Raw Text of 13 Wired Magazing Shorts
| Decentralize Yourself Street Cred, Wired 5.11 World Cup on Acid Street Cred, Wired 3.11 Sign On, Space Out Street Cred, Wired 3.09 Cyberspace for Outer Space Electric Word, Wired 3.06 For Formula Types Street Cred, Wired 3.06 Playing in Outland Street CredWired 3.05
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Virtual Piglet Lab Street CredWired 3.05 Tandy's Text-Typing Genius Street Cred, Wired 3.02 Moon Roaming by PC Electric Word, 2.10 Gonzo Science Class Street Cred, Wired 2.08 A New Sense Organ for the Net Electric Word, 2.06 Get Those Pictures Out of Your Head Street Cred, Wired 2.04 Glow-In-The-Dark BBS Net Surf, Wired 1.06, |
The cure? Download StarLogo, a free Macintosh app from the Epistemology and Learning Group at the MIT Media Lab. (A Windows version is on the way.) StarLogo's purpose is to help people, especially precollege students, think in a decentralized way.
After I downloaded StarLogo, I opened the sample project called Traffic (I live in Southern California). I found myself looking down on a simple highway like an airborne traffic reporter. The interface, developed by Media Lab professor Mitchel Resnick (see " Building a Learning Society," Wired 5.10, page 136), let me control the number of vehicles and the rate at which they travel. Within a few minutes, I figured out why those mysterious parking lots appear on LA's 405 freeway. Of course, hard braking causes traffic bunching, as does fast acceleration, which, in turn, causes hard braking - and the cycle continues. But the real culprit is different rates of braking and acceleration. If I set equal rates for both, even if they are very fast, cars travel smoothly.
It's fairly easy to program your own simulations in StarLogo because its language is based on MIT's Logo, in which you instruct "turtles" how to draw shapes and pictures, while "patches" are pieces of the world the turtles inhabit. But StarLogo extends Logo so you can control the behavior of thousands of turtles and patches in parallel. Traffic is only one type of simulation available; a student interested in termite behavior could program turtles to act like termites by making them attracted to a certain odor, then program patches to simulate wood by having them emit that odor.
StarLogo proved to me that sometimes traffic is a group mistake and that there are no evil termite managers to curse for the destruction of my porch. Sure, it sucks knowing that I can only blame my fellow man when I'm stuck in traffic, but on the bright side, StarLogo showed me that someday, management might be unnecessary - at least for destroying things.
- Caleb John Clark
Street Cred, Wired 3.11
Virtual-reality gaming dwells in a wonder stage, the territory of the curious and small groups of truly hip cyberteens - but GreyStone Technology's MagBall could change that. MagBall is not a "shoot or be shot" testosteronefest, it's a sport.
Six of the world's first sleek, black MagBall pods can be found at the Cybermind virtual reality center in downtown San Francisco. Greet your two teammates and three opponents, slide into a pod, and sit back as your new reality - a massive Day-Glo playing field - fills the high-res monitor before you. Sitting in what appears to be a giant jet-propelled drink coaster, your view is like the World Cup through the eyes of a center forward on acid.
In a streak of light, a ball zips past your pod. You pull your joystick trigger to magnetically attract it to the front of your pod and race off toward the goal, a running-back coaster bound for glory.
As in the old arcade game Asteroids, you have to overcome your pod's momentum to change direction. You can get going pretty fast, but changing directions is like stopping and running the other direction on a playing field - it takes time and effort. This helps make the gameplay more real, rewarding finesse and strategy over brute strength.
My second game was a clincher, down to the five-second warning. When I missed the shot at the last second, I felt exactly as if I'd missed a winning goal in a pickup soccer match. I shook my head, planned for next time, and joked with the other players.
MagBall is a virtual sport - with all the competitive excitement and team play of the real thing - and, more important, it's a giant step toward pulling virtual reality out of the wonder years.
- Caleb John Clark
MagBall at Cybermind Interactive: US$7 per eight minutes play time. Cybermind Interactive Inc.: (800) 492 9237, +1 (415) 693 0348, fax +1 (415) 693 0462, e-mail cybermind@compspec.com, on the Web at http://www.cris.com/~cybermn2.
Caleb John Clark writes with one hand as he clutches the tail of the technology beast thrashing pell-mell through society. He intends to orbit the planet at least once.
Street Cred, Wired 3.09
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." This T. S. Eliot quote greeted me when I clicked on a link titled The Nine Planets, a virtual tour of the Solar System.
I was at the stunning Web home page put up by the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space chapter at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Students for Exploration is an independent, international student organization (the public is welcome to join) that originated at MIT and Princeton in 1980 to promote the exploration and development of space.
The Tucson branch's Web page is a beautiful, well-organized, and professional compendium on every aspect of space exploration and study. A sleek, new, Sun-donated workstation keeps the page running smoothly, and the many designers use Netscape's background-color control and other features to full advantage.
The tour of the solar system takes an in-depth look at each planet, complete with history, pictures, animation, movies, and every link you can possibly think of to related information. This is a complete teaching tool that surpasses many CD-ROMs I've encountered.
The Shoemaker-Levy 9 link documents pictures and current data on the comet's collision with Jupiter, gathered from locations around the world. And a giant image map of the Milky Way greets you with a plethora of more cool links like Visions of the Future, where you can check out pages on star ships, space colony designs, and missions in the works from scientists around the world. A real-time link takes you to time-based information on Earth and solar weather as well as astronomy stats. Everything from launch manifests and weather maps to academic papers and Apollo movies is here. And, if you'd like to suggest a link that they've missed, there's a form for entering it.
The page is a jackpot Lotto prize for anyone interested in space. And hey, let's face it, we're festering here on our little planet and have a lot to learn before we stop peeing in our pool. Consciousness needs to be raised, different environments experienced, new resources found, and space is the place. Beam me up, I'm outta here!
- Caleb John Clark
Students for the Exploration and Development of Space Web site at http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu. Newsgroup at bit.listserv.seds-l, e-mail seds@seds.org.
Caleb John Clark writes with one hand as he clutches the tail of the technology beast thrashing pell-mell through society. He intends to orbit the planet at least once.
Electric Word, Wired 3.06 Not that you've ever had to think about it, but somebody has to play traffic cop in space. Until recently, the job meant tortuous hours staring at text and numbers on screen to determine a spacecraft's precise status. Now space-flight controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, monitor a glorious 3-D color environment using easy-on-the-eye icons. These icons, part of the new Cyberspace Data Monitoring System, display the subsystem status (such as power and temperature) of craft ranging from the far-flung Magellan and Voyager 2 to more pedestrian Earth-orbiting satellites.
The monitoring system gives controllers the "ability to obtain a thorough and intuitive status assessment of numerous spacecraft without reading any text," says Ursula Schwuttke, the task manager at JPL's Advanced Information Systems section.
Plot a course to http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/cyber.htmll.
- Caleb John Clark
Street Cred, Wired 3.06 So you are, in fact, a rocket scientist, and you need to write a technical paper, one with a lot of mathematical equations in it. You might get by with the meager extension called Equation Editor that is part of some software (MS Word and others), or you could go right to the source that created Equation Editor and get MathType 3.1. For a one-disk program, MathType is a robust and "intelligent" little app. Enter equations in lowercase text without spaces, and it formats them to the American Mathematical Society's standards on the fly. Formulas can be imported into most documents (word processing, graphics) using the import command or cut-and-paste. Once the formula is in the file, just click to edit.
With MS Word 5.0 and higher, you can add MathType to the menu for even easier importing. Equations for printout are typeset-quality, object-oriented graphics.
But here's the coolest part: using MathType made me feel like a rocket scientist. I typed a few numbers, selected icons as per the tutorial, looked up, and there was a beautiful formula in a scientific standard.
- Caleb John Clark
MathType 3.1 for Mac and Windows : US$199. Design Science Inc.: +1 (310) 433 0685.
Wired 3.05, Street Cred
The sound of rolling dice bounced from my Mac's speaker. My modem's lights flashed and my invisible human opponent's backgammon pieces moved mysteriously around the beautifully textured board on screen - and landed on me. "Take that!" my opponent wrote in the chat window. I was in Outland, a network devoted Mac games: chess, Go, Backstab, Reversi, a cool group strategy game called Spaceward Ho!, and others. In this fantastic cyberstop, everyone has one purpose - to play.
True to Mac style, the interface is intuitive, and it sports good-looking graphics. Most games have different skill levels, and no matter what you're playing, you can carry on live chats with your adversaries.
Without hourly charges, I found myself typing, "Hmm, got to think about this move" in the chat window and pac-ing around my room in my boxers glancing at the board on each lap.
Finally, no more wandering around the house begging people to play with you. - Caleb John Clark
Outland: US$9.95 a month. (800) 752 9688, via the Web http://www.outland.com, e-mail:
Wired 3.05, Street Cred
The Fetal Pig - here's a great, not to mention gutsy, name for a software title! This program is billed as a "comprehensive introduction to the anatomy of mammals which can complement or replace fetal-pig dissection units." In other words - it's virtual dissection for the squeamish, not to mention the ultimate politically correct educational software.
This Mac-only, single-disk application lets students explore the anatomy and biological functions of a fetal pig without hacking up a real dead, stinky, formaldehyde-soaked piglet. I remember my high school biology lab (ugh, right after lunch) with their stench and rubbery piglet skin as if it were yesterday. All the major systems are covered, including respiratory, reproductive, digestive, skeletal, and nervous. Kids can explore diagrams of the major systems on their own, play hangman-ish word games, or take tests.
The disk's HyperCard-like stack features simple, low-resolution, black-and-white interactive diagrams of a dissected piglet with detailed blow-ups and a few sounds. The diagrams are simple because the software fits on a single floppy, but they provide a lot of information and are usable on almost any Mac (LC or higher, 1Mbyte of RAM) - crucial for schools. The Fetal Pig comes with a hard copy teacher's guide that follows the 10 lessons on the disk.
The software has been sold to nearly 1,000 schools, and a company that sells real pigs offers the software as an alternative/supplement to customers. Fetal pigs around the world are breathing a sigh of relief, and whole generations of kids may soon escape the stink of formaldehyde.
Other dissection software available from Ventura Educational systems are VisiFrog and The Earthworm. Lab packs and network versions are available. - Caleb John Clark
The Fetal Pig, for Mac: US$59.95. Ventura Educational Systems: (800) 336 1022, +1 (805) 473 7383.
Caleb John Clark is a San Francisco writer who lives in the heart of North Beach. He feels like he's been hit in the forehead with a slingshot-fired won ton.
Street Cred, Wired 3.02
Computers aren't known for how well they KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). But back in 1986, some geniuses at Tandy made the Tandy 102, a legendary portable computer that to this day can slap a new PowerBook around.
I'd been looking in the paper for months when I finally found one for US$50 (that's not a typo). So what else is so great about this 8 1/2-by-12-inch box? Well, it lasts 20 hours on 4AA batteries; it has a built-in 300-baud modem; it weighs 3 pounds; it has a really full-sized keyboard (like a giant calculator on steroids); start-up is instantaneous; you can travel stress-free because it's too ugly to steal; you can add an acoustic coupler (I've heard of reporters who file stories from static-filled Russian pay phones with it); it has a transparent, condom-like encasing (writers I know have spilled full whiskey glasses on it without hurting a thing). This is genius!
There's no hard drive and no disk drive. In fact, the keyboard seems to be the only thing that moves, except for its 8-bit CPU and screaming 2.4 MHz processor that somehow keeps up with my typing. It uses text-based software stored in ROM and has an application for writing with cut, paste, and find - no spell check, but you can carry a dictionary and your pack will still weigh less than a PowerBook. It has a telecom application for downloading and sending data and a BASIC application for writing code and file management. Files are stored in RAM and kept there with a small hearing-aid-type battery. I bought an extra 8K RAM chip for $16.
Sure, the eight-line LCD display is small, but it works. Sure, it holds a finite amount of text, but you can modem files out, or use a serial port. You can also attach a 3 1/2-inch floppy drive and a television/video monitor. And, if you've completely lost your mind, it has a special port for downloading files onto an audio-cassette deck.
The manual, by the way, is a study in prehistoric, but surprisingly visionary, computer history. It points out that you can access over 100 BBSes in the country, gives detailed instructions on how to access CompuServe, and advises using electronic mail because it's faster and cheaper than the postal service.
As I use mine, I wonder, in this age of rampant gee-whiz technology, Why is some ugly old beige piece of plastic making me so happy? The answer is that its first, last, and middle name is "simple." I wish hardware developers would learn how to KISS better. They could make one of these in their sleep now, and I'd buy it in a second. - Caleb John Clark
Tandy 102, by Tandy Corporation: no longer sold; check classified ads for orphan processors.
Caleb John Clark is a writer who has just moved into the heart of North Beach and feels like he's been hit in the forehead by a wonton out of a slingshot.
Electric Word, 2.10
Marsokhod is a small planetary rover that looks like a cross between an insect and a monster truck. Its Russian-made chassis has six barrel-like wheels on three independent axles and a mechanical arm developed by McDonnell Douglas. But the neatest thing about it is the pair of video cameras that transmit a real-time, color, stereo video signal that can be synched into a helmet anywhere. When you strap on the helmet and grab the remote controls, you are virtually "in the driver's seat."
Marsokhod is an ongoing joint project between McDonnell Douglas, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Russia's Lavochkin Association, and the University of Hawaii. If all goes well in Washington (where NASA's budget is perennially under siege), Marsokhod, or one of its offspring, could land on the moon within the next several years, as the third mission in NASA's Discovery program.
And once the scientists have their turn, John Garvey - project manager for planetary systems at McDonnell Douglas - says lucky students will be able to control the vehicle from a classroom using a cable TV connection, a modem, and a PC. In fact, just such a link took place last summer when McDonnell Douglas wired a Santa Ana, California, high school to the rover at NASA's Ames Research Center a few hundred miles north, in Mountain View. As Garvey points out, there is no better way to excite students about science than to let them take a cruise on the moon.
To find pictures from the rover's tests on earth, FTP to artemis.arc.nasa.gov under amboy. For more info, e-mail John Garvey at garvey@apt.mdc.com.
- Caleb John Clark
Street Cred, Wired 2.08
Just when you think network TV is dead, it pulls off something like Beakman's World. Every Saturday morning on CBS, Beakman, a crazed scientist with a New York accent and black spiked hair (think Ferris Bueller crossed with Seinfeld's Kramer) takes kids on a half-hour educational roller-coaster ride.
The last episode I caught covered sound waves, pressure, and explosions. To explain pressure, Beakman placed a playing card on the top of a half-full glass of water. (This isn't a new science demo -- Mister Wizard did the same card trick 30 years ago -- but Mister Wizard didn't have a tattooed guy named Lester dressed as a giant rat helping him.) Beakman turned the glass upside down and the card stayed put, holding the water. Beakman explained that we live at the bottom of an ocean of air, and like swimming to the bottom of a pool (image of a swimming pool flashed on screen for a split second), you feel pressure on your head, the same kind of pressure that holds the card against the glass. My thirtysomething roommate, (the same guy who initially wanted to change the channel but was too lazy to move) jumped up off the couch and ran into the kitchen. "Cool! It works!" I heard him yell a few moments later.
Beakman's show is filled with fast cuts, comical sound effects that accompany waving arms and dancing eyebrows, and in-your-face graphics that clarify concepts and keep you watching closely.
Beakman also reads letters sent from viewers. One Saturday, he came upon one that read, "When are you going to stop talking and blow something up?" Immediately, a montage of every major explosion ever caught on film blazed across the screen: Falling buildings, fire bombs, rockets blasting off. Then Beakman's mother and her bridge partners marched out in full bomb squad pads and made a disclaimer before Beakman proceeded to blow up a "film canister thingy" with a couple of "fizzy tablets." Meanwhile, Lester the rat had sneaked away and dropped a chunk of dry ice in a garbage can full of water and closed the top. You can guess the rest. At the end of the half-hour, a couple of penguins watching TV in a snowstorm came on. "What'd you think of the show?" said one and the other answered, "Dynamite. Now let's turn the TV off and find something neat to do."
There might be hope for network TV after all.
Caleb John ClarkBeakman's World can be seen on CBS, Saturdays 12-12:30 p.m. EST.
Caleb John Clark is a writer who has just moved into North Beach and feels like he's been hit in the forehead by a wonton out of a slingshot.
Electric Word, 2.06
Spacecraft such as the Hubbell telescope and the Galileo space probe are remote-sensing antennae for the body of the Net. These digitally connected feelers transmit laser-guided streams of digital images, letting us see into the blackness surrounding us - through our desktop monitors.
Clementine I, a military space probe launched last January, is the latest addition to the Net's array of whiskers. It was built by the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (you probably remember it under its former title, the money-sucking SDI).
Just why is the Pentagon taking pictures of outer space? Are Defense drones looking for little green men to fight now that the commies have called it quits? No, the Clementine project is a mission to test tracking and targeting hardware using celestial bodies like asteroids, instead of more expensive manmade targets. But scientists are going to accumulate a wealth of astronomical data in the process of the military exercise.
Like the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization's revolutionary Delta Clipper ("Will the Delta Clipper Turn Deep Space Into Cyberspace," WIRED 2.02, page 68), Clementine was built fast and cheap using the latest technology. Launched just one day late, Clementine was developed on a remarkably short two-year schedule for US$75 million.
Measuring six feet in length, the 1,000-pound Clementine is making a complete map of the moon (the first in twenty years), and will then loop around Earth and shoot out 5.3 million miles for a fly-by of the asteroid Geographos. You can get Clementine's pictures from clementine.s1.gov.
- Caleb John Clark
Street Cred, Wired 2.04
If you're into any visual art (filmmaking, game development, etc.), but can't draw yourself out of a paper bag, this might be for you.
StoryBoard Quick 2.0 is a small Mac application (Windows version is coming soon) for creating simple story boards very quickly. It's small - 1 Mbyte on disk and 1Mbyte of RAM, so it can be used with an on-the-set PowerBook.
Storyboard applications are nothing new, but the innovative thing about StoryBoard Quick is that it comes with flexible predrawn characters, locations, and props that can be moused into frames using a simple tool box.
For instance, select "exterior, country road" from the locations window and a simple two-lane road with gray-scale mountains and telephone lines appears. Pan for the view you want and click on the "standing woman" icon. Then click on a grid square that combines the "looking forward" icon with the "walking" icon and drag her onto your country road. Select "tree" from the 100 props offered, and there you have it. The graphics are crude, but they get the point across and save tons of time.
You can use a pen tool to draw freehand in any frame, and you can import PICT files from scanners or video captures. Once you have what you like, dialog boxes let you put text under the frames. You can print from one to sixteen frames on a page. A nice professional touch is the option of four different aspect ratios: US Feature, TV, Wide Screen, and European Feature.
StoryBoard Quick is a fast, rough-and-tumble tool for getting your visual ideas out of your head and into the world for people to see.
Caleb John ClarkStoryBoard Quick 2.0: US$199. PowerProduction Software: +1 (310) 370 4793
Caleb John Clark has written for E2 and Omni and just bought a pair of rollerblades instead of an external hard drive that he didn't really need... yet.
Wired 1.06, Net Surf
It could have been just like any other one-phone-line, Fidonet BBS. That is if it wasn't in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Pam Trexler (sysop) hadn't four geology/mining degrees and a sub-contractor relationship with the Los Alamos Laboratories. Los Alamos's BBS of choice, Construction Net #6 is very technically oriented and a hub for anti-virus discussions. In a nutshell, this is a very hip, relatively unknown BBS. Beware of lurking scientists. Dial +1 (505) 662 0659 to connect.
Michael Rogero Brown michaelb@sunrise.cse.fau.edu Caleb John Clark calebjc@aol.com Kathleen Creighton casey@well.sf.ca.us Scott Dickenshied sdickens@nmsu.edu Andy Eddy vidgames@netcom.com JC Herz mischief@mindvox.phantom.com Heath Hunnicutt theath@microsoft.com Arthur Kroker ctheory@vax2.concordia.ca Marilouise Kroker ctheory@vax2.concordia.ca John Makulowich verbwork@access.digex.net