jacob ward

Editor Jake Ward demonstrates how to use an old plastic container and a can of air to take a beer from lukewarm to mountain-stream cold in just a few seconds. (For another video of this project, visit sonicIntoX’s channel at Metacafe.)

California’s Central Valley, that blistering flatland of artichoke fields criss-crossed by the occasional four-mile straightaway, would seem the perfect place to open up a big engine. But as I arrived in Davis, California, on the day my parents moved there from Seattle, I was hit with the sudden realization that I had, in fact, chosen the perfectly wrong trip on which to test BMW’s monstrous M6.

Davis, it turns out, is possibly the bike-friendliest town in the nation.

Sure, external hard drives aren't exactly scarce these days, but while the price point has come down a lot, they're still not cheap. Enter the hard drive case. For just a fistful of dollars, you can pick up a case that (almost) instantly transforms your old internal hard drive into a new storage unit. As Deputy Editor Jake Ward demonstrates here, putting it together is a piece of cake. In the end, you'll have a great-working hard drive, not to mention a few dollars more. Just, keep an eye out for the tiny screws.

You've never seen a group of programmers and designers flip out over someone like they did over Peter Semmelhack, CEO of open-source gadget company Bug Labs, at SXSW this morning. (That is, unless you were at Jonathan Coulton's show at the PopSci.com party last night. Grown men pulling their thinning hair and jumping up and down, that sort of thing. But Semmelhack's crowd came close, and they were sober.)

There's just no nice way to say it: You're stupid with your money. You may fancy yourself a shrewd investor, but if you have normal human instincts—if you stand up and cheer at sporting events, if you follow the crowd toward the exit at the theater—then you have the instincts that make investors alternate between delirious greed and inconsolable fear. Like most of your peers, you are wired to buy high and sell low, and that's why Richard Peterson is about to become one very rich psychiatrist.

The New York Times reports today that Google and IBM are sinking $30 million into a two-year project to build remote data centers that can handle sophisticated computing research remotely. No World of Warcraft player will again be safe now that students can crunch probabilities with the 1600+ processors Google is installing in an undisclosed location.

But seriously: the two companies—along with six universities (Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Maryland and the University of Washington)—are cooperating to get an inadequately funded area of research off the ground. The Times succinctly defines "cloud-computing" as a "new kind of data-intensive supercomputing" that "often involves scouring the
Web and other data sources in seconds or minutes for patterns and
insights." It's typically used by major corporations to analyze web traffic and refine big systems, but now any university kid with a password will be able to create programs and software that can take advantage of the horsepower Google and IBM are providing. —Jacob Ward

Sure, it's easy for some independent health panel to poo-poo what turns out to be a high incidence of pre-flight cocktails among NASA astronauts. (The study, obtained by Aviation Week & Space Technology and published on their website, found that on at least two occasions, astronauts were so intoxicated that flight surgeons warned that the crew members were a risk to the safety of the flight.)

NASA's standard 12-hour "bottle to throttle" minimum evidently isn't as
strictly observed as the space agency would like (NASA said it will
issue a reaction to the findings on Friday), but here's the thing, Mr. Health Panel: You try facing a Monday spent atop 47,000 gallons of rumbling jet fuel, and see if you don't need an extra Bloody Mary before reporting for work. —Jacob Ward