Category: Technology

A striking visual echo between two very different things:

The image on the left was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars. (I found it here.) It’s a zoom-in from outer space, showing the newly arrived Curiosity rover shortly after it began trundling around on the surface of the Red Planet. As a science fan, I find it incredibly wonderful that we not only have a brand-new mobile lab roaming Mars, but we can look down on the surface from orbit with telescopes so powerful they can make out the rover and even the twin tracks it has left behind in the soil. In this image Curiosity has just left its touchdown spot; the bluish (false color, btw) splotch to the lower right is where the “sky hook” retro rockets have blasted away the dust from the underlying bedrock. What we have, in essence, is a story in a single image — the arrival of a visitor to a distant planet, and the beginning of its exploratory career.

The image to the right shows another wanderer and its strikingly similar set of tracks. It’s a little hard to read, so here’s a rendering of the tracks alone, without all the extraneous background detail:

Here we see not the beginning of a journey, but the end.  The circle to the left is the fossilized remains of a horseshoe crab very much like the kind that wash up on beaches today. Some 150 million years ago, during the reign of the dinosaurs, this individual got swept by a wave out of the ocean and into a stagnant lagoon. The water there had no oxygen, so the clock was ticking. The creature managed to scurry along the muddy bottom for 32 feet before expiring. Apparently it’s not entirely unusual for fossilized horseshoe crabs to turn up alongside traces of their final steps; what’s special about this one is that this particular set of tracks tells an entire story, from the disturbed area of mud where the wave deposited the beast, to the meandering course it took as it sought to escape, to its moment of death. To see the whole set of tracks, and read a more detailed story, click here.

What I love about these pictures is how similar they seem, though they represent two very different kinds of wanderers, separated by hundreds of millions of years and hundreds of millions of miles. Nabokov famously opined that true literature can be recognized as a thing that creates an “indescribable tingle of the spine.” What tends to be overlooked, it seems to me, is that science can create that same feeling.

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Given the fact that Facebook just filed for a public offering of its shares which will value the company at $100 billion and make thousands of its current investors wealthy beyond imagination, you might be forgiven for thinking that Facebook is a wild success. That, and the fact that some 800 million people currently use Facebook, or more than 10 percent of the total world population.

But despite all that, I think that Facebook is failing.

Do I think that Facebook is going to go bankrupt tomorrow? Far from it. I’m sure that it will continue to print money for years to come, based on sheer momentum alone. (Hey, AOL still exists.) But if you listen to the way that people talk about Facebook you sense – or at least I do – that its cultural moment has passed. This is just based on a very unscientific analysis of my own very small circle of acquaintances, but once upon a time, Facebook was this awesome cool thing that you just had to try. Lately, all everyone seems to say about Facebook is “I don’t get it” or “I find it annoying but I feel like I have to go on once in a while.” Facebook, in other words, is heading the way of MySpace.

Becoming MySpace, of course, is the specter that haunts the nightmares of every Facebook investor. The company has been super aggressive in trying to avoid that fate by trying to metastasize into something grander than an automated blogging site, sending out tentacle everywhere in order to become a ubiquitous presence that binds together every aspect of the internet experience. They have striven for immortality through intrusiveness. And this, I think, will be their undoing. Continue reading Facebook’s Fatal Flaw

We were driving somewhere in central New York State, along a two-lane blacktop that wound a spectacular course through farm-dotted valleys, past placid lakes and along forested hillsides.  My brother’s attention, though, was on the unwavering purple line on the dashboard-mounted GPS unit. At last we reached the interstate on-ramp – and he drove right past it. “Turn left in 50 feet,” the GPS said. My brother obeyed, hanging a left onto the access road. According to the machine we were smack on the highway, yet here we were, stuck behind a tractor pulling a load of hay. “Time to destination, 30 minutes,” the GPS announced.

As we idled along behind the cloud-belching agriculture machinery, I had a feeling of déjà vu. Not for this exact moment of farm-machinery-induced frustration, but for that hot moment of clarity when you realize that you’ve been suckered by the self-assurance of modern technology.

It’s something I find happening more and more often. In the 25 years I’ve been a travel writer, the information revolution has changed everything. Once, we visited travel agents, bought paper maps, consulted destination guides. Now, all of those needs can be taken care of by a few flicks of a finger across a phone’s touch screen. Because information is so cheap, we don’t need to pay much attention to it. We can browse around the world the way we browse around the web.

Apps and gadgets of every kind allow us to summon instant expertise that otherwise would have required years of study. But they also remove the need to learn, to engage, and to be curious. We can ignore context. And so even when we know exactly where we’re located, we have no idea where we are.

Pilots have a word for the state of presence in the world around you; they call it situational awareness. “Keep your eyes out of the cockpit,” my flight instructor always used to tell me. Meaning: look at the world around you. Don’t get fixated on what your instruments are telling you. Understand the context of what you’re seeing. Situational awareness means understanding where things are in relation to one another.  It means knowing what’s going on, and what you can do when your plans start to unravel.

Electronic gadgets, in contrast, urge us to forget all that tiring mental work and just follow the purple line. They’re the mental equivalent of the electric scooters that obese people ride around at amusement parks to save themselves the effort of walking. Continue reading How GPS Makes Clueless Drivers

As a loyal devotee of Glee, I was stunned to see the the ReWalk exoskeleton featured in last night’s climactic scene. I won’t get into the plot details, but basically the ReWalk functions as a Christmas miracle, letting Artie walk again, albeit in a limited way.

Even more surprising than the inclusion of this rather arcane technology is the fact that the show’s description of if was entirely accurate. (This is, after all, a rather fantastical show.) They got the name right, and the fact that it’s been developed in Israel. And, true to life, the machine doesn’t let Artie just hop around. In order to use it, he has to press an arm-mounted keypad, and then take tentative steps one at a time. But by golly, he’s actually up and moving!

The most unrealistic aspect of the presentation was that, a) you can’t just buy a ReWalk yet; to use one you’d need to be enrolled in a clinical trial, of which there’s only one in the US, near Philadelphia b) it takes a fair bit of training to master.

UPDATE: With just a few days of shopping left before Christmas, word comes that ReWalk has been approved for sale by the FDA. Not for home use, as seen in Glee, but for use by patients in clinics and hospitals. “The ReWalk system will be available for sale as of January, for institutional use only,” says Heather Newcomb, Director of Communications at the Albert Einstein Healthcare Network near Philadelpha. “The cost will be around $85,000.” So even though no one will be finding one under their Christmas tree, a lot more people with spinal-cord injury will have a chance to ambulate again.

Here’s some video I took in January of one of the patients in the clinical trial, a man named Floyd Morrow:

And here’s a link to the story I wrote in Parade.

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Looks fast, right? It isn’t.

A few weeks ago Popular Mechanics posted my article about the British Steam Car Challenge and how they managed to break (barely) a record that dates back (if you squint at it the right way) to 1906. The full story is here, but today I wanted to take the opportunity to post some video from my time out in the desert with the team, so that interested readers can get a sense of what this thing looks like in action. In the video, it seems like it’s scorching, but the official speed on this run was only 127 mph.

They managed to up that figure later, but as one astute PM commenter observed, “3 Megawatts is equivalent to 4,000 horsepower, and they only got 150 mph? Something is very wrong with their design.”

Here’s another video from last Saturday night in Morocco, Indiana. Al Zukakas of Chicago takes his “Hot Blade” jet dragster to 269 mph in the quarter mile. The speed is impressive, but what really gets the crowd going is the sheer power of the sound, heat, and flame coming out of that big turbine. You can feel the thumping in your bones.

A late night last night. I was on assignment for Popular Mechanics, covering the debut of Paul Stender’s latest jet-powered contraption. Paul is best known as the guy who invented the jet-powered outhouse and the jet-powered schoolbus, but he’s done quite a few other vehicles as well — in fact, every winter he tends to brew up at least one new example of vehicular insanity in his Brownsville, IN, workshop in preparation for the upcoming drag-race and airshow season. Seen here is the “Urban Legend,” a ’67 Impala that’s been outfitted with a jet engine on its roof that Paul estimates will boost the car’s top speed from about 130 to about 250 mph. Note that he doesn’t achieve anything like that in this clip; the car, still a work in progress, suffered some major problems with the afterburner. Hopefully Paul will get the kinks worked out and will return to Morocco in September for a full-power run that hopefully the chest-pounding noise and fire of a full jet-car experience. I’ll be writing about the project in more detail in an upcoming issue of Popular Mechanics.

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Last week I got a lesson in piloting a C-Quester submarine in Aruba, a thrilling experience. I was struck by how similar it feels to flying a Zeppelin, which I wrote about for the July issue of Popular Mechanics. In both cases, you’re zooming along in a horizontal plane, while trying to maintain your altitude (or depth) by countering buoyancy effects with vertical thrusters. In both cases, you have to anticipate your correction well before it takes effect — there’s a huge lag time.

And in both cases, you’re bound to have a thrill of a lifetime. If you have a chance to try either one, I’d strongly suggest you take it.

Another day, another major earthquake — this time, a magnitude 6.9 tremblor that killed at least 300 people in China’s Qinghai province. I’ve been talking to a lot of seismologists lately, and they all agree that the recent cluster of devastating earthquakes, including the jolt that shook northern Mexico earlier this month, do not point to some planet-wide upheaval; it’s all a statistical coincidence, they say. Well, that may be true, but it sure doesn’t feel that way. It feels like something is up. Not surprising, then, that a few days ago false rumors started proliferating in Southern California that the Big One would strike imminently.

Seismologists’ reassurances would be more soothing if they had a detailed, empirically verified understanding of how earthquakes work. Unfortunately, they’re the result of forces at work deep within the earth that are difficult to gather data on. So the science remains in its early stages. But progress is being made — and soon, you can be a part of the process. As I wrote recently on the Pop Mech website:

As part of their battle to understand and protect against the destructive force of earthquakes, seismologists have gone to extraordinary lengths. They have bored holes deep into the earth’s crust, laid out arrays of sensors hundreds of miles across, and built supercomputers capable of running simulations at teraflop speeds. But the most exciting new effort in cutting-edge seismology involves a piece of instrumentation that’s a good deal less exotic. It’s called an iPhone. Continue reading iPhone vs Earthquakes