Category: Wired


Wired: Diamonds, Board Games & Memory

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March 24, 2009

Monopoly Killer: Perfect German Board Game Redefines Genre
I had no idea that one of the rules of Monopoly is that if a player lands on a property and doesn’t buy it, then the property is supposed to be up for auction.

Total Recall: The Woman Who Can’t Forget
I first saw this woman Jill Price on Oprah and thought it incredible that she could remember so many dates and details of her life and certain news events. She was dubbed “the woman who never forgets.” But of course, this isn’t true. Wired got a cognitive psychologist to dig deep and find out that her memory is actually not that different from everyone else. Though she does have remarkable memory, it’s for a certain reason.

The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist
And here’s a very engaging tale that I’m sure will be made into a movie some day. If you liked Italian Job or Oceans 11 (et al), then read it.

Leonardo Notarbartolo strolls into the prison visiting room trailing a guard as if the guy were his personal assistant. The other convicts in this eastern Belgian prison turn to look. Notarbartolo nods and smiles faintly, the laugh lines crinkling around his blue eyes. Though he’s an inmate and wears the requisite white prisoner jacket, Notarbartolo radiates a sunny Italian charm. A silver Rolex peeks out from under his cuff, and a vertical strip of white soul patch drops down from his lower lip like an exclamation mark.

In February 2003, Notarbartolo was arrested for heading a ring of Italian thieves. They were accused of breaking into a vault two floors beneath the Antwerp Diamond Center and making off with at least $100 million worth of loose diamonds, gold, jewelry, and other spoils. The vault was thought to be impenetrable. It was protected by 10 layers of security, including infrared heat detectors, Doppler radar, a magnetic field, a seismic sensor, and a lock with 100 million possible combinations. The robbery was called the heist of the century, and even now the police can’t explain exactly how it was done.

The loot was never found, but based on circumstantial evidence, Notarbartolo was sentenced to 10 years. He has always denied having anything to do with the crime and has refused to discuss his case with journalists, preferring to remain silent for the past six years.

Until now. More…

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Random Articles: Food Logos, Wired

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January 25, 2009

Because I find random things interesting [Stories Behind 10 Famous Food Logos]

Wired explains why Our President will face barriers in his attempt to upgrade the White House, technology wise. Plus, whether his tech plans are really that innovative. ["The Wired Presidency: Can Obama really Reboot the White House"]

This is how you find the humanity in science… [DIY DNA: One Father's Attempt to Hack His Daughter's Genetic Code]

“Do you want to see my flashlight?” Five-year-old Beatrice Rienhoff bounds into the foyer of her family’s home, sporting a blond Prince Valiant haircut and a bashful smile. She plops down on the floor and starts unscrewing the top of her toy flashlight, eager to show off its innards. Her hazel eyes brim with curiosity. Beatrice looks like any other healthy preschooler until she leaps into her father’s arms for a hug. As she does, her shorts push up a bit, exposing her legs. They are, as her dad calls them, “little bird legs,” entirely lacking in visible muscle. There is no curve of calf or quadricep, just twiggy bones pressed against flesh. It’s surprising that Beatrice can get around so fluidly on such gaunt limbs.

After climbing down from the embrace, Beatrice removes her sneakers, revealing soft orthopedic braces wrapped around slender, stretched-out feet. Her older brother MacCallum, perched on a nearby sofa, suggests it may be time for a new pair of braces. Hugh, whose neat gray hair and ruddy skin give him a J. Crew vibe, squats to conduct a close inspection. He quickly sees that MacCallum is right—the balls of Beatrice’s feet jut beyond the edges of the braces.

This is a minor issue compared to the serious health problems that have vexed Beatrice during her brief life. She was born with a rare genetic disorder, and at one point the Rienhoffs feared she might never walk, let alone run and skip. Physical therapy has helped tremendously, but even today Beatrice struggles to climb stairs, and her muscles remain alarmingly frail. Hugh also has good reason to worry about her heart—the disease could dilate the aorta, with fatal results. More

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Go to sleep!

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December 29, 2008

Sometimes I can’t sleep. it’s definitely not love.

sleep

3 Smart Things About Sleeping Late

(by Daniel Dumas)

1 // You may need more sleep than you think.
Research by Henry Ford Hospital Sleep Disorders Center found that people who slept eight hours and then claimed they were “well rested” actually performed better and were more alert if they slept another two hours. That figures. Until the invention of the lightbulb (damn you, Edison!), the average person slumbered 10 hours a night.

2 // Night owls are more creative.
Artists, writers, and coders typically fire on all cylinders by crashing near dawn and awakening at the crack of noon. In one study, “evening people” almost universally slam-dunked a standardized creativity test. Their early-bird brethren struggled for passing scores.

3 // Rising early is stressful.
The stress hormone cortisol peaks in your blood around 7 am. So if you get up then, you may experience tension. Grab some extra Zs! You’ll wake up feeling less like Bert, more like Ernie.

[Wired]

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Wired Writer Writes About Writing

Filed under: Wired, just dope, reading magazines by lucky — 3 Comments
September 10, 2008


This is so dope. Wired Magazine (one of my favorites) is doing a blog of sorts detailing the creation of one of their stories (!) a profile on Charlie Kaufman for their November issue. They’re basically going through the entire process of how a feature gets into a magazine…from the idea stage to the final copy. Pitching the idea to shaping the story to the assignment letter to submitting a rough draft:

Filing a rough draft always makes me a little queasy, and this one was no exception. I always feel the urge to write a note to my editor explaining the choices I made, stuff to look out for, etc., but usually am able to resist — really, the editor should be coming to this blind, like any reader would. But for the sake of transparency, and if you’ll pardon a little (more) self-indulgence, here are a few of the elements that gave me the most trouble as I tried to write this thing:

!

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Pump your brakes and drive slow, homie

Filed under: Wired, reading magazines by lucky — 2 Comments
July 26, 2008


So many people make driving decisions based on their individual needs. I had to give my car up a couple years ago (due to the need to pay rent and all). But when I used to drive, my thought process was always: how do I make the traffic system, and the driving experience as a whole, ideal. For example, if someone is looking to merge into my lane from an off-ramp, why not let them in? I understand not allowing too many people (esp. those needlessly aggressive drivers)—at that point you’re just holding yourself up. But what good will it do driving up and shutting that one car out? I’ll be one car ahead of them and the off-ramp will be that much more backed up. Or you cause silly accidents. Still, people make it their road goal not to let other cars in, out of some vindictive reasoning (How dare you be smart and not wait like everybody else?! [scoffs]), which I always found funny. And a bit selfish.

Traffic will always boggle my mind. But this article is one of the reasons I love Wired. They take universal issues and make them understandable. And when they’re discussing really technical things, they neither oversimplify nor complicate it. And they’re humorous. The article is about this book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt.

“The fundamental problem,” Vanderbilt says, “is that you’ve got drivers who make user-optimal rather than system-optimal decisions” — a classic case of Nash equilibrium, in which each participant, based on what they believe to be others’ strategies, sees no benefit in changing their own.

Those who seek a more efficient traffic solution use not only network topology and queuing theory but psychology and game theory, too. A typical puzzle: Waiting for an on-ramp metering light — a mild and remarkably effective congestion-control measure — has been proven to rankle drivers more than merging directly into a traffic jam. “What bothers people is that they can see traffic flowing smoothly,” Vanderbilt says. “So they think, ‘Why should I wait?’ They tend not to accept that the traffic is flowing smoothly precisely because of the metering light.”

I might get this book.

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