If you want to find out why everybody’s raising a fuss about Second Life right now, check out my article in Popular Science about it. SL is the first popular multiplayer online role-playing game (MORG) that isn’t a game at all. Or at least, it’s no more a game than going down to the corner bar is. Signing up for SL gets you an avatar (your online self-representation), a pocket full of Linden dollars (local currency), and the ability to fly and teleport anywhere you want in a world of islands completely designed by the avatars who live on them. You can chat, go shopping, build your dream house, take a class, or have sex — just by flying your avatar around. I think SL is a beta version of the future of the Web. Why exist in two dimensions when you can have three?

Check out the article.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the parallels between fandom and high tech communities (in fact, that’s the topic of my talk at Foo Camp today, which I hope at least a modest number of people will attend — I’m up against some sessions that I wish I could visit).

I just wrote a column about why I’d rather check out the free fan culture that’s grown up around Snakes on a Plane than actually see the movie — though generally I love bad monster movie. There’s been a lot of “what went wrong” articles about why the online buzz around Snakes didn’t translate into ticket sales. Nobody seems to have hit upon the obvious answer: some kinds of culture cannot be sold. What was popular about Snakes online was the way it inspired all kinds of free culture — joke posters, video parodies, cartoons, etc. These creations are satire, which means they’re funny because they aren’t really about Snakes per se — they make fun of other things (think about the “liquids on a plane” poster). That’s why they don’t necessarily kindle interest in the movie that inspired them. Think of the Snakes fan culture as a fork in a software project. People who enjoy and create Snakes satires aren’t necessarily the same ones who will go to see Snakes the movie.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about another tech community — this time, one that was created coercively. I refer to the people whose privacy was violated by the AOL data leak — the company deliberately released three months worth of search query data that wasn’t adequately anonymized. Although AOL has taken the data down, sites like Don’tDelete are still hosting it, in searchable form. Now I’m hearing reports that searching this data has become so popular that the top hits on some people’s names in Google are from their AOL search queries. Nobody is thrilled to discover this. You can learn an awful lot about someone’s private life by looking at their searches for, say, medical and personal information.

To square the circle, I’d say the people victimized by the AOL leak remind me of all the music fans sued by the RIAA. These are people who innocently used a corporate product in a way they thought was lawful and safe, and were punished by the corporation that built it.

Sometimes I have to indulge my science fiction geek urges.

That’s why I wrote about the allure of fembots for Popular Science. Some feminists say the fembot is an old-fashioned male fantasy because she’s a completely programmable (and controllable) woman. But most movies portray female robots as strong, out of control, and extremely dangerous. Even the evil Maria cyborg from 1927 silent flick Metropolis is tough as nails. So too is the nuke-carrying robobabe from Eve of Destruction, Pris of Blade Runner, and of course the boob-morphing female terminator unit from Terminator 3. And don’t get me started on the cylons of Battlestar Galactica. The point is that the fembot is not exactly a dumb USB device. She’s fascinating because she should be controllable, but isn’t — and she’s a creature who looks delicate but is stronger than you. Read my article to find out more.

Of course, I also had to write about stupid science fiction to make up for my foray into the world of kickass female cyborgs. So I posted on MeeVee about the secret messages from the Church of Scientology in one of the all-time worst SF shows ever, The 4400. There are some seriously weird parallels between Scientology lore about Body Thetans and alien superpowers and the plot of this horrible show about humans who’ve been altered by possibly-alien, possibly-human people from the future who hand out superpowers as if they were copies of Dianetics. Also, the 4400 “gifted” people live in a giant “complex” that looks strangely similar to a Scientology building. Bad science fiction or bad religion? You be the judge.

My post on MeeVee will be the first of several I’m going to write for the site about science fiction television. I’ll keep posting them here as they roll out, or you can bop over to the MeeVee blog and catch them when they’re hot off the feed.

It’s made of tubes!

One of the most interesting talks I saw at Black Hat two weeks ago was about how easy it is to use RSS feeds to infect unprotected computers with hostile code. Last week, I wrote about the latest research from Bob Auger on how reading blogs could leave you vulnerable to surveillance, identity theft, and being turned into a giant spam-engine.

What worries me is how free expression might be affected if blog readers are so easily turned into fraud machines:

If I were a bad guy and wanted to steal a bunch of passwords, I would hide some malicious code inside a comment on a popular blog. As soon as your reader downloaded that comment, you’d be infected. Or I would start a blog that sounded particularly interesting (or pornographic), tempt a bunch of people into subscribing to my feed, and inject naughty code into their computers that way. When you consider how many people automatically repost other people’s feeds onto their own blogs in a “what I’m reading” section or something like that, it’s clear how bad things could get.

But even worse, in the process of using the Web’s fastest free-speech engine to wreak havoc, the people injecting nasty code into blog feeds could undermine free speech itself.

Check out my story for more.

In my column last week, I complained (only slightly gratuitously) about the way science journalists write about animal experiments. No, this wasn’t a PETA screed. What bugged me about Nicholas Wade’s interesting article in the New York Times about a long-term Russian experiment in breeding tame animals was the way he wanted to pull some kind of human lesson out of what was specifically animal research.

Starting in the 1950s, Russian researchers had been breeding two sets of rats (as well as foxes and some other animals) — one pool was bred for friendliness to humans, the other for hostility. Over just a few generations, the researchers had some extremely tame and untame rats. This is fascinating because it shows that the process of “taming” domestic animals or farm animals might not be nearly as arduous as was once believed. But like many science journalists, Wade couldn’t just end his article with this animal-related discovery. He had to raise the question of what this meant for humans — could we be tamed in a few generations? Are we already tamed?

Those questions are interesting, to be sure. But they are out of the scope of this study. It leads readers astray to imply that somehow this study could be used to examine an idea as ill-defined as “human tameness.” I don’t mean to single out Wade, who has written a good story. Like many science journalists, including myself, he’s struggling to engage readers who would rather read about the Hezbollah or (more depressingly) where New Yorkers take their kids for flute lessons. I’m simply protesting the way he’s chosen to arouse reader interest by appealing to human vanity by making a story about inter-species relationships into a story that’s all about humans.

I contrast Wade’s article with another animal-research tale where humans actually are relevant. Writing in New Scientist, Alison Motluk describes how several research teams discovered that the gene for kicking off puberty in mice are the same in humans (article is behind a subscription wall — sorry!). That means our puberty genes are mighty old. They’ve been preserved since before the time when human and mouse ancestors separated on the evolutionary tree. Of course this isn’t exclusively a story about humans either, but it isn’t a stretch for Motluk to bring homo sapiens into the mix.

The point is: not every science story has to be about human beings in order to spark human interest. Sometimes humans are organic to the story, and sometimes they aren’t. A good science journalist should know the difference. This is advice I try to follow too.