Gary says "Check out the new EP of Halloween themed uke-abilly music from Mad Tea Party! (And check out Ami's new uke-playing skeleton tattoo...)"
"Below you'll find a list of the UN-recognized countries where as of yet there is no action registered. Do you know someone in any of these countries. Does your church or synagogue or mosque or temple have contacts there? What about your professional society? University alumni group? Would you be willing to send an email like this to them, explaining 350 and asking them to join in by organizing some event, large or small, for the 24th of October? Can you imagine the kind of message it would sound if every country on the planet joined in actions on Oct. 24th?"170 Countries! (And the "Missing 23") (Thanks, Darren!)1. Angola
2. Bahamas
3. Turkmenistan
4. Comoros
5. Djibouti
6. East Timor
7. Equatorial Guinea
8. Eritrea
9. Guinea
10. Guinea-Bissau
11. Kiribati
12. Lesotho
13. Liechtenstein
14. Luxembourg
15. Mauritania
16. Micronesia
17. Monaco
18. Namibia
19. North Korea
20. San Marino
21. Sao Tome and Principe
22. Seychelles
PeggyDraw is an app that lets you draw images on your computer that you want to display in lights on your EMS Labs Peggy 2. Windell is busy working on a revamp of the program. It's almost here. In the meantime, Mark Delp created a little program called bmp2peg (added to the Peggy project at Google Code). It converts BMP image files into Arduino Sketches. Above is a drawing of a pumpkin, created in bmp2peg, and sent to a Peggy 2 outfitted with orange LEDs.
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I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.
Noam sez, "There are so many things to love in this world, so just to point a few of them I've animated the xkcd comic xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel. Singing by the amazing Olga Nunes."
I Love xkcd (Thanks, Noam!)
"I like what's going on because I feel closer to the fans and the people who appreciate the music. It's the democratisation of music in a way, and music is a gift. That's what it should be, a gift." -- ShakiraLooks like more and more musicians are realizing that fighting file sharing doesn't make sense, but learning to embrace it has tremendous benefits. Maybe, one of these days, the record labels will figure this out as well.
"If people hear it I'm happy. I'm not going to say go and steal my album, but you know I think its great that young people who don't have a lot of money can listen to music and be exposed to new things." -- Norah Jones
"If you love music you're going to make it anyway. You'll find an audience, and you may not make like millions of dollars but you'll make enough to have a house and a family and a car." -- Nelly Furtado
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here's the second serialized installment of J.C. Hutchins' SF
thriller novel 7th Son: Descent.
To celebrate the Oct. 27 release of the book, J.C. is releasing Descent
in several free serialized formats: PDF, blog text, and audio. We're
distributing the text version of the novel in ten weekly installments.
In the last serialized episode, U.S. president Hank "Gator" Griffin was assassinated by a four-year-old boy during a stumping rally in Kentucky. The child died not long after, offering no clues for his murderous motives.
Two weeks later, seven strangers were ripped from their normal lives on the same day, kidnapped by mysterious government agents, and brought to a "beyond Top Secret" facility. Locked in the same room, these seven men realized that, despite slight variations in their appearance, they all appeared to be the same man. Are they brothers? Each remembers being an only child.
Check out the second serialized installment of 7th Son below. If you've enjoyed the experience so far, you can support the book by purchasing a copy at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders, or printing this PDF order form and presenting it at your favorite bookstore. You can learn more about the book at J.C.'s site.
For a moment, Kenneth Kleinman considered straightening his tie and rolling down the sleeves of his white oxford, but it was far too late for such bullshit. He looked up at General Hill's face, looked down at the soldier's spit-shined boots, and quickly pulled out the black plastic comb from his breast pocket to style what little hair he had left. He and Hill had become unlikely allies these past fifteen years, and Kleinman half-expected the general to rattle off the usual smirky insults about the old man's appearance. They didn't come.
"Are you ready?" Kleinman asked.
"Of course," the general said. The black man's voice was a stern baritone.
Kleinman stared at the closed door before them. It was curious, this anticipation churning inside him. He felt giddy, grave, and unsettled.
Kleinman turned back to the door and told Chapman, Hill's baby-faced assistant, to unlock the dead bolt. Before he did, the lieutenant unsnapped the holster strap covering the grip of his sidearm. This was procedure, Hill had explained. Nothing personal.
Chapman opened the door. He went in first. Then the general. Kleinman whispered a prayer and followed.
All seven were at the table. In all of Kleinman's eighty-three years, no experience was as exhilarating as seeing them here, together.
The marine was standing, of course. General Hill returned the salute, and the young man sat down, clasped his hands, and waited. The others' expressions were a menagerie of terror, expectation, and what appeared to be quiet gratitude. They had probably expected another one of "them" to walk through the door, Kleinman realized. The men didn't look at each other. They looked at the towering general. They looked at Chapman, who was packing acne scars and a loaded weapon. Then they looked at Kleinman.
Chapman closed the door and stood before it. Kleinman sat down at the head of the table. His sweaty palms slipped on the dark wood.
"Gentleman. My name is Dr. Kenneth Kleinman. I'm the man Dr. DeFalco told you about; I'm the head of this facility. This is Brigadier General Orlando Hill. He oversees security and operations."
The silence didn't last long.
"You are so fucking sued," one of them said. It was Dr. Mike, Kleinman noted; the well-dressed criminal profiler. The yeller-not-a-fighter. "The whole. Fucking. Lot. Of you. I want to know what the hell's going on. I want to know why a punk put a gun in my face before I was about to go on live—fucking live—television. I want to know who these people are." He looked around the table. "These . . . these . . ."
"Me's."
Jack said that, Kleinman saw. Last to be captured. Potbelly, beard, wire rims. Father of the twins. The geneticist. If anyone here could understand and appreciate what was about to come, it would be him.
Kleinman said nothing. He had known it would be this way, known it long before he'd stepped through that goddamned door. Let them speak. Let them vent. Just let the question come, the billion-dollar question, the question that would tear the roof off this place and cannonball these men into revelation and—if we're not careful—revolution.
"Where are we?" That was Thomas, the priest. He clutched his rosary. The beads chittered against the wood. The man was on the verge of tears.
The one called Kilroy twirled his drinking straw, compressed its flexible neck, then pulled it taut. Compressed it again, pulled it taut. The sound unnerved the trembling man to his left. Jay. So nicknamed in college, for there were too many students with the same name in his Foreign Policy class.
Ah. And there was John. The bard, the black sheep.
"Are we brothers?" the young man asked.
Kleinman sighed. There it was. The stone had been thrown into the lake; it was time to watch the shock waves. It was far too late for apologies, for pandering.
"You're more than brothers," Kleinman said. "Much, much more."
* * *
The child had been conceived in a saucer under a microscope, observed by more than a dozen scientists who had vowed years before—under Code Phantom orders, which meant under penalty of death—that they had made peace with playing God and were fully committed to their clandestine project. The child's mother and father were nameless donors selected from a tome the size of a Chicago white pages.His parents' heredity, genetics, education, and major life accomplishments had been summarized into ten-paragraph biographies, just like those of the thousands of other unwitting participants. The father's proficiency in athletics and mathematics made him an ideal candidate for the project. The mother's brilliance in art, biology, and language was coveted by the 7th Son team. She was also unspeakably beautiful.
On January 1, thirty years ago, their sperm and eggs were removed from cryostorage, thawed, and prepared for eventual artificial insemination. The parents weren't invited to the conception. Security was the overwhelming factor, of course—the project was Code Phantom . . . beyond Top Secret, beyond Eclipse Command.
Practicality also contributed to the decision. The father had been dead since 1967; the mother was then sixty-four years old. The lab-coat folk didn't think the woman would have taken the birth in the best of spirits.
The conception was successful on the third attempt, and the zygote was implanted into a surrogate who was paid an astounding amount of money to not ask questions. After the child's birth, it would be given to Dania and Hugh Sheridan, scientists working on the 7th Son project. Dania was one of the head technologists; Hugh was the lone child psychologist on the 7th Son staff. They would raise the child together as planned, in the way suggested by the scientists and the cadre of child specialists (who hadn't the foggiest to what project they were contributing when they were questioned by Sheridan, Kleinman, and the rest). The goal: to make the child the most well-rounded person it could be; to encourage the youngster to excel in any hobby or academic interest it pursued, or was connived into pursuing, if need be. Love the child. Gently push the child. Introduce religion, culture, athletics, and art to the child. Let the child grow to be playful, curious, and serious.
It would need the most supportive childhood possible, after all, if it was to be destined for great things.
The Sheridans changed their last name to Smith and moved to Indianapolis, as ordered. Regular reports by the "Smiths" and the 7th Son support staff who'd also moved to Indy would keep the project's leaders at the Virginia headquarters informed of the child's progress after the birth.
That September 7, John Michael Smith was born.
* * *
A moment after John connected the dots—right after the impact of the words John Michael Smith was being collected and fired from his neurons—Dr. Mike attacked. The room's silence was shattered by Mike's scream. He was already climbing across the table before John realized what was happening.Dr. Mike's hair had quickly torn free from its blow-dried style and had descended onto his brow in thick, knife-shaped shards. His eyes bulged. His knees slid and slipped on the tabletop. One of his loafer-clad feet nearly kicked John in the face. The dude was fast and frantic, and on Kleinman in seconds.
He shook the geezer, screamed this was bullshit. Somewhere, one of the seven was shouting for help, another was cackling the word "conspiracy, conspiracy" in a singsong voice, another still was shouting to stop it stop it he's trying to tell us something. At the end of the table, the priest whispered, "That's my name," over and over.
John sat there, disconnected, disbelieving, as if this were some improv performance in which he and these other players would smile and shake hands afterward. It felt like a dinner mystery. Yes, very much like that.
Lieutenant Chapman grabbed Dr. Mike from behind by the Brooks Brothers coat and yanked him off the table with one arm. Mike spilled to the floor, swearing and screaming. Chapman placed his .45 against the side of Mike's head and cocked the hammer.
Dr. Mike stopped in midswing and stared into Chapman's eyes. It was like hitting pause on a videotape, or watching two kids play freeze tag. Mike's mouth hung open for a moment, his fist still in midair. Chapman dug the barrel into Dr. Mike's temple—Are we all on the same page here? his eyes said—and Mike dropped his arm.
Chapman's gun did not budge. Kleinman was up from the table, wiping his glasses furiously. General Hill stepped between Kleinman and the derailed assailant, his shadow sweeping over Dr. Mike like a thundercloud.
"I will not tolerate that behavior," Hill said, his voice low and cold. "Not here. Not in my post. Do you understand me?"
Mike looked up and nodded. Chapman pulled the gun away and resumed his place by the door. Hill whirled around and pointed a dark finger at the rest of them. The fat lunatic stopped giggling.
"That goes for all of you. I'll say this one time. Violence will not be tolerated here, in this room, in this facility. You're wondering why you're here. You're hoping you've slid over into some Twilight Zone episode. You haven't. This is real, and it's only the beginning. So shut up. Listen to Dr. Kleinman."
As Kleinman stepped tentatively back toward the table, Hill cleared his throat. "And if any of you so much as daydreams about attacking this man," he said with an icy whisper, "I'll take you down myself."
The dude gargles crude oil, John thought.
Dr. Mike sullenly shuffled back to his seat, primly brushing his rumpled suit coat. Kleinman sat down and adjusted his spectacles.
"I know how all this must seem," Kleinman said, and shook his head. "But you must trust the general and me." He waved his hand across the table, from one side to the other, as if introducing two groups at a dinner party.
"John Michael Smith . . . meet John Michael Smith," he said.
At the other end of the table, the priest began to cry. "What is this all about?" Father Thomas asked.
Kleinman offered him a tired, sympathetic smile.
"It's about the greatest experiment ever conducted in the history of our species."
* * *
Hugh and Dania Sheridan, now Smith, raised the boy in Meridian-Kessler, an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Indianapolis. They followed the child-rearing plan outlined by the project leaders and encouraged Johnny Smith in every way they could.Johnny was raised Catholic, just as his mother had been. Although Dania was an agnostic by the time she'd entered the 7th Son project and Hugh was an atheist who had suddenly found himself in a foxhole in the name of science, they created a more than convincing portrayal of the "casual Catholic" family. Dania baked cakes for the fish-fry cake wheel, Hugh helped set up booths at fund-raisers. They never pushed the Catechism down their son's throat, but simply explained the core beliefs of Christianity and told Johnny there was a God if he believed there was one. They also taught their son religious tolerance: Judaism, Buddhism, a smidgen of shamanism, atheism.
Johnny took a shine to athletics early in life, thanks to his biological father's abilities and the ordered encouragement of his adoptive parents. T-ball and YMCA soccer were early obsessions, but—as with most children raised in Indiana—basketball became the sport he enjoyed most. When Johnny was five, Hugh installed a wooden backboard on the rear side of the garage, facing the cobblestone alley. They practiced free throws before dinner, and Hugh would always place Johnny on his shoulders for a slam dunk just before they raced each other, laughing, back to the house to eat.
Thanks to Hugh's former profession as a child psychologist, the couple explained complicated matters to the boy in terms he would understand. The family went to art galleries, attended operas and plays—potentially stodgy affairs for even the most patient of adults—and made those trips exciting for the child. Paintings were like windows into the mind, they'd say. Concerts and plays were like mythical creatures that lived for only a short time, disappeared, and were reborn at the next performance. Each incarnation was a little different, and that's what made them special. Like the phoenix? Johnny had asked after seeing a performance of Peter Pan, and the parents had smiled proudly. That's right. Just like the phoenix.
He grew up listening to 33s of Mozart and 45s of the Beach Boys. Dania would sing along and play accompaniment on the grand piano in the living room. Johnny liked it best when she'd bang out the thunderous opening chords of the Fifth Symphony and then suddenly nose-dive into "Roll Over Beethoven." The connection was not lost on the boy. He laughed every time she did that. She did, too.
Finger paints gave way to watercolors; free throws to flip-wrist bank shots; trikes to bikes.
Class sizes were small at the private grade school Johnny attended, and thanks again to his biological proclivities and his parents' unwavering encouragement, he excelled in all subjects. Johnny would become bored in his classes, but he never became a behavior problem. He simply wrote stories and long-division equations to keep occupied.
He was blond, beautiful, loved by his peers and teachers. He took karate classes and piano and guitar lessons. He played forward on the A team of his middle-school basketball team. He was an altar boy at his church. He traveled with his parents to the Indiana farmlands for picnics, and to nigh-magical places during summer vacations: Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, even Paris and London. His parents taught him the difference between confidence and egomania.
Through it all, the 7th Son team members were notified at least once a day of the boy's progress. The Virginia team leaders gave guidance where necessary, but since they were now creating and testing the technology for the project's Beta Phase, they had entrusted much of the daily business to the Indianapolis team. Pediatricians, family friends, occasional after-school tutors, and babysitters: many were 7th Son support staff, documenting the child's progress from the outside looking in, nearly always confirming the data Dania and Hugh were sending to Virginia.
When he was twelve, Johnny received the Catholic sacrament of confirmation. After careful research, the boy selected Thomas, after St. Thomas Aquinas, the patron saint of scholars, as his confirmation name.
Johnny had no living grandparents. He was told Dania was an only child, and both sets of grandparents had died before he was born. The only family John knew of were a far-flung uncle named Karl, his father's brother, and Karl's wife, Jaclyn. John had never met them. His father had only one photograph of them, which he carried in his wallet: a tiny, out-of-focus Kodak print from the late sixties. In the picture, Karl and Jaclyn were sitting on a picnic table, laughing at the camera. Her long brown hair was blowing in the wind, forever frozen in a grainy blur. His large, dark sunglasses matched the color of his collar-length hair. Karl and Jaclyn sent postcards from wonderful places with strange names: Caracas, Panama, Newfoundland, Beijing . . . each a geography lesson waiting to be unearthed. Transfixed by such adventures, John asked what his uncle and aunt did for a living. They worked for the United Nations, Hugh explained.
John attended an exceptional public high school, excelled in his freshman honors classes, and was exposed to many of the races and religions that he'd learned about in his youth. He loved public school, loved the clashes of skin colors and lingo. He tried out for JV basketball and was accepted. Johnny also excelled in track-and-field hurdling. He fell for a girl and received his first kiss one October night at the high school's homecoming game. They dated, if after-school McDonald's shakes could be considered dating. One day, he playfully told his mother that he would marry Patty Ross. Dania told him to be careful about making such assumptions about the future. Lots of things could happen from here to there, Dania warned.
The next day, John's parents were killed in a car accident.
The family was on its way to catch an evening showing of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Johnny would remember getting into the car, Dad turning on Lindstrom Lane, seeing the headlights rushing through the stoplight, rushing toward them . . . hearing his father slam his hand on the horn . . . the snarl of the oncoming engine . . . his mother's shrieks.
He would open his eyes two years later in a strange city and meet his aunt and uncle for the first time.
They would tell him he had spent his fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays in a coma.
* * *
The marine broke the silence:"With all due respect, sir, I'd like to know exactly how you know the greatest-hits version of my childhood. How you know about 'Roll Over Beethoven' and—"
"Your childhood?" said Jay, the thin man who'd fainted an hour ago. His voice was incredulous. "That's my childhood."
The giggling lunatic smacked his fat palm against the table. "Mine."
Two voices in unison, Dr. Mike, the well-dressed psychologist, and Jack, the bearded geneticist: "And mine."
John stared at them—stared at them staring at each other—and looked at Kleinman for a heartbeat, an infinity. He felt the tears well up in his eyes. Kleinman offered a gentle smile. This was a nightmare, John realized, a postcoital nap thanks to Saturday Sex with Sarah. Any second now he'd wake up, shake his head, and have a smoke, one of the last in the pack. Any second now. Anysecondnow.
He watched Thomas the priest clutch his rosary and shiver.
John wasn't waking up.
Kleinman removed his glasses and looked at the seven of them, one by one. John, the ponytailed, lanky black sheep. Michael the marine, the warrior, body-perfection personified. Kilroy2.0, the obese, bespectacled lunatic hacker. Father Thomas, a hero at his parish in Oklahoma. Jack, the pudgy, bearded geneticist. Dr. Mike, the well-coiffed criminal psychologist on the cusp of micro-celebrity. Jay, the United Nations humanitarian.
Kleinman spoke to all of them now.
"This is going to be hardest part to believe, but you must, because we don't have time for the alternative. You weren't in a car accident sixteen years ago. Johnny Smith was drugged that night. At dinner. The car wreck was a ruse to create a memory of danger, to create a 'splinter' he could come back to later in life, to examine. Something to remember.
"Johnny Smith's parents took him to the Indianapolis team, who in turn brought him here, to the Virginia facility."
"I don't fucking believe this," Dr. Mike said.
"Shut up," General Hill snarled.
"It sounds impossible, but John Smith's memories," Kleinman said, "all of them, every emotion he ever experienced during his first fourteen years—every fantasy, every dream, every prayer—were recorded and uploaded into the giant hypercomputer beneath this facility. There the memories of John Michael Smith were converted into electronic form, digital data stored for two years while Beta Phase began."
Dr. Mike: "What the—"
"Shut up," Hill said.
"With the blood samples we'd taken during those years of research, we retrieved John Smith's DNA—entire genomes, complete chromosomal strands—and cloned him," Kleinman said. "Cloned you. Seven times. In seven biotanks. All at the same time. During the two missing years in your memories—the two years you were told you were in a coma—we grew those seven clones to sixteen-year-old maturity using an accelerated growth process. We took those seven sons with their seven vacant minds . . . they had no life, and no life experiences to remember . . . and 'downloaded' John Smith's childhood memories into their brains.
"You see, these clones weren't just genetically identical. You were intellectually identical. Emotionally identical. You were the perfect, complete copies of John Smith 'Alpha.' The same memories, the same . . . human spirit, if you will.
"And so, each John Smith 'Beta' awoke in a city that was not Indianapolis. And each John Smith was told his parents were dead. Each of you had an Uncle Karl and Aunt Jaclyn to raise you, to physically rehabilitate you and to reintroduce you to society. We chose to blame the post-in-virtualvitro muscular state on atrophy caused by the coma. The ultimate goal? To have each clone go into a different career field."
The men sat in silence for a moment now, processing what they'd just heard. Finally, a question from the pudgy, bearded clone.
"Why?"
"For many reasons, Jack. As a geneticist, you can probably anticipate my answer," Kleinman said, "the most important being to ensure the cloning and memory retrieval and insertion technology worked. But many of us approached this as the ultimate nature-versus-nurture experiment."
"My parents. They're . . . they're alive?" It was Father Thomas.
"The people you remember as your parents, yes, they're actually alive," Kleinman said. "Your mother is alive, yes. Your father, he's here, in this facility."
The group began to unhinge again; a common growl rose from the seven as their confusion spilled forth. Chapman, who stood beside the door, instinctively placed his hand on the butt of his sidearm. Dr. Mike's voice rose above the rest. He stood up, red-faced. The spot where Chapman's pistol muzzle had dug into his temple flared like a burner on an electric stove. His blue eyes blazed.
"Out! Out! Get me the hell out of here!" Mike screamed.
"Gentlemen, please—," Kleinman began.
"Mom and Dad, here?" Father Thomas.
Giggles. Kilroy2.0.
"—the fuck out of here!" Dr. Mike shrieked.
General Hill took another step forward and pointed his finger at Mike. "Sit down."
"Blow me."
Hill rushed the table, but Michael stood up and stepped in front of the general. The marine's muscles flexed gracefully, his hands raised in a cartoonish We come in peace pose. Hill stopped and looked the young man in the eyes.
"What do you want, marine?" Hill snarled.
"I just want to know what's going on, sir." Michael's clipped, efficient tenor finally broke into a quiet desperation. "I want to know what the hell's happening here."
Hill forced a furious exhale through his nostrils and looked over at the old man. "Tell them, Kleinman."
The old man removed his glasses and tossed them on the table.
"We need you to stop him. The man you were cloned from. John Smith Alpha."
The stars. It had been years since John had seen them so clearly. Miami smog, Miami lights—they killed the view of all but the strongest stars, even if you were gazing from the beach. Only Orion seemed brave enough to cut though South Florida's midnight haze; only Venus was vibrant enough to shimmer from the horizon. To see stars like this, you had to be far from big-city lights. John reckoned they were probably in farm country.
He took a drag from his Camel Light. The old scientist Kleinman had given him a pack as they left the conference room three hours ago. The others here had said they didn't mind the smoke. He exhaled, watching the blue-gray smoke swirl out over this strange circular room, up and up, finally dissipating against the domed skylight above them. It was like sitting at the bottom of a grain silo. He was encircled by eight sets of doors. One led to a hallway. The rest, to seven small apartments. Living quarters.
He was surprised more of them weren't out here in what Kleinman called the Common Room. How could the other "Beta clones" sleep behind those doors, behind those one-way mirrored windows, in those small dorm rooms? How could they ignore the funnel cloud of questions? Yes, John was exhausted, but he wasn't ready to turn in. Would he ever be? Could you ever be, after staring into six pairs of your own eyes and hearing that your childhood was a glorified computer file, swapped from one disc to another? That you had been grown in a jar? Could you ever be, even if you didn't believe any of it?
John wasn't willing to find out just yet. Neither were Michael nor Jack, apparently. It was late, but the three of them drank coffee and sat on the circular couch in the center of the room and, like long-lost family, endured long silences with strange, strained smiles. It was early Sunday morning. Less than a day had passed since their abductions—or in the case of the marine, since reporting for duty. John now knew a little about each of them. He supposed he knew everything about them to a point . . . to age fourteen . . . if what Kleinman had said was true.
The conversation came in herks and jerks at first. Talking about being clones was off-limits. But John sensed a subconscious need between them to talk, to share. He likened it to the bond cigarette smokers have with each other: pariahs, relegated to puffing outside, huddled away from the office doors where clients might pass and make judgment. When you spot a kindred smoker—stranger or no—it's almost second nature to make small talk. After all, you have at least one thing in common.
And John, Jack, and Michael certainly had something in common, didn't they?
The trio broke the ice by chitchatting about what they did, and whom they loved.
Michael was a captain in the Marine Corps; he had a home in Colorado. Single, but seeing someone. When pressed, Michael revealed his lover's name: Gabriel. "You asked, I told," he said to them, smiling. "Gabe's great. I was supposed to go home and see him. He's probably worried." Both John and Jack could sympathize.
Jack was the number two guy at the Recombinant Genetics Lab at the University of Arizona. He had a wife, two kids. Twins. Sometimes irony is as delicious as a nectarine.
John told them about his life, unglamorous by comparison. No globe-trotting or gene-splicing adventures here—no government-sanctioned murder or mutated mice, for that matter. Just a thirty-year-old jack-of-all-trades who'd leaped off the college track to travel, play guitar, and try to write a decent song now and then. He'd done Nashville and some of Georgia before heading to Miami. It wasn't too late to break into show business, if that was something he wanted to pursue. It was never too late to do that. But he'd done just about everything under (and in) the sun to keep the lights on in the meantime. Worked construction, drove a cement mixer, tended bar. He was a part-time shot-pourer at a South Beach nightclub these days and spent the rest of his time pulling handyman duty at the small art gallery where he had met Sarah.
The conversation was eerie. Like reading a letter you wrote to yourself years before. Like talking to yourself in the bathroom mirror with the door closed. No. More uncanny and invasive than that. It was almost like chatting with your mind-self, that all-knowing judge/jury singularity inside your head. The You that only you know about, the You that knows all the lies you've told, all the silent good deeds you've performed. The You that rarely escapes the straitjacket of social graces, the politics of pleasantry . . . the You that is as brutally honest as it wishes to be. It has that luxury. After all, it lives in your head.
But not anymore. Now it's sipping coffee, and staring into your eyes.
"Do you really think Kleinman was telling the truth?" John asked softly. "About this, us, all of it?"
The marine took a sip of his black coffee and placed the Styrofoam cup on the circular coffee table. His forearms are huge, John thought.
"I've been thinking of a million different explanations," Michael finally said. "Identical septuplets—if there's such a thing—separated at birth. Plastic surgery. Brainwashing. Each idea I come up with is easier to explain than what the old man said today. Clones? No way. I mean, no offense, but you guys look nothing like me. Your bodies, I mean. Your complexions." Michael smiled, and John marveled that he'd seen that smile in the mirror a million times. "I'd never let my body get like that."
Jack chuckled and peeked down at his potbelly. For a moment, it was reflected in his glasses. "None taken. I've got a serious sweet tooth."
"One side of me says this cloning thing is too far-out to be true," Michael continued. "That what he said is all science fiction and I shouldn't believe it. The other side of me says it's so far-out, it must be true. If it weren't, why feed us such a line of convoluted bullshit?"
"I thought the same thing," John said. Surprised, he paused and took a drag off his smoke. "The exact same thing."
"And that's the truly far-out part," Michael said.
Jack frowned and rubbed his beard. "No. I can't reconcile the information," he said, shaking his head. "I can't put it all together. What that old man—"
"Kleinman," John said.
"Yeah. What he said is impossible. Cloning? That I can grasp. I do that on mice; swipe and swap genes to create knockout variants. But cloning a human: that's a more complicated matter, infinitely more difficult to pull off . . . and that's with today's technology. But we're talking about something that supposedly happened more than fifteen years ago. We—I mean, scientists—we were still waxing romantic about mapping the human genome back then, like it was a fairy tale. You know, something we'd discover while zipping around in our flying cars."
John and Michael smiled at that.
"But toss in that bit about recording human memories and growth accelerant, and you've converted me from skeptic to flat-out cynic," Jack said. "The technology doesn't exist. It doesn't. And it certainly didn't fifteen years ago."
Jack looked at John, at his long hair, slender face, and wiry arms. John felt like a suitor being once-overed by the prom date's parents.
"Something remarkable has happened to bring us here, that I'll admit," Jack said. "But there are more rational explanations than what I heard today. There are too many questions. Too many variables. Hell, you could all be actors wearing prosthetic makeup, reciting lines to make me believe I'm part of some government conspiracy."
He nodded to the double doors at the front of this circular room, the doorway that led out into the halls of 7th Son.
"I'm waiting for Allen Funt to come into this room and tell me I'm on Candid Camera. That's a better—and perhaps the easiest—explanation for all of this. The joke's on me."
Michael shook his head; John noticed how similar this motion was to Jack's, just seconds earlier. Monkey see, monkey do.
"Then it's on me, too, hoss," Michael said. "I'm not wearing makeup, and I'm not reading lines. Now I've seen equipment out in the field—shit, I've used equipment out in the field—that civilians never knew existed. I've worn things you'd think were brought back from the future. I can buy what the old man said; there's plenty of tech none of us'll ever know about. But I swear to God, I don't have the foggiest what's going on here."
John smirked. Michael and Jack looked at him, curious.
"You swear?" John asked.
"That's right," Michael said.
"Pinkie swear?"
Michael paused, blinking. Then they all laughed; it was good to laugh, to crack the piano-wire tension, to hush the questions rattling in their heads.
Michael picked up his mug of coffee, took a sip, and grinned. "Aw, man, that was good. Pinkie swears. Do y'all remember pinkie swears?"
Pinkie swears. John's mind raced back to cobblestone alleys and guitar lessons and Mom and Dad and—
He dropped his cigarette. "We all do. Don't we?"
* * *
John, Michael, and Jack sipped coffee and told stories. As an experiment. To see if what the old man said was true."Okay. My first memory," John began. "You'd think it would be music, if you knew me. But I remember flying, believe it or not. Flying in the arms of my father, at a park . . ."
". . . flying like a fighter plane," Michael said. "I was scared, hoss . . . I was screaming and then I wasn't . . ."
Jack: ". . . because I was intrigued, I suppose, because I was seeing the world from another vantage point, seeing possibilities swirl around me, watching my field of vision rise and expand, like climbing a hill and looking down at where I'd started . . ."
John: ". . . then I saw Mom waving from the picnic blanket, her blond hair swirling in the wind, the reds and whites of the blanket so vibrant, like Technicolor . . ."
. . . like an old John Wayne movie . . .
. . . like a high-contrast photograph, with the whites blown out and the reds dancing across the eyes . . .
and the grass, far below
green as anything; green as jade
Dad's face, looking up at me, seeing him laugh
hearing him laugh
and hearing me laugh, too.
I never forgot that.
First kiss. The chill of the fall weather, football weather, the roar of the homecoming crowd, the shared hot chocolate, Patty's mittens, my black, knit gloves with the fraying leather palms, her face near mine, her lips, soft and salty and moist, her tongue, tiny and tentative, slipping into my mouth, the holding of hands, the racing of my heart, head swimming, delirious, somehow noticing the bright purple fringe of her scarf and thinking it was all a wonderful dream
The Grand Canyon. Realizing how large it was and how small I was . . . hearing Dad say how it'd been there millions of years before me and how it'd be there long after . . . how insignificant I felt, and how I told Mom that I felt like nothing, like a grain of sand . . . she said it was okay to be humbled. She said to remember something so large was created by something as seemingly insignificant as a whisper of wind and a trickle of water . . . over time, little things change the face of the world; little things create great things, Johnny. You may be little now, but . . .
Never forget that.
Cornfields, combines, Frisbees, the soul of places—Listen with your ears. What do you hear? Now what do you feel?—the crisp ping of red dodgeballs, the squeaks of sneakers on basketball courts, the rattles of loose guitar strings and slippery plinks of misplayed piano keys.
Mom and Dad
"and kisses—"
"and headlights—"
"and screams."
John, Jack, and Michael stared at each other, stared at the pink sunlight creeping through the skylight, stared into themselves. They shared something intimate, alienating.
Memories. Every last one.
To a point. A flashpoint of bending metal and shattered glass.
The old man had been right.
* * *
Dr. Mike couldn't sleep. Wouldn't sleep. He lay in bed, staring up at the dark ceiling, then over at the door and then to the one-way mirrored window looking out to the Common Room (he'd closed the blinds as soon as he came in here). The room's simple setup had immediately reminded him of a college dorm room: a small, connected bathroom, a bed, a chest of drawers (filled with new Tommy and Polo khakis and shirts, all his size, things he would wear—and is it reasonable to assume the others have similar custom-picked duds? Yes, yes, it is), wall-mounted bookshelves, a desk, a gray telephone, and a chair. Of course the phone didn't work.But dorm room was a charitable description. This was a prison cell, Dr. Mike knew. He'd seen enough cells over the past two years while researching his book.
Dr. Mike kicked away the bunched bedsheets at his feet. He rubbed his temple, the bruised spot where that round-faced soldier's gun barrel had dug into his skin. Mike's mind raced over the past day's events, settling on the face of the old man . . . the old man who'd recounted Mike's childhood. He told me I was a clone, Mike thought, sneering. He told me that I was grown in a lab and my parents are still alive.
Bullshit. Parents were dead. Sixteen years gone.
Why was he here? Why was he here, really? Dr. Mike had asked the old man that. Larry fucking King, book tour, all derailed, he had pleaded. Hunting the Hunters would fade fast without hype—and he needed to be there for the hype.
Kleinman had shaken his head and apologized and said everything else would be explained tomorrow. In the meantime, no phone calls, no e-mails, no cell phones or text messages. Just a promise of a tour of the facility after breakfast and many answers about "why you are all here" and "7th Son" and "John Alpha." Big meeting in the morning. Get some rest.
As if.
John Michael Smith, Alpha. The so-called source of some impending doom and, according to Kleinman, the source of Dr. Mike's body and mind.
Again, bullshit. Never, ever.
Dr. Mike started, sat up. He heard something from beyond the door, hailing from the Common Room. Laughter. Mike stood and peeked through the closed blinds. Three of his fellow captives, sitting on the circular couch in the center of the room. One of them—the marine—had a Styrofoam cup in his hands. Another was picking up a cigarette that he'd dropped on the floor. They were getting to know each other.
A frantic thought shot through his head.
What if it was all true?
Mike began to sweat suddenly. No. It's not.
But what if? Look at them. They're cut from the same cloth. They're cut from your cloth. What if they really were clones, and there really was a John Alpha out there . . . and what if you could help take him down? That's what you do, isn't it? That's what you've done dozens of times. Taken down the bad guy.
Mike tore his fingers through his hair and sat on the bed again. He held his head in his hands.
You are a criminal psychologist, buddy. Wrote a book on the subject. If this is all true, you can help get into Alpha's head. You do that, save the day, and then they'll let you out.
Dr. Mike placed his fingertips to his temples. He felt the bruise. His eyes narrowed.
No. He couldn't believe it.
And he wouldn't help them. He wouldn't help them at all.
* * *
In his heart, Jay knew it was all true—despite the protestations of his left brain, despite the inner voice that had politely advocated and then screamed for him to employ common sense. Because what Kleinman had said made no sense at all.And yet, in the realm of Jay's experience, it did. In his years working for the United Nations, he had traveled to hungry—and power-hungry—nations as a field agent for the OHCHR, the UN's human rights watchdog group. He had witnessed things that defied rationality: land mines in farmer's fields, runoff from biochem facilities trickling directly into water supplies, grinning despots glad-handing and denying reports that millions of their countrymen were being eaten inside out by AIDS.
When you've stared at the green teeth of an Afghan who has to eat bread made from grass to survive, human cloning seems almost yawn-worthy, he thought.
Almost. Jay had fainted, after all. It was too much—the kidnapping, the surreal vision of six "hims" sitting around a conference-room table. That's why he'd beelined to his living quarters when Kleinman had led them to the Common Room. That's why he had shut and locked the door, drawn the blinds, and hunkered down. He needed to be alone, not bonding with the clones.
Bonding with the Clones. Sounded like a game show. Family Feud, eat your heart out.
Jay smiled. That's something Patricia would've laughed at. He ached for her, desperately wanted to talk to her.
Bitterness swept over him. Christ, what would he say, given the chance?
Jay sighed and stared through the darkness at the digital clock resting on the desk: 4:30 a.m. He folded his fingers together and gazed at the glint of his wedding band. He missed his wife. His East Village apartment. His job. The routine. The normalcy.
Another minute ticked away on the clock's LED.
Funny, how—in a way—the job had prepared him for this. View enough corruption and starving masses and you learn to become detached, analytical. That's the key to avoiding burnout. Empathy and impartiality are different beaches. You either wash up on one and scream like a savage or come to rest on the other, pull out your clipboard, and get to work. Information, not passion, is best used to facilitate change. The seven of them were going to be put to work somehow; that much, Jay knew. It was best if he tucked in his metaphorical shirt, put on his tie, and contributed.
Besides, when the man with the gun asks for your wallet, you give it to him.
But questions plagued Jay tonight. Big ones, about the past. If Kleinman was telling the truth, had Jay's parents taken him to art galleries because they wanted to, or because they had been ordered to? Where was the line? Where did parenting end and working for this experiment begin?
And after his parents' "deaths"—and his relocation to Omaha to live with the fabled Uncle Karl and Aunt Jaclyn—just how many paths of Jay's adult life had been altered (or ignored altogether) because of some scientists broadcasting secret messages from a bunker in Virginia? What kind of life could he have lived if he hadn't listened to his new parents?
Where would he be? What would he be? A soldier? A scientist?
Jay bit his lip.
Had he even had a childhood at all?
* * *
He giggled in the dark. He nodded and shook his head furiously. It was wonderful: the walls spoke here, too. They instructed him. He checked under the bed, in the desk, in the drawers—even inside the commode—for surveillance. There was none, though that didn't stop the walls from warning him that he was still being watched; that pinhead-size vidcams were installed everywhere in the room, and nano-mics were undoubtedly floating in the air and in his lungs, broadcasting everything he said, every heartbeat.Kilroy2.0 appreciated such warnings and told the walls so. It validated his own suppositions about this place. Eyes and ears would be everywhere. The Pedestrian cogs would try to glean the secrets of his omnipresence. They would fail.
Many things had been validated this day, had they not? Kilroy2.0 preached from his Web-site pulpits, and through his myriad contacts on the Web—especially his faithful Twelve: binary_fairy, blackjack, Accidental.Rob, Special(k), switchhit, and others—he had heard rumors about accelerated growth and neural datafiles long ago. His contacts were good apostles, delivering those fleeting whispers from faraway sources. And from his pulpit, Kilroy2.0 announced his prophecies. He exposed conspiracy.
Now he was conspiracy.
Kilroy lay in the dark and stared at the walls—into the walls. He listened for guidance. The walls finally spoke again.
kilroy2.0 is here kilroy2.0 is everywhere, they said.
there you are, he replied.
you are no longer in the timeless place, no longer in the temple
i know, the worker bees took me
it no longer matters you are home
home?
a new home for now; there is something important listen to us
i am listening
the life of your Before has returned; the ghost of your former life it haunts you
i don't understand
it is a splinter invading your divinity it is fallible the you/notyou can destroy you
please explain
kilroy2.0 was beginning and end
was?
now you are only omega the end; your Before ghost haunts you declare war
on who
on he who is you/notyou he who is not omega
alpha
yes
john alpha is the beginning
you are the end
i will end the beginning
to save yourself you must slay your self
i shall
you will help these bees, these cogs, Pedestrians; together you will find the alpha; together you will slay him
Silence.
kilroy2.0 is here, the walls said.
Giggles in the dark.
"Kilroy2.0 is everywhere."
* * *
Father Thomas was the only one of seven to sleep that night.He dreamed of hellfire, of burning flesh, of demons devouring legions of the damned. He saw fields of crosses, tens of thousands stretching into the crimson horizon. Christ hung from each one. The Messiahs wailed his name.
Thomas passed through crowds of stigmatic children who smeared their blood upon their faces. Fallen angels raised their charred wings to the orange sky and screamed. Thomas saw his mother and father, very much alive, fucking in the flaming blood of skinned goats.
Spikes of rock shot forth from the ground, impaling the unfortunate. All around, a symphony of screams.
Thomas wandered to the field of crosses and knelt before his Savior. He wept. The tears sizzled on the earth and evaporated.
Leave This Place, Christ commanded.
Thomas gazed upward. "Lord?"
You Do Not Belong Here.
Thomas smiled gratefully through his tears. "Can you help me, Lord? Can you deliver me to heaven?"
Never.
Thomas faltered. "Why, Lord?"
Christ smiled, his mouth slowly tugging at its sides . . . tugging apart, splitting, and becoming serpentine . . . bloodstained teeth suddenly dripping fangs . . . His crown of thorns transforming into great horns. Thomas shrieked.
You Belong In Neither Place, the thing said, and ripped its left hand free from the nail. It caressed Thomas's cheek.
"Why? Why?"
Isn't It Obvious, Fleshling? You Have No Soul.
Father Thomas awoke at daybreak, clutching his cheek and screaming.
The man's shape was drenched in silhouette as he knelt in the dusty, crumbling dead end of the subterranean passage. Nearby construction-site lights blasted their heat against his back. He welcomed the warmth. For months, he'd been a bona fide mole man, a digger, supervising the highly illegal tunnel carved here, in the bedrock of one of America's largest cities . . . a tunnel quite near one of that city's most iconic boulevards.
His breaths were measured and confident. The half-face particulate mask he wore—a fancy filtration respirator that vaguely resembled the snout and jawline of Star Wars storm trooper—did a fine job of blocking the oppressive haze of airborne grime, permitting him to focus completely on the work before him.
His eyes zeroed in on the tangled clusters of wires ahead, his hand extended to the battered toolbox to his left. His manicured fingernails brushed against the nearby construction jackhammer instead.
The man flinched as he felt the gritty sludge of lubricant and powdered stone eke under his nails. The particle mask wheezed as he gave a half snarl, half sigh. Disgusting.
He turned his cool blue eyes away from the nest of wires, to the toolbox. He snatched up the wire cutters and brought them to the shoebox-size metal box by his knee. A dozen black metal barrels loomed behind the metal box, like an altar.
He snipped a wire. Stripped its insulation. Twisted its conductive guts with another exposed wire. A thumb's length of electrician's tape now, wrapping round and round the connection.
A smile from behind the half mask. He clicked his teeth, like a predator.
A lone red light blinked to life inside the metal box. Look at that. A cheerful Christmas light, for a very special gift.
The man closed the toolbox with a cavalier swipe of his hand—he no longer needed it, all preparations now complete—and gave it a thoughtless shove. It screeched as it slid on the gravel, finally banging against the carved wall of the tunnel. He turned his attention to the jackhammer now, and its industrial pneumatic hose.
His manicured fingers went to work, detaching the hose. He hefted it in his left hand, then stood, satisfied.
He squinted in the blaze of the construction lights, at his creation. He tugged the half mask from his face.
John Alpha grinned again, and his teeth—glowing white in contrast to his brown goatee—glittered, looking very sharp indeed.
He turned away from the dead end and dark altar, pneumatic hose still in hand, and strode down the passageway, toward the faint light ahead.
* * *
Alpha reached the tunnel's entrance, blinking at the swaying bulbs above. Still underground, but in the sloping hallway now, the hallway once used for hired help.The portable air compressor was here, as was the silver, pistol-grip air-impact wrench. He picked up the tool, hefted it like the hand cannon it resembled, and clamped the pneumatic hose to its base. He casually flipped a switch on the compressor. It roared, alive, belching fumes into the dim hallway.
John Alpha glimpsed his reflection in the impact wrench. What a handsome devil. Smiled again.
He stepped into the hall, toward a thick door to his left. Behind him, the machine chugged on and on. The hose slithered behind him, an obedient snake attached to the wrench in his hand.
He opened the door, and his eyes, ever cool and observant, met those of his guest. His guest's eyes were suddenly wide, wild with fear. Good.
Alpha stepped inside, past the crates filled with sorrows-to-be-drowned, toward her. He paused at the center of the storage room, beside the video camera resting on a tripod. He gave his guest a wink, thrilling in the shudders it conjured. He tapped the red record button on the camera and finally made his way to the person tied to the chair before him.
Had he done that? Made that face so delightfully bloodied and misshapen? He certainly had.
"Yes, yes, you've told me everything," he said casually, as if resuming a conversation. And he was; his guest had passed out from the beating hours ago. "But I haven't told you anything. Not yet. I thought I'd remedy that"—he nodded toward the whirring video camera—"while finishing up this little project, our collaborative piece of cinema. I have a friend who's just dying to see how it turns out. He loves these kinds of movies."
Alpha brought the pulse tool to his captive's face. The bolt socket locked to its barrel glimmered, an inch away from her chin.
Alpha pressed the trigger. The tool screamed, a sound most often heard in auto shops—vippppp!—and she screamed, too, transfixed by the spinning socket, bucking her head away. The socket was a blur. He eased off the tool's trigger.
"This can take the lug nuts off a car wheel," Alpha whispered.
He lowered the air wrench to his guest's side, then stepped behind the chair, eyeing the bound hands, the fingers.
He leaned in close, his mouth hovering near her ear. "Let me share my vision with you. My plan. Pain will unite this world. There's a great deal of pain coming."
He wedged one of her fingers into the socket. And as the air wrench came alive again, and the flesh and bone were spun into slivers, and the blood sprayed against the chair, and the wall, and the floor, John Alpha never blinked. He kept cooing into that ear, low and cruel and certain, as the unholy noise filled the room.
"So. Much. Pain."
Dr. DeFalco, the bearded moonman who'd whispered into John's ear yesterday when John had been strapped to a gurney, escorted the visitors through the hallways of the 7th Son facility. It was just after 7:oo a.m. DeFalco politely declined to answer any questions other than "Where are we going?" That query came from the thin one who had fainted; Jay, if John recalled correctly, and "When will we talk to Kleinman?" That had been Jack, the gene splicer.
The mess hall, DeFalco replied. After breakfast, DeFalco replied. Which prompted another question: "What's for chow?" (Michael, USMC.)
The bearded, bespectacled, gibbering fat man, whom John had nicknamed the lunatic—the only one of them who had neither bathed nor put on the new government-issued casual duds they all had in their rooms—peeped a question about his computers. DeFalco said they should be installed in the Common Room later that day. John almost questioned why Kilroy2.0 had been allowed to bring his personal possessions along . . . but then reconsidered, realizing his own Gibson probably wouldn't come in handy in a national crisis.
The hallways of 7th Son were more fascinating than frightening now that John was seeing them from an upright perspective. The lighting was practical: intermittent fluorescent panels between white ceiling tiles. The walls were pale gray slabs of unpainted concrete. A small, delicately crafted mosaic, embedded in the middle of each wall, was in the shape of a horizontal double helix, forever stretching out before them on either side.
My tax dollars at work, John thought.
They walked in bleary-eyed silence. The place had a labyrinthine, institutional quality . . . a peculiar hybrid of 1950s hospital and public-school sensibility. They passed a few doorways with keypad locks, and closed doors that slid open from the middle. John saw no windows.
The mess hall was a mammoth room dominated by swooping stainless-steel columns and at least a dozen rows of tables and chairs. John smiled up at the sun—this room had a skylight, too.
They piled their cafeteria trays with scrambled eggs, sausage links, and flapjacks from a hot bar.
"Have your breakfast, gentlemen," DeFalco said, as they were sitting down at the tables. "Dr. Kleinman will be here shortly."
"When?" asked Father Thomas, his voice trembling. John thought the man still looked priestly despite the khakis and the black Izod.
"Shortly." DeFalco closed and locked the cafeteria's double doors.
John sat down next to Jack. He squinted through the sunlight glinting from the columns, then rubbed his eyes. Last night's conversation was still baking his noodle—it felt both tangible and ephemeral, like a half-remembered dream. Like headlights in fog. Shower, shave, or no, John still felt like shit.
Jack, the geneticist, looked worse. The all-nighter had done in the family man. He sleepily scratched his beard and stared down at his breakfast. They didn't speak.
Michael clomped past Father Thomas, who was sitting alone at another table. The marine tossed his tray onto the Formica and sat across from John. Michael was alert, focused. He slapped two cartons of milk on the table and frowned at the sleepyheads.
"Get the lead out, boys," he said. "Today's a working day. Today we learn everything."
"That's what I'm afraid of," Jack said.
"What's there to be afraid of?" Michael asked, then stuffed his mouth full of eggs. John was horrified and amused. The marine held his utensils as if they were drumsticks, deftly shoveling up the grub and popping it into his mouth at a breathtaking pace.
"We get our orders today, hoss," Michael said as he skewered a sausage. "We won't be sitting on our pretty fannies anymore. We'll get to act."
Now Dr. Mike and Jay sat down at the table. John had noticed them wandering around the room like a couple of middle-schoolers, wondering where to sit. Dr. Mike didn't look so Dapper-fucking-Dan when he was out of his business suit, John thought. Particularly with that bruise on his head.
"You know what? That's great, just great," Jack replied. He eyed the newcomers, then turned his attention back to Michael. "But I'm not like you. I didn't ask for this, and I don't want to take orders. I have a home. A life. A wife. She must out for her mind right now. And my girls . . ." He gazed around the cafeteria, sneering. "It's sick. You know what two words have been going through my head this morning? Lab rats. That's what I feel like. A rat in a maze."
Michael downed one of the cartons of milk, crushed it in his hand, and harrumphed.
"What?" Jack said. "You don't feel that way?"
"I don't care who you are, hoss—janitor, gene-splicer, prez of the U.S.—there's always a chain of command," Michael replied. "There's always a bigger fish. We all take orders. The only thing that makes us different is who we take orders from."
"So?"
"So you're sore because there's been a change of command."
The thin one—Jay was his name—waved his knife in protest. "Now wait a minute." He nodded to Jack. He loves to talk with his hands, John thought. Just like me. "He's right. This is different. We're talking about cloning. Identity. Have you even thought about what that old man said? Have you processed it? Have you thought about how many international laws were broken creating this place? Have you considered that I might know every single dream—every dirty little secret—you ever had till the time you were fourteen?"
Michael glanced at John and Jack. "A little."
"And?"
"And it means I know your dirty little secrets, bub." Michael opened another milk carton. It looked fragile in his calloused hands. He turned to Jack. "Listen. All I'm saying is you were a rat searching for your cheese long before you came here. You cut up mice and cloned them. I went where the brass told me. John here plays guitar and makes drinks for club jumpers. The only thing that's changed now is our bosses."
Jack threw his fork onto his tray. "No. That's not all. This isn't some change of job title. Everything's changed. When people talk about their childhoods, Michael, they talk about seeing the same movies, reading the same books . . . they might even go on about their parents and crushes. That's not what happened last night. When you, John, and I talked last night, we talked about the same experiences. The exact same experiences. The same memories."
"If they were even our memories to begin with," John said.
Jay groaned and crossed his thin arms. "Then it's true."
The sound of laughter made the men stop and turn their heads. It was Kilroy2.0, John saw, sitting at a faraway table. The lunatic was staring up at the skylight, then down at the walls and the floors. Kilroy2.0 laughed again—this time at the floor—and began whispering to himself.
"Does anyone know what's up with him?" Jay asked.
Dr. Mike finally spoke up. "Schizophrenic, most likely. Either that or autistic savant. He hasn't said much yet. If he's autistic, he may not say much at all. If he's a schizo—and if we get to a subject he's fixated on—we may never be able to shut him up."
"Creepsville," John said.
"Don't worry about him," the marine said, then downed his other milk. He nodded to the table where Father Thomas sat, alone. "Worry about the priest. He's the one who's fubar."
John looked over at the man. Father Thomas was resting his head on his crossed arms like a child trying to nap. He was holding his rosary.
John turned his attention back to Dr. Mike. "You a shrink?"
"Criminal psychologist," Mike sniffed. "I've done a lot of criminal profiling for the LAPD; some consulting work here and there." He raised his chin slightly. "I wrote a book recently."
The marine chuckled. "Sounds like all of you were heads of the class. Way ahead of the curve. Bet you fellas jumped a grade or two in high school and college, didn't you? Caught the eye of your teachers, were given additional responsibilities, graduated well before your buddies? Regular Doogie Howsers?"
They looked at him.
"Well, that's what happened to me." Michael's eyes were haunted for a moment. "After I got out, I mean. Yeah."
The group didn't speak, waiting for more. It didn't come. Michael blinked and brightened as he shifted gears.
"I mean, I didn't go Corps until five years ago. You don't ordinarily score captain—and earn the right to be in Force Recon—in such a short time. Especially when you get a late start like me."
Dr. Mike cleared his throat and rapped his knuckles on the table, as if calling a meeting to order. "This conversation is cute, but let me be the first to say I don't believe any of it." His eyes flitted from the others' faces to the room around them. "This is a grand delusion."
"That's what I said last night," Jack said. "Until we talked about the Grand Canyon and piano lessons and first kisses."
Jay stiffened, a forkful of food halfway to his thin, pale face. "First
"Sometimes one channel wins over the other, and you see the smile, sometimes others take over and you don't see the smile," says Luis Martinez Otero, a neuroscientist at Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante, Spain, who conducted the study along with Diego Alonso Pablos..."Mona Lisa's smile a mystery no more"
So did Leonardo intend to sow so much confusion in the brains of viewers, not to mention scientists? Absolutely, Martinez Otero contends. "He wrote in one of his notebooks that he was trying to paint dynamic expressions because that's what he saw in the street."
(Download MP4 video or Watch on YouTube, or view with subtitles on Dotsub).
Institute for the Future teamed up with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing Video to co-host the Digital Open, an online tech expo for teens 17 and under around the world.
We're publishing an 8-part series of videos profiling the winners. Today, meet 15-year-old Ferran Rovira Bosca, of Spain. He created a concept for an "Eco Self-Sustaining House" -- architecture of the future that captures its own renewable energy, and operates off the grid. Ferran believes technology can help us come up with new ways of protecing the environment and saving money in our households at the same time. He says he learns a lot about what's possible in this realm from exploring sustainable technology websites online.
Here's more about his "Casa Ecologica Autosuficiente."
Read more about the youth competition in IFTF's press release announcing Digital Open winners.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Chinese alligators like a good sing-a-long, but they don't worry about carrying a tune. They also don't much care what the opposite sex thinks of the song choice, according to a story on National Geographic News.
Researchers with the Chinese Academy of Sciences ran some tests to see whether alligator "songs"--it's really more like sustained, extremely loud croaking, which the researchers compare the sound to thunder--attracted mates to the singer. Surprisingly, it didn't work quite that way.
More story and a video of singing alligators after the jump!
The researchers had expected females to draw closer to the speaker that was playing recordings of males. Surprisingly, though, males and females reacted the same way to the calls of either gender. All the alligators stayed put, and about 75 percent of the alligators joined the recorded song. This response suggests that alligators don't sing to compete for prospective mates, the study says.
And yet, the alligators do seem to sing more during mating season. So far, the best guess is that the songs are really a way of saying,"Hey, I'm an alligator, too. And I'm over here!" Which, in the context of mating, is just the time-honored tradition of hoping the opposite sex notices that you exist.
Image courtesy Flickr user wwarby, via CC.
To "shoot," an anvil, for the record, is to blast it several hundred feet into the air using a charge of black powder. This delightful man, Gay Wilkinson, is apparently the world's champion anvil-shooter. The fireworks start at 1:30. [via Boing Boing]
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Sheriff Dart may continue to use Craigslist's website to identify and pursue individuals who post allegedly unlawful content... But he cannot sue Craigslist for their conduct.
Did you know that we have little MAKE badges you can put on your website? If we write about your project or site, you can use this badge to link back to your piece here on Make: Online:
If you just like us a lot (we love you too!) and want to send us some links o' love, you can post this badge on your site:
We have the HTML code, some other badge sizes, and links to other assets, such as our magazine covers, all on the link below.
We really appreciate all of the support we get from you all. It means a lot to us. Group hug!
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Bruce Sterling gave a wonderful talk at the Reboot Conference this summer in Copenhagen. At the beginning of the talk I wanted to strangle him, but as it progressed, it made more and more sense. By the end I thought it was one of the best speeches I'd ever heard, a story that I think everyone should hear. I've made an MP3 of his talk because I want to make it available to people in my family as a podcast. I hope Bruce and the people at Reboot don't mind.
Earlier this year, the Obama administration put Canada on its blacklist of shame - a "priority watch list" of intellectual property laggards, joining the likes of China, Russia and Venezuela.Sounds nice, but incredibly misleading. The "blacklist of shame" that McKenna mentions, but does not explain, is actually the US Trade Rep's special "301 Report." Mention it to just about any policy maker (excluding those pushing for protectionist policies for a specific industry, of course), and you get an eye roll. It's not so much "the Obama administration" but industries with wishlists attempting to restrain trade in foreign countries by putting forth scary stories about what's happening in those countries. The USTR basically takes those industry-submitted reports and wraps them up into the 301 report. It's a joke. Most of the complaints in the report concern countries that actually are in perfect compliance with international treaties -- but which the industry still wants to go further.
Canada, which has repeatedly promised but so far failed to deliver on copyright reform, isn't just out of step with the United States, but with much of the Western world.This is simply untrue. Canada's copyright law is actually quite in line with most of the Western world, no matter what the entertainment industry suggests (and, you might think that McKenna would ask someone other than the person representing the industry that benefits from this). Furthermore, the line that Canada has "so far failed to deliver on copyright reform" is either blatantly misleading or simply ignorant of rather recent history. Canadian politicians have tried to push forth copyright reform, but due to a massive public outcry from people who actually understand how things like the DMCA cause all sorts of problems -- especially concerning free speech and consumer rights -- those politicians were forced to back down.
The world has gone digital. And there's now an explosion of legitimate download sites in the U.S. and Europe, including ground-breaking music sites Pandora.com and Lala.com. But you can't use them in Canada.Actually, you have Canadian record labels like Nettwerk, that are doing quite well, even as its CEO has declared that copyright is obsolete and should be done away with entirely within a decade. And the reason that those services can't be used in Canada isn't because the law is too lax, but because the laws are too strict, in terms of figuring out special licensing setups in each country. It's such a pain to get them licensed in a single country that the services have been forced -- against their will in many cases -- to block access in other countries like Canada.
These and other businesses are choosing to bypass the market entirely, in part because of licensing problems.
And the creative industries that produce music, software and the like - industries that contribute significantly more to the economy than BitTorrent sites - may also shun Canada if nothing is done.
Alan Parekh of Hacked Gadgets made this really nice looking gear clock using a PIC microcontroller, a scavenged stepper motor, and a bunch of wooden gears that he cut out on a CNC router. The concept is pretty straightforward, however I really like the clear design, where each part is a functional piece of the clock mechanism. You'll never have to wonder what is inside this thing that makes it tick! [via Hacked Gadgets]
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Boing Boing guestblogger Connie Choe is a health and culture writer by day and a professional kimchimonger by night.
Having lived in suburbia for the past 20 years, I often hear desperation-tinged fantasies (my own, mostly)of wanting to flee this neatly manicured existence to someplace that is rather different and very beautiful, but that's not too expensive and preferably not mucked up by other travelers.
For anyone else who seconds this emotion, I believe the answer to our yearnings is WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms). Here's how it works: You choose a host organic farm in whichever country you like and arrange a temporary stay (ranging from a few days up to several months) during which you will work without pay in exchange for food and shelter. It's all the fun of being an indentured servant or migrant laborer without all the obligations!
If you're thinking that this is mostly the sort of thing that middle class 20-somethings do right after finishing their undergrad education, you are probably right. But why let them have all the fun? There's always an excuse like, "I lack the strength and heartiness of a farmhand" or "I really enjoy being under fluorescent lights for 50 hours a week" but I would venture to say that if you think those excuses are valid, maybe you never really wanted to leave home in the first place.
Here's an example of one farm listing in Denmark:
We live on a lovely 100-years-old traditional farm with horses, cats, bees, ducks and sheep. Close to the sea, centrally located in sunny Halsnæs. Near by is Dyssekilde eco-village and the costal cycling path. Eco bed & break-fast and basic camping facilities. In addition, we have a wood-carver and two blacksmiths on the farm.Work: there is plenty to do; building, chopping wood, tending the animals, cutting willow, developing the garden, general farm work, weeding, all depending on the season. We often go for a (morning) swim in the sea.
Hardworking guests are welcome during in January (willows) Spring (gardening), Summer (weeding) + building/renovating. Experience in farm work and/or building preferable, as is a genuine interest in organic farming and environmental issues.
Accommodation in a cosy wagon.
We speak English and a little German and even less French.
If this sounds half as dreamy to you as it does to me, I encourage you to make it happen ... I double dog dare you.
WWOOF - World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms
Photo courtesy of Howard F. Schwartz, Colorado State University, Bugwood.org / CC 3.0
On November 17th, we'll be launching the Alex Rider Dream Gadget Contest, to coincide with the release of the next chapter in Alex's adventures, Crocodile Tears. The book comes out the same day that MAKE, Volume 20 (the kid-themed issue) hits newsstands! In case you're unaware, Alex Rider is a young spy whose exploits are chronicled in a popular series of teen spy/adventure books. Alex uses all sorts of crazy high tech contraptions, made from things in his school backpack, to get out of sticky situations.
Here's the contest part: If you were Alex Rider, what gadget would you want in the upcoming adventure Crocodile Tears? Design your Alex Rider dream gadget, inspired by an everyday object (i.e. an iPod, a toothpaste tube, a pen). The winning gadget will be built here at MAKE Labs. Send us a schematic, tell us what your gadget is made from, and how it works. Your entry can be a schematic, sketches, and/or an explanation by you. Remember that the winning gadget should be inspired by an everyday object that one could realistically build (as much as we wish we could create a pair of scissors that fly us to the moon)!
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If you ever feel like putting your dinner where your cliched saying is, you might first want to read up a bit on how to cook that horse you're so hungry you could totally eat. Doug Powell, Ph.D.---professor of food safety at Kansas State University, and proprietor of must-read food and food safety site Barf Blog--can help, with a story detailing the flavors and cultural history of several favorite horse-related dishes from world cuisine, including...
Pictured: A sandwich made with Dutch smoked horsemeat (paardenrookvlees), cucumber, pesto and what looks to be some kind of soft, white cheese. I won't lie. I would totally eat that. From Flickr user fotoosvanrobin, via CC.
Pastissada de Caval
In northern Italy, the traditional horse meat stew from Verona known as Pastissada de caval is made with wine and paprika. Legend has it that the dish originates from the town's inhabitants marinating the meat from dead horses in the local Valpolicella wine and herbs and spices after a battle between the Ostrogoths and Barbarians in AD489. In Italy, horse - and donkey - meat has traditionally been cured to make bresaola or carpaccio.Alcoholic Mare's Milk
This reliance on the horse on the central steppes also means a reliance on mare's milk. Fermented, mare's milk becomes a mildly alcoholic yoghurt-like drink known as Kumis or Airag. When visiting Mongolia in 2005 President Bush was apparently offered Kumis although there is no record as to whether or not he actually consumed it.
OK, Jay, this clip takes a bit of set-up. Basically, it's a model of a factory-floor machine for moving pallets around a square assembly line. You put a pushing arm at each corner of the square and trigger them alternately in caddy-corner pairs. Some bright bulb figured out, however, that if you join two square tracks at one corner, you can do twice the work with only two more arms. Watch the intersection for a minute to confirm that the contents of the two square tracks are not mixed, which to me is counterintuitive. Here's a video of the simple, single-square case that apparently started the trend. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]
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“I’ve taken all the A-Grade browsers and tested them one-by-one for their feature support. Needless to say it’s produced some interesting results.”
After sorta-kinda hacking together one RFID-based project, Benjamin Eckel decided that enough was enough, and went through the effort of documenting the process correctly. If you've got a Parallax RFID reader and an Arduino kicking around that you have been meaning to hook up, this looks like a good place to start. He includes both the source code and some nice tricks to overcome some of the limitations of the system that he has run into.
[photo by Flick user todbot]
In the Maker Shed:
Now consider an open mediascape. Here, there are a million blogs -- or more -- that are predictable, partisan, and pedestrian: soda. But the quality of information has already hit rock-bottom, and at the bottom, soda offered via blogs is just a substitute for a slightly different flavor of soda offered on shock radio. The soda anyone can now offer in an open mediaconomy isn't that much worse than the soda that big producers already offer.<I'd argue that even if the worst stuff is worse (and, at times, it is), that doesn't really matter, since the good stuff is still way, way better.
Here's what's different: the wine is of a higher quality. In an open mediascape, what is truly different is not the quality of soda, but the quality of wine. Sure, there are ten thousand rabid bloggers who have Glenn Beck on eternal robo-repeat. But I also have access to Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, Robert Reich, and Paul Romer. I can hang out with Barry Ritholtz, Fred Wilson, and Rick Bookstaber.
In an open mediaconomy, yes, there's plenty lethally unhealthy soda on offer -- but I also have access to a new world of fine wine. In a closed mediaconomy, I'm out of luck: I'm stuck mostly with soda.
The net effect is this. The worse stuff is not that much worse. But the good stuff is way, way better.
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On November 17th, we'll be launching the Alex Rider Dream Gadget Contest, to coincide with the release of the next chapter in Alex's adventures, Crocodile Tears. The book comes out the same day that MAKE, Volume 20 (the kid-themed issue) hits newsstands! In case you're unaware, Alex Rider is a young spy whose exploits are chronicled in a popular series of teen spy/adventure books. Alex uses all sorts of crazy high tech contraptions, made from things in his school backpack, to get out of sticky situations.
MAKE is teaming up with the Penguin Group to present The Alex Rider Dream Gadget Contest.
Attention all adventure-seekers, gadget lovers, and closet inventors. You are invited to join in the fun! If you were Alex Rider, what gadget would you want in the upcoming adventure Crocodile Tears? Design your Alex Rider dream gadget, inspired by an everyday object (i.e. an iPod, a toothpaste tube, a pen). The winning gadget will be built here at MAKE Labs. Send us a schematic, tell us what your gadget is made from, and how it works. Your entry can be a schematic, sketches, and/or an explanation by you. Remember that the winning gadget should be inspired by an everyday object that one could realistically build (as much as we wish we could create a pair of scissors that fly us to the moon)!
Over the next few weeks, we'll be offering excerpts from the Alex Rider books, highlighting the fantastic, clever (and entirely fictional) gadgets used by Alex. We'll also be giving away a whole pile of books from the series!
The gadgets schematics we'll be sharing with you are all from Alex Rider: The Gadgets, a special illustrated book of gadgets described in the novels. In the series, M16 agent Smithers creates these clever tools for Alex to use on his missions. First up is the high-tensile yo-yo from Stormbreaker, useful for climbing:
High-tensile yo-yo:This black plastic yo-yo, slightly larger than standard, is in fact a miracle of miniaturized engineering. When it is activated using a concealed switch, it acts as a winch, winding the cord back around the axle. It is intended to clip in an agent's belt for use as a climbing aid. One half of the yo-yo contains the micromotor array, made from super-tough carbon fiber components. A complex micromechanical gear system delivers up to 350 watts of power.
The other half houses the highly advanced lanthanum/nickel/tin battery, which supplies as much current as a car battery yet fits into less than a tenth of the space. The battery holds enough charge to let the motor run continuously for one hour. When it is due to be recharged, the agent needs only to use the device as a yo-yo; the spinning motion runs a tiny generator in its core and will charge the unit fully in approximately fifteen minutes. The cord itself is made from an advanced form of nylon that can lift weights of up to two hundred pounds. One hundred feet of it are wound around the central axle.
Because the yo-yo may have to be used as a toy, either to recharge the battery or to pass inspection, it has been designed to function normally despite the unusually long cord; this has been achieved by using a pair of axles, inner and outer. When the yo-yo is dropped, the cord pays out to a length of one yard before the outer axle locks in place. The two sides can then spin around the inner one. Pulling the cord harder unlocks the outer axle and allows the entire hundred feet to unwind.
Check out the high-res gadget schematic of the yo-yo for more details. Alex uses it to get out of a very high-flung predicament in Stormbreaker:
He was suspended underneath the plane by a single thin white cord, twisting around and around as he was carried ever farther into the air. The wind was rushing past him, battering his face and deafening him. He couldn't even hear the propellers, just above his head. The belt was cutting into his waist. He could hardly breathe. Desperately, he scrabbled for the yo-yo and found the control he wanted. A single button. He pressed it and the tiny powerful motor inside the yo-yo began to turn. The yo-yo rotated on his belt, pulling in the cord. Very slowly, an inch at a time, Alex was drawn up toward the plane.
To get a bigger taste of Stormbreaker, download a sample excerpt.
Disclaimer: Excerpts from Alex Rider: The Gadgets by Anthony Horowitz are fictional and for inspiration only. Readers should not attempt to recreate these gadgets.
First up, we're giving away two copies each of Stormbreaker and Point Blank. Just leave a comment in this post and tell us why you or your kid(s) needs one of these books. Please make sure you include your email address in the comment form field (it won't be published). All eligible comments will be closed by Noon PDT on Sunday, October 25th. The winners will be announced next week on the site. Good luck!
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Flickr Link. I gotta say, the breasts are a little large, I don't think they quite got the parody down yet. (thanks, Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds)
Related: Do read Cory's Guardian UK column this week: "Corporate Bullying Must Be Resisted."
"Nanda Home Inc. is the owner of the intellectual property rights pertaining to these listings. By listing the 'Clocky' product you are in serious violation of the company's rights. Additionally, Nanda Home does not permit the re-sale of any of their brand product on eBay. There are no authorized Nanda Home re-sellers on eBay. If you continue to list our items, further legal action may be taken."Clearly, Nanda has a gross misunderstanding of the right of people to re-sell their own property. While it's true that it is against the law to sell counterfeit copies of a product, re-selling your own goods and representing them as "real" is completely within the bounds of the law, and eBay policy. To make matters worse, the condescending tone of the email also suggests that:
"You may need to take a tutorial. The next time you sell, you may be asked to take the tutorial, if it's required. Once you've completed the tutorial successfully, please review your account status for any other possible concerns. If there are no other issues, you should be able to sell again."Or, perhaps Nanda and eBay should take a tutorial on the right of first sale. In the aforementioned tutorial, eBay clearly understands the right to re-sell (in fact, a huge part of its business relies upon this fact). Yet, to make matters worse under eBay policy it's still a laborious process to get the item relisted -- even with the bogus takedown notice. As a seller of an incorrectly taken down Clocky listing, you have to contact Nanda and have them specifically authorize your product to be re-listed. Yes, even though it's Nanda who issued the incorrect takedown in the first place. So much for frictionless commerce.
World War I simple version | World War II simple version (Thanks, Safiyya!)
Every other week, MAKE's awesome interns tell about the projects they're building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they've gotten into, and what they'll make next.
By Kris Magri, engineering intern
Part I: The First Design
This summer I was given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a robot for the pages of MAKE Magazine (Volume 19, "My Robot, Makey"). As an intern, I had the inside scoop that an upcoming issue would focus on robotics. I talked with one of the editors, Goli Mohammadi, about including a step-by-step article showing people how to make their own autonomous robot from scratch, using an Arduino microcontroller. She took the idea to the rest of the crew, and they gave me a chance, asking for a draft article about the robot. I went into hyper-drive that weekend, designing and building a robot prototype in 44 hours over three days. This is a behind-the-scenes look at designing Makey.
The first thing I did was sketch ideas on paper. I based Makey on WALL-E, the little yellow robot hero from the movies. I quickly noticed that WALL-E's eyes are huge in contrast to his body. I knew the dimensions of the Parallax Ping sensor, which I planned to use for Makey's 'eyes,' so I realized I'd need to keep Makey's body as small as possible, to make the eyes look as big as possible.
I used Autodesk Inventor to design Makey. I can't say enough good things about this software. I've been using PCs for a good long while, and compared to big Unix workstations, I've never been impressed with what PCs can do for you. Inventor changed that. Inventor is the single best reason to own a PC, IMHO. I learned Inventor at school as part of my engineering curriculum, and this software is the "missing link" that has finally allowed me to design robots like I want to. Makey is the fifth robot I've built from scratch, and the first one I've designed on the computer, and the difference is like night and day.
What if your Twitter client stayed up when Twitter is down?
"Something about an oversized, oddly-shaped pump arriving in an unmarked box made the whole thing seem vaguely dirty." [MSNBC]
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Here's Dan Shapiro's geeky, fun, and inspiring five-minute Ignite talk about becoming a remote control hobbyist for under $100. He writes:
I've done a number of Ignite talks (5 minutes on a geek-friendly topics) but this was by far my favorite. Topics covered:Geeking out aero-style for a hundred bucks* Helicopter aerodynamics
* Battery technology
* The scourge of GDS, Glue Deficiency Syndrome
* Moore's law as applied to RC aircraft and most importantly
* A detailed buying guide that will get you airborne for under a hectobuck.Also a few shout-outs to little known aspects of the hobby world, like flying boats and 150 mph+ gliders. If this doesn't make you spend a few bucks on getting cheap chinese electronics airborne (and then suddenly and unexpectedly groundborne again), nothing will.
I'm not sure exactly what it means to be "hell bent for leather," but I am sure that this is the outfit you want to be wearing while you're thusly engaged. Prince Armory is (mostly) Samuel Lee, who goes by *Azmal on deviantART. Beautiful craftsmanship. [via Geekologie]
Make: Halloween Contest 2009
Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.
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Even in their inauspicious mobile-focused beginnings, it was clear from the start that Toronto indie Cabybara Games had a keen eye for pushing the visual boundaries on whatever platform they were given. The pixels of the handset and later iPhone version of their original debut puzzler Critter Crunch popped aggressively with a pastel palette against its warmer autumnal backgrounds, an art direction that helped earn the game its fair share of mobile awards.
More recently given the chance to bring that sensibility to the PlayStation 3, though, the team took the risk of not simply cheaply upscaling their vision to the wide-screen, but to give the game a top to toe graphic overhaul and create a full HD-res 2D animated game.
The results -- put plainly -- are basically staggering, with the soft and surreal wonder of Studio Ghibli-esque backdrops underscoring the hectic hand-animated critter-bursts on top, and are even more impressive when you learn that they're not the work of (as you might assume) a field of tirelessly slaving outsourced animators. In fact, nearly all of what you see in the game is largely the output of just two compatriots (or -- as Capy co-founder and president Nathan Vella terms them -- '2 radical dudes'): Nick "Qiqo" Stephan and Sylvain "Sylve" Coutouly, respectively responsible for character animation and background/world map art.
Documenting just what heights a tiny team can reach with vision and proper passion, then, posted here is a rare look into the conception and evolution of the world of Krunchatoa and its creatures within (and a special bonus look at main character Biggs invading other Sony/PlayStation classics), alongside the theatrical-quality animation produced by Capy to surround the launch of the game, available now on the PlayStation Network (with the launch of its free demo version due tomorrow, Oct. 22nd).
Before the art, though, Capy's awesomely cinematic launch trailer shows just what you can expect from the finished product: a single or multiplayer evolution on Data East's cult classic puzzler Magical Drop with, appropriate to its name and gluttonous lead, a food-chain chain-system where each critter can only be fed to another progressively larger.
Clark Kent told us about this "thought-provoking, artful schematic that explains the differences in basic political philosophy between progressives and conservatives."
It was created by David McCandless and Stefanie Posavec, and appears in The Visual Miscellaneum, which comes out on November 10.
I'm looking forward to the book. Below are some of the other infographics that are in it:
20th Century Death: What's Killed the Most? • 22 Stories • 30 Years Makes a Difference Alternative Medicine • Amphibian Extinction Rates • Articles of War: Most Edited Wikipedia Pages • Bee Limit Warning • Behind Every Great Man • Being Defensive • Better than Bacon • The Billion Dollar-o-Gram • Body by Insurance Value • The Book of You: Your Complete DNA • Books Everyone Should Read • Calories In, Calories Out • Carbon Aware The Carbon Dioxide Cycle • Celebrity Causes • Chatterboxes • Cocktails • Colors and Culture Cosmetic Ingredients • Creation Myths • The Creationism-Evolutionism Spectrum • Daily Diets • Dance Genreology • Dangers of Death • Enneagram • Fast Internet • Feeding Frenzy: the Organic Food Market • Food Coloring: Unpleasant Health Effects • The Future of Energy • The Future of Our Future • Global Media Scare Stories • The Global Warming Skeptics vs. the Scientific Consensus • Good News • Google Insights • The Great Firewall of China • Immortality • In 25 Words or Less • The "In" Colors • The "Interesting" Colors International Number Ones • Internet Virals • Kyoto Targets • Left vs. Right • Looking for Love Online • Low Resolution • Mainstream-o-Meter • Making the Book • Man's Humanity to Man • The Media Jungle • Microbes Most Dangerous • The Middle East • Moral Matrix Most Common Avatar Names • Most Popular Boys' Names • Most Popular Girls' Names Most Profitable Stories of All Time • Most Successful Rock Bands • Nature vs. Nurture The One Machine: Map of the Internet • Painkillers • Personal Computer Evolution Peter's Projection • Postmodernism • Red vs. Blue • Rising Sea Levels • Rock Genreology Salad Dressings • Selling Your Soul • Sex Education • Snake Oil? • Some Things You Can't Avoid • Stages of You • Stock Check: Nonrenewable Resources • Taste Buds • Things That'll Give You Cancer • Three's a Magic Number • Time-Travel Plots in TV and Film • Tons of Carbon • Types of Coffee • Types of Facial Hair • Types of Information Visualization Vacation Time by Country • Varieties of Romantic Relationships • Vintage Years • Virtual Kingdoms • Water Towers • We Broke Up Because ... • What Are the Chances?: Survival Rates • What Is Consciousness? • When Condiments Go Bad • Which Fish Are Okay to Eat? Who Clever Are You? • Who Owns the Top 100 Websites? • Who Reads the Most? • Who Runs the World? • Who Really Runs the World? • World Religions • X Is the New Black
Or consider Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg, chair of Stanford's psychiatry department and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association. Senator Grassley found that Schatzberg controlled more than $6 million worth of stock in Corcept Therapeutics, a company he cofounded that is testing mifepristone--the abortion drug otherwise known as RU-486--as a treatment for psychotic depression. At the same time, Schatzberg was the principal investigator on a National Institute of Mental Health grant that included research on mifepristone for this use and he was coauthor of three papers on the subject.Angell notes that this is pretty common:
Indeed, most doctors take money or gifts from drug companies in one way or another. Many are paid consultants, speakers at company-sponsored meetings, ghost-authors of papers written by drug companies or their agents, and ostensible "researchers" whose contribution often consists merely of putting their patients on a drug and transmitting some token information to the company.And as the relationship between doctors and pharma has gotten deeper and deeper, it means that the results of those all important "clinical trials" -- which the pharma supporters always insist are so important -- are highly suspect:
Because drug companies insist as a condition of providing funding that they be intimately involved in all aspects of the research they sponsor, they can easily introduce bias in order to make their drugs look better and safer than they are. Before the 1980s, they generally gave faculty investigators total responsibility for the conduct of the work, but now company employees or their agents often design the studies, perform the analysis, write the papers, and decide whether and in what form to publish the results. Sometimes the medical faculty who serve as investigators are little more than hired hands, supplying patients and collecting data according to instructions from the company.And yet the FTC is more worried about a mommy blogger recommending a book that a publisher sent her for free?
In view of this control and the conflicts of interest that permeate the enterprise, it is not surprising that industry-sponsored trials published in medical journals consistently favor sponsors' drugs--largely because negative results are not published, positive results are repeatedly published in slightly different forms, and a positive spin is put on even negative results. A review of seventy-four clinical trials of antidepressants, for example, found that thirty-seven of thirty-eight positive studies were published. But of the thirty-six negative studies, thirty-three were either not published or published in a form that conveyed a positive outcome. It is not unusual for a published paper to shift the focus from the drug's intended effect to a secondary effect that seems more favorable.
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Philip (Thanks, Darren!)The woman at my polling place asked me do I believe in equality for gay and lesbian people. I was pretty surprised to be asked a question like that. It made no sense to me. Finally I asked her: what do you think I fought for in Omaha Beach?
Click here for large. Boing Boing reader Austin Sipes whipped up this superb Mighty Boosh themed "Spirit of Jazz" costume for Halloween.
"If only I had flames to come from the hat," says Austin.
Chicka-chicka-OW! My hat's on fire, man! Related Booshery on the internet this week: Star Wars vs. The Mighty Boosh. There's also word that Mighty Boosh creators and co-stars Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt are planning "a Halloween sack race in Glasgow." And, the Pocket Book of Boosh has come out, at long last. Fun stuff.
Andy Diaz Hope takes photographs and slices them up ti put inside UV treated gel capsules, to stunning effect. [via Vitabits]
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The Election Defense Alliance filed a public records request under California law for a copy of the final election databases from recent elections in Riverside County California. Riverside coughed them up, after sending them first to Sequoia for "redaction of trade secrets" and forcing EDA to pay a substantial amount for this "service."So now there's a project underway to analyze the code, which can't make Sequoia very happy. But what may be even more interesting is that the folks hosting the code are suggesting that the way Sequoia buried its code in data files may violate federal election law concerning e-voting systems.
As near as we can tell, instead of stripping out proprietary stuff of any sort, Sequoia simply committed vandalism: they stripped the Microsoft SQL header data off the top, expecting that this would ruin access to the data under any possible database utility and making the contents unreadable. [Note: confirming this is a high-priority task!]
While they succeeded in ruining the files as data, they didn't realize what a Linux user could do with the "strings" command: strip out unreadable characters and leave everything left as readable plain text. This in turn revealed thousands of lines of Microsoft SQL code that appear to control the logical flow of the election.
It violates the federal rulebook on voting systems on several levels: the rules require that code be hash-checked to prove authenticity in the field for obvious reasons. If the real working code is buried in with the data, no such hash-checks are possible. The federal rulebook is also clear that code can't be interpreted, apparently to avoid modification "in the field" (generally county or city election offices). There is also a rule barring "machine generated code" and since these data files are allegedly created (and managed) by the WinEDS application, the code in these files has to be "machine generated"?That can't be good. Though it might further explain the resistance to ever sharing the code.
Leaf has released the Aptus II 5 digital back. Priced at €5,995, the new back is expected to ship from November 2009. Phase One's 645AF camera body with 80mm lens can be purchased along with the back for an additional €2,000. With a total price of €7,995 for the camera system, we are seeing a trend of affordable medium format cameras trickling into the market. Featuring the fastest capture rate of 0.9 fps in the Aptus-II product line-up, the back includes a 22 MP sensor, 2.5 touch screen LCD, 12-stop dynamic range and 25-400 ISO range. Comments Off [link]
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From the MAKE Flickr pool
Pedrobrito shares some footage of his Arduino powered Flor Automata responding to changing light levels. Nice construction! - see more of his structural explorations on Flickr.
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Few people chose their price based on the perceived value of the game. How much the person feels they can afford seems to play a much larger role in the decision than how much the game is worth.This is another good point that highlights the separation between price and value -- which too many falsely assume are the same thing. There were also a significant number of people who said they paid because they liked the "pay what you want model, and wanted to support it." So they were paying to support the model, rather than the game itself, which is interesting. I wonder if that component would fade over time as these sorts of models become more popular.
Tom Banwell is one of the artists featured in the currently-ongoing Steampunk exhibition at Oxford's Old Ashmolean building. Shown here is "Sentinel." [via Propnomicon]
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Have a project that calls for a bunch of 5V relays? Howsa 'bout 132 of them? After a good bit of desoldering, this $10 surplus board from Apex should have you (and some friends) pretty well stocked. Thanks to John Park for the tip!
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Mamiya has announced the price and availability of its new DM22 and DM28 medium format cameras. Priced at $9,995, for the body and 80mm f/2.8 lens D series lens, DM22 is by far the cheapest medium format camera around. The 22 MP camera has a 48 x 36 mm sensor and features true 16 bit/channel RAW files, dynamic range of 12 f stops and and an ISO range of 25-400. The 28 MP DM28 is identical to the DM22, except for its 44 x 33mm sensor and an ISO range of 50-800. It is priced at $14,990 for the body and 80mm f/2.8 lens and will start shipping along with the DM22 from November 2009. Comments Off [link]
Casper Electronics is currently taking PCB & kit pre-orders for the 4 voice synth/rhythm generator/effects processor beast better known as the Drone Lab. The v2 design sports 25 board-mount pots - good news for those who tire of tedious panel wiring. Knowing the designer (Pete Edwards), I'm guessing this'll be a fun one to mod/hack/bend as well.
Related:
Build a drone synthesizer
Be adaptablePeople who haven't built a company think that it's "the plan" or "the idea" that matters. That's almost never the case. Look at nearly every successful startup, and their business has little (if anything) to do with their initial plan. Google was going to sell search appliances as the core of its business. YouTube was supposed to be a dating service. Things change -- and the only thing that matters is how well your company adapts and executes. That's why it's silly to be too protective of a plan or idea or to focus on things like patents or NDAs. Most of that doesn't matter. Separately, projecting out more than a year may be a fun exercise, but is generally meaningless.
Why I ignore all "5 year plans": 5 years ago, YouTube and Twitter didn't exist, and Facebook was only for college kidsIf you go back and look at plans or predictions from 2005, of where web content would be in 2010, it's unlikely that "micromessaging" like Twitter or online video like YouTube was considered quite as central. Certainly some folks thought video was on the cusp back then, but they expected it to come from professional offerings like BrightCove, rather than a user-generated setup like YouTube. It's always difficult to predict which innovation is actually going to hit -- and plenty of companies, especially in the media space, have had to change and adjust their strategies due to things like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook -- just like how a decade ago, companies quickly started adjusting their strategy to deal with Google. Five years from now, plenty of startups will be adjusting their strategy for some other service as well... And the only way you can do that is by being adaptable.
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Instructables user 'computergeek' sent in this Arduino Charlieplexing tutorial. It's a great technique for controlling a lot of LEDs without having to use up all your I/O pins. In this example, only 4 pins are used to control 12 LEDs.
I noticed that there weren't many instructables on charlieplexing using an arduino, so i made this. I tried to keep the project simple, but that didn't work very well. The soldering is complex, I wouldn't recommend this as a first time soldering project.
In the Maker Shed:
Make: Arduino
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the equivalent of a herd of donkeys filing a class action suit against the inventor of the wheel....Unless there's something more to these legal threats -- and, admittedly, only one side is weighing in on what happened here, the whole thing just seems like a stretch by at least some UK newspapers to try to intimidate online sites into paying them.
Can anyone translate this review of the Gakken SX-150? At the end of the video it receives a 4-star rating, so we guess he likes it? If anyone knows more about this video, or any of his other 940 YouTube videos, let us know. Yeah, I said 940 videos! Check out his review of blue beer, Amazon manga, and the Korg Wavedrum. Fun!
As promised, Panasonic has today re-posted the latest firmware update for its Lumix DMC-LX3 digital compact. After a brief suspension, v2.1 which is the corrected version of the firmware previously available as version 2.0, is now available for immediate download via Panasonic's website. Version 2.1 offers a host of additional functions and improvements. Comments Off [link]
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Because, you know, it's the kind of thing that you can just accidentally do, hiring sex workers to come to your everyone's invited, inclusive Hack Day event. Two years in a row.
What a blot on technology culture this is. As a father of a young daughter whom I hope will be excited about technology, hacking, and making stuff, Yahoo's vile behavior makes me want to puke purple exclamation points. For shame.
Regrettable? I can think of some choice words to describe this, and regrettable is so far down the list that you'd need to scroll for a week to reach it. Love how this is all in the passive voice -- "the incident" is regrettable. As though it occurred in a vacuum, untouched by human hands. A kind of lightning strike of ghastly, stupid, boorish thoughtlessness. An act of God, perhaps.I wanted to acknowledge the public reaction generated by the images of female dancers at our Taiwan Open Hack Day this past weekend. Our hack events are designed to give developers an opportunity to learn about our APIs and technologies. As many folks have rightly pointed out, the "Hack Girls" aspect of our Taiwan Hack Day is not reflective of that spirit or purpose. And it's certainly not the message we want to send about our values here at Yahoo!. Hack Days are about making everyone feel welcome, including women coders and technologists.
This incident is regrettable and we apologize to anyone that we have offended. Rest assured, it won't happen again.
Because, you know, it's the kind of thing that you can just accidentally do, hiring sex workers to come to your everyone's invited, inclusive Hack Day event. Two years in a row.
What a blot on technology culture this is. As a father of a young daughter whom I hope will be excited about technology, hacking, and making stuff, Yahoo's vile behavior makes me want to puke purple exclamation points. For shame.
Regrettable? I can think of some choice words to describe this, and regrettable is so far down the list that you'd need to scroll for a week to reach it. Love how this is all in the passive voice -- "the incident" is regrettable. As though it occurred in a vacuum, untouched by human hands. A kind of lightning strike of ghastly, stupid, boorish thoughtlessness. An act of God, perhaps.
Sequoia blew it on a public records response. We (basically EDA) have election databases from Riverside County that Sequoia insisted on "redacting" first, for which we paid cold cash. They appear instead to have just vandalized the data as valid databases by stripping the MS-SQL header data off, assuming that would stop us cold.Sequoia Voting Systems hacks self in foot (via MeFi)They were wrong.
The Linux "strings" command was able to peel it apart. Nedit was able to digest 800meg text files. What was revealed was thousands of lines of MS-SQL source code that appears to control or at least influence the logical flow of the election, in violation of a bunch of clauses in the FEC voting system rulebook banning interpreted code, machine modified code and mandating hash checks of voting system code.
I've got it all organized for commentary and download in wiki form.
This is the first time we can legally study a voting system's innards without NDAs or court-ordered secrecy.
Sequoia blew it on a public records response. We (basically EDA) have election databases from Riverside County that Sequoia insisted on "redacting" first, for which we paid cold cash. They appear instead to have just vandalized the data as valid databases by stripping the MS-SQL header data off, assuming that would stop us cold.Sequoia Voting Systems hacks self in foot (via MeFi)They were wrong.
The Linux "strings" command was able to peel it apart. Nedit was able to digest 800meg text files. What was revealed was thousands of lines of MS-SQL source code that appears to control or at least influence the logical flow of the election, in violation of a bunch of clauses in the FEC voting system rulebook banning interpreted code, machine modified code and mandating hash checks of voting system code.
I've got it all organized for commentary and download in wiki form.
This is the first time we can legally study a voting system's innards without NDAs or court-ordered secrecy.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ape Lad sez, "Dresden Codak, a very funny webcomic, has this handy chart of '42 Essential Third-Act Twists' for writers."
42 Essential 3rd Act Twists
(Thanks, Ape Lad!)
Adam Greenfield's "Breathe Deep and Let Go of Things" tee is a nice variant on the classic WWII "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters that It would make a good companion to Matt Jones's Get Excited and Make Things poster.
Breathe deep and let go of things
(via Die Puny Humans)
Comrades, I present to you the unheralded but noble sport of "anvil launching" in which a brave athlete puts a crapload of black powder between two anvils, lights a fuse and runs like the devil, then watches as the topmost anvil sails hundreds of feet into the air!
Gay Wilkinson is the world champion anvil launcher and in this brief video, he demonstrates his grace and athleticism and total disregard for commonsense or safety. Gay, you are a credit to the sport.
How to Shoot an Anvil 200 Feet in the Air
(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
A spokesman for the Associated Press said today that there were "numerous versions and updates" to the breaking news over the weekend and that he was not sure if the Associated Press had run a clarification or correction.Sure it was "breaking news," but it involved the AP itself. You would think they would fact check the basics.
Above: A recently-discovered alternative version of the song "I Will" from The Beatles' White Album (1968), originally deemed too controversial to be included on the release. This rare track was remastered by audio engineer Peter Serafinowicz.
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Inspired by Lenore Edman's awesome D12 and D20 dice bags, Jessica Winter decided to make this D6 felted dice bag.
Dice Bag Project
More:
Knit a pirate dice bag
How-To: D12 and D20 Dice Purses
How-To: Make a handbag of holding
The Freakonomics guys have apparently either really dropped the ball when it comes to understanding science, or they're willfully ignoring it. Either way, I'm pretty disappointed.
The sequel's contrarian take on climate change--and the bad science it's steeped in--have been analyzed in exquisite detail by everybody from Paul Krugman, Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong, to the Union of Concerned Scientists, to various climate scientists spread hither and non about the Web.
That's a lot of links, but they're there so you can go back and read page-by-page breakdowns of the mistakes and inaccuracies, by experts, if you want. I think that's important, because I know at least some of you are going to assume that any criticism of this book and its contents is all about some violation of pseudo-religious orthodoxy. I want you to be able to go see that this is about science. If you just want a quick summary, though, read on...
There's a lot of stuff that the chapter on climate change gets wrong, but we can break it down into three key problems.
First, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt argue that carbon dioxide isn't really the cause of climate change. It's not really "the bad guy". They cite Stanford climate scientist Ken Caldeira as supporting this, but Caldeira says what he actually told them was that carbon dioxide wasn't the only bad guy. And that's true. There are several gases in the greenhouse gas family and they're all a problem to varying degrees. But that doesn't mean that CO2 isn't a problem. (If you read the links, there's some journalism "Inside Baseball" about whether Dubner and Levitt knew they were misrepresenting Caldeira and, if not, what happened instead.)
Second, they make the claim that the planet has actually been getting cooler for the last 10 years and, thus, climate change projections are wrong. That idea is based on data from a single study and is contradicted in others. Either way, short-term cooling doesn't invalidate a global warming trend. Why? Because global warming isn't a straight line going up. On a graph, this is a series of peaks and valleys. Close up, on the scale of decades, the trends appear to fluctuate up and down fairly randomly. Pull back and look at the last century, though, and there is clear upward movement. It doesn't really matter how hot or cold it was this year, or in 1999. What matters is what's happening, on a grand scale, between 1900 and 2009. (This link has the best in-depth explanation.)
The last thing I'm going to talk about is Dubner and Levitt's assertion that geoengineering is a better way of dealing with climate change than any attempts to change energy use or sourcing. This one, I'm less well-versed in, particularly when it comes to the economics of such an endeavor. Although, the J. Bradford DeLong links provide some context. But let's put it this way: Geoengineering is cool, but it's a big risk. You're basically running a massive, one-time experiment and hoping the models caught all the possible consequences. Not saying it's evil. Not saying we won't maybe need to try something like that someday. But it's not exactly a first-line-of-defense kind of weapon.
So, why do I care? Well, frankly, because I really enjoyed reading the original "Freakonomics" book. Dubner and Levitt are engaging writers, and they have a big audience. And that means they have a lot of influence. Part of me would like to ignore the problems with this new book, because it kind of comes across as an attention-grabbing ploy and I hate to bite the marketing stick. But, it's factually wrong. They're influential. And so their factual inaccuracies will enter into public debate as "fact". And so I feel the need to make a big, damn long post about it.
Anthony Tedesco created this Halloween costume with flashing electroluminescent wire for his son and entered it in the Make: Halloween Contest 2009. More pics of the costume and the build, including a schematic, are available in his photostream. The EL strand sequencing is controlled by a Microchip PIC10F202.
Make: Halloween Contest 2009
Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.
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Ever wish you could climb over your chrysanthemums, or roll over your roses? Well, now you can with this giant hammock, designed by Jane Hutton and Adrian Blackwell for an installation at the Jardins de Métis.
Anyone else build a climber over your garden? It seems like a great way to make efficient use of a small backyard space. The only issues I can think of would be the light that the structure blocks, and making sure that there is enough space underneath the structure to actually tend to the garden. As an extra benefit of this arrangement, if your vegetable garden is extra prolific, you could enjoy a nice snack and a nap without getting up. Just watch out for the thorns! [via inhabitat]
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Over the past two days, Internet advocates in Mexico have been voicing outrage over a proposed 3% telecommunications tax in a number of ways -- including flooding Twitter with the hashtag "internetnecesario," shorthand for "the internet is a basic neccesity." Here's one English language blog post from one blogger who believes the tax would be terrible news, and here is another in Spanish. Background on the politics in this Reuters item. (image via trendsmap.com, thanks @wordwardness).
