New documentary Me @the Zoo chronicles web celeb Chris Crocker’s rise to fame, both before and after his “Leave Britney Alone!” viral video.
Image: Chris Crocker

PARK CITY, Utah — From crowd-funding to the visual language of online video, internet culture is slowly but surely seeping into independent film.

Nothing illustrates the web’s growing influence on filmmakers more effectively than Me @the Zoo, a feature-length documentary that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The movie offers an “all access” look at the life of internet celebrity Chris Crocker, the 24-year-old Tennessee vlogger who — despite a long history as a YouTube personality — is known primarily as the teary young man whose “Leave Britney Alone!” video went viral in 2007.

Tackling a subject who’s a prolific DIY filmmaker — and someone who’s perhaps a bit of an internet-enabled oversharer to boot — proved interesting to Me @the Zoo‘s newcomer directors, Valerie Veatch and Chris Moukarbel.

“A challenge that we had coming into this was, ‘How do you make a documentary about someone who’s making a living documentary?’” Moukarbel told Wired.com during an interview at Sundance. “You know, he’s always going to be making videos. He’s always going to be documenting his life, and [our film is just] one little cross-section of that.”

Compiled from hundreds of Crocker’s homemade videos, old-school YouTube clips and the directors’ own footage, Me @the Zoo delivers a compelling look at this expanding era of internet fame — the odd paths people take to achieving it, and the ways it consumes lives much like traditional celebrity.

The film follows Crocker as he rises to online fame (or, as Crocker calls it, being “famous for not being famous”), then traces what Crocker goes through during the fallout after his infamous Britney Spears video — including his stint in Los Angeles for an ill-fated reality show. It also traces Crocker’s family history and takes a look at his mother’s struggles with drug addiction, something that influenced his defense of Spears.

Despite the uniqueness of Crocker’s story, there’s a point at which many people can identify with him. “I see it not just about me,” Crocker said. “Even though it’s my personal story, there’s so many things that hit home, with the drug abuse, and the bullying and stuff. So that’s how I try to look at it.”

Wired.com caught up with Crocker and Me @the Zoo‘s directors at Sundance to talk about the film, which got picked up by HBO Documentary Films and should hit the air this year, and also to discuss internet fame, funding movies through Kickstarter, and YouTube reaction videos finding their way to the big screen. (This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

Wired.com: Me @the Zoo started out with a much broader theme. How did it end up as a film that focused on Chris Crocker?

Valerie Veatch: Initially, our project was to examine people performing themselves on television and online and how changes in technology and cable laws and all of these things created an atmosphere where cheap, immediate content was what everybody wanted, and people began to deliver their own stories as that content. So the initial project was a timeline from like the late-1980s to early-’90s. And then, you know, kind of spinning into an internet story.

Chris Crocker: They were originally filming for a different documentary entirely, sort of how the rise of reality TV and cellphone cameras affected pop culture. And then when they started interviewing me, they realized that my personal story touched on all those themes. So it wasn’t originally supposed to be The Chris Crocker Story or anything. It just happened.

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A controversial proposal would regulate sugar as a toxic substance, and not simply because it’s a calorie-rich enabler of obesity. Some researchers say it’s intrinsically dangerous, not unlike alcohol or tobacco, with unique properties that set off a hormonal cascade ending in higher risks of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes.

It’s not a scientifically certain proposition, though a growing body of research suggests it may very well be true, and the implications are thorny. Even people sympathetic to public health-based regulations may balk at treating pastries as cigarettes, as University of California, San Francisco nutritionists suggested in a Feb. 2 Nature paper.

But to anyone looking to artificial sweeteners as an alternative, as pastel-packaged reassurances that regulators won’t ever need to pry donuts from their cold, dead and pudgy hands, science offers only more uncertainty. Some studies even suggest that fake sugar may cause the same problems as real sugar.

“That’s the $64,000 question,” said Susan Swithers of the Ingestive Behavior Research Center at Purdue University. “There are several epidemiological studies showing increased risk of metabolic syndrome in coincidence with the consumption of diet sodas” — a rich source of sweeteners. “But how they should be interpreted is not really clear right now. Because they’re correlational studies, they don’t tell us what caused what.”

Artificial sweeteners are a fast-growing, multi-billion dollar product, present in thousands of foodstuffs and synthesized by chemists as zealously as drug researchers pursue blockbuster drugs. But as described in a massive 2008 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition Review, the seemingly obvious health benefits expected of low-calorie sugar replacements have failed to materialize.

Even as Americans consumed more sweeteners, waistlines continued to expand. Cause and effect was ambiguous: Sweeteners might lead to weight gain, but maybe people most prone to gaining weight consume the most sweeteners. “This association may be coincidental or causal, and either mode of directionality is plausible,” concluded that study’s authors.

Other researchers, however, are more suspicious. When University of Texas Health Science Center epidemiologists conducted a 9-year-long study of 5,158 adult residents of San Antonio, Texas, they found a link between sweeteners and obesity. It persisted even after statistically accounting for gender, ethnicity, diet and beginning-of-diet body mass index. “These findings raise the question whether artificial sweetener use might be fueling — rather than fighting — our escalating obesity epidemic,” they wrote.

‘Artificial sweetener use might be fueling — rather than fighting — our escalating obesity epidemic.’

Another study of 6,184 adult Americans linked diet soda consumption with higher rates of metabolic syndrome, the umbrella term for a physiological disruption that leads to heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes. Once again, the link survived statistical adjustment for demographics, lifestyle and diet.

That’s precisely what’s expected from eating too much sugar, which at least in rats is converted in the liver to fat. That in turn provokes, via as-yet-unidentified mechanisms, resistance to insulin, a hormone used by cells to process glucose, better known as blood sugar. When insulin’s signals are ignored, blood sugar levels rise. Metabolic syndrome follows. But why should this happen when eating fake sugar, not real?

Swithers thinks she knows. In 2008, she and fellow Purdue researcher Terry Davidson fed rats a yogurt supplement sweetened either with glucose, a simple sugar, or zero-calorie saccharin. Apart from the supplement, both groups ate standard rat fare. Those that ate saccharin ended up packing on more fat, gaining more weight and consuming extra calories. A follow-up 2009 study reinforced the findings, and found that unusual weight gain persisted even when rats stopped eating sweeteners.

According to Swithers, two mechanisms may be responsible. When the rats’ bodies learned that sweetness didn’t predict an imminent caloric rush, as would naturally be produced by sugar-rich foods, their bodies may have automatically shifted into calorie-saving mode. At the same time, metabolic acceleration that normally occurs when eating high-calorie foods, and helps to process them, may have been slowed.

“All of our work has been in rats. We think similar processes happen in humans, but we haven’t tested them,” Swithers said.

Image: Steve Snodgrass/Flickr

Hands eagerly pawed all over Windows Phones at CES 2012. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS is often criticized for lagging far behind iOS and Android, the other major operating systems in the mobile space. But on Thursday, a leaked description of Microsoft’s next big mobile OS, Windows Phone 8, came to light, revealing how the operating system will improve.

The leak, reported by blog Pocketnow and validated by Windows insider Paul Thurrott, shows that Apollo (the codename for Windows Phone will be a major improvement over the current iteration, Windows Phone 7.5, otherwise known as Mango.

“Currently, we have to work around some limitations with Mango, and many of those limitations would be removed with the upcoming Apollo version,” Eric Setton, CTO of mobile VoIP app Tango, told Wired.

Mango is the current version of Windows Phone. It launched in October, bringing with it a slew of new features, including built-in social media and chatting tools, groups for organizing contacts, multitasking, and improved Live Tiles. A small update called Tango (not to be confused with the VoIP app) is slated next, and then the world will see Apollo, which is rumored to launch in mid-2012.

Microsoft wouldn’t tell us whether Thursday’s leak report is accurate, but offered insight on its OS plans in general.

“We think your smartphone should be smarter,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Wired. “When I take a picture, a ‘smart’ phone should anticipate that I may want to share it with a friend or on Facebook and help me easily do that. With Windows Phone these kinds of things are just built in, and we think there’s always room for a better way.”

A number of Windows Phone developers (several whom also write iOS and Android apps) were eager to share their thoughts on this rumored “better way.”

“I am very excited to hear that Microsoft is making a strong push to catch up to the iOS and Android platforms,” Sina Mobasser, co-founder of iOS and Windows Phone app BarMax said. “But while the specs that were leaked are certainly appetizing, they will not be enough.” Mobasser thinks Microsoft is still “holding a lot of cards close to its chest,” and we have to agree. But Thursday’s leak is still a tantalizing look at what Windows Phone could offer in the near future.

All of which begs the question: Is Windows Phone Apollo enough? If it were released right now, how would it measure up against its biggest competitors, iOS 5 and Android 4, aka Ice Cream Sandwich? Here’s our take on how it may fare in six key areas.

Hardware Support

Right now, Windows Phones are limited to single-core processors. They also lack support for removable storage. But Windows Phone Apollo will support multi-core processors, as well as microSD storage.

Because iOS devices do not include removable storage, Apollo would trump iOS there. But both the iPhone 4S, which was released in October 2011, and the iPad 2, released in March 2011, are dual-core devices that run Apple’s A5 processor. Apple’s next iPad is rumored to be built on a quad-core A6 processor, so it’s imperative for Microsoft that Windows Phone run multi-core processors, if only to remain modern and relevant.

Of course, Android began supporting multi-core devices as far back as Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) in February 2011. And pretty much every Android smartphone allows for SD or microSD storage. The Android OS has supported this feature for quite a long time.

“Hardware-wise, I’m not a big fan of what I call the ‘arms race’ because I think there is still a lot of room to optimize software to use hardware like GPUs more effectively,” Windows developer Kelly Sommer said via e-mail. Indeed, current Windows Phones don’t exhibit any major performance shortcomings, despite their specs handicap. But it never hurts performance — or public perception — to match industry-standard specs.

Apollo will also allow for more screen resolutions and device form factors than Mango currently does. “As a user, different screen resolutions and more powerful phones will help to sell more compelling hardware to better compete with iOS and Android,” Setton said.

Verdict: Apollo essentially reaches parity with iOS and Android in terms of hardware support, but doesn’t offer earth-shaking innovation.

Mobile Payments

Windows Phone Apollo will use NFC technology to facilitate mobile payments. With a swipe of your phone on a point-of-purchase RFID tag, you’ll be able to buy coffee, cigarettes, and sundry other consumables. Sound familiar? That’s what Google is doing — or is attempting to do — with its Google Wallet mobile payment platform.

Google Wallet is currently available on the Nexus S smartphone. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Unlike Wallet, however, it looks like Microsoft’s version of NFC payments will play by carrier rules. According to the PocketNow report, “The ‘Wallet experience‘ “will have the capability to be carrier-branded and controlled.” This is a point of contention for Android’s Wallet feature. Google has been battling carriers like Verizon over whether Wallet will appear on upcoming Android 4 devices. Wallet, in fact, did not make an appearance on the latest flagship Android device, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

Carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon want a piece of the mobile-payment pie through their own version of Wallet, dubbed Isis. This leaves Sprint as the only U.S. carrier that currently offers Google Wallet. And it also opens up a huge window of opportunity for Windows Phone to take charge in the mobile payments arena.

Developers could also take advantage of the technology, if the API is exposed. “Developers can leverage that to create some brand-new experiences for smartphone users,” Sommers said.

Although many people expected — hoped? hypothesized? — that Apple’s 2011 iPhone, the 4S, would include NFC, Apple hasn’t yet adopted the burgeoning technology.

Verdict: When it comes to mobile payments and NFC, Apollo is ahead of Apple’s current curve, though this could change if the iPhone 5 supports NFC in a big way. As for Android, Apollo’s NFC support might actually trump Android’s, if only because it would receive carrier blessings.

Desktop Integration

Windows Phone 8 Apollo will offer “companion” experiences with its desktop counterpart, Windows 8, which is also set to launch mid-year. Right now, Apple’s Mac OS and iOS are completely separate code bases and platforms. The upshot? Apollo could offer an unprecedented level of what we’ll call “pan-OS unification.”

One of the most interesting elements of OS unification is how it will be implemented: Windows Phone 8 will use the core system from Windows 8. Specifically, the updated OS will be based on the NT kernel rather than the Windows CE kernel, which is currently employed in Windows Phone (the kernel is the core layer of any OS — the interface between hardware components and applications that run on the device). In short, Windows Phone 8 will be very closely related to Windows 8, even to the level where desktop apps could be more easily ported to simplified phone versions.

Geeky kernel discussions aside, Microsoft plans to make user-experience models very similar across its desktop, mobile and Xbox platforms. Syncing information and content sharing across these three platforms will be made easier, as well.

In the world of Google, a deliberate focus on product compatibility helps keeps user data synced across Android phones and tablets, desktop web browsers, and Chromebooks. That said, Google doesn’t have a desktop OS the way Microsoft does (and, no, we won’t count Chrome). What’s more, the Google user experience is very different between mobile and web, from smartphone to tablet, and even from smartphone to smartphone, due to fragmented OS versions and rampant OEM and carrier UI skinning.

In iOS land, the interface is essentially consistent across iPhones and iPads. But the Mac OS desktop interface, of course, despite a bit of window dressing, is a completely separate experience, both in terms of UI and cross-platform app compatibility. As for cloud support, the iOS iCloud ensures your data and apps are synced across devices. In Windows Phone Apollo, SkyDrive will do the same.

Verdict: Awesome sauce! Apollo looks to offer a heretofore unseen level of integration between Microsoft’s desktop and smartphone products.

App Ecosystem

Microsoft plans to have at least 100,000 apps in its app market by the time Windows Phone 8 debuts later this year.

That’s all? By Apple’s latest counts, there are more than 550,000 apps in the iOS App Store. And according to the unofficial count from AndroLib, the Android Market has more than 750,000 apps at the moment.

Microsoft is working hard to offer incentives such as funding, guidance, and marketing opportunities to attract developers to its mobile platform. Windows Phone is currently the fastest-growing mobile app platform and just crossed the 50,000 app mark in late 2011. But it’s still got a long, long way to go before its offerings are on the same level as iOS and Android.

And let’s not forget that Windows Phone 8 will allow for native code support, which means devs can easily port apps they’ve already written for another platform to Windows Phone. This is definitely something developers are excited about.

“The vast majority of mobile app developers have built apps for iOS or Android,” Mobasser said. “We hope the porting of code is well thought-out and allows us to smoothly transition our app to Windows Phone without having to deal with a number of compatibility issues and bugs.”

Windows Phone 8 will also allow for app-to-app communications, something both iOS and Android already offer. “App-to-app communication can create some really interesting user experiences between applications,” Sommers said.

Windows Phone Mango’s Yelp-like Scout feature, which helps find local restaurants, businesses, and activities based on their proximity and rating, will get personal recommendations added to its list of functions. This is something the Foodspotting app just added to its repertoire as well.

Apollo should also feature its own Skype app, or have Skype baked right into the OS — the exact implementation isn’t quite clear from the leaks. Skype is already available on iOS and Android, if you’re keeping score.

Finally, for its camera app, Apollo will include new “lens apps” for more powerful smartphone image-capture abilities. Now, there are plenty of third-party photography apps already available on iOS and Android. And many Android phones currently have robust filters and scene options built in to their native camera apps. So while the Apollo camera update looks promising, it may not offer much of anything new to the smartphone scene.

Verdict: Windows Phone is still playing a serious game of catch-up in the apps arena. But sharing a code base with Windows desktop, along with native code support, will certainly help Microsoft’s app-related fortunes.

Data Management

Apollo will use a tool called “DataSmart” to make sure you’re able to easily track your monthly data usage. Available as a Live Tile that you can pin to your home screen, it will break down your data usage (helping you make smarter decisions about what you download) and give Wi-Fi networks — even carrier-operated Wi-Fi hotspots — precedence over cellular data connections whenever possible.

In iOS 5, you can track your cellular usage, but it’s buried inside the General settings menu. Yes, there are indeed a number of third-party iOS apps you can download that do the trick, but these features should really be exposed directly in the OS — like they are in Android.

Data management is better than ever with the advent of Android 4, aka Ice Cream Sandwich. The built-in Data Usage app provides numerous charts and graphs that reveal your data-gobbling habits, and you can even set governors and alerts to help you control data usage. Android sets the new standard for data management, so while Windows Phone’s solution sounds helpful, it will have a long way to go in matching Android’s approach.

Verdict: We’ll see. We’ll see. But if nothing else, Microsoft is moving in the right direction.

Enterprise

Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out that iPhones and iPads are rapidly being adopted in the enterprise environment.

To grab a piece of that market (many members of which are in search of new handsets now that BlackBerry fever is fading), Windows Phone 8 will offer the same native BitLocker encryption as Windows 8. That’s 128-bit, full-disk encryption. This could be good news for potential switchers, as built-in encryption in iOS devices reportedly has some security flaws. For Windows Phone 8, companies will also be able to create personalized, proprietary software for their employees, which Windows 8 will allow as well.

Now, does anyone besides developers use Android for enterprise applications? I kid — sort of. Google also offers storage encryption, as well as third-party encryption solutions.

Verdict: It looks like Microsoft will be ahead of the curve. And it should be. This is a Windows product, after all. If Microsoft can’t appeal to the mobile enterprise crowd, it’s got problems.

So What’s It All Mean?

Windows Phone Apollo looks like it will address a number of the issues currently holding back the OS from equal footing with its peers. But there are still a few areas that need improvement. “I think the biggest gaps are still software and design,” Sommers said. “Microsoft needs to be obsessed with paying attention to detail in its user experiences.”

This is an area that Android addressed in its Ice Cream Sandwich update in late 2011, and an area where Apple absolutely excels.

Based on the information that was leaked, Windows Phone 8 should achieve essential feature parity with its competitors — assuming no significant improvements are made to iOS or Android by the time Apollo arrives. And if the leaked info is merely a tease of what Apollo has in store — a mere subset of greater feature riches — then Windows Phone 8 will be quite compelling indeed.

Is AMD getting ready to build a processor based on ARM’s low-power chips? (Photo: Robert McMillan)

Could the low-power-chip design that’s used in your iPhone someday show up inside the chips built by Intel-rival Advanced Micro Devices?

Definitely maybe. Or as AMD’s brand new Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster put it to us: “The answer is not no.”

Of course, the answer is not yes either. That would be Papermaster showing his hand before he’s ready, something that new CTOs are not supposed to do.

Papermaster — who is famous for leaving Apple shortly after it’s antennagate fiasco — is part of a new executive team that AMD introduced to press and financial analysts at its Sunnyvale, California, headquarters this week. Led by the upbeat CEO Rory Read (hired in August from Lenovo), AMD comes off as a company that wears its second-place status versus Intel as a badge of honor rather than an impossible weight.

And as the CTO of company that has the unenviable job of taking on Intel, Papermaster’s apparent openness to ARM makes sense. AMD has been competing with Intel since back in the 1970s, and it’s a natural ally to ARM — the British company whose chip designs typically wind up in coffee makers and mobile phones — as it finds itself increasingly fighting with Intel.

The latest battlefield: Servers. ARM has already lined up a handful of server chip makers, including HP-friendly startup Calxeda, who are trying to push its designs into the server space.

For its part, AMD has done alright by integrating its graphics technology into its CPUs, but Papermaster says that in the next few years, the company wants to go all-modular, so that it can mix and match on-chip components. He envisions chip brains that can be quickly slapped together, almost like Lego blocks, and tweaked to compete with Intel. People would buy these things because of all the cool stuff they could do on-chip, rather than because they had a kick-ass clock speed or some astounding number of transistors.

And what if customers were clamoring for a low-power ARM chip that could serve up web pages without using up a lot of juice? “If our customers need a different instruction set architecture, we can drop that in and still leverage all the rest of our differentiation. That graphics experience, all our multimedia, can certainly be leveraged going forward,” Papermaster says.

That’s CTO-on-a-financial-analyst-day-speak for “Maybe we’d do it.”

Papermaster says that AMD’s chips are already somewhat modular today, but stating next year, they will be getting much closer to that Lego-block type of model.

AMD CTO Mark Papermaster

That’s approximately the same time that ARM licensees are expected to start shipping products with ARM’s new server-friendly Armv8 design.

According to chip analyst Kevin Krewell, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea for AMD to sign up as one of these licensees. ARM is new to the server game. And because AMD has been making server chips for years now, it could be a big help to the British company as it tries to move into this new market — currently dominated by Intel. “Any work they do with AMD to bring ARM into a server design would be helpful,” he said.

If AMD did decide to produce an ARM chip, that probably wouldn’t show up in servers before 2014, says Krewell, an analyst with The Linley Group.

That’s assuming they can come to a deal. According to Krewell, ARM isn’t looking at AMD as though it’s a typical licensee. “What I’m hearing is that ARM is looking for a little bit more from AMD,” he says. “They’re not looking for just money. They’re also looking for some patent cross licensing as ARM moves into the server business.”

And maybe that will work out. As AMD CEO Rory Read put it on Thursday as he closed the analyst meeting: “This is a different AMD.”

A long time ago, but on this planet, a Greek philosopher created an experiment to measure the radius of the Earth. Really, it was a cool experiment. But should we trust the ancient Greeks? No. So why not repeat the experiment? I have been suggesting this as a student project for a long time, but no one ever tackled it. No one until Chad Orzel (at Uncertain Principles and author of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog) suggested we do it. Right on.

The Greek Way

I don’t know where he got this idea (surely not from the internet), but Eratosthenes estimated the radius of the Earth by looking at two shadows at two different locations on the Earth. This diagram should help.

So, by looking at the length of the shadow at Alexandria and knowing the distance between these two locations, the radius can be calculated. There is one trick. The size of a shadow changes during the day and during the year. How could you overcome these problems before watches, cellphones, accurate maps, and Wikipedia? Simple, you cheat. Instead of measuring the shadow at two different places at the same time, you measure at two different places on the same day (but a year later). So, if you know the day and the time, you can just repeat the experiment. The other trick is to use the local solar noon. This is when the sun is at the highest point in the sky. If you just move north-south, this time is the same for both locations.

In the end, the Greeks obtained a fairly nice value for the radius of the Earth.

The Modern Way

You might think the modern way to measure the radius of the Earth is to just look it up. Not so fast. Really, the fun isn’t in knowing the answer; the fun is in getting the answer. So, using modern technology we essentially repeat the Greek experiment. Here is what we will do.

• On the same day, make a time-lapse video of a shadow due to the sun at two different locations (in this case Hammond, Louisiana, and Niskayuna, New York).
• From the video, you can find both the local noon time as well as the highest angle of the sun (from the shortest part of the shadow).
• The difference in angles at the two locations along with the distance between the two locations gives enough to find the radius.

Of course, we cheated a little bit. We looked up the distance between the two locations. Also, we used a common time so that we could find the difference between our local noons. Check out Chad’s more detailed post at Uncertain Principles. He even has some nice graphs. I guess I should include my time-lapse video, just in case.

The more I think about this, the more I like this experiment. Redoing classic experiments with a modern twist. Really, we could have done better. What if we used the moons of Jupiter or something to synchronize our times (instead of using official time). Instead of looking up the distance between the two locations, we could use short wave radio and time how long it takes for a pulse to go there and back. Yes, I know that might not work — but you get the idea.

There are already some classic experiments that are redone with modern technology. Think of all the different ways we have students measure the local gravitational field (g) in introductory labs. So, this is the same idea — but taking it to the next level.

The least suspenseful waiting game in Silicon Valley is now over, thank heavens. Facebook, which began as a decidedly private Harvard hangout, has begun the process of going absolutely, totally, unabashedly public.

Facebook filed for an initial public offering with the SEC Wednesday, which means we have the first raw glimpse of its financials. Advertising makes up 85 percent of its $3.7 billion in annual revenue. And it took in $1 billion of income in 2011.

Facebook is synonymous with the internet in many ways: It boasts more than 10 percent of the world’s population as active users and has realizable ambitions to be the preeminent vetting service on the net, making a “Like” as powerful and capricious as Caesar’s opposable thumb.

Even if you aren’t a Facebook user (I am not anymore), its impact is inescapable. The world’s largest social network has, for better or worse, made TMI a laughably quaint notion, redefined friendship, and become, if not a verb (like Google), perhaps the most recognizable proper noun of the digital age.

All of which should mean, of course, that Facebook is the investment of a lifetime. And maybe it is — well, it certainly is for the insiders and early private investors who’ll be cashing in some of their chips, and for those lucky employees among the 3,000 who will be getting some new chips in the big game. One lucky graffiti artist has become the latest living winner of that uniquely Valley lottery, joining the Microsoft Millionaires and a certain Google masseuse.

But for the rest of us, the story may not be quite the same. Popular brands often don’t quite line up with expectations. The dot-com bubble taught us that. Facebook’s IPO suggests that the backhanded Wall Street compliment, “priced for perfection,” was coined for this very company at this very time.

How high a price is too high? Netscape, the first superstar internet IPO, seemed reasonable at the pre-launch range of about $35. Its first-day pop was double that. NSCP languished for a while, went to triple digits and then disappeared into AOL. Google’s crowdsourced IPO price in the $80s seemed too dear for some sharp observers (like, ahem, this one). Yet while it is way off its historical highs, it is hardly on life support.

None of which tells us what kind of trajectory Facebook will have. We are a ways off from the first hours of trading Facebook stock, a giddy period driven more by hysteria and must-execute fund purchases than facts. And we’re probably years from being able to say with any certainty whether this valuation was fair.

I’ve been a pretty cantankerous contrarian about Facebook, if I’m putting all my cards on the table. Some 400 million members ago I said there was a bubble a comin’. Wrong. It’s fairly clear in the pieces I’ve written about Facebook’s IPO prospects that I’m a valuation skeptic.

Yes, it’s true that the barrier to entry in this business (Google Plus notwithstanding) is pretty steep. I thought Groupon’s sky-high IPO was a head-scratcher precisely because it is hard to imagine that, as good as the daily deals business is, it can be that good for any single company.

But with that said, it’s pretty safe to bet against the house instead of betting the farm on this one, simply because we have never seen an implied value like this, set by the collective sentiment of the presumably savvy, wealthy traders who are allowed to invest in private companies on such markets as Sharespost and SecondMarket. To say nothing of the fact that Facebook’s illiquid, pre-launch shares have steadily and rapidly increased in the past year or so.

Facebook is in a league of its own. It isn’t merely the latest dominant social network, and so it’s not just the next to be knocked off by the newest kid on the block (even though past has always been prologue in this [My]space). Its tentacles are everywhere. Branders and business support it by supplementing their own web presences with Facebook.com/yourbusinessnamehere. Politicians, publishers, small businesses, students, grandmothers — they all think they have to be there. That’s power, and it snowballs.

And yet …

It’s all about the valuation, and to a lesser extent your investment window (once your investment depreciates, the only decision is about when to book that capital loss). Nobody can dispute that Facebook is worth a lot of money. But as Sen. Everett Dirksen probably never said: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” $80 billion is a lot of money. So is $50 billion. But at those levels the difference is boom and almost bust.

As a journalist, I can’t invest in individual stocks, though the boring index and retirement mutual funds I own will almost certainly make me a Facebook investor. But if I could buy, I’m sure I wouldn’t. Not for the same reason I recently deleted my Facebook account. But for the simple reason that, like the belief there are do-overs when you reconnect with your high school buds, some things really are too good to be true.

By Mark Brown, Wired UK

Last week, NASA released its 2012 version of the famous “Blue Marble” image. By using a planet-pointing satellite, Suomi NPP, the space agency created an extremely high resolution photograph of our watery world.

The photo centered on the western hemisphere, highlighting North and Central America. It went viral and got even more hits on Flickr than the iconic “Situation Room” photo, taken at the time of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden.

Now, responding to public demand, the agency has created a companion image: this time focusing its lens towards the East and showing Africa, Saudi Arabia and India.

The Suomi NPP satellite hugs the Earth too closely to get this kind of image in one shot. It’s in a polar orbit with an altitude of 824 kilometers, but the perspective of the Eastern hemisphere Blue Marble is from 12,743 kilometers away.

As such, Nasa Goddard oceanographer Norman Kuring used images from six different orbits of the satellite over an eight hour time period on 23 January, then stitched the photos together to achieve the final composite.

Both of the 2012 Blue Marble images are taken by a new instrument aboard Suomi NPP called the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). As for those four vertical lines: that’s the reflection of sunlight off the ocean, or “glint”, that VIIRS captured as it orbited the globe.

Other famous photos of Earth include the original Blue Marble, which was taken on 7 December 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft. There’s also the equally famous 2002 one, which you might recognize as the default lock screen on the first iPhone. Plus “You Are Here“, an arresting photo of Earth from the surface of Mars, snapped by the Spirit rover in 2004.

Image: NASA/NOAA [high-resolution]

Source: Wired.co.uk