Remixes: powerful, but kind of tricky. Make them (or just write about 'em) and your fans are delighted, but the watchdogs are peeved. Our Gorillaz article was exactly what one guy wanted - did we read his mind? Another griped, How dare we write about fan fiction without mentioning gay Hobbit adventures? Others just wanted to help, like the one who supplemented our remix timeline: Turns out early Protestant hymns were often set to drinking ballads. Speaking of songs of yore, one audiophile responded to our item on the lo-fi nature of modern music technology with a history lesson: "Few of the most musically influential recordings were made on the best equipment," he wrote. "The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's was recorded on Revox tape recorders with the equivalent of 30 to 40 kHz sampling rate and 10 to 11 bits of dynamic range!" Right. We knew that.
All Tomorrow's Plotlines
"Remix Planet" (issue 13.07) was fascinating and exciting. Digital tools democratize the creative process, and I'm all for that. Art is too important to be for artists only. But William Gibson's comment "The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today" makes me wonder: From what will future generations sample?
Mike Zellers
Amherst, Ohio
As an artist and writer, I recoil at the idea that someone else might remix my ideas and hard work into something new. But then I realized that in my job -�as a researcher for an art museum -�I rely almost entirely on remixing culture; I had just never thought about it that way before. It's different with my own work. I started writing a fiction story as a weblog but then took it offline to prevent anyone from stealing my idea, even though it was inspired by someone else's book. I consider my paintings to be mine, even though their subjects are by no means unique.
We have a copy-and-paste, not cut-and-paste, culture, since every use of an idea creates a duplicate in ways far easier than the pre-Xerox, pre-scanner, and pre-Internet lawmakers could have possibly imagined.
Georgina Bath
Baltimore, Maryland
Great articles, but one classic remix got left out: watching The Wizard of Oz while listening to Dark Side of the Moon. Back before digital, it took some work coordinating the turntable and VHS machine (especially if any recreational pharmaceuticals were involved), but the result was pure slacker bliss.
Ray Weikal
Iowa City, Iowa
If You Steal, Steal From the Best
Dear William Gibson:
Regarding your article "God's Little Toys" (issue 13.07): Now that we're past terms such as "appropriation" and "borrowing," I'd like to let you know that I was so taken by the world of steam computing in your novel The Difference Engine that I've used some of its plot elements and its central character in a steam-powered adventure novel with Samuel Clemens, set in the 1860s in Chicago and on the Mississippi River. I'm sure you won't mind. After all, "who owns the words?"
Most mash-up artists wouldn't bother to notify the material's originator, origination being such an archaic, meaningless term, but I decided to buck the trend. Thanks for the great characters and story line! My publisher is stoked!
__Karl Moeller
Tucson, Arizona __
The Osprey Under Fire
There are many seemingly insurmountable problems inherent in the Osprey's design ("Saving the Pentagon's Killer Chopper-Plane," issue 13.07). The aircraft is unarmed. When landing in sand or dirt, so much debris is kicked up that it is difficult for troops to approach or exit the craft. It is also difficult for the pilots to see anything through the dust storm. An enemy with a cheap, rocket-propelled grenade and a lucky shot can take down a helicopter single-handedly (Blackhawks in Somalia, Apaches in Iraq, Chinooks in Afghanistan). Shouldn't a helicopter replacement have some sort of protection against rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire?
Too many of these designs were made with the cold war scenario of fighting Soviets in Europe. A new world requires new ideas.
Mike McGill
Woodland Hills, California�
Burning Down the House
While reading "The Dotcom King and the Rooftop Solar Revolution" (issue 13.07), I couldn't help but think that in the future, it will be a bummer to rush up to the roof and drag the burning corpse out of the mirror system before it sets the house on fire. Is it really a good idea to mount objects capable of concentrating enough solar power to melt a camera onto the roof of every house in America? Forget worrying about the birds; I do not think I am going to feel entirely safe in an airplane with these dotting the landscape.
Christian Spicher Hart
Scottsdale, Arizona
This One's for the Laddies
"75 of the Summer's Best Gadgets," "The Best Phone Sex Ever," "The Pentagon's Killer Chopper-Plane," "Women, Sex, and the Science of Orgasm" (issue 13.07): We remember subscribing to Wired, not Maxim. What happened to all the insightful and intelligent articles we used to read? Perhaps you should stop and ask why 75 percent of your readers are male rather than just shamelessly pandering to them.
Tim Lovelock and Eva Lane
New York, New York
"The Coming Boom" (issue 13.07) is great news about great work, but sexual satisfaction and desire are two completely different animals. A woman's ability to be satisfied does not guarantee she'll take a step to seek that satisfaction as much as a man would. How many men would take Viagra and cuddle up with a book? Shucks, what do I know: I'm just a man.
Randy D. Gananathan
Peachtree City, Georgia
That's a Lot of Solar Panels
Like many evangelical hydrogenists, General Motors' Larry Burns has clearly drunk the Kool-Aid (Start, Hotseat, issue 13.07). Without addressing the myriad technical difficulties of hydrogen, one could simply look at the energy required to make hydrogen from nonfossil sources. GM's latest Sequel fuel cell vehicle guzzles 8 kilograms of hydrogen to travel 300 miles. Most commercial electrolyzers require at least 60 kilowatt-hours of electricity to produce and compress 1 kilogram of hydrogen. This means GM's cutting-edge fuel cell vehicle needs 1.6 kWh of electricity to travel 1�mile. That's a lot of solar panels. By comparison, GM's EV1 could travel a mile on 0.2 kWh.
A plug-in hybrid would use electricity and batteries for what they excel at but also allow unlimited range and quick refueling using the gasoline infrastructure. Plug-in hybrid technology can get us 90 percent of the way there and do it decades ahead of the hydrogen economy.
Greg Hanssen
Irvine, California
Hi-Fi vs. Lowbrow
Alec Hanley Bemis' appraisal of how sound quality breaks down ("The Digital Devolution," Play, issue 13.07) is misleadingly incomplete and totally unnecessary. The general public cares nothing of fidelity, proven by the fact they once preferred cassettes over vinyl, and now MP3s over CDs. Less than one-tenth of 1 percent have ever owned a true audiophile turntable and currently less than 1 percent of the public own any modern audiophile equipment or buy DVD audio.
The only way for digital to not "devolve" is to offer pure audio in one universal format. That is unlikely to happen, though, thanks to greed from the major companies, piracy from criminals, and all of you assholes out there still illegally downloading 3 billion songs a month.
Keith "Plex" Barnhart
Roswell, Georgia
Undo
Labels for the left and right nacelles were reversed in "The V-22 Osprey: A Crash Course" (issue 13.07).
