tonyn84

The Design by Community project kicked off last week and will run through May. Every week, users will have the chance to vote on a different aspect of the fantasy phone's design. This first week focuses on the device's display and user interface, letting users pick their ideal screen size, keypad, secondary buttons, and the rest. Following weeks include size and shape, materials, operating system, connectivity, and more. Democracy! It worked for America, so why not for your smart phone?

Sadly, Nokia says it has no plans to actually build the device, though the company will be posting interviews with members of its design team and comments from "key bloggers" as the phone takes shape. In May, after you've slid your sliders and cast your votes, Nokia will create a series of concept sketches to cap the whole project off. Then, looking at them, they'll wonder, "why don't we actually make this thing?" [Nokia Conversations]

BloggyMcBlogBlog

Around three years ago, lifecasting was all the rage. We idolized iJustine, Justin.tv and the countless other people brave enough to film every action, every day. The trouble with their form of lifecasting is that it's done via a camcorder strapped to a hat, filming all your actions plus everyone else's. You could almost say the SenseCam is the lifecasting device for shy people who are merely interested in jogging their memory at a later date; people who want to tell a story without having to hear themselves.

So, What The Heck Is It?

Measuring the size of a square pack of cards, it hangs from a lanyard around the neck and films everything within your eyesight in 640 x 480 resolution photos, compressing them as JPEGs on the device's internal 1GB SD card. It can store over 30,000 images—which works out to around 100 hours' worth of lifecasting, based on approximately 300 photos taken each hour (which is the average number automatically shot), plus the time each photo was shot at.

Its 0.3MP VGA image sensor may not be as good as your cameraphone or even laptop webcam (though it does shoot in a wide-angle fish-eye style effect which I loved), but those devices require you to click a button every time you want a photo taken. The SenseCam takes photos passively, based on changes to the light, temperature or movement—or you can set it to take photos on a timer instead.

It contains several different sensors—light-intensity and light-color sensors, a passive infrared detector for measuring changes in body heat, a temperature sensor and an accelerometer for detecting movement. It's certainly interesting moving between rooms with different lighting conditions, and seeing how many more photos the SenseCam takes.

Every Step You Take, It'll Be Watching You

When connected to a computer it pops up as an external hard drive, with individual folders dedicated to each batch of 100 photos, or roughly 20 minutes' worth of memories. I used the SenseCam over two days, and by the end I had thousands of photos to sort through. Opening all the folders and previewing them on my Mac, I just ran through them quickly, so they turned into something akin to a flipbook. It was shocking seeing how often I open my Twitter tab when working, and how many times each hour I chew on my nails.

Cooking dinner provided the best results. The SenseCam detected the change in temperature and likely the light as well, so took as many as eight shots a minute. Chopping sundried tomatoes turned the shots into a movie when I ran through them quickly on the laptop later—and stirring pasta with a wooden spoon saw my hand move very slightly in each shot.

Sadly—and this is more of a reflection on my life than the SenseCam—none of the photos are really worth showing anyone. In fact, what you see below in the gallery are the only photos I deemed interesting enough. No-one, especially not me, wants to see hours' worth of photos of my laptop screen as I work, flipping tabs and checking email. An alarming amount of photos showed my BlackBerry in front of the camera, as I replied to emails when I was away from my laptop. A good number featured my cat in them.

Here Comes The Fun

But the potential here is huge. Whereas strapping a camcorder to a hat is deemed as intrusive, having a small box the size of a deck of cards strung from my neck on a lanyard is far from it. Filming makes both you, and the people around you, very aware of every action. Affectations are created that way; egos are born. Having a camera that you don't have to control means it's forgotten, so a truer representation of your life can be broadcast—should you choose to put the photos on Twitter, Facebook or Flickr.

As there's no plans for Microsoft to send the SenseCam down the production line (excluding the fact that they've licensed the technology to Vicon, who'll sell it to the medical industry), it's not too important hypothesizing on why you could ever want or need one.

I do wish however that I was wearing it several nights ago when my friend won tickets to the London premiere of Remember Me, and we were stood 5m away from Robert Pattinson (he of Twilight fame). The one shaky photo I managed on my BlackBerry, which while it has a better image sensor than the SenseCam's, was ruined thanks to my nerves and emotions running wild. The SenseCam, while triggered by changes in bodyheat or temperature, doesn't have stage fright when confronted with celebrities-you-really-shouldn't-fancy-but-actually-do.

There's a future here with the SenseCam, if Microsoft can find the right partner to license the technology to for personal use. They could even launch it successfully themselves. I wouldn't use it everyday, and certainly have no need for reviewing 100 hours of my life through the form of 30,000 photos, but it'd be great fun to wear while at a party—especially for those of us who often suffer from memory loss the next morning. Adding a 3G chip and GPS, so each photo could be sent to an online profile and tagged with your whereabouts would be future features I'd like to see...but then, who would be interested enough in viewing someone else's life from their perspective?

Innovative device with huge potential

Easy to use, easy to transfer to computers

Fish-eye effect is fun

It'll probably never see the light of day in Best Buy or on Amazon

Photos could be higher-res, admittedly

The message board was started by the CIA and Saudi government as a "honey pot" for gathering intelligence on extremist activities in the area. By all accounts, the strategy was working—the website saw significant terrorist traffic and provided a wealth of intelligence to both nations.

But according to the National Security Agency the site was a little too well-trafficked, and in 2008 it determined that the site was being used by terrorists to facilitate attacks against American forces in Iraq. A task force of officials convened and, despite the CIA's objections and one official's claim that the the NSA had no authority to do so, the plan to shut down the site went forward.

Dismantling sites is tricky business, and along with the forum the Pentagon unit that was carrying out the operation accidentally took out 300 servers in Saudi Arabia, Germany and Texas. The Germans, as well as the Saudi officials who had lost a valuable intelligence resource, were not pleased with the disruption.

Cyberspace is a new, complex front that officials are still figuring out to defend. If the CIA's website was in fact contributing to the death of American soldiers, then it makes sense that it was dismantled. But, as one researcher noted, "you can't really shut down this process for more than 24 or 48 hours"—on the internet, where there's a will there's a way—and the CIA maintains that the NSA only managed to drive the terrorist activity into the shadows of the net, where it can't be as easily monitored.

Cybersecurity will only become more important going forward, so it's good that we're working out these kinks now. The internet is fundamentally a different kind of battlefield and securing it is a daunting task. But I'd imagine a good first step, for government agencies, would be getting on the same page. [Washington Post]

When I was a kid, my dad had a Rolodex. Actually, my dad still has a Rolodex. My dad is one of the least organized people I know. In his apartment, he is good at stacking things (like newspapers and bills and books) on top of other things (like pingpong tables and folded easels) on top of other things (like trunks and cardboard boxes filled with newspapers and bills and books). I was adult before I learned that you're supposed to continue to replace the toothpaste cap on the tube after you use it.

However, Mr. Grossman is organized about one thing: correspondence. He has a log book in which he draws pictures, staples post cards, and keeps notes on every phone call he has. But his greatest feat of organization is his Rolodex. No residence or phone number in his life (or my life, or my siblings' lives, or his ex's lives) has ever gone undocumented. Sometimes he throws out useless cards, but mostly they live on stuck to the little wheel, reminding me of my uncle's ex-wife's parents' phone number or my camp address from 1989 or my great aunt Betty who died last year. The cards are mostly white—or more precisely, they're nicotine white, which is actually more of a kind of gold color. Some are pink, because apparently there was a period where the stationer tried to appeal to... people who like pink. Each one has a degree of soul and meaning that no entry in my Gmail address book will ever possess.

The Wheel of Life

When I got my first job at a newspaper in 2001, I had a small Rolodex. I got it because everyone around me had one. What's more, people talked about their Rolodexes. "I think I have her in my Rolodex," they'd say. Or, "If he leaves, he's going to take his Rolodex with him." This, of course, meant that someone's "contacts" were veeeeery important. Sometimes, people would take a card out of their Rolodex if I needed it, and I'd go copy the information and bring it back to them. There were people who stapled cards onto Rolodex pages and people who hand wrote all the information. Cards could be added or tossed or shared with ease. It was a genius, efficient and highly personal way of staying in touch.

I didn't keep my Rolodex for very long. There were several reasons for this. For one, I'm actually pretty good at memorizing numbers. Like 19. And 34. And 5. 19 34 5. I just rewrote them without even looking! This is funny because my memory for everything else in life is so bad that I usually can't remember the beginning of a sentence by the time I get to the end which is why I have no idea what this sentence is about. Another reason is that my dad taught me this nifty number memorization system [http://www.the-number-thesaurus.com/Rules.asp] when I was a kid. But the main reason is that I, like (almost) everyone else, eventually started keeping numbers and addresses on my computer and phone. Now I'm at the point where I hardly do that. I just search my Gmail or text people or Google around until I find the digits and street names I need.

But just because this is the more "modern" method of keeping numbers and such doesn't mean that it's a better system. Really, the Rolodex might be one of the more important memory systems ever created.

Arnold Neustadter, Inventor

The Rolodex was the brainchild of Arnold Neustadter, a somewhat anal twentieth century inventor from Brooklyn. His daughter Jane Revasch, now in her sixties, clearly grew up putting the toothpaste cap back on the tube. "If I took a message for him, he wanted to know everything—first name, last name, where they were calling from , why, their number, the time...and I was just a little kid!" she told me.

Still, way back when, Neustadter's address book presented a kind of mess that he couldn't harness. Mid-century families were infamous peripatetic. Vaguely dissatisfied despite being well-clothed and fed and in possession of a nice station wagon and decent wet bar, they determined that the real American dream existed just two suburbs over: Between 1948 and 1970, an estimated 20 percent of all Americans moved each year. How was anyone supposed to keep track of all those new street names without having to rewrite their whole address book every few months? Plus, some people died! Pages cracked with layers of caked White-out. New phone numbers meant that, when there was no longer room under M, a coda symbol would have to indicate that those entries were being placed in W. The S's were mostly residing on an inserted piece of paper clipped to the back cover and any completely new entries were just going to have to wait until you could find a replacement book. Sure you could just start a new book every few months, but who had the time!

This was pre-Google, so think of all the hours it took to do what I did just this morning: research what happened to the boy from ET, wonder whether or not Coca Cola used to actually contain cocaine, and figure out which president came before Grover Cleveland. (Interjection from Mr. Grossman: "The library was really far. Before the Internet, if I had questions like that, I just made up the answers.")

Neustadter had combatted office disorder before. His Swivodex was a device that kept ink bottles from spilling. The Clipodex was a device that attached to the knees and helped stenographers keep pads from moving. The Punched made holes in papers. In the late 1940s, he and a designer came up with a way of dealing with the address book dilemma: a propped-up rotating wheels fitted with inexpensive removable cards. Some models had a cover equipped with a lock. (Each lock actually took the same key—but don't tell!).

All in all, it was an elegant solution. The cards were removable so that the Q didn't have to take up any space at all if it had no entries; the circular design allowed the more demanding letters to have more space when necessary.

When Neustadter first started selling the Rolodex in the 1950s, stationery shops were skeptical that anyone would want the spindly device on their desk. By the 1980s, however, the Rolodex had become such an icon that lawsuits were filed by companies who accused former employees of taking them with them when they left—having a Rolodex filled with important names meant everything. There were models selling for more than $200 and people often valued them at prices far higher than that. An entire 1986 episode of Moonlighting was devote to one stolen one being held ransom for $50,000. Hell, it was worth it! Those numbers didn't exist in some kind of "cloud" or on a hard drive in the closet. And the library was really far.

Facebook Schmcebook

Rolodexes were a testament to your relationships and your personal history. In 2008, Stanford University professors found that the average Facebook member aspires to have around three hundred friends, but that would've seemed a piddling number to the average Rolodex devotee, who often made it a point to use as many cards as the contraption could allow—and some held up to six-thousand. I remember an officemate who used to leave his Rolodex flipped open to important people. He didn't realize this made him look like a douche. But I guess people do the same kind of thing on Facebook. Did I mention I'm friends with Wendy the Snapple Lady?

Mr. Neustadter, who died in 1996, never saw the way in which digital storage would affect his iconic invention. But his daughter insists he would've argued that his Rolo-baby was as relevant as ever. When I called to tell her that I was going to include the Rolodex in OBSOLETE, my book about objects that are fading from our lives, she got huffy. She spoke in a tone that requires exclamation points. "They still work! You just can't carry them around! Places still sell them," she said. I told her she was right—the book is about things that still exist, but just barely. She continued. "They aren't obsolete! Give your book another title! You know, look at it this way: computers get viruses! But the Rolodex, it's never taken a sick day in it's life."

Anna Jane Grossman is the author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of iamobsolete.net. Her writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

JrsyDevil's Advocate®

The theory was especially popular in the 1960s and 70s, when scientists were just beginning to unravel the mysteries of the double helix. Our DNA determines our physical appearance, the reasoning goes, and our predispositions to various illnesses, and plays a role in our general disposition and skill set. All of that has been passed down to us through countless generations. So why not memories?

It sounds far-fetched, but there are still vast swaths of genetic code whose purpose is unknown. And the evolutionary advantages of having memories passed down—even one as simple as "FIRE BAD"—are overwhelmingly clear. Will we be able to tap into those memories any time soon? Probably not. But one day some generation might. And when they do, they'll see exactly how that great-great-great-grandpa Brian spent all his spare time on cheese snacks and 90s sitcom reruns. [American Chronicle]

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

mrgibblechip

The Wrapsol adhesive film is priced from $25, and while probably not intended for what's shown in the video, can supposedly handle six foot drops.

Of course, no one's showing us a six-foot fall. Instead we're to believe that the film has magical shock-absorbtion abilities based on little bounces against concrete. I'd have an easier time believing this whole thing if someone had made it a point to show that the abused phone is completely functional and not just scratch-free. And dropped it from six feet up. [SlashGear]

In an interview with Vice, Dr. Gottesman covered the big mysteries of gas, such as what determines the signature scent of a fart:

A baby is born with a sterile intestinal track. During the delivery, there's lots of fluid and stool and whatever, and it's thought that at that exposure the baby's colon is populated by the mother's colon bacteria, thereby affecting the smell of the individual's farts for the rest of their lifetime. There's also other theories claiming the colon is populated during the first few months of exposure to fecal material, but that probably doesn't affect the smell as much as the initial intake of feces by the baby during delivery.

He also covered the effect of our favorite beverages have on our bums:

Beer is carbonated, so that's why it makes you fart. Coffee causes the sphincter muscles to relax just a little bit, so you tend to have more farts by accident if you're drinking something with caffeine than if you aren't.

And of course Vice didn't let him go before he explained the phenomenon of oops poops, more crudely known as sharts:

It has to do with the muscles of the anus. There are two muscles of control. One muscle, the internal muscle which is active all the time, it's the one that allows you to sit on that chair without shitting on the chair, then you also have the external muscle which is a voluntary muscle like your biceps. And when you need to hold stool in it will contract, and keep the stool on the inside. The passage that you are describing happens for one of several reasons. One is that the internal muscle has become very labile, meaning any little input inside the anus causes it to relax. Sometimes it relaxes too much, and that can cause stool to slip out. The other reason is you could have hemorrhoids–everybody has hemorrhoids, but people with bigger hemorrhoids sometimes experience gas slipping out between the hemorrhoids and taking with it mucus material produced by the hemorrhoids, which can cause staining of your underwear.

You can read the complete interview over at Vice and I highly recommend that you do, because it covers all the concerns we may have about our rear ends. [Vice]

Yeah, that's right. I'm on to you! Just try to fool me, you crop tool using liar. [Tree Hugger via Twitter]

Batman: Arkham Asylum Game Of The Year Edition Hops On 3D Bandwagon
FREE GLASSES INCLUDED!!

God of War III Review: Olympic Glory
Watch out, this game will break your hand.

FarmVille How To: The Tips and Tricks of The Farming Masters
Tip #1: Don't play Farmville.

The Silver Age: Is Valve The New (Old) Marvel?
Neat piece.

Star Wars MMO Pricing Plan May Have "Some Twists"
Micro-transactions.

Heavy Rain Patch Is On The Way
I encountered one big bug during my playthrough, but that was less than most.

The Amazing Bill Paxton Pinball Machine
Next, Heck will construct machines for the three sister wives.

Mass Effect, Dragon Age Creators Consider The Post-Release "Romance Pack"
This is important.

So, How Laggy Is PlayStation Move?
A lot like Wii MotionPlus, according to Jason.

Dead Mario And Crucified Jesus
It was only a matter of time, Princess.

Scrap Metal Micro-Review: There's a Difference Between Mindless and Pointless
Two hours of my last weekend fully agree with every word of this review.

What do we do when pictures of events we barely recall are all we have?

Original source of image unknown.

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

The accessory features "a 2000mAh battery for additional power, an LED to show charging state and capcity, start/select buttons, built-in stereo speakers, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and an omni-directional microphone." There's no exact release date, but 22moo, GameBone's maker, has released developer tools for those wanting to make their games compatible with the accessory already and hopes to have something on the market by the end of the year. [Finger Gaming via GameSetWatch]

Designed by RAFAA with the 2016 Olympic Games in mind, the Solar City Tower is supposed to be "a symbol for the forces of nature." Basically it combines a tourist attraction with an all-day source of renewable energy.

While not entirely unheard of, it seems a bit odd that excess energy from the day is being used to pump water over the tower to generate power at night. Is the net energy gain truly significant?

Intentions and eco-friendiness aside, the big question here is whether they can leave the waterfall running while someone jumps off the edge. [Eco Friend via Inhabitat]

Carr's book, the Night of the Gun, is about that change, mostly. His story is one of the downtrodden man coming around to a sweeter life; classic. But what's also striking is Carr's self awareness. That in order to confront his past—which is muddled through drug addiction and time—he has to first fact check it using a reporter's toolbox, interviewing ghosts from his past, police records and medical files. One lesson, as it pertains to this week's theme: Memories can deceive and escape us because it's sometimes safer and easier to let them. And so, facing down the darker facts of one's life takes a type of courage seldom seen, but demonstrated, by Carr, in this book. — Brian Lam

I am not a gun guy. That is bedrock. And that includes buying one, carrying one, and, most especially, pointing one. I've been on the wrong end a few times, squirming and asking people to calm the fuck down. But walking over to my best friend's house with a gun jammed in my pants? No chance. That did not fit my story, the one about the white boy who took a self-guided tour of some of life's less savory hobbies before becoming an upright citizen. Being the guy who waved a gun around made me a crook, or worse, a full-on nut ball.

Still, there it was: "I think you might have had it."

We were not having an argument, we were trying to remember. I had gone to his house with a video camera and a tape recorder in pursuit of the past. By now the statutes were up, no charges in abeyance, no friendship at stake.

Donald is not prone to lies. He has his faults: He has wasted a gorgeous mug and his abundant talent on whiskey and worse, but he is a stand-up guy, and I have seen him bullshit only when the law is involved. Still, I know what I know—Descartes called it "the holy music of the self"-and I believe that I was not a person who owned or used a gun. The Night of the Gun had stuck in my head because it suggested that I was such a menace that my best friend not only had to call the cops on me but wave a piece in my face.

I didn't hold it against him—Donald was far from violent, and maybe I had it coming. I doubt that he would have shot me no matter what I did. But now that memory lay between us. Sort of like that gun.

Memories are like that. They live between synapses and between the people who hold them. Memories, even epic ones, are perishable from their very formation even in people who don't soak their brains in mood-altering chemicals. There is only so much space on any one person's hard drive, and old memories are prone to replacement by newer ones. There's even a formula for the phenomena:

R = e-(t/s)

In the Ebbinghaus curve, or forgetting curve, R stands for memory retention, s is the relative strength of memory, and t is time. The power of a memory can be built through repetition, but it is the memory we are recalling when we speak, not the event. And stories are annealed in the telling, edited by turns each time they are recalled until they become little more than chimeras. People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived. I loathe guns and, with some exceptions, the people who carry them, so therefore I was not a person who held a gun. Perhaps in the course of transforming from That Guy to This Guy, there is a shedding of old selves that requires a kind of self-induced Alzheimer's.

In this instance, the truth didn't seem knowable.

I remember driving to a dark spot in between the streetlights at the rounded-off corner of Thirty-second and Garfield. Right here, I thought. This would be fine.

The Nova, a shitbox with a bad paint job my brother bought me out of pity, shuddered to a stop, and I checked the rearview. I saw two sleeping children, the fringe of their hoods emerging in outline against the backseat as my eyes adjusted to the light. Teeny, tiny, itty-bitty, the girls were swallowed by the snowsuits. We should not have been there. Their mother was off somewhere, and I had been home looking after them. But I was fresh out. I had nothing. I called Kenny, but he was plenty busy. "Come over," he said. "I'll hook you right up." In that moment of need, I decided to make the trip from North Minneapolis to South, from Anna's house to his.

I could not bear to leave them home, but I was equally unable to stay put, to do the right thing. So here we were, one big, happy family, parked outside the dope house. It was late, past midnight.

Then came the junkie math; addled moral calculation woven with towering need. If I went inside the house, I could get what I needed, or very much wanted. Five minutes, ten minutes tops. They would sleep, dreaming their little baby dreams where their dad is a nice man, where the car rides end at a playground.

Memory is the one part of the brain's capacity that seems to be able to bring time to heel, make it pause for examination, and, in many cases, be reconfigured to suit the needs of that new moment. Long before TiVo, humans have been prone to selecting, editing, and fast-forwarding the highlights of their lives. Even if every good intention is on hand, it is difficult if not impossible to convey the emotional content of past events because of their ineffability. Even in an arch me-as-told-to-me paradigm, the past recedes, inexorably supplanted by the present.

Memory remains an act of perception, albeit perception dulled by time, but it is also about making a little movie. Remembering is an affirmative act-recalling those events that made you you is saying who you are. I am not this book, but this book is me.

Episodic and semantic memory each lie in different ways, but each is eventually deployed in service of completing a story. Stories are how we explain ourselves to each other with the remorseless truth always somewhere between the lines of what is told. In this way, memory becomes not a faculty but a coconspirator, a tool for constructing the self that we show the world.

In Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie writes about the "special kind" of truth that memory conjures. "It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also. But in the end it creates its own reality, its own heterogenous but usually coherent version of events, and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own."

I get his gist, but I'm not sure I give any more credence to my memories than to the recollections of others.

When I committed to write a reported memoir about my past, I proceeded on a few assumptions:

1. Every person's story has value, including my own.
2. My life is the one thing in the world I am the leading expert on.
3. If I am truthful, no real harm can come to me.
4. Keeping careful video and audio records of everyone I talk to will give the memoir a verisimilitude born of transparency.
5. I am a good man who did bad things, but I'm better now.

I had no understanding of the fundamental audacity of writing a memoir. I do now. It presumes a level of interest in my life that I had not historically displayed and also has an embedded promise that something will be learned.

Even with the gimmick of reporting, my addiction narrative arrives at some very common lessons. Too much of a bad thing is bad. Everybody laughs and has fun until they don't. If you don't sleep and eat, but drink and drug instead, you will lose jobs, spouses, and dignity.

And the lessons of the recovery narrative are important, but even more prosaic. In the ensuing chapters, you will be unsurprised to learn that once I stopped doing narcotics and alcohol, things improved. I got jobs, remarried, had a baby, and, of course, learned to love myself.

Junkies and drunks frequently end up putting a megaphone to their own pratfalls because they need to believe that all of the time they spent with their lips wrapped around glass, whether it was a bottle of vodka or a crack pipe, actually meant something. That impulse suggests that I don't regret the past-it brought me here to this nice, happy place-but I'd also like to squeeze something more from it.

Even if the conception of the memoir is venal, or commercial, or flawed, there is intrinsic value in reporting. For instance, in spite of what I believed, it was probably me who had the gun, not Donald. I can't say with certainty, but that picture began to cohere after some reporting. I called Joseph, a professor at New York University, who knows a great deal about the mechanism of human recollection, to ask him how I could have gotten such a signal event in my life so completely wrong.

"Well, the drugged state you were in is going to alter the way you formed memories," he suggested. "You could probably have misattribution. You have lots of pieces that are recorded and stick together by that experience. Perhaps in that situation the sticking mechanism was not working well, and so all the pieces were there, but it wasn't put together quite right.

"Especially under the conditions you were in, you could have faulty mechanisms of various kinds. Because those little pieces are there, when you retrieve the memory, you put them back together, and for whatever reason, the gun ends up in his hand. You can get Freudian about that or not." He added that so-called flashbulb memory of the kind that I had can be incredibly vivid and still be very wrong. "The other thing that may be relevant is something called state-dependent learning, where certain memories are processed only when you go back into the state in which they were formed."

I'd do almost anything to remember what happened on The Night of the Gun or the snowsuits, but that is a state I don't plan on visiting anytime soon.

Each time I would return from a reporting trip, I would go through a ritual. On-site notes would be transcribed, interviews logged, and then I would empty the digital audio and video onto my computer. In order to make sure that the accumulated data of my life did not tip over my computer, I would transfer the large audio and video files to an external hard drive. As the data accumulated, I began to think of that hard drive as all-knowing, a digital oracle that knew more about my life than I did, a device that told the truth because that was all it contained.

Even so, my past is a phantom limb, something I feel the presence of but cannot touch. John Updike called it part of our "dead, unrecoverable selves." When the past is shifted to the present moment, it is infected by a consistency bias that requires that all things fit together, whether they do or not. Examine your own family history and folklore if you don't buy it. How many of those stories are literally, exactly true?

Memoir is a very personal form of creation myth. Whether it is in the form of a book or something told across the intimacy of first date candlelight, the this-is-me, this-is-who-I-am story is a myth in the classic sense, a tale with personal gods and touchstones. It becomes more and more sacred as it is told. And perhaps less and less truthful.

Going back over my history has been like crawling over broken glass in the dark. I hit women, scared children, assaulted strangers, and chronically lied and gamed to stay high. I read about That Guy with the same sense of disgust that almost anyone would. What. An. Asshole. Here, safe in an Adirondack redoubt where I am piecing together the history of That Guy, I often feel I have very little in common with him. And that distance will keep me typing until he turns into this guy.

David Carr writes at The New York Times, blogs at Media Decoder, and Tweets @carr2n.

This writing was excerpted from his book, NIGHT OF THE GUN, where you can find the rest of the story (complete with happy ending).

Copyright 2008 by David Carr. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

It's 99 cents, and it looks like a lot of fun. It would be even better if there was some kinda camera/judging thing that lets it automatically know when you've scored.

What else could you use the iPhone for that actually interacts into real space? Maybe something involving screen brightness and night lights? [iTunes via Mobile Crunch]

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Nota: If you're reading this, there's a good chance you've:

• Grown up
• Gone to school, earned good grades
• Found a decent job
• Gotten to a place, financially, where an iPhone seem like a think you should buy

Four nice things! Also: four reasons you should be embarrassed that you still can't read music. Nota teaches you how. Fairly intuitive, though a bit intimidating for a total newbie, and easy on the eyes. $5.

Etude: So you've figured out how to read music, with Nota. Cool! Not learn some songs on that crappy little electric keyboard you just bought. Etude turns your iPhone into a little tiny sheet music machine, with an in-app store for song downloads, all of which are free now. They're adding premium (read: modern) content soon, too. $3.

Transformers G1: Awakening: A Transformers RPG rendered with stunning authenticity. As someone who grew up with Transformers and can't make it through either of Michael Bay's films, this game was a revelation, both in pacing and style. $3.

SkiFree: Y'know, SkiFree! The one with the skier and the monster and the jumps, that you loved but haven't played since 1993? It's that, exactly, but minus the snow monster. (For now, at least). Free.

Navigon MyRegion: Says Brian B:

Navigon is one of our favorite navigation apps. Which is why we're pretty excited at the prospect of being able to buy it piecemeal: starting today, instead of buying maps for all of North America for $80, you can buy a MyRegion map of the East, Central, or Western US for $25.

The $25/$13 initial/subsequent package price is introductory, and will go up to $30/$15 before too long, so don't hesitate for a second if you'd even been considering Navigon up to this point.

Zombie Smash: I've never met a tower defense game I didn't like. I've also never met a piece of media that features zombies, be it a film, a game, or a book, that I didn't like at least a little. (Also, I've never met a zombie, full stop. Huh!) Zombie Smash is a horribly addictive tower defense game, with ragdoll physics. And writing, even! I tend to give up on tower defense games before finishing them, but I'm planning on seeing this one through. $2.

Fox vs Duck: Cue Frucci:

Your ducks get dropped down from the sky onto a pond populated by a hungry fish and watched over by a fox on the side. You tilt the iPhone to move the duck and get it off the pond and away from the fox. As the levels advance your enemies get faster and more objects show up on the pond, making life harder for your duck. There are also Xbox-style achievements and a global leaderboard.

A buck.

KaleidoVid:

Here's how you work the app, which isn't immediately obvious from the screenshots. You hold it up to anything-like a camera-and the app will take what your phone sees and turn it kaleidoscopy. Tap the screen to freeze the thing and save it to your photos, or immediately tweet/Facebook it.

He ends with what could be a devastating observation about iPhone apps in general, but we'll keep this fun and light, because it's Friday and I'm tired: "In any case, there's no "point" to the app other than it's pretty neat and gives you something to kill the time." Ha! Yes. Fun. $1.

PayPal: Fact: Now you can send money to another person by bumping your phones together. Add a sense of whimsy to your shady street transactions! Free.

Paper Boat Race: It's a 3D boat racing game. Pretty straightforward, really. But oh oh oh oh OH, can you guess what the gimmick is? JUST TRY. (Clue: It involves actual blowing.)

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory. Have a great weekend, everybody!

The device shows usage information, and also displays the cost of energy during the day, allowing you to run appliances whenever the cost of electricity is lower. [Tendril via Earth2tech via Treehugger]