Re-thinking the Appendix

The appendix may not be useless after all. The worm-shaped structure found near the junction of the small and large intestines evolved 32 times among mammals, according to a new study. The finding adds weight to the idea that the appendix helps protect our beneficial gut bacteria when a serious infection strikes.

Charles Darwin was one of the first scientists to theorize on the function of the appendix, which in his day had been identified only in humans and other great apes. He hypothesized that the distant ancestors of these animals survived on a diet of leaves, and so they required a large cecum, a portion of the gut that houses bacteria that can break down stubborn plant tissue. Later, he speculated, these ancestors shifted to a largely fruit-based diet that was easier to digest. A large cecum was no longer necessary, and it began to shrink; today our cecum is tiny. Darwin thought the appendix, which juts off of the cecum, is one of its former folds that shriveled up as the cecum shrank. Consequently, he thought it carried no function.

But some scientists have challenged the idea that the appendix serves no purpose. It's been clear for about a century that the structure contains a particular type of tissue belonging to the lymphatic system. This system carries the white blood cells that help fight infections. Within the last decade, research has shown that this lymphatic tissue encourages the growth of some kinds of beneficial gut bacteria. What's more, careful anatomical study of other mammals has revealed that species as diverse as beavers, koalas, and porcupines also have a structure jutting off of their guts in exactly the same place as our appendix—in other words, the feature is much more common among mammals than once thought.

by Colin Barras, Science Now |  Read more:
Image: iStockphoto/Thinkstock; (Inset) Ingram Publishing/Thinkstock

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How Valentine’s Day Created a Retailing Revolution

At the beginning of the 19th century, St. Valentine’s Day was of little note in American culture. It could easily have faded from the calendar out of Protestant indifference and civic irrelevance, forgotten right along with days dedicated to St. Agnes, St. Anne and any number of others.

Instead, St. Valentine’s Day suddenly surged in popularity in the 1840s. As Graham’s American Monthly announced in 1849, Feb. 14 “is becoming, nay, it has become, a national holyday.”

The day’s revival hardly stemmed from an unexpected burst of romantic love or a studied retrieval of folk customs. Rather, what made it all the rage was a new and fashionable commodity: commercially produced valentines, inventive seasonal prints that relied on lace-paper delicacy and ornamental frills for their appeal.

Holiday promotions and advertising, even for Christmas, were relatively undeveloped in the 1830s. The prevailing wisdom among employers was that holidays were impediments to enterprise: They were costly interruptions of labor and trade; they encouraged license, drunkenness and revelry; they diminished the virtues of industry and frugality. Time is money, after all.

St. Valentine’s Day provided an occasion to take another look at the economics of civic observance. Perhaps holidays offered a way to attract shoppers and create a ritual cycle for consumption; perhaps those shopkeepers of steady habits had made the wrong calculation.

by Leigh E. Schmidt, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Charles Schulz, Peanuts
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Photoshop is a City for Everyone: How Adobe Endlessly Rebuilds its Classic App

My dad has used Photoshop since 1.0. Twenty-odd years ago, he was a forward-thinking graphic-design upstart unafraid to use a computer instead of an X-ACTO knife. It turns out he made the right bet. These days, Photoshop is the only way to do his job. There's no X-ACTO fallback, and no viable "modern" alternative for this generation’s upstarts. And yet, today my dad feels like a hostage.

"I love and hate Adobe," he said when we first discussed this piece. See, Adobe doesn't build Photoshop for my dad. Adobe just builds Photoshop, and Photoshop is an insane mess. Every couple years brings a new version, costing hundreds of dollars, chock full of new features he doesn't need, and lacking the improvements he wants. Later, he downgraded his original sentiment: "I hate Adobe."

That surprised me, and not just because I've never heard my dad admit to hating anything. But I think I know how he feels, because I have my own love-hate relationship. It's called New York City. A city of too-small, too-expensive apartments, built in some antediluvian past, tunneled under with subways — elaborate rat-delivery mechanisms — and yet there are never enough trains, and the fare hikes are egregious, and it's so gross and hot down there in the summer, and nobody seems to know what to do about the homeless people huddled there in the winter.

And in a way, that’s Photoshop. It's like a world-class city — New York or London or Paris — centuries-old and layered thick with the past. They serve people, and people serve them, today’s denizens merely building upon what came before them. Cities grow and change organically as people find new uses for them. Sometimes they sprawl like kudzu (Houston, Los Angeles); sometimes they wither and shrink (Detroit).

Photoshop has grown and changed over the last two decades, becoming something new and unexpected. That’s great: it means new functionality and (in theory) better performance. But if, like my dad, you’ve been using the app from the beginning, when it was a tiny village that did one thing and did it well, you might be suspicious of all this change. Or at least wonder what it’s good for. Photoshop today seems basically feature complete, and totally unassailable. It's more than just the best professional image editing app: it's kind of the only professional image editing app. It’s the city that, to do your job, you have to live in.

But like New York, it can be a hard city to love. It feels its age, functional but a little run-down, maybe. It feels like if you tried really hard, you could probably still install Photoshop off a stack of floppy disks. You start to think about it the same way you think about NYC’s objectively amazing public transit system: why can’t it be better? Why can't it be slimmer? Why can't we just use Aviary and iPhoto and get our RAM back? Why isn't it dead yet?

Here’s the paradox: What makes Photoshop both anachronistic and indispensable? I figured to find out, I needed to dig into its past. After all, Paris has its catacombs, and Photoshop has its code. I decided to don my archeologist hat and do some excavating, i.e., I flew over to the West Coast and talked to some people.

by Paul Miller, Verge |  Read more:

Illustration: uncredited

Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction

 

The first independent film to gross more than $200 million, Pulp Fiction was a shot of adrenaline to Hollywood’s heart, reviving John Travolta’s career, making stars of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, and turning Bob and Harvey Weinstein into giants. How did Quentin Tarantino, a high-school dropout and former video-store clerk, change the face of modern cinema? Mark Seal takes the director, his producers, and his cast back in time, to 1993.

In late 1992, Quentin Tarantino left Amsterdam, where he had spent three months, off and on, in a one-room apartment with no phone or fax, writing the script that would become Pulp Fiction, about a community of criminals on the fringe of Los Angeles. Written in a dozen school notebooks, which the 30-year-old Tarantino took on the plane to Los Angeles, the screenplay was a mess—hundreds of pages of indecipherable handwriting. “It was about going over it one last time and then giving it to the typist, Linda Chen, who was a really good friend of mine,” Tarantino tells me. “She really helped me.”

When Tarantino met Chen, she was working as a typist and unofficial script consultant for Robert Towne, the venerable screenwriter of, most notably, Chinatown. “Quentin was fascinated by the way I worked with Towne and his team,” she says, explaining that she “basically lived” at Towne’s condominium, typing, researching, and offering feedback in the preparation of his movie The Two Jakes. “He would ask the guys for advice, and if they were vague or disparate, he would say, ‘What did the Chink think?’ ” she recalls. “Quentin found this dynamic of genius writer and secret weapon amusing.

“It began with calls where he was just reading pages to me,” she continues. Then came more urgent calls, asking her to join him for midnight dinners. Chen always had to pick him up, since he couldn’t drive as a result of unpaid parking tickets. She knew Tarantino was a “mad genius.” He has said that his first drafts look like “the diaries of a madman,” but Chen says they’re even worse. “His handwriting is atrocious. He’s a functional illiterate. I was averaging about 9,000 grammatical errors per page. After I would correct them, he would try to put back the errors, because he liked them.”

The producer, Lawrence Bender, and TriStar Pictures, which had invested $900,000 to develop the project, were pressing Tarantino to deliver the script, which was late. Chen, who was dog-sitting for a screenwriter in his Beverly Hills home, invited Tarantino to move in. He arrived “with only the clothes on his back,” she says, and he crashed on the couch. Chen worked without pay on the condition that Tarantino would rabbit-sit Honey Bunny, her pet, when she went on location. (Tarantino refused, and the rabbit later died; Tarantino named the character in Pulp Fiction played by Amanda Plummer in homage to it.)

His screenplay of 159 pages was completed in May 1993. “On the cover, Quentin had me type ‘MAY 1993 LAST DRAFT,’ which was his way of signaling that there would be no further notes or revisions at the studio’s behest,” says Chen.

“Did you ever feel like you were working on a modern cinematic masterpiece?,” I ask.

“Not at all,” she replies. However, she did go on to be the unit photographer on the film.

When Pulp Fiction thundered into theaters a year later, Stanley Crouch in the Los Angeles Times called it “a high point in a low age.” Time declared, “It hits you like a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart.” In Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman said it was “nothing less than the reinvention of mainstream American cinema.”

Made for $8.5 million, it earned $214 million worldwide, making it the top-grossing independent film at the time. Roger Ebert called it “the most influential” movie of the 1990s, “so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it—the noses of those zombie writers who take ‘screenwriting’ classes that teach them the formulas for ‘hit films.’ ”

Pulp Fiction resuscitated the career of John Travolta, made stars of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, gave Bruce Willis new muscle at the box office, and turned Harvey and Bob Weinstein, of Miramax, into giants of independent cinema. Harvey calls it “the first independent movie that broke all the rules. It set a new dial on the movie clock.”

“It must be hard to believe that Mr. Tarantino, a mostly self-taught, mostly untested talent who spent his formative years working in a video store, has come up with a work of such depth, wit and blazing originality that it places him in the front ranks of American filmmakers,” wrote Janet Maslin in The New York Times. “You don’t merely enter a theater to see Pulp Fiction: you go down a rabbit hole.” Jon Ronson, critic for The Independent, in England, proclaimed, “Not since the advent of Citizen Kane … has one man appeared from relative obscurity to redefine the art of movie-making.”

by Mark Seal, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz

Banksy

The Story Behind Banksy (Smithsonian)
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Ezra Klein: The Wise Boy

The first time I interviewed Ezra Klein, the 28-year-old prince of D.C. media, he brought me a sandwich: prosciutto on a poppy-seed baguette. (Also, chips and a beverage.) We were in the back of a chauffeured black town car, sent by the Washington Speakers Bureau, to take Klein from his office at The Washington Post, across the river, to a speaking event at the Northern Virginia Community College. There, he would give a talk on U.S. politics. “I have a little spiel I do at these,” he told me. “The one I like to do is called ‘Why Washington is Horrible (in Charts),’ but they don’t have PowerPoint capability, so I’m doing a modified version.”

The point was, we were not going to eat for a while, and Klein took care to bring us dinner. (He also took care to stipulate that, should my barometer of professional ethics require it, I could pay him back for said sandwich, which I did.) “Did you read that New York Times Magazine article on decision fatigue?” he asked me, unwrapping his sandwich. “They ran this experiment where the judges would get hungry, and if you came up to the judge right before lunch, you never got parole; if you came up right after, you always got parole. The numbers were unbelievable! So now I’ve become more respectful of the way my stomach runs my brain.” He took a bite of his sandwich and chewed in silence, rushing and elongating his neck as if he would run out of air before he swallowed.

“Why Washington Is Horrible (in Charts)” is more than a spiel; it is Klein’s grand theory of politics, the media, and history. “One of my big beliefs about Washington is that we highly overstate the power of individuals and highly underrate seeing Washington as a system, in general, but, in particular, we highly underrate the power of Congress,” Klein began as we wheeled through the city. He placed particular blame on the media for latching onto trivial matters and overlooking the sticky, more complicated issues of how the government actually works. “I think the focus on gaffes is a deep embarrassment, like, a deep embarrassment, and a systemic failure on the media’s part,” he says. “And the danger of that is that, when you don’t tell people how a machine works, when it’s broke, they don’t know how to fix it. And I think that’s begun to happen.”

The audience for having someone explain Washington’s often esoteric policy debates has proved to be far larger than anyone could have anticipated a decade ago, when Klein first started blogging, and he has franchised himself to keep pace. His Wonkblog, which started out as a solo venture and has since swollen to include a staff of five, has arguably become the Post’s most successful project, bringing in over four million page views every month. “It’s ‘fuck you traffic,’” one of Klein’s Post colleagues told me. “He’s always had enough traffic to end any argument with the senior editors.” On top of this, Klein writes a regular column for the print edition of the Post, as well as long features for The New Yorker. He is a columnist for Bloomberg View. He has a book deal. He frequently subs in for Rachel Maddow, on MSNBC, where he is also on contract as a contributor, and, recently, there were rumors that Klein was on track to get his own show on the channel. (Klein dismisses this notion, saying Wonkblog is his priority.)

By all accounts, he is doing the underlying job—understanding complex policy and translating it for the interested layman—well. Scholars, policy professionals, and journalists respect him, as do a handful of fellow wonks in the West Wing. “His voice matters a lot,” says a White House official. “The president talks to Ezra.” “I’ll put it this way,” says Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, “when I’m trying to get a quick handle on some currently hot policy, on the facts and the numbers, I very often find that I’m going to Ezra’s blog.”

That Klein has achieved this kind of success by age 28 is a fact that thrills his fans and rankles his detractors. (Wonkette once referred to him as a “child typist.”) It also puts him in the pantheon of hungry young men who have moved to Washington and shape-shifted, whether consciously or not, into something that’s more palatable to the city’s establishment. The blogger who, in 2008, tweeted, “fuck tim russert. fuck him with a spiky acid-tipped dick,” now styles himself as the evenhanded, empirically driven adult in a room of squabbling, stubborn children. Even his critique of Washington, grounded in data and charts and graphs, is establishment to the core: This place, he says, is not like it used to be.

“There are critiques that bother me, but that isn’t one of them,” he told me when I asked him about people’s obsession with his age. We sat nibbling on cookies in a bare, garishly lit greenroom, waiting for Klein to go on stage at the community college. “The idea that I shouldn’t do my work because I’m twenty-eight, as opposed to forty-six, does not strike me as a compelling critique.” But he is aware of his age, and, despite the high-profile job, the mortgage, and the wife, Klein says he intentionally tries to project a youthful image. “I wear jeans, not suits, for instance,” he says. Given that most of his peers have a different perception—“Ezra has kind of a dorky dad vibe,” said one friend—Klein’s playing up his youth explains why he is especially beloved by adults. When he finally came on stage, the audience was filled with people who could at least have been Klein’s parents, and they loved him: He was the good grandson delivering an intelligent and schticky bar mitzvah speech.

The presidential election was less than two weeks away, and Klein asked the crowd to consider a Mitt Romney victory, which they promptly booed. “You haven’t even seen him be president yet!” he exclaimed, in mock shock. “OK, let’s say his first act in office is the Give Ezra Klein Twenty-Five Million Dollars in Perpetuity Act of 2013.” The crowd ate it up. “See?” Klein said, waiting for the laughter to die down. “He’s not as bad as you think!” More laughter. Klein went on for an hour, replacing his charts with what he called “air graphing.” He talked about how Congress would likely block the Ezra Klein Act and, given the way the U.S. government is set up, leave the president with no recourse; he talked about the filibuster, about elections and the history of the devolution of the U.S. Congress, and he scolded the media for lying to this very audience, day in, day out.

“I couldn’t believe he was twenty-eight!” an older woman named Deb said when the Q&A was over and the audience began to trickle out. “I said to Judy, I said, ‘He must be brilliant! He must read all the time!’”

“I think he’s great! I read him in the Post,” added her friend Fran. “I’ve never read his blog, but I will!”

Then they swapped pictures of their grandchildren and lamented the fact that Klein was already married: A friend wanted her daughter to marry him.

Out in the lobby, Klein posed for photos and signed autographs, which, he later clarified, was unusual. A young man named Albert asked Klein for career tips. “My only advice is to try to get the job that’s most like the job you want, rather than the one that’s more prestigious,” Klein said. “Always try to be the talent.”

by Julia Ioffe, New Republic | Read more:

Image: uncredited

Pics and It Didn’t Happen

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are momento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
—Susan Sontag, from On Photography (1973)

A photograph is made of time as much as it is of light — a frozen shutter-speed-size gap of the present captured within a photo border. Despite this, photographs have always been a way to cheat death, or at least to declare the illusion of immortality through lasting visual evidence. There’s always the possibility that the next photo you take will one day be lovingly removed from a box by some unborn great-grandchild; the Polaroid developing in your hands might come to be pinned to someone’s bedpost in posterity. To update that to more contemporary terms, your selfie on Instagram might be a signpost for the future you of what it was like to be this young.

On Snapchat, images have no such future. Fittingly, its logo is a ghost.

By refuting the assumption of the permanence of the image, Snapchat is a radical departure. It inaugurates temporary photography, in which photos are seen once by their chosen audience and then are gone in 10 seconds or less. Snapchat recipients can take a screenshot, though the app discourages this by notifying the sender. Millions of people have done this a billion times with the Snapchat app (to say nothing of Facebook’s copycat, Poke).

The temporary photograph’s abbreviated lifespan changes how it is made and seen, and what it comes to mean. Snaps could be likened to other temporary art such as ice sculptures or decay art (e.g., Yoko Ono’s famous rotting apple) that takes seriously the process of disappearance, or the One Hour Photo project from 2010 that has as its premise to “project a photograph for one hour, then ensure that it will never be seen again.” There was once a Temporary Art Museum in Washington, D.C.However, whatever changes in the aesthetics of photographic vision Snapchat is effecting are difficult to assess, given that no one really knows what its self-deleting photos collectively look like. In many ways, this is exactly the point.

To understand the emergence of temporary photography, one must understand it in relation to the inflating archive of persistent images and their significance on how we perceive and remember the world.  (...)

Let’s face it, much of photography was already becoming Snapchat even before Snapchat existed. While much is justifiably, if hyperbolically. Here’s why I think those claims are problematically hyperbolic, made of “the death of privacy” in the age of information immortality, the likely fate of the vast majority of images today is to be briefly consumed and quickly forgotten. As well as offering relief from deepening documentary vision, the temporary photograph also responds to this photographic abundance, which has deflated the value of images. As making more and more photos becomes easier, each individual shot means less and less. Snapchat is an attempt at re-inflation.

by Nathan Jurgenson, New Inquiry |  Read more:
Image: Susan Sontag

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Automatic Nipple Detection Using Shape and Statistical Skin Color Information

Abstract. This paper presents a new approach on nipple detection for adult content recognition, it combines the advantage of Adaboost algorithm that is rapid speed in object detection and the robustness of nipple features for adaptive nipple detection. This method first locates the potential nipple-like region by using Adaboost algorithm for fast processing speed. It is followed by a nipple detection using the information of shape and skin color relation between nipple and non-nipple region. As this method uses the nipple features to conduct the adult image detection, it can achieve more precise detection and avoids other methods that only detect the percentage of exposure skin area to decide whether it is an adult image. The proposed method can be also used for other organ level detection. The experiments show that our method performs well for nipple detection in adult images.

1 Introduction 

There are a huge number of adult images that can be freely accessed in multimedia documents and databases through Internet. To protect children, detection and blocking the obscene images and videos received more and more concern. Automatic recognition of pornographic images has been studied by some researchers. Current methods can be briefly classified into two kinds [1]: (1) Skin-based detection and (2) Feature-based detection.

Skin-based methods focus on skin detection. Many skin models have been developed based on color histogram [1], chromatic distribution [2], color and texture information [3][5][6][8][9]. After skin region has been detected, perform one of below detections: (a) Model-based detection [3] which is using a geometrical model to describe the structure or shape of human body; (b) Region-based detection which extracts features for recognition based on the detected skin regions. These features include contour and contour-based features [1][8], shape features [2][6], a series of features [9] from each connected skin region: color, texture, and shape, etc. Featurebased methods focus on using the features directly extracted in the images. These features include normalized central moments and color histogram [4], shape feature (Compactness descriptor) [7], etc. These methods tend to use a global matching rather than a local matching. All existing methods mentioned above suffer from a fundamental problem that they did not conduct the detection at the organ (object) level. A certain percentage of skin detected over the whole image or a human body does not mean it is a naked adult image. To make a correct judgment, the basic rule is checking whether the female nipples, male and female private parts are exposure into the image. The only paper can be found in literature that detects the sex organ is in [10] for nipple detection. This method conducted the skin detection first, and then performed the nipple detection using self-organizing map neural network. They claimed thatthe correct nipple detection rate is 65.4%.

This paper focuses on nipple detection in images. It is a fundament step in pornography image detection. Our method is an organ model driven, that means we emphasize the features of organ to be detected. In nipple detection, shape and skin are the most important features for nipple appearance. Therefore, in the real application, both of them should be combined for detection, at least play the same important role. Our method consists of two stages:

 
(1) Rapid locating for potential nipple region. Adaboost algorithm with Haar-like
features is used to rapidly locate the possible nipple regions.

(2) Nipple detection which combines shape and skin statistical information is applied to determine whether the located regions from stage 1 are the real nipples.

The remaining structure of this paper is arranged as follows. Section 2 briefly introduces the Adaboost algorithm with Haar-like features and its application in searching the possible nipple region. Section 3 describes the details of the nipple model for nipple detection. Experimental results and discussion are presented in Section 4. Finally, the conclusion of this paper is presented in Section 5.

by Yue Wang, Jun Li, HeeLin Wang, and ZuJun Hou, Institute for Infocomm Research |  Read more (pdf):
Image via: Institute for Infocomm Research

Stranger Visions

The next time you comb your hair in a public restroom or aimlessly pick a stray strand off your coat while waiting for the subway, take a moment to think about the personal information you’re leaving behind. If you’ve seen enough crime shows on television, you know that hair follicles contain unique DNA sequences, from which a crafty scientist (or, increasingly, a savvy hobbyist) can glean all kinds of personal information about you. And while leaving your locks all over town isn’t necessarily as bad as, say, walking around with your Social Security number tattooed to your forehead, imagine what someone could do with that info.

In the case of artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg and her Stranger Visions project, she’s picking up stray hairs, cigarette butts, chewing gum and finger nails in public places like bus stops, restrooms, restaurants, and wherever else people might inadvertently leave traces of themselves behind, and using these samples to sequence and analyze theDNA contained within. She then uses this information to construct speculative portraits of what these anonymous shedders might look like based on their genetic profile. The project is currently on view at the Eyebeam Annual Showcase (through January 26th) and is part of an open studio presentation at The Clocktower Gallery on January 24th.

Dewey-Hagborg first conceived of the idea, which explores the dystopian future of genetic surveillance, while contemplating a stray hair caught in a crack in the wall at her therapist’s office. “I began thinking to myself, ’I wonder who would lay down on that couch when they go to therapy. The more I thought about it, the more curious I became about who this person could possibly be. As I just mulled it over, I started thinking about how I could figure out more about that person and, you know, kind of connecting that with all of the forensic shows you see on TV. The idea kind of stuck in my head.”

Though she didn’t have a background in biology or genetic research, she put together a proposal and started shopping it around to various residency and grant programs. She finally ended up as a 2012 resident at Eyebeam, where she began developing her ideas in earnest after taking several introductory crash courses in genomics that taught her the basics of analyzing sequenced DNA.

Using facial recognition algorithms she had worked with in the past, Dewey-Hagborg started collaborating with biologists at Genspace, a community biolab in downtown Brooklyn, and began building a 3D modeling software that would reconstruct the hypothetical visages of her mystery strangers. By identifying known parts of the genetic code that are associated with specific physical traits, then using a 3D facial modeling software developed by some researchers in Basel, Dewey-Hagborg was able to construct portraits of people based on their DNA.

by Julia Kaganskiy, The Creators Project |  Read more:

Image: Heather Dewey-Hagborg

When Will the Internet Reach Its Limit (and How Do We Stop That from Happening)?

The number of smartphones, tablets and other network-connected gadgets will outnumber humans by the end of the year. Perhaps more significantly, the faster and more powerful mobile devices hitting the market annually are producing and consuming content at unprecedented levels. Global mobile data grew 70 percent in 2012, according to a recent report from Cisco, which makes a lot of the gear that runs the Internet. Yet the capacity of the world’s networking infrastructure is finite, leaving many to wonder when we will hit the upper limit, and what to do when that happens.

There are ways to boost capacity of course, such as adding cables, packing those cables with more data-carrying optical fibers and off-loading traffic onto smaller satellite networks, but these steps simply delay the inevitable. The solution is to make the infrastructure smarter. Two main components would be needed: computers and other devices that can filter their content before tossing it onto the network, along with a network that better understands what to do with this content, rather than numbly perceiving it as an endless, undifferentiated stream of bits and bytes.

To find out how these major advances could be accomplished, Scientific Americanrecently spoke with Markus Hofmann, head of Bell Labs Research in New Jersey, the research and development arm of Alcatel–Lucent that, in its various guises, is credited with developing the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device and a litany of other groundbreaking 20th-century technologies. Hofmann and his team see “information networking” as the way forward, an approach that promises to extend the Internet’s capacity by raising its IQ.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

How do we know we are approaching the limits of our current telecom infrastructure?
The signs are subtle, but they are there. A personal example—When I use Skype to send my parents in Germany live video of my kids playing hockey, the video sometimes freezes at the most exciting moments. In all, this doesn’t happen too often, but it happens more frequently lately—a sign that networks are becoming stressed by the amount of data they’re asked to carry.

We know there are certain limits that Mother Nature gives us—only so much information you can transmit over certain communications channels. That phenomenon is called the nonlinear Shannon limit [named after former Bell Telephone Laboratories mathematician Claude Shannon], and it tells us how far we can push with today’s technologies. We are already very, very close to this limit, within a factor of two roughly. Put another way, based on our experiments in the lab, when we double the amount of network traffic we have today—something that could happen within the next four or five years—we will exceed the Shannon limit. That tells us there’s a fundamental roadblock here. There is no way we can stretch this limit, just as we cannot increase the speed of light. So we need to work with these limits and still find ways to continue the needed growth.

How do you keep the Internet from reaching “the limit”?
The most obvious way is to increase bandwidth by laying more fiber. Instead of having just one transatlantic fiber-optic cable, for example, you have two or five or 10. That’s the brute-force approach, but it’s very expensive—you need to dig up the ground and lay the fiber, you need multiple optical amplifiers, integrated transmitters and receivers, and so on. An alternative is to explore another dimension: spatial division multiplexing, which is all about integration. Put simply, you transmit multiple channels within a single cable. Still, boosting the existing infrastructure alone won’t be sufficient to meet growing communications needs. What’s needed is a network that no longer looks at raw data as only bits and bytes but rather as pieces of information relevant to a person using a computer or smartphone. On a given day do you want to know the temperature, wind speed and air pressure or do you simply want to know how you should dress? This is referred to as information networking.

by Larry Greenemeier, Scientific American | Read more:

Image: Bell Labs

Karl Brullov, The Last Day of Pompeii (detail)
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700 Years in Heaven

In school they tell you time is an illusion, but the profs over-complicate it if you ask me. There’s no such thing as before and after, just a big mash of now. “Time” is something our brains make up to help us get from point A to point B. Like the long path up to Stacy Adams’ house. Someone put it there so you wouldn’t walk around the woods in circles, not getting anywhere. Soon as scientists figured that out, they knew you could make time your bitch. You can stretch it and squash it and reshape it. You just need the right drugs and hardware.

Someday we’ll tell our kids about the night we saw our first Quantum Condenser, that’s what my Lou says on the path up to Stacy Adams’ house. Lou’s into the steevy new gear. I tend to wait for the third or fourth gen when shit actually gets good. But I have to admit I’m excited to see a real life QC. Stacy’s family was the first in the boro to get one. Her dad works at Bubble Labs, where they invented the thing.

You think she’ll let us use it? Lou asks.

I shrug. Then I tickle him because he’s obviously so excited. He shoves me away and then pulls me in and we go arms-around-waists, bumping against each other up the path. Me and my Lou.

Up the hill we go Hi Ho, up to Stacy’s big glass house at the top of the town like Mount Olympus (we just did that mod in Ancient History), and when we ring the bell Stacy’s there in her green double-breasted party suit.

Boys, she goes. Party’s in the back. Come on in.

She takes our wraps and leads us down to what I guess you’d call the basement, though it’s got windows on three sides and an amazing view of the town. The party’s pretty steeze. Mostly kids from school. Good music. Everywhere you look there’s the Bubble Labs logo. The girl’s family basically gets every new piece of tech for free.

I get a drink and say hey to a few people and then I wind back to Stacy, who’s easy to find in her green suit.

So how’s it work? I ask.

How’s what work.

You know. The QC.

She smiles because of course she knows what everyone wants to try.

You ever done it? I ask.

Yes.

I take a sip from my drink. And it’s safe?

I’m here, aren’t I?

What’s it like?

She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at the party, or maybe out the window on the far side of the room. She’s kind of smiling at herself but it’s like her brain’s gone for a little walk without me.

by John M. Cusick, yarn | Read more:

Illustration: discopalace (flickr.com)

John Coltrane, Miles Davis

The Shooter

The man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden sat in a wicker chair in my backyard, wondering how he was going to feed his wife and kids or pay for their medical care.

It was a mild spring day, April 2012, and our small group, including a few of his friends and family, was shielded from the sun by the patchwork shadows of maple trees. But the Shooter was sweating as he talked about his uncertain future, his plans to leave the Navy and SEAL Team 6.

He stood up several times with an apologetic gripe about the heat, leaving a perspiration stain on the seat-back cushion. He paced. I didn't know him well enough then to tell whether a glass of his favorite single malt, Lagavulin, was making him less or more edgy.

We would end up intimately familiar with each other's lives. We'd have dinners, lots of Scotch. He's played with my kids and my dogs and been a hilarious, engaging gentleman around my wife.

In my yard, the Shooter told his story about joining the Navy at nineteen, after a girl broke his heart. To escape, he almost by accident found himself in a Navy recruiter's office. "He asked me what I was going to do with my life. I told him I wanted to be a sniper.

"He said, 'Hey, we have snipers.'

"I said, 'Seriously, dude. You do not have snipers in the Navy.' But he brought me into his office and it was a pretty sweet deal. I signed up on a whim."

"That's the reason Al Qaeda has been decimated," he joked, "because she broke my fucking heart."

I would come to know about the Shooter's hundreds of combat missions, his twelve long-term SEAL-team deployments, his thirty-plus kills of enemy combatants, often eyeball to eyeball. And we would talk for hours about the mission to get bin Laden and about how, over the celebrated corpse in front of them on a tarp in a hangar in Jalalabad, he had given the magazine from his rifle with all but three lethally spent bullets left in it to the female CIA analyst whose dogged intel work and intuition led the fighters into that night.

by Phil Bronstein, CIR |  Read more:

Photo: The Shooter

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