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Q&A: John Hodgman on Perfecting the Illusion of Expertise more similar news »
John Hodgman is an expert. At everything. (OK, maybe not sports.) But where he really excels is in creating the illusion of expertise — and not letting pesky facts intrude on that authority. From his first book, a compendium of faux trivia aptly titled The Areas of My Expertise, to his fiction-spewing shtick on The Daily Show to his role as the bloviating PC in those Mac ads, Hodgman handles the most obscure subjects with an aura of invincible confidence. The fact that it's fake? All the funnier. Hodgman talks to Wired about his latest book, More Information Than You Require (out in October), and his new area of bona fide expertise: being semi-famous.
Wired: Is your character on The Daily Show the same person narrating your books? Or, for that matter, the PC in your Mac ads?
Hodgman: I should clarify at this point: I'm not that John Hodgman. There's a guy who goes on The Daily Show claiming to be me. And there's a guy who goes on the Mac ads claiming to be me.
Wired: You should sue!
Hodgman: No, I would say that the Resident Expert on The Daily Show is all me, or at least a heightened aspect of myself. Aside from finding humor in the deadpan descriptions of things precisely as they are, I just veer off into the fantastic and the absurd.
Wired: And that has made you slightly famous.
Hodgman: Well, I always had this desire to celebrate and somehow be a part of things that I thought were really great. When I wrote about Battlestar Galactica for The New York...
Wired.com
Mon Oct 13, 2008 more from this source»»
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Oct. 13, 1884: Greenwich Resolves Subprime Longitude Crisis more similar news »
1884: Geographers and astronomers adopt Greenwich as the Prime Meridian, the international standard for zero degrees longitude.
The late 19th century was an era of standardization. With the Second Industrial Revolution stimulating world trade, the Treaty of the Meter established the International System of weights and measures in 1875. With railroads linking together entire continents, nations were replacing hundreds (or even thousands) of diverging local times with a system of hour-wide time zones. (The United States adopted its zones in 1883.)
Amid all this, navigation at sea -- and the charting of stars in the heavens --
often remained a matter of local, national or even religious preference. Maps might be based on longitude east or west of Jerusalem, Saint Petersburg, Rome, Pisa, Copenhagen (think Tycho Brahe, Oslo, Paris, Greenwich (just east of central London), El Hierro (in the Canary Islands), Philadelphia (former U.S. capital) and Washington, D.C. These divergent reference meridians -- representing a mixture of astronomical, theological and maritime power -- ranged over 112 degrees of longitude.
You could do the math, but that meant you did the math. These were the days before computers and even the bulkiest of mechanical calculators. Got abacus?
Many state boundaries in the U.S. West were determined by the Washington Meridian, which then ran through the Old Naval Observatory in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood. But an 1850 law established its use "for...
Wired.com
Mon Oct 13, 2008 more from this source»»
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Obama v. McCain: The Wired Scorecard more similar news »
What do Barack Obama and John McCain say, and what have they done, about policies that matter to Wired? Here are descriptions and analysis on five issues: Broadband, H1B Issues, Investment in Green Tech, Net Neutrality, Spectrum. They may or may not come up in Wednesday’s third and final debate. But that doesn’t mean you have to be uninformed or apathetic.
Wired.com
Mon Oct 13, 2008 more from this source»»
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Microscope-On-a-Chip Is One Step Closer to the Tricorder more similar news »
: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com
LOS ANGELES, California – In the very near future, drawing blood may be obsolete. Instead, implants will be able to image your blood and monitor it constantly.
This is because scientists at Caltech have squeezed a microscope onto a computer chip not much larger than a dime. And that’s just the demo unit.
Shrinking a standard microscope to this size is practically impossible due to the layers of optics involved, but Caltech professor Changhuei Yang decided to skip the optics altogether and put microscopic samples almost directly onto a photo sensor chip — just like the one found in your cheap point-and-shoot.
The microscope-on-a-chip uses standard, off-the-shelf hardware sensors with a clever modification — pixels on the sensor are forced to only look through microscopic holes, which allows the chip to image very tiny things. The standard hardware makes future mass production cheap and easy and Yang’s lab is already working to create a small batch of iPod-size prototypes. He hopes to have working units in doctor's hands in a year or two, with full production in five5 years.
In addition to the handheld devices, Yang envisions blood- monitoring implants that provide instant health warnings and diagnoses. Click through the gallery to learn exactly how this ingenious invention works.
Left:
A working sample of the microscope-on-a-chip placed next to a dime shows how small it actually is. The part that does most of the work is the...
Wired.com
Mon Oct 13, 2008 more from this source»»
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The Prisoner's Sonic Shadow Looms Large more similar news »
Four decades after its short run concluded in controversy, Patrick McGoohan's brilliant sci-fi miniseries The Prisoner remains one of television's most influential shows. But its speculative tentacles reach deeper, inspiring user-generated music videos as well
as songs from artists as varied as The Rolling Stones and Wagon Christ.
Wired.com
Sun Oct 12, 2008 more from this source»»
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Power Ascender: Ballsy Tool Yanks People, Equipment up Walls more similar news »
What it is: Atlas Power Ascender
What it's used for: Rapidly pulling people and their gear up the side of a building or canyon
The prototype of the Power Ascender was not easy to use. The battery-powered, waist-mounted climbing assistant yanked people up a dangling rope at a blistering 10 feet per second — almost 7 mph — fast enough to snap their limbs back. So Atlas, a company run by four mechanical engineers outside Boston, set the maximum speed to a more reasonable 5 feet per second and added a variable- speed trigger like on a power drill. Now customers — such as US military personnel — simply clip the 25-pound device onto a climbing harness, push any nonbraided rope through the top, and let it fly. Inside the gizmo, a network of grippers scurries up the line and ensures that it threads cleanly out the side. The Ascender's 10-kilowatt output can lift up to 350 pounds, which is no easy task. "Having that much power that close to your crotch is a huge engineering challenge," says Atlas' Bryan Schmid, "and frankly a bit risky." Sounds pretty ballsy.
Wired.com
Sat Oct 11, 2008 more from this source»»
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VeriSign, ICANN Square Off Over DNS Root more similar news »
As the U.S. government starts the process of closing a major net vulnerability, two longtime net infrastructure rivals -- the non-profit ICANN and for-profit VeriSign -- are battling over who will compile and verify the net's most important document. Internet experts give the nod to ICANN and bring up VeriSign's greedy past.
Wired.com
Fri Oct 10, 2008 more from this source»»
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