: To model how flames turn buildings into ashes, the nation's leading fire researchers don't play with matches over the sink. Instead they burn down entire homes, cubicles and warehouses.
At the National Institutes of Standards and Technologies, researchers set huge fires under a 40-foot-long by 30-foot-wide exhaust hood that is connected to an $8 million control unit.
Using measurements of oxygen consumption, the researchers can precisely determine the temperatures inside the room as well as the heat-release rates of different materials. Then, using software like Fire Dynamics Simulator and Smokeview, the researchers run virtual and real-world side-by-side comparisons of how combustion works.
By modeling the way flames and smoke travel under real conditions, the fire scientists are creating new strategies and technologies for fighting tough blazes.
In this video gallery, you'll see Christmas trees fires, dorm rooms ablaze, and cubicles melting.
In this clip, we see how quickly a dried out Scotch-pine Christmas tree can light a room on fire. Within 30 seconds, the room is engulfed in flames. According to the NIST, holiday trees account for more than 400 fires, 10 deaths and $15 million in property damage every year.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
: At the end of the nerd-classic Office Space, Milton, the much-abused office loser, sets fire to the cubes of Penetrode, where the main characters work. Here, fire scientists give you an unintentional peek inside the movie's end. The video shows how quickly flames spread from ignition to a point known as flashover, when the room becomes engulfed in flame, in an open office plan.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
: When you can't trust your college roommate not to accidentally drop a lit cigarette into a trash can, this video proves that you don't need to -- as long as your college has sprinklers installed.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
: Following a six-fatality fire in Chicago in 2003, NIST modeled what happened on the 12th story of the Cook County Administration building. To understand how the fire got out of hand, the researchers measured the heat release rate of different components of the office building. In this video, we see four workstations with chairs in a 23-foot by 24-foot enclosure.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
: Here's another video from the series of tests intended to model the Cook County Administration building fire. This time the researchers tested a single workstation that wasn't enclosed. Eventually, these tests helped NIST recommend safety changes that should prevent future fires from turning deadly in similar environments.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
: Part of NIST's mission is to educate the public about how fires work. In this video, we watch as a living room goes from spark to flashover in mere minutes.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
: When firefighters lit up this Phoenix warehouse, they employed infrared cameras, lasers, sonar, vibration sensors and video to look for clues about how to predict structural collapse. They didn't find any dead giveaways, even with all that tech, but their conclusions and data can be seen here (.pdf).
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
: For firefighters, one of the worst things that can happen is the building collapsing on top of them, so figuring out how and when that's going to happen has been a focus of NIST research. In this video, dummy firefighters on top of a burning house fall through the roof before being pulled out by ropes.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
: To model how flames turn buildings into ashes, the nation's leading fire researchers don't play with matches over the sink. Instead they burn down entire homes, cubicles and warehouses.
At the National Institutes of Standards and Technologies, researchers set huge fires under a 40-foot-long by 30-foot-wide exhaust hood that is connected to an $8 million control unit.
Using measurements of oxygen consumption, the researchers can precisely determine the temperatures inside the room as well as the heat-release rates of different materials. Then, using software like Fire Dynamics Simulator and Smokeview, the researchers run virtual and real-world side-by-side comparisons of how combustion works.
By modeling the way flames and smoke travel under real conditions, the fire scientists are creating new strategies and technologies for fighting tough blazes.
In this video gallery, you'll see Christmas trees fires, dorm rooms ablaze, and cubicles melting.
In this clip, we see how quickly a dried out Scotch-pine Christmas tree can light a room on fire. Within 30 seconds, the room is engulfed in flames. According to the NIST, holiday trees account for more than 400 fires, 10 deaths and $15 million in property damage every year.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
: At the end of the nerd-classic Office Space, Milton, the much-abused office loser, sets fire to the cubes of Penetrode, where the main characters work. Here, fire scientists give you an unintentional peek inside the movie's end. The video shows how quickly flames spread from ignition to a point known as flashover, when the room becomes engulfed in flame, in an open office plan.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
: When you can't trust your college roommate not to accidentally drop a lit cigarette into a trash can, this video proves that you don't need to -- as long as your college has sprinklers installed.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
: Following a six-fatality fire in Chicago in 2003, NIST modeled what happened on the 12th story of the Cook County Administration building. To understand how the fire got out of hand, the researchers measured the heat release rate of different components of the office building. In this video, we see four workstations with chairs in a 23-foot by 24-foot enclosure.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
: Here's another video from the series of tests intended to model the Cook County Administration building fire. This time the researchers tested a single workstation that wasn't enclosed. Eventually, these tests helped NIST recommend safety changes that should prevent future fires from turning deadly in similar environments.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
: Part of NIST's mission is to educate the public about how fires work. In this video, we watch as a living room goes from spark to flashover in mere minutes.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
: When firefighters lit up this Phoenix warehouse, they employed infrared cameras, lasers, sonar, vibration sensors and video to look for clues about how to predict structural collapse. They didn't find any dead giveaways, even with all that tech, but their conclusions and data can be seen here (.pdf).
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
: For firefighters, one of the worst things that can happen is the building collapsing on top of them, so figuring out how and when that's going to happen has been a focus of NIST research. In this video, dummy firefighters on top of a burning house fall through the roof before being pulled out by ropes.
Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
BERKELEY, California -- For most people, photographing something that isn't there might be tough. Not so for Trevor Paglen.
His shots of 189 secret spy satellites are the subject of a new exhibit -- despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don't exist. The Other Night Sky, on display at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum through September 14, is only a small selection from the 1,500 astrophotographs Paglen has taken thus far.
In taking these photos, Paglen is trying to draw a metaphorical connection between modern government secrecy and the doctrine of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time.
"What would it mean to find these secret moons in orbit around the earth in the same way that Galileo found these moons that shouldn't exist in orbit around Jupiter?" Paglen says.
Satellites are just the latest in Paglen's photography of supposedly nonexistent subjects. To date, he's snapped haunting images of various military sites in the Nevada deserts, "torture taxis" (private planes that whisk people off to secret prisons without judicial oversight) and uniform patches from various top-secret military programs.
The nearly vertical streak in this image shows a satellite called Keyhole 12-3 crossing the sky near the constellation of Scorpio.
While all of Paglen's projects are the result of meticulous research, he's also the first to admit that his photos aren't necessarily revelatory. That's by design. Like the blurry abstractions of his super-telephoto images showing secret military installations in Nevada, the tiny blips of satellites streaking across the night sky in his new series of photos are meant more as reminders rather than as documentation.
"I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy," Paglen explains. "You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons."
More significant than the discovery itself, Paglen says, was the idea that anyone with a telescope could verify it and see the same exact thing that Galileo saw -- an idea Paglen is trying to re-create in his own photographs.
"It really was analogous to a certain kind of promise of democracy," says Paglen, who sees a similar anti-authoritarian premise running through his own work.
Paglen says his most recent project is the culmination of close to two years of trial-and-error experimentation with astrophotography, untold hours of fieldwork and analysis, an ongoing collaboration with amateur astronomers, and many nights in his Berkeley backyard and at California's Mono Lake.
"Lacrosse/Onyx II Passing Through Draco (USA 69)" shows the transit of another surveillance satellite.
To capture his images, the researcher and "experimental geographer" employs a motorized mount with various combinations of telescopes and digital and large-format film cameras. Paglen uses spy-satellite data compiled by Ted Molczan -- a renowned amateur astronomer profiled by Wired magazine in 2006 -- to predict where a given "black satellite" will be in the sky. Then he decides how he wants to compose the image.
"I'll find where a star will be in the compositional plane," he says. "Then I'll use one telescope, which is attached to a webcam, to focus on that star."
With the help of a computer program that controls the mount of the telescope and keeps it focused on the heavenly body, Paglen says he can get the telescope to swivel with the Earth's rotation.
He then uses another telescope attached to a high-end digital camera for his deep-sky shots, similar to the rig he used for his desert shots.
"I'll see the satellite in the sky, kind of know where it's going to be in the frame, then I'll open the shutter and take a long exposure of the satellite passing through."
Paglen's initial interest in the government's so-called "black projects" took shape while combing through U.S. Geological Survey archives of satellite prison photos in 2002. He noticed that many of the photo frames of prison sites were missing or, in some cases, heavily edited.
"I thought: What the hell is this? We still have blank spots on maps? We've mapped the whole structure of the cosmos and the human genome, so what's this all about?" Paglen said.
Eventually, those blank spots led Paglen to other covert subjects and turned a hobby into a full-time job -- one with a decidedly political stance.
"For a time, people were getting arrested for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge," Paglen notes. "So to me, what it meant to do photography also changed. There was a new kind of politics to it -- something that was very aggressive and dangerous -- and a presumption that it would reveal some kind of truth or evidence."
Ultimately, the satellite photos are an attempt to critique that attitude. While the budget for black military operations has more than doubled in the last 10 years and the government continues to espouse the virtues of secrecy, it can't prevent interested amateur astronomers from calculating the orbital paths of spy satellites.
"The National Reconnaissance Office cannot classify Kepler's laws of planetary motion," Paglen says. "They just work ... and they're unbelievably accurate."
BERKELEY, California -- For most people, photographing something that isn't there might be tough. Not so for Trevor Paglen.
His shots of 189 secret spy satellites are the subject of a new exhibit -- despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don't exist. The Other Night Sky, on display at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum through September 14, is only a small selection from the 1,500 astrophotographs Paglen has taken thus far.
In taking these photos, Paglen is trying to draw a metaphorical connection between modern government secrecy and the doctrine of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time.
"What would it mean to find these secret moons in orbit around the earth in the same way that Galileo found these moons that shouldn't exist in orbit around Jupiter?" Paglen says.
Satellites are just the latest in Paglen's photography of supposedly nonexistent subjects. To date, he's snapped haunting images of various military sites in the Nevada deserts, "torture taxis" (private planes that whisk people off to secret prisons without judicial oversight) and uniform patches from various top-secret military programs.
The nearly vertical streak in this image shows a satellite called Keyhole 12-3 crossing the sky near the constellation of Scorpio.
While all of Paglen's projects are the result of meticulous research, he's also the first to admit that his photos aren't necessarily revelatory. That's by design. Like the blurry abstractions of his super-telephoto images showing secret military installations in Nevada, the tiny blips of satellites streaking across the night sky in his new series of photos are meant more as reminders rather than as documentation.
"I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy," Paglen explains. "You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons."
More significant than the discovery itself, Paglen says, was the idea that anyone with a telescope could verify it and see the same exact thing that Galileo saw -- an idea Paglen is trying to re-create in his own photographs.
"It really was analogous to a certain kind of promise of democracy," says Paglen, who sees a similar anti-authoritarian premise running through his own work.
Paglen says his most recent project is the culmination of close to two years of trial-and-error experimentation with astrophotography, untold hours of fieldwork and analysis, an ongoing collaboration with amateur astronomers, and many nights in his Berkeley backyard and at California's Mono Lake.
"Lacrosse/Onyx II Passing Through Draco (USA 69)" shows the transit of another surveillance satellite.
To capture his images, the researcher and "experimental geographer" employs a motorized mount with various combinations of telescopes and digital and large-format film cameras. Paglen uses spy-satellite data compiled by Ted Molczan -- a renowned amateur astronomer profiled by Wired magazine in 2006 -- to predict where a given "black satellite" will be in the sky. Then he decides how he wants to compose the image.
"I'll find where a star will be in the compositional plane," he says. "Then I'll use one telescope, which is attached to a webcam, to focus on that star."
With the help of a computer program that controls the mount of the telescope and keeps it focused on the heavenly body, Paglen says he can get the telescope to swivel with the Earth's rotation.
He then uses another telescope attached to a high-end digital camera for his deep-sky shots, similar to the rig he used for his desert shots.
"I'll see the satellite in the sky, kind of know where it's going to be in the frame, then I'll open the shutter and take a long exposure of the satellite passing through."
Paglen's initial interest in the government's so-called "black projects" took shape while combing through U.S. Geological Survey archives of satellite prison photos in 2002. He noticed that many of the photo frames of prison sites were missing or, in some cases, heavily edited.
"I thought: What the hell is this? We still have blank spots on maps? We've mapped the whole structure of the cosmos and the human genome, so what's this all about?" Paglen said.
Eventually, those blank spots led Paglen to other covert subjects and turned a hobby into a full-time job -- one with a decidedly political stance.
"For a time, people were getting arrested for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge," Paglen notes. "So to me, what it meant to do photography also changed. There was a new kind of politics to it -- something that was very aggressive and dangerous -- and a presumption that it would reveal some kind of truth or evidence."
Ultimately, the satellite photos are an attempt to critique that attitude. While the budget for black military operations has more than doubled in the last 10 years and the government continues to espouse the virtues of secrecy, it can't prevent interested amateur astronomers from calculating the orbital paths of spy satellites.
"The National Reconnaissance Office cannot classify Kepler's laws of planetary motion," Paglen says. "They just work ... and they're unbelievably accurate."
The PC industry's two largest graphics companies released new top-of-the-line models this week. The new graphics processors will bring not just better videogame performance, but will also turn ordinary desktop PCs into the equivalent of supercomputers -- if programmers can figure out how to take advantage of the chips' massively parallel architectures.
"We're talking about every man, woman and child basically having a supercomputer on their desk," says Jon Peddie, a graphics-industry veteran and president of Jon Peddie Research.
AMD, which acquired graphics maker ATI in 2006, released two new chips, the Radeon HD 4850 and the Radeon HD 4870. Nvidia, the other dominant player in the space, unveiled its new GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce GTX 280 processors.
According to both companies, the new series of chips feature performance measured in teraflops (that's a trillion floating point operations per second), billions of transistors, hundreds of cores and new architectures that, according to industry analysts, could have a staggering effect on not only Crysis frame rates, but also how and what we use our computers for.
Indeed, cheap access to such formidable computing power could mean that, over the next few years, we will see an explosion of new independent research along with profound new discoveries, analysts say. Additionally, new consumer applications will be able to draw on the graphics processing unit (GPU) for even more eye-watering special effects and even occasionally useful visual information.
"We'll start to get things like real-time mapping from Google that incorporates all manner of real world information," says Bob O'Donnell, an analyst at IDC. "All of this is going to bubble up more and more."
As Peddie observes, it was only 11 years ago that the U.S. government spent approximately $33 million to build ASCI Red, one of the first supercomputers to achieve 1 teraflop. The new graphics chips offer similar power to the 1997-era supercomputer for a fraction of the cost.
"Now we can go down to Fry's or Best Buy and buy a graphics board that has 1 teraflop of processing power for $600 or less," says Peddie.
Getting that processing power to work for the average computer user, however, remains a challenge.
With the exception of a few games, most applications still aren't made to take advantage of the GPU's power. That's because GPUs are made for parallel processing (crunching lots of bits of data at the same time, then assembling the results all at once), whereas most current software programs are written to be executed serially (operating on one piece of data at a time, then proceeding to the next step).
That is starting change, albeit slowly, thanks to new initiatives designed to spur parallel processing.
Just last week, Khronos, the industry consortium behind the OpenGL standard, announced what it calls Open Computing Language, or OpenCL. With this new heterogeneous computing initiative, the group hopes to come up with a standardized (and universal) way of programming parallel computing tasks.
In many ways, it's the Holy Grail developers have been waiting for: a hardware-agnostic standard that unleashes the power of multi-core CPUs and GPUs using a familiar language.
Apple is throwing its weight behind parallel processing too, and last week committed to using the OpenCL specification as part of its next operating system release, Snow Leopard.
Other companies, including AMD, Nvidia, ARM, Freescale, IBM, Imagination, Nokia, Motorola, Qualcomm, Samsung and Texas Instruments have joined the OpenCL working group.
If initiatives like OpenCL gain momentum, the days of researchers applying for grants and traveling across the country to use a given university or research facility's super computer may well be at an end. Similarly, distributed computing projects like Folding@Home and Seti@Home may see an huge boost in performance by using hundreds of thousand of computers equipped with these new powerful processors.
Of course, if curing cancer or looking for aliens isn't your thing, we can also be fairly certain that Crysis will really scream on any system equipped with these new GPUs.
The PC industry's two largest graphics companies released new top-of-the-line models this week. The new graphics processors will bring not just better videogame performance, but will also turn ordinary desktop PCs into the equivalent of supercomputers -- if programmers can figure out how to take advantage of the chips' massively parallel architectures.
"We're talking about every man, woman and child basically having a supercomputer on their desk," says Jon Peddie, a graphics-industry veteran and president of Jon Peddie Research.
AMD, which acquired graphics maker ATI in 2006, released two new chips, the Radeon HD 4850 and the Radeon HD 4870. Nvidia, the other dominant player in the space, unveiled its new GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce GTX 280 processors.
According to both companies, the new series of chips feature performance measured in teraflops (that's a trillion floating point operations per second), billions of transistors, hundreds of cores and new architectures that, according to industry analysts, could have a staggering effect on not only Crysis frame rates, but also how and what we use our computers for.
Indeed, cheap access to such formidable computing power could mean that, over the next few years, we will see an explosion of new independent research along with profound new discoveries, analysts say. Additionally, new consumer applications will be able to draw on the graphics processing unit (GPU) for even more eye-watering special effects and even occasionally useful visual information.
"We'll start to get things like real-time mapping from Google that incorporates all manner of real world information," says Bob O'Donnell, an analyst at IDC. "All of this is going to bubble up more and more."
As Peddie observes, it was only 11 years ago that the U.S. government spent approximately $33 million to build ASCI Red, one of the first supercomputers to achieve 1 teraflop. The new graphics chips offer similar power to the 1997-era supercomputer for a fraction of the cost.
"Now we can go down to Fry's or Best Buy and buy a graphics board that has 1 teraflop of processing power for $600 or less," says Peddie.
Getting that processing power to work for the average computer user, however, remains a challenge.
With the exception of a few games, most applications still aren't made to take advantage of the GPU's power. That's because GPUs are made for parallel processing (crunching lots of bits of data at the same time, then assembling the results all at once), whereas most current software programs are written to be executed serially (operating on one piece of data at a time, then proceeding to the next step).
That is starting change, albeit slowly, thanks to new initiatives designed to spur parallel processing.
Just last week, Khronos, the industry consortium behind the OpenGL standard, announced what it calls Open Computing Language, or OpenCL. With this new heterogeneous computing initiative, the group hopes to come up with a standardized (and universal) way of programming parallel computing tasks.
In many ways, it's the Holy Grail developers have been waiting for: a hardware-agnostic standard that unleashes the power of multi-core CPUs and GPUs using a familiar language.
Apple is throwing its weight behind parallel processing too, and last week committed to using the OpenCL specification as part of its next operating system release, Snow Leopard.
Other companies, including AMD, Nvidia, ARM, Freescale, IBM, Imagination, Nokia, Motorola, Qualcomm, Samsung and Texas Instruments have joined the OpenCL working group.
If initiatives like OpenCL gain momentum, the days of researchers applying for grants and traveling across the country to use a given university or research facility's super computer may well be at an end. Similarly, distributed computing projects like Folding@Home and Seti@Home may see an huge boost in performance by using hundreds of thousand of computers equipped with these new powerful processors.
Of course, if curing cancer or looking for aliens isn't your thing, we can also be fairly certain that Crysis will really scream on any system equipped with these new GPUs.
The scary part about taking your sex-tech project to the mainstream is that on the long, hard journey from quirky to safe, you risk wrecking the very thing that made you special.
Then, when the Bowdlerized version doesn't do well, the backlash affects everyone in the sex-tech space, not just the particular application or product. "See?" say the analysts and the venture capitalists and the advertisers. "That's why we don't back sex things."
Then when there's a new sex thing they cautiously express interest about, the developers bend over backwards to show how nonthreatening and comfortable it really is.
Ah, the cycle of romantic startups.
Two years ago, I gave "relationships-management software" Girlfriend X a cautious thumbs-up. Now I'm bummed I can't do the same for its latest incarnation, or for the beta version of its sister site, Boyfriend X.
The genius of the original Girlfriend X and its companion PDA app ("GFX Wingman") was that it indulged in so-impolitic-it-must-be-true irreverence. Marketed as a dating solution for men, it took all those things that women naturally do in our heads and turned it into a database-driven toolset for players -- or those who wanted to play at playering.
For example, its Yield Generator module plotted how much money you spent against how much sex you got, presenting you with a nice cost-per-hookup graph. Other modules sent automated love notes to the right woman at the right time, tracked anniversaries and other milestones for ongoing arrangements, and suggested hundreds of (terrible) pickup lines whose very awfulness could serve to break the ice with new prospects.
After that column came out, Sex Drive readers inundated the developers with e-mail -- at least half a dozen requests, says founder Rick Pierce -- for a similar application for women.
Because yeah, we're good at keeping this stuff in our heads, but parallel dating -- sleeping with more than one person on a regular basis, without those people knowing any details other than, "I'm seeing other people" -- can get complex to keep up with if you do it for more than a month or two.
Unfortunately, Boyfriend X lacks the rueful humor of the early Girlfriend X, managing to be bland and insulting at the same time. (The first question in the Boyfriend X FAQ is "What if I'm not smart enough to get this all working?") And Girlfriend X was neutered on its way from stand-alone software to web-based portal.
Pierce says they wanted to get more serious and to make a sort of "one-stop shop" for relationship management, blending a niche contact manager with a content-driven site.
In other words, there's no Put Out Calculator for Boyfriend X that compares how many bases you've let him touch to how much money he's spent on you, then recommends what you could hold out for next.
The watered-down Girlfriend X is still about creating bad boys out of nice guys, in their minds if not in their actions. But then Boyfriend X warns women to stay away from bad boys and find nice guys.
It may be what the moneymen believe the masses want (without the taint of associating with porn), but it also turns off the very people who might have used the racier version.
No wonder the sex-positive movement despairs of the mainstream.
Girlfriend X and Boyfriend X do have their redeeming qualities. It is handy to have access to dozens of dating and networking sites from one page, and it's great to be able to search all of the reviewed profiles at once regardless of their site of origin.
Both services encourage members to rate people's online dating and social networking profiles (he's short! she's fat! he's married! she's psycho!) and to post positive testimonials for friends and dates. Both provide detailed tracking mechanisms where you can store details about each person and every interaction you've had.
The mashups Pierce plans in the coming months are definitely cool. One compares a person's interests with a local events calendar and the weather forecast, then generates a list of targeted date ideas. Another sifts through the headlines to keep you apprised of current affairs relating to your prospect's interests, so you always have something to talk about.
If they manage to automate more of the data entry -- perhaps an import function so you can bring profile information into your contact manager with a single click -- then X will mark the spot indeed, and the convenience will more than make up for the loss of personality.
I guess I'll have to track my own blow-job-to-oil-change ratio from now on.
See you in a fortnight,
Regina Lynn
Regina Lynn is the author of Sexier Sex: Lessons from the Brave New Sexual Frontier.
The scary part about taking your sex-tech project to the mainstream is that on the long, hard journey from quirky to safe, you risk wrecking the very thing that made you special.
Then, when the Bowdlerized version doesn't do well, the backlash affects everyone in the sex-tech space, not just the particular application or product. "See?" say the analysts and the venture capitalists and the advertisers. "That's why we don't back sex things."
Then when there's a new sex thing they cautiously express interest about, the developers bend over backwards to show how nonthreatening and comfortable it really is.
Ah, the cycle of romantic startups.
Two years ago, I gave "relationships-management software" Girlfriend X a cautious thumbs-up. Now I'm bummed I can't do the same for its latest incarnation, or for the beta version of its sister site, Boyfriend X.
The genius of the original Girlfriend X and its companion PDA app ("GFX Wingman") was that it indulged in so-impolitic-it-must-be-true irreverence. Marketed as a dating solution for men, it took all those things that women naturally do in our heads and turned it into a database-driven toolset for players -- or those who wanted to play at playering.
For example, its Yield Generator module plotted how much money you spent against how much sex you got, presenting you with a nice cost-per-hookup graph. Other modules sent automated love notes to the right woman at the right time, tracked anniversaries and other milestones for ongoing arrangements, and suggested hundreds of (terrible) pickup lines whose very awfulness could serve to break the ice with new prospects.
After that column came out, Sex Drive readers inundated the developers with e-mail -- at least half a dozen requests, says founder Rick Pierce -- for a similar application for women.
Because yeah, we're good at keeping this stuff in our heads, but parallel dating -- sleeping with more than one person on a regular basis, without those people knowing any details other than, "I'm seeing other people" -- can get complex to keep up with if you do it for more than a month or two.
Unfortunately, Boyfriend X lacks the rueful humor of the early Girlfriend X, managing to be bland and insulting at the same time. (The first question in the Boyfriend X FAQ is "What if I'm not smart enough to get this all working?") And Girlfriend X was neutered on its way from stand-alone software to web-based portal.
Pierce says they wanted to get more serious and to make a sort of "one-stop shop" for relationship management, blending a niche contact manager with a content-driven site.
In other words, there's no Put Out Calculator for Boyfriend X that compares how many bases you've let him touch to how much money he's spent on you, then recommends what you could hold out for next.
The watered-down Girlfriend X is still about creating bad boys out of nice guys, in their minds if not in their actions. But then Boyfriend X warns women to stay away from bad boys and find nice guys.
It may be what the moneymen believe the masses want (without the taint of associating with porn), but it also turns off the very people who might have used the racier version.
No wonder the sex-positive movement despairs of the mainstream.
Girlfriend X and Boyfriend X do have their redeeming qualities. It is handy to have access to dozens of dating and networking sites from one page, and it's great to be able to search all of the reviewed profiles at once regardless of their site of origin.
Both services encourage members to rate people's online dating and social networking profiles (he's short! she's fat! he's married! she's psycho!) and to post positive testimonials for friends and dates. Both provide detailed tracking mechanisms where you can store details about each person and every interaction you've had.
The mashups Pierce plans in the coming months are definitely cool. One compares a person's interests with a local events calendar and the weather forecast, then generates a list of targeted date ideas. Another sifts through the headlines to keep you apprised of current affairs relating to your prospect's interests, so you always have something to talk about.
If they manage to automate more of the data entry -- perhaps an import function so you can bring profile information into your contact manager with a single click -- then X will mark the spot indeed, and the convenience will more than make up for the loss of personality.
I guess I'll have to track my own blow-job-to-oil-change ratio from now on.
See you in a fortnight,
Regina Lynn
Regina Lynn is the author of Sexier Sex: Lessons from the Brave New Sexual Frontier.
1840: Samuel F.B. Morse receives a U.S. patent for his dot-dash telegraphy signals, known to the world as Morse code.
The code Morse devised in partnership with Alfred Vail uses a system of dots and dashes to represent letters and numbers. It went into practical use in 1844, after he and Vail produced a working electromagnetic telegraph transmitter. Vail worked on various refinements to the transmitter before leaving the business altogether in 1848, feeling that he was being low-balled on his salary.
Some scholars argue that it was Vail, not Morse, who actually came up with the dot-dash system. He did hold a small piece of Morse's patent but didn't get rich from it.
Regardless of who devised it, the original code was a little different than the one in use today. What we recognize as Morse code is actually an international variation of the original, or "American," code. The American code contained not only dots and dashes, but also spaces in five letters: C, O, R, Y and Z. (C, for example, was rendered like this: . . .) The numbers 0-9 were also different.
The international version, known as Modern International Morse Code, was introduced at a conference in Berlin in 1851. The American code remained in widespread use until the 1920s, when everyone finally lined up behind the international version.
1840 was a busy year for Morse. An accomplished, respected painter trained in photography, he opened a portrait studio in New York. Morse had met Louis Daguerre in Paris the previous year, and in New York he taught the