Is there a nation in the world that the Internet laughs at more than North Korea?

We create gag Twitter accounts. We reblog awkward photographs. We struggle to hold back giggles as we write deadpan accounts of ridiculous North Korean news reports. And then there's Team America: World Police, Margaret Cho on 30 Rock, and so on and so forth. With Kim Jong-un making wild new threats against the U.S., we're experiencing one of our periodic spikes in gags about the Hermit Kingdom.

We should probably feel guilty for all the light-heartedness, but schoolmarm-ing ourselves doesn't tend to feed hungry mouths or aid defections. A better use of time is to think about the idea of a laughable dystopia, an irrelevant dystopia, a dystopia made all the more dystopian because it doesn't know how to laugh.

"The regime says ridiculous things all the time. You know, claiming Kim Jong-il made 11 holes-in-one in his first game of golf and so on," Adam Johnson, author of the North Korean-set novel The Orphan Master's Son, told me. "Those things are funny, and they are to be mocked. And they don't seem to be in on their own joke, which invites us even more."

Indeed, even the regime's justifications for its own existence are laughable. There hasn't been a serious existential threat to North Korea since the 1950s. All of the threats that the regime manufactures for its citizens are antiques: Yankee invasions, Japanese rapes, South Korean sneak attacks... and that's about it. At least Orwell's Oceania got to cycle between Eurasia and Eastasia every once in a while.

North Korea's natural resources aren't worth fighting for. No world power cares much about freeing its citizens. It has some small degree of positional significance, but mainly insofar as China wants it to exist as a buffer between the mainland and South Korea, which has American troops at its disposal. Even South Korea barely wants reunification; actually taking in its wayward sibling would destroy its economy. And so the North Korean nightmare goes on and on and on, barely modifying its horrors.

Jokes about the Kim regime can be a step in the right direction, when deployed properly. "I've shared jokes about the Kim family with friends who escaped from North Korea," said Sokeel Park, a Seoul-based strategist for Liberty in North Korea. "I've heard that North Koreans inside the country are also increasingly telling such jokes about their leaders to trusted friends, and that's a great development which shows how the country is gradually changing on the inside."

But once you're outside the DPRK's borders, jokes are drained of much of their poison.

"The vast majority of jokes in the media relating to North Korea are not by North Koreans in North Korea," said Adrian Hong, a North Korea expert who was once jailed in China while trying to help North Korean refugees and who now is the managing director of Pegasus Strategies. "People don't have a big bandwidth for news of the world. When your bandwidth for North Korea is taken up by jokes about the leader and his funny hats and him pointing at things, most people won't necessarily have the same ability to retain information on the fact that a million-plus people starved to death in the 1990s or that half a million or more are in concentration camps now."

And yet, when was the last time you heard a joke about Belarus, Turkmenistan, or any of today's other modern-day dystopias? Perhaps our jokes are an indirect way of singling out the uniquely awful horrors of the DPRK.

"I think humor about North Korea can sometimes play a useful role in bringing attention to the issue," Park pointed out. "For instance I'd probably rather have Stephen Colbert make snarky jokes about the regime leadership than not talk about North Korea at all."

Of course, the vast majority of the jokes people have made about the DPRK have been aimed at its departed Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il. And here's where things get very complicated. After all, it's not as though making fun of murderous dictators can't be useful in toppling them, of course.

"I mean, Charlie Chaplin poked fun at Hitler and it was important when he did it," said Hong. "But the world knew what Hitler was about. The world knew how bad the regime was, and people understood that implicitly and then made jokes about it. But with North Korea, people still are not fully cognizant of how bad things are and how much massive human suffering exists in that place."

But here's a thought: What if the guffaws flung at Kim Jong-il were a kind of time-bomb? What if pop culture's fixation on his antics in life have helped us look at the society he made after his death?

Johnson, for example, noted a shift in discourse after Kim died in December of 2011, when he was putting the finishing touches on his novel. "I had been writing a book on North Korea for six years. When I would tell people that, I would get the strangest responses," he recalled. But "when I talked to people after Kim Jong-il died, instead of saying, 'What are you thinking, writing a book about North Korea?' they all had questions for me. 'Were people really crying at his funeral?' I was assaulted by genuinely interested parties."

"We had seen Saddam Hussein die, Moammar Gaddafi die -- not dissimilar figures, in some respects," he said. "And yet, when those two died, the palace doors were thrown open. People went through the secret files and wandered through the torture chambers. It de-mystified those guys. But when Kim Jong-il died, there was no cause of death, no certainty about how he died or when he died. I didn't see an autopsy report. It only made you wonder even more [about] what was going on."

And yet, here's the fundamental problem: even if pop culture did stop joking about North Korea and treat it with more gravity, what good would it do? How could it beat back what exists there? People living in the territory of North Korea have endured more than 100 years of uninterrupted oppression and tragedy. Their hardship stretches from the Japanese annexation in 1910 and Japan's wartime enslavement of Korean men and women, through the Korean War and its murder of millions, and on to the shocking stability of the Kim regime throughout more than six decades of brutality. The result is a world more terrible than anything any dystopian novelist could ever have concocted.

"Humor about North Korea is always going to happen, and most of it doesn't have much of an effect either way," said Park. "At the end of the day, if you're concerned with helping the North Korean people, you have bigger battles to fight than worrying about jokes on the internet."

When North Korea says it's testing nukes that can reach American shores, the average American doesn't particularly believe it or care. And get ready for gags about how Kim Jong-un was caught smoking in a hospital. We live in a world where our worst fever dream is real, but can't make it to the front page. Everyone laughs. Maybe we should feel guilty for laughing, but what else can we do?

Abraham Riesman is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in New York City. You can see more of his work at abrahamriesman.com.

The internet’s main asset, its essence and reason for being, is the ability for anyone to share pretty much anything with a theoretically infinite audience. Any image that exists in one place, that is shared through a website or through P2P networks, can gain traction, becoming sought out and viewed over and over until no one can even quantify the human impressions, much less the positive or negative impact created from and by viewing that image. The darkest, most discouraging things exist on the Internet–things like child pornography and "revenge" porn–and these things also develop a life of their own, skipping from screen to screen, from hard drive to hard drive, permanent in the sense that the possibility of the image existing always exists.

There are no longer any negatives to seize and destroy, and anyone may have seen or may possess any image. The harm done to those unwillingly depicted in pornography, specifically child pornography, is so egregious and disturbing to society’s sense of justice that we struggle to offer them something for their pain and suffering.

At first, more and more stringent sentencing laws regarding possession and production of child pornography was society’s attempt at condemning these criminals and their actions. As a culture, we’ve so stigmatized sex offenders with high mandatory minimums and lifetime registries that most are unlikely to lead normal lives. This is at once a precautionary measure, but also as an acknowledgment of the victims’ suffering. We want to punish in accordance to the harm we feel has been done.

But this does little practical good for those personally affected by child pornography. Many studies have shown the correlation between childhood sexual abuse and difficulties in adulthood, such as addiction, abusive relationships, and an increased risk of suicide. But the consequences of child pornography are more diffuse and difficult to escape. How can society, or the legal system, ever counteract the suffering of victims of child pornography, whose images, once online, are virtually impossible to completely eradicate?

Courts have a limited tool set when it comes to punishment. Some courts have been attempting to monetize those consequences, in the form of financial restitution for individuals featured in child pornography, with the money coming not solely from the producers of the images, but from anyone who is found in possession of the images. In Emily Bazelon’s The New York Times Magazine cover story, "The Price of a Stolen Childhood", she relays the stories of two young women, both subjected to childhood sexual abuse who later learned that their abuse has been photographed and shared with other men on the internet.

Due to a provision in the Crime Victims' Rights Act, victims of sex crimes have a right to know certain information regarding suspects in cases involving them. One of the women profiled in the Times's story, Nicole, began receiving scores of letters from court systems alerting her that some suspect was on trial for possession of child pornography and at least one of her photos had been found. Nicole had become a sort of celebrity (for lack of a better term) in the online child pornography world; her images were highly coveted and shared more widely than most. Because of this, she began receiving letters by the dozen alerting her to more and more individuals who had been arrested and owned pornography featuring her. 

Amy, the other woman profiled, had a similar story. After being forced into pornography by her uncle as a child, as a young adult she encountered symptoms similar to those many sex abuse survivors endure: trouble focusing, trouble in college, dissociation, and depression. But unlike a child sex abuse survivor who was not forced into pornography, Amy's abuse could not be truly put behind her. There was always another man arrested for possessing images of her abuse, always more letters arriving. It was this inescapable:

Marsh [Amy's lawyer] suggested that Amy see a forensic psychologist, Joyanna Silberg, who evaluated Amy and said she would need therapy throughout her life and could expect to work sporadically because of the likelihood of periodic setbacks. Silberg attributed these costs -- Amy's damages -- to her awareness of the ongoing downloading and viewing.

Marsh estimated that the cumulative lifetime impact of her abuse would total around $3.4 million. Amy's lawyer put together a lawsuit suing for restitution, not from the producer of the pornography, but from anyone possessing the images. When a former VP at Pfizer was arrested and found to possess four images of Amy, her lawyer successfully obtained $130,000 in restitution. Though unprecedented at the time, restitution of this kind has held up in appeals court, and both Nicole and Amy have received multiple settlements from men guilty of possessing their images. It seems possible that this type of financial liability could become commonplace for anyone found with child pornography.

Amy's awareness of the ongoing viewing of those images online diminished her mental health and quality of life.

—

It more formally relates the viewership of child pornography with the crime of abuse, but it also distinguishes between different types of damages. Amy's lawsuit wasn't based on damages from her abuse per se. She was entitled to restitution because her awareness of the ongoing viewing and the permanence of those images online diminished her mental health and quality of life. This is philosophically distinct from the idea that owners of child pornography are complicit in its creation because they create a demand. It is a way to describe a new phenomenon, one where the medium itself is injurious. 

Another troubling occurrence sensationalized by Hunter Moore, his Village Voice cover story, and his seedy internet empire, the now defunct IsAnybodyUp, is the phenomenon of revenge pornography. IsAnybodyUp and the sites that mimic it provide a platform for asshole exes to post sexual photographs, along with names, addresses, social media profiles, etc., in order to shame their ex-partners online. Though the underlying injury differs significantly, these women (and a few men) weren’t sexually abused to obtain the pictures, and in fact the most common photos on these sites are self-portraits, the images were not usually created for public consumption. Seeking financial restitution for the damages incurred from this type of online pornography is also a new kind of legal battle. Just last week a class-action lawsuit was filed against Texxxan.com, a revenge porn site, and GoDaddy for hosting the site.

Given the current liability laws going after these entities is at best a stretch. GoDaddy is almost certainly protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. But it seems the case is at least symbolic, and perhaps the beginning of a new wave of legislation on internet publishing and established liability, paving the way for future restitution. Again in this case, the power of the internet to immortalize pornographic images harms the women and men who have been exposed without their consent, and we feel a moral opposition to the people who’ve posted them and the revenge porn enterprise in general, but what is that worth? The women in this lawsuit have not been abused, but they have not consented to appearing in pornography open for public consumption either. Again, it is the permanence of the images that is inherent in our understanding of the damage that has been done to them. 

Our sense of fairness leads us to codify ways to punish the guilty and assist the victimized. America is nothing if not a litigious society obsessed with the righteousness of squarely placed blame. But the internet and the ways we communicate resist more simple formulas; the damages of any image ripple outwards, secretly multiplied in ways we can’t yet quantify. These innocent women – most especially those who were abused as children – certainly deserve something to compensate them for their horror; we’re just trying to figure out what it is and from whom. 

Top image: Sofia Arjam

@kellybourdet

Cocaine production in Bolivian jungle kitchen (Photo: Marco Vernaschi)

At what point does the new cocaine underdog become pound-for-pound the most tireless and rabid hound in the fight? As of last year, production was kicking into such high gear in Bolivia that federal drug agencies in the landlocked, developing nation began launching small aerial spy drones to sniff out both kitchens hidden deep in jungles and the product itself being muled over the country's porous borders. Now, things are only getting worse. 

The reason? Brazil. Believe it or not, cocaine use is dropping in America, where historically so much of Central American blanco has flowed. According to the United Nations 2012 World Drug Report, coke use over the past three decades is down an estimated two-thirds in the US. (Don't worry, America is still the most coked-up country in the world.) And since 2006, this downward trend has only picked up speed. Never ones to slip on profits, power, and prestige, drug cartels, as NPR reports, have since fixed their efforts on Brazil, the longtime No. 2 global consumer of cocaine. 

The intercontinental shift reaffirms coke's status as a status drug. Brazil is a "victim of its own success," Bo Mathiasen, a senior UN drug agent who focuses on illegal trade cross the continent, tells NPR. Take one look at Brazil's ballooning middle class--some 30 million Brazilians have in recent years been lifted out of poverty--and efforts to formally map its famed favelas, not to mention an already heavy drug culture that took root the 80s, and is it any wonder that the devil's coffee is now in higher demand there? Or that seemingly reinvigorated drug gangs are vying for a piece of the pie?

Of course it isn't. 

Which brings us back to Bolivia, the world's No. 3 producer of cocaine. Think of it this way: Bolivia is now officially Brazil's guy. NPR goes on to report that data from both the UN and the US suggest that that as consumption continues rising in Brazil, which shares a 2,100-mile border with Bolivia, so too does coca production ratcheting up across the Bolivian frontier. Stemming the flow of high-grade blow out of Bolivia, up the Mamore River, and on into Brazil and beyond is proving a Herculean task--even with the aid of surveillance drones--when only 35 drug interdiction agents are assigned to a single sector along the Brazilian-Bolivian river border.

In other words, Bolivian marching powder could well prove the biggest income-driver for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympic games in Rio. Those untold thousands of tourists aren't just going to stay awake by themselves. Just don't let them fly small drones at the futbol stadium. 

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson

They may lack the whimsical naiveté of Burton’s warped fairytale hero, but they can certainly out-shrub old Scissorhands in a heartbeat. Dutch Agricultural equipment company Gebroeders Ezendam B.V. sells a line of behemoth robotic hedge-clippers than can hit 5,000 shrubs an hour.

There are a wide array of machines here--some shape the shrubs into globes, some into cones, some into tiny root balls.

Pruned waxes poetic:

“In the din of hydraulic pumps, combustion engines and whirring blades, and in the heady aroma of gasoline and freshly cut greenery, the feral and the hirsute are systematized and standardized — by machines programmed by Le Nôtre to hack weeds into Platonic forms — before other machines come around to uproot, ball and ship them to waiting client landscapes that have no patience for informality and flavor. In some ways, it's so Dutch.”

But it’s not just so Dutch—it’s so any company that’s seeking to maximize profits by deploying uber-efficient technology, in any sector. As with car parts, so with hedges. Most of these shrubs will be sold to individuals and businesses who care little whether the shrub that’s getting plopped down out front was sculpted by a man or machine. More, better, faster.

So beware, shrubbers, the robots are coming for your jobs, too. What sad times are these? Unless you can trim a few thousand plants an hour, or you’ve got shears where your hands should be, your days are numbered.

But wait, someone still has to oversee the robots, right?

Nope. Input the GPS coordinates, and the shrub-bots of tomorrow will trim hedges all by themselves.

Kim Dotcom's new Mega cloud-based file storage system is already off to a roaring success. The service hit one million users in just one day, largely on the basis of the site's encryption system. That system is an attempt to wash Mega's hands of any copyright infringement, as the company itself has no way of knowing what the locally-encrypted files its hosting actually are.

In essence, Dotcom is arguing that he can't be held responsible for what Mega's users share because Mega has no possible way of knowing whether or not it's illegal. Mega's already received more than a hundred copyright notices, but that's a relatively small number considering Mega users are already sharing more than 50 million files in their 50 GB free accounts.

But there's one problem with that plan: What happens when sites begin indexing Mega download links, just as sites do with torrents? The whole point of Mega is that, while it's a file-sharing platform, only the people who a sharer hands their encryption key to can download the files. In the grand scheme of sharing, Mega is designed to be more like sharing a CD amongst friends rather than putting your 98 Degrees album to be indexed on Kazaa. That appears to be Dotcom's intention, but it should still come as no surprise that indexing sites have already popped up.

One such site that's getting a lot of attention right now is mega-search.me, a French site that apparently has been blocked from indexing Mega links. From a pop-up when you enter the site (Google Translated from French):

Due to a script developed by Mega to delete all files indexed Mega-search, the engine is temporarily unavailable. A solution to overcome this problem will be made shortly.

It's not conclusive evidence that Mega is blocking indexing sites, but MegaSearch did allege as much on Twitter. If Mega is doing so, it's a smart move. Mega's encryption system is top-shelf, to the point that Dotcom has offered more than 10 grand to anyone who can crack it, but its inherent flaw from Mega's standpoint is people making those links public. After all, it's hard to allege that the site doesn't know what its users are sharing if the web is full of links to copyrighted content on the site.

@derektmead

James Joyce, who wrote like a psychopath. 

Well, the Chinese are reading Finnegans Wake, what’s your excuse? The first translation of James Joyce’s notoriously abstruse work to be sold on the Chinese mainland became available on Christmas, and has already sold out all 8,000 copies.

China Daily notes that Chinese are "eager readers" of foreign literature, and last year, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was the number one bestseller on 360buy.com, one of China’s biggest online retailers. Canadian author Yann Martel’s book, The Life of Pi, is selling well, following the release of its movie adaptation. Chinese readers especially seem to like books about China, like Henry “Hank the Tank” Kissinger’s book On China, and Peter Hessler’s River Town, a nonfiction book about the town of Fuling, on the Yangtze River.

But Finnegans Wake? Full of word play, allusions and made-up words, Finnegans Wake is such a difficult book to read in its original English that Joyce’s own brother, Stanislaus, famously called it “the work of a psychopath.” People can’t even agree on the plot; instead they talk about it like deep sea divers describing underwater caves—something’s down there, did you see it? What was that?

These difficulties are only compounded when one tries to translate the work to Chinese. How do you translate a pun? It’s often said that Joyce’s language comes alive best when read aloud, but is that true when it is read aloud in Chinese? English speakers also have the advantage of sharing a literary canon with Joyce. Eager readers of foreign books or not, how well do the Chinese pick up on Joyce's obscure Shakespeare references?

The end result remains difficult and confusing–just as Joyce intended, I guess. It took Dai Congrong eight years to translate the work, and even she doesn’t claim to understand it, but that’s okay. "I would not be faithful to the original intent of the novel if my translation made it easy to comprehend," Dai told the AP. 

This is not the first time that a notoriously difficult translation has exceeded expectations in the Chinese market. When Joyce’s Ulysses, neither a short book nor a breezy read, was released in China in 1994, it sold more than 85,000 copies.

Just like when literature students encounter Joyce for the first time, some are accusing the Joyce fans of just being ostentatious. Microblogger and bank employee Li Weiqi wondered, "Might it be that [the book is] being hawked as a commodity to attract the pretentious?" Eight thousand copies isn't a huge number, especially if they're all destined display on bookshelves.

In a perhaps-accidental echo of Stanislaus Joyce, one Shanghai professor speculated that James Joyce “must have been mentally ill to write such a novel.”

But maybe a certain frustration is part of what draws people to Joyce. After all, Xiao Qian once stood over Joyce’s grave and said, “Here lies the corpse of someone who wasted his great talents writing something very unreadable,” only to translate Ulysses into Chinese with his wife in the early 1990s. In any case, it's not going to crack any Chinese bestsellers lists anytime soon. Finnegans Wake still trails behind other, older more popular works of Chinese literature, like Quotations from the Works of Mao Tse-Tung, which is listed by Guinness as having sold a whopping 800 million copies in the late ‘60s.

Let's get one thing clear right at the outset: Nobody likes pedophiles. Nobody likes the idea of pedophiles using the Internet to find children to stalk or get off on or do whatever sick things it is that pedophiles do all day long. And nobody — NOBODY — wants to make it easier for them to fulfill their vile, pedophilic fantasies, even if it is a profitable pursuit. Nobody except for a few of Silicon Valley's most famous social networks. 

On Friday, news emerged that Path, the mobile social network founded by early Facebook employee Dave Morin, has agreed to pay the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) $800,000 for violating the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a sometimes controversial law that's designed to keep kids safe on the Internet and prohibits children under 13 from registering for sites like Path and Facebook. Path also purged 3,000 accounts from the social network due to suspected COPPA violations, and says that it has implemented the proper steps during the registration process to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

The FTC's discovery of thousands of underage Path users was an accident actually, a fact that should serve as a warning sign that authorities haven't quite figured out how to police these sorts of things yet. Path found itself embroiled in an FTC investigation over privacy issues related to a feature that allowed the app to access the iPhone's entire address book in order to send invites to friends. But it wasn't like they meant to invite kids onto their social network, kids that could ostensibly be targeted by pedophiles trolling the network for twisted fun. The company even spotted the missing checks and balances that allowed underage kids to sign up and fixed it almost a year ago.

This is the point in the story when you have to wonder if Path is the only one who missed some checks and balances in its registration process. Guess what: It's totally not! In fact, compared to its big brother in Palo Alto, Path's number of underage registered users looks like a rounding error. There is another, bigger social network that's not only allowed underage children to register, it's been lobbying Washington, somewhat successfully, to change COPPA so that the illegal things it appears to be enabling aren't illegal any more. This social network's founder even suggested publically that he wants more kids to be on the site.

I am, of course, talking about Facebook, the book of faces that once included 7.5 million prepubescent users. That number comes from Consumer Reports who called it "troubling news" and concluded, "Clearly, using Facebook presents children and their friends and families with safety, security and privacy risks." This figure emerged six months after Facebook settled its own series of privacy violations with the FTC for an undisclosed sum. As a result of that settlement, Facebook is privvy to privacy audits every two years for the next 20 years. (Path must now do the same.) The FTC never really followed up on the alleged COPPA violations, or if it did, Facebook didn't have to fork over $800,000. Actually, if you use Path's settlement to calculate the cost per user, Facebook should have paid $2 billion for putting the safety of 7.5 million children at risk.

Do you know what happened instead? Washington finally responded to Facebook's lobbyists and changed COPPA. These weren't radical changes. The updated law still prohibted kids under 13 from registering for sites and actually broadened the definition of sites that target kids, meaning more of the Internet would face more oversight. That's good for you pedophile haters out there, i.e. everyone, but potentially bad for business in Silicon Valley.

The new COPPA did, however, include a loophole that could potentially allow Facebook to advertise to children. This wasn't enough for Zuckerberg and his clan, so Facebook sent a 20-page letter to the FTC imploring them to let kids at least use the Like button. It's free speech! "A government regulation that restricts teens’ ability to engage in protected speech — as the proposed COPPA Rule would do — raises issues under the First Amendment," Facebook wrote in the letter. Funny use of the word "teens" when talking about kids 12 and under, by the way.

Privacy and protecting kids online are huge issues and rather serious challenges for the Internet right now. Here's the long and short of it, though. Just because Path and Facebook allow kids to register for these sites does not mean that they're going to be taken away by Johnny Frisbeehands in his windowless van. It does mean that they're a little bit less safe than they would be if they stayed off of social networking sites. Is there a future in which these companies figure out a way to give kids access and protect them at the same time? Maybe, but we're talking about today and we're dealing with today's laws. The most anybody could ask for is that those laws treat everybody the same.

In other words, government, if you're going to charge one social network $800,000 for breaking a law, it's pretty shitty to let another bigger company with more lobbyists get away with it. Seriously, if you want to make an example of a social network, why not pick Facebook? For Christ's sake, there's a movie about the company called The Social Network. And finally, if you're going to put a price on enabling pedophiles, $2 billion seems like a better number than $800,000.

Image via Flickr

I just finished Infinite Jest.

Like anyone who's spent months reading a 1,008-page book, particularly this one, I'm at a loss. It's sprawling, and by this point, all the important details from the novel's opening pages are teetering on the foggy edges of my memory. I want to throw it across the room—out of desperation, or passionate love, or both. Instead I pick it up and begin it all over again, this time humbled. A student. But I'm lonely—everyone else I know read this book ten years ago—so I take to Google. "What happens in Infinite Jest???" I type. One of the first resources I find points me to a blog called Raw Thought.

I'm relieved. The blog entry is called "The End of Infinite Jest Explained." "This whole thing is one gigantic spoiler," it begins, warning, "only read it if you’ve already tried to figure it out for yourself first." I check myself, consider my situation for a while, then dive in, only to slap my forehead repeatedly as the author draws several niggling details into an elegant theory of the novel's oblique ending, which David Foster Wallace himself said can only be "projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame," meaning that it's implied, at best. It isn't until after I've thoroughly admired this spoiler artist's analysis that I realize who he is. Or was, rather.

From beyond the grave, it was Aaron Swartz who was walking me through Infinite Jest.

In this private denouement, I'm immediately struck by the resonances between this monumental, insane novel and the man who hipped me to its subtext. It's a melancholy connection, and not just for the obvious reason that David Foster Wallace and Aaron Swartz were both brilliant men who took their own lives after helping make other people's lives better and more interesting. As it turns out, Swartz was one of the Internet's pre-eminent Foster Wallace heads. A Reddit thread calls Swartz "the author of one of the most compelling theories about Infinite Jest's end." At Swartz's funeral last month. essayist Tom Chiarella paid tribute by reading a passage from Foster Wallace's iconic Kenyon commencement speech. 

For those of you who've never cracked its spine, the plot of Infinite Jest revolves around a fatally compelling film, "the Entertainment." Subjected to the Entertainment without warning, viewers go limp, losing interest in anything other than repeated-on-loop viewings of the film itself, eventually starving to death in puddles of their own waste. Created by an artist in order to communicate with his pathologically repressed son, the Entertainment becomes the subject of a protracted, violent political struggle, a Continental Emergency-style conflict between government forces representing the United States and Canada. Shadowy entities--spies, assassins, sinister-toothed agencies with terrorist tactics--wrest to obtain a master copy, planning nefarious uses for its dissemination.

A page from Foster Wallace's dictionary; Aaron Swartz's laptop 

Aaron Swartz didn't hold a master copy of a fatally-entertaining film, but he was sitting on a similarly-contested motherlode: those millions of JSTOR articles he downloaded through MIT's network. And although he wasn't hounded by Infinite Jest's Quebécois-seperatist wheelchair assassins, his life was derailed by a government that sought to exploit his white-hat idealist effort for its own political ends. Even with a weapon as potent as The Entertainment, someone like Swartz, or any of the hapless characters caught in Infinite Jest's narrative crosshairs, is powerless against a single-minded bureaucracy that seeks to beat down by law.

In Infinite Jest, it's clear that the Entertainment, if propagated, would destabilize the entire North American continent--it's only a matter of time--not simply because of the nature of the film, but because entertainment (lowercase-e) is a highly corporatized, state-subsidized, insidiously controlled industry, particularly unreceptive to the visions and desires of individuals. Swartz sought to destabilize this nation, too, but in a more literal sense. "Information is power," he wrote in a 2008 manifesto. "But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves." By breaking down electronic paywalls separating potentially vital information from folks without access--prohibited by cost, mostly, or excluded from the rarefied circles of academic institutions--he and his colleagues on the copyleft aimed to shift the balance of power, which, like a shadow, always trails knowledge. 

David Foster Wallace, in the Kenyon commencement speech read at Swartz's memorial, explained what he felt was the real benefit of education. It's that the hackneyed liberal arts cliché of "learning how to think" is actually a profound truth: how and what one chooses to think, he said, is an everyday choice, one which can transform the crushing banalities and injustices of day-in, day-out reality into "something sacred, on fire, lit by the same force that lit the stars." The secret is learning to exercise control over our default assumptions, to fight always, in "myriad, unsexy ways," against the sense of self-certainty that can calcify your mind, can kill you years before you die.

Depression makes this quotidian struggle harder. “Everything gets colored by the sadness,” Swartz wrote in 2007. When things get worse, “you feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none. And this is one of the more moderate forms.” Undoubtedly he identified with the horrifying psychic depression that Kate Gompert feels in Infinite Jest, itself a fictional avatar for its author's lifelong battle with “the Great White Shark of pain,”“a nausea of the cells and soul.” In a short story from his college days, Foster Wallace articulated his own unshakable darkness: “some people say it’s like having always before you and under you a huge black whole without a bottom, a black, black hole, maybe with vague teeth in it, and then your being part of the hole.”

He dedicated himself to this same perpetual fight against the status-quo, a fight for the freedom of the human mind, which he believed could soar to greatness if given open access to information.

–

It's no wonder that Aaron Swartz admired the mind and work of David Foster Wallace: he dedicated himself to this same perpetual fight against the status-quo, a fight for the freedom of the human mind, which he believed could soar to greatness if given open access to information. Like Wallace, who also wasn't afraid to stick his neck into the thick of politics and culture wars, this fight was the singular work of his life, and it undid him. Relentlessly hounded to revoke control over material that might enlighten, educate, or even Entertain people against the will of the state, Swartz, like his hero, hanged himself--out of desperation, or passionate love, or both.

Both deaths, each in their own way, immediately catalyzed waves of hand-wringing: memorials, conspiracy theories, frank discussions of depression, and think-piecey articles (this one included) attempting to sort out their legacy. The desire to understand a death as surprising and unnecessary as a suicide is natural; the tendency to project how a life might have otherwise unraveled--what it'd look like beyond the right frame, if you will--is inescapable. In Swartz's case, these twin impulses have resulted in a near-universal condemnation of his treatment by prosecutors. And while there are important, absolutely imperative political issues to be considered in the wake of Aaron Swartz's suicide, the wake is also terribly messy. Like Foster Wallace, Swartz was a human, dictated by his own neurochemical stew and the untold tragedies of his individual existence. 

We can no more understand the deaths of Foster Wallace and Swartz than we can ever truly know what happens after the end of Infinite Jest. And that's fine. It's what makes the novel great, actually. Because lives and deaths are ambiguous things, fractured and ennobled and crystalized by the interpretations of many others, and sometimes the work we leave behind--be it a giant cache or a giant book--poses as many questions as answers.

Follow Claire at @theuniverse

Connections

Aaron Swartz's Tragic Battle with Copyright

One Man's Two-Year Quest to Meticulously Map 'Infinite Jest'

The Internet Can't Hate David Foster Wallace Because He Is the Internet

Swartz photo by Sage Ross / Flickr; Foster Wallace by Suzy Allman for The New York Times

Maybe you know the British animator Cyriak as the guy who destroyed the Large Hadron Collider. Or, at least he did on 4chan and, a quick search reveals, a whole bunch of other more conspiracy-minded internet forums (and Yahoo Answers). The prank was pretty simple: mock up a fairly mundane-looking webpage purporting to host webcams for the LHC, present it to different online places in fairly mundane terms ("Just look at this site, where they have live webcams at the LHC. Nothing ever happens"), and, once it becomes "real" enough for the viewer, animate a couple of wormholes eating up existence. Good times.

The video below for Bonobo's “Cirrus” isn't a prank, just an epic and hallucinatory exercise in video looping, in which a few clips become the atomic seeds for an entire universe of motion. It's way fun.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

(Via Vice.com:) It was announced on Wednesday morning that Barrett Brown, a man who became a very public talking head for AnonOps (the brain trust that is arguably the cortex of the hacktivist group Anonymous, even though there technically isn’t one) is facing up to 100 years in jail for three separate indictments.

The most recent two indictments—the threatening of an FBI officer in a YouTube video and the concealing of evidence—do not seem worthy of such a harsh sentence, considering a man in Houston recieved only 42 months for threatening to blow up an FBI building, and a former dentist got 18 months for threatening to kill an FBI agent. The third, however, pertains to Barrett Brown's pasting of a link in an Anonymous IRC chat room to a document full of credit card numbers and their authentication codes that was stolen from the security company Stratfor, in the midst of a hack that released over five million internal emails. Those emails were published to Wikileaks. Some writers have rightfully raised their concerns about the legalities behind sharing a link that points to stolen material (which is why I have not linked to those five million emails) and whether or not that should be an indictable offense. However, Barrett’s work and research into Stratfor tells a much more complicated and disturbing story than a pile of stolen Visa cards.

Video of Barrett Brown being arrested.

It’s obvious by looking at the most recent posts on Barrett Brown’s blog that while he is highly interested in Stratfor, it wasn’t the credit card information that motivated him. When those five million emails leaked, a product called TrapWire, which was created by a company called Abraxas, was revealed to the public at large. And it caused a media shitstorm. In 2005, the founder of Abraxas and former head of the CIA’s European division, Richard Helms, described TrapWire as software that is installed inside of surveillance camera systems that is, “more accurate than facial recognition” with the ability to “draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” As Russia Today reported, one of the leaked emails, allegedly written by Stratfor’s VP of Intelligence, Fred Burton, stated that TrapWire was at “high-value targets” in “the UK, Canada, Vegas, Los Angeles, NYC.”

Now, the TrapWire software has largely been dismissed as, nothing to “freak out” over and that hopefully is the case. However, far beyond what the surveillance software itself can or can’t do, the revelation that TrapWire exists has caused a chain reaction of discoveries that have seemingly revealed a mob of very powerful cybersecurity firms.

Barrett Brown was doing some very serious investigating into a company called Cubic from San Diego, that was alleged to own TrapWire as a subsidiary of their firm. This is an allegation that they officially denied. However, these tax filings from 2010 that Barrett uncovered clearly state that Cubic had in fact merged with Abraxas Corporation. If you click through and take a look, you can see that Richard Helms’s name is right there on the top of the first page.

Alongside Abraxas and Cubic on those tax filings is another company called Ntrepid. According to Florida State’s records of corporations, Richard Helms is the director of that company. In 2011, Barrett’s work helped lead the Guardian to their report that Ntrepid won a $2.76 million-dollar contract from another U.S. defense firm called Centcom, to create “online persona management” software, also known as “sockpuppetry.” To break it down in plain English, online persona management was created to populate social networks with a bunch of fake and believable social media personas to “influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.”

Ntrepid also has a product they call Tartan, that’s detailed in this internal presentation hosted by the Wall Street Journal. In Ntrepid’s own parlance, they describe Tartan as a program that can “Analyze illicit organizations and less structured social networks by identifying: Ranks of influence within human networks… [and can] end the use of [online] aliases.” Clearly they are looking to dismantle the smoke and mirrors that groups like Anonymous maintain, by hanging out in chatrooms where they do not need to identify themselves officially, with many private communications happening at once. This creates a difficult to penetrate den, where people can easily hide online. Evidently, Ntrepid is seeking to pull all of that apart with Tartan.

In another document on Ntrepid letterhead, titled “Tartan Influence Model: Anarchist Groups,” Tartan is positioned as a software tool that can help combat domestic protestors who operate in “an amorphous network of anarchist and protest groups” and suggests that these groups are prone to violence. They name Occupy Wall Street and Occupy D.C. as part of the problem, and have “built Occupy networks through online communication with anarchists.” By identifying the threat of anarchistic, supposedly violent protestors, Tartan sells its services by saying their software “identifies the hidden relationships among organizers of seemingly unrelated movements… To mitigate the ability of anarchists to incite violence… Law enforcement must identify the complex network of relationships among anarchist leaders.” So, beyond taking apart movements that exist solely online, Tartan is looking to come out and crush real world protest movements as well.

A lot of this information and the connections between it all would not be easy to figure out were it not for Barrett Brown. For one, Barrett started ProjectPM, a wiki that is completely dedicated to piecing together all of this information about surveillance companies in the United States. He even got on the phone with a representative at Cubic to tell them that their company was full of liars and that they do in fact own TrapWire. Without Barrett Brown, tons of this research would likely have gone unearthed. Besides a few journalists, not many people have been looking into this information. The one other group that does is called Telecomix, the guys who are famous for supplying dial-up internet lines to areas of the world with oppressive dictatorships, and who I interviewed about the Gaza conflict here. They operate the Bluecabinet Wiki, and they worked very closely with Barrett Brown to uncover more information about the network of cybersecurity firms.

Ntrepid's "Anarchist Network Executive Summary" (pdf)

I talked to one of the volunteers at Telecomix, who strongly believes in the work that Barrett did to connect all of these very confusing dots: “I haven't seen reporters really taking a hard look at what Barrett Brown, the investigative journalist, was researching and where it leads to. His discovery that TrapWire = Abraxas and that there is CIA involvement is very important.  Do you know in Berlin right now a game was started to destroy surveillance cameras in public places? Barrett apparently was reading through the emails of HBGary and Stratfor, linking the data to the specific surveillance companies and contractors… It is an extremely time consuming task.”

Barrett Brown was not a hacker. He did not infiltrate any systems, nor did he appear to know how to do anything of the sort (he did try to take down the Mexican drug cartels in 2011, but that is a whole other story). Barrett was an investigative journalist who has been published in the Guardian, Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, and Business Week. He closely (perhaps too closely) aligned himself with Anonymous, and dug into some very serious, complicated, and high-level issues pertaining to the future of America’s cyberwar conquests. In light of recent news that the Pentagon wants 4,000 new “hackers for cyber command,” it’s clear that the US’ infrastructure for private cyber defense companies is only growing, and their motives are oftentimes confusing and frightening.

Clearly there is so much more to the Stratfor leak than a bunch of credit card numbers—and the truth behind it all, along with Barrett Brown’s possible century-long jail sentence—is a scary prospect for journalists, privacy advocates, and internet activists alike. As Barrett Brown himself said regarding the leak of Stratfor emails and the credit card numbers within them that some hackers from Anonymous used to donate money to charities: “Much of the media has focused on the fact that some participants in the attack chose to use obtained customer credit card numbers to make donations to charitable causes. Although this aspect of the operation is indeed newsworthy, and, like all things, should be scrutinized and criticized as necessary, the original purpose and ultimate consequence of the operation has been largely ignored.”

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

More on internet activism:

Aaron Swartz's Tragic Battle with Copyright

Is Mega Really the Second Coming of Megaupload?

Twitter Obeys the Government More Than You Think

Iran made waves earlier this week with the big news that it had successfully launched a monkey into space and back. That "and back" part is rather important, not just for the safety of the little primate in question, but also as it's an important step towards developing climate control and landing systems for a human flight, which Iran says is coming.

But hold up a minute. Iran may have pulled a monkey switch!

Look at that image above, from the Telegraph. On the right is the monkey in its launch chair, which matches the released image of the primate in the middle. Both have light hair and a bright red mole over its right eye. But look at the left: That monkey, wearing a silk tuxedo, was trotted out by Iran to show that it indeed hadn't killed its adorably payload. WHERE IS THE MOLE? Plus, it has dark hair.

Guess who's calling Iran on the bluff: Yep, an Israeli space nonprofit. “It looks like a very different monkey, the nose, the features, everything is different,” Yariv Bash, founder of Space Israel, a nonprofit tasked with sending an unmanned Israeli ship to the moon, told the Telegraph. “This means that either the original monkey died from a heart attack after the rocket landed or that the experiment didn’t go that well."

That means one of two things: Either Iran's original space monkey died during the flight, or it faked the whole thing. Now, there was a question of whether the launch was real in initial reports. No Western analysts reported a rocket flight from Iran at the time, which could have been a matter of intelligence agencies not wanting to discuss the launch just yet. But considering we've got a monkey gaffe of historic proportions on our hands, it appears that the whole thing is likely a ruse. The new space race is still heating up, but it looks like Iran's rockets are only flying on lies.

@derektmead

Stephen Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning Secretary of Energy, tendered his resignation today. He was a quiet presence during these exceptionally loud past few years on the Hill, and his legacy risks being woefully distorted. When you read about his resignation in any mainstream news outlet, for instance, you’re going to see the story framed this way: Chu was undoubtedly very smart, but he was not prepared for big league governance. Because Solyndra. For evidence, I submit the WaPo’s lede paragraph: “Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who won a Nobel Prize in physics but came under questioning for his handling of a solar energy loan, is stepping down.”

This is not just a problematic way to frame the story of his resignation, which has nothing to do with Solyndra, but does gross injustice to Chu’s impressive body of work as Energy Secretary.

First, Solyndra. Godforsaken Solyndra. Yes, it was embarrassing when a solar company that pocketed a $500 million government loan went belly up—but look. After an endless parade of Congressional investigations and the spewing of infinite politicized vitriol, no evidence of wrongdoing was ever uncovered. Ever. Even Solyndra’s most vehement foes admit this openly now, but they succeeded so fully in getting the news cycle to regurgitate their ‘controversy’ that nobody even remembers the facts.

The fact is, that loan program was designed to carry a certain amount of risk—it assumed that a number of companies pushing innovative, cutting-edge technologies were expected to go belly up, but that others wouldn’t. To this day, that portfolio has operated as planned—there have been some clean energy tech winners, a couple losers, and a few that are still developing.

So what will Chu’s legacy really be, since it can’t possibly be consigned to the failure of a single solar company?

That’s harder to say. Chu’s biggest influence was made early on. A vocal supporter of wind, solar, and nuclear power, Chu understood the threat posed by climate change better than almost anyone else in Obama’s cabinet. So, since he was in charge of distributing some $35 billion to various energy projects, he took the opportunity to invest heavily in cleantech research and deployment.

Alexis Madrigal, who wrote a book on the history of energy, describes Chu’s choices thusly:

“though the disbursements weren't perfect, they seemed, to an outsider, to be the mix of "shovel-ready" (remember that term?) projects and longer-horizon research that you'd expect. Who knows what fruits the seeds planted during his tenure will bear?”

Precisely. We may yet see a solar tech breakthrough that was engendered in this generous batch of research. We may not. But it’s clear that in the age of climate change, more funding must be directed to clean energy research. Chu heeded that call.

He also oversaw the development of ARPA-E, the Department of Energy’s answer to the DoD’s DARPA. The agency deploys funds to high-risk, high-gain energy projects, those looking for battery tech breakthroughs and super-efficient panels—stuff that may be considered pie-in-the-sky to some, but stuff that may eventually offer up a crucial key to a sustainable energy system.

The Energy Fixers, a Motherboard short on ARPA-E

In a similar vein, Chu started five separate Energy Innovation Hubs, each of which partner with a university. The latest, the Critical Materials Institute at Ames University in Iowa, will research how to optimize the rare earth metals used in wind, solar, and nuclear power. The Critical Materials Institute is perhaps Chu’s final victory—the Hubs were his brainchild. And this one will receive $120 million in funding over the next five years, and its focus is all-important, especially as we ramp up production of clean energy technologies in coming years.

Chu also strongly advocated for energy efficiency, and mobilized the DOE to jumpstart home retrofit programs, upgrade efficiency in federal buildings, and to partner with states to incentivize similar programs on the state level. He began outfitting federal buildings with white roofs, which reflect heat and improve efficiency.

He also repeatedly called for boosts in federal research funding in general, saying that we were on the brink of a Sputnik moment for clean technology—a line Obama later aped in a State of the Union address. In fact, he was constantly going to bat for clean energy. He wanted more attention, more money, and more focus on climate solutions, but the political climate in Washington made it impossible.

And that’s the true story of Chu’s tenure on the Hill: a brilliant scientific mind dropped into a pit of science-denying vipers. The radical GOP element in Congress blocked any significant effort to reduce carbon emissions, and never took Chu seriously. Remember, this was officially the most anti-science Congress in recent history—there’s no way that they were going to treat the ideas of a soft-spoken, extremely intelligent bureaucrat seriously.

Chu’s thinking was perfectly sound—a world that’s preternaturally warming due to the burning of carbon fuels needs alternative fuels, and to develop them as soon as possible. But his supposed colleagues in government proved they would rather devote their time to making him look bad for a single unfortunate loan than give any of his ideas a moment’s thought.

Given the environment he faced—filled with braindead climate denial and medieval calls for heads to roll over Solyndra—there was no way that Chu could have succeeded politically. But I’d say that all things considered, he did admirably—and his legacy may yet shine through the anti-science morass that clouds this particular moment in out politics.

Connections

What Hostess Says About Solyndra

Clean Energy is Not the Internet

This Will Be an Epic Year for Wind Power

These Are the Cleanest-Powered, Most Energy Efficient Nations on the Planet

Adios, Cooling Towers: The Energy Department Wants Plug-and-Play Nuclear Reactors

Scientists Have a Plan To Power 95% Of the World With Renewable Energy

Motherboard TV: The Thorium Dream

Last week, the video for Sivu’s “Better Man Than He” bounced around the blogosphere on the strength of a catchy hook and its novel concept. The video features James Page, the songwriter for Sivu, performing the song live inside an MRI machine.

Yeah, he’s actually in there. I got in touch with Page, a 24 year-old Londoner and lifelong musician, to double check.

“I did perform in the machine,” he says. “I had special headphones on, which is why in the video when a 3d version appears on my face you can see the headphone marks.”

The video was filmed at Bart’s Hospital in London, under the supervision of doctors Marc E. Miquel and Andrew D. Scott. Once the tape was rolling, Page sang his heart out, got the brainwaves flowing, and director Adam Powell put it to tape. For his part, Powell says he was inspired by a charitable cause.

“The video is a collection of data gathered from MRI scans and is inspired by research into improving the management of children born with cleft lip and palate,” Powell says. “I've just recently been obsessed with the idea of capturing images without conventional cameras/lenses.”

Page says he took to the concept right away.

“I had a lot of respect for the reason the machine was being used and when Adam mentioned the idea it just felt right,” he says. “I had a MRI scan last year due to problems with my ear, which was useful knowing what to expect.”

It’s striking, of course, to watch a song belted out from quite literally the inside of the signer’s head, which is likely why the video has racked up nearly 150,000 views in under a week.

“I think the video breaths a new light into the song,” Page says. “The imagery is quite cold and real but with the use of colour and the feel behind the song I think the final result is better than I could have dreamed of.”

Image: @erik_stinson

A 36-inch wide cast iron pipe, installed in 1950, started spewing into 23rd street in Manhattan at 10:30am today. It flooded the local subway station and caused train delays on the Broadway line, and my friend at his 15th street apartment found out it'd burst the hard way when he went to turn on the faucet and nothing came out.

Is it the recent flux of temperatures in the city that caused the breach? That was my early hypothesis. If you're not from New York, let me tell you about the past week's weather: It was pretty fucking cold a week ago, and then there were a couple of charming days this week, with a globally-warmed high of 61 degrees yesterday (22 degrees above average for January 31st). Overnight, temperatures dropped to around 27, and there have wind gusts all day--which shouldn't directly chill the underground water main, but it's still been miserable as hell. 

But the weather fluctuations aren't the problem, the sheer cold is. "Water main breaks are more likely to occur when frost penetrates deep into the ground to a level of 3-5 feet," the Manheim Borough Authority on Water and Wastewater explains. "Usually from late January until early April. While cold temperatures may send the frost deeper, the level of snow cover is also important." We haven't had huge amounts of snow here in NYC, so it's likely that the old main simply gave up, although it's still uncertain.

Thanks to Instagram, there's an unfathomable amount of coverage at the scene, from office windows and passersby. So, at least for now, we can look as a flood overtakes the. corner where all the Sprint ads take place and where the tourists shuffle into Mario Batali's Eataly. As sandhogs blast holes 800 feet below the surface, making way for the new Water Tunnel No. 3, the failed main is a reminder that New York is a pretty old city with very old infrastructure. Let's take a look at the witnesstagrams:

Science has given us some pretty great images of the brain over the years thanks to fMRIs, CT scans, and the like. But we’ve never seen anything quite like this: A “thought,” however simple, captured in real time in the brain of an animal doing what animals do naturally—looking for a bite to eat.

A group of Japanese scientists led by Akira Muto chose larval zebrafish for their thought-capturing experiment, in part because they are transparent in the embryonic and larval stages and already able to recognize prey. Using new gene expression technology, the scientists were able to re-engineer the baby fish’s genetics so the neurons in its optic tectum flashed with fluorescent light whenever they fired.

Researchers then tested the zebrafish in several scenarios to stimulate its optic tectum. In the first experiment, they attracted the baby fish’s attention with a moving spot of light. In the second experiment, they stimulated the baby fish using a paramecium—a single-celled organism that is the larva's natural prey.

What you see above is a close-up of the neurons firing during the first experiment while the fish is visually stimulated with a light.

Below is a video documenting the second experiment, from a wider perspective so we can see how the neurons fire in relation to the object stimulating them. The little dot jerking around is the paramecium. The neuronal firing patterns conformed to what we’ve long known about the relationship between eyes and brains, but were never able to see on such a minute scale in real time. Muto, et al., call it a “functional visuotopic map.”

Watch how the optic tectum fires in opposite relation to where the paramecium is. When the paramecium is on the left, the optic tectum fires on the right:

In a third experiment, the scientists left the larval zebrafish free to pursue and devour the paramecium. By watching them actually complete their hunting task, the researchers found that pre-capture behavior was always marked by activity in the anterior part of the optic tectum—signaling a neuronal difference between the hunt and the catch.

The study, published yesterday in the journal, Current Biology, is unavailable to readers without a subscription. But the journal provided this video abstract, below, in which you can see footage of the third experiment, as get a more in-depth explanation of the science directly from the researchers. It's as worth your time to watch in its entirety as any five-minute video in recent memory.  

As the researchers note, this kind of technology can't be used on humans—for starters, our heads aren't see-through. But our brains and fish brains work according to many of the same basic principles. Over time, these kinds of experiments could grant us ever keener insight into our own cognition. 

h/t io9

Have you ever heard of the Kamchatka Peninsula? It's near Siberia. You've heard of Siberia. That's where the Stalin and his homeboys used to send the poor bastards who betrayed the Motherland or thought about capitalism or wore the wrong hat or whatever. Siberia is unpleasant. It's cold, empty, remote, inescapable. It's just horrible.

Well, the Kamchatka Peninsula is worse. Not because it's colder, emptier, more remote or more escapable. The Kamchatka Peninsula is simply covered in overactive, magma-spewing volcanoes. It's a seismic wonderland, home to 160 volcanoes, 29 of which are active, one of which happens to be the largest active volcano in the Northern Hemisphere. It also happens to be smack dab on the treacherous edge of the so-called Ring of Fire, the especially seismically active  areas circling the Pacific Ocean.When you put it that way, the Kamchatka Peninsula sounds kind of awesome.

Awesome is definitely the word for what's happening in that hellish little corner of Russia right now. The fun started at the end of last November, when one of the volcanoes, the Tobalchik, started to erupt, and over the course of the next few weeks, three other volcanoes started to erupt within about 100 miles. It's unclear if all of the magma is coming from the same place, but it's putting on quite a show, a show of the rivers of fire and fountains of lava variety. The German newsweekly Der Spiegel says it's the "geological equivalent of winning the lottery."

Lucky for you, a team of photographers from Moscow want to give you a front row seat. They call themselves Air Pano, and they've done this before. In the past couple of years, members of the group photographed the world famous Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption in Iceland in 2010 and the Grímsvötn the following year. They canceled plans to shoot the  Burj Khalifa, that 3,000 foot-tall dagger stabbing into the heavens above Dubai. Instead, they found themselves watching a scene of Biblical proportions. And they put it on the Internet for your enjoyment.

Image via Air Pano

I remember a number of school teachers who would ask, "Who is watching the Super Bowl this weekend?" Some classmates hoorahed, their hands flailing in the room. She would continue, "I don't even know who is playing," and the jockish boys would affectionately disown her, and she would say, "But I like to watch the ads," to which the thirteen-year-olds would soulfully agree, "Oh yeah," or, "Me too!"

The cult of Super Bowl ads--the minute-long skydiving epics, heartbreakingly emo, adventurously idiotic, the precious, the unbelievable, the dudes saying "whassup"--reminds viewers in chorus with those same grade school teachers that this game isn't only how they demonstrate TVs in a BestBuy, it's part of how they're able to manufacture so goddamn many of them. I won't be making a point of watching the game this year, but from poking around a little bit, I've already seen most of the ads. So just as a warning, if you're the type that actually waits for Christmas Day to open your presents, you might want to click out of this window now.

Taco Bell - "Viva Young"

This is my favorite. It's not even that smart, but it jives nicely off of Taco Bell's Live Más concept: That geriatrics are exuberant enough to eat a Dorito Loco taco, get a Mexican gang tattoo and let loose in a swimming pool. Not that I'm a brand ambassador for any of these companies, but I'm kind of a sucker for Volcano Tacos, for which I have a GIF art fanpage. Greg Creed, Taco Bell CEO, told CNBC that the ad spot has already had over 500,000 views on social networks alone.

Doritos - "Chihuahua's Chips"

This ad seriously sucks. The only thing interesting is how gender neutral they made the dog, but I suppose this will come across as some torture inflicted by the annoying blonde who answers her phone, "Hey babe." And for being one of the worst ads ever, during the game tomorrow, it's going to air like 100 times, until people are somehow magically forced to like it.

Samsung

Economics surrounding the NFL are cut throat, and small business owners in New Orleans know this by now; their throats are pretty bloody, at least in terms of what they can and can't do to advertise a sandwich special tomorrow. Now that it costs $4 million to run 30 second TV ads during the 'big game,' this Samsung ad makes some decent satire about the state of the small town ad mandate. 

Budweiser - The Clydesdales: "Brotherhood"

This is ad is so emo, very Pinterest-conscious, it's almost as heart-melting as that T-Mobile flash mob stunt in Heathrow airport ad. But it's not. Still, I felt it taught me something. I had automatically gendered the long lost Clydesdale as a girl, but this ad is entitled "Brotherhood."

Toyota - "Wish Granted"

I just watched a girl give a longform review of this ad, because I really don't know what to say. It's clever, it's family fun. I had to Google "Kaley Cuoco" which helped me further realize just how alienated I also am from the mom and daughter segments of tomorrow's audiences.

Coke - "Chase"

This race between steampunks and Vegas showgirls that have overcome a camel caravan doesn't end until game day. Probably some shenanigans that'll end with a live confrontation at the 50 while Destiny's Child is trying to show everyone they still got it. I don't know why I'm rooting for the steampunks, but I am. Go Williamsburgh!

Pepsi

Ok, I like this Pepsi ad better than the Coke ad, but that isn't to say I'll ever like the Blue-Red Yin-Yang better or the flavor for that matter. I am pretty into Mountain Dew, but I haven little to seldom interest in these Next, Zero, Light, Maxx flavors. I just want to duct tape myself to a ceiling and defiantly drink some soda at my friend's parent's house now.

Mercedes - "Soul"

I already sold my soul when I was 15, and for far less than any $29,900. I made the deal with some druid-wicken-role-playing-gamer-nightowls at a Denny's in Bellevue, WA. I got five golden shrimp, a six ounce sirloin, a side of tomato slices, a side of cottage cheese, a starter soup, a starter salad, a milkshake, some juice, some coffee, bottomless cigarettes; the whole works. They drew a few drops of my blood, mixed it with some dust of a deer bone in a small vial, and voila–soul captured. By the way, is Willem Dafoe wearing a masonic ring at 1:20?

Volkswagen - "Get In. Get Happy."

All praises be to Jah, but do you think this is racist? Some Jamaicans have given it a thumbs up, but which market does it really speak to? And how will it be laughed at? Oh well. But still, why was the Jamaican cable guy really mean to my gay friend the other day? And why is reggae the chillest, most harmonious, most medicinal music we have? 

Sodastream

This ad won't actually air tomorrow, CBS was not down with it, obviously, as it shows a lack of dependency for all the Coke and Pepsi bottles in the world. I felt it strike a chord in me, I guess. Then again, maybe that's because I saw my friend working her new Sodastream machine the other day, and it was kinda cool.

If you're hesitant to watch the game, and don't want to wait for the that moment of music (called a stinger) before the screen goes black before one of these face-melting ads, then I hope this roundup has been of some service. There's always the throw back ads to watch as well. Whether it's those bros saying, "whassup,"  the girl at a laundromat crunching into a Dorito, Charles Barkley spitting an awful rhyme about Taco Bell's $5 Buck Boxes or some Coor's or  lending itself to the studies of American tramp stampery, there has to be a reason for everyone–especially non-football fans–to watch TV this Sunday. What will yours be?

Follow Daniel Stuckey on Twitter.

The wah-wah pedal, which first hit its stride in the opening guitar solo of Jimi Hendrix's 1968 Voodoo Child (Slight Return), defined the trippier side of funk ever since the genre started making everybody a little more mellow. But the pedal's invention was a total accident.

It came into being as the love-child of a commercial liaison between the Vox Continental Organ (seen here in this video of the Animals' 1964 "House of the Rising Sun"), and the Vox Super Beatle Guitar amp in 1966. Sometimes opportunistic corporate mergers lead to innovation, apparently. On the cusp of the psychedelic era, the British amp maker Vox was looking for ways to capitalize on Beatlemania. In 1965, it inked an agreement with California-based Thomas Organ Co., permitting the production of Vox amps in the United States. A subsequent redesign of the Super Beatle into a cheaper solid-state amp (as opposed to one that used more expensive vacuum tubes), and the marriage of the organ and the guitar led to the accidental invention of a more groovy expression pedal.

Prior to contracting with Thomas Organ for American distribution of guitar amps, Vox had reached an exclusive agreement with the Beatles to supply them with amps, and the popularity of the Vox brand rode the Fab Four's coattails on a wave of global hysteria. The Beatles' fanfare rolled out a red carpet for the marketing of Vox accessories, and as the psychedelic era blossomed in 1967, influential recordings by rockers like Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience featured the sound-bending effect of the novel "foot controlled continuously variable preference circuit for musical instruments."

The pedal's inventor Brad Plunkett, in a Bill Clinton moment, originally conceived of his brainchild as an accessory for the saxophone. Considering the dearth of righteous teens following Lisa Simpson's lead to the brass section, it was a stroke of good fortune for Vox when someone with slightly more cool plugged a guitar into it. 

Hippies - 1967

Hendrix and Clapton rose to massive fame on the late-60's high tide of psychedlic guitar fuzz and achieved universal recognition as rock deities. Another lesser-known musician from Chicago, Earl Hooker, also crafted a blazing wah-wah style of his own, which no doubt influenced the blues-heavy sounds of the more famous aforementioned players.

While the details of Earl Hooker's life remain sketchy, it's absolutely clear that  by the time the record "Wah Wah Blues" came out in 1968, he was using the pedal sound to glorious effect. In 1969, a French radio announcer proclaimed on-air that American blues guitar master Earl Hooker had "invented" the wah-wah pedal. He didn't, but he was definitely an early proponent and master deserving of recognition alongside more mainstream peers. He was also an incredible performer, as evidenced below:

Hooker was a profligate innovator, receptive to all the electric guitar experiments of the 1950's and '60's. Blues legend B.B. King said he was the greatest guitar player. An itinerant musician from Chicago's rougher side, he had no corporate sponsorships or celebrity perks. Several of his songs bear comical titles referring to the disease tuberculosis, from which he suffered his entire life, and which killed him in 1970--just as his raw style of Chicago blues was beginning to find a wider audience.

Hooker's instrumental Blue Guitar became Led Zeppelin's You Shook Me in an early moment of unmitigated sampling. While his sound lacks the psychedelic saturation of some of his late '60's wah wah contemporaries, his unique stylistic innovations are some of the finest flowers of an accidental device which found soil in a corporate merger between the organ and the guitar. 

Who is this guy here on the field during the pre Super Bowl ceremony sharing the spotlight with Jennifer Hudson and Alicia Keys? He managed to take fairly run-of-the-mill performances of "America the Beautiful" and "The Star Spangled Banner," and translate them into liquid sex for the hearing impaired. 

It turns out that tanned fellow hand dancing patriotic songs in sign language is none other than John Maucere. It stands to reason that his musical stylings are on the freaky side, since he was actually Playgirl's choice for "sexiest deaf guy" in January of 1990. 

John Maucere on a 1990 issue of Deaf Life, and in Playgirl

Besides being a hard of hearing sex symbol, Maucere is a long-time actor and advocate for equal rights for the deaf. Last night was the first Super Bowl broadcast to include an American Sign Language rendition of the pre-game ceremony. This step forward for inclusivity in sports is the outcome of a partnership between the National Association of the Deaf and Pepsi, who will soon be releasing a behind the scenes documentary of Maucere's trip to New Orleans and performance.

Internet access is an essential need on par with education access, but at what point do regulators recognize that? When will government officials acknowledge that widespread, guaranteed access is essential to fostering growth in the country? Somewhat surprisingly, that time is now, as the FCC is now calling for nationwide free wi-fi networks to be opened up to the public.

The FCC proposes buying back spectrum from TV stations that would allow for what the Washington Post is dubbing "super wi-fi," as the commission wants to cover the country with wide-ranging, highly-penetrative networks. Essentially, you can imagine the proposal as covering a majority of the country with open-access data networks, similar to cell networks now, that your car, tablet, or even phone could connect to. That means no one is ever disconnected, and some folks–especially light users and the poor–could likely ditch regular Internet and cell plans altogether.

As you might expect, telecom providers, as well as equipment manufacturers and even firms heavily invested in the cell phone market, like Intel, aren't interested in shaking up the current model that's securely lucrative. From the Post:

Cisco and other telecommunications equipment firms told the FCC that it needs to test the airwaves more for potential interference.

“Cisco strongly urges the commission to firmly retreat from the notion that it can predict, or should predict . . . how the unlicensed guard bands might be used,” the networking giant wrote.

Supporters of the free-WiFi plan say telecom equipment firms have long enjoyed lucrative relationships with cellular carriers and may not want to disrupt that model. [...]

“We want our policy to be more end-user-centric and not carrier-centric. That’s where there is a difference in opinion” with carriers and their partners, said a senior FCC official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the proposal is still being considered by the five-member panel.

Google and Microsoft both support the proposal, largely because more internet access means more potential users. And, as Google and Microsoft have argued, opening up the wireless market to all will help spur a massive boom in innovation. Self-driving cars are nearly here, as we saw at CES, and one of the major things still holding them back is connectivity; it's not hard to teach a car to drive itself down the road, but it takes serious networking capability to teach it to drive nicely with others. Blanketing the country in wi-fi that doesn't require numerous licensing deals could allow that.

That aside, the potential benefits to citizens are immense, as discussed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in its campaign to unlock wi-fi from the user side. And beyond what the EFF is doing, the FCC could make huge strides towards closing the immense rural internet gap. Really, the FCC's plan, which would be the first of its kind in the world, would be a massive leap forward in the Internet age, where something that's a basic requirement for anyone to succeed these days is finally acknowledged as such.

Update: In an email, a FCC spokesperson clarified that the proposal in question was initially introduced as part of an incentive auction program that has the potential to open up parts of the spectrum owned by TV stations. Only if those bands open up will a nationwide network be possible, which requires the owners of those bands to sell them back to the FCC.

“The FCC’s incentive auction proposal, launched in September of last year, would unleash substantial spectrum for licensed uses like 4G LTE," wrote the spokesperson. "It would also free up unlicensed spectrum for uses including, but not limited to, next generation Wi-Fi. As the demand for mobile broadband continues to grow rapidly, we need to free up significant amounts of spectrum for commercial use, and both licensed and unlicensed spectrum must be part of the solution.”

Top image: Flickr/rainbreaw

@derektmead

For more free network coverage, see:

Free Wi-Fi: The Movement to Give Away Your Internet for the Sake of Humanity

Free the Network

Occupy's One-Time Internet Is In A Showdown With Google in Kansas City