Redesign Brings (Some) Gmail Smarts to Yahoo Mail

Yahoo’s new CEO, Marissa Mayer, is bringing a bit of her old employer’s famous design simplicity to Yahoo’s most-used service, Yahoo Mail.

The revamped Yahoo Mail web interface bears more than a passing resemblance to Gmail and is now joined by dedicated mobile apps for iOS and Windows 8, as well as a redesigned Android app.

If you’re not seeing the new web version just yet, Mayer says the new version will be rolling out “over the next few days.” You can grab the iOS, Android and Windows 8 apps from their respective stores. (Note that the iOS app is iPhone/iPod touch only.)

The revamped Yahoo Mail is unlikely to bring home any prizes for originality, taking most of its design cues from Gmail, but it does offer a considerably cleaner interface across web and mobile apps. Mayer says the focus of the redesign was on speed and claims that “getting through your e-mails is faster than ever before.”

The changes are primarily cosmetic; the underlying functionality of Yahoo Mail remains largely the same. That said, Yahoo Mail has dispensed with some of its more annoying design decisions — for example, when you login you’ll now land in your inbox rather than being dumped on an intro page. The new look also cuts down on the overall clutter of the web-based interface and reduces the number of clicks it takes to perform common tasks.

Unfortunately the free version of Yahoo Mail still lacks several features you’ll find in competitors like Gmail or Outlook.com, most notably POP/IMAP access (for desktop mail clients) and automatic e-mail forwarding. If you need POP/IMAP access (for example, to use your mobile device’s built-in mail client) or ever want to automatically forward your mail to another account you’ll need to sign up for Yahoo Mail Plus, which runs $20 per year. (If you know what you’re doing you can use a proxy service to access Yahoo’s free version via IMAP.)

Existing Yahoo Mail users may benefit from the redesigned interface and new mobile apps, but cosmetic changes alone are unlikely to win many converts from Gmail or Outlook.com. Coming from Google, Mayer undoubtedly knows that Yahoo Mail still can’t compete with Gmail on power user features, but she concludes her post with the promise that the revamped look of Yahoo Mail is “just the beginning.”

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U.S. Spies See Superhumans, Instant Cities by 2030

3-D printed organs. Brain chips providing superhuman abilities. Megacities, built from scratch. The U.S. intelligence community is taking a look at the world of 2030. And it is very, very sci-fi.

Every four or five years, the futurists at the National Intelligence Council take a stab at forecasting what the globe will be like two decades hence; the idea is to give some long-term, strategic guidance to the folks shaping America’s security and economic policies. (Full disclosure: I was once brought in as a consultant to evaluate one of the NIC’s interim reports.) On Monday, the Council released its newest findings, Global Trends 2030. Many of the prognostications are rather unsurprising: rising tides, a bigger data cloud, an aging population, and, of course, more drones. But tucked into the predictable predictions are some rather eye-opening assertions. Especially in the medical realm.

We’ve seen experimental prosthetics in recent years that are connected to the human neurological system. The Council says the link between man and machine is about to get way more cyborg-like. “As replacement limb technology advances, people may choose to enhance their physical selves as they do with cosmetic surgery today. Future retinal eye implants could enable night vision, and neuro-enhancements could provide superior memory recall or speed of thought,” the Council writes. “Brain-machine interfaces could provide ‘superhuman’ abilities, enhancing strength and speed, as well as providing functions not previously available.”

And if the machines can’t be embedded into the person, the person may embed himself in the robot. “Augmented reality systems can provide enhanced experiences of real-world situations. Combined with advances in robotics, avatars could provide feedback in the form of sensors providing touch and smell as well as aural and visual information to the operator,” the report adds. There’s no word about whether you’ll have to paint yourself blue to enjoy the benefits of this tech.

The Council’s futurists are less definitive about 3-D printing and other direct digital manufacturing processes. On one hand, they say that any changes brought about by these new ways of making things could be “relatively slow.” On the other, they rip a page out of Wired, comparing the emerging era of digital manufacturing to the “early days of personal computers and the internet.” Today, the machines may only be able to make simple objects. Tomorrow, that won’t be the case. And that shift will change not only manufacturing and electronics — but people, as well.

“By 2030, manufacturers may be able to combine some electrical components (such as electrical circuits, antennae, batteries, and memory) with structural components in one build, but integration with printed electronics manufacturing equipment will be necessary,” the Council writes. “Though printing of arteries or simple organs may be possible by 2030, bioprinting of complex organs will require significant technological breakthroughs.”

But not all of these biological developments will be good things, the Council notes. “Advances in synthetic biology also have the potential to be a double-edged sword and become a source of lethal weaponry accessible to do-it-yourself biologists or biohackers,” according to the report. Biology is becoming more and more like the open source software community, with “open-access repository of standardized and interchangeable building block or ‘biobrick’ biological parts that researchers can use” — for good or for bad.  ”This will be particularly true as technology becomes more accessible on a global basis and, as a result, makes it harder to track, regulate, or mitigate bioterror if not ‘bioerror.’”

Some of the Council’s predictions may give a few of Washington’s more sensitive politicians a rash. Although the Council does allow for the possibility of a “decisive re-assertion of U.S. power,” the futurists seem pretty well convinced that America is, relatively speaking, on the decline and that China is on the ascent. In fact, the Council believes nation-states in general are losing their oomph, in favor of “megacities [that will] flourish and take the lead in confronting global challenges.” And we’re not necessarily talking New York or Beijing here; some of these megacities could be somehow “built from scratch.”

Unlike some Congressmen, the Council takes climate change as a given. Unlike many in the environmental movement, the futurists believe that the discovery of cheap ways to harvest natural gas are going to relegate renewables to bit-player status in the energy game.

But most of the findings are apolitical bets on which tech will leap out the furthest over the next 17 years. People can check back in 2030 to see if the intelligence agencies are right — that is, if you still call the biomodded cyborgs roaming the planet people.

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New Crowdfunding Site Seeks to Protect Backers of Industrial Design

Entrepreneur Jamie Siminoff wants to build more credibility into crowdfunding — so he’s launching a new platform that takes responsibility for ensuring the viability of new projects.

The crowdfunding process, pioneered by sites like Kickstarter, has had its share of huge successes, as well as failures. The problem, says Siminoff, is that when a venture fails, the funders are left holding the bag. That’s all well and good if you were investing in an artist’s crazy project. It’s much more of a problem if you thought you were pre-ordering a nearly finished gadget.

The biggest culprit for these kinds of issues are physical products. Witness the anger unleashed when Kickstarter darling Pebble announced a further delay alongside underwhelming color choices.

This kind of issue is why Kickstarter recently made some changes, undertaking a combination of education and rule revision. They reminded consumers that Kickstarter is not a store while requiring that all projects disclose risks and challenges, as well as forbidding renderings and concept videos in hardware products.

Siminoff’s answer is Christie Street, a crowdfunding site devoted exclusively to physical products. The promise of Christie Street is that it will vet the projects that it launches carefully, and provide guarantees of progress along the way. The idea is that these protections will make consumers feel safer about the products they’re backing. “We built something that we felt we needed,” he says.

Christie Street, named for the New Jersey road where Edison’s workshop was located, will require that all funders go through an auditing process before they are allowed to go live. Siminoff says that the idea will be to check for basic viability, a kind of sanity test.

“You look at the chips they say they want to use, the size of components that will need to fit in, and so on,” he says, “You check that things conform to what’s available on the market.” From there, they also perform third-party audits of the places where the product will be manufactured, and look at things like production cost and likely shipping time, to ensure that all of this seems realistic.

It’s an all-or-nothing audit. Either the new project meets Christie Street’s approval or it doesn’t. “Our feeling is that the customer that’s buying doesn’t have the sophistication to make the right decision [about whether a design's production targets are reliable],” says Siminoff, “The only way is create a place where you can trust to buy.”

Even after the initial approval, Christie Street stays involved in the project. Successfully funded projects get their money in stages, with Christie Street holding the rest in escrow. Inventors get one-third of the money on funding, one-third of the money once they have a production-ready prototype, and the final one-third when they have a golden prototype, which means they are ready for full manufacturing.

If at any time along the way the project fails, Christie Street will can the project and refund the remaining money to investors.

What constitutes failure? Siminoff ticks off four conditions.

First, the inventor could for whatever reason announce that they couldn’t finish.

Second, if the project ends up more than six months late. “This forces people to be more careful with their delivery dates,” says Siminoff.

Third, if the product falls short of what was promised. “If the pre-production sample is more than 15 percent worse than what was promised, we will not allowed you to manufacture the product,” says Siminoff. (For example, if you promised me 512GB and only delivered 256.)

Last, says Siminoff there are other nuances that they’ll have to work out as the site develops. For example, if a product ends up requiring significant redesign, then Christie Street might end up withholding funds. “Design is a tougher one to quantify,” he says, “but it’s important that the design overall fits what was promised to the customer.”

For the extra cautious, Christie Street goes even further than the refund of remaining money. For 10 percent of their pledge value, backers can insure their entire pledge. If the project goes wrong they’ll get all of it back. Combine that with a pledge from inventors that the product will retail for at least 10 percent more than the pledge amount, and you can either take a 10 percent discount for some additional risk or pay full retail, with a money-back guarantee.

In effect, Christie Street is navigating a space between crowfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which expect backers to handle a lot of their own due diligence while allowing the inventors to be entrepreneurs, and crowdsourcing design sites like Quirky, which handles all of the business elements in-house.

Christie Street is an effort at drawing the lines of trust in a new way, one tied directly to the realities of post-industrial product design. Rather than a blanket ban on renderings and early designs, or a Wild West ‘anything goes’ approach, they instead seeks to tame the parts where production can go really wrong, in the devilish details of prototyping and manufacturing. It leaves questions of whether or not the thing is cool to the wisdom of the crowds, while taking on the question of whether or not the thing is possible.

This is obviously a lot more intervention between middleman and inventor than you’d see on a site like Indigegogo or Kickstarter. Siminoff says that they can still take the same 5 percent cut as their competitors because physical products tend to be involved higher dollar-value projects from the start. “If all goes well, we’ll be doing 10 to 15 live projects a months a year from now,” he says, “We think we can be profitable in the product world.”

“We’re not trying to make it where inventors are just be a name on a product,” says Siminoff, “We still want them to be entrepreneur and build this thing. We just want to make sure that they don’t fail in a way that hurts the customer.”

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15 Agonizing Automotive Atrocities

Yugo.

There, we got it out of the way. When you read the headline, of course an image of a tiny Cold War-era hatchback popped into your head. We bet you also shuddered at the thought of a Pontiac Aztek.

We love to poke fun at failure, and no failure made a punchline better than the Yugo. We found that out while talking with Jason Vuic, author of The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. Vuic was aware that the Yugo fell far short of being a good car, but what truly amazed him was how many people who had never driven a Yugo knew just how bad it was. In failure, it became a wild viral marketing success.

Not all cars rose to level of infamy embodied by the Yugo. To paraphrase Shakespeare, some cars were born awful while others had awfulness thrust upon them. Some automotive atrocities were the result of automakers trying something new and falling far short of the mark, while other cars failed from a lack of effort. Still others were perfectly adequate cars but came to represent a regrettable moment in time.

Here we display all three kinds of auto-trocities, highlighting famous failures and digging deep to dredge up detritus better off forgotten. Yes, we know there are many, many more automotive atrocities and this list only scratches the surface of the heap. You’ll have a chance to list your favorite heaps tomorrow, so stay tuned.

Above: Peel Trident 1965-1966

Famous from appearances on Top Gear and Monster Garage, the Peel Trident was a “shopping car” built on the Isle of Man. Along with the bubblelicious BMW Isetta and the fiberglass Reliant Robin, the Trident was ridiculed for its small size and three wheels.

Photo: Casaflamingo/Flickr

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YouTube Makeover Offers Larger Videos

After months of experimenting with YouTube’s interface and serving limited trials to willing users, Google has launched a new look for the web’s biggest video-sharing site.

The new YouTube is reminiscent of Flickr’s redesign earlier this year — putting the content, in this case the videos, front and center. The new YouTube offers larger videos closer to the top of the page; the title is now below the video, just above the various sharing options.

The left of the page is home to YouTube’s new “Guide,” a list of all the YouTube channels you’re subscribed to, along with your history and video playlists. The YouTube Guide now comes with you across devices, offering up new videos and suggestions on everything from Android phones to Google TV.

The other notable change is that the page is no longer centered, it’s aligned to the left edge of the browser window. The result is a slightly less cluttered page with more emphasis on the video, though the dead space to the right looks a bit strange if you’ve got a large monitor.

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2012 Was the Year of the Drone in Afghanistan

The soldiers and marines are packing their bags. The pilots are sitting on the tarmac. But the armed robotic planes are busier than they’ve ever been: revised U.S. military statistics show a much, much larger drone war in Afghanistan than anyone suspected.

Last month, military stats revealed that the U.S. had launched some 333 drone strikes in Afghanistan thus far in 2012. That made Afghanistan the epicenter of U.S. drone attacks — not Pakistan, not Yemen, not Somalia. But it turns out those stats were off, according to revised ones released by the Air Force on Thursday morning. There have actually been 447 drone strikes in Afghanistan this year. That means drone strikes represent 11.5 percent of the entire air war — up from about 5 percent last year.

Never before in Afghanistan have there been so many drone strikes. For the past three years, the strikes have never topped 300 annually, even during the height of the surge. Never mind 2014, when U.S. troops are supposed to take a diminished role in the war and focus largely on counterterrorism. Afghanistan’s past year, heavy on insurgent-hunting robots, shows that the war’s future has already been on display.

It’s not just that the drone war in Afghanistan is so big. It’s that the broader air war is winding down. As the chart above shows, the Air Force flew fewer intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions in 2012 than it did in 2011, although the number of spy missions in 2012 is still greater than in 2010 or 2009. This year has seen over 1,000 fewer aerial attacks, by manned and remotely piloted aircraft alike, than there were during the surge years of 2010 and 2011. Total sorties are even lower than their 2009 levels. The only exception to the downward slope: drone strikes.

That suggests a pattern that may endure through the next two years of troop reductions. As the humans leave, the robots take up the slack.

The U.S. and Afghanistan have begun negotiations on what a residual troop presence is supposed to look like. So far, it’s believed that the Pentagon wants to leave behind between 5,000 and 10,000 troops, to continue to train the Afghan military, hunt terrorists and generally ensure Afghanistan doesn’t collapse. And before the New Year, Gen. John Allen, the outgoing commander of the war, is supposed to recommend to President Obama how fast next year’s troop drawdowns ought to proceed. Pentagon officials insist nothing’s etched in stone.

But we might not have to wait for 2014 to see the future of the Afghanistan war. “We may well see the development of counterterrorism become more important as time goes on,” Allen told the Senate last year. This year proved Allen wasn’t blowing smoke. U.S. special operations forces underwent a major command overhaul and now operate out of a private base run by the company formerly known as Blackwater. Super-sizing the drone war is fully in line with that broader shift. This may have been the year of the drone in Afghanistan, but the drones aren’t going home any time soon.

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240-Million-Year-Old Fossils Came From First Dinosaur ... Maybe

By Michael Balter, ScienceNOW

A team of paleontologists thinks it may have identified the earliest known dinosaur—a creature no bigger than a Labrador retriever that lived about 243 million years ago. That’s at least 10 million years earlier than the oldest known dinos and could change researchers’ views of how they evolved. But some scientists, including the study’s authors, caution that the fossils could instead represent a close dino relative.

Tracing back the earliest dinosaurs has not been easy. Fossils that old tend to be fragmentary, and researchers don’t always agree about their evolutionary pedigree. Paleontologists do agree, however, that pint-sized specimens found in Argentina and dated to 230 million years ago—with names like Eoraptor and Eodromaeus—are true dinosaurs. And in 2010, a team led by Sterling Nesbitt, a paleontologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, reported in Nature the discovery of a close dinosaur relative in Tanzania’s Manda Beds, a geological formation dated to between about 242 million and 245 million years ago. That specimen, called Asilisaurus, is not a dinosaur, but belongs to a so-called “sister taxon”—that is, the closest it can be to a dinosaur without actually being one.

That made Nesbitt and his colleagues take a closer look at what else has been found in the Manda Beds. One set of fossils, including an arm bone and several vertebrae, had been discovered in the 1930s and studied for decades by Alan Charig, a famed paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum. Before he died in 1997, Charig named the specimens Nyasasaurus, but he never published his conclusions about whether it was a dinosaur.

For the new study, which also includes Nyasasaurus fossils housed in the South African Museum in Cape Town, Nesbitt’s team carried out a systematic comparison of the bones with those of other dinosaurs and their relatives. The researchers, who report their findings today in Biology Letters, find a number of features characteristic of true dinos. For example, Nyasasaurus has a broad crest of bone along the edge of its upper arm, to which the animal’s chest muscles would have attached; this crest appears to extend more than 30% of the bone’s length, a telltale dino feature. Nyasasaurus also has three vertebrae in its sacrum, the part of the spine that is attached to the pelvis, whereas dino ancestors only had two. And a microscopic study of the arm bone, carried out by team member Sarah Werning of the University of California, Berkeley, shows that it had grown very rapidly during the animal’s development, also typical of dinosaurs as well as later mammals and birds.

Nesbitt says that this combination of characteristics, rather than any one taken alone, makes a strong case that Nyasasaurus was “either a dinosaur or the closest relative.” Moreover, by the time early dinosaurs such as Eoraptor and Eodromaeus show up in Argentina at least 10 million years later, they already represent diverse groups that must have been evolving for millions of years. That means that dinosaur evolution must have begun a considerable time before that, Nesbitt says. And it makes Nyasasaurus a good candidate for an early dino, especially as a very close dinosaur relative, Asilisaurus, was also living in the Manda Beds some 243 million years ago.

This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.

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Satellite Could Find Hidden Archaeological Sites by Remote Sensing

SAN FRANCISCO – Light reflected by the Amazon rainforest’s vegetation could help an orbiting satellite find the elusive fertile patches of soil known as terra preta — or ‘black earth’ — that mark archaeological sites where pre-Columbian populations settled.

Finding these rich patches of earth has been a challenge. They’re sprinkled throughout the enormous Amazon basin, hidden beneath an impenetrable forest, and embedded in a land with few roads.

So a team of scientists is testing whether satellite measurements of the light reflected by tree canopies could help researchers panning for black soil gold, a team of scientists reported here Dec. 3 at the American Geophysical Union conference.

The black earth patches, otherwise invisible from above, mark the locations of pre-Columbian archaeological sites, remnants of a civilization that lived in the Amazon for thousands of years. Wherever settlements sprang up, decades of discarded fish and animal bones, charcoal and other waste transformed the typically yellow and nutrient-poor Amazonian soil into nuggets of black gold.

“They’re super enriched with artifacts, charcoal – it’s like a giant compost,” paleoecologist Crystal McMichael of the University of New Hampshire said here Dec. 3 at the American Geophysical Union conference, where she presented the work. The sites vary in age from about 500 years to more than 2,000 years old. “They’ve retained nutrients for that long, which is incredible,” she says.

McMichael and her colleagues studied whether remote sensing could be used to help find archaeological sites. First, they assembled a database of known black earth and typical soil sites – about 2,900 of them — illustrated by the black and white circles in the map.

Then, they looked at data returned by the Hyperion spectrometer, which rides aboard the Earth-orbiting satellite EO-1, run by NASA and the USGS.

Hyperion scans tree canopies at a range of wavelengths [scans outlined in red on the map]. The team sorted through about 1,600 scanned areas, removing those blocked by clouds or with improper location tags. Then, they found the scans that contained patches of known black and normal soils. In those data, they saw differences in the vegetation reflectance – five wavelengths, in particular, were diagnostic of the different soil types.

“You have a different set of species that grow on those super-enriched soils as compared to the ones that grow on those crappy soils,” McMichael said. “You can use it to map species distributions or target archaeological sites.”

Next, McMichael and colleagues hope to confirm the result using data from other orbiters, and test their ability to find previously unknown patches of black earth. If confirmed, remote spectral imaging could help archaeologists find these remnants of an ancient civilization.

“There’s no stone, there’s no metal,” McMichael says. “Basically all that’s left of those people are earthen structures and these modified soils.”

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Induction Charging Comes to Public Transit

Say goodbye to catenary wires. Utah State University has unveiled an electric bus that charges through induction, topping off its batteries whenever it stops to pick up passengers.

Designed by USU’s Wireless Power Transfer team and the Utah Science Technology and Research initiative’s Advanced Transportation Institute, the prototype Aggie Bus is already on the road. It uses the same wireless charging principle as an electric toothbrush or a wireless smartphone charger, except optimized for a massive public-transit vehicle.

As in all modern inductive-charging setups, a transformer is “split” between the bus and a charge plate under the bus stop. When the bus drives over the charging plate, current flows with no physical contact required. Engineers at USU designed their system so that the Aggie Bus can be misaligned up to 6 inches from the charge plate and still get 25kW of power and 90 percent efficiency from the power grid to the battery.

Because of the fixed routes they run and frequent stops they make, induction charging is ideal for buses. Instead of charging up a massive battery overnight before a route, the Aggie Bus features a smaller battery setup that recharges every time the bus reaches a predetermined stop. The smaller batteries free up interior space, reduce downtime and lower battery costs — although induction plates must be added to bus stops.

Though the Aggie Bus is a working prototype, USU is working with Wireless Advanced Vehicle Electrification (WAVE) — a company spun-out from USU — in order to bring a commercialized bus to market. In mid-2013, WAVE and the Utah Transit Authority are planning to unveil a 40-foot induction-charged transit bus on the USU campus that’s capable of taking a 50kW charge. The project was funded by USU, who will purchase the bus, and a $2.7 million grant from the Federal Transit Administration.

Charging a bus through induction may be a new idea in the U.S., but bus routes with similar wireless charging systems have been in place in Torino, Italy, since 2003 and Utrecht, the Netherlands, since 2010. Ideally, induction charging would be used in city centers to replace noisy, smoky diesel buses. It would also work on already electrified routes, allowing cities to take down unsightly hanging catenary wires.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Dec. 2

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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Geek Culture's 26 Most Awesome Female Ass-Kickers

Angelina Jolie extends her reputation as filmdom’s most compelling ass-kicker, Female Division, when Salt opens Friday. Midway through a summer freighted with testosterone, Jolie’s lithe Agent Salt is a potent reminder of the power of feminine fighters.

A minority presence in sci-fi and action realms even in 2010, women warriors remain the exception to the guy-centric rule in film, TV, videogames and comic books. But that’s changing, according to Action Flick Chick blogger Katrina Hill, who moderates the "Where Are the Action Chicks?" panel Friday at San Diego’s Comic-Con International.

"Compare the original Predator to this summer’s Predators," she said in an e-mail interview with Wired.com. "The original film was a complete boy’s club, with the only woman in the movie being a hostage. Today, Predators has a kick-ass chick mixed in as an equal amongst these other badass men. So there are steps being taken in the right direction. It just takes time."

The rise of the female fighter will be addressed at no fewer than three other female-dominated panels at this year’s Comic-Con (Thursday’s “Divas and Golden Lassoes: The LGBT Obsession with Super Heroines” and Friday’s “Girls Gone Genre: Movies, TV, Comics, Web” and “Women Who Kick Ass: A New Generation of Heroines,” which features Fringe’s Anna Torv and V’s Elizabeth Mitchell.)

Here’s a look at 26 sexy-fierce female ass-kickers who’ve relied on biceps and brains to periodically kick-start geek culture.

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Modified Pinball Machine Creates Chaotic Lithographs

Bored of the standard printing process, artist Sam van Doorn has created STYN, a playfully chaotic design tool made from lithographic ink and a pinball machine.

The idea struck van Doorn while he was printing off a poster. “I realized the printer did exactly what I told it to,” van Doorn told Wired. “What would roll out of the printer would be predictable; every program and machine has its own aesthetic, which is easily forgotten when working as a graphic designer. Everything was too predictable, I wanted to be surprised.”

Van Doorn wanted to create a design tool that combined the control of printing with an element of chaos. The answer dropped into his living room when a roommate persuaded him to adopt an old pinball machine their friend was throwing out. “My roommate convinced me to pick up the machine and use it as a decoration in our home. So I did. We fixed it up, and while playing on it I realized that it had all the elements I was looking for; control, chaos and a load of fun.”

The prints are made on a poster that is placed under the pinball machine’s flippers. It has a grid printed on it outlining the field in which a 26mm ball, covered in ink used for lithography printing, will move. By playing the machine, the balls leave behind a trace of their path, creating an unpredictable pattern.

It took van Doorn hours of research to create the right ink mix to make sure the ball retained the ink for as long as possible, without making it too sticky to move.

“The challenge was to get the right paper and ink for the project, as well as the right rubbers to let the ball have a good bounce. The ball has to be able to move smoothly across the surface of the machine, to create a good game environment — the project wouldn’t be interesting if the machine wasn’t fun to play.

“If the ink was too thick, the ball would stick to the paper. But if the ink was to smooth, it would simply slide off the ball. The paper had to be smooth for the ball to create good patterns, but not too smooth so it would lose grip.”

After much trial and error, van Doorn was able to find a balance that allowed a single ball to be played with for hours and still leave a pattern. The resulting experience of play and print is an engrossing one.

“I underestimated the attraction of a pinball machine. Once people started playing they were dancing behind the machine to keep the ball in control, completely focusing on the game. Everybody wanted to play, not just for a print but for the fun of the game.”

Such is STYN’s design, that prints betray those players who struggle to keep the ball in play. Van Doorn was surprised to find the players to emerge with the best prints during the interactive exhibition were the 40 to 60-year-old men. “Man they could play that machine like I never could. After years of experience in pinball, damn they made that ball fly.”

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A Step Toward a Universal Cancer Blood Test

By Jocelyn Kaiser, ScienceNOW

People usually find out that they have cancer after developing symptoms or through a screening test such as a mammogram—signs that may appear only after the cancer has grown or spread so much that it can’t be cured. But what if you could find out from a simple, highly accurate blood test that you had an incipient tumor? By sequencing the abnormal DNA that a tumor releases into a person’s bloodstream, researchers are now one step closer to a universal cancer test. Although the technique is now only sensitive enough to detect advanced cancers, that may be a matter of money: As sequencing costs decrease, the developers of the method say, the test could eventually pick up early tumors as well.

The new work is part of a wave of research on using either cells shed into the blood by tumors or free-floating tumor DNA in blood to track the growth and spread of tumors and tailor treatments. The free tumor DNA tests generally rely on looking for known alterations in cancer genes to distinguish cancerous DNA from normal DNA. Seeking a way to detect tumor DNA without knowing its genetic makeup beforehand, postdoctoral researcher Rebecca Leary and others in the labs of Victor Velculescu and Luis Diaz at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, and collaborators at other institutions took advantage of an observation they and others have made: No matter the type of cancer, tumor cells almost invariably have substantially altered chromosomes, such as swapped pieces and extra copies of certain genes. This suggests that a test that could detect any chromosomal abnormalities in a person’s blood could serve as a general test for cancer.

Now, the researchers have shown that their idea has promise. First, they isolated the free DNA in blood samples from 10 people with advanced colon or breast cancer. Then, using next-generation DNA sequencing methods, they read the entire genome of the DNA in the blood. (The approach was similar to a new test that can detect Down syndrome in a fetus from a pregnant woman’s blood sample by looking for just an extra copy of chromosome 21.) The cancer patients all had DNA with chromosomal alterations in their blood, whereas none of 10 healthy controls tested positive, according to the team’s report today in Science Translational Medicine.

“There are multiple uses of this approach,” Velculescu says. His group initially hopes to track whether a patient’s tumor is responding to treatment or regrows after surgery. The test could also be used to decide what drug a patient should get without biopsying her tumor—in some patients, the Hopkins team detected extra copies of two genes known to drive cancer, ERBB2 and CDK6, which can be targeted with existing drugs.

The test isn’t that cheap or quick at the moment: Each of the 10 patients’ tests in the study cost several thousand dollars just for sequencing and took a month, including the time for analysis. And early detection is still a ways off. The technique has to sift through large amounts of DNA from normal cells that is also floating in blood to find tumor-associated sequences; the portion of DNA in the cancer patients’ blood that came from tumors ranged from 47.9% to as low as 1.4%. The test might have to work on blood samples with less than 0.1% tumor DNA to detect small, curable tumors, the researchers suggest. But that is just a matter of doing more sequencing, Velculescu says. And as sequencing costs continue to drop, “in the very near future, this could end up being extremely cheap,” he adds.

“The approach has tremendous promise and, should the sequencing strategy become economical, it could have important applications in early cancer detection,” says Daniel Haber of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who works on using circulating tumor cells to detect and monitor cancer.

Carlos Caldas of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute, who, like the Hopkins group, is working on sequencing free tumor DNA in blood, says the new study is the latest showing “that circulating tumor DNA is going to have a great future in all aspects of cancer management. … This is an exploding field.” He thinks such tests could reach the clinic within 5 to 10 years.

This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.

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Beyond Iron Dome: Israel Preps New Anti-Missiles, Eyes Lasers

Israel just proved that its new Iron Dome system can repel Hamas’ short-range rockets and missiles. The bad news: Those weapons are nothing compared to the more advanced missiles that Hezbollah and Iran can throw at Israel, which would surely overwhelm Iron Dome. That’s why Israel, and America, are already looking into the missile defense systems that come after Iron Dome — including ones that rely on lasers.

The Israelis can justly say their system worked better than American and Israeli skeptics (and Hamas) anticipated. Five Iron Dome batteries destroyed some 421 Qassam rockets and Iranian-made Fajr-5 missiles launched from Gaza, for an interception rate of between 80 and 90 percent. (Hamas fired over 1,500 projectiles, but Iron Dome ignores those that don’t impact populated areas.) It kept Israeli casualties far below Palestinian ones and might have convinced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu he didn’t need to re-invade Gaza. All this for a cost of under $30 million per interception.

All this has Israel pumping its fist. Uzi Rubin, a former Israeli missile defense official, boasted that Iron Dome outperformed the U.S.’ Patriot missile and showcased “Jewish genius with blue and white [i.e., Israeli] technology.” (Iron Dome was jointly developed with the U.S., but whatever.) And already Rafael, the company behind Iron Dome, is pledging to up its success rate to 95 percent in the next several months as it and the Israel Defense Forces sift through the launch data.

The thing is, Hamas is peanuts. Its Qassams and Fajr-5s are unguided systems, unsophisticated compared to the missile arsenals of Hezbollah and Iran, which include ballistic missiles. Even a souped-up Iron Dome would probably be overwhelmed by those. So as encouraged as Israel is by Iron Dome’s success, it’s already scaling upward, to more powerful interceptor-based missile defenses intended to blunt a layered assault from Hamas to Hezbollah to Iran. Some, however, doubt that a bullet is the right instrument for stopping another bullet, and would prefer to use the laser weapons the U.S. is developing.

Just days after Wednesday’s ceasefire with Hamas, it prominently tested Iron Dome’s big brother, called David’s Sling (and sometimes “Magic Wand”). Whereas Iron Dome’s stated maximum range is 45 miles (and is probably shorter in reality), David’s Sling’s interceptors are designed to hit incoming missiles from up to 200 miles away. If it works as intended, David’s Sling should protect Israel against the longer-range missiles that Hezbollah possesses M600, Zelzal, other Fajr models; and perhaps even the Scud ballistic missiles Israel contends Hezbollah got from Iran or Syria.

David’s Sling and Iron Dome have another brother, the Arrow. The Arrow has been in development for years and was originally conceived of as a Scud-stopper. Like some American anti-ballistic missile systems, the Arrow family of defenses is designed to stop a ballistic missile upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere — principally, Iran’s Shehab-3. Over the summer, Israel upgraded the hardware, software, sensor array, interceptors and “Green Pine” radar on the Arrow-2; and an Arrow-3 is on the horizon that can reach twice its predecessor’s altitude. That’s likely intended to blunt the impact of Iran’s forthcoming the Iranian Sejjil-2 medium-range ballistic missile.

You can think of Iron Dome as the bantamweight, David’s Sling/Magic Wand as the middleweight and the Arrow as the heavyweight. And viewed together, you can see what Israel fears: a concerted barrage from Iran and its proxies that comprises everything from unguided Qassam rockets to Sejjil-3 ballistic missiles. That scenario brought U.S. Patriot missile batteries, Aegis ships and some 3,500 troops to Israel last month for the largest joint missile-defense exercises ever between the two allies, and you might hear more on the subject on Thursday, when outgoing Defense Minister Ehud Barak visits the Pentagon.

But some think hitting a bullet with another bullet is the wrong paradigm for missile defense. One Ha’aretz writer, Reuben Pedatzur, pines for Northrop Grumman’s Skyguard chemical laser, which would burn through projectiles after picking them up on radar. In the pre-Iron Dome days, residents of southern Israel once sued the Israeli government to bring Skyguard to their communities. And it’s worth noting that on Tuesday, rival Lockheed Martin claimed its own developmental laser system, the Area Defense Anti-Munitions, shot down four “small caliber” rockets from about a mile away in recent testing.

Except that laser-based missile defenses have been promised for decades and are never quite there yet. Rubin, the former Israeli missile defense official, blasted Skyguard in Ha’aretz on Tuesday as “simply unrealistic,” noting that the U.S. doesn’t even use it in Afghanistan, where its bases are frequently rocketed. And the U.S. Navy, which has sunk a lot of money into developing laser defenses for ships, still doesn’t consider its most mature solid-state lasers ready to burn through missiles this decade.

Still, David’s Sling and the upgraded Arrow have years to go before they’re ready, and their own trials by fire might not go as well as Iron Dome’s. Meanwhile, Hezbollah is pledging to launch “thousands of rockets” if Israel attacks, and the threat of a war with Iran hasn’t abated. If Hezbollah, or Iran, follow through on that threat, Iron Dome’s limits might become as visible as its successes just were.

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U.S. Buys Yemen a Fleet of Spy Planes for Growing Shadow War

It’s not enough for Yemen’s skies to fill up with armed U.S. drones. Now the Pentagon wants to buy its Yemeni ally small, piloted spy planes. It’s a sign that the U.S. is upgrading the hardware it gives the Yemeni military, and digging in for a long shadow war.

That’s the upshot of a recent U.S. military message to the aviation industry. The Navy asked earlier this month for 25 “Light Observation Aircraft” — small, two-seater Cessna-style planes, good for short-range reconnaissance over, say, a patch of land that an  al-Qaida affiliate is trying to overrun. That’s in addition to all of the American remotely piloted aircraft that already fly over Yemen, which has become the hottest undeclared battlefield in the global U.S. drone campaign.

The planes have to be configured so the U.S. can teach Yemenis how to be their own eyes in the sky, and they need to be in Yemen in under 24 months. “Austere environment landing/takeoff capable” is a must. The push for the aircraft is somewhat reminiscent of the Pentagon’s “Project Liberty” crash program to rush small, relatively cheap Beechcraft planes to the Iraq and Afghan warzones so troops could trick them out with advanced sensors and cameras. It remains to be seen if that’s in the works for Yemeni pilots.

After a brief pause prompted by Arab Spring instability, U.S. defense assistance returned to Yemen this summer in a major way. But while the U.S. has been generous — $112 million this year, or about as much as the U.S.’ post-9/11 military assistance totaled by 2010 — it’s not bought Yemen many high-end systems. Small Raven drones, radios, night-vision goggles, rifles and ammo, ruggedized “raiding” boats and other hallmarks of unconventional, commando-style tactics have been the norm. Manned spy planes are certainly good for unconventional wars, and they also represent something of an upgrade.

The U.S.’ shadow war in Yemen is showing other traces of entrenchment and durability. In September, the Army put out a call for armored SUVs, the signature vehicle of the post-9/11 era for transporting security contractors and operatives who’d prefer not to be seen taking military transport. Starting in January, transiting diplomats once lodged in a Sanaa hotel run by the Kuwaiti government will now stay in a secured “hotel-like” domicile constructed by the State Department, separate from the U.S. embassy and complete with “30-plus channel hotel cable system” and room “for up to 240 guests.” (Hmm.)

All this gives substance to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s warning last week that the U.S. should disabuse itself of any notion that the war against al-Qaida was wrapping up. (Never mind that such notions were once spread by Leon Panetta.) Panetta wants to wage those wars whenever possible through foreign governments like Yemen’s, bolstering their capability to fight so that U.S. troop presences can be minimal. Now Yemeni pilots will be able to see just how long that war stretches over their horizon.

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Use Tomorrow's Web Standards Today With CSS '@Supports'

Using CSS 3 on the web today means that, inevitably, some browsers won’t be able to display some elements of your design. Hopefully you’re using progressive enhancement so that your pages still function in less-capable browsers, which might not understand all those fancy transform rules.

For more complex projects progressive enhancement might even mean turning to a feature-detection library like Modernizr, which will detect and apply CSS classes based on the current browser’s capabilities.

Modernizr is great when you need it, but did you know that soon the browser itself will be able to give you the same information?

Both Opera 12.10 and Firefox 19 (currently in the Aurora channel) support native CSS feature detection through the CSS @supports rule. CSS @supports offers the same capabilities of Modernizr — selectively applying CSS based on what the current browser supports — but it does it through much faster native code. Even better, because browsers that don’t support @supports will just ignore it, you can start using it today.

Opera Software’s Chris Mills recently posted a nice intro to using @supports which you should read for more details, but here’s an example to illustrate the basic idea:

@supports ( box-shadow: 2px 2px 2px black ) {

    .my-element {

        box-shadow: box-shadow: 2px 2px 2px black;

    }

}

The code above uses @supports to check for support for the box-shadow property and then applies a box shadow to browsers that will display it. Of course since many of the features you’d likely be detecting are still prefixed, a more complete example (pulled from the W3C’s @supports page) would look like this:

@supports ( box-shadow: 2px 2px 2px black ) or

          ( -moz-box-shadow: 2px 2px 2px black ) or

          ( -webkit-box-shadow: 2px 2px 2px black ) or

          ( -o-box-shadow: 2px 2px 2px black ) {

    .outline {

        color: white;

        -moz-box-shadow: 2px 2px 2px black;

        -webkit-box-shadow: 2px 2px 2px black;

        -o-box-shadow: 2px 2px 2px black;

        box-shadow: 2px 2px 2px black; /* unprefixed last */

    }

}

Now we’re checking for not just box-shadow but any vendor-prefixed versions of it as well. We’re also not just applying box-shadow, but also changing the outline color to white, which (assuming a white background) would not be good to do in browsers that don’t support box-shadow since it would make the outline invisible to the user.

As you can see, @supports is pretty handy for progressive enhancement and it avoids the overhead of loading a JavaScript library like Modernizr. CSS @supports also works with operators like not and or so that you could write a rule that says the opposite of what we did above. In other words, detect that the current browser doesn’t support box-shadow and do something else.

CSS @supports gets even more powerful when you start chaining @support rules together, which is what Mills does in his post on the Opera Dev center, detecting for animations and transforms to serve one thing to browsers that support 3-D transforms, one to those that only understand 2-D transforms and a third to those that don’t support transforms at all.

So should you ditch Modernizr and go with @supports? Probably not just yet, but soon. First off, if you’re using Modernizr for more than just CSS detection then obviously stick with it. But, as Opera’s Bruce Lawson notes in a follow-up to Mills’ post, “the reason to use @supports over Modernizr is performance; functionality that’s built into the browser will always be faster than adding it in script.” Getting rid of Modernizr would also mean eliminating an external dependency, which saves an HTTP request as well.

In fact Modernizr itself plans to defer to @supports in future releases. If you’d like to have the best of both worlds today, what you need to do is first detect for @supports and then if it’s not available load Modernizr. See Lawson’s post for a code snippet that does just that.

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Tracking Mars: Curiosity Makes Its Mark on the Red Planet

Since Curiosity landed on mars on Aug. 6, the rover has traveled hundreds of feet over the Martian surface. In the process, it has tracked up the sandy, dusty terrain, leaving tire marks, scoop divots, Morse code and one tiny piece of itself behind.

Unlike the Apollo astronauts' footprints on the moon, Curiosity's trails will probably be wiped away by the planet's frequent wind and sand storms. But there is still something so incredible about these little ephemeral marks we are making on another world.

Though the physical traces won't last, their impact lives on in the images the rover is sending back to Earth. Here are some of our favorite shots of Curiosity's tracks on Mars.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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How One <em>Myst</em> Fan Made Himself a Real-Life Linking Book

The classic PC game Myst was known for drawing people in to its massive, surreal world. But maker Mike Ando took a little piece of that world and drew it into ours. He made a lovingly authentic replica of the Linking Book that helps the main character — you — navigate the world.

Myst was a ground-breaking point-and-click adventure game created by Cyan Worlds, made of hundreds of beautifully rendered scenes whose combined size made the game so big that it needed a CD-ROM to play, back when many computers didn’t have them. It was the first breakout hit in PC gaming and from its release in 1993 it held the title of best-selling PC game until 2002 when The Sims surpassed it.

The game spawned four sequels, along with novels, music, and an MMO that is still online and being powered by donations from the fan base. The games have been widely ported and the game — once so huge that you needed special hardware to run it — is now available for download on iOS (among other places). In other words, it’s a pretty big deal.

At the core of Myst’s story was a mystical technology called Linking Books that pulled players into other realms, called Ages. They were these beautiful old tomes that, when opened, showed an animated preview of the Age to which you’d be linked.

“Ever since I first played the game, I always wanted my own linking book,” says Ando, “Of course, there was no way my old bulky 486 would fit within a book, but as time marched on technology advanced and computers became smaller. Eventually technology caught up and it was possible to shrink everything down to fit inside the book.”

Ando says his drive to make this project began six years ago when he learned where Cyan got the texture reference for the books — Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume LIV, Issue 312, December 1876 to May 1877. “My mind hatched all sorts of plans about what I’d do once I had the book,” he says, “and finally I decided to set the bar as high as I could — all the Myst games, all playable, and playable well, even the 3-D ones at 30fps.”

To do this, Ando needed to perform two main feats. First, he needed to find the parts to make a computer that would fit in an extremely limited space. Then, he needed to restore the antique book, customize it to look like the ones from Myst, and gut it to make room for the compact computer that would power the game.

“Research was the main skill involved,” says Ando, “I spent hundreds of hours, literally, trying to find suitable components to meet all my requirements.”

To build the tiny computer that powers the Linking Book, Ando needed to find a X86 board that could fit inside. Most mobile devices run on ARM, but Ando wanted to run the original releases of each game, so porting wouldn’t do. It had to be X86.

“To give you an idea of how uncommon it is to shrink an X86 computer down this small,” he says, “the smallest X86 computer made by Apple, the Mac Mini, is 17 cm — this book is only 12 cm, plus I had to squeeze in my own power source and screen.”

The parts that made up the computer came from specialist vendors that ordinarily sell to aerospace and other niche enterprise customers. Ando ended up ordering a mixture of store-bought parts, and custom PCB layouts, soldering the whole thing together and switching out components between a bunch of boards to get the most efficient versions. He says he designed the touchscreen controller himself.

And as for the touchscreen itself? At one point in his search, he found himself talking to a vendor in China to arrange for a custom design. “His English skills were so poor I suggested we talk in Chinese and I used Google Translate, so I guess you could add that to my skills,” he says. “I suspect he just found one already to size and charged me as if they made it. If so, good for him — I couldn’t find one anywhere.”

For restoration and preparation of the book, Ando turned to Ian Bates, the president of the Australian Bookbinding Association. Bates handled the restoration of the cover, along with cutting the pages and embossing the book with the Myst logotype (but only after Ando had picked which of the several versions of the Myst font they should use).

If you find yourself gasping in horror at the idea that a book restorer would destroy a beautiful old book for a strange electronics project, Ando wants to assure you that nothing of value was lost. “The book I used is basically a cross between a Reader’s Digest & a gossip magazine and many of the articles are incomplete,” he says, “Today, books like this are sold to interior designers literally by the meter without any care given to their contents, author or title. Their main value rests on the aesthetics of their spine.”

Photos courtesy of Mike Ando.

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Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Celestial Finger Painting

This colour-composite image was obtained by FORS1 on ANTU. It displays a sky area near the Chamaeleon I complex of bright nebulae and hot stars in the constellation of the same name, close to the southern celestial pole.This picture was taken a few days before the Paranal Inauguration and the "hand-over" to the astronomers on April 1, 1999.This colour composite photo of the Chamaeleon I area is based on six 1-min exposures obtained with VLT UT1 + FORS1 in the V, R and I bands. The sky field measures 6.8 x 11.2 arcmin2; North is up and East is left.

Image: ESO [high-resolution]

Caption: ESO

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Before the iPad, There Was the Honeywell Kitchen Computer

In the winter of 1969, the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog offered to computerize your kitchen.

Cooking up a gourmet holiday meal will be a snap, the department store promised. Push a few buttons, and — presto! — a shiny orange-red, white, and black machine will compute the perfect five-course meal. No more silly culinary errors. The days of your wife slaving away in her Chanel apron will vanish into memory, and all those blinking lights will add to your holiday cheer.

All you needed was space for this 100-pound machine. And about $10,000. And a teletype. And a paper tape reader. And some serious engineering skills.

Needless to say, Neiman Marcus’ male-topian fantasy never materialized. The department store didn’t sell a single Honeywell Kitchen Computer, and it may never have intended to. The ad was no more than a publicity stunt, just like the stores ads for your very own Noah’s Ark and His-and-Hers airplanes in Christmas catalogs past.

The computer did exist. It was based on one of the Series 16 minicomputers from Honeywell, an early computer maker that would later help power the Arpanet, the forerunner to the modern internet. It’s just that this machine didn’t quite live up to the image of the modern computer that so often turned up in the popular imagination in the late ’60s and ’70s. It’s a bit like the talking Honeywell that turned up two years earlier in the Michael Caine spy flick The Billion Dollar Brain.

The Neiman Marcus ad was “a brilliant idea” and “wonderful publicity,” says Gardner Hendrie, who served as program manager for the Honeywell machine at the heart of the Kitchen Computer and is now a trustee of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. “But I thought the packaging was probably a waste of time and wouldn’t sell.”

The Honeywell Kitchen Computer was really a 16-bit business machine called the H316 minicomputer. The H316 was available as a table-top machine or a machine you could mount on a rack, but Kitchen Computer was based on a version that was shoehorned into a futuristic, Jetsons-like pedestal. People did actually buy this machine, but not very many people.

“I don’t think it was a very popular style. Ninety-five percent of people wanted to build it into a [larger] system…. They were sticking them in racks,” says Dag Spicer, curator of the Computer History Museum, which is home to the only Kitchen Computer in existence. “The people buying these are engineers. They don’t care what it looks like.”

What they cared about were machines that could manage industrial, military, aerospace, research, and scientific projects — not sleek ines and a built-in writing desk. They wanted a minicomputer that could connect to a teletype and a paper tape reader.

An engineer would type a program in human-readable form, and the teletype would spit out the program on paper tape, translating the code into a series of punched holes and spaces. The paper tape reader could then read the holes and spaces as ones and zeros. The paper tape was “like a floppy disk, circa 1960. It’s a personal means of data storage,” Spicer says.

Without a teletype, a programmer would need to enter software into the Honeywell using the 16 buttons on the front panel, each of which corresponds to a bit. A pressed button represented a one, and un-pushed button signaled a zero. “The chances that you would get a program right doing it one bit at a time like that were so low,” Spicer said. “The first peripheral people bought for [the Honeywell] was a teletype so they could speak to it.”

Now try to imagine all that in late 1960s kitchen. A full H316 system wouldn’t have fit in most kitchens, says design historian Paul Atkinson of Britain’s Sheffield Halam University. Plus, it would have looked entirely out of place. The thought that an average person, like a housewife, could have used it to streamline chores like cooking or bookkeeping was ridiculous, even if she aced the two-week programming course included in the $10,600 price tag.

If the lady of the house wanted to build her family’s dinner around broccoli, she’d have to code in the green veggie as 0001101000. The kitchen computer would then suggest foods to pair with broccoli from its database by “speaking” its recommendations as a series of flashing lights. Think of a primitive version of KITT, without the sexy voice.

“What that means is you have to be able to decode the lights in your brain,” says Spicer of the Computer History Museum. Or at least remember the pattern and look up what it meant. At that rate, dinner might be ready next week. “The reason this is such a joke, a gag item, was that there was no real human-readable I/O [input/output] for it.”

It may not have worked in a practical sense, but at least it got people thinking about computers as consumer products. The concept of kitchen and home computers had already been circulating in popular culture by the time Neiman Marcus’ kitchen computer graced its Christmas catalog. In The Jetsons, which aired in the early 1960s, humans lived in a tech-happy world alongside robots and computers. In 1966, Westinghouse Corporation engineer Jim Sutherland built the Electronic Computing Home Operator (ECHO IV) to automate storing recipes, controlling home temperature, keeping track of household inventory, and conserving energy.

A year later, Philco-Ford Corporation released A.D. 1999, a short film that portrayed what life would be like at the end of the century. A scene in the kitchen of the future shows a family teleconferencing while mom plans dinner with the help of a flat-screen computer that knows how many calories dad is allowed to have. And after seeing the Neiman Marcus Kitchen Computer, Gordon Bell of Digital Equipment Corporation, a leading company in the minicomputer industry, sent out a congeries on the computer-in-the-home market in which he called the trend “inevitable.” And he was right.

The dedicated kitchen computer never quite happened. Since the Honeywell, there have been several attempts to revive the idea, like Electrolux’s Screenfridge and the HP Touch Smart, but none have really caught on. “In a way, the technology is in search of a problem,” said Spicer. “There is just this persistent meme of having computers in the kitchen, and somehow that’s going to create more leisure time.”

That said, this holiday season, so many of you will cook our meals with the help of iPads and laptops and smartphones, as you told us just last week. They’re smaller than the Honeywell. They’re cheaper. They don’t require a teletype. They’re not attached to your fridge. And you can take them outside the kitchen and use them for so many other things. Sometimes the future isn’t what a catalog tells us it will be. Sometimes, it’s better.

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