So many people comment on my shoes I thought I might as well put the information here for reference. TSA staff all seem to stare at my feet when I pass through a checkpoint, for example. Just the other day a TSA worker came over to me personally during a pat-down to compliment me. I guess if you work for the TSA you know shoes but they were really interested in my Brooks The Green Silence in Deep Royal/Brilliant Blue.

Although I study and practice social engineering every day these shoes have far exceeded any expectation I could have had. They have become one of my favorite tools to passively initiate conversations and mine for information. This photo shows how the left/right shoe colors are opposed to each other, which has really grown on me. I look forward to seeing more people with opposed colors on their feet.

I originally bought them because of their minimalist yet highly-efficient design for running (ultra-light, foot-wrap) and even more importantly the BioMoGo material.

We’ve added a non-toxic, natural additive to the MoGo compound that encourages anaerobic microbes to munch away once it hits an active enclosed landfill. Traditional Ethylene Vinyl Acetate™ (EVA) midsoles can last up to 1,000 years in a landfill. BioMoGo’s microbial munch rate is 50 times faster, biodegrading nutrients into reusable byproducts. Over the course of, say, 20 to 25 years or so, Brooks alone can save 29.9 million pounds of landfill waste. For you pigskin fans out there, that equals 1,277 football fields covered one shoe deep!

It sounds great yet my first pair (Black/Kelly Green) wore out in just 300 miles, which I am told by Brooks is to be expected. That is the only frustrating point for me since I doubt we can see 30 million pounds of waste saved if we our shoes wear four times faster. On the flip side the wear showed me a lot about how I was running and what to improve. Brooks has an answer for this too.

The best solution for all would be to keep waste from being generated and thus reducing the need for landfills. But with the current state of technology and the lack of existing alternatives for durable performance materials from rapidly renewable resources, Brooks feels improving the end-of-life outcome for its highly durable midsoles is currently the best available option.

Brooks specifically makes a point of educating people to reuse their shoes (see The Green Room) and supports organizations like Soles4Souls by donating shoes that can be reused by needy populations. But even after nine lives, shoes eventually will be thrown away—usually ending up in a landfill—and we are working to create a positive outcome for this that doesn’t currently exist.

Even better, Brooks provides a clear answer on how their “biodegradable” material has been tested to be compliant with recognized standards

…ingredients of BioMoGo have been tested at certified independent labs per the following protocols:

Anaerobic Biodegradation. ASTM D5210 – Standard Method for Determining the Anaerobic Biodegradation of Plastic Materials. University of New Mexico Department of Microbiology…

They have become for me the ultimate shoe to better study security and compliance.

The news is about some amazing efficiency in solving problems found by using a “protein folding game” called Foldit.

Researchers have for over a decade been unable to solve the structure despite using many different methods. Even recently, the protein-folding distributed computer program Rosetta@home that uses thousands of home computers’ idle time to compute protein structures, was not able to give an answer. The Foldit players using human intuition and three-dimensional pattern-matching skills, however, were able to solve the problem within days.

The scientific article published by Nature Structure & Molecular Biology (“Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players”) concludes with some amusing analysis by the scientists.

The critical role of Foldit players in the solution of the M-PMV PR structure shows the power of online games to channel human intuition and three-dimensional pattern-matching skills to solve challenging scientific problems. Although much attention has recently been given to the potential of crowdsourcing and game playing, this is the first instance that we are aware of in which online gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem. These results indicate the potential for integrating video games into the real-world scientific process: the ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.

This reminds me of both my high school chemistry and physics teachers who would always start lab work by saying something like “now, let’s make this fun”. So the first question I get from this story is why it has taken the scientific community so long to recognize the power of channeling human intuition through an interface that doesn’t suck.

I have my theories, of course. When I worked on systems used for digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM), and more specifically on radiology technology, I found an odd dilemma in the medical field — the most advanced interfaces were the least desired by highly-trained practitioners.

Medical researchers had me deploying new Irix workstations with high-end graphic processors to develop 3D fly-through capabilities of the human body. After a CT or an MRI scanner was done taking images in “slices” of the body these Unix systems would put all the images back together again into a virtual human. The researchers expected doctors to jump at the chance to use 3D.

To the untrained eye, let alone a gamer, the ability to fly through a patient’s body looked like a fantastic advance in medicine. However, when surgeons and radiologists sat down to look at the big screens (20 inches was big back then) they were unimpressed.

I’ll never forget one late evening when a surgeon rushed in for a pre-op debriefing. I was called in for support, and I stood behind him as he scrolled around the 3D body. Then he said “I can’t use this nonsense”, stood up, and walked over to a wall of old fluorescent-lit white boxes covered in greyscale film images of the brain. He scanned the wall, made some “mmm hmmm” sounds and left.

I stared at the wall of “slices” of the brain. There were literally hundreds of pictures that the surgeon had to put back together in his mind. It seemed like an impressive skill but it also made me wonder why the ability to put a 2D world into 3D would prevent the ability to see in 3D.

That’s a long way of getting to the point that the history of doing things a particular way in medicine creates ruts of reliability. It takes a long time, perhaps even years, for the industry to assess, approve and then adopt technology that a gamer might take less than 24 hours to try and like.

Anyway, this story reads to me like the scientific community has finally found a way to do what others have been doing for years — leveraging gamers to solve problems. And who better to solve 3D problems than people who are highly trained in 3D visualization? That being said I also noticed a slight dig against gamers in the phrase “ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed”.

Are we to believe that gamers are not a formidable force if undirected, or that their own direction is not as formidable as one led by scientists? Seems to me the scientists are the ones who were in need of direction.