Apparently, there were some private citizens from the USSR who were allowed into the U.S. for travel during the Cold War. But they couldn't just visit anywhere they wanted.

This map, from a post at Slate's Vault blog, shows the no-go zones, shaded in green. Some of this is quite funny — gee, guys, I wonder what you're keeping hidden out in rural Nevada? Another interesting point: Soviets could visit Kansas City, Kansas, but not Kansas City, Missouri. Which could just be a pretty good joke, on our part. The fun stuff is all on the Missouri side.

EDIT: In the original version of this post, I'd mentioned that Kansas had once been home to many, many missile silos, and speculated that this might be why so much of that state (and the Dakotas) was off-limits to Soviet travelers. But, Cold War historian Audra J. Wolfe contacted me and pointed out that there were no missile silos at the time this map was made, because there were no Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. So why ban the Ruskies from Kansas? Wolfe isn't entirely sure. She speculated that it might have had something to do with limiting access to public lands managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the Bureau of Land Management. It also could have been tied to the presence of Strategic Air Command bases in the state. And there were tons of Atomic Energy Commission-owned sites scattered all over the U.S. — it's hard to keep track of where they all were.

Of course, Wolfe also said that there wasn't always a clear logic behind the decisions about which parts of the country were made off-limits to Soviet citizens. For instance, much of our coastline was off-limits for no other reason than the fact that much of the Soviet coast was off-limits to Americans. "The main premise is 'strict reciprocity'," she wrote in a message to me. "X% of Soviet coasts are off-limits, therefore x% of US coasts are off-limits, too." So there, one might add.

What happens inside a caterpillar's cocoon? Scientists got to watch the whole process with the help of X-ray 3D scanning technology. In the video above, you can watch a caterpillar turn into a butterfly. Over the course of 16 days its breathing tubes (shown in blue) and its digestive system (shown in red) change shape and position within the body, while other structures grow from scratch.

Ed Yong has a great story to go with this, too. All about why it's important to actually watch the process happening in a single caterpillar, instead of just relying on the data scientists have collected from years of dissecting different caterpillars at different stages in the transformation.

This is the third story in a multi-part series on taxonomy and speciation. It's meant to help you as you participate in Armchair Taxonomist — a challenge from the Encyclopedia of Life to bring scientific descriptions of animals, plants, and other living things out from behind paywalls and onto the Internet. Participants can earn cool prizes, so be sure to check it out! The deadline is May 20th

As depicted on Star Trek: The Original Series, the tricorder is a device that looks like the bastard love child of a Polaroid camera and a 1970s-era portable cassette deck. It was worn around the neck on a strap. It was black and clunky and definitely not what we would, today, call a sexy piece of electronics.

What made the tricorder a great piece of fictional technology wasn't its looks, but what it did. "Mr. Spock could use it to identify any organism, plant or animal, anywhere in the galaxy," said Carlos Garcia-Robledo, postdoctoral fellow in the department of botany at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. A portable tool that could quickly identify any species anywhere would be a game changer for science. Eventually, according to Garcia-Robledo and others, we'll have just that — put a piece of leaf or fur or insect leg into a machine and out pops its taxonomic information.

But what makes this really awesome is that — aside from the portable part — this is something we can actually do already. Garcia-Robledo does it regularly in his lab. The real-world tricorder isn't just something that's going to transform science someday. It's already doing that, right now.

The non-fictional tricorder is based on an idea called DNA barcoding, which originated in 2003 with Canadian biologist Paul Hebert. He thought there might be an easy way to quickly identify species using short DNA sequences that are unique to one species or another. If you had a database of these sequences, then all you'd have to do would be to match a sample to a sequence and you'd know what species you were looking at. It's similar to the way we store fingerprints, and then use those to match prints from a crime scene with an individual person.

Of course, like fingerprinting, DNA barcoding turns out to be more complicated than it sounds. The sequence most commonly used to barcode animals is a gene called CO1. It's a piece of mtDNA. This DNA is found inside the mitochondria — organelles within a cell that produce energy. It's there because, once upon a time, those mitochondria were independent bacteria, doing their own thing as single celled organisms. MtDNA doesn't create you, it creates parts of your cells.

The mitochondria, and their DNA, get passed down from generation to generation in egg cells — sperm don't usually have them. So you carry your mother's mtDNA. And she carries her mother's. But that mtDNA doesn't travel through the generations intact. Over time, it picks up little errors and changes to the sequence. This is where DNA barcoding — and its complications — come in.

Image: A room full of DNA sequencers, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from jurvetson's photostream

The idea is that the changes that happen to CO1 should be able to serve as a marker between species. In order for that to work, though, the mutation rate has to hit a sweet spot, said Karen James, a staff scientist at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory. She does a lot of work with DNA barcoding and described the ideal amount of variation in the DNA sequence as being a Goldilocks sort of problem. If you have too little variation (i.e., if the mtDNA doesn't change fast enough) then you'll have too many different species that share the same barcode. But if the mutations happen too quickly and you have too much variation, then you could get a bunch different barcodes within the same species. Either way, the barcode would be useless — just as if lots of people shared the same set of fingerprints.

The good news is that, for many animal species, CO1 hits that sweet spot. The bad news is that it doesn't work for everything. In fact, it doesn't work for plants at all. Their mtDNA changes too slowly. In 2009, James was part of a team that identified alternative DNA sequences that can be used to barcode plants.

CO1 also varies in how well it works for different kinds of animals. Like plants, mtDNA changes slowly in cnidarians — a phylum made up of more than 10,000 species, including many kinds of jellyfish. The plant sequences won't work for them, either, so cnidarians are notoriously difficult to barcode.

All of this explains part of why DNA barcoding can't really be used to identify new species. If you don't know the organism well enough to know how quickly its mtDNA are mutating, than you have no idea whether the changes you see represent a new species, or just variation within an old one. But that's okay, say researchers like Garcia and James. It doesn't mean DNA barcoding is useless. Think back to the tricorder, and what Mr. Spock actually did with it. He wasn't identifying new species. Instead, he was figuring out which previously-identified species lived on which planet.

Rolled leaf beetles. Carlos Garcia-Robledo pulled half-digested plant bits out of their stomachs and used the DNA from those samples to find out what the beetles were eating. Photo by Charles Staines.

DNA barcoding can be used, along with traditional taxonomy, to help identify new species. Paul Hebert demonstrated this in 2004, when he figured out that a single species of tropical butterfly was actually 10 species of tropical butterfly, cleverly masquerading as one. But naming new species and pinning them to a board really isn't what the tool is best at — and it's not the most interesting way to use it, either. Even though the tricorder of today currently takes up a space the size of a room, it's already being used to study the world far outside the lab.

For example, Carlos Garcia-Robledo uses DNA barcoding to study the relationships between beetles and the plants they eat. His team figured out how to extract plant DNA from a beetle's stomach. Compare that DNA to a barcode library, and you start to get a good idea of what different beetles in different places are chowing down on. That matters, because the beetle's diets are changing along with the climate. As habitats get hotter, some plants can't survive. So what happens to the beetles that eat them? Garcia-Robledo uses DNA barcoding to track those patterns of adaptation and extinction.

Turns out, DNA barcoding is very good at helping us answer questions of sustainability and environmental change. It's especially important in places where it would be really hard to understand biodiversity and species interaction simply by collecting and counting — like the oceans, for instance.

We know that things people do can affect ocean ecosystems. And we know that some parts of the ocean bear more of the brunt of this than others. In order to understand what those differences really mean for wildlife, Smithsonian invertebrate zoologist Allen Collins has started collecting samples of all the biodiversity in a plot of ocean — from bacteria to charismatic megafauna. DNA barcodes tell him exactly what species live there. He can go back and sample the same spot over time to see how the mix of species has changed. And he can compare those changes in places relatively untouched by humans to what's happening in areas that have a lot of human impact. What, exactly, does "human impact" mean for ocean animals? That's what he's going to find out.

There are even consumer applications. Earlier this year, the ocean advocacy group Oceana released a report showing that restaurants and grocery stores have a habit of selling customers one fish, but labeling it as another. In fact, 33% of the 1200 samples they took over two years were mislabeled. When you think you're buying red snapper, you're often actually buying much cheaper tilapia. The secret swaps can affect your health and they can also affect fish populations. All Oceana's data came from DNA barcoding, Karen James said.

So far, all of this relies on bringing the world back to the laboratory for testing. But the real, portable tricorder is inching closer. We often talk about the $1000 genome, in terms of being able to sequence the entire thing cheaply. But the same technology that's making that dream a reality also applies to the much easier and faster task of sequencing a small strand of genome — you just have to adapt the tools to the purpose of barcoding.

Last year, a company called Oxford Nanopore announced that it had developed a miniature genome sequencer that could plug into a laptop's USB port. The device, called the MinION, isn't the real-world portable tricorder. It's designed to sequence entire genomes, for one thing, which isn't really what DNA barcoders want. It's also a one-time-use tool that's expected to cost $900 a pop — if it ever makes it to the marketplace. But the MinION is a step in the right direction. Someday (and probably someday soon), scientists will be able to study changing ecosystems instantly, while they're standing in that ecosystem — just like Mr. Spock.

Samples of organisms that Allen Collins brought back to the laboratory from a research trip to Bali. Someday, he'll be able to skip this step.

PREVIOUSLY:
• What leeches and ligers can teach us about evolution
• In the leech library: Behind the scenes at the American Museum of Natural History
• Be an Armchair Taxonomist!: A challenge from The Encyclopedia of Life

Groups leading the June 1-2 event include Random Hacks of Kindness, Code for America and the investment firm Innovation Endeavors. They’re working with government agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau, NASA and the U.S. Dept. of Labor to host activities which invite everyone to join the “civic hacker” community.

The weekend’s events will include block parties, meetups and hackathons, where participants will gather to prototype solutions to community-specific problems. “Challenges” will be identified, and made available to the public shortly before the event in each town, with invitations issued to so-called citizen hackers.

“We believe that government agencies must find groups of people, bring them together around an issue or problem that needs to be fixed, then step out of the way,” said Nicholas Skytland, program manager of NASA’s Open Innovation Program and one of the participants in the weekend’s events. “ ... let the collective energy of the people involved solve problems in creative and imaginative ways that we would never have done ourselves.”

At the start of the 2013 fiscal year, NASA tweaked the mission of its open government group to sharpen interest in “open innovation”. For the event, the space agency will offer a challenge and, potentially, an open data set to support it. NASA representatives also will attend the event to help developers as they develop their solutions.

That some of the participants are still wrestling with how much prominence to give the term “hacking” underscores why the event is being held in the first place: to put into the collective conscience the notion of the hacker as part of a digital bucket brigade—as worthwhile, even heroic, problem solvers.

“This is about recognizing the power of a new form of civic engagement,” said Dr. Michael Brennan of SecondMuse, a PR agency helping to organize the hacking weekend.

While some of the cities already signed up to host events remain skittish, others are planning to advertise their interest with banners on the side of public spaces like a City Hall, Brennan added.

The White House itself blogged about the hacking holiday, and will be hosting its second hackathon June 1. Invitees will be tasked with improving the popular We The People petition website, with the results released under an open-source licence.

“It’s a great cause and we’re excited to take part,” wrote White House online staffer Peter Welsch in his post.

At NASA, Skytland is responsible for leading the agency’s digital strategy and open government plan, with his goals including putting more high-value data sets online, promoting the use of open source software and creating more opportunities for the public to engage with NASA. He has experience planning hackathons, envisioning space exploration missions, designing next-gen space suits, training astronauts, developing open-source software and encouraging partnerships between government, industry, academia and other organizations.

Right now, he’s especially focused on how the government – and the space agency – can benefit from mass collaboration.

“We understand that the future of technology will be largely determined by citizens who will design, build, and hack their own technology together, and (the civic hacking event) is a way for us to really tap into that intelligence,” Skytland said. “Our goal is to inspire, incentivize and equip these communities to develop tomorrow’s technology and for NASA to be a part of the conversation.”

The agency has already let anyone who’s interested get a peek under the hood to see the mountain of information on countless subjects that NASA has collected. At data.nasa.gov, NASA lists more than 500 data sets that range from engineering data, charts and specifications to earth sciences data, atmospheric and environmental data and mission operations data relating to things like flight programs and mission control.

“We are interested in solving the toughest challenges, and we definitely don’t have all the answers,” Skytland said. “By tapping into a global community of expertise, partnering with researchers, scientists, technologists, academics and entrepreneurs as well as collaborating directly with citizens and innovative organizations, we can develop solutions that we would have never come up with on our own. Solutions that may have lasting impacts on both NASA and the world.”

Participants in the National Day of Civic Hacking will be encouraged to develop software, hardware, data visualization, and mobile/web applications. Challenges for the hacking event will be released about one month prior to the event, and there will be about 50 of them.

“Selfishly, for NASA, we want to develop a map of innovation around the nation,” Skytland said. “So this is a way for us to tap into talent in a way we haven’t considered before. NASA does space exploration really well, and we collect a lot of data, but we don’t always do those things in partnership with other agencies or the public.

“The idea of engaging a broad group of diverse people focused on pushing forward the development of a solution to a challenge – why this is so exciting is I personally feel the grand challenges of our time will require the talents of us all. Imagine what we could do if we focused on collaborating to improve something like the prosperity of our community over the course of a weekend. In general, this is not the kind of thing we do as a nation. This could be a movement focused on making the world a better place.”

The full list of participating cities is at the Hack for change website.]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/05/13/hackers-prepare-for-first-na.html/feed 8 http://boingboing.net/2013/05/08/why-a-grand-unified-theory-of.html http://boingboing.net/2013/05/08/why-a-grand-unified-theory-of.html#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 22:16:04 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=229081 A computer scientist and a psychology professor analyze Entropica — the artificial intelligence system that's been getting major buzz in the blogosphere. Quick version: It's a good idea, but it underestimates the complexity of the real world. Sure, you could create an AI that can play chess, but that same bot won't necessarily have the skills it needs to also be capable of understanding grammar and sentence structure. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/05/08/why-a-grand-unified-theory-of.html/feed 42 http://boingboing.net/2013/05/08/technology-business-culture.html http://boingboing.net/2013/05/08/technology-business-culture.html#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 21:31:16 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=229079 Medium just launched Lady Bits, a new collection hosted by former Wired.com editor Arikia Millikan. The goal: Provide a space for the kinds of stories and perspectives that get left out of traditional magazines because of advertising profiles that say tech readers are all dudes. It's a worthy idea and I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays out. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/05/08/technology-business-culture.html/feed 15 http://boingboing.net/2013/05/03/speed-aging-bourbon-with-the-p.html http://boingboing.net/2013/05/03/speed-aging-bourbon-with-the-p.html#comments Fri, 03 May 2013 19:40:28 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=228432 an entrepreneur who has figured out how to mechanically recreate this process — speeding up the time it takes to age bourbon from months or years, to a matter of days. This may or may not be an appropriate use of technology, depending on your bourbon ideology. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/05/03/speed-aging-bourbon-with-the-p.html/feed 43 http://boingboing.net/2013/04/30/this-history-of-the-car-in-l-a.html http://boingboing.net/2013/04/30/this-history-of-the-car-in-l-a.html#comments Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:52:57 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=227624 Matt Novak has written a fascinating piece about the history of Los Angeles transportation. It's a history that includes doomed monorails, oil derricks at Venice Beach, and a cameo by Roger Rabbit. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/04/30/this-history-of-the-car-in-l-a.html/feed 4 http://boingboing.net/2013/04/29/hear-alexander-graham-bell-spe.html http://boingboing.net/2013/04/29/hear-alexander-graham-bell-spe.html#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:32:10 +0000 David Pescovitz http://boingboing.net/?p=227248

The voice you can hear above is Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. Bell's voice, not likely heard anywhere since he died in 1922, was retrieved from a wax-and-cardboard disc recorded on April 15, 1885 and recently "played" for the first time in more than a century. That's the disc above, looking strangely similar to a CD. The recording was identified and digitized by a team including researchers from the National Museum of American History, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Library of Congress. In the clip above, Bell says "Hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell." You can listen to nearly five minutes more of the recording session below. (via Smithosnian and The Atlantic)

Over at Fast Company, our pal Chris Arkenberg wrote about how advances in synthetic biology and biomimicry could someday transform how we build our built environments:

Innovations emerging across the disciplines of additive manufacturing, synthetic biology, swarm robotics, and architecture suggest a future scenario when buildings may be designed using libraries of biological templates and constructed with biosynthetic materials able to sense and adapt to their conditions. Construction itself may be handled by bacterial printers and swarms of mechanical assemblers.

Tools like Project Cyborg make possible a deeper exploration of biomimicry through the precise manipulation of matter. David Benjamin and his Columbia Living Architecture Lab explore ways to integrate biology into architecture. Their recent work investigates bacterial manufacturing--the genetic modification of bacteria to create durable materials. Envisioning a future where bacterial colonies are designed to print novel materials at scale, they see buildings wrapped in seamless, responsive, bio-electronic envelopes.

That rumor turns out to not be true. But it is a fact that, whenever disaster strikes, it becomes difficult to reach the people you care about. Right at the moment when you really need to hear a familiar voice, you often can't. So what gives?

To find out why it's frequently so difficult to successfully place a call during emergencies, I spoke with Brough Turner, an entrepreneur, engineer, and writer who has been been working with phone systems (both wired and wireless) for 25 years. Turner helped me understand how the behind-the-scenes infrastructure of cell phones works, and why that infrastructure gets bogged down when lots of people are suddenly trying to make calls all at once from a single place. He says there are some things that can be done to fix this issue, but, ultimately, it's more complicated than just asking what the technology can and cannot do. In some ways, service failures like this are a price we pay for having a choice and not being subject to a total monopoly.

Brough Turner: Well, say you'd have an earthquake in California. This was for the old Bell system. The national long distance routing has a set of standard, predefined routes and it had network control centers in New Jersey and other places. Things would get overloaded and they would manually intervene by putting access restrictions on new calls coming into the area that was congested. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s they would let through one out of every five call attempts. They were doing that manually and just arbitrarily to reduce congestion. Over time things got more automated. During the long-distance competition of the 1990s, AT&T introduced computerized routing and started using automated rate limiting. It all really got quite sophisticated before the whole industry went away.

BT: First off, different cell phone providers use different technologies, different systems. I'm talking about the GSM system used by AT&T and T-Mobile. I know less about the Qualcomm version that's used by Verizon and Sprint. They evolved in different ways and the details are different, but the same basic principles are the same for all. With 4G, by the way, that's changing. Everybody is converging on the technology that comes from that GSM tradition.

In general, though, there are a bunch of different places where congestion can happen. Networks consist of different technologies, and different levels. You start with the mobile switching center that may cover a large area. There are only one or two mobile switches for Eastern Massachusetts. We're talking about a room full of racks, full of computers and other switching elements. The densest switch is in China, and they have something that will serve more than several million customers at a time.

So you have the mobile switching center. Then you have groups referred to as radio node controllers. There are dozens to hundreds of these conrolled by one switch. They're located closer to the radios and they deal with handoffs between different radios.

Then, of course, you have the individual radios and that's where you see antennas on top of and on sides of buildings. Those are everywhere. Each of those is a cell, and in each cell you have users who are connected to the network.

BT: Yup. The other thing about the radios is that they have different sizes of cells. You've got regular cells and then smaller sub-cells. You also have larger overlay macro-cells that are really big. They try to handle you within the small cell you're closest to. But it's a trade off between capacity — they'd like to have lots of small cells for that — and coverage — they don't want to put 100k small cells everywhere. So you might have a cell that covers a mile ara and then smaller cells within that that handle most of the traffic.

Interesting thing is that most people are actually stationary, sitting on their butts. For most people, calls originate from one or two locations and they stay there the whole time. But we have to have this incredibly complicated system to deal with the 5-8% of people who move around. Maybe less than that.

BT:They can offload some of that to a macro-cell. When it's a planned event — the Boston Marathon, for instance, before the bombings — they can bring in aditional mobile cells. They park little trucks around the edge of the event. All those radios, though, have to connect back to the radio network controller. If it's an installed radio it's probably a wired connection — copper or fiber. But when you can't get that, then they use point-to-point wireless. Either way, they call that the backhaul.

In different parts of the system different things will get congested. In some cases, the specific cell site might be overloaded and macros are also overloaded. In other cases, it's the backhaul that gets overloaded. And that doesn't even have to be an emergency to cause that. There's this great story where [telecommunications expert] David Reed was driving from New York to Boston in the middle of the night. His wife was driving and he was sitting there with one of the first iPads that had 3G service, and has they drove through Connecticut he was running speed tests along the way. Just to see the different responses in different cells. And at one point, he was limited to, like, 3 mbps. It was 3:00 am, so it wasn't about lots of people using the system. It was just that he was driving through a cell where the only backhaul was two T1 lines. So 3 mbps was the maximum anybody in that cell could ever get. And this was like a 20 mile stretch of highway.

BT: There are a bunch of separate channels in the wireless system. But the big division is between a control channel and all of these traffic carrying channels. Control channels are used for a lot of different things. For instance, they're used for call set-up and call tear-down. Your handset looks on a particular control channel for permission to make a request. It uses the control channel to request to make a call, like, "I need enough capacity to set up call," so then the system can find the traffic channel with enough free space. But they're also used for sms messages. Which is interesting.

BT: Yes. It's much better. The SMS messages have a relatively light footprint, first of all. The second thing is that they're asynchronous. If they can't get through this instant, they keep trying. If it gets over the radio to the cell site, it will get through. Even if it's delayed for 30 seconds or something. With voice you're either connected or you're not, and when you are that means that the traffic channel is tied up until you're done talking. More likely, it means you never get connected because traffic channels are already saturated.

BT: Yes. Now this is a piece where I know what equipment these large carriers have, but I don't know how they've chosen to implement capabilities that are there. So one way they can do this is they can bar new traffic being originated by people based on "class". There are typically 10 classes for regular subscribers and another six classes that handle things like 911 calls and emergency services. They can control which classes have access at the level of cells, or by groups of cells, or all of Eastern Massachusetts if they wish.

I'm not clear on how automated all of this is. They definitely have the ability to have it totally automated. There's technology you can buy from Ericsson that features call-load-triggered access class barring, so it automatically invokes certain policies about who can place calls in an area if the traffic there exceeds a pre-determined threshold. But that's an extra feature and you have to pay extra for it ... I guarantee it's in the range of 10s of thousands of dollars per mobile switch. So who knows what decision the carriers made about that. It might have been automated and it might not be.

What I am sure of is that they set up priorities for people with fire and safety access classes. And I think it's also clear that the Verizon mobile switching center was overloaded on Monday. The effect I observed in Massachusetts was you could not place a call from a landline into the Verizon mobile network for some period of time. They blocked all incoming calls for some period of time. But within the network [Verizon to Verizon] some number of calls were getting through. I didn't succeed, but some friends did after trying for 5 or 10 minutes. In overload cases they won't turn off everything. They'll say fire and safety get through immediately and maybe 10% of the other calls get to go through. They don't throttle down to zero, though, because you don't know if somebody desperately needs to make that connection.

BT: In the end, it does come down to trade-offs. That's true of any network. You're interested in coverage first and then capacity. If you wanted to guarantee that a network never had an outage your capital investment would have to go up orders of magnitude beyond anything that is rational. So each network is trying to invest their budget in ways that make network appear to perform better.

The cost of providing temporary extra capacity for the Boston Marathon, that's something that's in the budget and they plan for that event. But when you get something unexpected like a terrorist event, or an earthquake, or damage from a hurricane or tornado, then you have trade offs between capital and how robust your network is. Every time you have an event people say, "Oh, they didn't invest enough." But you look at New York City after Hurricane Sandy and Southern Manhattan was under 6 feet of water — all the buried infrastructure was lost. Meanwhile, in other places, a significant number of cell sites were knocked out because connections ran on overhead poles and got knocked down by trees. The antenna site literally got destroyed. Interestingly, you can lose 30% of your cells and stil get coverage. Coverage was there in New Jersey after Sandy, even with 1/3 of the network out. The catch is there wasn't much capacity.

BT: I honestly don't know how you could regulate it to work the way you wanted it to all the time. Reliability on the old Bell system was relatively high ... and we paid the a high price for that as consumers because to get that level of service they got to be a monopoly and they got to charge us a rate that allowed them to make a return on their investments.

With cellular systems, competition seems to drive more optimal decisions. We don't have as much competition as we used to, but there's still some. You really want at least four-to-six carriers, and most places it's really only like three or three-and-a-half. For the public, we have to have a trade-off between getting coverage we want and being stuck with a monopoly. You look at electricity or fixed-line phone systems, and there are regulations on those industries about how much coverage and capacity they have to have because it has to be a good system — you as the consumer have no other choice. They're monopolies.

9.4 New age crystals, lucky charms, protective pendants, mojo hands, voodoo dolls, magic wands

9.3 Quack devices, medical hoaxes

9.3 Fantasy “objects” in fantasy cinema and computer-games

9.2 Physically impossible sci-fi literary devices: time machines, humanoid robots

9.2 Perpetual motion machines; free-energy gizmos, other physically impossible engineering fantasies

9.0 State libels, black propaganda, military ruses; missile gaps, vengeance weapons, Star Wars SDI

8.9 “Realplay” services, “experiential futurism” encounters, military and emergency training drills, props and immersive set-design, scripted personas

8.8 Online roleplaying scenario games

8.7 Net.art interventions, diegetic performance art, provocative device-art scandals

8.6 Guerrilla street-theater; costumes, puppets, banners, songs, lynchings-in-effigy, mock trials, mass set-designed Nuremberg rallies, propaganda trains

8.5 Fake products, product forgeries, theft-of-services, con-schemes, 419 frauds

Spoiler alert: the list ends with these:

1.0 Engineering specifications, software code

0.5 Historical tech assessment of extinct technologies, the “judgement of history’

0.0 The ideal and unobtainable “objective truth” about objects and services

Design Fiction: The Design Fiction Slider-Bar of Disbelief ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/04/12/ordered-list-of-credible-ficti.html/feed 11 http://boingboing.net/2013/04/08/put-a-gps-on-your-cat.html http://boingboing.net/2013/04/08/put-a-gps-on-your-cat.html#comments Tue, 09 Apr 2013 03:54:44 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=223483 The process of this is pretty fascinating. The outcome is, well, kind of cat like. What was Tibula doing when he wasn't at home? Avoiding the house and staring at himself in windows, apparently. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/04/08/put-a-gps-on-your-cat.html/feed 12 http://boingboing.net/2013/04/05/4d-printing-and-programmable-m.html http://boingboing.net/2013/04/05/4d-printing-and-programmable-m.html#comments Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:19:26 +0000 David Pescovitz http://boingboing.net/?p=223109 Skylar Tibbits is developing "4D printing, where the fourth dimension is time," meaning that the printed objects change shape over a certain period.]]>

As part of Institute for the Future's research project on what we're calling "The Coming Age of Networked Matter," we've looked at progress around programmable materials that can morph and self-assemble. MIT professor and TED fellow Skylar Tibbits is pushing on this idea with what he dubbed "4D printing, where the fourth dimension is time," meaning that the printed objects change shape over a certain period. (Thanks, Jake Dunagan!) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/04/05/4d-printing-and-programmable-m.html/feed 7 http://boingboing.net/2013/04/02/oceans-could-yield-new-sources.html http://boingboing.net/2013/04/02/oceans-could-yield-new-sources.html#comments Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:27:43 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=222676 vast majority of them (97%) come from a single place — China. Given how important these elements are to the making of everything from computers to cars, that gives China quite the monopoly. With that context, here's the news: Japan just found a big supply of rare earth elements in mud at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Of course, what may be good news for manufacturing is not necessarily good news for the health of oceans. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/04/02/oceans-could-yield-new-sources.html/feed 13 http://boingboing.net/2013/04/02/worlds-largest-tunnel-boring.html http://boingboing.net/2013/04/02/worlds-largest-tunnel-boring.html#comments Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:04:37 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=222642

Known affectionately as Bertha, this tunnel boring machine has the widest diameter of any boring machine ever built; 57.5 feet. It's being used to dig a highway tunnel under downtown Seattle and it just arrived there today after being shipped from Japan.

I feel this warrants your attention for two reasons:
1) If you live near Seattle, you can actually go get a look at this massive beast before it starts chewing its way through the city. If you like looking at giant machines (or know someone who does) now's your chance. She's coming into the Port of Seattle, Terminal 46, as you read this and there will be ample opportunities to get a look as the pieces are assembled and moved into the nearby launch pit. The Washington State Department of Transportation has suggestions on places to go to get a good view.
2) If, for some reason, you were looking for a new way to lose massive amounts of time on YouTube, Bertha (and boring machines, in general) can help with that. Here's a cutaway animation explaining how boring machines work. Here's a video of Big Becky, another boring machine, breaking through to the other side of a tunnel at Niagara Falls, Canada. (In fact, boring machine breakthrough videos are, in and of themselves, a mesmerizing genre.) And in this video, you can watch the massively long line of support equipment go by in the wake of a boring machine.

Shown above, Helen Quinn, "particle physicist, PhD from Stanford in 1967, and grandmother of three young girls."

I've never understood why geeks hold their grandmothers in such contempt.

Perhaps you are tired of hearing people say 'how would you explain that to your grandmother?' when they probably mean something like 'How would you explain the idea in a clear, compelling way so that people without a technical background can understand you?'

Here's a similar saying you may have heard: 'That's so easy, my grandmother could understand it.'

Grandma got STEM counters the implication that grannies (gender + maternity + age) might not easily pick up on technical/theoretical ideas by sharing pictures and remembrances from/of Grandmothers who have made contributions in STEM-related fields.

Grandma Got STEM ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/23/grandmothers-who-are-brilliant.html/feed 61 http://boingboing.net/2013/03/22/tesla-vs-edison-vs-the-great.html http://boingboing.net/2013/03/22/tesla-vs-edison-vs-the-great.html#comments Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:43:53 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=220425 Edison or Edison > Tesla, perhaps you're missing something important. In reality, technology isn't shaped by one guy who had one great idea and changed the world. Instead, it's a messy process, full of flat-out failures and not-quite-successes, and populated by many great minds who build off of and are inspired by each other's work.]]>

Matt Novak (aka Paleofuture) is a historian and blogger who writes about the history of innovation and the history of the way we imagine the future. A couple of weeks ago, at South by Southwest, he gave a fascinating presentation that I wanted you guys to hear more about.

The basic thesis: Tesla vs. Edison — UR DOIN IT WRONG.

Whether you think Tesla > Edison or Edison > Tesla, Novak says you're missing something important. In reality, technology isn't shaped by one guy who had one great idea and changed the world. Instead, it's a messy process, full of flat-out failures and not-quite-successes, and populated by many great minds who build off of and are inspired by each other's work. This is about more than just getting history right. Letting go of The Great Man paradigm has implications for everything from copyright law, to how we go about innovation today. When we focus too much on Great Men, Novak says, we lose sight of what innovation actually looks like ... and we impede our ability to build the future.

You can listen to my interview with Matt Novak here, or download it at Soundcloud.

Here's a video of a successful test of a rocket engine designed by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin commercial space program. Eventually, this technology is supposed to provide the thrust necessary to send a manned capsule into space. For now, I just like seeing all that fire up close. (Thanks, Tim!)

A battery can hold a lot of energy, but it takes a long time to charge it. A capacitor can be charged very quickly, but doesn't hold a comparable amount of energy.

A graphene supercharger is the best of both: it takes just seconds to charge, yet stores a lot of energy. Imagine being able to charge your spent laptop or phone battery in 30 seconds, and your electric car in a few minutes. Also, unlike batteries, Graphene supercapacitors are non-toxic.

The Nobel Prize was awarded to the inventors of Graphene in 2010. Wikipedia defines Graphene as a "substance composed of pure carbon, with atoms arranged in a regular hexagonal pattern similar to graphite, but in a one-atom thick sheet. It is very light, with a 1-square-meter sheet weighing only 0.77 milligrams."

(via Tony Moore at the Boing Boing G+ community)

TraceRoute from Network-Tools.com to 216.81.59.173 [fin]
Hop (ms) (ms) (ms) IP Address Host name
1 0 0 0 206.123.64.42 -
2 0 0 0 64.124.196.225 xe-4-2-0.er2.dfw2.us.above.net
3 3 3 3 77.67.71.165 ae2-109.dal33.ip4.tinet.net
4 36 36 36 89.149.181.117 xe-1-2-0.atl11.ip4.tinet.net
5 37 35 38 77.67.69.158 epik-networks-gw.ip4.tinet.net
6 21 21 21 216.81.59.2 po0-3.dsr2.atl.epikip.net
7 58 58 56 10.26.26.102 -
8 61 57 58 206.214.251.1 episode.iv
9 59 63 62 206.214.251.6 a.new.hope
10 59 58 61 206.214.251.9 it.is.a.period.of.civil.war
11 Timed out 58 60 206.214.251.14 rebel.spaceships
12 58 66 65 206.214.251.17 striking.from.a.hidden.base
13 60 60 60 206.214.251.22 have.won.their.first.victory
14 61 57 57 206.214.251.25 against.the.evil.galactic.empire
15 61 57 56 206.214.251.30 during.the.battle
16 61 58 60 206.214.251.33 rebel.spies.managed
17 57 59 62 206.214.251.38 to.steal.secret.plans
18 60 60 56 206.214.251.41 to.the.empires.ultimate.weapon
19 62 60 58 206.214.251.46 the.death.star
20 60 60 57 206.214.251.49 an.armored.space.station
21 61 64 61 206.214.251.54 with.enough.power.to
22 59 58 60 206.214.251.57 destroy.an.entire.planet
23 63 62 65 206.214.251.62 pursued.by.the.empires
24 62 59 Timed out 206.214.251.65 sinister.agents
25 59 61 60 206.214.251.70 princess.leia.races.home
26 62 60 62 206.214.251.73 aboard.her.starship
27 61 61 68 206.214.251.78 custodian.of.the.stolen.plans
28 64 60 62 206.214.251.81 that.can.save.her

Trace complete

Traceroute, Ping, Domain Name Server (DNS) Lookup, WHOIS express 216.81.59.173: (via Hacker News) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/09/star-wars-easter-egg-hidden-in.html/feed 39