A task force commissioned by Florida Governor Rick Scott has an idea that the state will be putting to a vote soon: Giving a tuition discount to students majoring in STEM fields. Part of a college overhaul in the state, the law would freeze tuition for "high-demand" majors (engineering, physics, and similar fields), while letting poetry majors' cut sail away like so many diplomas in the wind. The Atlantic's Jordan Weissmann has some good thoughts on why this might be a bad idea. They're practical ones, too, for the folks who don't have a bleeding heart for aspiring sculptors. [The Atlantic]

Dog toy selection is more art than science. Maybe you think it's safe to just go for a classic. Something like a nice bone.

Wrong, research says. A team recently studied a set of very lucky Labrador retrievers (a breed known for its playfulness) in kennels, letting them spend 30 second intervals with several different toys. The dogs would get one type of toy, then another, completely different one, with the team measuring when the dogs decided to quit playing with each. The study measured several factors, going as far as determining if color or odor had anything to do with the pups' preferences.

Most of the time, it didn't really matter. The dogs had more fun with the soft, squeaky, slowly-edible toys than the tough, unmalleable ones, but not much else swayed their opinions. Dogs are hardwired, the authors theorize, to play with any novel object; the novelty just wears off after the animals determine what the toy is. The best way to get a social animal like a dog out of that rut, the researchers say, is to jump in and start playing, too.

[Discovery]

According to the latest polls, the 2012 presidential race is going to be a close one, which means that--once again--it will come down to the swing states: As the electoral votes in Ohio, Florida, and seven other "undecided" states go, so goes the White House.

But the details are messy. With nine swing states in the mix, there are a total of 2^9 possible outcomes in tomorrow's election. That's 512 different possibilities.

Which, normally, would be too many to keep track of. But in today's infographic, visualization all-stars Mike Bostock and Shan Carter boiled the "combinatorial explosion" of possible results down to a simple, interactive flowchart.

In a blog post, the designers explained their secret to keeping the chart simple:

In other words, by halting each outcome branch once a winner is determined (once one of the candidates acquires over 270 electoral votes, or they tie), Bostock and Carter represented all of the meaningful outcomes while showing us only about a quarter of the total possibilities (the flowchart displays 140 nodes, or 27% of the total possible outcomes).

The designers used D3, a JavaScript library developed by Bostock, to create their graphic. Read more about D3 here.

Finding methane on another world is like finding breadcrumbs on a trail--it's a telling clue, a detail that gives reason to ask more questions and maybe find some answers, in this case related to extraterrestrial life. This is why news from the Mars rover Curiosity late last week is kind of disappointing--looking around for methane, Curiosity found a whole lot of nothing.

But a dearth of methane does not necessarily dash hopes for finding evidence of life on Mars. And Curiosity could still obtain better measurements of the hydrocarbon, helping scientists understand how much there is and where it comes from. The methane mystery is far from over, said Geronimo Villanueva, a research assistant professor at Catholic University who is based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

In general, methane is an indicator that something on the planet has changed, Villanueva explained. Mars' tenuous atmosphere, which is only about 1 percent as thick as Earth's, is very stable--a hallmark of a dead place. "For things to change, there has to be some sort of activity going on," he said. "Either geological activity, and methane could be an indicator of that, or it could be an indicator of life."

On Friday, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars suite found almost none of it. Chris Webster, instrument lead for the Tunable Laser Spectrometer that's part of SAM, said he could report with 95 percent confidence that Mars has between 0 and 5 parts per billion of methane. "The bottom line is that we have no detection of methane so far," he told reporters. He also said the team has found evidence that Mars has lost at least half of its original air.

Something like 95 percent of Earth's methane (four hydrogen atoms bound to one carbon atom) comes from living organisms, so it could be a beacon of life--which is why the lack of large amounts of Martian methane is somewhat disappointing for astrobiology. But the missing methane still doesn't explain prior evidence for the gas on Mars. Villanueva is among those who have seen it.

Methane released into Mars' atmosphere, by life or by something else, should stick around in a diluted form for about 300 years, Villanueva said. But he and others have detected methane in the recent past, only to see it disappear in later observations.

"We don't know what that means. We should keep seeing it. It would get diluted, but nevertheless, there should be some remnant there," he said.

In 2009, Villanueva and colleagues at Goddard reported a huge uptick in methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars six years prior. Huge plumes of the hydrocarbon leached into the atmosphere at a rate comparable to a famous, massive oil and gas seep in Santa Barbara, Calif. But in follow-up observations, using the Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, the team didn't see anything. Scientists still don't know what caused this methane plume, or where it went.

Villanueva said if you took the 2003 methane signatures he and NASA's Michael Mumma observed, and spread them throughout the entire Martian atmosphere, the concentration would be somewhere around 5 or 6 ppb--consistent with what Curiosity sees at Gale Crater. Why is that interesting? It indicates the methane release, now about 10 years old, is probably not a recurring feature. If it was, the atmosphere would gain more methane as time goes by. "If it happened, it happened once," Villanueva said.

It's also interesting because it means more methane might be found elsewhere on Mars, he added. Just because Curiosity doesn't see it doesn't mean it's not somewhere else. Last week, Webster and other scientists at JPL were quick to point out that Curiosity will keep looking. For his part, Villanueva said he was surprised by the large error bar in the SAM team's calculations--Curiosity can do better than a 95 percent confidence between zero and 5 ppb, he said, adding that he's excited to see refined measurements.

Even if Curiosity nails down Mars methane concentrations with more accuracy, the gas might not be the result of life. There are plenty of explanations for meager methane on Mars--comets could deliver it, or it might be the result of interactions between long-ago groundwater and certain components of rock, like olivine, a mineral Curiosity just found. It's also possible that Mars does have microbes, but they don't produce methane, Villanueva said. There's still a lot of research to do before those questions can be answered.

"Mars is so arid and such an inhospitable place, if you see even very small amounts of methane, they are relevant. You can be thinking about some subsurface activity, maybe geologic activity, or life," Villanueva said. "But the gas by itself doesn't tell you that much. You need to go beyond."

Jeffrey Meldrum, an anatomy and anthropology professor at Idaho State University, has spent significant time in his career searching for Bigfoot. That's gained him the ire of colleagues, but it hasn't stopped him from upping the stakes more and more. Now he's gotten the nod from the University to build a remote-controlled blimp and continue the chase.

Meldrum is trying to raise $300,000 in private donations for the project, which pays for some high-tech bells and whistles, like a thermal-imaging camera, that could help find the infamously blurry animal. Meldrum will be running the blimp and camera with another Bigfoot enthusiast, William Barnes, who says he came up with the plan when he saw the creature more than a decade ago. Dubbing the plan the Falcon Project, the duo hopes to have a months-long expedition across the West started by next spring, but so far, to the chagrin of other believers, they haven't raised any cash to move the blimp skyward.

[MSNBC]

THE TREND

Dashboard navigation and entertainment systems are optional on most late-model cars, but they can add a couple thousand dollars to the sticker price. Now that smartphones have become as powerful as in-dash computers, accessory manufacturers are creating devices that allow phones to take their place-at a fraction of the cost.

THE BENEFIT

Depending on the gadget, drivers can monitor engine performance, find their car in a crowded lot, or issue voice commands to their phones while blocking incoming calls. A single cell-connected gadget can replace several older auto accessories, including Bluetooth headsets and GPS systems. The devices require no professional installation, and owners can easily move them between cars.

1) Mavia by Mavizon
The Mavia dongle enables car owners to diagnose engine troubles and track their vehicles remotely. Once plugged into the car's standard diagnostic port, the device collects data every 30 seconds about average and maximum speeds, engine performance, and fuel efficiency; internal cellular and GPS radios send data to the cloud, which the owner can access through an accompanying smartphone app. $169 plus $5/month service fee (available December)

2) Clarion Next GATE SC1U
The seven-inch Next GATE display puts a dozen iPhone apps at eye level. Drivers suction-cup the screen to their windshield and connect their iPhone 4 or 4S, which serves as the gadget's brain. Users can also plug it into the standard diagnostic port for engine updates, or connect it to the car's stereo to listen to one of its three text-to-speech apps, which read back a driver's Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds. $270

3) Parrot Minikit Neo
The Minikit Neo speakerphone clips to the sun visor. When a driver gets in the car, a vibration sensor signals the 2.5-ounce device to power on and pair with his smartphone via Bluetooth. Neo downloads the phone's contacts and enables voice dialing. Drivers can also use the Neo smartphone app to set an auto-reply SMS setting, which sends a "busy" text to incoming callers, or to find their car in a parking lot. $100

Happy election day! Surely you're not already tired of social media updates about politics, or the self-congratulatory Twitter messages from your friends who got up earlier than you did to stand in line. Now you can also see a map of everyone who used Foursquare to get an I Voted badge.

It's kind of interesting because it includes user info like gender, and where and when votes were concentrated. Check it out.

"If you don't have legs, you can propel yourself by deforming your body. Earthworms do this through peristaltic locomotion: The muscles in one body segment contract while others relax, which creates a traveling wave that moves them forward. Our robot, Meshworm, moves this way, using wires for muscles. To make a muscle segment, we twist the wire into a long, narrow spring, and then wrap the spring into a tube shape. After that, we link up several segments and cover them with plastic braided mesh, like the screen on your window.

We use a nickel-titanium alloy for muscles because it changes its molecular structure at 160°F, which shortens the wire, tightens the spring's coil, and squeezes that body segment. Our prototype-it's about five inches long and one inch in diameter-has four segments, each controlled by the robot's microprocessor.

A small battery inside provides an electrical current that travels through the wire; the wire's resistance makes it get hotter. We also add a wire tendon that runs from head to tail and keeps the worm's overall length fixed. As a result, when a segment contracts, the one behind it stretches out, and the robot inches forward. The tendon also has muscles attached so the robot can turn left or right.

Meshworm can move only a few millimeters per second, but it's very light-just a few grams. And the muscles' strength-to-weight ratio is unmatchable. A few grams of wire a couple centimeters long can lift 10 kilograms. Because the robot is soft and could be scaled down, we think it could be used as a medical endoscope. Or a swarm of them could monitor small places like the human intestine. Meshworm's muscles are heat-sensitive, so the robot probably wouldn't be good for entering a burning building. But it doesn't have any fragile components. We banged our prototype with a hammer and a 200-pound guy stepped on it, and it crawled away."

-Sangbae Kim, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.

There are many big things at stake today. Important things. Issues that will shape our country, decide the state of the economy, the rights of minorities, the way we interact with and occasionally drone-murder foreign nations. But, we're going to assume you're already aware of all that stuff.

Psychologists have for years been studying the tiny, relatively unimportant social cues that get us to vote one way or the other. (It's helpful, for American psychologists, that we have only two parties. For the rest of us, ehhh.) The reasons we vote aren't always big--sometimes they're subtle and small. So, here is a quiz to predict who you'll vote for, based on those cues.

1. Where will you be voting today? (Pick the closest)
a) church (2 points)
b) school (0 points)
c) firehouse (2 points)
d) other (1 point)

2. Which candidate would you say you physically resemble the most?
a) Barack Obama (0 points)
b) Mitt Romney (2 points)
c) Neither, due to gender or other, weirder reasons (1 point)

3. How aware are you of your own mortality?
a) we are all going to die, I think about this daily (2 points)
b) I will live forever!!! (0 points)

4. Are you good at pronouncing uncommon words?
a) very good (0 points)
b) ehh I take my best guess (1 point)
c) I find the name "Zoe" unnecessarily misleading (2 points)

5. When is your birthday?
a) March 12 (2 points)
b) August 4 (0 points)
c) any other day (1 point)

6. What are your favorite sports to play?
a) basketball (0 points)
b) skiing (2 points)
c) golf (0 points)
d) water sports (2 points)
e) anything else (1 point)

7. When you watch scary movies, how scared do you get?
a) really scared! (2 points)
b) a normal amount of scared thank you very much (1 point)
c) I don't scare easily (0 points)

8. Is your polling place dirty or smelly?
a) nope, pretty clean (0 points)
b) now that you mention it, it's a little gross (2 points)

9. What part of your brain would you say is larger and/or more active?
a) my amygdala, for sure (2 points)
b) my anterior cingulate cortex is, like, really active (0 points)
c) what? (1 point, and learn more about your own brain, idiot)

10. Did your football team win its last game?
a) yep! go [INSERT LOCAL SPORTS TEAM HERE]!!!!! (0 points)
b) nope. boo [INSERT OPPOSING, VICTORIOUS SPORTS TEAM THAT DEFINITELY CHEATED HERE]!!! (2 points)
c) I don't care about sports. (go to American jail, right now. your quiz is over.)

RESULTS!

If you scored less than 10, we predict you will vote for PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA. If you scored more than 10, we predict you will vote for FORMER GOVERNOR MITT ROMNEY. If you scored exactly 10, this quiz has been a waste of time for you and we apologize. Here, watch a video of a baby coati chewing on a fennec fox's giant ears. Now we're even.

THE SCIENCE

1.A study has shown that the location of your polling place matters. If you vote in a school, your thoughts will land on education, a social issue more strongly championed by the liberal candidate. But if you vote in a church or fire station, your thoughts will land on religion or security, respectively, both of which are more associated with the conservative candidate. It's called "contextual priming," and it works even if you're just shown a picture of something related--lockers, say, or religious symbols.

2. A study from Danny Oppenheimer and Alex Todorov called "Speed Dating for Senator" indicated that we tend to vote for people who look like ourselves. The researchers here actually merged a photo of the tester with a photo of a political candidate, and the testers invariably preferred that one to the original, non-merged candidate. Does everyone tell you you look like Mitt Romney? There's a fair chance you're voting for him, and not just because you're demographically similar--it's because we identify with those who resemble us.

3. A greater exposure to themes of death tends to result in a more conservative voting pattern, according to this study.

4. We're more likely to vote for a candidate whose name we can pronounce easily. Given that a moderator confused "Obama" for "Osama" during a presidential debate this year, we're going to go ahead and say those who have trouble with pronouncing less common American names might gravitate towards the easily-pronounced Republican.

5. We tend to identify with those who share our birthday. Romney was born in March, and Obama in August.

6. The reason candidate ad campaigns focus on hobbies so much is that we also tend to identify with those who share our interests, even if those interests are totally irrelevant to the job of being the President. These sports are, according to many sources, the main hobbies of the two candidates. Numbers 4, 5, and 6 are all taken from Democracy Despite Itself by Danny Oppenheimer and Mike Edwards.

7. Republican ads are often accused of using scare tactics. Well, the science backs it up--those who are more likely to be jumpy during scary movies tend to be more conservative.

8. A study in Psychological Scienceindicated that "subtle reminders of contamination can trigger a knee-jerk fear of outsiders," which aligns with a more conservative bent.

9. A study in Current Biology suggests that those with larger amygdalas--the part of the brain associated with fear and aggression--vote conservative. Those with more active anterior cingulate cortexes--the part of the brain associated with problem-solving and conflict monitoring--tend to vote liberal.

10. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests a correlation between the success of one's sports team and voting. If your team wins, you're more likely to vote for the incumbent.

Disclaimer: of course this is a fun silly thing, not to be taken too seriously. There are correlation/causation issues with some of these studies, and, besides, no even mildly intelligent mammal would think the outcome of a football game would have much effect on a presidential election. What we're saying is, this should be fun, but what's MORE fun is being informed and voting. I mean, voting isn't as fun as, I dunno, sledding, but it's a little bit fun and also important. Go vote, is what we're saying.

Ken Mampel, the Floridian man who repeatedly edited the Wikipedia entry on Hurricane Sandy to remove any mention of climate change, has been blocked from Wikipedia for a period of 24 hours due to "edit warring" on the Hurricane Sandy page. He appealed the block and was denied, though he's not banned for good--he's encouraged to keep editing now that his block is lifted. Read more on his Talk page.

It's the 21st century! Why can't we tweet or text our Designated Polling Station and have our votes counted that way? Well, because of fraud, mostly. Deciding the leader of the United States government is kind of a big deal, and research has shown it's more than possible to fudge a few votes when they're floating through the digital ether. But some are still making a good case for doing it anyway, as this BBC explainer video shows. It would increase turnout, they argue, and it's not like we don't have problems with our current system. Interesting. Something to consider while you wait in line to vote. [BBC]

Proof that remote e-voting is possible, even if we haven't figured out how to make it happen on Earth: NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station are filling out digital versions of their ballots today, and beaming them back to Mission Control. That's right. The most convenient polling location is several hundred miles above us, in Low Earth Orbit. Mike Wall at SPACE.com has the details. [via Huffington Post]

This is how the just-released game Curiosity: What's Inside The Cube? works: Anyone with an iPhone or iPad can download the iOS app. With the app, the players connect on the Internet, furiously tapping on their screens to remove pixely chunks of a single, gigantic cube. The one player lucky enough to remove the final pixel from the cube gets to see what creator Peter Molyneux calls a "life-changing" secret. So naturally, the gamers have already worked together to chip out pixels that form swear words. But still. Pretty neat game idea. [Kotaku]

The first gene therapy to be approved in the West will hit the market by the middle of next year, opening the masses to a controversial treatment that directly alters a patient's own DNA. Dutch biotech uniQure's Glybera was approved for sale by the European Commission late last month.

Gene therapies emerged--appropriately--about the same time the first human genome was being mapped during the 1990s, though the study of gene therapies goes back as far as the 1970s. They work by actually tampering with a person's DNA--usually by encoding a functioning gene to replace a mutated one, or by introducing DNA that encodes a therapeutic protein into the body. Clinical trials have gone on for years. Early on, failures caused many to dismiss the idea of tampering with genes. But later--in the following decade--many in the medical community changed their minds after witnessing a series of successes. Among them: China, which approved its first gene therapy in 2003.

In the West, however, gene therapy has been a source of constant debate, and that's what makes this development notable. Gene therapies carry a lot of promise, including the ability to treat any number of inherited diseases that have few treatment options. They are a way to literally tinker with the fundamental material that tells our cells how to function, so their potential is indeed vast--if we can make them work.

Glybera will treat lipoprotein lipase deficiency (LPLD), an extremely rare inherited disorder affecting the metabolism of certain fat particles. It affects something like one or two people in a million, so it's not like we're curing blindness here. Gene therapy is still limited to single-gene disorders--and most common diseases are more complex multi-gene problems.

Still, the acceptance of the first gene therapy into Western medicine could mark a turning point for gene medicine, provided nothing goes wrong. Many labs are still working on gene therapies for a number of conditions, and uniQure itself is working on additional genetic therapies for everything from hemophilia to Parkinson's. Even limited success there would naturally be a huge leap forward for medical science.

[Cosmos]

You already knew your Kinect was watching you, but perhaps not like this. A U.S. Patent and Trademark Office filing by Microsoft reveals that the company is devising a means for your Xbox peripheral to count the number of people in the room and even identify who they are in order to assess licensing fees for content based on the number of people in the room.

In other words, the days of ordering the Mayweather fight and having 40 of your friends over to defray the cost may soon be a memory. The idea here is to create a system that can charge the user on a pay-per-view basis, but not in the same way you're used to. In this patent filing, Microsoft is talking about pay-per-viewer, or collecting fees based on the number of individuals consuming the content. Kinect figures out if it's just you in the room, or if you have a dozen friends huddled around, soaking up your precious content. It could even use facial recognition to determine the approximate ages of those people present and halt playback of mature material if there isn't an adult present.

Your Xbox could then automatically collect fees for the number of people watching, or it could refuse to play the content until you top up your Microsoft Points account with an adequate sum--or until you kick all your friends out.

[via Gizmodo]

Warfighters have a whole suite of cameras they can use to see in the dark, through fog or smoke, and in broad daylight--but that's actually a problem, according to DARPA. Nobody wants to carry a suite of things. It would be better to have just one item that can do everything your suite could do.

DARPA wants a multi-band head-up display, which could be mounted to a helmet or a weapon scope, that combines several wavelengths of light into one image. Sunny? No problem--the camera can see in visible light. Smoke bomb blocking your view? No sweat; the camera can see thermal infrared signatures. The system would also have near-infrared capability to help users see through darkness.

A new DARPA project called the Pixel Network for Dynamic Visualization (PIXNET) seeks proposals for new sensors that can do all of this in one package. A successful proposal would be small, lightweight, low-power and low-cost, said Nibir Dhar, DARPA program manager for PIXNET. The system would communicate wirelessly with Android-based smart phones to fuse the images together, like you can see in the inset above. The warfighter would see a scene with visible imagery, thermal sensitivity and near-IR capability all in one.

Existing sensors are a good starting point, but they're not advanced enough to combine multiple functions the way DARPA wants. Combining reflective and thermal bands will be a challenge, not to mention making it ultra-portable. "What we really need are breakthroughs in aperture design, focal plane arrays, electronics, packaging and materials science," Dhar said. The solicitation is online here.

When I hear the phrase "political action," I think of public demonstrations. But the most influential form of political action has nothing to do with making a sign or attending a rally--it's about donating money, and it's not done in public.

To visualize this (mostly invisible) form of political action, artist-researcher Mauro Martino, sociologist Sasha Goodman, and other members of Northeastern University's LazerLab team created software to download, process, and geocode data from thousands of files submitted to the Federal Election Commission by political action committees (PACs). Next, they used several visualization tools to create an animation showing the location and timing of campaign contributions throughout 2012. They zeroed in on Boston, because that's where they live, but the model could be applied anywhere.

Here's the result:

On the project's website, the researchers explain their visualization, which they call "MoneyBombs," this way:

In an email, Martino told me that the LazerLab team--which is dedicated to the study of social networks and human behavior--created the visualization to show how campaign contributions follow "a predictable pattern of waiting punctuated by moments of intense action." Also, Martino says, "We were motivated by uncovering what people around us were doing politically."

You can view more MoneyBomb animations on the team's website.

In areas that allow unlimited billboard construction, the side of the road can look like a peeling, rusty forest. Signs that aren't hawking cellphone companies, fast food places or adult stores are adorned with horribly sketched toothy whales shouting YOUR AD HERE. But there is a better billboard future! Let's put plants on them instead, creating mini hanging gardens that can purify air and give us a break from a constant barrage of words and pictures.

Last year L.A.-based artist Stephen Glassman, who has apparently been making bamboo art installations for two decades, made a small-scale art project called Urban Air that involved a miniature billboard-bamboo setup. After it got some attention, leading billboard-maker Summit Media agreed to donate billboards in busy areas of Los Angeles for the first prototype.

It works by removing the advertisement-ready facade and retrofitting a billboard's metal husk to contain planters, live bamboo and a watering system. The installation includes environmental sensors and is connected to wifi. A new Kickstarter project is trying to raise $100,000 to hire all the electrical and structural engineers needed to build it. The goal is a bamboo billboard kit that could be installed anywhere.

Imagine if, instead of advertisements screaming about taxes and abortion and Obamacare, we were bathed in soothing placards of calm. Americans are exposed to 5,000 advertisements a day, as Treehugger points out--so this sounds like a welcome reprieve. You can learn more about the project here.

In a spectacular Sufjan-Stevensesque gimmick, Bravo has quietly pledged to create a television series about every single pocket of horrible rich people in the entire country. That includes housewives made of the same soft-touch plastic as many smartphones, trust-fund art gallery interns in New York, bipedal snake-monster matchmakers, and now, in Start-Ups: Silicon Valley, soulless husks of Ruby code in Silicon Valley. It is a performance art project of horrific proportions, a mirror held up to the American dream. You want to be rich? Here's what rich looks like. This will be shown in the Guggenheim in 40 years, probably.

So, Start-Ups: Silicon Valley. It's a show, co-created by a company called Zuckerberg Media (Mark's sister, apparently), with the same rough format as the Real Housewives series. We follow a handful of pretty people (eight, in this case) who have kind of met before but are now presented as the key members of a tight-knit group, as they go about their daily lives, interacting with one another and pursuing their own dreams, which are often just to be on television. Their daily lives, in this case, are a combination of sitting in offices actually making things, asking rich people for money to continue making those things, and (mostly) getting rip-roaring drunk and yelling at each other. And we're watching it because those things that they make? Those are things we care about. I mean, the things that these specific people make, neither we nor anybody else cares about those. But in a larger view, this culture and this area is responsible for things we use every day. One cast member gives a partial list of those dominant companies--Facebook, Google, Apple. And many of the smaller guys as well. So, that's why PopSci is covering this show. It's not why I in particular am watching it, but it's why I'm allowed to write about it on this site.

Here's the cast, and the awful app or service or company for which they are trying to secure millions of dollars in venture capital money:

The Cast

Ben and Hermione Way are from England. They say "bloody" a lot. They were separated at a young age, sort of like in the Lindsay Lohan film The Parent Trap. Each child was taken by one parent until 20 years later when they spontaneously met up in Thailand (accidentally? It's a fair-sized country) and then began a borderline-inappropriate relationship in San Francisco. Now they live together and work together and sort of act like they're dating each other? Like they don't make out or anything but I'm just saying they have a type of intimacy that is uncommon among siblings. On the other hand perhaps this is just a thing I do not understand about England! I have never been to England.

Their worthless app: Ignite, a fitness tracker app, sort of, that measures how long until you die. If you stop smoking cigarettes or if rage-watching television is found to be healthy, you will die a little later, and that will be reflected in the app. It currently has two and a half stars in the App Store, with reviewers calling it "hard to understand," "too complicated," "glitchy," and "a complete waste." Also one person gave it five stars and said "I am a dedicated Bravo viewer." I downloaded the app but it only told me when I would die, not when other people would die.

Sarah Austin is like iJustine or one of those other people (they are all bland pretty blonde ladies but it seems uncouth and maybe sexist to say "one of those bland pretty blonde ladies" so I'm saying "people") who just takes video of themselves and puts the video online and learns the word "innovation" and how to make portmanteaus, but not the word "portmanteau," and invents a portmanteau like "lifecasting" and proceeds to do that. At one point she mentions how much she charges for a tweet. It's more than I charge for a tweet. At another point she calls Silicon Valley "a 20th-century gold rush," which is actually a very accurate thing to say, because it is a desperate movement to extract money and run and also lots of people will be eaten by mountain lions in the hills of California.

Her worthless app: She makes videos about her own life at something called Pop17 and sometimes other people pay her to appear in videos where she tells us how many people are using Facebook right now and other cool tech stats.

David Murray used to be fat and now he is not fat. In this episode he gets a tan.

His worthless app: David has an app called Goalsponsors [sic] which is a list of goals, I think. He says this is because he improved his life and wants to help improve other people's lives, and at first it's like, well, he lost a lot of weight, that's cool and good and healthy, but then he also got a ton of plastic surgery and lasered the hair off his back and got hair plugs and you think well, I don't have a moral problem with that stuff, but maybe his self-regard is not as healthy as it seemed and maybe he shouldn't be pushing it on other people?

For all the work he had done, he looks pretty normal. Just a normal dude. Which is cool I guess.

Dwight Crow is a superbro. He is one of two people (the other being David) who explains his startup in layman's terms to someone who definitely already knows what his startup is, in this case his own goddamn business partner. He drinks a lot and is loud and obnoxious and should probably be on the Real World/Road Rules Challenge bungee-jumping off of Turkey's highest building or whatever.

His worthless app: Carsabi, a search engine for used cars. I typed "Nissan Sentra" into it and the first two results were a Dodge Grand Caravan minivan and a Mazda6 station wagon. Keep coding, bro.

Kim Taylor drew the short straw and was contractually obligated to be the one who "tells it like it is." So, she is kind of rude. Also she was a dancer for a basketball team and says that in most of the country that would be super cool but in Silicon Valley it is super lame. Later she will wear a revealing dress.

Her worthless app: Ampush Media. It's not an app, but I am not entirely clear on what it really is. Here's what their site says: "We combine market intelligence with data-driven analytics to convert clicks into high-value customers." That is startup-speak for "we do not really do much of anything but we have exposed brick in our office."

Jay Holanda and Marcus Lovegood were introduced in the pilot but we didn't learn anything about them. Bravo's site shows that Jay is a model who wears horrible jeans and Marcus works with an LGBT Super PAC which, well, that's hard to make fun of, there's a good chance he's actually doing some good in the world. You're fired from this show, Marcus. There's no place for you here.

What Happened This Episode?

The Brits threw a party, which was toga-themed, because there is only one type of themed party. "Nobody goes out clubbing here," says Lady Brit, "it's all about costume parties at people's houses in the startup world." Then their worthless app gets rejected. The teasers for the next episode indicate they will be rejected several more times.

Lifecaster Sarah got in a fight with Lady Brit about a perceived slighting at a previous year's South by Southwest festival. They yelled at each other on a bed and then Lifecaster Sarah asked if Lady Brit was upset that she made out with Gentleman Brit. See? Weird.

Superbro drank too much, wore a toga, then drank too much again. He did pullups on a doorframe and then fell down.

Not Fat Anymore David got a tan, did I mention he got a tan? He got a tan.

Obligatory Rude Girl was rude to her coworkers for no reason but then seemed pretty close to reasonable. She told Superbro that his second party was really lame, which it was. That wasn't rude, that was pretty cool I thought.

Jay and Marcus were kind of around but I don't even think they got a title card telling me what kinds of entrepreneurs they are. Serial? Successful? Pioneering? I have no idea!

The Bravo Reality Show (BRS) is scathing satire. A BRS looks like it's glorifying the lifestyles of those depicted--look how rich! Look how well-groomed, how well-sculpted these people are! They drink alcohol and have sex (cool!) and are on TV which is in itself something to be glorified. But these shows are not that. A BRS cast is made up of people whom you will hate, and maybe one person you would hate in real life but whom you will decide to "kind of like" on this show. And Bravo actually has interesting taste in picking out these people. Startup culture, whether it's in Silicon Valley, Brooklyn, or Austin, is a repulsive swimming pool of rancid money which you can only get by wholly diving in and combining the right combination of buzzwords. You open your mouth to say "disruption" and the foul currency flows in. And it's made worse by the fact that good stuff does sometimes come out of it. We all like Instagram, right?

Of course, Bravo is not really interested in finding the next Instagram, or even the next Path. It's interested in the hangers-on, the pretty folks who move from weird places like Milwaukee and England, who come with ladles in hand to scoop from the pool of disruption with nothing of particular value to offer anyone in exchange. And thank god Bravo decided to aim its laser-sighted BRS gun at this place and these people. It is fantastically cathartic and fun to watch.

When the so-called top-level domain names--with suffixes like .buy, .apple, or .book instead of .org or .com--went up for auction, it was compared to an Internet gold rush. Big companies hurried to snatch them up, despite the prohibitive $185,000 application fee. You might've heard about Google and Amazon going big on the new suffixes, but you probably didn't hear about Donuts Inc., a small, venture-backed company that's spent $56 million on more than 300 domains. For reference, that's about three times as many as Google is bidding for, and four times as many as Amazon.

Some are coming out against Donuts now, raising the specter of potential cybersquatting, the practice of sitting on a piece of web real estate and waiting for it to gain value, or in this case, the accusers say, providing an outlet for people to masquerade as the intended owner. ("Well, .apple must be the domain of the iPhone-making Apple company!") Bloomberg has the full story on it, but in short, this could turn into a messy legal squabble. Donuts is being sued is named in a letter to ICANN, the arbiters of web structure, from a lawyer representing other new-domain holders. The holders are lobbying for ICANN to investigate Donuts' ties to the occasionally controversial Demand Media. In the meantime, 140 of Donuts' bids are uncontested, one of the company's founder told Bloomberg, while it'll have to duke it out with some others for the other domains.

[Bloomberg]