Originally published on Open Media Boston by Tate Williams (Staff), Jan-26-13
BOSTON/South Boston - Members of the Internet collective known as Anonymous took to the streets of Boston yesterday in memory of fellow activist Aaron Swartz, who took his own life earlier this month, and to protest the criminal prosecution that they believe contributed to this death.
But despite the sinister grins of their characteristic Guy Fawkes masks, the protest had a much more somber tone than many of Anonymous’ previous public actions.
Read MoreOriginally published in Open Media Boston by Tate Williams (Staff), Dec-28-12
BOSTON/Government Center - Boston’s bike-sharing program is heading into its third year as a major success, exceeding ridership expectations and planning to expand. But one city councilor has expressed concern that not all parts of the city are benefitting from the project’s success.
Councilor Charles Yancey, as part of the authorization of a $300,000 grant to expand the Hubway program, asked city staff involved to create a written plan for expansion into underserved areas such as Jamaica Plain, East Boston and Mattapan.
“Far too often, in part because of the disparities in neighborhoods, many neighborhoods are left out of certain programs,” Yancey said in a phone interview this week. “My challenge to the administration is to find creative ways of expanding the program.”
Read MoreThe cat-loving parasite with a creepy reputation for hijacking its host's behavior is using the infected body's own immune system for transportation, but also to juice it with a neurotransmitter that can suppress fear. There's a growing body of research about the extent to which Toxoplasma gondii can affect the behavior of its host, and a recent study shows the single-celled organism has a sinister ability to hijack the very immune system cells meant to defend against it. It also causes the cells to secrete a neurotransmitter that makes the cells travel faster, but is also associated with reduced fear and anxiety.
Toxoplasma is known for reproducing in cat digestive systems, spreading to the bodies of living rats through cat feces, then steering the rats toward other predators to complete the life cycle. When the protozoa travels from cat poop to rodents, it can enter the brains of its hosts and affect behavior. Primarily, it makes the rat fearless or attracted to the smell of cat urine. Since the organism can only reproduce in another cat, this is Toxoplasma's clever way of getting back to its breeding ground.
Read MoreOriginally published in Open Media Boston by Tate Williams (Staff), Dec-21-12
Cambridge, Mass. - With climate change policy deadlocked, there’s a rapidly growing movement on campuses nationwide to convince universities to yank their investments in fossil fuel companies.
And at Harvard—where the nation’s largest, $30.7 billion endowment makes it the top target—student activists are seeing what they hope are signs that the administration might budge on the issue.
Read More“Ekranoplan,” said Gareth. “A ground effect vehicle. He’s mad.” … The ekranoplans reminded Milgrim of the Spruce Goose, which he’d toured in Long Beach as a high school student, but with its wings largely amputated. Weird Soviet hybrids, the ekranoplans; they flew, at tremendous speeds, about fifteen feet above the water, incapable of greater altitude. They had been designed to haul a hundred tons of troops or cargo, very quickly, over the Black or Baltic Sea. This one, an A-90 Orlyonok, had, like all the others, been built in the Volga Shipyard, at Nizhni Novgorod.
Read MoreFrom 2001 to 2004, I created one mixtape every two months, compiling the best of the music I had been listening to at the time. The idea, inspired by a Cameron Crowe interview, was to make a diary in music that you can look back on years down the line, and be transported back to the period of your life through the songs you were listening to. And it’s fun listening, and you can share with friends, etc. My rules were pretty basic: I would pull together 10 songs from each month and load them on to one 80 minute CD. I usually started with an audio or comedy clip and bisected the mix with another to mark the start of the second month.
Read MoreHaving never experienced a true computer emergency, it’s been easy to consider myself immune from them. It’s like how I had never missed a flight until I was almost 30, and thought I had some kind of superpower. But once I did, both miss a flight and have a computer emergency, it was the closest thing I think I’ve ever been to a survival situation. Which isn’t to demean people who face true physical danger in the world, but a statement to how my digital self has become a part of my identity to the point that a threat to my computer is a threat to myself. Earlier in the week, I packed up the corpse of my three-year-old MacBook and took it to the Apple Store in Back Bay around noon. I wrapped my external hard drive, which had everything I have in life, digitally speaking, backed up on it, in an old t-shirt. I entered a three-level store that looks like Spielberg’s Minority Report. All transparent or frosted plastic and glass. Brushed aluminum.
Read MoreHow do you camouflage an inflatable mylar drone in the shape of a penguin? You really can’t, but for the climax of Zero History, one character opts for a disruptive paint job known as “dazzle” as a way to break up its gestalt.
“The result wouldn’t conceal the penguin against any background at all, particularly the sky, but broke it up visually, made it difficult to read as an object.”
Dazzle, or “razzle dazzle” is a form of camouflage invented in World War I by British artist and naval officer Norman Wilkinson. The Royal Navy, unable to conceal its ships, went for something altogether different by painting them with loud, irregular black-and-white patterns. The result was a floating Picasso, certainly visible, but hard to make out its size, shape and speed. German submarines needed to know all three to successfully calculate a hit with a torpedo, so turning British ships into a series of discordant shapes did a far better job of protecting them than trying to make them blend into their surroundings.
Read MoreIn a subplot of Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard uses a rare prototype of an early computing device as a bargaining chip for a crucial email address. She makes a straight offer to a menacing, drunken ex-spy — even trade, email address for the Curta.
It’s described as a black, cylindrical hand-grenade, “a precious instrument…performing calculations mechanically, employing neither electricity nor electronic components. The sensation of its operation is best likened to that of winding a fine thirty-five millimeter camera. It is the smallest mechanical calculating machine ever constructed.”mputing device as a bargaining chip for a crucial email address. She makes a straight offer to a menacing, drunken ex-spy — even trade, email address for the Curta.
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