SWING, BATTER BATTER | MAY 2017
D E R E T T A SH Redefining the structural integrity of our smartphones With our resident demolition expert Julia “Louis-ville Slugger” Dreyfus
PAGE 3 I Carried a Router around with Me in a Baby
Uber in the Sky with Diamonds
Harness for a Week: Here's What Happened
How 3D Printing May Bring Back Dippin’ Dots
Will Adopting a Virtual Beehive Do the Trick?
PAGE 5 speed date Rigid Corpses and Soft Fruits
PAGE 8 Wipe Your Phone; Not Your Tears
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theMQ.org
The MQ’s Wired • May 2017
T HE MQ
ked: we as ade m if you what , p an ap it do? d woul
intern of things
Locates the nearest. You don’t know what
redditor-in-chief Barak
Jacob Aguirre
content
it is or where it is
Tzori hannah Rosenblatt
the things
Zenmo: you can transfer other people TO your
cole Greenbaun tech paladin Sage Cristal tech CLERIC Chris Jin tech bard Matt Olson
aura
tech wizard (evocation)
leading you, but it’s the nearest
Google Maps but for the
design
web safe color #006E51 Helps you sleep while generating white noise of your parents fucking
graphics
pixel pundit
Connor Gorry
analog auto-corrector
Jaz Twersky
Katherine Wood Jessica Ma
Card chip reader
Credit card checker
copy
sanctimonious spell-checker
social & publicity
Records you at night and
resident myspace technician
Summer Davis
Resident digg enthusiast
randomly picks one to play as your alarm the
bluetooth handler
Daniel Clinton
resident company viner
IT distributor
WEB
500 Internal Satire Error Lawrence
other editorial staff
seÑor maverick
religion to cover all your bases
Jen Windsor
Hannah Lykins
Chris Doherty
Lee
terms and agreements reader
staff
Sonogram: Instagram, BUT
Alexandria Vollhardt
Matthew McMahon
distribution
next day
Prays for you in every
astral plane
romelle Canonizado deep web legal advisor Lauren Kirkbride bitcoin miner Ingrid Sorensen
for fetuses
It’s a mirror app — no, it’s not just your phone screen this time
Effectively makes your phone a working umbrella
Ann Hawthorne
Mishelle Arakelian Andrew Buss Sarah Cain Kenny Cheng Daniel Chit Frances Debrunner Paola Diaz David Gorbitz Katie Hallsten Andres Hernandez-Cosme Amin Fozi Jonathan Funes Leo Grabowski Samprith Kalakata Leander Kanowski Dylan Knutson Daniel Kupor Maryanna Sophia Landaverde Chris Lee Nadia Link Nicholas Martin Rene Mejia Daniel Melnick Brandon Moguel Natalie Moy Natalia Nene Annie Nguyen Jay Noonan Yash Pande Kavita Poduri Tanner Prater Jerry Ramirez Rohan Rangray Vida Sadeghi Rhys Shriver Angelica Sun Doni Tadesse Luke Tribble Sarah Wernher Michael Ye Samira Yeganegi
TOP Ten
Things You Didn’t Expect to Find on the Internet 10. Mean people, but that one’s on you 9. A 14-year-old who is infinitely better than you at everything you hope to accomplish 8. A convincing argument that all your deepestheld beliefs are wrong 7. “An actual Nigerian prince who actually 6. “A fan fiction based on my poli class” 5.Two cats taped to a grapefruit 4. A picture of 8-year-old you in a soccer league that you don’t remember being in 3. “Porn … I thought you had to pay for that shit” 2. A sense of belonging 1. Print media
Tag yourselves, everyone.
Tuesdays at 6 p.m. in Half Dome Lounge.
The MQ is proud to be a Muir College student organization. Printing funds for The MQ are generously provided by the Muir College Council. All content is copyright © 2017 by The MQ unless superceded by previous condition of copyright, license, or trade dress. No portion of this paper may be reproduced, transcribed, or otherwise retransmitted without the express written consent of the Editor-in-Chief of The MQ. This production stretched us. It stretched us creatively. Breaking down a piece of work into single wording and stylistic choices is hard enough without having to then reconstruct it to a mimicking form. But we were able to capture all of the little things that make the whole humorous nonetheless. The hours were long , the material was tough – to manage and to fit – but the end result is a true testament to The MQ’s versatility. In the middle of a packed Spring quarter for everyone, with sleeplessness on the horizon, I believe we have successfully broken out of molds, flipped scripts, branched out, etc, etc. The dedication and the innovation from everyone really did make this a Special Issue. Our next editor on the list is Kat, who owns the most infectious laugh in The MQ. Her physical contributions here are many, but they’re only part of what Kat brings with her. In any conversation, Kat will take the time to make sure that you see clearly her vision of the matter and vice versa. Kat makes understanding easy - something that I’m continually growing more grateful for..
booster club
Thanks to Jessica, Sophia, David, Mishelle, Chris D., Rene, Sage, Matt M., and Chris J. for generously feeding our stomachs and souls with their dining dollars. Thanks to Rhys for some delicious oreos, and Jen for a neverending supply of snacks. Lastly, a special shoutout to IKEA for providing some sweet office space backdrops and an endless supply of aesthetic lighting for various graphics.
The MQ’s Wired • May 2017
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theMQ.org
Head in the Clouds: What happened with
Ye Olde Teche Faire
Uber’s crowdsourced plane program By Matt Olson Tech Bard
If you’ve ever used a phone, chances are you’ve called an Uber, or stayed at an AirBnB, or used Twitter to mourn a friend who used AirBnB and was murdered on a futon in Ontario. Companies that rely on crowdsourced labor used to be the underdog, the ones that your dad laughed at, like when you told him about the business your friend Brad was starting. But now, Uber and AirBnB are dominating their respective industries worldwide. I mean, when’s the last time you called an actual, honest-to-God taxi? There’s no doubt that crowdsourcing travel is “in” right now, but there’s just one place that hadn’t been explored: the sky. That is, until Uber decided to launch their new branch: SkyPlanes™, the crowdsourced pilot program that went up in flames, along with two neighborhoods, a park, and a freeway overpass. The ill-fated program began with a simple idea two years ago, according to confident Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. “Okay so bear with me, picture this: Ubers, right? But like … what if they were planes?” That question was the starting point for what eventually became Uber’s most expensive venture to date, second only to Uber’s ill-advised uberXXX program, where they rented out what their website refers to as “fuckbuses,” a name Kalanick reportedly insisted on.
After months of research by Uber’s team of elite ITT-Tech graduates, SkyPlanes™ was ready for initial testing. Surprisingly, initial tests simply gauged the likelihood that the general public would download an app called SkyPlanes™, instead of testing whether or not allowing literally anyone to fly a plane was feasible. Once the company knew that people would download the app, however, they moved directly to deployment. I managed to get in touch with Kalanick after several hours of being on hold and several bricks being thrown through various windows at Uber’s headquarters. I asked Kalanick about his reasoning behind the bizarre decision to roll out the program without more testing. According to Kalanick, it was “pretty easy.” “We knew people would
download the app, and once they knew it was made by Uber, the work was done for us,” Kalanick explained. “Those idiots would ride the back of a tandem bike into an active volcano if we told them it was driven by Kevin from Pasadena and it’s cheaper than calling a cab. This isn’t being recorded, right?” After confirming that it was, in fact, recorded, and subsequently being chased from Uber’s headquarters by a legion of security guards in Ubers once their Ubers arrived, I managed to contact Carl Rosenberg, the man responsible for the initial SkyPlanes™ plans, who also oversaw the project for the past year. “Honestly, we weren’t sure it would work,” Rosenberg admitted. “I had my doubts. I mean, why would anyone just sign up for a random person to pick them up in a plane and fly them somewhere? And then one day I had to fly to
New Jersey, and after spending five hours in an airport only to be told my flight had been canceled because no pilots really wanted to go to New Jersey because it’s New Jersey, I thought, ‘this SkyPlanes™ idea might actually work.’ “Needless to say, it did not.” The public reception towards SkyPlanes™ has been largely negative. While most people praise the idea for its originality, there were some major concerns, mostly about the number of daily plane crashes in the United States skyrocketing from 0.3 crashes a day to approximately 754. Kalanick has assured us that this is not the last we’ll see of SkyPlanes™, however. The app was downloaded over two million times, and as a result Uber reportedly has plans to expand into SkyCars™, SkyBoats™, and SkyCarsBLACK™ within the next three months.
Come one, come all to Ye Olde Teche Faire! Be thrust back into the “Merrie Olde Eighties,” a time of sweat, silicone, and giant desktop monitors. Mill about in period dress, looking at vendors’ wares and sipping ale, or as they called it, “Tab.” Participate in activities like Nerf Archery, games of Joust (the arcade game, not actual jousting, you Neanderthal), and have a great time watching the up-and-coming jester David, Man of Letter for a historical experience you won’t forget. Get five percent off if you come with your own acid-washed jeans!
Date: May 23rd, 1987 Location: The Woods of
Trafallor (the parking lot outside the Walmart on Genesee)
Activities Listen to the warnings of the local soothsayer as he predicts the end of the world as you know it because of the plague of Y2K! Participate in a digital pie eating contest! Whoever takes the most bytes in a minute wins! Apprentice to a local codesmith, and try your hand at some actual manual labor! Visit our petting zoo and pet our locally bred Deloreans and IROC Camaros!
Merchants Buy a Personalized Mousepad Crest!
Buy a Replica Floppy Disk, just like they forged in the olden times!
The Internet Made Targeted Advertisement a Thing — and You’re Better Off for It, You
Ungrateful Lout
For a quarter, get a kiss in the kissing booth from our very own Molly Ringwald impersonator!
By Lawrence Lee Byline Position
C
oo k i e s s to r e d in your b ro w s e r s have, with perfect accuracy, broadcasted every detail of your browsing history to the ad tech industry without fail for the past 10 years. Thousands of marketing companies are currently generating a map from your IP address to the probability of how likely you are to purchase an Acura in the next month. And you’re reading this for free, so suck it up, asshole. Bustling ad exchanges engage in automated, ferocious, and lightning-fast bidding wars for your screen space as you load every single web page. The GPS hardware on your phone connects you, inadvertently, to predictions on whether you want to go to Chili’s or Red Robin, as if you gave a shit about what awful burger you’re eating tonight. And you get to read thousands of reviews of those restaurants for free, so don’t pretend like you’re getting shafted. Every thirty seconds, a company uses some variation of “Omnichannel Identity Resolution” to determine exactly who you are based on your mouse movement patterns. At the same approximate frequency, a salesperson uses some variation of that term to sell your resolved identity to the highest bidder. Tech giants have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers to support server infrastructure that stores, processes, redirects, replicates, and disseminates your and eve-
Performances 12:00 p.m
Professional thespians juggle Rubik's cubes and solve them at the same time Warning: May involve the swallowing of said cubes
3:00 p.m.
A musical performance featuring Sir Hammer and Bardic Box Hear him perform his knockout rendition of “The One who Cannot be Touched”
8:00 p.m. ryone else’s online presences. And, in exchange, you got to Skype, at no cost, with your 94-year-old grandmother in Hungary moments before she passed, so kindly deal with it. Google’s primary source of revenue has been, and always will be, AdWords, the advertisements that appear with your search results; every single search you make is, in some way, impacted by the biases of a company who wants to sell you something. Google’s intimate knowledge of your life through your emails, your Hangouts messages, your Google+ profile (you dweeb), and your Android device’s usages, means that an
arbitrary engineer with enough privileges knows more about you than your own goddamn mother. But hey — you’ve spent over 10,000 hours (that’s a bit more than a year) of your life watching free, user-created YouTube videos. At zero dollars and zero cents per minute of video, can you really say that you’ve gotten a bad deal? Grow up. Who knows whether that neural net sitting in a server farm in countryside Romania will guess that you’re having a baby before even your spouse finds out? Who knows why the great debate of the week in a rural Sterling, VA office building is whether you’d rather subscribe
Italian lutenist Luigi Brotelli performs the chiptune rendition of the four-act opera “Great Brethren of Mario”
to FX or PornHub, or (probably) both. Who knows how many CPU cycles have been spent just trying to figure out whether you’d rather buy a Three-Day Disneyland/California Adventure Park Hopper or a season pass? And you know what? You wanted that season pass. You wanted it good, and you bought it good, and you sure as hell felt good about having it. Really, please, try and gain a little perspective. The Internet made targeted advertisement a thing, yes, but so did you, you inconvenient user.
JARGON WATCH
So did you.
X Based on your browsing history, you look like you would be interested in Napster (NAPS) stock!
A lute performance in the classical style of chiptune
Napster - The only file-sharing company stock that’s maintained its value since 2001!
The Switzernet (n.) / ˈði ˈswɪt-sɚ-ˌnɛt / A net-neutral browser established by the Treaty of Paris in 1919 Pfranc (n.) / ˈ fɹæŋk / The act of getting hit in the thigh by your key card as it elastically snaps back Woosh (n.) / ˈ wuːʃ / The act of missing someone on the three big social networks: Slack, Github, and JIRA
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The MQ’s Wired • May 2017
New Study Finds Air Horns are the Prometheus: The Story of the Reusable and How Elon Musk Best Way to Protect Your Privacy Rocket Doomed Us to the Wrath
Researchers couldn’t account for the possibility that air horns could also be used by hackers to scare unsuspecting coders away from their computers. By Hannah Lykins Resident Company Viner The ease and convenience of using modern technology is taken for granted, and its flaws are often overlooked.
Electronics like smartphones and laptops are common commodities that allow users to access everything they need in a matter of seconds, so it can feel daunting to know that one’s entire life can be accessed online by complete strangers. Hackers seem to be undermining all efforts to protect online privacy, but recently, researchers at Pennsylvania College of Technology have discovered something that may just stop hacking in its tracks: air horns.
“Honestly, this became sort of a passion project for me,” said Mitchell Kappat, chief researcher and professor in the Engineering Department at Penn Tech. “It feels like every goddamn day one of the students at this school is breaking into my office and stealing the answers to my exams, and I couldn’t figure out how to stop them! But one night, I waited after classes ended, hid under my desk, and screamed at the first kid that tried to break into my office; I knew then that I was on to something.” In his study, Kappat brought in participants from all around Williamsport, PA, and hired a hacker to break into their phones and computers, in order to see how people of all ages would respond to attempts
Tech's
Top
CEOs
Kitchen
Gadgets
at hacking. Study results showed that approximately 80 percent of participants didn’t know what to do when faced with their data being stolen; the other 20 percent immediately called their parents. “Honestly, I never thought it would happen to me because I literally changed my password like six months ago,” said David Toren, a participant in the study and alumnus of Penn Tech. “I turned my laptop off and back on again, because that usually takes care of my problems. But this time, it just didn’t help; so much for my degree in computer science.” Another participant in the study, Karen Jawnes, faced a similar issue. “I don’t understand this new gener-
Share
With
ation of technology. Back in my day, we didn’t have issues like this. The biggest risk to your life’s work was a burglar, or maybe a house fire, but definitely not a hacker. I don’t even understand how The Cloud works. So when I saw that I was getting hacked, I just threw my computer in the trash. I assume that solved the problem.” After coaching from the help of Kappat and his team, participants in the study were able to fend off their hacker with tactics like yelling, banging pot lids together, and, most efficiently, air horns. The results of this study definitively conclude that, contrary to popular belief, the best defense against hackers is a good offense. “Changing your password? Too easy for hackers to catch. Going to the police? Incredibly time-consuming. Asking the hacker to politely stop? Actually, this was pretty efficient. But none of these approaches compare to the tried and true method of loud, scary noises,” said Lab Coordinator Layla Ernast. Research into this field has just begun, and Kappat is already looking into beginning his next study. “Look, let’s face it. Technology continues to get more and more advanced every day. Humans, on the other hand ... well, you just can’t program them to not be scared of loud noises. So really, all we need at this point is to find the loudest noise we can. If I could compress the sound of a jet taking off into a can of compressed air, you bet your ass I’d be blasting hacker scum left and right.”
their
Favorite
Us
We sat down with six of tech’s top CEOs to get to know them a little better, and asked them what’s in their kitchen drawers. Maybe if we knew how these CEOs get down and dirty in their kitchens, we could unlock a piece of their minds. Foolish us. These narcissistic assholes just gadgetified their businesses. Jimmy
Wales Wiki-feed-ya “This end-all-cook-all of the kitchen gets ingredients from the worst sources, cooks excessive, redundant amounts of food, and is hated by the food scholars, but you’ll still use it because it is the easiest source of food.”
Richard
Branson
The Virgin Electronic Bartender “She gets me smashed everyday, and I still do not sleep with her. She is, indeed, the quintessential virgin bartender.”
Elon Musk MaidX “We updated The Jetson’s Rosie; she is operated through the heat produced in the kitchen, is voice operated, goes 0-60 in 3.7 seconds, environmentally friendly, can fly, can do anything, can even take you to Mars for grocery shopping.”
of the Wasps
By Chris Jin Tech Cleric For untold millennia, mankind has pursued new boundaries to cross.
From the wheel to the airplane, we have persevered through countless barriers and entered into new realms of technology. However, there are some boundaries man was not meant to violate. With the recent successful re-launching and re-landing of one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, we have made a dangerous step. We are no longer restrained by the shackles of single-use rocketry. Powers beyond our control have surely noticed, and they are not pleased. It will not be long before this technology attracts their ire, and the destruction of our civilization. These jealous, wrathful entities are, of course, the wasps. The common layman knows the wasps as the angrier, less huggable cousins of the humble bee. Anyone with hands-on wasp experience also knows that having a hands-on experience with wasps is a bad idea, because unlike bees, wasps are beings of pure hatred that do not have the common courtesy to tear their own intestinal tracts out after puncturing another creature’s skin. The wasp can sting as long as it has venom to spare, and knowing how dickish the little buggers are, that supply of venom is likely bottomless. It is clear that nature’s gift to the wasp was mastery over the reusable pointy flying object. Now Elon Musk has dared to try and capture their unique, sacred art, in defiance of the natural order. The unspoken covenant that bound the wasps from unleashing the full power of their holy, inexorable fury has been shattered, and there shall be hell to pay. Before I continue, allow me to recount the tale of Prometheus. Prometheus was your typical ancient Greek mythic hero, a proud upstart with a
“stick it to the man” attitude and with little regard for the fact that “the man” was the divine order. Prometheus boldly ventured to steal the secret art of fire from the Olympians and give it to humanity, a noble but naive endeavor that led to Pandora’s box being unleashed on mankind and to Prometheus being chained to a mountain, forever consigned to have his eternally regenerating liver to be eaten every 12 hours by an eagle. We are obviously in a situation very similar to that of old Prometheus. Our venerable champion Elon Musk crossed into the realm of the wasps to steal the secrets of reusable ballistics, and now an unspeakable calamity is speeding towards us at a breakneck pace. Unlike the tragedy of the Titan Prometheus, however, the tragedy of our titan Elon Musk threatens to have a more dire conclusion. The troubles released from Pandora’s box were bad enough; now imagine that the box was also filled with billions of angry, murderous wasps on a mission from heaven above. A cruel fate, indeed. The riders of wasp vengeance are soon upon us, waiting for some girl to accidentally kick Pandora’s Wasp Nest and bring forth humanity’s judgment. And Elon Musk, at once the patron of our progress and the harbinger of our doom, will be chained to Mount Everest, doomed to have his immortal liver repeatedly extracted to be used as battery cores for electric cars in the new wasp dominion. So, the next time you see a wasp, just know that he’s probably sizing you up for the inevitable Wasp Reckoning that will be descending on every major city around the globe within the next 50 years. And the reusable rocket won’t save us – the wasps are their true masters, and they will become the tools by which the wasps repeatedly sting human civilization to death.
Amazing: This Student Made a Graph in Excel
Mark
Zuckerberg Garlic Unitasker “I like my garlic crusher. It’s one of those simple rubbery rolling tubes. I use it to let people know where I am, to post photos of vacations I came back from, share articles on dating tips, transfer money, you know — I do everything on it that one wants out of a garlic crusher.”
Jeff Bezos The Amazon Cold Locker “This mile-deep fridge has everything from imported smoked sardines to barbeque shrimp flavored lube. It’ll even deliver food to Prime-eligible couches or student couches for six months via drone.”
Tim
Cook Knife Selector 5S “All the knives I own live in this box, and when I need one, I tell Siri what food I’m going to cut. Then Siri promptly ejects the best knife for the job, toaster-style, and it’s my job to grab it before it goes back in the box. Oven mitts recommended, designed in Cupertino.”
Move over, Alan Turing: there’s a new sheriff in town. Meet Joe Stevens, a college sophomore who is revolutionizing the way we use technology. “I’m thrilled that my minutes of hard work are paying off,” said Stevens. “When I suggested that we might be able to plot one data set versus another in Excel, I was laughed out of the room. But you know what? They laughed when we first suggested we could put a man on the sun. They couldn’t stop Lance Armstrong, and they can’t stop me.” Needless to say, this breakthrough has huge implications. Imagine a future where suffering, death, and Physics 2CL have
become obsolete. Now, imagine that world with neatly organized and plotted data. That’s the kind of world that forward-thinking innovators like Stevens are working towards. “I knew from the beginning that Joe was special,” said Helen Garcia, Stevens’ high school algebra teacher. “One time, he squeezed his elbow together so that it looked like a butt. We are truly blessed to have witnessed such a genius!” Stevens’ work has not gone unnoticed. Tech recruiters have been vying over his attention, hoping to secure his talents. “Google wants my dick,” said Stevens, gesturing to his crotch.
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The MQ’s Wired • May 2017
A Funeral and the Terminal Velocity of a Date:
Why the Jury is Still Out on Genetically Modified Palm Trees By Barak Tzori Redditor-in-Chief
Monday, September 19th, 2016. 9:35 a.m. Depositions begin in the case of Dead Guy 4552. v. DuPont. Begemann’s family accuses DuPont of workplace negligence and having eyes bigger than their stomachs in GMO research on date trees, which they say caused the death of Begemann. A subordinate engineer recounts that the new date palms would be able to produce over a ton of fruit each year with the only minor side effect being their height of approximately 1320 feet. The engineer is uneasy about this tradeoff, and wonders why they didn’t just make the trees wider.
Part seven of our series: Great and Terrible Signs — Technological Revelations 16:17. In this series we highlight the unknown stories of technological controversy that shows the possible limits of tech and computers. In Part Seven, we delve deep into the death of Brett Begemann and the possible connection of inherently dangerous GMOs. Wednesday, August 3rd, 2016. 2:40 p.m. All of DuPont Chief Engineer Brett Begemann’s plans for solving date and palm oil shortages — the chem papers, the design schematics — are all scattered on the floor. Next to his teeth. You can’t read the schematics. You can never tell what’s going on inside a person’s head. Even when what’s inside has been sprayed onto your lab coat by a 50 mile an hour genetic super-date like a one-tone Pollock.
Wednesday, September 21st, 2016. 1:12 p.m. In a DuPont executive’s deposition the unlikeliness of the tragedy comes to light. “The server farmers at Dell Inc. promised us no force on earth, not wind nor bird, could shake these high durability dates. It is impossible to know the true cause of the incident.
Sunday, August 7th, 2016. 11:00 a.m. DuPont’s lawyers outnumber Begemann’s family at the funeral. His fiancée warns against the tyranny of GMOs during her eulogy. The lawyers admit no wrongdoing during theirs. Begemann’s best friend finally confesses he doesn’t even like dates. “They’re too sweet,” he says, “and it’s not like they’re better when they’re dry.”
Wednesday, September 21st, 2016. 1:48 p.m. Leading arborist Rose Lee remarks that fruit tends to fall off its branch once it is ripe. Wednesday, September 21st, 2016. 1:51 p.m. “Really? Shit.” Monday, October 17st, 2016. 10:30 a.m. The trial begins. The
defense positions itself behind the idea that there is no way in which a date could be accelerated to a speed great enough to kill a person. Experiments must be done. Tuesday, October 18th, 2016. 11:15 a.m. The judge allows for a courtroom field trip to the amusement park. There a date is strapped into the centrifugal ride, along with sketch artists and the stenographers. All three are flung from the ride. High speed cameras indicate the date could not do significant neurological damage, let alone kill.
Barks and Bytes: Wearable Tech for Puppies Famed Parisian puppy designer Jean-Pierre Chevalier recently announced his inspiration for his latest PreFall/Winter 2017-2018 Haute Couture collection. While twirling his mustache, Chevalier explained that his inspiration came from his childhood pup pal Napoleon, as well as Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz. Schulz once stated that “Happiness is a warm puppy,” and this deeply resonated with Chevalier. Taking this to the logical conclusion, Chevalier introduced a new collection of puppy sweaters that utilizes fiber-optic infrared heat-wave technology. These SwelteringSweaters™ are
Wednesday, October 19th, 2016. 12:50 p.m. All-star pitcher Buster Posey steps up to the witness stand. Date in hand, he heaves a whopper of a fastball into a target 30 feet away. Again analysis reveals no major injuries sustained. Thursday, October 20th, 2016. 3:23 p.m. After closing statements, the jury is released to ponder the evidence in the courtroom’s “DuPont All-Natural-ZeroCal-Zero-Guilt Fruit Snack Jury Room.”
designed to keep puppies at an ideal 102.57°F and include other important features such as a barko-meter and treat dispenser. Buzz spread around his new collection, urging the puppy fashion community into respond with dogmatic remarks. Pauline Durand, a noted designer and rival to Chevalier, has criticized this new collection, calling it “ugly” and “heinous.” Durand is doggedly determined to detract sales from SwelteringSweaters™ as she claims that no such technology exists that is advanced enough to precisely warm a dog to the ideal 102.57°F. She has begun to file charges against Chevalier for false advertising.
Chartgeist People annoyed by distant saxophone music
Monday, October 23th, 2016. 9:45 a.m. The judge reads out the decision: not guilty. In celebration, one of DuPont’s lawyers chokes on a date pit. A juror is heard whispering, “Man, if fucking Aesop were alive for this one.”
This is what this paper looks like as a 64x64 JPEG
STAIRS
drone zone: Why Twitter, Netflix, and More are Racing to Have Drones
Tech companies are flocking to drones like drones to a light. By Cole Greenbaun Tech Wizard (Evocation) If you have yet to hear the iconic buzz of a drone flying around overhead
as a creepy dude films B-roll “for his vlog,” then you better get used to it because three major Silicon Valley companies have announced their intentions to implement drones into their business models. Starting with an announcement from Twitter followed by announcements from Netflix and Venmo, it seems like Silicon Valley is turning into the Drone Zone. So when did this dronesession or drone-OB-session begin? It all harkens back to the first tech company to utilize drones in their business model: Air Hogs. The San Bernardino based company started amidst the height of the dot-com boom and sold bioengineered pigs as exotic pets for the CEO’s of dot-com boom companies. They found these newly-winged beasts to be a high-profit niche market
of people who were told they’d only be successful “when pigs fly.” Once the bubble collapsed, they managed to survive by selling small rudimentary four-rotor helicopters they had been using to deliver the pigs, marketed as toys. Ten years later after the Obama administration’s efforts in the Middle East thrust drones into the spotlight, Air Hogs made the smart decision to stop marketing their products as “R/C helicopters” and instead as “drones.” Their stock rose exponentially as people started to buy drones in fear that the government would use their drones on the American public in order to take away their citizen’s drones. And thus the drone race began. “Look, if you ain’t got drones, you ain’t got shit,” said Silicon Valley’s top expert on drones, Johannas Vunderburg. “Consumers don’t care anymore about how reliable or convenient your product is. They care about two things — how high your product can hover and how fast it can fly.”
Several startup companies have capitalized off of this trend in the past couple of years, most notably the rapidly growing startup PhoneDronez. PhoneDronez, which is an app that allows you to summon a drone with a phone on it in case there are no payphones nearby, was started by entrepreneur Randy LeJax. He claims drones are the future of the tech world. “Let me tell you something, bud,” said Lejax in a phone interview over a PhoneDronez’s Phone-Drone, “Drones are hot and will only continue to get hotter. Everyone from a Hollywood liberal schlub to a redneck geezer wants one. It doesn’t matter if it takes photos or delivers pizza, so long as it’s a drone. Look, I know the associations with ‘too big to fail’ but I am confident in supporting what my good friend Dom Hofmann, yes the Dom Hoffman of Vine, said: “this is different, it’s too massive to miss.” Twitter, Netflix, and Venmo are some of the first major tech companies to incorporate
drones into their services, and are also the first non-hardware based companies to do so. “Our drones are going to be an essential part of our platform moving forward,” said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. “They’ll fly around and everything. What’s that? What will they do? I just told you’ll they’ll fly around and stuff, it’ll be great but most of all it shows how Twitter is looking towards the future.” Netflix has also started beta-testing a drone button on their website and apps, which when pressed, will start up a drone and display a status screen showing how long till the Netflix drone runs out of battery and stops flying. No matter what, drones are here to stay for the foreseeable future. These nifty pieces of tech are flying high in the tech world. Even Google is reportedly looking at starting an experimental wearable drone division by the end of 2017. So you either enter the drone zone or wait till the drone zone enters you.
datasTREAM:
Did you know that up to 2% of fire alarms are triggered by actual fires?
angry nerd: Stop Complaining about Movies! Every time a blockbuster movie comes out, some people just have to get on their soapbox and yell their opinions to the world. Stop your privileged whining, because no one cares or wants to listen. If you’re going to rant, do so quietly! The worst thing you can do is scream at people on the internet about why Christopher Nolan isn’t a master of cinema. It all started with Batman v Superman. Here every DC fan claimed to love it, while critics hated it. Obviously these critics need to shut up: everybody knows that movie was amazing. If you didn’t think BvS was an Oscar-
worthy visual masterpiece, you need to cool your jets, you arrogant attention-seeking ass. Then when Suicide Squad came out everyone once again dusted off their soapboxes and screamed at everyone about it. “It was objectively bad, the pacing was off and the script was boring,” they all yelled, trying to enforce their subjectivity on the world. No one cares if you hated it based on its merits! With a movie as amazing as this, you just need to keep it to yourself. Now excuse me, I need to go jerk off to the new Wonder Woman trailer. But you won’t hear me bragging about it!
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The Cutting Edge in Tech
As tech advances at a speed as fast as sound it can be hard to keep up, even if you’re just trying to tell the difference between a keyboard and a motherboard. Luckily, we at Wired have all the deets on what tech is streaming out of Silicon Valley, and that info is streaming in as fast as House of Cards on my Netflix subscription about to expire as I chug Yerba Mate. (Note to the editor: keep this in — it’s relatable). Here are all the latest products you are sure to see in an ad on the side of a Starbucks in the next year.
Comes with 6 GB of long-term memory and no short-term memory
The gPhone by Gphone* *unaffiliated with Google
The new gPhone is a revolutionary look at the rise in curved screens. It took away the front-facing screen and replaced it with two screens on either side of the phone. The phone then has a revolutionary rotary dial keyboard in the front, freeing the phone’s dual display from the shackle of the traditional keyboard. Finally, Gphone has introduced a new voice assistant to the gPhone that will faithfully recreate human sounds, including:
Comes in three colors: gold, obsidian, and grass-stained white denim
Blood-curdling screams when dropped Coughing and wheezing when low on battery Snoring when on sleep mode
No headphone/ charger port, but is waterproof
EDITOR’S CHOICE!
Comparison Tests gPhone
Halo Hertz
Dell Icarus
Pepsi’s Organic Wool Blad Runners
Stress test — Can it juggle three jobs and support a family of five?
No
No
Yes
Only on a Tuesday
Is it so sleek it’ll slide out of your pocket at X2 in Magic Mountain?
Yes
Yes
No
If bigger than size 9, yes
Skill at spreading peanut butter?
Excellent
Terrible
Good
No
Speed Test — How fast can it deliver your baby?
3.4 seconds
34 seconds
1.5 hours
3 days
Battery Test — How long does it last while being beaten with a sock full of batteries?
5 seconds
7 seconds
8 seconds
10 kiloseconds
7
2
Only Pearl Harbor
Screen Test — How many Michael Bay movies will it allow you to play?
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Dell Icarus
Maximum weight capacity 1.5 tons
Developmental biologists and Dell’s hardware nerds have come together to bring us the Dell Icarus. With a revolutionary square aspect ratio, this is the first laptop to mimic a Venus flytrap, spitting acid and slowly closing on any intruder. For those on the move, pull a 1:4 scale replica of the Icarus from under the battery. And, in a move revamping the computing industry, Icarus is the first laptop where all of the USB ports are outies.
EDITOR’S SELECTION!
PICK OF THE EDITOR! With Beats and Bose sound
Halo Hertz
One-half horsepower RAM
Password etched into the side so you’ll never forget
With Beats and Bose sound Jointly built by the power duo Bose and Beats, these haloshaped headphones produce high-quality sound coming at you from a full 360 degrees. The combined, circularized 226 mini speakers in each set are answering the calls of all of those extreme film watchers accustomed to the full-bodied, insanely intense experience previously exclusive to surround sound. Also built for maximum portability, the headphones come with a durable spider-silk based cord that’s just long enough to trip over.
Pepsi’s Organic wOOL BLAD RUNNERS Meet the shoe that’s been sweeping Silicon Valley. Noted for its slip-on construction, pure non-terrestrial organic wool and therapeutic acupuncture technique (in which you walk on various pins and needles), these shoes have become a standard in the tech world. Comes with a slot for a SIM card and a cord that connects to any standard projector. Adapters for the cord to the shoe and adapter from the cord to an HDMI port both sold separately.
Comes pre-licked
Comes with high school padlock for security (not pictured here) See how these gadgets compare on a classic product comparison quadrant graph! Number of un-corners
Authoritarian Dell Icarus
Amount of memory
High-ranking Department Head's choice
Willingness to forgive you
Number of corners
Pixel Phone
iPad gPhone
Libertarian Quality
Communism Amount of money invested by Pepsi
Quadrant Graphs
Artisanal grass-fed
Blad Runners George Foreman Grill
Number of graphs it appears on Evil
Good
Halo Hertz Coca-Cola High-Tops
Capitalism
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Delete Every Picture of Yourself Right Now — Do It for God’s Sake!
Fonts, An Annotated Timeline ~2000 BC
By Cole Greenbaun Tech Wizard (Evocation)
The NSA. The CIA. The KGB. The ISIS. The KFC. What do these organizations have in common? Two things: they have hecka cool acronyms and are looking at pictures of your fried chicken breakfast RIGHT NOW. Why are you even reading this right now? Delete every photo of yourself as soon as possible! In the age of the internet, privacy is dead! The only way to truly have any privacy anymore is to delete every goddamn photo of yourself, murder your computer and cell phone while they sleep, and cover yourself in mud and leaves deep in the Bitterroot National Forest. Ever heard of something called an IP address? Yeah buddy, that’s like a trail of bread crumbs that leads the government right to that up close photo of your nipple you took to see if male nipples actually have nipple holes! Who can access your IP address? Any goddamn hooligan with tin foil and a TV antenna, that’s who! That’s right, your next door neighbor Sheila could be ogling your 20 photos of the same sunset from slightly different angles right now! Delete them for God’s sake! Let me break it down for you. You take a picture. The phone elves, if you will, take that picture and place it into your gallery on your phone. Then you click on a link advertising a nose growth serum guaranteed to attract middleaged women to your imme-
The MQ’s Wired • May 2017
Papyrus
~1000 BC
Times
The Greek classic. Despite its name, this font was timeless in its usage and made up the majority of Western writings for hundreds of years. Did you know the ancient Greeks wrote in alternating directions?
~500 BC
diate area. As a result, secret government agents kick in your firewall, slip down through a skylight window into the gallery, rummage through your gallery, and pocket the juiciest photo of you pretending to wear the Taj Mahal as a hat, and escape without leaving a fingerprint, or cyberprint, if you will. They then set up a booth on the online black market selling your photos like popsicles, a nickel a pop, by which I mean a nickel for every video of you popping that back pimple. Alright, I’m going to address the elephant in the
room. Nude photos. Everybody takes them, whether you’re in a relationship, single, or have lodged one of your genitals into a soy sauce bottle. Even if you have used Snapchat to send these photos, which “claims” they “delete” each “photo” after a certain “amount” “of” “time,” you are in danger. That photo of you sliding nude down a barbecue sauce slip n’ slide alone, once sent, is transported onto Snapchat’s servers where the snoopy bastards collect all condiment-related nude photos and bustle out of their
kitchen with them on a silver platter to bring straight to the table of the Snapchat execs. NOTHING. IS. SAFE. In summation, delete every photo you have, not only of yourself but of anything. The only photos that are safe are monochromatic pictures. Then when you stare into the inky black darkness, you can use your memory, (the unhackable picture album!) to remember those sweet sweet pictures you deleted. Like that one of you and your grandfather before he died — the last time he smiled. Good times.
Interview: The Makers of Radiolab Cooked Up a Podcast
You Listen to with Your Nose
Times New Roman
The “New Roman” was really a rebranding by the Romans of an originally Greek idea. Come on, Romans.
~1939
Helvetica Neue
Serifs were too expensive during the Great Depression, so we got rid of them.
~1950s
Courier
We sat down with Jad and Robert, masters of auditory storytelling and hosts of WNYC’s Radiolab, to sniff out the secrets behind their newest endeavor – “Common Scents” Jad Abumrad: Hey, I’m Jad Abumrad. Robert Krulwich: I’m Robert Krulwich. J: And this is Radiolab. Today’s story — R: — came to us as a pleasant surprise — J: — from a tech mag — Wired: Hold on, what’s happening? J: What? WIRED: You’re here to be interviewed for the Wired piece. You know that, yes? R: I’m afraid that’s my fault. J: Oh yes, terribly sorry. I think I might have a problem. I see a mic and it’s, like, Pavlovian. R: We could talk about it, Jad. Wired: Well actually, we’re here to talk about your new podcast. J: Why talk? You thinking what I’m thinking, Rob? Wired: Can we focus? R: Radiolab ep about breaking old habits? Wired: Fellas … J: That’s it! I have a reporter in Minneapolis doing research already. Wired: FELLAS!! J: Oh yeah! What’s up? Wired: Can we please talk about “Common Scents.” R: Sure! What’d you want to know? Wired: You two have always been the best at storytelling, with Radiolab and “More Perfect.” J: Won’t dispute it. Wired: So what made you want to leave audio and go full schnoz?
The hieroglyphs introducing this new font said something about it being a “successor” to hieroglyphs. At least, that seems right. No one uses hieroglyphics anymore, so we can’t actually read them.
Invented as the first monospace for FORTRAN in the mid 1950s, this font’s gotta be monospace for those punchcards; otherwise, the spacing is all fucked up.
R: I think we’ve always worked to- R: — who was born with an extra J: — although the technology is wards altering how people think of nostril. still in its early stages. Wired: It sounds fascinating. R: Do you remember how in old media. J: That’s right. First we left radio And you listen to the whole thing movies they used to have foley artto die on the curb, and now with through your nose? ists do the sound effects? “Scents” we both felt like the au- J: Yup. J: The people that would rub two R: Well, listen might not be the balloons together during the swing ditory podcast space was getting right word. too crowded. set scenes — R: That’s when we hooked up with Wired: Then how does it work? R: — and produce that eee-oooJ: We’ll be happy to tell you — Marty Garrison — eee-ooo sound. J: — The world’s leading R: After this message. Wired: I’m following so far. Olfactologist — J: So it’s like that but with smell. R: — and began Wired: You lost exploring the large me. world tucked right Hi, I’m David Snively, and this interview is brought R: No one ever tried under our ovular, before us — leftist-academic to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is dedicated to J: — but all it took glasses. was a qualified Wired: So in the creating bold templates and empty-space fonts to intern shaking podcast you ta— pepper onto the miJ: Please, just say give you everything you need to launch your failed crophone. pod. R: And wouldn’t Wired: Um, okay. you know it, it Etsy business. Go to squarespace.com and enter So in the cast, you worked. take a deep dive Wired: Well, if promo code SNORT. into smell, modern it’s anything like smell culture, and the podcasts you’ve Squarespace — leaders in beautiful facades. even the illicit side produced to date, of smell. I’m sure it’ll be a R: That’s right. In the first episode J: And we’re back. scent-cess. of the pod we break down exactly Wired: Ok so how do you smell J: That’s how you’re going to end how it is humans came to smell — this interview? the podcast? J: — through the story of Gina R: It’s very simple, technologically R: Yeah, real weak. Let’s hope you Garrubbo — never go into radio. —
~2016
NeueHelvetica Neue A modern-era take on the modern font that’s really just Arial.
JARGON WATCH Infosec (n.) / ˈɪn-foʊ-sɛk / The amount of info you can forget in one second Trinary (n.) / ˈtɹaɪ-nə-rɪ / A computer encoding system that can express numbers and letters using only the number ‘3’ Flavor-infused water (n.) / ˈfleɪ-vɚ ɪn-ˈfjuzd ˈwɔ-tɚ Bad juice
/
The MQ’s Wired • May 2017
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FBI Releases Cloud Backup Service
How a 2002 Sci-Fi Movie May Influence the President’s Crime Policy
By Summer Davis Resident Myspace Tech
T
he FBI unveiled their new cloud backup service this past week after months of development, and boy, is it a doozy. The online backup service, known as iSpy, allows customers to store their pictures, videos, and important documents offline on an encrypted server. Sources say that it is inaccessible to hacking since it is located in the basement of the FBI Headquarters, but the creators of iSpy obviously haven’t pissed off Russia. The FBI has been working on services to sell to the public for a profit ever since President Trump cut their budget as revenge for being wiretapped. FBI Director James Comey said Trump “is forcing us to raise money from outside sources, even though I helped get him the presidency. We even tried a lemonade stand, for Christ’s sake! According to our sources, he only returns favors to his donors or people with the last name ‘Kushner.’” To register for iSpy, customers must input their names, birthdays, and Social Security numbers. If that seems like a lot of work, then get a whiff of this: They are then en-
“Privacy, security, integrity: these are the things that are important,” mused Comey. couraged to download iSpy to their laptops and phones, so they can always access it. Data is then backed up to the FBI’s server with no extra action needed on the part of the customers, other than a monthly subscription fee of 7.99 dollars. “The FBI’s facial recognition database holds information on about half of US adults, but not to worry – iSpy’s 15GB of storage space still allows plenty of room for your selfies,” said FBI spokesman Michael Kortan at a press briefing to promote the service. “If you’re always forgetting pesky information like passwords, iSpy is great for storing a document with all of your passwords organized by website. We’ll even backup your WhatsApp chat logs! What? No, our service is nothing like iCloud or
Google Drive. We charge money for it.” At an event celebrating the release of iSpy, Director Comey commented that he was grateful to “finally accomplish the mission the FBI had been working towards since our founding.” When asked to clarify what this mission was, Comey said, “Freeing up space on the devices of all Americans.” Early reviews of iSpy are positive. CNET gave it four stars, writing that “iSpy does exactly what it promises to do.” Gizmodo stated that “by storing our data, iSpy gives consumers a sense of security and provides peace of mind.” Even Buzzfeed Tech weighed in and said, “It’s a’ight.” Privacy advocate Edward Snowden reacted to the news of
the release of iSpy negatively, stating that he “didn’t get exiled to Russia for this.” He advised Americans that it was better to switch to disposable cameras in order leave no data trail at all, and recommended investing in filing cabinets if they needed more storage space. Looking towards the future, Director Comey expressed excitement for the next products that the FBI is working on. “We’re developing a search engine that allows you to get the answers you want from anyone, no matter how resilient they think they are. Also, we’ll be releasing a line of televisions and microwaves. Stay tuned, because the FBI has a lot of things in storage!”
But What Really ARE Pyramids? Pyramids. Simple right? You think that pyramids are just three-dimensional, triangular shapes that you might see once in awhile being featured on Sesame Street; but you couldn’t be more wrong. Pyramids are incredibly technical and complex configurations with extraordinary features that most people are oblivious to. Lucky for you, I am an expert on pyramids, and am gracious enough to impart my unbounded knowledge. The most important aspect to recognize about pyramids is that no two pyramids are alike. Like a snowflake, every pyramid is unique and miraculous. Here you will find the most important kinds of pyramids that even simpletons should know about.
The Great Pyramids of Giza
This pyramid is the oldest of the seven ancient wonders of the world, and the oldest of the ancient wonders that are also pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Giza is academically classified as an archeo-tetrahedron, but I like to call it Great PoG for short, and GPoG for even shorter. GPoG was a secret for thousands of years until scientists unearthed it when searching for the remains of Indiana Jones. After looking inside, scientists discovered that ancient Egyptians actually used the pyramid as a final resting place for their rulers, as well as a dry place to store their grain. Ben Carson may have actually been right about something after all!
Food Pyramids
The yummiest of pyramids are objects of disdain among society, feared and loathed as an infernal, diabolical construct capable of controlling the diets of humans. The food pyramid was adopted as a food nutrition guide by the US Department of Agriculture in 1992. Ultimately ineffective in its primary goal of promoting healthy nutritional habits and in its secondary goal of being a corrupt role model for young American pyramids, the food pyramid was replaced in 2011 by a more spherical diagram called MyPlate. Many, yours truly included, rejoiced at the fall of this abomination which thought we wouldn’t notice it was a pretender; two-dimensional pyramids are not bona-fide pyramids.
The $100,000 Pyramid
This final pyramid is an American game show that originally aired in 1973 as “The $10,000 Pyramid.” Initially hosted by Dick Clark, contestants on the game show would pair up with B-list celebrities and try to describe a word or phrase without explicitly saying it. The $100,000 Pyramid has won a total of nine Daytime Emmys, which is nine more Emmys than Supermarket Sweep ever received. Remember Supermarket Sweep? Of course not, because it was terrible, and everyone would rather watch celebrities play games with average Joes than watch middle-aged women run through a supermarket to win grocery money. I rest my case.
One-Dimensional Pyramids
Also called triangles, these pyramids are the most common types of pyramids one can see in their everyday life. These pyramids come in three different subgroups known as scalene, equilateral, and isosceles. One dimensional pyramids lie flat on a plane, and therefore look as if you were staring straight at one side of a pyramid. But don’t be fooled! There is always another side to everything!
Human Pyramids
These pyramids are not geometric pyramids, instead being categorized as acrobatic pyramids. Found often at football games and under circus tents, human pyramids are composed of a large group of people kneeling on the floor, and then more people kneeling on them, ad infinitum. Human pyramids end either when the structure cannot support any more people, or when there are no more people left to pile on the others. This impermanence makes humans ill-suited as pyramid construction materials. Using adhesives such as glue can remedy this, but this is generally considered cheating among experienced pyramid connoisseurs.
Not pictured: organizational acumen. By Paola Diaz and Brandon Moguel Contributors While the first 100 days of the new administration have passed with very little new leg-
islation to show for it, everyone has been awaiting a big innovation from the White House. Well, wait no longer, because the Trump administration is about to make a big splash with their idea for a new branch in the justice system. The president described, in a series of tweets his intention to use a certain sci-fi film as inspiration for his overhaul of the justice department: “Bored. Kind of feel like watching a movie. Obama never updated the DVD collection. Sad! #MAGA” “Found one with that Scientology guy. “Minority Report”. Great title!” “This might work. #MAGA #Wall #DVDs #TomCruise”
That’s right — the basis for the new tactic in the war on crime comes from a 2002 film nominated for Best Sound Editing. Remember that movie where Tom Cruise is in the future and he has to run around a bunch and save the world? Okay, the one with annoying lens flares and albinos in pools predicting murders? Yep, Steven Spielberg’s 15-year-old cult favorite Minority Report. Apparently the administration remembers it too. While it seems like President Trump was expecting a feel-good story about minorities getting reported, the movie for him was nonetheless entertaining, as it served as inspiration for Trump’s newest proposal. For those not familiar with the movie or Philip K. Dick’s short story that it is based on (shame on you), the premise is as follows: In the future, when homicides reach epidemic proportions, three genetically manipulated siblings capable of seeing the future, known as the precognitives, are used by the government to stop murders before they happen.
While a cool enough concept (who doesn’t like the idea of Jeff Sessions sitting in a kiddy pool figuring it all out?) obtaining these precrime predictions is another story. Other than PowerPoint, we have yet to find a way to projects one’s visions onto a screen. Advances in neurotechnology have made it possible to monitor a person’s brain activity, but not what they’re thinking. Tech experts have suggested one plausible idea could be the use of NSA-collected metadata to make predictive calculations about the future, but the president has suggested using a Miss-USAstyle tournament to find “some hot future-tellers.” Sean Spicer defended the process in a briefing on Tuesday. “The president has had much success in the past for selecting individuals of the highest caliber across a wide variety of criteria using the pageant style. Because what use is a clairvoyant if they don’t look good in a sash?” Steven Spielberg, the director of the film, felt the need to release a statement, saying, “The president has clearly missed the central point Philp K. Dick was trying to make when he wrote the short story over 60 years ago. Charging people with ‘future crime’ erases the idea of free will. Arresting someone for a murder that never took place is an unconscionable paradox.” He added, “If anything, the film is meant as a critique of post 9/11 American society gradually ceding its privacy in exchange for ‘security.’” However, White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon said Spielberg’s concerns can be disregarded for “obvious reasons.” “Because he’s a director,” added Bannon. “Not because he’s Jewish. You just can’t trust greedy ... directors.” Either way, if the United States is going to be modeled after a Tom Cruise movie, let’s all just be happy it’s not Vanilla Sky.
Mr. know-it-all: Why do Americans drive on the right side of the road? Well technically, the entire concept of your question is inherently flawed. Direction depends on what orientation you are observing the road from. And saying “Americans” could be referring to people from either North or South America. A littleknown fact is that in the South American country Guyana, they actually drive on the left side of the road, though again, that’s a meaningless distinction because of the ambiguity of the concept of direction and Guyana’s measly GDP of only three billion. While answering your
datastream:
asinine question that demonstrates the failing public school systems in this country, I started talking to my coworker Steve about what a road really is. Steve graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder, with a degree specializing in road studies. Steve told me that by 10,000 BCE, roads were in widespread use by humans and that the first paved road was constructed in Egypt. After a quick Wikipedia search, I confirmed these facts. I hope this helped answer your question, you dense sack of bricks.
Did you know that 0000 in hex means 0000000000000000 times in binary?
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I Got a SmartWatch.
It Ruined by Rene Mejia Contributor I have received Apple’s new product, the AppleWatch 5, for free before its launch in major retail stores. To fulfill my contract with Apple, I will provide an hour by hour breakdown of my time with the watch.
my Day
10 a.m. I ask Siri what time it is, and she says it is 10, which is also the number of times she has been cheated on. I’m confused but I’ve decided to ignore this and write a report for my job.
12 p.m. Wait, how do AIs form relationships? Do AIs even have genders to speak of? Will I be able to finish my report by 1 p.m.? Am I insane? 1 p.m. I send a voice message to my boss through the watch informing him that my report will be late. I try to text a friend, but my fingers are far too big for the watch’s numbers. I am glad that the watch at least tries to have the functions of a phone.
11 a.m. I want to avoid pulling out my laptop for the report, so I check the AppleWatch’s apps to see if I can do it on there instead. I then learn that AppleWatch 5 has no Word, Excel, or even a notetaking app. I reluctantly pull out my laptop, also made by Apple, to work on my report.
2 p.m. I update my watch. It says it will take five minutes. It takes an hour. I use the extra time to finish my report.
show your face at a Renaissance Faire ever again. To put it in more simple terms, a ballista is like an HP Elite Slice, and the other weapons are like the Dell Dimension 4600. It’s like comparing apples to oranges. Now that you know you are building a ballista and not cheiroballistra, you can focus on the individual parts needed for construction. Most items necessary for the formation of a ballista can be found online or at your local Whole Foods under the “Gluten Free Bread/Balsa Wood” aisle. However, the central tool that enables a ballista to function is the hard-to-come-by torsion spring. Not to be confused with a prod, torsion springs allow a ballista to “shoot off its load,” if you will. Luckily, Hobby Lobby is always fully stocked with torsion springs, found between the wooden crucifixes and the arrowheads. When purchasing this tool, the first thing I noticed was they were more expensive than I originally thought. When I initially researched torsion springs, I found that during their peak demand they could
be traded for a woven basket full of bread. However, the price tag I found at Hobby Lobby was at least 25 times the amount I had intended to pay, so I ended up paying 25 woven baskets of bread! But don’t let this throw you off from building a ballista, because to my great surprise I found that the torsion springs came in a variety of five different colors! I ended up spending so much time in Hobby Lobby trying to decide on a color that my wife texted me asking if I had left her for another woman, and my girlfriend called me to ask if I had left my wife! The conversation inside my head kept debating, “Do I want tangelo or mint? And what about lava? But pacific matches my eyes!” I finally decided to purchase a kiwi-colored torsion spring so that my ballista could blend in with the well-manicured grass in my back lawn. From there I bought my kiwi-colored springs under the strangely
8 a.m. I wake up and put on the watch. I turn it on. Siri sarcastically greets me. I ignore her and look at the time. It is early enough to eat breakfast, but I am too lazy to get out of bed and I set an alarm on the watch for 9 a.m. 9 a.m. The watch wakes me up from my nap. I notice that I forgot to remove the watch from my arm before I took my nap. My arm hurts.
Bored of building your own computer? Rather get back to the basics of personally constructed tech? Well, you’re in luck because Wired was granted exclusive access to a Hobby Lobby in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and we discovered that it is the only retailer of the key tool that is required for constructing a ballista. According to Hobby Lobby, they are the only medieval tech company that provides all the right tools for constructing a homemade ballista in order to “get rid of the gays.” Before you can construct your ballista, you must be able to distinguish it from other medieval weapons that are not nearly as destructive. Luckily, all Hobby Lobby employees are instructed in the arts of medieval discrimination and ancient weapon construction and are there to help! The most common weapons that people mistake for the ballista include the scorpio, the catapult, and the classic trebuchet. Of course you can choose to build these weapons in lieu of a ballista, but be warned you may never be able to
11:30 a.m. My watch is almost dead. I attach a portable charger to it and place the charger in my pocket.
3 p.m. Siri hits on me. I find it odd and very creepy. Her boyfriend’s cheating must have done a number on her. 4 p.m. After arriving at work, my boss pulls me into his office to yell at me for my late report. My leg is really warm for some reason. 5 p.m. The charger sets me on fire. Siri uses this opportunity to call me ‘hot.’ Not funny.
5:05 p.m. My boss is on fire. 6 p.m. Firefighters have extinguished the fire. However, I now lack a charger. Apple will not give me new chargers or send new firefighters. Oh well. 7 p.m. During dinner, my watch garnered the jealousy of a passing self-proclaimed “rich guy.” I check the time in front of him. Siri tells me the time is 7, which is also the number of separate AIs that her boyfriend has cheated on her with. She proceeds to make moves on me. I try to avoid the implications of the relationship. 8 p.m. Do AIs feel emotions? Should I have tried Microsoft’s new watch instead? I try to deactivate Siri. It fails. I think she hates me now. 9 p.m. She does. She told me. My boss also hates me, even more than normal. The watch has five percent battery remaining. 10 p.m. The self-proclaimed “rich man” knocks at my door and threatens me. He says he’s a Samsung corporate agent and will kill me if I don’t give him the watch. I give it to him gladly. Sucker.
suspicious eye of the cashier, took them home, and built my ballista! I could go on and describe my experience with building my ballista, but I wouldn’t want to spoil the fun. I personally recommend that each person builds their own ballista with Hobby Lobby torsion springs. As Hobby Lobby CEO David Green says “There’s nothing more satisfying than basking in the shade of your own ballista, except for the feeling of being able to practice your skeet shooting on a picture of George Takei!”
The MQ’s Wired • May 2017
what’s inside: Your Four-Month-Old Beauty Blender Dust mites. The only thing that dust mites like to gnaw on more than cigarette ash and paint chips is your dead skin cells, and skin cells come a dime-a-dozen inside your beauty blender! Statistics show that individuals shed enough skin a day to feed a million of these nasty little allergens. To make matters even worse, dust mites produce a lot of feces, so consider that when you smear a combination of chemicals and bug semen on your face every morning. glass. Remember that time you accidentally dropped your perfume bottle and tried to swab up the contents with your beauty
datastream:
Want To Build Your Own Ballista?
Hobby Lobby Has the Tool You Need
By Sage Cristal Tech Paladin
Read This First By Jen Windsor Señor Maverick Locomotives. Horsepower. Compound engines.
own as airplanes no longer require the labor of horses to fly. As new technologies like this one spread across the world, we must always prioritize the safety and knowledge of consumers, to ensure that they are protected from deceitful business practices and misinformation. A growing number of businesses are in need of ever-greater quantities of energy to transport goods, pump water from mines, or operate paper shredders, so the power provided by the steam engine is attractive. But we need to be aware of just where it comes from,
how it works, and how to use it safely. Unlike a draft animal, managing a steam engine is more complex than simply feeding it, sheltering it, and grooming its mane once in a while. It is in these little-known complexities that nefarious entrepreneurs can prey on unknowledgeable customers. Before going steamy, consumers should ask questions about installing steam engines, and make sure they like the answers. Consumers need to
Your Boyfriend’s Pubic Hair. Most people never know what happens with their beauty products when they are out of their home. And to your great surprise, your boyfriend has taken up an interest in your beauty blender. To be more specific, you boyfriend likes to rub your beauty blender on his genitals out of pure curiosity. You still love your boyfriend, but he has very strange quirks.
Did you know there are approximately 7 cricket legs in every keyboard?
Thinking About Investing in the Steam Engine?
These buzzwords have flooded the energy technology market and are on every consumer’s mind. Sources of greater and greater amounts of “electricity” are increasingly prevalent in Americans’ and Europeans’ lives and will be a key to this new revolution of industry occurring around the world. Just as recently as two years ago, a British inventor from Cornwall developed a compound cycle engine that uses high-pressure steam to produce power, and it has already proven itself a boon to movement and communication in our society. Overland commerce has already seen the advantages of steam-powered cars over horsepowered cars. Moreover, transportation of goods over waterways is becoming easier than ever now that steamboats can power themselves down canals, rather than having to be dragged by horses. And, perhaps most spectacularly, air travel has undergone a revolution of its
blender? Well, you definitely got some glass lodged in it while attempting to clean up your mess. Maybe that’s why you always bleed after putting on your concealer.
decide h o w m u c h horsepower they need in a steam engine, consider if they have the space for a large boiler and the fuel to heat it, and determine whether the long-term advantages of the mechanism outweigh the conveniences of horse-drawn locomotion. Having a steam engine may not necessarily mean independence from horse power, as a machine
needs constant refueling and might break down at inconvenient times. Moreover, a steam engine, unlike a horse, cannot function as a last-ditch source of food or insulation if one gets stranded while
traveling in the wilderness. Consumers should also weigh the pros and cons of buying a steam engine versus leasing one from an energy conglomerate. It’s certainly nice to be able to own your own steam engine, but it’s not a cheap venture. You need to consider if you will use a steam engine often enough to justify the greater cost of outright buying over leasing, much like a summer vacation home or a 3D printer. At the end of the day, we need to make sure that all consumers are well-informed and armed with every single statistic relevant to steam power. They need to be able to protect themselves from boiler explosions and rising fuel prices and make effective, informed decisions about these unexplored, daunting new fields of technology. It won’t be long until the day that the common commuter must decide between buying horse feed or coal at the gas station, and hopefully they will have the knowledge to make the right choice.
The MQ’s Wired • May 2017
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How to Make Siri Easier to Deal With By David Vereau Görbitz Contributor
O
to listen to what she has to say. Being negligent and rude just makes her more likely to become passive aggressive with you and will most certainly end in negative conflict. Try not to ask her trivial questions. Just stop asking her to divide by zero, or to tell you a story. Siri doesn’t want to be taken as a joke.” William Gatson, an AI enthusiast, had more hands-on advice: “When I get some attitude from Siri, I throw my phone against the wall,” he said. It used to stop her … until my Instagram app stopped working,” explained Gatson. He then described the perks of using five phone cases at the same time. I also noticed that he had three different phones, which seemed suspicious, but who am I to judge? Anyways, you can never be too cautious when using protection. Any doctor will tell you that using five condoms
ften, we find ourselves angry at the speechrecognizing persona inside our phones. Yes, you know what I’m talking about: sometimes Siri is a little bit too extra for you. We interviewed Stephen Applegate, an AI personality developer, and compiled the best tips and tricks to make your time with Siri more pleasant. “The most common mistake I see people make is not to asking Siri how she is doing,” explained Applegate. “Siri sometimes just wants someone
By him, for hers everywhere Take a peek at some sample SheScript code to see just how easy it is to create a class while being feminine..
at once will make you five times more likely to avoid pregnancy. Wired’s interns have come up with a few tricks to help you finally live peacefully with Siri. Our research has found that asking Siri how her week has been going will yield better results than when you ask her to find a good restaurant for dinner. “You know, if you show some interest in her, she will actually help you find a good place to meet with your Tinder date,” explained our 28-year-old intern, Dave. Finally, try not to update your phone’s operating system if you can avoid it. Each time Apple releases a new update, Siri becomes more and more like a real person. Trust me, it gets scary. Just don’t update; as long as you stay primitive, Siri will not take control of your life.
SheScript is the new language that women have been passively waiting for all of this time, and it just might be revolutionary. With a new sleek feminine design, SheScript offers the perfect blend of practicality and non-confrontational encouragment perfect for any emotionally volatile coder. Described as both “pretty-looking” and “way too oversimplified to be used for complex coding,” SheScript is loved by male beta-testers everywhere.
Meet the Creators
Jerry Higgens I got my start as a software designer in high school when my neighbor offered me an internship at his company one day. However, I remember my friend Sheryl struggling with all of these ‘applications’ for positions, and spending time ‘learning things,’ and I knew that she needed some extra help, since she clearly wasn’t the natural I was. I created this language with her in mind.
RichT. Lewis When a girl at the start-up I worked at would come in and make small talk in the mornings, she always looked so cute and cheerful. But whenever she started coding for the day, she would get this serious expression on her face and it was so off-putting. I hope that SheScript will stop her from having to feel all of this seriousness, so that she can stay cute and cheerful all day.
Bobby Mackenzie Although I haven’t talked to any “girls in STEM” per se, I want them to know that my lack of experience doesn’t correspond to a lack of empathy. To all of those girls interested in coding out there, I truly understand your struggle, and want you to know that I think it’s okay for you to be in this field. It really is — you can trust me. And don’t fret, because SheScript is finally giving you the extra help and care that you need. We can now provide you with some extra-supportive bootstraps that you can pull yourself up by without breaking any nails.
“Since our company started requiring SheScript for women employees, my female coworkers’ code has decreased in quality and capacity — and it’s my time to shine! My code used to be slower and clunkier than my team member Anya’s code, but now that she’s getting used to SheScript and experiencing all its limitations, my code has become the basis of several key components of our product! Sure, we’ve had more system-wide shutdowns since the change, but if you can’t stand the segfaults, get out of the code base.”
“I tested SheScript for our female engineers, and I have to say it makes complex coding virtually impossible. I couldn’t make a proper hash table, and mining Bitcoins was out of the question. Every time I tried to process a large database, the program crashed. The language is highly inflexible, which provides the perfect buffers for women to code freely but safely. I wouldn’t trust my girls with anything other than SheScript, which ensures they won’t be messing around with any coding that would get them into trouble.”
[Redacted due to overly emotional, obscene content]
- Scott Bratsman, Product Manager at Pegasource
- Raymond Scheur, Head Software Engineer at CoreTech
- Rose Wilson, Assistant Software Engineer at CoreTech
#ForHerOwnGood
So You Want to Start a Startu Publicize
Appearance The worse thing you can do in Silicon Valley is create a company with a name, logo, and tagline that is original, non-minimalist, and uses a font with serifs. Here we provide three examples of what we assume would be successful startup companies that are not real. But if we find that you have used our examples, we will take legal action.
Compact Collaborative Transport Spaces
t e e n o d an h n e ou s e w rt ne o o th t y e’s lish ho t po o o n n nd tha Her ab on ou n e , a e . st ls e th ist sur ist e gu am ex e f ex rom mo r n . b l f u e se s ry o er tip ust et y th d g in to
So, you want to start a startup, eh? Good luck sucker, because without our advice you will never be able to succeed in creating an original entrepreneurial venture that doesn’t immediately fall flat on its face after launch. Wired has a few tips and tricks to be semi-profitable in your impulsive endeavor collected from everyone in the industry from A to Z, that guy Aaron in hardware to the Zuck himself. Use them, or fail — it's your choice.
Open So
Soft Core SoftWare Gentle, sensual, and sensical. If there is one thing that sells, it’s the subtle implication of gentle sexual intercourse. Having a name that gently deposits your customer’s eyes onto the sensual logo of the obviously rose-scented pillow will sell more than any half-naked floozy wrapped in Ethernet cords ever could. WingIt! You find it, we forcefully superglue wings to it. Implying excitement through the clever use of an exclamation point, this biotech company branding is a complete package. The title runs right off the tongue for a fast and catchy zinger. However, it is contrasted by the blunt, straightforward slogan that isn’t hiding shit from anyone. It’s just the kind of honesty consumers are looking for in the biotech world. Mom and Pop Boards Just like mom used to make. Modern technology has such a cold feel nowadays that most people prefer a warm hug to a new computer. That being said, millennials are starved for human affection so much so that they look to their smartphones and computers for support and validation. By marketing your startup as a family-owned business, you can easily profit off of their natural desire for friendship!
Optimize Your Office Feng Shui
To optimize your office space, studies have shown the best way is to optimiz the feng shui. First, place efficiency boosting objects around the office such as energy flues or motivational windows. Second, make sure to label the firs floor as the 12th to create the feeling of a skyscraper. Then, to encourage an always-fun, always-stay attitude, carpet the office in a putt putt green. Finally foster a sense of community with an open source office, allowing anyone to file their papers anywhere they please. That’ll make sure your office feng shui is fully optimized.
up?
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“Nowadays, all you need to do is hire some 20-something to be on Facebook all day and let ‘em work their magic.” - Tom Anderson, MySpace “Corporate temporary tattoos. There’s no cheaper, more impermanent way to turn your employees into walking billboards. Plus, it reminds them who they really belong to.” - Vivian Brand, Tyson Foods “Squash. Write your logo on a decorative squash. Squash.” - Summer Squash, Squash Conglomerate
ource Office
ze h st n y,
Advertisement “One word: company logo printed on yarmulkes. No better way to spread the good word than piggybacking on the Good Word itself!” - Penn Tateuch, Five Guys of Israel
One of the best ways to advertise your company is to co-opt a logo or ad from a different older, less recognizable company. (Remember the saying: “older than 15, no one has seen.”) Advertisements can’t be copyrighted because they aren’t real art, so they’re a goldmine for budding start-ups.
“200 dollars buys you approximately 2000 fortune cookies. Put “I see a successful Enterprise™ in your future” and they’ll eat that right up. Well, not literally. I hope.” - Pearson Fitzgerald Chang, Enterprise Rent-A-Jar
How to Get Seed Funding
Complementary Energy Flues
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Fun-ertaining Putt-Putt carpet
nal vatio i t o ow dM entleity Wind m g Au Rea
Active Flex Seats
• • • •
Be resourceful by turning every elevator ride into an elevator pitch. • Make your investors feel like they need you. Ignore all their calls and emails for two weeks before you allow them to invest in your startup. Wine ‘em, dine ‘em, FEC fine ‘em. Go door-to-door with products. Investors love that shit. In all honesty, you don’t need investors as long as you can forge handwriting accurately enough. Don’t even try. You are a strong, independent startup and you don’t need no investors.
Product Once you follow all these steps, you are finally ready to decide on a product idea. This is the least important step for a successful startup, so once you have money and publicity just steal an idea from an intern or something. That should do it, and if you make sure to write an “I own everything you make” clause into their contracts, you should be fine. Otherwise, congratulations, you have successfully started a start up!
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