O N G ORY
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T H I R D A N NUAL
Wrong Theory : The Power of Im
perfection by
h
ic Scott Dad SILICON MODERN
WHAT A TRIP
FIRST LOOK
10 Rules for Making Great Stuff Now
Airbnb’s Vision for Your Next Vacation
Nike’s Awesome New High-Tech Air Jordans
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| OCT 2014
A N N O U N C I N G T H E N E W P O LO FL AG S H I P 7 11 F I F T H A V E N U E , N Y C
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104 D E S I G N 2014 The Rise of Silicon Modern
Nike looked to a 200-year-old weaving technique to make its new Air Jordan XX9.
features 22.10
007
kohler.com/numi
Kohler’s most advanced toilet
010
features 22.10
adam voorhes
10 L E S S O N S F O R A NEW ERA
108 Unite the Digital and the Physical
110 Build a Journey— Not Just a Destination
112 Customization for Everyone
114 Performance Is in the Details
116 Beauty Is as Important as Utility
The handlebars vibrate to tell you when to turn.
118 Manage for Creativity
120 Orchestrate the Entire Experience
122 Reuse Proven Technology
134
124
FEAR & LIKING ON FAC E B O O K What happens when you give the thumbs-up to everything? It’s not pretty.
Abandon Your Assumptions
126
BY MAT HONAN
Be Wrong
138
BY SCOTT DADICH
THE WINNERS Two gamblers found a king-size bug in a video poker machine. Then the Feds caught on. BY KEVIN POULSEN
012
contents
ISSUE 22.10 14
48 Videogames Kids love Minecraft. So let them read about that.
The Network What’s happening in the WIRED world
BY CLIVE THOMPSON
20 This Issue From the editor’s desk
23 Comments Reader rants and raves
INFOPORN Eclipses: Weaving Patterns in the Sky
ALPHA 29 20/20 Hindsight The history of technological innovation is a pageant of oversights.
27
51
Terry Gilliam’s New Dystopia
BY BO MOORE
54 Zola Jesus Gets Back to Basics
82 Sugar High Tricks for finding the best Halloween treats
84 Beauty Secrets 86 Mr. Know-It-All On tech swag and banking your blood
56 Leonardo Ulian
BY JON MOOALLEM
Turns Our Tech Obsession Into Art
58 Mega Man Returns The robot hero finally gets his due.
How champion Ironman James Lawrence stays strong, mile after mile
The latest additions to the WIRED lexicon
65 Halloween’s Top Scream Factories
66 Alien Storyboards
GADGET LAB 89 90 92 94 96 99 100
Design Your Day Wake Up Head Out Work Stay Fit Have Fun Unwind
68 Body Arts
Jawbone not cutting it? Just print out a new one.
40 Pop-Up Wetlands
The science of jumping
of Sandstone
36 Jargon Watch
40 3-D-Printed Body Part
80 We Have Liftoff
The writer of Doctor Parnassus reimagines the future in The Zero Theorem
62 Extreme Triathlete
David Newman has a better way to think about medicine
Glow sticks
ULTRA
BY STEVEN JOHNSON
38 Alpha Geek
76 What’s Inside
Boost Literacy
A tattoo that makes music
70 Waypoints: Mexico City A hidden pyramid and craft beer at 7,000 feet
Rice paddies qu thirst when lak
44 We’ll Drink to Robots for win
46 How to Stop the Bad Guys Rip apart their a magic button
Q: 73 Dome Sweet Dome Look around Hawaii’s faux Mars habitat
46 All-Seeing Airships
ASK A FLOWCHART What’s a Good Tech-Related Costume for Halloween? BY ROBERT CAPPS
Not creepy in the least
74
A Mortician’s Tale Caitlin Doughty wants us all to be undertakers
ON THE COVER
Illustration for WIRED by Oliver Munday
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Watch WxD We wish the Stag Theater at Lucasfilm’s Skywalker Sound HQ were big enough to let all of you attend WIRED ’s inaugural design retreat, which begins on September 29. But the Stag isn’t a Tardis—that’s a whole other continuity. Our solution: Go to WIRED .com, where we’ll post recaps and video of conversations with creative stars like Marissa Mayer, Carlton Cuse, Sarah Stein Greenberg, Adam Savage, and more. Bonus: You won’t have to wear a name tag. Or pants.
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016
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What have you been most wrong about?
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Scott Dadich @sdadich
EXECUTIVE EDITOR Jason Tanz @jasontanzMANAGING EDITOR Jacob Young @jake65EDITOR, WIRED.COM Mark McClusky @markmcc
AT 24, I TOLD MY ART DIRECTOR THAT TYPEFACES WERE FASHION STATEMENTS.
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THE NSA!
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SOMEDAY THEY’LL MAKE A BETTER FILM THAN ROBOCOP.
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THE STRANGER I FOLLOWED FOR TWO BLOCKS. HE WAS NOT RYAN GOSLING.
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I DON’T MUMBLE.
TECHNOLOGY & PRODUCT DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT Hayley Nelson @hayley_nelson TECHNOLOGY MANAGER Kathleen Vignos @kathleencodes
WEB PRODUCER Nicole WilkePROJECT MANAGER Stephen McGarrigle THINKING THAT APPLE WAS GOING OUT OF BUSINESS PRODUCTION IN 1996. PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Ron Licata @ron_licata
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ANY INCLINATION TO LEAVE THE HOUSE WEARING SHORTS IN THIS CITY.
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WHEN I WAS IN THIRD GRADE, I WAS CONVINCED SMASH MOUTH WAS A GOOD BAND.
Out-cleans the 5 big boys. In independent floorcare tests, the new DC59 Motorhead vacuum out-cleans the top five best-selling full-size vacuums across carpets and hard floors. Without the hassle of a cord.*
dyson.com/nocord * Tested against upright market, dust loaded, using ASTM F608, ASTM F2607, IEC 60312-1 5.2, 5.9. Using competitor NPD sales volume data, MAT April 2014.
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this issue
@sdadich
I
studying mechanical engineering, but halfway through my sophomore year, I accidentally found my way into the world of design. I loved the problem-solving side of engineering—and the math—but I’ll never forget the magnetic pull of a certain computer lab brimming with Macintoshes, each loaded with Illustrator, Photoshop, and PageMaker. My change of major felt like a seismic shift, and I worried that it meant I’d no longer be doing something “important,” but that’s because back in 1996, I didn’t understand what we at WIRED have come to realize: Design and technology just aren’t that far apart. Yes, the core of my design coursework revolved around concepts like color theory and spatial systems, but all the while I was actually learning how to think critically and making the best use of—you guessed it—emergent technology. ¶ Maybe you never thought about it this way, but designers touch and shape every single part of your day; they are a constant presence in your life. Your smartphone, glasses, activity tracker—someone made them, worrying over the details that turned those things into indispensable companions. From the x-height of the type on your car’s in-dash display to the lumbar support of your new desk chair to that sacred moment every evening when you finally jettison your Flyknits, pretty much every experience has been lovingly crafted—one might even say engineered—by designers. ¶ In fact, there’s never been a better time to be a designer. Every day, powerful new tools and technologies put new opportunities at our fingertips. The designer’s toolkit is ever-expanding, and contemporary advances in manufacturing, prototyping, and production have enabled nothing less than a modern renaissance in all forms of design, from industrial to graphic. Even better, I’ve been delighted to learn that the designer’s quiver and the editor’s quiver share more than a few arrows: We use systems and software as tools to unify, to improve function, and to beautify. Design is inextricably linked to innovation. The founders of this magazine understood this essential truth; as an organizing principle, the WIRED story has always centered on design. ¶ You can see that manifest itself this month, across just about everything we do. You can see STARTED MY COLLEGE CAREER
it here, in our third annual design issue. You can see it in the new edition of Design\ Life, our yearly style manual for gadgets and gear. You can see it online at WIRED .com/design, which has become one of the most popular sections of our site under the visionary leadership of articles editor Cliff Kuang. And perhaps most excitingly, you’ll see it at WIRED by Design, a live magazine event about how design and creativity are shaping a better future. ¶ Cliff likes to say that design allows us to make sense of our technology, and he’s right. That relationship has never been more important, particularly in the world we cover. It makes me happy that I chose to become a designer all those years ago—especially because it gave me the chance to explore these new frontiers with you.
SCOT T DADICH Editor in Chief
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PHOTO BY JAMES BRIDGES, COPYRIGHT NECKBONE PRODUCTIONS; GETTY; PLATON; DAN WINTERS; BRYAN DERBALLA; GETTY; ILLUSTRATION BY STANLEY CHOW
On September 30, W I RED will host its first design conference. W I RED by Design will be held at Skywalker Sound in Marin County, California, and will feature today’s top technologists, artists, and thinkers.
ROBBIE G OR MLEY, M ALTM A N AT THE BALVENIE FOR 39 YEARS . Barley’s secrets are second nature to him. Turning the seed on time so it germinates evenly. Seasoning with enough peat in the kiln. Knowing when the grain’s ready, just by looking. Kept in his constancy, is the consistency of The Balvenie.
HANDCRAFTED AT THE BALVENIE
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THE FIVE RARE CRAFTS of the Perfect Single Malt Scotch Whisky The Balvenie is the last distillery of its kind in the Scottish Highlands, the only one still maintaining a traditional malting floor, among other uncompromising holdouts. It takes a team of coopers, a resident coppersmith, a Malt Master, and absolutely no shortcuts to produce its unique range of Single Malts. Here are The Balvenie’s F I V E R A R E C R A F T S —Home-grown Barley, Floor Maltings, The Coppersmith, The Coopers, and The Malt Master—by the numbers.
RARE CRAFT No.2: Floor Maltings
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RARE CRAFT No.1: Home-grown Barley
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Single malt Scotch whisky distillery growing its own barley across its 1,000 acre farm: The Balvenie.
RARE CRAFT No.3: The Coppersmith
A good handful The Balvenie’s coppersmith keeps stills in peak conditions. Part of that process is sweetening the still with “a good handful” of juniper, an expert skill few possess.
RARE CRAFT No.4: The Coopers
Four malt men oversee a traditional malting floor. They spread and heat the grains until they’re ready for the kiln.
RARE CRAFT No.5: The Malt Master
1,460 Number of days that coopers spend learning how to maintain the casks.They need to master the secrets of toasting, as well as repairing, rebuilding, filling, and sealing.
52 Number of years that Malt Master David Stewart has spent ensuring The Balvenie single malt is the ideal marriage of spirit, wood, and time.
To learn more about the whisky process, receive event invitations, and much more, sign up for WAREHOUSE 24 at thebalvenie.com
Handcrafted to be enjoyed responsibly. The Balvenie Single Malt Scotch Whisky, 43% Alc./Vol. ©2014 Imported by William Grant & Sons, Inc. New York, NY.
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THE ARTPHONE AGE
Ooh, pretty sunset. You know just what to do: Angle your iPhone, snap a photo, and post to Instagram. Fifty likes! Congrats—you’re part of the next creative revolution. Our August issue was dedicated to the “Artphone Explosion”: photographers, musicians, designers, and writers who are using their phones to create incredible art for a new (and hyper-filtered) digital age. And it turned out we couldn’t talk about phones and creativity without diving into a dangerous texting game called Damage Control and the history of autocorrect. It was ducking awesome.
RE: “THE ARTPHONE EXPLOSION”
“IT’S NOT THAT PEOPLE ARE MORE CREATIVE; IT’S THAT WE SEEE MORE CREATIVITY MORE OFTTEN.” Jim_hall1025 on WIRED .com
RE: “DANGEROUS GAME”: FRIENDS TEXT FROM EACH OTHER’S PHONES FOR LULZ
RE: FEAST FOR THE EYES”: FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY GOES MAINSTREAM
“There are classes at Whole Foods that train people on taking photos of food with an iPhone. This is real, people.” Dan Sisco (@siscodan) on Twitter
“Last summer I got a text from someone whose number I didn’t recognize. Rather than set her straight, I decided to play a game to see what I could pry out. Over a couple of days, she became increasingly frustrated at my vagueness as she made references to what must have been a passionate relationship. I finally realized I had to stop the charade and halfway apologized for the ‘mistake’ and, like a true chickenshit, didn’t own up to my agenda in stringing things out. To this day, I still feel guilty. It is indeed a dangerous game when we play around with other people’s emotions and their personal lives.”
Fred Mills via email
“I absolutely love Sara Cwynar’s cover art—it’s awesome to see a ‘traditional’ art medium holding its own on the front of a tech magazine! Keep up the creativity!” Kelly Diamond via email
RE: “TEH HISTORY OF AUTOCORRECT”
“I especially like the subliminal autocorrects. I work at Alcatel. My iPhone corrects that to Alcatraz. Is it trying to tell me something?”
David on WIRED .com
“We had a scientific conference for a disorder called ‘primary ciliary dyskinesia’ a few years back. The materials all said ‘primary celery dyskinesia.’ It is truly heartbreaking when your celery can’t move.” Pongo on WIRED .com
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comments
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RE: “RAISE THE SHIELDS”: TIPS ON TOUGHENING UP YOUR PASSWORDS
RE: “IMMERSE YOURSELF”: MOBILE DEVICES HERALD A NEW GOLDEN AGE OF JOURNALISM
“Frank Rose’s piece made me LOL. Yes, they did teach us how to fold The New York Times—in junior high! Ask any native New Yorker over the age of 60.” Rebecca Rubin via email
RE: “HOUSE BROKEN”: HOW TO BUILD A SMARTER SMART HOME
“As a homeowner, the concept of the smart home is a difficult sell. Far too much at the moment is gimmicky (i.e., controlling everything from your smartphone). For me, the real value is not needing the smartphone in the first place. I didn’t bother with a Nest thermostat because I couldn’t justify $250 when a programmable thermostat costs less than $50 after rebates and performs the same function of keeping my utility bills down.”
Methos1999 on WIRED .com
RE: “IMMERSE YOURSELF” ”
“A GOLDEN AGE FOR READERS DOESN’T NECESSARILY TRANSLATE INTO A GOLDEN AGE FOR WRITERS OR PUBLISHERS..”
“Disagree with a password manager. That is putting all your eggs into a hackable electronic basket.” Dan1101 on WIRED .com (Editor’s note: Got something better? Do tell: Our trusty deadtree password manager just isn’t the same since the Great Coffee Spill of 2014.)
“My personal strategy is to use weak and easy-toremember passwords for low-risk sites (like this one, sorry, wired) and strong ones for banks and shopping. I don’t really care if someone hacks my Disqus account, so I put my effort and memory into remembering the password for Amazon, my bank, email, etc.”
Bailers77 on WIRED .com (Editor’s note: Sure, friend— we’re totally lowrisk. Totally.)
Andrew Leonard on Salon.com
RE: “THE LAST GUARDIANS”: MARVEL’S COSMIC CHARACTERS MAKE THEIR BIG-SCREEN DEBUT
RE: “AUTO IMMUNE SYSTEM”: DARPA FUNDS A DEVICE TO HACK-PROOF YOUR CAR
“Vintage cars solve the problem. As in, the kind that existed before onboard diagnostics was an acronym.” Nathan on WIRED .com
“If there was no comedy in this flick, it probably wouldn’t hold up well. Introducing a Star Wars–type comic group isn’t easy when very few kids know who these characters are. I think it’s an excellent strategy to bring in young viewers and new readers.” Bugz Bugbee on WIRED .com
UNDO
Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek hacked into a Ford Escape, not a Ford Explorer (“Auto Immune System,” Alpha, issue 22.08).
This laptop got lost and nothing happened. When almost a quarter of security breaches are caused by lost or stolen devices, choosing the right technology partners becomes a critical business decision. When you have Dell laptops with Intel® Core™ vPro™ processors, the most secure commercial PCs on the market, it’s a decision you never have to think twice about. Just like that laptop.
Better technology is better business
Dell.com/betterbusiness Intel, the Intel logo, Intel Core, Intel vPro, Core Inside and vPro Inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. ©2014 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Dell, the Dell logo, and the Dell badge are trademarks of Dell Inc.
current tetrad
THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
*The larger the number, the deeper into
10/8/2014
4/4/2015
9/28/2015
total
4/15/2014
partial
Eclipse magnitude*
1
penumbral
0
-1
year
25
0 0
ad
ad 20 0
0
ad 15
0
0
ad 0 10 0
50
0
ad
0
bc 50 0
bc 0 0
0 0 15
10
7
bc
2
0 0
0
bc
Earth’s shadow the moon travels.
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SOURCE: NASA TECHNICAL PUBLICATION TP-2009-214173; VIZUALSTATISTIX
We're in the middle of a four-eclipse set— don't freak out about it. Horsemen. Beatles. Cow stomachs. Great things come in fours, and lunar eclipses are no exception. These particular events are called tetrads—four total eclipses in a row, each about six months apart, with no partials in between. And because the moon reliably orbits Earth, and Earth reliably orbits the sun, tetrads have a temporal rhythm. But you won’t see it by looking at a list of eclipse dates. No, to reveal the celestial tapestry that weaves itself eternally through the night sky, you need to plot them out. This chart shows the magnitude of all lunar eclipses over a span of about 5,000 years—total eclipses plus partial and penumbral ones (where the moon passes through the fringe of Earth’s shadow but remains illuminated). The blue circles are part of a tetrad. Endtime zealots are bug-eyed over the four-eclipse streak we’re now in the middle of, but just give them the meh-hand. Happens all the time. Next tetrad begins in 2032. —Seth Kadish
eclipses that are part of a tetrad
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BOREDOM MUST HAVE MISSED ITS FLIGHT. Nowhere does it state that “on board” must equal “being bored.” Thanks to Delta Studio,TM you can stream all kinds of free entertainment on your personal devices. Movies. Shows. Even live TV. In fact, it’s the most entertainment in the sky. No wonder more people choose Delta than any other airline.
o
MIND THE GAPS THE CONSEQUENCES OF TECH’S BLIND SPOTS IN MARCH 1857, a full two decades before Thomas Edison invented
the phonograph, the French patent office awarded a Parisian printer named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville a patent for a machine that recorded sound. Inspired by anatomical studies of the human ear and fascinated with the art of stenography, Scott had stumbled across a radical new idea: Instead of a human writing down words, a machine could write sound waves. ¶ Scott’s contraption funneled sound waves through a hornlike apparatus that ended with a membrane. Sound waves would trigger vibrations in the membrane, which would then be transmitted to a stylus made of a stiff brush. The stylus would etch the waves on a page darkened by
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the carbon of lampblack. He called his invention a phonautograph: the self-writing of sound. In the annals of invention, there may be no more curious mix of farsightedness and myopia than the story of the phonautograph. On the one hand, Scott had managed to make a critical conceptual leap—the realization that sound waves could be pulled out of the air and etched onto a recording medium—long before others got around to it. (When you’re two decades ahead of Edison, you’re doing pretty well for yourself.) But Scott’s invention was hamstrung by one crucial—even comical—limitation. He had produced the first sound-recording device. But he neglected to include playback. It seems obvious to us now that a device for recording sound should include a feature that lets you hear the recording. But that’s hindsight. The idea that machines could convey sound waves that originated elsewhere was anything but intuitive. It wasn’t that Scott forgot or failed to make audio playback work; it was that the idea never even occurred to him. It was in his blind spot. For understandable reasons, when we tell stories of technological innovation, we tend to focus on insight and even seeming clairvoyance—the people who can see the future before the rest of us. But there’s a flip side to such farsightedness that shows up again and again in the history of innovation: the blind spots, the possibilities that somehow escaped our field of vision but that, in retrospect, seem glaringly obvious. Perhaps the most familiar kind of blind spot is the assumption that (@stevenb johnson) is the author of the new book How We Got to Now and host of the PBS series airing in October. STEVEN JOHNSON
Argument
some new device will never find a mass audience. A classic of this genre: the confident predictions about the (tiny) demand for computers at the dawn of the digital age. “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home,” Ken Olsen, the cofounder of Digital Equipment Corporation, is famously quoted as saying in 1977. But the more interesting blind spots are about how a novel technology might be used. Strangely enough, working at the cutting edge of a field makes you more prone to these sorts of blind spots, because you’re exploring new territory without conventional landmarks or guidelines. You design a tool with one specific use in mind, but that focus blinds you to other ones. Scott, for instance, was trying to build an automated stenographer. He assumed that humans would learn to “read” those squiggles the way they had learned to read the squiggles of shorthand. It wasn’t that crazy an idea, looking back on it. Humans had proved to be adept at recognizing visual patterns; we can internalize an alphabet so well
oct 2014
The first soundrecording machine was patented in 1857. It never occurred to the inventor to include a playback function.
we don’t even have to think about reading once we’ve learned how to do it. Why would sound waves, once you get them on the page, be any different? Sadly, the neural toolkit of human beings doesn’t seem to include the capacity for reading sound waves by sight. A similar myopia surrounded the invention of the laser in the postwar era. Science fiction writers had been speculating on the military uses of concentrated beams of light since at least H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. (The “heat ray” is a recurrent device throughout the sci-fi canon.) When researchers at Bell Labs and Hughes Aircraft actually began producing laser light in the 1960s, they never imagined that its first mainstream use would be scanning barcodes at checkout counters. Another archetypal innovator blind spot: failing to anticipate how a new tool will be abused. The inventors of the foundational email standards—Post Office Protocol and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol—had a clear vision of the communications revolution their
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THE POWER OF INNOVATION
How do bright ideas actually turn the lights on? A collaboration among Shell, energy innovator and Shell LiveWIRE winner Laurence Kemball-Cook and the local population in a Rio de Janeiro favela is helping to transform a community and potentially the future of energy around the world.
For an in-depth look at the transformative power of innovation in the Morro da Mineira favela, watch the film series at youtube.com/shellletsgo.
POSITIVE ENERGY
“The favela is a magical place, and this technology inspires a sort of magical feeling that we can create our own energy as human beings,” says Kemball-Cook, a lover of cities and an ardent admirer of the favela’s creative, entrepreneurial environment.
THE ANATOMY OF AN ENERGY MIX
The interplay of technologies on this field makes play itself a meaningful source of power. By combining two renewable energy sources, Shell helps to ensure the lights go on, and stay on.* * Note: All numbers are estimates.
70% SOLAR ENERGY
Average number of hours of sunshine per year in Rio.
8
WATTS
PER STE
EP
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“This project is doing more than lighting our fútbol field; it’s encouraging our children to think about science and engineering.” — PEDRO PAULO, Morro da Mineira President
At a time of major transformation in energy use, as the world faces increasing demand for energy and cleaner solutions, Shell is exploring a broader energy mix complemented by innovative technologies. In the Morro da Mineira favela, Shell is directly empowering the local population by creating a more powerful and reliable lighting system powered by a mix of renewable sources — solar panels and strategically placed kinetic energy tiles invented by Laurence Kemball-Cook, Founder and CEO of Pavegen and a Shell LiveWIRE young entrepreneur award winner. With this mix, Shell is moving the future of renewable energy several steps forward. What better way to help light a fútbol field — a previously vital community center in an economically challenged urban center that had fallen into disrepair — than by enabling the players themselves to generate some of the electricity needed by simply playing the game? “The matches held here bring families, friends and the whole community together to celebrate not only every player’s potential, but the potential of our community itself,” says Pedro Paulo. Kemball-Cook sees this project as literally lighting the way for the future. “It’s predicted that by 2030, 60 percent of people worldwide will live in a city, so densely populated areas like this are a great testing ground for the kind of technology we’re developing and for technologies that have yet to be invented,” he says. “Tomorrow’s energy solutions are going to be all about mixing different sources of energy and continually playing with new ideas; we need to be constantly cultivating and encouraging innovation.”
100% SUSTAINABLE ENERGY
30% KINETIC ENERGY The weight of a footstep is transformed into a burst of energy within the kinetic tiles.
Average number of hours of light for the fútbol field from fully charged batteries.
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THE POWER OF COMMUNITY Shell believes that within the power of people’s ingenuity lie the answers to tomorrow’s energy challenges. Through this project, Shell is not only turning the lights on, but also inspiring a love of science and technology among the community’s bright young minds. In this way, initiatives such as this will help provide communities around the globe with new, innovative energy now and for generations to come.
WATCH THE FILM SERIES AT YOUTUBE.COM/SHELLLETSGO
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A PEEK UNDER THE HOOD SENSORFLEX™ technology inside our Britton Hill waterproof boot is a tri-layer system that adapts to any surface for support, comfort and performance. All in one stylish package. timberland.com Timberland, , and SensorFlex are trademarks of TBL Licensing LLC. © 2014 TBL Licensing LLC. All rights reserved.
a virt ual c on feren c e
GEICO GECKO’S DIGITAL NOMADIC JOURNEY Each month the GEICO Gecko heads to the cities, neighborhoods, and streets across the USA where innovation is happening. Here at the corner of Avenue of Positive Change and Boulevard of Big Dreams, he finds some incredibly cool individuals doing incredibly cool things—and he shares every incredibly cool discovery via social media.
Seattle: A Pacific Northwest gem brewing up innovation In a city that so proudly geeks out over everything from music to coffee, Seattle has become a hotbed of top-notch techies. Big companies from social networking sites to online retailers and search engines have all set up regional offices tapping into the stellar talent pool. One of the Pacific Northwest’s most important emerging markets for large and small enterprises, Seattle fosters its online community through indie newsletters, offline networking events, and conferences.
IDEAS. INFORMATION. COLLABORATION. Oct 6–10, 2014 Experience Live Online arstechnica.com SPONSORED BY
The thriving startup scene is all about social networking, from local computer science grads specializing in big data to seasoned engineers and VPs. geico.com VISIT US ONLINE AT WIREDINSIDER.COM + FOLLOW @WIREDINSIDER ON TWITTER + LIKE WIREDINSIDER ON FACEBOOK
alpha
brainchild would unleash. Their system was designed to allow the maximum flow of messages with a minimum of filtering or barriers. The idea of hijacking the medium for spam seems not to have occurred to anyone until 1978, when a DEC marketer named Gary Thuerk sent out a bulk email to the entire Arpanet, inviting them to check out “the newest members of the DECSystem-20 family.” Today spam constitutes more than 70 percent of all email. Many blind spots arise out of the constraints of governing metaphors, as Scott experienced with his stenography metaphor. Many of us failed to see the social media revolution coming, in part because the web’s governing metaphor was drawn from the idea of the document: hypertext and pages, not people. World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee had explicitly drawn on literary metaphors when he built the web’s HTML/HTTP standard; documents were clearly defined in the protocol—user identities were not. Consequently, most of the early experiments with the web drew on magazine or publishing models, not social networks. We often fail to perceive important developments or possibilities because we assume that recent trends will continue to follow their current trajectory. About a decade ago I wrote a book on the contemporary state and near future of videogames, which focused on their increasing complexity: an obvious and indisputable trend that could be seen in the evolution from PacMan to World of Warcraft. Despite the fact that I’d spent countless hours researching and ruminating on the gaming industry, I completely failed to anticipate the rise of microgames like FarmVille and Dots, whose simplicity made them perfect for Facebook or the iPhone.
argument
Assuming that current trends will continue sometimes causes us to worry too much about a problem that ends up not being such a big deal. Two hundred years ago, Thomas Malthus predicted that population growth would lead to global famine. That turned out to be wrong—even though the population grew faster than he ever imagined—because he failed to account for increases in agricultural productivity. Drawing on that lesson, advocates of today’s “abundance” school of thought, led by people like Peter Diamandis, argue that emerging clean energy sources such as solar and nuclear power will make the dire energy forecasts of today look like Malthusian blunders in a few decades. But optimistic forecasters also inevitably have their blind spots. We could innovate our way out of dependency on fossil fuels only to be plunged into chaos and war when the world suddenly pivots away from Big Oil. The solution you confidently see often hides its own set of problems.
WE FREQUENTLY FAIL TO ANTICIPATE HOW A NEW TOOL WILL BE ABUSED: THE INVENTORS OF EMAIL HAD NO CLUE THAT IT WOULD BE HIJACKED FOR SPAM.
We can at least take comfort that the most embarrassing blind spots sometimes lead to constructive outcomes. Scott never made a penny from his invention and has been largely forgotten by history. But about 15 years after his first recordings, another inventor was tinkering with his phonautograph design when he came up with a new technique for capturing and transmitting sound. His name? Alexander Graham Bell.
lexicon
oct 2014
JARGON WATCH unfeelability cloak
n. / n- fē-l -'bi-l -tē 'klōk / ' The tactile equivalent of an invisibility cloak. This new metamaterial conceals the contours of an object by evenly distributing physical pressure. Potential applications include packing materials, carpets, and even sleeping bags.
precrastinate v. / 'prē- kras-t -n t / ' Getting tasks done ahead of schedule with extra effort. Precrastinating might be as detrimental to productivity as procrastinating, especially when people precrastinate on trivialities like email, mentally exhausting themselves before turning to greater challenges.
nanojuice n. / 'na-nō-jüs / An ingestible fluid containing colored nanoparticles, administered to diagnose disorders in the gastrointestinal tract. The tiny particles vibrate when pulsed with laser light, creating pressure waves that reveal intestinal activity in real time.
trackvertising n. / 'trak-v r- tī-ziŋ / ' Advertising embedded in a music video to encourage viral sharing. A track recorded by the Colombian pop superstar Shakira and sponsored by the yogurt brand Activia is now the most widely shared commercial in history, viewed more than 300 million times on YouTube. —JONATHON KEATS
jargon@WIRED .com
MIKEY BURTON
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038
oct 2014
alpha geek
by sarah fallon
andrew hetherington
TRUTH IN NUMBERS Unnecessary medical treatments cost $210 billion a year in the US. David Newman’s site could help change that.
WHEN YOU TAKE A DRUG, you should know the odds. What’s the chance those antibiotics will help your sinus infection but cause you to develop a fatal case of Clostridium difficile diarrhea? Is the blood pressure medication that makes you feel icky really preventing a stroke? The information is out there, but it’s often buried inside swaths of studies—too many for doctors to keep up with and too complex for civilians to parse. The result, says David Newman, a director of clinical research at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine, is “ignorance on both sides of the stethoscope.” ¶ That’s why he created theNNT, a website that aims to provide clear and precise data for drugs and diag-
nostic procedures. He and his collaborators scour the literature and crunch the information down to a single metric called the number needed to treat—the number of people who need to take a drug for one person to benefit. The higher the NNT, the less likely you are to benefit. The results are eye-opening. For instance, most people with mild hypertension don’t actually benefit from drugs like beta-blockers, and antibiotics aren’t always worth the side effects. But patients get prescriptions for them anyway. “People tend to think that, if it’s a medical intervention, there’s science behind it,” Newman says. Now at least patients can review that science for themselves.
Touchpad technology. Launchpad performance. The all-new C-Class.
It is the unexpected fusion of breakthrough intelligence and groundbreaking acceleration. The all-new C-Class features a more powerful, efficient engine backed by an available AIRMATIC® suspension that allows the driver to choose between a Sport or Comfort ride. Inside, every detail has been redesigned to a new level of luxury and craftsmanship. The interior boasts a Head-Up Display, a large multimedia screen and an intuitive touchpad that actually reads your handwriting — controlling navigation, climate, music, social media and more. The 2015 C-Class. Prepare to be amazed with the simple press of a finger and the push of an accelerator.
2015 C 300 4MATIC® sedan shown in Iridium Silver metallic paint with optional equipment.
©2014 Mercedes-Benz USA, LLC
For more information, call 1-800-FOR-MERCEDES, or visit MBUSA.com.
medicine
migration
oct 2014
by David MacNeal
BIG DATA IS FOR THE BIRDS
south for the winter, birds need to rest their weary wings—preferably somewhere with food and water. But due to California’s agricultural development (not to mention its record-breaking drought), their preferred West Coast wetland stopovers are few and far between. So Matt Merrifield, a geographer with the Nature Conservancy of California, dove into geospatial data to help develop an alternative. The answer: flooded rice paddies. ¶ After the September harvest, farmers flood their fields to break down leftover rice straw. That’s water—but not on the right schedule. “We had to identify, very specifically in time and space, where there were a lot of birds but not a lot of water,” Merrifield says. So he overlaid migration data—crowdsourced from birders—with satellite images showing farmland water use. Then the Conservancy paid rice growers in the overlapping areas of California’s Central Valley to keep certain fields flooded when the birds arrive in October. ¶ The result: about 10,000 acres of popup wetlands for birds to visit en route from Alaska to South America, sited underneath them at the exact time they need a landing. “Eventually we want to do this not only in the Central Valley but up and down the Pacific Flyway,” Merrifield says. That should make for some happy birds. —ALLIE WILKINSON
A FEW YEARS AGO, if a horrific infec-
tion ate your jawbone, doctors had to build makeshift mandibles from your fibula, a process that left you sliced open as surgeons painstakingly whittled away at replacement bone. Yech. ¶ Today they can just hit Control-P: Based on MRI and CT scans of your busted-up body parts, hyperspecialized 3-D printers produce custom replacements, no sculpture skills required. As biomedical engineer Scott Hollister says: “We don’t all have to be Michelangelos anymore.” And in October, engineers, medical device makers, and doctors will meet at the FDA in Maryland to discuss regulations for an industry that’s growing—one printable bone at a time.
Cranial Plate In 2013, Oxford Performance Materials created a new skull for a man who had lost 75 percent of his cranium. The material, polyetherketoneketone, encourages bone growth. Jawbone An 83-year-old woman in the Netherlands had an infection in her jaw, but her age meant a 15-hour replacement surgery would be risky. So in 2011, a company called Xilloc printed her a new jaw out of laser-sintered titanium dust. Installation time: four hours. Spinal Cage In France this summer, Medicrea made a “spinal cage” for a patient with a deformed spine. The new
disk fit perfectly between the two affected vertebrae. Tracheal Splint When an Ohio infant had problems with his windpipe in 2012, the University of Michigan printed a special supertiny tube to keep his airways open. Shoulder Joint A Belgian woman had lost bone in her shoulder this year. Mobelife engineers mapped the area to craft an implant that would fit the joint and not require removing any additional bone. Hip Joint A congenital disease had eroded a Swedish teenager’s hip. In 2012 an implant based on CT scans of the affected area, also by Mobelife, got her walking again.
CY
WHEN THEY’RE FLYING
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wine
by ashik siddique
oct 2014
jesse harp
BOTS IN THE BOTTLE HIGH TECH VINEYARDS SURE, THE LABEL on your Côtes du Rhinoceros suggests that the grapes were
tended by craggy, distant-eyed, French-accented wine savants who nurture the earth, as did their fathers and their fathers’ fathers before them. But the truth is, if modern technology can make for better vino and cut costs, plenty of winemakers are going to buy it. (Anyway, between hotter summers and an influx of bulk wine from around the world, that French guy will soon be out of a job.) Here’s how they keep the Tempranillo flowing.
lecting bin.
for harvesting.
down each row.
Fru Sci Flo Thirsty vines mean concentrated flavor. These sleeves track water flow through the stems, so growers can
Lancaster Hawkeye Mark III This drone images vineyards in nearinfrared,
a freak frost.
Wonka style.
© 2 0 14 O A K L E Y, I N C .
DISRUPTIVE BY DESIGN
NICOLAS GARFIAS_DESIGNER
WE BELIEVE EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD CAN AND WILL BE MADE BETTER
D I S C O V E R M O R E A T O A K L E Y. C O M / D I S R U P T #DISRUPTIVEBYDESIGN
Law Enforcement
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Defense
oct 2014
by Brendan I. Koerner
AIR COVER A FLOATING SET OF EYES IN THE SKY
without resorting to gunfire, cops lay strips of tire-shredding spikes in a fleeing vehicle’s path. But placing them on the road can be hazardous work: Officers are often struck by swerving cars and flying debris after setting up the spikes, which must be deployed right as the fugitive approaches. Eric Spencer was stunned when his brother, a longtime police sergeant, explained the perils at a family dinner. “Doing it all by hand seemed like the dumbest thing ever,” recalls Spencer, a patent attorney in Finksburg, Maryland. His preteen son suggested deploying them from afar—an idea that struck Spencer as ingenious. Behold DynaSpike, a tire-puncturing system operated by remote control. By pressing a button from a safe distance, a cop can make the gadget’s spikes spread across a lane and a half of traffic in 1.5 seconds. The power source is a canister of compressed air that can be recharged by a car’s cigarette lighter in a few minutes. Though the $1,700 DynaSpike is about three times more expensive than manually deployed spikes, a dozen police departments from New Mexico to Pennsylvania have purchased it. Spencer doesn’t have stats on how often the DynaSpike has helped nab fugitives, but he’s certain that no cops have been harmed while pressing the button.
TO END HIGH-SPEED CHASES
THE OLD WAY of scanning for threats like cruise missiles and enemy aircraft over US airspace: ground-based radar combined with fixed-wing airplanes. The new way: blimps. ¶ In October the US military will send a floating defense system 10,000 feet above Maryland for a three-year trial run. These aerostats—heliumfilled aircraft that are tethered to the ground—use radar to see as far as 340 miles away, and they’re much cheaper than keeping a piloted plane aloft and burning fuel in the skies. (Also, ground-based radar has a much smaller range.) ¶ The two-craft test setup, which will monitor the region around Washington, DC, can stay up for 30 days at a time and, in theory, keep tabs on cars, trains, and boats as well as aerial threats. But don’t worry about government McSnoopersons: Though aerostats have been used for a while along the US border to scan for narcotics trafficking and have been deployed overseas by the military, these aircraft won’t have cameras or infrared. They’re just for enemy airplanes. Not for people. Nope. —ELISE CRAIG
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OCT 2014
BRECHT VANDENBROUCKE
READING MINECRAFT HOW VIDEOGAMES CAN BOOST LITERACY
MINECRAFT IS THE HOT NEW videogame among teachers and parents. It’s consid-
ered genuinely educational: Like an infinite set of programmable Lego blocks, it’s a way to instill spatial reasoning, math, and logic—the skills beloved by science and technology educators. But from what I’ve seen, it also teaches something else: good old-fashioned reading and writing. ¶ How does it do this? The secret lies not inside the game itself but in the players’ activities outside of it. Minecraft is surrounded by a culture of literacy. The game comes with minimal instructions or tutorials, so new players immediately set about hunting for info on how it works. That means watching YouTube videos of experts at play, of course, but it also means poring over how-to texts at Minecraft wikis and “walk-through” sites, written by gamers for gamers. Or digging into printed manuals like The Ultimate Player’s Guide to Minecraft or the official Minecraft Redstone Handbook, some of which are now best sellers. ¶ This is complex, challenging material. I analyzed several chunks of The Ultimate Player’s Guide using the FleschKincaid Reading Ease scale, and they scored from grade 8 to grade 11. Yet in my neighborhood they’re being devoured by kids in the early phases of elementary
school. Games, it seems, can motivate kids to read—and to read way above their level. This is what Constance Steinkuehler, a games researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discovered. She asked middle and high school students who were struggling readers (one 11th-grade student read at a 6th-grade level) to choose a game topic they were interested in, and then she picked texts from game sites for them to read—some as difficult as first-year-college language. The kids devoured them with no help and nearly perfect accuracy. How could they do this? “Because they’re really, really motivated,” Steinkuehler tells me. It wasn’t just that the students knew the domain well; there were plenty of unfamiliar words. But they persisted more because they cared about the task. “It’s situated knowledge. They see a piece of language, a turn of phrase, and they figure it out.” Hannah Gerber, a literacy researcher at Sam Houston State University, found much the same thing. She monitored several 10th-grade students at school and at home and saw that they read only 10 minutes a day in English class—but an astonishing 70 minutes at home as they boned up on games. Again, it was challenging stuff. Steinkuehler found that videogame sites devoted to World of Warcraft, for example, are written at nearly 12th-grade level, with a 2 to 6 percent incidence of “academic” jargon. Passion for games drives writing too. When Steinkuehler informally observes kids contributing to game sites and discussions online, she sees serious craft. “Suddenly, being a writer is sexy and hip and cool. They have an audience that knows their stuff, and they expect you to be knowledgeable,” she says. What about fiction? Oh, games have you covered there too: Behold the teeming seas of Minecraft fan stories at sites like FanFiction.net or Wattpad. My kids are deep into a trilogy of Minecraft novellas—written by a 13-year-old girl in Missouri. I’m praising Minecraft, but nearly all games have this effect. The lesson here is the same one John Dewey instructed us in a century ago: To get kids reading and writing, give them a real-world task they care about. These days that’s games.
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8,000 MAXIMUM CALORIES THAT WORLD-RECORDHOLDING TRIATH CONSUMES DAILY p. 62
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TERRY GILLIAM CREATES A NEW DYSTOPIA IN THE ZERO THEOREM 051 | OCT 2014
by bo moore |
levon biss
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You’ve done surveillance dystopias before, though. What’s different about today’s version?
TERRY GILLIAM M isn’t a fan of the real world. Th The 73-year-old director’s movies are each an exercise in escaping esc it, whether through fantasy (2009’s Th The IImaginarium i of Dr. Parnassus), satire (1985’s Brazil), or surrealism (pretty much all of Monty Python). His latest, The Zero Theorem—starring Christoph Waltz as Qohen, a reclusive computer savant working for an all-seeing British corporation—is Gilliam’s flinching reaction to today’s hyper-stimulating Internet culture. In a move away from typical dystopian dullness, his vision of London is a riot of colorful advertisements that stalk pedestrians down the street, balanced by a dreamy virtual reality that Qohen uses to escape the onslaught. The world may have changed since Gilliam started offering his scathing critiques, but not for the better—and he’s as pissed off as ever.
Before we get started, is it OK if I record this? Sure, sure. The NSA is, why shouldn’t you?
That’s a great place to start— The Zero Theorem seems to be very much about surveillance. I think citizens actually love the fact that somebody is watching and listening to them. Everybody lives for their selfies and their tweets—to actually exist, somebody has to be talking to you or listening in on you. That’s where The Zero Theorem started and ended. It became a focus for a lot of the things that were bothering me today, including this constant connection. Qohen just wants to be disconnected, wants to escape from the world that’s out there, full of people just filling the Internet with pictures of the food they’re eating.
Initially, Mancom, where Qohen works, was much more like the Ministry in Brazil. But I wanted to make a point that this body isn’t governmental. That’s something quite different now—corporations dominate, and the political side is almost secondary. The funny thing is, the film was supposed to be set in the near future—how near I didn’t know. But by the time most of my “futuristic ideas” had been filmed, they were already in the past.
Your movies often combine elements of the familiar and the speculative.
Terry Gilliam’s new film continues in the spirit of 12 Monkeys and Brazil.
When people do sci-fi films, they always seem to focus on futuristic technology. But the world is always a mixture of technologies. Like, I’ve got an iPhone, which is more powerful than the computer that put a man on the moon. It’s extraordinary. At the same time, we’ve got leaky 19thcentury plumbing.
The mainframe computer at Mancom seems like a step back in time—it’s so massive. As computers get smaller, the central computer gets bigger. And the NSA’s new data center in Bluffdale is so vast—acres and acres and acres. So we modeled the Mancom computer after this huge blast furnace that we found in a steel mill. Maybe the future will need to be like that to deal with the amount of information we’ll have.
You can do a lot more with a smaller budget today. Has that changed how you make movies? Six years ago, when we first talked about doing this movie, the budget was $20 million, and we ended up making it for $8.5 million. There’s probably $500,000 of savings in there in improved technologies—for example, Christoph and Mélanie Thierry
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ZOLA JESUS THE SINGER GETS BACK TO BASICS Nika Roza Danilova, aka Zola Jesus, grew up on 100 acres of Wisconsin woodland. Her new album, October’s Taiga, takes us back there, but it’s also a return to her deeper Russian roots—the title refers to that country’s vast boreal forests. “I tried tapping into the feral energy of the taiga when I was writing these new songs,” she says. “It feels free, and a little savage.” Though Taiga is Danilova’s fifth LP, she’s calling it her “true debut.” Stripped of the layers and reverb that defined her older, synth-dominated work, it’s the clearest—and most accessible—expression of Danilova’s artistry yet. “It forced me to confront the music with a confidence I’ve never been able to develop until now,” she says. With the first single, “Dangerous Days,” Danilova stands at the intersection of Katy Perry and Florence and the Machine: industrial art-pop’s return to nature. That newly emboldened voice powers the album’s other tracks, like the shed-my-skin anthem “Ego.” It’s music in range of chartable territory—even as it calls to mind more uncharted corners of the world. —JASON KEHE
In The Zero Theorem, Christoph Waltz plays Qohen Leth, a computer genius struggling with existential angst in the form of a math problem. recorded some new lines on their iPhones while he was in Berlin and she was in France, emailed them back to me, and they’re in the film. We couldn’t have done that a few years ago. But the rest is people working for scale, working their asses off, being very clever, and filming in Bucharest. And getting actor friends to come in and work— but I can’t take advantage of all my friends next time.
their attention? When the big studios have $80 million to spend on a campaign for a film, it’s really hard to find room to put up your billboard or your poster. That’s what I find difficult now.
Does that budget impact the audience you can reach too?
I look at my heroes, the ones who got me going, and I’m very proud to feel that we’re heroes to somebody else. As we enter the last act, that feels pretty good. But the press is going absolutely apeshit over this Python show—they write about us as if we were the beginning of comedy. What about the Marx Brothers? Where’s Buster Keaton? It’s like it’s all been forgotten. That’s the part of the modern world that I really despise. There’s no history—everything exists only in nanoseconds.
I don’t really know how to think of an audience, because there are a million different audiences out there. It’s more, how do you get the people that might like what you do—and they’re not always fans yet—how do you get BO MOORE (@usebomswisely) interviewed director Nicolas Winding Refn in issue 21.07.
A bunch of your fellow Monty Pythoners did a reunion show in July. Do you ever worry that Python’s influence might have gone too far?
GLUEKIT. COURTESY OF AMPLIFY (THE ZERO THEOREM)
SINGER-SONGWRITER
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THE COSMOS ON A CHIP
FOR ITALIAN ARTIST Leonardo Ulian, this is our universe. At its center: a microchip. Beyond: resistors, capacitors, inductors, transistors. Ulian’s “technological mandalas”—webs of circuitry in the form of the Hindu or Buddhist symbolic diagrams of the cosmos—are icons for an electronic age, and he’ll be exhibiting them this fall in Milan. Each mandala, the biggest of which is nearly 5 feet across, takes two weeks to create and requires as many as a thousand parts (mostly purchased from Russian sellers on eBay). They’re meant to trigger deeper questions about our relationship with technology. “People nowadays almost worship electronics,” he says. “I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that someone has created a religion based on microchips.” Chant with us: ohm … —Jason Kehe
PHOTOGRAPH BY LEONARDO ULIAN
Technological mandala 20—Resonator, 2014.
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LIKE ’80S MOVIE STARS, classic videogame characters have now been around
long enough to mount Rob Lowe–like comebacks. After all, these iconic figures aren’t just flecks of light platform-jumping on a screen. They’re tiny Rorschach blots onto which Gen Xers can project their receding childhoods. Which makes those characters very hard to kill. ¶ Take Mega Man. The heroic little robot with big power-ups debuted in an eponymous Nintendo game in 1987 and has spun off 131 titles; his games have sold more than 30 million copies. He even had a TV show. But by 2011, the Blue Bomber was doing the equivalent of supermarket ribbon-cutting. He was passed over for the Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 videogame, and Capcom, the Japanese company that spawned him, announced it was euthanizing two new Mega Man titles in the pipeline. ¶ Mega Man fans (they are legion) made their displeasure known. The Internet is good for this. After all, his numbers weren’t in the Mario range, but he was no Atari E.T. either. So Capcom went into appeasement mode, rereleasing six classic Mega Man titles in May. And in October he finally makes his debut in the popular Super Smash Bros. franchise, while tabletoppers will get Mega Man: The Board Game. The resurrection of this 8-bit alter ego—and the entire vintage videogame trend—is like Lik-a-Stix for our juvenile id. The Blue Bomber provides simple pleasures in a complex world, and if you’re looking for a nostalgia fix, it’s hard to beat the speed and pluck of Mega Man. —Rene Chun
Magik*Magik can be a string quartet— or a 70-piece symphony.
FROM TOP: COURTESY OF CAPCOM; COURTESY
MEGA MAN RETURNS FINALLY, THE ROBOT HERO GETS HIS DUE
Session musicians are the temps of the music world—bands built to disband. That can make finding them exceedingly difficult. So in 2008, conductor Minna Choi founded Magik*Magik Orchestra, a collective with the skills and versatility to back up just about anyone. Now they’re the not-sosilent force behind your favorite artists. ¶ With an expandable roster, Magik*Magik has played for an incredible range of musicians, from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood to WIRED favorite Zola Jesus (see page 54). They even shared the bill on Death Cab for Cutie’s 2012 tour. “They bridge the gap,” says Chris Walla, former Death Cab guitarist, “between the sometimes stuffy classical world and the absolutely uneducated artists of the indie rock world.” ¶ That bridge extends to film too. After Magik*Magik recorded Nathan Johnson’s score for the time-travel flick Looper, the composer called them back for October’s sci-fi western Young Ones. “My movies tend to have a nontraditional element,” Johnson says, “so Magik*Magik was perfect.” As the group continues to gain collaborators, Choi puts on more hats: arranger, pianist, manager. Next up is songwriting— Magik*Magik’s debut album, which Choi penned, comes out next year. Curtain up. —KATIE M. PALMER
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IRON WILL ONE MAN’S EXTREME ROUTINE A TYPICAL adult American works out
17 minutes a day. James Lawrence is not a typical adult American. In 2012 he completed 30 ultradistance triathlons, smashing the previous world record of 20 in a year. And what makes the Utahn’s feat especially superhuman is that just four years earlier, he’d never even tried one. In fact, endurance really wasn’t his thing. “I didn’t have that background, so I struggled with trying to learn and stay motivated,” Lawrence says. That’s changed, thanks to a meticulous regimen. In between four daily meals—and backbreaking workouts—Lawrence slams up to 10 snacks, and slurps a training drink every hour while he’s active. At his most extreme, that totals up to 8,000 calories a day. It makes sense when you look at his schedule: In October he’ll compete in the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii, and next year he’ll attempt an ultradistance triathlon in each of the 50 states in 50 days. Hope he packs his protein powder. —Greg Thomas
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For James Lawrence, each week of peak training means cramming in lots of exercise and enough calories to fuel a family of four.
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Erebus | PONTIAC, MI How do you conjure a murky swamp with no water? Erebus creates the illusion with smoke and green lasers swirling at waist level. Airbags smother you as you trudge across a floor covered in 4 inches of foam.
HIGH TECH HAUNTS ENGINEERING FEAR AVID PHOBOPHILES support more than 2,000 haunted houses in the US, and fright-immune repeat visitors force haunters to constantly invent new, supersize scares. “We push the boundaries as much as we can, and that means we design a lot of the tech ourselves,” says Erebus owner Ed Terebus. This Halloween, expect the technologically enabled unexpected at these scream factories. —Mai Nguyen
The Dent Schoolhouse | CINCINNATI, OH The walls and railings in this schoolhouse’s dim, candlelit hallways are studded with rubber shock pads— when wanderers reach out for guidance, they get a zap. The Darkness | ST. LOUIS, MO 3-D glasses with prism-like film diffract light so reds and yellows appear close while blues and greens seem far away. That makes this haunt’s floor-to-ceiling clown graphics disorienting at best and full-on traumatic if you never recovered from Stephen King’s Pennywise. The 13th Gate | BATON ROUGE, LA As guests try to push their way through a darkened room, 8-foot-tall air-filled sacs envelop them, turning the space into a claustrophobe’s nightmare. Watch out—at some houses, actors might grab at you from inside. Paul Windle
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Under the Dome While working on Dune, Giger painted this concept of Harkonnen Castle with an eerie elongated carapace. He incorporated that design into the Alien’s skull—though the eye sockets ultimately disappeared.
Mike Worrall produced this 1990 concept drawing of the xenomorph for Alien3.
SKETCHES FROM SPACE A FRESH LOOK AT ALIEN ARTWORK
The Storyboard Express Director Ridley Scott, known for exhaustively storyboarding his films, produced Alien’s “Ridleygrams” in three weeks. This one featured the alien ship with the fossilized Space Jockey in the pilot seat—a plot point Scott returned to in 2012’s Prometheus.
THE ALIEN XENOMORPH may have first appeared onscreen burst-
ing through poor John Hurt’s chest, but it originally spawned from the mind of surrealist H. R. Giger, whose work on a failed Dune adaptation (sorry, Jodorowsky) caught the eye of writer Dan O’Bannon. Though Giger’s preproduction work on Alien has occasionally surfaced online, fans won’t have to hunt through the darkened corridors of the Internet any longer: The new book Alien: The Archive is the first complete collection of concept art and photography from the franchise. Just don’t put your face too close to the pages. —Shirley Li
Evolution of a Species The filmmakers wove sexual imagery aplenty into the Alien’s design—that double mouth begs for a Freudian read— but the facehugger was even more blatant. O’Bannon pitched the octopus-like foundation; Giger added the fingers and terrifying (but later scrapped) eyeball.
PHOTOS FROM ALIEN - THE ARCHIVE (TITAN BOOKS). TM & © 2014 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Huge Ships Chris Foss, who also worked on Dune, made this early illustration of the doomed ship Nostromo pulling a massive asteroid with a built-in refinery. Elements of Foss’ rendition and an illustration by Ron Cobb both inspired the design.
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PUT A STAKE IN ORIGIN STORIES told you of the genesis of my geek rage? When I was but a wee lad, my parents were assaulted by a deadly dull backstory. I swore then and there to avenge them! My latest foe is the new film Dracula Untold, which takes Bram Stoker and a few scraps of Slavic folklore and whips it all into a frothy $100 million blockbuster about how the famous vampire first became a bloodsucker. It’s like one of Rudyard Kipling’s delightful Just So Stories, except it’s several hours long, it’s not at all delightful, and it undermines the mystery of one of literature’s greatest characters. But its real sin is that it’s superfluous; it’s just a windup, part of an effort to turn the classic Universal monsters into an Avengers-style megafranchise. (And I don’t mean that as a compliment.) Here’s an idea: Don’t force us to endure flicks about the Wolfman’s pimply adolescence or Van Helsing’s rambunctious college years. Instead, skip right to the climactic team-up movie! People will camp out for weeks to see the Mummy meets the Hunchback of Notre Dame meets the Invisible Man meets the Creature from the Black Lagoon. And when each monster can be onscreen for only 90 seconds, there’ll be no time for backstory. Cut, as the saying goes, to the chase!
Dmitry Morozov’s tattoo scanner plays sounds that he can alter by moving his arm.
SKIN TONES ONE-ARMED BAND DMITRY MOROZOV’S TATTOO isn’t just about looks, it’s about sound. The Moscow-based artist has a hefty 8- by 3-inch barcode stretching down his left forearm, and when he scans it with the right gadget: music. ¶ Morozov grew up studying guitar and is a self-taught engineer. “I wanted to combine two passions—electronic music and robotics—and I already had tattoos,” he says. Morozov created the barcode in Photoshop and modded a scanner with two black-line sensors, a stepper motor, and a Nintendo Wii remote. ¶ As the motor guides the sensors along his tat, the length of each bar dictates the duration of the sound; if he moves his arm, the Wii’s accelerometer detects the shift and distorts the tone. It’s a little … monotonic, and not everyone is impressed—many Russians associate tattoos with criminal culture. But Morozov is determined to change their minds. “I try to explain the theory and technology of the art and body, and then most people respond positively,” he says. Sounds like progress. —Hanna Trudo
Piotr Malecki
For more Angry Nerd, go to VIDEO.WIRED.COM .
ILLUSTRATION BY ZOHAR LAZAR
HAVE I EVER
ULTRA
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WAYPOINTS MEXICO CITY
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7, 3 5 0 F E E T A B O V E S E A L E V E L — W A T C H O U T F O R A L T I T U D E S I C K N E S S ! // 1 1 1 V O L C A N O E S ( A C T I V E A N D I N A C T I V E ) I N O R N E A R C I T Y L I M I T S // 689 YEARS S I N C E T H E F O U N D I N G O F T E N O C H T I T L Á N ( W H I C H B E C A M E M O D E R N - D AY M E X I C O C I T Y ) // 3 HOURS A V E R A G E R O U N D - T R I P C O M M U T E // 275 E C O B I C I B I K E - S H A R E S T A T I O N S // 105,064 C A P A C I T Y O F E S T A D I O A Z T E C A , T H E O N LY S T A D I U M T O H O S T T W O W O R L D C U P F I N A L S
VOLCANOES, AGAVE, AND BIKE-SHARING HIGH DESIGN IN MEXICO CITY Check out a pyramid to the Aztec wind god in the middle of the bustling Pino Suárez metro station, where workers found it during construction. Take in the megacity view from the iconic Torre Latino. Skip the roof and get a drink at the bar three stories down. Marvel at the lack of irony accompanying telecom billionaire Carlos Slim’s collection of antique money at the Museo Soumaya. DO
THE MUSEO SOUMAYA’S NEW BUILDING OPENED IN 2011. AMONG ITS 66,000 HISTORICAL OBJECTS AND MEXICAN ARTWORKS IS A COLLECTION OF 2,300 SPOONS.
WITH NOTORIOUS AIR POLLUTION, legendary traffic, frequent earthquakes, and
a population approaching 25 million, how does the Western Hemisphere’s largest metropolis stay livable? Good design. From October 15 to 19, Mexico City hosts the sixth annual Design Week Mexico, showcasing artists who work to bring this megacity down to a human scale. And innovative ideas are popping up all over the Distrito Federal. Architect Andres Meira, for example, is at work on a domestic earthquake alarm that will warn residents before the shaking starts. And the Uber-like startup Yaxi enables anyone with a smartphone to hail a safe cab—no Spanish-speaking required. —Lizzie Wade
Celebrate Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, on his feast day, October 28, at San Hipólito Church in the heart of downtown. Explore the city on two wheels
during the weekly Sunday bike ride, when 30 miles of busy streets are closed to cars. Visit the sustainable development exhibit at the Museo Interactivo de Economía to learn how Mexico City is staving off environmental apocalypse. EAT
Enjoy the country’s burgeoning craft beer scene at Crisanta. (Try the chocolaty house porter.) Acquire a taste for the pre-Columbian drink pulque (fermented agave sap) at La Pirata. Stop at El Califa, open till 4 am, for Mexico City’s trademark dish: late-night tacos al pastor, filled with spiced pork and topped with a slice of pineapple.
Jorge Dávalos
“The Plaza de las Tres Culturas captures some of Mexico City’s darkest moments: the Spanish conquest, the 1968 student massacre, the 1985 earthquake. But despite all that, it’s still there. It’s still alive.” —Isaac Torres, visual artist, urban planner, and Mexico City native
ILLUSTRATION BY JUSTIN MEZZEL
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by Kate Greene
POWER SYSTEM
Solar panels supply power and charge the batteries for the habitat. If juice levels fall below 5 percent, a hydrogen fuel cell kicks in.
BEDROOMS WORKSHOP & AIRLOCK
“Q” BY CARL DETORRES; PLANS COURTESY OF BLUE PLANET RESEARCH
Crew can use the 3-D printer to make hair clips, replacement parts, and anything else they forgot back on Earth. This area is also the door to the surface; they simulate depressurization and pressurization before and after sorties.
Six pie-slice-shaped staterooms each contain a mattress, a desk, and a stool. Clothing goes under the bed, which sits at the wide side of the slice. Cozy like a closet.
COMPOSTING TOILETS
Repurposed poop (sans pathogens) from one mission might be plant food for the next one.
DOME SWEET DOME
I’d always wanted to visit Mars. Instead I got Hawaii. There, about 8,200 feet above sea level on Mauna Loa, sits a geodesically domed habitat for testing crew psychology and technologies for boldly going. I did a four-month tour at the NASA-funded HI-SEAS—that’s Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation—in 2013, and a new 8-month mission is scheduled to start in October. It’s a long time to be cooped up, “so the psychological impacts are extremely important,” habitat designer Vincent Paul Ponthieux says. The key to keeping everybody sane? A sense of airiness. Yep—even on Mars, you’re going to need more space.
WORKOUT AREA
Everyone exercises in shifts, often to videos like P90X and Insanity. Other workouts: juggling and balloon volleyball.
COMMUNICATIONS
Mars is up to 24 minutes away as the photon flies, so crews have NASA-issued email addresses with an artificial delay and access to a web made of cached, nondynamic pages.
HIGH CEILINGS
The 36-foot-diameter dome has a living area of about 1,000 square feet, and the second level is a loftlike partial floor. To long-term inhabitants, these spaces appear to shrink over time, so high ceilings are crucial.
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by tiffany kelly
jeff m inton
oct 2014
Are you really saying that people should handle their loved ones’ bodies? Can we do that? Most people think dead bodies are dangerous or that they’re required to hire a funeral director to prepare a body. I’m a licensed mortician, but I want to teach people that they don’t need me. If you’re keeping the body at home, you could put dry ice around it and that would last for a couple of days without any problems. You usually only need to hire a professional for a cremation or cemetery burial.
But … why would I want that? We don’t see dead bodies anymore. You have to talk about death when you have dead people laid out in your living room on a monthly basis or if you take care of bodies yourself. But when a group of professionals comes in and takes the body away and then basically sells the body back to you a couple of days later, nobody has any proof that we’re going to die. It’s become this taboo, pathological, hidden thing.
Pristine, embalmed corpses don’t help us embrace death, do they?
has been cutting pacemakers out of corpses, grinding human bones by hand, and loading bodies into cremation chambers for seven years. But the 30-year-old mortician doesn’t want to keep all the fun to herself: She thinks the rest of us should get to have a little more face time with the deceased. In her new book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (that’s a cremation joke), Doughty argues for more acceptance of death in our culture—and tries to spark a wave of amateur undertaking. CAITLIN DOUGHTY
What do you want to happen to your body after you die? I want a natural burial. Just straight into the ground in a shroud. But that’s because what’s not legal yet is having your body laid above ground for animals to consume it. That’s what I really want. I would love to be eaten by animals, because I eat animals and I’m an animal, and when I die they get to eat me. That seems only fair.
HAIR AND MAKEUP BY NICOLE DEL RIO
DEAD SIMPLE A MORTICIAN SHARES HER UNDERTAKING
A chemically preserved body looks like a wax replica of a person. Bodies are supposed to be drooping and turning very pale and sinking in while decomposing. Within a day or so after they’ve died, you should be able to see that this person has very much left the building. That’s the point. I think dead bodies should look dead. It helps with the grieving process.
076
by julia greenberg
Brendan James
oct 2014
WHAT’S INSIDE GLOW STICKS HYDROGEN PEROXIDE
BUTYL BENZOATE
In bleaches and disinfectants, this strong oxidizer rips apart molecules to whiten or clean. Here it’s sealed in a glass capsule that cracks open when you bend the plastic stick. Once it’s unleashed, H2O2 triggers a chemical chain reaction that puts the glow in the stick.
This supersolvent is also used as a preservative in cosmetics. Here it keeps the colors and oxalate esters flowing and spread throughout the outer tube, so when it’s time to crack the inner capsule, your glowie is as rave-ready as you are.
OXALATE ESTERS
The hydrogen peroxide reacts with these molecules in the outer tube to form a highly unstable compound that quickly breaks down into CO2 , releasing energy that excites the dyes and produces light. Scientists developed this process in the early 1960s; American Cyanamid trademarked its version as Cyalume.
FlashingBlinkyLights Glow Sticks
DIMETHYL PHTHALATE
Best known for keeping plastics and rubbers pliable, this oily liquid also helps stabilize unstable chemicals like hydrogen peroxide. Making up nearly 90 percent of the inner capsule, DMP dilutes and preserves the peroxide, extending your glow stick’s shelf life all the way to next Halloween. Some companies have cut the phthalates, citing concerns that they could affect reproductive growth.
FLUORESCENT DYES: ANTHRACENE DERIVATIVES, LUMOGEN RED 300
These dyes absorb and release energy produced by the hydrogen peroxide reaction, emitting a photon in the process—chemiluminescence! Some manufacturers add salts, like sodium salicylate, to speed things up and intensify the glow. Most of the dyes used here have a base structure of three fused benzene rings. It’s what hangs off those rings that determines what color is produced: One anthracene variant shines that iconic ghostly green; another glows blue. Add Lumogen Red 300 to anthracene blue to get purple; tweak the ratios to get pink. These dyes can irritate eyes, skin, and the respiratory system, but at the levels here, researchers say, kids could swallow this stuff (they have) without harm. Hey, it can’t be any worse for you than ecstasy.
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jack hughes
by Robert Capps
BIG AIR THE ATHLETE TEST
2,600
1 second The start of the jump. 2,400
1.2 seconds On the downward motion of the jump, the amount of pressure initially drops because the athlete is in free fall.
2,200
2,000
1.6 seconds The athlete is starting to put power into the ground. How much depends on the ankle, knee, and quadriceps. This is the loading phase. Bad loading = a need to strengthen the lower joints.
1,800
1,600
1,400
force (newtons)
When the NBA season tips off this month, the Cleveland Cavaliers will have more than just LeBron in their arsenal. They’ll also have a new way to assess and train players, all based on a simple test: the vertical leap. ¶ What can you tell from a jump? Quite a bit, according to Sparta Performance Science, the Menlo Park, California, athletics-lab-meetssoftware-startup that developed the tech. The single best measure of raw performance, it turns out, is how much force an athlete can put into the ground—it determines everything from sprinting ability to the velocity of a pitcher’s fastball. ¶ So Sparta developed an analytics system based on making subjects jump on a force-detecting plate. Proprietary software records and analyzes the jump microsecond by microsecond. When crunched, this data shows where athletes are weak and where they’re strong. “It’s changed how I look at exercise, because we can now customize workouts for each individual,” says Andrea Hudy, assistant athletics director for sports performance at the University of Kansas, which licenses the software for use in basketball and other sports. ¶ In addition to the Jayhawks and Cavaliers, baseball’s Colorado Rockies, the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, and the University of Notre Dame all use the system. “We’re now used in every major American sport,” says Sparta founder Phil Wagner. And things are, presumably, only looking up.
oct 2014
1,200
1.8 seconds The athlete has reached the bottom of the jump and is changing direction, starting to move upward. Whether he maintains or loses power here depends on his core. Those who show little or no dip are capable of quick changes of direction, which is why this is called the explode phase. This particular athlete loses a fair amount of force, which may put him at risk for a back injury. Prescription: core exercises.
1,000
800
1.8 to 2 seconds In the drive phase, the athlete builds a significant amount of force as he pushes upward with the glutes and hamstrings. This suggests he’ll be a fast straight-line runner, something you want in a wide receiver, 100meter sprinter, or (as is the case here) center fielder.
2.1 seconds Athlete leaves the ground.
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Chris Philpot
1. Choose the right town. Pick either a hard-partying city (San Francisco’s Halloween enthusiasm is legendary) or the exact opposite— industry lore holds that candy sales are high in areas where alcohol consumption is low. That makes Salt Lake City, land of teetotaling Mormons, a potential boon.
oct 2014
I WANT CANDY TRICKS FOR MAX TREATS
YOUR KIDS MAY BE CONTENT with a few fun-size Snickers and tiny
boxes of Nerds, but if you’re looking for quality candy and lots of it, you need a PhD-level strategy. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered—we talked to a bunch of academics* to create this greedis-good guide to landing more loot. —Katie Arnold-Ratliff
2. Target the perennially festive. During the year, watch for blocks teeming with Christmas wreaths and Fourth of July cookouts: They’ll be kind to trick-or-treaters too.
3. Run the numbers. Population density, street interconnectivity (cul-desacs waste time), and higher average incomes yield the best haul.
4. Rely on shame. Knock on doors that are visible from the street. Aware that their neighbors can see them, residents are less likely to ignore the bell.
5. Capitalize on pity. Research shows that empathy inspires generosity, so incorporate an injury into your child’s costume—one-legged Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon, say—or, if you’re diabolical, compel your kid to fake something.
6. Share the wealth. Use social media to share information with fellow candy hounds about successful routes, which houses are running low, and who’s giving out the good stuff. You’ll never collect a box of raisins again.
*Our Halloween Optimization Panel: Amy Hillier, assistant professor of city and regional planning, University of Pennsylvania // Shamus Khan, associate professor of sociology, Columbia University // Beth Kimmerle, candy historian // Robb Willer, associate professor of sociology, Stanford University
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084
by jonathon keats
oct 2014
CHARTGEIST Amazon Smartphone Features
Sources of Nintendo Profits, 1889–2014 Assorted traditional playing cards
Cuttingedge gaming devices
Anything with Pikachu
TECHNICAL SOPHISTICATION
Who’s Looking Forward to the Fifty Shades of Grey Movie Jaded hedonists looking for ideas
Masochists looking for two hours of torture Stay-athome moms looking for thrills
DEPRAVITY
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JIRI BRUTHANS
once were human-animal “legend people,” until an angry coyote god turned them into rock. This is probably not how it actually happened, but scientists haven’t been able to add much more than to say “it’s a weathering thing.” So geoscientist Jiří Bruthans and his colleagues at Charles University in Prague tried mimicking the process in miniature: They took 4- by 12-inch blocks of “locked sand”—a material that’s between loose sand and sandstone— and crammed decades of erosion into weeks or months by simulating rain and intensive salt weathering. What Bruthans discovered is a sort of geological beauty trick in which the key factor is weight. The massive load of rock, which he approximates by squeezing his blocks with clamps, actually stabilizes the structures: The stress locks the grains of sand into place. It’s an elegant explanation and one that befits the sculptural formations. If Bruthans ever gets tired of geoscience, he can always sell his experiments as modern art.
UTILITY
PROFITS
AS THE STORY GOES, the iconic spires in Utah’s Bryce Canyon National Park
Stuff that makes it run faster
Stuff that sells you Amazon products
NUMBER OF PEOPLE
UNDER PRESSURE THE BEAUTY SECRETS OF SANDSTONE
Jiří Bruthans created this pillar with simulated salt weathering; in nature (like at Bryce Canyon, below), factors like frost and rain also shape the landscape.
NUMBER OF FEATURES
Stuff that makes it look pretty
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086
by Jon Mooallem
[email protected]
Christoph Niemann
MR. KNOW-IT-ALL YOUNG BLOOD, TECH SWAG I read that mice injected with blood from younger mice improve on cognitive tests. Should I bank my blood? I went and read about this too. I read that for years scientists have been taking an old mouse and a young mouse, putting them next to each other, and stitching their circulatory systems together, just like jump-starting a car. Then they let the blood of one mouse circulate through the other—a process called parabiosis.
SO YEAH,
And introducing the young mouse’s blood—or even just introducing one particular protein found in the blood, called GDF11—to an old mouse does all sorts of wonderful stuff: It allows the old mouse to run longer on a treadmill. It changes the old mouse’s brain in ways that suggests its memory has been improved. I read that it even rejuvenates a crusty old-mouse heart. Like, voilà! The heart isn’t crusty anymore. I also read that a Harvard scientist named Amy Wagers was “already working to commercialize” GDF11, which is found in human blood too. And this was the eye-opener for me: Even
oct 2014
as scientists are always cautioning the media that it’s way to soon to speculate about their studies’ implications, one of these scientists—the one named Wagers, aptly—was already placing her bet. Good for her, I say. I’m all for capitalism! But I’m also all for hematological self-determination. (Or, say, blood freedom.) I’d hate, one day, to have to pay some multinational corporation for a synthetic knockoff of my own younger self’s blood—the very stuff that was pumping through my body for decades without costing me a damn cent. What a dystopia that would be! There’d be kids on the corner with clipboards, asking for donations so Americans for Hematological Self-Determination could sue these corporations. There’d be Blood Freedom teach-ins and Blood Freedom protest songs—which would be hard because “Blood Freedom” really doesn’t rhyme with much. So my answer is yes, absolutely. Stockpile your blood now, as much as can be squirreled away at the proper temperature. Just in case. Think of it as a tiny hedge against the Wagers of the future.
I get a lot of swag from startups—messenger bags, fleeces, hats, T-shirts—and my girlfriend makes fun of me for wearing it. Which is the douchiest to wear? Like, is a fleece cooler than a hat? Look, I don’t care what you wear, but I do think that a startup fleece is definitely not cooler than a startup hat, because a startup fleece puts the name and logo of the startup in closer proximity to your heart than a startup hat would. My instinct is, keep this stuff away from your heart. Far away. The closer to your heart, the douchier.
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by Scott Dadich BRYAN EDWARDS 0
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YOU WAKE UP in the morning and you reach for … something. Your water or your smartphone,
your glasses or an activity tracker—anything. As different as those products are, all have one thing in common: Someone designed them, worrying over details that range from wood grain to user interface. These encounters play out over and over again as your day progresses, from your commute to the office to that sacred moment when you finally jettison your shoes and turn off the workday. Here, in an excerpt from our special Design|Life issue on newsstands now, we plan out an idealized day in the life of a family with unimpeachable taste. It begins with a beautiful morning when you reach for … something.
Hey, sleepyhead. These dreamy products will make your early mornings a lot less challenging. BY KATIE M. PALMER
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1 | Lexon Mezzo Radio The speaker grille and analog knobs are cutely retro, but this radio’s rubberized exterior signals a decidedly modern sense of style. It references the past without dipping into sappy nostalgia. Can’t say the same about the Prairie Home Companion coming out of the speaker … | $75
2 | Withings Aura Smart Sleep System The Aura rethinks sleep-tracking from the bottom up. A pad beneath your sheet measures your heart rate, breathing, and body movements. The bedside unit detects environmental changes and uses its LED and sound system to gently wake you. | $299
3 | Yellow Submarino Organizer Your toiletries will want to sail across the universe—or at least the sink—in this yellow submarine. Four magnetically attached compartments hold the essentials. Made of hefty porcelain, it’s finished with a pop of yellow rubberized paint, so it’s both vibrant and easy to clean. | $70
4 | Bison + Max Sprecher Signature Straight Razor It’s too pricey for your travel kit but makes a priceless home groomer. The carbon-steel blade will last decades, and the carbon-fiber handle won’t give out before the blade does. It’s a choice heirloom. Just make sure your kid doesn’t turn into Sweeney Todd. | $895
5 | Manual Coffeemaker No.1 If you scoff at K-Cups— and you can spare a few extra minutes for a truly worthwhile mug of joe—this pour-over stand does justice to your single-source beans. Double-walled glass keeps the water temperature stable while your precious coffee brews. | $80
Commuting is less painful when you’ve got the proper gear. This stuff will tame the meanest streets. BY SHIRLEY LI
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1 | The North Face Fuse Uno Jacket It’s all in the name: This North Face mountaineering jacket uses just one sheet of material (hence “uno”) by changing the fabric type while weaving. The origami-like pattern reduces seams by more than 40 percent—making the jacket lighter and more durable. | $399
2 | Cylo One Designed and manufactured in Portland, Oregon, the Cylo One tackles some common cycling woes: The bike’s frame includes integrated lights so you’ll never worry about losing them, and its fenders, disc brakes, and carbon belt drive perform like champs in the rain. | $1,900 and up
3 | Paul Cocksedge Studio Double O Bike Lights Regular bicycle lights pack bulbs densely together, resulting in an eye-hurty glare. These clip-ons from British designer Paul Cocksedge keep you visible, yet their 12 LEDs are comfortably spread out. Your fellow commuters will thank you. | $75
4 | Logitech Case+ Logitech’s new iPhone case doesn’t just protect your fifth appendage. There’s a magnetic plate on the back of the standard-size case, and a set of included components snap on and off to suit any situation. Add a windshield mount (shown), battery pack, card wallet, or folding stand for watching videos. | $200
5 | Tylt Energi 5K+ When your gizmos are running low on juice, Tylt’s slim battery pack can provide a second life. Its pair of built-in cables—one Lightning plug for your iOS devices and one micro-USB plug for Android phones, fitness bands, and e-readers—will juice up whatever mobile gear you’ve got. | $90
CYLO ONE: CYLO; DOUBLE O BIKE LIGHTS: MARK COCKSEDGE
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RALPH LAUREN Pink Pony
“When someone we love has cancer, we are all affected–husbands, wives, mothers and fathers, sisters, brothers and friends. Pink Pony is the symbol of our effort MRXLIÁKLXEKEMRWXGERGIV³XSQEOIEHMJJIVIRGI all around the world.” Ralph Lauren
THE PINK PONY CAMPAIGN IS RALPH LAUREN CORPORATION’S INITIATIVE IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CANCER. TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT OF THE PURCHASE PRICE OF PINK PONY PRODUCTS IN THE US BENEFITS THE PINK PONY FUND OF THE POLO RALPH LAUREN FOUNDATION. TO LEARN MORE, PLEASE VISIT
RALPHLAUREN.COM/PINKPONY
WORK
Sell your soul to the company, but keep your sense of style. BY LIZ STINSON
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1 | Blu Dot Stash Desk This is a desk for thoughtful concentration, not digital distractions. A single drawer hides the tools you need but don’t always want to look at. Blu Dot calls it a pencil drawer, but it works just as well for a phone, sunglasses, or charging cables. You can choose whether it’s placed on the left or right side. | $399
2 | Adobe Ink and Slide Adobe’s foray into hardware has produced two slick tools for the iPad: Ink, a cloudconnected stylus, and Slide, a high tech ruler (not shown). Both work with the company’s Creative Cloud suite of applications to make perfect shapes. Even if you’re not an architect, you can now draw like one. | $200
3 | Kujira Whale Knife Japanese blacksmith Toru Yamashita originally created his handforged whale knife as a children’s tool to sharpen pencils. And while this grownup version certainly looks adorable, beware the blade: It’s sharp enough to slice through the most stubborn of envelopes. Or fingers. | $55
4 | Uni Promark View Highlighter The problem: You colored outside the lines. Again. The solution: these clever highlighter pens. Each one has a little window near the tip that you can peek through to see exactly what you’re highlighting before you mark it. You get five bright colors in a pack. | $12
5 | Microsoft Surface Pro 3 With Type Cover Redmond finally gets it right with the Surface Pro 3. The 12-inch display awakens with the click of a stylus, which you can then use to write directly on the touchscreen. The kickstand on the back will adjust to sit at almost any angle, and the keyboard even boasts two typing positions. | $929
STASH DESK: BLU DOT
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Take the work out of your workout by choosing some great gym buddies. 0
BY CORY PERKINS
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1 | Sonos Play:1 The latest addition to Sonos’ line of wireless speakers may be just 6.3 inches tall, but the Play:1’s two custom drivers still pump out plenty of hi-fi sound. Stick it in the corner, cue up your favorite chill-out Spotify playlist, and forget about that horrible techno you endured at spin class. | $199
2 | Nike Free 3.0 Flyknit Shoes Nike employs strands of superstrong polyester yarn to make this running shoe ultralight and to reduce material waste in manufacturing. Couple that with the sole’s hexagonal grooves, which bend with your natural stride, and you’re in for a feel-good run. | $140
3 | Handsome Dan Leather Head Medicine Ball These 12-pound handmade medicine balls from Leather Head are stuffed with hide scraps left over from manufacturing other products. They’re so soft that you may even want to hold on to one while grunting through just a few more sit-ups. | $325
4 | Steeletex Gym Bag Your running shoes and sweaty gym clothes require the ultimate in postworkout protection. Steele Canvas Basket also makes bags that are used in armored cars—a perfect match! This duffel is waterresistant all around and antibacterial on the bottom—supertough, just like you. | $110
5 | TomTom Runner Cardio Watch TomTom combines everything you need to optimize your runs in one watch. With both a heart rate sensor and GPS, you can make sure you’re staying in the zone while you pace out the miles. Afterward, sync your run data to popular tracking apps like Strava. | $270
SONOS PLAY:1: SONOS
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When the workweek is done, be prepared to maximize your playtime. BY BRYAN LUFKIN
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1 | Beyerdynamic T 1 These aren’t just any old headphones. They’re German-made high-fidelity pleasure factories for your ears. Superlight neodymium magnets make for more efficient drivers, so they deliver more clarity, more nuance, and above all more volume than your ho-hum cans. Commence headbanging. | $1,399
2 | Schiit Valhalla 2 Headphone Amp The first thing you learn about fancy headphones: A solid amp is definitely required. It’s hard to find one more solid—or more beautiful—than this. It’s stacked with some of the best capacitors, resistors, and vacuum tubes on the market. | $349
3 | Melissa & Doug Standard Unit Building Blocks Your kid’s not going to be the next Andre Agassi, but they could be the next Alvar Aalto. Start training those brain muscles now with this collection of 60 hardwood building blocks in a variety of shapes, from basic cubes to arches and columns. | $70
4 | Pop Chart Lab’s Giant-Size Omnibus of Superpowers If Carl Linnaeus had been an X-Men fan, this 2- x 3-foot poster would have hung in his bedroom. It maps the superpowers of 600 heroes and villains, including many of the strongmen, telepaths, and human fireballs from Marvel, DC, and indie publishers. | $35
5 | Leica T With a 16.3-megapixel sensor, two customizable control dials, and the ability to mount any of Leica’s exemplary T- and M-system lenses, this shooter captures images as sharp and beautiful as its own silhouette. Even the accessories are smart; the strap simply snaps into the camera’s aluminum shell. | $1,850
Relaxing is easy when you’re surrounded by well-designed objects. Kick back and spend some downtime with these beautiful tension-releasers. BY PRANAV DIXIT
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1 | Sharp Aquos Q+ TV There’s not a lot of 4K content out there just yet. But with the Aquos Q+ series, you’ll be ready for it when it arrives. Packed with 10 million more subpixels than 1080p, this UltraHD set will upscale existing 1080p images to make them look almost as good as the next-gen standard. | $1,900 and up
2 | Spiegelau Stout Glasses Sure, you could sip your stout from a regular glass. You could also gulp down a Château Margaux straight from a crusty old boot. These glasses from Left Hand Brewing Company and Rogue Ales accentuate the roasted malts of any dark brew while preserving its frothy head. | $25 for two
3 | Amazon Fire TV + Controller Having access to over 200,000 movies and TV episodes and 100-plus games is nice. Finding what you want by talking to your remote is amazing. Tell the Fire TV clicker the name of what you’re craving—a movie, an actor, a game—and it loads right up. | $99; $40 for the game controller
4 | Normann Copenhagen Swell Sofa A word of warning: If you have plans that don’t involve lounging around idly for hours, avoid the Swell. The sofa gets its name from a loaf of rising bread, and once you sink into its doughy embrace, you won’t be leaving (or leavening) anytime soon. | $3,850
5 | Harman Kardon Aura Wireless Speaker It looks like the Jony Ive–designed subwoofer that comes with the Harman Kardon SoundSticks, but the wireless Aura speaker spits out more than just low frequencies. Its six 1.5-inch drivers and 4.5-inch subwoofer fill your room with the full spectrum of sound. | $400
SHARP AQUOS Q+ TV: SHARP; SWELL SOFA 3 SEATER: NORMANN COPENHAGEN
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FEATURES | 22.10
10 Lessons for a New Era of Design 104 | Wrong Theory 126 | The Facebook Experiment 134 | Outsmarting Video Poker 138
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The Rise of Silicon Modern BY CLIFF KUANG
Charles and Ray Eames began chasing a radical vision: mass-produced plywood furniture that curved like a flowing sand dune. In an extra bedroom, the husband-andwife team rigged up a system to bind together thin layers of wood veneer, which they’d stack into a curvy mold studded with clamps. But the glue required hours to set, making the process unworkable. ¶ And then a friend who knew of the Eameses’ experiments told them about a problem facing injured GIs: Their metal splints didn’t fit well, causing them to crack. So the Eameses pitched the idea of a curvy wooden splint to the Navy and won a contract. The deal gave them access to top-secret materials, including a new fastdrying glue. The splints were a success, and when the Army declassified the glue after the war ended, the Eameses finally had what they needed. Their LCW and DCW—Lounge Chair Wood and Dining Chair Wood—became instant classics, heralding the start of what people now refer to as midcentury modern. ¶ In fact, many of the signature products of that school were made possible by a postwar technological bounty. When the Eameses wanted to make fiberglass chairs, they scrounged their prototype materials from military surplus stores and contracted with a manufacturer that had been making radar domes. Designers George Nelson and Harry Bertoia adapted once-obscure manufacturing techniques to create, respectively, their Swag Leg table and Diamond Chair. The conditions that allowed midcentury modern to flourish arose from surplus tech innovations that took on new life in a designer’s hands. ¶ We’re living in an eerily similar time. Thanks to 40 years of increasingly cheap and tiny processors, new software, cheap sensors, and digital manufacturing, people can build products that would have seemed impossible a decade ago. The iPod—arguably the Eames chair of this new era—became feasible only when Apple’s head of hardware engineering, Jon Rubinstein, found a hard drive so tiny and capacious that its own inventors didn’t know what to do with it. Sensor technology created to track cattle and nuclear materials now enhance experiences like Disney World, where new MagicBands guide wearers through the park. Joris Laarman let algorithms make crucial design decisions for his 3-D-printed chair (right). It is, in fact, another golden age: the era of Silicon Modern. ¶ This new age will only get more exciting. When technical wizardry becomes commonplace, design becomes a competitive advantage. Yet design is so easy to copy that designers must constantly improve upon their work. The result is a fevered pace of innovation. As companies compete to retain their edge, they create a virtuous circle that produces better and better products. ¶ In the following pages, we’ve collected 10 great exemplars of the current movement. They encompass big ideas, inspiring projects, and new forms of expression. Silicon Modern is here, and it’s only going to get better. IN 1941,
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3-D-Printed Chair The cells in Joris Laarman’s chair can be packed closer together or farther apart depending on where they fall in the 3-D-printed structure. His cellular approach to design upends traditional production, which relies on assembling premade parts. “You can introduce all these different variables, and your machine can do that in one go,” Laarman says.
ERIK A ND P ETRA H E S M E R G
WIRED
Electronics Panel on handlebar stem gives access to wires and cables.
Titanium Frame 3-D-printed and welded titanium provides an optimal mix of strength, stiffness, and light weight.
Navigation App Discover My City app is designed for both iOS and Android.
Carbon Belt Drive Quiet, smooth, clean, and almost maintenance-free.
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A Bike With Buzz Haptic Feedback Handlebars vibrate to tell you when to turn. S OME RULES of the road never change, whether you’re on a bike or in your car. Like: Don’t use your phone. But what if you’re lost and need directions? The Solid bike was created with just such a situation in mind. Developed by a Portland, Oregon, design shop called Industry and bike builders Ti Cycles, the 24-pound titanium prototype harbors high tech guts—it connects to a phone via Bluetooth and uses haptic feedback to provide turnby-turn directions. As you near, say, a right turn, the right handgrip vibrates. Go too far and both sides buzz. The point, says Industry cofounder Oved Valadez, is to put your phone away and enjoy the ride. “We wanted to empower people to look up,” he says, “to have the bike guide you.” Now it needs to learn how to fix its own flats. —Liz Stinson
Electronic Shifters Change the gears at the touch of a button.
LOGO BY JAY FLETCHER
Dynamo Generator in front hub produces energy for onboard electronics.
LESSON
A DA M VO O RH ES
UNITE THE D I G I TA L A N D T H E P H YS I CA L
WIRED
The Redesign of Airbnb to be worth some $10 billion just by making it dead easy to share a stranger’s house. The company got to 11 digits because it does that job elegantly—as you’d expect from a service built by two designers and an engineer. But to keep growing, Airbnb has to become even more appealing. To that end, the founders recently unveiled a dramatic redesign of their app, site, and even their logo— which reminded some wags of a certain female body part. Katie Dill, the company’s head of experience design, is ready to explain all those changes. —Cliff Kuang
AIRBNB DIDN’T COME
The photos on the site used to be of amazing apartments. Now they’re homey vignettes: people shopping, playing guitar. Why the shift? That experience—of being home wherever you are—is unique to Airbnb. So the product has to be about experiences, not just properties. When you think about taking a trip, you might think about the trees you saw or the sounds of a café or the vines in the wind at a winery. We want to evoke that with imagery.
How do details like that tie to Airbnb’s broader goals? When a guest and host interact with each other through the app,
they have to feel like they are part of the same thing. Design consistency gives you that peace of mind and the sense that this is a stable place to build a relationship. Whenever an app is buggy, the grid doesn’t line up, or the type treatment is off, you start to question a company and wonder where else they’re slipping. What about my money? Are they going to protect me? You can fix that by caring about the details.
So what new products lie in Airbnb’s future? One day Airbnb will be able to have an impact on all aspects of a trip—we want to help you find interesting things to see and better ways to remember them. To do that,
LESSON
B U I L D A J O UR N E Y— N OT J U ST A D E ST I N AT I O N
we have to think about every step of the experience. But as I’ve found in my career, few organizations make that effort, because teams are siloed. Users can sense that disconnect. Our aim is to create flow from one point to the next. For example, we’ve found that every trip has hero moments—the best parts of the journey, whether it’s a meal you had or a street you walked. We want to use those moments to help you craft a story. So we now have a place on the site, create.Airbnb .com, where travelers can log their memories and share them. We’ll see if that makes sense to incorporate as a core part of the listings.
But eventually users go offline and talk face-to-face. How does Airbnb foster positive interactions? With the right cues— for both the host and the guest. I can’t talk about everything we’re working on, but part of it is host training. We’ve revamped reviews to offer more relevant pieces of information to hosts, such as private feedback
about their guest’s stay. We also do simultaneous reviews—you can’t see your reviews unless you give one yourself. That’s a powerful tool that reinforces the community’s values. And we’re looking at ways we can better inform users—for example, with search results in our app geared to your location.
What did you think when people said the new logo looked kind of … personal?
The number of Airbnb guests has skyrocketed. 10M 8M 6M 4M 2M
2010 *As of September
2012
2014*
My favorite response on Twitter was something like “If you see that in the mirror, you should see a doctor.” This is a symbol that communicates several things—belonging, a sense of place—and it’s simple enough to draw in the sand with your toe. That’s amazing! People have fun writing about the negative things, but the positives are what will make it live on.
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NONCOMISSIONED OR SECONDARY CREDIT TK
powered knees! Cheetah blades! Today’s prosthetic limbs are tricked out. But it’s not fancy gadgetry that makes a prosthesis great—it’s the socket. Traditional sockets are hard shells customtailored to fit a stump, but a leg’s volume can fluctuate more than 10 percent over months of wear, making walking uncomfortable. The Infinite Socket from LIM Innovations looks to fix that problem by replacing the hard shell with an adjustable endoskeleton. ¶ Using 3-D scans of a user’s leg and stump, an engineer designs curved carbon-fiber struts and shapes them with a CNC router. Personalization is easy: If the struts aren’t perfect the first time around, fitters can heat and reshape the special acrylic-based carbon fiber. Plus, exterior straps can loosen or tighten the whole structure. At last, nextgeneration bionics have a socket to stand on. —Kyle VanHemert
MI CROPRO CESS OR-
Personalizing Prosthetics
Ratcheting Buckles A working design borrows from snowboarding boots: Small ladder-ratchet buckles encircle the struts, so users can adjust the fit with one hand.
Soft Seat A height-adjustable saddle near the top of the rear of the prosthetic relieves some of the pressure from the end of the stump.
WIRED
LE SSON
Comfort Padding Wearers say they can walk all day, thanks in part to washable cushioning throughout the socket.
Carbon-Fiber Struts Struts molded precisely to the contours of the wearer’s leg give structure, and simple mods cut adjustment times from weeks to just a day.
NONCOMISSIONED ILLUSTRATION BY BROWN OR SECONDARY BIRD DESIGN CREDIT TK
ADAM VOORHE S
CUSTOM I ZAT I O N F OR E V ERYO N E
BRYAN CHRISTIE D E S IGN
Custom-Molded Cup The cup that cradles the wearer’s stump is a proprietary blend of thermoplastic materials; a vacuum seal suctions the limb into place, and the endoskeleton fits around the cup.
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A Fast Read CA R L C R O S S G R OV E
has created a masterpiece—but he doesn’t want you to look at it. At least not for long. A senior designer at the famed type foundry Monotype, Crossgrove designed Burlingame (shown at right), a font that’s uber-clear at low resolutions and small sizes, so it’s legible with a split-second glance at a car dashboard display. And after 25 years studying type, Crossgrove had a hunch about the design specs that would work best. ¶ Type designers can account for all kinds of little tricks our eyes play on us as we read—for instance, the crossbar on a capital H will look centered only if it’s 2 to 3 percent higher than true center—but with Burlingame, Crossgrove had hard data to back up his ideas. In 2012, Monotype worked with MIT’s AgeLab and a transportation research center on a typeface legibility
test, which measured the “glance time” it took to recognize text on a simulated dash display. Several characteristics suggested faster reading: open spacing between letters, simple shapes, and large x-height (the height of the lowercase letters relative to capitals). ¶ This proved what Crossgrove suspected, and he’d already built a videogame display font with loose spacing and a big x-height that he’d never used. He resurrected the font and refined it for optimized digital performance with tweaks like a curved foot on the lowercase l (ell) to distinguish it from a capital I. Extrawide apertures, or mouths, on letters like c and e help distinguish them instantly. These subtle details have a huge impact on digital interfaces, but if they’re designed well, you’ll never give them a second glance. —Sara Breselor
New Looks, Classic Ideals
This fall brings new software to the two major smartphone camps. On Apple’s side, iOS 8 further refines the pared down, functional aesthetic Jony Ive rang in with iOS 7. At Google the similarly flat language of Material Design, shaped by Matías Duarte, will herald
Redwood City, Ca
1. Head northwest toward Brewster Ave 2. Turn Right onto Brewster Ave 3. Turn Left onto Veterans Blvd 4. Take the 2nd right toward US-101 N 5. Merge onto US-101 N via the ramp to 2. Turn Right onto Brewster Ave
VO U VOLUME
iOS 8
Material
an overhauled Google ecosystem. Both men have been hell-bent on positioning design as not just a look but a philosophy, with ideals inherited from the past 60 years of design thinking. Which makes sense: Even as designers get access to new technologies and tools, they’re trying to solve some of the same problems as their predecessors. So they come up with answers that are very similar. Want proof? Take a look at what the design stars of yesterday said about their work, next to the words of Ive and Duarte. —KYLE VANHEMERT
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P E RF O RM A N C E I S I N T H E D E TA I L S
Elegant Capitalism
venture firms won’t hand out wads of cash to just anyone. Increasingly they’re looking to bet on something special—a blend of aesthetics and seamless experience that can elude your typical tech bro. The result? A new kind of capitalist—the “venture designer”—who aims to infuse killer-app elegance into young businesses from birth. ¶ So, for example, ace creative consultancy Frog, the brains behind the new Microsoft Office design and FEMA’s community-driven disaster-recovery plans, hired Ethan Imboden to be its first head of venture design last December. One of his first moves was to focus a preschooler app from education startup Kidaptive on its adult customers, creating a way for parents to engage in their child’s progress. “I know we’re successful when a team walks away with a different understanding of their own business,” Imboden says. “That pays dividends beyond our work.” ¶ Now more and more traditional VCs are riding designer coattails. Former Google UX leader Irene Au joined Khosla Ventures in April; John Maeda, who turns arty types into entrepreneurs as design partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, was inspired to leave his post as president of the Rhode Island School of Design when he saw his students starting companies. It’s too early to say whether designers can boost their ventures to higher valuations. But for once, an art degree just might be the way to deep pockets. —Bo Moore
SILICON VALLEY
TYPEFAC E S WIT H PU RP O SE Burlingame responds to the unique demands of reading in a screen-based world, but it’s just the latest in a long line of typefaces designed for specialized use.
Roissy (1970): Charles de Gaulle Airport Signage Adrian Frutiger designed Roissy to harmonize with the airport’s architecture and be legible from any angle and distance. He turned it into a print typeface, Frutiger, which is still popular (it was refreshed in 2013).
Retina (2002): Wall Street Journal Stock Listings The width of Retina characters stays constant when they’re set in boldface, so when a stock price requires a bold listing (indicating a change of more than 5 percent), the column width and layout don’t change.
Bell Centennial (1978): AT&T Phone Books The cathode-ray typesetting machines once used to produce phone books worked by filling in pixels on a grid. Bell Centennial’s “ink traps,” strategically placed notches on the letterforms, helped prevent clogging.
Clearview (2004): US Highway Signs After 10 years of research, mixed-case letters began replacing all-cap styling for easier recognition. Plus, the shape of Clearview letters reduces halation—the blurry, haloed appearance of words on reflective signs.
PORTRAITS BY GETTY IMAGES
SIMPLICITY
Jony Ive
Paul Rand Famous for the IBM logo (1972). “I haven’t changed my mind about modernism … It means simplicity; it means clarity.”
DETAILS
“I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity, in clarity.”
Charles Eames Famous for the Eames Lounge (1956). “The details are not the details, they make the product.”
HUMILITY
“No detail is too small to bring a smile to your face.”
Dieter Rams Famous for Braun hardware (1960s). “Good design is unobtrusive ... [and] restrained, to leave room for the user’s selfexpression.”
EXPERIENCE
iOS 7 is “unobtrusive and deferential … It actually elevates your content.”
Bill Buxton Famous for the first multitouch tablet (1984). “It is ultimately experiences, not things, that we are designing.”
“Design is essential in today’s world. It defines your experiences.”
Matías Duarte
WIRED
Waterproofing Manhattan E VE N B E F O R E the floodwaters of 2012’s superstorm Sandy had retreated from the coastal cities of the Atlantic seaboard, residents and policymakers understood that this wouldn’t be the last time a changing climate threatened to submerge the region. They had to do something about it. That’s where Bjarke Ingels came in. He and his Danish design firm were among 148 teams competing to devise some waterproofing for the still damp coastline. Their plan, dubbed the Big U—one of six federally funded projects—will transform Lower Manhattan. It’s infrastructure with ambition and scope to rival the dreams of famed New York remodeler Robert Moses. But Ingels’ project doesn’t just protect against storm surges; it actually makes the city better. ¶ What’s going to change? On the Lower East Side, tens of thousands of old folks and people in low-cost housing— the least able to evacuate—will get better access to expanded riverside parks, which will slope up from the shore to provide up to 20 vertical feet of flood protection. On
Wall Street new shops and High Line–like plazas will nestle under the elevated FDR highway. And the disused spaces of Manhattan’s southern tip will blossom into a museum and public green. The team calls it social infrastructure. “Manhattan is really a child of industry and commerce, and the bulk of the mountain range that is its skyline is a product of that utilitarian approach,” Ingels says. “There’s the need to protect the city and an opportunity to intervene in a part of Manhattan that could be richer and more lively. We’re merely the midwives of an evolution.” Conversations with residents pushed Ingels’ group into designing “compartments” that work in ways appropriate to the neighborhood they’re protecting. ¶ It won’t come cheap. Construction on the first compartment, in the Lower East Side, will cost $335 million. (Though doing nothing would cost more: cleanup and recovery from Sandy in Manhattan alone has run well over $1 billion.) But the Big U might help New Yorkers worry a little less—and look forward to a city remade. —Adam Rogers
LESSON
B E AUT Y IS AS I M PORTANT AS UT ILIT Y
Battery In addition to new parks and berms, a museum will tell the story of the city— and feature an aquariumlike window into the harbor that will let visitors see the water level, from normal to Sandy to apocalypse.
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Lower East Side Previously, a highway separated the area from a poorly maintained park. Now LES residents will get new paths to the river as well as new parks, pools, and play spaces when they get there.
Chinatown Surge walls will drop down from overhead during storms.
Financial District Under the elevated FDR highway, new spaces will accommodate shops on the “dry side” and pop-up markets and galleries on the “wet side.”
B RYA N CH RIST IE D E S I G N
WIRED
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The Burberry Revolution sales at the Burberry fashion house were floundering. Together, CEO Angela Ahrendts and creative chief Christopher Bailey turned the company around, making Burberry an admired name in fashion and branching into China and the digital world with equal skill— which is probably why Apple poached Ahrendts last year to help build out its already formidable retail capabilities. Soon after, Burberry appointed Bailey its new CEO, an unusual track for a creative director. Here he talks about managing a design-driven business. —Scott Dadich A DECADE AGO
When I went from creative director to overall boss, I found that I had to juggle much more complex decisions. How has it been for you?
SOURCE: YAHOO
Remarkably smooth. Angela and I always worked in partnership, and our team is still here. I have always moved from one project to another, whether it be architecture, technology, or design. My new role just involves a broader audience— investors, analysts, and others. I took on this role because design and creativity are Burberry’s soul. That’s always been my approach.
Has your design vision changed as you’ve settled into the new role? It’s been a natural evolution, because design thinking is always at
J O E P U G LIESE
the heart of what we do. You either have the world as your canvas or you have a 1- by 1-inch screen. The important thing, regardless of format, is creating emotional reactions. Music, in particular, lets you do that very quickly. It can be exciting or melancholy—or it can drive you kind of crazy.
But people aren’t just experiencing your branding. They’re reacting to it on social media. We started as a retail organization, having one-on-one conversations with customers. Digital platforms allow us to do that again, while also revealing trends that are useful for new products. For example, we often use our website Art of the Trench for design inspiration. It lets us see a trench coat translated zillions of differ-
LESSON
ent ways. Sometimes people say, “Wish you would do this kind of a coat.”
M A NAG E F O R C RE AT I V IT Y
How would you characterize your personal design philosophy? The tech giants are moving into wearables, which suggests a convergence between fashion and technology. Do you see that?
My father was a carpenter, and my grandfather, an electrician, was a gadget fanatic who bought every new thing. They both shaped my worldview: quick-slow, quickslow. For example, the making of a trench coat is very slow, involving lots of handicraft. But I also love the speed of what we do online. I’m proud of that approach: Not everything should be quick; not everything should be slow.
Apple succeeds because of beautiful product design, but wearing a product rather than putting it in your bag means that it’s on show. It tells people about your character. Now, what happens if you put technology into fibers? What happens if you put chips into an accessory? We set up a group to puzzle through these issues— the What If Group.
Doesn’t new technology privilege the quick over the slow? I don’t see it as a problem. We’ve livestreamed a runway show, but it takes four to six months to get clothes into a store. So we developed Runway Made to Order, which will make you a piece in just six to eight weeks. That’s a nightmare to do, because it changes our entire supply chain. But it’s really important.
Burberry’s stock price has soared in recent years. $1,800 $1,400
But a trench coat might last a lifetime. Technology life cycles shorten every day. How do you reconcile that?
$1,000 $600
JAN 2004
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People will always want a physical experience. These create the stories we tell digitally, so there isn’t really a clear-cut division between those worlds. I like that.
WIRED
Really Magic Kingdom YO U R OW N Disney World memories likely summon the thrill of Space Mountain, the snow-globe-worthy Main Street—plus long lines, a jumbled wad of tickets, and the feeling of being just one more dollar sign in Mickey’s eye. Disney knows this, which is why it worked for years on a $1 billion technology platform that aims to deliver an easier, personalized park experience (see “Like Magic,” issue 21.09). Just 16 months after its first public trial, some 50 percent of Disney World’s visitors use its new MagicBand wearable device and the accompanying app to skip long lines, preorder food, and charge purchases to their Disney resort room. And it kind of feels … fun. “The things you want to do at the park all become the family’s mission,” says Tom Staggs, Disney’s chair of parks and resorts. “Being able to lock that mission in de-stresses your whole vacation.” Such a bespoke suite of experiences was once unimaginable in the Happiest Place on Earth. Now, tiny electronics and big data have made it possible. Here’s a look at the band, the experience, and the future. —Cliff Kuang
LESSON
Short-Range RFID An RFID chip lets resort guests swipe their bands to pay at any register in Disney World, access express lines, and unlock their hotel room. Readers throughout the park flash the wearer’s name so that employees can give personal greetings.
Long-Range Transceiver RFID is fine for conscious, opt-in transactions like unlocking a door, but it’s no use for being able to recognize how people move around attractions. That requires a long-range copper antenna. Sensors hidden in the Be My Guest restaurant and some rides can detect your presence from up to 40 feet away.
Battery and Processor The battery lasts for at least two years—but there’s no power button and no plug. How’s that work? The processor detects if the band leaves Disney World and puts itself to sleep. Once back in the park, it wakes up.
Design Disney wanted to simplify inventory and manufacturing, so every MagicBand fits almost any wrist, from linebackers to toddlers. How? A portion of the rubber band can tear away, leaving a smaller-diameter wristband.
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App Visitors can preselect three rides for which they can enter express lines. Taking into account ride availability and proximity, the app plots those choices into itinerary options. The app also offers updates on wait times for every ride. Entry Gates A problem with the old turnstiles was that everyone had to enter one by one—very slow. So Disney researched 26 different MagicBandenabled entrances, finally settling on V-shaped gates that allow visitors to walk side by side, speeding entry by as much as 25 percent.
V I R G I N AT L A N T I C H A S recently spent more than $5 million to redesign its economy cabin service. The goal: less work for flight attendants and a leaner, greener airline. Design firms MAP and Giraffe Innovation, along with Virgin’s own team, used 3-D modeling and rapid prototyping to rework everything down to the spoons, reducing each plane’s load by about 280 pounds. Across its fleet of 38 planes, those tweaks (and others in first class) make for an estimated savings of $15 million a year and a 2,600-ton cut in carbon emissions. We’ll expect the same from Virgin Galactic’s spacecrafts—if they ever launch. —Joseph Flaherty
Built-In Place Mat MAP tested more than 20 combinations of materials and textures to find the perfect rubbery coating for the surface of the tray. The result is fewer slips and spills—and no wasteful paper liner.
COURTESY OF DISNEY, TRAY ILLUSTRATION BY BROWN BIRD DESIGN
Restaurants Visitors can use the app to reserve a table and select a meal at Be Our Guest. When you (and your MagicBand) cross the bridge to the restaurant, a host greets you by name and the kitchen is alerted to prepare your food. Sensors in the tables let the servers know where you are.
A Top-Notch Teapot The widened spout cuts pouring time per cup to just over two seconds, and a new angle for the handle improves control over the faster flow.
Super-Light Cutlery Virgin replaced its drab utensils with mod purple ones. Reduced weight and updated materials ratchet down the carbon footprint. Rides New for fall: You can star in a Disney film. Sensors detect where you’re sitting on the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, and high-speed cameras capture your ride. The footage is stitched into a downloadable movie featuring the dwarves. It’s just 15 seconds long—perfect for Instagram. What’s Next The app might track and respond to negative experiences. The victim of a hellish wait might get an offer for free ice cream. Or if parts of Disney are crowded, visitors might get a chance to skip a line elsewhere, keeping them from feeling too grumpy.
Tinier Trays Designers shrank the serving tray by a third, squeezing more meals onto the heavy food carts so fewer are needed on board. Attendants deliver the main dishes from the trolley, then they serve ice cream from lightweight “usherette” trays.
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Hooked Edge Shrinking the tray meant the last one in the trolley might be out of reach, so the designers molded a hook into the edge of each one that queues up the next in line for the attendant.
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Nike Looms Large N I KE I S G R E AT AT applying the latest technology to shoes, but for the new Air Jordan XX9, the company looked to a 200-year-old weaving technique. To make its unibody upper, sneaker legend Tinker Hatfield and his team enlisted Avery Dennison, a niche manufacturer of clothing labels. Hatfield had created color-coded diagrams for the XX9’s complex 3-D surfaces; Avery Dennison had master weavers and Jacquard looms, able to interpret the diagrams into warp and weft. The resulting $225 kicks are more svelte and 8 percent lighter than the Air Jordan XX8—making them more comfortable but also easier to manufacture and better suited to street wear, which helps their crossover appeal. “That’s a sophisticated way to make a shoe,” Hatfield says. “It’s slimmer and sexier, since there’s only one layer.” All thanks to technology from the early 1800s. —LIZ STINSON
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Singular Design Traditional sneakers are usually made of many layers glued together. The Air Jordan XX9’s upper is fashioned from a single woven piece. By tuning the tightness of wefts— the threads running left to right in a weave—the designers could assign precise tensions to specific zones on the shoe, creating its curving topography.
Support Cable To stabilize the midfoot during a sprint or jump, the Jordan team wove a series of 12 pockets into the upper. A thin cable threads through the channels, distributing tension from the laces: When you pull on them, the entire upper contracts around the foot like a corset.
Variable Weave In areas where the foot needs more support (around the outside near the pinkie toe), the yarn gets a tighter weave; at the top of the foot the yarn is looser for breathability. The different zones give the shoe a customized, glovelike feel—and beautiful, intricate patterning.
RE U S E P ROV E N T E C H N O LO GY
Digital Model Hatfield sent his raw designs—in the form of a marked-up upper and iPad sketches—directly to Avery Dennison. The company’s weavers then translated these into a yarn arrangement and an Adobe Illustrator file their looms could understand. Finally, the weavers uploaded them and pressed Start. Ordinarily, assembling a shoe prototype would have taken days; the XX9 went from sketch to sample in hours.
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Prototyping the Future strewn with drones and screens full of code, looks more like a startup than a journalism outfit. Which is weird, because it’s on the 28th floor of the headquarters of The New York Times. As creative director of the Times’ R&D Lab, Lloyd has a tough job. She’s supposed to figure out new approaches to media consumption at what’s arguably the stodgiest institution in the business—they don’t call it the Grey Lady for nothing. But while the Times can’t predict the future, it can hire a bunch of wicked smart designers to prototype it. ALEXIS LLOYD’S OFFICE,
Lloyd’s main insight so far concerns one trend in particular: the compulsion to record. People now use social media to post all their pictures, report the details of their daily exercise, and share their most fleeting thoughts. Companies (and probably the government too) hoover it all up. But recording
isn’t understanding. “We’ve fallen into assuming that if we just get enough data and process it in enough ways, we’ll cross this threshold from knowledge to wisdom,” Lloyd says. “We’ve been quantifying what can easily be quantified, but it misses all the ideas and concepts we encounter throughout the day.”
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So what’s the solution? A move from recording to listening. Lately, Lloyd’s lab has been trying to create objects that don’t just catalog the world but actively process and respond to what’s going on around them. One early experiment, Blush, is an LED brooch that lights up when real-life conversations
touch on topics the wearer has recently explored online. The idea is that people around you will see your Blush glowing and know that you know something about what they’re talking about. A newer approach is a table with touchsensitive pads in the surface. When you hear something interesting
SOURCE: COMSCORE
The Times has fallen behind Buzzfeed in monthly visitors.
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at a meeting, you tap the pad. At the end of the meeting, the table emails a digest of the conversation to everyone who attended, with a transcript of the moments they personally flagged. Of course, the Times won’t be getting into the jewelry or furniture business anytime soon. But Lloyd says the lis-
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tening table and other speculative projects like it are meant to help the organization think about how connectivity might change people’s relationship with media. That’s her specialty— at the R&D Lab, Lloyd also cocreated News .me, a web app that creates personalized news digests using Twitter data. In 2010
the Times sold it to Bit.ly, the linkshortening company. So while Lloyd acknowledges that an always-on, wearable listening device like Blush might sound creepy, the concept behind it—a product that links digital content with face-to-face interactions—seems inevitable. A similar
gadget might, for instance, automatically add articles to your reading list when a friend mentions them in conversation. Likewise, an ecosystem of objects such as the listening table could create novel delivery routes for news. That’s the point of the lab: to make the future less abstract and
the possibilities for the Times a bit more concrete. “It’s one thing to talk about these things,” Lloyd says. “It’s another to actually try to build them.” You can understand why a 163-year-old information business might be interested in the challenge. —KYLE VANHEMERT
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by Scott Dadich Harness the power of imperfection.
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Edgar Degas began work on what would become one of his most radical paintings, Jockeys Before the Race. Degas had been schooled in techniques of the neoclassicist and romanticist masters but had begun exploring subject matter beyond the portraits and historical events that were traditionally considered suitable for fine art, training his eye on café culture, common laborers, and—most famously— ballet dancers. But with Jockeys, Degas pushed past mild provocation. He broke some of the most established formulas of composition. The painting is technically exquisite, the horses vividly sculpted with confident brushstrokes, their musculature perfectly rendered. But while composing this beautifully balanced, impressionistically rendered image, Degas added a crucial, jarring element: a pole running vertically—and asymmetrically—in the immediate foreground, right through the head of one of the horses.
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Degas wasn’t just thinking outside the box. He was purposely creating something that wasn’t pleasing.
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Wrong Theory, a History
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Throughout history, artists and innovators have advanced their fields by making deliberately “wrong” choices. Here are some great moments in Wrong Theory. — C O RY P E R K I N S
Degas wasn’t just “thinking outside of the box,” as the innovation cliché would have it. He wasn’t trying to overturn convention to find a more perfect solution. He was purposely creating something that wasn’t pleasing, intentionally doing the wrong thing. Naturally viewers were horrified. Jockeys was lampooned in the magazine Punch, derided as a “mistaken impression.” But over time, Degas’ transgression provided inspiration for other artists eager to find new ways to inject vitality and dramatic tension into work mired in convention. You can see its influence across art history, from Frederic Remington’s flouting of traditional compositional technique to the crackling photojournalism of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Degas was engaged in a strategy that has shown up periodically for centuries across every artistic and creative field.
Think of it as one step in a cycle: In the early stages, practitioners dedicate themselves to inventing and improving the rules—how to craft the most pleasing chord progression, the perfectly proportioned building, the most precisely rendered amalgamation of rhyme and meter. Over time, those rules become laws, and artists and designers dedicate themselves to excelling within these agreed-upon parameters, creating work of unparalleled refinement and sophistication—the Pantheon, the Sistine Chapel, the Goldberg Variations. But once a certain maturity has been reached, someone comes along who decides to take a different route. Instead of trying to create an ever more polished and perfect artifact, this rebel actively seeks out imperfection—sticking a pole in the middle of his painting, intentionally adding grungy feedback to a guitar solo, deliberately photographing unpleasant subjects. Eventually some of these creative breakthroughs end up becoming the foundation of a new set of aesthetic rules, and the cycle begins again. For the past 30 years, the field of technology design has been working its way through the first two stages of this cycle, an industry-wide march toward more seamless experiences, more delightful products, more leverage over the
1 90 3 Paris’ fashion elite recognized Paul Poiret at a young age for his skilled drawings; but where other designers focused on cages and corsets, his work featured draped fabric and natural silhouettes.
1 91 3 Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was a departure from traditional composition: The rising star abandoned harmonic consonance in favor of harsh, tense tones that incited a riot at its first performance.
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EARLY /MID20TH C E NTU RY In developing the Epic Theater style, dramatists like Bertolt Brecht consciously reminded audiences of the play’s artifice, encouraging actors to break the fourth wall and temper the authenticity of their performance.
1964 Sick of the utilitarianism dominant at the time, Robert Venturi designed his Vanna Venturi House to include blatantly unnecessary features—like the facade’s nonsupporting arch and an interior stairway leading to nowhere—that are now hallmarks of postmodernism.
world around us. Look at our computers: beige ige and boxy desktop machines gave way to bright ght and colorful iMacs, which gave way to sleek and sexy laptops, which gave way to addictively touchable smartphones. It’s hard not to look back at this timeline and see it as a great story of human progress, a joint effort to experiment and learn and figure out the path toward a more refined and universally pleasing design. All of this has resulted in a world where beautifully constructed tech is more powerful and more accessible than ever before. Itt is also more consistent. That’s why all smartphones nes now look basically the same—gleaming black glass ass with handsomely cambered edges. Google, Apple, and Microsoft all use clean, sans-serif typefaces in their respective software. After years of experimentation, we have figured out what people like and settled on some rules. But there’s a downside to all this consensus—it can get boring. From smartphones to operating systems to web page design, it can start to feel like the truly transformational moments have come and gone, replaced by incremental updates that make our devices and interactions faster and better. This brings us to an important and exciting moment in the design of our technologies. We have figured out the rules of creating sleek sophistication. We know, more or less, how to get it right. Now, Apple we need a shift in perspective that allows us to move forward. We need a pole right through a horse’s head. Google We need to enter the third stage of this cycle. It’s time to stop figuring out how to do things the right way, and start getting it wrong. Microsoft
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when I was creative director here at WIRED, I was working on the design of a cover featuring John Hodgman. We were far along in the process—Hodgman was styled and photographed, the cover lines written, our fonts selected, the layout firmed up. I had been aiming for a timeless design with a handsome monochromatic color palette, a cover that evoked a 1960s jet-set vibe. When I presented my finished design, WIRED’s editor at the time, Chris Anderson, complained that the cover was too drab. He uttered the prescriptive phrase all graphic designers hate hearing: “Can’t you just add more colors?” I demurred. I felt the cover was absolutely perfect. But Chris did not, and so, in a spasm of designerly “fuck you,” I drew a small rectangle into my design, a little stripe coming off from the left side of the page, rudely breaking my pristine geometries. As if that weren’t enough, I filled it with the ugliest hue I
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DESKTOP COMPUTER, IMAC: ALAMY; MACBOOK AIR: APPLE, INC.; BRECHT: GETTY IMAGES
1 98 9 In the 1980s, Will Wright created SimCity, a cutting edge videogame. Instead of building a closed ecosystem—like most developers before him—he handed the tools over to players to map their own gamescape.
could find: neon orange—Pantone 811, to be precise. My perfect cover was now ruined! By the time I came to my senses a couple of weeks later, it was too late. The cover had already been sent to the printer. My anger morphed into regret. To the untrained eye, that little box might not seem so offensive, but I felt that I had betrayed one of the most crucial lessons I learned in design school—that every graphic element should serve a recognizable function. This stray dash of color was careless at best, a postmodernist deviation with no real purpose or value. It confused my colleagues and detracted from the cover’s clarity, unnecessarily making the reader more conscious of the design. But you know what? I actually came to like that crass little neon orange bar. I ended up including a version of it on the next month’s cover, and again the month after that. It added something, even though I couldn’t explain what it was. I began referring to this idea—intentionally making “bad” design choices— as Wrong Theory, and I started applying it in little ways to all of WIRED’s pages. Pictures that were supposed to run large, I made small. Where type was supposed to run around graphics, I overlapped the two. Headlines are supposed to come at the beginning of stories? I put them at the end. I would even force our designers to ruin each other’s “perfect” layouts.
At the time, this represented a major creative breakthrough for me—the idea that intentional wrongness could yield strangely pleasing results. Of course I was familiar with the idea of rule-breaking innovation— that each generation reacts against the one that came before it, starting revolutions, turning its back on tired conventions. But this was different. I wasn’t just throwing out the rulebook and starting from scratch. I was following the rules, then selectively breaking one or two for maximum impact. Once I realized what I’d stumbled on, I started to see it everywhere, a strategy used by trained artists
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who make the decision to do something deliberately wrong. Whether it’s a small detail, like David Fincher swapping a letter for a number in the title of the movie Se7en, or a seismic shift, like Miles Davis intentionally seeking out the “wrong notes” and then trying to work his way back, none of these artists simply ignored the rules or refused to take the time to learn them in the first place. No, you need to know the rules, really master their nuance and application, before you can break them. That’s why Hunter Thompson could be a great gonzo journalist while so many of his followers and imitators—who never mastered the art of traditional reporting and writing that underlay Thompson’s radical style—suffer in comparison. Why does the Wrong Theory work? After all, symmetry is naturally pleasing. Put two faces in front of a 1-year-old and she will immediately pick the more symmetrical one. But what if we’re after something deeper than simple pleasure? It turns out that, while we might initially prefer the symmetrical and seamless, we are more challenged and invested in the imperfect. Think of Cindy Crawford’s mole or Joaquin Phoenix’s scar. Both people are stunning, but they stand out for their so-called imperfections. A better thought experiment might be to put that child in a room with 99 symmetrical faces and one asymmetrical one. Which one do you think she’ll be drawn to? A 2001 study conducted by Baylor College of Medicine and Emory University might begin to answer that question. In it, neuroscientists conducted fMRI scans on 25 adults who received squirts of fruit juice or water into their mouths in either predictable or unpredictable patterns. The
scans showed that the subjects who got the unpredictable sequence registered noticeably more activity in the nucleus accumbens—an area of the brain that processes pleasure. Yes, our minds learn to prefer activities that we repeatedly enjoy, because we recognize those patterns and come to expect a payoff. But the study suggests that when our predictions are wrong—when we walk into a surprise party instead of a planned dinner, for instance—that’s when our pleasure centers really light up. We may find comfort in what we know we like, but it’s the aberrations that bring us to attention.
H HOW MIGHT THESE findings be applied to technology
design? It’s still a bit early to say. Right now we are late in the second stage of the design cycle—applying agreed-upon rules to an ever-widening array of products, apps, sites, and services. Put another way, designers are still trying to get things right, not deliberately make them wrong. But even as they do so, they are learning how to push up against once-sacrosanct conventions. As a result, they’re giving us glimpses of what “wrong” technology might look like.
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Take Instagram. When Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were first developing the photo-sharing social network, they wrote a sentence on a whiteboard that summed up the accepted wisdom around photo sharing: “Today online, people post photos that they take with cameras, and they store them in albums to share with only their friends.” Then, systematically, they began replacing words. Cameras became phones, in albums became as single photos, only their friends became everyone. In the process, they stumbled upon an innovative insight about how people’s behavior would change. This isn’t really an example of Wrong Theory—the result was incredibly appealing, not intentionally off-putting. But the method they used to create it, understanding and then subverting explicit established rules, suggests the kind of thinking that can move us into this new era. Indeed, we’re starting to see that kind of thinking everywhere. Snapchat built a multibillion-dollar empire on a notion that seems deeply wrong at first blush—actively preventing users from archiving and accessing their communication. And Netflix undercut the entire structure of television by deciding to release every episode of its original series at once. That meant trading off some of the pleasure of the weekly cliffhanger and the day-after watercooler chatter for more complicated
plotlines—like the maybe-too-byzantine Arrested Development reboot—and the joys of binge-watching. Or take a look at the growing subgenre of intentionally frustrating videogames—like Flappy Bird or Super Hexagon—that ignore standard on-ramping and throw players directly into chaos. All of these examples point the way toward the next challenge for technology design. What happens after you’ve learned how to make technology that is supremely appealing and functional? A whole new range of opportunities opens up. By breaking those rules, we can create technology that is more than merely useful or beautiful or natural. We can imagine technology that is complicated and personal—nostalgic, funny, selfdeprecating, abrasive. Yes, there will be missteps. For every Kind of Blue there were about a million Metal Machine Musics—unlistenable exercises in selfindulgence. But only by courting failure can we find new ways forward. It’s time for us to create the next wave of technology. time ogy. It’s ti for us to be wrong. Editor in chief S C OT T DA D I C H (@sdadich)) wrote about invisible design in issue 21.10.
1 997 Industrial designer Hella Jongerius molded perfectly proportioned tableware, then fired it at exceedingly high temperatures, slightly deforming each piece.
2007 The Sopranos’ artfully crafted final scene built tension expertly— then shocked audiences by abruptly cutting to black just before the expected climax.
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There’s this great Andy Warhol quote you’ve probably seen: “I think everybody should like everybody.” You can buy posters and plates with pictures of Warhol and that phrase plastered across his face in Helvetica. But when you view Warhol’s quick quip in its full context, from a 1963 interview in ARTnews, it is just as much a prescient description of how we interact on social media today as it is a definition of pop art. Warhol: Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we’re getting more and more that way. I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody. ARTnews: Is that what pop art is all about? Warhol: Yes. It’s liking things. ARTnews: And liking things is like being a machine? Warhol: Yes, because you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again. This sounds a lot like Facebook, where the default response is a “like.” New job? Like. Toms are 10 percent off with free shipping today only? Like. Bedbugs? Oh, I’m so sorry. Like. By putting that binary option on everything it shows us, Facebook encourages us to be really efficient, Warholesque liking machines. And every like informs Facebook’s algorithm, which uses that data to feed you more stuff it thinks you will like. By that logic, the more you like, the more you will like, an ever-escalating spiral of satisfaction. To follow that to its logical end, in Facebook’s perfect world we would like everything we see—from our friends’ status updates to news stories to ads. If its algorithm truly works
as intended, we shouldn’t be able to stop ourselves from liking all the stuff it shows us. That, of course, would be just fine with Facebook’s advertisers. Advertising budgets are won or lost based on how many people make the decision to give an ad or page or brand the thumbs-up. It may seem like an insignificant gesture to you, but the fortunes of ad agencies, media empires, and even Facebook itself hang on your every click. Liking is an economic act. This summer, I decided to be Facebook’s perfect user and like everything I saw. For 48 hours, I liked literally everything Facebook sent my way—the status updates, the suggested pages, the ads—even if I hated it. I wanted to see how it would affect what Facebook showed me. I wanted to see how my Facebook experience would change if I constantly rewarded the robots offering up News Feed content, if I continually said, “Good job, robot, I like this.” The results, it turned out, were rapid and dramatic.
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first thing I liked was LivingSocial, some kind of discount service. My friend Jay had liked it, a fact that was announced at the top of my feed. Then I liked two status updates from other friends. So far, so good. But the fourth thing I encountered was something I didn’t really like. I mean, I don’t truly like LivingSocial, whatever the hell it is, but this was different. This fourth update was something I actively disliked: a bad joke—or at least a dumb one. I liked it anyway.
Right away, Facebook responded to my sudden, newfound appreciation by giving me even more to appreciate. You might have noticed that when you like an article on Facebook, it often responds by suggesting a few other items it thinks you might also be interested in. Let’s say you like a story about cows that you see on the Modern Farmer website. Facebook will immediately present you with three more like-ready options below that cow story: “related links,” in Facebook parlance. Probably more stories about cows.
ALL PHOTOS BY GETTY
Related links quickly became a problem for my experiment, because as soon as I liked the four related links below a brand— and with brands, they give you four, not three, related links— Facebook gave me four more. And then four more. And then four more. If I kept it up, I’d be stuck in an eternal loop of related links. So I made a rule: I would like the first four, but no more. Sometimes liking was awkward. My friend Hillary posted a picture of her toddler, Pearl, with bruises on her face. It was titled “Pearl versus the concrete.” I didn’t like it at all! It was sad. Normally this was the kind of News Feed item that would compel me to leave a comment, instead of hitting a button. Oh well. Like. The only time I declined to like something was when a friend posted about the death of a relative. I had just experienced a death in my own family, and I wasn’t about to make someone else’s grief part of my experiment. But there was still plenty to like. I liked one of my cousin’s updates, which he had reshared from Joe Kennedy, and was subsequently besieged with Kennedys to like (plus a Clinton and a Shriver). I liked Hootsuite. I liked The New York Times, I liked Coupon Clipinista. I liked something from a friend I haven’t spoken to in 20 years—something about her kid, camp, and a snake. I liked Amazon. I fucking liked Kohl’s. In a surprisingly short amount of time my News Feed took on an entirely new character. After about an hour, there were no human beings in my feed anymore. It became about brands and messaging rather than humans with messages. For all the talk about Facebook as a social network, this was a stark reminder that it ultimately exists to get me to click on ads. Likewise, content mills rose to the top. Upworthy and the Huffington Post owned nearly my entire feed. That first night as I scrolled through my News Feed, the updates I saw were (in order): Huffington Post, Upworthy, Huffington Post, Upworthy, a Levi’s ad, Space.com, Huffington Post, Upworthy, the Verge, Huffington Post, Space.com, Upworthy, Space.com.
Feeds were becoming increasingly divergent. On the laptop, while I still saw mostly branded content, I continued to see the occasional update from my friends. But in less than 24 hours my mobile feed was nearly devoid of human content. I was only presented with the chance to like ads or stories from various websites. On that little bitty screen, where real estate is so valuable, Facebook’s robots decided that the way to keep my attention was by hiding the people and showing me only what other machines had pumped out.
When I checked my phone one last time before bed, I saw a conservative post about Gaza. Ah crap. This was a fraught issue that I was not eager to weigh in on one way or the other. But whatever. I hit the Like button, then turned in for the night. By the next morning, the items in my News Feed had moved very, very far to the right. I was offered the chance to like the Second Amendment and some sort of anti-immigrant page. I liked them both. I liked Ted Cruz. I liked Rick Perry. The Conservative Tribune came up again and again and again in my News Feed. I got to learn its very particular syntax:
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A sentence recounting some controversial news. Good! A sentence explaining why this is good. An implied call to action, posing as a question.
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Once I saw this pattern, I started noticing it everywhere. And it wasn’t just employed by upstart publications you’ve maybe never heard of. SFGate, the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, uses a similar tactic. It is a very specific form of Facebook messaging, designed to get you to engage by first being provocative and then giving you a question at the end that encourages you to interact. And if you take the bait—if you hit Like—you’ll be shown even more from that publisher, and more, and more, ad nauseam. I was also weirded out to see that my laptop and mobile News
day one rolled into day two, I began to dread dropping in on Facebook. It had become a temple of provocation. My News Feed had not only drifted further and further right, it had oddly also drifted further and further left—a digest of bipartisan extremism. What began as scattershot likes of random stories had snowballed into rigid ideology. Leftie posts from Rachel Maddow, Raw Story, and Daily Kos were interspersed with items that were so right-wing that I was afraid liking them would land me on a watch list. This is a problem much bigger than Facebook. It reminded me of how we often talk at each other instead of to each other. We set up our political and social filter bubbles and they reinforce themselves. Our media diets become hyperniche feeds that cater to our specific prejudices and never give us any other perspective. We go down rabbit holes of special interests until we’re lost in the queen’s garden, cursing everyone aboveground. Worse than the fractious political tone my feed took on was how deeply stupid it became. I was given the chance to like a BuzzFeed post of some guy dancing, and another that asked “Which Titanic Character Are You?” A third BuzzFeed post informed me that “Katy Perry’s Backup Dancer Is the Man Candy You Deserve.” (Thanks?) According to New York magazine, I am “officially old” because Malia Obama went to Lollapalooza (like!), and CNN helpfully offered “Husband Explores His Man-ternal Instincts” alongside a photo of a shirtless man cupping his nipCONTINUED ON PAGE 146
TWO GAMBLERS FOUND A KING-SIZE BUG IN VIDEO POKER. IT WAS THE WORST THING THAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED TO THEM. BY KEVIN POULSEN
Michael Friberg
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the high-limit room at the Silverton Casino in Las Vegas and sat down at a video poker machine called the Game King. Six minutes later the purple light on the top of the machine flashed, signaling a $4,300 jackpot. Kane waited while the slot attendant verified the win and presented the IRS paperwork—a procedure required for any win of $1,200 or greater—then, 11 minutes later, ding ding ding!, a $2,800 win. A $4,150 jackpot rolled in a few minutes after that. All the while, the casino’s director of surveillance, Charles Williams, was peering down at Kane through a camera hidden in a ceiling dome. Tall, with a high brow and an aquiline nose, the 50-year-old Kane had the patrician bearing of a man better suited to playing a Mozart piano concerto than listening to the chirping of a slot machine. Even his play was refined: the way he rested his long fingers on the buttons and swept them in a graceful legato, smoothly selecting good cards, discarding bad ones, accepting jackpot after jackpot with the vaguely put-upon air of a creditor finally collecting an overdue debt. Williams could see that Kane was wielding none of the array of cheating devices that casinos had confiscated from grifters over the years. He wasn’t jamming a light wand in the machine’s hopper or zapping the Game King with an electromagnetic pulse. He was simply pressing the buttons. But he was winning far too much, too fast, to be relying on luck alone. At 12:34 pm, the Game King lit up with its seventh jackpot in an hour and a half, a $10,400 payout. Now Williams knew something was wrong: The cards dealt on the screen were the exact same four deuces and four of clubs that yielded Kane’s previous jackpot. The odds against that were astronomical. Williams called over the executive in charge of the Silverton’s slots, and they reviewed the surveillance tape together. The evidence was mounting that Kane had found something unthinkable: the kind of thing gamblers dream of, casinos dread, and Nevada regulators have an entire auditing regime to prevent. He’d found a bug in the most popular video slot in Las Vegas. As they watched the replay for clues, Kane chalked up an eighth jackpot worth $8,200, and Williams decided not to wait any longer. He contacted the Silverton’s head of security, a formidable character with slicked-back silver hair and a black suit, and positioned him outside the slot area. His orders: Make sure John Kane doesn’t leave the casino. Kane had discovered the glitch in the Game King three months earlier on the other end of town, at the unpretentious Fremont Hotel and Casino in downtown’s Glitter Gulch. He was overdue for a lucky break. Since the Game King had gotten its hooks in him years earlier he’d lost between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands annually. At his previous haunt, the locals-friendly Boulder Station, he blew half a million dollars in 2006 alone—a pace that
JOHN KANE WAS ON A HELL OF A WINNING STREAK. On July 3, 2009, he walked alone into
Contributing editor KEVIN POULSEN (@kpoulsen) wrote about hacking OkCupid in issue 22.02.
E V E N B E F O R E the phone rang in his suburban Pittsburgh home, Andre Nestor had a gut feeling that everything was about to change for him. Superstitious and prone to hunches, he’d felt it coming for days: April 30, 2009, would be exactly 15 years since Nestor ignored an urge to play a set of numbers that came up in the Pennsylvania lottery Big 4. That was the story of his life—always playing the right numbers at the wrong time. Games of chance had been courting and betraying Nestor since he was old enough to gamble. In 2001 he’d moved to Las Vegas to be closer to the action, answering phones for a bank during the day and wagering his meager paycheck at night. That’s when he met John Kane in an AOL chatroom for Vegas locals. Though Nestor was 13 years younger than Kane and perpetually flirting with poverty, they developed an intense addicts’ friendship. Nestor’s records show he lost about $20,000 a year for six years before he gave up, said good-bye to Kane, and moved back to the sleepy Pittsburgh suburb of Swissvale, Pennsylvania, in 2007. For about two years he had a stable life, living off public assistance, gambling infrequently, and playing the occasional lottery ticket. Then Kane called to tell him about a bug he’d found in video poker. Nestor drove to the airport that night and camped there until the next available flight to Las Vegas.
MUG SHOT COURTESY LAS VEGAS METROPOLITAN POLICE DEPARTMENT
earned him enough Player’s Club points to pay for his own Game King to play at his home on the outskirts of Vegas, along with technicians to service it. (The machine was just for fun—it didn’t pay jackpots.) “He’s played more than anyone else in the United States,” says his lawyer, Andrew Leavitt. “I’m not exaggerating or embellishing. It’s an addiction.” To understand video poker addiction, you have to start with the deceptively simple appeal of the game. You put some money in the machine, place a bet of one to five credits, and the computer deals you a poker hand. Select the cards you want to keep, slap the Draw button, and the machine replaces the discards. Your final hand determines the payout. When the first video poker machine hit casinos in the 1970s, it was a phenomenal success—gamblers loved that they could make decisions that affected the outcome instead of just pulling a handle and watching the reels spin. The patent holder started a company called International Game Technology that debuted on the Nasdaq in 1981. IGT’s key insight was to tap into the vast flexibility offered by computerized gambling. In 1996, the company perfected its formula with the Game King Multi-Game, which allowed players to choose from several variations on video poker. Casinos snatched up the Game King, and IGT sold them regular firmware upgrades that added still more games to the menu. On September 25, 2002, the company released its fifth major revision—Game King 5.0. Its marketing material was triumphal: “Full of new enhancements, including state-of-theart video graphics and enhanced stereo sound, the Game King 5.0 Multi-Game suite is sure to rule over your entire casino floor with unprecedented magnificence!” But the new Game King code had one feature that wasn’t in the brochure—a series of subtle errors in program number G0001640 that evaded laboratory testing and source code review. The bug survived like a cockroach for the next seven years. It passed into new revisions, one after another, ultimately infecting 99 different programs installed in thousands of IGT machines around the world. As far as anyone knows, it went completely undetected until late April 2009, when John Kane was playing at a row of four low-limit Game Kings outside the entrance to a Chinese fast food joint at the Fremont, smoke swirling around him and ’90s pop music raining down from the casino sound system. He’d been switching between game variations and racking up a modest payout. But when he hit the Cash Out button to take his money to another machine, the candle lit at the top of the Game King and the screen locked up with a jackpot worth more than $1,000. Kane hadn’t even played a new hand, so he knew there was a mistake. He told a casino attendant about the error, but the worker thought he was joking and gave him the money anyway. At that point, Kane could have forgotten the whole thing. Instead, he called a friend and embarked on the biggest gamble of his life.
their surprise, the button sequence didn’t work. Over the following days, they explored the Hilton, the Cannery, then the Stratosphere, Terrible’s, the Hard Rock, the Tropicana, the Luxor, and five other casinos, drawing the same dismal results everywhere. For some reason, the Game King glitch was only present at the Fremont. At the end of a frustrating week, Nestor headed to the airport for his return flight with just $8,000 in winnings. As a final insult, he lost $700 in a video poker machine while waiting for his plane. Kane decided to wring what he could from the four Fremont machines. He learned to speed up the process by using the Game King’s Double Up feature, which gave players a chance to double their winnings or lose everything. Respectable payouts that might once have satisfied Kane were garbage now. After five weeks using the new strategy, Kane had pocketed more than $100,000 from the Fremont. Unsurprisingly, the Fremont noticed. In modern casinos, every slot machine in the house is wired to a central server, where statistical deviations stick out like a fifth ace. The four machines under the Chinese food sign shot to the top of the Fremont’s “loser list” of underperforming games: They’d gone from providing the casino a reliable $14,500 a month to costing it $75,000 in May alone. On May 25, a slot manager approached Kane after one of his wins and announced that he was disabling the Double Up feature on all of the Game Kings—he was aware that Kane used the option copiously, and he figured it must have something to do with his run of luck. Kane took the development in stride: The bug, not the Double Up, was the real secret of his success. But he was in for a shock. The next time he played the Game King, the magic button sequence no longer worked. In an instant, the Fremont was no better than all the other casinos that had been immune to the glitch. He phoned Nestor, who processed the news. With the Double Up option turned on, the bug worked; turned off, it didn’t. Whatever internal stew of code made the Game King exploitable, Nestor concluded, the Double Up option had been a key ingredient the whole time. They just hadn’t known it. This wasn’t bad news at all. It was the missing link. It explained why the bug had failed them everywhere but at the Fremont. Most casinos don’t enable Double Up because it’s unpopular with players. But that could easily be changed. High rollers and slot aficionados often have favorite game variants or features that aren’t available by default but can be enabled by any passing slot attendant. Nestor purchased two dress shirts and caught another flight to Las Vegas, where he joined Kane at Harrah’s. Row after row of Game Kings were waiting, and, true to the plan, the staff didn’t hesitate when Kane and Nestor asked for Double Up to be enabled. Nestor got the first significant winning hand of the trip: four fours and a kicker for $500. He tapped the magic sequence, hit Cash Out, and watched with delight as his $500 became a $10,000 jackpot. He tipped the slot attendant $20.
NESTOR TAPPED THE MAGIC SEQUENCE OF BUTTONS, HIT CASH OUT, AND WATCHED AS HIS 500 PAYOUT BECAME A 10,000 JACKPOT.
Kane picked him up at the curb at McCarran airport. After a quick breakfast, they drove to the Fremont, took adjacent seats at two Game Kings, and went to work. Kane had some idea of how the glitch operated but hadn’t been able to reliably reproduce it. Working together, the two men began trying different combinations of play, game types, and bet levels, sounding out the bug like bats in the dark. It turned out the Game King’s endless versatility was also its fatal flaw. In addition to different game variants, the machine lets you choose the base level of your wagers: At the low-limit Fremont machines, you could select six different denomination levels, from 1 cent to 50 cents a credit. The key to the glitch was that under just the right circumstances, you could switch denomination levels retroactively. That meant you could play at 1 cent per credit for hours, losing pocket change, until you finally got a good hand— like four aces or a royal flush. Then you could change to 50 cents a credit and fool the machine into re-awarding your payout at the new, higher denomination. Performing that trick consistently wasn’t easy—it involved a complicated misdirection that left the Game King’s internal variables in a state of confusion. But after seven hours rooted to their seats, Kane and Nestor boiled it down to a step-by-step recipe that would work every time. Nestor and Kane each rang up a few jackpots, then broke for a celebratory dinner, at which they planned their next move. They would have to expand beyond the Fremont before the casino noticed how much they were winning. Fortunately, Game Kings are ubiquitous in Vegas, installed everywhere from the corner 7-Eleven to the toniest luxury casino. They mapped out their campaign and then headed back to Kane’s home for the night. Kane lived in a spacious house at the far northeast edge of town. His Game King was in the foyer. A spare bedroom down the hall was devoted entirely to a model train set, an elaborate, detailed miniature with tracks snaking and climbing through model towns, up hills, across bridges, and through tunnels, every detail perfect. The home’s centerpiece was the living room with its three Steinway grand pianos. Kane is a virtuoso pianist; in the early 1980s he was a leading dance accompanist in the Chicago area, and even today he sells recordings under the vanity label Keynote Records. He left the professional music world only after failing to advance in the prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Now he ran a management consulting practice that claimed one-third of the Fortune 100 as clients. Kane’s business was lucrative, so he was accustomed to handling money. But now that they were on the verge of a windfall, he was worried about Nestor; he could see his younger friend returning every cent to the casinos at the roulette tables or blowing it all on frivolities. “If you had a million dollars, what 10 things would you do?” Kane asked him. He wanted Nestor to make a list and really think through his priorities. Nestor started a list, but it would prove unnecessary. After another day at the Fremont, they branched out. To
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and continuing to argue over the split. Nestor was now of the opinion that he shouldn’t have to pay Kane anything. It was Nestor, after all, who’d figured out that the Double Up feature was part of the bug. That should make them square. “This was my gift to you,” Kane shot back testily. “If you’d found this bug instead of me, you would never have told me about it.” The accusation stung. Nestor gaped at his friend, then he stood and walked away from the machine. The next day Nestor nursed his hurt feelings with a solo trip to the Rio. He found a Game King displaying four aces and a kicker and hit it for $5,600. Then he wandered into the high-limit room and found another four aces. He punched this one twice: $20,000 at a $5 denomination, then, after a decent interval, $8,000 at the $2 level. Nestor’s records show that he eventually left the casino with about $34,000 in his pockets. He didn’t need Kane at all. “There was so much money to be made, what did it even matter?” he says. On his last day in Vegas, Nestor continued his solo run, hitting a Game King at the Wynn for a combined $61,000. Back in his room at Bill’s, he added up his winnings: He was going home with $152,250 in cash in his luggage. And he wasn’t done yet. There were casinos in Pennsylvania, too, where he could operate without the slightest risk of Kane knowing what he was up to—or demanding a cut up front. After Nestor left, Kane tore into Vegas with a vengeance. Official numbers have never been released, and Kane declined to speak for this article, but the FBI would later tally Kane’s winnings at more than $500,000 from eight different casinos. The Wynn, where Kane kept four nines on one Game King for days, was the biggest loser at $225,240. Back in Pennsylvania, Nestor targeted the newly opened casino at the Meadows Racetrack in Washington County. In contrast to Kane, who played the bug with joyless, businesslike intensity, Nestor was voluble and chatty at the Meadows. He dressed smartly and, according to court documents, brought along a small entourage for company: his roommate, a retired cop named Kerry Laverde; and Patrick Loushil, a server at Red Lobster who agreed to collect some of Nestor’s jackpots for him, so they wouldn’t all show up on Nestor’s tax bill. Nestor hammed it up every time he won, gushing excitedly to the slot workers—“I’m so excited! Here, feel my heart!”—and tipping generously.
AFTER A NIGHT IN JAIL, AN UPSET KANE CALLED NESTOR. STAY OUT OF THE CASINOS, HE SAID. DO NOT GO BACK TO THE CASINOS.
T H E R E W E R E no limits now. They could play anywhere and beat the house wherever they went. Nestor, who’d been scraping by on a $1,000-a-month welfare check, saw a whole new future unfolding: home ownership, an investment account, security, better clothes, and gifts for his friends back home. For his part, Kane was already well on his way to erasing the massive losses he’d suffered since moving to Sin City. Working as a team had its advantages. While experimenting with the bug, they discovered that they could trigger a jackpot on the same hand more than once: All they had to do was lower the denomination again and repeat the steps to activate the glitch. They could effectively replay their win over and over, as much as they wanted. It was a risky play—even the busiest casino might notice the same player repeatedly winning with the same hand. But now that they were playing together, Kane and Nestor could ride on each other’s jackpots. Nestor won $4,000 with four aces; then, after waiting a bit, Kane slid over to the same machine and replayed the hand for another $4,000. They could even piggyback on other players’ wins. No longer confined to four low-limit slots at a single casino, they prowled the floor at Harrah’s looking for empty machines still showing a player’s jackpot. Once they got an attendant to turn on Double Up, it took only seconds to replay the hand at up to 10 times the original value. Video poker wasn’t even gambling anymore. “You had complete control over how much you could win,” Nestor says. “If you wanted to go to a casino and win $500,000 in one day, you could win $500,000 in one day.” At the end of the evening, Nestor says they went to his cheap hotel room at Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall and Saloon to settle up. As the benefactor of Kane’s discovery, Nestor had agreed to give his old friend half his winnings. But now that the cash was rolling in, he was having second thoughts about the arrangement. Every jackpot, he realized, was being reported to the IRS, and he’d already won enough from the bug to propel him into a higher tax bracket. If he paid half to Kane off the top, he might wind up without the reserves to pay his tax debt come April of the following year. He broached the subject with Kane: He’d be more comfortable holding on to the money until his taxes were paid. It was just a year. He’d happily give Kane half of his post-tax winnings then. Kane was indignant but not surprised; leave it to Nestor to turn even free money into a problem to obsess over. He insisted Nestor honor his agreement, and Nestor grew more agitated, his voice rising in pitch. “What am I doing? Why am I even doing this?” he complained. “I’m not winning any money doing this if I’m giving you all this up front.” Kane finally agreed to accept a third of Nestor’s $20,000 take for the day. Nestor says he counted out $6,000 in hundreds onto an end table, and Kane said good night. The tension between the men lingered the next day at the Wynn, a towering upscale supercasino with more than 1,300 slots. They played side by side, raking in money
began to unravel the night Kane found himself waiting for a payout at the Silverton. The casino’s head of security stood just outside the slot area. Kane paced and huffed, spun the swivel chair back and forth like a metronome, and complained to passing slot attendants. Finally, three men strode up to him. The head of security directed Kane to an alcove, handcuffed him, and escorted him away from the video poker machines. An armed agent from the Gaming Control Board arrived soon after. He sealed the machines Kane had been playing on with orange evidence tape and collected Kane from the back room, where he’d been handcuffed to a chair. Kane’s wallet and the $27,000 in his pocket were confiscated, and he was booked into the Clark County Detention Center on suspicion of theft. After a night in jail, Kane was released. On Monday he called Nestor to warn him that the bug had been discovered. He sounded more upset than Nestor had ever heard him. “Stay out of the casinos,” Kane said. “Do not go back to the casinos.” Nestor’s heart sank for his old friend. It was painful to imagine Kane suffering the indignity of a night in jail, mug shots, fingerprints, being treated like a common criminal. But after the call, Nestor talked himself into an alternate theory. What if there’d been no arrest? What if Kane suspected—as he must have—that Nestor was using the bug and had made up the story about the Silverton to scare Nestor into stopping, so Kane could have the exploit all to himself? By this time Nestor had been back in Pennsylvania three weeks and had already won nearly $50,000 from the Meadow’s Game King. He decided to ignore Kane’s story and started planning his next trip to the Meadows. “You had complete control,” Andre Nestor says. “You could win $500,000 in one day.”
BUT IT ALL
in Las Vegas, engineers from the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s Technology Division descended on the Silverton. The forensics investigation of the Game King scam had fallen to John Lastusky, a 25-year-old clean-cut USC computer engineering graduate. Lastusky pulled up the game history on the two machines Kane had played and reviewed the wins, then slid out the logic trays, the metal shelves housing the Game King’s electronic guts, and checked the six EPROMs containing the machines’ core logic, graphics, and sound routines. There was no sign of tampering. He confiscated the logic trays and packed them up for the trip back to headquarters. Housed in an anonymous office park near the airport, the GCB’s Technology Division was formed in the mid-1980s to police video gambling as it began its Nevada ascent. The division helps set the rigorous standards that gamemakers THREE DAYS LATER,
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like IGT must meet to deploy machines in the Silver State. A 3,000-square-foot laboratory at the back of the office is packed end to end with slot machines in various states of undress—some powered down, some in maintenance mode, others stripped to their bare electronics, though most are configured as they would be on a gaming floor. A smaller, locked-down room adjacent to the lab is more important: It houses a permanent repository of the source and executable code for every version of game software ever approved in Nevada—more than 30,000 programs in all. The code vault is at the center of the gaming board’s massive software integrity operation. Every new addition is carefully examined: Is the random number generator random enough? Does the game pay out at the advertised rate? Is there logic where there shouldn’t be? “We’re not necessarily looking for something nefarious, but the goal is to ensure the integrity of the product,” says division chief Jim Barbee. There’s a real, if mostly unrealized, danger of gaming software being backdoored. The concept was proven in 1995, when one of the GCB’s own staffers, Ron Harris, went bad. Harris modified his testing unit to covertly reprogram the EPROMs on the machines he was auditing. His new software commanded the machine to trigger a jackpot upon a particular sequence of button presses—like a Konami Code for cash. He was eventually caught, and he served two years in prison. That stain on the board’s integrity haunts the division to this day. But by all evidence, the division’s paranoia, coupled with the game industry’s self-interest, have kept video gambling code clean and mostly free of exploitable bugs. That made the Game King case an intriguing puzzle for Lastusky. Armed with the surveillance footage of Kane in action, Lastusky sat at one of the Game Kings in the lab and began experimenting. Within a few days he was able to reliably reproduce the exploit himself. He gave his findings to IGT, which rushed out a warning to its customers advising them to immediately disable the Double Up option. “Replacement programs are being expedited,” the company explained. Every Game King on the planet running a vulnerable version would need a patch. The upgrade process would be grueling. When an operating system like Windows or OS X
HOW THEY BEAT THE HOUSE
The “Double Up bug” lurking in the software of Game King video poker machines survived undetected for nearly seven years, in part because the steps to reproduce it were so complex. John Kane and Andre Nestor experimented until they could trigger it at will. —K.P.
has a security bug, customers can download the patch in a few minutes over the Internet. Slot machines aren’t online. New programs are burned onto EPROMs by the manufacturer and shipped in the mail in plastic tubes. Blind to the firestorm erupting in Vegas, Nestor spent the rest of July and most of August playing at the Meadows, until August 31, when the casino finally got suspicious and refused to pay Nestor on a four of a kind. Nestor protested but walked away, breaking into a run as he reached the parking garage. Nestor was up more than $480,000. The Game King ride was over, but he had enough money to last him forever.
1. Locate a Game
2. Flag down a slot
King video poker machine configured for multi-denomination play. If you’re in Las Vegas, you’re probably already standing next to one.
attendant and ask them to enable the Double Up option. Say thank you and smile until they walk away.
3. Insert money or a voucher and select the lowest denomination level offered by the machine—for example, $1 per credit on a $1, $2, $5, $10 machine.
4. Choose your favorite
game variant—Triple Double Bonus Poker is fun—and start playing.
BRATISLAV MILENKOVIC
on October 6, 2009, a dozen state and local police converged on Andre Nestor’s split-level condo on a quiet, tree-lined street in Swissvale. He was dozing on his living room couch when the banging started. “State police! Open up!” The battering ram hit the door seconds later, splintering the frame and admitting a flood of cops into the house. Nestor says he started toward the stairs, his hands over his head, when he came face-to-face with a trooper in full riot gear. “Get on the floor!” yelled the trooper, leveling his AR-15 at Nestor’s face. Nestor complied. The cop ratcheted the handcuffs on Nestor’s wrists, yanked him to his feet, and marched him into the kitchen. For the next two hours, Nestor watched helplessly, handcuffed to a kitchen chair, while the police ransacked his neat home. They flipped over his mattress, ripped insulation from his ceiling, rifled his PC. At about 4 pm, Nestor’s roommate, Laverde, arrived home and was arrested on the spot as an accomplice to Nestor’s crimes. It was the first major gambling scandal in Pennsylvania since the state had legalized slots in 2004. The media portrayed Nestor as a real-life Danny Ocean, and prosecutors hit him with 698 felony counts, ranging from theft to criminal conspiracy. The district attorney seized every penny of Nestor’s winnings and gave it back to the Meadows. Nestor and Laverde spent about 10 days in the county jail before making bail. A defiant Nestor vowed to fight the case—no jury would convict a gambler, he was certain, for beating a slot machine at its own game. But on January 3, 2011, when it was time for jury selection, Nestor was hit with another surprise. Two FBI agents showed up and pulled him from the Washington County courthouse. The Justice Department had taken over the case. Nestor and Kane had both been charged federally in Las Vegas. As the agents walked him to their car, Nestor stopped in front of a television camera and let loose. “I’m being arrested federally now—for winning at a slot machine!” he shouted in disbelief. “This is what they do to people! They put a machine on the floor, and if it has programming that doesn’t take your money and you win on their machine, they will throw you in jail!”
The Las Vegas prosecutors charged Nestor and Kane with conspiracy and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Passed in 1986, the CFAA was enacted to punish hackers who remotely crack computers related to national defense or banking. But in the Internet age the government had been steadily testing the limits of the law in cases that didn’t involve computer intrusion in the usual sense. Kane and Nestor, the government argued, exceeded their otherwise lawful access to the Game King when they knowingly exploited a bug. The casinos only authorized gamers to play by the rules of video poker. “To allow customers to access previously played hands of cards at will, would remove the element of chance and obviate the whole purpose of gambling,” assistant US attorney for the District of Nevada Michael Chu argued in a court filing. “It would certainly be contrary to the rules of poker.” The defense attorneys pushed for dismissal of the computer hacking charge, on the grounds that anything the Game King allowed players to do through its interface was “authorized access” by definition: The whole point of playing slots is to beat the machine, and it’s up to the computer to set and enforce limits. “All these guys did is simply push a sequence of buttons that they were legally entitled to push,” says Leavitt, Kane’s attorney. The pretrial motions dragged on for more than 18 months, while in the larger legal landscape, the CFAA was going under a microscope for the first time since its passage. In January 2013, coder and activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide after being charged under the same law for bulk-downloading academic articles without permission, spurring calls for reform. Three months later, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out computer hacking charges in a closely watched case against David Nosal, a former executive at a corporate recruiting firm who persuaded three employees to leak him information from the firm’s lead database. The Ninth Circuit found that pilfering contacts doesn’t become computer hacking just because the data came from a computer instead of a copy machine. Seeing parallels to the Game King prosecution, the judge overseeing Kane and Nestor’s case CONTINUED ON PAGE 146
GET ON THE FLOOR! YELLED THE TROOPER, LEVELING HIS AR-15 AT , NESTOR S FACE.
AT 1:30 PM
Keep playing at the $1 level until you win a big hand. An $800 royal flush is perfect.
5.
6. With your royal flush
7. Insert more
showing but not yet cashed out, hit the More Games button on the touchscreen and select a different game variation. Play it until you score a win.
money or a voucher into the machine.
8. Touch the More Games button again, and change to the maximum denomination—in this case, $10 per credit. Then return to your original $800 royal flush.
9. Press the Cash Out
button. “Jackpot! $8,000” will appear on the screen and the light on the top of the machine will illuminate. Congratulations!
10. Wait for the slot attendant to show up with an IRS form W-2G (“certain gambling winnings”). Once you’ve signed it, they’ll get the machine to spit out a jackpot ticket.
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COLOPHON
GAMBLES THAT HELPED GET THIS ISSUE OUT:
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ples. “A cloud that looks like a penis.” “Stop what you’re doing and look at this baby who looks exactly like Jay Z.” My feed was showing almost exclusively the worst kind of media tripe. Garbage. I liked it all. While I expected that what I saw in my News Feed might change, I never expected for my behavior to have an impact on my friends’ experiences. I heard about it immediately. That first night, my friend John sent me a message. “Have you been hacked?” Nope. I’m just really into Kohl’s now. The next morning, another friend sent a note. “My fb feed is literally full of articles you like, it’s kind of funny,” she complained. “No friend stuff, just Honan likes.” I replied with a thumbs-up. This continued throughout the experiment. When I posted a status update to Facebook just saying “I like you,” I heard from numerous people that my weirdo activity had been overrunning their normal flow of baby pictures and ice-bucket videos. Facebook’s response to this, essentially, is that the News Feed performed as it should have. I was liking all kinds of updates and pages from brands that I normally wouldn’t have, so of course it showed me even more of them. “Your News Feed is what you make it,” a Facebook spokesperson explained in an email. “You connected with over 1,000 new pages in 48 hours, and your News Feed changed to show you mostly page content, triggered by these new connections. If you had made 1,000 new friends in 48 hours, your News Feed would be mostly new-friend content.” Maybe so. And it does speak to how remarkably adaptive the News Feed is. But the thing is, I was also liking every update I saw, from every one of my friends, even the ones I did not normally interact with. Yet in just a day, those updates from actual human beings largely vanished. Maybe that’s because Facebook rewards volume over substance. The more content something churned out, the more likely I was to see it and the more likely I was to interact with it, which meant the more likely I was to see more of the same. That meant that publishers and advertisers won out. It also meant that, by liking everything, I turned Facebook into a place where there was nothing I liked. 1
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ordered the government to justify the hacking charge. The prosecutors didn’t even try, opting instead to drop the charge—leaving only an ill-fitting “conspiracy to commit wire fraud” count remaining. Prosecutors had a weak hand, and they knew it. As a December 3, 2013, trial date approached, the Feds made Kane and Nestor separate but identical offers: The first one to agree to testify against the other would walk away with five years of probation and no jail time. The old gambling buddies had one more game to play together. It was the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Without speaking, they both arrived at the optimal strategy: They refused the offer. A few months later, the Justice Department dropped the last of the charges, and they were free. KANE AND NESTOR haven’t spoken since 2009.
After his Silverton arrest, Kane began recording classical music in his house and uploading the videos to a YouTube channel. Last March, after the federal case was dropped, he sent a CD of some of his performances to his high school piano teacher. “I’m essentially now retired from a career in business, have remained single, leading a quiet suburban life,” he wrote. Nestor’s greatest regret is that he let the Game King bug come between him and Kane. “I didn’t want it to go that far,” he says. “I thought he and I were friends long enough that these kinds of issues didn’t need to happen.” He claims he always intended to pay Kane his cut from the secret jackpots. Now he can’t. His roommate, Laverde, signed over Nestor’s money in exchange for avoiding a trial of his own. (There are no court filings to suggest that Kane’s winnings were seized.) Nestor says the Meadows still has his winnings, and the IRS is chasing him for $239,861.04 in back taxes, interest, and penalties—money he doesn’t have. If there’s one silver lining, it’s that Nestor has been banned from Pennsylvania casinos. He still gambles occasionally in neighboring states, but his more pressing addiction right now is Candy Crush, which he plays on a cheap Android tablet. He cleared 515 levels in two months, using a trick he found on the Internet to get extra lives without paying.
Ordering fish at the Third Street Shell station taco truck; taking the 405 at rush hour; four summer camps in 10 weeks; messaging a 13-year-old Minecraft fanfic writer on Wattpad; that horse at the Sonoma County Fair; the Gumptions; getting married; asking for a refund on duck legs (I was charged for breasts!); going for the high B-flat in Brahms’ German Requiem; Legoland’s Chima water park; eating pinkish pork; waiting until after the Vegas business trip to learn how to file expenses. WIRED is a registered trademark of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. Copyright ©2014 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA. Volume 22, No. 10. WIRED (ISSN 1059–1028) is published monthly by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. Editorial office: 520 Third Street, Ste. 305, San Francisco, CA 94107-1815. Principal office: The Condé Nast Building, 4 Times Square, New York, NY 10036. S. I. Newhouse, Jr., Chairman; Charles H. Townsend, CEO; Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., President; David E. Geithner, CFO; Louis Cona, Chief Marketing Officer; Jill Bright, Chief Administrative Officer. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40644503. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885 RT0001. Canada Post: Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to PO Box 874, Station Main, Markham, ON L3P 8L4. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to WIRED, PO Box 37706, Boone, IA 50037–0662. For subscriptions, address changes, adjustments, or back issue inquiries: Please write to WIRED, PO Box 37706, Boone, IA 50037–0662, call (800) 769 4733, or email subscriptions@ WIRED.com. Please give both new and old addresses as printed on most recent label. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks after receipt of order. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to WIRED magazine, 4 Times Square, New York, NY 10036. For permissions and reprint requests, please call (212) 630 5656 or fax requests to (212) 630 5883. Visit us online at www.WIRED.com. To subscribe to other Condé Nast magazines on the web, visit www.condenet.com. Occasionally, we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services that we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these offers and/or information, please advise us at PO Box 37706, Boone, IA 50037-0662, or call (800) 769 4733.
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WHAT’S A GOOD TECH-RELATED COSTUME FOR HALLOWEEN? by Robert Capps HMM. WHAT DO YOU WANT MOST OUT OF IT?
A FLOWCHART
I WANT TO SCARE THE CRAP OUT OF PEOPLE!
I WANT IT TO BE HILARIOUS!
I WANT TO GET LUCKY
WHO ARE YOUR FRIENDS?
Slutty Dalek?
WHAT KIND? JOCKS
NERDS
COMICS
SCIENCE
POP CULTURE
STUDENT COUNCIL
THE TOUGH MUDDER/TRIATHLON KIND, RIGHT?
WEAR A SUIT MADE OF MONEY
ENDURANCE, BABY!
NO, WE JUST DRINK AND WATCH SPORTS
Be a giant Jawbone UP
1
OK then, a slutty TARDIS
THE OMNI FROM VOYAGERS! HEALTHCARE. GOV SERVER
A HYPERCUBE
TO BE RICHIE RICH?
BUT NO ONE WILL KNOW WHAT I AM
WTF IS THAT?
WILL MY COSTUME EVEN WORK?
THE TARDIS IS A PHONE BOOTH. HOW DO YOU MAKE THAT SEXY?
No, to be a Marvel Studios exec
They’ll know what your shadow is, though
Fine, be … dunno, a Star Trek guy or whatever
It will by November 15, promise!
GOOGLE IT—IF YOU DARE!
Be a giant Jawbone UP still in the box
WHO DO YOU WANT TO SCARE?
THAT SEEMS KINDA LOWBROW
MY HYPERCONSERVATIVE NEIGHBORS
MY HYPERLIBERAL NEIGHBORS
INTERNET STARTUP FOUNDERS
ELON MUSK
THE TAXI AND LIMOUSINE COMMISSION
UBER DRIVERS
LYFT DRIVERS
A GOVERNMENT DRONE
GMO Corn
A WOMAN (OR PERSON OF COLOR)
Skynet
AN UBER DRIVER
A Lyft driver
A beard trimmer
4
8
OCT 2014
© 2014 General Motors. All rights reserved. Cadillac® ATS Coupe
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Available reconfigurable Head-Up Display Bose® Active Noise Cancellation 272 HP 2.0L Turbo engine or available 321 HP 3.6L V6 engine cadillac.com/ATScoupe
