The Highest Bidder on This Super-Rare Videogame Probably Won’t Pay

One of the only sealed copies of the Nintendo Entertainment System game Stadium Events is currently up for sale on eBay. menaceone/eBay

What is quite possibly the world’s most valuable single production videogame is currently up for sale. But don’t be fooled into thinking it’s more valuable than it really is.

Stadium Events is the rarest game that was actually sold in stores for the Nintendo Entertainment System, and the copy currently being auctioned by seller “menaceone” on eBay is about the best, most pristine copy in existence: It’s still in its factory shrink-wrap, and it’s been given a grade of 85 out of 100 by the Video Game Authority, which authenticates and grades collectibles. It’s currently sealed in an acrylic slab for preservation, which also proves that it’s an authentic sealed copy.

The seller told GameSpot that he is a former Nintendo employee who got this game from the company back during the NES era.

How much will it sell for? It’s hard to say, exactly, because it’s been many years since a sealed Stadium Events was sold publicly. In January 2011, a sealed copy sold for a record high of $22,800. But demand for collectible games has exploded since then. In fact, if you look at the eBay auction today, you’ll see a current high bid of over $91,000.

Wow! Crazy! It will never sell for that much.

Sadly, what often happens when an eBay auction for a rare videogame like this starts drawing attention, the auction gets trolled. Bidders, some using burner accounts, start placing bids they never intend to follow through on. If you look at the item’s bidding history, you can see where the legitimate bids end and the trolling starts: Right around the $30,000 mark, where bidders start placing a series of incremental bids just to poke the item’s price up a little higher bit by bit.

Yes, whichever jokester loses this game of Russian roulette is technically legally obligated to purchase the item, but in reality the worst risk they’re running is getting an Unpaid Item strike on their eBay account.

This has happened a few times recently: Witness the profoundly ugly copy of Nintendo World Championships , estimated to be worth about $5,000, but bid up by trolls to just under $100,000. Later, the seller said that the game was sold privately for $5,000, the price at which he had set the auction’s original opening bid. The 11,000-game collection that the Guinness Book called the “world’s biggest” was auctioned on another site called GameGavel for over $750,000, but to this day it has not yet sold at any price.

What can be especially frustrating about these trolled auctions is the inevitable wave of incorrect news reports that follow, suggesting that the item in question has “sold” for the wildly inflated, unrealistic, fraudulent bid amount, without even a caveat.

Is there anything that can be done about this? Potentially: Remember that copy of Action Comics issue 1, the first comic book to feature Superman, that sold for $3.2 million on eBay, a record price for any comic? In that case, only pre-approved bidders could place bids. This is a standard feature of eBay, although it does require more work on the part of the seller.

Nobody’s going to impulse-buy a Stadium Events like it was a pack of gum at the checkout line. The number of videogame collectors who are prepared to make a legitimate five-figure bid on a rare item such as this is small, and they’d certainly be willing to take the extra step of securing pre-approval before placing a bid.

The 10 Best Books of 2014, According to Everyone

Year-end “best of” lists are great for things like pop culture moments, celebrity snafus, or provocative photographs. But when it comes to a best-of list for books, you’re not looking for cheap entertainment or nostalgia as you click through. You want to know what you should have been reading during those commutes you spent scrolling through Instagram or playing Candy Crush.

A book is an investment, both of time and money. And while everyone—from blogging bibliophiles to The New York Times—is entitled to their opinion, the number of best-of lists out there and the variance among them has left us wondering just what books are worth bringing with us into the new year.

To find “the best of the best ofs,” we decided not only to aggregate a sampling of lists, but also to assign points based on the selectivity of each list. We used the following formula:

100 / # of books in a given list = points awarded to each book in that list

For example, when a book was featured on a Top 100 list, it received 1 point. But if it made a Top 10 list, received 10 points. So if a book made the cut for a shorter list, it was rewarded. The more lists a book made, the more points it accumulated. Many of the lists we used didn’t assign rankings or declare an overall best, so we didn’t assign weight to those that did.

After we gathered from the essentials (Amazon, Publishers Weekly, Goodreads, The National Book Awards), we threw in a few blogs and national publications and tallied up the scores. Thus, the following 10 books are those that made the highest number of lists, and especially the selective ones.

So whether it’s your New Year’s resolution to do more reading or you have an Amazon gift card burning a hole in your pocket, these are the books from last year that everyone was—and will continue to be—reading.

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Score: 64.286

Why it stands out: The No. 1 bestseller in the US for the first week of 2015, All The Light We Cannot See tells the stories of two young people living in France during World War II. The main characters are each blinded, be it by cataracts or Nazi propaganda, and Doerr examines the ways in which the voice of a stranger can guide or misguide. Partly inspired by today’s ubiquitous cell phone service that we too often take for granted, Doerr’s novel is also a commentary on the magic of radio.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Score: 51.992

Why it stands out: “My fourth novel is about a traveling Shakespearean theatre company in a post-apocalyptic North America,” Emily St. John Mandel claims on her website. After the “Georgia Flu” wipes out civilization, the theater troupe trudges across the wasteland bringing art into the lives of fellow survivors. But the post-apocalyptic world isn’t exempt from new threats, despite hope for rebirth. Station Eleven jumps back and forth in time and weaves threads between characters to illustrate how, even at the end of the world, the human connection prevails.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

Score: 43.7

Why it stands out: This novel spans political violence in Jamaica in the 1970s, New York City’s crack wars in the 1980s, and so much more. Marlon James delves into the attempted assassination of Bob Marley as well as the country’s clandestine Cold War battles, following several fictional characters who encounter these real events. Critics rave about James’ mastery of both oral history storytelling and patois dialect, and his ability to craft and juggle perspectives that often contradict and obscure the truth. With comparisons to the works of David Foster Wallace and Quentin Tarantino, James has garnered the highest of contemporary praise.

Redeployment by Phil Klay

Score: 41.0

Why it stands out: Based on his own experiences as a Marine in the Iraq War, Phil Klay’s collection of short stories explores the challenges of re-assimilating into life back home. He doesn’t just relay stories of his deployment; he relays the myriad ways in which average Americans react when he tells them about it. Dexter Filkins, a New York Times journalist who covered the war, deemed Redeployment “the best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls.” It also won the 2014 National Book Award for fiction.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

Score: 39.0

Why it stands out: This work of nonfiction postulates a modern-day mass-extinction, triggered by the human race and its ecological irresponsibility (rather than, say, a massive volcanic eruption). From climate change to wilderness destruction, Elizabeth Kolbert explains the cognitive dissonance that ensues when a species is evolved enough to create such disruption and also realize what they’re doing. If Kolbert’s alarming thesis doesn’t entice you, her dry sense of humor and accounts of her travels—from the Bikini Atoll to the Andes to her own backyard—will keep you hooked.

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

Score: 35.549

Why it stands out: The author of Cloud Atlas is back with another book told in six semi-disparate segments that build in surprising ways. David Mitchell aptly portrays the minds of a multitude of characters: a psychic teenage girl who runs away from home, a Cambridge student, an Iraq war reporter. He also leaps into multiple future years, later shifting into reverse to connect them to their fictional pasts. NPR went as far as to say that Mitchell has a “mastery over what feels like the entire world and all its inhabitants.”

The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison

Score: 32.692

Why it stands out: Leslie Jamison studies empathy from numerous angles, shedding light how we experience our own pain and the pain of others—physical or emotional, real or performed. From working as a medical actor hired to quiz med students on symptoms, to running alongside ultramarathoners, Jamison has gone to extremes for these essays. In them, she also draws on personal encounters with illness, and she even discusses reality TV, exposing the ins and outs of what it means to feel in today’s complex society.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson

Score: 28.692

Why it stands out: A drifter named Doll rescues a neglected toddler, whom she names Lila. As an adult, Lila takes shelter from the rain in a church, whose minister later baptizes her and eventually becomes her husband. But one morning, Lila goes out to the river and essentially un-baptizes herself. Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams (above), wrote for The Atlantic: “Robinson resists the notion of love as an easy antidote to a lifetime of suffering or solitude, suggesting that intimacy can’t intrude on loneliness without some measure of pain.”

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

Score: 25.286

Why it stands out: Read this one before it’s time to binge-watch it: In November, Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman signed on to develop a TV series adaptation of the book. It’s the story of three mothers whose children attend Pirriwee Public primary school, where one night at an after-school event, chaos erupts. One parent winds up dead, but it’s unclear whether it’s by accident or murder. Overall, the book comments on the lies women tell themselves and others in order to uphold a perfect image.

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

Score: 25.286

Why it stands out: Filled with suspense, this mystery novel has a surprising twist at the end—one so unexpected that some reviewers barely mention it for fear of sparking spoilers. Its teenage narrator uses fairy tales to describe situations. The characters are self-absorbed, wealthy WASPs on an island off Martha’s Vineyard, and The LA Times calls it “a classic story of decaying aristocracy and the way that privilege can often hamstring more than help.” It’s also a King Lear allegory, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Today’s iPhone Anniversary Reminds Us What Real Innovation Looks Like

Steve Jobs holds up the first iPhone at the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco, Jan. 9, 2007. Paul Sakuma/AP

As this year’s CES wraps up with another collective “meh,” it’s worth remembering what the launch of a truly world-changing gadget looks like.

Eight years ago today, Steve Jobs stood on a stage in San Francisco and unveiled the first iPhone, a moment that in retrospect heralded everything from the death of the PC to the birth of the selfie stick.

How popular is the iPhone? In 2006, the year before its release, Apple’s total revenue was about $19.3 billion. That’s for the whole year, for every Apple product combined. In figures pointed out Thursday by Om Malik, UBS Research is projecting iPhone sales alone will generate more than $43 billion in revenue for Apple during the three months ending December 31, 2014. To put that figure in context, as Malik notes, chipmaker Intel is expected to see about $55 billion in sales for the entire year. Networking behemoth Cisco Systems posted fiscal 2014 revenues of just over $47 billion.

Infomania, Texting and Productivity: How Tech May Hamper the Connected Experience

UniBul/Flickr

There’s no question that texting and other social digital media are making inroads in business. But is texting an actual productivity enhancer as some claim it to be, or a distraction that takes away from the connected experience vital to real work?

The consumer-style texting apps vying for a toehold in business include WhatsApp, TextSecure, Wickr, Vibr and Text Me, among others. These applications often allow voice and video calling, too. In the case of Wickr and TextSecure, they also allow higher levels of privacy to ease the worries of corporate IT pros. Wickr even offers a Snapchat-like level of privacy, where texts automatically disappear after a predetermined period of time.

Supporters of texting at work say it enables more immediate responses to routine or emergency questions. Detractors find just the opposite – if every message can be delivered immediately, even mundane things may seem like a priority, shifting attention from the job at hand. That shifting of attention and the sometimes compulsive need to check texts and emails has had a name for almost 10 years now – “infomania.”

Even that far back, infomania was found to affect the cognitive ability of workers, actually negatively affecting productivity. Infomania was quantified in a 2005 study commissioned by Hewlett Packard and conducted by British psychologist Dr. Glenn Wilson. His research concluded that 62% of UK adults were addicted to checking messages out of office hours and on vacation.

Half of workers responded to emails immediately or within 60 minutes, and one in five would interrupt a business or social meeting to respond to an email or telephone message. Actually, for business, that sounds pretty good so far. Here’s the catch: Rather than boosting productivity by shifting attention from meetings and tasks to read and respond to messages, these Infomaniacs saw a measurable drop in their IQ.

Wilson’s tests of the average work showed that functioning IQ fell ten points when dealing with these distractions. Subsequent papers claimed that this kind of drop in IQ is more than double that of having recently smoked marijuana, and similar to having missed an entire night’s sleep. The effects were more pronounced with men in the study than women. (This either anecdotally supports the theory that women are better at multitasking than men, or that women may just function better than men in general when they’re stoned or sleepy. Either way, it’s probably not the best way for a company to run.)

So texting and other interruptions to the business day may not be the productivity booster that application developers claim them to be. But one of the latest consumer texting applications has even less of a foot in the door. In early December, Fundamental Applications announce a texting application aimed at Millennials. Dubbed Serum, it’s a mobile chat application that lets users post questions and have text conversations with their friends anonymously.

Fundamental’s Director, Julian Ing, said that Serum’s audience can solicit and receive honest, truthful opinions by smartphone. Examples of how Serum works (in Ing’s opinion, not mine) includes polling friends about their actual opinion as to how a woman might look in a dress, or whether someone’s friends think her boyfriend is cheating. That’s a pretty sexist value proposition, and I’m not sure it’s very compelling. And let’s also acknowledge that this application is aimed at consumers.

On the other hand, the current trend among consumer-focused applications is to build valuation by reaching into business. Facebook and Twitter have been aggressively pursuing business users. Facebook in particular provides a collaborative environment in private groups to share documents and create conversations around multiple projects. Also, given that Serum is aimed at the Millennial market, which in 10 years will represent the majority of mobile workers, it’s not unreasonable to assume that in a few years, if successful, Serum will start to position itself as a way to crowdsource opinion in business. That’s failure waiting to happen, unless they radically change their value proposition.

Currently billed as an opportunity for your peers to give frank opinions without repercussion, Serum is the opposite of how crowdsourcing is valuable for business. Companies need to understand where opinions come from – maybe not on an individual level, but certainly at a line-of-business level. You need to know whether concerns are coming from a particular department, or from sales people selling a particular product.

It’s comical to even think of how your frank opinion might be taken, unless you’re misusing your right to that opinion. If infomania can make productivity drop through the floor, one more texting app constantly asking Millennials what they anonymously think of things is really going to leave a bruise on business.

It’s really the loosest form of a connected experience. What’s needed is more meaningful interactions – personal interactions, where information can be shared collaboratively and everyone’s opinion carries some weight. Whether done with in-person meetings or through video conferencing, that’s the right next step for business. It creates the connected experience proven to enhance, not detract from, real work.

Texting might be useful within small work groups between these more formal meetings, but it should never be seen as a substitute. And it should never add to the noise that hampers real productivity.

Simon Dudley is the Video Evangelist for Lifesize. He can be reached via Twitter @simondudley.

The High Bidder On This Super-Rare Videogame Probably Won’t Pay

One of the only sealed copies of the Nintendo Entertainment System game Stadium Events is currently up for sale on eBay. menaceone/eBay

What is quite possibly the world’s most valuable single production videogame is currently up for sale. But don’t be fooled into thinking it’s more valuable than it really is.

Stadium Events is the rarest game that was actually sold in stores for the Nintendo Entertainment System, and the copy currently being auctioned by seller “menaceone” on eBay is about the best, most pristine copy in existence: It’s still in its factory shrinkwrap, and it’s been given a grade of 85 out of 100 by the Video Game Authority, which authenticates and grades collectibles. It’s currently sealed in an acrylic slab for preservation, which also proves that it’s an authentic sealed copy.

The seller told GameSpot that he is a former Nintendo employee who got this game from the company back during the NES era.

How much will it sell for? It’s hard to say, exactly, because it’s been many years since a sealed Stadium Events was sold publicly. In January 2011, a sealed copy sold for a record high of $22,800. But demand for collectible games has exploded since then. In fact, if you look at the eBay auction today, you’ll see a current high bid of over $91,000.

Wow! Crazy! It will never sell for that much.

Sadly, what often happens when an eBay auction for a rare videogame like this starts drawing attention, the auction gets trolled. Bidders, some using burner accounts, start placing bids they never intend to follow through on. If you look at the item’s bidding history, you can see where the legitimate bids end and the trolling starts: Right around the $30,000 mark, where bidders start placing a series of incremental bids just to poke the item’s price up a little higher bit by bit.

Yes, whichever jokester loses this game of Russian roulette is technically legally obligated to purchase the item, but in reality the worst risk they’re running is getting an Unpaid Item strike on their eBay account.

This has happened a few times recently: Witness the profoundly ugly copy of Nintendo World Championships , estimated to be worth about $5,000, but bid up by trolls to just under $100,000. Later, the seller said that the game was sold privately for $5,000, the price at which he had set the auction’s original opening bid. The 11,000-game collection that the Guinness Book called the “world’s biggest” was auctioned on another site called GameGavel for over $750,000, but to this day it has not yet sold at any price.

What can be especially frustrating about these trolled auctions is the inevitable wave of incorrect news reports that follow, suggesting that the item in question has “sold” for the wildly inflated, unrealistic, fraudulent bid amount, without even a caveat.

Is there anything that can be done about this? Potentially: Remember that copy of Action Comics issue 1, the first comic book to feature Superman, that sold for $3.2 million on eBay, a record price for any comic? In that case, only pre-approved bidders could place bids. This is a standard feature of eBay, although it does require more work on the part of the seller.

Nobody’s going to impulse-buy a Stadium Events like it was a pack of gum at the checkout line. The number of videogame collectors who are prepared to make a legitimate five-figure bid on a rare item such as this is small, and they’d certainly be willing to take the extra step of securing pre-approval before placing a bid.

Infomania, Texting and Productivity: How Tech May Hamper the Connected Experience

UniBul/Flickr

There’s no question that texting and other social digital media are making inroads in business. But is texting an actual productivity enhancer as some claim it to be, or a distraction that takes away from the connected experience vital to real work?

The consumer-style texting apps vying for a toehold in business include WhatsApp, TextSecure, Wickr, Vibr and Text Me, among others. These applications often allow voice and video calling, too. In the case of Wickr and TextSecure, they also allow higher levels of privacy to ease the worries of corporate IT pros. Wickr even offers a Snapchat-like level of privacy, where texts automatically disappear after a predetermined period of time.

Supporters of texting at work say it enables more immediate responses to routine or emergency questions. Detractors find just the opposite – if every message can be delivered immediately, even mundane things may seem like a priority, shifting attention from the job at hand. That shifting of attention and the sometimes compulsive need to check texts and emails has had a name for almost 10 years now – “infomania.”

Even that far back, infomania was found to affect the cognitive ability of workers, actually negatively affecting productivity. Infomania was quantified in a 2005 study commissioned by Hewlett Packard and conducted by British psychologist Dr. Glenn Wilson. His research concluded that 62% of UK adults were addicted to checking messages out of office hours and on vacation.

Half of workers responded to emails immediately or within 60 minutes, and one in five would interrupt a business or social meeting to respond to an email or telephone message. Actually, for business, that sounds pretty good so far. Here’s the catch: Rather than boosting productivity by shifting attention from meetings and tasks to read and respond to messages, these Infomaniacs saw a measurable drop in their IQ.

Wilson’s tests of the average work showed that functioning IQ fell ten points when dealing with these distractions. Subsequent papers claimed that this kind of drop in IQ is more than double that of having recently smoked marijuana, and similar to having missed an entire night’s sleep. The effects were more pronounced with men in the study than women. (This either anecdotally supports the theory that women are better at multitasking than men, or that women may just function better than men in general when they’re stoned or sleepy. Either way, it’s probably not the best way for a company to run.)

So texting and other interruptions to the business day may not be the productivity booster that application developers claim them to be. But one of the latest consumer texting applications has even less of a foot in the door. In early December, Fundamental Applications announce a texting application aimed at Millennials. Dubbed Serum, it’s a mobile chat application that lets users post questions and have text conversations with their friends anonymously.

Fundamental’s Director, Julian Ing, said that Serum’s audience can solicit and receive honest, truthful opinions by smartphone. Examples of how Serum works (in Ing’s opinion, not mine) includes polling friends about their actual opinion as to how a woman might look in a dress, or whether someone’s friends think her boyfriend is cheating. That’s a pretty sexist value proposition, and I’m not sure it’s very compelling. And let’s also acknowledge that this application is aimed at consumers.

On the other hand, the current trend among consumer-focused applications is to build valuation by reaching into business. Facebook and Twitter have been aggressively pursuing business users. Facebook in particular provides a collaborative environment in private groups to share documents and create conversations around multiple projects. Also, given that Serum is aimed at the Millennial market, which in 10 years will represent the majority of mobile workers, it’s not unreasonable to assume that in a few years, if successful, Serum will start to position itself as a way to crowdsource opinion in business. That’s failure waiting to happen, unless they radically change their value proposition.

Currently billed as an opportunity for your peers to give frank opinions without repercussion, Serum is the opposite of how crowdsourcing is valuable for business. Companies need to understand where opinions come from – maybe not on an individual level, but certainly at a line-of-business level. You need to know whether concerns are coming from a particular department, or from sales people selling a particular product.

It’s comical to even think of how your frank opinion might be taken, unless you’re misusing your right to that opinion. If infomania can make productivity drop through the floor, one more texting app constantly asking Millennials what they anonymously think of things is really going to leave a bruise on business.

It’s really the loosest form of a connected experience. What’s needed is more meaningful interactions – personal interactions, where information can be shared collaboratively and everyone’s opinion carries some weight. Whether done with in-person meetings or through video conferencing, that’s the right next step for business. It creates the connected experience proven to enhance, not detract from, real work.

Texting might be useful within small work groups between these more formal meetings, but it should never be seen as a substitute. And it should never add to the noise that hampers real productivity.

Simon Dudley is the Video Evangelist for Lifesize. He can be reached via Twitter @simondudley.

These Are the 10 Best Books Out There, According to Everyone Else Out There

Year-end “best of” lists are great for things like pop culture moments, celebrity snafus, or provocative photographs. But when it comes to a best-of list for books, you’re not looking for cheap entertainment or nostalgia as you click through. You want to know what you should have been reading during those commutes you spent scrolling through Instagram or playing Candy Crush.

A book is an investment, both of time and money. And while everyone—from blogging bibliophiles to The New York Times—is entitled to their opinion, the number of best-of lists out there and the variance among them has left us wondering just what books are worth bringing with us into the new year.

To find “the best of the best ofs,” we decided not only to aggregate a sampling of lists, but also to assign points based on the selectivity of each list. We used the following formula:

100 / # of books in a given list = points awarded to each book in that list

For example, when a book was featured on a Top 100 list, it received 1 point. But if it made a Top 10 list, received 10 points. So if a book made the cut for a shorter list, it was rewarded. The more lists a book made, the more points it accumulated. Many of the lists we used didn’t assign rankings or declare an overall best, so we didn’t assign weight to those that did.

After we gathered from the essentials (Amazon, Publishers Weekly, Goodreads, The National Book Awards), we threw in a few blogs and national publications and tallied up the scores. Thus, the following 10 books are those that made the highest number of lists, and especially the selective ones.

So whether it’s your New Year’s resolution to do more reading or you have an Amazon gift card burning a hole in your pocket, these are the books from last year that everyone was—and will continue to be—reading.

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Score: 64.286

Why it stands out: The No. 1 bestseller in the US for the first week of 2015, All The Light We Cannot See tells the stories of two young people living in France during World War II. The main characters are each blinded, be it by cataracts or Nazi propaganda, and Doerr examines the ways in which the voice of a stranger can guide or misguide. Partly inspired by today’s ubiquitous cell phone service that we too often take for granted, Doerr’s novel is also a commentary on the magic of radio.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Score: 51.992

Why it stands out: “My fourth novel is about a traveling Shakespearean theatre company in a post-apocalyptic North America,” Emily St. John Mandel claims on her website. After the “Georgia Flu” wipes out civilization, the theater troupe trudges across the wasteland bringing art into the lives of fellow survivors. But the post-apocalyptic world isn’t exempt from new threats, despite hope for rebirth. Station Eleven jumps back and forth in time and weaves threads between characters to illustrate how, even at the end of the world, the human connection prevails.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

Score: 43.7

Why it stands out: This novel spans political violence in Jamaica in the 1970s, New York City’s crack wars in the 1980s, and so much more. Marlon James delves into the attempted assassination of Bob Marley as well as the country’s clandestine Cold War battles, following several fictional characters who encounter these real events. Critics rave about James’ mastery of both oral history storytelling and patois dialect, and his ability to craft and juggle perspectives that often contradict and obscure the truth. With comparisons to the works of David Foster Wallace and Quentin Tarantino, James has garnered the highest of contemporary praise.

Redeployment by Phil Klay

Score: 41.0

Why it stands out: Based on his own experiences as a Marine in the Iraq War, Phil Klay’s collection of short stories explores the challenges of re-assimilating into life back home. He doesn’t just relay stories of his deployment; he relays the myriad ways in which average Americans react when he tells them about it. Dexter Filkins, a New York Times journalist who covered the war, deemed Redeployment “the best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls.” It also won the 2014 National Book Award for fiction.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

Score: 39.0

Why it stands out: This work of nonfiction postulates a modern-day mass-extinction, triggered by the human race and its ecological irresponsibility (rather than, say, a massive volcanic eruption). From climate change to wilderness destruction, Elizabeth Kolbert explains the cognitive dissonance that ensues when a species is evolved enough to create such disruption and also realize what they’re doing. If Kolbert’s alarming thesis doesn’t entice you, her dry sense of humor and accounts of her travels—from the Bikini Atoll to the Andes to her own backyard—will keep you hooked.

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

Score: 35.549

Why it stands out: The author of Cloud Atlas is back with another book told in six semi-disparate segments that build in surprising ways. David Mitchell aptly portrays the minds of a multitude of characters: a psychic teenage girl who runs away from home, a Cambridge student, an Iraq war reporter. He also leaps into multiple future years, later shifting into reverse to connect them to their fictional pasts. NPR went as far as to say that Mitchell has a “mastery over what feels like the entire world and all its inhabitants.”

The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison

Score: 32.692

Why it stands out: Leslie Jamison studies empathy from numerous angles, shedding light how we experience our own pain and the pain of others—physical or emotional, real or performed. From working as a medical actor hired to quiz med students on symptoms, to running alongside ultramarathoners, Jamison has gone to extremes for these essays. In them, she also draws on personal encounters with illness, and she even discusses reality TV, exposing the ins and outs of what it means to feel in today’s complex society.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson

Score: 28.692

Why it stands out: A drifter named Doll rescues a neglected toddler, whom she names Lila. As an adult, Lila takes shelter from the rain in a church, whose minister later baptizes her and eventually becomes her husband. But one morning, Lila goes out to the river and essentially un-baptizes herself. Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams (above), wrote for The Atlantic: “Robinson resists the notion of love as an easy antidote to a lifetime of suffering or solitude, suggesting that intimacy can’t intrude on loneliness without some measure of pain.”

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

Score: 25.286

Why it stands out: Read this one before it’s time to binge-watch it: In November, Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman signed on to develop a TV series adaptation of the book. It’s the story of three mothers whose children attend Pirriwee Public primary school, where one night at an after-school event, chaos erupts. One parent winds up dead, but it’s unclear whether it’s by accident or murder. Overall, the book comments on the lies women tell themselves and others in order to uphold a perfect image.

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

Score: 25.286

Why it stands out: Filled with suspense, this mystery novel has a surprising twist at the end—one so unexpected that some reviewers barely mention it for fear of sparking spoilers. Its teenage narrator uses fairy tales to describe situations. The characters are self-absorbed, wealthy WASPs on an island off Martha’s Vineyard, and The LA Times calls it “a classic story of decaying aristocracy and the way that privilege can often hamstring more than help.” It’s also a King Lear allegory, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Today’s iPhone Anniversary Reminds Us What Real Innovation Looks Like

Steve Jobs holds up the first iPhone at the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco, Jan. 9, 2007. Paul Sakuma/AP

As this year’s CES wraps up with another collective “meh,” it’s worth remembering what the launch of a truly world-changing gadget looks like.

Eight years ago today, Steve Jobs stood on a stage in San Francisco and unveiled the first iPhone, a moment that in retrospect heralded everything from the death of the PC to the birth of the selfie stick.

How popular is the iPhone? In 2006, the year before its release, Apple’s total revenue was about $19.3 billion. That’s for the whole year, for every Apple product combined. In figures pointed out Thursday by Om Malik, UBS Research is projecting iPhone sales alone will generate more than $43 billion in revenue for Apple during the three months ending December 31, 2014. To put that figure in context, as Malik notes, chipmaker Intel is expected to see about $55 billion in sales for the entire year. Networking behemoth Cisco Systems posted fiscal 2014 revenues of just over $47 billion.

If Social Media Sites Were Drugs, These Are the Drugs They Would Be

WIRED

Earlier today Pew released a survey that found 23 percent of adults in the United States used Twitter in 2014.

That’s up from 18 percent in 2013, but a far cry from the 71 percent who used Facebook. Indeed, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram all grab higher shares of the American adult crowd.

Ben Dreyfuss

Ben Dreyfuss is the Engagement Editor and Mother Jones Magazine, and—full disclosure—is the brother of WIRED Opinion editor Emily Dreyfuss, which is the only reason he agreed to let her publish this.

For the apparently vanishingly tiny percentage of Americans who tweet dozens of times a day—the overwhelming majority of Twitter users basically never tweet—this seems nuts. Twitter is intensely addictive! How do only a handful of people use it? How do 300 million Americans go a whole day, week, month, life without checking Twitter incessantly? Are they monks? Ascetics? How do they stay clean and sober?

The answer, of course, says more about Twitter’s high barrier to entry than it does the ultimate addictiveness, but just like with drugs, for those of us born with the tendency to overuse, Twitter is irresistible.

Anyway, I took this train of thought naturally to Twitter to riff on social networks and drugs. Do these tweets make perfect sense? Maybe not! But hey, it’s social media! It’s fun and jazzy and casual and not everything makes sense but there is still some essential truth to it! You dig?

Do you agree? Sound off with your own analogies in the comments if you think you can do better.

When Does the Air Resistance Force Make a Difference?

Rhett Allain

I often look at cases where things are falling. We typically call this “free fall” motion because the object is moving only under the influence of the gravitational force. With only the gravitational force, the object has a constant acceleration and the motion is fairly simple to model.

However, objects on the surface of the Earth usually have an air resistance force on them also. When can we ignore this extra force and when is it important?

Modeling Air Resistance

Let’s say I drop a ping pong ball. As it falls, I can draw the following force diagram.

The most common model for the air resistance says that the magnitude of the force depends on:

• The density of air (ρ). This typically has a value around 1.2 kg/m³.


• The cross sectional area of the object (A). A ping pong ball would have a cross sectional area equal to π*r².


• The drag coefficient (C). This depends on the shape of the object. For a spherical object, a unitless value of 0.47 is typical.


• The magnitude of the velocity squared. The faster you go, the greater the air resistance force.

The direction of the air resistance force is in the opposite direction as the velocity of the object. That’s why there is a negative sign in the expression along with the r – hat (which is a unit vector in the direction of the velocity).

But how do you find values for the drag coefficients for different objects? The real answer is that you must measure them experimentally. However, Wikipedia has a nice list of some values. What about a falling human? I often have to model the motion of a falling human, but there isn’t a C value listed. There is one trick I can use.

The trick involves terminal velocity. Suppose a human jumps out of a stationary hot air balloon. At first, only the gravitational force acts on the human giving an acceleration of -9.8 m/s². However, as the human increases in speed, the air resistance force also increases. At some point, the air resistance force will be equal in magnitude to the gravitational force and the human will no longer increase in speed. We call this “terminal velocity”.

Now for the trick. It seems to be mostly accepted that the terminal velocity for a skydiver is about 120 mph (53.6 m/s). Of course, this is the terminal velocity for the normal skydiving position with head facing down and arms and legs spread out. If I guess at a human mass of 70 kg, I can set the air resistance and gravitational forces equal. Also, for simplicity I am going to call all the constants in front of the velocity squared just K (since they don’t change).

I only need the mass and the terminal velocity and I can build a model for air resistance. Yes, this is just a model. If you go super fast, this model probably isn’t valid. For now, it’s all I have to work with.

How High is Too High?

If I drop an object from some height, there are two things I could do to obtain a value for the falling time. First, I could just ignore air resistance and use the typical kinematic equation:

Solving for the time is fairly straightforward. But what if I add in air resistance? What then? There is a problem. Air resistance is a force that depends on the velocity. This means that the force (and thus the acceleration) is not constant. That’s a big problem.

We can still solve this with a numerical calculations. In short, I can use a computer to model just a tiny time interval for a falling object. During this short time interval, the forces are roughly constant. Here is an older post that gives an introduction to numerical calculations. Also, don’t forget that my ebook (Just Enough Physics) has a whole chapter on numerical calculations.

Let’s just get to the calculation. Here is a model of a ping pong ball falling from a height of 10 meters. Actually, this is a Glowscript program so you can run it yourself and even edit it. Try it! In this calculation, I have a ping pong ball and a ball without air resistance dropped from the same height. In this plot, you can see that the ping pong ball hits after the no-air resistance ball with a time difference of 0.32

But this doesn’t answer the question: how high is too high? Of course, there isn’t just one answer to this question. The maximum height depends on how accurate you want your model. Here is the real plot that you want. This shows the falling time difference between an object with air resistance and one without for different starting heights. Actually, since larger starting heights will have larger times, I have plotted the fractional difference in times.

From this, it looks like a human drop height of about 160 meters would give a falling time about 10% different than that without air resistance. If you are just getting a rough estimate (like falling off a building), it would probably be fine to ignore air resistance. If you were dropping a ping pong ball instead, I would assume no air resistance for heights around just 4 meters.

But it’s not just about the falling time. Sometimes you care about the final velocity instead of the time. Could you just use the same cut-off heights for velocity that you do for time? I don’t think so. Let’s take a look at a falling human for example. If this human was falling off a building, near the end of the fall the air resistance would be much greater than it was at the beginning of the fall. However, this increase in speed at the very end might not make a huge difference in the falling time.

Here is a plot for the same objects showing the fractional difference in final velocities for with and without air resistance.

If I go with the same idea of getting just a 10 percent velocity error, the falling height for a human would 60 meters instead of 160 meters.

Homework

Ok, there are things left to look at – so I will give them as a homework assignment.

• What about the kinetic energy at the end of a fall? How high would a human have to fall so that there was just a 10 percent error in KE?


• Suppose I want to drop a ping pong ball in a lecture class to show that you need to include the air resistance in order to properly model its motion. How high should I drop this ball?


• I want to make some spheres made of wood (let’s say wood has a density of 900 kg/m³). Make a plot of drop height for a 10 percent fall time error vs. ball radius. As the ball gets larger, it’s mass to cross sectional area ratio changes. Bigger balls should be able to be dropped from a larger height with less error. How small should a wooded ball be such that if dropped from a height of 2 meters, the fall time is off by 10 percent?

That’s your homework.