My story from this week’s New York magazine, in which Mr. Lewis helms the squad in a tense late-inning affair, and I draw the ire of parents in the Berkeley-Albany Softball League for nine and ten-year-olds.
Posted at 12:36 pm | Comment | Filed under Recent stories | del.icio.us Digg Reddit
[If you are a New Yorker subscriber, you can read it here. For a PDF copy, click here.]
THE NEW YORKER
February 23, 2009
Shoot!
An Appalachian gunsmith’s robot army.
BY EVAN RATLIFF
At the age of seventy-four, Jerry Baber has winnowed his primary interests in life to four subjects: shotguns, robots, women, and cars. When Baber is holding forth—his default mode of communication being the filibuster—his conversation tends to fall somewhere among these categories. Often his passions intersect, as in the question of whether or not a Corvette is an ideal car for picking up women. (It is.) Similarly, Baber might be discussing his love of robots and shotguns, and whether, by combining the two, he is helping to shape the future of warfare from his garage. (He is.)
Baber, an engineer by training, is an expert in investment casting—a method for making small pieces of finely shaped metal. He lives down the road from the Bristol Motor Speedway, in Piney Flats, Tennessee, a hilly town dotted with cattle farms, just south of the Virginia border. There he operates a small foundry, where he manufactures gun parts. Over the years, he has contributed triggers, barrels, hammers, and other components for half a million firearms. “I probably know as much, or more, as any one single person about manufacturing guns,” he told me one afternoon, while driving through the Appalachian foothills in his cherry-red Chevy Impala. (”The best buy on the road today, barring none.”) Post continued…
Posted at 6:01 pm | 6 Comments | Filed under Recent stories | del.icio.us Digg Reddit
Just in time for the inauguration, my latest feature for Wired — on whether and how President Obama will carry out his promises to reboot the federal government — is available online. The glossy version should be out sometime later this week or early next.
I’ll have more to write shortly here about what has happened vis-à-vis Obama’s digital strategies since the piece closed in December. First, however, a note of disclosure. Originally the piece contained a description of my own minimal participation in the campaign, part of a longer section on how Obama utilized tech to win the presidency. Eventually we decided that the role of tech in the campaign had been covered well elsewhere (most expertly by Jose Antonio Vargas at The Washington Post). So we focused the piece more on how Obama might use the same digital techniques to govern. The longer first person bit shrunk to the somewhat cryptic:
Those efforts were combined with massive database-crunching to identify potential voters who could be approached door-to-door by last-minute canvassers, myself included.
Posted at 2:09 pm | Comment | Filed under Disclosures, Politics, Recent stories, Technology, Wired | del.icio.us Digg Reddit
For the August issue of Men’s Journal, I volunteered as an early guinea pig for a genome scanning service offered by the California-based company Navigenics. My genetic proclivity towards any of a couple dozen diseases was less than depressing but mildly alarming — and perhaps also completely unreliable. Here’s a .pdf of the story.
Navigenics and another genetic testing company, 23andMe, both just obtained their official licenses to operate in California.
Posted at 12:44 pm | Comment | Filed under Men's Journal, Recent stories, Science | del.icio.us Digg Reddit
My latest feature for Wired, “Law of the Jungle,” is out in the June issue. Seven months in the making, it’s the story of how an internationally renowned primatologist named Marc van Roosmalen went from being hailed as an environmental hero to being labeled Brazil’s foremost environmental criminal — sentenced to more than a dozen years in a dank prison in Manaus. Roosmalen, a Dutch-born researcher and naturalized Brazilian citizen, worked for a Brazilian government institute studying both the plants and primates of Amazon, and made a name for himself over the past two decades by discovering a half-dozen or more new species of large primates and other mammals. In an effort to link his science to conservation, he ran primate rehabilitation operations (including out of his backyard, in downtown Manaus), and set up non-governmental organization to raise money to buy and protect the habitats of his discoveries.
Along the way, however, he engendered a variety of enemies, some of them with the power to collapse his life’s work. The environmental authorities spent half a dozen years pursuing him for a shifting collection of environmental crimes that coalesced under one label: biopiracy. Released temporarily from prison, Roosmalen lives on the run in fear for his life. His final appeal is still to be decided.
Posted at 11:37 am | Comment | Filed under Environment/Energy, Recent stories, Wired | del.icio.us Digg Reddit
In the latest May issue of Outside, I have a feature-length profile of Garrett Lisi, a physicist who came up with a potential unifying theory of physics while living in a van on Maui. (The piece is out on newsstands but not yet online.) The very bare bones of his theory, which he first published last November, involve fitting together the four forces of physics — the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and gravity — into an incredibly intricate shape called E8. Lisi was a challenging guy to capture, mostly because the ideas behind his theory are largely unintelligible to the almost anyone who (like me) lacks some — if not extensive — higher-level study of physics. It was clear as soon as I started delving into it that the stories hyping Lisi as “the next Einstein,” or what have you, were doing so with only the flimsiest of notions of whether he is, or even could be, right.
Interestingly, Lisi himself pretty much seemed to feel the same way. He was ambitious in his aims but modest about his chances of succeeding. As he told me — and several extremely accomplished academic physicists agreed — his theory had at best maybe a 5% chance of being at least partly right. So I ended up trying to play around with this notion of “the next Einstein” (as you can see in the cover line) and use it to focus in on what I found most fascinating about Lisi: that despite his ambitions, he refuses to compromise his lifestyle.
It was also interesting to see the divide among physicists when Lisi started showing up in the media last fall. On the one hand, the surprisingly caustic world of physics blogs made quite a show over having to waste precious time debunking such a crank. On the other, I talked to quite a few physicists (including a Nobel Prize winner) who said some version of, “hey, he’s probably not right, but he’s got some good ideas and does proper math, so who cares if he gets a bit too much press? New ideas are always for the good.” Which struck me — at least as an outsider to the community — as a healthier approach. In any case, no physicist who had actually bothered to talk to Lisi actually thought he even remotely approached being a crank. In fact, they all seemed to kind of admire his outsider approach. He certainly wouldn’t be the first physicist to make contributions working outside of academia.
Posted at 11:47 am | 2 Comments | Filed under Outside, Recent stories, Science | del.icio.us Digg Reddit
It’s official: no more excuses for cellulosic ethanol. President Bush signed the new energy bill today, which contains the incredibly overdue provision raising CAFE (federal fuel) standards to 35mpg. That was probably the single most important action the federal government could have taken to push along new energy technologies. But the bill also raises the amount of mandated alternate fuels — “mandated” being used somewhat loosely since there is not a clear enforcement mechanism for the mandate — to 36 billion gallons by 2020. Of that, 16 billion gallons is required to come from cellulosic ethanol. There seems to be a good chance that next year’s Farm Bill will contain biofuel subsidies to go with those standards. The presidential candidates on the whole seem to be enamored with biofuels.
All of which means that the cellulosic researchers and entrepreneurs I wrote about two months ago — all of whom were arguing for a stronger federal mandate and more money to get cellulosic ethanol out of the lab — have gotten their wish: a chance to prove that a cellulosic-ethanol driven transportation system is viable. Now they’ve got to actually make it.
Posted at 2:34 pm | Comment | Filed under Environment/Energy, Recent stories | del.icio.us Digg Reddit
My latest piece for Discover, for their January issue highlighting the top science stories of 2007, explores the environmental challenges created by the blistering pace of development in China. It clocks in as the number one science story of the year, mainly because 2007 was likely the year when China passed the United States in greenhouse gas emissions.
Recounting the litany of environmental problems facing China can paint a pessimistic picture, to say the least. But there are some spots of hope to be found in the determination and limited success of the NGOs that have sprouted up in the last decade. And the 2008 Bejing Olympics — for which the head of the IOC has hinted at canceling the marathon, among other things, due to poor air quality — offers a moment in the spotlight that could drive the Chinese government to up their enforcement of environmental regulations.
But among the experts I talked to, the factor that could make the single biggest difference for China’s approach to global warming, in particular, is the U.S. finally taking some action to control its own greenhouse gas emissions. That looks unlikely to happen this year, but at least raises the hope that if the next president takes action on climate change, we could get a two for one with China doing so as well.
For more on this topic, it’s worth reading Jaques Leslie’s comprehensive piece in this month’s Mother Jones, and also the amazing New York Times series on China and the environment.
Posted at 2:06 pm | Comment | Filed under Discover, Environment/Energy, Recent stories | del.icio.us Digg Reddit
I made a rare foray into daily news over the weekend, with a story posted at Wired online about the discovery of a dinosaur “mummy.” (In quotes as it’s a naturally preserved dino, not mummified in the sense of ancient Egypt; so don’t get excited you old-earth creationist folks.) The short piece was actually many months in the making, although it might not look it. I found out about the discovery from National Geographic Television over the summer but have had to keep it under my hat since then.
Back in June, I flew down to Boeing’s research office, in the hills outside of Canoga Park, near Los Angeles, to observe the dinosaur heading into the company’s giant CT scanner. It didn’t go exactly as planned. The researchers, led by Phil Manning from the University of Manchester, had trucked the body from South Dakota, only to discover that they’d built a frame around it too wide to spin on the CT bed. As a result, most of the day was spent hacking and sawing away at the corners of the dino’s plaster, trying to shrink it enough to fit. Post continued…
Posted at 12:37 pm | 2 Comments | Filed under Recent stories, Science | del.icio.us Digg Reddit
A little late posting this, but I made a pair of appearances on National Public Radio recently, both times discussing the ins and outs of cellulosic ethanol based on my Wired piece. Both shows are archived for your listening pleasure:
First off, “Talk of the Nation Science Friday,” on October 5.
Followed by “Fair Game,” November 15.
Posted at 6:25 pm | Comment | Filed under Environment/Energy, Media appearances, Recent stories, Science, Wired | del.icio.us Digg Reddit
