they began using computers, mobile phones, and the Internet years before the mainstream. What's more, his polls have found that more than two-thirds of people who get word-of-mouth product recommendations either buy something based on it, or plan to.

"The data are crystal clear," Keller adds, when I call him up. "They give and receive advice more. If I had $100 to spend, and I could spend it focusing on the mass market or I could put some chips on a group that could get me somewhere between two and five times as much energy with word of mouth, well, they're going to get my message out more quickly and more efficiently." He points to a recent example: Before Nintendo launched its hugely successful Wii video-game console last year, it handed out thousands of demo units to "mom influencers" around the country, creating a "built-in base of evangelists."

In any case, Keller concludes, "Duncan is making a straw-man argument. Because nobody, including myself, thinks that Influencers are the only group of consumers who matter."

Keller makes good points (although it's a bit hard to swallow his last assertion, given that the subtitle of his book flatly states that "one American in 10 tells the other 9 how to vote, where to eat, and what to buy"). And even Watts, for all his bombast, can be quite self-critical. "My models might be totally wrong," he says cheerfully. "But at least I'm clear about what I'm saying. You can look at them, and tell me if you disagree. But none of these other thinkers are actually clear about what they're saying. You can't tell if they're wrong."

No researcher, he points out -- including Keller -- ever analyzes interactions between specific Influentials and the friends they're supposedly influencing; no one observes influence in action. In essence, Keller appeals to common sense -- our intuitive sense of how the world works. Watts thinks common sense is misleading.

Mind you, Watts does agree that some people are more instrumental than others. He simply doesn't think it's possible to will a trend into existence by recruiting highly social people. The network effects in society, he argues, are too complex -- too weird and unpredictable -- to work that way. If it were just a matter of tipping the crucial first adopters, why can't most companies do it reliably?

As Watts points out, viral thinkers analyze trends after they've broken out. "They start with an existing trend, like Hush Puppies, and they go backward until they've identified the people who did it first, and then they go, 'Okay, these are the Influentials!'" But who's to say those aren't just Watts's accidental Influentials, random smokers who walked, unwittingly, into a dry forest? East Village hipsters were wearing lots of cool things in the fall of 1994. But, as Watts wondered, why did only Hush Puppies take off? Why didn't their other clothing choices reach a tipping point too?

For his part, Gladwell is diplomatic. "Duncan Watts is exceedingly clever, and I've learned a great deal from his research," he emailed me. "In the end, though, I suppose that I feel the same ways about his insights as I do about Steve Levitt's disagreements with me over the causes of the decline in violent crime in the 1990s. I think that all books like The Tipping Point or articles by academics can ever do is uncover a little piece of the bigger picture, and one day -- when we put all those pieces together -- maybe we'll have a shot at the truth."

MARKETING, OF COURSE, has always relied heavily on instinct and intuition. Admen like to believe they're creative geniuses, gifted at truffling out social trends (which is why, they hasten to point out, they're irreplaceable). Joe Pilotta, research VP for a firm called Big Research (and one of Watts's bigger fans), suspects marketers cling to their belief in Influentials partly because they're lazy. They love the idea of needing to reach only a small group of people to "tip" a product, he says with a laugh. Plus, it strokes their egos: "Think about it. You're saying, 'I am in control -- I am the biggest influencer, because I am going to influence the influencers!' It's an arrogance that only the corporate world could enjoy."

But the Internet has cranked up the pressure to show a return on advertising dollars, spawning incipient panic at agencies worldwide. It is into this world that Watts has injected himself, with his unwelcome insistence that basic marketing wisdom be tested scientifically. "The whole reason why Duncan's work upsets people," Pilotta points out, "is that he demonstrates that the world is complex, that it's not that easy."

Actually, if you believe Watts, the world isn't just complex -- it's practically anarchic. In 2006, he performed another experiment that chilled the blood of trendologists. Trends, it suggested, aren't merely hard to predict and engineer -- they occur essentially at random.

Watts wanted to find out whether the success of a hot trend was reproducible. For example, we know that Madonna became a breakout star in 1983. But if you rewound the world back to 1982, would Madonna break out again? To find out, Watts built a world populated with real live music fans picking real music, then hit rewind, over and over again. Working with two colleagues, Watts designed an online music-downloading service. They filled it with 48 songs by new, unknown, and unsigned bands. Then they recruited roughly 14,000 people to log in. Some were asked to rank the songs based on their own personal preference, without regard to what other people thought. They were picking songs purely on each song's merit. But the other participants were put into eight groups that had "social influence": Each could see how other members of the group were ranking the songs.

Watts predicted that word of mouth would take over. And sure enough, that's what happened. In the merit group, the songs were ranked mostly equitably, with a small handful of songs drifting slightly lower or higher in popularity. But in the social worlds, as participants reacted to one another's opinions, huge waves took shape. A small, elite bunch of songs became enormously popular, rising above the pack, while another cluster fell into relative obscurity.

But here's the thing: In each of the eight social worlds, the top songs -- and the bottom ones -- were completely different. For example, the song "Lockdown," by 52metro, was the No. 1 song in one world, yet finished 40 out of 48 in another. Nor did there seem to be any compelling correlation between merit and success. In fact, Watts explains, only about half of a song's success seemed to be due to merit. "In general, the 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible," he says. Why? Because the first band to snag a few thumbs-ups in the social world tended overwhelmingly to get many more. And who received those crucial first votes seemed to be mostly a matter of luck.

Word of mouth and social contagion made big hits bigger. But they also made success more unpredictable. (And it's worth noting, no one in the social worlds had any more influence than anyone else.) So yes, Watts figures, if you rewound the world to 1982, Madonna would likely remain a total unknown -- and someone else would have slipped into her steel-tipped corset. "You cannot predict in advance whether a band gets this huge cascade of popularity, because the social network is liable to throw up almost any result," he marvels.

Predictably, the music industry received the analysis -- "Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market," published in Science in 2006 -- with a cocked eyebrow. When Watts presented his findings to executives at a major record label last spring, the younger among them were reasonably receptive. They're accustomed to the unpredictability of hit-making online, so they can grasp the terrifying randomness of success.

But the older execs?

Watts laughs. "They were all like, 'I think it's bullshit. I'm still going to go with my gut,'" he recalls. "And I'm like, Okay, good luck to you. You're going to need it."

IF INFLUENTIALS CANNOT TIP A TREND into existence -- and if success in a networked society is quite random -- what's a poor marketer to do? Is there any way to intentionally infect people with an idea or a product?

Watts believes there is. In the past three years, he has worked on a new form of advertising he calls Big Seed marketing (this is part of his work at Yahoo, where he is a principal research scientist). Watts developed the concept with a friend, Jonah Peretti, a veteran of the viral wars. While a student at MIT in 2001, Peretti had an email exchange with Nike that turned into an accidental pass-around hit, reaching 50 million people and catapulting him onto the Today show. A year or so later, a satirical Web site Peretti created in one weekend -- blackpeopleloveus.com -- amassed 30 million page views in a few weeks. Soon, companies were frantically trying to hire him to help their online ad campaigns "go viral." Peretti partly disagrees with Watts about the randomness of trends; he thinks it's possible to intentionally make a funny Web site into a pass-around hit online. But as Peretti discovered, real-world goods are harder. When he tried to pitch "some company's shitty product," he couldn't force it to go viral.

In their hunt for a practical way to create maximum exposure for any given ad, Watts and Peretti developed a way to marry the benefits of old-school mass marketing with clever six-degrees effects. Their first test case came when the Brady Campaign, the gun-control group, asked for help with an online petition.

Watts and Peretti set up a regular mass-market ad buy, running banner ads on several prominent blogs and news sites. Like many ads these days, they added a button on the ad that allows people to forward the ad to a friend -- a way of collecting eyeballs for free. Typically, people ignore this "share with your friends" pitch. But Watts and Peretti included technology called ForwardTrack, which displays the route the ad travels once you've forwarded it. This turned ad forwarding into a piece of social cartography. People would pass the ad specifically to those friends most likely to keep it moving. It became a Facebook-like contest to sign up the most friends.

The technique marries Watts's two main epiphanies: Cascades require word-of-mouth effects, so you need to build a six-degrees effect into an ad campaign; but since you can never know which person is going to spark the fire, you should aim the ad at as broad a market as possible -- and not waste money chasing "important" people. And it worked. The pass-around effect doubled the number of people who saw the Brady Campaign's ad. They paid for 22,582 hits and received an additional 31,590 for free. Another campaign they ran for the Oxygen network quadrupled the audience size, adding 23,544 hits to the initial 7,064.

Neither was, technically, a viral hit. Neither passed the disease threshold, where the meme spreads exponentially and engulfs the mainstream. "But you can double your impact, which is still pretty good," Watts says.

The ultimate irony of Watts's research is that, if you really buy it, the most effective way to pitch your idea is ... mass marketing. And that is precisely what the wizards of Madison Avenue, presiding over our zillion-channel microniche market, have rejected as obsolete. "But that's the thing about magic," says Watts. "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

Very small children are brutally honest. Show them a picture you've painted, sing them a song you wrote: If they don't like it, they have no problem telling you that you suck.

So when precisely does the ability to disguise one's opinion emerge -- to engage in what psychologists call "ingratiation behaviort", and lie and say that you're impressed when you're not? I was surprised to learn that researchers haven't looked too closely at the beginnings of flattery. Apparently the first studies have recently been done by KangLee at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. As the University of Toronto Magazine reports:

They asked a group of preschool children ages 3 to 6 to rate drawings by children and adults they knew, as well as strangers. The preschoolers judged the artwork both when the artist was present, and when he or she was absent. The three-year-olds were completely honest, and remained consistent in their ratings; it didn't matter who drew it, or whether the person was in the room. Five- and six-year-olds gave more flattering ratings when the artist was in front of them. They flattered both strangers and those they knew (although familiar people got a higher dose of praise). Among the four-year-olds, half the group displayed flattery while the other half did not. This supports the idea that age four is a key transitional period in children's social understanding of the world.

There are, Lee says, two reasons to flatter: Either to reward someone's behavior, or to butter them up in case you need them to be nice to you later on. Lee's not sure which strategy the four-year-olds are pursuing. But because they flattered strangers as well as people they knew suggests "they are thinking ahead, they are making these little social investments for future benefits."

Here's some lovely news: The University of Michigan Press has asked me to edit the 2008 edition of their now-annual anthology, the Best of Technology Writing.

It's a really terrific series. I'm biased in saying so, since one of my stories appeared in last year's anthology, heh. But it's a really superb collection of the most thought-provoking and well-crafted tech around.

So, to figure out what stories ought to go in the upcoming collection, we need your help. If you go to the publisher's web site, you can nominate any 2007 tech story you like! The specific rules, as they note, are:

The competition is open to any and every technology topic--biotech, information technology, gadgetry, tech policy, Silicon Valley, and software engineering are all fair game. But the ideal candidates will:

- be engagingly written for a mass audience;
- be no longer than 5,000 words;
- have been published between January and December, 2007

The deadline is fast approaching -- nominations need to be in by January 31, 2008! And you can nominate as many pieces as you like.

Here's a fascinating fact: Out of the 10 bestselling books in Japan last year, five were "cellphone novels" -- books that were written on the mobile phone, with the authors tapping out sentence by sentence via text message.

Apparently the rise of the cell-phone novel has caused enormous consternation over there, because the style of this new genre so radically violates traditional Japanese storytelling craft. Historically, the prose in Japanese novels was ornate, with long, lavish descriptions of locations. But because these new novels are written on technology that doesn't allow for quick, fluid writing, cellphone novels tend to consist of prose more reminiscent of Hemingway or Pinter -- short, snipped sentences, with much of the book occupied by terse dialogue.

I knew almost nothing of this trend, until I read a superb recent article by Norimitsu Onishi in the New York Times. You really gotta go read this story: Virtually every paragraph describes some weird new collision of culture, society, literature and technology.

For example, three of the top-10 bestselling novels were written by first-timers. Why? Because, as Japanese experts note, of the omnipresence of phones. We think of text-messaging merely as a medium for intrapersonal communication. But if you think of the phone as a new type of word processor, then a different picture emerges. The reason all these young people are writing novels is that they've discovered, quite by accident, that they're carrying typewriters around in their pockets. These authors aren't using their phones to text other people; they're texting themselves. "It's not that they had a desire to write and that the cellphone happened to be there," said Chiaki Ishihara, an expert in Japanese literature at Waseda University who has studied cellphone novels. "Instead, in the course of exchanging e-mail, this tool called the cellphone instilled in them a desire to write." Indeed, many of the authors are teenagers who pecked out their novels during snippets of downtime at school.

Beyond awesome. Even more interesting is Onishi's exploration of the stylistic implications of thumb-written novels. Younger readers love them; older ones don't, because they prefer the flowing descriptive prose of traditional Japanese fiction. Some literary critics complain that because the prose is so dialogue-heavy, cell-phone novels ought more properly to be classified as comic books. (A niggling distinction, you'd think, except that literary prizes and bestseller lists hinge upon these taxonomies: After the Harry Potter books sold so well that they colonized the bestseller lists in the US, many newspapers created "children's bestseller" lists specifically so that "serious" fiction wouldn't get drowned out.)

Now dig this: The cell-phone novel now has its own recognizable style, obviously. But because 12-button keypads are pretty difficult interfaces upon which to compose book-length prose, many Japanese authors have begun writing cell-phone novels on typewriters: I.e. novels written merely in the style of 12-button composition. As Onishi notes ...

... an existential question has arisen: can a work be called a cellphone novel if it is not composed on a cellphone, but on a computer or, inconceivably, in longhand?

"When a work is written on a computer, the nuance of the number of lines is different, and the rhythm is different from writing on a cellphone," said Keiko Kanematsu, an editor at Goma Books, a publisher of cellphone novels. "Some hard-core fans wouldn't consider that a cellphone novel."

Our tools, of course, affect our literary output. And all this made me wonder how other writing tools affect what's written. I use Movable Type to write my blog, and I'm constantly annoyed by how small the text-entry boxes are. Whenever I write an entry, the text quickly flows down several box-lengths, which can make it hard to keep track of my argument. The problem, of course, is that the tool was designed with the idea that people would be writing extremely short, pithy entries ... whereas my entries tend to drag on and on and on. It reminds me of the writing on one of those old, proprietary-hardware word-processors from the 80s, which were outfitted with screens that only let you see seven lines at a time.

Virginia Heffernan wrote a neat piece a few weeks ago comparing the cognitive and emotional effects of several different types of word processors: She argued that the unadorned, uncluttered, blank-page aesthetic of Scrivener -- an alt.word.processor -- produced a "clean and focused mind," in contrast to distractions of Microsoft Word, with its "prim rulers" and "officious yardsticks".

So what would my prose be like if I wrote on my phone keypad?

(Photo above by Edward B., courtesy his Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license!)

In the current issue of Wired magazine is my latest column -- and this one's about why I love speculative fiction: Because it's the last remaining literature of big ideas! Check it out on the Wired site for free, and an archived copy is below.

Note to fanboys/fangirls/fanthings: I know I'm using the phrase "science fiction" imprecisely here. Technically, I'm talking about all forms of speculative writing -- science fiction, fantasy, realist utopian/dystopian writing, science-fantasy, etc. But since most Wired readers probably aren't familiar with these distinctions, nor with the term "speculative fiction" as a genus that contains many species, I used "science fiction" in its place ... even though this usage is imprecise and basically inaccurate. (BTW, the graphic above is a crop of the nifty illustration accompanying the piece, by Rodrigo Corral.)

And away we go ...

Take the Red Book Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing by Clive Thompson

Recently I read a novella that posed a really deep question: What would happen if physical property could be duplicated like an MP3 file? What if a poor society could prosper simply by making pirated copies of cars, clothes, or drugs that cure fatal illnesses?

The answer Cory Doctorow offers in his novella After the Siege is that you'd get a brutal war. The wealthy countries that invented the original objects would freak out, demand royalties from the developing ones, and, when they didn't get them, invade. Told from the perspective of a young girl trying to survive in a poor country being bombed by well-off adversaries, After the Siege is an absolute delight, by turns horrifying, witty, and touching.

Technically, After the Siege is a work of science fiction. But as with so many sci-fi stories, it works on two levels, exploring real-world issues like the plight of African countries that can't afford AIDS drugs. The upshot is that Doctorow's fiction got me thinking -- on a Lockean level -- about the nature of international law, justice, and property.

Which brings me to my point. If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best -- and perhaps only -- place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.

From where I sit, traditional "literary fiction" has dropped the ball. I studied literature in college, and throughout my twenties I voraciously read contemporary fiction. Then, eight or nine years ago, I found myself getting -- well -- bored.

Why? I think it's because I was reading novel after novel about the real world. And there are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality. After I'd read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I was like, "OK. Cool. I see how today's world works." I also started to feel like I'd been reading the same book over and over again.

Here's my overly reductive, incredibly nerdy way of thinking about the novel: Consider it a simulation, kind of like The Sims. If you run a realistic simulation enough times -- writing tens of thousands of novels about contemporary life -- eventually you're going to explore almost every outcome. So what do you do then?

You change the physics in the sim. Alter reality -- and see what new results you get. Which is precisely what sci-fi does. Its authors rewrite one or two basic rules about society and then examine how humanity responds -- so we can learn more about ourselves. How would love change if we lived to be 500? If you could travel back in time and revise decisions, would you? What if you could confront, talk to, or kill God?

Teenagers love to ponder such massive, brain-shaking concepts, which is precisely why they devour novels like Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, the Narnia series, the Harry Potter books, and Ender's Game. They know that big-idea novels are more likely to have an embossed foil dragon on the cover than a Booker Prize badge.

Adults and serious intellectuals used to love ruminating over this stuff, too. Thought experiments formed the foundation of Western philosophy -- from Socrates to Thomas Hobbes to Simone de Beauvoir.

So, then, why does sci-fi, the inheritor of this intellectual tradition, get short shrift among serious adult readers? Probably because the genre tolerates execrable prose stylists. Plus, many of sci-fi's most famous authors -- like Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick -- have positively deranged notions about the inner lives of women.

But the worm is turning. For whatever reasons -- maybe the reality fatigue I've felt -- a lot of literary writers are trying their hand at speculative fiction. Philip Roth used a "counterfactual" history -- what if Nazi sympathizers in the US won the 1940 election? -- to explore anti-Semitism in The Plot Against America. Cormac McCarthy muses on the nature of morality in the Hobbesian anarchy of his novel The Road. Then there's the genre-bending likes of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Susanna Clarke, and Margaret Atwood (whom I like to think of as a sci-fi novelist trapped inside a literary author).

Those aren't writers whose books are adorned with embossed dragons. But that doesn't mean they don't owe that dragon a large debt.

One of the broken-record themes of my blog -- and my video-games journalism -- is how badly our culture understands the meaning of play and games. This is partly because the philosophy of play, ludology, isn't taught at any level of school; it's also been almost completely ignored by philosophers both ancient and modern. Small children love to dream up weird new games and think about new forms of play, but this is systematically drummed out of them when they go to school and are told that there are only seven or eight "serious" sports, like football and baseball and the like.

So I was delighted to open up this weekend's "Week in Review" section of the New York Times and find that John Schwartz had written "The Joy of Silly" -- a lovely, thoughtful piece on the culture of the wacky Wham-O toys of the 60s, created by the recently and sadly deceased Wham-O founder Richard Knerr. Here's an excerpt:

Our toys, Dr. Tenner said, flow from the cycles of innovation and refinement that define all technologies. The playthings tend to be the byproducts of a new technology and a fertile imagination. So Silly Putty came from failed experiments in making artificial rubber, and the Slinky was a tension spring that a naval engineer saw potential in -- and not just potential energy. The postwar period from 1945 to 1975 was especially rich in innovation, and thus toys, Dr. Tenner said.

But the cultural moment has to be right as well. "You can see pictures in Bruegel of kids running after a hoop and a stick," he noted, but in the Hula Hoop the technology of cheap, plastic manufacturing dovetailed with a nation ready to shake its hips. The message of the Hula Hoop, and for that matter of Elvis Presley, he said, emerged in a time for many of intense optimism, which seemed to say: "You can let yourself go. You can dance wildly. You can swing wildly. You don't have this dignity to preserve."

Dr. Hall said one thing that defined the early Wham-O toys was that they were "a little transgressive," and involved physical activity with a little naughtiness or risk.

There's plenty more worth reading in this too-short piece! Schwartz also quotes Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who points out that toys of the Wham-O vintage were "so noneducational in that dreary, earnest, modern sense of ours." This is a superb point: When I walk into toy stores -- which I do a lot more frequently now that I have a two-year-old -- I'm struck by how avidly the toy-makers are trying to peddle their wares based on their presumed educational value. Never mind the fact that these educational aspects are usually just corporate bumph (they're almost never scientifically tested, for sure); the point is that the toy-makers know that parents desperately want the toys to be an early inflection point in their children's parabolic punt into Yale or Harvard. Parents are terrified that if their kids play in an open-ended way, they'll just -- well -- waste time.

Yet -- as Schwartz comes close to saying outright, but doesn't quite -- one of the whole points behind play and games is to waste time. It's not the sole point or even the chief point, but it's a frequent one. One of the reasons I like playing video games is specifically to park my brain inside ringing, clattering box of physics for an hour or so, merely for the gorgeously idle pleasure of it. I do not intend it to be productive: I am choosing to waste time. Hell, I probably need to waste a certain percentage of every day simply to prevent myself from getting emotional rug-burn from all my other, frenetically Taylorist attempts to optimize every single waking minute. When I install a stupid, time-wasting game on my PDA phone, it's partly to restore that device's spiritual balance -- to make sure that I use it to waste some time. Otherwise I'd just be using it to check email neurotically all day long, and precisely what kind of life is that?

Wasting time proudly has, I've decided, become a weirdly radical act.

(The picture above is by Marilynn K. Yee, and beautifully illustrated the Times piece ... check it out in full here.)

One of the biggest puzzles of Islamic terrorism is why so many of its participants are engineers. Perhaps the most famous one is Mohammad Atta, the 9/11 mastermind (pictured above); but when you read news reports of suicide bombing incidents, you realize he's not alone. It's engineer after engineer after engineer.

Why? Because in the Middle East, the mindset of engineers mixes with religiosity -- and a lack of professional opportunity -- to produce a toxic, combustive psychology. That's the conclusion of "Engineers of Jihad", a paper by sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog of the University of Oxford -- the link is directly to the full PDF.

Their research is incredibly interesting and thorough. To start off, they compiled a list of 404 members of violent Islamist groups, and found that engineers were, indeed, wildly overrepresented. Engineers make up only 3.5 per cent of the Islamic countries they studied, yet they made up 19 per cent of the group of terrorists -- which means engineers are six times more likely to be terrorists than they ought to be.

Where things get really interesting is their exploration of engineering psychology -- and the dynamics of engineers' lives in the Islamic countries. First off, Gambetta and Hertog note that previous sociological studies have found that engineers are far more likely to be religious and conservative than other academics -- four times more than social scientists and three times more so than people in the arts and humanities. What's more, this religiosity affects their careers. A study by the Carnegie Foundation found that the more religious and conservative an engineer is, the less likely she or he is to be regularly publishing work -- and thus less likely to be employed as an engineer.

To make matters worse, as the academics point out, most of the Islamic countries in which these engineers become radicalized have crappy economies: When the engineers return home from their training in the West, they can't find good jobs. In Egypt, for example, "Many graduates preferred joblessness even to relatively well-paying menial jobs, and for numerous young Egyptians marriage became unaffordable. Making a virtue out of necessity, many graduates tried to restore their dignity by declaring their adherence to antimaterialist Islamic morality."

On top of this is what Gambetta and Hertog call the "engineering mentality". To quote them at some length:

Friedrich von Hayek, in 1952, made a strong case for the peculiarity of the engineering mentality, which in his view is the result of an education which does not train them to understand individuals and their world as the outcome of a social process in which spontaneous behaviours and interactions play a significant part. Rather, it fosters on them a script in which a strict 'rational' control of processes plays the key role: this would make them on the one hand less adept at dealing with the confusing causality of the social and political realms and the compromise and circumspection that these entail, and on the other hand inclined to think that societies should operate orderly akin to well-functioning machines -- a feature which is reminiscent of the Islamist engineers ...

The upshot? The creation of a class of young men who are highly educated, conservative, highly religious, economically thwarted, pissed off at both their own countries and the West, unable or unwilling to examine the complex social and political reasons for their personal troubles, and seeking a straightforward "answer". "It appears that engineers ... found themselves perfectly and painfully placed at a high-voltage point of intersection in which high ambitions and high frustration collided," Gambetta and Hertog conclude.

It's a really interesting analysis! Still, I was surprised to read some of their data and assumptions. For example, engineers being overall more conservative? That shocked me: I hang out with tons of computer and software engineers, and if anything they tend to be either left-wing or libertarian. (Or, as the Jargon File would have it, just generally suspicious of authority.) But possibly computer engineers, because they deal with the flow of information -- a discipline that necessarily bumps you up intellectually against notions of freedom, secrecy, customization, personal choice, etc. -- wind up in different emotional and psychological place than engineers who work more straightforwardly with physics. And one could easily dispute other parts of Gambetta and Hertog's argument; Hayek's analysis of engineering psychology has been disputed.

Still, this is one of the most ambitious attempts to tackle the puzzle of engineer terrorists I've yet seen.

(Thanks to the Atlantic Monthly for finding this one!)

This is fascinating: Apparently geologists have spent decades assuming that the shapes of Mid-Atlantic-state rivers were natural -- when they're actually man-made.

Basically, one of the problems with studying rivers in the US is that so many have been warped by commercial and residential development that it's hard for us to know what the stream ought to look like, naturally. The closest to "natural" that the geologists could identify were rivers of the mid-Atlantic states -- which move in ribbon-like channels through silty banks. They assumed, for decades, that this ribbon-like shape was the Platonic solid.

But it turns out that those ribbon-straight rivers were in fact affected by human development, as two scientists -- Robert C. Walter and Dorothy J. Merritts -- report in Science today. As the New York Times reports:

In a telephone interview, Dr. Merritts described a typical scenario. Settlers build a dam across a valley to power a grist mill, and a pond forms behind the dam, inundating the original valley wetland. Meanwhile, the settlers clear hillsides for farming, sending vast quantities of eroded silt washing into the pond.

Years go by. The valley bottom fills with sediment trapped behind the dam. By 1900 or so the dam is long out of use and eventually fails. Water begins to flow freely through the valley again. But now, instead of reverting to branching channels moving over and through extensive valley wetlands, the stream cuts a sharp path through accumulated sediment. This is the kind of stream that earlier researchers thought was natural.

"This early work was excellent," Dr. Merritts said, "but it was done unknowingly in breached millponds."

(Image above by Fhantazm, via his Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license!)

Dig it: Companies run by CEOs with attractive faces tend to have higher profits, according to a pretty hilarious new study appearing in next month's issue of Psychological Science. Psychologists Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady took a bunch of pictures of CEOs, put them into grayscale and standardized them in size, and then showed them to college students. The students were given no other information about the CEOs -- they weren't even told which companies they ran. With nothing other than the picture to go on, the students were asked to rate the CEOs according to their apparent "competence, dominance, likeability, facial maturity and trustworthiness."

The upshot? CEOs who scored high on the Am-I-Hot-Or-Not ratings turned out to be piloting the most profitable companies. As a press release notes:

"These findings suggest that naive judgments may provide more accurate assessments of individuals than well-informed judgments can," wrote the authors. "Our results are particularly striking given the uniformity of the CEOs' appearances." The majority of CEOs, who were selected according to their Fortune 1000 ranking, were Caucasian males of similar age.

We could, of course, regard this as a sterling example of "Science Confirms The Obvious." I mean, in modern America, is this news? That attractive, confident-looking white dudes are where it's at? And this comes on the heels of dozens of recent studies of hot-ology, which have demonstrated time and time again that tall, willowy, cocksure white folks are cleaning everyone else's clocks. It also fits neatly into Malcolm Gladwell's thesis in Blink -- i.e. that first impressions are of enormous importance.

Nonetheless, we are, as the scientists note, left with the chicken-and-egg question: "which came first, the powerful-looking CEO or their successful career?"

As a reader, my favorite blog is Boing Boing. But as a blogger myself, Boing Boing is often a bit of a hassle to blog around, because my policy is to virtually never post about anything that has already been seen on Boing Boing. My theory is a) that I prefer to introduce my readers to things they haven't heard of yet, and that b) most of them are already reading Boing Boing, so c) I won't bother covering anything Boing Boing has already posted about. (The exception is if something posted on Boing Boing makes me think of an original analysis -- i.e. a new point about something.)

As you'd expect, this policy dices me out of many juicy postings because Boing Boing is incredibly fast. A friends or readers will send me a link to something cool, but when I'm swamped with work it often takes me a day or more to post it -- during which time Boing Boing will, almost without fail, beat me to the punch. Ah well.

But precisely how good -- and how fast -- is Boing Boing? Is it just that I'm lazy and slow, or does Boing Boing beat most other blogs too in discovering links? The blogger Simon Owens recently wondered about this, so he decided to run some data and check it out. He recorded every link that Boing Boing posted on a particular day, and then removed any postings that were self-promotional, because they have an unfair advantage in breaking news about themselves. That left 16 postings of links to other web sites. Owens used blog-search engines to see which other blogs had posted about those links -- i.e. whether any other blogs had scooped Boing Boing.

The results?

In the end, there was a grand total of 112 blogs that had scooped Boing Boing for this 24-hour period. Divided by 16, that means that an average of 7 blogs scoop Boing Boing for every post. But this is a slightly misleading figure, because of the 16 links that day, Boing Boing was the first to post 8 of them. That means that for 50% of the links that Boing Boing posts, it was the first blog to find them.

I also noticed that the later in the day the links were posted, the more likely that other blogs had managed to scoop Boing Boing. This indicates that many of the links posted on Boing Boing are to URLs that were created within a 24-hour time span.

So what does this mean? Was my theory correct?

Well, in this particular instance: Yes. Boing Boing was consistently among the first blogs in the blogosphere to discover a link of interest and then post it.

Pretty cool stuff.

We are, by now, accustomed to talking about "the genetic code." But we rarely think about what that metaphor means.

So I was delighted to stumble across this fun essay: "DNA as seen through the eyes of a coder." Bert Hubert, a programmer, compared DNA to computer code and finds a number of startling similarities. For example: DNA is highly "commented," just like good computer code; indeed, junk DNA can be thought of as code that is "commented out" -- i.e. old code left over from previous revisions that is no longer used, and surrounded by comments telling the processor to ignore it. DNA also exhibits "bug regression" -- new, unexpected bugs that are caused when a programmer tries to fix an existing bug. (Mutations that emerged in Africans to create immunities to malaria, for example, accidentally made the hosts susceptible to sickle-cell anemia.)

But this is my favorite part of the essay:

Somebody recently proposed in a discussion that it would be really cool to hack the genome and compromise it so as to insert code that would copy itself to other genomes, using the host-body as its vehicle. 'Just like the nimda worm!'

He shortly thereafter realised that this is exactly what biological viruses have been doing for millions of years. And they are exceedingly good at it.

A lot of these viruses have become a fixed part of our genome and hitch a ride with all of us. To do so, they have to hide from the virus scanner which tries to detect foreign code and prevent it from getting into the DNA.

The metaphor, of course, works both ways. Just as the mechanics of DNA are a useful metaphor to help understand how computer viruses work, the mechanics of computer programming are a useful metaphor to help understand how DNA works.

(Thanks to Justin Blanton for this one!)

This is probably one of the most controversial video-game columns I've ever written. Back in November -- I'm coming late to this, of course, because of my two-month blogging drought -- I wrote a piece for Wired News about how playing Halo 3 online had given me a glimpse into the strategic use of suicide bombing.

As you might imagine, I got a ton of email and blog-comment about it. Interestingly, only a very few accused me trivializing real-world suicide bombing -- which is nice, because I certainly didn't want to -- and the great many "got" my point. But, hilariously, a significant chunk of people, including most of the thread following my post at Wired News, chimed in to berate me for sucking at Halo, and/or to offer me tips on improving my play. Heh.

At any rate, this'll all make more sense after you read the piece. It's online free at Wired News, and a copy is permanently archived below!

Suicide Bombing Makes Sick Sense in Halo 3 by Clive Thompson

I used to find it hard to fully imagine the mind-set of a terrorist.

That is, until I played Halo 3 online, where I found myself adopting -- with great success -- terrorist tactics. Including a form of suicide bombing.

This probably bears some explanation. I'll begin by pointing out a basic fact: A lot of teenage kids out there play dozens of hours of multiplayer Halo a week. They thus become insanely good at the game: They can kill me with a single head shot from halfway across a map -- or expertly circle me while jumping around, making it impossible for me to land a shot, while they pulverize me with bullets.

I can't do those things. I haven't got enough time to practice as they do: I'm an adult, with a job and wife and kid, so I get maybe an hour with Halo on a good day. I wind up sucking far, far more than most other Halo 3 players, and despite the best attempts of Xbox Live to match me up with similarly lame players, I usually wind up at the bottom of my group's rankings -- stumbling haplessly about while getting slaughtered over and over again.

So after a few weeks of this ritual humiliation, I got sick of it. And I devised a simple technique for revenge.

Whenever I find myself under attack by a wildly superior player, I stop trying to duck and avoid their fire. Instead, I turn around and run straight at them. I know that by doing so, I'm only making it easier for them to shoot me -- and thus I'm marching straight into the jaws of death. Indeed, I can usually see my health meter rapidly shrinking to zero.

But at the last second, before I die, I'll whip out a sticky plasma grenade (pictured above) -- and throw it at them. Because I've run up so close, I almost always hit my opponent successfully. I'll die -- but he'll die too, a few seconds later when the grenade goes off. (When you pull off the trick, the game pops up a little dialog box noting that you killed someone "from beyond the grave.")

It was after pulling this maneuver a couple of dozen times that it suddenly hit me: I had, quite unconsciously, adopted the tactics of a suicide bomber -- or a kamikaze pilot.

It's not just that I'm willing to sacrifice my life to kill someone else. It's that I'm exploiting the psychology of asymmetrical warfare.

Because after all, the really elite Halo players don't want to die. If they die too often, they won't win the round, and if they don't win the round, they won't advance up the Xbox Live rankings. And for the elite players, it's all about bragging rights.

I, however, have a completely different psychology. I know I'm the underdog; I know I'm probably going to get killed anyway. I am never going to advance up the Halo 3 rankings, because in the political economy of Halo, I'm poor.

Specifically, I'm poor in time. The best players have dozens of free hours a week to hone their talents, and I don't have that luxury. This changes the relative meaning of death for the two of us. For me, dying will not penalize me in the way it penalizes them, because I have almost no chance of improving my state. I might as well take people down with me.

Or to put it another way: The structure of Xbox Live creates a world composed of two classes -- haves and have-nots. And, just as in the real world, some of the disgruntled have-nots are all too willing to toss their lives away -- just for the satisfaction of momentarily halting the progress of the haves. Since the game instantly resurrects me, I have no real dread of death in Halo 3.

I do not mean, of course, to trivialize the ghastly, horrific impact of real-life suicide bombing. Nor do I mean to gloss over the incredible complexity of the real-life personal, geopolitical and spiritual reasons why suicide bombers are willing to kill themselves. These are all impossibly more nuanced and perverse than what's happening inside a trifling, low-stakes videogame.

But the fact remains that something quite interesting happened to me because of Halo. Even though I've read scores of articles, white papers and books on the psychology of terrorists in recent years, and even though I have (I think) a strong intellectual grasp of the roots of suicide terrorism, something about playing the game gave me an "aha" moment that I'd never had before: an ability to feel, in whatever tiny fashion, the strategic logic and emotional calculus behind the act.

And the truth is, I'm probably going to keep doing it. Because when it comes to online Halo -- I still suck.

Here's a lovely sign of the times: College basketball coaches have discovered that the only way to forge an emotional bond with teenage athletes you're trying to recruit is to send them text messages.

Indeed, apparently coaches now inundate star high-school basketball players with so many SMS messages that the NCAA has recently banned Division I colleges from using text messaging in recruiting. The texting was so volumous it was causing serious charges on the kids' monthly bills.

There's a New York Times story today tha gorgeously unpacks the social revolution afoot. Here's a taste:

"What kind of relationship can you build in 160 characters?" asked Kerry Kenny, the incoming chair of the N.C.A.A.'s Division I Student Athlete Advisory Committee, referring to the maximum length of a text message.

Many college coaches say text messaging is an effective way to build a casual relationship with potential recruits.

"Sometimes kids don't want to talk on the phone," said Pat Skerry, an assistant men's basketball coach at Rhode Island. "They don't give you much."

Skerry and other basketball coaches are allowed to call seniors twice a week. In most other sports, phone calls to seniors are limited to one a week, although coaches can also send e-mail messages and faxes. Before the ban went into effect, "I'd just sit on the couch late at night, just kind of flicking away, while the TV was on," Skerry said. "It's a good way to stay up with 40, 50 kids almost daily."

I love it. The teenagers do not actually regard the phone as something to be talked on. I have to say, I'm coming around to the same point of view. I'm surprised how often, when I'm in the middle of a business converation, that I wish the exchange were happening in text -- so I could quickly skim the content of a conversation, and skip past the throat-clearing pleasantries. This is particularly true of PR folks who call me to pitch their products or companies for coverage. I'm happy to hear about all and any pitches, but man alive, it can be horribly tedious to slog through it on the phone. Ditto for voice mail. The slow, ponderous nature of voice mail -- and the fact that you can't cut and paste information in it -- has made me almost consider a total ban on it. I'm thinking of simply leaving a message saying hi, I'm not at my phone right now, and I don't take voice mail -- please email me at clive@clivethompson.net. Literally the only person on the planet I personally know who doesn't use email -- or computers, for that matter -- is my mother. And I always try to answer the phone when I see her calling!

Anyway, the point is, I quite understand why the student athletes prefer texting. Could you imagine the nightmare of trying to hack through dozens of voice mails every day from pleading coaches?

(The picture above is by Nesster, courtesy his Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license!)

While egosurfing for responses to my blogging via Technorati, I ran across Matt Corwine's excellent response to my posting of a few days ago, in which I declared that "audiophiles are jackasses." As Matt writes:

But here's something different: I wonder whether he's being fair to the extreme audiophiles by assuming that in addition to being really into speakers, they're also into music. Perhaps audiophilia and musicophilia are two different things that are sometimes, but not always, present in the same brain.

So there's music and then there's sound. A lot of people like both, but maybe some who like sound don't much care for music -- they might be happy just listening to test tones or Boston records or whatever, as long as it sounds great on their system.

I'm probably 5dB short of being an audiophile. Before I bought my first record, I was really into listening to the vacuum cleaner. Today, I can sometimes get into hearing awesomely produced music on a high-end system that costs more than my house, but I think the part of my brain that gets off on such things is separate from the part that actually likes music. In the same way that I enjoy making sushi for entirely different reasons than I enjoy eating it.

It's a great point. It reminded me of a similar phenomenon: Guitar-collecting freaks who do not actually record or perform with their gear, but who merely enjoy having 50 different guitars around so they can occasionally play a chord or two and re-experience the timbre that makes each unique.

What's the best music to exercise to? Scientists and laypeople alike have known that music affects everything from your mood to your co-ordination. But apparently one psychologist has attempted to quantify the effect of music on your workout: Costas Karageorghis, an associate professor of sport psychology at Brunel University in England. Ten years ago, he invented the Brunel Music Rating Inventory, which ranks songs based on four criteria. According to a story in today's New York Times ...

... one of the most important elements, Dr. Karageorghis found, is a song's tempo, which should be between 120 and 140 beats-per-minute, or B.P.M. That pace coincides with the range of most commercial dance music, and many rock songs are near that range, which leads people to develop "an aesthetic appreciation for that tempo," he said. It also roughly corresponds to the average person's heart rate during a routine workout -- say, 20 minutes on an elliptical trainer by a person who is more casual exerciser than fitness warrior.

Dr. Karageorghis said "Push It" by Salt-N-Pepa and "Drop It Like It's Hot" by Snoop Dogg are around that range, as is the dance remix of "Umbrella" by Rihanna (so maybe the pop star was onto something). For a high-intensity workout like a hard run, he suggested Glenn Frey's "The Heat Is On." [snip]

In other words, the best workout songs have both a high B.P.M. count and a rhythm to which you can coordinate your movements. This would seem to eliminate any music with abrupt changes in time signature, like free-form jazz or hard-core punk, as well as music that varies widely in intensity, like much of indie rock.

I love it: Don't exercise to indie rock! It's too whiny! And do not even think of working out to emo. That stuff'll reverse your metabolic rate.

Oddly, this whole debate reminds me of Sasha Frere-Jones' critique of indie rock in the New Yorker -- "A Paler Shade of White" -- in which he argued that indie rock (such as Wilco, pictured above) has systematically stripped out any influences from the R&B roots of American rock 'n roll proper, and has thus become, among other things, singularly undanceable. "In the past few years, I've spent too many evenings at indie concerts waiting in vain for vigor, for rhythm, for a musical effect that could justify all the preciousness," he wrote. "How did rhythm come to be discounted in an art form that was born as a celebration of rhythm's possibilities?" As you'd imagine, there was a tsunami of outcry to -- and praise for -- Frere-Jones' piece. Those who agreed with him decried what they saw as the unrhythmic plodding-ness of indie rock; those who disagreed pointed out plenty of bouncy counterexamples, and questioned Frere-Jones' whole identification of whiteness with a lack of synchopation.

But it strikes me that we could resolve the question by gathering some highly relevant data: The playlists on MP3 players at the local gym! If we presume that exercise goes best to rhythmic music, and furthermore that few gym-goers would actively seek to undercut their workout with nonrhythmic music, then we've got a nice built-in control for the inherent subjectivity of music appreciation. If indie rock is rhythmic, people will exercise to it; if it isn't, they won't.

Anyone out there looking for a fun sports-psychology MA or PhD thesis?

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine published its 2007 "Year in Ideas" issue -- their annual compendium of the year's most interesting and offbeat research. I wrote up five of their scientific and technological entries. The entire issue is online here for free, but I'm also archiving my pieces here for posterity's sake.

This is one really fun -- it's about the "Gomboc", the world's first self-righting object: An object with only one stable and one unstable point of balance. You can see a video of the Gomboc in action here!

The self-righting object

The Gomboc is a roundish piece of clear synthetic material with gently peaked, organic curves. It looks like a piece of modern art. But if you tip it over, something unusual happens: it rights itself.

It leans off to one side, rocks to and fro as if gathering strength and then, presto, tips itself back into a "standing" position as if by magic. It doesn't have a hidden counterweight inside that helps it perform this trick, like an inflatable punching-bag doll that uses ballast to bob upright after you whack it. No, the Gomboc is something new: the world's first self-righting object.

The Gomboc is a result of a long mathematical quest. In 1995, the Russian mathematician Vladimir Arnold mused that it would be possible to create a "mono-monostatic" object -- a three-dimensional thingy that purely by dint of its geometry had only one possible way to balance upright.

The challenge intrigued two scientists -- Gabor Domokos and Peter Varkonyi, both of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. They spent a few years doing the math, and it seemed as if a mono-monostatic object could, in fact, exist. They began looking to see if they could find a naturally occurring example; at one point, Domokos was so obsessed that he spent hours testing 2,000 pebbles on a beach to see if they could right themselves. (None could.)

After several more years of scratching their heads, they finally hit upon a shape that looked promising. They designed it on a computer, and when it came back from the manufacturer, they nervously tipped it over, wondering if all their work would be for naught. Nope: the Gomboc performed perfectly. "It's a very nice mathematical problem because you can hold the proof in your hands -- and it's quite beautiful," Varkonyi says.

Yet the scientists now say that Mother Nature may have beaten them in the race after all. They have noticed that the Gomboc closely resembles the shell of a tortoise or a beetle, creatures whose round-shelled backs help them right themselves when flipped over. "We discovered it with mathematics," Domokos notes, "but evolution got there first."

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine published its 2007 "Year in Ideas" issue -- their annual compendium of the year's most interesting and offbeat research. I wrote up five of their scientific and technological entries. The entire issue is online here for free, but I'm also archiving my pieces here for posterity's sake.

This one is about a pair of scientists that investigated the mystery of how laptop cords get tangled up so quickly when you leave them loose in your bag. Heh.

Knot Physics

When Doug Smith pulls the power cord for his laptop out of his bag, he inevitably finds that -- whoops! -- it has somehow tangled itself into a dense knot. This is, of course, a common complaint of the high-tech age (and before, with other types of cord). Most of us simply shrug. But Smith is a physics professor at the University of California, San Diego, and he wanted to know precisely why the knots form in the first place.

So he devised a clever experiment. Working with his research assistant Dorian Raymer, he took some string -- about the thickness of a computer-mouse cord -- and dropped it into a small square plastic box. They spun the box around for 10 seconds, then opened it up. Sure enough, they found “this really monster, complex knot,” Smith says. Then they repeated the experiment a dizzying 3,415 more times, using strings of different lengths and boxes of larger sizes, to see whether there were any rules that governed how badly the string knotted.

In the end, one law emerged: The longer the string, the more likely it is to form a knot. String that was 1.5 feet or shorter never got tangled up. But “as the string gets longer, the probability of a knot forming goes up and up,” Smith says, at least to 18 feet. Flexibility matters, too. The more pliable the string, the more likely it is to knot spontaneously.

Smith and Raymer then worked out the physical principles that explain why the knots form. When they programmed a computer model with these rules, it produced knots that predicted the results they got from the real-world box. In October they published their results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with a title worthy of Wallace Stevens: “Spontaneous knotting of an agitated string."

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine published its 2007 "Year in Ideas" issue -- their annual compendium of the year's most interesting and offbeat research. I wrote up five of their scientific and technological entries. The entire issue is online here for free, but I'm also archiving my pieces here for posterity's sake.

This one is about "the death of checkers" -- the story of the scientist who solved the game. Reinhard Hunger did the awesome illustration that is thumbnailed above; check out the full-size version on the Times' site!

The Death of Checkers

Checkers has been around for more than 400 years, has been enjoyed by billions of players and has taught generations of young children the joy of strategy.

And now it's all over. This July, Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer scientist at the University of Alberta in Canada, announced that after running a computer program almost nonstop for 18 years, he had calculated the result of every possible endgame that could be played, all 39 trillion of them. He also revealed a sober fact about the game: checkers is a draw. As with tic-tac-toe, if both players never make a mistake, every match will end in a deadlock.

One upshot is that Schaeffer now possesses software that can play unbeatable checkers. Indeed, go to his Web site and you can play online yourself, providing you're prepared to lose again and again and again -- or maybe, just maybe, fight to a draw, assuming you, too, play with the crystalline perfection of a silicon brain.

Schaeffer did not solve checkers by replicating human intuition or game-playing ability. Rather, he employed what’s known as a “brute force” attack. He programmed a cluster of computers to play out every possible position involving 10 or fewer pieces. At the peak of his labors, he had 200 computers working around the clock on the problem, both in Alberta and down in California. (The data requirements were so high that for a while in the early '90s, more than 80 percent of the Internet traffic in western North America was checkers data being shipped between two research institutions.)

The brute-force method is slow, which is its big limit. Schaeffer says he suspects you couldn’t use it to solve chess, because that game -- with between 10 to the 40th and 10 to the 50th possible arrangements of pieces -- is far more complicated than checkers, which has 5 × 10 to the 20th positions. “Chess won't be solved in my lifetime,” he predicts. “We need some new breakthrough in technology to do that. CLIVE THOMPSON

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine published its 2007 "Year in Ideas" issue -- their annual compendium of the year's most interesting and offbeat research. I wrote up five of their scientific and technological entries. The entire issue is online here for free, but I'm also archiving my pieces here for posterity's sake.

This one's about "community urinanalysis"! The illustration, by Cybu Richli, accompanied it.

Community Urinalysis

Everyone knows how a drug test works: You urinate into a cup and your employer (or prospective employer) has the sample tested to see if you've been using any illegal substances. This year, though, Jennifer Field, an environmental chemist at Oregon State University, experimented with an unusual variation on this process. She found out what illicit drugs the population of an entire city was ingesting.

How? By collecting and then testing water from the city’s sewage-treatment plant. Since all drug users urinate, and since the urine eventually winds up in the sewers, Field and her fellow researchers figured that sewer water would contain traces of whatever drugs the citizens were using.

Sure enough, when Field's team tested a mere teaspoonful of water from a sewage plant -- which it ultimately did in many American cities -- the sample revealed the presence of 11 different drugs, including cocaine and methamphetamine.

The research team called this technique community urinalysis. From a privacy standpoint, it's a very clever approach to monitoring drug usage, because while it is involuntary -- drug users can't help urinating -- it also manages to preserve the public's anonymity. “It’s the closest to the urinal you can get without violating privacy,” says Field, who presented her findings at an August meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Because it allows for sampling on a daily basis, community urinalysis can track a drug epidemic in real time, showing the police and doctors how the popularity of a particular drug is waxing or waning. For instance, Field says that the use of methamphetamine was constant from day to day -- because “once you're hooked, you're hooked” -- whereas the usage of cocaine sometimes peaked on weekends.

One affluent community that Field tested showed very few drugs except cocaine; by contrast, methamphetamine levels varied widely from city to city. And the single most popular drug? Caffeine. CLIVE THOMPSON

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine published its 2007 "Year in Ideas" issue -- their annual compendium of the year's most interesting and offbeat research. I wrote up five of their scientific and technological entries. The entire issue is online here for free, but I'm also archiving my pieces here for posterity's sake.

This one's about a new theory for why the appendix exists! That lovely image above, by Bryan Christie Design, accompanied it.

The Appendix Rationale

For years, the appendix got no respect. Doctors regarded it as nothing but a source of trouble: It didn't seem to do anything, and it sometimes got infected and required an emergency removal. Plus, nobody ever suffered from not having an appendix. So human biologists assumed that the tiny, worm-shaped organ is vestigial -- a shrunken remainder of some organ our ancestors required. In a word: Useless.

Now that old theory has been upended. In a December issue of The Journal of Theoretical Biology, a group of scientists announce they have solved the riddle of the appendix. The organ, they claim, is in reality a ''safe house'' for healthful bacteria -- the stuff that makes our digestive system function. When our gut is ravaged by diseases like diarrhea and dysentery, the appendix quietly goes to work repopulating the gut with beneficial bacteria.

''In essence,'' says William Parker, a chemist who co-wrote the paper, ''after our system crashes, the appendix reboots it.'' The theory may explain the location of the appendix: Positioned at the beginning of the colon, it often escapes being voided when a sick colon violently empties itself out the bottom.

If the appendix is indeed crucial, why don't people who have their appendixes removed die? Because in the modern world hygiene and medicine can keep our levels of healthy bacteria adequate. The appendix may have evolved its rebooting function back when our ancestors lived a more vulnerable life -- and an entire village might suffer catastrophic diarrhea. In that situation, each gut had to rely on its own resources to recover after a collapse, so the appendix was crucial.

Parker admits the argument is ''deductive.'' There's no way to test it other than performing ''some heinous experiment'' -- like going to an isolated tribal village, removing half the population's appendixes and seeing whether that half dies during the next bout of dysentery. Even so, anatomists have been receptive to Parker's theory. CLIVE THOMPSON

There's a fascinating piece in today's New York Times about a new legal fight: Should border guards be able to search through the contents of your laptop when you're entering the US? Apparently this question is being decided, as we speak, by several federal courts. The administration argues that yes, it should be allowed to look through your hard drive, partly for practical reasons -- for example, they've discovered people with child pornography crossing the border -- and for legal reasons: A search through a hard drive is no different than searching through one's paper records in a briefcase. Most federal courts have agreed with this reasoning.

But one judge -- Dean D. Pregerson of Federal District Court in Los Angeles -- recently disagreed, and barred the results of an airport laptop search. Why? Because, as the story notes:

"Electronic storage devices function as an extension of our own memory," Judge Pregerson wrote, in explaining why the government should not be allowed to inspect them without cause. "They are capable of storing our thoughts, ranging from the most whimsical to the most profound."

This is incredibly fascinating stuff. It's also going to become more and more crucial, because -- as I've noted in a recent Wired column, and my profile last year of Gordon Bell, the guy who's outsourcing all his memory to a terabyte hard drive -- we're offloading more and more of our grey matter to our silicon matter. Pregerson is precisely right. In an era where the line between our artificial memory and our real one is becoming increasingly blurry, searching through a hard drive is going to be more and more like reading your mind.

Here's an easy prediction: Anyone who's worried about memory-privacy at the border will start storing most of their silicon thoughts online, where border guards won't have access to it. Of course, leaving all your stuff on Google Drive has its own problems; it's another easy place for the government to subpoena. So there'll be other solutions, probably, including steganographic memory storage -- hiding documents inside other documents -- and new forms of crypto. Either way, interesting times ahead, eh?

About a year ago, I blogged about the "loudness wars" in music: How the overuse of compression is killing the dynamic range of albums these days. Compression, to recap, is the technique of reducing the acoustic difference between the quietest and loudest parts of a song. In the old, old days of the 70s, most rock albums had very quiet and very loud parts -- they weren't very compressed. But beginning in the 90s, record producers began compressing the heck out of recordings, because when the quieter parts aren't significantly quieter than the louder parts, the overall song sounds "louder": It blasts out of the speakers with a more commanding, electric presence.

Alas, it also sounds more monotonous, and psychoacousticians have long argued that highly compressed music leads to "ear fatigue". So the upshot is today's music sounds less and less distinctive, with performances that have less and less nuance. It's gotten so bad that even the music industry is getting worried that they're ruining music. According to a great piece on this subject in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, a panel at last year's South by Southwest music conference -- entitled "Why Does Today's Music Sound Like Shit?" -- was focused almost exclusively on the problem of overcompression. The producers suggested that it's time to start recording music with far less compression, so that the true sonic variety of a song can be re-experienced.

Fair enough. But here's the really interesting thing: The story goes on to point out that it may simply be too late:

But even most CD listeners have lost interest in high-end stereos as surround-sound home theater systems have become more popular, and superior-quality disc formats like DVD-Audio and SACD flopped. Bendeth and other producers worry that young listeners have grown so used to dynamically compressed music and the thin sound of MP3s that the battle has already been lost. "CDs sound better, but no one's buying them," he says. "The age of the audiophile is over."

When I read that final line, I was, I have to confesss, struck by a powerful -- if snotty -- thought: Thank god the age of audiophiles is over. Speaking as someone who loves music, who has actually played and recorded pop music for 20 years, and who still plays six different instruments, I think music is crucial to the human spirit.

But audiophiles? Audiophiles are jackasses. You know who I'm talking about: The guys -- and they're almost always guys -- who own $54,000 stereo systems and have their entire apartments dominated by thousands of vinyl albums of rare imports that are boring beyond description but which they force you to listen to, when you make the ghastly mistake of actually visiting their sonic sanctuaries.

I think what annoys me about audiophiles -- and perhaps what has begun to annoy me, ever so slightly, about the handwringing over "the loudness wars" -- is that they posit a way-too-fussy, sancitmonious attitude towards how one ought to listen to pop music. Because when it comes to pop music, are ultra-high-precision sound systems really so necessary, or even desirable? After all, pop music originally came to life in the 50s and 60s on horrifically tinny AM radios. Indeed, the playback devices were so crude that producers had to mix the stuff specifically to take account for the jurassic properties of the godawful speakers. (One of main reasons Phil Spector invented the