Articles | Michael Behar | Writer & Editor | Boulder, Colorado

Wired | January 2008

Formula for Disaster Download PDF

Explosions. Storms. Waves. CGI ace Jos Stam is creating a physics machine that can make special effects look absolutely, completely real.

Jos Stam is standing on a pearly white beach under a cloudless sky. He is visiting his parents, who are vacationing in Faro, a medieval town on Portugal’s Algarve coast. Stam, a 41-year-old computer scientist specializing in 3-D graphics, doesn’t look at the world the way the rest of us do. Reality is a binary riddle to be cracked, a series of fleeting images best appreciated after they’ve been rendered into 1s and 0s. Even here, watching the waves hit a beach in Portugal, his thoughts drift, as they always do, toward numbers. He begins scribbling in a small black notebook filled with mathematical interpretations of everything he sees.

Stam is a Nordic Goliath, a neck-craning 6’8″, with blond hair, pale green eyes, a deeply cleft chin, and hands the size of bear paws. He wrote the software behind many of the visual effects in modern Hollywood films—he is one of the few programmers to have won an Oscar—yet he’s all too aware that no software can re-create the aquatic spectacle before him. Computers can simulate simple fluid motion, but on their own they still can’t reproduce the complexity of a breaking wave. Continue reading →

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January 18, 2008 by admin

POPULAR SCIENCE | JANUARY 2008

Paging Dr. Fear Download PDF

If fear really is all in our heads, Joseph LeDoux thinks he can eliminate it. The first step is to block out memories. When I was nine years old, my family moved into a newly constructed home in a pleasant Seattle suburb. Within a few days, I began to notice an unsettling number of spiders creeping along baseboards, dangling in closets, and loitering under furniture. I convinced myself that the assault could only be because our digs had inadvertently razed some kind of spider civilization, and these guys were out for revenge. I remember being unable to sleep, spooked by the sight of an eight-legged nasty clinging to the ceiling, waiting to pounce. I would insist that my father leave the stairwell light on so I could track its every move, certain that under the cover of darkness the little monster would sneak into my bed and burrow into my ear canal, where it would lay its sticky spider eggs and spawn a whole new arachnid dynasty. I stuffed wads of toilet paper into my ears as a first line of defense.

Fast-forward 30 years, and I find my repulsion firmly entrenched, seemingly for good. On a recent business trip, I glimpsed a spider behind the nightstand in my hotel room. I summoned the concierge, who duly chased the evil critter into the hall with a broom. “No problem,” he smirked when I apologized for my wimpiness. “Happens all the time.” Continue reading →

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August 24, 2007 by admin

KITEBOARDING | AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2007

The Desert Downwinder Download PDF

A Brazilian surf champ, a former New York internet marketing exec and a wave rookie from Colorado make the trip of a lifetime along 200 Miles of Brazilian coastline.

I just stepped off a red-eye flight from Miami to Fortaleza, Brazil’s fourth largest city, and I need to crash hard. But my guides, Dave and Jessie Hassell—an American couple who ditched their Manhattan cubicles to become kiteboarding outfitters in Brazil—are determined to get me on the water. “This is the hammock capital of the country,” Jessie, 27, informs me as I haul my gear onto the beach in Cumbuco, a dusty burg 30 minutes from the airport and 1,700 miles from the throngs of Rio de Janeiro. “They call them rede, pronounced ‘hedgy.’” “I could really use a hedgy,” I confess, about to wimp out in favor of a nap when a flash of red and blue whooshes past. It’s a kiteboarder racing downwind. Watching him shred through the South Atlantic surf gets me fired up to ride. I live in Colorado, where my riding is confined to reservoirs and where, as you might guess, we don’t get many waves. Ever since I started kiteboarding four years ago, I’ve fantasized about riding real, ass-kicking ocean waves, as opposed to the puny speed bumps spit out the back of a ski boat. Continue reading →

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April 24, 2007 by admin

Women’s Health | April 2007

Global Warming Special Report Download PDF

Keep Your Cool It’s pretty freakin’ impossible to ignore the fact that our climate is changing more dramatically than the co-host lineup on The View. Whether we have Al Gore to thank or the bazillion scientists and researchers who pelt us with warnings about melting glaciers and confused polar bears, global warming is no longer just a theory. Earth has a fever: It’s heating up because carbon dioxide (CO₂)—a gas we produce when we bum fossil fuels like petroleum or coal to make the electricity that powers our high-wattage lives—is trapping heat from the sun that would normally bounce away into space. The CO₂ acts like a layer of Saran Wrap around the planet, and like a bug in a roach motel, heat gets in but can’t get out. It’s what we call the greenhouse effect.

So what’s a little extra warmth? Is your life going to change that much? Well, it could—but not if you start doing some simple things now that’ll make a major difference later. We read dozens of reports, interviewed experts from climatologists to sustainable farmers to women just like you who are working (literally) to save the earth, and came up with 31 no-sweat fixes—none of which involve getting rid of your car and moving to a cabin in the woods._ Even if you tackle just a few of these, you’ll help preserve the planet so you can enjoy a healthy life for years to come. It may be getting hot in here, but that doesn’t mean you have to sweat it out. Continue reading →

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March 24, 2007 by admin

Popular Science | March 2007

The Prophet of Garbage Download PDF

Joseph Longo has invented a machine that turns our most vile trash into clean energy—and promises to make a relic of the landfill.

It sounds as if someone just dropped a tricycle into a meat grinder. I’m sitting inside a narrow conference room at a research facility in Bristol, Connecticut, chatting with Joseph Longo, the founder and CEO of Startech Environmental Corporation. As we munch on takeout Subway sandwiches, a plate-glass window is the only thing separating us from the adjacent lab, which contains a glowing caldera of “plasma” three times as hot as the surface of the sun. Every few minutes there’s a horrific clanking noise—grinding followed by a thunderous voomp, like the sound a gas barbecue makes when it first ignites.

“Is it supposed to do that?” I ask Longo nervously. “Yup,” he says. “That’s normal.” Continue reading →

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February 11, 2007 by admin

Wired | February 2007

Reservoir Logs Download PDF

A submersible robot called the Sawfish can harvest healthy timber from long-forgotten underwater forests. Clear-cutting never looked so green.

I’m standing on a steel barge in the center of Ootsa Lake, a 154-square-mile reservoir in northwestern British Columbia. A chafing wind blows from the west, where the snowy, nearly treeless slopes of the Kitimat Range vanish into overcast skies. I jump as a voice booms over the outdoor PA system: “Clear to cut!” A few seconds later, a massive spruce tree erupts from the murky water.

Two hundred feet below, a remotely operated vehicle dubbed the Sawfish is wielding a 54-inch-long chain saw. On the deck of the barge, an operator sits inside a cramped, dimly lit control room made from a shipping container. He’s maneuvering the Sawfish with a joystick, and his eyes are locked on a video feed of footage from eight underwater cameras embedded in the contraption. A generator delivers power to the sub through a 720-foot-long high-voltage cable that also encloses a set of fiber-optic lines to transmit guidance commands from the pilot. Continue reading →

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December 24, 2006 by admin

Outside | December 2006

The Zero-G Spot Download PDF

Michael Behar has a simple fantasy: to be the first man on the planet to join the 100-mile-high club. But as he discovers in his hot pursuit of the big bang, he’s hardly alone. In fact, cosmic copulation has become the hottest craze since the Kama Sutra.

A couple of months ago, I was late-night channel-surfing and caught the tail end of Moonraker, the campy old James Bond flick in which Agent 007 both saves the world and enjoys zero-gravity sex with Dr. Holly Goodhead. (Nice day at the office.) As they embraced in a free-floating tumble, I realized something very important: I wanna do that.

You see, I have always been a space geek. So having sex above the stratosphere has long been on my list of adventure goals. But until recently, all I could do was dream. These days—thanks to the burgeoning space-tourism industry—the concept of the 100-mile-high club is starting to seem seriously feasible. Continue reading →

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November 24, 2006 by admin

Air & Space | October/November 2006

The Ground Download PDF

Astronauts get the glory, but flight directors run the show.

Michael Moses remembers feeling giddy that day in February 2005 as he walked into chief flight director Milt Heflin’s office at NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston to accept his new job. Among space engineers, becoming a flight director is a crowning career achievement, and Moses half-expected Heflin, known as Uncle Milty, to give a round of high-fives to the nine newly selected directors gathered in the room. But Heflin’s words were sober. “We got an hour-long lecture that this is dangerous business, that we are on the pointy end of the sword, and that if we screw up, somebody dies,” Moses recalls.

Not exactly welcoming, the lecture at least had an impact. “That night I hardly slept,” says Richard Jones, who like Moses had worked for years in mission control before being promoted to flight director. Another new flight director, Holly Ridings, whose previous job in mission control had been monitoring the attitude of the International Space Station (ISS) in orbit, says that now, “every time I sit down in the flight director chair, there is a little piece of my mind that thinks, ‘If things go really wrong today, the U.S. space program could be over—or at least grounded for a very long time.'” Continue reading →

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October 20, 2006 by admin

Outside | October 2006

Windsurfing Has Been Canceled Download PDF

So say Matt Nuzzo and Trip Forman, the founders of Real Kiteboarding, who are channeling Jake Burton and trying to turn their breezy passion into the next action-sport phenomenon. Michael Behar joins the believers on a rum-soaked Caribbean cruise to find out: Is kiteboarding the new snowboardoing?

I’m about to go for the ride of my life. It’s February, and I’ve been in the British Virgin Islands for five days with Trip Forman and Matt Nuzzo, founders of the Cape Hatteras, North Carolina-based Real Kiteboarding. The duo has recently teamed up with charter-yacht juggernaut the Moorings to offer a weeklong kiteboarding cruise in the BVIs. Their first official trip will be in December, but I’m on their shakedown sail, an informal preview that’s part scouting mission, part Faustian flotilla. Within these hundreds of miles of Caribbean perfection—where warm and consistent trade winds swirl across deserted beaches and secluded bays—our aim is simple: Eat like royalty, drink like rock stars, and kite our asses off. Continue reading →

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October 1, 2006 by admin

Outside | Fall/Winter 2006

A New Shining Path Download PDF

While thousands of trekkers swarm the Inca Trail, Machu Picchu’s Salcantay Route offers better views, deluxe digs, and splendid isolation.”

It’s early may and I’m trekking to Machu Picchu with Enrique Umbert, a 57-year-old Peruvian commodities trader who just confessed to me that his passion for the Andes “is like a love affair with a beautiful woman.” I can see the attraction: Directly in front of us are Humantay and Salcantay, dueling ice-clad peaks, 19,412 and 20,574 feet tall, respectively. Gravity-defying glaciers cling to their summits, and every so often a tractor-size slab of ice calves off and triggers a thundering avalanche into a distant ravine. The twin massifs frame a radiant half-mile-wide meadow called Soraypampa, our campsite for the night and the starting point of the spectacular 30-mile Inca path called the Salcantay Route, a little-known, backdoor way to Machu Picchu. Continue reading →

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