It was a holiday week for July Fourth, but there was still plenty going on in the security world. WIRED took a deep look at a budding partnership between the Army’s Cyber Command and the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service group. DDS brings private-sector tech expertise to the government, and this new collaboration adds Army technologists to the mix to work on difficult development challenges for the Department of Defense. Meanwhile, a different DOD program run by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency provides mobile, desktop, and browser apps to dozens of US defense agencies through an ultrasecure app store that has some crucial differences from commercial platforms.
WIRED also looked at where Congress and the Supreme Court may take privacy precedent and regulations in the future as digital technologies alter the privacy landscape. Speaking of which, find an hour this weekend to do a quick and easy audit of your mobile and desktop apps. Check up on what data they’re able to access and collect from you, and make sure you’re not running any programs that are overreaching.
There’s more! As always, we’ve rounded up all the news we didn’t break or cover in depth this week. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
Facebook announced on Monday that a programming bug caused the service to briefly unblock a number of accounts that users had blocked. The glitch reportedly affected a small portion of Facebook users for just a week—but at the scale of Facebook, even “small” mishaps can have massive repercussions. The company said it notified a whopping 800,000 users that they may have been affected.
While the bug was live, affected users could have had accounts they previously blocked message them or see things they shared with mutual friends, although the accidentally unblocked accounts still couldn’t directly see a user’s page. Facebook wouldn’t provide any additional information about the bug, but for people who rely on blocking to keep them emotionally and/or physically safe, the incident is more than just a minor hiccup.
On Tuesday, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence published findings of a review of the 2017 Intelligence Community official assessment, which concluded that Russia did interfere in the 2016 US presidential election to support Donald Trump’s candidacy. After reviewing documents and intelligence and interviewing investigators, analysts, and other officials, the committee found that the IC had produced “a sound intelligence product.” The committee released an unclassified report and also prepared a classified version. The review was launched last year amid doubts about the IC’s findings. It noted a couple of small things it would have wanted the IC to investigate further, including the role of the Russian-controlled media outlet RT. But overall, the report raised few questions or concerns.
Bugs abounded this week, with another problematic one in which some recent models of Samsung smartphones, including the Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S9, were reportedly texting out photos from users’ camera rolls to random contacts without leaving a trace of the errant messages. The bug seems to have been in the Samsung Messages app, which is the default texting app on Samsung mobile devices. The problem may have been related to interoperability issues as carriers upgrade to the new Rich Communication Services protocol that the industry plans to use as a replacement for SMS texting. Samsung users found some workarounds for the issue, including revoking permission for the Samsung Messages app to access their photos. Samsung said it was aware of the reports.
In Boots Riley’s trippy new film Sorry to Bother You, hunger is the main throughline. The hunger for truth. The hunger for justice. The hunger to succeed personally, and even more so in one’s professional life. At RegalView, a low-level telemarketing firm in Oakland, one path to success presents itself in the form of code-switching. The disaffected Cassius Green (LaKeith Stanfield) is hungry to prove himself.
He’s a damaged soul eager for anything other than failure and hardship. On the advice of a coworker (Danny Glover), Cassius begins to use a “white voice” when speaking with prospective customers—what white people “wished they sounded like,” Glover explains—and its pay-off is immediate. Cassius becomes the company’s top salesman, earning the title of “Power Caller” and a promotion upstairs, where it’s required he talk in his white voice at all times.
But professional advancement comes with a moral clause. Cassius is wedged between doing what is right and what is profitable; one reason he took the job in the first place was to help his uncle save his home, which was in foreclosure. These are questions of survival Riley is volleying at us—what, exactly, are you willing to give up for the American Dream? Your friends? Your principles? For someone like Cassius, there are always conditions to Making It. For black people, in particular, success has its own fine print.
Sorry to Bother You is a deliciously untame thing: an allegorical satire about the exploitation of labor and land. (It joins a cohort of black futurity coming to the screen in recent years, including Get Out by Jordan Peele and Random Acts of Flyness, which debuts in August on HBO; Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death is also in development at HBO.) Like reality, the film is a genre mash-up in the most satisfying of ways—part workplace comedy, part existential drama, with elements of science fiction. The movie’s heart centers on economic injustice and class struggle. It’s heavy stuff, and rightfully so. These are heavy times. But longtime activist and rapper Riley, who wrote and directed the film, never burdens the audience with too much at once: he garnishes the film’s steady unease with splashes of dark humor courtesy of its leading cast (an exceptional Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, and Armie Hammer).
The tsuris surrounding Cassius worsens as coworkers form a union and threaten RegalView brass with a strike. “Trouble’s already here,” Squeeze (Steven Yeun), the lead organizer, says at one point. “I’m just helping folks fix it.” But it’s too late for Cassius; intoxicated by the taste of success, he refuses to join their cause, even as his artist girlfriend, Detroit (a radically enchanting Thompson), finds his new situation at odds with her own beliefs. (According to one of her t-shirts: “The future is female ejaculation.”)
Riley’s gonzo dystopia begins to unfurl in greater detail once Cassius settles in on the executive level, where he sells slave labor “over the phone.” RegalView, as it turns out, is part of a larger corporation called WorryFree Solutions. Its deranged visionary of a CEO, the bro-y, coked-out Steve Lift (a role Hammer was destined to play) offers people lifetime employment, housing, and food in exchange for non-stop labor. WorryFree, however, is anything but paradise. Individuals who sign up live in prison-like accommodations, eat scraps, and work as indentured servants for the rest of their lives. It’s a perverse critique of human capital—the gig economy, mass incarceration, an underpaid workforce in one sinister illustration—and an existence that doesn’t feel too far from what one possible future holds in false utopias like Silicon Valley. In this, Riley gives us one of the year’s sharpest pieces of political art. Sorry to Bother You arises from the best kind of fiction, one inspired from the fury and turbulence of real life.
In the film’s final and most revealing act Cassius is stirred from slumber. After a one-on-one meeting with Lift takes an absurd turn, he’s forced to reconsider the cost and question of his success (I won’t spoil the surprise here). For his part, Riley reconstructs the do-anything pursuit of capitalism into a collage of racial horror. The conclusion is both shocking and oddly poetic, but never once did it read as unbelievable. Throughout, the film’s aims remain locked on the issue of hunger. Only, in the end, Riley isn’t afraid to take it one step further and show how the powerless, and people of color in particular, no matter how much fight they put up, ultimately get swallowed whole.
Turbulence, the splintering of smooth streams of fluid into chaotic vortices, doesn’t just make for bumpy plane rides. It also throws a wrench into the very mathematics used to describe atmospheres, oceans and plumbing. Turbulence is the reason why the Navier-Stokes equations—the laws that govern fluid flow—are so famously hard that whoever proves whether or not they always work will win a million dollars from the Clay Mathematics Institute.
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Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
But turbulence’s unreliability is, in its own way, reliable. Turbulence almost always steals energy from larger flows and channels it into smaller eddies. These eddies then transfer their energy into even smaller structures, and so on down. If you switch off the ceiling fan in a closed room, the air will soon fall still, as large gusts dissolve into smaller and smaller eddies that then vanish entirely into the thickness of the air.
But when you flatten reality down to two dimensions, eddies join forces instead of dissipating. In a curious effect called an inverse cascade, which the theoretical physicist Robert Kraichnan first fished out of the Navier-Stokes equations in the 1960s, turbulence in a flattened fluid passes energy up to bigger scales, not down to smaller ones. Eventually, these two-dimensional systems organize themselves into large, stable flows like vortexes or river-like jets. These flows, rather like vampires, support themselves by sucking away energy from turbulence, instead of the other way around.
Animation by Goddard Space Flight Center/Cosmos Studios/NASA
While the inverse cascade effect has been known for decades, a mathematical, quantitative prediction of what that final, stable flow looks like has eluded theorists. But a glimmer of hope came in 2014, when Jason Laurie, now at Aston University in the United Kingdom, and his colleagues published a full description of the flow’s shape and speed under strict, specific conditions. Since then, new simulations, lab experiments and theoretical calculations published as recently as last month have both justified the team’s calculations and explored different cases where their prediction starts to break down.
All this might seem like only a thought experiment. The universe is not flat. But geophysicists and planetary scientists have long suspected that real oceans and atmospheres often behave like flat systems, making the intricacies of two-dimensional turbulence surprisingly relevant to real problems.
Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Quanta Magazine
After all, on Earth, and especially on the gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, weather is confined to thin, flattish slabs of atmosphere. Large patterns like hurricanes or the Gulf Stream — and Jupiter’s huge horizontal cloud bands and Great Red Spot—might all be feeding on energy from smaller scales. In the last few years, researchers analyzing winds both on Earth and on other planets have detected signatures of energy flowing to larger scales, the telltale sign of two-dimensional turbulence. They’ve begun mapping the conditions under which that behavior seems to stop or start.
The hope, for a small but dedicated community of researchers, is to use the quirky but simpler world of two-dimensional fluids as a fresh entry point into processes that have otherwise proved impenetrably messy. “They can actually make progress” in two dimensions, said Brad Marston, a physicist at Brown University, “which is more than what we can say for most of our turbulence work.”
Up in the Air
On Sept. 14, 2003, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sent an aircraft into Isabel, a Category 5 hurricane bearing down on the Atlantic Coast with winds gusting to 203 knots—the strongest readings ever observed in the Atlantic.
NOAA wanted to get readings of turbulence at the bottom of a hurricane, crucial data for improving hurricane forecasts. This was the first—and last—time a crewed aircraft ever tried. At its lowest, the flight skimmed just 60 meters above the churning ocean. Eventually salt spray clogged up one of the plane’s four engines, and the pilots lost an engine in the middle of the storm. The mission succeeded, but it was so harrowing that afterward, NOAA banned low-level flights like this entirely.
About a decade later, David Byrne got interested in these data. Byrne, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, had previously studied turbulent energy transfer in lab experiments. He wanted to see if he could catch the process in nature. He contacted Jun Zhang, an NOAA scientist who had been booked on the very next flight into Isabel (a flight that never took off). By analyzing the distribution of wind speeds, the two calculated the direction in which energy was traveling between large and small fluctuations.
Starting at about 150 meters above the ocean and leading up into the large flow of the hurricane itself, turbulence began to behave the way it does in two dimensions, the pair discovered. This could have been because wind shear forced eddies to stay in their respective thin horizontal layers instead of stretching vertically. Whatever the reason, though, the analysis showed that turbulent energy began flowing from smaller scales to larger scales, perhaps feeding Isabel from below.
Their work suggests that turbulence may offer hurricanes an extra source of fuel, perhaps explaining why some storms maintain strength even when conditions suggest they should weaken. Zhang now plans to use uncrewed flights and better sensors to help bolster that case. “If we can prove that, it would be really amazing,” he said.
On Jupiter, a much larger world with an even flatter atmosphere, researchers have also pinpointed where turbulence switches between two-dimensional and three-dimensional behavior.
Wind speed measurements taken by the Voyager probes, which flew past Jupiter in the 1970s, had already suggested that Jupiter’s large flows gain energy from smaller eddies. But in 2017, Peter Read, a physicist at the University of Oxford, and Roland Young, his postdoc at the time, made a wind speed map using data from the space probe Cassini, which swung past Jupiter in 2000 on its way to Saturn. They saw energy flowing into larger and larger eddies, the hallmark of two-dimensional turbulence.
But nothing about Jupiter is simple. On smaller scales—across patches of surface about the distance between New York and Los Angeles or less—energy dissipated instead, indicating that other processes must also be afoot. Then in March, the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter found that the planet’s surface features extend deep into its atmosphere. The data suggest that not just fluid dynamics but magnetic fields sculpt the cloud bands.
For Freddy Bouchet, who studies turbulence at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Lyon, France, this isn’t too discouraging, since the two-dimensional models can still help. “I don’t think anybody believes the analogy should be perfect,” he said.
Progress on Paper
At the end of 2017, Bouchet and Eric Woillez, also at ENS, sketched out their own theoretical account of how two-dimensional fluid flow can describe a rotating system such as the atmosphere of a planet.
Their work shows how flows built from smaller turbulence can match the enormous pattern of alternating bands visible on Jupiter through a backyard telescope. That “makes it really relevant for discussing real phenomena,” Bouchet said.
Bouchet’s work relies on considering the statistics of the large-scale flows, which exchange energy and other quantities in a balance with their environment. But there’s another path to predicting the form these flows will take, and it starts with those same obstreperous Navier-Stokes equations that lie at the root of fluid dynamics.
For two “totally fruitless” years at the beginning of this decade, Gregory Falkovich, a pen-and-paper theorist at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, stared at those equations. He tried to write out how the flow of energy would balance between small turbulent eddies and a bigger flow feeding on them in a simple case: a flat, square box.
A single term, related to pressure, stood in the way of a solution. So Falkovich just dropped it. By discarding that troublesome term and assuming that the eddies in this system are too short-lived to interact with each other, Falkovich and his colleagues tamed the equations enough to solve the Navier-Stokes equations for this case. Then he tasked Jason Laurie, his postdoc at the time, with running numerical simulations that proved it. “It’s always nice when you have an exact result in turbulence,” Marston said. “Those are rare.”
In the team’s 2014 paper, they found a formula for how the velocity in the resulting large flow—a big vortex, in this situation—would change with distance from its own center. And since then, various teams have filled in the theoretical rationale to excuse Falkovich’s lucky shortcut.
Hoping for payoff in the pure math of fluids and for insight into geophysical processes, physicists have also pushed the formula outside a simple square box, trying to figure out where it stops working. Just switching from a square to a rectangle makes a dramatic difference, for example. In this case, turbulence feeds river-like flows called jets in which the formula starts to fail.
As of now, even the mathematics of the simplest case, the square box, isn’t totally settled. Falkovich’s formula describes the large stable vortex itself, but not the turbulent eddies that still flicker and fluctuate around it. If they vary enough, as they might in other situations, these fluctuations will overwhelm the stable flow. Just in May, though, two former members of Falkovich’s lab—Corentin Herbert, also at ENS, and Anna Frishman of Princeton University—published a paper describing the size of these fluctuations. “It teaches a little bit what the limitations of the approach are,” Herbert said.
But their hope, ultimately, is to describe a far richer reality. For Frishman, the pictures returned from Juno’s mission over Jupiter—showing a fantasyland of jets and tornadoes swirling like cream poured into the solar system’s largest coffee—are a driving influence. “If it’s something that I could help understand, that would be cool,” she said.
Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
Google, it seems, is looking to get into the videogame business.
Over the past few months—most notably, and most recently, on the gaming site Kotaku—rumors have been circulating that the search giant is working on a multi-pronged games initiative that would involve both hardware and a streaming platform, codenamed “Yeti.” Reportedly, Google is looking to pull game developers under its umbrella through either cooperation or acquisition and met with executives at both E3 and the Game Developers Conference to gauge their interest in the efforts, whatever they may be.
But a few meetings and some investment money isn’t enough to build a successful gaming platform. Does Google have what it takes? Moreover, does the company’s history say anything about their potential future in the industry?
Google’s been interested in videogames for a long time, for reasons that should be pretty obvious. Gaming is a huge, lucrative business that could potentially give Google a lot more eyes for its advertising. In 2014, they made a play for the big time by trying to buy Twitch, a deal that ultimately fell through but was likely influential in the company beefing up YouTube Gaming—a platform built around streaming, Let’s Plays, and generally trying to do everything that Twitch does but with that extra Google sheen.
Likewise, rumors of Google testing the waters in the console world have been around for almost the company’s entire tenure in tech. Notably, Google internally incubated Niantic, the augmented-reality-game company that made roughly all of the dollars (nearly a billion of them in 2016) by collaborating with Nintendo on Pokémon Go. Naturally, Google’s probably smarting from the pain of letting Niantic go before that smash hit landed.
But what do those past ambitions, and the success Google’s had with turning YouTube into a hub for videogame culture, indicate about the company’s present actions to enter the industry? That’s harder to suss out. Google’s excellence as a tech giant has largely been in presentation: all of its big wins have come through creating attractive, useful ways to consume existing content. Even its hardware initiatives are based on content presentation: the Chromebook‘s great innovation is being, essentially, a web browser tied to a minimally taxing device. Getting a win in the already busy world of gaming would require much more than that.
Over the years, through YouTube and the Google Play Store, the company has proven it can create an ecosystem where videogame content can thrive. If Google is to launch a gaming platform, its presentational savvy—the ability the company has to make using your technology feel slick, interesting, and healthily interconnected—will have to be the backbone. Ultimately, Google can (and seems to be willing to) pay for content. But it’s the package around it that’s going to matter most.
The prospect of a streaming service is more complicated. As we’ve discussed before, the extant internet infrastructure isn’t really supportive of a robust streaming service for games as it stands. There’s just too much data that needs to move at too fast a speed. Google’s one leg up in this conversation is their own ongoing infrastructure investment: Google Fiber. While Fiber isn’t nearly as widespread as Google might like, coupling Fiber with whatever Yeti ends up being could at least ensure it works well enough to be compelling to the people fortunate enough to have the bandwidth for it. That, however, might end up being a small fraction of the gaming population.
For a tech giant like Google, though, almost no hurdle is insurmountable if the right resources are put behind it. However, if the company does want to truly create a compelling gaming environment, there’s one element that might prove extremely necessary: moderation. As it stands, YouTube gaming and the Google Play gaming portal are very messy communities and if they’re integrated into a larger platform, it would behoove their parent company to keep a closer eye on them. YouTube’s problems are well documented, and Google Play is, well, the best place to download illegitimate mobile emulators, if that’s your thing. Google has the power to produce a compelling place for games, but it’ll take work to make it useful and robust. Otherwise, it’ll be as hard to parse as your YouTube recommendations.
Another Independence Day has come and gone. Hopefully, you were careful and didn’t do anything dangerous with fireworks and instead just loaded up on some down-home cooking and face time with your favorite family members. The summer rages on, however, and that’s why, with the help of our friends at TechBargains, we’ve picked six choice deals for you to browse this weekend.
Even though the Nest gets all the attention, we love Ecobee’s thermostats. Why, you ask? The temperature sensors that you can place around your home make a difference in keeping your home cool during the hot summer months. And, it’s controllable via Amazon Alexa, to boot.
Neato knows how to make a good robovac, and we know because we’ve tested a few recently. This low-end Botvac Connected seems like another decent model from Neato, and it’s selling for only $200 right now.
Breville’s Smart Ovens are often ranked among the top toaster ovens you can buy. Normally, you’d pay almost $300 for a compact, versatile appliance like this but right now you can grab this beauty for only two Benjamins. Apartment dwellers, this is a deal you should consider.
If you’re anything like us, you love tech that barely takes up any space. That’s why you might dig this compact Dell desktop. Even though it’s small enough to tuck behind a monitor or TV, you get full quad-core 8th generation Intel power that can handle everyday tasks without breaking a sweat.
There’s never enough storage to fit all the stuff you need for your digital life. So, upgrade your computer (whether it’s a laptop, desktop, or even a PS4) with a spacious 1 TB solid state drive. It’s got the space and it’s got the zippy responsiveness we’ve come to expect from SSD-type storage. And, most importantly, it won’t hurt your bank account too badly.
Allen and Spike have been helping to keep their community safe together for the past six years. In that time, the two have been involved in numerous drug busts and criminal apprehensions. But their work isn’t without some lighter moments as well.
In an adorable video posted this week, Allen decided to show off another one of Spike’s special abilities — singing. Specifically, singing along
with the chorus of 2000’s hit single by the Baha Men, “Who Let The Dogs Out?”
Yes, it’s an unusual talent, but Spike’s partner couldn’t be prouder.
Chito lives with the Cabrera family in Mexico. It’s there that the adorable dachshund has taken it upon himself to serve as a guard dog of sorts, keeping watch over things at home during the day and alerting his people when strangers approach. Or so his family thought.
This guard dog was actually being vigilant for a much different reason — and that explains his waistline.
Recently, the Cabreras made an interesting discovery, and they caught it on video. The footage they captured shows Chito posted at their gate as usual as a local baker approaches on a bike with his tasty wares. Without hesitating, the baker hands Chito a secret meal, which he accepts with a wagging tail.
When she got a closer look, she noticed that someone — not something — was perched atop the leaves.
It was a tiny frog.
As she turned on her phone to take a video, the shy little animal looked up at her, and then started burrowing down further into the lettuce for shelter. He’d just been on quite the journey, and probably wasn’t ready for much more excitement.
Until then, the officers look forward to watching their progress.
“By preventing the smuggling attempt, [the team] have also ensured that the birds and eggs received the immediate care and attention that they needed,” Grant Miller, head of Heathrow’s CITES team, told the BBC. “The frontline work of my team is key to tackling the international illegal wildlife trade, which does so much environmental damage and threatens the survival of endangered animals.”
The rescue had recently taken in a mama dog who had lost her puppies while living on the streets. She was heartbroken and defeated when they found her, and it was clear she missed her puppies so much and couldn’t understand what had happened to them.
“She was walking round with food in her mouth trying to find them to feed them,” Hilary Anderson, cofounder of Barking Mad Dog Rescue, told The Dodo. “So sad.”
When the shoebox puppies arrived in the rescue’s care, they realized that the puppies needed a mom and the mama dog they had just rescued needed puppies to care for — so they decided to bring them together.
Dr. Mark Jones, associate director of Born Free Foundation UK, says the consequences for these animals could be deadly if the Congo’s plan were to move forward.
“Primates in particular are highly social,” Jones told The Dodo. “Capturing live great apes from the wild usually entails disrupting entire social groups and killing other family members, with devastating consequences for family groups. Given the precarious status of these species, the proposed transfers could have a very significant conservation impact.”
In a letter sent to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species earlier this week, Born Free and other advocacy groups pushed for the plan to be reconsidered, as the removal of endangered species from the wild is technically illegal under the Congo’s national law.
While the shelter normally permits volunteers to walk and play with the dogs, the staff realized their kennels were the safest, most secure spots for the dogs to be that evening. Fireworks can often trigger a flight response in dogs, so after 7 p.m., each pup was settled into their kennel for the night.
“We also had volunteers walking around spraying a bit of lavender oil [which promotes relaxation], and had classical music playing through the speakers,” Santiago said. “All of those things, in combination with the volunteers, really helped.”
While Santiago admits the “Calming Canines” event was somewhat of an experiment, there’s no doubt the shelter will be employing the same routine for next July 4th, and on New Year’s Eve.
Throughout the last couple of weeks, the RSPCA has been receiving a bunch of very unusual calls from beachgoers and people hanging out by the water — about drunk seagulls. At first, everyone at the rescue was a bit confused, but as soon as they went out to collect some of the seagulls in question, they realized why everyone was so concerned.
“At first, the birds look like they have botulism [an illness caused by bacteria] but then, after vomiting, most seem to recover,” Jo Daniel, an officer with the RSPCA, said in a press release. “The birds absolutely stink of alcohol when we collect them so now our vans smell like pubs!”
In 2016, the USFWS announced it would stop the protection plan and round up the survivors to put them in captivity. It was postponed after public outcry, but now the new federal plan, which was proposed by USFWS late last month, again has conservationists deeply fearful for the future of the species.
“The USFWS rightly notes that landowner support is critical to the future of red wolf recovery,” Wheeler said. “But that support can’t be achieved through the unregulated hunting and trapping of red wolves that happen to wander onto private land. This claim, offered without any evidence to uphold it, defies both history and common sense and ignores the fact that humans are the root cause of most red wolf mortalities.”
“Raju became a symbol of hope for captive, abused elephants all over the world,” Wildlife SOS said in a statement. “His spirit was all but broken, a testament to the ordeals he had been through.”
Raju was brought to the Wildlife SOS rescue center, where veterinarians rushed to treat his leg, which had been seriously injured by the shackle. He was also suffering from severe malnutrition, foot ailments and painful abscesses on his shoulders and hips from his life being ridden on the streets.
That was four years ago — and now, Raju is so content living life as a free elephant. On Wednesday, the Wildlife SOS staff surprised him with a party complete with decorations, toys and treats to celebrate his rescue anniversary.
Gone is the boss who loved first-class travel to places like Morocco and Rome, forced his staffers to find him an apartment (and a used Trump hotel mattress), and asked fast-food executives to hire his wife. But EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s many scandals haven’t been the real bugaboo for environmental advocates—rather, it’s been his rollback of environmental regulations on toxic waste, tailpipe emissions, air pollution, and greenhouse gases.
And in fact, Pruitt’s replacement might be more effective at gutting environmental protection than Pruitt himself.
Pruitt left office Thursday after questions of lavish spending, mismanagement, and ethical lapses. He was the target of 13 investigations by the EPA’s own inspector general, according to The New York Times. In June, a federal judge ordered Pruitt to produce documents supporting his statements on CNBC that humans were not a major contributor to climate change.
So when Pruitt’s resignation was tweeted by President Trump on Thursday afternoon, there was relief among many EPA employees, according to Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a non-profit legal group that represents civil servants from several federal agencies. “They were overjoyed,” said Ruch, who spoke to several EPA employees after Pruitt left. “It was ‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead.’”
In fact, the scene outside EPA headquarters in Washington got a bit nutty yesterday afternoon, as a man wearing an oversized papier-mâché Pruitt head posed for pictures with happy EPA staffers.
That glee may be fleeting. For now, Pruitt’s replacement is Andrew Wheeler, a coal industry lobbyist who worked briefly at the EPA 25 years ago and will return as the acting administrator. He was approved as deputy administrator by the Senate in April 2018, but Wheeler would face a second Senate vote if Trump nominates him to become the permanent agency head.
From 1995 to 2009, Wheeler was a staff member for James Inhofe, a Republican senator from Oklahoma who is one of Congress’s fiercest climate-deniers. Then, as a lobbyist, Wheeler represented the largest coal-mining operation in the United States, Murray Energy, for more than a decade. In 2017, Murray Energy gave Pruitt an “action plan” to overturn existing EPA rules on mercury pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and air pollution that crosses state lines.
So far, the White House and other federal agencies are on track to pass 16 of the rollbacks. Under Wheeler, “the administration’s agenda won’t change,” says Vicky Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center, a non-profit group at the Georgetown Law School that works with state officials on federal environmental regulatory issues. “Because Wheeler has deeper roots in DC, knows his way around these issues, and has built more relationships than Pruitt,” Arroyo says, “he might be more effective at completing [the White House] agenda.”
Just as Pruitt urged Trump to abandon the Paris Climate Agreement, Wheeler has attacked mainstream climate science, writing in 2010 that the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change was biased. “The UN IPCC has blurred the lines between science and advocacy to the point where they are unable to separate situational awareness from proposed remedies,” Wheeler wrote in a blog on his law firm’s website. “They have been advocating for specific policy actions and ignoring the original charter of informing the public on the state of science.”
At his Senate confirmation hearing in November 2017, Wheeler was noncommittal when faced with the federal government’s own climate report. “I believe that man has an impact on the climate, but what’s not completely understood is what the impact is,” Wheeler said during the hearing. At least on climate science, Pruitt and Wheeler are speaking from a similar book.
That matters because the Trump administration continues to block the Clean Power Plan, which seeks to limit greenhouse gas emissions from plants that burn fossil fuels. The plan was developed by President Obama, but Trump’s EPA reversed course and is now asking a federal court to oppose it. The Supreme Court blocked the plan from going into effect until a lower court can rule on its merits.
Under Wheeler’s tenure, Arroyo expects that her work will continue, with several states who are suing the EPA to enforce the Clean Power Plan, toxic air pollution rules, and climate protection rules. “It’s not a new day,” she says, “but we all have to be relieved that someone who is so blatantly corrupt is let go.”
The best questions are always the ones that don’t have a single clear answer. In my physics classes, I like to present students with problems that can promote a lively discussion—and to do that, they have to have multiple answers that could possibly make sense. (And they shouldn’t involve lots of math, otherwise my students will just get hung up on the calculations.)
Here is a version of one of these great questions; it’s truly a classic.
A human (person A below) has two baseballs. The human tosses the two balls at the same time but to two different people (persons B and C as labeled below). The trajectory of each ball is shown. Which ball arrives at the person first? Defend your answer.
Just to be clear, there is no air resistance on these balls—just the gravitational force is acting on them after they are “tossed.”
OK, now you need to think about your answer. Pick the best possible answer and share with your neighbors. Yes, actually get out of the house and go to your neighbor’s house and see what they think about this question. It’s going to be the beginning of a great conversation. Trust me.
Since I really want you to pick an answer, I am going to delay going over this problem. Instead, let me point out why this is such a great question for an introductory physics class.
It’s a simple question to understand. You can present this situation to someone and they understand what’s going on—it’s not some super complicated thing. Really, you could just show the picture and then say “which one gets there first?”
Everyone probably has an answer. Students might not be too certain of their answer but they won’t just say “I don’t have a clue”—they will all at least have a clue. Even better, the students will be able to give some justification for their answer. This means that they are going to be ready to discuss with other students. Hint: Getting them to discuss with each other is half the battle.
There are some aspects that students want to know. They are going to say “well, which one had a greater launch speed?” When they ask something like this, I just say—who knows?
Like I said, it’s a great question. Now, because I am weak I will go over the solution. Look away if you are still thinking about this.
The Physics
Let me start with a demo. This is a demonstration you can do yourself. Here’s what you do.
Take two coins. Place one on the very edge of a flat table so that it is just about to fall off. Now take the second coin and slide it shuffleboard-style so it hits the coin balancing on the edge. The horizontal sliding coin should fly off the table and hit the ground while the edge coin just falls and hits the ground. But here’s the cool part: They both hit the ground at the same time.
Here’s what this would look like (in slow motion).
Also, here is a numerical calculation of this same thing (so you can see it better). And here is the code on trinket.io if you want to play with it—try changing the starting velocity if you want to see what happens.
What exactly should you see? You should see that the two coins hit the ground at the same time. Why? Because both coins have the same starting vertical position and the same starting vertical velocity. In the vertical sense, the two motions are identical. And this is the key to projectile motion—an object moving under the influence of the gravitational force can be broken into two separate one-dimensional problems in which the only thing in common is time. In the horizontal direction, it’s a coin moving at a constant velocity. In the vertical direction, it’s a ball that starts off from rest and accelerates.
But what does this have to do with the two-baseball problem above?
To explain, we can look at another example: Two balls that are tossed straight up (just in one dimension). Here we go.
What does this show? This shows that the ball that goes higher stays in the air for longer. Boom. That’s your answer. It doesn’t matter what the balls are doing horizontally. It only matters what they do in the vertical direction. The ball that goes higher (even when also traveling horizontally) stays in the air for longer. In the question above, person C gets the ball first.
Maybe you don’t believe me. Maybe you think it depends on the throwing speed. It doesn’t. Here is a real numerical calculation to show you how this works. Go ahead and click Play to run it.
See. It works. The ball that goes lower gets to the person the fastest. Go ahead and change the starting speed and see what happens. I made the “people” move so that they will be in the right position to “catch” the ball. You can change the launch angle too. Go ahead and have some fun with this.
Here’s some choice equipment for cooking like a pro in the wild. Toss the packets of dehydrated soup and make a real meal at the campsite instead.
1. Combekk Dutch Oven With Thermometer
This Dutch oven is, in fact, made in the Netherlands. Combekk’s 4-liter pot is crafted from recycled iron—railroad track, mostly—and has a thermometer built into its sidewall. Set the whole thing in the campfire coals; the 6-mm-thick bottom keeps heat distributed evenly.
2. Bialetti Mini Express 2-Cup Stove-Top Coffee Maker
A morning espresso blocks the sleep-inducing adenosine molecules in your brain, making you alert enough to read a trail map. Bialetti’s fountain pours two shots in about five minutes. Like the popular moka pot, it’s unfussy and made of durable aluminum.
Igloo’s new BMX line is a departure from the decades-old brand’s usual style. The 25-quart cooler has been modernized with beefy latches, stainless steel kick plates, and tie-down loops for securing the load in your ride. It’ll keep ice icy for four days at 90 degrees Fahrenheit, so you can stay awhile.
The tent has been pitched, all the gear has been stowed away. Now you deserve a beer. Coleman’s new growler holds several of them. If you don’t finish all 64 ounces of craft brew on the first night, this double -walled flagon maintains its chill for up to three days.
When it’s all packed up, the car-camping-friendly Venture looks more like a picnic basket than a grill. That simplicity belies its smart, versatile design. The wooden lid doubles as a cutting board that can be nestled snugly onto the base—which in turn doubles as a stash spot for the propane canister.
Reddit’s little mascot, Snoo, contains multitudes. The precious, ever-smiling alien hangs out at the top of hundreds of subreddits, mixing with the locals like a savvy politician. In r/trees, a community for marijuana enthusiasts, Snoo puffs a joint. In r/gonewild, Snoo poses for a selfie in a wig and lingerie. In r/Asceticism, Snoo dematerializes into the cyberether, its form the mere wisp of an outline.
Cheeky bugger. Indeed, Snoo’s existence has always been something of an inside joke. Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian doodled the creature in a notebook during a marketing class his senior year at the University of Virginia. Black and white with pops of red, it seemed conjured from pure whimsy: oval head, pom-pom ears, single antenna. Like a Teletubby, minus the space suit. When Reddit launched in 2005, the drawing served as a convenient icon for the site, which was then a place for sharing news links. (Advance Publications, which owns WIRED publisher Condé Nast, is now a Reddit shareholder.) At first, Ohanian wanted to call the site S’new, a marshmallow-mouthed contraction of “What’s new?” The tastier name Reddit prevailed; Snoo, more pleasingly spelled, lived on with the mascot.
As Reddit expanded and its user base splintered into tribes (subreddits), Snoo proved a fitting role model. “Snoo came to symbolize Reddit and a Reddit user,” Ohanian says, in that the icon happened to be particularly moldable. It’s a happy accident that Ohanian’s hurried sketch left Snoo colorless and genderless, a form onto which everyone could map themselves.
This creative canvas was, in some ways, illustrative of the early web, where nobody knew you were a dog. The closest thing to verification on Reddit, even now, is a confirmation that the email attached to your account is real. Anonymity is accepted, even encouraged. You can have multiple accounts, fake accounts, throwaways for posting the kinds of deep, dark musings that absolutely must not, under any circumstances, get traced back to the real you. (I have three usernames: one for lurking, one for reportage, and one for purposes I would never share in print.) Identities are fragmented; each version of you, a new Snoo.
There are some limits, especially now that Reddit has matured. You can’t harass or threaten other users, nor deploy Snoo to those ends. In fact, Snoo has several design constraints. When Reddit unveiled a new version of the site in April—its first refresh in a decade—the team canonized certain anatomical features: Snoo’s head “should always appear blank or neutral”; its eyes should be orange-red, hex #FF4500; it can’t have fingers; it should have ears (the better, perhaps, to hear, and thereby discourage, hate speech). The company also gave Snoo a more explicit purpose: to discover and explore humanity. (Following the redesign, r/trees and r/asceticism no longer feature a Snoo.)
This, it turns out, is a continuation of Snoo’s origin story. Ohanian says it was never just any alien. It’s from the future, a tiny time traveler here to observe our reality. As Ohanian explains, “It was a guarantee we weren’t going to fail. If we failed, Snoo wouldn’t be able to travel back to the present.”
Let’s parse that. There is a future, a distant one, in which Reddit still exists, in which sweet-faced creatures like Snoo merrily dwell. Certainly this is a very lovely thought. It is also a pompous and rather ingenious bit of teleology. All startup founders operate from a foundation of optimism—they’re going to change the world. But Ohanian does them one better. He built hope into his platform’s very mythology.
Nobody would mistake Reddit for a rainbowland of pure love. Trolls still yuck it up, and Snoo has seen some nasty things. But as the reputation of other social media plummets, with users turning against the algorithms that mine our every like and post, Reddit’s status as a messy myriad of supportive, mostly self-policed communities has stayed fairly constant. There is no pressure to curate a well-designed profile, to be the person Instagram or Facebook or Snapchat expects you to be. That’s what Snoo stands for. More space than substance, Snoo shows us another way to represent ourselves online: as shape-shifting cosmic weirdos, trying to find our place among the stars.
