Return to Sender
Piano Key,
By Frank Baxter RE: The Naked Truth
Are we that transparent? One look at our April cover and you thought you could see right through us. Our more exacting readers accused us of using sex to sell a story and of practicing Neanderthal gender politics. We hear you. But the photo of actress Jenna Fischer wasn't entirely gratuitous. To illustrate the concept of radical transparency — companies exposing their practices, warts and all, to the world-a glued-on transparency that readers could lift to "undress" The Office's secretary made a certain sense. (Apologies to Redfin's Glenn Kelman for not asking him to pose.) Your criticism stings, but it makes you look, you know, evolved: As always, your standards are impeccably high. When you pick up Wired, you expect something that appeals to what's in your head, not what's in your pants. Which, we like to think, is mostly what you get.
Open for Business
The democratization of media through Web 2.0 technologies is forcing companies and individuals to look at themselves and the work they do in a new light ("The See-Through CEO," issue 15.04). It's forcing us all to have a healthier relationship with our customers, clients, and business partners. And at the end of the day, honesty and transparency are an important component of any relationship. Thanks for the inspiration; I've even started a blog on the topic.
Jeff Rohwer
Los Angeles, California
A Revelation
"The See-Through CEO" was, uh, revealing, but the layout is what really grabbed me. The wide margins for notes and the contextual highlighting in the main body made the text easy and intuitive to read. Ironically, the layout and presentation effectively communicate an interactive, bloglike feel much better than the online version, which offers only the standard hyperlinked endnotes.
Kevin Howard
Sacramento, California
Red Herring
"What's that, Playboy?" my partner asked when she saw the April cover. I explained, with some embarrassment, that I had not noticed the semi-transparent cover when I bought my copy. For a magazine that likes to view itself as mapping the future, your old-school sexism is deeply disappointing.
Richard Ingram
Toronto, Ontario
I'm Not Buying It
After 20 years in high tech trying to be taken seriously as a female with a brain, I don't find the image of a "professional" woman being stripped naked with a peekaboo cover amusing. I'm done pretending that I'm such a good sport and one of the guys and that it's just fine having images of women's bodies being used to sell whatever crap needs selling — like, say, a story about high-level managers and CEOs (almost all of them men) and their latest gimmick to get an edge on the competition.
Karen McWilliams
Livermore, California
Agri-Prop
The inclusion of Monsanto, number 21 in your Wired 40 list (issue 15.04), bothers me. You mention "frankencorn" but dismiss the impact of genetic modifications on our food supply. Please go to number 18, Netflix, and rent The Future of Food. A company that sues farmers whose crops have been pollinated by windblown seeds from its patented GM plants is truly unwired.
Guy Rollins
Wimberley, Texas
Vaporware
I don't want to be saddled with a monthly fee to pay for software that lives on the Internet just so "businesses can amass a trove of data" about me ("Desktop, R.I.P.," issue 15.04). I'll keep my desktop on life support rather than let it — and my privacy — vanish in the clouds.
__Judy Nollet
Eagan, Minnesota __
Silly Pictures
The photographs of people's faces as they play videogames ("Game Faces," issue 15.04) made me laugh deeply and gleefully, over and over again. Every time I look at the photo essay, it makes me smile.
Caroline Paquette
Excerpted from the blog Little Package
Creative Dissent
"The World Needs More Rebels Like Einstein" (Start, issue 15.04) brings me back to the 1960s, when I was teaching high school chemistry. I was torn between giving students free rein to pursue new challenges and making sure they would earn high scores on standardized tests.
John H. Woodburn
Amherst, Virginia
Windows Windfall?
"Blue Stages of Death" (Start, issue 15.04) made me wonder whether there's a developer out there responsible for the original blue screen of death who gets royalty payments every time an irritated Windows user views one.
Chris Roberts
Des Moines, Iowa
I'm Sensing a Little Pain ...
It was great to read about the flexibility of our brains ("Mixed Feelings," issue 15.04). But the idea of us having only five senses is out of date. The five senses idea is a hand-me-down from Aristotle. The number of senses is probably more like 21 — including light, color, sweet, salt, sour, bitter, touch, pain, proprioception, kinesthesia, blood oxygen content, cerebrospinal pH, plasma osmotic pressure, and lung inflation. You can then subdivide further by counting one sense as a specific cell type responding to a stimulus (inside your body or out) to get up to 33. Add to this the kind of neuroplasticity your article talks about, and whether our sense of such things as circadian rhythms can be counted as well, and it's clear that we're not so much experiencing the world in the traditional, ahem, sense as responding to a sensory soup that just as much defines the world as any "real" objects in it. How we think about our senses may be defined by our language (which, in turn, increasingly appears to be the mind's source code), and changing how we talk about them is the first step in feeling our way into a new world of sensory appreciation.
Viv Craske
Brighton, England
Stream of Conscience
Thank you for the information on safe2pee.org (Start, "The Best Google Maps Mashups," issue 15.04). When transgender people are acknowledged at all in the media, generally it's either to explain them to non-transfolks or to exploit them as freaks in some way. To see information of use to transfolks in a mainstream publication in a completely normal context is refreshing. Once again, Wired is ahead of the curve.
Jen Abrams
Brooklyn, New York
Speed Reader
Don't think I didn't notice the colors you used to design your package on bite-size culture ("Snack Attack," issue 15.03): fast food yellow and orange. I had the urge to rush through the articles about our short-attention-span society.
James Becktel
Indianapolis, Indiana
Long Live the LP!
I'm disgusted by the suggestion that the album is "dead" or disposable, that anything by a second- or third-rate band like Radiohead represents the peak of the format, and that the perfect CD is vanishingly rare ("Snack Attack: The Death of the Album," issue 15.03). If some random MP3 happens to be a more enjoyable listening experience than the Red Hot Chili Peppers' latest disc, then maybe that's because the Chili Peppers are not very good! As long as there are artists out there who aren't in it just to "move product," the album will live on. The only people who actually believe that the album is dead or disposable are technophiles who have no place talking about music at all.
Brian Wood
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Ears on the Sky
I enjoyed the "Shot Spotter" article (issue 15.04), about networks of hidden microphones that detect gunfire and alert police. Did you know that the technique of locating shots by sound dates back to World War I? Canadian troops used microphones to locate German artillery batteries so they could aim anti-battery fire. The folks in the digital signal processing labs in my department at Carleton University use similar principles to guide robotic mics and video cameras that turn toward whoever is speaking.
John W. Chinneck
Ottawa, Ontario
