Josh McHugh

Litcrawl Reading

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I thoroughly enjoyed reading a hypercompressed version of the NASA hypergravity experiment story I wrote for Wired 9 (!) years ago. I batted lead-off on the Elbo Room stage during Litcrawl, the final evening of San Francisco's annual Litquake festival. The theme of the event, which featured SF Writers' Grotto members, was Death, advertised as "Come Cheer The Reaper."

Why We Drive the Way We Do

My latest piece in Wired - a book review of Tom Vanderbilt's "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)." I love this topic - love it.

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UPDATE: Grotto icon Mary Roach reviewed the very same book in the 8/10 NYT Book Review. I think I may like her review better.

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BoingBoing: "meaty, thinky"

Link: Promise and peril of data-scraping - Boing Boing.

Josh McHugh's Wired feature, "Should Web Giants Let Startups Use the Information They Have About You?," is a meaty, thinky piece about the many risks of data-scraping.

So says BoingBoing, in a bit of love for my scraping piece in the January issue of Wired. I know what I want on my headstone, and I will henceforth be pasting that kind blurb on everything that I own.

Drug Test Cowboy Coverage

The human guinea pigs story got some solid coverage on Metafilter.

Also, I was a guest on a segment of NPR's Talk of the Nation yesterday.

Drug Test Cowboys

My story about human guinea pigs is up on the Wired site, here.

A note of correction: the print version of the story, in its final section, says that I thought about quitting after a series of unsuccessful blood draws by a nurse named Christina. That is wrong. The only time Christina drew blood from me was during the screening. Christina and the other nurses were totally professional and really nice throughout, but my highly active sympathetic nervous system caused my veins to close up a lot.

At one point, Lynda Frassetto, the researcher in charge of the study, changed the standard 3-failed-draws maximum to one for me because I was having such a tough time. Then the study stopped for 3 weeks, giving me a chance to regroup and to draw some fortitude from the stories of lab rats in Bob Helms' Guinea Pig Zero anthology. When I went back, I had a different attitude about having blood drawn (it's part of the job, not something nasty happening to me), and the draws were much more successful.

Treemugger!

The Treehugger blog takes a chainsaw to the piece with my name on it in April's Wired 40 issue. The Wired article highlights the green aspects of 4 companies on the Wired 40 list- SunPower, Exelon, Toyota, and Monsanto. The Treehugger piece focuses on some far-from-green sentiments in the descriptions of those companies on the list (not in the article) . Treehugger has a point there - the green filter was clearly turned off during the editing of those company descriptions.

A bit of transparency (or just clarification) is useful here: the list came first, and the attending "Trends" articles came second. The overriding criterion for inclusion and rank on the Wired 40 list is innovation. And yes, it is possible to be innovative in areas where green-ness isn't the #1 objective. The companies in the "Green Power" piece aren't there because they are the 4 greenest companies in the world. They're there because they're the 4 greenest companies on Wired's list of the 40 most innovative companies. Big difference.

Another very solid point raised by the Green Brigade: where the heck is Exelon going to put those spent nuclear fuel rods?

Link: This Month in Wired: Not Much (TreeHugger).

Pistorius story is up

My piece for Wired on Oscar Pistorius is on the web here. There are some photos that weren't in the hard copy version and some video of him running as well.

centrifuge vid

Here's a little video of the 20g centrifuge at NASA Ames Research center in action. I spent some time in this thing a few years ago for my favorite Wired assignment.

technorati tags:centrifuge, NASA, blackout, Mars, Wired

Blogged with Flock

G-LOC times 3

Entertaining video of a guy being subjected to hypergravity during a ride in a fighter jet. It brings back memories.

Funny and Extreme Videos - G Force

technorati tags:gravity, G-LOC, syncope, blackout

Maverick's piece

Unfortunately, the Maverick's piece I did for Wired isn't up on the Wired (Wired News) website. That's annoying! But here's the 2-page Mav's spread on buzzkiller.net - a huge .jpeg, but one must try to do the wave justice.