Month-Long Tournament Celebrates End of Oakland’s 80-Year Pinball Ban

Pinball enthusiast TJ Beyer sets up an Iron Man machine at a Radio Shack in Oakland to mark the beginning of a month-long tournament. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

OAKLAND, California—Can you believe there was a time when the game of pinball was illegal in this town?

Can you believe that time was this year?

Residents of this Bay Area city probably couldn’t possibly imagine they were breaking the law every time they sidled up to a Bally table and played the silver ball. But it was only last month that the Oakland city council finally passed a measure lifting an 80-year ban on the public operation of pinball machines. To celebrate this occasion, a local RadioShack is holding a month-long pinball tournament. The chain, a key resource for pinball owners, has purchased and installed an Iron Man machine in the store in the city’s Fruitvale Station, and invited players to test their skills. Anyone who tops 50 million points will be invited back to compete for the grand prize—the table itself.

Pinball, Scourge of the Nation’s Youth

Oakland’s absurd ban dates to the 1930′s, when the machines were considered a form of gambling. Before the addition of flippers, which allowed the player to bounce the ball and more accurately affect the game’s outcome, pinball machines simply rolled the ball down the playfield. The only way of controlling the outcome was to imprecisely nudge the table. This was not particularly effective, making pinball largely a game of chance. You might get a payout for achieving a high score.

“There was this stigma for what pinball was,” said Josh Sharpe, president of the International Flipper Pinball Association, “which stuck around as it evolved into an amusement machine, with electricity and the opportunity to control the ball via flippers.”

The Iron Man pinball game, ready to be played. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Roger Sharpe, the Association’s co-founder and Josh’s father, was a driving force behind destigmatizing pinball in the 1970s. In 1976, the elder Sharpe appeared before the New York city council to demonstrate that pinball as practiced was a game of skill, not chance. His testimony (and supple wrist) helped reverse New York’s ban on pinball. But the bans, like other ridiculous or outdated laws, remained on the books in other cities across America, including Oakland.

That said, the law went largely unenforced and it wasn’t until an Association tournament was shut down that the organization knew it must fight to see the statute reversed.

“It might have even been about the noise of the business, just based on the machines and the people there,” Sharpe said of the complaint that led to the enforcement of the anti-pinball law. “If you want to shut someone down, find a way to make what they’re doing illegal. So they found this old rule that didn’t allow people to operate pinball machines that way.”

Managing to stack 4 balls on one flipper — something that rarely, if ever, happens in real game play. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Instead of backing down, the group fought the law as many other communities have done over the last 40 years. The result was Oakland lifting its pinball ban, as a part of a larger measure looking at modern gambling establishments in the Bay Area city.

“We’ve had a really big pinball renaissance and resurgence in the past five years,” said Jody Dankberg, director of marketing for Stern, the only company in America currently manufacturing pinball machines.

“We’re seeing a huge growth in location pinball, a huge growth in league play, tournaments, and things like that,” Dankberg said. “Organizations like the IFPA, these competitive players, they’ve really been the driving force behind getting some of these bans lifted.”

Pinball bans still exist, like in Oakland’s neighboring city Alameda—the location of the Pacific Pinball Museum, which had to remove all the coin slots off of its machines to comply with the law. But pinball can finally emerge from out of the shadows in Oakland.

“It opens the door for so many more cool things,” Dankberg said. “Across the country we’re seeing a huge trend in the barcade business: bars that sell craft beer and have classic videogames and pinball machines.”

“With a law on the books, like it was in Oakland, it prevents that type of venue. So now this is pretty exciting—hopefully we’ll see more pinball in Oakland.”

Terminal Velocity

Much of high-end auto racing has always been about squeezing a bit more kinetic energy out of each drop of gasoline. But improvements in electric car technology mean racing can ditch the fossil fuels. Starting in September, the new FORMULA E series will bring teams from around the world to compete on the streets of Beijing, Monte Carlo, Buenos Aires, Miami, and six other cities. And they'll all be driving a version of the same car: the Spark-Renault SRT_01E. Built using systems from several storied automotive firms, the 1,764-pound electrorocket represents the thinking of the best minds in the sport. Carmakers hope that new ideas will emerge from the crucible of racing to zoom all electric vehicles forward.

The battery-powered rocket that could transform formula 1 racing. WILSON HENNESSY | BRYAN CHRISTIE DESIGN

1. Chassis Built by the Italian firm Dallara, which also makes the chassis for Indy cars, the Formula E chassis is made of a strong, lightweight carbon-fiber composite. As in a typical F1 car, the driver sits in an aluminum tub for better crash protection.

2. Steering Wheel This is the command center. Many of the controls are what you'd find on a typical race car: paddle shifters for flicking between the SRT's six gears, a speed limiter for driving in the pit lane, a radio button so the driver can talk to his team. Here, though, there's also a knob for adjusting the motor's power and a button that engages a temporary boost for passing. And, of course, a screen displays how much juice is left in the battery.

3. Tires Formula E tires must be both efficient and versatile, since the cars will be racing not on dedicated racetracks but on city streets. Michelin designed an 18-inch tire that's treaded for all-weather performance—a first for an international race series—with low rolling resistance to extend battery life. The're so rugged that they won't need to be changed mid-race, which makes the series more sustainable and also saves the teams some cash—a single tire gun (the tool that removes a lug nut in a split second) can cost thousands of dollars.

4. Battery Pack In a normal F1 car, the engine and gas tank are right behind the driver. Here that space is occupied by a roughly 772-pound cube containing 164 lithium-ion batteries. Designed by the British firm Williams F1, the power pack has a capacity of 30 kilowatt-hours—enough for 20 to 30 minutes of hard driving. The races will last twice that, so when the driver makes a pit stop with an almost-dead battery, he'll hop into a different, fully charged car. Right now all the battery packs are the same, but to encourage innovation, this stricture may eventually be relaxed, allowing teams to experiment with different suppliers to gain an edge.

5. Battery Management System In any electric car, the BMS is a bundle of hardware and software that keeps the battery pack operating safely and reliably by balancing the charges in the cells and tracking temperature, voltage, and current. Here it's even more crucial, because racing demands more of each cell, draining them much more rapidly than in an electric passenger car and recharging them constantly through the regeneration system. Williams crammed the BMS with many more sensors than usual, allowing it to monitor conditions at a greater level of detail; each second, the unit captures some 350,000 inputs that help the software maximize the health and performance of the battery pack.

6. Electric Motor The 57-pound cylindrical motor comes from McLaren, the British company famous for supercars that cost more than a nice house in a good school district. This is the same motor that McLaren uses in its $1.5 million P1 hybrid. Although the P1 has a higher top speed (217 mph as opposed to the Spark-Renault's 140 mph), electric motors have a lot of low-end torque, so the SRT_01E and the P1 both catapult from 0 to 60 in less than three seconds. One important feature is the motor's regeneration system: Whenever the driver takes his foot off the throttle, the spinning rotor charges the battery pack. The motor also helps produce the car's unique, pod-racer-esque sound; at top speed, the car hums at 80 decibels, compared with the 130-decibel scream of its gas-fueled Formula 1 brethren.

WILSON HENNESSY

How Agriculture’s Growth Promoters Might Work: A Mouse Study Sheds Some Light

Rama (CC), Flickr

The farm practice that underlies most agricultural use of antibiotics is known as “growth promotion”: It calls for giving very small doses of antibiotics routinely to meat animals because those doses cause them to gain fat and muscle more quickly than they would otherwise. Growth promotion dates back to the early days of the antibiotic era, and has always been somewhat mysterious. Though there were attempts to pick apart its mechanisms in the 1950s and 1960s (I’ve been reading some fascinating old accounts), for the most part, people simply accepted that it worked. It’s only in the past decade or so, as interest has increased in the microbes that reside everywhere in our and animals’ bodies (a vast community generally known as the microbiome), that researchers have begun trying to dissect what is going on.

The scientific team that has probably pursued this most intensely is the NYU Langone Medical Center lab led by Martin J. Blaser. Blaser published a popular account of their research into antibiotics’ effect on obesity, asthma, diabetes, and other disorders in Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues , published in April. (Disclosure: I reviewed the book for Nature .) Two years ago, the team showed that giving small doses of antibiotics to very young mice affected genes controlling metabolism of nutrients, and caused the mice to gain weight. Now they have followed up that research with detailed work exploring how much the timing and length of antibiotics affects weight gain. Though the work is still in mice, it leads to provocative conclusions about how growth promoters work in livestock, and what early-life antibiotics might do to humans as well.

In the new study, published last week, Blaser’s colleague Laura Cox and additional researchers from both NYU and other institutions gave both long and short-term regimens of low doses of penicillin to rat pups and also to rat mothers before they gave birth. In all cases, the mice that received the low-dose penicillin, or their offspring, grew up to be heavier than undrugged mice. In the mice that received the low doses continuously, the balance of microbes in their guts was permanently altered. In the ones that received the short regimens, their microbiomes returned to normal after the drug doses ceased — but they continued to gain weight faster than they should have. And finally, when mice that had not been dosed received transplants of gut bacteria from dosed mice, they gained weight abnormally as well, even though they had not received any antibiotics themselves.

Granted that mice are not cattle, pigs, chickens or other meat animals, this is still illuminating of what may be going on when growth promoters are administered. (Something that, even today, is dismissed with “it just works” hand-waving.) It also sheds light on what may happen in humans when young children receive antibiotics. Children don’t get antibiotics as a routine thing the way livestock do, but they do very commonly receive short courses for common childhood infections such as ear infections. It’s possible, as Blaser has suggested elsewhere, that those early-life prescriptions may be an unacknowledged cause of the worldwide rise in obesity.

In the paper, Blaser’s team is careful to call this work a model; and, again, the work is only conducted in mice. But to me the results provide one more clause in the long argument of why antibiotic overuse — which we know contributes to antibiotic resistance, and may contribute to obesity — should be scaled back.

Note: I am a few days late in writing about this because I was traveling. Faster and more thorough responses appeared at The Scientist and the Genetic Literacy Project, and Ed Yong’s take at Phenomena is especially good.

Cite: Cox, Laura M. et al. Altering the Intestinal Microbiota during a Critical Developmental Window Has Lasting Metabolic Consequences. Cell , Volume 158 , Issue 4 , 705 – 721. DOI: http://ift.tt/1oxrkE9

The HTC One Arrives In Redmond

HTC

HTC has just announced a Windows Phone version of its flagship smartphone, the One.

The HTC One for Windows is new in terms of platform only: It’s a spitting image of the beautiful brushed-aluminum HTC One Android phone released earlier this year. The Windows Phone version only available on Verizon, and the price looks good: It’ll be $100 with a two-year contract.

Like the Android version, it’s being referred to as the M8, a nickname given to the 2014 model of the HTC One to avoid confusion with older models. So while it’s an old face, it’s still one of the nicest pieces of Windows mobile hardware we’ve seen to date—camera notwithstanding, of course (the high-end Nokias have it beat in that regard).

The Windows Phone version of the One has the same crisp 5-inch, 441 pixel-per-inch, 1080p display, the same zippy Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 quad-core SoC, the same MicroSD expansion slot, the same better-than-most stereo speakers, and the same 2600mAh battery. All of these are good things. Unfortunately, the Windows Phone version of the M8 also has the same camera as the Android M8. It’s nowhere near as good as the superb 41-megapixel shooter in the Nokia Lumia 1020, which still holds the camera crown in the Windows Phone world. While the spec sheets for both versions of the HTC One are nearly identical, I was able to find one difference: The Windows Phone version doesn’t appear to have a barometer sensor, unlike the Android M8. So if that makes a difference to you, be wary.

Otherwise, be excited. Windows Phone now has a proven, refined flagship phone that, unless you’re a discerning mobile photographer, many would say the platform has been lacking.

With New Delivery Service, Uber Declares War on Google and Amazon

Uber

Uber is already an expert in getting you from door-to-door. Now, the company wants to figure out how to deliver stuff to your door as well.

On Tuesday, Uber announced a pilot program for what it calls Uber Corner Store, a service that would allow Uber users in the Washington D.C. area to get staple items like toothpaste and bandages delivered from local stores. According to a blog post, the program will only last a few weeks, but it hints at CEO Travis Kalanick’s long-term vision for Uber, which is to transform the company from a pure transportation play into a full-fledged logistics company.

Uber has never been one to back down from a fight. Since its earliest days, it has wrestled with regulators and fought dirty with competitors like Lyft. But all of that may be child’s play compared to what could come next. With Corner Store, the five-year-old startup could be setting itself up for an all-out war with two of tech’s superpowers: Google and Amazon.

It hints at CEO Travis Kalanick’s long-term vision for Uber, which is to transform the company from a pure transportation play into a full-fledged logistics company.

In recent years, the two giants have been aggressively vying for a share of the same-day delivery market. Earlier this month, Amazon expanded its Get It Today service to six new locations. Meanwhile, Google has been consistently adding retailers to its Shopping Express service. These moves are both a response to the growing on-demand economy and a ploy to get shoppers so hooked on a single service, from beginning to end, so that they’ll rarely shop anywhere else. As WIRED’s Marcus Wohlsen recently described the battle: “logistics—the tech industry’s boring sideshow—has emerged as its central drama.”

Corner Store items can be delivered within the shaded areas. Uber

Uber certainly has plenty of catching up to do. But the company also has one major advantage: it has played perhaps the biggest role in developing this on-demand economy. Uber taught us to treat our phones like remote controls for the real world, in which we can summon anything, from vehicles to pizza to pot, with the push of a button. Which is why it’s not entirely crazy to imagine that people might be more inclined to use Uber than other services to buy things they need right this minute.

Uber taught us to treat our phones like remote controls for the real world, in which we can summon anything, from vehicles to pizza to pot, with the push of a button

That said, Uber will have to figure out a way to make money on this service, either by taking a cut of sales or by charging customers a delivery fee. For now, the service is free for customers, who merely cover the costs of whatever items they bought.

Of course, this war will have its casualties. Startups like WunWun and Postmates have built businesses exclusively around courier and delivery services. As larger competitors like Google, Amazon, and even Uber continue to offer their existing customers those same services, shoppers may have less reason to seek out another delivery app. That could grossly limit the market for startups like WunWun and Postmates and relegate them to glorified messenger services.

For now, Uber maintains that Corner Store is merely an experiment. “But,” the blog post reads, “the more you love it, the more likely it will last.”

Michelin’s Clever New Tires Stay Just as Grippy as They Wear

Michelin

The more you drive on your tires, the more they wear down. After a while, the grooves that improve traction, particularly in the wet, wear away. Eventually, you either buy a new set or risk running off the road next time it rains. But thanks to some clever engineering, Michelin has made tires that don’t age the way they usually do. As the rubber wears off, new grooves emerge to keep you on the road.

Modern street tires have radial grooves—the ones that go around the circumference of the tire—that channel water so the rubber can make solid contact with the road. The more water that can be channeled, the more traction the tires have to do things like turn and stop the car. Typically, these grooves get shallower and less effective as the tire wears, so it takes longer to stop the car on wet roads. When Michelin began looking at designing a new all-purpose tire, it decided improving wet-weather traction on worn tires was the problem to solve.

“That was our mission,” explained Ron Margadonna, senior technical marketing manager for Michelin. “We wanted to change that as much as we could.”

And so the company’s engineers did something very clever and very simple for its new Premier A/S tire: They designed tread grooves that expand as the tire wears, allowing the tire to perform nearly as well when it’s half-worn as it did when new. It’s a novel safety feature with the potential to save lives, and it’s such an obvious idea, we wonder why it took so long to hit the market.

Michelin’s new “Evergrip” tire technology includes three key changes. First, the four radial rain grooves have been redesigned to resemble an inverted V, with a wall angle that results in wider grooves as the tire wears. As the grooves become shallower over time, they retain nearly the same volume. Michelin wouldn’t reveal much about how the tires are actually made, but did say that with a little “tire Pam”, they can pop the tires off their molds during manufacturing—that’s trickier than usual because the tire is actually wrapped around the mold.

The tires also include an “emerging groove” on the shoulder of the tire. Narrow sipes, or tiny carvings on the edge of the tire, help to channel water away from the center of the rubber. On the Premier, these grooves are shaped like teardrops, wide at the bottom and very narrow at the top. As the rubber wears away, the sipes expand into larger grooves appear around half-tread depth, further assisting in wet weather performance by giving a little more room for water to disperse from underneath the tire.

Gif: WIRED

Lastly, the company changed what the tires are made of. It mixes a ton of silica into the rubber compound. The common additive to modern tires limits resistance (for better fuel economy) while simultaneously improving grip under braking and acceleration. In the Premier tire, Michelin has put as much silica into the rubber as possible. A little sunflower oil is added to the mix too, improving flexibility and performance in colder weather. Michelin says a half-worn Premier with 5/32″ tread stops 14 feet shorter in the wet than Goodyear’s Assurance Tripletred A/S tire, its most direct competition.

The Premier A/S (all-season) went on sale earlier this year in 32 sizes, covering 70 percent of the market. A recreational pickup/SUV version is coming next year. The company demurred when asked about the Evergrip technology coming to other Michelin tire lines, but said it has the capability to deploy it more widely.

And now, we have evidence that this isn’t just marketing mumbojumbo. Testing by Consumer Reports shows the Premier stops in similar distances on wet and dry roads, both when new and when the tread is worn down to 5/32″, the point where getting new tires is often recommended.

Mailbox, the Innovative Email App, Is Now Available for Mac

Mailbox, the popular iPhone mail app, is now rolling out on the Mac. Mailbox

When Mailbox came out for the iPhone, people were so excited about its novel mail-sorting features that they lined up like it was a hot new nightclub to try it out. Now its coming to desktop, with beta invites trickling out to users starting today.

The idea behind Mailbox is simple: Most of us treat our inbox like a to-do list, so why not use an app designed to accommodate that behavior? The mobile version of Mailbox was built on a handful of features that made triage easy and put inbox zero actually in reach. You could swipe emails to sort them into folders or “snooze” them until later. After getting snapped up by Dropbox, Mailbox introduced a feature called Auto-swipe that intelligently learned when and where you sorted certain messages and subsequently took care of it for you automatically.

You can now sort messages to the desktop app from your phone, or vice versa. Mailbox

The desktop version of Mailbox is built on many of these same features. It’s got a spartan, all-white look with a familiar three-pane interface. You can sort emails by swiping them with your trackpad, just like you do on the mobile app. Power sorters are given a few new tools. Holding down the “CMD” key cleverly reveals hotkeys for sorting via keyboard, and selecting multiple items in the inbox lets you swipe them all at once, a satisfying mass-sort that design lead Tony DeVincenzi likens to “hitting your mail with a baseball bat.”

DeVincenzi points out that the team didn’t just grab the swipe feature from the mobile app and call it a day. Instead, they tested dozens of new interactions for sorting mail with keyboard and trackpad, including slapping big buttons on each message and hiding sorting options in expanding, mouse-over menus. Ultimately though the designers wound up back at swipe as the most natural way to organize. But they did tweak the interaction so that it felt natural on the desktop. “On mobile, it’s mapped one-to-one with your thumb,” DeVincenzi says. “It feels like a physical affordance.” To fine-tune the feel on the desktop, the designers built a UI panel that let them play with properties like tension, bounce-back, velocity and spring. (This whole thing is kind of interesting. For decades, desktop mail clients have been built on keyboard-and-mouse interactions. Here instead we have one built for keyboard and trackpad. It’s a surefooted break from the click-and-drag tradition and an embrace of our current Age of Swiping).

Some of the most interesting features in the desktop app are new sorting options that let you organize mail based on whatever device you happen to be holding at the moment. On your phone, you can sort a message in Mailbox so that it only pops back up when you next open Mailbox on your desktop, or vice versa. If you’re one of those people who routinely mark things as unread on the go so you can deal with them at your computer, you’ll understand how useful this could be, but, more broadly, it’s an interesting example of the possibilities that open up when your mail app becomes a mail platform—a space Mailbox will continue explore in future updates. “Now that we have Mailbox on all the main screens, we can start doing creative things in the ecosystem,” DeVincenzi says.

The compose window was based on an 8.5 x 11″ sheet of paper. The slender form wraps text lines faster, making it feel easier to fire off notes. Mailbox

There are a few other new details worth pointing out. One is the compose window, which pops up in the middle of the screen as a vertical rectangle. It was modeled after an eight-and-a-half by eleven sheet of paper. As DeVincenzi explains, the slender form wraps lines more quickly, which makes it a comfortable space to write both longer emails and quicker replies. It opens with a shadow underlay which subtly helps you focus on what you’re writing. The desktop app now lets you save drafts, which is a first for Mailbox. It’s still limited to Gmail and iCloud mail accounts.

To understand Mailbox’s greater approach to email, it’s instructive to compare its new desktop app to Gmail. Where Google might show you 20 or so messages on the default screen, Mailbox will just show you 9 or 10. That information density is very deliberate; it visually and conceptually puts individual messages forward as things you should act on in the moment, instead of a list of items you skim, open up when needed, or put off ’til later. “We wanted those emails to feel grabable and moveable,” DeVincenzi says of the thick, amply-padded messages in the Mailbox inbox. If you’re the type of person who works best when your papers are organized and your desk is free of clutter, you’ll instantly be able to see the appeal.