Alexis C. Madrigal

The first high-res image we've seen of the Curiosity rover's descent. Just look at it.

What can you really say about this image from Mars? Nothing.

But I'll try. The best images are when human artifacts are presented against the Martian landscape. What's fascinating is that it's *our* technology that looks alien, not the empty world to which we've sent it. 

Here's the image's context: as the Rover descended to Mars, it jettisoned its heat shield, which fell to the Martian surface. As it went, the Rover took images with the Mars Descent Imager, known as MARDI. A few of these photographs have been released by NASA, but the bandwidth to Mars is rather limited, so we hadn't seen a single full-resolution frame from that camera. Until now. Because that's what you're looking at. Click on the photo to enlarge it and just pan around a little.

Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society has a few more details and cleaned up the image above a tiny bit.

Update, 1:56pm: NASA's put out a full-resolution close-up of the heat shield. Behold!

A visual explanation of where our robotic explorer is sitting on the red planet.

We look at this photo with awe. Even taking images through a dust cover and at lower than maximum resolution, the Curiosity Rover's first color evidence of its position on the red planet is exciting.

So is this higher resolution photograph from the Rover's "MastCam."

We all get a lot of spam. Just today, Gmail has neatly filed more than 100 messages into my Spam folder. When I look at the list of subjects, I wonder: How the hell could any of this actually make someone money?

It's just weird: I understand annoyances like telemarketing where it's clear that some people buy things from people who call them at home. But spam? It just seems like a waste all around.

Now, in a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Justin Rao of Microsoft and David Reiley of Google (who met working at Yahoo) have teamed up to estimate the cost of spam to society relative to its worldwide revenues. The societal price tag comes to $20 billion. The revenue? A mere $200 million. As they note, that means that the "'externality ratio' of external costs to internal benefits for spam is around 100:1. Spammers are dumping a lot on society and reaping fairly little in return." In case it's not clear, this is a suboptimal situation.

Many activities impose costs on society that are not "internalized" by the firms or individuals. Air and water pollution are the paradigmatic examples. You get to drive your car around emitting particulates and various other smog-causing molecules that increase the cost of treating asthma and other illnesses for other people by a tiny bit.

Spam has a remarkably high externality ratio, not just relative to driving an automobile, but stealing one, too. Here's a chart that Rao and Reiley include in their paper, which just looks at the direct costs of spam to end users (which they estimate at $14-$18 billion):



It is just so cheap to send spam and even if you only ensnare a tiny number of people, that's enough to make it worthwhile. Rao and Reiley estimate that only 1 in 25,000 people need somehow buy something through spam advertising to make it worthwhile.

NASA's robots have gotten bigger, better, more productive, and more powerful.

Breaking down what the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter saw of our rover's descent.

As the Mars Curiosity Rover descended through the atmosphere of Mars, humans on their couches weren't the only ones watching. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, NASA's Martian satellite, was also looking -- and taking pictures. Today, the MRO released an image of the rover descending, still attached to its parachute and before the heartstopping Sky Crane maneuvers. You can see it up there on the upper left, labeled (1).

What you're looking at is a large parachute -- 16 stories tall, 50 feet in diameter, the largest ever flown outside the Earth-Moon system -- and beneath it, the one-ton rover with its "backshell" on. The parachute is on the upper right, labeled (2).

Finally, in the last panel (3), we see the full entry, landing, and descent sequence rendering. The MRO image is from about the middle of the overall maneuver, though it's difficult to tell if it was taken before or after the heatshield on the Mars-side of the rover package was jettisoned. The full frame from the HiRISE camera is shown below. (Click to enbiggen!)

Details aside, I find the coordination of our robots on Mars to be more mindblowing than even the amazing descent of the rover. This is a nascent exploration ecosystem. And the metaness of it all -- humans tweeting about watching a humanmade satellite watch a humanmade rover descend on Mars -- feels profound, not forced. The layers of effort and decades of organization necessary to make this feat possible provide the grit and structure for the easy triumphal narrative. 10 years of stale sweat, bad coffee, and thankless work for seven minutes of glory in the long story of knowing where we live.

The Curiosity rover landed safely on Mars in a picture-perfect landing sequence. But really, the proof is in the pudding, and by pudding, I mean pictures. The pictures aren't just something to look at, but represent clear evidence that the rover's imaging and communication systems are in good shape. The ability to send the data that contains a photograph is step one of the Martian phase of this complex and fascinating mission.

So, it's probably fitting that the first image we got from the surface of Mars is our rover looking at its own shadow. We're there on the surface of the next planet out from the sun, staring at ourselves, marveling at the achievement.

NASA's latest rover touched down on Mars with what appears to be a perfect landing. This is the scene from mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when they got word that the Mars Curiosity rover had landed safely.

Two legends meet in the pages of The Atlantic.

Reuters

Norman Mailer, tough guy to like. Marilyn Monroe, an easy persona to love. She died 50 years ago today, and in the August issue of The Atlantic in 1973, he ran an excerpt from his book on her.

The stated goal of his work on Monroe was to create a "literary hypothesis" of the legend "who might actually have lived," that was so good, any "future facts discovered about her would have to to war with the character he created." He may have succeeded.

Here he is discussing her marriage to Arthur Miller, which due to the vagaries of copyright law, is the only part I can reproduce here:

How beautiful they look in their wedding pictures. Staid Arthur Miller has been a scandal to his friends ... for he and Marilyn sit in entwinement for hours. Like Hindu sculpture, their hands go over one another's torsos, limbs, and outright privates in next to full view of company ...

But ... like everything else in Marilyn's life, she lived in the continuing condition of a half-lie, which she imposed upon everyone as an absolute truth--it was that Miller adored her out of measure. Like a goddess. Since Miller was also a man with such separate needs as the imperative to write well ... this half-lie or half-truth that he adored her without limit had to collapse ... Now there was an absolute denial, equally ill-founded. He did not love her at all. He wished only to use her ...

She, with her profound distrust of everyone about her, begins to suspect him. Has he married her because he can't write anymore? Is his secret ambition to become a Hollywood producer? ...

She has lived with the beautiful idea that some day she and Arthur would make a film that would bestow upon her public identity a soul. Her existence as a sex queen will be reincarnated in a woman. It is not that her sex will disappear so much as that the sex queen will become an angel of sex ...

It was as if she wanted to become the angel of American life; as if, beneath every remaining timidity and infirmity, she felt that she deserved it. Perhaps she did. Are there ten women's lives so Napoleonic as her own?

Overabundant skepticism about genetic manipulation in sports may be as dangerous as the hype that heralded its arrival.

Alexis Madrigal

After Ye Shiwen shocked the Olympics with her performance in the 400 meter individual medley, swimming the last 50 meters faster than Ryan Lochte, the men's champion in the event, a long-time American coach ominously hinted that perhaps a new kind of performance enhancement had arrived on the athletic scene.

"If there is something unusual going on in terms of genetic manipulation or something else, I would suspect over eight years science will move fast enough to catch it," John Leonard, the American executive director of the World Swimming Coaches Association, said.

It's important to note that there is no evidence that Ye engaged in any doping practice, let alone something as new and high-tech as genetic manipulation.

But, the fact that genetic manipulation was even on the table or in the ether as the example Leonard gave in his accusation is remarkable. So I set out to find out how scientifically plausible it might be for Ye -- or any athlete -- to enhance his or her performance with current gene doping technology.

The context here could not get larger. Ever since humans deduced the powerful nature of DNA and all the associated molecules that do work in our cells, people have wondered: how long before we can simply change our own genes? On the one hand, all kinds of genetic diseases could be cured. On the dark side, if genetics sets the limits of human action, how long before we create genetically enhanced humans? And, like many things in bioethics, these thoughts are never very far away from the long shadow of the Nazis' eugenics program.

These fears and hopes have traveled with all kinds of work on the genome from Watson and Crick through the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA to the earliest gene trials and the sequencing of the human genome. But until very recently, we had no evidence that transferring genes into human cells was helpful at all. In the early 2000s, gene therapy suffered a series of setbacks, including the high-profile death of a young patient. In the words of the Mayo Clinic, "The possibilities of gene therapy hold much promise. To date, however, that promise has not been realized."

Given that background, I was planning to write a story about how it was sort of nuts for John Leonard to talk about genetic manipulation, not because athletes wouldn't try it, but because it's unlikely to be effective.

But then I called up Richard Snyder, a University of Florida biologist who has a grant from the World Anti-Doping Agency to create reliable blood tests for gene doping. As as result, he's intimately involved in both what might be possible with current gene transfer technology -- and how we might detect any kind of illicit practice.

Snyder told me that gene doping of exactly the kind you'd expect high-level athletes to use is already effective in animals and that in the last few years, therapeutic gene therapies in humans have started to experience and sustain success, particularly in treating hemophilia and certain types of congenital blindness. And right now, there's no available test for gene doping. Put those three facts together and the idea that someone might be transferring genes into his or her body doesn't sound so outlandish.

"In the last five years, there have really been some dramatic examples of gene transfer being efficacious in humans. What we've been seeing in animals for a long time is coming to humans. We've optimized the delivery routes and the viral gene transfer vectors themselves. We understand the diseases better and know what genes we need to deliver to treat people," Snyder said. "This technology can also be usurped for illegitimate means."

He sent me over a paper his team published last year in the journal Gene Therapy, and began to walk me through how gene doping -- and his method of catching it -- could work.

How Gene Doping Works

Here is the basic idea of gene doping. First, you need a virus. Viruses work by going into the cells of your body and hijacking the machinery in there to make more of whatever they want, which in many cases is more viruses.

Second, you need to modify that virus. Scientists have been defanging viruses for a while and turning them into DNA delivery machines that they call vectors. These viruses are loaded with a "cassette" (this is actually what they call it) of DNA that the viruses then insert into cells within the mammalian body.

That DNA is the blueprint for whatever protein you are trying to make. In the case of doping, there's a protein hormone that your kidneys make called Erythropoietin, or EPO. Hormones control a lot of things in your body; in this case, EPO stimulates the production of red blood cells (erythrocytes). Because red blood cells carry oxygen, having more of them means more oxygen carrying capacity, a key factor in athletic performance. Simply put: inject yourself with EPO and your body starts cranking out more red blood cells.

There's a measure for the percentage share of blood that is composed of red blood cells. It's called hematocrit. Normally, it's about 40-45 percent, but by taking EPO people can boost that count to 50 percent or more. In fact, the only way to catch EPO cheaters for a while was to look for people with very high hematrocrit numbers. There are now more sophisticated ways to tell synthetic EPO from naturally occurring EPO, and people get caught even if their hematocrit numbers are in the normal range.

So here's the illicit promise of gene doping: your cells already make EPO, so what if you could get them to make more? Then, the EPO would be "natural," right?

In fact, this is the premise of Snyder's work. In the 2011 paper, he and his team injected monkeys with different doses of a virus carrying an EPO cassette. They are effectively transferring not the hormone itself, as in traditional doping, but the machinery to make the hormone inside the body.

You can see what happened to one of the monkeys in the chart here. Remember that what dopers want to do is increase their hematocrit because that means they have greater oxygen carrying capacity. That's accomplished by increasing the amount of EPO in the blood. Both things occurred in this monkey. After the administration of the gene transfer, the monkey's hematocrit jumped from around 40 to between 50 and 60 percent.

This makes gene doping for EPO look possible, certainly. But the same study tells a cautionary tale, too. Another animal in the study was given a larger dosage. Initially, its hematocrit shot up as EPO production kicked in. But as the production kept climbing, the hematocrit stalled out and then crashed.

"What happened there is the animal mounted an immune response against the EPO that was being made off the vector and that also wiped out the EPO that it made on its own," Snyder explained. If that happened to a human, it would be life-threatening.

"Because then you're like a kidney transplant patient who has to take a lot of EPO," he said. "I don't even know if that's recoverable, even if they were injecting themselves with EPO."

When I expressed my surprise at the study and related my skepticism about gene transfer as a strategy for doping, Snyder told me, "You went into this thinking gene transfer vectors and gene therapies don't do anything, but it can have quite the opposite effect if you don't dose correctly."

With that kind of danger in gene doping, the globe's anti-doping agencies are trying to figure out how they're going to test for this kind of cheating. Snyder said that his lab, working with others in Germany and France, had found a way. It's a tiny bit technical, but bear with me.

When your body naturally makes proteins from its DNA code, there are long sections between the actual coding sequences called "introns." When your body goes to transcribe that section, it knows to leave out those parts and create a copy with just the "exons." But when people use viruses to do gene therapy, they do the intron cutting step beforehand. So, the compact DNA sequence that gets loaded into the vector is shorter than the version that's in the cells of your body. Snyder and his team latch on to that difference to sort out naturally occurring DNA (endogenous) from the DNA they've injected (exogenous).

"We've showed that in primates, if we inject them into the muscle, we can still detect the sequences in their blood months after the injection," Snyder said. They hope to transform this science into an actual working detection system by 2016. "Our primary focus is to develop technology that can be utilized on a wide scale for the direct purposes of screening athletes," he said. "Our push is to try to get them out for the next Olympics."

Which might be when this issue really breaks into the mainstream doping conversation. All those hormones that people directly inject? Hypothetically, at least, it would be possible to produce them in human bodies in the same way that EPO was produced in these macaques. "The most likely biological targets for cheating are erythropoietin, the protein enhanced by Repoxygen; genes for the production of myostatin and insulin-like growth factor I, which affect muscle production (as in the lower mouse in the photo); and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors, a family of proteins that regulate metabolism," Brandon Keim noted in Wired a couple years back.

Are Athletes Already Gene Doping?

Given the state of the experimental science, the big question now is whether anybody is actually trying to succeed with gene doping. Don Catlin, a pharmacologist at UCLA, told Nature News that gene doping "is not a good idea, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone's out there trying it." That seems to be roughly Snyder's position as well.

Out in the world, there's very little evidence one way or another that athletes or coaches are actively seeking out gene doping with one major exception. Repoxygen is a gene therapy drug developed by an Oxford biomedical company that is also supposed to stimulate the production of EPO. (It's based on a different virus from the one Snyder works with.)

Well, in 2007, a German trial of track coach Thomas Springstein revealed that he'd sent an email to a Dutch doctor in which he wrote, "The new Repoxygen is hard to get. Please give me new instructions soon so that I can order the product before Christmas."

Wait. The *new* Repoxygen?! This seemed like a smoking gun, opening the door to a shadowy world in which gene transfer methods aren't just used but are practically old hat. Nonetheless, no Repoxygen was ever found on Springstein and a New York Times article claimed it was "unlikely that Springstein ever got hold of [the drug]."

Still, that was five years ago. Gene transfer methods have improved a lot since then. "As much negative press and as much lack of results in humans that there was from the late 90s through the mid-2000s in gene therapy," Snyder said, "scientists were still plugging away trying to make better vectors, trying to understand what went wrong, trying to understand the genetic components that need to go into this, trying to understand the dosing, trying to understand all the parameters that go into gene transfer."

And now that they do, and so does everybody else. "I don't want that to sound too academic, like we're not really interested in the actual use of this technology," Snyder concluded. "Our primary focus is to develop technology that can be utilized on a wide scale for the direct purpose of screening athletes."

Gene doping may have arrived later than some thought -- the World Anti-Doping Agency banned it in 2003 -- but an overabundance of skepticism about its impacts may be as dangerous as the hype that heralded its arrival.

The Amazon basin is one of the world's wondrous ecosystems, supporting massive amounts of life, both in kind and quantity. You might have thought about poison frogs or monkeys, but you've probably never stopped to wonder, "Where are all the nutrients that power this biotic explosion coming from?"

The answer is actually astonishing and delightful in that one-planet-one-love kind of way. As laid out in a 2006 paper that science writer Colin Schultz dug up, nearly half of the nutrients that power the Amazon come from a valley in the Sahara called the Bodélé depression. At 17,100 square miles, the area is about a third of the size of Florida or 0.5 percent the size of the Amazon basin it supplies.

"This depression is a unique dust source due to its location at a bottle neck of two large magmatic formations that serves as a `wind lens', guiding and focusing the surface winds to the Bodélé," the authors, an international team of geologists, wrote.

This is what that looks like.



But now let's zoom out. The dust storms that come swirling out of the Sahara can cover an area larger than the United States. That's the only scale that could deliver 40 million tons of dust from Africa to the Amazonian basin each year.

What happens when you make humans into vessels for ideas.

Forgive me for being late to Jonah Lehrer's transgressions and resignation. It's a sad story. I did not know quite what to say.

I don't want to delve too deeply into the media scrum, but I do want to note how neatly this kind of narrative conforms to the arc Bill Wasik laid out in And Then There's This, his book on viral culture from 2009.

Wasik tells the story of Blair Hornstine, a kid who sued her high  school when she found out it was going to allow a boy with a slightly lower GPA to be co-valedictorian. The media got hold of the story and things got ugly: Hornstine was found to have plagiarized several papers and Harvard rescinded her acceptance.

I would like to propose a new term to encompass all these miniature spikes, these vertiginous rises and falls: the nanostory. We allow ourselves to believe that a narrative is larger than itself, that it holds some portent for the long-term future; but soon enough we come to our senses, and the story, which cannot bear the weight of what we have heaped on it, dies almost as suddenly as it was born. The gift we so graciously gave Blair Horstine in 2003 was her fifteen minutes not of fame but of meaning.

Unfortunately for Lehrer, he has to keep making meaning every day out of what he's done. We'll all get to use him in our long-running rhetorical battles and move on. Until the day, of course, when something we do -- good or bad -- pushes us into the meaningsphere and we're judged by the crowd.

Sandra Fluke. Trayvon Martin. George Zimmerman. Chen Guangcheng. Octomom. Gore Vidal. Olympian 1. Olympian 2. Olympian 3. Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell. Chick-Fil-A.

When everyone makes media, everything is a news peg. (Didn't see that one coming, somehow.)

There's no way to escape that I, too, am fitting Lehrer into a pattern that I recognized long ago. Lehrer is a vessel for my idea, for your idea, for our ideas. And we can't help but excise, erase, or ignore the inconvenient human parts of that container: Cut down the mess, sand the rough edges, spackle the holes we don't understand or know. Which is, sadly and dumbly, what did Lehrer in.

Add another entry to the Encyclopedia of Weird Robot Trading Events. This morning, a poorly programmed algorithm unleashed by Knight Capital Group went haywire, disrupting the normal trading of up to 148 stocks including some of the most heavily traded names in the country, according to the New York Times.

Traders immediately pointed fingers at one of Wall Street's most powerful brokerage firms, Knight Capital Group, speculating that a "rogue algorithm" kept buying or selling millions of shares of companies for 30 minutes, sending their shares soaring or plunging. The Jersey City-based company said in a statement that "a technology issue occurred" in the division of the company that uses computer algorithms to buy and sell stocks from other market participants.

Research firm Nanex claims to know what happened based on the high-resolution time-series data they possess. It appears that an algorithm, presumably Knight's, began "buying at the offer price and selling at the bid, which means losing the difference in price." On one stock, Exelon, the algorithm was losing about 15 cents a trade, but making the same mistake 2,400 times a minute. This is a very fast and very twisted robot logic of buy high, sell low. It's not something any human being would do, and yet, here we are. It happened.

This is a field where bugs have major consequences:

As Knight, one of the biggest market makers in the United States financial markets, rushed to contain the problem, it asked customers to send trades to other brokers. Knight's stock dropped nearly 25 percent on Wednesday morning.

Not for their muscles, but maybe for their minds.

Gold medalist He Zi wearing what appears to be k tape (Reuters).

If you've been watching the Olympics (or a bunch of other sports), you've probably seen some athletes wearing tape on various parts of their bodies. I first noticed some of the Chinese divers with tape on their lower backs. Other athletes have it on their shoulders or legs. What is this stuff? And how does it work? Actually, let's step back: Does it work?

It's called kinesio (or just 'k') tape. Athletes use the tape as a kind of elastic brace that they say helps relieve pain. The tape and technique were developed by Kenso Kase thirty years ago in Japan. Since then, many companies have developed similar adhesive tapes and they are in something of a marketing war.

Unfortunately, the evidence that k tape does much of anything is scant. One positive and relatively sophisticated trial found some shoulder pain relief in using the tape. But that study had some serious methodological problems. A metareview published earlier this year of all the available studies on the use of the tape was less positive. It looked at 97 papers on k-tape focusing on 10 studies that actually had control groups. Here's what they found:

In conclusion, there was little quality evidence to support the use of KT over other types of elastic taping in the management or prevention of sports injuries.

The tape, they continued, "may have a small beneficial role" for some injured people in certain situations, but "further studies are needed to confirm these findings."

I think that's all fairly technical language for: This stuff doesn't really do anything. So why might athletes continue to use it? Well, sometimes lying to yourself can lead to good things. Thinking you are better than you are (for whatever reason) might actually *make* you better than you are. Here was the conclusion of Joanna Stark and Caroline Keating's 1991 study, "Self-Deception and Its Relationship to Success in Competition": "The results were consistent with the proposition that self-deception enhances motivation and performance during competition."

Psychologist Roy Baumeister made a similar point in a widely-cited paper with an elegant turn of phrase. He claimed there was an "optimal margin of illusion" that allowed for the best human functioning. It might be good to think your vertical leap is greater than it is, but it's depressing to know just how earthbound you might be and dangerous to think you can fly.

And so, perhaps that's what k-tape does for athletes. It gives them the illusion of an edge, which might turn out to be all they need to have one. Just because lucky socks can't be empirically tested on a control group doesn't mean they don't matter. Just ask anyone who wears lucky socks.

An explanation in two sentences.

The social networking company may dominate the headlines, but not the top line.

Facebook has more users than any service in the world, as they slowly close in on a billion. But when it comes to revenue, many old and new companies are generating more revenue in the digital world than Facebook.

PaidContent assembled a list of the companies generating the most revenue "from digital content, or from the advertising around that content." They released it today and, surprisingly, Facebook is currently sitting at number 11.

Who are the 10 companies ahead of Zuckerberg's empire? Google is the clear leader, but you'll also find old rivals Yahoo, Apple, and Microsoft. The business information players are also strong: Bloomberg, Reed Elsevier (an investor in PaidContent, BTW), and Thomson Reuters. And last but not least, as in all things, don't forget China! Telco China Mobile and general tech player Tencent both make appearances on the top 10.

There is some good news for Facebook, though: they're the only social networking site on the list. You won't find a Tumblr, Twitter, or Pinterest in the top 50 global digital revenue generators.

Not every company makes these numbers easy to access, so in some cases, PaidContent has made educated guesses based on research. They (impressively) explain their methodology for each individual company on the list.

A misstep reveals that the company doesn't understand its outsized role in the media ecosystem.

Update: Twitter's general counsel, Alex Macgillivray released a blog post explaining Twitter's policy and apologizing for Twitter's active content-policing role in what happened with Guy Adams. It should be said that Macgillivray's blog post is decently transparent about the affair, but I think the notion of One Privacy Policy to Rule Them All doesn't make sense. He writes:

We've seen a lot of commentary about whether we should have considered a corporate email address to be private information. There are many individuals who may use their work email address for a variety of personal reasons -- and they may not. Our Trust and Safety team does not have insight into the use of every user's email address, and we need a policy that we can implement across all of our users in every instance.

This is essentially abandoning any idea of nuance or reason in hopes of making this customer service process more efficient. I just don't think Twitter can make these kinds of blanket decisions and I'd bet that they *already* do not function that way in reality. This type of dispute will require judgment and judgment requires not just policy but trained and even wise people. But don't take my word for it, Twitter, just look at what happened this week! 

Let's stipulate that Twitter banning journalist Guy Adams for posting NBC executive's Gary Zenkel's corporate email address was a very bad idea. They have begun fixing the damage they did by reinstating his account. NBC retracted its complaint, according to Adams.

Ok.

Now, whether it was a craven decision or merely bad judgment comes down to whether Zenkel's NBC email address is public or private information. In today's world, this is not as obvious a question as it might appear. (It may help to imagine that you are Gary Zenkel and you are the one getting hundreds of nastygrams from people with axes to grind.)

On the one hand, as Adams himself has pointed out, anyone with the Google can find it and it is now available on thousands of web pages, though not nearly as widely before. Not to mention, it's of the exact form as everyone else at NBC Universal, simply FirstName.LastName@nbcuni.com.

On the other hand, many people's home addresses, for example, are available on the Internet in some form, but tweeting them would be considered a rightly bannable offense by Twitter. In fact, Twitter has long had an operating practice that tweeting certain types of information, if a complaint was filed, could get you banned. This kind of dispute is something that Twitter has to resolve each and every day between all kinds of people from high schoolers to a journalist and NBC.

So, imagine you're Twitter and you deal with situations like this every day. You would almost undoubtedly have to develop a sense of public and private that were nuanced. Tweeting some kinds of phone numbers might be, but others wouldn't. Tweeting a Facebook page might not be, but a location of an individual might be.

The easy answer is that if something is public on the Internet in any way, it is public on the Internet in every way. But that's not really true and people don't really behave that way. The context of a fact matters a lot, something that almost everyone recognizes intuitively.

Helen Nissenbaum's work on "contextual integrity" has laid all of this out clearly. As I've glossed it before, here's Nissenbaum's basic idea:

In her scheme, there are senders and receivers of messages, who communicate different types of information with very specific expectations of how it will be used. Privacy violations occur not when too much data accumulates or people can't direct it, but when one of the receivers or transmission principles change. The key academic term is "context-relative informational norms."

Noting the context in this case, however, actually makes Twitter's behavior more damning. The NBC executive's email was distributed as a direct result of and in the context of his work. Adams requested that people contact him about the work that he'd done for NBC Universal and gave a work address. There is not actually a privacy violation, at least on my initial inspection. Even if Gary Zenkel did not expect his email address to get passed around Twitter, he could reasonably expect that his email address could be used by consumers of NBC entertainment to contact him about NBC entertainment-related business.

This is quite different, say, from tweeting Zenkel's home address because reasonable people do not expect that angry customers should be generally welcomed at the homes of business associates. That information exists within a different context. You can't just show up at your dry cleaning guy's apartment because he messed up your pants. You can't knock down a fellow blogger's door because she didn't link to your story. And you can't go stand on Gary Zenkel's front lawn and shout at him about the Olympics.

Twitter can't hide behind a policy here because we know that individuals are making these decisions and that they are capable of understanding the nuances involved. They knew the email address was publicly available and a business address. They knew they were banning a journalist. And they did it anyway.

Of course, the other key piece of context is that NBC and Twitter are also business partners. This almost certainly played a role in this affair, if only in the speed with which Adams was dispatched. For themselves, NBC and Twitter should have known how bad it would make Twitter and NBC *look* to ban Guy Adams. For the world, they should have known how bad it *was* to ban Guy Adams.

As an information conduit, Twitter has gotten too big to pretend that it can ban journalists who are critics of its business partners for borderline infractions. That kind of ill-considered move, even under the cover of a nuanced/opaque/wiggleroomy policy, does not square with Twitter's current position in our news ecosystem.

In other words: You're a real part of what it means to have free speech now, Twitter, and you better start acting like it. You've scaled your servers, now it's time to scale your policies.

In the August issue of GQ, Sean Flynn has a feature on the Anders Behring Breivik massacre in Norway, in which Breivik killed 77 people, most of them in a shooting rampage on a small island.

Flynn describes meeting a police officer, Håkon Hval, who helped deal with the immediate aftermath of the violence. He concludes with a horrifically modern detail: the unanswered ringing of the phones of the dead and escaped.

When the sun went down, Håkon was in a boat not far from shore. Divers were in the lake, searching the depths for bodies that might have been drowned, and Håkon was providing security. It was very quiet. Håkon could hear waves licking at the sides of the boat, and then, from the island, he could hear something else: a chorus of chirping and buzzing and snippets of pop songs. In the darkness, he saw tiny lights flickering on, then off, then on again, like fireflies. There were hundreds of them, scattered along the Lovers' Trail and on the lawn below the cafeteria and in the tent field and where the bodies lay. Mobile phones lighting and ringing and nobody answering.

"There was nothing you could do," Håkon said. "You just had to wait until they ran out of electricity."

It is, as Matt Pearce pointed out, an almost unbelievably haunting end to an already haunting story.

More batteries are coming to your life -- and they're going to have to get a whole lot smarter.

Batteries have become a strangely integral part of our lives. Every single person with a cell phone has to constantly manage power in a way that no one did even 10 years ago. The mobile revolution has brought with it a sea change in the way that people use and think about stored electricity.

In a sense, the constant presence of batteries in our lives is the biggest change in the way we relate to energy since the ubiquitous grid power came into American lives in the first half of the 20th century. Socket electricity is an essentially limitless resource for an average person. Batteries are different. They only hold a finite amount of power. They degrade over time. And they are absolutely essential to modern communications devices.

But Ryan Wartena, CEO of Growing Energy Labs, Inc, believes that this is only the beginning. Batteries are only going to show up in more places and become more important. He's got a vision for the future of batteries, and his company wants to be the software layer that sits between your grid power and your battery power. In these two videos, he discusses the future he sees on the horizon. And make sure to check out his introductory video from earlier this month.

"We think almost every product is better when you can experience it with the people you care about."

Last week Facebook filed its first quarterly earnings report, and investors were disappointed. The company just isn't growing fast enough to support the hypothetical numbers analysts have in their spreadsheets to justify Facebook's share price. Mark Zuckerberg, presumably anticipating that reaction, baked in a response in his opening statement on his company's conference call with analysts. You've probably heard a variation of this before, but it's worth noting again (emphasis mine):

We believe one of the biggest opportunities we have is to create the identity and social layers that all new apps and websites can be built on top of. We think almost every product is better when you can experience it with the people you care about so over time we expect almost all of these products should naturally become social.

Whether or not you think almost every product -- TVs, cars, pets, refrigerators, running shoes -- is better when it's "social," will probably determine your gut feeling about Facebook's long-term prospects.

How about those Olympics? Everyone's talking about them! Which is great, unless you happen to have no interest in or knowledge about international sporting competitions turned megamarketing boondoggles.

Sprinters this and medals that. Swimmers, divers, pentathletes! Who can keep up with it all?

So, here are seven vaguely related interesting conversational levers you can use to politely steer the conversation away from London and to something, anything else. (You're welcome.)

Them: "So-and-so won a bronze medal!"
You: "That's fascinating. Did you know bronze is composed of roughly 88 percent copper and 12 percent tin? Its melting point is about 1742 degrees Fahrenheit."

Them: "I wonder how London's dealing with the Olympics."
You: "That's fascinating. More fascinating is how London dealt with World War II aerial bombardment. Working people basically forced their way into the tube stations during the Blitz, where they slept on the platforms."



Them: "Michael Phelps is amazing. I wonder how he's gonna do this year."
You: "That's fascinating. Elizabeth Phelps, the NYU neuroscientist, has shown you can defuse and even erase fearful memories just by thinking about them in very specific ways."

Them: "Danny Boyle is directing the Olympics opening ceremony!"
You: "That's fascinating. He also once directed a short called Alien Love Triangle, which starred 'Kenneth Branagh, Heather Graham, and Friends' Courtney Cox, who plays a male alien in a female body.' It remains unreleased."

Them: "In the medal race, I think China's going to come out ahead."
You: "That's fascinating. Speaking of heads, the actress Hedy Lamarr also designed a secret communications system for the American war effort. It relied on frequency-hopping, which is now a key foundational technology for some cell phone networks like Sprint's."

Them: "Peter Sagan is a big underdog in the men's road race. Still, I hope he wins the gold."
You: "That's fascinating. Carl Sagan put together a golden record for the Voyager spacecraft, which is about to become the first humanmade object to leave our frigging solar system. He included whale songs, Beethoven, Chuck Berry, thunder, greetings in a bunch of languages, and 116 images."

Them: "Some athletes are wearing shoes that were 3D printed by Nike!"
You: "That's fascinating. These guys 3D printed a gun."