Chips & Salsa

CHIPS&SALSA T H E M AGA Z I N E F OR GE E K S News Opinons Reviews

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August 2013 Malaysia RM 21

IS PRIVACY DE AD? Ed w ar d Sno w den’s Re v ela t ion

Technology Science

CHIPS&SALSA is brought to you by...

Editor Deputy Editor Writer

Tan Zhi Yuan Kok Yuen Ming Eugene Phua

Creative Director Designer Illustrator Photographer Photo Editor

Cyrus Chong Karen Koo Brendan Chang Janette Kwan Mazin Siraj

Advertising Sales Manager Senior Account Executive

Christina Chia James Chum

Marketing Marketing Manager

Lester Siew Simone Khang

Production Senior Production

Scarlett Wong Jackie Chan

Dixon Seow

—Welcome to the first issue of Chips&Salsa

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CONTENTS F E AT U R E D Opinion: Is Privacy Dead?

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Edward Snowden’s Saga Where On Earth Is He Now?

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Opinion: Snowden: Hero / Villain ?

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5 Whistleblowers That Shaped History

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Exclusive interview with Google CEO Larry Page

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Google Glass: The Future Of Technology

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MOVING PICTURES Pacific Rim is Literally The Most Awesome Movie of The Year

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Sadly, Loving Wolverine Is Not The Same as Loving The Wolverine

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FASHION Clothes & Accesories geeks Would Die For

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SCIENCE What is the Higgs Boson and why does it matter?

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Le t t er f r om t he edi t or

Greetings and welcome to the maiden issue of Chips&Salsa!

We couldn’t be more excited to have made it to this point and so, on behalf of the chips&salsa team, i would love to say thank you and you’re awesome! for picking up our magazine from the shelves and making it past the contents page! cheers!

As you can probably tell, chips&salsa isn’t a magazine that talks about chips and salsa nor it is a cookbook. If you thought this was, then please accept my sincerest apologies and give this magazine a shot. You might like it, who knows! For those who knows that Chips&Salsa is a jargon for softwares and hardwares, then you truly are a geek and this is the magazine you’ve been waiting for all your life. Chips&Salsa is a magazine is a full-color monthly Malaysian magazine that reports on technology news while covering on a geek’s lifestyle topics such a games, movies and fashion.

When we set out to create a geek’s magazine that would cover everything a geek needs to know, we agreed on right away was to steer-away from any political biased opinions and make sure to make this magazine serious but at the same time fun. What you will find in the pages of Chips&Salsa Magazine is a collection of serious and fun articles written by real geeks who have watched every episode of Star Trek and memorizes at least 20 digits of the pi number. We don’t always exercise (but that’s not what we’re promoting), but we make sure our WoW characters have enough health potions before we go on a raid. What I’m trying to say here is, we’re not perfect human beings, but we’re definitely geeks that gets too serious on subjects that most people take as “just a game”, and that’s what makes us indifferent. So let’s embrace our geekiness and indulge in a copy of Chips&Salsa, preferably with a pack of chips and salsa.

We are honored to share our interests with all you geeks out there.

Feel free to write in to our headquarters to share your thoughts on this magazine or to ask the authors questions.

We appreciate your support and to have you as a reader of Chips&Salsa Magazine.

May the force be with us

Tan Z Y, Editor

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CONTENTS GAMES PS4 vs Xbox One: Review: Which One Is Better

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Game Reviews: The Last Of Us, Dota 2

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Apple iOS 7: 10 things you need to know

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PERSONALITIES The Man O f Ste el: Inter view with Henr y Cavill

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F E AT U R E D : p a g e 10

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Is Privacy Dead ?

—Mark Weinstein

While Microsoft and Google are in the latest salvo war over whose email system is truly private (calling Gmail “private” is perhaps an oxymoron), a much more significant issue is at the core: How important is our privacy? We are living in an era where Facebook’s Graph Search gives strangers greater access than ever to our “private” data and Google arbitrarily steals our passwords and emails (during its Street View project). Did our forefathers misunderstand the demand for privacy as an inalienable right for lawabiding citizens in democracy?

Is privacy dead? Do we care?

These are important questions, and are fundamental to the decisions we are making today about the future of privacy in the midst of the rampant technology invasion into our lives. There is an irony that while the world moves towards democracy, individual privacy is being eroded. Privacy began to disappear about 15 years ago when nobody was paying attention. It started with mass adoption of the Internet and the need to monetize “eyeballs” which became a key component of the “B-to-C” revenue model; there were no rules. Rather than interact with their customers directly, data scraping became a default mechanism of Internet companies.

The idea of data scraping was in its nascent stage then, along with the enticing prospect ­—illustrated by Tan Z Y

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of the true 1:1 marketing opportunity it seemed to offer. Using tracking cookies along with aggressive data scraping had its real catapult about 10 years ago as being social on the Internet became even more public, sexy and fun. There were chat rooms, MySpace, blogs and then Facebook. You could discover everything about your friends, neighbors, and strangers by simply Googling them. We were broadcasting to the world. Who cared?

It was addictive; a whole new world to explore.

Consumers and companies alike -- as we published our lives online, the service providers grabbed the data and learned as much as they could about us. In that heady elixir we overlooked the natural component about how important privacy is even when we’re social; and how much we do not like to be spied on. It’s not an oxymoron to be private and to be social.

It’s a fundamental component with varying gradients in our communities and relationships.

By definition “being social” happens even in a private 1:1 conversation. We’re social yet private in our homes with our loved ones. We’re social with our friends, but we’re not broadcasting to the whole world. We’re social at work and in restaurants.

It was sexy and exciting to be broadcasting everywhere until we realized, “Look at this digital trail. We don’t want our boss too see this part of us.”

Privacy is coming back to where it fits in with individuals, societies and corporations. It had a little vacation. As Microsoft points out, not only have we posted things that we’d like to take back, but the companies we are posting them with are analyzing every word and phrase in our private emails and building a repository of data on us based on our every click, post and email. We are creeped out. Companies claiming to protect our privacy have been negligent.

Google has been fined millions of dollars for violating its users’ privacy and their own privacy policies. PATH, a purported privacy centric photosharing app, was just fined $800,000 by the FTC for violating their own privacy policies (for the second time) and the law. Instagram (Facebook-owned) recently attempted to change their privacy policy and claim ownership over the pictures in their members’ accounts. The uproar was palpable and the company quickly reversed course, but trust was broken.

TRUSTe says 90 percent of us worry about online privacy, and just before Facebook’s IPO fully 59 percent of its users did not trust it to protect their personal information. These numbers, high already, are likely increasing. Can the free market save us

and give us choices that protect our privacy without the imposing hand of government regulation to protect us? Can a social media company be profitable without resorting to tracking cookies and data scraping? The answer is yes. Just as Whole Foods can sell food with high profit margins without resorting to high fructose corn syrup, so can an Internet company provide users with a service and revenue model designed in their highest interests, truly serving the needs and desires of customers. Today I have built Sgrouples.com, a site founded on “privacy by design,” respecting our members, giving them an unprecedented Privacy Bill of Rights, and explicitly not tracking, scraping or selling their data. It’s been called “Facebook and Dropbox with privacy.”

Is that enough? In democracies, laws have always been in place to protect the privacy of lawabiding citizens. Our great country is founded upon the right for its citizens to enjoy their privacy. That has always distinguished us from regimes where privacy was trampled upon and it is why so many of our forebears left their homes to come to America. Coupled with capitalism, citizens of democracies prefer the power of consumer choice to the overbearingly strong-

arm of regulation. Yet this insidious invasion of our privacy has been largely unregulated and often shrouded in deceptive practices. Companies must become transparent in defining not only exactly what they are doing with our information but also how they are spying on and tracking us. There is too much deception in the legalese of privacy policies and terms of services.

Law abiding citizens are entitled to the right of privacy regardless of how electronic this world gets.

Governments in the USA, Canada, as well as the European Commission, are lining up and saying ‘Wait a minute. Privacy is a fundamental right of the citizens of our nations and we must protect it.’

The bottom line is that as human beings we are naturally social, in discreet ways. In the allure of publicly posting details of our lives, we temporarily forgot that discretion is a natural component of the human social experience.

In the midst of our memory lapses an industry also became hooked on the unsavory business of tracking our every move and post. Today we are remembering natural order and balance in the social milieu, and the privacy revolution is real.

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little

temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

—Benjamin Franklin 9/

Edward Snowden’s Saga Where On Earth Is He Now?

Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American who leaked details of several topsecret United States and British government mass surveillance programs to the press. Snowden is a former technical contractor for the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Snowden leaked the information, primarily to Glenn Greenwald of London’s The Guardian, in spring 2013 while employed as an “infrastructure analyst” at NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.

The Guardian in turn published a series of exposés in June–July 2013 and revealed programs such as the interception of US and European telephone metadata and the PRISM and Tempora Internet surveillance programs. Snowden’s disclosures are said to rank among the most significant NSA security breaches in United States history. On June 14, 2013, United States federal prosecutors charged Snowden with espionage and theft of government property.

Snowden’s leaks have been a subject of great controversy. Some have referred to Snowden as a hero and a whistleblower, while others have

described him as a traitor.

Snowden has defended his leaks as an effort “to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them”.

Government officials have condemned his actions as having harmed U.S. interests and its position in the War on Terror.

Meanwhile, the media disclosures have fueled debates in the United States and elsewhere over mass surveillance, government secrecy, and the balance between national security and information privacy in the Post-9/11 era.

Here is a timeline of happenings of Edward Snowden: May 7, 2004, Snowden enlisted in the United States Army reserves as a Special Forces recruit but did not complete the training January 2005, works as a National Security Agency (NSA) security guard for the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland, before joining the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to work on IT security 2007 the CIA stationed him with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was responsible for maintaining computer network security

Snowden left the agency in 2009 for a private contractor inside an NSA facility on a US military base in Japan later identified as Dell, which had substantial classified contracts.

Snowden took a Certified Ethical Hacker training course in 2010.

2013 Snowden remained on the Dell payroll until early 2013.

May 20 left Hawaii for Hong Kong June 6 leaked details of several top-secret United States and British government mass surveillance programs to the press.

9 June identifies himself as source of leak Edward Snowden leaves Hong Kong for Moscow 23 Jun 2013 NSA whistleblower left on Aeroflot flight to Moscow, Hong Kong government confirms, two days after US charged him with espionage Edward Snowden arrives in Moscow 23 Jun 2013 NSA whistleblower lands in Russia after Hong Kong allows him to leave, with WikiLeaks saying it is

providing assistance 25 Jun 2013 President Barack Obama says the US will follow all legal channels to extradite Edward Snowden Snowden applies for political asylum in Russia – and 20 other countries Vladimir Putin hinted Edward Snowden could remain in Russia. 1 Jul 2013: Vladmir Putin says US whistleblower can stay if he stops ‘bringing harm to our American partners’ Edward Snowden accuses US of illegal, aggressive campaign Edward Snowden gives a news conference at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow with human rights activists 12 Jul 2013 Whistleblower uses first public appearance since surveillance leaks to defend decision and praise states that offered asylum Edward Snowden granted asylum in Russia Edward Snowden 1 Aug 2013 NSA whistleblower has left Moscow airport where he has been stranded for more than a month.

­—illustrated by Tan Z Y /10

May 7, 2004, Snowden enlisted in the United States Army reserves as a Special Forces recruit but did not complete the training

January 2005, works as a National Security Agency (NSA) security guard for the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland, before joining the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to work on IT security

2007 the CIA stationed him with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was responsible for maintaining computer network security

Snowden left the agency in 2009 for a private contractor inside an NSA facility on a US military base in Japan later identified as Dell, which had substantial classified contracts.

May 20 left Hawaii for Hong Kong

9 June identifies himself as source of leak

June 6 leaked details of several top-secret United States and British government mass surveillance programs to the press.

Edward Snowden leaves Hong Kong for Moscow

23 Jun 2013 NSA whistleblower left on Aeroflot flight to Moscow, Hong Kong government confirms, two days after US charged him with espionage

1 Aug 2013 NSA whistleblower has left Moscow airport where he has been stranded for more than a month.

Edward Snowden arrives in Moscow

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Snowden: Hero / Villain ?

—Karen Khoo

Is he a hero for protecting the public’s privacy at grave risk to himself?

Is he a villain who should be prosecuted for disclosing secrets to terrorists?

Here’s one definition of a hero: It’s someone who, given a choice between doing the right thing at great personal cost or the wrong thing for great personal benefit, chooses the former.

Think of Wesley Autrey, the remarkable fellow who leaped in front of an onrushing New York subway train in 2007 to save a stranger. Or Nelson Mandela, the now-ailing South African leader who spent 27 years in prison rather than sacrifice his commitment to set his people free.

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But what of Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former intelligence worker who revealed that he is the leaker responsible for exposing the government’s secret tracking of Americans’ phone records? Is he a hero for protecting the public’s privacy at grave risk to himself?

Is he a villain who should be prosecuted for disclosing secrets to terrorists? Or, like many whistle-blowers before him, is he a complex combination of both?

Now that the National Security Agency story has a face, the answer could say a lot about how it ends —

“ I don’t see myself as a hero because what I’m doing is self-interested: I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity. ” ­—Edward Snowden

—A protestor holding up a sign showing his support to Edward Snowden

with Snowden behind bars and the government continuing its spying without restraint, or with Snowden lionized and government backing off.

If Snowden’s account of his actions holds up, a big “if” considering the scrutiny that his selfunmasking ensures, he might well be a worthy successor to Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers exposing government lies about the Vietnam War. Snowden appears to have had nothing personal to gain and a great deal to lose. He sacrificed a comfortable, upwardly mobile life, a $200,000 annual income, his family and girlfriend for a life on the lam, if not in custody.

He says he acted only after concluding that a system under which “any analyst at any time can target anyone” poses “an existential threat to democracy.” And unlike others who’ve controversially exposed government secrets — WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, the latter currently on trial and facing life in prison — Snowden was at least somewhat more selective in his disclosures, and the journalists who received them.

Further, with each new disclosure, it has become increasingly obvious that the primary result of Snowden’s actions is a plus. He has forced a public debate on the sweepingly invasive programs that should have taken place before they were created. If continued indefinitely, a secret government database permanently tracking the actions of every American would, indeed, pose a threat to democracy.

At the same time, Snowden’s actions betray an unsettling penchant for

drama. He gave himself the code name “Verax,” Latin for truth-teller, and warned a Washington Post reporter that the U.S. intelligence community “will most certainly kill you” if it could block the disclosure.

Nor does the useful service of his disclosures alter the fact that Snowden appears to have broken the law and exposed information that is both deeply classified and effective in tracking terrorists. The government can’t easily ignore such an offense.

Snowden says he’s prepared for prosecution and, in fact, expects it. But the price of standing for principle can be tortuously high.

Sometimes, it comes without any reward other than the satisfaction that comes from doing the right thing.

Snowden proclaims that’s enough for him, and if that proves true, his actions might ultimately be judged heroic. But he faces many trials — literal and figurative — between now and then.

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5 Famous Whistleblowers Who Changed The World —Gabriel Grandin Ever since he came forward as the source behind the leaks that outed PRISM, Edward Snowden has received an enormous amount of attention from the media.

Daniel Ellsberg A former U.S. military analyst employed by the RAND corporation, in 1971, Ellsberg leaked a top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government’s rationale behind its decisions during the Vietnam War. These documents, known as the Pentagon Papers, were widely published

by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other American newspapers.

Whether history will hail him as a hero, as polls suggest, or, as Jeffrey Toobin recently suggested in the New Yorker, a “grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison,” Edward Snowden is only the most recent successor in a line of whistleblowers that have shaped contemporary history.

Let’s take a look at some of Snowden’s forerunners and examine how they have fared:

W. Mark Felt Better known as “Deep Throat,” W. Mark Felt was an FBI agent who leaked information about the Watergate scandal to Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Following President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, Felt denied his role as a whistleblower for thirty years before revealing himself in a 2005 Vanity Fair article in which Felt was quoted as saying, “I’m the guy they called Deep Throat.” At the time, Felt was 91-years-old. /14

In a 1998 interview, Ellsberg said, “The public is lied to every day by the President, by his spokespeople, by his officers. If you can’t handle the thought that the President lies to the public for all kinds of reasons, you couldn’t stay in the government at that level.”

In the years since the release of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg has become an activist, and was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 2006.

Bradley Manning While deployed in Iraq, U.S. Army Pvt. Bradley Manning downloaded a trove of military and diplomatic information, including over 500,000 army reports and classified combat videos, to WikiLeaks. One of these videos, a recording of a U.S. Apache helicopter opening fire on a group of civilians in Eastern Baghdad, has over 13 million views on YouTube.

Manning’s leaks, which surfaced in 2010, caused a political disturbance not just in the United States, but also in the Middle East, where they helped to catalyze the Arab Spring.

Pvt. Manning is now on trial at Fort Meade, Maryland, for charges that include “aiding the enemy.” He now faces up to 20 or more years of imprisonment.

Julian Assange Founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Mr. Assange’s organization has been responsible for over 1.2 million leaks to date since the website’s creation in 2006.

In a recent interview with Sky News, Assange pronounced Edward Snowden “a hero who has informed the public about one of the most serious events of the decade.”

Assange has spent the last year holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he is seeking political asylum from charges against him in Sweden. Today marks the oneyear anniversary of his stay at the embassy.

Aaron Swartz Internet pioneer, skilled hacker, and creator of the social news site Reddit, at age 24, Swartz hacked into JSTOR, an academic journal database, and systematically downloaded over four million articles through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer network.

Mazel tov, Julian.

He was arrested by MIT campus police in 2011, and was subjected to a barrage of federal charges, including up to $1 million in fines and 50 years in prison. In January, Swartz was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, where he had hanged himself.

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Google’s Larry Page on Why Moon Shots Matter —Karen Khoo

Larry Page lives by the gospel of 10x.

Most companies would be happy to improve a product by 10 percent.

Not the CEO and cofounder of Google.

The way Page sees it, a 10 percent improvement means that you’re basically doing the same thing as everybody else.

You probably won’t fail spectacularly, but you are guaranteed not to succeed wildly.

tweaking code to achieve modest gains. Thousandpercent improvement requires rethinking problems entirely, exploring the edges of what’s technically possible, and having a lot more fun in the process.

That’s why Page expects his employees to create products and services that are 10 times better than the competition. That means he isn’t satisfied with discovering a couple of hidden efficiencies or

This regimen of cheeky aspiration has made Google an extraordinary success story, changing the lives of its users while fattening the wallets of its investors. But it has also accomplished something

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far beyond Google itself: In an industry rife with bandwagon-hopping and strategic positioning, Page’s approach is a beacon for those who want more from their CEOs than a bloated earnings statement. While Google has made some missteps in recent years, and while its power has deservedly drawn the scrutiny of regulators and critics, it remains a flagship for optimists who believe that innovation will provide us with not just delightful gadgetry but solutions to our problems and inspiration for our dreams. For those people—and maybe for the human enterprise itself—a car that drives itself (to name one of the

company’s recent tech triumphs) is a much more valuable dividend than one calculated in cents per share. There’s no question which is more important to Larry Page.

Of course, it can be challenging working for a boss whose dominant trait is dissatisfaction with the pace of progress.

Astro Teller, who oversees Google X, the company’s blue-sky skunkworks division, illustrates Page’s proclivities with a parable. Teller imagines wheeling a Dr. Who time machine into Page’s office. He plugs it in and—it works! But instead of being bowled over, Page asks why it needs a plug. Wouldn’t it be better if it didn’t

use power at all? “It’s not because he’s not excited about time machines or he’s ungrateful that we built it,” Teller says.

“It’s just core to who he is. There’s always more to do, and his focus is on where the next 10X will come from.”

Page thought big even when he was little—he has said he always wanted to be an inventor, not just to produce gadgetry but to change the world.

As an undergrad at the University of Michigan, he found inspiration in a student leadershiptraining program called LeaderShape, which preached “a healthy disregard for the impossible.” By the time he got to grad school at Stanford, it was a natural step for him to 10X his potential thesis idea—a tool to annotate web pages—into a search engine that transformed the web and the world.

And once Google’s riotously successful ad business provided a plump financial cushion, Page was free to push for innovations that bore only a passing relationship to his core business. Google would build an email service— with 100 times the storage of competitors.

Google would provide translations—for the entire web, from any language to any other.

Google would give readers instant access to a global library—by scanning nearly every book ever published and putting the contents in its indexes. More recently, Google launched its

own version of an ISP service—laying its own fiber and providing broadband service to Kansas City customers at 100 times industrystandard speeds.

That moon-shot mentality is the basis of Google X, which the company established in early 2010 to identify and implement once-impossible scifi fantasies: Hail Mary projects like the selfdriving car. Or Google Glass, a wearable computing system. Or an artificial brain, in which a cluster of computers running advanced algorithms learn from the world around them, much like humans do.

Page was closely involved in establishing Google X, but since he has ascended to lead the company, he can’t spend as much time there. Some Googlers wonder if Page, clearly at his happiest working on moon shots, is essentially taking one for the team by assuming the sometimes prosaic tasks of a CEO. (Talking to bureaucrats about antitrust issues, for example, is probably not his idea of a good time.) The evidence shows, however, that Page has attacked his role

with full-hearted fervor, applying the same 10X mentality to the process of running the company.

He reorganized the management team around an “L-Team” of top aides, and he relentlessly rallied employees around a sweeping effort to integrate all of Google’s offerings into a seamlessly social whole. And in the boldest move in his tenure, he engineered the $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility, one of the world’s biggest handset companies.

In one of the rare interviews he has granted as CEO, Page recently discussed thinking big and other Googley issues with Wired at the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters.

Later that same day, Page, who turns 40 in March, announced a new philanthropic venture. After observing epidemiological behavior via Google Search’s flu-tracking service, he decided to pay for free flu shots for kids in the entire Bay Area.

Google is known for encouraging its employees to tackle ambitious challenges and make big bets. Why is that so important?

I worry that something has gone seriously wrong with the way we run companies.

If you read the media coverage of our company, or of the technology industry in general, it’s always about the competition. The stories are written as if they are covering a sporting event.

But it’s hard to find actual examples of really amazing things that happened solely due to competition. How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing? That’s why most companies decay slowly over time. They tend to do approximately what they did before, with a few minor changes. It’s natural for people to want to work on things that they know aren’t going to fail. But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time. Especially in technology, where you know there’s going to be non-incremental change.

So a big part of my job is to get people focused on things that are not just incremental. Take Gmail.

When we released that, we were a search company—it was a leap for us to put out an email product, let alone one that gave users 100 times as much storage as they could get anywhere else. That is not something that would have happened naturally if we had been focusing on incremental improvements.

—Google CEO, Co-founder Larry Page 17/

But you have to gradually improve your existing products too, right?

Of course. But periodically, every n years, you should work on something new that you think is really amazing.

The trick is coming up with those products. I could probably give you a list of 10 major things that are wrong with email. I try to maintain lists like that in my head.

Now you have a separate division called Google X, dedicated to moon-shot projects like selfdriving cars. Why did you decide you needed to set up an entire department for this?

I think we need to be doing breakthrough, non-incremental things across our whole business. But right now Google X does things that can be done more independently.

You know, we always have these debates: We have all this money, we have all these people, why aren’t we doing more stuff? You may say that Apple only does a very, very small number of things, and that’s working pretty well for them. But I find that unsatisfying. I feel like there are all these opportunities in the world to use technology to make people’s lives better. At Google we’re attacking maybe 0.1 percent of that space. And all the tech companies combined are only at like 1 percent. That means there’s 99 percent virgin territory. Investors always worry, “Oh, you guys are going to spend too much money on these crazy things.”

But those are now the things they’re most excited about— YouTube, Chrome, Android. If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things.

“There are all these opportunities to make people’s lives better. Tech companies are attacking 1 percent of them. That leaves 99 percent virgin territory.”

On the other hand, as the canard goes, the pioneers take the most arrows. Look at the experience of Xerox PARC, where fantastic innovations didn’t seem to help the corporation itself.

PARC had a tremendous research organization and they invented many of the tools of modern computing. But they weren’t focused on commercialization. You need both. Take one company I admire, Tesla. They’ve not only made a really innovative car, but they’re probably spending 99 percent of their effort figuring out how to actually get it out to people. When I was growing up, I wanted to be an inventor. Then I realized that there’s a lot of sad stories about inventors like Nikola Tesla, amazing people who didn’t have much impact, because they never turned their inventions into businesses.

Why don’t we see more people with that kind of ambition?

It’s not easy coming up with moon shots. And we’re not teaching people how to identify those difficult projects. Where would I go to school to learn what kind of technological programs I should work on? You’d probably need a pretty broad technical education and some knowledge about organization and entrepreneurship. There’s no degree for that. Our system trains people in specialized ways, but not to pick the right projects to make a broad technological impact.

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I know that you and Google cofounder Sergey Brin have been thinking about some of these challenges for a long time. In an interview I did with you both back in 2002, you virtually wrote me out the specs to Google Glass.

Why didn’t we do it then? We’d have had a lot more time to get it done! It’s like autonomous cars. I wanted to do them when I was at Stanford. That was over 14 years ago. The only thing that changed was we got the guts to actually do it.

Google X’s moon shots aside, what’s taking your time at Google?

A great deal of my effort is spent making sure that we have a great user experience across our core products.

Whether you’re in Chrome or Search or Gmail, it’s just Google, with one consistent look and feel. It’s not a good user experience if there are 50 different ways to share something. That requires integration.

As Google now grapples with its image as a powerful, maybe scary company, does it get harder to implement big changes?

It’s harder, but there are also more benefits.

A billion people use our products.

But have you done a good enough job explaining your intentions? Take Book Search. Providing a way to search through the world’s books seemed to you to be an unalloyed good. But you ran into a backlash and chronic litigation.

It’s certainly not pleasant. But show me a company that failed because of litigation. I just don’t see it. Companies fail because they do the wrong things or they aren’t ambitious, not because of litigation or competition.

Steve Jobs felt competitive enough to claim that he was willing to “go to thermonuclear war” on Android.

How well is that working?

Do you think that Android’s huge lead in market share is decisive?

Android has been very successful, and we’re very excited about it.

Did you envision that kind of success when you bought Andy Rubin’s small company in 2005?

We have a good ability to see what’s possible and not be impeded by the status quo. At the time we bought Android, it was pretty obvious that the existing mobile operating systems were terrible. You couldn’t write software for them. Compare that to what we have now. So I don’t think that betting on Android was that big a stretch. You just had to have the conviction to make a long-term investment and to believe that things could be a lot better.

One area where people say that Google is indeed motivated by competition is the social realm, where in the past two years you have been working hard in a field dominated by a single rival, Facebook. That’s not the case?

how our users shared information, how they expressed their identity, and so on.

And, yeah, they’re a company that’s strong in that space. But they’re also doing a really bad job on their products. For us to succeed, is it necessary for some other company to fail? No. We’re actually doing something different. I think it’s outrageous to say that there’s only space for one company in these areas. When we started with search, everyone said, “You guys are gonna fail, there’s already five search companies.” We said, “We are a search company, but we’re doing something different.” That’s how I see all these areas.

What’s your evaluation of Google+?

I’m very happy with how it has gone. We’re working on a lot of really cool stuff. A lot of it has been copied by our competitors, so I think we’re doing a good job.

Android has always prided itself on being a more open platform, compared to Apple’s walled-garden approach.

That came into stark relief when Apple pulled Google Maps from iOS6 and launched its own maps app. Did the uproar over that decision vindicate your commitment to openness?

I don’t want to comment on partner relationships. But we’ve been working on Maps for a long time, and it’s nice to see people realize that we’ve put a lot of effort and investment into it.

That’s clearly more appreciated now.

Look, you may have the greatest maps in the world, but if nobody uses them, it doesn’t matter. Our philosophy has always been to get our products out to as many people as possible. Unfortunately that’s not always easy in this day and age. The web has been great; we were able to get products out to everyone, quickly and with high quality. Now we’re going backward with a lot of the platforms that are out there. Companies are trying to wall everything off, and I think that impedes the rate of innovation.

Google has been challenged on the patent front, an issue you addressed by buying Motorola’s portfolio.

We bought the company as well.

Exactly. But since then the company has released only products that were previously in the pipeline. We don’t know what your plans are.

Should we expect Google to be as disruptive and innovative with

It’s not the way I think about it. We had real issues with 19/

Motorola as it has been in other areas?

As we said when we acquired Motorola, we’re running it independently, and Dennis Woodside is in charge.

But that’s very much what we want to do with Motorola and what Dennis wants to do. There’s a lot of room for innovation in hardware. The phones we use now have glass that everyone worries will break if they drop the device. Five or 10 years from now, that will be different. There’s going to be a lot of change.

As we speak, anyone who goes to Google’s homepage sees a link to information in opposition to an International Telecommunication Union proposal that may constrain the open Internet. Last year you did something similar around the controversial SOPA bill. We didn’t use to see that kind of lobbying on Google.com. Why do it now?

Consider our own history. When we started Google, it wasn’t really obvious that what we were doing wouldn’t get regulated away. Remember, at the time, people were arguing that making a copy of a file in a computer’s memory was a violation of copyright. We put the whole web on our servers, so if that were true, bye-bye search engines. The Internet’s been pretty great for society, and I think that 10 or 20 years from now, we’ll look back and say we were a millimeter away from regulating it out of existence.

My guess is that talking to regulators is probably not your favorite thing to do.

I like talking to everyone. That’s just the way I’m wired. But I do think the Internet’s under much greater attack than it has been in the past. Governments are now afraid of the Internet because of the Middle East stuff, and so they’re a little more willing to listen to what I see as a lot of commercial interests that just want to make money by restricting people’s freedoms. But they’ve also seen a tremendous user reaction, like the backlash against SOPA. I think that governments fight users’ freedoms at their own peril.

How do you maintain the Google culture—including the mandate to think big—within such a huge company?

We’re a medium-size company in terms of employee count. We have tens of thousands of employees. There are organizations out there that have millions of employees.

That’s a factor of a hundred, basically. So imagine what we could do if we had a hundred times as many employees.

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You hold a weekly TGIF meeting, where any employee can ask you or other top executives a question, either in person or electronically. How can you keep that kind of intimacy as you grow?

Anything is scalable. We do need to be more cognizant of time zones, because we’ve got a lot of people in different places. Short of building a giant space mirror that causes the whole Earth to light up at the same time, there’s not much we can do about that. So we’re moving that TGIF meeting to Thursday, so that people in Asia can get it during their work week. That process still works pretty well at our size, and I’m sure it will work fine up to a million people as well.

Wait, that’s the second time you’ve mentioned Google as potentially a million-person company.

Doesn’t Walmart have more than a million employees?

OK, maybe it’s not important for us to have a million employees, but I like to think that we could build companies that are really scalable to that size. We could add people and still be really innovative. That would be great for us. We’re one of the bigger companies of the world, and I’d like to see us do more stuff—not just do what somebody else has done, but something new.

Google Glass: The Future Of Technology —Karen Khoo

—Model wearing the new google glasses Larry Page and Sergey Brin have long had the dream of a hands-free, mobile Google, where search was a seamless process as you moved around the world. As the years progressed the vision did, too, expanding beyond search to persistent connections with the people in your lives.

performed with a smart phone — without the smart phone. Instead, you wear some sort of geeky prosthetic (one of those pictured is reminiscent of the visor that Geordi La Forge wore on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” but Google has also been experimenting with a version that piggybacks on regular spectacles.)

In other words, Google’s view of the world now has the social side fully baked into it.

On top of your field of vision, you get icons, alerts, directional arrows, and other visual cues that inform, warn, or beg response.

Today, Google is revealing that it is taking concrete steps towards that vision with ProjectGlass, an augmented reality system that will give users the full range of activities

And all of a sudden, the world becomes dickish — as in Philip K. Glass is the second big project out of Google (x),

the company’s Mountain View skunkworks devoted to long-term projects. Since Larry Page reassumed the role of CEO (exactly one year ago today), his fellow co-founder Sergey Brin has focused on Google (x) and Glass is apparently the project Brin promised news of almost a year ago at Google’s I/O conclave. Glass has been in the works for years, with key input from Babak Amir Parviz, a Google (x) employee who is still listed as the McMorrow Innovation Associate Professor at the University of Washington.

Parviz is one of three co-signers of the Google+ post announcing the project. His research

specialties make him sound like a character in a Michael Crichton novel: Bio-nanotechnology, Self-Assembly, Nanofabrication, MEMS. Before coming to Google he co-authored a paper entitled, “Self-assembled crystalline semiconductor optoelectronics on glass and plastic.” All of this indicates that Google has made some advances in science behind projecting computer visuals that hang in your field of vision.

The second author on the Google+ post is Steve Lee, known previously as a Google location manager. I once saw Lee in action before Google’s Privacy Council, successfully 21/

defending a set of features in Google Latitude that, with the user’s permission, registered and stored a complete history of one’s peregrinations.

It was clear that Lee was excited about the possibilities that come from exploiting location services in new ways. Obviously, location — giving directions, providing information about nearby services, and pegging the whereabouts of friends — is going to be a big part of this new initiative.

The third is Sebastian Thrun, he of the autonomous driving vehicles, open online education and a leader at Google[x].

Nuff said. Oh, and Sergey Brin didn’t sign the post but was deeply involved in the project.

The concept video for the Glass project concentrates on the cool things you may do with it one day — create instant contact with friends, monitor feeds about weather and other info, get information about a subway station out of service, receive turn by turn directions on the way to a destination, snap a picture by command, even find your way to a certain tome in the labyrinthine Strand bookstore. Everything works perfectly because, well, it’s a concept video and not a depiction of something that’s actually perfected. But Googlers have been testing prototypes and have already solved some (not all) of the challenges required to make this real and feasible. (In other words, this is more grounded than the Apple’s famous 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept video — which, although way premature, is looking prescient these days.)

The video has more than enough information to open up a conversation about the potential effects of having the digital world unbound from the confines of a hand-held gadget and more or less integrated into everyday reality. How can people maintain privacy when anyone can shoot video undetected? Will any teenager ever complete a face-to-face conversation when business e-mails, fresh family photos and Kardashian news spontaneously pop up in our fields of vision?

Really when you think about it, the possibilities of such systems are dazzling and dumbfounding. Consider that another paper co-authored by Parviz explores the idea of contact lenses that meter health issues by analyzing tear fluids “in a noninvasive and continuous fashion.” The information is then sent wirelessly for medical analysis. It’s easy to imagine a Glass-like connection as way to persistently jack into a vast informationsphere. It’s also provocative to envision how Glass would enhance Girls Around Me. As of now, Glass is very much a concept as opposed to a product. Despite Google’s testing, it’s very far from public beta. (The New York Times’ Nick Bilton, citing unidentified sources in a story that got some of the project right, had earlier claimed that Google would be selling a product by the end of the year; Google indicates that this is extremely unlikely.) Google is releasing the video now to spur conversation and elicit suggestions. In addition, the move out of stealth will allow Google[x] testers to try out various permutations of the system without worrying about leaks. It’s also a timely means for Google to remind the public that its engineers have visions that transcend the current spats with Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, the DOJ and the European Union.

No wonder there’s a twinkle in Google’s eye today. /22

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PS4 / Xbox One Which is better ?

Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox One do battle with eight-core AMD technology

VS Gamers are putting their pre-order money down as if it’s an expensive bet on which video game system will deliver the best performance over the next decade.

Both systems are evenly matched in many respects and should be able to usher in the next generation of gaming that the Wii U hasn’t been able to deliver.

With E3 2013 in the books, we can finally get a better perspective as in a PS4 vs Xbox One comparison about their finer differences.

Sony was clearly in command following E3 when Microsoft announced its strict DRM policy that barred used game sales and required Xbox One consoles to connect to the internet once every 24 hours.

The backlash was immediate. Gamers made it clear that physical copies of games should be theirs to own and resell as before.

Likewise, they felt as if offline gaming should be possible, especially if ISPs or Microsoft’s servers go down. It has happened before and will likely happen again.

That’s why Microsoft reverted its policy, sticking to the Xbox 360 method of handling DRM while also getting rid of benefits like the ability to share your Xbox One games with other consoles.

PS4 and Xbox One will function like they did in the PS3 and Xbox 360 era, which is the one area in which gamers are happy to hear hasn’t been “upgraded.”

Console design Both Microsoft and Sony went with very box-like designs for their next-generation consoles.

The Xbox One literally put the box in Xbox, with a large black rectangular shape that has been compared to an oversized 80s VCR unit.

The only thing adoring the front is a slot-loading Blu-ray disc drive, while almost all of the cable hookups are in the back, including the HDMI input port for Live TV, something the PS4 doesn’t have.

When Sony finally unveiled what the PS4 looked like at E3, it reminded /24

—Side to side size comparison of the PS4 (left) and the Xbox One (right)

everyone in the audience of the PS2 design. The stand - not included - really drove that point home.

PS4 is smaller in size compared to the Xbox One and a little bit sleeker thanks to its angular shape and two-halves design.

The Xbox One and PS4 console designs aren’t game changers, especially compared to the more dynamic-looking previous generation of consoles.

But as a teacher may have once told you, beauty is on the inside.

The price While Microsoft amended its always-online policy, the company has yet to backtrack on its other controversial E3timed announcement: the higher Xbox One price.

Xbox One will cost $499 in the U.S., £429 in the U.K. and $599 in Australia, a premium because it comes with the 1080p Kinect camera out of the box.

The PS4 will cost $399 in the U.S., £349 in the U.K., €399 in Europe and $549 in Australia sans the PS4 camera, previously known as the PlayStation 4 Eye. Separately, the PS4 camera will cost $59 in the U.S., £54 in the U.K., and $99 in Australia, so PlayStation 4 is still cheaper even when the console and camera are combined.

With wallets tighter than ever, Sony may have a distinct advantage this holiday season.

Agreeing on an AMD CPU As much as the two warring systems are different, the heart of the Xbox One and the PS4 remain very similar.

That’s because they’re both running x86 octa-core CPUs, and these eight-core processors are built by the same chipmaker, AMD. The use of AMD in the Xbox One and PS4 is certainly a switch for both companies.

Previously, Microsoft had used an IBM PowerPC processor, while Sony partnered with Toshiba and IBM on its own complicated Cell processor that developers didn’t warm up to.

While the Xbox One will run a heavily modified eight-core AMD processor, PS4 will utilize a x86-64 “Jaguar” CPU.

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AMD’s Graphics Core Nex t Both console makers are also relying on AMD to design their next graphics processors that will produce the next-generation visuals that differentiate console games from the emerging smartphone market.

The Xbox One marries its GPU to the CPU in a system-on-achip design, according to Wired, with DirectX 11.1 support.

The single 40-nanometer SoC really contrasts with the two dedicated 90-nm chips found in the Xbox 360.

However, it only marginally contrasts with the PS4, which also combines its AMD CPU with the chip maker’s GPU. In the case of PS4, the graphics processor is described as semicustom AMD Radeon that runs at 1.8 TFLOPS.

Does Sony really scores 8GB GDDR5 RAM? One of the most impressive things about the PS4 specs has been its use of 8GB GDDR5 RAM. Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One to have 8GB RAM as well, but it’s DDR3 memory variety.

That may mean more to game developers in the long run as opposed to gamers themselves right now, but it’s still an interesting choice for the Xbox One. Further complicating this memory game is the fact that each console requires a portion of the RAM to run the operating system.

PS4 reserves up to 3.5GB of memory for the OS, leaving developers with 4.5GB, according to documentation. They can sometimes access an extra 1GB of “flexible” memory when it’s available, but it’s not guaranteed.

Xbox One’s “guaranteed memory” amounts to a slightly higher 5GB for developers, as the OS takes up 3GB, which probably doesn’t make up for the DDR3 memory usage for most developers.

Which has the better controller?

The Xbox One controller vs the PS4 DualShock 4 controller is a debate that won’t be won anytime soon, mostly because gamers’ already have a locked-in preference.

The reason for this is that neither Sony nor Microsoft have radically changed their respective controllers over the years - they’re more like evolutions from 2000 and 2001.

The DualShock 4 is a little bigger in the next-generation thanks to its unique front-and-center touchpad. Sony stuck with the dual analog sticks down in front, but at least have a central divot recess for easier gripping.

Microsoft also didn’t mess with success, only slightly modifying its controller in the jump to the Xbox One. It’s 40 design innovations are subtle, including the tweaked D-Pad on the bottom-left of the game pad and extra rumble features.

In testing the two controllers at E3 2013, Sony’s DualShock 4 felt leaps-and-bounds better than the PS3 DualShock 3 controller, however, it was only catching up to comfort already provided by the Xbox 360 and now Xbox One gamepads.

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Xbox One Kinect vs PS4 Eye While Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will appeal to “core” gamers with mature launch titles, as evidenced by the strictly motion-less E3 lineup from Microsoft and Sony.

However, behind-the-scenes, the two companies are charging forward with motionsensing games thanks to the Xbox One Kinect and PS4 Camera.

Microsoft designed the 1080p Kinect to track up to six skeletons for immerse video game effects that the company says is “human control for a human experience.”

Expanding on that motto, the packed-in Kinect 2.0 will be able to process 2GB of data per second, analyzing more joints, the slight rotation of a wrist or shoulder and your heartbeat.

The PlayStation Eye, which will not come with the PS4 system, features two 1280×800px cameras inside a similarly shaped camera bar.

In addition to human interaction, the DualShock 4 controller will come into play with the PS4 camera thanks to its multi-colored light bar. It will also be compatible with those PS4 Move motion controllers that have gone unused.

Xbox One Launch Games More than the subtle differences in specs, the games that result from those specs is what will determine which console gamers choose this fall.

Xbox One launch games include exclusives like Ryse: Son of Rome, Dead Rising 3, Forza Motorsport 5, Killer Instinct, LocoCycle and Kinect Sports Rivals.

Also on day one is Call of Duty: Ghosts. It’s not exclusive to Xbox One, but the downloadable content (DLC) is going to be a timed-exclusive (likely a month) for Xbox One gamers.

Further out, notable Xbox One launch windows games are Titanfall (likely another timed-exclusive for a year) , Project Spark, and Minecraft: Xbox One Edition.

PS4 Launch Games Sony is also stacking its PS4 launch game lineup with Killzone Shadow Fall, DriveClub, Knack and Diablo 3, all exclusives releasing on day one.

Joining those games whenever the PS4 launch date happens to be will be Watch Dogs and Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag from Ubisoft.

Yes, both of these highly anticipated games are also releasing on Xbox One , but PS4 (and PS3) gamers are going to see an extra hour of gameplay for each.

Sony was also showing off PS4 games like inFamous: Second Son, The Witness and The Order 1886 at E3.

Really, though, everyone is waiting to see what Naughty Dog has in store - possibly Uncharted 4 - and its stable of other first-party developers like SCE London Studio and Media Molecule.

The look of the console, the feel of the controller and the way the games make you feel make up the main differences from which consumers will decide.

However, there are smaller factors potential PS4 and Xbox One buyers should consider when going to the store this holiday season.

It’s a good idea to converse with friends to know which system they’re going to buy.

Since there’s no such thing as cross-platform multiplayer, you may be split up when playing Call of Duty on PS4 when all of your friends own it for Xbox One. Both Microsoft and Sony are charging for multiplayer this generation, whereas PS3 gamers got to log into matches scott-free.

However, only Microsoft is going to lock apps behind its Xbox Live paywall.

Sony has confirmed that streaming video content like Netflix, Hulu Plus and MLB.TV on PS4 won’t require a PlayStation Plus subscription.

Next-generation console buyers who don’t plan on paying the yearly fee and do plan on using the system for entertainment purposes may want to weigh that into their final decision.

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What Is the Higgs Boson and Why Does It Matter?

—Gabriel Grandin

On 4 July scientists at CERN in Geneva declared that they had discovered a new particle ‘consistent’ with the long-sought Higgs Boson, also known as the ‘God particle.’

Although further research is required to characterize the new particle fully, there can be no doubt that an important milestone in our understanding of the material world and of the evolution of the early universe has just been reached.

Exciting times! But why all the fuss? What is the Higgs boson and why does it matter so much?

Was finding it really worth all the effort?

The answers to these questions can be found in the story of the so/28

called Standard Model of particle physics. As the name implies, this is the standard framework that physicists use to interpret the elementary constituents of all matter and the forces that bind matter together, or cause it to fall apart. It is a body of work built up over many decades of unstinting effort, which represents the physicists’ best efforts to interpret the physical world around us.

The Standard Model is not yet a ‘theory of everything.’ It does not account for the force of gravity. In recent years you may have read about exotic new theories of physics which attempt to unify the fundamental forces, such superstring theory. Despite the efforts of hundreds of

theorists engaged on these projects, these new theories remain speculative and have little or no supporting evidence from experiment. For the time being, and despite flaws that have been acknowledged since its inception in the late 1970s, the Standard Model is still where most of the real action is.

The Higgs boson is important in the Standard Model because it implies the existence of a Higgs field, an otherwise invisible force field which pervades the entire universe. Unlike other kinds of force field (such as an electromagnetic or gravitational field) the Higgs field points but it doesn’t push or pull. It was invented in 1964 in attempts to explain how otherwise

massless particles could acquire mass, by Belgian physicists Robert Brout and François Englert, English physicist Peter Higgs at Edinburgh University and Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble at Imperial College in London. The mechanism was applied three years later in the construction of a theory of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force (responsible for a certain type of radioactivity)

by American Steven Weinberg and Pakistan-born theorist Abdus Salam.

The mechanism works like this. Without the Higgs field, elementary particles such as quarks (the constituents of protons and neutrons) and electrons would flit past each other at

“The discovery of the Higgs Boson particle is

the speed of light, like ghostly will o’ the wisps. The elementary particles that make up you, me and the visible universe would consequently have no mass. Without the Higgs field mass could not be constructed and nothing could be.

one of the biggest discoveries of the century”

What actually happens is that these elementary particles interact with the Higgs field and are slowed down by it, as though swimming in molasses. We interpret this ‘slowing down’ as inertia and, ever since Galileo, we have identified inertia as a property of things with mass.

Many of the predicted consequences of the Higgs field were borne out in particle collider experiments in the early 1980s. But inferring the field is not the same as detecting its tell-tale field particle.

The publication of Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’ is timely, coming only six weeks after the discovery announcement. But I had the idea for a book about the discovery of the Higgs boson in March 2010, just as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was setting a new world record for particle collision energy.

I figured that there was a chance that this particle -- the last missing piece in the jigsaw of the Standard Model -- might be discovered soon. This is perhaps the first example of a book that has been largely written in anticipation of a discovery.

But the question was: How soon?

We saw tantalizing glimpses of the Higgs in summer 2011, and in August I met with Peter Higgs on a wet Thursday afternoon in Edinburgh.

Higgs had retired in 1996 but had remained in Edinburgh close to the University department where he had first become a lecturer in mathematical physics in 1960. He was now a sprightly 82 years old.

Higgs had published the paper that was to bind him forever to the particle that bears his name in 1964, and had waited nearly fifty years for some kind of vindication. ‘It’s difficult for me now to connect with the person I was then [in 1964],’ he explained, ‘But I’m relieved it’s coming to an end. It will be nice after all this time to be proved right.’

Alas. The tantalizing glimpses were a desert mirage. They faded as we got close enough to inspect them. But strong hints resurfaced in data reported in December. Expectations built in intensity. Right up to July 3 we had hypotheses and compelling theoretical structures. Finally, on the following day we began to gather hard scientific facts. Our understanding took a giant leap forward.

Simply declaring the discovery of a new particle pays little respect to the efforts of all involved in running the LHC, operating the two primary detectors -- ATLAS and CMS, setting the triggers, managing the pile-up of protonproton collision events, calculating the background, managing the worldwide computer grid needed to analyze the results, performing the detailed analysis and not sleeping much. The discovery represents an enormous triumph for an experiment that was conceived nearly thirty years ago, on which construction began twelve years ago, and which has engaged worldwide collaborations of three thousand scientists working in competition on each detector facility.

Precisely what kind of boson has been discovered remains to be seen, and there’s hope of more surprises yet to come.

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Clothes & Accesories Geeks Would Die For —Karen Khoo

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Fibonacci Scarf

WiFi-Detecting T-Shirt

LED Binary Watch

Who says you can’t be geeky and fashionable at the same time? Diana Eng, a former contestant of Bravo’s Project Runway, meshes the two together with her Fibonacci scarf. The fashionable scarf was knitted using the Fibonacci number sequence, a mathematical pattern often found in nature. The garment is available for $275 on Eng’s website.

Are you often in dire need of a WiFi signal but can’t ever find one? Maybe this WiFidetecting t-shirt from ThinkGeek.com would be the perfect shirt for you. According to ThinkGeek.com, the shirt is available for just $19.99 and shows the strength for 802.11b/g WiFi signals. (It’s currently out of stock, but keep checking back if you’re interested in buying one!)

Online store UncommonGoods is selling this sleek watch for $159, but don’t be fooled -- it’s no ordinary watch. It’s a LED Samui Moon Binary watch, which requires you to know the Base 2 number system used by computers to read it.

Tetris T-Shirt

Drum Machine T-Shirt

Wordnik co-founder and CEO Eric McKean handmade this Tetris-inspired shirt to wear to a Web 2.0 Summit back in 2009 (he also made a cool Darth Vader-inspired dress!) If you happen to be a crafty nerd, you can try your hand at making the shirt yourself -- the Tetris fabric used for the dress is available on Spoonflower.

If you’re more of a band geek than a tech geek, consider purchasing this extremely awesome electronic drum machine shirt, which comes with a working drum machine and looper, nine different drum kits with seven professional-grade drum sounds each, and a working mini amp that you can clip onto your belt -- all for $29.99.

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Apple iOS 7: 10 Things You Need To Know 1. User Inter face

5. AirDrop

It’s about time Apple let Jony Ive loose on iOS. The new design is beautiful, with a clean new type face, new uniform logos for many apps and a translucent in-app effect that means your home screen is always slightly visible. Clutter has been reduced to a bare minimum, but when you have multiple things onscreen, the translucency helps create a 3D effect, which gives you an idea of what’s at the front of the screen and what’s lurking at the back.

Share content with people nearby you, without bumping phones. When looking at a picture for example, click the share button and they’ll receiver a notification that takes them straight into the app. The software will display your contacts in the immediate area, and transfers are peer-to-peer so you can use it anywhere, without any network or set up required. Transfers are fully encrypted so your content is protected and private.

2. Control Centre A quick swipe up from the bottom of the screen brings up the new, translucent Control Centre. From here you can adjust the most common settings such as brightness, Wi-Fi, AirPlay and volume controls for whatever song you’re playing. You can even flick the iPhone’s camera flash on as a makeshift torch. It’s not just limited to the home screen, so no matter where you are in the system, you can swipe up to access the Control Centre.

3. Multi-tasking Multi-tasking is now available for all apps on iOS 7 and a double-click lets you flick back and forward through a new card system that looks strikingly similar to the one found on the old BlackBerry webOS. iOS 7 also notices which apps you use most frequently and which ones you check at certain times of the day, automatically waking them up when you need them. The system now adapts to network coverage and saves your updates for when your signal is strongest in an effort to save on battery life.

4. Safari Safari has been getting lots of love from iOS 7; it now features a full-screen interface and a “smart” search field that brings up your favourites when you tap it. Tabs are now stacked vertically and you’re no longer limited to just 8. The browser also hides the controls on the top while you’re scrolling up or down and will jump back a page if you swipe across from the left. Lastly, any typing in the search box results in auto-suggestion from bookmarks, history and common searches.

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6. Camera & Photos

7. Siri

The new Camera app features filters so you can add real-time photo effects, and you can switch between video, photo, square and panorama with a swipe. Apple’s also tidied up your photo library for you, and it now organizes them into ‘moments’ based on the locations that you’ve taken them and also the date. Share these instantly via AirDrop, iCloud, Facebook or Twitter.

Siri now has two new male and female voices, and German and French languages are now included.

There’s a brand new interface that shows the sound wave, and also gives your results with pictures. It now includes Twitter search integration, so you can just ask Siri what people are saying on Twitter, and Siri also now has Wikipedia access built in. Siri also now provides Bing web search within the app, and the ability to change device settings and play back voicemail.

http://www.t3.com/features/apple-ios-7-things-you-need-to-know/ap-apple-ios7-homescreen624-jpg

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GAME RE VIE W: The Last Of Us Score: 87 Summary: Twenty years after a pandemic radically transformed known civilization, infected humans run amuck and survivors kill one another for sustenance and weapons - literally whatever they can get their hands on. Joel, a salty survivor, is hired to smuggle a fourteen-year-old girl, Ellie, out of a rough military quarantine, but what begins as a simple job quickly turns into a brutal journey across the country.

There’s no denying it: The Last of Us hits almost every nail on the head. Its storytelling, its gameplay, its characters, and their journey in this bleak but almost sadly beautiful world that saw the downfall of the human civilization doesn’t ever really try to shortcut its way to genuine emotions, opting, on the contrary, for the hard but humanely faithful path. The ambivalence of the human soul, the spot on portrayal of conflicting morals and the tragedy of impossible choices are all beautifully written and played. Plus, the multiplayer is far from being a gimmick; quite the contrary, in fact. It’s very much a coherent and enticing experience on its own, with a brilliant meta-game idea, and a unique, multiplayer take on survival.

Dota 2 Score: 92

Summary: Dota 2 features the characters and factions from the original Defense of the Ancients title with new features.

Valve studiously avoided reinventing the wheel with Dota 2, and given how beloved the gameplay is that is undoubtedly the best thing for the game, the community, and the genre. The infrastructure for matchmaking, spectating, and everything else that surrounds actual matches is executed on a level only the best studios can rival.

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Sadly, Loving Wolverine Is Not the Same as Loving The Wolverine —Angela Watercutter

If the X-Men were the Avengers before The Avengers, then Wolverine is their Iron Man: a ladies man, a bit of a lone wolf, a straight-shooter, and ultimately a character beloved by Marvel fans.

And yet, unlike the wildly popular and successful Iron Man films, it seems impossible to give him a standalone movie that isn’t a bit of a dog. Case in point: The Wolverine.

That’s hard to say.

Wolverine is an amazing character. Dark, conflicted, badass, noble,

in possession of great hair – he’s a fantastic hero.

And Hugh Jackman plays him with the kind of gusto that should make Robert Downey Jr. jealous.

Yet, there’s something about Wolverine solo flicks that just don’t hit – and it might have something to do with the lack of other X-Men. (Spoiler alert: Minor plot points for The Wolverine follow.)

In The Wolverine there are hardly any other X-Men present. Jean

Grey shows up in Logan’s dreams to remind him that she’s dead by his adamantium-enabled hand, but that’s pretty much it (more on that later). There’s no Mystique. No Beast. No Rogue or Storm. The X-Men are fascinating because they’re a group of outcasts singled out for being mutants who find ways to become heroes. They work better together because, well, who doesn’t like a merry band of mutants? Guys like Tony Stark and Thor work on their own

because they have lives outside of superherodom—billionaireplayboy-philanthropist and Asgardian god, respectively—and Logan, if Wolverine is to be believed, just sulks over Grey and drinks in the woods until he’s whisked away to Japan to accidentally be embroiled in a face-off with the Yakuza. Or whatever.

The Wolverine, directed

by James Mangold and based on the Wolverine run by Frank Miller and Chris Claremont, starts 35/

—Hugh Jackman as Logan In The Wolverine. Photo courtesy Twentieth Century Fox

out well enough. While in Nagasaki during World War II, Logan saves a young man named Yashida from the atomic bombing.

Fast-forward to the present day, and Logan is living in the woods and avenging hunted bears (no kidding) when he gets pulled away by a young woman named Yukio (Rila Fukushima) who tries to give him a samurai sword—the same one Yashida tried to give him after he saved his life—and tells him he has to come to Japan to say good-bye to Yashida, who is now old and ailing. He agrees to go for “one day.”

Naturally, this doesn’t happen. As soon as he /36

arrives, Logan learns that Yashida has become the most powerful man in Japan. And he’s dying.

And he wants Logan’s powers so that he can live. Oh, and his doctor is (unbeknownst to Logan) Viper/Madame Hydra. Logan, of course, tells Yashida that he doesn’t know what he’s asking for and wouldn’t want it if he did and refuses the request.

Yashida dies almost immediately thereafter, and while at the funeral Wolverine ends up taking on a slew of Yakuza gangsters who try to kidnap Yashida’s granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto). This is where it goes off the rails.

Literally. Mariko escapes

on a bullet train and Logan follows her, getting himself embroiled in yet another gangster face-off, and the two eventually find refuge in a Love Hotel. Logan, who now isn’t healing the way he used to, passes out, and Mariko finds a veterinarian to fix him up before they head to her family’s home in Nagasaki to hide out.

From there the plot gets messier and more convoluted—yet manages to not really go anywhere.

When Mariko is finally abducted, Logan and Yukio team up to save her. Nobody is who they say they are. A blackclad clan of ninjas with bows-and-arrows attempts to thwart Wolverine’s efforts to save her by

essentially harpooning him in the street.

There’s an inevitable romantic subplot. A face-off with the Silver Samurai. And it all gets thrown together in a way that, while serviceable, doesn’t really amount to much.

What’s unfortunate is that there’s nothing particularly wrong with The Wolverine, Jackman is on-point, most of the action sequences are fun enough, and there are even a few genuine laughs (and a few moments of comedy that are most definitely unintentional).

But yet, the thing that should ring true with a Wolverine story— Logan’s pathos, his

darkness—never comes through. For all his brooding and whatnot, the version of the hero on display only scratches the emotional surface even though got the claws to go much deeper.

(This becomes painfully obvious when Logan explains to Mariko what happened between him and Jean Grey and even she looks bored.) Logan’s got a an intense backstory and is consistently dealing with a lot of existential crises as the result of his mutation. But when part of a character’s thing is that he’s stoic and gruff, audiences—no matter how much they like or identify with him—don’t get left with much to watch him do besides fight, deliver one-liners, and endure painful dream sequences.

Yet while all of this is happening, it’s hard not to think, “You know what would be awesome right now? If [INSERT X-MAN HERE] showed up.” Yes, the whole Japan part of Logan’s storyline is supposed to be about a period when he’d separated from his fellow mutants because “that’s not who I am anymore.” Ok, fine. But even if he’s the strong,

silent one, he works better on a team. He’s a great character that kind of needs other people like him to bring out his good side. Remember that great cameo in First Class where Logan told Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr to “Go fuck yourself”?

Yeah, The Wolverine needed that, but in reverse. His conflicted nature just makes more sense when he’s surrounded by a bunch of similarly misunderstood misfits, who can reflect his interesting qualities.

Basically, he’s more like the Hulk (who’s also had a rough cinematic history).

spoiler-y, but a word of advice: Stay in the theater through the credits. It’ll be worth it. Thanks to some great cameos, the bit provides a segue into X-Men: Days of Future Past, which ends up making it something of the movie’s saving grace if for no other reason than it serves as a reminder that Logan will be rejoining his fellow mutants soon. And, let’s face it, Wolverine is great, Jackman as Wolverine is fantastic, but Logan is better when he doesn’t have to go into the fight alone.

This become most true in The Wolverine‘s coda.

To reveal exactly what happens would be too

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Pacific Rim Is Literally the Most Awesome Movie of the Year —Angela Watercutter

There’s been a lot of talk about Pacific Rim. Depending on whom you ask, it’s a shallow rock-’em-sock-’em “extended 3D episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers on very expensive acid.” It’s an imminent flop that could end up sinking faster than Battleship.

It’s a gripping emotional thrill complete with rich imaginative worlds unlike any ever seen before.

It’s tracking poorly. It’s got a killer soundtrack. It’s possible Kanye West could save it from itself!

Here’s my advice: Just shut up and go see it, preferably on the largest screen imaginable.

Unlike Man of Steel, Star Trek Into Darkness, Iron Man 3, or any number of other massive movie juggernauts that hit the multiplex this summer, Pacific Rim is an increasingly rare breed in Hollywood: an original story. It’s not based on a comic or a prequel of a popular Pixar film or a sequel to a movie version of a popular TV show. And while its lack of an established name may prove to be a weakness — and part of the reason of why it’s tracking so poorly — it’s also the movie’s greatest creative strength. And while it certainly pays loving homage to everything from Godzilla to Neon Genesis Evangelion, it’s not like anything you’ve seen before.

Just ask Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima, whose recent eight-tweet love-letter to the film declared, “I have never imagined that I would be fortunate enough to see a film like this in my life. The emotional rush I had inside me was the same kind I had when I felt the outer space via 2001: A Space Odyssey and and when I had touched the dinosaur in Jurassic Park.

Animation and special effects movies and shows that I loved in my childhood days they all truly exist in the screen… This film is not simply a film to be respected, but most importantly, it let us dream the future of entertainment movies. Pacific Rim is the ultimate otaku film that all of us had always been waiting for. Who are you, if you are Japanese and won’t watch this?”

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Since I happen to be a critic, it’s also worth noting that it isn’t a perfect film. There few flaws here and there, notably that it doesn’t let characterization get in the way of its retina-blasting mecha-on-kaiju action, but in the larger summer movie blockbuster scheme of things, that simply does not matter. This easily the most fun flick to hit the theaters so far this summer, a fist-pumping, awe-inspiring ride for anyone who loves monster movies, robots, or just wants to get their face rocked for two hours.

It’s also a total surprise. Not because no one saw it coming, but because it’s all coming from the minds of writer Travis Beacham and Guillermo del Toro, the only two guys as nerdy about big fun action movies as the fans who will be lining up to pay 15 bucks for Pacific Rim at the box office.

“When I was a kid – I grew up in the 80s – and we were seeing this sort of thing all the time,” Beacham told Wired in a recent interview. “We had Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Gremlins, Star Wars — there was a constant stream of invention coming out of Hollywood. As much as I’m going to be in line for the next Star Wars, I think in addition to those sorts of things what I would love to see in Hollywood is a new spirit of invention in which we originate as much of our own material as we can.”

And so they did. Is Pacific Rim going to be as well-received and long-loved as those movies Beacham mentions? It’s hard to say, particularly when you’re no longer 12 years old and have been consistently spoiled by the wonders of Industrial Light & Magic for most of your adult life. But more than any film in recent memory, Pacific Rim is a worthy contender for Most Worth Multiple Theater Outings, a film capable of recapturing that feeling of movie magic — the feeling that the purpose of movie-going is escapism.

(Spoiler warning: Minor plot points for Pacific Rim to follow.)

That’s really all you need to know, but if you absolutely must know more, here’s why del Toro’s film rules. /40

Pacific Rim begins a decade into Earth’s war with a race of monsters—kaiju—sent from another dimension through a crack in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

After the initial invasion flattened cities like San Francisco and Manila, humans fought back against the monsters by forming the Pan Pacific Defense Corps (PPDC) and launching the Jaeger program, which created 250-foot mechas to fight the kaiju. Initially the gambit worked, and as kaiju fell, young Jaeger pilots became heroes, Maverick-in-Top Gun-style.

But over time, the kaiju got bigger and their attacks more frequent. The PPDC began losing the war, and pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) loses his brother and co-pilot Yancy (Diego Klattenhoff) during battle.

This is particularly painful, since the pilots are mentally connected in what’s called “the Drift” to control the mecha during battle, meaning Raleigh was still sharing thoughts and memories with his brother when he died.

Naturally, and also in Maverick-in-Top-Gun-style, this causes Raleigh to abandon the fight. In fact, most of the world does. The international governments that formed the PPDC are looking to disband it, focusing their efforts instead on building massive walls along the Pacific coasts to keep kaiju out. But PPDC commander Stacker Pentecost (the never-not-brilliant Idris Elba) is unwilling to give up the fight and has collected the last remaining Jaegers and their pilot teams from Australia,

Russia, China, and also recruited American Raleigh back into action to pilot his old Jaeger, Gipsy Danger.

It is this return to action that provides Pacific Rim with its emotional core. In order to step back into a Jaeger, Raleigh needs a new co-pilot—someone who can handle the Drift with him—and the one he’s most compatible with is Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) a young woman whom Stacker is very protective of (and, in a welcome addition to the current sci-fi summer slate, a legitimately kick-ass female protagonist).

But really, Pacific Rim is about battles. And from the moment Raleigh is brought to Hong Kong — where Stacker is staging the final Jaeger defense against the kaiju onslaught — the film is an almost neverending series of face-offs. And, oh, what glorious face-offs they are. ILM’s chief creative officer John Knoll, a Toho monster movie fan as a kid, told Wired recently that the marrying of kaiju and robots in the same film was something new for the VFX house and “that was actually a big part of the appeal of this was that this was original material, this wasn’t a sequel or an adaptation — I love working on original things where there is no stylebook established that we have to be faithful to and we can try new things.”

To that end, his team went bananas creating scenes that are as beautiful as they are stupidly fun. Battles move

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through the ocean, crash into buildings, dive into the center of the Earth and even go into space and never lose a bit of luster or suspense. “Giant fucking robots versus giant fucking monsters” was kind of the whole point of Pacific Rim, and it drives it home like a rocketpunch to the face. (If you see this movie for no other reason, see it for its fantastic use of a Jaeger sword.)

might constitute “science” when the world is facing certain doom at the hands of creatures from an unknown dimension. Newton’s quest also gives the film a reason to use what might be del Toro’s greatest trick: Ron Perlman, who shows up as black-market kaiju parts dealer Hannibal Chau. (Don’t question it, just take in his gold grill and tacky suit and smile.)

Of course there are other things in Pacific Rim to keep fanboys and fangirls happy, too. There’s a pretty smart wink to the kaiju flick The War of the Gargantuas in the first third of the film. Legendary Pictures head Thomas Tull gets in a cameo — in name at least (are these requisite now?). The aforementioned soundtrack comes courtesy of Ramin Djawadi, who also does the music on Game of Thrones, and the film’s theme has licks from Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello. The mechs themselves evoke the Japanese anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. GLaDOS herself, Ellen McLain, is the frigging voice of Gipsy Danger.

And, as del Toro might say, that’s just the tip.

Pacific Rim has moments that feel downright hokey, but then again, so does Ghostbusters. (The end was a battle with a giant haunted marshmallow, remember?)

So does Back to the Future. And they’re all incredibly fun. Not too long ago there was a time—before prequels and the Marvel Cinematic Universe—when most people went to see summer flicks hoping to be surprised by something they hadn’t seen before, not looking for a faithful rendering of something they read or saw on TV as a kid. Pacific Rim may come with a marketing blitz and scores of teasers and promotion, but it is trying its damnedest to be that kind of movie. “I love that sense of discovery,” Beacham said. “You’re experiencing something for the first time and your parents aren’t in on it, previous generations aren’t in on it. It has a chance to belong to you and your generation in a way that nothing has. If Pacific Rim is a fraction of that, I would be very proud.”

There are also the touches that only master worldbuilding del Toro can bring. There are visuals of people who have built homes around fallen monster carcasses, references to people who “think the kaiju were sent from heaven,” and flashes of detail about the anti-verse from whence the creatures came abound. This narrative, surprisingly, is also the source of the most humor. As part of the resistance, Stacker has brought on a pair of researchers—Dr. Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day) and Gottlieb (Burn Gorman)—tasked with figuring out if there is a less explosive way to defeat the kaiju. Their bickering, and Newton’s crazed attempts to literally get inside the brain of a kaiju, give an often zany look at what /42

It might be impossible to even be that kind of movie these days, in a world where we speculate about the villain in the next Iron Man flick before the script is even done, but Pacific Rim is the closest anything has come so far this summer, if not a few summers back. It’s beautiful and flawed and — despite over a year of hype — still manages to pull quite a few surprise punches. And there’s just no spoiling that.

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The Man Of Steel— Interview With Henry Cavill

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It’s not every day that you get to sit across from Superman.

Henry, welcome to Australia.

Even sans super-suit, it’s still quite a thrill to meet Henry Cavill, the latest actor to take up tights in Zack Snyder’s ‘real world’ reboot of the comic book hero: Man of Steel. Cleftchinned good looks and sculpted abs aside, its clear Cavill sought to fill out the role of Clark Kent/ Cal-El with an earnest sincerity. Not unlike the film’s grave tone, the actor articulates his experiences in reverent terms like ‘honour’ and ‘blessing’. He is also open about growing up as an unpopular kid, and bringing the lonely life that comes with being an actor to the role of the ultimate outsider.

Excellent – once people have seen the film, they’ll know the extra meaning of that line!

It might be a case of British stoicism talking, but one thing’s certain: Cavill has proven himself a very respectful custodian of the cape.

Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

[Laughs] For those of us who love you from The Tudors, we know you’re no stranger to a costume drama, but it strikes me that this is THE costume. So what went through your mind when you donned the red cape?

It was a very long process of trying to work out how real it was.

Part of your brain denies it for a very, very long time, because it’s too crazy a concept to pull in. You think of Superman and how much everyone knows who Superman is, and then you’re playing Superman, or you’re given a role in a new Superman movie. It just took so long for me to actually realize it.

The first time I realized it and it really sunk in, I was driving to set in Plano, and there was a cornfield selling corn…and kryptonite.

And then I was driving past gas stations and diners that were selling Superman cookies and big blow up Superman dolls outside the gas stations, and that’s when it really sunk in. I thought, “Woah! Ok! This is actually happening. And I’m actually playing Superman.”

And then I put the suit on, and the suit is an incredible thing, it’s got an energy all to itself. A lot people put a lot of love into designing that thing, and building it, and choosing all the materials and all the rest. And when you put it on, it doesn’t feel like you’re just wearing a Superman suit, it feels like you’re creating something.

So there was that moment, but that still hadn’t brought it home until I was on set and these people were – fully-grown men – were shaking, while shaking my hand while they were meeting me. And I’m going, “Woah! Ok. This is actually happening now.”

And then you forget about it in the year and a half since you finished shooting, then you see the movie and it’s unreal.

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It blows you away all over again. Speaking of shaking, it strikes me again that Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan are the superhero creators, right? So what kind of a one-two punch is it to work with those guys?

It’s like osmosis, it just goes into you.

Fantastic! Chris is obviously very good at what he does. (Screenwriter) David Goyer is amazing, and Zack is amazing as well. So the three of them all working together, putting those different approaches and mindsets to these kind of movies, into one thing, was a blessing. And something I felt really fortunate for.

Are you prepared to be Superman for the next generation?

It seems every generation has their Superman. For better or worse I grew up with LOIS & CLARK, so what was yours? And have you wrapped your head around being Superman for this generation?

When did I first discover Superman? I have no real recollection. I have three older brothers, and they were watching Superman movies before I was born and so by the time I was old enough to watch movies, or even remember them, I had probably seen [Superman movies] quite a few times. So there was no one defining moment where I can go, “That was when I discovered Superman.”

I didn’t get to read the comic books as a kid. I started that as soon as I got the role. I remember Lois and Clark, I remember to the movies, but it was just that awareness of Superman in society, as opposed to any one moment. /48

Absolutely. And what was the other part of the question?

I don’t know if you can be prepared for that. I think you just go with it. It’s a lot of fun to be playing this character, and an honour to be able to have the opportunity to be able to tell that story.

This film is largely a quest for self-discovery for Clarke – unfolding in a series of stories which has the effect of you being on screen a lot of the time listening – how did you approach those scenes of discovery?

Well, two reasons: in school I was never a popular kid, so I spent a lot of time sitting back and watching, and trying to work out why. Because I was trying to be nice, but it wasn’t received, or people would just spin it around and make it something else. So I spent a lot of time watching then. And also as an actor you live a very lonely life, you’re constantly going to new places and meeting new friends. And sometimes you’re in a place for such a short period of time that you’re like, “I don’t want to go through the whole process of proving to people that I’m a good person, and trying to convince them they can trust me, just

to leave and never see them again.” And it’s not such a sad thing, it’s just one of those things. You’re there for, I don’t know, three or four months, and you go, “I’m just going to do my own thing this time.” And you spend a lot of time sitting on the outside: you don’t get to go to a coffee shop with a mate; you just sit there by yourself. And that’s totally fine; you get totally comfortable with sitting there with a newspaper or a book, and just enjoying that. And you get to see the rest of the world do their thing without your influence.

So I applied that to the script and to my character an awful lot, because that’s what he does. He’s not someone who wants to be seen, and so he spends a lot of time trying to work out the answers by watching.

And if we’re reminiscing about school days, we of course all know the great story of Russell Crowe giving you advice back in the day (when Cavill approached him on the set of Proof of Life). So the question is, have you paid it forward?

When it comes to that kind of thing, I think trying to do something like that is the wrong way of going about it.

Russell didn’t try and do something like that; he just – out of the goodness of his heart – sent this wonderful thing and had a big effect [on me]. If I’m going out of my way to try and advise kids, or help mold a kid’s career, that’s the wrong thing to do. As long as I stay honest and straightforward in the things I say when asked these questions, then it’s honest. And hopefully that’ll affect someone, as opposed to some contrived, “This is me giving advice to you, kiddo. Use it well.”

With an added head scrub.

Right.

Absolutely.

Now I loved Amy Adams in the film…

She’s good!

And of course this is such a monumental relationship that you have to build, and there’s a scene towards the end of the film – that I don’t want to spoil – but it seemed more intimate than a kiss. So I just wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about building a relationship when everyone has such high hopes for it.

The thing is, with Amy and I, I think we approach acting in the same way. It’s through the characters’ eyes, we’re not trying to do anything deliberate, or through the audiences’ eyes. It was very obvious the journey that Lois and Clark are going on, separately in the movie, and at the same time, how much their existence affects the other, and changes the entire viewpoint of the other, or at least provides a completely different view point: one they didn’t know existed. And that creates a very, very special place in peoples’ hearts, in real life. And so it wasn’t as though we went about any sort of crazy way to show this amazing relationship, because there was so much pressure in providing that; we just went about it as realistically as one can in this crazy movie, which is set in a real world setting. But yeah, we just approached it from the characters’ eyes.

Ok, well there is an obvious set up for more films, so are you ready to set to the skies, or into the harness again?

[Laughs] If it does happen, then 100%. It’s a great story to tell, and something which I’d love to continue telling.

And I suppose there’s the element of serendipity there that you just have to allow it to happen.

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In school I was never a popular kid, so I spent a lot of time sitting back and watching, and trying to work out why. ­—Henry Cavill

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