Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

It’s 10 P.M. Do You Know What Your Avatar Is Doing?

January 8, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(ILLUSTRATION: RAYGUN STUDIO)

IN THE 1982 SCIENCE-FICTION NOVEL Software, an elderly character named Cobb Anderson trades in his frail human body for an android avatar and then sets out on an unusual mission: to start a cult. The old man’s new body allows him to alter his appearance at will, which turns out to be handy for gathering disciples. To gain trust and devotion, Anderson meets with his initiates one at a time—and then changes his face to resemble theirs. “I always use this trick on the recruits,” he says with a chuckle. A few years ago, a research psychologist at Stanford University named Jeremy ... Read More

More like this: Culture, January-February 2013
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Live from New York, It’s Mozart and Strauss

January 4, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
A Metropolitan Opera production streams into San Luis Obispo, California (PHOTO: MICHAEL WILLER)

A smattering of applause rang out from the auditorium of the San Luis Obispo, California Performing Arts Center just past 10 o’clock one recent Saturday morning. The clapping grew louder for a few seconds and then trailed off, reflecting the hesitance of the 400 or so patrons on hand. It’s not that they felt ambivalent about maestro Maurizio Benini, who was making his way to the pit of the opera house to conduct The Elixir of Love. But he was in New York City, and their view inside Lincoln Center came from watching a live, high-definition simulcast on a huge screen. Is applause appropriate ... Read More

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Buenos Aires Painting the Town With Christmas Ornaments

December 24, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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In 2001, when Argentina’s economy was near collapse and property prices plummeted, UCLA art prof Fabian Wagmister bought a 15,000-square-foot abandoned warehouse in Buenos Aires. When he finally set out to clear the remaining debris from the building last year, he uncovered more than 100,000 Christmas ornaments piled in one of the back rooms. What to do with a trove of metallic bulbs, plastic wreaths, and bags of fake snow for a sunny Argentine Christmas? Re-gift them, of course. “As artists we were immediately taken by the powerful expressive potential of the materials,” says ... Read More

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When Santa Traded His Sleigh for an Automobile

December 19, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Santa's automobile filled with presents (December 8, 1898 Altoona Mirror)

The history of Santa Claus in the United States is a messy one, complete with disagreements between historians over something as simple as the author of the poem "The Night Before Christmas." But one thing we do know is that this early 19th century poem was the first to put Saint Nicholas in a sleigh with flying reindeer. In the 21st century we often forget that in the original poem, jolly old Saint Nick was depicted as an elf with miniature reindeer: But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer, With a little old driver, so lively and quick, I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick. But ... Read More

More like this: Time Machine
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Finally, Perhaps, Answers to the Question of Whether We Are All Sims

December 11, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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And now for a bit of news that you (and I) will almost certainly not understand: scientists at the University of Washington say they've devised a test that may prove whether or not the lives we live are actually just one giant computer simulation created by our future descendants. Yes, you read that right. The researchers are responding to a 2003 paper published in Philosophical Quarterly by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford, who posited that somewhere down the line humans will become smart enough (and computer processing powerful enough) to model entire ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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Take a Tablet and Wake Up Smarter?

December 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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Over the years we’ve taken occasional peeks at the fate of the One Laptop Per Child initiative, an intuitively positive-sounding program that reasons giving every young students in the world a key to the digital future has just gotta be a great idea. Perhaps not all that surprisingly, it hasn’t turned out that way, at least not on the scale that visionaries like Nicholas Negroponte have suggested. The seven-year effort retooled itself (again) a year ago, as Jeff Shear reported on this site, with a third version of a cheap (i.e. inexpensive) laptop that would be handed out to children in ... Read More

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The Touchy-Feely Future

November 15, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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When I heard that we might soon be able to feel textures through screens, I wanted to play. So I badgered my way into a demonstration with Dave Rice, spokesperson for Senseg, a leading company in the emerging field of haptic (from the Greek meaning “to touch”) technology. We met at a San Francisco coffee shop, where he pulled out a Toshiba tablet that Senseg’s people had hacked with haptics. Engineers had opened up the tablet and embedded their custom electronics. Then they covered the screen’s glass with a special coating that has particular electrical properties. They also ... Read More

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The Love Bot

October 30, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Optimistic Robot

THE ROBOT IS SMILING AT ME, his red rubbery lips curved in a cheery grin. I’m seated in front of a panel with 10 numbered buttons, and the robot, a three-foot-tall, legless automaton with an impish face, is telling me which buttons to push and which hand to push them with. Touch seven with your right hand; touch three with your left. The idea is to go as fast as I can. When I make a mistake, he corrects me; when I speed up, he tells me how much better I’m doing. Despite the simplicity of our interactions, I’m starting to like the little guy. Maybe it’s his round silvery eyes and ... Read More

More like this: November-December 2012
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The Great Depression and the Rise of the Refrigerator

October 9, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Refrigerator ads from the April 16, 1933 San Antonio Light (San Antonio, TX)

When I moved to Los Angeles and began my search for an apartment I was a little surprised by the fact that a refrigerator wasn't included with most of the units I toured. In every other city where I've ever lived, the average apartment always included a refrigerator with the cost of rent. I was only looking for a one-bedroom apartment, but I was expecting that this was the norm everywhere for the most basic of apartments. When I asked the manager of the apartment building I wound up renting from why there was no refrigerator, she explained that the property only supplies "the essentials." ... Read More

More like this: Time Machine
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My Nuclear Bomb Detonates More Safely Than Your Nuclear Bomb

September 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

In yet another example of the serendipity of science, a University of Michigan research team applied “cocrystallization”—a process used in the pharmaceutical industry to alter the physical properties of drugs—to the production of high explosives, and discovered what may improve explosives technology in use for the last half century. Mixing two mainstays, the volatile CL-20 and the popular HMX (two parts to one), chemist Adam J. Matzger and colleagues cooked up an explosive that travels about 1 percent faster than HMX alone, the military’s explosive of choice since the 1940s. Not a ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Findings, Politics, Science & Environment
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