Start

• Superpowers fighting to claim the melting, oil-rich Arctic will want the moon next; we need the rule of law.
• New unsticky "Clean Gum" won't mar sidewalks.
• Satellite photos caught an empty Burma during a communications blackout.
• Faceslam: Facebook snub. Crowd farming: Stadium foot traffic as power plant.
• Forty rocketeers made an X-Wing, but it exploded.
• Chipuya Town is a Japanese mobile MMORPG.
• Matter/antimatter mix powers superlaser.
• Athlete's foot medicine contains no surprises.
• Mr. Know-it-all: Surgical masks do little against Chinese pollution. eBay bidding just for good feedback violates TOS. Shark cartilage doesn't fight cancer.
• Russia's covering Chernobyl with a steel shelter.
• Fire hoses spray mist on ignitable gases.
• Lace running shoes more comfortably: One normal cross, then up to the next eyelet, then cross again.
• Memorize numbers by giving each digit a mnemonic, then think of those mnemonics appearing along a walk around your block.
• Google buys companies that dominate, are first to a space, or could be a threat if Microsoft buys them.
• Self-absorbed geeks = "microcelebrities."
• Preteens are the best competitive texters.
• If The Golden Compass makes bank we'll see two sequels.
• Scotsmen have reinvented ancient Scottish ale.
• Infoporn: Silly Santa math.

Play (highlights)

• Stripper-blogger Diablo Cody wrote the sweet new comedy Juno.
• Comic book Persepolis became a 9-out-of-10 film.
• F4CC motorcycle could go over 200 mph but the tires would melt.

The Angry Mogul

• CD sales fell 10 percent in 2006. The future is digital.
• Universal Music CEO Doug Morris made Yahoo and YouTube pay to run music videos. He made Microsoft pay UMG a dollar per Zune. He's pissed at piracy. But he's letting Amazon sell DRM-free MP3s.
• Why DRM-free? To break Apple's monopoly. iTunes represents 20 percent of all U.S. music sales.
• UMG's digital revenue comes from iTunes and cell companies (ringtones).
• UMG will sell a subscription service (with DRM) called Total Music, urging Microsoft to add it to Zunes.

The Ultrabuilder

• The secret behind future "supertall" buildings is the buttressed core, a Y-shaped floor plan with a strong central support.
• Structural engineer Bill Baker is the go-to man for supertalls.
• Baker designed the butressed core to maximize window access and usable space in skyscrapers like the over-2600-foot Burj Dubai; it makes buildings taller, faster to build, and potentially more profitable.

Ode to Joystick

• Video Games Live directs live orchestra and choir videogame music performances.
• Creator Tommy Tallarico and conductor Jack Wall arrange the score and direct local musicians at symphony halls.
• VGL and competitor Play! are barely profitable, but they bring a new 20s/30s crowd to symphony halls.

Getting a Grip

• Making robots interact with a human environment, even finding and picking up a stapler, is tough.
• Solution: Make them learn. AI, for real this time, honest!
• RoboCub is a humanoid bot being taught to mimic and learn from human motions it sees.

Features
What Went Wrong

• Iraq went wrong because we concentrated on the hardware, not the social landscape.
• Since the '90s, everyone (including Wired) got excited about war in the information age.
• Under Bush, Rumsfeld made an Office of Force Transformation to give the armed forces a $230-billion networked makeover.
• That hasn't helped against our tech-primitive enemies in Iraq.
• Oh, our technology worked great for invasion, but it's rubbish at securing peace. For that, we actually need troops.
• For example, 150 troops are in charge of security for the 50,000-person Iraqi city of Tarmiyah.
• Their leading officer recruits local watchmen to help.
• US forces have sophisticated command centers on a network (CPOF), but the system was designed for "short, decisive battles" against armies, not extended missions against insurgents.
• Many forces can't get online enough to make CPOF useful.
• Meanwhile, insurgents just use the Internet and TV, and they already know the local culture.
• Psyops agent Joe Colabuno wins over informants by knowing the culture, name-dropping sheikhs and debating using the Koran. He makes posters spoofing insurgents to sway public perception.
• General Patraeus still believes in network-centric warfare, but as the man behind the surge, he believes in adequate troops too.
• The co-conceiver of networked warfare says: Combat operations are like football; stability operations are like soccer. The network model needs to adapt.
• The Army is adapting, spending $41 million on "Human Terrain Teams" of "150 social scientists, software geeks, and experts on local culture." They're credited for more local support and less combat in certain areas.
• HTTs will become more integral, but we don't know if they'll be armed or given command authority.

Back to the Futurama

• Five years after Fox canceled it, David Cohen and Matt Groening's Futurama returns on Comedy Central.
• The new shows — four features split into 16 22-minute episodes — are also being released on four DVDs starting November 27.
• Fox shuffled the show during its four seasons, and ratings dropped.
• Added to those four years, reruns and DVD sales earned over $100 million, estimates a writer.
• Creators are David X. Cohen and Matt Groening.
• Groening, Simpsons creator, still draws a weekly comic strip called Life in Hell. He has never seen any Star Trek.
• Cohen is a Trekkie, invented "Worst. Episode. Ever," and loves sci-fi.
• Futurama is about pandering to the elite audience. Cohen checks the web to see fans discover hidden jokes; then he makes the jokes harder.

Your DNA Decoded

• A thousand-dollar test tells you what diseases your genes predispose you to, as well as other factors.
• In the future, we'll use genetic information to plan our lives, and we could live an extra ten years.
• 23andMe, founded by Anne Wojcicki, wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, will give people their genetic info and build a database for research. Google invested $3.9 million.
• FedEx 23andMe a ten-minute wad of spit, and view your results online in under a month.
• There's still much to learn about which combinations of genes cause what conditions.
• It cost the Human Genome Project $3 billion to map an entire genome in 2003; it's about $250,000 now.
• Disease isn't solved yet; half of heart disease cases aren't explained by known risk factors.

Chat: Rich Barton, Zillow

• The housing crunch makes Zillow's algorithmic house appraisal more useful.
• Selling houses is no longer binary: homeowners can name a "make me move" price.

The Bone Factory

• Many medical skeletons are illegally shipped overseas. India has long been the biggest exporter.
• The country banned exporting human remains in 1985, but the black market thrives.
• India banned exports after a bone trader with 1500 child skeletons was suspected of kidnapping and killing the children.
• Skeletons are vital for medical schools.
• Example process: Corpses are taken from funeral pyres or graves, anchored in a river where they're eaten to mush and bone, scrubbed, sunbleached, and sanitized.

The Secrets of Silicon Valley

• "Ted," founder of TheFunded.com (where startuppers rate venture capital firms), is Adeo Ressi.
• Ressi, a self-promoter, made millions with 90s dot-coms, then started an online gaming platform Game Trust, which was taken over by investors.
• Ressi started TheFunded in response, getting friends like Weblogs Inc. founder Jason Calacanis to tell stories.
• When firms started invading TheFunded, Ressi banned shills to keep ratings real.
• Angel investments are surpassing VC money; hedge funds offer a low-maintenance alternative. VCs have to emphasize "customer service."

Nick Douglas writes at Valleywag, Too Much Nick, and Look Shiny. He would, in fact, read that magazine if you paid him to.

NICK DOUGLAS — Forget RoboCop — the real bad dude in the '87 film is the massive ED-209. But this bumbling behemoth — its one weakness was stairs — couldn't beat Tom Servo in a battle of wits. Here they are, with video of eight other badass sci-fi robots. In the deleted scene below, ED-209 pumps some rounds into a businessman. Cathartic but not safe for work.

1. ED-209, Robocop: As shown above, this thing can cause serious damage. No wonder all the security bots in Deus Ex Machina look just like him. You have 30 seconds to comply.
2. Roy Batty, Blade Runner: He's seen things you people wouldn't believe. He will obliterate you. And then he will write a Kansas song about it.
3. The Iron Giant: It's always the quiet ones. The Art-Deco Iron Giant is gentle until the guns come out. Then it's wham, bam, blam blam blam.
4. Toaster, Battlestar Galactica: The original Cylons, redesigned. And thank gods they don't look like something from the Apple labs — the oscillating red glow on these slick gray killing machines strike terror in humans' hearts.
5. Six, Battlestar Galactica: The Cylons look like us now! Only Gaius Baltar . God's special messenger wants to tell you his plan — but she might have to kill you.
6. Optimus Prime, Transformers: Robots can't disguise their prostate problems.
7. Droideka, The Phantom Menace: This Star Wars battledroid tucks, rolls, then whips back like a casual gunslinger to fire twin blasters.
8. Tom Servo, Mystery Science Theater 3000: "Look at this. Blonde hair." "Yeah, you can usually find a blonde hair in a field of wheat." "At night." "In a fog." Oh snap, someone got Servo'd! Gumball-machine-head over there has a razor wit, and for a party trick he bends space and time.
9. T-1000 or The Terminator: Who's tougher, the molten T-1000 or the Terminator that, um, melts him to death? Feel free to debate below.
10. The orange-shirted dance competitor: Once he pulls the strobe effect, it's all over.

"You could see she was focused. It seemed to me that everything she did, she did systematically. Even the way her dance bag was packed," her ballet teacher told the Herald.

But, as we've asked before, what kind of robot is she?

She told the paper, "I don't think there was a plan." So she's not a Cylon.

"She wanted to smash," says her debate coach. So she's not an Asimov robot.

"She was extremely capable and self-motivated," said the coach. "I really didn't need to teach her anything." So, not an Aibo.

Wausau girl hits big-time [Wausau Daily Herald]

I figured out why Marissa [Mayer] ran from you instead of punching you in the face.

It's obvious: the Three Laws of Robotics.

Earlier: Valleywag party report (including Marissa Mayer incident) [Valleywag]

• Steve Jobs, Apple CEO
• John Chambers, Cisco president and CEO
• Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard prez and CEO
• Hector Ruiz, Advanced Micro Devices chairman and CEO
• Jonathan "Does this ponytail make me look edgy" Schwartz, Sun Microsystems prez and CEO
• Vint "I really invented the Internet" Cerf, Google VP
• Gavin Newsom, San Francisco mayor
• A robot

British prime minister visits with execs in Silicon Valley [Mercury News]
Blair visits Delancey Street cafe, world events a phone call away [SF Chronicle]
Photo: Jobs, Chambers, and Blair try to bite each other at once

"Google is like the Borg," said Milo Medin, a computer networking expert who was a founder of the 1990's online service @Home, referring to the robotic species on "Star Trek" that was forcibly assembled from millions of species and computer components.

Is Google ready to become the new Borg? Not according to a simple LexisNexis news search, which shows that "Microsoft" appeared within ten words of "Borg" 15 times in the press last year. "Google" only managed three Borg mentions.

But wait! Map in the number of times Microsoft was mentioned without Google, and that 2005 lead all but disappears. Google only got three Borg mentions in 2005, but that somehow lowered the Microsoft-but-not-Google count by nine.

The arithmetic doesn't make sense — which reveals Google's secret power. Google is able to warp the space-time contiuum around search. They're not the Borg — they're the Q.

Earlier: What's he building in there: Google buys a city [Valleywag]

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

Earlier: Marissa Mayer: hologram or android? [Valleywag]

Evidence that Max Levchin is a cyborg

• The suspicion started when Marketwatch scared me (and this time not because of Jon Friedman's writing style). Bambi Francisco published her interview with Max Levchin — complete with WMV featuring the Slide founder. And one thing drove me crazy (other than my inability to screencap it): Max moved like a Disney animatronic model. [Bambi Francisco]
• 

  The man is ripped. What human engineer has biceps? [Flickr]

• As noted in the above photo's Flickr page, Max follows a polyphasic sleep schedule — a perfect excuse to stay constantly awake, always heading somewhere else to "sleep."
• When he worked at PayPal doing security (alert: common robot job), Max invented the Gausebeck-Levchin test, a Captcha test designed to tell humans apart from computers. Tell me this — how did Max know what computers think? [Wikipedia]

After the jump, I run Max through the Voight-Kampff test.

• I confronted Max with my fears, using the reliable Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner.

  Valleywag: Reaction time is a factor in this so please pay attention. Answer as quickly as you can.
  It's your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?
  Max Levchin: Is there some sort of a connotation with calfskin?
  Knowing you, you are testing my homosexuality index. :-)(
  I have gotten leather wallets for bdays before.
  Wag: It's just a question. In answer to your query, it's written down for me. It's a test, designed to provoke an emotional response.
  Max: Ah.
  I say thanks.
  Wag: You've got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?
  Max: Trying to remember the correct quote from Blade Runner...
  In real life, I'd probably ask him to consider whether he'd like to be "collected" like the butterflies — on a pin.
  Then again, I am a bit of a enviro.
  Wag: Describe, in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.
  Max: It's hard to translate that from Russian.
  My mom is associated with Russian words, not English.
  Wag: Go ahead.
  Max: Warmth, food, toys, multiplication table, after-school projects, camping, trains.

  Conclusion: Without an actual Voight-Kampff machine, or even being in the same room with Max, the test proves inconclusive. But he knows Russian, and those replicants looked Ukranian, right? [Voight-Kampff machine]

• In his defense, Max pointed to an unsolicited documentation of his spontaneous facial expressions. For example:

  

  Um, sure Max. Did you think I'd forget a little thing called the emotion chip? You are so busted. [atgig.com]

Silicon Valley is actually not the place to find hackers. Hackers aren't usually wealthy enough to live here, unless they've sold out. And if they have sold out, are they really hackers any more? Or are they crusty old punk detritus, washed up on the shores of integrity, their pirate banners wrapped around their unwashed groins like a loincloth of shame?

In truth, the seedy and often maligned hacker seen in movies and comics is not the real deal. Just because you break into systems uninvited does not alone give one the mantle of "hacker." Hackers are coders, they're the guys who stay up all night making a piece of software do something that it wasn't meant to. They're the folks who can whip up a visual demonstration in 48k of code, or can slap support for a new language into an IDE in 8 coffee-fueled hours.

And this is why I think EclipseCON is the biggest hacker convention we've yet seen in the Bay Area. DefCon, HOPE, CCC, HAL; they're all amateurs. EclipseCON is where the real innovation is taking place, and the folks behind that innovation aren't cool fashion gods, nor are they pierced-up striped-tights-wearing grrrrrrrrrrrrrls. They're the same unshaven, bushy-tailed coders that exist in almost every organization around the world. And they're building the coolest shit imaginable in this open source tools platform.

After the jump, let them eat carrot cake.

Take NASA, for example. They used Eclipse to build the controls for the Mars Spirit rover. They took a tools platform built by IBM for enterprise-type application construction and turned it into a glorified remote control for a robot that takes 8 minutes to respond to commands. Their only limitation is the speed of light. And if that's not hacking, I don't know what is.

The convention was overbooked, no one could get in without pre-registering, the coffee was great, and the lunch was a standard affair. One oddity: dessert was served in the exhibit hall, and the carrot cake tended to arrive a half hour before noon, making it appear as though the convention's controllers were trying to pass off the cake as the whole meal itself. And if there is one thing this crowd did not need, it was more cake.

Photo — hey look, there're women!: EclipseCon 2006 [EclipseCon]

Your best call is to skip the first 12 minutes and listen to him reading from the book.

"How to Survive a Robot Uprising" - Daniel H. Wilson speaks at Google [Google Video]