STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

[MIKA27]

You Won't Need A PIN Number When You Pay For Everything With Your Face

Imagine a world where your debit card stays in your pocket at all times, and you never have to touch cash. This is a place where you don’t have to remember your wallet, or even phone, when you run down to the corner store. It’s a future well off in the distance, to be sure, but dozens of companies are taking the first steps to get there.

You probably already know about payment systems like Google Wallet, which can use NFC technology to let you check out with the swipe of a smartphone. There are also services that use geo-fencing to register when you’ve walked into a store and when you walk out. The latest fad, however, doesn’t require any extra equipment at all — at least none you’d be carrying around. You just need your face. It’s a big, crazy step. But also one we have the tools to start working toward.

At present, there’s a small slew of companies using facial recognition software to handle all kinds of transactions. The work they’re doing has the potential to completely change your daily life, and scare the underpants off of privacy advocates. But companies like Uniqul are mostly counting on the former. This Finnish start-up is on a mission with the stated purpose to create “the world’s fastest payment system,” and this week they launched a novel payments system based on facial recognition.

The elephant in the room, of course, is whether stores are willing to make the massive investment in extravagant facial recognition equipment to use the service, and whether people are willing to let Uniqul file their face away in a database of customers.

The basic premise behind Uniqul’s checkout process is that you should never have to do anything but be yourself when paying for something. No wallet. No iPhone app. Just a smile — or a grimace depending on your mood. You just walk up to the register where a camera scans your face and matches it against the database. “In the background our algorithms are processing your biometrical data to find your account in our database as you are approaching the cashier,” the company explained in a press release. “The whole transaction will be done in less than 5 seconds — the time it usually takes you to pull out your wallet.” The only thing you have to do beyond that is tap OK on a screen.

It’s hard to look past the basic idea behind Uniqul’s service and not wonder what you gain by paying with your face. On one hand, the pay-by-face method is fast and entirely effortless. Again, there’s no need wave your smartphone at anything. But even that benefit is tenuous, since 1) you’re going to need to carry around a debit card or cash for everywhere without a face-reading kiosk, and 2) is the 5-second transaction (assuming it goes smoothly) really do much for you over a 15-second swipe-and-PIN purchase?

And on the other hand, the system would require an upfront investment from merchants so that they have the right face-scanning equipment in the store and software to support it. Beyond that, the privacy question lingers. Will people that aren’t using the service feel comfortable in front of the face-scanner, even if it’s not scanning their faces?

Oh, and it’s not free, either. Uniqul calculates fees based on physical space — from €0.99 a month for terminals in a one to two kilometer radius to €6.99 for global access — and it’s entirely possible that you might end up paying for a service that you can only use in a couple of different location. Remember: Paying with your face is only fun when it works.

There are other players here, of course. An American company called Diebold is taking that same facial recognition idea and applying it to ATMs. The benefit here has as much to do with security as it does with convenience. So this time, instead of walking into a shop and getting your face scanned, you walk up to an ATM machine and connect to the network with a QR code on your phone. Instead of typing in a pin, you simply step back for a face scan, and you’re on your way to taking out cash. The Diebold machine is so plugged in, it doesn’t even issue paper receipts. Instead you get a text.

But again, plenty of people out there are very turned off by facial recognition software. You need only look as far as Facebook’s huge screw up when it attempted to roll out facial recognition feature to make tagging photos easier. While many users protested, Germany declared the software to be straight up illegal. So that’s one country that won’t be enjoying a pay-by-face future.

Otherwise, merchants and customers alike will have to invest time and energy to make the switch to virtual payments, regardless of whether it’s by facial recognition, NFC or otherwise.

There is another way, though. Ironically, plain old humans might be the best “facial recognition” tech out there. Square is arguably leading the way with its geo-fencing features (think of it as analogue facial recognition). The new Square Wallet software syncs up your profile with a store’s point-of-sale software so that the cashier knows who you are when you walk in based on — you guessed it — your face. The GPS and Wi-Fi chips in your phone help. And because the system registers your presence as soon as you walk into the store, it’s possible to tailor a completely personalised shopping experience based on that individual customer’s preferences.

That sounds like a great compromise, huh? You get the convenience of facial recognition without the fear-inducing, privacy-invading trouble of facial recognition software. That sounds all well and good until you realise that it’s also creepy to walk into a random store and be greeted by your name. Oh well, though. The future’s bound to be uncomfortable at one point or another. Just remember, it’s only going to get here when it’s as convenient for the stores as it is for you.

[MIKA27]

Get Your Zombie/Daryl Fix With This Exclusive US Walking Dead Trailer

http://youtu.be/Dxg27QsaIEY

AMC has released a new, lengthy trailer to Season Four of The Walking Dead. Things seem to be going from bad to worse for Rick, Daryl and the rest of the gang with a possible zombie-baiting traitor in their midst. Check out the full trailer here.

For some reason, AMC elected to geo-block its new Walking Dead trailer but a zombie-loving netizen has provided a repost for your viewing pleasure.

Highlights include a zombie getting churned up underneath some car tyres, Tyrese putting the smackdown on a crush of zombies (this looks to be a nod to a famous scene from the comics) and Daryl Dixon doing his usual broody crossbow stuff. The first episode of The Walking Dead Season 4 premieres on AMC in the US on 13 October, with Foxtel to follow around 36 hours after.

MIKA: I love this series.

[MIKA27]

Norwegian Town Builds Artificial Sun To Light Up Five Months Of Darkness

The far north or south isn’t the only place on Earth that spends the winter locked in perpetual darkness. Beginning in September and ending in March, the tiny Norwegian town of Rjukan is cast into a perpetual shadow. But no longer: this month, engineers are completing The Mirror Project, a system that will shed winter light on Rjukan for the first time ever.

A few days ago, helicopters descended on the 3500-person town to install three huge rectangular mirrors on the face of the mountains that pin Rjukan in on either side. Technically, these are heliostatic mirrors, which are controlled by a central computer that tilts their positioning to reflect the sun onto a specific, static location. (It’s more common to find them on solar farms, for example.)

The “hot spot”, in this case, is a 185sqm circle on the town square — soon to be converted into an ice rink (apparently, the reflected light still won’t be terribly warm). When Rjukan begins to fall into shadow roughly a month from now, the mirrors will begin their first tests. “The project will result in a permanent installation which, with the help of the 30sqm mirrors, will redirect the sun down into the valley,” explained town reps. “The square will become a sunny meeting place in a town otherwise in shadow.” The entire operation, amazingly, is set to cost less than a million dollars.

As lovely as it is, the Mirror Project forces us to wonder: Why was Rjukan built in the first place? In fact, it was settled around the turn of the century, when a famed Norse industrialist named Sam Eyde built a hydroelectric factory in the valley. It turns out that Eyde had the mirror idea first — but had no way to implement it. According to TIME, his alternative was to build a cable car that workers could use to escape the valley floor for a few hours on weekends.

[MIKA27]

Fukushima Is Leaking Radioactive Water Into The Pacific Ocean After All

Well, over two years after the Tōhuku earthquake and tsunami, TEPCO officials admit that radioactive groundwater has been leaking into the nearby ocean for, well, two years. The confession came just one day after an election that brought Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s pro-nuclear party a solid majority, and months after watchdogs raised the red flag about possible ocean contamination.

Environmental experts have long feared that the contaminated water was causing damage to local marine and even human life, though TEPCO insists that the danger is low. “Seawater data have shown no abnormal rise in the levels of radioactivity,” a TEPCO spokesperson told the press on Monday. This is all after the company denied groundwater leaking into the ocean for, again, two years.

So we have to wonder: If the radioactive water is leaking into the ocean but the water’s radioactivity levels don’t raise, where does the radiation go? TEPCO officials say it’s been contained by the silt fences erected in the water around the nuclear power plant. If they’re wrong — or obfuscating — and it made it out, it’s entirely possible that the ocean’s carrying the radiation off to far flung places like it’s been doing tons of debris. Meanwhile, TEPCO admitted earlier this month that radiation levels in the nearby groundwater were spiking, further raising suspicion about the levels in the ocean.

Despite the press conference and the apologies, this latest revelation is just the latest link on a chain of misinformation stretching all the way back to the earthquake itself. After the initial tragedy, it wasn’t just TEPCO that was fudging the truth about what was really happened at the crippled nuclear power plant. It was the Japanese government too. But now with newly elected lawmakers in place, at least the people get a little bit of the truth, dismal and destructive as it may be.

[Fuzz]

Norwegian Town Builds Artificial Sun To Light Up Five Months Of Darkness

In China, they'd just remove the mountain that was causing the shadow...

[MIKA27]

In China, they'd just remove the mountain that was causing the shadow...

Because they can!

[MIKA27]

How Star Wars Just Inspired A Real-Life Scientific Discovery

The real-life Tatooine may not have two suns — but it has unlocked the secrets of a geomorphic mystery. Close to Tozeur, Tunisia — George Lucas’s stand-in for the barren planet — there’s a wilderness of sand that’s permanently changing.

When wind whistles across the dunes, it pushes that sand into huge, crescent-shaped structures known as barchans. These things are huge, and they move — pretty much wherever the wind forces them too — but scientists have found it hard to quantify those movements. After all, when sand moves on sand, it’s difficult to measure absolute positions.

That’s where Star Warscomes in. Because in the same barren patch of land is something rather more iconic than sand: It’s home to the movie set which served as Mos Espa, Tatooine’s go-to spaceport. In fact, the set now lies encircled by a large barchan — and the scientists have been using it as a reference point to determind just how much those barchans have shifted.

With the buildings of the set as fixed geographic points, scientists were able to use satellite imagery to track the movement of the barchan over the years. Turns out, it’s schlepping at a whopping 50 feet every year — and is now just 33 feet away from the fictional city, according to a paper published in the journal Geomorphology. That movement is 10 times faster than the movement of similar structures on Mars. It’s a surprising result, given how much faster the Red Planet’s winds are than ours.

Unfortunately, that also means that the buildings of Mos Espa could soon be swallowed by sand. Not even the Force can help with that.

[MIKA27]

Inside The Boeing Capsule That Could Be NASA's Next Space Taxi

Boeing is gunning for the contract to transport NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, and yesterday it showed off its latest design for the insides of its intergalactic ferry, the CST-100 Space Capsule.

The gumdrop-shaped module is 4.5m wide and can fit up to seven astronauts. Bigelow Airspace constructed most of the exterior and Boeing handled most of the insides, which looks like what you’d expect from a commercial aircraft made by a company that makes most of the planes you regular earth travellers fly in. The CST-100 has two rows of seats, plenty of cargo storage, and a freezer to transport scientific experiments. Controls feature shuttle-era switches, hand controllers, a touchscreen display, and are mounted above the first row of seats. There’s also a giant front window with a portal on either side.

One important thing is missing though, and that’s the waste management system. This is the second iteration of the interior of Boeing’s commercial spacecraft, so they’re still exploring options for how to handle the toilet situation, from adult diapers to mechanical devices.

While two astronauts strapped into the CST-100 yesterday, they didn’t leave the station — the vessel won’t actually take its first orbital flight until 2016. And even then, we don’t know if it’ll nab the contract. It’s also competing with SpaceX and Sierra Nevada. But Boeing of course is the most experienced in the field, so we’ll see how this puppy actually flies when the time comes for a test drive.

[MIKA27]

Aussie Caught Driving Car With Pliers As Steering Wheel

Imagine you’re the police. Imagine you’re in your police car. Imagine eating a doughnut. Imagine complaining about life to your partner. Imagine seeing a car with two obviously blown tyres drive by. Imagine pulling that car over. Imagine seeing that the driver driving the car was using a makeshift steering wheel made from… locking pliers.

This actually happened. There is a person out in this world that thought replacing a steering wheel with pliers would be a good idea (at least it was locking pliers, right). Police in South Australia said that a white sedan was driving dangerously in Adelaide. When they pulled him over, the car was not registered, not insured and had been involved in a previous hit-and-run car crash. Oh yeah, and it had that no steering wheel thing. Just look at it. At least put an Xbox steering wheel or something.

The driver is being charged with driving “while disqualified and returning a positive drug test”. Of course.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: Robotic Crab Scuttles The Sea For Sunken Treasures

One problem with conventional ROVs is that while their propellers are plenty strong enough to kick up columns of silt from the sea floor, they typically lack the power to effectively navigate in strong currents, which limits where and how well they can survey a given area. But this new underwater explorer sidesteps both of these problems by skittering around the sea floor like a crab.

Developed over the past two years by a team at the Korean Institute of Ocean Science and Technology (KIOST) led by Bong-huan Jun, the Smart Car-sized Crabster CR200 is designed to survey shipwrecks and areas of scientific interest in turbulent coastal waters down to 200m, where currents can reach speeds of 1.5m/s and the water pressure tops 25bar (about 362 psi).

The Cr200 does this by crawling about on six articulated legs — the rear four have four degrees of freedom while the front two have six — though the ROV can also fly along the seafloor like conventional craft using thrusters. If it spots something of interest with any of its 10 optical cameras, the CR200 can grab it with its front two legs, which double as manipulator arms, and store it in a frontal compartment.

The current model is powered through an umbilical tether from its mothership which allows the CR200 to deploy for more than 24 hours. Future iterations will likely have an onboard power source as well as the ability to “swim” like a sea turtle using its rear legs rather its thrusters and dive as deep as 6km. But first the ROV must first be tested next month off the coast of South Korea. If successful, James Cameron might just soon have some robotic competition.

[MIKA27]

A New Kind Of Microchip Mimics The Human Brain In Real Time

A team of scientists in Switzerland has managed to cram 11,011 electrodes onto a single 2mm by 2mm piece of silicon to create a microchip that works just like an actual brain. The best part about this so-called neuromorphic chips? They can feel.

Don’t over interpret the word “feel” though. The brain-like microchips built by scientists at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich are not a sentient beings, but they can carry out complex sensorimoter tasks that show off the network’s cognitive abilities. And what’s more impressive is that all of this happens in real time.Previous brain-like computer systems have been slower and larger, whereas the Swiss system is comparable to an actual brain in both speed and size. That’s exactly what the team was trying to do.

“Our goal is to emulate the properties of biological neurons and synapses directly on microchips,” says University of Zurich professor Giacomo Indiveri.

The next step for these neuromorphic chips is to take on more and more complex tasks. In a paper published this week by the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers who built the chips suggest that they could connect the neuromorphic chips to sensory systems like an artificial retina. This is somewhat of a fascination for the community of scientists trying to build a brain-like computer. Stanford professor Kwabena Boahen rose to prominence after developing a silicon retina that behaved like a biological retina, and since then, he’s been working on ways to mimic the brain using artificial circuits.

Truth be told, it won’t be a single scientist or even a team that ultimately accomplishes the task of building a computer that truly behaves like the human brain. The grey matter between our ears is so impossibly complex that so far only supercomputers seem halfway capable of such a feat. And over the next 10 years, a whole slew of scientists will attempt to accomplish that task. It will be difficult, and with a budget over $US1.6 billion, it will be frightfully expensive. But at least they have some microchips to start with.

[MIKA27]

Japan: Hunt on for serial killer who leaves haiku clue

Man in his sixties sought after five people are killed in remote rural village

Police in rural Japan are searching for a 63-year-old man suspected of having killed five people, burned down two houses and left behind a haiku poem as a clue.

On Sunday night, the bodies of 71-year-old Makoto Sadamori and his wife Kiyoko, 72, were found in the smouldering remains of their home, in a mountain hamlet in the western Yamaguchi prefecture.

Around 80 metres away, police came across a third body, thought to be that of a 79-year-old woman, Miyako Yamamoto, whose house had begun to burn at around 9pm, approximately the same time as the Sadamori home.

The remote village is said to contain just 10 households, a temple and a community centre, so when two more bodies were found in other nearby homes on Monday, the dead amounted to a third of its population.

Like their fellow victims, 73-year-old Satoko Kawamura and Fumito Ishimura, 80, are believed to have been battered to death. All five reportedly died instantly after being struck on the head with a blunt instrument.

Criminologist Jinsuke Kageyama told the Japan Times: “All of the victims must have been asleep when they were attacked… Even elderly people resist. It would have been difficult to strike them repeatedly only on the head.”

Police have yet to find a murder weapon, but think they may have discovered a clue to the killer’s identity: a haiku poem, fixed to a window at the home of their chief suspect, Yamamoto’s 63-year-old neighbour, which reads: “Setting on fire/ Smoke gives delight/ To a country fellow.”

The haiku is a traditional Japanese form of verse, consisting of 17 syllables in three lines. Most haiku use imagery drawn from nature as a metaphor for human emotions.

There was no trace of the poem’s author, who has not been named. Two cars were still in his garage, however, and police began their manhunt in the woods around the village last night.

According to the hamlet’s surviving residents, the man was known to be unfriendly and something of a troublemaker.

One of the victims, Satoko Kawamura, had reportedly complained about the man’s dog. Once, after she flinched from the pet in fear, the man supposedly shouted: “Are you going to batter him to death?”

Another resident of the village reportedly told police the haiku had been in the man’s window for some time. There had been a small fire at Kawamura’s home around five years ago, and another local house burned to the ground in 2011. Police said they were examining possible connections between the cases.

According to one Japanese newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, the suspect had also told neighbours that if he killed someone, he would be immune from prosecution because he is on medication.

[MIKA27]

Archaeologists discover dinosaur tail in Mexico's desert

The five-metre tail was the first ever found in the country

Archaeologists in Mexico have unearthed the fossilized remains of a 72 million-year-old dinosaur tail, the country's National Institute for Anthropology and History (INAH) said.

The five-metre tail was the first ever found in Mexico and was unusually well-preserved, said the INAH's director Francisco Aguilar.

The team of experts, made up of archaeologists and students from INAH and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), said the tail belonged to a hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur.

The tail, found in the desert near the small town of General Cepeda in the border state of Coahuila, probably made up half of the dinosaur's length, Aguilar said.

Archaeologists found the 50 vertebrae of the tail completely intact after spending 20 days slowly lifting a sedimentary rock covering the creature's bones.

Strewn around the tail were other fossilised bones, including one of the dinosaur's hips, INAH said.

Dinosaur tail finds are relatively rare, according to INAH. The new discovery could give further insights into the hadrosaur family and aid research on diseases that afflicted dinosaur bones, which resembled those of humans, Aguilar said.

Scientists have already determined that dinosaurs suffered from tumours and arthritis, for example.

Dinosaur remains have been found in many parts of the state of Coahuila, in addition to Mexico's other northern desert states.

"We have a very rich history of paleontology," Aguilar said.

He noted that during the Cretaceous period, which ended about 65 million years ago, much of what is now central northern Mexico was on the coast. This has enabled researchers to unearth remains of both marine and land-based dinosaurs.

The remains of the tail will be transferred to General Cepeda for cleaning and further investigation.

[MIKA27]

Revealed: How Mars Lost Its Atmosphere

The Red Planet lost its protective blanket of air billions of years ago. Now astronomers are certain why

One of the biggest challenges about flying to Mars is remembering why you went there in the first place. The Curiosity rover has been on the Red Planet for almost a year now, and the landing itself — an outrageous feat achieved by a stationary hovercraft that lowered the 1-ton Mars car to the surface by cables — was a global television event. But once the wheels touched the soil and all of the high fives had been exchanged, most people outside of the space community turned away.

Curiosity, however, went to Mars to work, and if its sister rovers Spirit and Opportunity — both of which arrived in 2004 and one of which is still chugging — are any indication, it should be at it for a long time. In the past year, Curiosity has already made some intriguing discoveries about the mineralogy of Mars and the planet’s watery past, and this week it delivered again. In a pair of papers published in the journal Science, investigators announced new findings from the spacecraft about one of Mars’ most long-standing mysteries: how it lost its atmosphere, and why.

Mars’ modern atmosphere is only 1% the density of Earth‘s, but the planet’s watery phase is believed to have lasted for the first billion of its 4.5 billion years, which means its air must have been around that long too. But things were never likely to stay that way.

Mars has only half Earth’s diameter, 11% its mass and 38% its gravity, making it easy for upper layers of the original atmosphere to have boiled away into the vacuum of space and been blasted out by meteor hits. And that cycle would build on itself: the thinner the air became, the easier it would be for space rocks to hit the ground, unleashing still more explosive energy and, in effect, blowing still more holes in the sky.

But that’s only one mechanism. Planets can lose their air not just from the top up but also from the bottom down, as elements of the atmosphere bond with — and retreat into — the soil. Martian meteorites that landed on Earth have often been found to include gas bubbles from the Martian sky, evidence that this commingling was going on.

Curiosity scientists sought to settle the matter with the help of the rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instruments, a collection of sensors that sniff the air for its chemical makeup — particularly its mix of isotopes. Elements don’t come in just one form, but in different sizes and weights — such as carbon 12 and carbon 13 — determined by the number of neutrons in the nucleus. That weight issue is critical in atmospheric studies, because just as heavier metals sink downward and lighter ones rise as a molten planet is forming, so do gases stratify themselves in the atmosphere by weight.

Earlier measurements of Mars’ current atmosphere had always shown a high concentration of the heavy isotopes of carbon and oxygen — convenient elements to measure because Mars’ atmosphere is overwhelmingly made of carbon dioxide. Those findings differ from the isotopic makeup of the sun and the early solar system as a whole, in which lighter isotopes were more evenly represented. Mars, like Earth and all of the other planets, would have started out with that same relatively even mix. The fact that the heavy isotopes dominate the remaining Martian air means its lighter, high-altitude gases bled away first — supporting the top-down theory.

“As atmosphere was lost, the signature of the process was embedded in the isotopic ratio,” said NASA‘s Paul Mahaffy, principal investigator for the SAM team, in a statement. That was the theory anyway, but it took a suite of instruments like SAM to sample the air with enough sensitivity to prove the heavy-isotope imbalance. As the Science paper revealed, Curiosity indeed sealed that deal.

The findings are considered particularly reliable because Curiosity used two different instruments to do its work: the tunable laser spectrometer, which analyzes how Martian air pumped into a chamber reflects two different frequencies of infrared laser; and the mass spectrometer, which, as its name suggests, measures the entire spectrum of elements present in an air sample according to their mass. “Getting the same results with two very different techniques increased our confidence that there’s no known systematic error,” said NASA’s Chris Weber, lead author of one of the new papers.

Mars’ lost air is never coming back, but the little bit it does have still makes the planet a chemically active place — and plays a major role in the combination of parachutes and braking-rockets spacecraft from Earth rely on to reach the surface safely. But change is a constant everywhere in the universe, and even today, the Red Planet’s atmospheric loss is thought to be continuing. How fast that’s happening will not be known until the arrival of NASA’s next Mars probe, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, which is set for launch in November. The already harsh Mars, MAVEN may find, is fast becoming harsher still — one more reason to appreciate the improbably verdant Earth.

[MIKA27]

Dennis Farina Dies at Age 69

Plenty of actors invest time doing research for their roles, but most of them had nothing on ex-cop-turned-actor Dennis Farina.

Plenty of actors invest time doing research for their roles, but most of them had nothing on Dennis Farina. Farina, who died July 22 of a blood clot in his lung, spent nearly two decades as a Chicago cop, a career that led him to work as a consultant for director Michael Mann. Mann saw something in the raspy-voiced burglary cop, giving him a small part in his movie Thief in 1981, then casting him as star of his hard-boiled TV drama Crime Story.

Farina became a fixture in movies and TV, playing cops, mobsters, and connected guys in classics from Midnight Run to Get Shorty to Law and Order. There’s no substitute for experience; Farina’s Chi-Town voice, his creased face, his tough bearing suggested he’d been around and seen action. As a cop, he could make make threats that were not strictly legal and make them sound credible (see video, below); as a crook, he could promise to end a rival and make it sound almost charming. He was the thespian equivalent of a weathered silver dollar or a V-8 getaway car; a durable classic they don’t make anymore.

Yet Farina was a real actor, not jut a lucky beneficiary of casting. He could swear like a poet but also do comedy and play the nice guy. Late in his career, he held his own with Dustin Hoffman as a mobster’s empathetic confidante in HBO’s Luck, and one of his last roles was a comic turn in Fox’s sitcom New Girl. The law made him, and his most memorable roles brought the law, and law-breakers, alive. That he was taken at age 69 was a crime. RIP.

[MIKA27]

We Don’t Need No Stinking Wonder Woman Movie

Wonder Woman is one of the single weirdest pop culture creations ever.

Fans often don’t want to hear this about her. When DC Entertainment Chief Diane Nelson recently tried to explain in an interview that DC doesn’t know what to do with the character, because “she doesn’t have the single, clear, compelling story that everyone knows and recognizes,” there was the inevitable backlash. Susana Polo at The Mary Sue made the argument that is usually made in these situations: that there is nothing tricky about Wonder Woman, and that the reason Hollywood is unwilling to greenlight a film is because Hollywood is sexist.

The absence of Wonder Woman, a character traditionally part a superhero triumverate with Superman and Batman, became even more noticeable after the recent Comic-Con announcement that we’re going to have yet more Superman and Batman on the big screen — but this time, together! It’s a predictable choice, and a result of the same dreary calculus which insists on recycling the same guys (and it is always guys) over and over, rather than creating something new, or possibly with a slightly different gender.

Still, while Hollywood is quite sexist, and I have no trouble attributing the lack of female-led superhero films in general to that fact, Wonder Woman still presents some serious and legitimate problems for anyone who wants to bring her to the screen today.

Most of those problems date back to the character’s comic book origins. The man who created Wonder Woman, psychologist William Marston, was … well, he was kind of a kook. He believed that women were superior to men in large part because they were more submissive than men. He designed Wonder Woman expressly as an icon to teach both boys and girls the virtues of female strength — that female strength being inextricably linked to submissiveness.

Marston wasn’t shy about the BDSM connotations. Here he is in 1944, for example, explaining Wonder Woman’s appeal in an article called “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics”:

Well, asserted my masculine authorities, if a woman hero were stronger than a man, she would be even less appealing. Boys wouldn’t stand for that; they’d resent the strong gal’s superiority. No, I maintained, men actually submit to women now, they do it on the sly with a sheepish grin because they’re ashamed of being ruled by weaklings. Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to and they’ll be proud to become her willing slaves!

Nor was Marston shy about bondage in his comics. Look at any given page of the original Wonder Woman run, and you’ll find women and men alike trussing each other up in inventive and improbable ways. Here, for example, is our heroine breaking free of a gimp mask with her teeth while mentally providing a brief background in bondage history.

I’ve heard folks argue that the point here is that Wonder Woman is breaking out of the bondage, not that she’s tied up — but come on. She’s in a gimp mask. Someone’s tied up on almost every page. You can’t tell me Marston didn’t think that was sexy — especially when he’s on record saying that the point of Wonder Woman is to make folks proud to be willing slaves.

Obviously, later versions of Wonder Woman don’t focus quite so much on the gimp masks, and Wonder Woman’s lasso of obedience even got down-rated to the less useful but substantially more comfortable lasso of truth. Still, the outlines of the original remain. There isn’t really any way around the fact that Wonder Woman is an avowedly, even militantly, feminist icon who wears a revealing swimsuit, plus a lasso and bracelets which were intended to be, and are still read now, as bondage gear.

And the bondage/feminism problem is only the beginning of the character’s idiosyncrasies. Wonder Woman is explicitly supposed to be bringing peace — but she comes from an Amazon warrior culture and spends most of her time fighting. She’s a pagan Greek who wears a flag on her swimsuit. She comes from an all-female culture which excludes men — but her mission is to save man’s world. And that’s not even getting into the not-even-a-little-buried lesbian eroticism of the original comics.

Fans agitating for Wonder Woman often point to the Thor movie as if Thor is a similarly odd or difficult choice for a film. But Thor is just a manly warrior who hits things. He’s not a *** pacifist bondage enthusiast. Wonder Woman is.

I’m not saying that Wonder Woman is a bad or uninteresting character. In fact, I am saying the opposite of that. Those original Wonder Woman comics are glorious and bizarre and beautiful — they are some of the greatest comics, and damn it, some of the greatest art, ever created by anyone. Amazons playing bondage games where they dress up as deer and eat each other; giant spacefaring kangaroos with extra lungs; evil midget hypnotists who ensorcell women in order to draw forth pink, ropy gobs of ectoplasm; cross-dressing snowmen — Marston is a cracked genius, whose exhilaratingly, perversely sexual feminist, *****, pacifist vision still looks, 60 years later, like it’s 100 years ahead of its time.

As just one example almost at random; here’s a brief sequence from Wonder Woman #12, drawn by the amazing (and amazingly named) Harry Peter. Those are winged women from Venus tying up war-mongers in nets of magnetic gold to make them peaceful and loving. You’ve got Marston’s favorite themes of peace, submission, matriarchy, and eroticized love (those are Venus girls after all), all stuffed into one. Plus, in that last panel, where a woman is substituted for the male captives, we get a nod to female-female submission, as the deft, quick motion lines convey the exhilaration of captivity and the rush of returning to a mother-prompted semi-fetal position.

There is, in short, a very specific artistic vision here, in the hothouse plethora of wings and dresses and nets and eloquently curling hair. And that artistic vision is precisely why it’s hard to take Wonder Woman and make sense of her in a different context. Who would try to turn Henry Darger into a popcorn flick? Who wants to make Little Nemo into a television show? How could anyone think that that would be a good idea?

It’s true that Wonder Woman was made into a successful television show…as well as into lots of other comics, and an animated film, and even into a seminal piece of video art. But very few of these later iterations have been anything but awful. The 70s television show, despite much nostalgic cache, is virtually unwatchable now (as opposed to the 60s Batman, which is as great as ever.) The 2009 Wonder Woman animated film presents Amazons as needing instruction in love from Steve Trevor. The ongoing comic by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang presents Amazons as castrating child-killers and makes Wonder Woman the daughter of Zeus so that her powers come from her patriarchal bloodline. Even takes that don’t flee in panic from the feminism, like Gail Simone’s run on the comic, inevitably smooth out the edges, turning Wonder Woman into a fairly standard empowered action heroine, winking now and then at the character’s oddness, but mostly ignoring it.

None of this is surprising. Pop culture remains uncomfortable with feminism, and if it’s going to overcome that discomfort, it’s going to try to do it in a way that appeals to the broadest number of people as possible, by avoiding stories that would make both feminists and non-feminists furrow their brows. The current media landscape — and the moderate advances of feminism in media — have arguably made Wonder Woman more, rather than less, difficult to deal with. Just look at Xena, Buffy, Katniss, and Korra — there are lots of female action heroes now who are empowered in ways that don’t involve bondage imagery or all-female-community essentialism.

There’s not that much to Superman or Batman. They’re pulp action heroes, period. Wonder Woman, on the other hand, was deliberately, ideologically feminist, sexual, and even messianic. Marston made it work, and made it popular — those original comics were hugely successful. But a studio simply isn’t going to pony up the funds for a feminist bondage extravaganza on the strength of the fact that something similar made money six or seven decades ago. Any Wonder Woman film that gets made is going to have to make her blander while leaving her recognizable. It’s tricky.

And it also seems kind of pointless. If you have to ignore the characters’ oddness to make the thing work, why use the character at all? If you don’t want the feminist bondage submissive pacifist lesbian goofiness, why not just make a superhero story about someone else? I know there are Wonder Woman fans who love the character in her later, more conventional, almost uniformly badly written incarnations. I don’t really understand it, but I acknowledge it.

As far as I’m concerned, though, I don’t have any desire to see yet another badly conceived version of the character tramp through yet another mediocre storyline, and doing so won’t honor Marston or his creation. Honestly, I’m glad the character is tricky enough that studio execs can’t quite figure out how to ruin her for a mass audience. May she foil all such attempts to bind and/or unbind her.

[Habana Mike]

Aussie Caught Driving Car With Pliers As Steering Wheel

Imagine you’re the police. Imagine you’re in your police car. Imagine eating a doughnut. Imagine complaining about life to your partner. Imagine seeing a car with two obviously blown tyres drive by. Imagine pulling that car over. Imagine seeing that the driver driving the car was using a makeshift steering wheel made from… locking pliers.

This actually happened. There is a person out in this world that thought replacing a steering wheel with pliers would be a good idea (at least it was locking pliers, right). Police in South Australia said that a white sedan was driving dangerously in Adelaide. When they pulled him over, the car was not registered, not insured and had been involved in a previous hit-and-run car crash. Oh yeah, and it had that no steering wheel thing. Just look at it. At least put an Xbox steering wheel or something.

The driver is being charged with driving “while disqualified and returning a positive drug test”. Of course.

That's not called pliers, it's Vise Grips - completely different and quite legal in some southern states!

Still I wonder, how do you find time to come across and post all this awesomeness!

And hell yeah's to Dennis Farina...

[MIKA27]

Still I wonder, how do you find time to come across and post all this awesomeness!

Thanks for reading and posting Mike!

I actually don't have time during the day, but I make the time...

[Fuzz]

That's not called pliers, it's Vise Grips - completely different and quite legal in some southern states!

Actually, they are locking pliers. Vise Grips is a trade name for locking pliers, though they were originally invented and sold under that name.

[MIKA27]

The North Pole Is Now A Lake

If you think these images from the North Pole look more like a lake than the snow-covered expanse you’d expect, that’s because it is — the North Pole has melted. April saw the ninth heaviest snow cover on record measured in the Arctic, covering the Pole in more of the white stuff than it’s seen in a long ol’ time. But by May temperatures increased and almost half the cover melted.

It’s not, perhaps, quite as dramatic as it sounds. Throughout July temperatures have been uncharacteristically high — up to 1-3C higher than usual on July 13, for instance — and the result has been an abrupt thaw of the snow cover that was left. These images, acquired from the North Pole Environmental Observatory, show the thaw in progress, between June 30 and July 25.

It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t the first time there’s been a meltwater lake at the North Pole, nor is it the worst — and we certainly shouldn’t draw climate change conclusions from what is realistically one data point. But it should at least make us think about what we’re doing to the planet.

[MIKA27]

A Fleet Of Blimps Will Soon Serve As A Missile Shield In The US

A still-chilling consequence of post-9/11 America is that we remain all too aware of the fact that we could be attacked at any moment. And so with worst case scenarios in mind, the US military is constantly upgrading its defence systems in increasingly creative ways. Washington DC is next in line. It’s getting blimps.

To call Raytheon’s JLENS system mere blimps, though, is doing the defence contractor a disservice. These house-sized flying spy fortresses can identify threats on the ground that even the most powerful land-based radar would miss. They can spot and track incoming cruise missiles, mine-laying ships, armed drones, or anything incoming from hundreds of miles away in 360 degrees and react in real-time. Perhaps most impressively, the JLENS system can stay in the air watching over a base or a city for up to 30 days, all day and all night, without needing to be resupplied or refuelled. Obviously, this is preferable to the very expensive fleet of five spy plans that it would take to do the same work that the JLENS does with less than half the manpower.

In a matter of weeks, the defence Department will deploy several JLENS blimps over the Washington DC to watch over the nation’s capital. At 74m long, the aircraft aren’t exactly Goodyear blimp-sized, but they’re not inconspicuous either. The JLENS system is made up of two aerostats: One equipped with a fire control radar that provides targeting data and the other with a surveillance radar that can see in all directions. Floating at 3000m above the ground, the JLENS system will also be able to see all the way out to the Atlantic Ocean.

The JLENS system is already on its way to the Washington DC area after having finished a successful test out in Utah. With over 100 soldiers trained on the system, the US Army ran early user testing in a number of different complex scenarios. The next step is to transport the whole outfit to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland where it will undergo an operational evaluation and eventually enter into active duty, so to speak.

It’s unclear exactly when the JLENS system should take flight, but it’s hard to see the downside in the arrangement until then. When all said and done, the defence Department will be spending up to 700 per cent less on the JLENS system than on spy planes, and will ostensibly get better protection. And who knows? They might be able to pitch in some aerial photography for Redskins games.

[MIKA27]

This Is The 'Fastest GPU Ever' Made

NVIDIA has just announced an insane new GPU. Designed for (wealthy) graphic professionals, the Kepler-based Quadro K6000 is, apparently, “the fastest and most capable GPU ever built”.

With twice the capacity of the Quadro 6000 that it replaces, the specs on this thing are just crazy: it has 12GB of super-fast DDR5 graphics memory, 2880 streaming multiprocessor cores, ultra-low latency video I/O, and the ability to drive four simultaneous displays at up to 4K resolution. So, you probably need this on your home PC, right?

Just as an example of the power of this thing, Nissan can apparently load almost-complete vehicle models using it. And that’s incredibly impressive. But impressive will come at a cost. While there are no firm pricing details available at present, the K5000 costs $US2250 — so brace yourself. It will be available later in the year

[MIKA27]

Chromecast Is Google's Answer To Getting Web Video On Your TV

Meet Chromecast. This is Google’s vision for how Chrome can help unite your experience across all of the many screens we’ve got. And you better believe it’s all about video. Who knew a little $35 dongle could change the way you watch forever?

What we’ve got here is a set-top box type of product that plugs into your TV a bit with a capability similar to AirPlay Streaming. This is the clear successor to last year’s Nexus Q, and it’s different in almost every way: it’s unobtrusive, cheap and actually useful.

Chromecast, according to Google, will have close to zero setup time. Just pop the little flash-drive shaped device into your TV’s HDMI port, connect it to your home Wi-Fi, and then you’re ready to wirelessly transfer what you’re watching on your computer, phone or tablet on your TV.

It’s not limited to Android and Chrome OS and Android devices either. The reasoning for using Chrome is that it runs on all operating systems. It’s super simple, if the application you’re using on your phone or other device supports Chromecast, there will be a little “Cast” button. Hit it, and just like that, it will land on your TV. From there, you can control playback from multiple devices if you’d like.

And it doesn’t stop with YouTube — all supported applications will have the cast button. In the demo today, we were shown Netflix, Google Play Movies, TV and Music. Google says Pandora is coming soon.

What’s more there will be a Google Cast SDK so that basically any app can eventually use it. It also opens the door for the development of additional devices so that other set-top boxes with Chromecast built-in.

But even better, this isn’t limited to specific service-based applications like Netflix. The desktop version of Chrome is getting a cast button so that you can beam your Chrome tab to your TV with a click. So in the case of something like pay TV, you can simply beam the browser-player to your TV and be done. The one caveat, of course, is that we’re almost certain that the media has to be in the cloud.

From the looks of it, Chromecast is what we’ve been waiting for from a set-top box for a long time. Rather than a platform-siloed experience like the one you get from Apple TV— Chromecast leaves the options wide open. We can’t wait to get our hands on one.

Chromecast is available today through Google Play for $35, and it will ship from Google by August 2. Unfortunately, it’s a US-only product for now.

[MIKA27]

Leaked Images Of BlackBerry's New A10: This Actually Looks... Nice

BlackBerry’s rumoured big shiny new A10 has cropped up in a series of leaked high-res images and it looks… actually kinda nice. The new phone is rumoured to be a bigger and faster flagship smartphone for the company, and these images show the device in more detail than before.

It’s not dissimilar in style to Samsung’s Galaxy S4, though the bottom of the phone also resembles the HTC One with it chrome chin.

The Vietnamese site Tinhte — which often manages to get its paws on phones ahead of launch — has also released a video of the same handset too. Watch it below.

The A10 is rumoured to pack a 5-inch AMOLED display, a dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM, and there’s been suggestion that it could arrive some time before the end of 2013. The accuracy of all this is clearly up for debate — as is whether it can actually help BlackBerry out if its hole. Let’s wait and see.

[MIKA27]

Australia / US Talisman Sabre Military Exercise Reaches Full-Throttle

For the past few days, around 30,000 US and Australian troops have been taking part in Talisman Sabre; an enormous amphibious landing exercise off Shoalwater Bay in central Queensland. This video depicts the joint US-Australian military exercise in action (for once, bombastic rawk guitars are thankfully absent).

“With the counterinsurgency efforts in the Middle East winding down, Marines are returning to their amphibious origin,” the US Department of Defense explains on its YouTube page. “Airman First Class Ashley Powell sheds lights on a company of Devil Dogs that used the cloak of darkness to infiltrate the Australian coastline.”

Check out the full clip below.