Last night, we got in a brief discussion with a pal regarding the Hollywood history of bearer bonds . These arcane financial instruments played a key role in at least two cinematic classics from our younger years: Beverly Hills Cop , in which Eddie Murphy’s pal foolishly steals some “German bearer bonds” from a drug dealer, and Die Hard , where they were hidden deep within the …
Tags: · bearer bonds, Beverly Hills Cop, crime, Die Hard, drugs, Hans Gruber, Mexico, money, movies, Texas
We’ve recently been toying with the idea of self-publishing a book, but can’t quite seem to get over the feeling that such a maneuver will result in a disastrous labor-to-pay ratio. That said, we’ve been heartened to learn that putting out one’s own book is no longer the sole domain of conspiracy theorists and frustrated poets. The great Yaphet Kotto has joined the trend …
Tags: · 1980s, books, James Bond, Kill Bond, Live and Let Die, Midnight Run, movies, Philippines, Yaphet Kotto
We’re off to deal with the federal government, so we’ll outro with one of the greatest stunts in cinematic history: the crocodile jump from Live and Let Die . As amply shown above, no fancy CGI or other tricks were used in the making of this scene—croc farm owner Ross Kananga (nee Heilman) actually jumped from snout to snout to snout a grand total of five times. (That third …
Tags: · crocodiles, James Bond, John Cazale, Live and Let Die, movies, Ross Kananga, stunts
No Bad Movie Friday this week, as The Tubes yielded up precious few usable clips from Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 . Instead, we’re gonna hit you with a special treat—rare archival footage from the heyday of Father Divine , taken during his prosperous Harlem phase. It’s best viewed in tandem with this 1953 Life spread , which neatly sums up Father Divine’s penchant …
Tags: · Bad Movie Friday, Father Divine, Harlem, nuclear power, religion
The controversy over Iran’s nuclear ambitions has sent plenty of folks scurrying back to the history books, to examine what made South Africa give up its bomb-building program . In joining the throng, though, we stumbled upon a curious factoid from the annals—an assertion, in an old (and offline) Foreign Affairs article, that South Africa initially had peaceful reasons for developing …
Tags: · atomic testing, Iran, mining, nuclear power, South Africa
I have previously written about Mongolia’s struggles with endemic alcoholism , which the political establishment has tried to address by leading by example . But as this editorial makes clear, the problem is only getting worse, with over 55 percent of the nation’s population admitting to excessive alcohol intake. Aside from raising taxes to exorbitant levels, then, what is a …
Tags: · alcoholism, books, Charles Duhigg, Mongolia, psychology, The Power of Habit
For those of y’all who follow my microblog , you might have noticed a recent fascination with pop-culture relics of the early Atomic Age. That interest is a spin-off of a book-related strand about America’s early nuclear reactors, one of which plays a small-yet-pivotal role in the plot. As I iron out some kinks in that particular scene today, please check out Dagwood Splits the Atom …
Tags: · books, comics, Dagwood Splits the Atom, nuclear power
Having grown up in fear of nuclear catastrophe , the post-earthquake turmoil at the Fukushima reactors has really knocked me for a loop. From the moment the plants’ administrators started issuing mealy-mouthed explanations about the situation, I knew that disaster was imminent. The big question now is not only how much radiation will blow toward Japan’s major population centers, but what …
Tags: · books, earthquake, Fukushima, Haruki Murakami, Japan, nuclear power, Underground
Followers of Microkhan’s microblog may have noted that I’ve developed a recent fascination with World War II-era combat art , which was created as part of an official War Department program to depict the conflict in oils, inks, and water colors. Once the the war was over, the painting continued as the U.S. speedily developed its nuclear weapons program, most notably by conducting …
Tags: · art, atomic testing, Bikini Atoll, nuclear power, World War II
As part of Wired ‘s latest cover package , I’ve got a short piece up about why, exactly, our dreams of nuclear fusion power have never come to fruition. In a nutshell, the problem is that plasma is really devious—we can get it plenty hot enough to produce fusion, in the style of the Sun and other stars, but we can never quite seem to keep it where we want it. Our only reliable means …
Tags: · ITER, nuclear fusion, nuclear power, physics
Yesterday’s cross-country plane ride gave me the chance to catch up with Jon Lee Anderson’s sobering dispatch from Iran , which pretty much cements the notion that the Islamic Republic will never give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Not that I didn’t already know that on some level—as Anderson so eloquently puts it, Iran seems hard-wired to strive for membership in the global …
Tags: · atomic testing, diplomacy, Iran, nuclear power, South Africa, Vela Incident, weapons
Contrary to our expectations, the Haim Saban profile in this week’s New Yorker is a killer read. We had no idea that the man’s empire began with a spectacular insight about cartoon music royalties, or that kiddie-show billionaires have such awesome pull with world leaders. And there is at least one classic reporting detail, in which the author describes Saban crediting his palatial …
Tags: · economics, Haim Saban, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, television, The New Yorker
In response to yesterday’s post on the onetime vogue for mining-by-nuke , a treasured commenter asked:
I remember a rumor that someone proposed building an alternative to the Panama Canal (perhaps even at sea level) using nuclear explosives. Did you find any evidence of that in your research?
Indeed we did! This was actually the pet concept of Edward Teller , the man behind the …
Tags: · Edward Teller, maritime, nuclear power, Panama, Panama Canal, Project Ploughshare
There are already so many reasons to love our Canadian brothers: poutine , Rush, Alex Trebek. But let’s add another to the lengthy list: The nation to our north makes PET scans possible, by producing the bulk of the world’s supply of medical isotopes. Chief among these isotopes is Technetium-99 , which is key to safe pediatric bone scans.
But now it looks as if Canada may be getting …
Tags: · Canada, cyclotrons, medical science, nuclear power, Technetium-99
Though it’s still siphoning money from Uncle Sam’s coffers, the general consensus is that Yucca Mountain will never emerge from its bureaucratic coma . So what’s next? Microkhan is glad you asked :
For the moment, the only real option is to leave the waste where it was created, encased in metal cylinders and stowed in concrete bunkers. Barring the machinations of some truly ingenious …
Tags: · environment, Nevada, nuclear power, Yucca Mountain
Yesterday’s post about Political Power Units (PPUs) and the Polynesian island of Niue attracted a few dissenting e-mails. These correspondents argued that Microkhan got it wrong by a country mile, and that Niueans are political weaklings when compared to their South Pacific neighbors:
Niue, powerful? Don’t make me laugh, O Mighty Microkhan. By contrast, I give you Pitcairn Island: 48 …
Tags: · Niue, Pitcairn, Political Power Unit, politics
Microkhan’s been reading everything under the Sun regarding the forthcoming Indian election, a true marvel of democracy . Yesterday’s fodder was this New York Times bit on the growing political enthusiasm of India’s urban elite. Buried amidst the reporting was a rather gobsmacking fact: only 543 members of the nation’s parliament are directly elected by the people. (This …
Tags: · Andorra, India, Niue, Political Power Unit, politics
On the road for much of today, so start your week off right with a little vintage King Kobra , the rare hair-metal band willing to sacrifice its hair for a worthy cause—in this case, the destruction of Commies. Louis Gossett Jr. kills it in this video, too.
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Tags: · Cold War, Iron Eagle, King Kobra, Louis Gossett Jr., music
Let me start the week by directing y’all’s attention to my latest Wired essay , in which I argue for the revival of a bygone regulation: the requirement that patent applicants submit working models of their inventions. Sound onerous? Yeah, that’s the point:
The abolition of the model requirement [in 1880] was initially a boon to backyard inventors, who often lacked the capital to …
Tags: · innovation, intellectual property, patent models, patents, technology, Wired
After a week’s hiatus, Bad Movie Friday returns with a vengeance, as well as the most unnecessary use of a rocket launcher ever committed to film (c. the 1:20 mark). The ridiculous clip above is plucked from the 1987 Skinemax anti-classic Hard Ticket to Hawaii , in which several Playboy centerfolds play badass DEA agents. The acting is beyond atrocious; we remain convinced …
Tags: · Bad Movie Friday, Deron McBee, Hard Ticket to Hawaii, movies, Skinemax
Crashing on a major Wired deadline today. In my absence, please enjoy the North Korean propaganda video above, featuring the least enthusiastic narrator in the history of film. Back tomorrow with something truly splendid from the history of swindling.
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Tags: · North Korea, satellites
Left-of-center politicians are often demonized for simply “throwing money at a problem” instead of concocting a more innovative solution. But there are, in fact, instances in which direct cash incentives are by far the most efficient tact. Such appears to be the case in India, which continues to have a serious problem with female infanticide , especially among the rural poor. As Delhi’s …
Tags: · bribery, India, infanticide, marriage
In keeping with our recent paying-gig focus on addiction science, we’d like to turn your attention toward the remarkable work of Lee N. Robins , who recently passed away . In the early 1970s, after hearing rumors that tens of thousands of Vietnam War veterans had come stumbling home as hopeless heroin addicts, Robins vowed to determine whether that was really the case. She found that …
Tags: · addiction, drugs, heroins, psychology, Vietnam War
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Hd6Wohi-97w
The greatest to ever do it
I have a heavy writing day ahead: I’m having serious problems with a transition in my lede, and experience has taught me that ironing things out will take a good eight hours. So I’m shirking my Microkhan duties for the day and just tossing up some rare footage of the greatest squash player to ever walk the Earth. …
Tags: · Jahangir Khan, Pakistan, sports, squash, writer's block, writing
https://www.youtube.com/embed/OqFOUioAz6k
Whenever I’m stuck on a writing project—an all-too-frequent occurrence—I usually try to find my way forward by contemplating a single question: How can I shift what I’m trying to say without reaching for cliches? Because a lot of the time, the reason I’m banging my head against the wall is because I’m taking an approach to the …
Tags: · creativity, George Lucas, movies, writing
The illustration above should give you some sense of how I spent my summer: Learning everything I possibly could about the current state of hibernation research, the unheralded key to getting our species to Mars and beyond. I did so in order to write this new Wired story , which came out on Thanksgiving morning. The piece’s narrative throughline is about an Alaskan researcher …
Tags: · exhuastion, hibernation, Mars, mental health, philosophy, Wired, writing
At the tail end of June, I stopped posting on Twitter. I’d been inching toward that decision for a while, in large part because the space had become so joyless. I realized I was mostly there out of a sense of obligation, or maybe fear—if I wasn’t out their touting my own work, would anyone lay eyes on a single word I ever write? But though my particular line of work seems to demand some …
Tags: · lighthouses, Twitter
I am a writer based in the former hat-manufacturing capital of America. I ’m currently a contributing editor at Wired , for whom I write in-depth stories about criminal justice, national security, biomedical research, and sundry other topics. I’m also the author of two books of narrative nonfiction: Now the Hell Will Start , the tale of an American G.I. who went native in …
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When I parted ways with Twitter back in June, I did so with a post stating that I needed more time to focus on strengthening my parasocial relationships. This was only half in jest: I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time dialed into my headphones, listening to people chatter about great books , bad movies , and everything in between . This is partly because I’ve picked up a …
Tags: · Abroad in Japan, Japan, podcasts
The lyrics for national anthems are usually testaments to a country’s finer aspects—its gorgeous scenery, perhaps, or the indomitable fighting spirit of its longtime (though not necessarily original) residents. One notable exception is the anthem of Bikini Atoll , the South Pacific island that the United States destroyed with nuclear weapons tests in the early years of the Cold War. Just …
Tags: · Bikini Atoll, music, national anthems, nuclear weapons
