Image: Induct

While Google and other companies test their driverless cars while angling for governments to regulate them and consumers to demand them, one company dove headfirst into the market and is already selling a driverless "car" to businesses and universities.

To be fair, the vehicle, called the Navia, isn’t exactly a car—it’s more of a trolley or shuttle and looks a bit like an oversized golf cart. It’s made by a French company called Induct and is already operating at Oxford University, in city centers in Singapore, and in a couple small European cities such as Strasbourg, France. 

The idea behind it is to solve the “first and last mile” problem (actually getting from home or work to a mass transit system) that many commuters have in cities. Unlike Google’s driverless cars, however, the Navia can’t even operate in manual mode—it doesn’t even have a steering wheel. Like other driverless cars, the Navia uses LIDAR and GPS to navigate autonomously.

“Our objective is to remove private cars from the center of cities. You can just jump in a Navia and it takes you where you want to go,” Pierre Lefevre, CEO of Induct, told me. “It can manage pedestrians and other vehicles and it can follow all of the normal street regulations.”

The all-electric Navia holds eight passengers and can go as fast as 28 mph, but it normally operates at about 12 mph in city centers. Obviously you’re not going to go on a road trip with one of these, but it’s easy to see its potential uses. Lefevre says the company has been in talks to sell Navias to hospitals, universities, amusement parks, and airports to serve as an automated shuttle. 

It’s an early look at what many experts think will be the truly disruptive nature of driverless vehicle technology: carsharing. In the future, you’ll be able to call a car to come pick you up, have it drive you somewhere, and drop you off. It’ll then go shuttle someone else around, meaning the car isn’t useless while you’re doing your shopping or at a bar or something—it’s being used by someone else. Navia is the same. Customers can order the Navia to pick them up with a smartphone app and can tell it where to go. After it’s done, the Navia is free to go ferry someone else around. 

Right now, service is free and open for anyone to use in the seven locations where it’s being operated, but Lefevre says the company is considering subscription and pay-as-you go services. 

As you might expect, it’s not cheap: The Navia costs $250,000, which is a lot for a glorified golf cart. The company notes that it often costs more than that to run a bus or shuttle in a year (and that, because it’s electric, companies will eventually save money if they use the Navia), but buses and shuttles usually hold far more than eight people and can travel on highways and larger roads if necessary. 

Induct obviously has much less to lose than Google if something goes awry—it’s much harder to injure someone going 12 mph in a small vehicle than it is in a full-fledged driverless car. But in any case, it’s exciting to see someone simply go for it with this technology.  The company has two vehicles out for demonstration purposes in California and one in Florida, so it might not be long until it gets approval to sell them in small city centers in the United States. It’s a baby step towards full integration of driverless cars, but at least it’s something.

Image NASA Johnson Space Center

This week, a team of engineers based out of NASA's Johnson Space Center unveiled their newest spacesuit prototypes: the Z-2 series. Using the momentum generated by the inaugural Z-1 series—which was essentially Buzz Lightyear's spacesuit without the pop-out wings—the JSC team have invited the public into the actual design process with Z-2. You can vote for your favorite prototype here.

This is a brilliant move by the JSC, and yet another indication that NASA is getting its mojo back after the beleaguered Space Shuttle years. The online poll is a great way to take the public's temperature about future missions and gage the overall interest in manned spaceflight. But most importantly, the spacesuit isn't just a flashy makeover, but a substantive step towards planetary exploration. 

For example, it's the first newly designed suit to be to be vacuum-tested by a human being for over 30 years. It's designed for planetary mobility, which sends a strong message about NASA's intention to stay in the game when it comes to manned exploration of the other worlds. And some of the improvements are deliciously sci-fi. For the first time, 3D human laser scans and 3D-printed hardware have been used to make a super-individualized fit. The upper and lower torso of the suit use the most advanced impact resistant composites ever built into a prototype. Yet despite these additions, the Z-2 weighs less than the current model.

“We are creating a better tool for astronauts,” said advanced suit team lead Amy Ross in an AMA. “Our goal is to make a suit that protects the astronauts and lets them do their work without making them tired or even having to think about their suit. We haven't reached our goal, but we have made vast improvement over the current suit.”

In addition to the practical upgrades, the designs are invitingly weird. The first, called “Biomimicry,” takes its inspiration from bioluminescent organisms, tipping its hat to extremophiles in particular. The second, “Technology,” is a retrofuturist's wet dream. And the third, “Trends in Society” is “reflective of what every day clothes may look like in the not too distant future.” That should be exciting for any space enthusiast, because it suggests NASA is still committed to making spaceflight accessible to civilians one day.

The Tron-style "Technology" design. Photo via NASA Johnson Space Center.

In the same AMA, the team delved into all the essential topics, like whether you can poop in the Z-2 suit (it is “not recommended”) and what kind of unlikely dangerous scenarios the suit can withstand.

“Your buddy pushes you off of the porch of your Mars lander on the top of Olympus Mons,” answered Ross. “You roll down Olympus Mons, bounce across the surface and disappear over the lip of a crater. Your battered suit comes to rest in the freezing shadow at the bottom of the crater. An alien eats you. All because you ate the last Oreo.” Good to know.

But in between the joke questions, the team provided some great insights into the future of spacesuits more generally. In the long-term, they are looking to evolve beyond the bubble-style full pressure suits, either by integrating nanotech restraint layers or developing spray-on suits out of Fabricon. They also expressed interest in pursuing a mechanical counter-pressure suit, a skintight alternative to the traditional lumpy spacesuit.

“We are very glad to see progress being made on MCP and in addition, we ourselves are actively funding development of these materials,” said suit/human interface lead Shane McFarland. “Many of us view MCP as having a place in the future of spacesuit design, although when advances in technology allow that future to occur is a big unknown. In the meantime, we are looking at developing flight capability to support missions in the next 5-15 years.”

So while we'll have to wait at least a few decades for form-fitting space unitards, it's exciting that real advances are being made with the full pressure design. The polls close on April 15, so be sure to cast your vote soon. In the meantime, check out the team's AMA for more info about resisting itches in orbit and creating a spacesuit for doge. Much suit. So space. WOW.

Image: Flickr/Tolga "Musato"

Continuing a long trail of internet censorship that’s heated up over the past months, Turkey today blocked access to Youtube. It’s just a week after the country blocked Twitter—or rather, attempted to—although that ban was at least temporarily lifted by a Turkish court only yesterday.

While Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been mounting a stand against social media in general for a while, the Youtube block is a particular blow for internet freedom and democracy in the country, ahead of elections this weekend.

The video site went down just hours after an anonymous Youtube account posted an audio recording of what they alleged was Turkey’s intelligence chief discussing military operations in Syria with other high-ranking officials. Reuters said they were unable to authenticate the recording but said it was “potentially the most damaging purported leak so far as it appeared to have originated from the bugging of a highly confidential and sensitive conversation.”

Erdogan’s war against social media is wrapped up in allegations of corruption that have been fuelled by leaks on sites like Youtube and Twitter, which he accuses of spreading misinformation in a plot against his government.

The Hurriyet Daily News confirms that the Youtube block was brought into effect by the government-appointed telecommunications directorate TIB, who acted on a controversial new internet law brought in earlier this year. The law allows sites to be blocked without a court order if they’re deemed to violate someone’s privacy—but quite whose privacy it’s really out to protect is questionable.

If the Twitter ban is anything to go by, blocking access to Youtube will only encourage more people in Turkey to visit the site—Twitter saw a record number of Turkish visits in the first day of its apparent block, with access easily attained by changing DNS settings, using VPNs, sending tweets by text, or taking to the deep web via browsers like Tor.

It's not the first time Turkey has tried to ban Youtube; it blocked access to the site over 2007 and 2008 owing to videos considered offensive to the first Turkish president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. But at that time, Youtube was still the eighth most popular site in Turkey, with even Erdogan memorably admitting he accessed it.

Judging by DNS addresses being shared on Twitter (and suggestions to just use Vimeo instead) it looks like Turkish web users are already finding ways around the latest block. 

CONFIRMED: The Tor Project website is blocked at the DNS-level in Turkey on the largest ISP, TTNet.

But it also looks like the government might be wising up to a few of the tricks to get around bans as well: Net activists Telecomix Turkey just tweeted that the Tor Project website—from which you can download the Tor browser—has been blocked at DNS level. Of course, that won't put a stop to the cat-and-mouse game: Mirror sites are already being passed around.

Image: Screenshot from Vimeo/Rotor

At some point, every band is in need of a music video. And with the wealth of cheap cameras and software, the tools to get it done are easily accessible. But, you still need the skill, talent, artistic vision, and that stuff, which doesn't come on the cheap. Fear not, for a new music video startup company called Rotor intends to subvert this model. 

Think of it like plug-and-play music videos: Users upload a song to the website, add four video clips, and then Rotor's music video creation tool does the rest of the creative heavy lifting.

The site was designed by a team of music video directors, visual artists, and creative coding experts: Diarmuid Moloney, Eoghan Kidney, and Tim Redfern. I tested the new tool, which is preparing for its beta run, and talked to Kidney, about the idea's inception, the software and technology behind Rotor, and the team's future plans for the site.

Motherboard: Where did the idea come from originally?

Kidney: Our CEO Diarmuid Maloney had the original idea and developed it with the Propel scheme in Derry. I came onboard mainly because, as a music video director, I knew tons of musicians who can't afford or don't know how to make videos; and they're still really important, even more so now. 

What was the modus operandi?

It was important to us that we didn't just make a system that offered a few generic styles. We know that musicians wouldn't be interested in that. We need to give visual artists the tools to make their own video styles, so we've developed a way to do that. We're really excited to see that in the wild and see if people take it up, like a WordPress for music videos with visual artists earning every time one of their styles is used.

How flexible is it? Is there a great depth to what Rotor can direct?

It's as flexible as a user wants it to be. A musician could upload a tune, choose a style and hit "go" if they like, but a style designer can create styles from scratch in Patchbay. They can be customizable, with a user contributing video clips, dictating pace or whatever. We're working on ways that an artist can video a performance, upload it and have it put together in an interesting way, and other really interesting features which we will release hopefully sometime in Q3. We've got tons of ideas but so little time!

Do you have a target user in mind?

All musicians who want to find more ways of getting their music heard.

Is the video synced rhythmically to the music at all?

Yes. Rotor analyzes the music that's uploaded, finding information such as locations of beats, segmentation based on similarity (i.e. where the chorus and verses are), intensity levels of segment, etc. It's this information that is used to compose the video via the style. 

How were its aesthetic and stylistic parameters designed?

In our web-based style authoring tool Patchbay. We're getting lots of artists on board from different backgrounds, introducing them to Patchbay and letting them go off and make styles that they can then sell to musicians. 

Which videos have really surprised you so far?

We were working with music directors Sasha Rainbow and Stephen Agnew and they really took to it and started to get great results out of it. We'll have styles directed by them ready on launch. So, it depends on who uses it and what they do with it. We're still in development, so a lot of surprises to come I'm sure, and we can't wait to see what people make with it.

If users design music video styles, are they then asked to share that style with others in a communal way? 

They don't have to if they don't want to. We recommend they do though, as it could be a good opportunity to make a few quid. We're planning on an extremely fair revenue-sharing model. 

What software and technology is behind Rotor?

Our CTO whiz Tim Redfern has coded a rendering engine in C named RotorD that lives in the cloud. We're using Ruby for the front end. We've created a proprietary browser-based tool in Javascript that directors can use to design a style. It's a nodal-based system that we hope audio visual designers will be familiar with, much like VJ tools like Isadora or post production tools like Nuke.

Final thoughts on the development process? 

Well, it's the first time any of us have really attempted anything like this. We're all from very non-web based backgrounds, so it's been a real learning curve. I've had to learn how to code to some degree and use things like Python. We're also always on the lookout for new partners that can help us find our user base. So, if anyone out there is interested in coming onboard, get in touch.

Image: Wikipedia Commons

Due process is part of both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution, but its been ignored by the state Oklahoma's execution procedures.

Oklahoma County District Judge Patricia Parrish held that the Oklahoma law that prevents anyone from disclosing the source of drugs used in lethal injection procedure violates the constitutional rights of the inmates to due process, because they are denied information necessary for vetting the drugs.

"I think that the secrecy statute is a violation of due process because access to the courts has been denied," Parrish ruled, according to the AP, adding that the decision "wasn't even close."

Oklahoma’s black hood law only dated back to 2011, when acquiring the drugs from European drug manufacturers suddenly became more difficult. The law states that the “identity of all persons who participate in or administer the execution process and persons who supply the drugs, medical supplies or medical equipment for the execution shall be confidential and shall not be subject to discovery in any civil or criminal proceedings."

The legal challenge filed on behalf of two death row inmates argued that without knowing the source of the drugs, the inmates could not be assured that the drugs were being administered correctly and that the drugs themselves weren’t contaminated.

According to Aaron Cooper, a spokesman for the Attorney General's Office, defended the statute to The Guardian, saying that the matter was already settled on both a state and federal level and that "the entire reason for Oklahoma's confidentiality statute is to protect those who provide lethal injection drugs to the state from threats, coercion and intimidation."

The two inmates Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner sued the state, demanding that it disclose the source the pentobarbital and vecuronium that would kill them during their scheduled executions that were originally scheduled for March 20 and March 27. The executions were moved when it was revealed that the state did not have the necessary drugs on hand to perform the execution, and the inmates’ request for a stay of execution was dismissed as unnecessary.

The source of drugs has become a contentious issue across the country after inmates in Oklahoma and Ohio exhibited signs of suffering during execution.

Neighboring Missouri’s black hood laws have come under scrutiny recently as well, as details. State Rep. Jay Barnes, chairman of the house committee, called Missouri’s statutes “clearly too vague,” and said he believed that the department of corrections should not appear to operate “under secrecy and be able to change vital protocols without legislative oversight.”

The decision in Oklahoma has implications beyond the state’s borders. "Judge Parrish's decision is a major outcome that should have a reverberating impact on other states that are facing similar kinds of transparency issues," Deborah W. Denno, a professor of law at Fordham University, told the AP.

In Oklahoma, though, attorneys for Lockett and Warner are getting closer to the transparency they desire.

"We hope that no execution will go forward until we are able to obtain full information about how Oklahoma intends to conduct those executions, including the source of its execution drugs," federal public defender Madeline Cohen said when the Oklahoma inmates’ execution was delayed earlier this month.

The state itself, which already had put forth a Heculean effort to get lethal injection drugs, vowed to still carry out the executions. Oklahoma assistant attorney general John Hadden told The Guardian that the state will appeal Parrish's decision to the Oklahoma supreme court.

Image: Robin Baumgarten

For game developers around the world, March is the season to head West. My fellow cave dwellers have awoken from hibernation, flocking, spawning, and returning to our respective territories for the Game Developer’s Conference 2014. I was on the floor of the conference all week for various game-centric events, combing through the various tracks of the summit, diving into the strange and wonderful world of conference parties, dodging sales reps on the expo floor, and eating many burritos.

Last year, I went to a dubious party where many of my fellow indie developers felt uncomfortable. It was a very Hollywood, very entertainment industry-styled party, but centered around a video game conference. It was weird.

“The video game party” doesn’t seem like a thing that should exist. It even seems superfluous when I call it a ‘party.’ People who play games once had a paradisiacal natural habitat: the arcade. That's before it was slashed, quartered, deforested, wiped out by over-hunting, as prey of the now extinct rental video shops, the nearly extinct home console, and good old fashioned American geography.

With the exception of trendy barcades dotting the gentrified cities of America, Dave & Buster’s and it’s mini-mall ilk are all that remain of the arcade, which was forced to evaporate sometime ago, at least stateside. Once, I asked founder Nolan Bushnell how Chuck E. Cheese had managed to survive in the arcade business for so long. He leaned in and said, “Well first of all, it’s very hard to kill rats.”

Image: Robin Baumgarten

Bushnell himself is largely responsible for the format of the arcade, being a carnival barker in his youth and the driving force behind Pong, which he sold to bars across Silicon Valley and beyond. These days, the business of making arcade games is not looking good, even though Japan continues to have a decent market for it. Instead, developers and curators have moved in to fill the void with the so-called ‘new arcade.’ Among those actively working in this space, which includes collectives in Toronto, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, Chicago, Austin, Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, and Melborne, it is London that really focuses on bringing games into nightlife.

I’ve worked with Queens video game exhibition space Babycastles on such things here in New York. In Montreal, Kokoromi actively transformed the indie arcade with their showcase parties. NYU GameCenter has a cabinet built by their MFAs at the Brooklyn Brewery’s beer garden. Rob Lach built an impressive multi-game cabinet for Logan Square’s Emporium Arcade Bar to highlight the work of his fellow Chicago devs through Indie City Games. Designers have been doing the same thing in less drunken environments for years. A din is starting to grow from the void; there’s palpable traction for the idea of reviving the arcade; after all, arcades are the threshold through which many of us entered gaming.

Of all the new arcades, one group consistently reinvents how this new arcade functions. They do so, not through the shell of a cabinet, or in the art world, but instead by transforming bars and nightclubs into arcades. They’ll put games on a Cold War-era German fishing boat, in a faux living room, in bars around Shoreditch, in a party, anywhere they can sneak under the radar. There are games stuck in their fingernails.

Image: Robin Baumgarten

They are London’s Wild Rumpus, a ragtag band of roughhousers who, aside from having an excellent grasp on what’s important in video games today, know how to make them fun, accessible, and meaningful in an outfacing, inclusive, very public way. Essential for not preaching exclusively to our tiny, mostly supportive indie video game choir.

Rewind to 2011, when Rumpus began out of a need to have those North American new arcade experiences across the Atlantic in London. Instead of beelining for the art world, Marie Foulston, then a Penguin Books producer, decided to brings games where the people were: drinking and dancing. Foulston now leads a troop of six fellow indie game reprobates, among their ranks Pat Ashe, a game dev and performer, George Buckenham, a game designer and developer, Ricky Haggett, Honeyslug founder and creator of Hohokum, Dick Hogg, an illustrator and designer, and Alice O’Connor, an artist and craftsman. Together, they are dedicated to reviving the idea of the arcade as a social space.

Here’s how Rumpus works. They come into your town—typically London. They set up shop somewhere: on a boat, in a warehouse, at a bar. They sell tickets online ahead of time. They sell out. They still try to get you in at the door. There’s live music, there’s games. You’ll play games, you’ll talk to people, you’ll play games with people and talk with them while you’re doing so. They have a great curation of new games, games you haven’t heard of, games you love to play with others. They’re about the new multiplayer, about weird controllers, about interactive experiences that you actually experience. Last year they had their largest turn-out for “The Wild Rumpus on a Fucking Boat,” on the aforementioned German fishing vessel.

“That party has a sad side too—as it was our first big audience shift as we moved from a free event to a paid event that was set away from Shoreditch,” Foulston recounts. “We noticed that we'd lost a large chunk of audience who weren't part of the games community, or weren't already initiated into games—it was an awesome space… but it was a shift for us away from what we've always said was one of our big goals: to bring these games to new audiences.”

There are of course, events that are going to be specifically for that incumbent audience, and no larger guestlist comprised entirely of indie game Twitter feeds exists than “That Venus Patrol and Wild Rumpus Party,” which has accompanied the Game Developers Conference for the last three years. Co-hosted by Independent Games Festival Chairman, Brandon Boyer, and his home for gaming romantics, Venus Patrol, they combine to form the be-all and end-all party for the year’s biggest gathering of game makers at San Francisco’s Public Works venue.

Image: Robin Baumgarten

In addition to just being fun, there were games to showcase. Beers to drink. Songs to dance to. This year, Adam Saltsman & Keita Takahashi’s Alphabet was present. Instead of using a keyboard, players used the cobbled together dance pad controllers like you’ve seen in Dance Dance Revolution, similar to the MegaGIRP control pad by Babycastles seen at Motherboard’s own launch party back in 2012. In Alphabet, you move little letter men across the level. Part obstacle course, part race, its fun to watch folks scramble, Twister style. They cooperate to compete—jumping over one another to vie for the front-running space.

There was ROFLpillar, by Lucky Frame, a game about being a larvae you control by rolling in a rainbowed potato sack. Kyle Reimergartin’s FJORDS, was gorgeous, glitchy, fun. And there was Push Me Pull You, a four player game I saw all over the conference being play tested on laptops, where two Human Centipede/CatDogs play shuffleboard with their torsos, created by Melbourne-based designers Nico Disseldorp, Stuart Gillespie-Cook, Michael McMaster, and Jake Strasser.

They make games to get other sects of culture interested in games too. Musclecat Showdown, by Major Bueno and Bee & Puppycat creator Natasha Allegri debuted at the party, paired with furred controllers with little cat buttholes under their tails, hopefully attracting fans of cartoons and Allegri’s artwork, aside from the GDC attendees.

Meanwhile, all these games are accompanied by live sets from gaming’s favorite musicians and VJs. Daedelus, Baiyon, Arcane Kids, and Phillipe Lemarchand all performed, accompanied by their own visuals, as well as the work of Berlin’s Christoffer “TRU LUV” Hedborg, amongst others. Phillipe Lemarchand, a portmanteau of Phil Fish and Richard Lemarchand, closes out the party each year.

Image: Robin Baumgarten

Stepping away from the nightclub for just a second; Wild Rumpus also debuted the “Mild Rumpus,” an exhibition at the conference’s West Hall, essentially a living room in the middle of the conference center’s efficient American brutalist architecture. Featuring games better suited to be experienced at home, it included some of my favorites, like Kentucky Route Zero and Hohokum, alongside Quadrilateral Cowboy and Samorost3. Not only was this a quiet place of refuge and relaxation amongst the uncomfortable architecture of the quintessential civic center, it was a meeting place for passers by to be surprised by talks or play sessions with the designers themselves, always somehow emerging on an adjacent beanbag or from across an IKEA coffee table.

The Rumpus team’s warmth and familiarity does so much to make games approachable. Granted we’re at a gaming conference, but nevertheless—their work is important as advocates for the power of gaming as a medium. Foulston and her merrymakers don’t showcase anything without injecting life into every orifice of what can often be stuffy affairs.

These things are important because we need to re-learn how people approach games, especially in the context of our largest annual spawn at GDC. You don’t see any proponents of the new arcade putting games in pretentious places; hell, I can’t even get Babycastles to use a consistent logo. You’re going to keep seeing Foulston and her compatriots putting them in fake living rooms, in nightclubs, in homemade arcade cabinets, in backpacks, in teddy bears, in planetariums, wherever they can find new people.

I returned to the infamous party I wrote about last year to find that not many of my fellow developers were there. 

Image: White House Press Photo

Earlier this week, news leaked that President Obama would be taking some measures to reform the National Security Agency’s bulk collection program. Today, as expected, we learned that the rollback will essentially only limit the NSA from collecting metadata from phone calls, without touching any of its other programs. 

Unsurprisingly, that’s not enough to assuage the concerns of some of the country’s most prominent civil liberties groups, including the ACLU, Demand Progress, and the Center for Democracy and Technology. But, considering Obama’s and the federal government’s general response to Edward Snowden’s leaks about government data collection programs, it’s a good start.

“It’s worth taking a look at where we were a year ago. The NSA was secretly scooping up and storing all this data. Six months ago, the secret was out,” Kevin Bankston, policy director of the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation said on a conference call discussing the new policy. “By January, the administration opened the door to ending the program but was talking about scary alternatives. So, I think today’s announcement is a real turning point. We’re pleased the President realized it’s not necessary to keep records [of everyone] and this represents a huge step in the debate over the power the NSA should have.”

Obama isn’t getting rid of all of the NSA’s data collection programs, however. Thursday’s announcement applies only to what is known as the Section 215 bulk telephony metadata program, which is definitely a good first step, but, as we’ve slowly learned, it’s just one of many NSA and government surveillance programs. Metadata can be used to identify a person’s politics, identity, religion, and lots of other personal information, so it’s definitely good news that the administration is scaling that back. But, the general consensus is that there’s still a lot of work to be done.

“The ACLU is pleased the President came down on the right side of history and privacy and has seen there’s no need to collect this data on Americans, but we’re calling on him to go far beyond phone records,” Michelle Richardson of the ACLU said. “There are other massive collection programs, and those too need to be reigned in with the same sort of limited approach [the administration is taking with phone metadata.]”

Still, as Bankston said, it’s better than the tack that the government took early on in this process and it’s encouraging that the President has taken a step back from his overly defensive approach. Soon after Snowden initially revealed some of the NSA’s programs, Obama noted that NSA programs “struck the right balance” between keeping Americans safe and screening their personal communications, and said that the programs have “applie[d] very narrowly to the leads that we have obtained on issues related to terrorism or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” As it became clear that the government was collecting far more than it probably should be, his stance, publicly, has changed.

“I think it was a mix of both principle and pragmatism that has led to the change,” Bankston said.

It remains to be seen whether Obama or Congress will take any further action to cut back surveillance programs, but not too many people are holding their breath. 

"They've been quite clear that they're talking only about telephone and they're talking only about Section 215," Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute said. "To contextualize that, we’ve seen them play a set of musical chairs with this before. It's just one component of [a larger program] that has been broken up and farmed out to other authorities."

Google Glass has entered the cockpit. Image: Wikimedia

Google upped its fashion game this week, announcing it's working with hip eyewear brands like Ray Ban to de-nerdify its high-tech glasses, which means we can look forward to augmented aviators before too long. Apparently, just in time, because Google Glass has officially entered the cockpit.

Two pilots flew a Beechcraft King Air C-90 aircraft wearing the computerized eyewear this month, in what they're calling the first Glass-assisted flight. (Though, at least one tech-savvy pilot-to-be has tried it out before.) Naturally, there's a video of the pioneering trip, unearthed today by Jalopnik. It's shot from the cockpit, so you can see what the future of flight might look like.

Admittedly, it's not exactly gripping footage. Information cards on the display walk the pilots through the pre-flight safety inspection and takeoff checklist, and augment their frame of vision with air navigation maps and meteorological charts en route. It's just like if Google Maps was projected on your windshield while driving, except the little blue dot that follows your current location is shaped like a tiny airplane.

Nonetheless, it's something of a watershed moment for the aviation industry, which, like so many industries, has been speculating about the potential benefits of Glass and similar AR technology. Adventia European College of Aeronautics, the flight training school that carried out the Glass flight on March 5, as part of "Pilot Innovation Day," listed some of these benefits in a press release for the event.

First, there's safety: Pilots don't have to let go of flight controls or even glance away to see data like coordinates, weather updates, etc during the flight. There’s also potential cost savings: According to Adventia, the digital display could save 150,000 Euro and 60 kg a year spent carrying paper onboard. And the device could help better educate pilots-in-training by offering a real-time, data-rich peek into the cockpit.

The flight app was developed by Droiders, an official Google Glass developer, and its checklists are modeled off the checklist app that Stanford University Faculty of Medicine use in surgery. It forces the wearer to complete every item on the list before continuing, so that it also theoretically minimizes mistakes.

Of course, it's just a proof of concept; as you can imagine, there are lots of questions left to answer. What if pilots start relying on this automated controls, and their device is hacked, or there's a glitch? Just this week, a couple of computer engineering students in Israel demonstrated that the GPS app Waze, also a Google product, could be hacked to create a fake traffic jam and throw off everyone's commute. That's disconcerting enough on the road, imagine if someone wanted to mess with aircraft navigation in the sky.

What's more, Glass isn't even commercially available yet, though it's supposed to hit shelves sometime this year. So, your next cross-country jaunt isn’t going to be piloted by a robot. But some travelers will start seeing the device while flying the friendly skies. Virgin, everyone's favorite futurist airline, is testing out the gadget for staff attendants, so while a Google Glass app won't help captain your next trip, it might take your next in-flight beverage order.

Image: Facebook Screengrab

Last year, Mark Zuckerberg helped create Internet.org, a consortium of companies that are working on delivering the internet to everyone on Earth. Today, we found out how he plans on doing it: With drones, satellites, lasers, and a team of scientists poached from NASA and some of the top research institutions in the world.

In a Facebook post (where else?) Zuckerberg announced the formation of the “Connectivity Lab” at Facebook:

Today, we're sharing some details of the work Facebook's Connectivity Lab is doing to build drones, satellites and lasers to deliver the internet to everyone. Our goal with Internet.org is to make affordable access to basic internet services available to every person in the world … Our team has many of the world's leading experts in aerospace and communications technology, including from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and Ames Research Center. Today we are also bringing on key members of the team from Ascenta, a small UK-based company whose founders created early versions of Zephyr, which became the world’s longest flying solar-powered unmanned aircraft. They will join our team working on connectivity aircraft.

The way he’s planning on doing this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise considering earlier this month the company was working on acquiring Titan Aerospace, a drone manufacturer that makes solar-powered aircraft capable of staying in the sky for months at a time. It’s unclear if that deal fell through, but it appears the company might be going another route with Ascenta, and could be working on making its own drones. 

In a video explaining how it’s going to work, Facebook’s Yael Maguire says that, for rural areas, Facebook plans on building out an array of low-Earth orbiting satellites that’ll beam the internet down to the planet. For suburban areas, they’ll rely on the drones. 

“You think about the traditional model of how we access the Internet, and it starts with a base station. It’s a tower that provides radio signals,” he said. “We look at [those] pieces and we want to challenge all of those assumptions about the way we deliver the Internet.”

Really, the “how” doesn’t matter at this point—it’s the “what” and the “who.” The goal of providing internet access to everyone on Earth is a laudable one, even if an video accompanying the video is a bit hyperbolic (“What happens when the rest of us get [internet] access? It doesn’t get twice as good, it gets like a bazillion times as good,” the narrator says.) But this is a Facebook Connectivity Lab, not an Internet.org Connectivity Lab. Earlier this week, Facebook said it wanted to be on your face with its acquisition of Oculus. This is just one more move in Zuckerberg’s blitzkrieg to own all things internet, including how we access it.

Prototypes of the high-flying Bouyant Air Turbine. Images: Altaeros

In far-flung rural Alaska, where electricity can cost as much as $1 per kilowatt hour—more than 10 times the national average, according to the New York Times—a wind turbine encased in a giant helium balloon is about to break a world record. The Bouyant Air Turbine (BAT) is about to be floated 1,000 feet into the air in the name of cleaner, cheaper, and mobile energy. That single airborne grouper—it's sort of a hybrid of a blimp, a kite, and a turbine—will power over a dozen homes.

The BAT is the brainchild of Altaeros, a company founded by MIT alumni, and, if everything goes according to plan, it's going to be the highest-flying power generator in history.

Floating turbines higher up in the air, where wind speeds are greater isn't a new concept. 

"It's known that wind speed increases with altitude above ground level, and power density increases with a cubic factor of wind speed," Altaeros co-founder Adam Rein told me in an email. "Roughly speaking, a doubling of wind speed equates to an eight-fold increase in wind power density. Conventional turbine manufacturers are also trying to reach higher heights because of this fact—though not as high as our turbine."

Makani Power, which was acquired by Google last year, may have done most of the legwork in popularizing the high-altitude turbine. But Altaeros is looking to push the boundaries of where high-flying turbines can be deployed right now.

"The immediate benefit to our customers is generating low-cost, clean electricity in place of expensive, dirty fossil fuel," Rein said. The company is aiming to deploy its turbines in remote areas, hard-to-reach areas that currently rely on expensive diesel generators or costly patchwork grids—in those markets, the BAT can be the cheapest, easiest source of power.

Altaeros floats its BATs using a helium-filled inflatable shell that resembles an open-mouthed grouper. Winds blow stronger and more consistently the higher above the ground you get, and the hovering BAT harnesses the gale and sends electricity down through the high-strength tethers that hold the machine steady.

"The BAT has an automatic controller, which adjusts the attitude and altitude of the BAT, through winches on the ground station, in order to maximize power capture, flight stability, and limit loads on the structure," Rein claimed. "The BAT is fully capable of operating autonomously, without the need of a ground crew to launch or land the system." The device can deliver two to three times more power than a conventional turbine, Rein said. And it costs a lot less to install.

The company expects to be able to offer electricity for 18 cents per kilowatt hour; that's a lot more than the national average of 11.6 cents. But it's definitely cheaper than available options in places like Hawaii (where the average is a whopping 37 cents per kwh) and the aforementioned Alaska, and it gets pretty close to densely populated California, where a residents' average power bill comes out to 16 cents per kwh.

Rein noted that the BAT "will also remove the logistical headaches caused by complex fuel supply chains, or transporting and installing large wind towers over rough terrain." He also imagines it will be useful for industrial operations, like mining or resource extraction, and for acting as giant hotspots, too. "The BAT's shell also offers the opportunity to lift additional payload equipment—internet, phone, and imaging devices—that can offer customers an additional stream of revenue."

Obstacles remain, to be sure. "The largest barrier to implementation right now is the need for a product that is reliable in all weather conditions for long periods of time," Rein said. He noted that the "FAA will play an important role in the approval of our product." It's already approved a draft policy allowing the BAT to take flight, but the prospect of a multitude of floating wind turbines sprouting up in remote areas around the nation certainly calls for a cohesive regulatory framework.

And do expect to see more skyward turbines in coming years. Some scientists have argued that we could meet the entire world's energy demand if we were able to harness the hugely powerful jet stream. That number's since been revised, but they believe that there is a massive reservoir of potential, just sitting in the sky.

Rogers, center, meets with European leaders Image: House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

You might remember House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan, from his lovely, universally-hated (by 14-year-olds, at least) CISPA cybersecurity bill that would have allowed nearly seamless information sharing between companies and the federal government. You might also remember him from his c’est la vie attitude towards civil liberties in general. 

Well, we’ve got some good news and some bad news: Rogers announced today that he won’t seek re-election and is instead retiring from politics to start a conservative talk radio show on Cumulus. The bad news? He’s got at least one terrible, civil liberties-killing bill to try to push through Congress before he goes.

Like CISPA, the newly introduced “FISA Transparency and Modernization Act,” seeks to make it easier for the federal government to get your information from companies. 

On the surface, the bill “ends bulk collection of metadata under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, including telephone, email, and internet metadata.” It also includes a ban on the bulk collection of library records, bulk firearm sales, medical records, tax returns, education records, and other sensitive personal records.

That would seem like a step in the right direction (though I am personally not opposed to the government knowing who is purchasing guns in bulk), especially because the outdated 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the one that created the secret courts the NSA used to seize metadata records in the first place. But, as always, the devil is in the details. Yes, the bill would end bulk collection, but it wouldn't end overly broad, targeted information collection. Rogers’ new bill may inadvertently (or perhaps completely advertently) allow the government to completely bypass the judicial process and demand companies’ data without a court order. 

The most concerning language comes in an amendment to the old FISA bill called Sec. 503, which makes it even easier for the government to demand data from companies. In the old FISA, security agencies could only ask for records if it pertained to a specific investigation. That’s not what the NSA was doing, but that’s how it was written into the law. Sec. 503 allows the government to ask for data without a court order, as long as they have a “reasonable articulable suspicion” that the target is a foreign power, is associated with a foreign power, or is in contact with (or known to) an agent of a foreign power. That’s a much lower bar, according to Amie Stepanovich, senior policy counsel at human rights organisation Access Now. 

“It lowers the standard, and by lowering it, they’re codifying the practices [the NSA] was already practicing,” she told me. 

American Civil Liberties Union lobbyist Michelle Richardson said that the committee “uses reform momentum as a pretext for expanding government power.”

“We want to be clear. The House Intelligence bill is not a fix, it’s not even a half measure. It’s not the ACLU saying it doesn’t go far enough. The bill affirmatively does harm,” she said. “It’d allow the FBI to directly demand records without a national security subpoena that’s unprecedented in 35 years of FISA. For all its flaws, FISA has required prior judicial authorization. Repealing that and giving the FBI the authority to collect what it wants without judicial review is a huge step backward.”

The Rogers bill would basically allow the government to bypass the court whenever it deemed that it was moving too slowly, which is pretty obviously problematic. 

The government would also only need to get court approval after spying has already taken place, a move that Harley Geiger of the Center for Democracy and Technology says gives government agencies "virtual subpoena power."

"The HPSCI bill would take some steps to ending the mass part of the surveillance but it would give federal intelligence agencies what looks like subpoena power over records," he said. "That is unprecedented. We do not have that system set up right now."

Rogers’ bill will compete with Wisconsin congressman Jim Sensenbrenner’s USA Freedom Act, a bill that has been supported by 163 members of Congress and has been vetted and supported by many civil liberties groups such as the Access Now, ACLU, CDT, and Demand Progress. That bill essentially brings more transparency to the FISA court and would put a civil liberties advocate on the FISA court. 

The Freedom Act has had fairly wide support, but Rogers is known for getting what he wants. He pushed CISPA through the House without too many hang-ups and, as head of the Intelligence Committee, he’s got a lot of clout. He says he’s open to amending the new bill—but I wouldn’t hold your breath. 

Image: Mediagalleries/Twitter

We already knew that bots were writing news content, automating narrative stories from data-rich topics like sports scores and financial markets. Now, robo-reporters are starting to get scoops. They're not just writing stories; they're breaking them.

Thomas Steiner, a Google engineer in Germany, designed an algorithm that covers the news as it's breaking by monitoring activity on Wikipedia (old school journalists everywhere are wincing) and watching for spikes in editing activity.

The idea is that if something big is happening—especially if it’s a global event—multiple editors around the world will be updating Wikipedia and Wikidata pages at once, in different languages. That spike in activity tips off the bot to the story. According to Steiner, his news bot spotted major stories like the Boston Marathon bombing and the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines MH370.

The bare-bones site tracking real-time editing is called Wikipedia Live Monitor. It was first created last year, and now Steiner's has extended his robo-news operation to Twitter. The bot mines the social media site for a particular search term triggered by the Wikipedia activity and pulls out all relevant photos to illustrate the story.

"We have connected the world of breaking news events based on detected concurrent Wikipedia and Wikidata edits with the world of social network sites," said Steiner in a paper recently published on Cornell's arXiv preprint server and picked up by MIT Technology Review yesterday.

You can check out the visual news events on the Twitter bot account @mediagalleries. The earliest are from a case study Steiner did to test out the program during the Olympics in Sochi. More recently, there are galleries illustrating major sports events, and the latest updates to flight MH370 and the conflict in Crimea.

#BreakingNews candidate via @WikiLiveMon: http://t.co/8urCEpUKkc. Media gallery: pic.twitter.com/rE6JMkxQ4A

You can see, it's still a rudimentary process, hardly about to put the staff of the New York Times out of business. But it says a lot about the direction automating the news is heading in.

Finding stories by scanning Twitter is nothing new; journalists do it all the time, like a modern-day wire service. But spotting them through algorithms and reporting them via bots, with no human middle man anywhere in the process, is a different ballgame.

It's sensible enough: When people around the globe are connected and online, there's little reason not to know everything that happens the instant it does, and Steiner's work is just the latest small attempt at harnessing that huge reporting power. "The Olympics being an event of common interest, an even bigger majority of people share the event in a multitude of languages on global social network sites, which makes the event an ideal subject of study," he wrote in the paper.

Still, the Fourth Estate is one of the more disconcerting industries being taken over by robots, and not just because it’s my own livelihood. And it’s more common than you think; Kristian Hammond, cofounder of Narrative Science, a company that's been automating content for several years now, predicted that 90 percent of the news could be written by computers by 2030.

Last week, a robot wrote a breaking report of an earthquake in Los Angeles, published on the LA Times—that's a top story in a major publication. And we wrote about how the recently announced Buzzfeed-Whisper partnership means viral stories will now be automated, too, creating original content from crowdsourced data—just like Steiner’s Wikipedia bot, except thousands of people will be reading them.

Image: Shutterstock/Perfect Gui

If you visit certain websites, or associate yourself with an unsavoury group of people, you run the chance of being added to one of the US government's many watch lists. In the interest of national security, they are used to monitor, and if necessary stop, the movements of “known or suspected terrorists.”

But due to amateur errors and the database's sheer size, these lists are allowing dangerous individuals to slip through, and prohibiting innocent people from flying. Two recent cases show just how fallible these lists are: With humans trying to deal with mountains of information, grave mistakes are being made.

First off, these monitoring systems aren't always effective at protecting the US from terrorist threats. Despite repeated warnings from the Russian government about his recent radicalisation, the activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers responsible for the April 2013 Boston Bombing, somehow didn't raise alarm bells when he was traveling between the US and Dagestan for jihadi training. Tsarnaev was included on a watch list, but because his last name had been misspelled in a security database, he reentered the country undetected.

On the other end of the spectrum, other people are prevented from traveling on erroneous grounds. Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim, a Malaysian citizen and Stanford PhD student, was stopped when she tried to return to the US in December 2005. She was handcuffed, detained for two hours, and then questioned. After some confusion, it was revealed she had been put on the secret No Fly List by mistake, and she was then told that she had been removed from it. However, shortly after her visa was revoked and she was denied from reentering the US, making travel to her “second home” impossible.

The agent responsible “erroneously nominated” Ibrahim for the list back in 2004, after he ticked the “wrong boxes”, “filling out the form exactly the opposite way from the instructions on the form,” judge William Alsup wrote.

After a seven-year legal battle, shrouded in secrecy by repeated claims from US officials that the case should be dismissed, Ibrahim was finally removed from the No Fly List. This week, the Department of Justice said it wouldn't appeal the ruling.

But it wasn't easy. Information about the case against Ibrahim remained classified and was kept from her, including whether or not she was on the No Fly List at all. It was a lengthy, laborious exchange between the US government and Ibrahim's lawyers.

The eventual ruling in Ibrahim’s case, however, isn't necessarily a sign of a shifting trend. She is the first person to successfully challenge their placement on a watch list, and with the case being closed to public scrutiny, it is unclear how others may clear their name. Those who might have been placed on one by mistake can only find out by attempting to board a flight and being denied, and as Ibrahim discovered, even then it is likely that any attempt at dialogue with the US government would result in them neither confirming nor denying whether you were placed on a list. It’s a kafkaesque system with no transparent way even to confirm your position, never mind challenge it.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, this opacity means that “innocent people can languish on the watchlists indefinitely, without real recourse.” 

“The impact on a citizen who cannot use a commercial aircraft is profound,” Judge Trenga said in relation to another case. “Placement on the No Fly List is defining and life restricting across a range of constitutionally protected activities and aspirations. […] A No Fly List designation transforms a person into a second class citizen, or worse.”

Members of civil liberties groups are also worried about the future of these lists. One of them is Ben Wizner, an attorney who is currently working with Edward Snowden:

“We already have watch lists that say that some people can fly and some people can’t, or that they can go in this lane or they can go in that lane,” he told Ars Technica. “But that’s only going to proliferate as there’s more and more data and faster and faster computers and more confidence that they can make these predictions about us.”

In 2012, 875,000 “known or suspected terrorists” were included on US watch lists, and 1,600 additional names were, at the time, nominated to be added every day so the FBI could keep tabs on them.

Despite what some people may say about the US requiring greater surveillance mechanisms to prevent another 9/11—even though such programmes were completely ineffective at thwarting the Boston plot—these two cases show that some serious problems with the watch list system exist, both for stopping terrorists and ensuring that innocent people aren't stopped from living their lives normally.  

@josephfcox

Image: Wikimedia

On Wednesday, March 27th, the largest state in the contiguous United States got almost one-third of its electricity by harnessing the wind. According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the bulk of the Lone Star State's power grid, a record-breaking 10,296 MW of electricity was whipped up by wind turbines. That's enough to provide 29 percent of the state's power, and to keep the lights on in over 5 million homes.

ERCOT notes in a statement issued today that "The new record beats the previous record set earlier this month by more than 600 MW, and the American Wind Energy Association reports it was a record for any US power system."

The landmark is further evidence of one of the nation's unlikeliest energy success stories—American conservatives have a renowned aversion to clean energy, and Texas is still deep red, yet wind farms are cropping up in the state faster than almost anywhere else. ERCOT points out as much, as it boasts of the sector's recent growth: 

Texas continues to have more wind power capacity than any other state. The ERCOT region has more than 11,000 MW of commercial wind power capacity, with nearly 8,000 MW of new projects in development and more than 26,700 MW under study.  Wind power comprised 9.9 percent of the total energy used in the ERCOT region in 2013, compared to 9.2 percent in 2012.

Texas has more wind power than any other state, by a huge margin. And it keeps blowing through these major milestones just about every year. There was some trepidation that Texas's wind industry would slow as fracking rose in prominence and a key tax credit faced expiration, but hallmarks like this underline some very strong fundamentals. Wind power is ideal for Texas, where there's a lot of open land, a lot of breezy plains—and a rising demand for electricity, as the state's population continues to grow.

So the wind boom has carried on. After new power lines are installed to better route the power from rural areas to more populated cities, Texas will be the 5th-largest wind power producer in the world. Most importantly, perhaps, is that there's now a thriving industry with real economic and political power—citizens and politicians alike appreciate, work, and profit from the wind sector, so they'll be more willing to fight for it.

Clean energy has become an institution in the most un-hippie state in the country, and there's reason to believe it will not only stay that way—but continue its trajectory and even pass on its influence to the rest of the nation. If Texas can get a third of its energy from the wind, why not Kansas, Wyoming, Alaska? With installation and generation continuing apace, and promising new high-flying technologies rolling out, the future of wind power is looking stronger than ever.

In Austin, Texas, earlier this month, two teams of adventurous young fans of augmented reality game Ingress squared off for control of the city. Using Ingress, a massive mobile real world game in which users battle over physical space, the two teams competed for a rad prize: the right to unlock Doritos vaults hidden around Austin. As you'll see in the video above, it was hardly an easy proposition, with the Enlightened and the Resistance trading portals left and right. The Enlightened took an early lead, opening the first two Doritos vaults. But the Resistance made a late comeback, unlocking a vault of their own—and winning tickets to the killer Doritos Boldstage in the process.

The Department of Justice admitted to spying on the Associated Press last year after a it published a series of stories the agency didn't like. Image: White House Press Photo

Attention journalists: You have been or are going to be spied on. By the government, by the companies you cover, by everyone.

That’s probably already obvious, based on reports of the Justice Department snooping on the Associated Press last year and Microsoft’s recent admission that it spied on a journalist’s Hotmail account in an attempt to find the source of an internal leak. But just in case, here’s some more fuel for the fire: Most of the world’s top news organizations have been the target of state-sponsored hacking, according to Google research reported on by Reuters.

The paper, which found that 21 of the world’s top 25 news organizations had been targeted, was presented at a Black Hat hackers conference in Singapore. 

Many internet users are targeted by attacks via email designed to steal personal data, but journalists are a "massively over-represented" segment, Shane Huntley, a security software engineer at Google told Reuters. "If you're a journalist or a journalistic organization we will see state-sponsored targeting and we see it happening regardless of region, we see it from all over the world both from where the targets are and where the targets are from."

It’s disconcerting, but it isn’t surprising. If journalists are supposed to be a government watchdog, it makes sense that the government wants to know which houses those dogs are guarding so they can know when a shitstorm is brewing. That doesn’t make it any less messed up, potentially illegal, and free speech-killing.

And it's not just the government. If Microsoft is spying on you and Yahoo, Google, and Apple reserve the right to spy on you, it's safe to assume whoever you're covering (if you're really covering them, and not just regurgitating press releases) is going to enjoy having something on you. If you piss off the wrong people you are going to get doxxed. It's not a nice thought, but, at the moment, it's the reality of the business.

Journalists generally are already accustomed to low pay, long hours, weak job security, comment trolls, and an unrelenting news cycle. Some even go to jail protecting sources or risk their lives covering conflict. Now we can add targeted government surveillance to that fun list. And for some people, finding yourself the target of some government or corporate blackmail campaign because an intelligence agency or Microsoft found out you’re cheating on your girlfriend could be a bridge too far. 

Here in the United States, we have a pretty incredible amount of legal protections from things like libel and slander and leaking documents and talking shit about people who deserve it. That is an amazing thing that many, many people (journalist or not) around the world would love to have. But it's worth asking, is there really a “free press” when the press knows their personal lives are being targeted by everyone they write about?

Image: UMC Utrecht

We have 3D-printed a skull, and it works, because we have inserted it into a woman's head and she lives on.

We have 3D-printed kidneys.

We have 3D-printed blood vessels, to nourish them.

We have 3D-printed ears, so that we can better hear the sounds of the 3D-organ-printers humming.

We have 3D-printed bones, to give the 3D-printed bag of organs some form, and, eventually, a skeleton.

We have 3D-printed skin to cover the whole 3D-printed mess with. 

We won't really need to 3D-print brains, because we will have computers for that instead. 

In his 1999 book The Biggest Secret, New Age conspiracy theorist David Icke laid out his reptoid hypothesis, which combines a New World Order narrative with a plot out of X-Files: A race of subterranean reptilian humanoids from the constellation Draco have posed as powerful humans to take control of Earth.

While Icke wasn't the first to propose the idea that a subversive alien Illuminati group is controlling the globe, his theory is perhaps the most publicized in recent years, and it hits on every top conspiracy note. As Rational Wiki puts it, Icke is a proponent of a super-duper grand unified conspiracy theory that mixes together just about every conspiracy theory you can think of; this he calls the "Babylonian Brotherhood." 

Some have argued that it's a complex allegorical narrative, and his theories have been the subject of scholarly examination. Others have said it's little more than a vehicle for anti-Semitic hatred, as is the case with many NWO conspiracy theories. For example, there's this exchange from a 2001 Guardian article on Icke:

"What is this crap, this metaphorically hidden language?" asked a member of Anti-Racist Action, a visiting scientist from Somalia. "Who is a lizard? It's bullshit. Bullshit! As a human being, you have to use proper language."

"What do these words imply?" I asked him.

"What do you think they imply?" he replied. "Lizards? Reptiles? Cockroaches? Amphibians? They imply hatred. Racist hatred."

Icke has repeatedly denied that his shapeshifter theory is racist. (Regardless of whether you think it is or not, I think we can all agree that having to issue denials about the alleged racism of a reptilian Illuminati conspiracy is a, um, unique position to be in.) 

But taken at face value—that shapeshifting alien reptiles have taken over the planet like an alternate They Live plot—and propelled through the conspiracy-fueled echo chamber that is the Internet, the theory has become a meme for the tragicomic absurdity of class- and politically-based power struggles, especially in the US. 

Perhaps most famously, Louis CK grilled Donald Rumsfeld in 2011 about whether or not the former Secretary of Defense was in fact a lizard person. But fear of a reptilian takeover has been trumpeted most loudly on YouTube, where video posters and commenters have been shining light on the reptoids' takeover of the White House since the video megasite's inception. What follows is an oral history of the YouTube conspiracy community's years-long fight against our subhuman leaders. 

The Reptilian Infiltration Is Ancient

nolifemerc, 1 year ago: Reptilians (also called reptoids,[1] reptiloids, or draconians) are purported reptilian humanoids

thugonthaglock7, 5 years ago:  Humans originate from the lyrae star sytem in the milky way some 500 light years from here. The lyrans were the first humans and very advanced. Until the repitillian invasion the new draconian invaders fought wars with the lyrans and pleaidians and ultimately the draconians won and won earth because they needed it for a special reason. The reptillian mystery has always been with us and if you study religions you find out they all point to the same idea they talk about reptillian "gods".

Bryan Randall, 8 months ago:  There's a reason these 'puppet masters' are known as the elite, they can deceive an entire nation and in turn give the illusion that they're are in control, that takes some serious talent!

Jake Ingram, 5 years ago: srry thats not good enough but all presidents are reptillians, part of illuminati

President George H.W. Bush Has a Suspicious Tongue

19Rockers85, 5 years ago: Pause at 0:05 eyes, 1:50 fang. At 54ish seconds he has forked tongue and imo he almost says "signed the declaration..." Opinions please.

Lee J, 5 years ago: Fuck, slit pupils like a snake!

Roadskare62, 4 years ago: Seriously what the fuck? 1:48. His fucking tooth! WTF?!?!?!

overshot5k, 4 years ago: THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!!!

slarfuggle, 4 years ago: damn im getting pretty lightheaded looking at these videos i wonder if its an astral-attack from those bastards?

Gabe Newell, 4 years ago: well his blinking can be because he is nervous i do that to sometimes but the tongue thing looks kind of suspicious.

Louize Helen, 4 years ago: not sure about bush senior being a reptilian, but he's definitely creepy- isn't clinton supposed to be an illuminati member though also? his eyes look pretty normal in comparison...

oldlanguage, 5 years ago: when you see them in person just look closely, they put a lot of emphasis on the letter S, they cant help getting the tip of the tongue out of the mouth just like a snake, their eyes change, pupils change, skin color turns greenish, and if you get one of them mad you can see them transforming, but they can suppress it - depending on how mad you get them. my advice is if you see these behaviors in a person just annoy the fucker until he\she cracks up.Love and Peace to you all

R4CH3LDeH4V3N, 5 years ago: seriously, those eyes are crazy!!! and he doesn't stop blinking at any point throughout the video. he's reptilian allright.

TheLordisWisdom, 4 years ago: He is a demon/possessed not a reptile. Do some research on the on the Illuminati and you will understand.

dannyel22, 5 years ago: Pause at 5secs a blatant eye shift. Pause at 1:50 is that a fang??! If you look at the mouth at 54secs and about 1:29 I'm positive I can see a forked tongue. What do you see??

hoodboi25, 5 years ago: omg..this shit is real..dat muthafucka is a demon!!!

ErinGoRaw, 5 years ago: all i needed was the pause at .05 to see those obvious two tiny slits (not possible in a human) to know the bush's have no compassion and are fricking REPTILES

themixeruper, 4 years ago: 0:35.... look at his eyes

ReptiliansAmongUs, 5 years ago: yeah is in the eyes. Like SoulContainer said, theres a weird eye movement like at 00:35

Evie de la Vara, 4 years ago: creepy! his eyes really do look just like a snakes!

rowania, 5 years ago: yes i noticed that, when he says cash, that area, his whole face becomes ridiculously evil and snake like

fooken hoff, 5 years ago: This is very similar to how a chameleon moves their eyes, it reminded me of that.

super2pac, 5 years ago: what the fuck looke at his eyes its looke like a snakes eyes holy shit yo this is some real shit

XxToxicxHazardxX, 5 years ago: Holy... Shit... Bye guys.... I'm gonna go hide in a corner now...

Wes Beare, 5 years ago: every time after he blinks it seems the pupil is fine, but right before he goes to blink again (which he does constantly) it does that weird slit pupil shit that's messed up

Xm Flash, 5 years ago: Look at his eyes, Sarah, and you will see a vertical slit that is prevalent in Reptilians. And look at HIS left eye at 30 to 37 seconds.

President Bill Clinton Is an Alien Apparition

Lyss G, 6 months ago:  President clinton isnt fukin real! Neither is the royals! What do you think goes on in hollywood?! Theres 5 clever jewish families from the end of the war that has been brainwashing us since the tv came out making us believe they are part of the royals and goverment using prosthetics like they do in the movies! Please watch Dallasgoldbug's channel! Evidence to prove it all!

timfosho, 1 year ago:  People denying he looks like hes in a trance. Stop it. He looks like hes completely zoned out, which is understandable for a person as mentally tough as Clinton. Is he under hypnosis? No he is not.

SUZociety, 4 years ago: the reptilians have more control then u think the only way to free ourselves from the Reptilians is to create equal money housing and food for all... this will cause them to lose all power of mind control and cause them to reveal there selves this is where the battle will begin

AND NO ONE NOTICED THE SMOOTHED SKIN, ELF-LIKE FACE? THAT WASN'T BILL CLINTON, IT WAS A CLONE, PROGRAMMED TO TALK AND ACT LIKE HIM! LOOK AT THE SNAKE/REPTILIAN PATTERN ON FACE AND NECK - CHITAURI DNA! ARE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THAT GULLIBLE? GOD HELP US! 

Cazachamucos, 5 years ago: we all have reptilian blood, the darker the less, the whiter the more!

TheBeatnik1000, 10 months ago:  Seriously! Im shocked, stunned etc, etc! This is fucking sensational! The US President is not in charge of his own actions! You all are joking about it, but dont you realize what it means? The conspiracy about a "shadow" government run by god knows who, is true? The next thing to discover might as well be that David Icke is right?

Metatrons Cube, 1 year ago:  Occult Magicians can hyptonize people. Look at how they have every one hypnotized on the money spell, no matter where your from people want money and "need" money to survive. Money is humanities new God

Shawn William, 9 months ago:  he looks very much possessed. . or hypnotized.. maybe they really do 'give up their bodies' to be inhabited by demonic beings.

bart vanderzwaan, 5 years ago:  fake my ass !!wake up!! . keep up the good work rek . we win they loose

zzoonkeedd, 4 years ago:  Better try to use in these motherfucker the camera with heat sensor, maybe these beings are different then us. Try to do this somebody!

MaTchBoOkPoEt, 5 years ago:  when the camera flashes fucking xrays his head!! wtf let alone his scales behind his ears and under the chin... an easy way to spot some of these possessed scum on tv or on vids like these is one eyes jet black ones normal. and the skin around the ears and neck is allways greenish pre shift. youtube is the sunglasses from They Live

Powerisintruth, 1 year ago:  REPS. WE KNOW YOUR OUT THERE. BETTER COME CLEAN NOW......

9eazemaker, 3 years ago:  thiziz why america iz fkdup, yu keep fighting one another cz yur fkn pussy to fite the real enemy, dnt yu idiotz see, the real enemy iz within, the real enemy iz yurselvezandinbein weak, yu war againzt yur ownfknpublic, yur no better than thoze tryin to eliminate yu, go fk yurselvez

aimspader, 5 years ago:  Oh, man. I was just thinking how much he favored Queen Elizabeth. How weird.

SovereignBeing, 3 years ago:  the things clinton gets up to would make a child sacrificing satanist blush.. come on folks learn how to discern humans from reptilians,. ! time to wake up..!

noisecape, 5 years ago :  definately, they will always slip up with disinfo somewhere!

Xander Taylor, 3 years ago:  I have read elsewhere that they hate flashes from cameras because of this very thing. It does make one wonder, though, if Bill Clinton wasn't telling the truth when he said he was the first black President. Who knows?

Tomas Valencia, 5 years ago :  he really looks like crocodile. This is great evidence.Bravo

matsutakneatche, 4 years ago:  he looks haggard; too many blow jobs from the lizard underlings.

AmazonKC, 5 years ago:  Ok... I belive Reptilian aliens are real... but this is not evidence. I mean come on! A shadow hit his face for a second. He didn't shape shift at all... lol

AsellusPrimus, 4 years ago:  lol? Did you just like draw a little black thing in on one of the slides? NEXT

Joshua Roberts, 5 years ago:  let me go a step further - by their actions they are in fact yielding or reifying latent carrier wave signatures from the past expressed genetically or at an even more fundamental cell biology level of being. one cannot even rule out the extra dimensional influence argument; however, as to the deliberate channeling and what not of such forces as an agenda shared by elites etc we cannot say and yet we may as well suggest it or more - it matters very little if they do or dont...

mamacordella, 5 years ago:  Yes,he is possessed by reptilians, real evil. Reptilians are 4th density with abilities to appear in our 3rd density for very short mo- ments.Like we eat 2nd density animals, cows, chickens etc, so does the 4th density eat us 3rd density.Like we substitute plants to eat, they also eat animals blood.(mutilations)Most abductions never return.Don't ever leave your kids unwatched, plead to Jesus Christ when in danger! He will help.

ogrishTWO, 5 years ago:  the dude behind clinton at 0:38 is creepy looking, turtle/human hybrid.

thugonthaglock7, 5 years ago: Humans on earth are a hybrid race our DNA isnt originally from here. The annunaki which are a hybrid of the draconians came here and started human life for a reason. They taught us how to start a society and become miners for there special need of gold. Until this day the watchers secretly control our society. They have alot to do with the illuminati and the new world order, N.W.O.

TheRealThatOneKid, 5 years ago: no one's commented so i will. This shit is real, and people need to see it

wine tosee, 1 year ago: The snakes have charmed the charmer with that ole reptilian swagg...

shelley Gomez, 1 year ago: Yes it has to be aclone or possesed!!!

On President George W. Bush, Haunted Soul

Mgooboo Mckenzi, 3 weeks ago: yeah his scales really stand out in this video, plus i think i heard him hiss like a snake 

OceanBlue Sonic, 2 months ago: I saw it! either it was a camera error or it was real. I knew he couldn't be trusted

johnegum53, 3 months ago: I am proud and honoured to be a slave to the illuminati. Im happy,rich and have servants of my own. Id rather have the illuminati rule the world than ANY religious leader. So my little peasants, go on spreading your pathetic lame conspiracy theories. All i can say to you minions is . . . PROOVE IT. We shall rule till we destroy the universe.

kevin Tucker, 1 year ago: Not reptilian. Controlled by a spirit. He is a member of the skull and bones and he allowed a spirit to inhabit him during his initiation at Yale.

Nikita1983ks, 4 months ago: The eyes, the teeth, the scales all over his face! Look closely under his chin!!!

Jay BEE, 1 year ago: slit pupils throughout the whole video

Ip Man, 9 months ago: From 0:00 to 3:53 I see a war criminal!! Who gives a f*** about his eyes?!

Robert NinjaCousins, 6 months ago: Ok so im watching a whole butt load of these right. I don't know about all that shape shifting shit or aliens or whatever the fuck. And surley don't know if they are reptilian eyeballs im seeing. But one fact does remain in this video. His eyes are supposed to be BLUE!!! Wtf are they doing brown? Clearly brown? I see other shit quality vids and can still see blue eyes.. -_- explain that

D0gKcuf, 5 months ago: You can only know by the eyes and teeth !!!

darin decarlo, 7 months ago: of all the weird reptilian videos ive watched this is the worst

aintathug, 4 years ago:   Look, I'm not saying I fully believe this theory...all I'm going to say is this: Try and fully wrap your head around the idea that growing up, we're trained to IMMEDIATELY reject anything that , in our mind, sounds "ridiculous" or "ludicrous." You feel me? I just think that we need to be more open minded to anything and everything.

shanethomashicks, 4 years ago: depopulation has started. the revolution will not be televised. the lie is the truth and the truth is the lie.

queentab25, 2 years ago: He's a crook reptilian with a suit on he made sure that he messed up america and now we ain't got no jobs what a loser

twotma, 2 years ago: GOOOOOOD JOB MAN!!!! now we need 7 billion ppl to see this :D Keep the good work m8 !!! YEAH !

MindFugger, 2 years ago: No way anyone can dismiss this one as being a reflection from lights! The slit pupil is clearly there! No light reflection! Thank you for sharing!

soniclady89, 1 year ago: Didn't ole GDubbya have BLUE eyes once!??! 0.0

PYTHAGORAS101, 1 year ago: I love reptiles, Not when they are deceitful human looking. They have a superior complex ,which is insanity.

Abi Rii, 2 years ago: REPTILIAN CRIMINALS ! ! ! ...Out from this World ! .. LIGHT FORCES deport them in a hell dimension ! I HAVE ASKED, SO DO IT !

President Barack Obama Blinks Weird

xXGAMING101Xx, 2 weeks ago:  is true obama has aliens working for him

Sallie Zedpie, 1 year ago:  Good catch. Also check out the old vampire on the left....he looks like part of the 500 club who really control shapeshifters like Obama.

anthony garza, 5 months ago:  That is the camera light in his eyes Ive seen lots of "reptilian" videos and one thing yall always base it off of is the slit in the eyes and every single one of them is a flash or camera lighting.... yall are retarded get your head out of the clouds focus on your own life..

Porcha Turner, 1 month ago:  I don't think it's fake. If you look close there is a lot of things like this going on with people of power and influence. Look for Oprah's satanic moment if you don't believe me. Watch her eyes very closely and make sure to read the comments after.

Arjan Lion, 3 months ago:  Obama looks like he see's the shape shifter and is like da fuq

MrCornishtommy, 5 months ago:  Humans have a reptilian part of the brain, it goes back to when we were amphibians, having evolved from fish.Yes, on this planet you are either descended from fish or giant aquatic scorpions. Deal with those facts, get your peanut sized brains around the concept of time measured in billions of years. Shape shifting reptiles? Grow up, fecking pathetic brain dead morons. We already are, in parts, reptile, as are all mammals. We should have burnt the first pilgrims before they left Bristol......

Robert Olvera, 7 months ago:  Wtf did you see his eyes

Antonio Mac, 4 months ago:  the worst part is when his eyes cahnge he him self reacts. he open his eyes wider and lean forward just alil. like he was fixin him self

silverbulletgirl29 ,  7 months ago:  If you did your homework, everyone should know damn well by now that the world was never meant to be ours. It's the Beast's. Aliens are really not your scifi creatures, they're demons is what they really are. Then there is djinn, reptilians, nanotechnology, microchip, robots, terminators, machines, & other evil beings. We are in Revelations start reading the part on the Red Dragon is released & goes to the 4 corners of the earth to destroy mankind w/evil. POLITICS/SYSTEM=SATAN

jthouse51, 5 months ago :  I watched this live, never saw this happen...you people are classic, and the sole reason why I come to these videos, so I read your comments. Keep em coming while I crack open another beer *ahhh....

mayzon111222, 5 years ago: anyone who believes this stuff needs to take a look at their lives

noisecape, 5 years ago: reptilians as such are not real. there are spiritual entities though, humans know very little at all about these things. what many of you refer to as 'reptilians' are the same things that religions have been referring to as 'demons' for a long time. doesnt make them demons. doesnt make them aliens. just makes them something we will probably never understand.

noisecape, 5 years ago:   definately shape shifting theory is just wrong. Possession is what happens. These high end politicians and such are members of dark orders, they partake in all sorts of demonology. It only stands to reason that many are possessed, it also helps them to be master-liars and deceptors. As for what DOES the possession...well...it's all just rationalising the unknown. You can say 'demons', or 'reptoids', or 'archons' or whatever else helps you sleep at night. Truth is: we don't understand.

eljono1, 4 years ago: My testees shape shift when I jump into a cold pool. I am no Reptile though.

cyberhouserulz, 4 years ago: Give me a break. They need our gold? Ok then why wouldnt they friggin have us all out ther digging for gold all day. If any of this BS was even remotely true we would be enslaved by the far superior race and used to do nothing but get gold. Why the elaborate scheme of creating a world full of art and culture and parks and football games and on and on and on. These things are using their precious resources, so why do they allow them to happen? think about shit you loonies.

Like all right-thinking emoji users, I was delighted by Apple's recent announcement that it's working on bringing greater ethnic diversity to its emoji keyboard. As it stands, there could hardly be less: of the 800 or so available emojis, several dozen represent humans, and all but two of these (a turbaned man and a boy in a type of Chinese cap) are white. 

The campaign for emoji diversity came to mass public attention in December 2012, when Miley Cyrus tweeted “RT if you think there needs to be an #emojiethnicityupdate,” and several thousand people did just that. Last summer, Motherboard spotted a petition to “make emoji less racist,” hosted on DoSomething.org.

RT if you think there needs to be an #emojiethnicityupdate

When MTV got involved, Apple decided it was time to respond. Katie Cotton, Apple’s vice-president of worldwide corporate communications, agreed that there “needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set,” and said that the company was “working closely” on the issue with Unicode Consortium. The Unicode Consortium is the organisation responsible for developing the Unicode Standard, which allows emoji (as well as other symbols) to display correctly across different devices, and without their agreement Apple wouldn't be able to make any changes to its emoji provision.

But while ethnic diversity has been the most glaring and uncomfortable absence from the emoji keyboard, every emoji fan will have his or her own list of missing icons. How do you signify a shrug? Or say “I hope so”? Emoji originated in Japan (which makes its whiteness all the more puzzling) and its food still skews heavily towards the Japanese: there are multiple types of sushi, but no tacos, cupcakes or hotdogs. Some people have been rather more concerned about that last omission than about the lack of racial diversity–which makes me wish there were a way of raising an emoji eyebrow.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Intel Free Press

Bernie Hogan, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, works on issues of identity and trust in social media. Speaking to the BBC earlier this week, he supported Apple’s pledge to improve emoji diversity, but noted that there will “always be more potential icons than you can reasonably put in a system.” Practically speaking, it would be impossible to devise an emoji for every conceivable object, thought, and emotion. But if it were possible, would it be desirable?

Probably not, Hogan told me over the phone. Even the most ardent emoji fan would fall back on only a small number of emojis for regular use. He pointed out that the icons’ primary function is to add “expressive power” to the words in a text or tweet—and within those media, there’s a relatively limited number of things we  actually want to express.

Emojitracker, a website which allows you to see emoji use on Twitter in real time, makes it clear how heavily we rely on several emojis, while more or less ignoring the majority. The Recently Used section of the emoji keyboard encourages this narrow vocabulary, making 21 icons much quicker to access than the rest. The result is that, as Hogan puts it, those 21 favourites “become part of your grammar.” With the others, you have to balance the pleasure of using an emoji against the hassle of finding it—and the more emojis there are, the greater that hassle would be. At a certain point, we’d give up and go back to using words.

Emoji Dick. Image: Flickr/Fred Benenson

Hogan suggests that now is a peak time for emoji creativity: we’re familiar enough with them to recognize and play with their potential and their constraints, but not so familiar with them that we find them mundane. Hence emoji art exhibitions, emoji music videos, and the competition to recreate Nigella Lawson’s life in emoji. In February 2013, the Library of Congress accepted Emoji Dick, a translation into emoji of Herman Melville’s classic. (“There is, in the literal sense, no other book in the Library’s collections like it,” said one of the Library’s recommending officers.)

Although you can use emojis to recreate a 600-page 19th-century novel and the lyrics of a pop song, however, its possibilities aren’t quite endless. Emoji is closer to pictorial languages like Japanese and Chinese than it is to English or Spanish, but scholars of linguistics would hesitate to call it a language. Apart from anything else, its scope is much narrower. Eight hundred emojis may feel like a lot, but a proficient reader and writer of Japanese will be able to recognise approximately 2,000 kanji characters, and combine these to produce a vocabulary of about 10,000 words.

But even if Apple created 10,000 new icons, emoji still wouldn’t classify as a language. In order to do so, it would have to develop what linguistics scholars call a generative grammar: a set of rules that determine meaning, and govern right and wrong ways of ordering words. Whether a language is orthographic (English), pictorial (Japanese) or sign (British Sign Language), it will follow a particular and precise grammar. When people tweet or text an emoji sequence, the order of the icons does not produce or disrupt meaning in the same way. You can’t have the emoji equivalent of a nonsensical, ungrammatical English sentence like “Lucy the hops beetle quietly James.”

Jonnie Robinson, lead curator of sociolinguistics at the British Library, suggested to me that emoji shares some features with pidgin languages. Pidgins develop when two or more groups of people who don’t speak the same language have to find a way to communicate—on slave plantations, for example, where slaves from different parts of Africa would be working together. Pidgins typically have a limited vocabulary and lack nuance, a developed syntax, and the ability to convey register, i.e. to address your boss more formally than you would a friend. 

Pidgin speakers, like emoji users, develop certain tactics to get around the constraints of their limited communication system, such as repeating a word to signify intensification: “big big” to mean “very big.” This is something which translates easily to emoji. Earlier this year Hogan, who monitors emoji use on Twitter, observed Justin Bieber fans tweeting rows of weeping emojis to signify their intense distress at his arrest.

As a pidgin passes between generations, and children born start to use it as their primary means of expression, it develops register, syntax and nuance—all the features that make it a proper language. But although we now speak of digital natives, it’s unlikely there will ever be a generation whose mother tongue is emoji.

As a result, we could have all the emojis in the world and still be stuck at the level of translation rather than invention, for all but the simplest messages. Emoji Dick and Nigella’s life in emojis only work because we’re familiar with Moby Dick and Nigella. I can signify “I’m so excited!” with some clapping hands and a dancing woman, but if I want to tell a friend in detail about my day, I have to intersperse emojis with text, or risk incomprehension. 

Unless we’re reproducing what we already know, emoji remains like swearing or slang—something to add verve to our language, rather than a language in itself. But at least when Apple gives us the updated keyboard, we’ll be able to use emoji to reproduce the life of Obama, or Lupita Nyong’o, as well as Nigella.

Inset images of emojis on iPod: Flickr/chinnian

Image: Air Support Unit, King County Sheriff's Office

Before the deadliest landslide in America in a decade, geologists had known that the land in Snohomish County, Washington was liable to give way at some point. In fact, geological reports have demonstrated the risks of building in the area since the 1950s. According the US Geological Survey, “large landslides are the norm in many parts of the western foothills of the North Cascades," the Seattle Times reported.

Almost a week after the mudslide, 25 people are known to have died and 90 people are still missing . To prevent something on this scale from happening again, some are asking how to make better use of the new information and maps made with LiDAR—aerial mapping that uses laser pulses fired at the ground from a passing aircraft. It has been used to look for lost cities in the jungles of Honduras thanks to its ability to cut through foliage. It has also been used to discover fault lines in the Pacific Northwest, and reexamine the flood zones of New York Harbor.

“Lidar is like a new pair of glasses,” University of Washington geologist David Montgomery told the Seattle Times. “If you can see more, if you have better data, you can better assess the true risks.”

Image: USGS

Lidar can be accurate down to just a few inches, a vast improvement over old topographical surveys done based on aerial photography that, due to tree cover, could only be guesses. But the issue here wasn't one of not knowing. It was who didn't know.

“We’ve got all this great new data,” University of Washington geologist David Montgomery told the Seattle Times. “But if you don’t have anybody to digest it and turn it into information that can get out to the public—it’s just nice data.”

That, though, is the difficulty. Getting an accurate map of the landscape is expensive but possible, yet what’s less understood is how to disseminate the information to the county officials in charge of zoning, and residents of the area, to prevent building more homes in vulnerable areas. That’s part of what’s so frustrating for Pacific Northwest geologists: they didn’t need new technology to tell them that the hill above the town of Oso was susceptible to landslides. The information was even in the public sphere, via a Snohomish County website.

Nevertheless the county believed that it was safe to build homes down by the Stillaguamish River. “It was considered very safe,” John Pennington, head of Snohomish County’s Department of Emergency Management, said at a news conference Monday. “This was a completely unforeseen slide. This came out of nowhere.”

It wasn’t “completely unforeseen” to geologists in the area, nor to the US Army Corps of Engineers who, in 1999, before the area was Lidar mapped warned there was a "potential for a large catastrophic failure.” But somewhere along the line, communication broke down—the right information didn’t make it to the right people, or the full implications of the information wasn’t made clear.

“I hope a lot of counties take a good, hard look at their landscape hazard zones after this,” Dan McShane, an engineering geologist in Bellingham and blogger, was quoted as saying by the Seattle Times.

It's one thing to look, but even that's data. Translating data to action remains is the crucial next step, to mitigate the effects of the next natural disaster.