Wired - January 2014 Usa

Published on June 2016 | Categories: Types, Brochures | Downloads: 49 | Comments: 0 | Views: 1021

of x

Content

HOW TO TEAR
DOWN AN AIRCRAFT
CARRIER
THE BEST
BOUNTY HUNTER
IN THE WORLD
UBER’S NEXT
BIG THING
Get it on | jan 2014
WHY
WEARABLE
TECH WILL
BE AS BIG
AS THE
SMARTPHONE
HEADS
UP
BY BILL WASIK
Watch and glasses
concepts created for
WI RED by Branch.

Honestly
I needed a laptop and a tablet.
(VWLPDWHG UHWDLO SULFH VKRZQ 5HWDLO SULFHV PD\ YDU\ 2IÀFH VROG VHSDUDWHO\ $SSV IURP :LQGRZV 6WRUH Windows.com

That’s why I got a new Windows 2-in-1,
which does both. It’s a laptop when I
need to get stuff done, and a tablet
when I want to have fun.
Lenovo Yoga 11S
$
799
99

PERFECTION TAKES TIME. THAT’S WHY 151 YEARS AGO DON FACUNDO
BACARDÍ MASSÓ EXPERIMENTED WITH AGING, SHAPING WITH CHARCOAL
FILTERS AND BLENDING HIS RUM TIME AND TIME AGAIN. ONLY WHEN HE
HAD THE FINEST BLEND WOULD HE ADD HIS NAME TO THE BOTTLE.
10 YEARS
H O P E F U L L Y,
Y O U R B A R T E N D E R I S A
P E R F E C T I NG H I S RU M
LITTLE FASTER
F A C U N D O B A C A R D Í
S P E N T
LIVE PASSIONATELY. DRINK RESPONSIBLY.
©2013. BACARDÍ, BACARDÍ UNTAMEABLE and the BAT Device are trademarks of Bacardi & Company Limited. Bacardi U.S.A., Inc., Coral Gables, FL. Rum - 40% Alc. by Vol. BACARDI.COM

Michelle Gomez is a genius at ﬁnding people
who want to stay lost. But she had never gone after
anyone like Ryan Eugene Mullen.
BY RANDALL SULLIVAN
Battlestar’s Ron Moore is back, with
one show about a disease outbreak and another
based on a time-travel romance.
BY ADAM ROGERS
HUNTI NG THE GHOST OUTLANDER
David Agus helped Steve Jobs live longer.
Now he wants to help us all.
BY AMY WALLACE
Building a bridge or supercomputer is hard.
Demolishing them is just as tough.
Five case studies in the art of mega-destruction.
BY BRYAN GARDINER AND ERIC SMILLIE
DOCTOR’ S ORDERS DECONSTRUCTI ON ZONE
Google Glass was just the beginning. A new generation
of wearable tech is coming—and it will transform the way
you experience the world.
BY BILL WASIK
TRY I T ON
Many of the
workers
dismantling the
USS Enterprise
are the offspring
of those who
built her.
moore
wrote
almost 60
Star Trek
episodes.

*OUSPEVDJOH PVS XPSME

DMBTT
MVYVSZ TFEBO UIF ,
5IFZ TBZ USBEJUJPO BOE IFSJUBHF BSF XIBU NBLF B MVYVSZ TFEBO, CVU JT UIBU USVMZ UIF DBTF 0S JT JU
UIF GBDU UIBU JU◃T NFUJDVMPVTMZ DSBGUFE GSPN UIF GJOFTU NBUFSJBMT BWBJMBCMF 0S UIBU JU◃T FRVJQQFE
XJUI UIF NPTU BEWBODFE POCPBSE UFDIOPMPHZ BOE JT UIF QFSGFDU DPNCJOBUJPO PG DPNGPSU, QPXFS
BOE FMFHBOU EFTJHO 8IJMF PUIFST NBZ CF DPOWJODFE UIBU IJTUPSZ JT XIBU EFGJOFT B MVYVSZ TFEBO,
XF JOWJUF ZPV UP DPNF UP ZPVS PXO DPODMVTJPO. &YQFSJFODF UIF ,900 GPS ZPVSTFMG BU LJB.DPN},900.
, FYQFDUFE 4QSJOH *OJUJBMMZ POMZ BWBJMBCMF JO TFMFDU NBSLFUT XJUI MJNJUFE BWBJMBCJMJUZ. 2015 ,900 78 QSPUPUZQF TIPXO XJUI PQUJPOBM GFBUVSFT. /PU BMM GFBUVSFT
BSF BWBJMBCMF PO BMM USJN MFWFMT.

LJBDPN

0 1 0 JAN 2014
GADGET LAB
75 Fetish
Sketch your iPad
masterpiece with
the FiftyThree Pencil
76 Gearhead:
Road Warrior
Essentials for
cold-weather running
78 How It’s Made
Inside Z.Vex guitar efects
pedals
82 Head-to-Head:
Hand Warmers
Gadgets to keep your digits
from freezing of
84 Benchmark:
Esla Kicksled
The snow sled
that started it all
86 The Bigger
Picture
It’s easy to take
pictures. The trouble is
organizing them.
BY MAT HONAN
ULTRA
49 Uber in Overdrive
What will the car service do
with all that Google money?
BY MARCUS WOHLSEN
52 Angry Nerd
The monster's name isn't
Frankenstein!
57 Need to Know
The inﬂuences on 47 Ronin
57 Cool Tools
A catalog of the best
versions of everything
58 In Praise of Recaps
Why watch TV when you
can read it?
BY BRIAN RAFTERY
62 Sin City, Minus the Sin
Things to do and see
in Las Vegas
Q:
65 Sea Shell
Exosuit lets divers go deep
without the nasty side efects
66 We Have Ignition!
How Dan Winters
photographs a rocket launch
68 A Guide to Retailer
Phone Trees
Avoid customer-service
automaton hell
68 3 Smart Things
About Hibernation
70 Perfect Fit
Meet your robot body-double
72 Ms. Know-It-All
On apps for learning fast
and fact-checking
Facebook comments
ISSUE 22.01
12 Network Efects
What’s happening in
the WIRED world
19 Re:Wired
Readers react to Paloma
Noyola Bueno, Bob
Odenkirk, and Nest Protect
22 Release Notes
Behind the scenes of
this issue
INFOPORN
Distant planets that are
close to home
ALPHA
27 Numbed by Numbers
Why quants don’t know
everything
BY FELIX SALMON
34 Tree Whisperer
Deploying the forests
against the tsunamis
40 Better Testing for
Sperm Donors
GenePeeks susses out
genetic defects before
they cause trouble
40 Jargon Watch
Keeping up with the
latest in the lexicon
42 Less Hazy Shade
of Winter
A town that uses mirrors to
brighten up the day
46 The Parent Trap
How teens lost the
ability to socialize
BY CLIVE THOMPSON
025
ASK A FLOWCHART
What wearable tech is right for me?
BY ROBERT CAPPS
136
ON THE COVER
Photograph for WI RED by Ian Allen.
Watch, glasses, and screen renderings
by Thomas Porostocky and Branch.
Model: Steven Boyd/Two Manage-
ment. Grooming by Yvette Swallow/
Aubri Balk. Styling by Micah Bishop/
Artist Untied. Sweater: J.Crew

SIP RESPONSIBLY
WWW. GREYGOOSE. COM I FACEBOOK. COM/GREYGOOSE
©2014. GREY GOOSE, THE GEESE DEVI CE AND TRADE DRESS ARE TRADEMARKS. I MPORTED BY GREY GOOSE I MPORTI NG
COMPANY, CORAL GABLES, FL. VODKA 40% ALC. BY VOL. ; FLAVORED VODKAS EACH 40% ALC. BY VOL. - DI STI LLED FROM GRAI N.

F
R
O
M

T
O
P
:

C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F

C
N
É
;

A
R
I
E
L

Z
A
M
B
E
L
I
C
H
;

G
E
T
T
Y

I
M
A
G
E
S
0 1 2 JAN 2014
NETWORKEFFECTS
WHAT’ S HAPPENING IN THE WIRED WORLD
WEB
CES Bonanza
This January, Gad-
get Lab will be on
the ground in Las
Vegas at the expo
formerly known as
the Consumer Elec-
tronics Show, with
a live blog, photo
galleries, and much
more. We’ll explore
the absurd gadget
obsession that pre-
vails at CES—the
largest, most talked
about, most over-
blown consumer-
technology show-
case in the world.
VIDEO
Sunny Skies
WIRED’s video series The Window takes you
behind the scenes of the Crescent Dunes Solar
Energy Plant outside Tonopah, Nevada, to
show how a California ﬁrm is building a giant
solar power supply based on molten salt.
ON THE WEB video.wired.com video.wired.com
this giant solar array spans
1,600 acres of Nevada desert.
WEB
Innovation Insights
Why Apple should
fear App Store
competition from
Facebook, how
millennials aren’t
really as obsessed
with technology as
you think, and the
challenge of bring-
ing your landline
anywhere: WIRED’s
Innovation Insights
blog discusses
these topics and
other issues facing
businesses today.
ON THE WEB
WI RED.com/insights
ON TWITTER
@WI REDinsights
FOLLOW US
Join our half-
million friends at
facebook.com/
WIRED.
Follow the
WIRED ones on
Twitter, starting
with @WIRED.
Stay on top
of our latest
posts on Google+
at google
.com/+wIRED.
Stuf we love
from around the
Internetz, at
WIRED.tumblr.com.
WIRED people,
places, and things
on our Instagram
feed, WIRED.
Six-second
videos of the
WIRED world.
Follow
WIRED on Vine.
Subscribe
to our YouTube
channel at
youtube.com/
WIRED.
DOWNLOAD
Get the digital
edition of WIRED for
your tablet at
bit.ly/tabletWIRED.
for a long life: smile, don’t
smoke, have kids, wear comfy
shoes, drink a glass of wine.
TABLET
RULES TO LIVE
LONGER BY
DOCTORTOTHE
STARS DAVID AGUS
PAGE THINKS
WE’LL ENJOY
LONGER LIVES IF
WE FOLLOW HIS
GUIDELINES.
GET THE DIGITAL
EDITION OF
WIRED TO SEE HIM
EXPLAIN HOW.

30% data sourced from HostCabi.net, as of 10/25/13. IBM, ibm.com, Let’s Build a Smarter Planet, Smarter Planet and their logos are trademarks of IBM Corp., registered in many
jurisdictions worldwide. See current list at ibm.com/trademark. SoftLayer is a registered trademark of SoftLayer Technologies, Inc. ©International Business Machines Corp. 2013.
IBM Cloud hosts 30%
more top websites than
anyone in the world.
IBM Cloud hosts more of the most-highly
trafﬁcked websites than Amazon and every
other cloud provider. And our SoftLayer
bare metal options allow cloud clients to run
their most demanding apps on dedicated
servers—without unwanted interference from
their virtual neighbors. ibm.com/getstarted
This is Cloud on a Smarter Planet.

DESIGN DIRECTOR
Cláudia de Almeida @claudiadraws
MANAGING ART DIRECTOR
Victor Krummenacher
@krummenacher
SENIOR ART DIRECTOR
Eric Capossela @ecapossela
ART DIRECTOR Josef Reyes
ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTORS
Allie Fisher, T. A. Gruneisen
SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR
Anna Goldwater Alexander
@annagoldwater
PRODUCTION DIRECTOR
Ron Licata @ron_licata
PRODUCTION MANAGER Ryan Meith
INFORMATION SYSTEMS & TECHNOLOGY
Chris Becker, Josh Strom @jadedfox
FACILITIES Joel Gordon
KP Ron Ferrato, Art Guiling
CONTRIBUTORS
DESIGN Ben Chirlin,
Robin Ann McIntosh,
Ross Patton, Michael Salvador,
Kelley Zerga
PHOTO Jacqueline Bates,
Rosey Lakos, Paloma Shutes,
Josh Valcarcel, Ariel Zambelich
PRODUCTION Myrna Chiu,
Theresa Thadani
VIDEO Alexa Inkeles @alexainkeles
Nurie Mohamed
PRODUCERS
Samantha Oltman @samoltman
Matt Simon @mrmattsimon
FEATURES EDITOR
Mark Robinson @markrobsf
ARTICLES EDITOR
Adam Rogers @jetjocko
NEW YORK EDITOR
Joe Brown@joemfrown
NEWS EDITOR Chuck Squatriglia
INVESTIGATIONS EDITOR
Kevin Poulsen @kpoulsen
SENIOR EDITORS
Michael Calore @snackﬁght
Sonal Chokshi @smc90
Jon J. Eilenberg (Digital
Editions) @jjeilenberg
Sarah Fallon @sarahfallon
Laura Hudson @laura_hudson
Clif Kuang (Design) @clifuang
Betsy Mason @betsymason
Cade Metz
Susan Murcko @susanmurcko
Joanna Pearlstein
(Research) @jopearl
Caitlin Roper @caitlinroper
Peter Rubin @provenself
Bill Wasik @billwasik
SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Bryan Gardiner
EDITORSKeith Axline @kaxline
Damon Lavrinc @damonlavrinc
SENIOR STAFF WRITER
Steven Levy @stevenlevy
SENIOR WRITERS
Mat Honan @mat, David Kravets,
Robert McMillan @bobmcmillan
Greg Miller @dosmonos
Ryan Tate,
Kim Zetter @kimzetter
STAFF WRITER Marcus Wohlsen
@marcuswohlsen
CONTRIBUTORS
EDITOR Chris Kohler @kobunheat
WRITERS Roberto Baldwin @strngwys
Christina Bonnington @redgirlsays
Alexandra Chang @alexandra_chang
Nadia Drake @slugnads
Brandon Keim, Adam Mann,
Angela Watercutter @waterslicer
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Mary H. K. Choi, Anil Dash,
Joshua Davis, Jason Fagone,
Charles Graeber, Jef Howe,
Brendan I. Koerner,
Lone Shark Games, Daniel H. Pink,
Brian Raftery, Evan Ratlif,
Spencer Reiss, Clive Thompson,
Fred Vogelstein,
Gary Wolf, David Wolman
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Rhett Allain, Samuel Arbesman,
David Axe, Andy Baio,
Keith Barry, Deborah Blum,
Beth Carter, David Dobbs,
Rachel Edidin, Erik Klemetti,
Jefrey Marlow, Maryn McKenna,
Graeme McMillan, Doug Newcomb,
Quinn Norton, Jason Paur,
Ryan Rigney, Lore Sjöberg,
Philippe Starck, Jason Turbow,
Kristian von Bengston
CORRESPONDENTS
Erin Biba, Paul Boutin,
Stewart Brand, Mark Frauenfelder,
Lucas Graves, Chris Hardwick,
Steven Johnson, Jonathon Keats,
Brian Lam, Steven Leckart,
Bob Parks, Frank Rose,
Steve Silberman
EDITORIAL FELLOWS
Biz Carson @bizcarson
Julia Greenberg @julia_greenberg
Kif Leswing @kiﬂeswing
Ashik Siddique @ahsheek
CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS
James Day, Christopher Grifth,
Brent Humphreys, Platon,
Joe Pugliese, Moises Saman,
Art Streiber, Dan Winters
CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS
Brown Bird Design, Tavis Coburn,
Carl de Torres, Gluekit, Lamosca,
L-Dopa, Mario Hugo, Erin Jang,
Zohar Lazar, Jason Lee,
Christoph Niemann, John Ritter,
James Victore, Ben Wiseman
PUBLIC RELATIONS DIRECTORRachel Millner @rachelmillner
SENIOR MAKER Chris Anderson
SENIOR MAVERICK Kevin Kelly
FOUNDING EDITOR Louis Rossetto
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Thomas J. Wallace
Jason Tanz @jasontanz
EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Jacob Young @jake65
MANAGING EDITOR
Mark McClusky @markmcc
EDITOR, WIRED.COM
Robert Capps @robcapps
DEPUTY EDITOR
We asked:
“What’s your
most meaningful
article of
clothing or
accessory?”
DEPUTY CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Billy Sorrentino @billysorrentino
DESIGN DEVELOPMENT EDITOR
Margaret Swart @meswart
PHOTO DIRECTOR
Jim Merithew @tinyblackbox
DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Hayley Nelson @hayley_nelson
DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING
Stefan Antonowicz @gadhra
COMMUNITY DIRECTOR
Eric Steuer @ericsteuer
WEB PRODUCER
Nicole Wilke
COPY CHIEF Jennifer Prior @jhprior
COPY EDITORS
Brian Dustrud @dustrud
Holly Haynes
ASSOCIATE RESEARCH EDITOR
Cameron Bird @seaaabirddd
ASSISTANT RESEARCH EDITORS
Katie M. Palmer @katiempalmer
Victoria Tang
DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR
Erica Jewell
EDITORIAL OPERATIONS MANAGER
Jay Dayrit @jaydayhey
EDITORIAL BUSINESS ASSOCIATE
Katelyn Davies
ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR IN CHIEF
Cory Perkins
ENGINEERS Adam Hemphill,
Pawan Mittal, Kathleen Vignos
COMMUNITY
Daniela Hernandez @danielaphd
CONTRIBUTORS
COPY Lee Simmons
RESEARCH
Elise Craig @e_craig
Jordan Crucchiola @jorcru
Jason Kehe @jkehe
Timothy Lesle @telesle
Bryan Lufkin @bryan_lufin
Terrence Russell
Scott Dadich @sdadich
EDITOR IN CHIEF
my paternal grandfather’s
cordovan wingtips. Walking a
mile in another man’s shoes
never looked so good.
my great-grandmother’s gold chain
necklace. it has a charm with pictures
of my great-aunt and great-uncle.
My jean jacket, all the way tt
from eighth grade. Worth
wearing despite perpetually
cold elbows.
flat black boots! Can’t
live without them.
An antique muumuu from
Africa, where my Indian
mother was born. It’s actually
hers, but I, er, borrowed it.
My grandfather’s suit (which
I had tailored to fit—wish he
hadn’t smoked for 50 years).

Nest Protect: Smoke + Carbon Monoxide
™
It sends a message to your phone if there’s a problem at home.
Amazon Apple Store Best Buy Home Depot nest.com
Your smoke alarm should know where to reach you.

TO SUBSCRIBE OR ORDER BACK ISSUES
EMAIL [email protected] CALL (800) so wirioinside the US, +1 515 243 3273 outside the US
MAILwirio, PO Box 37706, Boone, IA 50037-0706. Foreign subscriptions payable by credit card, postal money order in US dollars, or check drawn on a US
bank. SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMER SERVICE www.wired.com
REUSE PERMISSIONS [email protected] (800) 897 8666 REPRINTS [email protected] or (800) 501 9571, ext. 100 ADDRESS wirio, 520 Third
Street, Ste. 305, San Francisco, CA 94107-1815 PHONE (415) 276 5000 [email protected] (letters); [email protected] (pitches) Copyright ©2014 by Condé
Nast. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is prohibited. wirio (ISSN 1059-1028) is a publication of Condé Nast, a subsidiary of Advance
Publications Inc. PRINTED IN THE USA. ABC Audited
Howard S. Mittman
VICE PRESIDENT & PUBLISHER
Keith A. Grossman
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER
Maya Draisin
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER, MARKETING
Patrick LaVergne
DESIGN DIRECTOR
Tracy A. Loughlin
SENIOR DIRECTOR
EVENTS & SPECIAL PROJECTS
Stefanie Rapp
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,
INTEGRATED SALES
Camille Signorelli
EXECUTIVE BRAND DIRECTOR
Rory Stanton
DIRECTOR, FINANCE
& BUSINESS OPERATIONS
SENIOR DIRECTOR, MEDIA INNOVATIONS
Christopher Bower
SENIOR DIRECTOR, FINANCE & BRANDING
Ted Smith
ACCOUNT DIRECTORS
Christine Kaußman,
Lindsay Nickens
ACCOUNT MANAGERS
Tim Begley
Amanda Romano
DETROIT DIRECTOR
Stephanie Clement
LOS ANGELES DIRECTOR
Elizabeth M. Murphy
LOS ANGELES SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER
Alissa Heideman
MIDWEST ACCOUNT DIRECTOR
Beth DeVillez
MIDWEST ACCOUNT MANAGER
Lindsay Clark
SOUTHEAST DIRECTOR
Dave Hady
SOUTHWEST REPRESENTATIVE
Julian R. Lowin
NORTHWEST SENIOR MANAGER
Kristen Hayashi
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT/
CHIEF INTEGRATION OFFICER Drew Schutte
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, OPERATIONS & STRATEGIC SOURCING David Orlin
MANAGING DIRECTOR, REAL ESTATE Robert Bennis
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT/CORPORATE CONTROLLER David B. Chemidlin
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, MARKET RESEARCH Scott McDonald
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, FINANCE Jennifer Graham
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Julie Michalowski
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, EDITORIAL OPERATIONS Rick Levine
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, HUMAN RESOURCES JoAnn Murray
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY Nick Rockwell
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS Patricia Röckenwagner
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, EDITORIAL ASSETS & RIGHTS Edward Klaris
VICE PRESIDENT, CN LICENSING John Kulhawik
VICE PRESIDENT, MANUFACTURING Gena Kelly
VICE PRESIDENT, STRATEGIC SOURCING Tony Turner
VICE PRESIDENT, PLANNING & STRATEGY Shen-Hsin Hung
VICE PRESIDENT, DIGITAL PLATFORMS Hal Danziger
VICE PRESIDENT, DIGITAL PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT Chris Jones
VICE PRESIDENT, HUMAN RESOURCES Paul E. Wolfe
VICE PRESIDENT, HUMAN RESOURCES Nicole Zussman
VICE PRESIDENT, SPECIAL PROJECTS Patty Newburger
VICE PRESIDENT, DIGITAL OPERATIONS & MONETIZATION Christopher Guenther
VICE PRESIDENT, CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS Joseph Libonati
CONDÉ NAST MEDIA GROUP
VICE PRESIDENT, CORPORATE PARTNERSHIPS Josh Stinchcomb
VICE PRESIDENT, INSIGHT & BRAND STRATEGY Daniella Wells
VICE PRESIDENT, MARKETING SOLUTIONS Padraig Connolly
VICE PRESIDENT, FINANCE Judy Saﬁr
CONDÉ NAST CONSUMER MARKETING EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT Monica Ray
VICE PRESIDENT, CONSUMER MARKETING Gary Foodim
VICE PRESIDENT, PLANNING & OPERATIONS Matthew Hoßmeyer
VICE PRESIDENT, CONSUMER MARKETING PROMOTIONGina Simmons
VICE PRESIDENT, MARKETING ANALYTICS Christopher Reynolds
CONDÉ NAST ENTERTAINMENT PRESIDENT Dawn Ostroß
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT/CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Sahar Elhabashi
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, MOTION PICTURES Jeremy Steckler
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, PROGRAMMING & CONTENT STRATEGY,
DIGITAL CHANNELS Michael Klein
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT/CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER Fred Santarpia
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT & STRATEGY Whitney Howard
VICE PRESIDENT, DIGITAL VIDEO OPERATIONS Larry Baach
VICE PRESIDENT, TECHNOLOGY Marvin Li
VICE PRESIDENT, REVENUE OPERATIONS Jason Baird
VICE PRESIDENT, MARKETING Mei Lee
VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCTION Jed Weintrob
VICE PRESIDENT, SCRIPTED TV Gina Marcheschi
VICE PRESIDENT, BRANDED CONTENT & SALES MARKETING Anissa E. Frey
NORTHWEST MANAGER
Kara L. Wardley
PREMIUM MARKET MANAGER
Alyson Grobeck
EXCHANGE ACCOUNT MANAGER
Tracy Eisenman
UK, IRELAND, NETHERLANDS &
SWITZERLAND REPRESENTATIVE
David Simpson
FRANCE, GERMANY, SPAIN
& PORTUGAL REPRESENTATIVE
Laurent Bouaziz
ITALY REPRESENTATIVE
Elena De Giuli
ASIA REPRESENTATIVE
Matthew Farrar
ASSISTANT GENERAL MANAGER,
ADVERTISING
Susi Park
SENIOR DIGITAL PLANNER
Robbie Sauerberg
DIGITAL PLANNERS
Lauren M. Burkey,
Charlotte Raimondi, Ed Sumner,
Colin J. Weber
INTEGRATED
MARKETING DIRECTOR
Michelle Meehan
SENIOR INTEGRATED
MARKETING MANAGERS
Michael Assenza, Christopher Cona,
Catherine Fish, Katherine Kirkland,
Francesca Trumni
MARKETING DIRECTOR
Monika Bondy
SENIOR MARKETING MANAGER
Caitlin Rauch
ASSOCIATE MARKETING MANAGER
Cassandra Bradley
MARKETING COORDINATOR
Meagan Jordan
ART DIRECTOR
Florence Pak
ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR
Mark Majdanski
SENIOR DESIGNER
Parker Bowab
MULTIMEDIA DESIGNER
Jessica Sander
SENIOR PRODUCER,
MARKETING SOLUTIONS
Matthew Stevenson
EVENTS DIRECTOR
Amy Sokoloß
ASSOCIATE PROMOTIONS MANAGER
Kelsey Taylor
PROMOTIONS ASSOCIATE
Michelle Luis
BUSINESS MANAGER
Aubelia Oesman
BUSINESS ANALYST
Janelle Teng
ASSOCIATE TO THE PUBLISHER
Caitlin Tierney
ADVERTISING SALES ASSOCIATES
Saiba Arain, Patrick Brennan,
Sarah M. Bergeron, Nikki Korch,
Kathryn McNally,
Martin Navarrete, Greg Pruett,
Adrienne Steinbaum,
Lilly Stitt, Ashley Tabroß
PUBLISHED BY CONDÉ NAST
CHAIRMAN S. I. Newhouse, Jr.
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Charles H. Townsend
PRESIDENT Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr.
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER/CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER John W. Bellando
PRESIDENT, CONDÉ NAST MEDIA GROUP & CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER Louis Cona
CHIEF ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER Jill Bright
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER Joe Simon
FOR ADVERTISING OPPORTUNITIES, PLEASE CALL (212) 286 3868.
FOR IDEAS, EVENTS, AND PROMOTIONS, FOLLOW @WIREDINSIDER OR VISIT WIREDINSIDER.COM.
Andrew Maiorana
GENERAL MANAGER,
ADVERTISING
We asked:
“What’s your
most meaningful
article of
clothing or
accessory?”
a pair of 12-year-old ohio
state basketball shorts
help me sleep and play tough
defense in my dreams.
Wool socks hand-knitted
by my Grandma. Grandma, if
you’re reading this, can you
send me another pair?
My Wwi watch—1915, with a shrap-
nel guard and original strap.
My mom’s I.D. bracelet
from the late 1960s.
A necklace with my son’s first
initial. It’s in Courier font.

2014 CLA250 shown in Polar Silver metallic paint with optional equipment. MSRP for a 2014 CLA250 excludes all options, taxes, title, registration, transportation charge and dealer prep. Options, model availability
and actual dealer price may vary. ©2014 Mercedes-Benz USA, LLC For more information, call 1-800-FOR-MERCEDES, or visit MBUSA.com.
The car of your dreams is now the car of your reality. Introducing the unique Mercedes-Benz CLA.
An uncompromising 4-door coupe that elevates pulses, drops jaws and causes double takes wherever
it goes. Its muscular, seductive look is only trumped by its incredible price. Starting at just $29,900,
the breakthrough CLA challenges you to rethink everything.
Set your soul free.
The all -new CLA. Starting at
$
29,900.

JAN 2014 0 1 9
“You could have at least
called Noyola Bueno
the next Einstein or the
next Stephen Hawking—
a little less lazy.”
Jules Styles, via email
RE:WIRED
STUDENTS AREN’T MACHINES,
so why does school often feel
like a factory? In November’s
“Free Thinkers,” contributing
editor Joshua Davis argued that
it’s time to do away with the
industrial paradigm of educa-
tion—and many instructors are
already ditching the top-down
model. In Mexico, for instance,
a ﬁfth-grade teacher let his
students take charge. By year’s
end, one of those kids—Paloma
Noyola Bueno—emerged as the
top-scoring math student in the
country. On the cover, we likened
her to a well-known brainiac,
and Paloma told Univision she
was “happy for the comparison.”
Meanwhile, her story has
captured the world’s attention.
RE: “WHERE THERE’S SMOKE” (ISSUE 21.11)
“I have a two-story, four-bedroom
home. Code requires hardwired
smoke detectors on each ﬂoor,
including the basement, plus one in
each bedroom. That’s over
$900 for seven Nest detectors.
If I add the thermostat, I’m
pushing $1,200. It’s a killer idea at
maybe half the cost, but at that
price it’s a nonstarter for me.”
Salguod, on WIRED.com
RE: “FREE THINKERS” (ISSUE 21.11}
RE: “FREE THINKERS” (ISSUE 21.11)
“HOMESCHOOLERS HAVE BEEN USING
THESE TECHNIQUES FOR DECADES, ESPECIALLY
AN APPROACH CALLED UNSC
QQ
HOOLING.”
Jeanne Faulconer, on WIRED.com
“Good for Paloma on
being regarded as
a bright and rising star.
But she could have
been a kid in India, China,
Bolivia, or Nigeria. She
represents geniuses
in developing countries
who will remain undis-
covered if teachers
do nothing to uncover
their true potential.”
Carlos G. Solano, on WIRED.com
TEACH DIFFERENT
RE: “FOSSIL WATCH”
(ALPHA, ISSUE 21.11)
“It’s a thrilling pros-
pect that, thanks
to 3-D printing,
museums and collec-
tors alike may soon
wield the power
to develop skeletons
in-house, no molds
necessary. My inner
child giddily envi-
sions a front lawn
inhabited by herds
of dinosaurs.”
Erik Bahnson, via email

0 2 0 JAN 2014
RE: “BETTER CALL BOB”
(ISSUE 21.11)
“TL;DR BOB
ODENKIRK IS
AMAZING.”
Audrey Tolbert (@atolbs),
on Twitter
RE: “RIDLEY SCOTT’S USUAL SUSPECTS” (ULTRA, ISSUE 21.11)
“YOU OMITTED THE FILMMAKER’S MOST
COMMON SIGNATURE VISUAL: HIS LOVE OF
BALD, POWDERY RR WHITE MEN IN ROBES.”
Paul Orlemanski, via email
RE:WI : RED
[email protected]
RE: “SPOOKED” (ALPHA, ISSUE 21.11)
“Thus far there are no Darknet solutions that can
defy the NSA indeﬁnitely. The only way to rein in spying
is for citizens to decide that the agency has gone
too far and punish politicians who protect its game.”
UrgeIt, on WIRED.com
RE: “ORSON SCOTT
CARD SPEAKS”
(ULTRA, ISSUE 21.11)
“It always really confused
me how Card could be so
against gay people when
he wrote a book called
Xenocide. Especially since
a lot of that book had to
do with dealing with dif-
ferences and giving rights
to those you once thought
didn’t need them.”
Cayla Sigrah,
on Facebook
RE: “THE END OF
UNPLUGGING”
(GADGET LAB,
ISSUE 21.11)
“People don’t
feel that
the world will
collapse if they
leave behind
their phones.
People feel
the world will
go on without
them and
leave them
behind—it’s
insecurity, not
arrogance.”
Sarah Mullin, on
Facebook
UNDO The name of the company employing Ryan Blanck is Hanger, not
Hangar (“The Next Step,” Alpha, issue 21.11).
RE: “ALL THE DATA YOU CAN EAT”
(ISSUE 21.11)
“JUST IN TIME
FOR BRUNCH, AN
INFOGRAPHIC
EMPLOYING MATH
TO PROVE BACON
IS INDEEDA
MIRACLE FOOD.”
Dean Peters, on Google+
RE: “THE WORST DAY
IN THE LIFE OF THE
BOSTON BOMB SQUAD”
(ISSUE 21.11)
“Hollywood tries to make
every moment exciting,
when in reality a lot of
work on an improvised
explosive device is bor-
ing. We’re very methodi-
cal, and there are many
long minutes waiting for
the robot to do its job.
So it’s that old saying
about war: stretches of
boredom broken up by
seconds of sheer terror.”
Writer (and former bomb
technician) Brian Castner,
during a Reddit AMA
RE: “ALL THE DATA YOU
CAN EAT” (ISSUE 21.11)
“Serious cooking
doesn’t center
around recipes
but technique.
What separates
Alton Brown
from many TV
chefs is that he
tries to explain
the chemistry
and physics of
his cooking pro-
cesses. That’s a
lot more useful
and entertaining
than the usual
recipe collec-
tions, which are
always a matter
of taste.”
Guest, on WIRED.com

H
B
O

G
O
®
i
s

o
n
l
y

a
c
c
e
s
s
i
b
l
e

i
n

t
h
e

U
S

a
n
d

c
e
r
t
a
i
n

U
S

t
e
r
r
i
t
o
r
i
e
s
.

©
2
0
1
3

H
o
m
e

B
o
x

O
f
f
i
c
e
,

I
n
c
.

A
l
l

r
i
g
h
t
s

r
e
s
e
r
v
e
d
.

H
B
O
®

a
n
d

r
e
l
a
t
e
d

c
h
a
n
n
e
l
s

a
n
d

s
e
r
v
i
c
e

m
a
r
k
s

a
r
e

t
h
e

p
r
o
p
e
r
t
y

o
f

H
o
m
e

B
o
x

O
f
f
i
c
e
,

I
n
c
.
SM

TODD TANKERSLEY
RELEASENOTES
0 2 2 JAN 2014
Cover Models
To depict the almost-here future of
wearable gadgets (“You Will Wear It,”
page 90) on the cover, we turned to
industrial design ﬁrm Branch. “Google
Glass is phenomenal, but when you
put everything into one object, it
can feel convoluted,” Branch’s Josh
Morenstein says. He and cofounder
Nick Cronan envisioned their own sys-
tem: a two-part setup that seamlessly
integrates a watch and glasses.
The watch
face could
show a
carousel
of icons
that users
scroll
through,
as if the
display
encircled
their wrist.

earth similarity index y
0.5 1.00
–90
90 60 30 0 –30 –60
–90
–60
00
02
04
06
08
10
12
14
16
18
20
22
24
00
02
04
06
08
10
12
14
16
18
20
Kepler-22 b Kepler-61 b
HD 40307 g*
Kepler-62 e Kepler-62 f
Gliese 581 g* Gliese 581 d
Gliese 667C c Gliese 667C f Gliese 667C e
Gliese 163 c
Tau Ceti e*
Two decades ago, astronomers weren’t sure if any
planets existed outside of our own solar system.
Now they’ve identiﬁed more than 1,000 all over
the galaxy. But in order to support liquid water and
therefore life as we know it, a planet must be small
enough, rocky, have an atmosphere that’s dense
but not crushing, and sit just the right distance
from its star: Too close and water would evapo-
rate, too far and it would be a frozen wasteland.
So of the 1,000 known exoplanets, just 12 might
boast the Goldilocks-like conditions necessary
for aliens, says astronomer Abel Méndez of the
Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the Univer-
sity of Puerto Rico. But how likely is that? Méndez
used size and orbital distance to calculate an Earth
Similarity Index for each. The closer the planet is
to 1.0, the better the chance of ET. —
DISTANT PLANETS THAT
ARE CLOSE TO HOME
At least two of
Gliese 667C’s rocky
planets probably
have tight, tidally
locked orbits. That
means a scorching
side and a freezing
side—not to men-
tion no night or
day. Still, with heat-
distributing oceans
and atmospheres,
life just might stand
a chance.
Kepler-22 b likely
has a thick, heat-
trapping atmo-
sphere that could
prevent life as
we know it. But
how about life
as we don’t know
it? Astrobiolo-
gists are work-
ing on ﬁguring out
where extraterres-
trial extremophiles
might thrive.
A mere 12 light-years away, Tau Ceti e
is so close that astronomers could
analyze its atmosphere for biosigna-
ture gases in 10 to 20 years. But if its
large size correlates to a superdense
atmosphere, it could be a hothouse
more like Venus than Earth.
It’s a fine line between a super-
Earth and a mini-Neptune. Astrono-
mers are still debating whether
HD 40307 g is rocky or gaseous,
based on how big it is.
Gliese 581 g is only slightly bigger than
Earth and sits smack dab in the mid-
dle of its sun’s habitable zone. There’s
just one catch—it might not exist.
size of earth =
S
O
U
R
C
E
:

J
I
M

C
O
R
N
M
E
L
L
N
onformative + tobias nusser
h
o
r
i
z
o
n

l
i
n
e

emirates.com/us
“Airline of the Year” 2013 Skytrax World Airline Awards
Fly in comfort
to somewhere outside
your comfort zone
Visiting somewhere new isn’t just a vacation, it’s an adventure.
Experience your trip of a lifetime with Skytrax Airline of the Year.
Enjoy globally inspired cuisine, up to 1600 channels of infight
entertainment, and relax on your lie-fat seat in business class.
Now fying to over 135 destinations worldwide, with 31 destinations in Asia.
Join Emirates Skywards to earn Miles that you can also redeem for reward travel on our partner airline Virgin America.

027
By felix salmon
illustration by LAMOSCA
jan 2014 argument
NUMBED BY NUMBERS
WHY QUANTS DON’T
KNOW EVERYTHING
BY NOW, nearly everyone from the president of the United States on
down has admitted that the National Security Agency went too far.
Documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the rogue NSA contractor
who has since gained asylum in Russia, paint a picture of an organi-
zation with access to seemingly every word typed or spoken on any
electronic device, anywhere in the world. And when news of the NSA’s
reach became public—as it was surely bound to do at some point—the
entire US intelligence apparatus was thrust into what The New York
Times recently called a “crisis of purpose and legitimacy.” ¶ It was
a crisis many years in the making. Over the course of three decades,
the NSA slowly transformed itself from the nation’s junior spy
agency to the centerpiece of the entire intelligence system. As the

amount of data in the world doubled,
and doubled again, and again, the NSA
kept up with it—even as America’s
human intelligence capability, as typi-
ﬁed by old-fashioned CIA spies in the
field, struggled to do anything use-
ful with the unprecedented quanti-
ties of signals intelligence they had
access to. Trained agency linguists
capable of parsing massive quantities
of Arabic- and Farsi-language inter-
cepts don’t scale up nearly as easily
as data centers do.
That, however, wasn’t the computer
geeks’ problem. Once it was clear
that the NSA could do something, it
seemed inarguable that the agency
should do it—even after the bounds
of information overload (billions of
records added to bulging databases
every day) or basic decency (spying
on allied heads of state, for example)
had long since been surpassed. The
value of every marginal gigabyte of
high tech signals intelligence was,
at least in theory, quantifiable. The
downside—the inability to prioritize
essential intelligence and act on it;
the damage to America’s democratic
legitimacy—was not. As a result, dur-
ing the past couple of decades spycraft
went from being a pursuit driven by
human judgment calls to one driven
by technical capability.
This shift in US intelligence mirrors
a deﬁnite pattern of the past 30 years,
one that we can see across ﬁelds and
institutions. It’s the rise of the quants—
that is, the ascent to power of people
whose native tongue is numbers and
algorithms and systems rather than
personal relationships or human intu-
ition. Michael Lewis’ Moneyball viv-
idly recounts how the quants took
over baseball, as statistical analysis
trumped traditional scouting and pro-
pelled the underfunded Oakland A’s
to a division-winning 2002 season.
More recently we’ve seen the rise of the
quants in politics. Commentators who
“trusted their gut” about Mitt Rom-
ney’s chances had their gut kicked by
Nate Silver, the stats whiz who called
the election days beforehand as a lock
for Obama, down to the very last elec-
toral vote in the very last state.
The reason the quants win is that
they’re almost always right—at least
at ﬁrst. They ﬁnd numerical patterns
or invent ingenious algorithms that
increase proﬁts or solve problems in
ways that no amount of subjective
experience can match. But what hap-
pensafter the quants win is not always
the data-driven paradise that they and
their boosters expected. The more a
ﬁeld is run by a system, the more that
system creates incentives for everyone
(employees, customers, competitors)
to change their behavior in perverse
ways—providing more of whatever
the system is designed to measure and
produce, whether that actually creates
any value or not. It’s a problem that
can’t be solved until the quants learn
a little bit from the old-fashioned ways
of thinking they’ve displaced.
NO MATTER THE discipline or industry,
the rise of the quants tends to happen
in four stages. Stage one is what you
might call pre-disruption, and it’s
generally best visible in hindsight.
Think about quaint dating agencies
in the days before the arrival of Match
.com and all the other algorithm-
powered online replacements. Or
think about retail in the era before
floor-space management analytics
helped quantify exactly which goods
ought to go where. For a live exam-
ple, consider Hollywood, which, for
all the money it spends on market
research, is still run by a small group
of lavishly compensated studio execu-
tives, all of whom are well aware that
the ﬁrst rule of Hollywood, as mem-
orably summed up by screenwriter
William Goldman, is “Nobody knows
anything.” On its face, Hollywood is
ripe for quantiﬁcation—there’s a huge
amount of data to be mined, consid-
ering that every movie and TV show
can be classiﬁed along hundreds of
different axes, from stars to genre
to running time, and they can all be
correlated to box-ofce receipts and
other measures of proﬁtability.
Next comes stage two, disruption. In
most industries, the rise of the quants is
a recent phenomenon, but in the world
of ﬁnance it began back in the 1980s.
The unmistakable sign of this change
was hard to miss: the point at which you
started getting targeted and personal-
ized ofers for credit cards and other
ﬁnancial services based not on the rela-
tionship you had with your local bank
manager but on what the bank’s algo-
rithms deduced about your ﬁnances and
creditworthiness. Pretty soon, when
you went into a branch to inquire about
a loan, all they could do was punch num-
bers into a computer and then give you
the computer’s answer.
For a present-day example of dis-
ruption, think about politics.
In the 2012 election, Obama’s D
A
V
E

K
A
U
P
/
G
E
T
T
Y

I
M
A
G
E
S
FELIX SALMON (@felixsalmon) is
the ﬁnance blogger for Reuters. He
wrote about the problem with tech
IPOs in issue 20.04.
Oakland,
2002—when
data geeks
moneyballed
the national
pastime.
jan 2014 alpha 028 argument
COMMENTATORS WHO “TRUSTED
THEIR GUT” ABOUT MITT ROMNEY
HAD THEIR GUT KICKED BY NATE
SILVER, THE STATS WHIZ WHO
CALLED THE ELECTION FOR OBAMA.

BUI LT
FRE E
Jeep i s a r egi st er ed t r ademar k of Chr ysl er Gr oup LLC.

I NTRODUCI NG THE ALL- NEW 2014 CHEROKEE
R I GHT HE R E , T HE NE W S TA NDA R D OF I T S C L A S S E ME R GE S F E AT UR I NG A B OL D
E XTERI OR DESI GN WI TH THE SMOOTH RI DE AND UP TO 31 MPG HWY DELI VERED BY I TS
CL ASS- E XCL USI VE NI NE- SPE E D T RANSMI SSI ON. WI T H AVAI L ABL E NAPPA L E AT HE R-
T RI MME D I NT E RI OR I NSPI RE D BY NAT UR AL HUE S F ROM AROUND T HE WORL D, BE ST- I N-
CL ASS 4X4 CAPABI L I T Y AND 8. 4" T OUCH SCRE E N COMMAND CE NT E R, T HE 201 4 JE E P
CHE ROKE E I S RE ADY F OR ANY J OURNE Y T HAT YOU’ RE RE ADY T O BE GI N.
JEEP. COM/CHEROKEE
2. 4L I 4 FWD Model s: EPA est . 22 ci t y/31 hwy MPG. Act ual mi l eage may var y. Jeep “Mi d- Si ze SUV” sub- segment at i on based on
13MY cr oss- shop act i vi t y. Excl udes vehi cl es wi t h t hi r d- r ow seat i ng. Jeep i s a r egi st er ed t r ademar k of Chr ysl er Gr oup LLC.

SEE THE
WORLD,
ONE HORI ZON AT A TI ME

old-fashioned campaign opera-
tives didn’t disappear. But they
gave money and freedom to a core
group of technologists in Chi-
cago—including Harper Reed,
former CTO of the Chicago-based
online retailer Threadless—and
allowed them to make huge deci-
sions about fund-raising and
voter targeting. Whereas ear-
lier campaigns had tried to tar-
get segments of the population
deﬁned by geography or demo-
graphic profile, Obama’s team
made the campaign granular
right down to the individual level.
So if a mom in Cedar Rapids was
on the fence about who to vote
for, or whether to vote at all, then
instead of buying yet another TV
ad, the Obama campaign would
message one of her Facebook
friends and try the much more
effective personal approach.
Most strikingly, the campaign
perfected the art of A/B testing—
the practice of testing alternate
versions—when it came to fund-
raising emails. Writing effec-
tive language for such appeals,
and designing them in the best
possible manner, has tradition-
ally been considered an art—but
all gut intuition was discarded
in favor of raw data about what
worked and what didn’t. One email
in June, headlined “I will be out-
spent,” raised $2.6 million on its
own, while projections based on
their testing indicated that other
emails would have raised less than
a ﬁfth of that. Everything was A/B
tested, from the background color
(yellow worked better than white
for some reason) to the greeting,
the subject line, and the size of
the request.
AFTER DI SRUPTI ON, though,
there comes at least some ver-
sion of stage three: overshoot.
The most common problem is
that all these new systems—
metrics, algorithms, automated
decisionmaking processes—result
in humans gaming the system in
rational but often unpredict-
able ways. Sociologist Donald T.
Campbell noted this dynamic back
in the ’70s, when he articulated
what’s come to be known as Camp-
bell’s law: “The more any quan-
titative social indicator is used
for social decision-making,” he
wrote, “the more subject it will
be to corruption pressures and
the more apt it will be to dis-
tort and corrupt the social pro-
cesses it is intended to monitor.”
On a managerial level, once the
quants come into an industry and
disrupt it, they often don’t know
when to stop. They tend not to have
decades of institutional knowl-
edge about the ﬁeld in which they
have found themselves. And once
they’re empowered, quants tend
to create systems that favor some-
thing pretty close to cheating. As
soon as managers pick a numer-
ical metric as a way to measure
whether they’re achieving their
desired outcome, everybody starts
maximizing that metric rather than
doing the rest of their job—just as
Campbell’s law predicts.
Policing is a good example, as
explained by Harvard sociologist
Peter Moskos in his book Cop in
the Hood: My Year Policing Balti-
more’s Eastern District. Most cops
have a pretty good idea of what
they should be doing, if their goal
is public safety: reducing crime,
locking up kingpins, confiscat-
ing drugs. It involves foot patrols,
deep investigations, and build-
ing good relations with the com-
munity. But under statistically
driven regimes, individual offi-
cers have almost no incentive to
actually do that stuff. Instead,
they’re all too often judged on
results—speciﬁcally, arrests. (Not
even convictions, just arrests: If
a suspect throws away his drugs
while ﬂeeing police, the police will
chase and arrest him just to get
ONCE QUANTS
DISRUPT AN
INDUSTRY, THEY
OFTEN DON’T
KNOW WHEN
TO STOP AND
THEY CREATE
SYSTEMS THAT
ENCOURAGE
CHEATING.
alpha 032 argument

the arrest, even when they know
there’s no chance of a conviction.)
The same goes for the rise of
“teaching to the test” in public
schools, or the perverse incen-
tives placed on snowplow opera-
tors, who, paid by the quantity of
snow cleared, might simply ignore
patches of lethal black ice. Even
with the 2012 Obama campaign,
it became hard to learn about the
candidate’s positions by visiting
his website, because it was so opti-
mized for maximizing donations—
an easy and obvious numerical
target—that all other functions
fell by the wayside.
The most profound example
of overshoot, of course, hap-
pened in ﬁnance, where the rise
of quantiﬁcation could concen-
trate decisionmaking—and mon-
eymaking—within a relatively
small group of people at a bank’s
headquarters. Soon they were
trying to optimize their algo-
rithms to maximize proﬁt, mini-
mize risk, and make millions of
dollars for themselves. Global
regulators didn’t help: In 2004,
in sympathy with the over-lev-
eraged, hyper-quantiﬁed banking
system, the Basel Committee—
the Switzerland-based body that
oversees world ﬁnance—put out
the Basel II accord, more than 250
pages of regulations that efec-
tively placed individual banks
in the driver’s seat. The accord
essentially embraced all of the
quantitative techniques used by
the wizards who would end up
blowing up Wall Street, and it
allowed banks to operate with
astonishingly high levels of debt.
As everybody knows, all of that
ended in catastrophe in 2008.
(You can read more about the par-
ticular math of that cataclysm in
my March 2009 cover story for
, “A Formula for Disaster.”)
IT’S INCREASINGLY CLEAR that
for smart organizations, living
by numbers alone simply won’t
work. That’s why they arrive at
stage four: synthesis—the prac-
tice of marrying quantitative
insights with old-fashioned sub-
jective experience. Nate Silver
himself has written thought-
fully about examples of this in his
book, The Signal and the Noise. He
cites baseball, which in the post-
Moneyball era adopted a “fusion
approach” that leans on both sta-
tistics and scouting. Silver cred-
its it with delivering the Boston
Red Sox’s ﬁrst World Series title
in 86 years. Or consider weather
forecasting: The National Weather
Service employs meteorologists
who, understanding the dynamics
of weather systems, can improve
forecasts by as much as 25 percent
compared with computers alone.
A similar synthesis holds in eco-
nomic forecasting: Adding human
judgment to statistical methods
makes results roughly 15 percent
more accurate. And it’s even true
in chess: While the best comput-
ers can now easily beat the best
humans, they can in turn be beaten
by humans aided by computers.
In ﬁnance too we’re starting to
see at least the outlines of a syn-
thesis. In September 2010, the
Basel Committee came out with
Basel III, and while it doesn’t fully
dismantle Basel II, it does add lay-
ers of common sense on top of all
the rocket science. As well as rais-
ing the required capital ratio, it
sets a leverage ratio (efectively
a maximum size that a bank can
grow to, given the amount of cap-
ital it has) and liquidity require-
ments that experienced bankers
know create a cushion for the
whole system. Essentially, while
the algorithms were given free
rein under Basel II, there’s a host
of overrides in Basel III that put
power back where it belongs, in
the hands of experienced regu-
lators. Basel III isn’t perfect, but
no international system of bank
regulation could ever hope to be.
In a few years’ time, if and when it
gets fully implemented, it’s going
to be a vast improvement on what
preceded it.
That’s what a good synthesis
of big data and human intuition
tends to look like. As long as the
humans are in control, and under-
stand what it is they’re control-
ling, we’re fine. It’s when they
become slaves to the numbers
that trouble breaks out. So let’s
celebrate the value of disrup-
tion by data—but let’s not for-
get that data isn’t everything.
jan 2014
FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE 4-HOUR WORKWEEK

JOHNNY APPLESEED has nothing on Akira Miyawaki: The
85-year-old Japanese environmental scientist has planted
more than 40 million trees in 15 countries. Now the ardent
arborist is using planned forests as a tidal-wave shield.
“After the earthquake in 2011, the tsunami destroyed hard
concrete barriers,” Miyawaki says of Japan’s then-safe-
guards, which covered at least 40 percent of the country’s
22,000 miles of coast. “On the other hand, coastal
Shinto shrines and temples survived, protected
by forests of native trees.” ¶ Miyawaki, director
of the Japanese Center for International Studies in
Ecology, is taking an all-natural approach to disas-
ter prevention: growing a Great Wall of Forest. He’s
using nontoxic debris from the 2011 quake to build
mounds for planting deep-rooting trees like Japanese vari-
eties of machilus, evergreen oak, and blue oak. In October,
Miyawaki and his team completed a forest in Minamisoma,
a city in Fukushima prefecture. But he wants to go beyond
Japan and persuade governments worldwide to plant tsunami-
buffering trees. The goal, he says, is for the protec-
tive forests to survive 9,000 years, into the next ice age.
Miyawaki’s
10-volume
survey of data
on Japanese
vegetation
weighs
80 pounds.
jan 2014 034
Photograph by Takashi Osato By Bryan Lufkin
Alpha GEEK

Cat
Air
Command
Right
here!
Almost
there.
This
way.
Searching…
Video
Memo
Photo
ADVERTISEMENT
Join Samsung GALAXY Note 3 and its crew of helpers on a journey using
three simple gestures—dot, circle, box. In this fantasy land, you’ll see how
the Samsung GALAXY Note 3 gives you the tools to build your own efﬁcient
world It’s as simple as dot, circle, box.
120 MAPLE AVENUE
EVERYTHING STARTS WITH A
DOT
THE SIMPLE JOY OF
DOT CIRCLE & BOX
ACTION MEMO
Air Command is the starting
point to summon Action
Memo. Use the S Pen to jot
notes and turn them into
actions: new contacts, calls,
emails, internet searches,
maps, and tasks.
S FINDER
Use the Samsung S Finder to
search your device —and if you
can’t remember what you’re
looking for you can even draw
it. Sift through videos, audio,
images, and memos using the
handy keyword search.
S FINDER
Use your S Pen to write down the
word Cat and the S Finder will scour
your device for the likes of pictures,
videos, memos and even drawings.
Hover anywhere,
make a dot with the
S Pen, and you can
use Air Command.
ACTION MEMO
Want to know how to get to the
Pet Store? Using Action Memo, jot
down the address and a map will
launch to show you the way.

To Read
Sum
m
er
Ski Trip
Circle it.
Move it.
Label it.
Ski Trip
Shopping
To Read
Summer
Ski Trip
Shopping
To Read
Summer
Summer
To Read
Ski Trip
Ski Trip
Shopping
Shopping
Ski Trip
S
h
o
p
p
in
g
Summer
DRAW A
CIRCLE
SCRAPBOOK
Curating personal content
can be cumbersome, but
Samsung’s Scrapbook keeps
what you save in one place.
Simply draw a circle around
content using the S Pen to
collect and store it for later.
Draw a circle around the content
that you want to keep to easily ﬁle
it away and come back to later.
Scrapbooker
ORGANIZE
IT IN YOUR
SCRAPBOOK
IN DIFFERENT
FOLDERS.
ADVERTISEMENT
DRAW A
CIRCLE
AROUND
YOUR
CONTENT.
1
MAKE
A NOTE
TO TAG.
2
3

MULTI WINDOW
Using more than one feature
at the same time can help you
get more done. With Samsung’s
Multi Window, you can multitask
quickly and move information
or drag content between
windows and applications.
PEN WINDOW
Windows hiding out of view
are the bane of productivity.
With the Samsung Pen
Window, you can pull up
feature by just drawing a box.
PEN WINDOW
If you’re ironing
out a major deal
from the slopes,
Pen Window lets
you open useful
applications in
tandem with old
ones to help you
make the most of
your time.
DRAG & DROP
Chatting with
Mike and want
to share skiing
pictures? No
problem: you can
transfer all sorts
of ﬁles swiftly and
easily using the
Multi Window
and its Drag and
Drop function.
BOX
Open several windows
at the same time. It’s the
future of of productivity.
NEW WAY OF MULTITASKING
QUICK CALL
Inbox
Ben Lewis
Great, Mark.
How are you?
Pull to
the left.
Hey Ben. How are
you doing?
GALAXY GEAR
SMART RELAY
Easily view messages, emails,
and receive calls on your Gear
with the touch of a button.
QUICK CALL
Never miss a call. You
can answer and make
calls from your wrist.
Navigate your way around
the Gear and see the
important things in your
life with a simple swipe up,
down, left, or right.
LIFE AT A GLANCE WITH THE
To learn more, visit www.samsung.com
ADVERTISEMENT
NOTIFICATIONS
SMART RELAY
NAVIGATION

VISIT US ONLINE AT WIREDINSIDER.COM + FOLLOW WIREDINSIDER ON TWITTER + LIKE WIREDINSIDER ON FACEBOOK
PROMOTIONS + SPECIAL OFFERS + EVENTS

SHOPPING FOR SPERM is a gamble. Clients can specify a donor’s race, height,
and GPA, but hundreds of diseases that lead to stillbirth, early death, or
lifelong illness are caused by genetic defects that only manifest when both
parents pass on a defective, recessive allele. Sperm banks screen for some
genetic conditions, of course, but not these rare ones, since the technology
is expensive. That’s about to change: The sperm donation service Manhat-
tan CryoBank has begun working with a startup called GenePeeks to look for
about 600 potentially dangerous recessives. GenePeeks relies on a technique
called exon sequencing that’s cheaper than sequencing the whole genome,
because it looks only at stretches of DNA that code for proteins, which are a
tiny fraction of the total. The company’s algorithms assess sperm donors and
potential new moms to predict how their two genomes might combine at fer-
tilization. Then GenePeeks can eliminate the riskiest donors from a client’s
set of options. So if she carries, say, the mutation for Zellweger syndrome,
and one of the donors does too, then (sorry) that Olympic athlete is oß the
table. GenePeeks cofounder Anne Morriss says she hopes eventually to oßer
the test to people planning to conceive the old-fashioned way: If Mom and
Dad are a risky match, they could turn to IVF and pre-implantation genetic
screening. Until then, though, they’ll just have to roll the dice. — srii siiixA
patrick hruby
C
H
R
I
S
T
I
A
N

N
O
R
T
H
E
A
S
T
jan 2014 040
MATCHMAKER
BETTER TESTING FOR
SPERM DONORS
terminator polymer
n. / 't r-m -
'
nā-t r 'pä-l -m r /
A plastic that spontaneously repairs
itself when torn. Named after
the self-healing T-1000 robot in
Terminator 2, terminator polymers
rebind and recover nearly all
their strength within hours, making
them potentially suitable for
things as diverse as artiﬁcial skin
grafts and car tires.
reliefography
n. / ri-
'
lēf-'ä-gr -fē /
Reproduction of artworks using
digital scanning and 3-D printers.
Developed by Fujiﬁlm, reliefography
produces near-perfect copies
of paintings like van Gogh’s Sunﬂow-
ers, down to the texture of each
brushstroke. The facsimiles, which
can sell for $30,000 apiece, are
being marketed in Asia.
EROs
n. pl. / 'ē 'är 'ōz /
Easily retrievable objects. A new
class of small asteroids that
can be nudged into a gravitationally
stable position to make studying
and mining them practicable.
Of the 10,000 asteroids previously
designated as NEOs (near-earth
objects), at least a dozen are EROs.
pay-per-gaze
adj. / 'pā-p r-'gāz /
Real-world advertising augmented
with gaze tracking. Google has
just patented pay-per-gaze
technology that runs on Glass,
monitoring which ads wearers look
at and gauging their emotional
response by measuring pupil
dilation—data that could be sold
to advertisers.
—JONATHON KEATS
[email protected]
JARGON
WATCH
babies
alpha
lexicon

D
A
V
I
D

L
E
V
E
N
E
/
G
U
A
R
D
I
A
N

N
E
W
S

&

M
E
D
I
A
L
T
D
2
0
1
3
.

I
L
L
U
S
T
L
U
K
E
S
H
U
M
A
N
VACATIONERS SEEKING midwinter sun don’t usually think
of Norway, where the sun is low even on the brightest
winter day. So the town of Rjukan, Norway, is turning to
an old trick to lure tourists—and like all the best tricks,
it’s done with mirrors. ¶ Rjukan sits in an east-west
valley, ﬂanked by mountains that block the sun from
September to March. So the town has mounted three
56-square-foot reﬂectors on a ridge nearly 1,500 feet
above; the mirrors track the sun and beam a 1,476-foot-
long ellipse of noontime daylight onto Rjukan’s market
square. ¶ Believe it or not, the concept for Solspeil, or
Sun Mirror, is a century old, from back when the town
ﬁrst sprang up to house hydropower plant workers.
The plant’s founder, Sam Eyde, read about the idea in
1913 and dreamt of building it. He believed that sunlight
would increase workers’ productivity. Modern Rjukan
residents are hoping for a business boom of a diferent
sort. “We want to show the world that we have managed
to take the sun down to our city,” says Øystein Harald
Haugan, Rjukan’s World Heritage coordinator. You’ve
got to hand it to them—Hawaii might give you a lei at
the airport, but hijacked sunshine? That’s hospitality.
jan 2014 042 illumination alpha
By sara Breselor
HERE COMES THE SUN
NORWAY’S NEW HOT SPOT

THE PARENT TRAP
HOW TEENS LOST THE
ABILITY TO SOCIALIZE
ARE TEENAGERS LOSING their social skills? Parents and pundits seem to think so.
Teens spend so much time online, we’re told, that they’re no longer able to handle
the messy, intimate task of hanging out face-to-face. “After school, my son is on
Facebook with his friends. If it isn’t online, it isn’t real to him,” one mother recently
told me in a panic. “Everything is virtual!” ¶ Now, I’m not convinced this trend
is real. I’ve read the evidence about the “narcissism epidemic” and the apparent
decline in empathy in young people, and while it’s intriguing, it’s provisional. Lots
of work ofers the opposite conclusion, such as Pew surveys ﬁnding that kids who
text the most also socialize the most in person. ¶ But for the sake of argument,
let’s agree that we have a crisis. Let’s agree that kids aren’t spending enough time
together mastering social skills. Who’s responsible? Has crafty Facebook, with
its casino-like structure of algorithmic nudging, hypnotized our youth? If kids
can’t socialize, who should parents blame? Simple: They should blame them-
selves. ¶ This is the argument advanced in It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of
Networked Teens, by Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd. Boyd—full disclosure,
a friend of mine—has spent a decade
interviewing hundreds of teens about
their online lives. What she has found,
over and over, is that teenagers would
love to socialize face-to-face with their
friends. But adult society won’t let
them. “Teens aren’t addicted to social
media. They’re addicted to each other,”
Boyd says. “They’re not allowed to
hang out the way you and I did, so
they’ve moved it online.”
It’s true. As a teenager in the early
’80s I could roam pretty widely with
my friends, as long as we were back by
dark. But over the next three decades,
the media began delivering a met-
ronomic diet of horrifying but rare
child-abduction stories, and parents
shortened the leash on their kids. Poli-
ticians warned of incipient waves of
youth wilding and superpredators
(neither of which emerged). Munici-
palities crafted anti-loitering laws and
curfews to keep young people from
congregating alone. New neighbor-
hoods had fewer public spaces. Crime
rates plummeted, but moral panic
soared. Meanwhile, increased com-
petition to get into college meant well-
of parents began heavily scheduling
their kids’ after-school lives.
The result, Boyd discovered, is that
today’s teens have neither the time
nor the freedom to hang out. So their
avid migration to social media is a
rational response to a crazy situation.
They’d rather socialize F2F, so long
as it’s unstructured and away from
grown-ups. “I don’t care where,” one
told Boyd wistfully, “just not home.”
Forget the empathy problem—these
kids crave seeing friends in person.
In fact, Boyd found that many high
school students flock to football
games not because they like foot-
ball but because they can meet in an
unstructured context. They spend the
game chatting, ignoring the ﬁeld and
their phones. You don’t need Snapchat
when your friends are right beside you.
So, parents of America: The problem
is you; the solution is you. If you want
your kids to learn valuable face-to-
face skills, conquer your own irratio-
nal fears and give them more freedom.
They want the same face-to-face inti-
macy you grew up with. “Stranger
danger” panic is the best gift America
ever gave to Facebook.
Email: [email protected]
ILLUSTRATION by ben wiseman
jan 2014 alpha 046 clive thompson

Market volatility, volume and system availability may delay account access and trade executions. Offer valid through 4/30/14. Minimum funding
(within 60 days) of $2,000 required for up to 500 commission-free Internet-equity, ETF or options trades. Contract, exercise and assignment
fees still apply. See Web site for details and other restrictions/conditions. TD Ameritrade reserves the right to restrict or revoke this offer
at any time. This is not an offer or solicitation in any jurisdiction where we are not authorized to do business. TD Ameritrade, Inc., member
FINRA/SIPC/NFA. TD Ameritrade is a trademark jointly owned by TD Ameritrade IP Company, Inc. and The Toronto-Dominion Bank. © 2013
TD Ameritrade IP Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission. 36 USC 220506
FREEZING UP IS FOR
BUNGEE JUMPING AND
PUBLIC SPEAKING.
Trade commission-free for 60 days. | tdameritrade.com/trade
TRADE ON A PLATFORM THAT PREVENTS ANALYSIS PARALYSIS.
There’s a lot of information out there. Which means it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
With tools like integrated research on Trade Architect, you can get a consensus
of what analysts are saying about a stock, all in one simplified view. So you’re
not overwhelmed. You’re not underwhelmed. You’re just…whelmed.

The money you could save with GEICO.
See how easy it is to save today.
What’s green
and never goes
out of style?
Some discounts, coverages, payment plans and features are not available in all states or all GEICO companies. GEICO is a registered service mark of Government
Employees Insurance Company, Washington, D.C. 20076; a Berkshire Hathaway Inc. subsidiary. GEICO Gecko image © 1999-2013. © 2013 GEICO
geico.com
|
1-800-947-AUTO (2886)
|
Local Ofﬁce

0 49 J A N 2 0 1 4
DOLLARS THE AVERAGE VISITOR TO
LAS VEGAS BUDGETS FOR GAMBLING
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 62
G
R
O
O
M
I
N
G

B
Y

V
E
R
O
N
I
C
A

S
J
O
E
N
by marcus wohlsen
UBER IN OVERDRIVE
WHAT THE CAR SERVICE WILL DO
WITH BIG MONEY FROM GOOGLE
Cody Pickens
TOOLS
REVIEWED
IN KEVIN
KELLY’S
BOOK
COOL TOOLS
. . . . . . . . p. 57
485
TV & FILM
ADAPTATIONS
WITH
“CHŪSHINGURA”
IN THE TITLE
47
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 57
HOURS OF TV
THE AVERAGE
AMERICAN OVER
THE AGE OF 15
WATCHES DAILY
2.8
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 58

0 5 0
J A N 2 0 1 4
U L T R A
simpler task: It just has to bring those
cars and those eyeballs together—the
faster and cheaper, the better.
“Uber should feel magical to the cus-
tomer,” Kalanick says one morning in
November. “They just push the but-
ton and the car comes. But there’s a
lot going on under the hood to make
that happen.”
A little less than four years ago,
when Uber was barely more than a
private luxury car service for Sili-
con Valley’s elite techies, Kalanick
sat watching the cars crisscrossing
San Francisco on God View and had
a Matrix-y moment when he “started
seeing the math.” He was going to make
the monster move—not just across the
screen but across cities around the
globe. Since then, Uber has expanded
to some 60 cities on six continents and
grown to at least 400 employees. Mil-
lions of people have used Uber to get
a ride, and revenue has increased at a
rate of nearly 20 percent every month
over the past year.
The company’s speedy ascent has
taken place in parallel with a surge
of interest in the so-called sharing
economy—using technology to con-
nect consumers with goods and ser-
vices that would otherwise go unused.
Kalanick had the vision to see poten-
tial proﬁt in the empty seats of limos
and taxis sitting idle as drivers wait
for customers to call.
But Kalanick doesn’t put on the airs
of a visionary. In business he’s a brawler.
Reaching Uber’s goals has meant dig-
ging in against the established bureau-
cracy in many cities, where giving
rides for money is heavily regulated.
Uber has won enough of those ﬁghts
to threaten the market share of the
entrenched players. It not only ofers
a more efcient way to hail a ride but
gives drivers a whole new way to see
where demand is bubbling up. In the
process, Uber seems capable of open-
ing up sections of cities that taxis and
car services never bothered with before.
In San Francisco, Uber has become
its own noun—you “get an Uber.” But
to make it a verb—to get to the point
where everyone Ubers the same way
they Google—the company must out-
perform on transportation the same
way Google does on search.
No less than Google itself believes
Uber has this potential. In a massive
funding round in August led by the
search giant’s venture capital arm,
Uber received $258 million. The
investment reportedly valued Uber
at around $3.5 billion and pushed the
company to the forefront of specula-
tion about the next big tech IPO—and
Kalanick as the next great tech leader.
The deal set Silicon Valley buzzing
about what else Uber could become. A
delivery service powered by Google’s
self-driving cars? The new on-the-
ground army for ferrying all things
Amazon? Jef Bezos is also an Uber
investor, and Kalanick cites him as
an entrepreneurial inspiration. “Ama-
zon was just books and then some
CDs,” Kalanick says. “And then they’re
like, you know what, let’s do frickin’
ladders!” Then came the Kindle and
Amazon Web Services—examples,
Kalanick says, of how an entrepre-
neur’s “creative pragmatism” can
defy expectations. He clearly enjoys
daring the world to think of Uber as
merely another way to get a ride.
“We feel like we’re still realizing
what the potential is,” he says. “We
don’t know yet where that stops.”
FROM THE BACK of an Uber-summoned
Mercedes GL450 SUV, Kalanick ban-
ters with the driver about which make
and model will replace the discontin-
ued Lincoln Town Car as the default
limo of choice.
Mercedes S-Class? Too expensive,
Kalanick says. Cadillac XTS? Too small.
So what is it?
“OK, I’m glad you asked,” Kalanick
says. “This is going to blow you away,
dude. Are you ready? Have you seen
the 2013 Ford Explorer?” Spacious, like
a Lexus crossover, but way cheaper.
As Uber becomes a dominant pres-
ence in urban transportation, it’s easy
to imagine the company playing a role
in making this prophecy self-fulﬁlling.
It’s just one more sign of how far Uber
has come since Kalanick helped cre-
ate the company in 2009. In the begin-
ning, it was just a way for him and his
cofounder, StumbleUpon creator Gar-
INANUBER-FIEDFUTURE,
FEWER PEOPLE OWN
CARS, BUT EVERYBODY
HAS ACCESS TO THEM.
WHEN UBER R COFOUNDER was in sixth
grade, he learned to code on a Commodore 64. His favorite things
to program were videogames. But in the mid-’80s, getting the
machine to do what he wanted still felt a lot like manual labor.
“Back then you would have to do the graphics pixel by pixel,”
Kalanick says. “But it was cool because you were like, oh my God,
it’s moving across the screen! My monster is moving across the
screen!” ¶ These days, Kalanick, 37, has lost none of his fascina-
tion with watching pixels on the move. In Uber’s San Francisco
headquarters, a software tool called God View shows all the vehi-
cles on the Uber system moving at once. On a laptop web browser,
tiny cars on a map show every Uber driver currently on the city’s
streets. Tiny eyeballs on the same map show the location of every
customer currently looking at the Uber app on their smartphone.
In a way, the company anointed by Silicon Valley’s elite as the
best hope for transforming global transportation couldn’t have a
W

and CEO Travis Kalanick
CLOUD SCANNER + DIGITAL FILING SYSTEM
Do more in less time.
NeatConnect lets you send scanned
items straight to your favorite cloud
services and more. You can even send
scans as emails – all without ever
turning on a computer.
Work wherever you want.
Put NeatConnect where your paper is.
Its integrated Wi-Fi and touchscreen
interface let it do its job from virtually
any room in the house, or any spot in
the ofce.
Simplify your life.
Neat streamlines your day-to-day
workﬂow and gives you more time to
do what you want. Find any document
fast, organize everything digitally, and
stop wasting time with paper.
Order NeatConnect now & get 3 FREE MONTHS of NeatCloud
®
Visit www.neat.com/wired Call 866-395-2231
UNPLUGGED PRODUCTIVITY
NEATCONNECT SCANS DIRECTLY TO:

0 5 2
J A N 2 0 1 4
U L T R A
A NG R Y NE R D
zohar Lazar
For more ANGRY
NERD, go to
video.WIRED.com.
Staf writer MARCUS WOHLSEN
(@marcuswohlsen) wrote about
Dropbox in issue 21.10.
Uber has since faced the wrath of
government and industry in other
cites, notably New York, Chicago, Bos-
ton, and Washington, DC.
One councilmember opposed to
Uber in the nation’s capital was self-
described friend of the taxi indus-
try Marion Barry (yes, that Marion
Barry). Kalanick, in DC to lobby on
Uber’s behalf, told The Washington
Post he had an ofer for the former
mayor: “I will personally chaufeur
him myself in his silver Jaguar to
work every day of the week, if he can
just make this happen.” Though that
ride never happened, the council ulti-
mately passed a legal framework that
Uber called “an innovative model for
city transportation legislation across
the country.”
Though Kalanick clearly relishes
a ﬁght, he lights up more when talk-
ing about Uber as an engineering
problem. To fulfill its promise—a
ride within five minutes of the tap
of a smartphone button—Uber must
constantly optimize the algorithms
that govern, among other things,
how many of its cars are on the road,
where they go, and how much a ride
costs. While Uber offers standard
local rates for its various options,
times of peak demand send prices
up, which Uber calls surge pricing.
Some critics call it price-gouging,
but Kalanick says the economics are
far less insidious. To meet increased
demand, drivers need extra incen-
tive to get out on the road. Since they
aren’t employees, the marketplace
has to motivate them. “Most things
are dynamically priced,” Kalanick
points out, from airline tickets to
happy hour cocktails.
Kalanick employs a data-science
team of PhDs from ﬁelds like nuclear
physics, astrophysics, and compu-
tational biology to grapple with
the number of variables involved
rett Camp, and their friends to get
around in style.
They could certainly aford it. At
age 21, Kalanick, born and raised in
Los Angeles, had started a Napster-
like peer-to-peer ﬁle-sharing search
engine called Scour that got him sued
for a quarter-trillion dollars by major
media companies. Scour filed for
bankruptcy, but Kalanick cofounded
Red Swoosh to serve digital media
over the Internet for the same com-
panies that had sued him. Akamai
bought the company in 2007 in a
stock deal worth $19 million.
By the time he reached his thirties,
Kalanick was a seasoned veteran in
the startup trenches. But part of him
wondered if he still had the drive to
build another company. His break-
through came when he was watching,
of all things, a Woody Allen movie.
The ﬁlm was Vicky Christina Barce-
lona, which Allen made in 2008, when
he was in his seventies. “I’m like, that
dude is old! And he is still bringing
it! He’s still making really beautiful
art. And I’m like, all right, I’ve got a
chance, man. I can do it too.”
Kalanick charged into Uber and
quickly collided with the muscular
resistance of the taxi and limo indus-
try. It wasn’t long before San Francis-
co’s transportation agency sent the
company a cease-and-desist letter,
calling Uber an unlicensed taxi ser-
vice. Kalanick and Uber did neither,
arguing vehemently that it merely
made the software that connected
drivers and riders. The company
kept ofering rides and building its
stature among tech types—a con-
stituency city politicians have been
loathe to alienate—as the cool way
to get around.
IF UBER EXPANDSINTO DELIVERY,
ITSCOMPETITIONWILL SUDDENLY
INCLUDE BEHEMOTHS LIKE
AMAZON, EBAY, ANDWALMART.
HIS NAME’S
NOT FRANKENSTEIN!
IT’S ALIVE! Yes, the most perni-
ciously persistent misattribution
in all of pop culture simply refuses
to die. This time it’s thanks to the
bolt-necked adaptation I, Franken-
stein—and not just because it turns
Mary Shelley’s classic creation into
an alpha hunk whose jaw is squarer
than his head and who settles dis-
putes with Filipino stick ﬁghting. I
can handle the fact that it’s another
modern-day remake; you can’t put
that torrent of crap back in the
bottle. The real problem is that the
ﬁlm perpetuates sci-ﬁ’s cardinal sin
and calls the creature Frankenstein.
For the last time: Victor Franken-
stein is the original book’s titular
character. Remember him? Sci-
entist guy? Ethically challenged?
Forged a creature out of bits and
pieces of dead bodies? Mary Shel-
ley pointedly refrained from ever
giving that creature a name, in
order to maximize the horrifying
existential limbo that it represents.
Referring to Frankenstein’s mon-
ster as Frankenstein is like call-
ing Pinocchio Geppetto! Nobody
ever says, “Oh look, there’s that
toy maker and possible pedophile
Geppetto and that weird little stick
boy, who’s also named Geppetto.”
Clearly, the only course of action
is to pull all copies of the novel and
reprint it as I, Who Am Often Mis-
takenly Referred to as Frankenstein.

0 5 4
J A N 2 0 1 4
U L T R A
hell of a lot of other things that we
can do and intend on doing.”
But the calculus of delivery may not
even be the hardest part. If Uber were
to expand into delivery, its compe-
tition—for now other ride-sharing
startups such as Lyft, Sidecar, and
Hailo—would include Amazon, eBay,
and Walmart too.
One way to skirt rivalry with such
giants is to offer itself as the back-
end technology that can power same-
day online retail. In early fall, Google
launched its Shopping Express ser-
vice in San Francisco. The program lets
customers shop online at local stores
through a Google-powered app; Google
sends a courier with their deliveries
the same day.
David Krane, the Google Ventures
partner who led the investment
deal, says there’s nothing happen-
ing between Uber and Shopping
Express. He also says self-driving
delivery vehicles are nowhere near
ready to be looked at seriously as part
of Uber. “Those meetings will happen
when the technology is ready for such
discussion,” he says. “That is many
moons away.”
At the same time, Krane is clear that
Google’s big investment was moti-
vated not just by Uber’s potential
but also by the potential for the two
companies to work together. Krane
mentions maps as one technology the
companies are looking to collaborate
on. He doesn’t ofer speciﬁcs, but it’s
easy to imagine one day searching for
a restaurant on Google Maps and see-
ing not just its location but the wig-
gling web of Ubers that could take you
there. For now, however, Uber shows
little interest in getting ahead of itself.
Of Kalanick, Krane says: “He’s a heat-
seeking missile. He’s undistractable.”
Such focus will be vital as Uber looks
to expand from dozens to hundreds
of cities. In the meantime, the pure,
hard calculus of getting every ride
to arrive within ﬁve minutes will be
plenty to keep Kalanick occupied. As
much as business success, the charge
he gets from cracking this code drives
his commitment to Uber, just as mak-
ing videogames did when he was a kid.
“I just enjoyed it. It was fun,” Kalanick
says of his days as a preteen coder. The
same, he says, applies to his willing-
ness to go all in on Uber. “When some-
thing’s fun, it’s obvious: That’s when
you just need to do more of it.”
in keeping Uber reliable. They stay
busy perfecting algorithms that are
dependable and ﬂexible enough to be
ported to hundreds of cities world-
wide. When we met, Uber had just
gone live in Bogotá, Colombia, as well
as Shanghai, Dubai, and Bangalore.
And it’s no longer just black cars
and yellow cabs. A newer option,
UberX, offers lower-priced rides
from drivers piloting their personal
vehicles. According to Uber, only cer-
tain late-model cars are allowed, and
drivers undergo the same background
screening as others in the service. In
an Uber-fied version of the future,
far fewer people may own cars but
everybody would have access to them.
“You know, I hadn’t driven for a year,
and then I drove over the weekend,”
Kalanick says. “I had to jump-start my
car to get going. It was a little awk-
ward. So I think that’s a sign.”
BACK AT UBER headquarters, burly
drivers crowd the lobby while nearby,
coders sit elbow to elbow. Like other
San Francisco startups on the cusp
of something bigger, Uber is prepar-
ing to move to a larger space. Its new
digs will be in the same building as
Square, the mobile payments com-
pany led by Twitter master mind Jack
Dorsey. Twitter’s ofces are across
the street. The symbolism is hard to
miss: Uber is joining the coterie of
companies that deﬁne San Francis-
co’s latest tech boom.
Still, part of that image depends
on Uber’s outsize potential to expand
what it does. The logistical numbers it
crunches to make it easier for people
to get around would seem a natural ﬁt
for a transition into a delivery service.
Uber coyly fuels that perception with
publicity stunts like ferrying ice cream
and barbecue to customers through
its app. It’s easy to imagine such pro-
motions quietly doubling as proofs
of concept. News of Google’s mas-
sive investment prompted visions of
a push-button delivery service pow-
ered by Google’s self-driving cars.
Kalanick acknowledges that the
most recent round of investment is
intended to fund Uber’s growth, but
that’s as far as he’ll go. “In a lot of ways,
it’s not the money that allows you to
do new things. It’s the growth and the
ability to ﬁnd things that people want
and to use your creativity to target
those,” he says. “There are a whole
WIRED.com/subscribe
Powered by Condé Nast.
PROMOTI ON
SUBSCRIBE NOW.
PRINT AND DIGITAL
ACCESS INCLUDED.

0 5 7
J A N 2 0 1 4
U L T R A
The Whole Earth Catalog, that massive ’70s-era periodical compendium of geo-
desic domes and mushroom-growing rigs, was famously called “Google in paper-
back form.” What we need today, obviously, now that everything is available to
us all the time, is something that helps us narrow down the options—less Google,
perhaps, and more WolframAlpha. That’s where Kevin Kelly comes in. The
cofounder of the magazine you’re reading has turned his long-running online-
reviews project into Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. It’s a glorious collection
of … well, stuf: the best self-cleaning litter box, the best deep-step safety ladder,
the best USB bike taillight. One shining example in each of hundreds of catego-
ries of things you never realized you needed and now couldn’t possibly do with-
out. It’s all lovingly vetted and has a trace of the slightly wackadoo focus that
made Whole Earth so charming. (Geodesic dome: page 119.) PETER RUBIN
1
2 3 5
4
4
7

R
O
N
I
N
:

F
R
A
N
K

C
O
N
N
O
R
/
U
N
I
V
E
R
S
A
L

P
I
C
T
U
R
E
S
;

1
:

T
O
H
O
/
G
E
T
T
Y

I
M
A
G
E
S
;

2
:

C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F
K
A
D
O
K
A
W
A

P
I
C
T
U
R
E
S
;

3
:

P
U
B
L
I
S
H
E
D
B
Y
K
O
D
A
N
S
H
A
I
N
T
E
R
N
A
T
I
O
N
A
L
L
T
D
.
;

4
:

C
E
L
E
S
T
I
A
L
P
I
C
T
U
R
E
S

L
T
D
.
;

5
:

P
H
O
T
O
F
E
S
T
.

P
E
R
P
L
E
X
U
S
:

M
I
C
H
A
E
L

M
C
G
I
N
N
I
S
WITH ALL THE tricked-out CGI on display in the trailers for
fantasy-action ﬂick 47 Ronin, you might not realize that the
Keanu Reeves vehicle is actually a literary masterpiece. Or
at least it’s the latest in a long line of Chūshingura—ﬁctional
takes on a badass historical vendetta that’s become one of
Japan’s most enduring legends. Before you see it, explore the
movie’s other inﬂuences with these picks. —Ashik Siddique
NEED TO KNOW
47 RONIN
1
Kanadehon Chūshingura: The
Treasury of Loyal Retainers (1748)
The urtext of samurai loyalty, in
which 47 ronin avenge their dead
master. Written for the Bunraku
(puppet theater) and based on
actual events, Chūshingura later
became a ballet, a play, and count-
less movies and TV programs.
2
The Tale of Zatoichi (1962) One
of Japan’s longest-running samurai
series begins with this tale of a
blind masseur who turns out to be
freakishly handy with a blade. Crazy
swordplay? Compelling characters?
Cinematic ﬁnal showdown? Check,
check, and checkmate.
3
Hagakure: The Code of the
Samurai (MANGA EDITION, 2011)
Yamamoto Tsunetomo was a samurai
in the early 18th century; the original
collection of his commentaries,
dictated to a younger warrior, is
considered the quintessential guide
to samurai conduct. The manga
version makes it more accessible
but no less enduring.
4
Five Deadly Venoms (1978) In
producing this kung-fu classic, the
Shaw Brothers married spectacular
wirework with fantasy-infused
narratives. The recipe transformed
martial-arts movies and set the
stage for 47 Ronin.
5
Red Sun (1971) If you want a
serious East-meets-West samurai
throwdown, track down this wild
international Western. Charles
Bronson and the great Toshirô
Mifune costar in a trope stew of
outlaws, a samurai, Comanche
Indians, and Ursula Andress.

0 5 8
J A N 2 0 1 4
U L T R A
Jan Kallwejt
WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITEpure-bananas scene from the most recent
season of the Emmy-winning Homeland? Was it that time Car-
rie seduced a Lebanese informant using a few bottles of chenin
blanc and a Thelonious Monk bootleg? Or was it the twist reveal-
ing that Sgt. Brody tried to kill the secretary of the interior with
a self-detonating Jitterbug phone? Well, sorry, because those
scenes don’t actually exist. In fact, I gave up on the series half-
way through season one. But thanks to bloggers, tweeters, and
podcast hosts, I can keep up with all
the programs I don’t actually watch.
That’s because the best recappers
and ranters give me just enough
details that I can stay up to speed—
while still leaving enough out that
I can ﬁll in the cracks and create
my very own version of the show.
Call it “recapillary action.”
Don’t get me wrong: I still watch
plenty of TV, which is part of the
problem. Mad Men, Nashville, Key
& Peele, Game of Thrones, January’s
True Detective—I can barely keep
up. Factor in the time I already set
aside to consume other media (or to
write the occasional wise-ass maga-
zine piece) and I have to do some
culture-culling. So more than a year
ago, I decided that if I wasn’t watch-
ing a show for work or for pleasure
but didn’t want to be left out of the
post-credit conversations, I’d simply
go swimming in an ocean of spoilers.
It’s how I learned that Dexter had
become a lumberjack and Lady Sybil
had become a corpse. Most fans
waited months to make these discov-
eries; I needed about ﬁve minutes.
But these secondhand views also
allow me to become a show run-
ner—at least, in my own head. On
the podcast “How Was Your Week?
With Julie Klausner,” for example,
programs like The Blacklist and
The Newsroom inspire hilari-
ous spiels that inspire in the non-
watcher mega-absurd visions of
these shows, none of which could
possibly match their ﬂatscreen
realities. (I could mount a small
revue of the Smash show tunes
I made up during that series’ two-
season run.) From what I can tell,
the faux Newsroom that aired
once a week in my head was way
less infuriating (and a bit less yelly)
than the one on TV. To watch the
real version would be a comedown,
like the time Will ﬁred an intern for
stealing his Bruce Hornsby album.
And now that the midseason
replacements are upon us, I’m look-
ing for the next kinda-big thing—not
on the air, but online, where even
the most middling show is exhaus-
tively dissected, allowing me to keep
up without getting bogged down.
Why bother with DVR disk space and
downhill alerts when I can mainline
the show’s gestalt? Twitter, fetch me
my needle. —sriAN rAiiirY
MUST-READ TV
CONFESSIONS OF A
VICARIOUSVIEWER

S
H
U
T
T
ER SPEED High sp
e
e
d
c
o
n
tin
u
o
u
s

s
h
o
o
ting up to 7.0 fps a
llo
w
s
y
o
u

t
o

Meet the
NEW GAME-CHANGER
c
a
p
ture quick action
.
ADVERTI SEMENT
*With CANON iMAGE GATEWAY#
**With the free download of the EOS Remote app.
SPIN HERE to check out
the newest features of
the Canon EOS 70D and
unlock your potential.
Canon is changing the way advanced photographers and aspiring
filmmakers are capturing their world. Featuring the revolutionary Dual
Pixel CMOS AF technology that unlocks the potential of Live View, the
EOS 70D camera is changing the world of DSLRs by allowing users to
utilize smooth autofocus to shoot video like a camcorder.
Visit usa.canon.com/gamechangeraf for more
information about the Canon EOS 70D.

VISIT US ONLINE AT WIREDINSIDER.COM + FOLLOW WIREDINSIDER ON TWITTER + LIKE WIREDINSIDER ON FACEBOOK
PROMOTIONS + SPECIAL OFFERS + EVENTS
GIVE THE GIFT THAT
KEEPS ON MAKING.
MakerBot steps up the season,
empowering you to create
beautiful 3D things and share
them with the world.
Explore the MakerBot 3D Ecosystem
t MakerBot
®
Replicator
®
3D printers
t MakerBot
®
Digitizer
™
Desktop 3D Scanner
t MakerBot
®
Filament materials and colors
t MakerBot
®
Thingiverse, and more!
makerbot.com/jan14
thingiverse.com/jan14
3D print your
decorations,
gifts & more.
VIVOPC—YOUR BOOK-SIZED BUSINESS-FRIENDLY PC.
Easy to use, easy to ﬁt, this small-form-factor PC gives you all the essentials you
need for your everyday business without ever getting in the way.
Imagine all the functionalities of a traditional desktop PC in a chic, compact box with a
footprint slightly larger than a standard DVD jewel case. Meet the ASUS VivoPC.
Powered by an Intel
®
processor and featuring SonicMaster technology, VivoPC paves the
way for complete day-to-day computing. Its built-in 802.11ac Wi-Fi gives you speeds up to
three times faster than standard wireless-N speeds and stable connections for online video
conferencing, quick ﬁle downloading, and ofﬁce communications. Select models support up
to two displays through HDMI and mini DisplayPort, increasing productivity and giving you
enhanced multitasking capabilities, as well as a VESA-mountable attachment.
asus.com/us/ASUS_VivoPC/VivoPC_VC60
SONOS PLAY:1
Fill your home with music.
Nothing ﬁlls your home with music like SONOS, the wireless HiFi system. The mini but mighty
PLAY:1 is the newest SONOS wireless speaker speciﬁcally designed to ﬁt anywhere while
delivering epic, HiFi sound—represented here by vivid color.
sonos.com/ﬁllyourhomewithmusic/play1

0 6 2
J A N 2 0 1 4
U L T R A
I
L
L
U
S
T
R
A
T
I
O
N
:
L
U
K
E
S
H
U
M
A
N
;

M
A
P
:

B
R
O
W
N

B
I
R
D
D
E
S
I
G
N
;
N
E
O
N

M
U
S
E
U
M
:

C
O
R
B
I
S
39, 727, 022 PEOPLE VISITED VEGAS IN 2012, 4, 944, 014 OF THEM TO ATTEND ONE OF SIN CITY’ S 21, 615 CONVENTIONS // ORGANIZERS ESTIMATE THAT IN 2014, CES
WILL INJECT ABOUT $150 MILLION IN NONGAMING REVENUE INTO THE ECONOMY // GAMING REVENUE WAS $9. 4 BILLION IN 2012. ABOUT TWOTHIRDS OF THAT
COMES FROM THE MORE THAN 40 CASINOS ON A 4. 2-MILE STRETCH OF LAS VEGAS BOULEVARD // THE STRIP IS HOME TO 16 OF THE COUNTRY’ S 20 LARGEST HOTELS
SEE
1
The Neon
Museum “Visi-
tors can relive
the history
of Las Vegas
through our
native art form,”
mayor Carolyn
Goodman says.
2
Lou Ruvo
Center for
Brain Health
Frank Gehry’s
design sticks
out like a metal-
lic sore thumb—
on purpose.
His aim? To lure
people in to
learn about
neurocognitive
disorders.
3
The Mob
Museum “An
interactive look
at the inﬂu-
ence of orga-
nized crime,”
Goodman says,
“and how law
enforcement
won the day.”
4
The National
Atomic Test-
ing Museum
Explore the his-
tory of nuclear
testing in the
Vegas desert.
Plus, you can
play with a
Geiger counter.
DO
5
Drive a Bull-
dozer “Dig
This is an equip-
ment play-
ground where
you get to
operate heavy
machinery,”
says illusionist,
comedian,
and Las Vegan
Penn Jillette.
“It feels good
to move giant
tires and con-
crete around.”
6
Play Games
The Pinball
Hall of Fame,
housed in an
old auto parts
store, is free,
and the games
cost a quarter
to 75 cents.
7
Eat Thai
“Lotus of Siam
is one of the
best Thai
restaurants in
the country,
and it’s not
in a casino,”
Jillette says.
8
Geek Out
The Sci Fi Cen-
ter is a comic
book/nerd-
merch empo-
rium with a
small theater.
Ask about Doc-
tor Who night.
BULLDOZERS, BOMBS, AND NEON
LAS VEGAS WITHOUT THE SIN
WAYPOINTS
LAS VEGAS
THE NEON MUSEUM // THE 2ACRE LOT IS CALLED THE NEON BONEYARD // THE SILVER
SLIPPER ABOVE IS ONE OF MORE THAN 150 SIGNS // FOLLOW @NEONMUSEUM
LAS VEGAS GLITTERS in the desert
like a mirage, beckoning visitors to
stop by for a drink—or a debauched
weekend. But even if you don’t have
a system to beat the house, you’ve
probably been to Vegas. It’s the con-
vention capital of the world—hosting
about 20,000 annually. The 47-year-
old Consumer Electronics Show that
descends on Vegas each January is
the biggest. This year, about 150,000
attendees will pump cash into Sin
City nightlife—as well as less vice-
ridden attractions. “From Red Rock
Canyon to Hoover Dam,” mayor Car-
olyn Goodman says, “we’re an amaz-
ing hiking, climbing, cycling, and golf
destination.” Plus, you know, gam-
bling and booze. —
Penn & Teller
have a long-
running
comedic
magic show
at the Rio.
On any given
night, the
show can
include
knives, guns,
and a duck.
4
5
6
8
1
2
3
7

Cody_76 A taste of things to come.
Cody_76 11h
Cody_76 8-ball, corner pocket!
Cody_76 8h
Cody_76 I think I’ll keep him.
Cody_76 4h
Cody_76 Great morning.
Cody_76 3m
lexus.com/RX #LexusRX
NEVER LOSE YOUR EDGE.
No matter what stage you’re in, never stop celebrating life. Grow up without
settling down in the more connected, more agile, more seductive Lexus RX. R X
RX F SPORT shown with options. ©2013 Lexus.

“Beats has taken a more democratic,
even-handed approach to frequency
response. Whether it’s deep bass
cuts, or a squealing heavy metal gui-
tar, highs, mids, and of course lows,
all are given equal attention”
The world’s most famous headphone is
now lighter, sexier, stronger, and more
comfortable. The New Beats Studio®
has been completely redesigned and
reengineered and now features preci-
sion sound, Adaptive Noise Canceling,
a remarkable 20-hour rechargeable
battery, and RemoteTalk™. Beats’ most
technology-packed product to date
is in every way a step up over the old
model.
“It feels as if the Studio has
spent the last half-decade
working out”
Beats Acoustic Engine™ makes your
music sound more intimate, personal
and real. Its signature DSP software
generates the emotional experience
that Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine, and some of
the music industry’s greatest producers
want you to feel. The technology makes
dance and Hip Hop tracks vibrant and
full of energy… Exactly how the artist
would play it back for you in person.
And these rich, full sounds resonate
from a company with a serious music
heritage.
Legends of sound
Beats by Dr. Dre® was established in
2008 as the brainchild of legendary art-
ist and producer Dr. Dre and Chairman
of Interscope Geffen A&M Records Jim-
my Iovine. Their mission was to fx what
people didn’t like about headphones,
in particular the low-quality earphones
that come free with smart phones
and music players. The success of the
original Beats Studio, and every Beats
product, was in bringing the energy,
emotion and excitement of playback in
the recording studio to a new gener-
ation of music lovers, evolving head-
phone design to new heights.
Put the world on mute
The Adaptive Noise Canceling system
allows the listener to fully disconnect
from outside noise. Whether it’s your
daily commute or the drama from your
loud neighbors, ANC automatically
balances your music with the world out-
side. This intelligent update on a design
icon also boasts a powerful,
reengineered sound that will strike
a balance between music and your
environment. While other headphones
can only block consistent low frequency
sound, like a jet engine, the New Beats
Studio gets rid of noise from cars, con-
struction and people.
“Fully disconnect from
outside noise”
Advertisement
HEAR
THE DIFFERENCE
Lighter, stronger, and more
comfortable
Tested in wind tunnels and designed
with all the care of a sports car, the
New Beats Studio features fast curves,
smooth surfaces, and no visible screws.
Beats shaved 13% off the original
weight and gave it a lighter, stronger,
and more comfortable headband that
makes the Studio comfy enough for
hours of listening pleasure. Softer ear
cups and improved padding and er-
gonomics provide a custom ft for every
head shape. And Beats has addressed
every issue with modern headphones,
even the big problem of battery life.
“Comfy enough for hours of
listening pleasure”
Nothing is worse than dead batteries
when you’re in the mood to listen, so
to keep your music playing for longer,
Beats has added a visible Battery Fuel
Gauge, so you always know how much
juice is left. To prevent the battery from
draining, the New Studio turns itself off
automatically when you unplug, and
the headphone’s 20-hour battery life
means it will outlast any plane journey.
Never feel tied down
Now the Beats Studio is wireless,
you can enjoy sound quality that
made Beats by Dr. Dre famous, only
without the cord getting in your way.
Controls on the ear cup even let you
switch tracks without pulling out your
music player or smart phone, and also
come with a cable you can plug in, for
even more ways to listen. Take calls, skip
songs, and change the volume right
from the headphone.
If you want to listen to your
favorite Hip Hop, electronic dance, or
Rock’n’Roll track, all while cutting out
background noise, this is the only
headphone for you. Get your New
Beats Studio from beatsbydre.com
and select retailers.

AFTER EIGHT HOURS underwater at a depth
of 1,000 feet, a diver must spend 10 days
in a decompression chamber. That’s why
shipwreck salvagers and pipeline inspec-
tors use submarines or unmanned rovers.
Now there’s a better solution: Nuytco’s
Exosuit. The articulated shell keeps its
inhabitant at surface atmosphere while
enabling free movement on the sea-
ﬂoor. Divers have worn a version of the
$600,000 suit to do internal repairs on
New York City water supply pipes and will
soon use one to check for oil pipeline leaks
of Dubai. With thrusters and an optional
hook hand, the Exosuit is way more badass
than scuba gear. —
065
I
L
L
U
S
T
R
A
T
I
O
N

B
Y

G
L
U
E
K
I
T
;

S
U
I
T
:

C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F

N
U
Y
T
C
O
R
E
S
E
A
R
C
H

L
T
D
;

F
I
S
H
,

S
E
A
:

G
E
T
T
Y

I
M
A
G
E
S
;

“
Q
:
”

B
Y

M
A
T
T

W
.

M
O
O
R
E
SEA SHELL
Manipulators
The suit comes with
accessories: claws for
all occasions, includ-
ing large and small grip-
pers for diferent-sized
objects, a saw for cut-
ting lines, and a hook.
Telemetry
A ﬁber-optic cable
connection allows
topside monitoring
and control of the
suit in case the diver
loses consciousness.
Extreme Flexibility
Eighteen rotary joints
in the arms and legs
allow the diver to bend
and ﬂex freely.
Helmet
The domed window lets
divers see past their
chest down to their feet.
That means they don’t
have to contort to see
what they’re working on.
Air
Two redundant oxygen
systems provide up
to 50 hours of air, which
is constantly recircu-
lated through carbon
dioxide scrubbers.
Thrusters
Divers control four
1.6-horsepower thrust-
ers with their feet. If
your mission needs more
juice, you can upgrade
to eight thrusters.

C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F

D
A
N

W
I
N
T
E
R
S
IF YOU WANT to document controlled explosions like award-
winning photographer Dan Winters does, you’d better
start young. The frequent wirio contributor was set-
ting up shots of homespun model rockets decades before
covering shuttle launches for national magazines. Winters’
new book, Road to Seeing—part memoir, part history of
photography—details his transformation from tinkerer
to master via celebrity shoots, a microscopic study of the
honeybee, and, of course, rockets. wirio asked Winters for
a breakdown of how he captures liftoß. —rAcHii swAsY
WE HAVE IGNITION!
HOW TO SHOOT
A ROCKET LAUNCH
Previsualize the story
Long before setting up,
Winters storyboards
the whole event. (The
shuttle, not unlike a
human, had a good side
and a bad one. “I don’t
like her in proﬁle,” he
says. “I like to see the
wing surfaces. That
3
⁄4 angle is her sexiest.”)
Arrive early
Winters arranges up
to 11 cameras onsite
one day in advance of
the launch. His tight-
est shot is taken with
a camera that’s a
mere 650 feet from
the vehicle. Others
he’ll place a quarter of
a mile away.
Bring sandbags,
augers, and
tie-down straps
To curb vibration,
Winters weighs down
tripods with 100-
pound sandbags. “We
also put augers into
the ground and attach
straps, like securing a
load to an 18-wheeler.”
Automate the action
During the main
event, the closest non-
astronaut is 3 miles
away. So Winters’ rigs
operate on a timer,
powering up 10 min-
utes before launch. The
sound of the rocket
itself triggers the cam-
eras to start shooting.
Take it in
Watching the launches
(which he does, as
you might imagine, with
a camera on hand) is
incredibly emotional
for Winters: “It seems
insane—so violent and
loud. It’s audacious
that you would even try
such a thing.”
jan 2014 066

I
L
L
U
S
T
R
A
T
I
O
N

B
Y

C
H
R
I
S
T
I
A
N

N
O
R
T
H
E
A
S
T
1. Waking up early does real
damage. Being jolted awake can
drastically drain a hibernating ani-
mal’s energy. One study showed
that if woken just once, a little
brown bat will burn as much fat as
it would in 67 days at rest. Unex-
pected interruptions (like clue-
less humans wandering into caves)
have been linked with population
decline of other bat species.
2. Squirrels can freeze during
hibernation—and live. The heart
rate of the Arctic ground squirrel,
which stays dormant for up to
eight months, slows to just three
beats per minute, helping make
it the only mammal that can survive
when its body temperature drops
below freezing. Scientists are
still trying to ﬁgure out exactly
how the water in the squirrel’s body
remains ﬂuid without any form
of antifreeze. During its eight-
month hibernation, the supercool
rodent loses 0.2 percent of its
body weight a day, which can
amount to almost half its weight
by the time it wakes up.
3. Females can mate and even give
birth during hibernation. Female
bears can emerge from their win-
ter dens with brand-new cubs. And
some bats, having mated before
or during hibernation, can store the
sperm for conception when they
wake up. —VICTORIA TANG
SANTA CLAUS DOESN’T HAVE a customer service number (that we know of),
but Swedish furniture kaiju Ikea does. The trick is navigating the menu. Nigel
Clarke can help. His UK website Please Press 1 helps Brits shortcut phone-menu
jungles for many retailers. The US version is being rolled out, and he gave
us a peek at the cheat codes you need to return that Vännerna Läppar throw
pillow. This may be the best gift you’ll get this season. —!oNAiHoN xiAis
IKEA 800-434-4532
Introductory message wait
time: 30 seconds
Request a catalog: press 1
Information and product
recall or product registra-
tion: 2
Ť Information regarding
current recalls: 1
Ť Info on previous
recalls: 2
Ť Info on product registra-
tion cards: 3
Ť Speak with an adviser
about something you’ve
bought: 4
Info about store locations or
general customer service: 3
Place an order: 4
Ť Order a gift card: 1
Ť Place a business order: 2
Ť Place an order for a
kitchen: 3
Ť Place an order for your
home: 4
Make changes to an order: 5
Ť Help with your kitchen
order: 1
Ť Not received your
order/questions about
delivery: 2
Ť Received your order
and are calling to report
a problem: 3
If you know the extension
of the person you want
to reach: 6
Ť Company directories: 1
Ť Speak to an operator: 0
Amazon 888-280-4331
Introductory message wait
time: 10 seconds
Item delivery or tracking: 1
Problems with an order or
questions about returning
an item: 2
Help with Prime membership: 3
Help with your Kindle: 4
ŤAssistance regarding your
newly purchased Kindle Fire
or Kindle Paperwhite: 1
Ť Help with other Kindle
models like Kindle Fire,
Touch, or Keyboard: 2
Ť Assistance with accounts,
payments, and all other
issues: 3
All other questions: 0
Apple
800-676-2775
No phone menus. An automaton
answers. No, it’s not Siri.
Toys “R” Us
800-869-7787
Press 1 for questions about an
online order, then 2 to ask about
an order you didn’t get or 3 to
ask about an order that you did.
Bed Bath & Beyond
800-462-3966
Press 4 for customer service,
then 1 to place an order or 2
to check on an existing order,
or hold to talk to a person.
3 SMART
THINGS ABOUT
HIBERNATION
068

Like all one-of-a-kind works of art,
it’s hand signed and numbered.
Every handcrafted bottle of Patrón is unique, just
like the tequila inside. What’s more, it’s been inspected
over 40 times before we’ll sign off on it.
simplyperfect.com
Simply Perfect.
T
h
e

p
e
r
f
e
c
t

w
a
y

t
o

e
n
j
o
y

P
a
t
r
ó
n

i
s

r
e
s
p
o
n
s
i
b
l
y
.

©

2
0
1
3

T
h
e

P
a
t
r
ó
n

S
p
i
r
i
t
s

C
o
m
p
a
n
y
,

L
a
s

V
e
g
a
s
,

N
V
.

4
0
%

A
l
c
.
/
V
o
l
.

PERFECT FIT
MEET YOUR
ROBOT BODY
DOUBLE
You order a shirt online, put it on, and it looks
like it was made for a different species. Are
you an oddly shaped weirdo? Probably! But
that’s not the point. People send back one in
four online clothing purchases, often due to
poor ﬁt. And obviously, the only way to solve
such an intractable problem is with shape-
shifting robots. ¶ Retailers like Adidas, Thomas
Pink, and Hugo Boss ship clothing samples to
Fits.me’s studio in Tartu, Estonia, where staf
put each item on a mannequin that can alter its
shape—thousands of combinations of hip width,
chest diameter, sleeve length, and waist size.
Then they photograph it. In the end, each item is
associated with a giant database of images—and
yes, one likely resembles you. So when you’re
shopping at Adidas.com, you plug in your mea-
surements and see the item you want on your
body shape. ¶ Fits.me says the process ofers a
quicker and more accurate image than 3-D ren-
dering or computer-generated avatars (creepy).
And the company’s database of body shapes
may be more valuable than its software: Fits
.me plans to sell retailers information on shop-
pers, which could help outﬁtters design cloth-
ing and target sales. And there’s probably some
side gigs on the Internet for photogenic ﬁgure-
morphing droids. —
Fifty actuators
under the skin
expand and con-
tract the panels
to form up
to 100,000
human shapes.
The skin of the
robo-mannequin
is made of
Pedilin, a mat-
erial used to make
prosthetic limbs.
The female
form has
proven more
difcult to
model than
the male, says
chief technol-
ogy ofcer Paul
Pallin. “More
curves means
the shapes are
more varied.”
Roboticists
at the University
of Tartu in Esto-
nia enlisted the
help of Human
Solutions, a
German tech-
nology ﬁrm spe-
cializing in body
dimensions and
ergonomic simu-
lation, to get the
anatomy right.
DATAS T REAM //
T RANS PORTAT I ON I NCI DENT S : 1 , 7 89 // VI OL ENCE BY PEOPL E OR ANI MAL S : 767 // CONTACT WI T H OBJ ECT S AND EQUI PMENT: 7 1 2 // FAL L S , S L I PS , AND T RI PS : 668 //
E X P OS URE T O HARMF UL S UB S T ANCE S OR E NVI RONME NT S : 3 2 0 // F I RE S AND E X P L OS I ONS : 1 1 6
DATAS T REAM // WORKPL ACE FATAL I T I ES BY T YPE, 201 2
070

MS. KNOW-IT-ALL
AN APP SAYS IT CAN TEACH ME THE
BASICS OF A FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN
34 HOURS. IS THAT THE BEST THING
I COULD LEARN IN 34 HOURS?
Christoph Niemann
AS YOU RACE through the work week, 34
hours—Monday morning to Tuesday
afternoon—seems like no time at all; it
doesn’t even get you to hump day. But
when it comes to learning something
new, 34 hours is “a huge amount of
time,” says John Wiseman, an adviser
to online education site Skillshare.
“You could learn top to bottom how to
design a website in that time.” Thirty-
four hours is shorter than a semester-
long college course, but if you’re the
only student, far more intensive. (This
is why that Duolingo app enables basic
proﬁciency in a language after an aver-
age of 34 hours.) “You may not get to
Malcolm Gladwell levels of mastery,”
Wiseman says, “but you can get a really
big start” on just about any new skill.
If someone comments on your
Facebook post and they’re
abjectly wrong, are you morally
obligated to correct their
misinformation?
Ever since people learned to write,
they’ve been writing inappropriate
things (see Roman grafti: “Lucilla ex
corpore lucrum faciebat,” or “Lucilla
made money from her body”). The
Internet has just made tasteless, derog-
atory writing easier—if less Latinate—
a phenomenon evident in unmoderated
forums everywhere. The New York
Times has 14 moderators, some part-
time, reading comments before they
post and culling not just those with
slurs but responses that are otherwise
abusive, insubstantial (think “yay!”), or
of-topic. Boing Boing has a separate
comment forum and deletes posts that
are racist, homophobic, misogynis-
tic, and so on. “I think of it as a dinner
party that we have invited guests to,”
says Mark Frauenfelder, Boing Boing’s
founder. “It’s fun to have disagreements,
but if someone starts getting nasty, we
will kick them out.” Or you could go
extreme: In September, Popular Science
turned off comments, citing studies
that show negative comments polar-
ize and skew how people respond to
the initial posts.
On Facebook? A personal blog?
Without a big staf, contending with
comments can turn into an emotion-
ally harrowing time suck. (Frauen-
fel der stopped engagi ng wi th
commenters, because it was too tax-
ing.) But you have a responsibility to
enforce standards in your own space.
If someone spray-painted a nasty
comment on your house, you would
get rid of it. Our virtual spaces may
just be rentals, but that doesn’t mean
what happens there doesn’t matter. If
taking on each slur, lie, or personal
attack is too much, do the right thing:
Turn of the comments.
With 34 hours, you could become
a badass in the kitchen. I’d learn to
cook with mouth-singeing Szechuan
peppercorns. Scared of pepper heat?
In 34 hours you could bake 34 souf-
ﬂés, enough practice to ensure yours
never fall, or roast a 110-pound pig
three times. You don’t need half that
time to learn to juggle or master basic
sleight of hand. You need only 30 hours
of practice to get certiﬁed as a recre-
ational pilot. (It may take more time
to earn the cash to aford the plane.)
With 34 hours, you could even get pro-
ﬁcient at stitching a wound—if you
ﬁnd anyone who will let you practice.
Thirty-four hours won’t turn you into
a pro—but it will enable you to imag-
ine actually getting good.
jan 2014 072

N E T WO R K . D E TA I L S . C O M
NETWORK THE
PROMOTION
AN INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY
OF MEN’S STYLE WRITERS AND
PHOTOGRAPHERS—CURATED BY
THE EDITORS AT DETAILS
Fashion.
Grooming.
Lifestyle.

0
7
5
P
O
S
T

P
R
O
D
U
C
T
I
O
N

B
Y

M
A
T
T

T
A
Y
L
O
R
/
A
D
A
P
T

D
I
G
I
T
A
L
FINE
LINES
$50 AND UP FETISH FIFTYTHREE PENCIL
Steve Jobs once argued that the best stylus is the one between your thumb
and middle ﬁnger. It’s easy to see why—typical tablet pens don’t do much your
digits can’t. Pencil, however, is not content to be just a replacement append-
age. Designed to work with the iOS sketching app Paper, and built by the same
people, Pencil has two ends: You draw with one and erase with the other. It talks
to your iPad via Bluetooth Smart, so switching functions requires nothing more
than spinning the thing around. Also, you can rest your palm on the screen
while you draw and it won’t mess up your masterpiece, but your ﬁngertips are
then free to zoom in and out, undo mistakes, or artfully smudge your scribbles.
After you use Pencil, drawing with your ﬁngers feels downright juvenile.
BY KYLE VANHEMERT LUPI NE HAMMACK BRANCH

0
7
6
RUN LIKE HELL
GEARHEAD ROAD WARRIOR
The winter nip in the air gives you
a perfect excuse to break your
New Year’s resolutions. Don’t do
it—suit up with this running gear
and you won’t even notice the cold.
BY BRENT ROSE BENJAMI N BOUCHET
1
2
3
4
5
SENNHEISER
PMX 685I
SPORTS
Not only are these
running headphones
comfortable and
rinsable, but they
serve up rich audio
with just enough
bass to keep your
legs chugging. They
sound and ﬁt better
than others cost-
ing three times as
much. $64
2
GARMIN
FORERUNNER
220
This is one of the
prettiest, easiest-
to-read running
watches we’ve seen.
Load it up with train-
ing programs, let the
color screen coach
you through a work-
out, and then sync
your personal highs
(and lows) with your
phone. $250
4
MERRELL
BAREFOOT
RUN ROAD
GLOVE 2
Sidestep the toe
shoes and try these
light, zero-drop
kicks. They’re
breathable, ﬂexible,
and ﬂat as a pan-
cake. Wide toe boxes
let your tootsies
splay naturally. Just
build up your dis-
tance slowly to
avoid injury. $100
5
ZEPHYR
HXM
SMART
To get accurate ﬁt-
ness feedback, you
need to track your
ticker. This chest-
strap monitor talks
to your phone via
Bluetooth, passing
heart-rate info to
your favorite run-
ning apps so they
can guide you right
into the zone. $70
3
THE NORTH
FACE ISOTHERM
WS JACKET
Gore-Tex Wind-
stopper material on
the front of this zip-
up keeps the freez-
ing gusts at bay;
quick-wicking fabric
on the back and
sides keeps you dry
and ensures you
don’t overheat. $160
1
RUNKEEPER
ENDOMONDO
RUNTASTIC

VISIT US ONLINE AT WIREDINSIDER.COM + FOLLOW WIREDINSIDER ON TWITTER + LIKE WIREDINSIDER ON FACEBOOK
PROMOTIONS + SPECIAL OFFERS + EVENTS
Connected devices
will soon outnumber people...
is your business ready?
“Shelly Palmer CES ﬂoor tours are
simply the best way to identify
and understand key technologies,
differentiate offerings, and create
action items and strategic take-
aways from the show.”
Helping you succeed in a connected world.
Shelly Palmer is an industry-leading advisory and business
development ﬁrm.
We offer deep-knowledge subject matter expertise and
strategic counsel to brands, as well as media, advertising,
entertainment and technology companies—and ofﬁcial VIP
experiences and show ﬂoor tours for International CES
®
and
Mobile World Congress.
“Shelly Palmer’s consulting
practice offers a unique blend of
technical expertise, creativity and
business sense—hugely helpful
in an increasingly complex world.”
“Shelly Palmer’s thought
leadership at Mobile World
Congress helped us formulate
our connected world strategy.”
shellypalmer.com
@shellypalmer
—Paul Mascarenas
CTO, Ford Motor Company
—Tom Dooley
COO, Viacom
—Keith Weed
CMO, Unilever

0
7
8
STOMP
BOX
HERO
Many of the twisted, alien
guitar sounds from bands
like Dinosaur Jr., Wilco, and
Nine Inch Nails are birthed in
a nondescript warehouse just
outside Minneapolis. Electri-
cal engineer and tonal magi-
cian Zachary Vex has been
designing ofbeat efects ped-
als for more than 18 years.
His stomp boxes are coveted
by musicians as much for
their careful construction
and hand-painted designs as
their brash, funky tones. If
you’re a guitar geek, you’ve
gotta have a Vex. Here’s how
the fuzz meets the box.
BY MI CHAEL CALORE
CHAD HOLDER
HOW IT’S MADE
Z.VEX EFFECTS PEDALS
Such beautiful
works of audio art
deserve their own
unique packaging.
THE WIZARD
Zachary Vex built
his ﬁrst pedals
in 1995, design-
ing the circuits,
wiring them
up, and paint-
ing them with
funky decora-
tions. The com-
pany he founded
still does things
by hand.

Options shown. ©2013 Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.

C
A
M
R
Y S
E IS
O
N
E H
EC
K
O
F A
R
ID
E
.

2
6
8

H
P
W
ITH
A
V
A
IL
A
B
L
E

,

2
6
8

H
P
,
C
A
M
R
Y S
E IS
O
N
E H
EC
K
O
F A
R
ID
E
.

1
3
2
5
4
HOW IT'S MADE
0
8
0
4. CLASSIC
ROCKERS
Vintage parts
like these germa-
nium transistors
from the 1960s
are highly prized
by pedal builders.
Older electron-
ics produce tones
that can be hard
to replicate with
modern materials.
3. CRAFT WORK
All of Z.Vex’s ped-
als are wired by
hand, just like the
radios and amps
of decades past,
before the robots
took over.
1. METAL BOX
Each of Z.Vex’s
signature pedals
starts its ascent
toward audio
awesomeness as
a raw aluminum
box. Holes for
the knobs, jacks,
and switches are
hand-drilled.
5. SUPERCRUNCH
Each transistor
inside every Fat
Fuzz Factory is
individually tested
and measured. This
degree of rigor in
choosing the com-
ponents is essen-
tial. Diferent
gain levels in the
transistors will
produce difer-
ent ﬂavors of fuzz,
and Z.Vex’s ped-
als need to deliver
just the right
amount of crunch.
2. ART OF NOISE
After a base coat
is applied, one of
Vex’s in-house art-
ists hand-paints
each pedal. There’s
a standard design
for each type of
efect, but the
painters are free to
dream up their own
one-of creations.
CONTI NUED

0
8
2
HOT POCKETS
HEAD-TO-HEAD HAND WARMERS
Reusable hand warmers will keep your digits cozy when the
temperature drops. The best choice for you depends on how
much outdoor action you’ll be seeing this winter.
BY BRYAN GARDI NER BENJAMI N BOUCHET
BEST FOR: Backcountry trekkers who need all-day warmth
and don’t mind inducing catalytic reactions in their pockets.
BEST FOR: Those needing quick bursts of heat who’d rather
ﬁll up from a USB port than a bottle of ﬂammable liquid.
ZIPPO ENERGYFLUX RECHARGEABLE
This old-school palm-sized gizmo generates a pocketful of
ﬂameless heat. To get it cooking, you ﬁll the reservoir with
lighter ﬂuid, then heat the platinum-coated ﬁlament burner
by holding a match to it for 10 seconds. An oxidation reac-
tion between the burner and the fuel kicks in, creating a
warming effect that lasts much longer than the 12 hours
indicated. The included oxygen- and heat-regulating pouch
ensures a nice slow burn for those extra-long winter hikes.
The EnergyFlux generates heat by converting electrical
energy from its lithium-ion battery into thermal energy.
Unlike with the Zippo, you can choose between two temper-
atures—109 or 120 degrees Fahrenheit—by ﬂicking a switch.
It can take a while to heat up, and you’ll be limited to four
or ﬁve hours of warmth, so no climbing Everest with these
things. However, if it gets pleasant enough outside to trade
BTUs for watts, the USB port lets you top of your phone.
$20 $43

0
8
4
C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F

E
S
L
A
EASYSLIDER
BENCHMARK ESLA KICKSLED
Whether you’re using it as a grocery-getter or just for pure winter fun,
the hardest part about piloting a kicksled is staying stopped.
BY NI CK STOCKTON
KICKSLEDS HAVE BEEN a winter standby among northern
folk for generations: They’re sturdy, fast, and perfect for
hauling everything from a case of Elsinore to an egg-
nogged uncle across the snow with ease. Rural Scandi-
navian artisans constructed the ﬁrst kicksleds in the late
1800s by attaching runners to the legs of wooden chairs.
Then in 1933, Finnish builder E. S. Lahtinen brought the
hybrid of tool and toy into his failing smithy and started
large-scale production. Other than the folding hinge that
Lahtinen’s grandson added in the 1970s to make the seat
collapsible, ESLA uses largely the same materials and
design to this day. Twist the handles and the steel bends,
turning the boxy frame with surprising agility. When it’s
time to stop, just use your heels as brakes.
$250
1958
2014
Stand on the
rails, grab the
chair, and kick!

0
8
6
’VE TAKEN THOUSANDSof amazing pictures over the past decade,
mostly with my iPhone: two births, countless weddings, moun-
taintops, sunsets, beaches, foreign lands, and so many other fan-
tastic experiences. And all those photos are in a mess, randomly
strewn across dozens of drives in my home and on servers in
remote data centers. ¶ We’re living in a new golden age of photog-
raphy, and it’s because of the cameras we all have in our pockets:
always connected to the Internet and ready to ﬁre. There’s a cli-
ché that the best camera is the one you have with you, but that’s
only half right; capturing a photo in itself means nothing. We take
pictures to remember—to document a moment, revisit it, and
share it with others. The best camera would actually be the one
you have with you that takes great shots, then edits, organizes,
and shares them for you. ¶ By that standard, the iPhone is half a
great camera. It takes wonderful photos, but Apple’s solution for
managing those snaps is basically to dump them on a drive—on
your computer or in the cloud. While it ofers some rudimentary
organizing principles (date, location,
and face recognition among them),
it makes you do all the most onerous
parts of selecting and editing. It gives
you incredibly limited sharing options,
and good luck getting people outside
of Apple’s ecosystem to see those pics.
Because of this, photos have become
just as ephemeral as the moments
we’re trying to capture. We need a
search engine for our own photogra-
phy, capable of handling as much data
as we can throw at it. We need a Google
for our pictures. Turns out, there is one.
Google’s supernerds managed to
turn algorithms into photo editors.
Set the Google+ app to auto-upload
pictures from your phone and it will
store them online and automatically
correct the color and lighting. It will
organize them by date and location.
Did you take a bunch of shots in suc-
cession? It will turn them into an ani-
mated GIF. Most amazingly, the service
ﬂags your best shots—where everyone
is grinning and the light is just right—
as highlights. Magic in the Arthur C.
Clarke sense of the word.
Finding stuf is also incredibly easy.
The app uses face recognition to pin-
point your friends—and your friends’
pictures of you. That’s nothing new,
but you can search your pictures for,
say, “bikes” and it will find all the
images with bicycles in them, even
if you’ve never labeled them. When
you’re ready to show of, Google+ lets
you share your snaps with a few clicks.
But here’s where I reveal a tragic
ﬂaw. While Google gets the back half
right—organizing, storing, and shar-
ing—taking the pictures continues
to be a problem. Even Google’s best
phones aren’t very good cameras.
The cam on the iPhone 5S simply
trounces any ﬂagship Android handset.
It’s not just the quality of the Android’s
lenses or sensors (the Samsung Gal-
axy S4 has better raw numbers) but
the apps themselves that disappoint.
On Halloween I took the Nexus 5
out trick-or-treating. It was running
the very latest version of Android,
released just that day. Google touted
its ability to use algorithms to make
your pictures better, and bragged
about the phone’s ability to handle low
light, movement, and other tough situ-
ations. My wife packed an iPhone 5S,
which had shipped the previous month.
We both took lots of pictures.
How’d we make out? My wife had a
clot of gorgeous photographs she’ll
likely never revisit or share. I had a
beautifully organized collection of
images you can barely make out.
Email mat_honan@ .com.
It’s easier than ever to take photos, but just try keeping track of them.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
MAT HONAN
TAVI S COBURN
I

M
O
T
O
R
O
L
A

a
n
d

t
h
e

S
t
y
l
i
z
e
d

M

L
o
g
o

a
r
e

t
r
a
d
e
m
a
r
k
s

o
f

M
o
t
o
r
o
l
a

T
r
a
d
e
m
a
r
k

H
o
l
d
i
n
g
s
,

L
L
C
.

100+ MAGAZINES | ALLYOUCANREAD ACCESS | ONE LOW PRICE
START YOUR FREE TRIAL TODAY AT NEXTISSUE.COM
Try it
FREE for
30 days

0 8 9 JAN 2014
The Wearable Revolution 90 | David Agus 100 | Taking Stuff Apart 108 | Q&A: Ron Moore 116 | Hunting the Ghost 120
FEATURES | 22.01
Dan Deacon

FOR DAN EISENHARDT—a competitive swim-
mer for more than a decade, beginning as
a 9-year-old in his native Denmark—the
data he needed in the water, what he could
never know in the water, was his splits. His
event was the 1,500-meter freestyle, the
longest slog in the sport, a near-mile of
grinding exertion divided into 15 laps of
100 meters apiece. As with every distance
sport, pacing is all; lag your target time on
the ﬁrst two laps and you may never catch
up, but accidentally beat it and you’ll load
your tissue with lactic acid, doom your
endgame. How fast was his last lap? How
did it compare to his usual pace? His coach
up on the pool deck could know, his par-
ents in the stands could know. But Eisen-
hardt, at war in the water, could only guess.
The rigors of engineering school even-
tually forced Eisenhardt to stop racing. He
worked for a while as a management con-
sultant. But later, during business school,
while he was spending an exchange semes-
ter at the University of British Columbia,
the problem nagged at him again. For a
project in an entrepreneurship class, he
pitched a business plan: data-enabled gog-
gles for swimmers like his former self. He
teamed up with some other students, and
they soon concluded they had the wrong
sport. Swim goggles were too small to sup-
port a screen, plus the athletes were too
few in number—and too unaccustomed
to shelling out for expensive gear. Close
at hand in wintry Canada, though, was a
better idea. In January 2008, after a year
or so of tinkering, four of the classmates
founded Recon Instruments.
Their first product, Recon Snow,
is a heads-up display for skiers and
snowboarders. From the outside it looks
just like any set of ski goggles. But tucked
below the right eye is a little display, con-
trollable by a simple remote—snow-proof
with big, chunky buttons—that clips to a
jacket. The main screen is a dashboard
that shows speed, altitude, and vertical
descent. There’s also a navigation view
that uses the built-in GPS to plot position
on a resort map, as well as an app screen
that offers access to a camera. Through
Bluetooth, the display integrates with
a smartphone, letting skiers play music,
answer calls, and see text messages or other
notiﬁcations. Recon has sold 50,000 of the
Snow so far, and the second generation,
Snow2, came out in November. The com-
pany’s next product—Jet, designed for
cyclists, with voice control and gaze detec-
tion for hands-free use—will ship in March.
Technically, the Recon doesn’t do any-
thing that the average smartphone couldn’t.
The lavish array of sensors in today’s
phones can chart speed and altitude;
social networking apps can find friends
and set up voice or video chats; any num-
ber of map apps can navigate users down
a mountain. That is, a smartphone would
do those things—if users could access
it on a ski slope or cycling run. But they
can’t, at least not without risking a crack
in their screen or their head. What Recon
sells is the ability to see all the crucial data,
and only the crucial data, at times when it
would other wise remain locked away. It
brings the power of the smartphone out
of your pocket and into your ﬁeld of vision,
accessible any time you glance its way.
This is the promise of wearable tech-
nology, and it’s the reason—after more
than 20 years of tinkering by cybernet-
ics enthusiasts—we’re finally seeing an
explosion of these devices on the market.
It’s the reason Google has poured mil-
lions into an improbable set of eyeglasses,
why Samsung has unveiled a companion
watch for its smartphones, and why Apple
is widely rumored to be exploring some-
thing similar. It’s the reason tiny compa-
nies banked thousands of preorders last
year for smartwatches, gesture-controlled
armbands, transmitting rings, notiﬁcation
bracelets, and more. A new device revolu-
tion is at hand: Just as mobile phones and
tablets displaced the once-dominant PC,
so wearable devices are poised to push
smartphones aside.
In purely technological terms, the wear-
able revolution could take shape much faster
than the mobile revolution that preceded it.
Thanks to what former editor in chief
Chris Anderson has called the “peace divi-
dend of the smartphone wars,” sensors and
chip sets are cheaper now than ever, mak-
ing it easier for small companies to incorpo-
rate sophisticated hardware into wearable
devices. And while smartphone manufac-
turers had to master the tricky art of pro-
viding dependable mobile Internet service,
wearable manufacturers can piggy back on
those innovations using simple Bluetooth
or other protocols to communicate with a
smartphone and thus with the outside world.
With all that prebaked hardware and wire-
less connectivity—and huge preorders from
crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter—it
has become possible for tiny companies to
dream up, build, and sell wearable devices
in competition with big companies, a feat
that was never possible with smartphones.
It may seem laughable to suggest that
people will soon neglect their iPhones in
favor of amped-up watches, eyeglasses,
DATA WILL NOT HELP
YOU IF YOU CAN’T SEE IT
WHEN YOU NEED IT.
Dan Eisenhardt, 38, started
Recon with three MBA
classmates to create a heads-up
display for snow goggles.
BILL WASIK (@billwasik) is a senior editor
at . He wrote about the Internet of
things in issue 21.06.
dan goldman

0 9 4 JAN 2014
rings, and bracelets. But then again, 10 years
ago it seemed laughable to think that people
would use their smartphones to email, surf
the web, play games, watch videos, keep
calendars, and take notes—all once core
tasks of desktop PCs. We can already see
how wearable devices might peel of some
of the phone’s key functions: One study of
smartphone users indicates that on average
we unlock our gadgets more than 100 times
a day, with some of us pawing at screens
far more often than that. Internet analyst
Mary Meeker estimates that as many as
two-thirds of those uses could be handled
with a wearable device.
To get there, though, pure function-
ality won’t be enough. After all, people
could surf the web on their BlackBerrys;
smartphones didn’t really take of until the
advent of the iPhone, a device that launched
an aesthetic transformation in the tech
industry, as design went from an after-
thought to a corporate necessity, a core
competency prized no less than the ability
to make a faster chip or stable operating
system. Wearable devices—technology that
people will want to display on their bod-
ies, for all to see—represent a new thresh-
RECON HEADSUP DISPLAY
From the outside, the only real
sign that anything’s different
about these Oakley goggles is a
tiny red logo on the right. On the
inside, though, the Recon Snow2
(starting at $399) sports an inge-
nious display that lets skiers and
snowboarders stay connected
on the sl opes. Wi th an arm-
band-mounted remote control,
users can toggle between a few
simple screens showing speed
and more. Friends using Recon
devices at the same resort can
keep track of one another on a
map. Recon sold 50,000 pairs of
its ﬁrst-generation goggles, and
the company’s second product—
Jet, designed for cyclists, with
voice control and gaze detection
for totally hands-free use—goes
on sale in March.
The display’s main
screen shows speed and
other key metrics …
… while another shows your
progress on the trail …
… and a third shows
notiﬁcations.

old in aesthetics. The tech companies that
mastered design will now need to conquer
the entirely diferent realm of fashion. And
that could require technologists to unlearn
a great deal of what they think they know.
THESE DAYS THAD STARNER, a wearables
pioneer who now serves as technical lead
for Google Glass, cuts the ﬁgure of a casual-
chic tech executive, with stylishly cropped
blond hair and a penchant for plain black
T-shirts. But when I meet him at a Google
ofce complex in Mountain View, he turns
his laptop toward me and presses Play on
an artifact from his deeply unfashionable
past. It’s a grainy clip from 60 Minutes in
which Morley Safer challenges Starner—
then a scraggly-haired kid with a goatee,
dark trench coat, and black Ho Ho–sized
object afxed to his left eye—to carry out
what was then his parlor trick: retrieving
any piece of information in 30 seconds.
“Give me the lifetime average and number
of home runs, doubles, singles, and triples
of Mickey Mantle,” Safer says.
“How do you spell Mantle?” Starner asks.
He types the name on a one-handed key-
board (a “Twiddler” that used combina-
tions of 12 buttons to span the whole range
of characters) and peers into his eye-screen.
“I’m getting a lot of hits on that,” he says,
a touch of nervousness in his voice.
“So did he,” Safer retorts.
The year was 1997, and the task took
Starner far longer than he’d hoped. He
eventually got there by scouring results on
AltaVista, the world’s best search engine at
the time: “The right hit was often in the top
14 but not the top one,” Starner now recalls.
Thirteen years later Starner came to
work for the company that finally per-
fected Internet searching. Google made it
signiﬁcantly easier and faster for people
to ﬁnd the information they were seeking,
a process that has only sped up in recent
years. Google Search, for example, now not
only auto-completes but auto-searches,
Starner points out. “You don’t even have
to get all the way through your ﬁrst word
and it might have the right piece of infor-
mation for you.” It all comes down to what
Google CEO Larry Page calls “reducing the
time between intention and action,” words
that Starner calls a mission statement.
That dovetails exactly with Starner’s
vision of how wearables can revolutionize
the way we access technology in our every-
day lives. He cites a seminal 1968 paper
by Robert B. Miller, an IBM psychologist
who spent years studying early computer
operators. It identiﬁes a crucial threshold
of human behavior with machines: We’re
inclined to give up on them if they take
more than two seconds to respond to an
instruction. In his own research as a long-
time professor at Georgia Tech, Starner
found the same rule of thumb applies to
accessing devices themselves. He calls it
the magic two-second rule. “If you can’t get
to a tool within two seconds,” he says, “your
use of it goes down exponentially.” Even
today, smartphones have trouble meeting
that standard. By the time we extract them
from our skinny jeans, swipe, type a pass-
code, and ﬁnd our way to whichever app
we wanted, the moment has usually passed.
Wearables reduce that friction. That’s
the selling point of Recon Instruments, and
it’s the same promise that Mary Meeker
sees when she imagines wearables replac-
ing many of our smartphone interactions.
When you put on Google Glass—or, say,
the Pebble smartwatch, whose unprece-
dented $10.3 million Kickstarter campaign
two years ago arguably helped launch the
wearable era—you suddenly have a win-
dow into your phone, with your calls, texts,
and emails popping up on a glanceable
screen as they ﬂow in. In the case of Glass
or some of the other smartwatches on the
market, you even get a camera and voice
recorder to document the world around you.
But reducing the time between intention
and action goes much further than that. In
many of the most cutting-edge applications
for wearables, the time between intention
and action is actually negative: The device
knows what users want before they want it.
The heart of the Glass experience is Google
Now, the company’s attempt to divine
and deliver needed information based on
context. Observing your driving patterns,
the app gives trafc updates when you’re
almost ready to ask for them; scanning
your calendar, it displays an alert when it’s
time to leave and gives you directions too.
Google Now is already available for Android
and iOS, but requiring users to check an
app on a phone defeats the whole pur-
pose. It’s a perfect ﬁt for wearables, though,
because it gives instant, even predictive
information to get you through the day.
For all its portability, the smartphone
still has a distracting screen that pulls us
away from whatever else we’re doing—in
the car, in business meetings, at restaurants.
Wearables, by contrast, are a gateway to
augmented reality, a more ubiquitous but
less distracting data layer that gives us con-
stant intelligence about the world around
us—and keeps our attention grounded in
that world, rather than of in the digital
ether. Phil Libin, CEO of the cross-platform
note-taking app Evernote and a big pro-
ponent of the promise of wearables, sees
WEARABLESWILL KNOW
WHATUSERSWANT
BEFORETHEYWANTIT.
Thad Starner, 44, started
wearing a head-mounted dis-
play as an MIT grad student in
the ’90s. Now he’s the techni-
cal lead for Google Glass.
R
O
B

F
E
L
T
/
G
E
O
R
G
I
A

T
E
C
H

0 9 6
JAN 2014
Google Now–like applications as his com-
pany’s future. The ultimate efect of these
devices, he says, will be to “make you more
aware, more mindful. They’ll reduce the
number of seconds in the day when you’re
confused. That’s what this whole connected
universe will do. It will make you a function-
ally smarter human being.”
THIS NEW WORLD of wearables will never
arrive if nobody consents to wear them.
Such is the problem that weighs on Sonny
Vu, CEO of Misfit Wearables, a startup
dedicated to creating devices that truly
deserve to be called fashionable. Misﬁt’s
name is appropriate, at least as it pertains
to its ofce in a drab residential section of
Daly City, California. Crammed into a two-
bedroom town house, the growing company
threatens to resemble a very unfashion-
able sweatshop. The hardware team occu-
pies one small bedroom, software the other.
Shipping hangs out in the dining room, right
up against the tiny kitchen. “We used to
have a garden,” Vu says, gesturing out the
sliding-glass door, “but all the plants died.”
Despite the overstuffed surroundings,
Misfit’s first product, the Shine activity
tracker, is a study in spare elegance. It’s a
graceful aluminum disc just over an inch in
diameter. A set of simple accessories allows
it to be worn in multiple ways: as a pin, a
pendant, a wristband, or even a timepiece
(a ring of tiny lights around Shine’s perim-
eter indicates the time).
Vu’s goal with Shine was to make a ﬁtness
tracker that women in particular would
be willing to show of. Most of the current
trackers, Vu says, “look like they were made
by Silicon Valley men for Silicon Valley
men,” using materials such as plastic and
rubber that are more suited for utilitarian
gadgets than stylish accessories. Worse,
most ﬁtness trackers are designed to be
worn on the wrist—but Misﬁt’s research
found that 30 percent of women say they
would never wear a device there, either
because they already own a watch or brace-
let they like or because they refuse to wear
anything there at all.
Wearables, Vu has concluded, “need
to be either gorgeous or invisible,” and
his ﬁrst product goes a long way toward
gorgeous. But it’s also worth pondering
the ways in which gorgeous isn’t enough.
For example, as a physical object, Google
Glass is arguably quite attractive, with
its curved titanium headband and well-
proportioned computing assembly poised
just above the right eye. Ride the eleva-
tor up to Google’s “concierge” space in its
San Francisco offices, where buyers get
fitted with one of five tasteful Glass col-
ors—Shale, Tangerine, Charcoal, Cotton,
or Sky—while attractive Glass-wearing
staf serve complimentary drinks and hors
d’oeuvres, and Google Glass seems almost
fashionable. But the evidence suggests that
out in the real world, it simply isn’t; six
months into the experiment, even hardcore
tech boosters who once wrote glowingly of
Glass were seldom seen actually wearing
the thing. (And these are some of the least
fashion-conscious people on the planet.)
The problem with Google Glass is not
that it’s bad industrial design. Google,
like the rest of Silicon Valley, has learned
a great deal about how to make an aestheti-
cally pleasing product. But Glass is meant
to be a highly visible addition to some-
one’s body as they walk around in public.
That demands more than just a gorgeous
product; it demands a fashionable prod-
uct. And the tricky task of wearables mak-
ers will be to understand the distinction.
One can boil that difference down to
two basic rules. The ﬁrst is what we might
call—with apologies for the vulgarism—the
Bluedouche principle. For those who don’t
remember the term, it’s an epithet hurled
circa 2007 at anyone who walked around
talking on a Bluetooth earpiece all day.
For all their functionality, and for all
the attempts to
make more stylish
models (Jawbone
sells beautiful and
highly ingenious
ones), earpieces
have never suc-
ceeded in shedding
this fundamental
perception of lameness. That’s because
wearing technology sends a pointed social
message, which can render even the best
industrial design superﬂuous.
Consider: However gorgeous a Bluetooth
earpiece, it fundamentally says that its
wearer might need to make or receive a call
at any time—and for most people, that’s not
a cool message to send. It makes the wearer
look like they jump
at the world’s beck
and call rather than
engaging with it on
their own terms. It’s
hardly coinciden-
tal that the demo-
graphics in which
the earpieces seem
to have caught on
(salespeople, say, or
small-business own-
ers) tend to value that kind of always-on
hustling. One imagines that some of them
keep their earpieces in even when they’ve
forgotten to charge them up. Similarly, suc-
cessful wearable devices will need to con-
vey a message to
the world that the
wearer is happy to
send—even if the
batteries are dead.
If the first rule
presents a chal-
lenge for wearables
as they gain accep-
tance, the second
will present a prob-
lem once they really
take off. Call this the Trucker Hat princi-
ple, after the low-fashion item that became
popular as a hipster accessory in the early
aughts and then lost steam precisely for its
popularity. Everybody was wearing one, so it
wasn’t cool anymore. Here’s yet another way
the design lessons of the smartphone era
won’t apply in the wearables age. If you walk
into a business meeting where everyone has
Sonny Vu, 40, started
Misﬁt Wearables in an attempt
to create gadgets that are
genuinely fashionable.
PEBBLE $150
With more than
250,000 sold,
the Pebble has
attracted a huge
community of
developers, who
make apps that
migrate functions
of the phone
and into the open.
FITBIT FORCE
$130 AND ZIP
$60
Fitbit makes a
range of activity
trackers, from the
Force, which can
double as a watch,
to the Zip (right).
JAWBONE UP24
$150
This new ﬁtness
tracker stays
connected with
your phone
via Bluetooth,
letting the app
ping you with
personalized
inspiration.

the same phone as
you, you’ re not
likely to care very
much. But what if
you walked into
that same meet-
ing and five other
people were wear-
ing the exact same
eyeglasses as you?
Or even the same frame in ﬁve diferent col-
ors—say, white, pink, yellow, blue, and green,
to name the ﬁve hues that grace Apple’s styl-
ish (but not, by this deﬁnition, fashionable)
iPhone 5c? You might as well all be wearing
the same trucker hat.
This urge for individuality is so well
known in fashion research that there is even
a quantitative measure of it called the con-
sumer need for uniqueness scale. Devel-
oped by three marketing professors in 2001,
the CNFU test consists of 31 first-person
statements—for example, “I collect unusual
products as a way of telling people I’m dif-
ferent” or “When a style of clothing I own
becomes too commonplace, I usually quit
wearing it”—statements the subject ranks
on a scale of 1 to 5. In most study groups,
there’s a wide variation in CNFU scores,
but nearly everyone who takes the test will
reveal at least some desire for uniqueness.
The tech industry isn’t immune to this
drive for individuality. Witness Apple’s
legendary “1984” and “Think Different”
ad campaigns, which encouraged custom-
ers to distinguish themselves from the
brainwashed hordes. But even Apple users
didn’t expect that their computer would
express their per-
sonality and style
to the same extent
their clothing did.
Now tech compa-
nies will be com-
peting in product
categories—wrist-
watches, glasses,
other fashionable
accessories—where even the least fashion-
conscious consumers demand a great
degree of uniqueness and variety.
IN THESE EARLY DAYS, it’s the Bluedouche
problem—the social message that our
wearable tech is sending—that most needs
to be overcome. That’s why some of the
SHINE FITNESS
TRACKER $120
Sonny Vu’s grace-
ful aluminum disc
matches the func-
tionality of other
trackers in a stylish,
minimalist form.
SAMSUNG GALAXY
GEAR $300
By far the
most techni-
cally impressive
of the current
smartwatches,
with its bright
screen and wrist-
band camera.
THE FIRST WAVE
Wearable technology is still in its infancy,
but here are some of the products you may
already be seeing on the street. —..
METAWATCH
FRAME $230
With its steel case
and leather band,
the Frame is cur-
rently among the
more fashionable
smartwatches.
NFC RING
PRICE TBD
This simple metal
ring comes
embedded with
a radio chip that
lets it open doors,
make payments,
and more.

most promising devices today are sim-
ple, targeted products that allow for more
elegant form factors and a more stream-
lined sales pitch. Sonny Vu calls this use-
case engineering, meaning a tight focus
on one particular function, such as noti-
ﬁcations. “Right now what we’re seeing
with smartwatches is that they’re like
smartphones you can wear on your wrist,”
Vu says. “I don’t think that’s the way to go.”
Vu said this in September, a week before
Samsung unveiled its Galaxy Gear smart-
watch, but it was as if he’d been given a sneak
peek at the device. Technologically speak-
ing, the Galaxy Gear is impressive, with its
bright 1.6-inch touchscreen, 1.9-megapixel
camera on the side of the wristband, and
Dick Tracy–style speaker underneath it, at
the clasp. Thanks to support for S Voice,
Samsung’s (not quite as capable) answer
to Siri, the Gear can reply to text messages,
add to a calendar, dial a contact, and more.
Testing out the Galaxy Gear is a revelation,
because it’s a chance to step a little far-
ther into that possible future, a few hops
down that plausible timeline in which wear-
ables subsume the functions of our phones.
Based on early reviews, though, this
maximalist approach has possibly been a
mistake. “Nobody will buy this watch, and
nobody should,” snifed former New York
Times columnist David Pogue in a repre-
sentative review. Some of this response
has to do with tech limitations—at launch,
the Galaxy Gear was compatible with only
one phone and had just a handful of apps.
But some has to do with the social message
such an all- encompassing device sends—
namely, “I’m wearing a fully functional com-
puting device on my body.” Contrast that
with the stand-alone ﬁtness tracker, like
the Jawbone Up or the Nike FuelBand. By
sending a more constrained and accept-
able social message (“I’m sporty”) and hew-
ing to Vu’s advice of doing one thing well,
those devices have forged the ﬁrst proﬁtable
path to the future of wearable computing.
Two recent Kickstarter projects, sched-
uled to hit the market at the beginning of
2014, take that lesson further. One, the NFC
Ring, is the brainchild of John McLear, a
web developer in the British city of Brad-
ford who hit on his big idea after his girl-
friend “kept shouting at me about leaving
the front door unlocked,” he says. So he
came up with a simple way to unlock a door
with no key: Make a ring, the simplest and
most unassuming genre of jewelry, but
embed a near-ﬁeld-communication chip
into it. That chip lets the ring talk not just
to NFC-enabled door locks (available of the
shelf) but also to a host of other systems,
including touchless payment networks
that are already widely used in the UK
and Europe. McLear also ofered a wealth
of diferent looks—not just various sizes
but colors of metal, inlays, and anodized
coatings. The Ring beat the Bluedouche
problem by ofering very speciﬁc function-
ality while surmounting the Trucker Hat
problem with an array of unique choices.
Fifteen thousand preorders flowed in.
BEYOND GLASS
Google isn’t the only company trying to put a computer on your face. But some of its competitors
have drastically diferent visions of how we’ll use head-mounted devices. —..
TELEPATHY ONE
Takahito Iguchi—founder of Telepathy, a
recent Japanese transplant to Silicon Val-
ley—thinks Glass tries to do way too much.
He’s built a slender device called One,
which, with a combo camera, earpiece, and
tiny projector, enables real-time sharing of
audio and video for better face time with
friends. It’s scheduled to hit the market this
year, but no price has been set.
MOTOROLA HC1
Motorola Solutions (the part of Motorola
that Google didn’t buy) sees heads-up dis-
plays as an industrial device: a crucial tool
that repair techs or surgeons could use to
browse or share images in high-stress situ-
ations. The HC1—which retails for $4,399
to $5,499—is rugged and water-resistant,
with removable, washable neoprene ﬁttings.
META SPACEGLASSES
This startup wants to go beyond Glass’
above-the-eye screen to provide true aug-
mented reality, providing a pervasive dig-
ital overlay on the entire field of vision.
Meta’s soon-to-be-released Space glasses
($667) are far from stylish, but they’ll let
you use hand motions to manipulate objects
displayed on the transparent eyeglass
screens—a pretty neat trick.

0 9 9
JAN 2014
“ IT FEELS LIKE 2003 OF
THE MOBILE ERA,” ONE
ENTREPRENEUR SAYS.
The second intriguing example is the
Embrace+, a simple device for delivering
notiﬁcations from your smartphone. But
here’s the twist: It doesn’t have a screen.
Through a smartphone app, users can pro-
gram the Embrace+—a translucent bracelet
with LEDs hidden inside—to ﬂash diferent
colors, depending on the message being
conveyed. If a best friend calls, it might
ﬂash red; if a post gets liked on Facebook,
orange; and so on. Perhaps owing to the cur-
rent demographics of Kickstarter users, a
surprising portion of the project’s roughly
4,500 backers are thirtysomething men,
says Rudi Beij nen, the Dutch expat in Shen-
zhen, China, who heads up the project. But
he imagines, logically enough, that the
device will eventually ﬁnd a market among
teenage girls who can’t always look at their
phones—in English class, for instance. By
eschewing a screen for a suggestive set of
lights, it manages to skirt the Bluedouche
problem, turning a wrist-mounted wear-
able into a subtle act of adolescent rebellion.
NOT LONG AGO IN NEW YORK, I visited the
SoHo showroom of a boutique watchmaker
called House of Horology. There I met the
two principal collaborators behind the Agent
smartwatch, another Kickstarter campaign
(more than 5,600 backers have pledged in
excess of $1 million so far), whose ﬁrst units
are scheduled to ship in early 2014 and who
personify the coming merger of tech and
fashion. Indeed, the two men embody their
respective realms almost comically. The
tech brains and prime mover behind the
Agent project is Chris Walker, 35, a rotund
baby-faced Idahoan packed into a charcoal
suit. The style is supplied by Lawrence Ley-
derman, House of Horology’s 31-year-old
proprietor, a New York City native wear-
ing a mustardy-tan hoodie and cargo shorts.
Leyderman comes from a watch family
(his father owns a watch-repair shop in
Midtown), and he grew up admiring boxy
“pilot”-style models from such European
watch houses as Panerai, Automar, and
Bell & Ross. Their inﬂuence is clearly vis-
ible in Leyderman’s own line of Bedlam
watches, which he began selling in 2012 to
great acclaim; last spring, New York maga-
zine named his shop the best men’s watch
store in the city. Walker already knew he
wanted to build a fashionable smartwatch
when he stumbled across the store last
January. He suggested a partnership, and
Leyderman began developing his take on
the design: a chunky, vaguely military-
looking frame cast in metal with an irreg-
ular 12-sided face, plus a thick leather or
rubber strap with contrast stitching. Today
the two are putting the ﬁnishing touches
on Agent, which they ambitiously imagine
as the world’s best smartwatch along just
about every dimension: function, stabil-
ity, security, and—best of all—coolness.
So far this kind of marriage between
technology and fashion thinking remains
vanishingly rare. Among big companies,
perhaps the most notable example is Beats
by Dre, the ubiquitous headphones that
kids all around the country wear on their
ears or, tellingly, around their necks—that
is, when they’re not even listening to them.
Though Beats is based in Santa Monica,
near the Hollywood-industrial complex
that feeds its image, its designer—Rob-
tion of Beats as an overexposed commod-
ity; in the weird cultural math of fashion,
the existence of Kobe Bryant’s one-of-a-
kind Beats in faux snakeskin makes your
cheap old black model somehow less cliché.
“Capturing people’s imagination in a way
that makes them want to put your stuf on
their body is a skill set that not many people
have,” Brunner says. “It deﬁnitely doesn’t
exist in many large corporations.” Brunner
rattles of some of the ways that fashion and
tech are at odds: the very diferent sorts of
early adopters whose acceptance drives
products into the mainstream, and the
even more aspirational dynamic (“Who do
I want to be like?”) that motivates people
to buy. “It’s very complex,” he says. “Tech
companies don’t get that stuf.” Then again,
they might now be ready to learn. In just
the past year, Apple alone has hired execu-
tives from Burberry, Levi Strauss, and Yves
Saint Laurent—in the last case, to head up
a “special projects” division that many sus-
pect will wind up creating wearable devices.
It’s an auspicious moment for wearables,
one that’s been two decades in the making.
Sonny Vu, echoing a sentiment I hear from
a few wearables thinkers, says “it feels like
2003 of the mobile era”—that is, right before
smartphones came along to invent a new
category. A pessimist, pondering the reac-
tion to Google Glass and the Galaxy Gear,
might counter that it’s more like 1993, when
Apple’s Newton PDA showed of the capa-
bilities of mobile devices a decade before
the public was prepared for it. But unlike
with mobile, the barrier to the wearable
future isn’t technological innovation; it’s
the unique challenge of creating something
that is not just functional or even beautiful
but deeply personal. The wearable future
will be here someday. The only question is
how soon you’ll be willing to put it on.
ert Brunner, a graying but hip 55-year-old
with chunky plastic glasses and new twins
at home—works out of an ofce near the
San Francisco waterfront. He explains that
Beats keeps its oferings fresh through a
canny process of constant product intro-
duction. In addition to the company’s
standard offerings, it puts out limited-
edition seasonal colors every six months
or so, often informed by the same high-
end color forecasting research that fash-
ion houses use. Beyond that, Beats also
regularly rolls out tiny runs of “custom”
headphones, cobranded with a pro foot-
ball team, say, or tagged by a grafti art-
ist, or even single pairs made to order for
a particular celebrity. Those editions take
a ton of work to coordinate, and if they do
impact the bottom line of such a large com-
pany, it’s probably for the worse. But these
small editions help counter any percep-

WITH BETA
CAROTENE
WITHOUT BETA
CAROTENE
David Agus helped Steve Jobs live longer. Now he wants to help us all.
DOCTOR’ S ORDERS
BY AMY WALLACE BRYCE DUFFY
1 0 1
Grow a garden.
Never skip breakfast.
Don’t smoke.
Smile.
Take a baby aspirin.
Have a glass of
wine with dinner.
Start a sensible
cafeine habit.
Eat real food.
Eat more
produce.
Wear comfortable
shoes.
Have children.
The more servings,
the lower the
risk of coronary
heart disease.
Low-dose aspirin
reduces the risk of
getting cancer—
and dying from it.
Most vitamins
show no beneﬁt,
and some increase
the risk of dying.
Avoid sunburns.
Pick up a pooch.
Eat more cold-
water ﬁsh.
S-t-r-e-t-c-h.
Avoid vitamins and
supplements.
I
L
L
U
S
T
R
A
T
I
O
N
S
B
Y
H
O
L
L
Y
W
A
L
E
S
CANCER INCIDENCE
AFTER 3 YEARS
(P=.0003]
R
E
L
A
T
I
V
E

R
I
S
K

O
F

C
H
D
RISK OF DEATH
(P=.003]
1
.
2
1
.
6
%
0
.
8
%
0
.
4
0 3 6
DAILY SERVINGS OF
FRUITS & VEGETABLES
CANCER DEATHS
AFTER 5 YEARS
(P=.004]
ASPIRIN
NO ASPIRIN
7
%
8
%

AMY WALLACE (@msamywallace) wrote about a biol-
ogist who shot six of her colleagues in issue 19.03.
I
It’s 6:30 on a Monday morning and already David Agus is
doing an admi rable job of sticking to the rules. Dressed
in the no- nonsense uniform that one of his patients,
the late Steve Jobs, encouraged him to adopt and wear
daily—gray slacks and a black sweater over a white
dress shirt—the pioneering biomedical researcher
and oncologist meets me outside his hotel on West
56th Street in Manhattan with a large Starbucks cof-
fee
1
in his hand and a big smile
2
on his face. Already he’s
gone for a brief morning run,
3
and his activity levels
are being monitored by the black Nike Fuelband
4
on
his left wrist. The previous evening he dined on king
salmon
5
at Café Boulud, ﬁnishing it of with a ﬁne Cab-
ernet,
6
and, as he always does, he took a statin
7
and a
baby aspirin
8
before falling asleep. Though he hasn’t
eaten breakfast,
9
he looks freshly scrubbed
10
and is
wearing comfortable shoes.
11
In his new book, A Short
Guide to a Long Life, he prescribes 65 rules we should
follow to achieve better health; in the past 18 hours
he’s accomplished a solid 10.
Agus is clearly an over achiever. This morning we are
heading to CBS News, where one or two times a week
he banters about health topics with CBS This Morn-
ing’s Charlie Rose and the other anchors. This has
been going on since May and was an outgrowth of the
2012 publication of his best seller The End of Illness,
a paradigm- shifting book about how to live health-
fully and well. In addition to these TV appearances, he
contributes op-eds to The New York Times, appears in
Nike’s new Movement Matters public- awareness cam-
paign, and is a regular participant at events like the
World Economic Forum in Davos, PopTech in Maine,
and the Aspen Ideas Festival.
But Agus, 49, is no average pop-doc. He’s also an
accomplished and well- regarded research scientist.
A professor of medicine and engineering at USC, he
has helped develop new drugs and landmark diagnos-
tic tools, cofounded two health care technology com-
panies, and made breakthroughs in both how to treat
cancer and how we think about it. On top of all this, he’s
a clinician, devoting two and a half days a week to see-
ing patients—more than a few of them famous. Sumner
Redstone, for example, has publicly thanked Agus for
his “miracle recovery” from prostate cancer. “He thinks
outside the box,” says Redstone, 90. “Everything he told
me to do contributed to my battle against cancer. Today
I feel better than I did when I was 20.” Neil Young, who
mentions Agus in his recent memoir, calls him simply
“my mechanic.” As for Jobs, the iCEO was such a close
friend that he helped Agus’ ﬁrst book ﬁnd its audience
by renaming it. (Agus’ original title for The End of Ill-
ness was What Is Health?—but Jobs vetoed it, saying
reading it was like “chewing cardboard.”)
The combination of serious scientist and acces sible
communicator has earned Agus plenty of high- proﬁle
admirers. “He’s disruptive” is how his friend will.i.am
describes Agus. “A prophet,” says Marc Beniof, chair
and CEO of Salesforce.com and another buddy. “What
he does is really important,” vice president Al Gore
says, praising Agus’ willingness to defy “a certain peer
pressure” that discourages “taking the discoveries of
science into popular culture.”
For his part, Agus isn’t really trying to defy any-
one. To him it’s all part of a single plan. That’s because
Agus isn’t just trying to build a career, make a pile of
money, or get famous; he’s trying to beat cancer. And
he knows that even as he searches for breakthrough
treatments and reﬁnes state-of-the-art clinical care,
these accomplishments alone will not achieve this goal.
Agus believes we can conquer this devastating disease
only if individuals take ownership of their health. They
can’t do that if they don’t know how. So he has taken
it upon himself to educate them, one rule at a time.
Not everyone is a fan of Agus’ approach. He has
at times been accused of making things a little too
straightforward, a little too simple. Should more of us
really be taking statins? And we shouldn’t take vita-
mins? To those critics, A Short Guide is guaranteed to
rankle. Because despite its various disclaimers—“The
rules in this book are not meant to be blanket recom-
mendations”—the little volume contains Agus’ stark-
1. [RULE 18] Start
a sensible cafeine
habit. “Consum-
ing cafeine in
modera tion from
natural sources
like the cofee
bean and tea leaf
has long been
shown to confer
positive beneﬁts
on our health.”
2. [RULE 29]
Smile. “The act
itself will trigger
the release of
pain-killing, brain-
happy endorphins
and serotonin.”
3. [RULE 17] Jack
your heart rate up
50 percent above
your resting base-
line for at least 15
minutes every day.
4. [RULE 2]
Measure yourself.
“You might want
to consider add-
ing a tracking app
or device of some
kind to your life.”

1 0 3
est, most clear-cut prescriptions yet. Such reassuring
conﬁdence is expected from health proselytizers, who
tend to limit themselves to advice based on scientiﬁc
consensus. Cutting-edge scientists, on the other hand,
are almost allergic to sweeping certainties. By deﬁni-
tion, they work in areas that are messy, ambiguous, and
subject to frequent and sometimes wholesale revision.
They trafc not in answers but in questions. By combin-
ing the roles of serious biomedical researcher and dedi-
cated wellness guru, Agus sometimes seems to have
boldly decided that still- unsettled science is settled
enough to be translated for the masses. He’s conﬁdent
in his interpretation of the data, whose message he
feels is too urgent to wait for the plodding agreement
of the conservative medical establishment. The result
is that in a ﬁeld rife with caveats, Agus speaks with a
ringing clarity. Which is great, as long as he’s right.
You might say that Agus is geneti-
cally predisposed to his career trajectory. His father,
Zalman Agus, is a professor emeritus of medicine and
physiology at the University of Pennsylvania. His grand-
father, Jacob Agus, was a rabbi and theologian who
wrote books with titles like The Evolution of Jewish
Thought. When he died, in 1986, The New York Times
noted that he’d “promoted dialogue between Chris-
tians and Jews.” Now grandson David has combined
these passions, promoting a dialog about health and
medicine with the fervor of a devout scholar.
It wasn’t always this way. To hear him tell it, he was
an introverted if precocious science nerd almost from
birth—puttering in the lab as a child, competing in
national science contests, publishing three papers in
peer- reviewed journals before he went to college. He
attended the best schools: undergrad at Prince ton, med
school at Penn, and a residency at Johns Hopkins. He
remembers being told, when it came time to pick a spe-
cialty, that oncology was “career suicide.” At the time,
he recalls, the ﬁeld “was an insipid branch of medicine
bereft of hope and innovation.” But fresh out of Hopkins
in 1994, he accepted an oncology fellowship at Memo-
rial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
While working in the lab of David Golde, then Sloan-
Kettering’s physician in chief, Agus was part of a team
that discovered that while vitamin C might help pre-
vent cancer, it can become an arch enemy when you
have cancer. It turned out that tumors feed on it. He
also worked to develop a new lymphoma drug under
Golde and is among those who did the initial work
that led to the pharmaceutical called Perjeta (per-
tuzumab), which binds to a protein on the surface of
about a quarter of breast cancers, efectively turning
one of their “on switches” to of.
But as formative as this research was for Agus, the
relationships he forged were really what shaped his
methods. Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, had gone
public about his ﬁght with prostate cancer in 1996. The
men became close after meeting at a “who’s who in can-
cer research” retreat in 1998. So when Grove ofered
some constructive criticism, Agus was hard-pressed
not to listen. “I love what you’re doing in the lab, but
you’re not any good at telling people about it,” Grove
said to the young researcher. Agus was defensive at
ﬁrst. “What does that have to do with anything? It’s
good science,” he countered. Nonetheless, he began
scheduling talks at hospitals around the New York
area, 150 over the following year. “I forced myself to
be a better presenter,” he says.
It was Grove who encouraged Agus to move to Cali-
fornia, where Agus took a position at Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center in Los Angeles in 2000. Already, word
was spreading about this young doctor who was devel-
oping new therapies. But Agus had yet to ﬂesh out his
systemic approach to cancer, which would be spurred
by two key moments. The ﬁrst occurred in 2004, when
Clifton Leaf, a cancer survivor, wrote a cover story in
Fortune called “Why We’re Losing the War on Cancer.”
Leaf made a compelling case that the medical commu-
nity was approaching cancer the wrong way—spending
more energy trying to understand it and not enough
trying to control it. The article gnawed at Agus. Why
was he so powerless to treat advanced cancer?
The second moment occurred ﬁve years later, at the
Aspen Ideas Festival. There Agus met the famed physi-
cist Murray Gell-Mann, who had won the Nobel Prize in
1969 for his work on the theory of elemental par ticles.
Talking to Gell-Mann crystallized the ideas that Leaf’s
article had set in motion. “My ‘Aha!’ moment came when
he talked about the complex systems he confronted
in physics and how he would go about trying to build
models,” Agus wrote in The End of Illness. Physicists
were able to build theoretical models of things they still
didn’t completely understand and make discoveries
using those models. Why hadn’t doctors approached
medicine like this? he wondered.
That same year, Agus stood before thousands of col-
leagues at a meeting of the American Association for
Cancer Research in Denver and did not mince words:
“We’ve made a mistake.” For 50 years, he said, too
many resources had been aimed at analyzing how can-
“He’s disruptive,” says
will.i.am. “A prophet,”
adds Mark Beniof.
5. [RULE 37]
Eat more than
three servings
of cold-water
ﬁsh a week.
6. [RULE 10]
Have a glass of
wine with dinner.
7. [RULE 21]
Inquire about
statins if you’re
over-the-hill.
8. [RULE 22] Take
a baby aspirin.
9. [RULE 41] Never
skip breakfast.
10. [RULE 11]
Practice good
hygiene—in bed
and out.
11. [RULE 59]
Avoid stilettos
and other sneaky
sources of
inﬂammation.

N
BOLDFACE
PATIENTS
David Agus has
treated a roster of
high-proﬁle patients.
Here’s a sampling. LANCE ARMSTRONG
Former professional cyclist
ILLNESS: testicular cancer
NEIL YOUNG
Singer-songwriter, musician
ILLNESS: undisclosed
TED KENNEDY
US senator, Massachusetts
(died 2009)
ILLNESS: brain cancer
SUMNER REDSTONE
Executive chair of CBS
and Viacom
ILLNESS: prostate cancer
“Agus is a genius.
He cures people
of cancer.”
“Agus has given us
a remarkable peek
into our health.”
cer works. “We don’t necessarily need to understand
cancer to control it,” he remembers saying. There were
hisses in the audience. It wouldn’t be the last time.
He was already at work on The End of Illness, which
he’d begun in 2008. “I wrote the book out of weakness,
not out of strength,” he says. “I knew I couldn’t treat
advanced disease. So we had to do everything we could
to get people to understand that there were ways to
prevent it, ways of thinking about it diferently, and to
spur the ﬁeld to change.” In the book, he would pro-
pose a shift in our approach to managing disease and
prolonging quality of life. Most crucially, he ofered a
new way to think about cancer. It’s not something the
bodyhas, he asserted, so much as something the body
does. Cancer is not a noun, in other words, but a verb,
as in, we need to stop our bodies from “cancering.”
Agus says one of his main goals in becoming an author
has been to empower individuals, to give them the best
data available and tell them how to use it. “There’s a
portion of the population who still want to be told
what to do. You can’t ignore them,” he says. But still,
he adds, his central aim—counterintuitively—has been
to inspire his readers to speak up, ask questions, and
challenge accepted norms. Even if that means they chal-
lenge him. Rule 27 is “Partner with your doc,” which is
ﬁtting, as Agus seems bent on partnering with us all.
o one doubts Agus’ devotion to data.
But some say he can take it too far—to the detriment of
patients’ pocketbooks and their emotional well-being.
Nowhere has that criticism played out more publicly than
on ABC News, which did two reports on Agus in 2012—the
ﬁrst in January, just as The End of Illness went on sale, the
other in October, right after it came out in paperback.
Bill Weir, the correspondent who did both reports, billed
the first one as “the assignment that saved my life.”
But in the second he admitted, “Now I’m not so sure.”
Weir, a seemingly ﬁt 44-year-old husband and father,
volunteered to let Agus use him as a test subject to
show how cutting-edge technology can extend life.
The newsman underwent a battery of tests, includ-
ing a full-body CT scan, and then sat down to get the
results on camera. He was stunned to hear Agus say
that he had lesions with calciﬁcation in major coronary
arteries. He could be at risk for a heart attack. Agus
told Weir that he might become “the 45-year-old who
went jogging and died.” Weir needed to develop a regu-
lar schedule,
12
Agus said, improve his diet, stop taking
vitamins, and move around more throughout the day.
“At that moment I vowed to change,” Weir reported.
But even as Agus’ book became a best seller, some
in the medical community were questioning one of its
central premises: That more information is the key
to making good decisions, even when the tests used
to glean that information may do damage (full-body
12. [RULE 49] Pick
up a pooch. Dogs
keep you on a regu-
lar schedule.

1 0 5
DENNIS HOPPER
Actor (died 2010)
ILLNESS: prostate cancer
STEVE JOBS
Cofounder, chair, and
CEO of Apple (died 2011)
ILLNESS: pancreatic cancer
TOM SHERAK
Former president of the
Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences
ILLNESS: prostate cancer
JOHNNY RAMONE
Guitarist, the Ramones
(died 2004)
ILLNESS: prostate cancer
ROBIN QUIVERS
Radio personality,
The Howard Stern Show
ILLNESS: uterine cancer
“Agus is keeping me alive,
month by month by month.
He’s on the leading edge.”
“An amazing
adviser. Such
a heart.”
G
E
T
T
Y

I
M
A
G
E
S
CT scans, for example, involve radiation exposure). “I
started hearing from people the morning after that ﬁrst
report aired,” Weir told me. What they said was that
Agus was, as Weir put it in his second report, “a good
example of bad medicine.” In his second piece, Weir
reported that ﬁve doctors had asserted that Agus had
overstated Weir’s risk of dying.
Weir says he quickly realized he’d unwittingly waded
into an ongoing argument about what comprises over-
testing in health care. He also conceded to me that as
a guy who’d long avoided doctors and who paid no
attention to what he ate or what his ancestors had
died from, he “probably needed a wake-up call.” But
the way Agus had delivered his diagnosis—his unwav-
ering certainty—bothered Weir.
What Weir wishes Agus had told him, he says, was
“You are going through a machine that is the best we
have in terms of seeing into the crevices and crannies
of your body, but to be completely honest with you, the
smartest people in the world can’t agree on how to inter-
pret the data it creates.” While Weir acknowledges that
Agus changed his behavior for the better—he eats more
salmon now and carries a FitBit in his pocket—he thinks
Agus’ evaluation lacked context.
When Agus and I talk about Weir, he laments that
Weir’s reports made him sound like an unquestion-
ing proponent of CT scans (in fact, he thinks they need
improvement; he does not recommend them in either
of his books). But Agus stands by his ﬁndings. Yes, the
chance of Weir having a heart attack is low. But they did
ﬁnd plaques. “This is somebody who has existing heart
disease, and he wasn’t on any preventive measures,”
Agus says. Why risk letting it get worse? I ask what he
would say to Weir if they talked about the reports today.
“It changed your life with no real downside except for
cost,” he says. “This was a gift!”
This is hardly the only controversy around Agus. He
has efectively waged war on the vitamin and supple-
ment industry, telling his readers to forgo the pills and
powders
13
and consume fresh food instead.
14
He shuns
practices like juicing and detoxing,
15
which many equate
with healthy living. Then there’s his belief that most
people over 40 should talk to their doctor about tak-
ing a statin. Statins do more than cut down on choles-
terol; they reduce inﬂammation in the body, which is
key, Agus believes, to maintaining good health.
Many disagree with Agus on statins. Among them
is David Newman, director of clinical research, emer-
gency medicine, at Mt. Sinai Hospital and editor in chief
of TheNNT.com, a site that analyzes peer-reviewed
research to help make recommendations on therapies
and treatments. “What’s missing from the conversation
is something about whether or not there is a downside,”
Newman says, noting that some people suffer side
efects from statins. “If he’s even implying that healthy
people should be taking a statin, I disagree with that.”
The problem, Newman says, is that Agus’ approach
ofers so little room for doubt. “Asking the question
‘Why not do more to prevent illness?’ is so lopsided.
It doesn’t ofer the possibility of having an intelligent
conversation about what is good and what is bad. It
just assumes there is only good.”
Agus takes issue with this portrayal. “The data is very
clear on a society level that statins make people live lon-
ger,” he tells me. “If you have side efects as an individual,
you have to weigh that. If everyone in your family lives to
be 100 with no heart disease and no cancer, then maybe
you don’t need to be on a statin. But if some of them
died in their ﬁfties of a heart attack, then you probably
do.” What he wants, he says, is for people to investigate
the potential beneﬁts and side efects for themselves.
“I’m not saying, ‘Everybody take a statin!’ ” Agus says.
He is saying that everybody should consider it for its
impact on inﬂammation in the body. “A discussion with
your physician has to happen. The data is that good. And
to really make that discussion happen, you have to make
things black and white.” (The American Heart Asso-
ciation and American College of Cardiology recently
issued new guidelines suggesting that more people
should take statins, though the recommendations were
immediately challenged by some prominent doctors.)
Certainty and simplicity—they are Agus’ most efec-
tive tools, and they also earn him the most blowback.
On our day together in New York, he shows me an email
he’s received from a renowned physicist at an Ivy League
university. The professor heard Agus on NPR talking
13. [RULE 62]
Avoid vitamins and
supplements.
14. [RULE 5]
Eat real food.
15. [RULE 60]
Avoid juicing.
“Does the body
really like consum-
ing 10 carrots all
at once?” he asks.
“I think not.”
[RULE 54]
Avoid detoxes.

1 0 6
T
about how chemotherapy helps people with cancer live
longer and better. Apparently the professor found Agus’
comments too enthusiastic. “It sounded like you were
doing an infomercial for the local rubes,” the man wrote.
If Agus is tempted to call the guy an elitist, he doesn’t
admit it to me. His response, which he reads to me, is
gracious and stresses the importance of educating the
public and helping them cut through all the confusing
messages about health. “Educate or mislead?” Mr. Ivy
League ﬁres back, but Agus refuses to be baited. “I agree
that chemotherapy is not the future,” he writes back
amiably, “but I see it beneﬁt patients daily. We need
much better, but it does work.”
Still, how can he be so sure of things—so black and
white, to use his words—in a ﬁeld so thoroughly gray?
“That’s the greatest question ever!”
16
he says, launching
into an answer that basically boils down to this: Because
somebody has to. “At some point, everything in medi-
cine has to hit a critical mass of data so it becomes fact,”
he says. “When there are enough studies that are big
enough and statistically sound, we need leadership to
make that statement—to say, ‘Listen, we need to have a
normative change here.’ You need to make declaratory
statements.” Someone, in other words, must step up,
look at the data, and be brave enough to make a call.
Agus is more than willing to be that person—even if it
means occasionally taking a hit for it.
“For me to be criticized a little is nothing,” he says.
“Because I get to see people who are dying of disease.
So if I get criticized for trying to prevent disease?” He
pauses. “Bring it on!”
After Agus’ appearance on CBS This Morn-
ing, we get into a black sedan and head downtown. He’s
due to ﬁlm a talk on cancer for TEDMED, the medical of-
shoot of the famed big-ideas conference, but before we
can get there, Agus’ phone begins to buzz with the news
that Howard Stern has just mentioned him by name on
SiriusXM. Agus has a quizzical look on his face, but he
quickly ﬁgures out that Robin Quivers, Stern’s sultry-
voiced sidekick, has gone public this morning about her
triumph over uterine cancer. Agus consulted on her case.
On the show, a remarkably emotional Stern says, “I
do want to thank Dr. Agus, one of Robin’s doctors, for
stepping in … He’s a genius. Genius.” Later, Stern goes
so far as to spell the doctor’s name, “A-G-U-S,” and lauds
him for helping Quivers choose a course of treatment.
Soon hundreds of emails will start pouring in to Agus’
inbox. Thank you, they’ll all say in one way or another.
Thank you for taking care of our Robin.
The cavalcade of A-listers in Agus’ life has boosted his
public persona and made him famous in his own right.
This is something his friends have encouraged him to
think about. One of them, Dov Seidman, a business eth-
icist and author, tells me about a conversation he and
Agus had just before The End of Illness came out. The gist,
Seidman says, was that he warned Agus about the lure of
fame. “David’s sweet spot is that the white coat is really
on,” Seidman says. “He’s in the lab, staying close to sci-
entiﬁc breakthroughs. He’s got the legitimacy and gravi-
tas that comes with being the person who is engaged in
medical science on the cutting edge. Many people who’ve
gone broad and popular have disconnected from that.”
Seidman told Agus that popularity could be seductive and
urged him not to let it interfere with his work in the lab.
It’s a helpful reminder that alongside his controver-
sies and TV appearances and best sellers, Agus is also
a renowned scientist. Take, for example, his work with
Danny Hillis, an inventor, scientist, and entrepreneur.
A pioneer of parallel computing and a former vice
president of Walt Disney Imagineering, Hillis is Agus’
partner in a company called Applied Proteomics. They
met after Agus reached out for Hillis’ help. At ﬁrst Hillis
ignored the doctor’s calls, but then one day (in fact, all
in one day), Al Gore, John Doerr, and Bill Berkman con-
tacted Hillis and told him to pick up the phone.
He did, and Agus got right to the point: If he only had
a better way to measure proteins in the blood, he could
better evaluate each patient’s cancer and prescribe
more effective treatments. When you are “cancer-
ing,” you see, your body’s proteins change. Hillis was
intrigued but skeptical, at least at ﬁrst. “The problem
is you have hundreds of thousands of proteins in your
blood—many more than you have genes, actually,” Hillis
says. “And to detect the kinds of subtle changes cancer
causes, you need to measure how much of them you
have, not just whether they are there. But David con-
vinced me that this was a really important problem.”
A beat, and then he adds, “He’s very convincing.”
In 2007 the two men founded Applied Proteomics
to explore the problem in earnest. They decided that a
good ﬁrst product for their company to develop was a
diagnostic test for colon cancer. Agus ﬁnds the current
test, a colonoscopy, ﬂawed in that—while it enables the
removal of precancerous polyps—many people avoid it
because they can’t bear the idea of being scoped. A less
invasive diagnostic test would deﬁnitely save lives. Using
advanced computing power, Hillis and Agus succeeded in
“For me to be criticized
is nothing,” Agus says.
“Bring it on.”
16. [RULE 31]
Be positive.
17. (RULE 57)
Avoid sunburns.

T
ﬁnding a way to analyze small protein changes that occur
in the body when polyps are present. They expect their
test to be on the market as early as next year. It wouldn’t
have happened, Hillis says, without Agus’ persuasiveness.
Agus combines three characteristics rarely seen in the
same person, Hillis says. “One is tremendous personal
charisma and enthusiasm. He also is a great abstract
thinker. And then he is a great observer. Very keen. He
really sees the way you’re moving, the gaze in your eye,
the color of your skin. Usually people who are working
on a theoretical plane—like me—are kind of oblivious
to things like that. But he’s able to make that bridge
between the clinical and the theoretical and then get
other people excited about it.”
If there’s one thing that ties all of Agus’ divergent
activities together, it’s this: He’s a connector. Whether
developing a new diagnostic tool or urging readers to
use sunscreen,
17
he believes the critical thing is connect-
ing with people and getting them not just to understand
what needs to be done but to act on it. This fundamen-
tal goal underlies all that Agus does.
18. We ﬂew
together, so I got
to witness him fol-
lowing (RULE 56):
Avoid airport back-
scatter x-ray scan-
ners. Until science
can prove the safety
of such machines,
he explains in his
new book, “I’ll be
requesting the
manual pat-down
massage when I go
through the TSA’s
gateway at airports.
You should too.”
19. (RULE 16) Get
of your butt more.
20. (RULE 9)
Cultivate om in
the ofce.
hree days after we return from New
York City,
18
I pay a visit to Agus’ Beverly Hills clinic. As
he ushers me into his modest ofce, there is more evi-
dence that he follows his own rules: a treadmill desk.
19

But it’s in the examination room that I ﬁnally see, up
close, what drives him.
Today one of his patients is Tom Sherak, a longtime
studio executive and former president of the Acad-
emy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Sherak,
68, has been ﬁghting prostate cancer since 2001. For
ﬁve years another doctor kept the disease in check,
but in 2006, when the cancer grew more aggressive,
Sherak’s friends told him to contact Agus. Sherak is
no whiner, but he admits that the disease has taken
its toll: Chemo robs him of his energy, his sex drive,
sometimes even his will.
Agus is treating Sherak with Taxotere, a drug that
interferes with cell division. It’s powerful stuf—after
each treatment (Sherak’s on his ﬁfth) he can do little
but lie in a recliner for at least a week. As the chemo
enters his body via an IV drip, Sherak—in a white hos-
pital gown, with a blanket tucked snugly around his
lower half—appears upbeat, at least at ﬁrst.
“Are we doing a good job or what?” he asks as Agus
takes a seat next to him. The doctor smiles and squeezes
Sherak’s ankle. The news is good: The aggressive cells
are in retreat. But instead of looking overjoyed, the
patient’s face clouds over.
“We’re stopping after six treatments,” Sherak says,
locking eyes for a moment with his wife, who is sitting
on a chair near his feet.
“OK,” Agus responds. “Things are looking good.”
“I need to stop at six,” Sherak repeats.
“That’s ﬁne. You’ve got to listen to your body,” Agus
says, his voice calm,
20
but it’s impos sible to ignore the
anxious question that hangs in the air. Would a seventh
cycle prolong this man’s life? Or an eighth?
“I need a break,” Sherak says. There are tears in his
eyes. “I need to see what my body will come back to.”
At this Agus throws up his hands in faux exaspera-
tion. “It’s like that movie where they say, ‘You had me
at hello,’ ” he says gently. But then he adds, “I’m there. I
agree. We don’t have an algorithm for how many cycles
to give, but we’re in a good spot. No matter where we
stop now, I’m comfortable.”
When it comes to treating disease, Agus knows bet-
ter than most how elusive certainty is. There is no algo-
rithm. Things are not black and white. “Listen, if there
were one right way to do it, we would all be doing it,” he
says. The hard part comes in using your gut, he says, to
interpret the best data you have. The hard part comes
in daring to step into the void and make those tough
calls—to serve up the rules that so many of us crave
or often need. Agus believes with all his heart that the
beneﬁts of doing so far outweigh the risks.

D E C O N S T
Z O N E
B A Y B R I D G E | D E M O L I T I O N B E G A N : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 3 | D U R A T I O N O F P R O J E C T : 3 Y E A R S
The original eastern span of
the San Francisco–Oakland
Bay Bridge, photographed
from the Oakland side on
November 8, 2013.
The 80-year-old steel is
not like modern steel:
Crews must be prepared
for diferences in
strength and hardness.

Building bridges and supercomputers is hard.
R U C T I O N
Taking down the old
span is expected
to cost $240 million.
Demolishing them is just as tough.
Five case studies in the art of mega-destruction.
Under that greenish-gray
paint is a coat of lead-based
stuf. To avoid contaminating
the bay, the metal will be
trucked away and cleaned
before being resold as scrap.
1 0 9
spencer lowell
The new bridge took
11 years to build.

JAN 2014
H
o
n
e
ycomb
p
ie
r
s
s
n
o
oper tr
u
c
k
Built during the Great Depression, the eastern span
of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge was a mar-
vel of utilitarian emciency. (Some of the construction
cranes were even incorporated as part of the struc-
ture.) But now that its graceful replacement is oper-
ational, the old span has to be taken down—without
dropping anything into the bay. —iric smiiiii
LAST EXI T
FOR THE
BAY BRI DGE
To ﬁgure out the best
sequence for remov-
ing the high-tension
pieces, engineers will
use a 3-D model, based
on structural analysis
and historical records,
that shows how the
forces are distributed.
CUT THE TRUSS SPANS
Named for their length in feet, the 504 and 288 truss spans are not
under as much tension as the cantilever, so there’s less chance they’ll
explode in your face when you cut into them.
BLAST FOUNDATIONS
The foundations of piers E3 to
E5 are like honeycomb inside.
One idea for demolition: Drill
into them, plant a series of
computer-controlled explosives
around the internal walls, set
of the charges, and let the con-
crete collapse into the void.
MIND THE BIRDS
The shallow-water foundations
of piers E19 to E22 may be saved
for a new pedestrian walkway and
bird sanctuary. On the bridge
itself, a long-armed snooper
truck will be used to install spikes
to deter nesting. Any avian hold-
outs will be removed by hand. 3
Bryan Christie Design
BUILD A MONUMENT
The massive art-deco column of
pier E1, near Yerba Buena Island,
may be preserved as a monu-
ment to the bridge that served
the Bay Area for 77 years. The
E2 pier will also likely remain and
be converted into an observa-
tion platform for the new span.
E5
E3
E19–E22
E2
E1
E4
Cantilever Truss
504 Truss spans
288 Truss Spans
oakland
yerba buena
island /
san francisco

NASA REMODEL
The NASA Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center is big. Big enough to house the Sat-
urn V rocket that propelled men to the moon. Big enough to have its own weather system (mist can
form along the ceiling on humid days). And now it’s getting an overhaul: The seven ﬁxed platforms
of the VAB’s High Bay 3 must be detached, moved outside, and demolished to make way for a modular
system that can better accommodate a variety of dißerent rockets and exploration programs. Here’s
how contractors are completing one of the world’s largest renovation projects. —srYAN cAroiNir
OLD PLATFORMS OUT
The ﬁrst step was to remove
the seven huge steel platforms
(weighing 140 to 230 tons
apiece) that once hugged shut-
tles and rockets. Precise centers
of gravity had to be calculated
for each of these multistory
structures. After wiring and util-
ity systems were disconnected,
the platforms were detached
and slowly lowered to the ﬂoor
by a ceiling-mounted bridge
crane. Careful movement
was essential to prevent sway.
Good thing this crane is precise
enough to touch its load to an
egg without cracking it.
About 700,000 feet of
copper cabling has been
ripped from the build-
ing so far, and another
60,000 will be removed
in the coming year.
The space shuttle
Atlantis suspended in
the Vehicle Assembly
Building in 2010.
NEW PLATFORMS IN
The old fixed platforms will be
replaced with a modular sys-
tem of 10 platforms that can
be repositioned vertically and
horizontally. That flexibility
will be crucial for NASA’s new
Space Launch System, which
will rival the Saturn V rocket
in size and is designed to offer
a variety of conﬁgurations for
different missions. The facility
is also expected to host much
smaller rockets from commer-
cial space companies.
1 1 1 JAN 2014
N A S A A S S E M B L Y B U I L D I N G | D E M O L I T I O N B E G A N : 2 0 1 2 | D U R A T I O N O F P R O J E C T : 4 Y E A R S
l-dopa
M
A
T
T

S
T
R
O
S
H
A
N
E
/
G
E
T
T
Y

I
M
A
G
E
S
P
l
a
tform rem
o
v
a
l

cranes
S
h
ip
-to-Ship Tran
s
f
e
r
Ammunition package
After more than 50 years of service—including a cameo in Top Gun—the
100,000-ton USS Enterprise was inactivated in late 2012. It will be the first
nuclear aircraft carrier of this class to get dismantled (in fact, the Enterprise
is the only ship of its class ever built), and the Navy estimates the project
will take about 14 years. —srYAN cAroiNir
THE END OF THE ENTERPRISE
2. INTERIOR STRIPPING
On December 1, 2012, the carrier pulled into Norfolk, Virginia, and its contents
were stripped—tools, furniture, linens, technical manuals, spare parts, crypto-
graphic equipment. Cranes removed weapon launchers, anchors, antennas, and
other large items.
1. ORDNANCE OFFLOAD
To transfer some of the ship’s
munitions, Enterprise crew mem-
bers ﬁred shot lines over to the
USNS Sacagawea and used them
to string messenger lines made
of wire rope. Then, while the
ships traveled for hours through
the Atlantic, just 30 yards apart,
they slid ammunition packages
across the water. Sounds crazy,
but this sort of at-sea transfer
has been used for supply replen-
ishment since at least the late
1800s. The remaining ordnance
was airlifted across in 946 heli-
copter trips.
The Enterprise
contains 60,923
tons of steel.
U S S E N T E R P R I S E | D E M O L I T I O N B E G A N : 2 0 1 2 | D U R A T I O N O F P R O J E C T : 1 4 Y E A R S
Sacagawea
Enterprise

C
a
s
k
s on a Tr
a
in
h
a
n
f
o
rd storage
s
it
e
The four
5-bladed pro-
pellers weigh
32 tons each.
6. SCRAPPING AND DISPOSAL
Each steel-encased reactor will be moved by barge from Puget Sound to the
Hanford nuclear storage site, where it will be buried in a radioactive package that
also includes other nasties like asbestos, cadmium, arsenic trioxide, cyanacrylate
adhesive, and paints containing cyanide, coal tar epoxy, and chromium trioxide.
And the steel in the hull? Chopped up and recycled, of course.
5. TOWING
Onward! To the Puget Sound
Naval Shipyard in Bremerton,
Washington, via the scenic route.
The Enterprise won’t ﬁt through
the Panama Canal, so a tugboat
will pull the hulk around Cape
Horn and up the Paciﬁc Coast.
During the four-month trip, the
two vessels will be anywhere
from 1,200 to 2,000 feet apart,
depending on the waves: Ideally,
when the tug goes up on a wave,
the carrier should too. Constant
adjustments to the tow length
keep them in sync.
3. DEFUELING
In June 2013, tugboats towed
the ship across Hampton Roads
harbor to Newport News Ship-
building, where her keel had
been laid in 1958. (Many of the
workers taking her apart are
the offspring of those who
built her.) Crews then remove
the fuel from the eight reac-
tors, but exactly how they do
it is classified. The empty com-
partments, along with their
radioactive piping systems, are
eventually sealed shut.
4. SPENT FUEL REMOVAL
The spent nuclear fuel is placed in containers with 14-inch-thick stainless steel
walls (each cask weighs about 350,000 pounds). The containers are then loaded
onto trains and trundled off to the Naval Reactors Facility at the Idaho National
Laboratory for analysis and storage.
1 1 3 JAN 2014
F
o
u
r
-month
Tr
ip

OVERWRITE, THEN APPLY MAGNETS ... OR DESTROY COMPLETELY
First, technicians overwrite data three times, twice with pseudo-random patterns
and once with a known pattern. Then some disks are demagnetized, while others
may be sent to a separate metal-destruction facility. Some places use a disk sander
to abrade the recording surface. Others feed disks into a crusher, which pushes a
steel piston through the center of the drive. Still others apply concentrated hydri-
odic acid solution.
DATA DESTRUCTION
Some cabinets are sent
to museums or other labs.
Otherwise, steel from the
housings, copper from
the connections, and the
plastics are all shredded.
Supercomputers typically become obsolete after about ﬁve years, and one
of the latest to get its pink slip is Roadrunner, which was omcially shut down
on March 31, 2013. Built by IBM and installed in 2008 at the Los Alamos
National Laboratory, this $121 million daisy chain of 296 server racks and
122,400 processor cores helped model everything from the decay of the US
nuclear weapons arsenal to how white dwarf stars explode into supernovas.
The supercomputer cluster housed 34 disk drives, some of which almost cer-
tainly contained sensitive information. Los Alamos doesn’t share the speciﬁcs
of the removal and destruction process, but previously published guidelines
from the US Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards
and Technology provide a sense of how it works. —srYAN cAroiNir
I B M R O A D R U N N E R | D E M O L I T I O N B E G A N : 2 0 1 3 | D U R A T I O N O F P R O J E C T : 1 M O N T H
D
e
m
a
g
n
e
t
iz
ation and
D
e
s
t
r
u
c
t
i
o
n

T
h
e
P
roject from
A
b
o
v
e
DEMOLISH THE DAM
To make way for the water, work-
ers will haul 380,000 cubic yards
of sediment from San Clemente
Creek (where the new river will
run) and dump it on the main
heap of silt, which will remain
permanently. Eventually they’ll
pick the dam apart with hoe rams.
WATCH AND WAIT
In ﬁve years, California Ameri-
can Water will hand the site over
to the Bureau of Land Manage-
ment. “Ideally, 20 years from
now,” Svindland says, “you won’t
know that a dam was ever there.”
TO RAZE THE
DAM, MOVE
THE RIVER
S A N C L E M E N T E D A M | D E M O L I T I O N B E G A N : 2 0 1 3 | D U R A T I O N O F P R O J E C T : 3 Y E A R S
The rerouted water will be
temporarily piped around the
dam. Once the structure is
torn down, the river will ﬂow
through where it once stood.
CUT A NOTCH
Crews are going to cut a
450-foot-long canyon through
the ridge behind the dam
and carve a new river channel
around the sediment to neigh-
boring San Clemente Creek.
“I’m not aware of any other dam
removal project that’s looked at
that type of option,” says Rich-
ard Svind land, director of engi-
neering for California American
Water. “River rerouting is tough
to do.” This Herculean task, the
largest dam removal in state
history, will involve building
a diversion dike to direct the
water along its new course.
1 1 5 JAN 2014
Boulders
and plantings
will make the
new route
ﬁsh-friendly.
2.5 million
cubic yards
of silt
The dam will
eventually be
removed.
California’s San Clemente Dam opened in 1921, and today its reservoir is choked
with silt. That means an earthquake or ﬂood could send a wall of mud sliming down
the Carmel River and the valley below, damaging more than a thousand buildings.
So dam owner California American Water and state and federal resource agencies
decided to take it down. Dynamite isn’t an option because of the dirt and water that
would spew forth, so engineers decided to move the river instead. —
Old path of river
New path of river
New Canyon

BY adam rogers
1 1 7 René & Radka
OUTLANDER
BATTLESTAR’S
RON MOORE
RETURNS
WRITER RONALD MOORE has taken television to its most challeng-
ing places. In the 1990s, thanks to bleak multi-episode arcs on Star
Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, he earned a reputa-
tion as the go-to guy for war, despair, and Klingon angst in the Star
Trek universe. He later ran the ﬁrst season of HBO’s superweird Car-
nivàle, the saga of Depression-era carnies caught in a battle between
magical avatars of good and evil. And then, in 2003, he scraped the
30-year-old cheese of Battlestar Galactica and rebuilt it into one
of the best programs of the millennium—the plots were clever, the
characters morally ambiguous, and the galaxy full of spaceships
and killer robots. ¶ But after Battlestar ended in 2009? Not much.
A BSG prequel, Caprica, lasted a single season, and while science
ﬁction and fantasy became pop-culture staples, Moore hasn’t had
a show on the air in three years. Now, at last, he returns to TV with
two dramas: the disease-outbreak show Helix on Syfy, and the Starz
program Outlander, based on a series of time-travel romance books. ¶
All that is good news, of course, but Moore jumps back into the showrun-
ner’s chair in a TV universe where his signature moves—dark themes,
moral relativism, and anti heroes—have become standard operating
procedure. spoke with Moore about how he sees the
world he helped shape and how he might change things yet
again. Here are some highlights from that conversation.

F
R
O
M

T
O
P
:

P
H
O
T
O
F
E
S
T

(
3
)
;
E
D
M
I
L
L
E
R
/
S
O
N
Y
;

P
H
I
L
I
P
P
E

B
O
S
S
E
/
S
Y
F
Y
Articles editor ADAM ROGERS
(@jetjocko) wrote about climate
maps in issue 21.12.
1 Star Trek (1989–1999)
Over the course of the ’90s, Moore wrote
59 episodes for The Next Generation, Deep
Space Nine, and Voyager. He also worked
on Star Trek videogames (Borg, Klingon) and
movies (First Contact, Generations).
2 Roswell (2000–2002)
A decade on Star Trek gave Moore impeccable
sci-ﬁ bona ﬁdes. So when execs at the
WB decided that Roswell needed a stronger
alien presence, Moore was hired as the
show’s number two guy.
3 Dragonriders of Pern (2002)
The biggest not-quite of Moore’s career:
Network overlords grounded his TV version
of Anne McCafrey’s beloved, never-
adapted books just days before the pilot
was set to start ﬁlming.
4 Carnivàle (2003)
Carnies, revivalist preachers, and cryptic
dreams: just HBO being HBO. Moore ran
the ﬁrst season of Carnivàle for creator
Daniel Knauf before leaving the dust bowl
for the Galactica.
5 Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009)
Moore’s classic reboot of the original ’70s
show is four seasons (plus extras) of space
opera, political allegory, and OMG-what-
if-my-favorite-character-is-a-Cylon. Sadly,
the spinof prequel, 2010’s Caprica,
burned up on reentry—frak!
6 Outlander (2014)
After years in deep space, Moore is ﬁnally
back on his home planet. Outlander, based
on Diana Gabaldon’s fantasy romance books,
time-travels through distant—and not-so-
distant—Scotland.
7 Helix (2014)
First a Cylon invasion, now an outbreak of a
deadly disease. Poor mankind just can’t escape
Moore’s sinister, invisible threats.
8 Star Wars TV series (2014?)
Moore was part of a top-secret team of
writers selected by George Lucas to develop
a live-action Star Wars TV show. Could
2014 be the year we ﬁnally see the results?
What do you think has changed
about TV since Battlestar?
MOORE: The number of choices. More
and more outlets, more and more net-
works. You have Netflix as a player,
Amazon is doing it too. They keep
broadening the scope, which is really
good for science ﬁction. When we ﬁrst
did Battlestar, there weren’t many
outlets interested in doing that kind of
programming. Now that there’s more
content in general, all the networks—
even the broadcast networks—are
looking for ways to dißerentiate them-
selves, to program something that
someone else isn’t. And there’s not a
lot of science ﬁction out there.
The Voyages
of Ronald Moore
His mission: to explore strange new
worlds. Here’s a warp-speed tour of
Moore’s ever-expanding universe.
—!AsoN xiHi
There is, though. Once Upon a
Time, Sleepy Hollow …
Sure, which is more fantasy than
hardcore science ﬁction, but I take
your point. Genre programming is
out there.
Do you see Battlestar’s inﬂu-
ence on the new crop?
I don’t know, to be honest. People
who worked on Falling Skies told me
they were influenced by the show,
which was very ﬂattering. Anecdot-
ally I’ve had people saying, we used
to love Battlestar and we’re using
this or that element.
At a minimum it showed that
you could have crazy, science-
ﬁctional situations but still
have genuine emotions and
believable characters.
I would be very happy if the show
proved that you can take the genre
seriously, that it doesn’t have to be
just silly and escapist—you can play
it honestly and play the characters
truthfully. And that there’s an appe-
tite for that approach.
Does Helix do that too? The
science ﬁction part is about
a scary virus of mysterious ori-
gins, right?
On a certain level it’s about a virus,
but it’s also about what looks like
science gone bad. And behind all that
is a story about people striving to
help humanity, and the price they’re
willing to pay to achieve that goal.
And you’re doing Outlander for
Starz. How’d you come to that?
My wife, Terry, and my producing
partner, Maril Davis, are huge fans
of the books. A few years back we
were all having dinner in Vancou-
ver, and we started discussing pas-
sion projects. Maril and Terry hadn’t
talked to each other about the books
before, and they said I should go oß
and read them. I love history and
historical ﬁction, so I was immedi-
ately taken with them, and I thought,
this is a television series. It took a
while to get the rights, but eventu-
ally we persuaded Sony to acquire
the rights and then pitched it to
Starz, and Starz said yes. They said

1 1 9
1
4
5
6
7
from the outset, we love the material,
you don’t need to reinvent it. Make it
for the fans, and everyone else will
come along for the ride.
It worked with Game of Thrones.
Game of Thrones proves that. I had
never read it. I just sat and watched it
and was shocked when they cut Sean
Bean’s head off. So, yeah, there are
spoilers out there for these book series,
but they don’t percolate up to the gen-
eral audience. Having the books out
there doesn’t spoil the experience.
You were one of the ﬁrst
showrunners to really interact
with fans on the Internet,
and now it’s almost a job
requirement. Think you’ll do
that again?
I’ll probably start doing that on
Outlander. Things are diferent now.
Twitter was a little after Battlestar,
and when the studio asked me to
start doing podcasts, I had never
even heard that word. Now every-
one does it. I remember what it was
to be a fan and wanting to have con-
tact with the people who are doing
the work.
Some TV writers worry that the
relationship can become too
close. You start giving fans what
they want instead of what they
don’t expect.
I never worried about it back then.
Outlander is slightly different in
that we’re trying to realize some-
thing they already love. We do want
to please people who have fallen in
love with these books. That said—I
said this during Battlestar—it’s not a
democracy. I make the choices I think
are the best creatively.
You won’t be keeping tabs on
Twitter and Facebook while an
episode is airing?
That’s a very skewed perspective,
in my opinion. I would go online
when Battlestar aired and people
were liveblogging, but that’s a very
small fraction of the audience, a very
speciﬁc slice. I feel good about the
decisions we make, and Diana Gabal-
don, who wrote the books, reads the
scripts. We talk, and if Diana thinks
what we’re doing is OK, that’s good
enough for me.
How have TV audiences changed
since your last show? Are they
better trained in terms of genre
conventions?
You just have to make it convincing. If
they like the people and they believe
in the world, if it makes sense and
they’re not saying, “That would never
happen,” the audience will go any-
where you want to take them.
One thing that has changed,
though, is viewing habits. They’re
shifting under our feet. House of
Cards changed the game. If you’re
going to put a series out all at once,
that’s a fundamentally diferent view-
ing experience. There’s not really a
cliffhanger ending to any episode.
They had one that was sort of a stand-
alone, but other than that, all the epi-
sodes meld in my head into one big
story. That’s a big diference.
You seem to be drawn mostly
to genre material. Where did
that come from?
Wild Wild West and Star Trek were
two of my great loves. I watched both
in syndication in the ’70s. Wild Wild
West was really interesting, that com-
bination of genres—a Western and
secret agent, and they dabbled in
the occult and paranormal. I really
wanted to do a new version for CBS. I
still think it’s a great property. Some-
day I hope to go back to it.
Is it true that you also worked
on developing a live-action Star
Wars show?
Yeah, I did. There was a team of writ-
ers that George Lucas put together,
and we would go up and work at
Skywalker Ranch every six or eight
weeks. We would break stories with
George and talk about Star Wars. I
did a couple of scripts.
You can’t get of the hook that
easily. What was it like?
It was fun; there were moments
when I would catch myself argu-
ing with George Lucas about what
Darth Vader would or would not do.
Because you’re in a writers’ room,
and you go back and forth. You’re
telling the man, “I don’t think Darth
Vader would do that.” And he says,
“Yes, he would.” And you go, “Oh.
Maybe he would, then.”

But in the summer of 2013, that’s exactly what she was doing.
Gomez, the proprietor of a one-woman operation in Lockhart,
Texas, called Unlimited Recoveries, is one of the best skip tracers
in the world. A combination bill collector, bounty hunter, and pri-
vate investigator, a skip tracer ﬁnds people and things that have
disappeared on purpose. Gomez specializes in “hard-to-locate
recoveries”—she prefers cases others can’t solve. To track down
the ﬂeet of Caterpillar wheel loaders taken by the Peruvians, Gomez
reached out to the estranged wife of the family’s patriarch, tell-
ing the woman that she was pregnant with her husband’s child.
The ruse worked: Eventually the wife told Gomez that the heavy
equipment was on its way to a construction site in South America.
For Gomez, 43, skip tracing is as much about stalking and cap-
turing elusive prey as it is about getting paid. Today much of that
hunting is done digitally, and Gomez has made an art of comb-
ing through cyberspace and ﬁnding the status updates, ﬁnancial
records, and location blips that virtually everyone leaves behind
in the modern age. Gomez’s digital background stretches back to
childhood, when her parents, both IBM engineers, insisted that
the 10-year-old Michelle build a computer from scratch. “I even
had to do my own soldering,” she remembers. The experience laid
a foundation for the skills that have made her so good at ﬁnding
people. “Proﬁling a subject is a lot like constructing a mother-
board,” Gomez says. “You have to see connections that are invisible
to other people by ﬁlling the spaces between with information.”
On May 22, 2013, she was tracking down the missing wheel load-
ers when she got a call from an executive at Alternative Collec-
tion Solutions, one of the country’s premier collection and debt
recovery agencies. ACS needed help recovering a 53-foot Hatteras
yacht called Morning Star that had been taken nearly a year ear-
lier by a man named Ryan Eugene Mullen.
Mullen, the ACS executive said, would not be an easy man to
ﬁnd. The executive told Gomez that Mullen was wanted by the
FBI for stealing more than $2 million from federal government
agencies. So far the authorities had failed to locate him, as had
the three private investigators who’d already taken a crack at
ﬁnding Mullen and the boat. If she could get Morning Star back,
the man told Gomez, they’d pay her $10,000, plus she could keep
any criminal reward money being ofered for the fugitive.
As she heard the details, Gomez felt what she calls “that boot-
NAME
MICHELLE GOMEZ
LOCATION
LOCKHART, TEXAS
OCCUPATION
SKIP TRACER
SPECIALTY
HARD-TO-LOCATE
RECOVERIES
RANDALL SULLIVAN ([email protected]) is the author of Untouch-
able: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson.
AT 4'11" AND JUST OVER 100 POUNDS,
MICHELLE GOMEZ DOES NOT LOOK LIKE
THE SORT OF PERSON YOU'D HIRE TO
RETRIEVE EARTHMOVING EQUIPMENT
STOLEN BY A PERUVIAN CRIME FAMILY.

JAN 2014 1 2 3
ing-up buzz.” Staying on the run from the
FBI is no easy feat. Neither is evading three
professional investigators dispatched by
some of the country’s biggest debt recov-
ery agencies. Mullen had clearly ﬁgured
out something—some technique for cover-
ing his tracks or otherwise keeping ahead
of his pursuers—that put him well above
the average con. Gomez wanted the case.
She began with a Google search and
became even more fascinated by Mul-
len when she read a bulletin posted on a
sketchy-looking civic discussion website
called City-Data.com: Ryan Eugene Mullen
was said to have been born in New York City
on November 11, 1977, stood 6´3˝, weighed
200 pounds, and had light brown hair, pale
blue eyes, and a deep voice. He wore a size
15 shoe and was an “avid runner and tan-
ner” who had been diagnosed with paranoid
schizophrenia and tested at a near-genius
IQ level as a teenager, Gomez read. He also
possessed “violent tendencies,” having
been incarcerated at a young age for beat-
ing his girlfriend and menacing a friend
with a knife. And apparently he had sto-
len the $2 million from the government in
multiple cybercrimes that put him on the
FBI’s Most Wanted list in 1999. If accurate,
Mullen had been a fugitive for 14 years.
How had such a man stayed in the shad-
ows for so long? She had never seen a case
quite like it. “My circuits were firing,”
Gomez recalls.
GARY BLUM HADN’T become one of the rich-
est men in Louisiana’s St. Mary Parish by
passing up opportunities to turn a proﬁt.
That was why, in the fall of 2012, a couple
of local real estate agents suggested that
Blum might like to meet Ryan Mullen, a
young investor looking at local properties.
Mullen, it seemed, had an annual seven-
ﬁgure income, much of it from video poker
machines he owned in a small casino. The
stranger had tied up his impressive boat, Big
Ol’ Girl, in New Iberia and promptly began
to negotiate the purchase of an apartment
complex, offering a $100,000 check for a
deposit, which was being held in escrow
by his lawyer. Mullen had next sought to
buy the Arlington Plantation in St. Mary
Parish, but the deal fell apart over terms.
So the agents sought out Blum, suggesting
that Mullen instead purchase Blum’s plan-
tation in Franklin, Louisiana, the Alice C.

JAN 2014 1 2 4
When Mullen came out to visit the plantation in November,
Blum met a tall, round-shouldered fellow. Mullen had a broad
and pleasant face, along with an air of privileged background, and
Blum found him “personable and very interesting.” A few weeks
later, the realtors showed up at the Alice C with a contract and a
$50,000 check ofered as a deposit.
Blum was no easy mark. At age 72, he had amassed a fortune
that included the millions he made in 2008 when he sold his
controlling interest in the First State Bank of the Florida Keys.
Blum maintained nearly a dozen personal residences, includ-
ing a sumptuous home in Key West. “I had no shortage of other
places to live,” he observes, and so he signed a contract agreeing
to sell the Alice C for $1 million. All that was needed to close was
ﬁnancing from a bank.
Not long after the contract was initiated, Mullen asked Blum if
he might tie up his 53-foot Hatteras yacht at the plantation’s pri-
vate dock on the Bayou Teche, in the heart of Cajun country. Blum
agreed and began to introduce Mullen locally as the scion of a
wealthy New Orleans family who had grown up in River Ridge, a
community on the banks of the Mississippi.
During one of his ﬁrst visits to the Alice C, Mullen noticed Blum’s
Rolls-Royce Silver Spur parked in the garage,
right next to the Porsche Carrera and the Mer-
cedes G500 the banker also kept at his Loui-
siana home. Mullen told Blum he himself was
a Rolls-Royce collector. In fact he owned just
about every model made since 1950. The claim
sounded like a bit much to a wealthy friend of
Blum’s, whose own car collection included a
Rolls. So Blum’s friend went to the ofcial Rolls-
Royce registry, where every car made by the
company is accounted for. And damned if this
Mullen wasn’t listed as the owner of 14 Rollses.
“Hell,” Blum says, “you ﬁnd out a man really does
own 14 Rolls-Royces, it’s not difcult to believe
whatever else you hear about him.”
AFTER THAT FIRST call from ACS, Gomez ran Mul-
len’s name through a pay-per-use database of
public records called FindMySkip.com. Her con-
tract with the service prohibits her from revealing much about
what it provides, Gomez says, “but it’s all about SITS—shelter,
income, transportation, and social contact. That’s what you need
to ﬁnd someone.” There were lots of hits on the Social Security
number she’d been given, Gomez remembers, “but most of them
were for aka names, or they were hidden behind all these place-
holder companies.” There was nothing that came back to the name
Ryan Eugene Mullen. “When a person is able to obscure his iden-
tity like this, we call it ‘ghosting,’ ” Gomez says.
An increasing number of the people she chases understand that
staying out of jail in the 21st century requires the ability to minimize
their digital trail, using those traces they do leave (often deliber-
ately) to their advantage. They pay cash whenever they can and use
social media only to plant false information, boasting of heading of
to a surﬁng vacation in Hawaii, for instance, when they are really
going skiing in Colorado. These are the kind of people who take for
granted that they can’t have legitimate bank
accounts or valid government ID. They can
and do collect credit cards linked to busi-
ness addresses, but those are almost always
post ofce boxes or vacant locations, and
the applications usually have at least one
digit in the Social Security number or date
of birth changed. Even careful criminals,
though, eventually reveal their locations,
Gomez says. “They get tired and slip,” she
says. “Everybody needs human contact, and
that’s usually what brings them to ground.”
This Mullen, though, was not slipping.
What put him out in front of others, Gomez
soon ﬁgured, was that his ghosting tech-
nique seemed to include creating alternate
versions of himself, virtual doppelgängers
that had confounded both law enforcement
and collection agencies. Many were named
Mullen. She found a Ryan Paul Mullen and
a Reuben Ryan Mullen, for example, both
linked to the provided Social Security num-
ber. There was also a Ryan Gino Mullen,
who also showed up on City-Data.com, but
that person was literally a dead end, hav-
ing been fatally wounded in a shoot-out
with NYPD ofcers in the aftermath of a
Manhattan bank robbery.
Puzzled, Gomez resorted to a resource
she taps only rarely: the help of friends at
federal agencies, friends for whom she has
done favors and who in return are willing to
let her check her information against gov-
ernment databases. “Their databases turn
up what we call ‘trace details’ that you can’t
get with the databases available to ordi-
nary citizens,” Gomez says: phone num-
THE PEOPLE
GOMEZ CHASES
UNDERSTAND THAT
STAYING OUT OF
JAIL IN THE 21ST
CENTURY REQUIRES
THE ABILITY TO
MINIMIZE THEIR
DIGITAL TRAIL.

bers, addresses, company and individual names that have in some
way been associated. “I found there was almost nothing on Ryan
Eugene Mullen, DOB November 11, 1977, but there was a bunch of
stuf connected to a Ryan Patrick Mullen, DOB December 4, 1980,”
Gomez says. “That Mullen existed mainly as the agent for compa-
nies that had cases against them involving bank fraud.” There was
also a trail of lawsuits and criminal charges relating to worthless
checks. She decided to concentrate on Ryan Patrick Mullen. “But it
was just tentative,” Gomez says. “I mean, this was a maze.”
By May 28, Gomez had uncovered trace details going back more
than a decade linking Ryan Patrick Mullen to three individuals, all in
the New Orleans area: Girven and Catalina Mullen, who were appar-
ently Ryan Mullen’s parents, and an Al Morris, who was linked to
Ryan Patrick Mullen through a business address on Airline Drive.
She called Morris and discovered a coarse and cagey character on
the other end of the line. A former deputy sherif, Morris was a long-
time friend of Ryan’s father, Girven, better
known as “Moon,” a man who had made
a hardscrabble fortune as the owner of a
towing company and four large junkyards.
When Ryan dropped out of school, Moon put
him to work running one of the junkyards.
Ryan had done all right for a while, Mor-
ris said, but at some point decided that he
preferred spending the business’s money
instead of paying bills with it. Morris esti-
mates that Ryan was pocketing hundreds
of thousands a year, using it to entertain
new acquaintances at the city’s ﬁnest res-
taurants and best hotels. Moon eventually
ﬁgured out what was going on, Morris said,
and he and Catalina cut Ryan of completely.
PLACE
ALICE C
PLANTATION
LOCATION
FRANKLIN,
LOUISIANA
CONNECTION
IN NOVEMBER
2012, RYAN
MULLEN OFFERED
TO BUY THE
PROPERTY FROM
GARY BLUM FOR
1 MILLION.

1 2 6 JAN 2014
When Gomez read him the description she had of Mullen’s mixed
ancestry—Irish, Sicilian, Dutch, German, English, Ukrainian, and
Lebanese—Morris said, “Bullshit.” And Mullen damn sure was no
avid runner and tanner.
Gomez described the worthless-check charges she had found, and
Morris said he’d heard about them. It was his understanding, Mor-
ris told her, that Mullen possessed some kind of high tech “check-
making machine.” For about the hundredth time in the past few
days, Gomez recalls, she found herself asking, “Who is this guy?”
BANKER GARY BLUM saw no reason to be suspicious of the $50,000
check tendered as a deposit on the Alice C or of anything else involv-
ing the young Mr. Mullen. “Ryan understood real estate transac-
tions, all the terms and technical details,” Blum explains. “He knew
banking and ﬁnance too, and computer technology and high-end
cars. I don’t mean he knew a little; he knew a lot. He knew more
about Hatteras yachts than most of the
people who sell them for a living.”
Nor were the real estate agents working
the Alice C deal doubting Mullen’s bona
ﬁdes, not after they received a call from
inside a New Orleans bank—the caller ID
showed up on their phone—conﬁrming
that Mr. Mullen was a valued customer
who kept two accounts there, one con-
taining more than $600,000 and the other
more than $700,000.
The only thing out of the ordinary came
when Mullen brought an appraiser up from
New Orleans. Blum was startled when he
read in the appraiser’s report that the Alice
C had been valued at $1.55 million—“way

on the high side,” Blum says. “He was only paying me $1 million,
which is about what it’s worth. I saw paperwork on the deal, and he
had ﬁnancing for $950,000 in place, meaning that for just $50,000
out of pocket he’d own it.” The mortgage company, presumably,
thought Mullen had put up $600,000. In reality, he’d gotten a mil-
lion-dollar loan for a mere 5 percent down.
By then Ryan Mullen was charming the locals. He’d become a
regular at Mr. Lester’s Steakhouse, located in a casino that was the
hub of social life in St. Mary Parish. “Ryan was very visible,” Blum
says. “At the casino I’d be with friends, who include the sherif and
the publisher of the local newspaper and a couple of judges who
are part of our group. I would introduce him, and he was talkative.”
Mullen was doing most of his socializing in the company of a
couple of Blum’s younger friends. “Ryan would drive us all out to
Mr. Lester’s in this black Rolls-Royce limousine he had,” Blum’s
friend Jason Guthrie recalls. “Not just a Rolls, a Rolls limousine that
could carry eight people, easy.” Mullen and Guthrie got together
for lunch almost every day. “I thought he was a real nice guy,”
Guthrie says. “Kinda efeminate, but I thought he was just a rich
mama’s boy kinda person.”
Mullen ﬁxed his image in the minds of Guthrie and the others
when he drove them and several young ladies into New Orleans for
a night on the town. They ate at Tony Angello’s, a pricey Italian res-
taurant on the southern shore of Lake Pont-
chartrain. “We walked in and everybody
was telling him, ‘Hey there, Mr. Ryan,’ ”
Guthrie recalls. “Tony Angello himself came
right out to the table to say hello, hugged all
the ladies.” After dinner they drove to the
Hotel Monteleone, a Beaux Arts landmark
in the heart of the French Quarter whose
Carousel Bar & Lounge is fabled as a liter-
ary watering hole. When Mullen pulled up
to the hotel, “he parked that Rolls-Royce
limousine right in the freakin’ road,” Guth-
rie recalls. “He looked at the valet, and she
knew exactly who he was. He said, ‘My car
be all right here?’ And she goes, ‘Oh yeah,
baby, you can park it anywhere you want.’ ”
The only disquieting moment of the eve-
ning came when one of the men began to
needle Mullen, asking why he didn’t take
them to the casino with the video poker
machines he owned. “Ryan made a remark
about the guy being nosy and then changed
the subject,” Guthrie says.
PLACE
HOTEL
MONTELEONE
LOCATION
FRENCH QUARTER,
NEW ORLEANS
CONNECTION
MULLEN DROVE
A PACK OF
FRIENDS FROM
ST. MARY PARISH
TO THE HOTEL'S
FAMED CAROUSEL
BAR & LOUNGE
IN A ROLLS-ROYCE
LIMOUSINE.
PLACE
BAYOU BELLE
TRUCK STOP
LOCATION
BREAUX BRIDGE,
LOUISIANA
CONNECTION
UNTIL AT LEAST
2009, MULLEN
OWNED THE VIDEO
POKER MACHINES
IN THE TRUCK
STOP CASINO.

PLACE
ALICE C
PLANTATION DOCK
LOCATION
FRANKLIN,
LOUISIANA
CONNECTION
MULLEN LIVED
ABOARD HIS
53-FOOT
HATTERAS YACHT
WHILE IT WAS
MOORED AT THIS
DOCK ON THE
BAYOU TECHE.
BY THE END of May, Gomez had found the
casino. It was located at the Bayou Belle
Truck Stop in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.
Such casinos are roadside fixtures in
Louisiana, and most are quite proﬁtable.
“Places half the size make 4 or 5 million a
year,” says a New Orleans real estate bro-
ker who accompanied Mullen on a visit to
the casino a few years ago (and who agreed
to talk with provided we didn’t use
his real name). “I can tell you that when
a man picks you up in a $200,000 Rolls-
Royce, brings you to a casino, walks in the
front door, and everybody is saying, ‘Hey,
Mr. Ryan! How are you, sir?’ then takes you
into the back, cashes out the registers, and
opens up a vault containing hundreds of
thousands of dollars, it gets your atten-
tion,” the man—who we’ll refer to as Eddie
Fortino—says.
Ryan Mullen, Gomez found, had oper-
ated the poker machines through a com-
pany called Henderson Gaming, but his
license was revoked by the state police
in 2009. The truck stop itself, Gomez dis-
covered, belonged to a man named Harper.
Gomez noticed that the name was also
connected to Mullen in a real estate trans-
action that had taken place in Natchez,
Mississippi.
The deal involved the purchase of a pala-
tial riverfront home owned by Reuben
“Buzz” Harper, a man well known through-
out the South, including Arkansas, where he
had became a county judge at a young age.
In New Orleans, Harper was famed as an
interior designer for the rich and famous;
the Times-Picayune named him its Best-
Dressed Man of 2000. Rumor has it that
Mullen had apparently lived with Harper,
who introduced him as “my nephew.”
Fortino, who was the broker on the deal,
recalls that the Natchez mansion had been
appraised at $3 million, but Mullen went
into contract to buy it for about half that
much. The sale never went through, how-
ever, and Harper died in early 2011.
Boggled by the spiraling complexity of
Mullen’s identity, Gomez called US dep-
uty marshal Michael Sheasby, the man
leading the federal chase for the fugitive.
Sheasby repeated the information about
Mullen stealing $2 million from the gov-
ernment, Gomez recalls, and said that the
US Marshals Service had been looking for
him for a year.
“I told Sheasby I couldn’t find any Ryan Mullen on the FBI
website,” Gomez says, “but I was told that the Most Wanted list
changes regularly. Sheasby said he was going to put Mullen on
the Marshals’ Most Wanted list and that they would be ofering
a reward. Sheasby seemed mainly concerned that I call him if I
located Mullen so he could make the arrest. I told him it was only
a matter of when, not if, and Sheasby laughed.”
ON MAY 28, GOMEZ made her ﬁrst call to New Orleans private detec-
tive Curtis Stallworth, the only pursuer of Ryan Mullen known to
have made face-to-face contact with him. Stallworth, a former
New Orleans police ofcer, told Gomez he had been hired four
or ﬁve years earlier to serve Mullen in a civil fraud case. It had
taken a lot of months and miles to ﬁnd the man, Stallworth said.
He ﬁnally located Mullen at a property out on Jeferson Highway
in New Orleans. “I staked the place out for hours until one day
PLACE
HOOTERS
PARKING LOT
LOCATION
BATON ROUGE,
LOUISIANA
CONNECTION
MICHELLE GOMEZ
MET EDDIE
FORTINO HERE,
AND HE FINALLY
AGREED TO
LEAD HER TO
MULLEN.

JAN 2014 1 2 9
CONTINUED ON PAGE 130
I went by real early in the morning and
saw the garage door open,” the detective
recalls. Inside the garage were several
Rolls-Royces, says Stallworth, who caught
Mullen stepping outside and served him
with the papers.
Stallworth did not learn that Mullen had
warrants out on him until early 2013, when
he was visited by a bounty hunter who said
the man was wanted by the government.
Stallworth went back out to try to relocate
Mullen, but the fugitive had moved on. Over
the next few months, Stallworth followed
Mullen’s trail all over Louisiana. He still
remembers well his trip to Plaquemines
Parish, where Mullen had brieﬂy taken up
residence in a huge riverfront mansion and used checks he’d some-
how manufactured to pay the rent, living there for several months
before the owners realized that the more than $20,000 they’d col-
lected added up to zero. “Those people were extremely upset with
him down there,” Stallworth says. “If they’d have caught him, he’d
have been gator bait for sure.”
On June 18, Gomez tried a new plan of action. She phoned the
previous owner of the Hatteras yacht, Dennis Kenny of Memphis,
Tennessee. The sale of his yacht had been complicated, Kenny
told Gomez.
The boat, built in 1984, was in good shape, but Kenny was moving
on to a new phase of his life, so he ofered his boat, then called the
Morning Star, at a price of $115,000. A sale had been negotiated,
but the deal fell apart when the buyer’s broker saw the price inex-
plicably changed to $182,000 on some paperwork and decided the
deal was ﬁshy. The same buyer came back with a new broker, and
the purchase was successfully concluded on July 3, 2012. After a
series of online searches and phone conversations, Gomez deter-
mined that the second broker on the sale had been none other
than Eddie Fortino, the same man who had been the broker for
the Harper property in Natchez.
On the afternoon of June 19, Gomez phoned Fortino at his ofce
in Metairie and informed him that she knew he had aided Ryan
Mullen in the scam involving Morning Star. Fortino had brokered
the purchase of the yacht for the $115,000 asking price, but—in a
trick reminiscent of the Alice C real estate deal—the sales docu-
ments showed that the Morning Star was bought for $182,000.
That was the price United Leasing had paid to buy the boat from
Mullen under the terms of a “leaseback” agreement. (It was United
Leasing that had eventually enlisted ACS to track down the yacht.)
Fortino insisted that he didn’t set up the ﬁnancing for the boat
and had only received a $10,000 broker’s fee; Mullen had pock-
eted the remaining $57,000 himself.
“Pretty slick,” Gomez says. “Mullen not only got a Hatteras yacht
he could hide out on—without his name ofcially attached to it—
he also picked up a nice chunk of spending money.”
After Gomez described what she had surmised about the yacht
deal, “Fortino asked me, ‘How long did it take you to ﬁgure it out?’ ”
Gomez recalls. “That’s when I knew I had him.”
GOMEZ PRESSURED FORTINO, going so far as to bluf him with the
idea that he might get paid for helping locate Mullen. Finally,
Fortino agreed, promising also to send Gomez a copy of Mullen’s
passport. When it arrived, Gomez was more intrigued than ever;
the name on the passport was Patrick Peter Mullen, and the date
of birth was December 4, 1981. “For a moment I asked myself if
that was his real name,” she says, “but then I realized, no, it’s
just another of his false identities.” A call to one of her govern-
ment friends produced the information that a red ﬂag had been
placed on that passport number in the US Department of Home-
land Security database. Gomez also discovered that the US Secret
Service was looking for Mullen.
Gomez brought along a little extra muscle when she left her Texas
home in her Ford Edge SUV on June 26 and headed to New Orleans:
Joe Mendez was a licensed bodyguard who carried a .40 Glock
on his belt. Mullen was somewhere

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 129
CONTINUED ON PAGE 133
in the metropolitan area, Gomez believed,
but it was dimcult to say exactly where—
especially when Fortino kept changing his
story, putting the yacht somewhere near
Baton Rouge, then near Lafayette. Then he
stopped answering the skip tracer’s phone
calls and text messages.
Gomez located Fortino’s own home on a
canal in Springﬁeld, just northwest of Lake
Pontchartrain, and on the afternoon of June
30 she drove up there, arriving as he was pre-
paring his place for a big July 4th party. She
confronted him in the front yard, threaten-
ing to go to the authorities with all the infor-
mation she had learned about him unless he
told the truth about Mullen’s whereabouts.
Fortino buckled and promised to lead Gomez
to the yacht the next day.
At 8 am the following morning, July 1, Gomez
and Mendez were waiting in her SUV when
Fortino’s pickup pulled into a Hooters park-
ing lot. He led the SUV on an hour-and-a-half
drive across the Mississippi on Interstate 10
into Iberville Parish, where he pulled over to
the side of the road, climbed out of his truck,
and told Gomez she would have to continue
without him. He said that both the yacht and
Mullen could be found in the private slip of the
Alice C Plantation in St. Mary Parish.
MULLEN WAS AT THAT moment preparing Big
Ol’ Girl for imminent departure. The series of
real estate deals he had organized in Cajun
country had collapsed. The closing date on
the original contract for the Alice C had come
and gone and still no money had shown up.
Gary Blum agreed to an extension through
June 28, but the real estate brokers he’d
hired, who were handling both the Alice C
deal and Mullen’s apartment complex pur-
chase in New Iberia, had discovered that the
$100,000 deposit for the apartment com-
plex didn’t exist—no lawyer was holding it
in escrow as they had been told. Learning
this, the broker handling the Alice C deal
decided to again verify that Mullen had nearly
$1.4 million in two separate accounts in a
local bank. When he asked for the bank omcer
who’d phoned several weeks earlier, the bro-
ker was told that no one by that name worked
there. And there were no customers of the
bank named Ryan Mullen either.
Mullen was securing the decks of his yacht
at 11:15 am when Gomez parked her SUV in
the driveway of the home next to the Alice
C. With Mendez right behind her, Gomez
stepped through a screen of sycamore trees
into the enormous backyard of the plantation
and found herself within 20 feet of a large
man with a broad face and a mildly curious
expression, standing on the dock beside his
big boat. She asked his name. “Ron Muller,”
the man replied. Gomez smiled and pulled
out her cell phone, while Mendez stood by,
one hand on his pistol.
Ten minutes later, Mullen was in handcußs,
surrounded by four police omcers, arrested on
a warrant from St. Bernard Parish for issuing
worthless checks and a warrant from the fed-
eral court of the Eastern District of Louisiana
for failure to appear on a contempt of court
charge. He was taken away along with the ﬁve
animals on board the yacht: two Chihuahuas,
a pair of cats, and a magniﬁcent green par-
rot. As the bird was carried oß in its cage, it
amused the growing crowd by repeating again
and again the two phrases it knew best: “Kill
’em all!” and “Where’s Mullen?”
Within two hours, the omcers had released
the yacht to Gomez. On board, she found iden-
tiﬁcation and contracts that placed Mullen at
an assortment of addresses, purchase con-
tracts for plantations in Louisiana and Mis-
sissippi, and billing and shipping invoices
for various luxury automobiles along with
a zippered bag ﬁlled with keys to more than
a dozen vehicles. Gomez also discovered
two large locked cases bearing the labels
mAsiircHicx xiYiAo ANo iriNiir and
mAsiircHicx ANAiocui iNiiriAci.
From St. Mary Parish, Mullen was moved
to the jail in Jeßerson Parish, where he faced
criminal charges. Gomez spent the night baby-
sitting the yacht at the Alice C, waiting for
a pilot who had been dispatched by ACS to
guide the boat back to Berwick, Louisiana.
As a banker, Blum knew all about the check-
making machinery inside those cases, includ-
ing how dangerous it could be in the hands
of a criminal. “An ordinary citizen is not sup-
posed to have that equipment,” Blum says.
“It’s highly regulated, because these mag-
netic ink printers make checks that pass auto-
matically through the prooﬁng machines in
banks.” Most citizens are unaware that very
few checks are ever physically examined, Blum
observes: “It’s all electronic. If you’ve got one
of those machines that do the correct type of
embossing, the checks will clear, the money
will be released, and it can take months before
the accounts are reconciled and somebody
realizes what’s going on.”
Blum was in some ways even more
impressed that Mullen had been able to
arrange that call to his brokers from inside
the New Orleans bank that veriﬁed the exis-
tence of two accounts containing almost
$1.4 million.
MULLEN WAS AT THAT
MOMENT PREPARING
HIS YACHT FOR
IMMINENT DEPARTURE.
THE SERIES OF
REAL ESTATE DEALS HE
HAD ORGANIZED IN
CAJUN COUNTRY HAD
COLLAPSED.
Q
1&1 Search Engine Optimization
Q
Listing in business directories
Q
Facebook
®
credits
Q
1&1 Newsletter Tool
MARKETING SUCCESS
Q
Over 140 popular apps (WordPress,
Joomla!
™
, TYPO3 and many more...)
Q
App Expert Support
1&1 APP CENTER
Q
Premium software, including:
Adobe
®
Dreamweaver
®
CS5.5
and NetObjects Fusion
®
2013
Q
1&1 Mobile Website Builder
Q
PHP 5.4, Perl, Python, Ruby
POWERFUL TOOLS
Q
Maximum Availability (Georedundancy)
Q
300 Gbit/s network connection
Q
2GB RAM GUARANTEED
Q
1&1 CDN powered by CloudFlare
STATE-OF-THE-ART TECHNOLOGY
Q
Included Domains:
.com, .net, .org, .info, .biz
Q
Linux or Windows operating system
Q
Unlimited Power: webspace, trafﬁc,
mail accounts, SQL databases
ALL INCLUSIVE
FLEXIBILITY & SUPPORT
FOR YOUR WEB HOSTING PROJECTS
1and1.com
®

$
1.
99
/month*
COMPLETE PACKAGES
FOR PROFESSIONALS
STARTING AT
HOSTING
N
E
W
Guaranteed Performance
Daily Backup
PHP 5.4
Web analytics
Geo-redundancy
> 300 Gbit/s network connection
CDN
NetObjects Fusion
®
2013
Adobe
®
Dreamweaver
®
CS5.5 included
Mobile Website Builder
Over 140 apps
Drupal
™
, WordPress, Joomla!
™
, TYPO3, Magento
®
and many more…
Free mode or safe mode
MySQL
Newsletter Tool
SEO
Call 1 (877) 461-2631
or buy online
TRIAL
30 DAY MONEY
BACK GUARANTEE
MONTH
FLEXIBLE PAYMENT
OPTIONS
CALL
SPEAK WITH AN
EXPERT 24/7
1and1.com
®
* 1&1 Web Hosting packages come with a 30 day money back guarantee, no minimum contract term, and no setup fee. Price reﬂects 36 month pre-payment option for 1&1 Basic package.
Price goes to regular $5.99 per month price after 36 months. Some features listed only available with package upgrade or as add-on options. See website for full details.

VISIT US ONLINE AT WIREDINSIDER.COM + FOLLOW WIREDINSIDER ON TWITTER + LIKE WIREDINSIDER ON FACEBOOK
PROMOTIONS + SPECIAL OFFERS + EVENTS
PROU5T
JESUS
BEER
SEX
TACOS
WEED
HELLO! WHICH ONE OF THESE IS BEST?
Ooh, you’re so naughty. Now, imagine that you can rank all the things in the world, and
share those opinions with your friends. And then have cool conversations! Proust is a
new game for you to judge everyone and everything until there’s nothing left to judge.
Play it on your phone today!
proust.com

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 130
JAN 2014 1 3 3
“I had heard about software that can manip-
ulate the phone system where a false origin
appears on caller ID,” Blum says, “but it never
occurred to me that somebody I knew might
be using it.”
GOMEZ’S JOB WAS done, but it didn’t feel that
way. Her investigation had begun as the pur-
suit of a man on the run from the FBI for 14
years. Along the way, she not only learned
that Ryan Eugene Mullen was a false name
but also became convinced that the story of
his exploits as a cybercriminal was one Mullen
himself had invented, along with several oth-
ers, to obscure his trail. “All along I assumed
that part was real, because the Marshals Ser-
vice is not going to put out a story like that if
it isn’t true,” Gomez says. It was easy to see
what Mullen had gotten out of the deception:
The Marshals Service, the attorneys at United
Leasing, and the assorted bill collectors,
bounty hunters, and private investigators who
were after him had wasted weeks and months
looking for versions of Mullen that didn’t
exist anywhere but online. She herself had
used up most of a week conﬁrming that Ryan
Eugene Mullen was a phantom, Gomez noted,
and “I wanted to know how it happened.”
In some instances, she found, a single busi-
ness transaction efected with a false identity
had created the ofcial record of a ﬁctional
Mullen. Ryan Eugene Mullen, though, had ﬁrst
appeared on City-Data.com, Gomez deter-
mined. Ryan Gino Mullen also seemed to
have ﬁrst appeared on the forum. The origi-
nal postings, just weeks apart, appeared to
have diferent authors, but there were clear
links between the two. She assumed that Mul-
len himself or someone working for him had
posted both bulletins to create confusion for
anyone Googling him, but she wasn’t able to
learn anything more about the posts.
Gomez was “trying to untangle a deep dark
web,” Fortino says. “But Mullen created that
web so no one can untangle it.”
The most troubling lesson she learned from
Mullen, Gomez says, is how readily mislead-
ing information can migrate from a posting on
an Internet forum to ofcial status. “In a sec-
ond, what’s false becomes true,” she observes.
“All it takes is for one person to put it on the
record.” That seems to be what happened with
Mullen’s Most Wanted status. A spokeswoman
from the US Marshals Service told that
Deputy Sheasby knew nothing about a $2 mil-
lion cybertheft by Mullen until he was told by
“an investigator,” and that he’d passed on the
story only because he felt obliged to make other
investigators aware of everything he had heard.
The long process of sorting out Mullen’s
crimes and ﬁnding all his assets had begun.
(Mullen declined repeated requests to be
interviewed for this story.) The Secret Ser-
vice acknowledged that an investigation was
under way, but the prosecutor on the case in
Jeferson Parish, Jody Fortunato, knew noth-
ing beyond that. The Secret Service declined
to speak with about the case.
A couple of weeks into his incarceration,
Mullen placed a call from jail to his friend Guth-
rie. He claimed he’d been beaten up shortly
after arriving. Mullen described a litany of
charges against him and pledged to make
restitution to his victims. After this claim of
contrition, though, he conﬁded that three days
before his capture he’d had a feeling some-
thing was wrong and thought then about mov-
ing the yacht to a new location. “I wish I had
listened to myself,” he told Guthrie.
Gomez laughs when she hears this. “Maybe
he lost track of which self he was, until I came
along to remind him.”
THE MARSHALS SERVICE,
ATTORNEYS, BILL
COLLECTORS, BOUNTY
HUNTERS, AND
INVESTIGATORS
ALL HAD WASTED WEEKS
AND MONTHS LOOKING
FOR VERSIONS OF MULLEN
THAT DIDN’T EXIST.

COLOPHON
Pre-owned lizard costume from Chloe’s Closet;
threadbare gym socks; finally buying the
basics for a home sewing kit, thus completing
my transition to a mom-type person; two-ply
cashmere; the bottomless list of musicians
influenced by Lou Reed; documenting 16
courses at wd~50; Weezer’s “Undone – The
Sweater Song”; discount post-Halloween fake
mustaches; the tangled web of deceit; Reddit’s
endlessly insightful IAmAs; Snoop Dogg and
the Trombone of Sadness; the hoodie that got a
43-year-old carded at Target; ﬁzzy water; plate-
let replacement procedures; my Syngenor “This
time science has gone too far” T-shirt; the loose
stitching on a Kindle Fire HD cover; resuming
hibernation a year later; Jackie’s pillbox.
WI RED is a registered trademark of Advance
Maga zine Publishers Inc. Copyright ©2014
Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Printed in
the USA. Volume 22, No. 1. WI RED (ISSN 1059–
1028) is published monthly by Condé Nast,
which is a division of Advance Magazine Pub-
lishers Inc. Edi torial ofce: 520 Third Street,
Ste. 305, San Francisco, CA 94107-1815. Prin-
cipal ofce: The Condé Nast Building, 4 Times
Square, New York, NY 10036. S. I. Newhouse,
Jr., Chairman; Charles H. Townsend, CEO;
Robert A. Sauer berg, Jr., Presi dent; John W.
Bellando, COO/CFO; Louis Cona, Chief Mar-
keting Ofcer; Jill Bright, Chief Administrative
Officer. Peri odi cals postage paid at New
York, NY, and at additional mailing offices.
Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement
No. 40644503. Canadian Goods and Ser-
vices Tax Registration No. 123242885 RT0001.
Canada Post: Return undeliver able Cana-
dian addresses to PO Box 874, Station Main,
Markham, ON L3P 8L4.
POSTMASTER: Send address changes to WIRED,
PO Box 37706, Boone, IA 50037–0662. For
subscriptions, address changes, adjust ments,
or back issue inquiries: Please write to WIRED,
PO Box 37706, Boone, IA 50037–0662, call
(800) 769 4733, or email subscriptions@WIRED
.com. Please give both new and old addresses
as printed on most recent label. First copy of
new sub scription will be mailed within eight
weeks after receipt of order. Address all edito-
rial, business, and production correspondence
to WIRED maga zine, 4 Times Square, New York,
NY 10036. For permissions and reprint requests,
please call (212) 630 5656 or fax requests to
(212) 630 5883. Visit us online at www.WIRED
.com. To subscribe to other Condé Nast maga-
zines on the web, visit www. condenet.com. Occa-
sionally, we make our subscriber list available to
carefully screened com panies that ofer prod-
ucts and services that we believe would inter-
est our readers. If you do not want to receive
these ofers and/or information, please advise
us at PO Box 37706, Boone, IA 50037-0662, or
call (800) 769 4733.
WIRED is not responsible for the return or loss
of, or for damage or any other injury to, unso-
licited manuscripts, unsolicited artwork (includ-
ing, but not limited to, drawings, photo graphs,
and trans parencies), or any other unsolic-
ited materials. Those sub mit ting manu scripts,
photo graphs, artwork, or other materials for
consid eration should not send originals, unless
speciﬁcally requested to do so by WIRED in writ-
ing. Manu scripts, photo graphs, artwork, and
other materials submitted must be accom-
panied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
THREADS THAT HELPED
GET THIS ISSUE OUT
WHAT WEARABLE
TECH IS
RIGHT FOR ME?
1 3 6 JAN 2014
by Robert Capps
A FLOWCHART
IT’S NOT RAGE.
I JUST CAN’T
FOCUS WHEN
I’M BOMBING A
SLOPE AT 70 MPH.
YES! WHY DO I
STILL HAVE TO
USE MY THUMBS
TO TEXT, LIKE IT’S
THE STONE AGE?
I’LL F*@!ING KILL
YOU!!
LOOKING COOL
NOT LOSING IT
WHEN IT POPS
OFF
NOTHING THAT
18 HOURS OF
ROCKETJUMPING
IN TEAM FORTRESS
2 CAN’T DEFUSE.
Google
Glass
Sorry,
this is
the future—
you’re not
allowed to
get wet.
Oculus
Rift
GoPro
Ankle
Monitor
Jawbone
Up24
Fitbit
Flex
HELL YES. I WANT
TO LOOK HOT.
I WANT ONLY
NORMAL LOOKS.
NO, I NEVER MAKE
EYE CONTACT
ANYWAY.
ANY RAGE
ISSUES?
I’LL BENCHPRESS
YOU.
MUSCLES DON’T
DEFINE A PERSON
… RIGHT?
READY TO HIT
THE GYM?
PEOPLE WHO
CRAM AS MANY
FEATURES AS
POSSIBLE ONTO
THEIR WRISTS
HOMEBREW
ENTHUSIASTS
WHO LOVE
THINGS THAT
KINDA WORK
Samsung
Galaxy Gear
Pebble
Smart Watch
Basis B1
WHO
DO YOU
MOST WANT TO
IDENTIFY
WITH?
DO YOU CARE
IF YOU GET WEIRD
LOOKS ON THE
STREET?
STAY CONNECTED GET IN SHAPE
DO YOU HAVE
WRISTS?
WHICH
DO YOU WANT
TO DO?
CHANGE
THAT.
YES NO
DO YOU HAVE
LEGS?
HUH. DO
YOU HAVE A BODY
AT ALL?
OK.
Robocop-
style
implants!
YES NO
DOES YOUR
ACTIVITY OF CHOICE
INVOLVE LOTS OF
RUNNING?
DO YOU
WANT TO
TRACK METRICS LIKE
STEPS OR MILES OR
CALORIES?
YES NO
Misfit
Shine
BABY STUFF. HOW
ABOUT RESTING
HEART RATE?
WHAT THE HELL
ELSE WOULD
I TRACK?
AND LAPS IN
THE POOL. I’M A
TRIATHLETE.
Nike+
FuelBand SE
I PREFER
ARBITRARY
“POINTS.”
VERY
LOL, YOU SAID
“BRA.”
WHICH
IS MORE
IMPORTANT TO
YOU?
HOW
IMPORTANT
IS IT TO BE ABLE TO
STUFF THE DEVICE INSIDE
YOUR SPORTS
BRA?
YES NO

©
2
0
1
3
C
a
r
t
i
e
r
calibre de cartier
CHRONOGRAPH 1904-CH MC
THE 1904-CH MC, THE NEW AUTOMATIC WINDING CHRONOGRAPH MOVEMENT, WAS CONCEIVED, DEVELOPED
AND ASSEMBLED BY THE CARTIER MANUFACTURE IN THE GREATEST WATCHMAKING TRADITION. THIS MOVEMENT
IS EQUIPPED WITH INGENIOUS SYSTEMS FOR UTMOST PRECISION: A COLUMN WHEEL TO COORDINATE ALL
THE CHRONOGRAPH FUNCTIONS, A VERTICAL CLUTCH DESIGNED TO IMPROVE THE ACCURACY OF STARTING
AND STOPPING THE TIMING FUNCTION, A LINEAR RESET FUNCTION, AND A DOUBLE BARREL TO ENSURE
UNRIVALED TIMEKEEPING.
42 MM CASE AND BRACELET IN STEEL, MECHANICAL MANUFACTURE CHRONOGRAPH MOVEMENT, SELF-WINDING,
CALIBRE 1904-CH MC (35 JEWELS, 28,800 VIBRATIONS PER HOUR, APPROXIMATELY 48 HOUR POWER RESERVE),
CALENDAR APERTURE AT 6 O’CLOCK, STEEL OCTAGONAL CROWN, SILVER OPALINE SNAILED DIAL, SILVER
FINISHED CHAMFERS.
EXPLORE AND SHOP WWW.CARTIER.US - 1-800-CARTIER

Wired - January 2014 Usa

Comments

Content

Sponsor Documents

Recommended