Neptune’s Trident case mod honors the god of liquid cooling

By Tim Stevens

What do you do if your Battlestar Galactica case mod has conquered Earth and space with its awesomeness? Why, you conquer the seas, of course. Brian Carter is back with this Neptune’s Trident mod, a lovely blue thing with three separate cooling loops, one for each of the three EVGA GeForce GTX260 video cards inside. The result? A powerhouse for sure and something that we think would look quite appropriate in Tron Legacy.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/23/neptunes-trident-case-mod-honors-the-god-of-liquid-cooling/

Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here’s What Happened

Photo: Joe Pugliese

By Evan Ratliff

Officially it will be another 24 hours before the manhunt begins. That’s when Wired’s announcement of my disappearance will be posted online. It coincides with the arrival on newsstands of the September issue of the magazine, which contains a page of mugshot-like photos of me, eyes slightly vacant. The premise is simple: I will try to vanish for a month and start over under a new identity. Wired readers, or whoever else happens upon the chase, will try to find me.

1  – August 13, 6:40 PM: I’m driving East out of San Francisco on I-80, fleeing my life under the cover of dusk. Having come to the interstate by a circuitous route, full of quick turns and double backs, I’m reasonably sure that no one is following me. I keep checking the rearview mirror anyway. From this point on, there’s no such thing as sure. Being too sure will get me caught.

I had intended to flee in broad daylight, but when you are going on the lam, there are a surprising number of last-minute errands to run. This morning, I picked up a set of professionally designed business cards for my fake company under my fake name, James Donald Gatz. I drove to a Best Buy, where I bought two prepaid cell phones with cash and then put a USB cord on my credit card — an arbitrary dollar amount I hoped would confuse investigators, who would scan my bill and wonder what gadgetry I had purchased. An oil change for my car was another head fake. Who would think that a guy about to sell his car would spend $60 at Oil Can Henry’s?

I already owned a couple of prepaid phones; I left one of the new ones with my girlfriend and mailed the other to my parents — giving them an untraceable way to contact me in emergencies. I bought some Just for Men beard-and-mustache dye at a drugstore. My final stop was the bank, to draw a $477 cashier’s check. It’s payment for rent on an anonymous office in Las Vegas, which is where I need to deliver the check by midday tomorrow.

Crossing the Bay Bridge, I glance back for a last nostalgic glimpse of the skyline. Then I reach over, slide the back cover off my cell phone, and pop out the battery. A cell phone with a battery inside is a cell phone that’s trackable.

About 25 minutes later, as the California Department of Transportation database will record, my green 1999 Honda Civic, California plates 4MUN509, passes through the tollbooth on the far side of the Carquinez Bridge, setting off the FasTrak toll device, and continues east toward Lake Tahoe.

What the digital trail will not reflect is that a few miles past the bridge I pull off the road, detach the FasTrak, and stuff it into the duffle bag in my trunk, where its signal can’t be detected. Nor will it note that I then double back on rural roads to I-5 and drive south through the night, cutting east at Bakersfield. There will be no digital record that at 4 am I hit Primm, Nevada, a sad little gambling town about 40 minutes from Vegas, where $15 cash gets me a room with a view of a gravel pile.

The Adventure continues, continue reading - http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/11/ff_vanish2/

Nov. 23, 1963: Doctor Who Materializes on BBC

By John Scott Lewinski

1963: At 6:15 on a cold, wet night, the BBC premieres its new family science fiction show, Doctor Who, with its first episode, “An Unearthly Child.” The series will become a legendary part of modern British folklore and the longest-running sci-fi series on TV.

Featuring a benevolent traveling alien known only as The Doctor, the series followed the adventures of the heroic Time Lord and his human companions through time and space.

Originally developed by Canadian Sydney Newman, BBC’s head of drama, the day-to-day creation of the show’s first season fell to script department head Donald Wilson, BBC staff writers C. E. Webber and Anthony Coburn, story editor David Whitaker, and producer Verity Lambert. Fans of the show traditionally recognize Lambert as the show’s strongest creative force at the start.

The stories took place in serial form — with each episode lasting about 25 minutes, ending with a cliffhanger that would bring the audience back for the next segment.

Ron Grainer (the composer for many TV themes, including The Prisoner) wrote the series’ unforgettable theme music with its driving bass beat. But experimental composer Delia Derbyshire of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop is credited with choosing the eerie electronic sounds that created the final piece.

The original brief for the character didn’t specify his origin (later identified as Gallifrey), his race or his actual age. Portrayed by veteran character actor William Hartnell, the first Doctor was a dark, often-hostile man of mystery.

Viewers first encountered The Doctor’s ship, the Tardis (Time and Relative Dimensions in Space) in a junkyard as the Doctor headed out in London. The interior of the time-space traveling craft is dimensionally transcendental and exists in its own universe — allowing the ship to be bigger on the inside than its outer shell.

A properly operating Tardis includes a chameleon circuit that changes its exterior appearance to blend in with the surroundings. But The Doctor’s ship malfunctions and remains stuck as a 1960s Metropolitan Police public call box.

Because the show was originally intended for children, the creators cast an appealing, sympathetic actress, Carol Ann Ford, as The Doctor’s teenage granddaughter, Susan. When Ian Chesterton (William Russell) and Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill), two of Susan’s teachers, become concerned over the girl’s bizarre behavior, they stumble across The Doctor and Tardis. Once exposed, The Doctor insists on taking the two earthlings with him into time and space.

But, a very real tragedy almost swept the show aside before any audience found it. The assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22 dominated the news and public consciousness that weekend, obviously pushing the premiere of a new TV series off the British TV radar.

BBC program planners decided to re-air the original premiere a week later, along with the series’ second episode. Doctor Who’s first storyline featured time travel back to caveman times and attracted a lukewarm public and critical reaction.

But, the show’s second complete story — a sci-fi piece kicking off with “The Dead Planet” — featured a voyage to the home planet of the Daleks. The metallic monsters became an overnight sensation and established Doctor Who as a British institution.

The series remained in production from 1963 to 1989. Producers invented the convention that The Doctor’s alien physique could regenerate into new forms 12 times — allowing new actors to seamlessly take over the part through the decades. After Hartnell came Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Perter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann, Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant. And next year we’ll have Matt Smith.

Doctor Who returned to regular BBC production under producer Russell T. Davies in March 2005 and remains one of the network’s top-rated series.

Photos: 1) Left to right: William Russell, Carol Ann Ford, William Hartnell and Jacqueline Hill made up the original Tardis crew on Doctor Who.
2) The Daleks surround the Tardis in the ’60s Doctor Who.
Images courtesy BBC

Sources: BBC; Doctor Who: The Official Site; Doctor Who: The Classic Series Site

See also:

• New Doctor Brings New Doctor Who Logo, Insignia With Him
• Timeless Tom Baker Makes Return Trip to Doctor Who
• Fans Reconstruct Doctor Who’s Trashed Past
• Moffat Leading Doctor Who Into the Future
• Nov. 23, 1889: S.F. Gin Joint Hears the World’s First Jukebox
• March 21, 1963: The Rock
• March 31, 1963: L.A. Streetcars Take Their Last Ride
• June 20, 1963: Cuban Missile Crisis Spurs Moscow-D.C. ‘Hot Line’
• July 19, 1963: Cracking the 100-Kilometer-High Barrier … in a Plane
• Aug. 5, 1963: Finally, a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
• Aug. 28, 1963: Road to Redmond Walks on Water
• Nov. 9, 1963: Dual Disasters Stun Japan

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/11/1123dr-who-debuts

New ‘FinFETs’ Promising For Smaller Transistors, More Powerful Chips

Researchers are making progress in developing new types of transistors, called finFETs, which use a finlike structure instead of the conventional flat design, possibly enabling engineers to create faster and more compact circuits and computer chips. The fins are made not of silicon, but from a material called indium-gallium-arsenide, as shown in this illustration. (Credit: Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University)

Purdue University researchers are making progress in developing a new type of transistor that uses a finlike structure instead of the conventional flat design, possibly enabling engineers to create faster and more compact circuits and computer chips.

The fins are made not of silicon, like conventional transistors, but from a material called indium-gallium-arsenide. Called finFETs, for fin field-effect-transistors, researchers from around the world have been working to perfect the devices as potential replacements for conventional transistors.

In work led by Peide Ye, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, the Purdue researchers are the first to create finFETs using a technology called atomic layer deposition. Because atomic layer deposition is commonly used in industry, the new finFET technique may represent a practical solution to the coming limits of conventional silicon transistors.

“We have just demonstrated the proof of concept here,” Ye said.

Findings are detailed in three research papers being presented during the International Electron Devices Meeting on Dec. 7-9 in Baltimore. The work is led by doctoral student Yanqing Wu, who provided major contributions for two of the papers.

The finFETs might enable engineers to sidestep a problem threatening to derail the electronics industry. New technologies will be needed for industry to keep pace with Moore’s law, an unofficial rule stating that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles about every 18 months, resulting in rapid progress in computers and telecommunications. Doubling the number of devices that can fit on a computer chip translates into a similar increase in performance. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to continue shrinking electronic devices made of conventional silicon-based semiconductors.

In addition to making smaller transistors possible, finFETs also might conduct electrons at least five times faster than conventional silicon transistors, called MOSFETs, or metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors.

“The potential increase in speed is very important,” Ye said. “The finFETs could enable industry to not only create smaller devices, but also much faster computer processors.”

Transistors contain critical components called gates, which enable the devices to switch on and off and to direct the flow of electrical current. In today’s chips, the length of these gates is about 45 nanometers, or billionths of a meter.

The semiconductor industry plans to reduce the gate length to 22 nanometers by 2015. However, further size reductions and boosts in speed are likely not possible using silicon, meaning new designs and materials will be needed to continue progress.

Indium-gallium-arsenide is among several promising semiconductor alloys being studied to replace silicon. Such alloys are called III-V materials because they combine elements from the third and fifth groups of the periodical table.

Creating smaller transistors also will require finding a new type of insulating layer essential for the devices to switch off. As gate lengths are made smaller than 22 nanometers, the silicon dioxide insulator used in conventional transistors fails to perform properly and is said to “leak” electrical charge.

One potential solution to this leaking problem is to replace silicon dioxide with materials that have a higher insulating value, or “dielectric constant,” such as hafnium dioxide or aluminum oxide.

The Purdue research team has done so, creating finFETs that incorporate the indium-gallium-arsenide fin with a so-called “high-k” insulator. Previous attempts to use indium-gallium-arsenide finFETs to make devices have failed because too much current leaks from the circuit.

The researchers are the first to “grow” hafnium dioxide onto finFETs made of a III-V material using atomic layer deposition. The approach could make it possible to create transistors using the thinnest insulating layers possible — only a single atomic layer thick.

The finlike design is critical to preventing current leakage, in part because the vertical structure can be surrounded by an insulator, whereas a flat device has the insulator on one side only.

The work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Semiconductor Research Consortium and is based at the Birck Nanotechnology Center in Purdue’s Discovery Park.

---

Adapted from materials provided by Purdue University. Original article written by Emil Venere.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091110171746.htm

Cisco doubles down on collaboration with 61 new products

Included are enterprise e-mail and social networking software

By Matt Hamblen

Cisco Systems Inc. massively expanded its portfolio of collaboration technologies today, announcing 61 products, including a corporate-grade hosted e-mail system called Cisco WebEx Mail as well as a social networking application and a video system to help groups securely share video content and search capabilities.

The range of products shows Cisco’s interest in integrating and expanding new video-related technologies with more traditional collaboration tools, such as instant messaging and presence, Cisco officials said. One new tool, called the Intercompany Media Engine, focuses on allowing companies to share business-to-business communications over any IP network.

The products are designed in part to make it easier for companies to incorporate content from video and other media produced on all kinds of devices, from expensive telepresence videoconferencing systems to handheld Flip video cameras, as well as photos and recordings taken from smartphones.

Alan Cohen, vice president of enterprise solutions, said in an interview that today’s new products, and Cisco’s recent agreement to buy videoconferencing vendor Tandberg for $3 billion demonstrate that “Cisco is doubling down [its investment] on collaboration.”

Cohen said he feels Cisco “intends on doing this,” referring to a completion of the massive Tandberg purchase, despite a blog by Cisco Chief Strategy Officer Ned Hooper on Nov. 2 that suggested fiscal prudence might prevent the deal from being completed.

Yankee Group Inc. analyst Zeus Kerravala said the Tandberg deal “has to go through just because video is too important to let it fall through.” Considering the broad range of products that Cisco announced, Kerravala called Cisco’s overall investment in collaboration “huge.”

Of the 61 products, Cisco’s new WebEx Mail product will have the biggest impact, Kerravala said, because of the industrywide move into cloud computing. The e-mail system will put Cisco in a better position to compete with Microsoft for e-mail customers as e-mail moves more fully to the cloud architecture in 2012, Kerravala said.

Also important, Kerravala said, is Cisco’s new Unified Communications version 8.0, which adds support for a wide range of endpoints, including more smartphones, video and Wi-Fi-ready Cisco Unified IP phones. That software will help connect the diverse array of devices that produce video. “The value of a network is proportional to the number of nodes, and there are a lot of nodes out there but they are just not connected now,” Kerravala added.

Cisco didn’t offer pricing or shipping information for the new products.

WebEx Mail will interoperate with Microsoft Outlook and support mobile devices. Built on technology acquired from PostPath, it will allow each user a 25GB mailbox, Cohen said. It will also support firewalls and other security services.

Article Continues - http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9140473/Cisco_doubles_down_on_collaboration_with_61_new_products

Implantable Silicon-Silk Electronics

Silicon on silk: This clear silk film, about one centimeter squared, has six silicon transistors on its surface. These flexible devices can be implanted in mice like the one in this image without causing any harm, and the silk degrades over time. The orange liquid on the hair is a disinfectant used during the surgery.  Credit: Rogers/Omenetto

Biodegradable circuits could enable better neural interfaces and LED tattoos.

By Katherine Bourzac

By building thin, flexible silicon electronics on silk substrates, researchers have made electronics that almost completely dissolve inside the body. So far the research group has demonstrated arrays of transistors made on thin films of silk. While electronics must usually be encased to protect them from the body, these electronics don’t need protection, and the silk means the electronics conform to biological tissue. The silk melts away over time and the thin silicon circuits left behind don’t cause irritation because they are just nanometers thick.

“Current medical devices are very limited by the fact that the active electronics have to be ‘canned,’ or isolated from the body, and are on rigid silicon,” says Brian Litt, associate professor of neurology and bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Litt, who is working with the silk-silicon group to develop medical applications for the new devices, says they could interact with tissues in new ways. The group is developing silk-silicon LEDs that might act as photonic tattoos that can show blood-sugar readings, as well as arrays of conformable electrodes that might interface with the nervous system.

Last year, John Rogers, professor of materials science and engineering at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, developed flexible, stretchable silicon circuits whose performance matches that of their rigid counterparts. To make these devices biocompatible, Rogers’s lab collaborated with Fiorenzo Omenetto and David Kaplan, professors of bioengineering at Tufts University in Medford, MA, who last year reported making nanopatterned optical devices from silkworm-cocoon proteins.

To make the devices, silicon transistors about one millimeter long and 250 nanometers thick are collected on a stamp and then transferred to the surface of a thin film of silk. The silk holds each device in place, even after the array is implanted in an animal and wetted with saline, causing it to conform to the tissue surface. In a paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, the researchers report that these devices can be implanted in animals with no adverse effects. And the performance of the transistors on silk inside the body doesn’t suffer.

Article Continues- http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23847/?a=f

Diablo for loners: the story behind indie-hit Torchlight

Creating a new entry in the world of Diablo-style loot-fests that sticks to single-player may seem mad in this day and age, but Torchlight from Runic Games manages to pull it off. We discuss where the game came from, where it’s going, and why it deserves the buzz coming from all corners of the Internet.

By Ben Kuchera

Sometimes it seems like your friends list on Steam is completely taken over by a game, and right now PC gamers are enamored with a new, $20 take on the Diablo formula called Torchlight. This is a game with bright, attractive graphics, enough looting to satisfy fans of new equipment and weaponry, and… no multiplayer? Ars Technica caught up with Wonder Russell, the “Minister of Culture” for Runic Games, to explore what makes this game so special.

From the ashes…

The first question was a simple one: why ship a top-down loot fest such as Torchlight without multiplayer? The answer goes back to how Runic Games formed, and where the game is headed, along with an interesting culture at the developer that rewards playability. It starts with the closure of Flagship Studios, and the subsequent loss of all the IP that developer was working on. In the case of the team that would become Runic Games, they lost Mythos, a free-to-play MMO, right before it went into open beta.

“To lose a game you’ve worked on for years like that is heartbreaking, so first priority for us as a new team was simple: ship a game,” Russell explained. The founders of the company had worked on both Diablo and Fate, so they knew this genre inside and out—it was a natural fit. Sticking to single-player meant that they could focus on one thing and deliver it with a high degree of polish.

So they wanted something fast, in the vein of Diablo, but it had to be good. Those requirements rarely add up to anything worthwhile, but the strategy for creating the game left a lot of room for iteration. “The MO at Runic is to ‘always have a playable build.’ The game has been essentially playable weeks after its inception, and so everyone can play and comment and tweak—we have constant, daily iterations of the game, so playtesting really began a year ago and has only ramped up since then with our hardworking QA team,” Russell told Ars. They also invited the friends and family of the developers to come in and play to make sure the game was fun for the more casual fans. The goal was simple: to make the game fun to play, even if that meant focusing on single-player.

Torchlight should have quite the future ahead of it. “We are making an MMO version, due out in about two years. Torchlight with a co-op would be fun, but it just wasn’t feasible in our initial dev cycle, and even if we could add it at this point, we’d essentially be competing with our own game.”

Digital distribution makes life easier for indies

When it came to distribution, Runic cast the net wide. “We basically approached all the usual suspects—Steam, Direct2Drive, etc, and began setting up those partnerships and agreements,” Russell said. “There is definitely an ease-of-use and approachability with digital downloads that is a huge help to the indie developer, but getting the word out there that you have a game for sale that’s a lot of fun to play is always going to be the trickiest part of the business, especially for a small company like ours, with zero marketing budget.”

Luckily, the community around the game has done quite the job of evangelizing for them; a thread in our own forum has resulted in many buying the $20 game. That price point—and the low requirements—weren’t an accident. “The price point was really set with the idea of making Torchlight as widely available as possible, which we extend to our settings too; we don’t use shaders, and have optimized the game to even run on a netbook,” Russell explained. “We want your granny to be able to play if she wants to!” The game features three character classes, with around 20 hours of gameplay for each play-through.

That 20-hour mark is somewhat misleading, however. After you beat the game the first time, you unlock a never-ending dungeon as well as more quests to help you get to the level 100 cap. You’ll also be able to enchant an item and pass it on to your “descendant,” the next character you play with. Shared stashes allow you to pass items from one character to another; while you play with one character, you can be looting for everyone. “That way, if you are playing a melee character and find a great gun, you can keep it in the shared stash for your ranged character, rather than selling it,” Russell told Ars.

“We’ve made Torchlight to have extremely high replayability, the randomized dungeons, help too.” He also notes that they’re releasing the complete set of developer tools used to create the game itself. “We know the modding community is going to go crazy, and folks will be able to play with tons of new content, levels, monsters, and more.”

But is the game good?

In a word: yes. The addiction grabs you very quickly, and the ability to share loot as well as level your in-game pet go a long way to making this a very inviting game with a fair amount of challenge in the higher levels. The replayability is also very high, and the $20 price tag puts it into the realm of an impulse buy.

If you’re a fan of the genre, there really is no excuse not to pick this one up, and my mouse-finger is already itching to play more. It can be a lonely experience at times, but by sticking to what it knew and leveraging the best of PC gaming, Runic Games has created a high-quality title that’s worth the buzz. This is a keeper.

Follow the link for a Video clip of game play – http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/11/diablo-for-loners-the-story-behind-indie-hit-torchlight.ars

ARPA-E Awards Consortium $4.4M to Develop Next-Generation Magnets; Applications in Motors in Hybrids, EVs, Wind Turbines

Schematic representation of the bottom-up assembly concept to develop high-energy nanocomposite materials for next-generation magnets. Source: Univ. of Delaware

A consortium led by the University of Delaware won a $4.4 million grant from the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) (earlier post) to develop high-performance, next-generation permanent magnet materials, with a 2x target increase over the state-of-the art magnetic energy density.

High-energy permanent magnets are critical components in the new energy economy due to their widespread use in advanced motors for hybrids and electric vehicles and in advanced wind turbine generators, and the currently dominant Nd-Fe-B (neodymium, iron and boron) magnets use materials that are not domestically available and are subject to critical supply disruptions.

<!––>George Hadjipanayis, the Richard B. Murray Professor of Physics and chairperson of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware, is the principal investigator on the project. He will coordinate a team of chemists, material scientists, physicists, and engineers from the University of Delaware; University of Nebraska; Northeastern University; Virginia Commonwealth University; the US Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University, in Ames, Iowa; and the Electron Energy Corporation in Landisville, Pa.

Hadjipanayis was one of the three researchers who discovered the Nd-Fe-B magnets in the early 1980s. In the new project, he and his team will be working to identify new materials that will result in magnets twice as strong as those currently in existence.

The UD-led team will explore three different routes over the three-year project:

• Discover new materials in tertiary rare earth-transition metal-element X systems that have not yet been explored due to synthesis difficulties such as vapor pressure, high reactivity, toxicity, or their refractory nature.
• Develop materials that are free of rare earth metals and stabilized by the addition of small non-magnetic atoms (Fe-Co-X).
• Use the bottom-up approach to develop high-energy nanocomposite materials consisting of a uniform and nanoscale mixture of high anisotropy hard (Nd-Fe-B) and high magnetization soft (Fe) magnetic phases.

At the recent International Conference on Magnetism 2009 held in Germany, Prof. Hadjipanayis gave an invited talk on a novel experimental approach for large-scale fabrication of rare-earth-transition-metal magnetic nanoparticles.

The approach of the University of Delaware researchers is based on high-energy ball milling, which for two decades has been employed in manufacturing of nanocrystalline and amorphous permanent magnet materials. In their study, the milling was done in the presence of surfactants (oleic acid) which kept the size of the particles small. The SmCo particles fabricated by this technique had an average size down to 5-6 nm and exhibited a room-temperature coercivity of up to 19 kOe.

These nanoparticles are expected to play a very important role (as a hard magnetic component) in the synthesis of nanocomposite high performance permanent magnets with double the strength of the best existing magnets. The hard magnetic flakes, which were also fabricated by this procedure, could have applications in laminated magnets with increased electrical resistivity and high-gradient magnetic filters.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/11/ud-arpae-20091102.html

Intel and Numonyx pave the way for scalable, higher density phase change memory

by Darren Murph

Both Intel and Numonyx have been talking up phase change memory for years now, but for some reason, we’re slightly more inclined to believe that the latest breakthrough is actually one that’ll matter to consumers. In a joint release, the two have announced a new non-volatile memory technology that supposedly “paves the way for scalable, higher density phase change memory products.” Put as simply as possible, researchers have been testing a 64Mb chip that “enables the ability to stack, or place, multiple layers of PCM arrays within a single die,” and the two are calling the discovery PCMS (phase change memory and switch). We know, you’re drowning in technobabble here, but if these two can really apply Moore’s Law to density scaling, you’ll be thanking ‘em as you pick up your $50 6TB hard drive in 2014.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/30/intel-and-numonyx-pave-the-way-for-scalable-higher-density-phas/

Giz Explains: Why Every Country Has a Different F#$%ing Plug

Ok, maybe not every country, but with at least 12 different sockets in widespread use it sure as hell feels like it to anyone who’s ever traveled. So why in the world, literally, are there so many? Funny story!

The more you look at the writhing orgy of plugs in the world, the sillier it seems. If you buy a phone charger at the airport in Florida, you won’t be able to use it when your flight lands in France. If you buy a three-pronged adapter for le portable in Paris, you might not be able to plug it in when your train drops you off in Germany. And when your flight finally bounces to a stop on the runway in London, get ready to buy a comically large adapter to tap into the grid there. But that’s cool! You can take the same adapter to Singapore with you! And parts of Nigeria! Oh yeah, and if said charger doesn’t support 240v power natively, make sure you buy a converter, or else it might explode.

And aside from a few oases, like the fledgling standardization of the Type C Europlug in the European Union, this is the picture all across the world.

I’d hesitate to refer to power sockets as a part of a country’s culture, because they’re plugs—they don’t really mean anything. But in the sense that they’re probably not going to change until they’re forcefully replaced with something wildly new, it’s kind of what they are.

There are around 12 major plug types in use today, each of which goes by whatever name their adoptive countries choose. For our purposes, we’re going to stick with U.S. Department of Commerce International Trade Administration names (PDF), which are neat and alphabetical: America uses A and B plugs! Turkey uses type C! Etc. Thing is, these names are arbitrary: the letters are just assigned to make talking about these plugs less confusing—they don’t actually mandate anything. They’re not standards, in any meaningful sense of the word.

And even worse, these sockets are divided into two main groups: the 110-120v fellas, like the the ones we use in North America, and the 220-240v plugs, like most of the rest of the world uses. It’s not that the plugs and sockets themselves are somehow tied to one voltage or another, but the devices and power grids they’re attached to probably are.

How This Happened

The history of the voltage split is a pretty short story, and one you’ve probably heard bits and pieces of before. Edison’s early experiments with direct current (DC) power in the late 1800s netted the first useful mainstream applications for electricity, but suffered from a tendency to lose voltage over long distances. Nonetheless, when Nikola Tesla invented a means of long-distance transmission with alternating current (AC) power, he was doing so in direct competition with Edison’s technology, which happened to be 110v. He stuck with that. By the time people started to realize that 240v power might not be such a bad idea for the US, it was the 1950s, and switching was out of the question.

Words were exchanged, elephants were electrocuted, and eventually, the debate was settled: AC power was the only option, and national standardization started in earnest. Westinghouse Electric, the first company to buy Tesla’s patents for power transmission, settled on an easy standard: 60Hz, and 110v. In Europe—Germany, specifically—a company called BEW exercised their monopoly to push things a little further. They settled somewhat arbitrarily on a 50Hz frequency, but more importantly jacked voltages up to 240, because, you know, MORE POWER. And so, the 240 standard slowly spread to the rest of the continent. All this happened before the turn of the century, by the way. It’s an old beef.

For decades after the first standards, newfangled el-ec-trick-al dee-vices had to be patched directly into your house’s wiring, which today sounds like a terrifying prospect. Then, too, it was: Harvey Hubbell’s “Separable Attachment Plug“—which essentially allowed for non-bulb devices to be plugged into a light socket for power—was designed with a simple intention:

My invention has for its object to…do away with the possibility of arcing or sparking in making connection, so that electrical power in buildings may be utilized by persons having no electrical knowledge or skill.

Thanks, Harvey! He later adapted the original design to include a two-pronged flat-blade plug, which itself was refined into a three-pronged plug—the third prong is for grounding—by a guy named Philip Labre in 1928. This design saw a few changes over the years too, but it’s pretty much the type Americans use now.

Here’s the thing: Stories like that of Harvey Hubbell’s plug were unfolding all over the world, each with their own twist on the concept. This was before electronics were globalized, and before country-to-country plug compatibility really mattered. The voltage debate had been pared down to two, which made life a bit easier for power companies to set up shop across the world. But once they were set up, who cared what style plug their customers used? What were you gonna do, lug your new vacuum cleaner across the ocean on a boat? Early efforts to standardize the plug by organizations like the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) had trouble taking hold—who were they to tell a country which plug to adopt?—and what little progress they did make was shattered by the Second World War.

Take the British plug. Today, it’s a huge, three-pronged beast with a fuse built right into it—one of the weirder plugs in the world, to anyone who’s had a chance to use one. But it isn’t Britain’s first plug, or even their first proprietary plug. In the early 1900s the Isles’ cords were capped with the British Standard 546, or Type D hardware, which actually include six subversions of its own, all of which were physically incompatible with one another. This worked out fine until the Second World War, when they got the shit bombed out of them by Germany, and had to rebuild entire swaths of the country in the midst of a severe shortage of basic building supplies— copper, in particular. This made rewiring stuff an expensive proposition, so the government was all, “we need a new plug, stat!”

Here was the pitch: Instead of wiring each socket to a fuseboard somewhere in the house, which would take quite a bit of wire, why not just daisy-chain them together on one wire, and put the fuses in each plug? Hey presto, copper shortage, solved. This was called the British Standard 1363, and you can still find them dangling from wires today. Notice how even in the 1940s and ’50s—practically yesterday!—the UK was devising a new type of plug without any regard for the rest of the world.

Now imagine every other developed country in the world doing the same thing, with a totally different set of historical circumstances. That’s how we ended up here, blowing fuses in our Paris hotel rooms because our travel adapters’ voltage warning were inexplicably written in Cyrillic. Oh, and it gets worse.

You know how the British had control over India for, like, ninety years? Well, along with exporting cricket and inflicting unquantifiable cultural damage, they showed the subcontinent how to plug stuff in, the British way! Problem is, they left in 1947. The BS 1363 plug—the new one—wasn’t introduced until 1946, and didn’t see widespread adoption until a few years later. So India still uses the old British plug, as does Sri Lanka, Nepal and Namibia. Basically, the best way to guess who’s got which socket is to brush up on your WW1/WW2 history, and to have a deep passion for postcolonial literature. No, really.

Is There Any Hope for the Future?

No. I talked to Gabriela Ehrlich, head of communications for the International Electrotechnical Commission, which is still doing its thing over in Switzerland, and the outlook isn’t great. “There are standards, and there is a plug that has been designed. The problem is, really, everyone’s invested in their own system. It’s difficult to get away from that.”

When Holland’s International Questions Commission first teamed up with the IEC to form a committee to talk about this exact problem in 1934. Meetings were stalled, there was some resistance, blah blah blah, and the committee was delayed until 1940. Then a war—a World War, even!—threw a stick in the committee’s spokes, (or a fork in their socket? No?), and the issue was effectively dropped until about 1950, when the IEC realized that there were “limited prospects for any agreement even in this limited geographical region (Europe).” It’d be expensive to tear out everyone’s sockets, and the need didn’t feel that urgent, I guess.

Plus, the IEC can’t force anyone to do anything—they’re sort of like the UN General Assembly for electronics standards, which means they can issue them, but nobody has to follow them, no matter how good they are. As time passed, populations grew, and hundred of millions of sockets were installed all over the world. The prospect of switching hardware looked more and more ridiculous. Who would pay for it? Why would a country want to change? Wouldn’t the interim, with mixed plug standards in the same country, be dangerous?

But the IEC didn’t quite abandon hope, quietly pushing for a standard plug for decades after. And they even came up with some! In the late 80s, they came up with the IEC 60906 plug, a little, round-pronged number for 240v countries. Then they codified a flat-pronged plug for 110-120v countries, which happened to be perfectly compatible with the one we already use in the US. As of today, Brazil is the only country that even plans to adopt the IEC 60906, so, uh, there’s that.

I asked Gabriela if there was any hope, any hope at all, for a future where plugs could just get along:

Maybe in the future you’ll have induction charging; you have a device planted into your wall, and you have a [wireless] charging mechanism.

Last time I saw a wireless power prototype was at the Intel Developer Forum in 2008, and it looked like a science fair project: It consisted of two giant coils, just inches apart, which transmitted enough electricity to light a 40w light bulb. So yeah, we’ll get this power plug problem all sorted by oh, let’s say, 2050?

She took care to emphasize that the standards are still there for people to adopt, so countries could jump onboard, but even in a best-case scenario, for as long as we use wires we’ll have at least two standards to deal with—a 110-120v flat plug and the 240-250v round plug. For now, the Commission is taking a more practical approach to dealing with the problem, issuing specs for things like laptop power bricks, which can handle both voltages and come with interchangeable lead wires, as well as as something near and dear to our hearts: “We have to move forward into plugs we can really control,” Gabriela told me. She means new stuff like USB, which is turning into the de facto gadget charging standard. The most we can hope for is a future where AC outlets are invisible to us, sending power to newer, more universal plugs. My phone’ll charge via USB just as well in Sub-Saharan Africa as it will in New York City; just give me the port.

In the meantime, this means that things really aren’t going to change. Your Walmart shaver will still die if you plug it into a European socket with a bare adapter, Indians will still be reminded of the British Empire every time they unplug a laptop, Israel will have their own plug which works nowhere else in the world, and El Salvador, without a national standard, will continue to wrestle with 10 different kinds of plug.

In other words, sorry.

Many thanks to Gabriela Ehrlich and the IEC, as well as the Institute for Engineering and Technology and Wiring Matters (PDF), and USC Viterbi’s illumin review. Map adapted from Wikimedia Commons by Intern Kyle

Still something you wanna know? Still can’t figure out how to plug in your Bosnian knockoff iPhone? Send questions, tips, addenda or complaints to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

Send an email to John Herrman, the author of this post, at jherrman@gizmodo.com.

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