How Russian Tycoon Yuri Milner Bought His Way Into Silicon Valley

To many, Milner’s success is not just too much and too fast in a land of too much and too fast but … but … and here people start to petulantly phumpher … somehow unfair: Here’s an outsider who has handed out money at outrageously founder-friendly terms—paying huge amounts for relatively small stakes, essentially buying exclusive access to the most desirable companies on the web! It is his outsiderness that seems most irritating and even alarming. How is it that an outsider has spotted opportunities that the Valley’s best investors missed? Does Milner’s success suggest that the rest of the world is starting to horn in on what has been, to date, as American as apple pie—the Internet future and Internet riches?

Source: Wired
Published: Oct 21, 2011
Length: 22 minutes (5,694 words)

How Dan Harmon Drives Himself Crazy Making ‘Community’

Harmon calls his circles embryos—they contain all the elements needed for a satisfying story—and he uses them to map out nearly every turn on , from throwaway gags to entire seasons. If a plot doesn’t follow these steps, the embryo is invalid, and he starts over. To this day, Harmon still studies each film and TV show he watches, searching for his algorithm underneath, checking to see if the theory is airtight. “I can’t not see that circle,” he says. “It’s tattooed on my brain.”

Source: Wired
Published: Sep 22, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,446 words)

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

It had taken a while for the world to realize what an amazing treasure Steve Jobs was. But Jobs knew it all along. That was part of what was so unusual about him. From at least the time he was a teenager, Jobs had a freakish chutzpah. At age 13, he called up the head of HP and cajoled him into giving Jobs free computer chips. It was part of a lifelong pattern of setting and fulfilling astronomical standards. Throughout his career, he was fearless in his demands. He kicked aside the hoops that everyone else had to negotiate and straightforwardly and brazenly pursued what he wanted. When he got what he wanted — something that occurred with astonishing frequency — he accepted it as his birthright.

Source: Wired
Published: Oct 6, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,221 words)

Inside the Russian Short Wave Radio Enigma

Shortwave radio aficionados developed various hypotheses about the role of the station in Russia’s sprawling, military-communications network. It was a forgotten node, one theory ran, set up to serve some function now lost deep in the bureaucracy. It was a top-secret signal, others believed, that transmitted messages to Russian spies in foreign countries. More ominously, countered another theory, UVB-76 served as nothing less than the epicenter of the former Soviet Union’s “Dead Hand” doomsday device, which had been programmed to launch a wave of nuclear missiles at the US in the event the Kremlin was flattened by a sneak attack. (The least sexy theory, which posited that the Buzzer was testing the thickness of the ionosphere, has never enjoyed much support.)

Source: Wired
Published: Sep 27, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,612 words)

The Future of Light Is the LED

Brett Sharenow is presiding over the Pepsi Challenge of lightbulbs. The CFO of Switch, a Silicon Valley startup, Sharenow has set himself up in a 20-by-20 booth at the back of the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, and he’s asking passersby to check out two identical white shades. Behind one hides a standard incandescent bulb, the familiar lighting technology that has gone largely unchanged since Thomas Edison invented it 132 years ago. Behind the other is a stunning, almost art- deco-style prototype that holds 10 LEDs and a secret fluid. It’s a liquid-cooled bulb, as radically different from Edison’s invention as anything that’s ever been screwed into a standard socket and, Sharenow hopes, the next big thing in the $30 billion lighting industry. The challenge: Can you tell which is which?

Source: Wired
Published: Aug 19, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,403 words)

How the Navy’s Warship of the Future Ran Aground

What is the Littoral Combat Ship? Is it a heavily armed brawler meant to wade into bloody coastal battles and sacrifice itself while taking out multiple enemy missile boats? Is it a mine-clearer? A sub-hunter? A low-cost patroller ideal for slowly stalking pirates, drug runners and weapons smugglers and training alongside allied navies? … Is it an affordable version of the Navy’s large destroyers, meant for the export market? Is it the flagship of an industrial scheme designed to revamp American shipbuilding? The answer is … all of these things. And none of them.

Author: David Axe
Source: Wired
Published: Aug 3, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,011 words)

Contraceptive Comeback: The Maligned IUD Gets a Second Chance

The problem is, IUDs have been at the bottom of the contraceptive heap for years, the victim of bad press and a four-decade-old scandal. But Peipert is finding that you can let the past go—of the 8,300 women who have received counseling in his study so far, about 50 percent have chosen an IUD, making it by far the most popular choice. IUDs are on the verge of a remarkable return to popularity. Nationally, 5.5 percent of women using contraception choose them. That sounds unimpressive, but it’s the first time in more than 20 years that the number has risen above 2 percent; in 1995, it was 1.3 percent.

Source: Wired
Published: Jul 15, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,543 words)

Chain World Videogame Was Supposed to be a Religion—Not a Holy War

The stick would soon hold a videogame unlike any other ever created. It would exist on the memory stick and nowhere else. According to a set of rules defined by Jason Rohrer, only one person on earth could play the game at a time. The player would modify the game’s environment as they moved through it. Then, after the player died in the game, they would pass the memory stick to the next person, who would play in the digital terrain altered by their predecessor—and on and on for years, decades, generations, epochs. In Rohrer’s mind, his game would share many qualities with religion—a holy ark, a set of commandments, a sense of secrecy and mortality and mystical anticipation. This was the idea, anyway, before things started to get weird. Before Chain World, like religion itself, mutated out of control.

Source: Wired
Published: Jul 15, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,554 words)

Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics

(Not single page) For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. Roboticists have developed tools to accomplish this task, known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. But the sensors required to build that map have traditionally been either expensive and bulky or cheap and inaccurate. … On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. That’s the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies.

Author: Jason Tanz
Source: Wired
Published: Jun 16, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,786 words)

The Mystery of the Canadian Whiskey Fungus

When he arrived at the warehouse, the first thing he noticed (after “the beautiful, sweet, mellow smell of aging Canadian whiskey,” he says) was the black stuff. It was everywhere—on the walls of buildings, on chain-link fences, on metal street signs, as if a battalion of Dickensian chimney sweeps had careened through town. “In the back of the property, there was an old stainless steel fermenter tank,” Scott says. “It was lying on its side, and it had this fungus growing all over it. Stainless steel!” The whole point of stainless steel is that things don’t grow on it.

Source: Wired
Published: May 17, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,617 words)