Papers of anti-comic book crusader now open to scholars
Among comic books aficionados his name is still synonymous with prudery and repression. Several years ago I was perusing the goods at a comics store in Southern California, when I came across reprints of that exquisitely gruesome series, Tales from the Crypt.
"Say," I asked a teenager at the register, just as an experiment. "You ever heard of that guy who went ballistic on comics back in the 1950s?"
"You mean Dr. Wertham?" the kid replied with a big, knowing smile. "Fredric Wertham?"
Yes, him—the psychiatrist whose 222 boxes of papers the Library of Congress has opened to the public. In comics lore, Dr. Wertham has become something of a cryptic figure himself. But long before Tipper Gore, Edwin Meese, Andrea Dworkin, and our current crop of anti-video game crusaders took their turns at policing the national palette, Wertham was on the job, insisting that comics turned America's kids into crooks and worse.
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Peregrine soliton may explain ocean's rogue waves
Researchers have finally observed a special type of wave that has eluded experiments for almost 25 years. The Peregrine soliton, a special type of large wave that can retain its size and shape while traveling at a constant speed, has finally been demonstrated using light pulses traveling through fiber optics. Studies of the Peregrine soliton could help us model the rogue waves that can cause sudden disasters in the ocean, and give definite limits for a large class of solutions to the non-linear Schrodinger equation. In waves and optics parlance, a soliton is a single wave that retains its shape while traveling at a constant speed for significant distances. This type of wave can only happen in certain media, like water, where movement is unrestricted. For example, as a water wave moves, it tends to break and curl forward. But sometimes its forward motion is sufficient that the wave will continually catch itself and can't break, resulting in a soliton.
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Google in talks with major studios to rent movies via YouTube
The Financial Times is reporting that Google is in talks with major Hollywood studios to bring streaming movie rentals from their catalogs to YouTube by the end of the year. Citing multiple sources with knowledge of the plans, the FT claims that the YouTube on-demand video service will probably launch first in the US, and will offer movies, simultaneous with the DVD release, for about $5. The movies won't be downloadable, so you'll need a live Internet connection to watch them. But the lack of a download capability isn't as big of a deal as you might think at first. The recently launched Google TV platform, which brings YouTube directly to Internet-connected televisions, presumes a constant Internet connection, so the rumored streaming rental model is a perfect fit for it.
Unbeknownst to most users, YouTube has actually been offering streaming movie rentals from a number of smaller studios since January. YouTube then began quietly expanding the service to a wider number of content partners, adding not just indie films but some major movie releases to its catalog. What will launch later in the year, then, will presumably be a version of the service with most or all of the major studios on board.
The FT's story comes at a time when Apple is set to make a major music-related announcement next week, amid rumors of an A4-based AppleTV built around a new streaming platform.
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Beyond Internet addiction: Ars diagnoses your online maladies
The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition contains definitions and diagnostic criteria for every mental disorder you can imagine—including Nightmare Disorder, Rumination Disorder, and Selective Mutism. With a fifth revision of this key text currently in the works, mental health workers around the globe are wondering: should "Internet addiction" be added to the list?In 2008, the Journal of American Psychiatry argued that "Internet addiction appears to be a common disorder that merits inclusion in DSM-V."
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Weird Science votes all the useful people off the island
You've been extremely helpful, so bugger off: What started out as a routine study of group behavior ended up turning a bit surreal. According to the authors of a new paper, they started out trying to find out how long a group would tolerate members that abused the common good. In the process, they found that members who put the most into the common good were quickly expelled from the group. Not entirely believing it, they replicated the findings—twice. Some of the hate comes from the overly officious group members, who viewed those who gave more than they needed to as breaking the rules. But some of it also comes from people who think that altruistic behavior like this simply raises expectations unnecessarily. Bonus points go to the people who put the press release together for the best two opening sentences I've probably read all year: "You know those goody-two-shoes who volunteer for every task and thanklessly take on the annoying details nobody else wants to deal with? That's right: Other people really can't stand them."
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