For the past several years, visitors to Google search page have smiled at the scribbles of Dennis Hwang, the graphic designer who comes up with the creative sketches that are incorporated into the Google logo on special occasions. The first doodle Hwang created for Google was on Bastille Day back in 2000, when he incorporated a French flag and some fireworks into the company logo. Other notable Google doodles have been the double helix to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA, a sketch of Einstein to commemorate the scientist's birthday, and "Google" spelled out in dots in honor of Louis Braille's birthday.

For the most part, Hwang's doodles have been viewed as a public expression of Google whimsy, a way to have a little fun and inject some levity into what would otherwise be a dull, minimalist home page. But last week, this seemingly harmless logo offended some people:

The doodle was intended to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik. But some conservative bloggers are angry that Google honored an achievement of the United States' totalitarian archenemy during the Cold War, the Los Angeles Times reports. They're especially pissed that Google has never posted a doodle to honor American troops' achievements on Veteran's Day or Memorial Day. (Never mind that Google regularly drapes its logo with the American flag every July 4.)

It's actually not the first time that Google has come under fire for its doodles. On past Thanksgivings, Google's incorporation of a turkey into its logo has drawn criticism from Brazil, Australia, and other parts of the southern hemisphere, with claims that Google is too focused on the north. Google has altered its logo for non-Western holidays like Persian New Year and Chinese New Year, but I'm afraid we're getting to the point where Google will be scrutinized for every single doodle it publishes. It's a pity that this politicization of the Google logo will only work to dampen down the tiny bit of creativity we have left in the corporate world.

One fascinating aspect of Israel's mysterious September 6th airstrike on Syria is just how Israel's jet fighters evaded Syria's Russian-made radar system. David A. Fulgham at Aviation Week's defense technology blog has an informed guess: The Israelis hacked it (perhaps it was these guys).

U.S. aerospace industry and retired military officials indicated today that a technology like the U.S.-developed “Suter” airborne network attack system developed by BAE Systems and integrated into U.S. unmanned aircraft by L-3 Communications was used by the Israelis. The system has been used or at least tested operationally in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last year.

The technology allows users to invade communications networks, see what enemy sensors see and even take over as systems administrator so sensors can be manipulated into positions so that approaching aircraft can’t be seen, they say. The process involves locating enemy emitters with great precision and then directing data streams into them that can include false targets and misleading messages algorithms that allow a number of activities including control.

Fulgham relays a report in a Kuwaiti newspaper saying that the Russians are scratching their heads trying to figure out just what the Israelis did, while the Iranians, who use the same anti-aircraft systems, are equally befuddled. Fulgham's post suggests that the real mission of the Israeli raid wasn't knocking out North Korean nuclear supplies (and obviously, speculation about that didn't derail the six-party talks), but making clear that Iran's air defenses won't protect its nuclear sites from Israeli bombs.

(Hat tip: Danger Room)

A clever entrepreneur in India is selling plane tickets for just $4. The catch: The Airbus 300 never takes off! 

Passengers just get to experience what it's like to sit on a plane. They get to fasten their seat belts, watch the safety demonstration, be waited on by stewardesses with drink carts, and hear announcements such as, "We will soon be passing through a zone of turbulence." The plane, by the way, has only one wing; a chunk of the tail is missing; and the bathrooms are out of service.

Photo: Gizmodo

The "virtual journeys" are turning out to be a success in a country where only 1 percent of the population has ever experienced real off-the-ground air travel. Commenters have pointed out that it's not much different from city folks who take their kids for pony rides (or to petting zoos, for that matter) at county fairs, or people who pay to spend the night in a cabin of the Queen Mary ship docked in Long Beach, California. People will pay for simulated experiences; just look at some of the most popular video games.

The "virtual journeys" could serve a practical purpose, though. With India's rapid economic growth, more people are flying for the first time. A report about unruly Indian passengers quoted an airport manager as saying that many are first-time fliers who don't understand airplane etiquette. One tried to open the door right before takeoff, for example. The report recommends that Indians be taught the do's and don'ts of plane travel. "Virtual jouneys" may be the place to start.

There's no word yet, though, on whether long security lines, lost luggage, and getting bumped for a free ticket later will be added to the experience.

Visions of the future generally reveal more about the time in which they are created than the time they are predicting. Take for example this film of rocket pioneer Werner von Braun describing humanity's space-bound future, made during the early days of the space race. Or this article from the rapidly industrializing America of 1900 predicting that all wild animals would be extinct by 2000 and that Nicaragua and Mexico would join the union after the completion of the Great Nicaragua Canal. (Both of these examples can be found on the fantastic Paleo-Future blog, which specializes in this sort of thing.)

It is with this history in mind that I approach the World Future Society's just released Forecasts for the Next 25 Years. The predictions are quite interesting, and about as plausible as the ones above probably seemed when they were made. Not surprisingly, wariness about the rise of China is prevalent. The WFS predicts that a water shortage in China will cause the price of commodities around the world to increase. They also believe that India's future development is more viable than China's because of its greater political transparency and democratic institutions. All this reflects traditional wisdom in political economy, but I'm not so sure. For the past few years, China has specialized in disproving the traditional wisdom. The WFS also reflects current fears about global warming in forecasting, "The costs of global-warming-related disasters will reach $150 billion per year." As the Times pointed out this week, 20 years ago, the depletion of the ozone layer was leading scientists toward similarly gloomy predictions. Admittedly, global warming will be a much tougher problem to address, but the future may surprise us.

Here's the best prediction, though:

Forecast #4: We’ll incorporate wireless technology into our thought processing by 2030. In the next 25 years, we'll learn how to augment our 100 trillion very slow interneuronal connections with high-speed virtual connections via nanorobotics. This will allow us to greatly boost our pattern-recognition abilities, memories, and overall thinking capacity, as well as to directly interface with powerful forms of computer intelligence and to each other. By the end of the 2030s, we will be able to move beyond the basic architecture of the brain’s neural regions.

As I sit here using this primitive input system to create this post, the thought of being able to use my vastly improved interneuronal connections to research foreign policy and find links for blog posts (I imagine it would look something like the above postcard from 1910) gives me a supremely nerdy glimmer of hope about an otherwise bleak-seeming future. And maybe that's what futurism is really about. 

NASA is seeking astronaut candidates to staff up the International Space Station and to carry out future missions to the moon (and beyond). Here are some highlights from the want ad posted on USAJobs.com:

• The salary range is $59,493.00 to $130,257.00 per year
• "The open positions require extensive travel on Earth and in space. Possible destinations may include, but are not limited to, Texas, Florida, California, Russia, Kazakhstan, the International Space Station and the moon."
• All positions require mandatory drug tests
• Women, minorities, and teachers are specifically encouraged to apply
• The positions are only open to U.S. citizens
• Applicants must be between 62 and 75 inches tall to fit in Soyuz space capsules
• Minimum requirements are a bachelor's degree in specific math and science fields, as well as 3 years of experience in the workplace
• New NASA employees receive 13 days of paid vacation per year, plus 10 federal holidays
• Most NASA facilities have free parking

PAUL CROCK/AFP/Getty Images

Last week, the Pentagon admitted that a B-52 had mistakenly flown nuclear-armed cruise missiles across the United States. And worse, for almost fourteen hours no one—at the base of departure, on the bomber itself, or at the base of arrival—had any idea something was wrong. Officials have assured the public that there was no danger of a nuclear explosion, even if the plane had crashed.

The specific warheads carried by U.S. cruise missiles belong to the W80 family, in this case the W80-1. (Other versions of the W80 are designed for use with Tomahawk cruise missiles, which are launched from submarines.) There are about 1,450 of these warheads in the active stockpile, with another 360 or so in the inactive stockpile. They have "dialable" (variable) yields of up to 150 kilotons, or about 10 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. And, as mentioned by the Pentagon, they have several safety measures built in to prevent accidental detonation.

First, the actual detonation system is physically protected by an "exclusion zone," which isolates it from electric (and to some extent physical) shocks. The exclusion zone can be connected to the rest of the warhead’s electronics by a "strong link," which does not physically connect until the warhead is armed.

An accident—fire, lighting strike, crash, etc.—could breach either or both of these safeguards, so the electronics inside the exclusion zone also contain safeguards, called "weak links." These are electronic links designed to fail under lower stress than either the exclusion zone or the strong link. This ensures that, for instance, if the exclusion zone collapses, the weak links will as well and the nuclear core will remain inert.

And beyond those nested safety systems, most U.S. warheads have other safeguards, including insensitive high explosives that will not detonate easily due to mechanical shock. The biggest worry with this incident was not technical, but organizational: How did nuclear warheads get loaded onto a plane and flown across the country before anyone even noticed they were gone?

This passage from a recent piece by Joshua Davis in Wired concerning last spring's cyber attack on Estonia's Internet infrastructure reads like a deleted scene from The Matrix:

Across the dinner table from Aarelaid sat Kurtis Lindqvist, the man in charge of running Stockholm-based Netnod, one of the world's 13 root DNS servers, which direct global Internet traffic. That makes Lindqvist a sort of Olympian in the IT crowd. He is a handsome 32-year-old with a dimpled chin and close-cropped hair. By day, he wears a trench coat and shades, but the geek in him is just below the surface. He loves to play badminton and often programs late into the night. And, befitting the trench-coat-and-shades look, he belongs to a clandestine alliance of Internet elite with the power to cut off global Internet flows. He's one of the so-called Vetted: the select few who are trusted by the world's largest ISPs and can ask them to kick rogue computers off the network.

The Vetted constantly crisscross the globe to expand their network of trusted members, and by a stroke of luck, Lindqvist and some others were in Tallinn that week for what was referred to as a BOF — a birds-of-a-feather — meeting with European network operators.

So what is this mysterious geek Illuminati?

As far as I can tell, "the Vetted" refers to the Internet Architecture Board. The IAB traces its origins back to DARPA, the tech-research division of the U.S. Department of Defense that created an early precursor of the Internet in the 1970s. Today, the IAB, no longer under DoD control, is responsible for overseeing "aspects of the architecture for the protocols and procedures used by the Internet." The IAB also oversees the Internet Engineering Task Force, of which Lindqvist is a member. The IETF oversees global TCP/IP protocols and does indeed hold regular "Birds-of-a-Feather" meetings. Far from being a clandestine society, however, the IETF is an open community whose meetings are open to anyone who happens to be interested. 

As for the enigmatic Mr. Lindqvist, he seems bemused by all the attention, writing on his personal blog:

No, I don't like staying up at night. I even told Wired to correct this. I like to sleep at night. Also, I don't think I have done serious programming for years...

I also believe that I have never owned a trench-coat. I do own a half-long beige jacket though...:-)

I'm still not sure I trust a guy who uses emoticons to protect us from Russian cyber terrorists.

UPDATE: In an e-mail exchange with Blake, Passport's editor, Lindqvist writes:

Actually, exactly what [the Vetted] refers to I suggest you ask Wired about, I have never attributed this term to anyone - and I am not exactly sure myself. Second guessing the author of the Wired article, I would assume this does not refer to the IAB as the IAB has no operational role at all. It has an oversight function inside the IETF, that sets the technical standards for the Internet. It's members are appointed by a well defined process inside the IETF.

No word yet from the folks at Wired, however.

A new hotel is going up, and it's going up very high—in outer space. Galactic Suite, the world's first space hotel, plans to open for business in 2012.

Guests will get to enjoy "space sports," "surreal sleeping arrangements," and—you guessed it—stargazing. They will see the sun rise 15 times a day as they travel around the world in 80 minutes. To move about in zero gravity, they will wear Velcro suits that let them stick to the walls of their pod rooms. To take a shower, they will go to a spa room with floating bubbles of water. (Accommodating other bathroom activities, however, is still proving to be a challenge.)

The three-bedroom hotel is already taking reservations (seriously, just check out the Web site) at $4 million for a three-day stay and eight-week training at a James Bond-style space camp on a tropical island. It's a steal of a deal considering that Virgin Galactic is charging $200,000 for a mere seven minutes in space.

Of course, those with even more money can shoot for the moon. Space Adventures, a space tourism company, will be charging $100 million to take people around the moon as early as 2009. (Lunar tourists won't actually land on the moon; they'll just get incredible views.)

Unfortunately, the nascent space tourism industry will remain out of the reach of most of us Earthlings until prices come more down to Earth. But it's still pretty cool.

Need any more proof that markets are value-neutral? 

Take a look at the share price of China Public Security Technology (CPST), which jumped over 20 percent following Sunday's article in the New York Times. In the article, the Times called out the Florida-based company for providing technology that will help the Chinese government monitor its citizens even closer than before:

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

It's not something I'd want to be associated with, but investors who bought shares in CPST today are just behaving rationally. After all, electronic surveillance is a growth market—and nowhere more so than in China.

YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty

Last week, The Economist posed the question: Why is Japan the source of so many bright ideas? At 1,200 patents per million people, Japan has the highest rate of patents in the world—even when you account for multiple counting.

But Japan's success in patenting only tells part of the story. Patents are often awarded for incremental achievements; for instance, improving the clarity of photos on a cell phone camera rather than coming up with a unique new design. So it's likely that incremental innovations inflate Japan's patent figures. Another reason for Japan's patent performance could be its concentration of manufacturing and particularly electronics industries. The "clustering" of competitors and demanding clients means that not only do companies have an incentive to come up with constantly improving products, but they also have a strong incentive to make sure they patent each improvement so as to avoid copying by competitors. Switzerland is the second highest patent-awarding country after Japan, no doubt bolstered by its cluster of big pharmaceutical companies.

Perhaps it's an issue of quantity over quality. As John T. Preston, the former director of MIT's Entrepreneurship Center, states, "The radical breakthrough patents that we see mainly come out of laboratories in the United States." A number of truly innovative and useful inventions—such as cell phones, the Internet, and Windows—all have their origins in the United States. The Japanese may have plenty of ideas, but the real question should be, are they really that smart?

As Christine points out elsewhere today on Passport, it's been a stormy summer for sports. Europeans are busy booing doped-up cyclists, but American sports fans have their fair share of things to complain about, too. After the Barry Bonds scandal, for instance, a chemist who worked with BALCO told USA Today that he believes baseball's culture of doping is still very much alive:

What they're doing is taking steroids in the offseason, and then using HGH and EPO during the season. There's testing now, but I'm sure somebody has already designed an undetectable steroid."

Undetectable steroids may soon be obsolete. A team of medical researchers at the University of Milan has found a way to reduce mental and perhaps physical fatigue through small electric shocks to the brain. The shocks are imperceptible and have no collateral effects, the scientists claim in a study soon to be published in the European Journal of Neuroscience. The discovery could herald the end of doping ... or perhaps the start of a new trend of artificial performance-boosting, and this time among nerds as well as jocks.

NASA/Getty Images

Using an array of sensitive, sophisticated techniques, scientists have discovered that our rotund planet Earth is a bit smaller than previously thought: a whole 0.1 inches (2.5 mm) smaller from surface to center on average.

Some of the other updated measurements the scientists made after two years of measuring include:

• Continental drift. North America and Europe are parting ways at 0.7 inches (18 mm) a year.
• Post-glacial rebound. Scandinavia and northern Canada are increasing in height by 0.2 to 0.3 inches (5 to 8 mm) each year. Their elevation is increasing because they've had an enormous weight of ice lifted off them since the end of the last ice age.
• The frisky Pacific. The Pacific seabed is the most active of all, heading northwest at a whopping 2 inches (5 cm) per year.

So what? Well, the more accurate measurements give scientists a better baseline against which to measure and track environmental changes such as melting ice caps and evaporation from the Amazon Basin. If the sea level is rising somewhere, it's important to know whether that change is due to a sinking continent, or due to, say, global warming. Regardless of the important implications of the new measurements, we at least now know for sure that it's a smaller world after all.

Andrew Wong/Getty Images Sport

According to a new study (PDF) conducted by the Communications Workers for America, a union for telecom employees, the United States is a sluggish 16th among industrialized nations in terms of Internet speed. The CWA crunched numbers for all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, and found that the median download speed in the U.S. was 1.9 megabits per second (mbps). It compared that to data from other countries provided by the International Telecommunications Union.

In Japan, which topped the list, the median download speed is 61 mpbs, 30 times faster than in the United States. That means a movie that would take 2 hours to download in the U.S. would only take 2 minutes in Japan.

But never mind entertainment. What about more vital uses for the Internet, such as telemedicine in hospitals, education, and business? The United States needs to do much better. In fact, that 1.9 mbps number probably overstates the speed of American connections. The study claims 80,000 respondents, "nearly all" of whom had cable or DSL connections. Other studies, however, estimate that 30 to 40 percent of Americans are still rockin' dial-up.

It's no secret that ramping up (pdf) corn ethanol production has been rife with problems. The net energy gain from corn-based ethanol is pretty small at best—its corrosive impact on most pipelines usually requires you to truck it to market. And, of course, the use of corn for fuel has been driving up food and feed prices.

But I think it's best to think of corn as the beginning of the ethanol journey, not the destination. There is a furious R&D effort to develop enzymes—the bug or bugs—that can be used to break down cellulosic materials cheaply.

Now, Craig Venter, the man best known for his controversial for-profit contribution to the human genome mapping race, claims to be on the brink of producing a synthetic bug that can do just that, and more. BusinessWeek reported last week that Venter "believes he is within weeks or months of creating the world's first free-living artificial organism in his laboratory." His bug could potentially clean up dirty fossil fuels and help make ethanol.

In his typical down-to-earth fashion, Venter jokes that he's "going from the gene king to the oil king." It's unlikely, though, that any concrete application for his new bug will emerge for quite some time.

But this is about much more than any particular technology, or even the energy business as a whole. Some say Venter is out to become the "Bill Gates" of artificial life, which has huge ethical and legal implications. Arthur L. Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, tells BusinessWeek that synthetic biologists may be "manipulating nature without knowing where they are going.... There are arrogant scientists, and our friend Venter may be one of them." Time will tell if Caplan's fears are vindicated.