Brendan I. Koerner

Where To Hide From Mother Nature

Articles — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Human beings are self-absorbed creatures, so the response to Hurricane Katrina has naturally included some hand-wringing over the question: Could this happen to my hometown? Depending on the worrywart's location, the theoretical catastrophe could be a flash flood, a wildfire, or an earthquake rather than a hurricane; no corner of the United States is immune to lethal natural disasters.

Still, some corners are safer than others. If an American wants to minimize his chances of dying at Mother Nature's hands, where should he set up house? Slate crunched the numbers "and did some educated guesswork" to find the U.S. city… more

Brain Brew

Articles — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Coffee is the drug that changed my life. Without its brain-perking effects, it's doubtful that I could have passed astronomy in college, read The Wealth of Nations cover to cover, or made a favorable first impression on my girlfriend's parents despite suffering from a colossal hangover. In fact, this very review would be immeasurably harder to write were it not for the steaming cup of milk-tinged joe to my laptop's left.

But I seem to have derived less benefit from my addiction than many other habitual caffeine ingesters whom Antony Wild describes in Coffee: A Dark History. A British coffee… more

Rise of the Green Machine

Articles — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 03:00:00 -0400

Toyota promised me 60. The spec sheet on the 2005 Prius clearly states that the car gets five dozen miles per gallon of gas on city streets. But I'm test-driving a beige hatchback along Sepulveda Boulevard on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and according to the touchscreen on the dash, I'm topping out at 49.7.

Granted, 49.7 miles per gallon is at least twice what all the gas hogs around me are getting. But whenever I hit the accelerator, no matter how gradually, my mileage dips. I must be doing something wrong. I click the screen over to… more

Riches to Rags

Articles — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

A successful scam consists of two essential parts: the fraud and the getaway. An ill-gotten fortune, no matter how spectacular, isn't very useful if it can only be spent on cigarettes and candy bars at the prison commissary. So a competent con artist will figure out from square one not only how to part the suckers from their cash, but also how to disappear when the inevitable end becomes imminent.

Casual fans of flim-flam history are already aware that Charles Ponzi, whose surname is now synonymous with "pyramid scheme," couldn't dodge the law when his financial house of cards collapsed… more

Welcome To The Machine

Articles — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 00:00:00 -0500

That serious problems plague our new, computerized voting machines -- on which 29 percent of U.S. voters are poised to cast their votes in November -- has been apparent ever since $3.9 billion in federal funding for the machines was made available in 2002, in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore. In the years since, report after report has cautioned that the machines lack the security and robustness necessary to withstand the assaults of hackers or unscrupulous technicians. But no one seems likely to stop the rollout of the machines, more than 50,000 of which have been purchased by… more

The Ambition Tax

Articles — Sat, 27 Mar 2004 00:00:00 -0500

From this side of the Pacific, we've always shuddered at the prospects for young people in a place like Japan. The routine of archetypal sarariman, or corporate drone, sure sounds dreadful: a drab college education followed by a youth of low-paid toil, long commutes into Tokyo, and little chance for advancement beyond middle management. The very best a sarariman can hope for, we're led to believe, is to someday go into hock for a suburban condo and to scrape together enough money so the kids can attend after-school cram sessions.

It all seems so tedious, so pointless, so restrictive --… more

Intel's Tiny Hope for the Future

Articles — Wed, 31 Dec 2003 04:00:00 -0500

As a department head at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's R&D arm, David Tennenhouse spent the late 1990s approving or denying funding for hundreds of far-out military programs. One proposal he reviewed, from a research team at UC Berkeley, outlined a concept called smart dust -- fleck-sized wireless sensors intelligent enough to organize themselves into autonomous networks. Dropped from a passing helicopter, the sensors could spy on enemy movements or detect a hidden stash of mustard gas. Tennenhouse was intrigued enough to authorize several hundred thousand dollars in funding. Then he moved on to the next bizarre… more

In Computer Security, a Bigger Reason to Squirm

Articles — Sun, 07 Sep 2003 00:00:00 -0400

Like prison wardens marveling at an escapee's spoon-dug tunnel, computer-security professionals acknowledge grudging admiration for the author of SoBig.F, the virus that deluged e-mail In boxes last month. At the epidemic's peak in mid-August, according to the antivirus company Central Command, SoBig.F-related messages accounted for 73 percent of e-mail traffic worldwide, making it history's most aggressive online contagion.

"You have to think the person who did this has some awareness of the Internet's infrastructure," said Mark Carey, an independent computer security consultant in Columbus, Ohio, who has analyzed SoBig's code. "It's a little more sophisticated than what we've previously seen."

On… more

Fat Pipe Dream

Articles — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 00:00:00 -0400

"My dream is big, OK?"

Coming from a man who used to boast of having a 300-year business plan, that's saying a lot. But Masayoshi Son isn't exaggerating. His latest master plan includes nothing less than the demolition of Japan's telecom industry, and, not incidentally, the revival of his moribund company, Softbank. To get there, he's hawking next-generation, superfast, supercheap DSL to the Japanese masses.

He may no longer be the world's eighth-richest man -- Softbank's stock price is down 98 percent from its bubble peak -- but Son still moves with an impressive entourage. A cadre of yes-men, crowded around him… more

Your Cellphone is a Homing Device

Articles — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 03:00:00 -0400

If you purchased a new cellphone over the past 18 months or so, odds are that one of the features listed in small print on the side of the box was "E911 capable." Or, as in the case of my latest Motorola, "Location technology for piece [sic] of mind." Perhaps you asked the salesman to explain the feature, and he replied that it means that cops can home in on your phone in case of an emergency, a potentially important perk should you ever find your hand pinned beneath an immovable boulder in rural Utah, as Aron Ralston did recently.… more