Alexis C. Madrigal

Facebook is widely expected to go public in the very near future with a valuation north of $75 billion. It's a moment that tech watchers have been anticipating for half a decade and will make millionaires out of many, many early Facebook employees.

But let's go back to May of 2005, less than a year after Facebook was initially incorporated. TheFacebook, as it was then called, measured its users in the low millions. Only American college students could be on the network, and they were verified through their college e-mail addresses. TheFacebook had steamrolled first through Harvard, beginning in February of 2004. Here is Zuck's first statement as the proprietor of The Facebook, which he gave to the Harvard Crimson's Alan Tabak, now a lawyer at the high-powered firm, Davis Polk:

"Everyone's been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard," Zuckerberg said. "I think it's kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week."

As of yesterday afternoon, Zuckerberg said over 650 students had registered use thefacebook.com. He said that he anticipated that 900 students would have joined the site by this morning.

After conquering the Crimson, Zuckerberg expanded the operation to a group of Ivy League schools, and then on to the rest of the country's colleges. It was clear big things lay on the horizon for the company, but I'm not sure anyone could have seen quite how big.

It was that spring that 'TheFacebook, Inc' made its first filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The paperwork details a $6,840 investment from a time when only Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and Dustin Moskovitz had to be listed on the startup-friendly Rule 506 Form D. Zuckerberg appears to have used is personal phone number for the filing, a New York 914 number rather than the Palo Alto landline used after August of 2005. The legal fees associated with the filing were a mere $50. And it's signed by the very hand of Zuckerberg.

QR codes are an intermediate technology at best, a novelty at worst.

Every government agency got on the Internet in a different way. Often times, individuals decided that they'd take their little corner of the world online. Hundreds of different ways of presenting government information to the public sprang up. Sometimes these websites were terrible, but other times, they were wonderful, or at least happened to contain vital documents that could be found nowhere else.

Now, though, government agencies know that they *have* to be online, which means they need A Policy. Not only that, they need a plan to deal with the wild legacy infrastructure that preceded the era of The Policy. Dawn Stover, an energy and environmental journalist, dives into what's happened at the Department of Energy, an agency that's tried to consolidate its many websites into the singular Energy.gov.

In short, documents that were once available online are now locked away. She details how the theoretical efficiency and transparency of the open government initiatives has actually worked against the freedom of information in some key cases. References to Yucca Mountain, the Hanford nuclear site, and the new AP1000 reactor design are all very limited. These are not small issues! We're talking about the still-with-us history of nuclear power as well as its possible future. Here's Stover's take:

The Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, which once posted Yucca Mountain project documents on its website, closed in September 2010. All of its documents were transferred to the Office of Legacy Management, where I'm told they can be requested using the Freedom of Information Act process, which usually works something like this: Send a letter, wait a few months, and maybe you'll get a response. Maybe. Not only is that inconvenient, but it's also expensive. Instead of a simple download, I practically have to start a letter-writing campaign in order to get assistance from a paid federal employee. Never mind the fiscal drain on my own time. And all of this, remember, is for a document so rare and precious that it was online in full for years.

The Office of Legacy Management (known as LM) oversees a huge records-management facility in West Virginia that opened in December 2009 and boasts a "state of the art electronic record keeping system." LM even requested a $3 million increase PDF in its 2012 budget just to manage the Yucca Mountain records and information systems. But like Energy.gov, the LM website has no section for Yucca Mountain, and its search engine spits out links to a random assortment of PDFs -- with no summaries or index to provide guidance. Apparently that "state of the art electronic record keeping system" doesn't include any provisions for accessing documents online.

The General Accountability Office warned of these problems last May in a report commissioned by House Republicans, which cautioned that Yucca Mountain documents would no longer be electronically accessible to the public or to scientists after the project shut down. And it's not just Yucca Mountain. Search Energy.gov for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and you get only 33 results. For Hanford, only 20 results. For the AP1000 reactor, a grand total of six. Documents of all sorts have simply disappeared from public view as a result of website consolidation and reorganization, and this has repercussions not just for the general public and independent researchers but also for federal employees and contractors who use the Energy Department website and are no longer able to refer to historic documents -- such as loan guarantees for nuclear power plants or Environmental Impact Statements for energy projects.

Stover contrasts the DOE's approach with that of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which she says "has comprehensive collections of documents, organized by topic area as well as by facility location." I might suggest that part of the problem with the DOE's open government policy is in the nature of the DOE itself. Unlike the NRC, which has one single purpose, the DOE is a sprawling agency with its hands in everything from nuclear weapons stockpiles to solar cell development and a whole lot of other things in between. It's hard to make one size (or site) fit all that. Almost inevitably, some corners are going to be left unswept.

Of course, there are more cynical readings of the agency's moves, and it seems like frustration has led Stover to one of them. She sees the DOE abandoning real transparency for a false, but socia-media friendly kind of transparency.

Every federal agency brags about its commitment to the Obama administration's goal of open government. Unfortunately, each agency charts its own path toward this goal, with different ideas about what should be made available and how it should be structured. For some departments, "open government" means a serious effort to make information easier to find. For others, it simply means summer interns scanning documents into PDFs with poorly worded tags, posting newsy articles with attractive photos, and opening Twitter and Facebook accounts. Unfortunately, the latter is where many federal energy documents seem to be headed.

One way to look at several of Google's recent moves, from the standardization of its data privacy policies to the inclusion of social intelligence in its search results, is to chalk them up to the relentless pursuit of profit. This story would suggest that Google is trying to improve its bottom line despite (some) user opposition to its new strategies.

So, one would expect that Wall Street would look at such behavior and say, "Bully to you, Google!" But that's not what's happening. Reuters' Alexei Oreskovic has a nice story out about how investors are as confused as the rest of us about what Google is trying to do.

Some are wondering if Google has a clear strategy for generating revenue and growth out of a plethora of fledgling initiatives, from Android to its Facebook wannabe, Google+, especially since Page and management refuse to offer guidance.

"Right now people are skeptical about those bets paying off," said Walter Price, a portfolio manager at RCM Capital Management, referring to Google's efforts outside its flagship search business.

Google's managers "get on a conference call and they're super enthusiastic about their future, and yet you look at the (stock's) multiple and the way the stock is treated, and people don't share that enthusiasm," said Price, whose firm owns Google shares.

What's interesting is that Google CEO Larry Page has been shutting down a lot of Google's goodwill-generating but revenueless products. "More wood behind fewer arrows," is actually the term they use to describe this process. However, the new strategy hasn't generated better arrow flight. (Is that the right way to extend the metaphor? Or does putting more wood behind fewer arrows generate even more wood rather than longer distance?)

In any case, let's also be real here: Google is sitting on a $45 billion pile of cash thanks to its cash-printing search display ad business. If the company's data collection and social stuff just don't destroy that core business, the company is going to be fine. Because, minor media outcry aside, there are no real signs that people have stopped Googling when they Google something.

The animated GIF has been a mainstay of the Internet since web pages could only have gray backgrounds and Creed was a popular band. The way they work is simple: two or more images are superimposed on each other and they switch back and forth on a timed loop. This gives the impression of sputtering animation. For some reason, in those early days, torches like this were very popular:

In any case, the practice of GIF making has changed a lot over the years. Now people like to capture celebrities doing weird things. These loops somehow make almost anything funny, even Cameron Diaz feeding Alex Rodriguez popcorn.

I think Forbes' excellent privacy blogger, Kashmir Hill, may have coined (or popularized) a new social media term: bashtag. A bashtag is what happens when a company (McDonald's) tries to start a promotional hashtag (#McDStories) and users use it to hate on said company.

I can't quite believe it, but I think this is a first reference for this neologism. That is to say, I can't find anyone using bashtag in quite this way, although that may be more of a failure of Twitter's search functionality than the creativity of the Internet.

In any case, expect to see #bashtag appearing soon in slide decks on social media across the land. It is a very simple way to describe what advertisers don't want to happen.

Turning around the troubled phone maker won't be easy, but the company's CEO doesn't seem to want us to know that.

RIM, the maker of the Blackberry, has a new CEO. His name is Thorsten Heins and he was the company's COO. Heins replaces co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, who led the company for two decades. The two outgoing executives have come under heavy criticism as the company's share price has fallen almost 90 percent since its 2008 peak. As the smartphone market has exploded over the last few years with the success of Apple's iOS and various phones running Google's Android, RIM has been left in the dust. It has been, after all, almost five years since Apple released the iPhone, and RIM may finally put out a competitive operating system later this year.

So, it was with considerable shock that we watched the video above. Despite that record, Heins fawns over the outgoing CEOs and basically describes RIM as too innovative. We understand that as the new CEO he has to carry some corporate weight, but the level of pandering to the previous administration might be why investors reacted so negatively to Heins' appointment. This video -- and script -- make Heins look plain bad. "Think prom video meets un-coachable corporate droid," as Paul Kedrosky put it.

Here's a transcript of what Heins said in the first couple minutes of the video, but you should really watch for yourself.

I'm absolutely excited. I mean, this is so fantastic and phenomenal to become the CEO, being trusted by Jim, Mike and the board to follow Mike and Jim's *big* footsteps.

I joined this company four years ago and it was growing but comparably it was small in the wireless arena, as a player. We have taken this to total new heights and that journey isn't over yet, right? If we continue doing well what we're doing, I see no problems with us being in the top three players worldwide in the next years in wireless.

At the very core of RIM, at its DNA how I always describe it, is the innovation. We always think ahead. We always think forward. We sometimes think the unthinkable. And that is fantastic. That is the core of every high technology company. We've learned to execute. Yes, we have to get better at execution, but we've learned a lot going from when I joined them in 2007. Never lose this innovation spirit, but once we say a product is defined, we move decisively into execution mode and get the product done in good quality, on time, and also at good cost.

More internally, from a process perspective, we need to get a bit more disciplined in our own processes. We are a great innovative company but sometimes we innovate too much while we are building a product. I want to spend more time prototyping, exploring, and research and development while we are building product on a separate stream.

The longer tech industry watchers chew over the numbers that Google CEO Larry Page gave on last week's earnings conference call, the worse the aftertaste seems to get. Rocky Agrawal calls attention to the key Page quote about the site's supposed 90 million users:

"Over 60 percent of Google+ users use Google products on a daily basis. Over 80 percent of Google+ users use Google products every week."

Unless we're misinterpeting what 'Google product' is, these numbers are very strange. Remember that Google's products include Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube, so one has to wonder about the 40 percent of Google+ users who don't use a single Google product in a day. One might even conclude that the 20 percent of Google+ users who don't use a Google product in a week are not really "on" the Internet in a way that most users would recognize.

Worse, if these are the numbers that Page chose to use to *bolster* his case that Google+ was succeeding, imagine what the other numbers look like?

We're getting to that part of the solar cycle during which we should expect to be hit by many solar storms that could endanger our electrical infrastructure.

The biggest solar storm since 2005 is headed our way, according to skywatchers who saw our star let off an M9 flare, just a hair away from the most powerful kind of solar flare. The charged particles hurtling towards Earth are known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME, and we haven't had one this severe since the peak of the last 11-year solar cycle.

The amount of solar activity that can result in big solar storms follows a fairly (but not perfectly) consistent path through time, rising and falling according to mechanisms we don't quite understand. We're just now coming back to the time of peak solar activity, so we could see many more solar storms before we return to the quiet of the trough of the cycle in a few years. If you want to keep track of this stuff, tune in to Spaceweather.com, which obsessively tracks the sun's doings.

To be clear, this storm, while it may cause problems for some satellites and will make for prettier aurorae in the arctic regions near the Earth's magnetic poles, the solar storm only ranks as an S3 on a scale that runs from S1 to S5.

What might happen when we get hit by a much bigger storm? A few years ago, I wrote about a very big storm in 1859 and found that there was so much current in the air that telegraphs could be run without their batteries. It'd be like if the air suddenly started charging your iPhone. Telegraph operators were (rightly) flabbergasted.

"We observed the influence upon the lines at the time of commencing business -- 8 o'clock -- and it continued so strong up to 9 1/2 as to prevent any business from being done, excepting by throwing off the batteries at each end of the line and working by the atmospheric current entirely!" the astonished telegraph operators of Boston wrote in a statement that appeared in The New York Times later that week.

The Boston operator told his Portland, Maine counterpart, "Mine is also disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?" Portland responded, "Better than with our batteries on," before finally concluding with Yankee pluck, "Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?"

But that was way back at the beginning of the buildout of communications and electrical infrastructure. The damage resulting from a storm like that now would be much, much worse. The National Academies of Science found that if a storm like the 1859 one hit again, it could cause $1 trillion (yes, trillion) in damage.

This month, Gregg Easterbrook dug into some even more exotic possibilities about what the sun could get up to over the coming decades. They range from pretty much nothing to the end of, well, everything.

At least the sun seems unlikely to explode anytime soon. Standard conjecture regarding the inner processes of stars holds that they emit cornucopian amounts of neutrinos, which are subatomic particles. A generation ago, when the first neutrino-detectors were built, they didn't find anything close to the expected number of neutrinos from the sun. This led the late science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who is credited with the concept of the telecommunications satellite, to speculate that Sol was about to explode, and the human experiment to reach an untimely end.

Today, researchers believe that prior assumptions about solar neutrinos were in error. The sun seems fine. It's not about to explode. Probably. We think.

Melting icecaps may make it possible for cables to run directly from Asia to Europe, bypassing North America.

Normally, when we talk about the new routes through the Arctic that global warming may enable, we're talking about cargo shipping lanes, but a new article in Network World claims that a warming Earth may open up new undersea telecom routes, too. The new undersea cables aren't being driven by a need for more capacity, but rather to reduce latency in the network.

There is also discussion that unprecedented, previously unfeasible, Arctic routes now may be possible, because of melting Arctic icecap. These would allow traffic to flow from Asia directly to Europe, bypassing North American networks completely.

This is yet another way that our climate impacts the landscapes of our world, even the ones that you don't think of, like the geography of Internet traffic.

Via Evgeny Morozov

I've been plowing through some old Apollo materials looking for references to the earth stations that were receiving the satellite transmissions from the crew on the moon. In so doing, I came across this long version of the lead-up to Armstrong's famous quote as he stepped onto the lunar surface. The transcript and video of the moments right before one of the most widely replayed film snippets in history records Buzz Aldrin setting up the shot. He asks NASA for the correct f-stop for the camera while Armstrong tests the lunar regolith. This is the behind-the-scenes footage of one of the more glorious achievements in human history.

Aldrin: You've got a good picture, huh?
Houston: There's a great deal of contrast in it, and currently, it's upside-down on our monitor, but we can make out a fair amount of detail.
Aldrin: Will you verify the position - the opening I ought to have on the camera?
Houston: Stand by.
[Armstrong begins to descend.]
Houston: We can see you coming down the ladder now.
Armstrong: Okay, I just checked getting back up to that first step, Buzz. It's -- not even collapsed too far, but it's adequate to get back up... It takes a pretty good little jump.
Houston: Buzz, this is Houston. F/2 - 1/160th second for shadow photography on the sequence camera.
Aldrin: Okay.
Armstrong: I'm at the foot of the ladder. The [Lunar Module] footpads are only depressed in the surface about 1 or 2 inches, although the surface appears to be very fine grained as you get close to it. It's almost like a powder. Down there, it's very fine. I'm going to step off the [Lunar Module] now. THAT'S ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND.

All that transmission flew through space to two tracking stations in Australia, Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes, as well as Goldstone in the Mojave Desert.* It's a bit complicated, but the broadcast appears to have begun with the feed from Goldstone, switched to Honeysuckle Creek right before Armstrong set foot on the moon, and then drew on Parkes after a few minutes. The Australian site at Honeysuckle Creek rebroadcast the feed up to an Intelsat III satellite perched over the Pacific, which relayed it down to a newly constructed earth station in the tiny town of Jamesburg in the hills of Monterey, California, which sent it on to mission control in Houston and the rest of the world.

* I originally listed Goldstone as being in the Australian desert. It is not. It's in California.

Twitter purchased the small Vancouver startup Summify today, but it could be a big step for the company's value as a news source.

Summify created a service that would send you the "top news" from your social networks based on a proprietary algorithm that combined your interests with the most popular links among the people you follow on Twitter, say. It took some of the anxiety out of knowing that you could never possibly read every tweet from a large network.

To appreciate why it matters that Twitter acquired Summify, you should try linking your Twitter account to Flipboard. Flipboard takes the links that my Twitter connections post and turns them into a magazine-style digest. Every morning, when I want to see what's happening, I don't fire up Twitter itself and cruise through hundreds of tweets. Instead, I fire up Flipboard and see right through the 140-character tweets to the vast sea of information on which they rest. This is an immensely useful way of dealing with large amounts of tweets.

An even more impressive service is Nieman Journalism Lab's "Fuego," which ranks the links that people who are interested in the future of journalism are tweeting. (Right at this moment, the top two stories are about Twitter's acquisition of Summify. Meta!)

If I think about what Twitter might do with Summify, it's pretty simple: Flipboard + Fuego. Basically, it's a personal "trending topics" generator. Take the hottest links from your feed drawing on Twitter's rich data, combine them with your personal preferences, and present them in some nice format. Perhaps this format could be a (very monetizable) daily newsletter filled with news and information that's relevant to you. If we were anachronistic, we might even call this bundle of content a "newspaper" that just happens to be curated by your Twitter network.

Twitter has always had a front-end problem. We're talking about a product that, for years, most users accessed through third-party clients. No matter, though. The networks that the basic idea allows people to build are what is valuable. And now, the company is trying to find the right way to expose all the value lying in those networks. One way is all the change you've seen at Twitter.com. The next? Well, that's Summify.

My connections in the technology world are nearly universally opposed to SOPA. They (i.e. we) see it as a threat to the open Internet. Hollywood and the music companies say there is nothing to fear from this legislation. Yet most independent analysts and the organizations that would have to comply with the law say that it creates serious problems.

To protest SOPA, many Internet companies -- as you no doubt have seen or heard by now -- have blacked out their websites. I've seen Internet watchers go back and forth about the usefulness of the current blackout protest. Two tweets stand-in for a whole lot of others:

"Going dark is cute, but, the only way SOPA dies is if the tech industry starts lobbying just as hard as the entertainment industry," Gizmodo's Mat Honan wrote. And Gawker Media's Joel Johnson tweeted, "Is it possible to appreciate protest blackouts and also think that they're mostly preaching to the choir?"

Combined, the two tweets suggest support for anti-SOPA ideas, but a fear that the protests are basically useless because the target audience (Congress) won't be swayed by the blackouts. It's a sentiment that I've seen (re)tweeted in various guises over the last few days.

In thinking about this critique, I recalled talking to a long-time organizer during the heat of the Occupy protests late last year. "Protests don't solve things," she told me. "Protests create problems that policymakers then have to solve."

To be clear, by "create a problem," I mean to frame some set of facts and events in the world in such a way that they become a coherent bad, separate from the general messiness of the world. For web nerds, it's like dropping a shadow on text: suddenly, something is foregrounded. Much of that foregrounding isn't accomplished by the protests themselves, but by the media that spins out of such protests.

Remember all those pieces after the occupations that asked, "What are protesters so upset about? Whoa! It turns out there's something to this 1% stuff!" The number of media mentions of income inequality skyrocketed and the number of people who believed income inequality has grown and the government should do something about it grew along with them. You saw the rhetoric of politicians change and policy wonks offer Washington-ready ideas. Occupy created the problem (in the narrow meaning presented above) of inequality in the United States. They gave meaning to the growth of income and wealth gaps in this country.

Back to SOPA. It looked like SOPA was going to sail through Congress. Remember that in May, its sister bill PIPA passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in just two weeks and with almost no opposition. But then the Internet -- its for-profit companies and non-profit allies -- woke up. Wired.com and BoingBoing and Ars Technica started to cover the story in greater depth. Redditors were suddenly very interested in these bills. The tech community became aware of this problem. The efforts of protesters over the last eight months convinced most in Silicon Valley that they had to do something about these bills' progress.

But The SOPA Problem remained largely within the tech world, within the choir. How to push those ideas into society more broadly? One might think, "Let's create a 'news event' with a digital protest." Would that work?

Last night, the Wikipedia blackout was the top story on the BBC. This morning, the New York Times homepage looks like this:

For all you high school students who have papers due tomorrow, as well as anyone else who might like to access Wikipedia while the site is offline to protest SOPA, we have a clever workaround for you.  Atlantic friend and contributor Philip Bump created a simple site -- http://pbump.net/wiki/ -- that lets you search Google's cache of Wikipedia to find recent copies of articles. Obviously, the cached versions of the millions of Wikipedia articles won't retain their full functionality, but as a temporary Wikipedia replacement, it's pretty slick.

The site also a great reminder that the Internet is very good at defeating attempts to restrict information flow by anyone, even those people protesting to keep the flow unfettered.

(As several people have pointed out to me on Twitter, you can also access Wikipedia by turning off Javascript in your browser or going to the mobile site. Just FYI.)

The Coast Guard icebreaker Healy finished clearing a path to Nome, Alaska for a Russian fuel tanker this week, but their trip is far from the only wild adventure these special ships have undertaken. In the frozen arctic, the city of Nome, Alaska was in desperate need of help. A stormy Bering Sea had kept the city from receiving its full standard shipment of diesel fuel, which its residents burn to generate electricity and run their vehicles.

The town had enough fuel to last through March, but the sea on which Nome perches stays frozen until midsummer; it seemed the city would have to fly in fuel.

So, in mid-December, as winter bore down on the great north, a Coast Guard icebreaker prepared to lead the Russian tanker Renda through the frozen sea to the 3,600 souls of Nome. Yesterday, the ships reached Nome and the long-awaited fuel transfer began. The Coast Guard photos (above) capture their arrival, as well as the preparation made on land to run hoses to the city's fuel storage locations.

The mission, which New Scientist deemed 'unprecedented,' was possible only because of the power of the icebreaker. This special class of ships is so interesting precisely because they are designed to do exactly what other ships cannot. The process of breaking up ice is startlingly simple conceptually.

"While significant engineering goes into designing an icebreaker, breaking ice is based on two simple principles: (1) a sledgehammer is better than a butter knife and (2) two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time," wrote the Coast Guard's head of Cutter Forces, Lt. Cmdr. Kristen Serumgard.

As easy as Serumgard makes it sound, icebreaking at the poles is a crazy technological adventure. Here are seven things you should know about the US Coast Guard Cutter Healy, our country's newest icebreaker, and other ships of its ilk.

1. Icebreakers work by riding up on the ice and using the weight of the ship to break the ice. I always thought icebreakers worked like a wedge, prying apart the ice, but that's not actually true. The icebreakers have a rounded bow, unlike the sharper ones found on traditional ships, that allows them to ride up onto the ice. "As the bow raises up and the stern sinks below the water," the Coast Guard's Serumgard explains, "the force of buoyancy acting on the submerged portion of the stern... creates a lever-like action bringing Healy's 16,000 tons down onto the ice and breaking it." Then, the Healy moves through the broken ice, pushing it aside in a swatch two or three times as wide as the ship.

2. Many Russian icebreakers are powered by nuclear reactors. Since the nuclear-powered Lenin icebreaker went into operation in 1959, nine other Russian ships have launched with nuclear reactors that generate steam for their operations. The ships only have to refuel once every four years, which is a nice advantage in the Arctic, where supply lines can easily be severed by storms or ice. They are also very powerful. On the downside, they have to carry a nuclear reactor on board the ship.

3. The American icebreaker Healy can travel through 4.5 feet of ice at a speed of 3 knots. At least that's the top speed and maximum thickness for the Healy. For more specific operations (ramming, backing), the ship can take on ice 8 feet thick. Russia's more powerful nuclear icebreakers, like the NS 50 Let Pobedy can take on 9 feet of ice!

4. The Healy and Renda, are being aided by a video-capable drone. In addition to the traditional tools of navigation, the BP Oil Spill Response team lent a tiny 2.5-pound drone to the Nome resupply effort to help them get a drone's eye view of the task ahead of them. The Aeryon Scout UAV helps the team identify ridges of thicker ice and route around them.



5. The first icebreaking ships appeared on the Delaware River in the US and the Elbe River in Germany in the 1840s. The first ship designed to operate in icy conditions, City Ice Boat No. 1, was built in Philadelphia in 1837. It was eventually converted into a barge in the early 1900s. Dedicated icebreakers appeared in St. Petersburg and Hamburg in the 1870s, and oceangoing vessels by the turn of that century. Icebreakers rounded into their current shape during the 1970s as new propulsion systems (nuclear powered in Russia, diesel electric in other countries) increased the power and range of the boats. In recent years, a new propulsion system called the "azimuth thruster pod" has provided new flexibility with its ability to move in 360 degrees.

6. The first dedicated US icebreaker, the Northland, was eventually sold to the Israeli 'underground,' and used to run Jewish immigrants to Palestine past a British blockade. Though a "disappointment" as an icebreaker, the ship went on to a very strange afterlife in the Middle East. (That's her below, after they removed the masts that provided her auxiliary power.) The Coast Guard history of this ship will be the basis for my next novel, a maritime adaptation of The Red Violin:

[The Northland] was decommissioned in 1946 and sold to the Israeli "underground." After conversion work she was renamed The Jewish State and ran the British blockade of Palestine transporting Jewish immigrants. After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Northland, now renamed Matzpen, became the first warship of the new Israeli Navy. She saw action against Egyptian forces that attacked Israel by sea; shelled Tira and Tyre and then served as a training ship, then a tender to the Israeli motor torpedo boat fleet, and finished her career as an accommodations ship for the port command at Haifa. She was decommissioned from the Israeli Navy in February, 1962 and sold for scrap.

7. A 2007 National Academies study found that US icebreaking capabilities were "at risk of being unable to support national interests in the north and the south." That's because two of the United States' three polar icebreakers have exceeded their design lifetimes. The Polar Star and Polar Sea began operation in the late 1970s and have experienced some problems in recent years. They require too much maintenance and their systems are getting old. No relief is on the horizon for at least several years.

Images: United States Coast Guard.

The innovative show portends a post-Internet revival of production values, minus the pretension to authority.

Nothing on the dial sounds quite like WNYC's Radiolab. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich's science-heavy show foregrounds complex and fascinating production values as well as buddy-comedy banter that leads listeners on the path to enlightenment. After an incredibly successful few years, 'the Radiolab effect' has begun to influence the next generation of great radio producers, reports Julia Barton at Nieman Storyboard. She spoke with Julie Shapiro, the artistic director of the wonderful Third Coast International Audio Festival, and Roman Mars, who produces the 99% Invisible podcast and helped judge the festival this year. Both have heard hundreds of radio pieces from up-and-comers.

It turns out that replicating the show's production values is difficult, but its approach to knowledge and storytelling are easier to incorporate.

[T]hey are hearing another trademark of the show, its conversational style. You'd think, since the talk radio format is mostly talk, that this would be a given. But radio evolved in the age of oratory, when a stentorian delivery helped pierce the broadcast static, and that's what listeners still expect.

In the age of HD and earbuds, though, producers are finding they can sound more like themselves. "Radiolab" co-hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich break down complicated stories through a relaxed Socratic dialogue, an approach that's also been popularized by NPR's "Planet Money" and APM's "Freakonomics."

Barton's suggests that our cultural expectations of radio -- funneled through different technological listening devices -- are changing. It may be broadcast over traditional airwaves, but it's webby. It feels interactive and interrogative rather than narrowly investigative. Abumrad and Krulwich aren't coming from on high, but right there with the listener adventuring through the story.

I was reminded of Andrew Sullivan's wonderful 2008 piece for this magazine, "Why I Blog."

The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is--more than any writer of the past--a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.

What's different about Radiolab (and what I think is changing about the web) is that it *is* a production, just one of a very new kind. Radiolab is actually post-blog and post-livestream. It's not aping the oratory of old or the raggedness of the new. It's a hybrid that takes lessons from the past, recent and deep.

That's where I think web journalism is headed, too.  "No one wants to read a 9,000-word treatise online," reads a telling line from Sullivan piece. "On the Web, one-sentence links are as legitimate as thousand-word diatribes--in fact, they are often valued more."

While this might have been true at one point, it simply no longer is. Here at The Atlantic, there is a very strong positive correlation between length of post and readers attracted. The genre conventions of blogging are changing. Few old-style linkblogs exist and a whole culture has developed around the longread. New online publications (e.g. The Verge) look beautiful.

This is the Radiolab effect extended: expect less pretension to authority, greater understanding of one's nodeness, but greater respect for the production culture of the pre-web era.

There's not much to say about it, but I'm moving "The iPad 3 debuts in March" from the Rumor category to the Really Solid Rumor category. A Bloomberg team writes:

The company's manufacturing partners in Asia started ramping up production of the iPad 3 this month and plan to reach full volumes by February, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the details aren't public. The tablet will use a quad-core chip, an enhancement that lets users jump more quickly between applications, two of the people said.

One other thing to note from the big scoop. A source tells the publication that the iPad 3 will be compatible with the fastest available cell networks, known as LTE. That's a big deal and would make the new tablet the first Apple product to use the newer networks.

"Apple is bringing LTE to the iPad before the iPhone because the tablet has a bigger battery and can better support the power requirements of the newer technology, said one of the people," Bloomberg reported.

The iPad 3 screen will also be better than the current (i.e. my) version of the tablet.

Before we talk, you need to watch the video above. It's just one minute and 24 seconds. You'll observe a crow (probably a 'hooded crow') pick up the lid to a jar, set it down on the apex of a snow-mottled roof and slide down one side, carefully keeping its feet on the lid until it gets to the bottom. Then it picks up the lid, flies back to the apex, tests out another face of the roof, finds it lacking, returns to the original position, and slides down again.

It is a remarkable demonstration of the intelligence of the crow, which sits on a smart branch in the animal tree within the family Corvidae. There is something so deliberate about this play: the crow uses a toy; it searches for the best sledding path; it repeats the adventure down the roof; it keeps upright with its feet planted on the lid when, as a bird, it could simply fly. The bird does not want to travel down the roof, it wants to slide down the roof.

I wanted to know if there was a greater significance to this video and this amazing bird. So, I called up Alan Kamil, who has been studying corvids for decades and is co-director of the Center for Avian Intelligence at the University of Nebraska. I've got to send you this YouTube clip of this crow sledding down a roof in Russia, I told him.

Across the phone line, I heard Kamil gamely open his email and begin to watch the video. Like most people who watch the video, he chuckled and said, "Wow, this is cool," a proposition to which I assented.

Then I started my questioning. What can we learn from this YouTube video? How can we explain this bird's behavior? Is there some natural analog to this in the wild? Was there some kind of greater lesson here about the evolutionary process or how crows use play?

Kamil demurred. "It would just be storytelling." Exactly! I wanted to exclaim.

"It is in keeping with the general reputation of corvids," Kamil told me. "I don't know what to make of it scientifically but it is a cool example of a play-like behavior in a corvid."

There are two problems with making much of the video. First, scientists need context. We don't know where the bird is or how it learned this trick. There's not much to say without the proper markers of meaning that surround this kind of behavioral evidence.

Second, when humans look at a crow doing something human-like, they have a very hard time not seeing themselves as the crow.

"Human beings have a strong, strong, strong tendency that if we see an animal do something that's analogous to what we do, like use a tool or answer an arithmetic question, we assume that the animal is doing it and understands the situation in the same way we do," he said. "And sometimes that's true but more often it's false."

And with thousands upon thousands of animal videos forming the core of YouTube's value (just kidding!), we now have an opportunity to anthropomorphize a great variety of animal behaviors. Kamil noted, though, that his worries about our human-centric view of animals were "not a comment on YouTube." Our tendency to see ourselves -- our type of consciousness, really -- in animals long precedes the Internet.

All that may be true, but looking at the crow, can't we just *tell* that it's having a really good time? Doesn't our presence in the animal kingdom give us some insight into our fellow creatures?

"I've worked with corvids, various species for 40 years now, and I have no doubt in my mind as a person that they enjoy certain things, playing around kinds of things, but I've never done research about it," Kamil told me. "I have a dog and talk to my dog and think of it as a little human being, but that's as a dog owner, not as a scientist."

For the Museum of Modern Art's Talk to Me exhibit, MIT's SENSEable City Lab created a piece composed of 40 laptops that were sent all over the world and programmed to transmit data and images from their environments back to MIT. Fast forward some months and one of those laptops had entered common usage at the Lab. It was left on a desk and stolen in a burglary. (Of all the luck!) How do you think this crime caper might end? This is a story with a moral, after all.

Via Tim Maly