All Things Digital

In the universe of the free (”free” as in beer), getting ripped off is the norm. Yes, many products and services are deliberately priced at zero these days, but a significant portion of consumers will gravitate to illegitimate free versions of not-free stuff. Free versions of pricey digital products are not hard to find on underground file trading sites, or in bits and pieces on above ground aggregators like YouTube. Most high-priced wares like expensive commercial software can be had for literally nothing. But very cheap things are widely pirated for free as well. 

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A friend of mine recently slimmed down on Weight Watchers. She joined two months ago, and in just a couple of weeks, she’d shed 10 pounds. She’d been trying for a year to lose weight, but nothing worked–until now. Why did Weight Watchers work so well? For a really fascinating reason: because it isn’t a normal diet. It’s something more. Something fun. It’s an RPG.

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Fans of extraterrestrial life may have been disappointed when Internet-fed rumors of Martian life ended in a NASA press conference on soil composition. But they can take solace in a newly popular theory that suggests the rest of space may teem with microbes.

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Here’s the thing about the TV business: It’s only as profitable or as valuable as the people who watch it. And if the only people who watch it are senior citizens strapped by debt, it’s not worth much–not to advertisers, anyway.

When Viacom posted second-quarter results yesterday, the company admitted its TV business hit a snag. Global advertising sales grew just two percent, and U.S. ad sales only eked out one-percent growth. Ad volume “dropped off” mid-quarter, according to Viacom president and CEO Philippe Dauman.

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“The Dark Knight” made a mind-warping, record-breaking $155.3 million at the box office over the weekend. Thousands of people waited hours in line to sit in a dark room and watch the movie with strangers. They didn’t have to wait in line, though–they could have watched it at home.

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There’s a dawning sense that extremely large databases of information, starting in the petabyte level, could change how we learn things. The traditional way of doing science entails constructing a hypothesis to match observed data or to solicit new data. Here’s a bunch of observations; what theory explains the data sufficiently so that we can predict the next observation?

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“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all.

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YouTube videos that show a group of friends apparently cooking kernels of popcorn with their cellphones have been viewed more than a million times since they were uploaded last week. The clever parlor trick looks amazing enough, but there’s a hitch: It’s not physically possible, according to University of Virginia physics professor Louis Bloomfield.

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If elected president, Sen. John McCain would reserve the right to run his own warrantless wiretapping program against Americans, based on the theory that the president’s wartime powers trump federal criminal statutes and court oversight, according to a statement released by his campaign Monday.

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Like any of the 796 superdelegates in this highly charged presidential-election cycle, Tom Ryan says he’s taking his responsibility of choosing a Democratic nominee for president very seriously.

So seriously that the putative candidate for mayor of Scranton, Pa., has posted several YouTube videos describing what it’s like to be a superdelegate.

“Many of you don’t know what it’s like to be in my shoes,” Ryan agonized in an April 17 video shot at what looks like his kitchen table. “If Hillary wins Pennsylvania, do I go with the will of the people of the state and support Hillary? Or do I go with the will of the people of the nation and support Obama? This is why I’m undecided.”

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The stereotype of Japanese office culture–rigid, formal and hierarchical–is still the norm in most of the country. Hiroyuki Nishimura observes none of those rules. In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, the lackadaisical 31-year-old with a soul patch and wispy goatee has become the most influential figure on the Japanese Web.

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Tired of the United States and the other 190-odd nations on Earth? If a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires get their way, in a few years, you could have a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters. With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer have launched the Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities “with diverse social, political and legal systems.”

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It costs $482.79 to get a decent pizza in San Francisco–$17 for the pie, $85 for cab fare and $378.80 for the flight to New York. Throw in $1.99 for tinfoil. I wrap each slice individually to protect the toppings and maximize what I can fit inside a regulation-size carry-on: six pies’ worth of triangular packets, arranged in an alternating pattern to create rectangular layers. The bag attracts some attention at airport security. Apparently, 48 interlocking aluminum-wrapped triangles are easy to mistake for an IED.

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The House is set for hearings on one of the hottest–and most contentious–topics in Pentagon research today.

Every arm of the Pentagon’s vast research complex is scrambling to figure out how to turn social and cultural networks into military advantage. Social scientists are being embedded in combat brigades, to explore Iraq and Afghanistan’s “human terrain.” Computer labs back at home are trying to model foreign cultures like the weather and predict the next epicenter of unrest. But all of these projects are loaded with controversy. One of the biggest academic groups in social science has condemned the Human Terrain System program as unethical; prominent researchers and officers think the prediction project is pie-in-the-sky, at best.

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Shortly after Will Wright released yet another version of his SimCity in the mid 1990s, I was visiting Maxis’ studios and chatting with Will about evolutionary system and self-generating software. SimCity was a city that built itself according to a few rules–which the player tweaked and tried to maximize. It was the ultimate nerd god-game, the nerd playing god. Will offered to give me a peek preview of his next project. SimCity was so cool, I was expecting something even more generative, more ambitious, more god-like–something like Spore.

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