Alexis C. Madrigal

This is the sort of thing that makes you wonder what real names policy is all about. Today on Twitter, Salman Rushdie detailed his adventures with Facebook's name police.

"Amazing. 2 days ago FB deactivated my page saying they didn't believe I was me. I had to send a photo of my passport page. THEN... they said yes, I was me, but insisted I use the name Ahmed which appears before Salman on my passport and which I have never used," Rushdie wrote. "NOW... They have reactivated my FB page as 'Ahmed Rushdie,' in spite of the world knowing me as Salman. Morons."

You know, Ahmed Rushdie, world-famous author of The Satanic Verses and Midnight's Children.

Seriously, what is the point of forcing Salman Rushdie to go by Ahmed Rushdie? How does this benefit the social web?

The thomp-thomp of your heart beat will occur roughly three billion times in your lifetime. Over the last hundred years, scientists have learned a lot about the heart's mechanisms, as described in the dense, but clear video from the Guardian above. This is a summary of how a single heartbeat occurs, based on the description Michael Shattock of King's College London gives therein

Pacemaker cells at the top of the heart get things going, putting out an electrical signal on a steady but variable rhythm based on the body's needs. That signal spread down through the top chambers of the heart to the atrioventricular node, which directs the signal rapidly to the bottom of the heart. The pumping motion then spreads upward. Shattock noted this wiring makes for an efficient mechanism.

The electrical impulses that induce a heartbeat are generated by individual cells exploiting differences in the concentrations of sodium and potassium ions. (Ions are the name we give to molecules carrying an electrical charge.) There is lots of sodium outside the cell and relatively little inside whereas there is lots of potassium inside the cell and not much outside. Proteins open up channels through the cell membrane and like cold air rushing into a warm house, the sodium molecules push into the cell. Remember the molecules are ions, so a higher concentration of them makes the cell more positive. That's the electrical action that we call a nerve impulse. To end the activity, potassium channels open up and potassium rushes out of the cell, bringing down its positivity. Sodium is also pumped out of the cell through what is called active transport.

"How does that electrical activity translate into mechanical activity?" Shattock asked. The key to that action is calcium. During the period in which the cell's membrane is charged -- the action potential -- calcium enters the cell. The calcium triggers the release of more calcium from tiny bags -- sarcoplasmic reticulum -- filled with the element. Then, the calcium diffuses to the muscle filaments themselves and causes the actual movement. To relax the heart cells, the extra calcium that came across the cell membrane gets pumped out, and the heartbeat ends. Then, the process happens again and again until you die.

I see a lot of footage of the Earth from space, and let's be honest, it's all pretty good. Our planet is beautiful from above and as cameras have improved, the views we get of the Earth from orbit get better, too.

This particular video, though, is the best that I've seen. The footage is from NASA, but the editing is courtesy of Michael König. He selected a series of stunning shots of city lights at night and beautiful aurorae. This is meditation moviemaking.

So, turn off the lights, relax your muscles, and hit play.

After all the hullabaloo last week when Groupon debuted on NASDAQ, this week hasn't seen any big Groupon news. Instead, the company's scribbled down to a low on Wednesday of 23.61 and then bounced back a bit to end the week at 24.25, down from its open at 28.

Here's the chart:

I was all prepared to hate Twitter's new 'Activity' feed. The last thing I want is the Facebookification of Twitter. "Can't you leave well enough alone?" I huffed under my breath. But then I tried it.

And I like it. I wouldn't say it's "high value," which is one of Anthony De Rosa's complaints over at the Guardian. But it's fun. I like scrolling through what people are doing. It's a different window onto how people use Twitter, and I think it exposes more of the value that they're putting into the network. Specifically, being able to see the favorites of my followed crowd is fun. I  also like seeing when multiple members of my community decide to follow someone that I don't know. The new Activity section helps me shape my Twitter community, which is what ultimately determines what my Twitter experience will be like.

BUT -- and this is a big but -- Twitter needs to allow people to opt out of having their activity be public. There is just no technical or usage excuse not to allow users that control. Period.

We do not usually make movies about the mechanics who keep the planes working so that the pilots can fly them. We don't devote long speeches to the people who plate the needles needed for blood transfusion apparatus. We seldom recall the machinists who built the engines of our tanks.

But these people all contributed to the war efforts of the past. In this gallery, we look at the technologists behind the war from nuclear scientists to drone operators to the veterinarians who patched up horses in World War I.

Motherboard's Alex Pasternack dug into the hard support for a particular kind of nuclear power using the element thorium. Thorium reactors, conceptually, are a brilliant solution to our energy dilemma: they would be impervious to meltdowns, could be built faster and smaller than traditional nuclear plants, and cannot be used to produce radioactive material for nuclear weapons. Sound good? Well, it should. Wired had a great feature on thorium in 2009 that you should read if you're interested in the topic and Pasternack's documentary is a worthy advancement of the story.

I'm in it for a few seconds, mostly laying down some history and context about the nuclear debate in this country. Back in the middle of the 20th century, there were dozens of proposed reactor designs. Out of those, a couple of reactors became the standard, mostly based on the early success of the Navy's nuclear program. In retrospect, it may be that we locked in the wrong nuclear technologies for the wrong reasons (military applications, early success in the Navy, a desire for fast commercialization), leaving too many of the benefits of carbon-free nuclear power on the table.

The thorium documentary above walks you through some of that and introduces you to the key figures of the small but intense group of thorium advocates who are trying to mainstream their issue.

I love what Google has done to defend the world's search engine against content farm nonsense. But based on comments by Google's Matt Cutts reported on Search Engine Land, the latest changes to the search engine's algorithm could step on some publishers' toes. Check these out:

Cutts said Google is testing algorithms that determine "what are the things that really matter, how much content is above the fold." ...

"If you have ads obscuring your content, you might want to think about it," asking publishers to consider, "Do they see content or something else that's distracting or annoying?"

As a pro-user move, I think it's hard to argue with Cutts, but I'm not on the business side of a publisher trying to make money. If I was, I think I might be asking, "Why should Google get to determine what the right mix -- or placement -- of ads and content is?"

The founder of Pinboard, which bills itself as the social bookmarking site for introverts, fired a fascinating shot across the bow of just about every social network in the world. Maciej Ceglowski took aim at what people in Silicon Valley call "the social graph."

The social graph is shorthand for the idea that people's relationships can be represented as a series of nodes connected together by defined relationships known as edges. Why would you want to do this? Ceglowski explains:

We nerds love graphs because they are easy to represent in a computer and there is a vast literature on how to do useful things with them. When you ask Google for directions from Detroit to Redwood City, for example, you're interacting with a graph that represents the US road network. The same principle applies any time a site tells you people who bought object X might also be interested in book Y.

In other words, you want the graph because then you can apply the extant math to extract value from the network. The same types of algorithms that can recommend a book to you can be used to recommend friends and products. 

But the problem, Ceglowski demonstrates, is those bedeviled details, particularly in dealing with the edges (i.e. relationships). 

And then there's the question of how to describe the more complicated relationships that human beings have. Maybe my friend Bill is a little abrasive if he starts drinking, but wonderful with kids - how do I mark that? Dawn and I go out sometimes to kvetch over coffee, but I can't really tell if she and I would stay friends if we didn't work together. I'd like to be better friends with Pat. Alex is my AA sponsor. Just how many kinds of edges are in this thing?

Lest you think that these problems are confined to relationships that *you* don't have, Ceglowski has a response for that, too. "This is supposed to be a canonical representation of human relationships," he wrote. "But it only takes five minutes of reading the existing standards to see that they're completely inadequate."

In fact, he argues that the more realistic we make the relationships in the social graph, the more humans will see how inadequate they are. He compares the phenomenon to the well-known "uncanny valley" for computer-generated humans in which the more a robot or CGI person looks like a real person, the creepier it gets. "As the model becomes more expressive, we really start to notice the places where it fails," he concluded.

This might seem like tech insider baseball, but what it would mean is that the more Facebook or Google's social graph start to look like the mental map of the relationships you have in your head, the less you'll like using social networks. In other words, the better their model gets, the worse it would do as a product.

That leads Ceglowski, who is clearly making a lot of friends in Silicon Valley, to wonder if the semi-closed social networks will end up not as the future, but as the past. Facebook as the new AOL, not the next big thing.

Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90's. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.

But at the time no one knew what it would feel like to have a big global network. We were all waiting for the Information Superhighway to arrive in our TV set, and meanwhile these big sites were trying to design an online experience from the ground up. Thank God we left ourselves the freedom to blunder into the series of fortuitous decisions that gave us the Web.

Via Bobbie Johnson

Could this sort of errand service spread to other parts of our lives? If so -- awesome!

Startups do all kinds of things. Some of them sell weapons to the military. Others work on solar power. And yet another, Cherry, which launched yesterday, will send someone to wash your car, no matter where it is. (At least if you live in San Francisco, the service's first market.)

Here's the idea. First, you sign up for the service and put a credit card on file. Then, any time you want your car washed, you check in online with the car's location, and someone arrives to wash it there. $29 gets charged on your credit card and that's it. I spotted the service when Shasta Ventures' Jacob Mullins tweeted he was getting his car done. That's the photo up there that he posted.

While I think Cherry is interesting as it is, when I first saw Mullins tweet, I thought it was a much more wide-ranging service. "Ask and you shall receive. @Cherry will arrive at my office to wash my car in 33 mins. Amazing," Mullins wrote. So, naturally, I thought Cherry was some kind of real-world errand running service. You tweet what you need done and someone does it. How awesome would that be? Like Mechanical Turk for the real world!

UPDATE: Oh, wait! Such a startup exists. It's called TaskRabbit: "Get just about anything done by safe, reliable, awesome people." Stay tuned for more on them.

Image: Jacob Mullins, @jacob.

Amazon quietly purchased a Charlotte voice-to-text startup called Yap, an SEC filing shows.

Though the acquisition was apparently completed in September, no public announcement has been made by either company. The filing does not mention Amazon by name, but Yap merged with a company called "Dion Acquisition Sub" that just so happens to be headquartered at 410 Terry Avenue in Seattle, Washington, an Amazon.com building.

Yap's consumer voicemail-to-text service had remained in private beta, but according to Charlotte's CLTBlog, the underlying intellectual property reached far beyond the beta app.
Yap was founded by the Jablokov brothers, Igor and Victor, in 2006. In June 2008, the company raised a $6.5 Series A round of funding led by SunBridge Partners, which has an office in Charlotte.

"Yap is truly a leader in freeform speech recognition and driving innovation in the mobile user experience," Paul Grim, General Partner at SunBridge Partners, said at the time. "It is increasingly clear that the fastest, easiest, and safest way to interact with services on a mobile device is using your voice, and Yap makes this both possible and intuitive."

The acquisition is particularly interesting given the prominence of Apple's voice efforts and the depth of Google's. In the everyone-does-everything war between Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, this could be a small step for Amazon into voice control, which it does not currently have in any of its products.

The other important context here is that this is another southern success story, much like the ones we highlighted in our Startup South roadtrip. Charlotte was one city that we didn't get to -- but we were impressed by the level of outrage that the local startup community seemed to feel about it. There have been some other good exits for startups from that area of North Carolina, too.

Pew research shows (again) that kids still care about privacy

In our continuing series, Kids Are Not As Dumb About the Online World As You Assume, Pew Research finds that a majority of young adults have not posted something online because they thought it might negatively impact their future. This reflects the sophistication that young users bring to social media. While some youth may overshare online, the mass of kids are thinking about what they're doing. Which you'd expect because almost no one is more sensitive to social webs than kids under the age of 18.

Pew's researchers explain:

[T]he privacy-protecting behaviors of youth are complex, and involve a combination of application choice, profile settings, selective friending, and message control. Contrary to the public perception that teens and young adults simply "don't care" about their privacy online, there is growing evidence that younger users' privacy aspirations are not radically different from the views held by older adults.

Among 17-year-olds, a full 67 percent of the sample said they refrained from posting things online. Check out the metadata management by this middle school girl Pew quoted:

Like I tell all my friends who like take pictures, like, I'm like, you can't tag me in that. You can't tag anybody who's not on Facebook.

I'll also note that it benefits only social media companies to continue perpetuating the myth that kids these days have no desire for privacy. Kids and adults may differ in what they think is appropriate to put online or what they'd like to keep private, but privacy -- as a conceptual framework -- is baked into both groups.

Image: Michael D Brown/Shutterstock.

Alaskans are awaiting the landfall of a storm that may end larger than any on record in the area. Imagine a blizzard with near hurricane-force winds. The storm is tracking for a direct strike on Nome. "Alaska west coast to be hit by one of the most severe Bering Sea storms on record," the National Weather Service wrote in a special message. "A powerful and extremely dangerous storm of near record or record magnitude is bearing down on the west coast of Alaska."

The message concluded with a remarkably ominous tone. "This will be an extremely dangerous and life-threatening storm of an epic magnitude rarely experienced. All people in the area should take precautions to safeguard their lives and property." The storm looks so bad that the National Weather Service had to reach back to a storm that hit in November of 1974.

If you're not an avid arctic-storm watcher, it's hard to know where to turn for information about the storm's progress. Here's a quick guide to keeping up with the situation.

• The National Weather Service is obviously indispensable, but their site is difficult to navigate. This is the main page that you want to keep an eye on.
• The Department of Homeland Security also puts out a situation report on Alaska each day, which you can read here.
  
• Local and national news organizations are tracking the storm. Try the Fairbanks @newsminer, the Fairbanks paper, which has been keeping up a steady stream of tweets. The Alaska Dispatch is another excellent local news outlet. KTUU is a good Anchorage television station to keep an eye on. And of course, the Anchorage Daily News is a standby.
  
• Newsminer also provides an excellent list of webcams through which you can watch the storm make landfall.
• The Twitter hashtag appears to be #AKstorm, though I've seen several variations. If you'd like a more curated feed of tweets, the Weather Channel put together a list of 13 people and news outlets to watch.
  
• FEMA is watching the situation, too.
  

The Korean gaming company Nexon is one of the most underrated Internet companies in the world. Nexon was, it is fair to say, the first company to experience massive success with a business model built on selling virtual items. Building from their wild success with the Mario Kart-like racing game, Kart Rider, Nexon created a gaming empire first in Korea and then around Asia. This empire was unprecedented and it opened up a whole new way of thinking about making money off of gaming.

Nexon brought all kinds of different game types to the Korean market, and soon thereafter, to China both through their own efforts and through copycats. At the time, the Asian markets were considered a sinkhole by Western publishers because the retail business they depended on in the west didn't work. Instead of going into stores and buying games, piracy ran rampant and western game makers couldn't figure out how to make money. Nexon cracked the code, creating monetizable games by completely chucking the retail model that had succeeded in the west.

It should also be noted that when Nexon was doing all this stuff in the early and mid-2000s, no one was paying for anything on the Internet. Many people weren't convinced that anyone would ever buy anything virtual on the Internet, let alone virtual items for a game*. So their success wasn't just significant for gaming but for all Internet companies. They proved that if you tuned your content right, people would pay for bits.

Still western analysts were resistant. They chalked up Asian consumers willingness to purchase virtual stuff as evidence that they were just fundamentally different, exotic consumers of content. Now, of course, we know that people across the world can be induced to buy virtual items. More than $2 billion in virtual goods will purchased in the United States alone this year. So, Nexon also proved that innovations that started out in the Asian Internet space could flow into western markets.

Techcrunch's Sarah Lacy is one of the few mainstream tech journalists who've noticed how significant Nexon is. Here's her gloss: "It has higher revenues, far better margins and dramatically better user engagement statistics than Zynga, even if most average Western investors have never heard of it," Lacy wrote.

In 2010, the company had revenues of 934 billion won, which works out to about $835 million. Nexon's IPO could net the company $1.3 billion, which would allow it to expand its operations considerably. This is an Internet company that should be on your radar.

* A reader reminded me that there was a black market for money in some massively multiplayer online games, which is a good point. The market, though, was fairly small and was grouped by most interested parties under the category, "Stuff Weird MMO Players Do," more than a mass market phenomenon.

While Sarah Rich and I were driving through the south's startup landscape, we heard about plenty of new companies that we didn't get a chance to meet. Perhaps the most intriguing was Atlanta's Soneter, a member of Georgia Tech's Venture Lab. Here's the pitch.

24 million apartments don't have an individual water meter. Instead, the water bill is tallied by the entire building. That means that it is difficult to encourage efficiency through a price signal because people aren't paying for the water they actually use. In the past, if you wanted to install individual meters for every unit, you'd have to cut into the water pipes and stick those meters inside. That's expensive and time-consuming. The Soneter meter, by contrast, clamps on *outside* the pipe, meaning it's easier and cheaper to install.

The way they like to put it, Soneter is "extending the smart grid to water networks." The hardware works with in concert with management software that can provide real-time feedback to residents about how much water they're using.

This is a cool, sensor-based business that seems to have a clear, addressable market.

The new Gmail interface has too much white space, at least for our taste around The Atlantic. Luckily, there's an easy fix to this problem. Click on the settings icon and set your "Display Density" to "Compact."

The 10 largest energy companies in the world are all oil and gas concerns. They also help us draw a map of global power: Three are American, three are Russian, two are Chinese, one is French, and one is British.

This is according to the annual Platts Top 250 list, which ranks the world's energy businesses.

It's worth noticing the scale of these companies. All generate more than $100 billion per year in revenue. Google had revenue of $8.4 billion in 2010. Microsoft generated $62.5 billion in the same year.

Wouldn't it be great if there was an app that broke down all the barriers between you and the world? Haven't you been waiting for mobile, social software that lets you share not just companies and restaurants, but everything (including ice cube ratings) with everyone? Now that app is here.

It's called Jotly, and it doesn't actually exist, except in the funnier-than-you-think-it-can-be video above. Take a look. I think you'll enjoy how the video manages to send up nearly every startup cliche in just two minutes.

Its creator, Alex Cornell, said to look out for "the color blue, rounded corners, SoLoMo, ratings, points, free iPads, ridiculous name (complete with random adverbing via "ly"), overpromising, private beta, giant buttons, "friction-less" sign up, no clear purpose, and of course a promo video."

This is your moment of zen today. Two adventurers set out in a canoe and happened upon a starlings (collectively known as a murmuration) doing their amazing collective dance in the sky.

Watch the video. Just take it in. The starlings coordinated movements do not seem possible, but then there they are doing it. Scientists have been similarly fascinated by starling movement. Those synchronized dips and waves seem to hold secrets about perception and group dynamics. Last year, Italian theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi took on the challenge of explaining the murmuration. What he found, as ably explained by my old Wired colleague Brandon Keim, is that the math equations that best describe starling movement are borrowed "from the literature of 'criticality,' of crystal formation and avalanches -- systems poised on the brink, capable of near-instantaneous transformation." They call it "scale-free correlation," and it means that no matter how big the flock, "If any one bird turned and changed speed, so would all the others."

It's a beautiful phenomenon to behold. And neither biologists nor anyone else can yet explain how starlings seem to process information and act on it so quickly. It's precisely the lack of lag between the birds' movements that make the flocks so astonishing. Having imported a theoretical physicist to model the flock movement, perhaps a computer scientist would be the right choice to describe the individual birds' behavior.