Wired: Top Stories

Researchers Track Disease With Google News, Google.org Money

Epidemiologists are tracking global disease by parsing Google News sources and public health list-serves into data that could provide an early warning about the next big disease outbreak.

08.07.2008 03:00:00 - Wired: Top Stories

Get Started With Movable Type

The Movable Type blogging engine is easy to set up and customize. This Webmonkey tutorial covers the basics of templates, plug-ins and everything you'll need to inject some personality into a vanilla MT installation.

08.07.2008 02:30:00 - Wired: Top Stories

How to Check Yourself for Genetic Abnormalities

Curious about that wheat-gluten allergy that runs in the family? Wondering if you're more likely to develop cancer than your mate? There are several options for testing the stuff your genes are made of, ranging from online DNA-sequencing shops to home-brew basement kits. Grab your cotton swabs and confront your future.

08.07.2008 02:00:00 - Wired: Top Stories

Amendment Would Put Spy Lawsuits, Amnesty On Hold Pending Investigation

As the Senate takes up the FISA bill on Tuesday, an odd amendment from New Mexico Democrat Sen. Jeff Bingaman appears to be the last real hope for those who want a court to rule on the legality of Bush's spying program.

08.07.2008 01:00:00 - Wired: Top Stories

Netroots Activists Mad at Obama for Spy Bill Flip-Flop

Netroots activists are using a wiki and Barack Obama's social networking tool to try and change the senator's mind on an upcoming vote on overhauling warrantless wiretapping legislation.

07.07.2008 22:42:00 - Wired: Top Stories

Rising Fuel Prices Hit Transit Riders

Think riding the bus makes you immune to rising fuel prices? Think again. Transit systems are getting hit hard, and they're raising fares to make up for it.

07.07.2008 20:30:00 - Wired: Top Stories

What's Inside: 'Just for Men' Hair Color

Ethoxydiglycol
Back in the '50s, home hair dyes were laced with toxic chemicals that turned a simple touch-up into a haz-mat operation. Luckily, dye makers found substitutes like EDG, a fume- free organic solvent that keeps the ingredients in a thin, pourable consistency.

Oleyl Alcohol, Vegetable Fatty Acid
That thin, pourable consistency would be problematic during application. Mixing the base with the separate bottle of "color developer" causes these two fatty organic thickeners to kick in, making the product cling to your hair like shampoo.

Ethanolamine
In last month's episode of What's Inside, this ingredient starred as a solvent in Easy-Off oven cleaner. Here it's an alkalizer that boosts the pH toward bleachlike levels and swells the hair's outer layer so the color can penetrate more fully.

Erythorbic Acid
If you take ascorbic acid — aka vitamin C — and rearrange the atoms just so (isomerization!), you get erythorbic acid. It's a cheaper antioxidant that protects the dye from sun and oxygen damage.

Trisodium EDTA
With its ability to bind heavy metals, EDTA is used to clean up after radioactive spills. That same talent is enlisted here to suck up copper in tap water, which might otherwise react with the product to create damaging radicals. Dyed hair is messed up enough already.

Polyquaterium-22
Sounds like a comic- book invention, but this common polymer coats each strand, smoothing the shaft's outer layer and improving lubricity — a fancy way of saying it's a hair conditioner.

p-Aminophenol, p-Phenylenediamine
These so-called intermediates react inside the hair fiber to produce the appropriate color when oxidized. This combination turns dark brown. Other chemicals (or different proportions of these) can make any shade — from Sandy Blond to Jet Black.

Resorcinol
Is there anything this stuff can't do? It's used as a chemical skin peel, a biological glue for aortic surgery, a sunscreen, a treatment for whooping cough, and — when mixed with the right acids — a TNT-like explosive. In Just for Men, it's a coupler, an additive that reacts with the oxidized intermediates to dial in the target color.

Hydrogen Peroxide
When combined with the other ingredients, this ubiquitous denizen of the medicine cabinet provides a superabundance of highly reactive oxygen, which turns those intermediates and couplers into luxurious dark coloring that will surely fool everyone into thinking that this is your natural look.

05.07.2008 06:00:00 - Wired: Top Stories

How To Follow the Tour De France Online

A web insider's guide to of all the options for streaming video, audio, live news tickers, interactive maps and contests associated with the world's biggest (and toughest) bike race.

05.07.2008 06:00:00 - Wired: Top Stories

How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand

The targeted offenses: if you are stolen, call the police at once. please omnivorously put the waste in garbage can. deformed man lavatory. For the past 18 months, teams of language police have been scouring Beijing on a mission to wipe out all such traces of bad English signage before the Olympics come to town in August. They're the type of goofy transgressions that we in the English homelands love to poke fun at, devoting entire Web sites to so-called Chinglish. (By the way, that last phrase means "handicapped bathroom.")

But what if these sentences aren't really bad English? What if they are evidence that the English language is happily leading an alternative lifestyle without us?

Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it's escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.

In China, this sort of free-form adoption of English is helped along by a shortage of native English-speaking teachers, who are hard to keep happy in rural areas for long stretches of time. An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don't get enough quality spoken practice. The likely consequence of all this? In the future, more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese.

It's not merely that English will be salted with Chinese vocabulary for local cuisine, bon mots, and curses or that speakers will peel off words from local dialects. The Chinese and other Asians already pronounce English differently — in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For example, in various parts of the region they tend not to turn vowels in unstressed syllables into neutral vowels. Instead of "har-muh-nee," it's "har-moh-nee." And the sounds that begin words like this and thing are often enunciated as the letters f, v, t, or d. In Singaporean English (known as Singlish), think is pronounced "tink," and theories is "tee-oh-rees."

English will become more like Chinese in other ways, too. Some grammatical appendages unique to English (such as adding do or did to questions) will drop away, and our practice of not turning certain nouns into plurals will be ignored. Expect to be asked: "How many informations can your flash drive hold?" In Mandarin, Cantonese, and other tongues, sentences don't require subjects, which leads to phrases like this: "Our goalie not here yet, so give chance, can or not?"

One noted feature of Singlish is the use of words like ah, lah, or wah at the end of a sentence to indicate a question or get a listener to agree with you. They're each pronounced with tone — the linguistic feature that gives spoken Mandarin its musical quality — adding a specific pitch to words to alter their meaning. (If you say "xin" with an even tone, it means "heart"; with a descending tone it means "honest.") According to linguists, such words may introduce tone into other Asian-English hybrids.

Given the number of people involved, Chinglish is destined to take on a life of its own. Advertisers will play with it, as they already do in Taiwan. It will be celebrated as a form of cultural identity, as the Hong Kong Museum of Art did in a Chinglish exhibition last year. It will be used widely online and in movies, music, games, and books, as it is in Singapore. Someday, it may even be taught in schools. Ultimately, it's not that speakers will slide along a continuum, with "proper" language at one end and local English dialects on the other, as in countries where creoles are spoken. Nor will Chinglish replace native languages, as creoles sometimes do. It's that Chinglish will be just as proper as any other English on the planet.

And it's possible Chinglish will be more efficient than our version, doing away with word endings and the articles a, an, and the. After all, if you can figure out "Environmental sanitation needs your conserve," maybe conservation isn't so necessary.

Any language is constantly evolving, so it's not surprising that English, transplanted to new soil, is bearing unusual fruit. Nor is it unique that a language, spread so far from its homelands, would begin to fracture. The obvious comparison is to Latin, which broke into mutually distinct languages over hundreds of years — French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian. A less familiar example is Arabic: The speakers of its myriad dialects are connected through the written language of the Koran and, more recently, through the homogenized Arabic of Al Jazeera. But what's happening to English may be its own thing: It's mingling with so many more local languages than Latin ever did, that it's on a path toward a global tongue — what's coming to be known as Panglish. Soon, when Americans travel abroad, one of the languages they'll have to learn may be their own.

Michael Erard (author@umthebook.com) wrote about the spread of the Chinese language in issue 14.04.

05.07.2008 06:00:00 - Wired: Top Stories

Hideo Kojima's Top 5 Memorable Games

The maestro of pixelated sneaking lists his top five memorable games and, weirdly, his own 'Metal Gear Solid' made the cut.

04.07.2008 20:57:00 - Wired: Top Stories