BERLIN - CHEERS! GLOBAL WARMING

Here's another reason to feel terrible the morning after binge drinking: you were not only most certainly generating regrets you won't realize you have until later in the evening, you were gulping down the future of the children, not to mention drinking away the whole planet’s future. Beer is a climate killer. After a recent trip to Munich, where we spent a few days' pay on beer for two nights, we decided to figure out exactly what we'd done to the world.

MILAN – HOOKERS, GAYS, DRUGGIES, AND DEATH

Elizabeth Pisani is a smart lady: a journalist-turned-scientist with a PhD in epidemiology who's worked for the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and UNAIDS. She is also the author of the whistleblowing The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS, an international bestseller that outlines the myriad ways in which governments, NGOs, and the United Nations has wasted billions of dollars trying to fight HIV and AIDS because they like to ignore that the disease is largely spread by prostitutes, gay men, and drug injecting folk.

NEW YORK - THE TEACHINGS OF CARL

I first met Carl years ago—where else but on the Internet—through his website, a vast bazaar of world-transforming ideas inside a frames-enabled online church. His boldface insights and CAPS-LOCK "presentations" made me an instant devotee. Determined to share what I had seen with the world, I took on the futile task of sprucing up his creations for mass consumption. I made a pamphlet out of his plan to obtain free energy by putting a giant gyroscope on top of the Earth, and I had his theory about the compatibility of creationism and evolution published in my college literary journal. But it was never easy. Inevitably, our instincts clashed.

TECHNOLOGY ISSUE EXTRA - THE VIRTUSPHERE

Yesterday we told you about a depressed artist living as a hamster; today let’s introduce you to two brothers who got the anthropomorphized rodent concept right...
In eighth grade I wrote a science-fiction story about people living in giant hamsterballs with virtual-reality goggles strapped to their heads. I had just learned the word “dystopian.” Future VR iterations in Lawnmower Man, The Matrix, and Existenz left me cold, but I remained confident that as a society we were on the right track… but nothing came of it. And then these Latypov brothers dreamed up The Virtusphere. On a recent tour of the lab, I expected to stumble into a cybersex sweatshop with immigrants trying to claw their way out of these things, or else find a hyper-intelligent gerbil with VR goggles--the Patient Zero of their operation. Could the Virtusphere be the mass cyber-exodus we’ve all been dreaming about, or is it just another one of those shitty VR machines from the 90s that were a $200,000 cure for a settled stomach? Virtusphere inventor Ray Latypov has the answer.

TECHNOLOGY ISSUE EXTRA - FROM MUSIC VEST TO GRAVITY POWER

At the tender age of 16, Michael J. Waldron spent most of his spare time in Philly, buying up boxes of bootlegged eight-tracks. Once his van was full, he’d drive the them back home to Yardley, PA, where he'd sell them for a small profit at parking lot swap meets. When he wasn’t entrepreneuring, Waldron was teaching himself about electronics. He was obsessed with taking things apart, tinkering with their innards, and putting them back together again. It was only a matter of time before his two hobbies met and spawned one brilliant creation. In 1981, that creation was finally realized: the music vest. It was actually just a vest with a radio in the pocket and speakers in the shoulder, but at the time it was a pretty novel idea and its blueprint has since spawned shameless imitators like the Headphone Hat. Between '81 and '86 the Music Vest made a lot of noise, but it was silenced shortly thereafter due to a Cold War scandal. Seriously. We talked to him about that.

LONDON - FIRST CROP CIRCLE OF THE YEAR

My ma is something of a crop circle “enthusiast.” So with the first crop circle of the year, uh, cropping up in Wiltshire--and on Earth Day, how appropriate/unimaginative--I thought I’d ask her what they’re all about and check in on her level of excitement.

TECHNOLOGY ISSUE - INSIDE THE SINGULARITY ON VBS (UPDATED)

In a couple days you're going to be able to find our Technology Issue, which has a lot of smart stories in there about sciencey and computery things that'll get your mind's rainbow wheel of death spinning for a while. We wanted to show you just how seriously we're not fucking around by featuring our interview with Ray Kurzweil first thing this morning, but how fantastic, we're having technical difficulties. (PS: all fixed. Enjoy.) Why don't you go over to VBS, where today Kurzweil's telling us more about his vision of the Singuarlity—a point around 2045 when computers will acquire full-blown artificial intelligence and technology will infuse itself with biology. His theories have all sorts of supporters, detractors, and critics, but do you even remember what life was like before three-year-olds had cell phones and you actually had to remember facts instead of relying on the internet? That was only ten years ago. If Kurzweil is right, we'll have supercomputers more powerful than every human brain on the planet combined within a few decades.

THE INTERNET - I JOINED THE IDIOT CLASS

I intended to spend a tenner on my first attempt at cyber-gambling, but the rules at the William Hill Online Casino state that a minimum of three and a half times my planned budget is required. Fuck it, I thought, I’m feeling lucky so I might as well go for it. Needless to say, I am now £35 poorer.



NEW YORK - CRISIS AVERTED

On Friday my buddy was like, "Want to split a 60 from the jar guy?" I was like TOTALLY! You see, the jar guy is not for the masses and a close connection is required to obtain his services. The other option is the overpriced baggie of some powder that resembles cocaine but would more likely test positive for drano and baking powder. I even had an empty jar from weeks earlier sitting around for such an occasion, so splitting it up would be a breeze... unless disaster struck.

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On a recent excursion to an arty-farty festival, an experience comparable to a lobotomy, we bumped into this lovely Brit who looked like something straight out of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and we were sure he’d been sent to our rescue. He wasn’t. He did however provide some much needed entertainment as we were stuck at a dreadful four hour long experimental brass performance at a horseracing track in the middle of nowhere outside of Bergen, Norway. He introduced himself as Inter Inter Inter David and claimed that the box he was carrying around was actually a computer.

SCANDINAVIA - THE INTER INTER INTERNET

On a recent excursion to an arty-farty festival, an experience comparable to a lobotomy, we bumped into this lovely Brit who looked like something straight out of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and we were sure he’d been sent to our rescue. He wasn’t. He did however provide some much needed entertainment as we were stuck at a dreadful four hour long experimental brass performance at a horseracing track in the middle of nowhere outside of Bergen, Norway. He introduced himself as Inter Inter Inter David and claimed that the box he was carrying around was actually a computer.