Rants & Raves
Future Fun
Congratulations onWired 8.01, which must be the most comprehensive compendium of human perversion gone wild ever written. Either that, or I'm volunteering for the first one-way expedition to Mars, just to be on the safe side. I'm amazed nobody spotted an obvious killer app in all that cloning and genetic-engineering stuff: Move over, celebrity skin - here comes vat-grown celebrity meat! "Yeah, I love Carmen Elektra too ... do you want breast or leg?"
Federico Heinz
federico_heinz@yahoo.com
A few years back you published a specialWired issue, Scenarios. I read it cover to cover, and I always wishedWired would publish another one. I just received the January 2000 issue, and, after reading a few articles, I must commend you. This is the return ofScenarios I had looked forward to.
Michael Crehan
crehan@mindspring.com
Xenophobia
Browsing through your initial issue of the millennium, I was drawn in by the article on Nick Pugh and his Xeno III ("Ground Xeno," Wired 8.01, page 106). Good stuff. But be wary - didn't we see this in the designs of a young Gerald Wiegert in the 1970s?
Being a car designer in Detroit, I'll be the first to admit that it's an old-boy network here, with politics aplenty. But I don't think überman Pugh is the catalyst for the Cougar, the Cadillac EVO, or the recent leaner forms in car styling. When the mid-1980s saw smoother, rounded forms, was there one person to call upon? Probably not. But after a while, cars all began to look the same (and, to a large degree, still do). I don't mean to down-play Nick's originality or purity, but at the same time, when things change, it's not always due to one source. Styling, after all, is often just fashion.
Chet Wisniewski
wisniewski748@earthlink.net
He Shoots, He Scores!
I want to voice my appreciation for all the coverage you give to the commercialization of space ("Who Needs NASA?" Wired 8.01, page 118). I keep hoping that an Internet billionaire will turn out to have astronomical dreams and finance one of the first pushes back into the heavens - instead of buying basketball teams!
Richard Stiennon
stiennon@well.com
Some of the positive hype from the January issue reminded me of the 1950s, when Ford and GM had a touring cavalcade of cars of the future. Ford's model hovered and was to be guided by cables buried in the roadway. GM's was a turbine car that ran on anything, even peanut oil. Nick Pugh's Xeno III is very handsome, although not particularly cutting-edge or technologically advanced (witness the Chevy engine). More interesting is the hot-pod concept. Like Pugh, I anticipate the time when a shrug changes lanes and a thought turns on the radio.
Richard Garriott-Stejskal
rgstejskal@hubwest.com
Capital Punishment
I was distressed thatWired featured the likes of head-transplant neurosurgeon Robert White ("A Little Off the Top," Wired 8.01, page 194). Many reputable transplant surgeons have distanced themselves from White, in recognition of the view that some things just shouldn't be done.
White has tortured countless monkeys in the past to "perfect" his perverse craft. Tony Stark, in his bookKnife to the Heart, writes of one of White's experiments: "[The monkey] had woken up to discover its head attached to a body it did not recognize and over which it had no control. The poor beast was paralyzed from the neck down because it was impossible to join its spinal cord to the cord in the body of the donor. It couldn't even breathe unaided. From the monkey's perspective, it was perhaps fortunate that White didn't have the funds to take care of the animals for long. Once rejection took its toll and the monkeys' faces started to swell and bleed, they were killed. None lived longer than a week."
In my view, White is not a medical innovator - he is a monster. Hopefully he will fade into obscurity where he belongs, and we will look back on him as an aberration, an embarrassment to the legacy of the human species.
Alix Fano
Director, Campaign for Responsible Transplantation
alixfano@mindspring.com
Proper Protocol
I am counsel to the US House Committee on Banking, where we have obvious interests in encryption. Thank you so much for the article on IPv6 ("Breaking Protocol," Wired 7.12, page 344). I have been having a devil of a time coming up with something that explains the technology - succinctly - to interested representatives. Your piece fills the bill very nicely. The sidebars on the bits are especially useful.
Dick Peterson
waypeter@aol.com
Oceans Apart
I find it unbelievable that some researchers are seriously advocating developing methods to squelch hurricanes by preventing the transfer of heat from the ocean to the air ("Activate Cloud Shield! Zap a Twister!"Wired 8.01, page 212). Surely they realize that an important function of these storms is to dissipate excess heat. Consistently preventing the oceans from transferring heat to the atmosphere would almost certainly lead to global alterations in ocean currents. This is the kind of action that contributes to extinction events through elimination of important nutrient-cycling currents and initiation of worldwide sea-level elevation, disrupting shallow-water ecologies, flooding low-elevation terrestrial environments (the Eastern seaboard, for one), and raising ocean temperatures beyond manageable limits for many organisms.
Is it really such a good idea to protect New Orleans from a storm at the risk of later sacrificing all of the East Coast?
Andrew Heffron
smudge@coastalnet.com
Open Door Policy
After reading "Newer York, New York" (Wired 8.01, page 88), I can't help wondering what the first Microsoft Outlook virus of 2016 will do. Will it poison my food? Perhaps it will manipulate the kitchen and burn my meals, or close the door on me - forever.
Meanwhile, could you please ask Michael McDonough or Bruce Sterling if there is a Linux (or Mac or Amiga or Palm OS or BeOS) housing project in my future? I would feel quite uneasy buying a 1.0-version Microsoft house and would like to know if I will be left out in the cold waiting for release 1.11 (or whatever they call the working version).
César Còrcoles
chechar@airtel.net
Circular Reasoning
Consider the premise of Frank Tipler's concept the Omega Point: He believes life is crawling to a finite point in history ("Deus ex Silico," Wired 8.01, page 218). But the mathematical concept of infinity will not allow such a future. For example, in order for the Omega Point to arrive, we must calculate pi to its final decimal place, which cannot be done. Sorry, Tipler, the simple circle denies your faith.
Greg Nickisch
Springfield, Virginia
Undo
Enlightened: Texas Instruments' Digital Light Projection ("Seeing Digital," Wired 8.02, page 78) is not a component in the JVC ILA-12K projector; each was used in separate showings ofThe Phantom Menace. ... Pub Crawl: Understanding USA ("This Is Your Life,"Wired 8.02, page 80) was published by TED Conferences. ... Two See: Information on Clem Chambers' 2C stock market visualization package (New Money,Wired 8.02, page 202) is available at www.2c2c.com. ... Not-Com: Projects at the MIT Media Lab ("Model Tee," Wired 8.01, page 64) can be found online at www.media.mit.edu.
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