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Free Wifi Coming to Downtown Las Vegas

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Originally published in Las Vegas Citylife on March 13, 2013

Downtown-wifi-map

This summer, downtown Las Vegas will join Denver, El Paso, Houston and dozens of other municipalities that have installed free wi-fi service in their city centers in an attempt to foster their burgeoning tech scenes.

Phase 1, active by early summer, will include an area bound by U.S. 95 to the north, Eighth Street to the east, Charleston Boulevard to the south, and I-15 to the west. Phase 2, following shortly after, will add an additional area bound by Charleston to the north, Las Vegas Boulevard to the east, Wyoming Avenue to the south and Main Street to west. A third phase is also in development, which will extend service further southeast along Fremont.

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Vegas’ First Hackerspace

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Originally published in Las Vegas Citylife on February 21, 2013

As of last week, SYN Shop is open for business.

Nestled within a row of shops on Fourth Street between Fremont and Ogden, the freshly painted space is bustling with activity as founders and friends build shelves, test hardware and set up equipment. Rows of soldering irons, copper wire tip cleaners and multimeters sit on a workbench under an oscilloscope, waiting to be arranged. A 4-foot-tall wirelessly controlled PDP-11 microcomputer, christened “NOMAD” and mounted to an electric wheelchair base, rumbles around the room.

With its origins in the monthly gatherings held in the garage of founding member Krux, SYN Shop is five years in the making. Several years of planning, negotiation and finally the acquisition of a viable location has led to this: Las Vegas’ first hackerspace.

Think of a hackerspace as something like a gym membership for your brain — a community workshop where, instead of treadmills, ellipticals and weights, you are given access to tools, electronics gear and manufacturing hardware. A place to create and a place to meet, collaborate and learn from other creators.

Hackerspaces are not new. However, aside from a few standouts early on in their history (with the majority of those started in the 1990s), they have only in the last decade begun to be seen as generally viable and self-sustaining, bolstered in part by the growing awareness and popularity of the maker movement.

A repurposed traffic light in the front window shines steadily, indicating the current hours of operation. Green for open, yellow for an hour or less remaining and red for closed. This is especially useful, as while there are posted hours (Monday and Thursday from 6-10 p.m., and Saturday 3-10 p.m.), founders will often open the doors as available, and anyone is welcome to come in and check the place out when the light is on. Access will expand once the space is fully up and running, but for now, the traffic light acts as gatekeeper.

Brian Munroe, ringleader of the group of volunteers that manages SYN Shop (everyone involved is a volunteer), walks me through the space, which features a planning area, a classroom and a maker’s dream list of hardware and machinery.

Thanks to member donations and the support of Work in Progress (which is itself funded by Downtown Project), SYN Shop has already acquired an impressive list of gear, including a Full Spectrum 90w laser cutter, an electronics lab, hand tools, an industrial sewing machine and other crafting tools, two 3-D printers (including a top-of-the-line MakerBot Replicator 2), a Shapeoko CNC mill and the crown jewel of the hackerspace, a Shopbot full-size CNC router.

Everything in the hackerspace is accessible after paying the $40 monthly membership fee, although members must supply their own materials and undergo a brief certification process with the more complex machines to ensure proper use and safety. For traveling makers looking for a place to tinker, day rates will also soon be available.

As the goal of the space is to give builders and tinkerers a place to share, create and learn, Brian emphasizes that SYN Shop is not a traditional or service-based business. At SYN Shop, parts or projects cannot be simply ordered for pickup later — this is an entirely do-it-yourself operation.

Thankfully, makers will not be entirely on their own when it comes to building their creations, as classes will be scheduled frequently, covering everything from basic soldering technique to advanced electronics and hardware design.

With so many of us spending our day-to-day lives working digitally, we often miss out on the pleasure of creating something we can grasp with our hands. To conceive and plan and construct, from the tactile pleasure of handling your own fully formed 3-D model, to placing a soldering tip to a board and seeing that which you’ve labored over suddenly come alive, that is an experience worth having.

Now that can be ours, simply for the price of membership and the willingness to learn.

SYN SHOP 117 N. Fourth St., synshop.org

In These Perilous Times

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Originally published in Las Vegas Citylife on February 13, 2013

“Badly drawn, badly written, and badly printed – a strain on the young eyes and young nervous systems – the effects of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. Their crude blacks and reds spoils a child’s natural sense of colour; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories. Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the `comic’ magazine.”

— Sterling North, Chicago Daily News, 1940

“Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about Rock n’ Roll!”

— Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Super Mario Bros.

In the winter of 1574, early in the days of English theatre, the Common Council of London issued a statement censoring and restricting theatrical performances within the city limits of London, complaining of their great popularity among youth and, as they described it, “the inveigling and alluring of maids, especially of orphans and good citizens’ children under age … and many other corruptions of youth and other enormities.”

While fears of plague and the resultant risk of large gatherings also played a role in the ruling, chief among the reasons for the declaration was the danger that this form of entertainment posed for the young, lower classes, and the overly susceptible.

This was followed by an outright ban within the city limits of London and further censorship, lasting until the Restoration era of the 1660s.

…

From the 1690s until 1710, both Pope Innocent XII and his successor, Pope Clement XI, following previous bans on female singers, whistling, and shouting during performances, outlawed opera entirely, a sinful and seditious form of music at odds with the morals and spirituality of the Church. The Teatro Tordinona, a place where “extravagance, gluttony, and every other most guilty form of intemperance triumphed, so that the resources of families were squandered, youth were corrupted, and pilgrims were scandalized,” was torn down, only to be rebuilt several decades later with opera’s later resurgence.

Pope Clement XI did however go lax on one previous Papal view: cats, traditionally seen as a symbol of Paganism and often exterminated as a result, were finally allowed back into the homes of God-fearing Christians.

…

With the popularity of jazz in the 1920s, so grew opposition to the so-called devil’s music (not the first to be labelled as such, and not the last). Within a decade, over 60 communities in the US (and Germany in its entirety) enabled prohibitions against the public performance of jazz, with the music seen as “the accompaniment of the voodoo dance, stimulating half-crazed barbarians to the vilest of deeds.”

Sixty years later, the 100th Congress of the United States passed Resolution 57, designating jazz as “a rare and valuable national American treasure.”

…

It never stops.

And then there’s film, immediately after its rise in popularity and again and again throughout its history, most notably with the moral censorship guidelines of the 1930 Hayes Code, which stated among its goals that “the important objective must be to avoid the hardening of the audience, especially of those who are young and impressionable, to the thought and fact of crime.”

Television, every couple decades since its invention. As FCC Chairman Newton Minow put it in 1961, a procession of “blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.”

Comic books, particularly during the 1940s and 50s. Portrayals of superheroes, crime, and horror led to the 1954 publication of psychiatrist Fredric Wetham’s Seduction of the Innocent, an alarming screed warning of the dangers of lowbrow sequential art. This was followed by the formation of the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in the same year, which held hearings on the potentially deleterious impact of comic books on young readers.

Role playing games in the 1980s. Dungeons and Dragons was believed by some to promote devil worship and suicidal behavior, with opponents often tying unfortunate events involving young players to the demonic influences of the game.

Don’t get me started on rock and roll.

…

So we arrive at the present, and with it a new target. Video games, a normative form of entertainment with over 90% of youth and the majority of adults playing, are the new opera, the new jazz, once again stimulating half-crazed teenagers to the vilest of deeds.

They’ve been connected to Sandy Hook (Adam Lanza was said to have played in his “underground bunker,” normally referred to as a basement), Aurora (James Holmes, alongside 10 million other players, was a fan of World of Warcraft, a fantasy adventure game), and the Virginia Tech massacre (shooter Seung-Hui Cho hadn’t played a video game since Sonic the Hedgehog in the early 90s).

During a press conference held the week after the Sandy Hook shooting, Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President of the NRA, called the game industry “a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people.”

On January 12th, following outcry against the industry, the Vice President of the United States met with the heads of several prominent video game publishers as part of a task force looking at the role of video games in mass shootings.

Last week, Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, when asked about supporting universal background checks for gun purchases, replied that video games were “a bigger problem than guns.”

Never mind that murder rates have fallen in the United States over the past twenty years, while video game sales have skyrocketed.

Never mind that the largest video game markets in the world, per capita, also happen to have some of the lowest reports of gun violence.

Never mind that this same sort of hysteria has happened many times before.

…

During the rise to prominence of any new form of media or pop culture, there follows a cadre of misguided do-gooders, armed with misinformation and loose correlations, ready to lash out at any perceived potentiality for harm. They take to the streets with the notion of protecting the youth, publishing anecdotal evidence as fact, pointing to unrelated ties and exclaiming “This! This is that which we should repress, for surely it brings no good!”

When tragedy happens, the new medium is hoisted onto the platform, threatened and mocked, examined and dissected because somewhere, somehow, there has to be a link between it and our woes. Because it’s the easy way, because it’s the new, it must be at fault, lest we pause and find fault in ourselves.

Over and over again, until the new is no longer new and another arises to take its place.

Las Vegas Expanding Humanity’s Future in Space

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Originally published in Las Vegas Citylife on January 23, 2013

Bigelow Aerospace sits on 50 acres of land in North Las Vegas, just a few miles south of the Craig Ranch Golf Course. I park in the small lot just inside the gate of the complex, where I am directed into the nearby security building.

Several other journalists are already present, along with a guard. After examining and recording IDs, we’re given badges and presented with the rules. No weapons allowed. No recording or photography outside the designated press areas. Keep your badge visible at all times, and always stay with an escort.

The guard hands us each a map. Guest parking and press room are highlighted green, unauthorized areas, AKA the rest of the complex, are bright red.

We’re shuffled back outside. An SUV idles nearby as another guard explains that we’ll be following him to the interior parking lot. We get back into our cars and caravan a quarter mile down a road called Warp Drive, into the sprawling complex.

…

In the summer of 1961, just months after Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth, a team of engineers at NASA and Goodyear Aircraft Corporation completed their two year project: to develop and prototype a new design of space station, a large inflatable donut that could be tucked within a rocket and launched into space, where it would then expand to a full diameter of 24 feet. Once pressurized, the rotating torus would serve as a way station for astronauts and transport vehicles as they journeyed to the moon and beyond.

Unfortunately, the proposed plan, alongside other 2001-style spinning habitats, nuclear-powered stations, and massive orbiting spheres, never made it farther than the prototype stage before it was shuttered. Serious consideration of an inflatable space station design was shelved, and wouldn’t be revived for another thirty years.

With the development of the International Space Station in the 1990s, inflatable designs were back on the table. NASA proposed TransHab, an inflatable cylinder with a 27 foot diameter, intended to serve as a habitation module for crew based on the ISS. Unfortunately, cost overruns and controversy mired the project, and in 1999 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act banned NASA from further developing TransHab. But there was hope embedded in House Resolution 1654 — an explicit exception stated that, while NASA themselves could not develop the inflatable station, they could lease such a model from commercial sources, provided the costs and safety risks were in line with with previously established guidelines.

Enter Robert Bigelow.

After hearing of the failed project in 1999, Las Vegas native Bigelow, owner of the Budget Suites hotel chain and an avid space buff, reached out to NASA, eventually landing exclusive development rights to the technology. He brought on engineers from the NASA project to consult with his team, including TransHab lead developer William Schneider, and, bolstered by an eventual $250 million from Bigelow’s own coffers (with an additional $250 million pledged), development of an inflatable space module was once again underway.

Bigelow Aerospace has signed a $17.8 million contract with NASA, insignificant money when compared to the cost of the overall project, but a huge win for the private company. It has taken over a decade of development time and the launching of two test modules (the Genesis I and II, both currently in orbit) for Bigelow Aerospace to gain the space agency’s trust.

The milestone-based contract is for the roughly spherical 13 foot Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), which in 2015 will be launched onboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule, connected to Node 3 of the International Space Station, and expanded. There it will live for two years, undergoing environmental studies and experiments, serving as an uninhabited test bed for future module deployments and laying the groundwork for Bigelow Aerospace’s next major project: their own commercial space station.

Earlier this year, Bigelow Aerospace and Hawthorne, California based SpaceX began a joint effort to secure customers around the globe for Bigelow’s proposed 2016 Alpha Station, a space station comprised of two BA 330 inflatable modules, the big brothers of the BEAM module, each capable of supporting a crew of six. Private and national crews to the station will be ferried at costs between $25-36 million per seat, with a minimum stay of 60 days in orbit and access to the station’s shared research facilities.

Beyond the Alpha Station, Bigelow Aerospace is in talks with NASA to make use of the BA 330 in ongoing ventures, and foresees a future where their inflatable habitats are used in Lunar and even Martian exploration missions.

…

Some of us linger for a bit once the media advisory is complete, chatting with the engineers and NASA representatives, wandering around the spacious press room that serves as Bigelow’s museum to the future, the floor filled with scale and full size mockups of inflatable modules, capsules, space stations, and terrestrial bases. It’s amazing that this place is in Las Vegas. Most people have no idea that Bigelow Aerospace exists, let alone that its facility is only minutes from downtown. Why is that? I mean, hell, they’re building space stations in there.

As Mike Gold, the Bigelow Director of Operations, admits, the company has been in heads down mode for several years, and public awareness has not been a priority.

The Bigelow Aerospace website, framed within a model of a BA 330, is woefully outdated, and the company has played no visible role in the recent growth and portrayal of Las Vegas as an up and coming tech hub.

Unlike NASA and SpaceX, who’ve both been incredibly successful in the online space with their outreach programs, Bigelow Aerospace does not maintain a Facebook page, nor do they have any sort of presence on Twitter.

Robert Bigelow himself is notoriously secretive, once claiming to have never sent an email, instead preferring more direct (and secure) methods of communication. Until recent years, he did not allow pictures of himself to be printed. Perhaps this sentiment is woven into the culture of his company as well.

Still, Bigelow Aerospace is doing incredible things, and deserves to be on your radar. In two years, when you see the news of the launch, when the module expands and inflates for the first time, revealing the red and blue Bigelow logo emblazoned across its side, remember one thing: that little piece of space station was born in Las Vegas, Nevada.

A major video-game publisher is coming to Las Vegas

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Originally published in Las Vegas Citylife on January 9, 2013

A major video-game publisher is coming to Las Vegas, and this time it isn’t simply to plant a booth at a convention, drink too much, sleep too little and fly home three days later with a massive hangover.

Thanks to nearly a million dollars in incentives from the Nevada Office of Economic Development and the City of Las Vegas, Take-Two Interactive will be relocating its Northridge, Calif., QA Testing studio to downtown Las Vegas, where it will take over two floors of the newly renovated 1960s structure at 302 E Carson, just one block south of the Fremont Street Experience.

Until now, Las Vegas has been pretty much off the radar of the major game publishers. We have studios that have done work with and for the big guys, but they are all independent, and aside from Petroglyph’s team of roughly a hundred, relatively small in size. A publisher the size of Take-Two deciding to uproot and build a studio here in Las Vegas is significant news.

A minor caveat: it’ll be a quality-assurance studio. This means that the bulk of the facility’s work will revolve around testing games created by the other studios under the Take-Two umbrella, rather than developing its own.

QA is traditionally seen as the more tedious side of game development. It’s a relatively easy way to shove one’s foot in the game industry door, and while there are opportunities for growth within QA itself, many do it with the intention of moving on to other disciplines as quickly as possible. The downside of the ease of entry is that it’s also generally one of the lowest paying and hardest working positions in the industry, with an average salary of $35,000-$40,000.

As a dedicated QA facility, Take-Two’s Las Vegas studio may not have the level of growth opportunities typically found within a full-service studio, as separation from the rest of the development teams may hamper the co-mingling, process familiarity and networking that is required to move up within the industry. Still, it will allow for passionate local industry newcomers and veterans to connect with and learn from each other, and who knows what will happen once those connections are made.

Again, this development is significant.

To understand why, see the story of Westwood Studios, started by locals Brett Sperry and Louis Castle, creators of the venerable Command & Conquer franchise. Local team, very successful, eventually purchased by Electronic Arts and folded into their mothership in 2003.

That’s not the important part. The important part is that as a result of Westwood and its success, Las Vegas was now home to a large cadre of skilled game developers who, even after the buyout and eventual closure, still wanted to make games in Las Vegas. As a result, nearly every active game development studio based in Las Vegas can trace its roots back to that original Westwood team.

With a plan to hire more than 150 developers, Take-Two’s new facility will become the largest studio in town. Thanks to a welcoming business climate, the proximity to Switch (one of the largest data centers in the country) and the growth of Downtown as a tech magnet, other studios will follow.

The game industry as a whole, not unlike Vegas, is very transient, and whether due to personal growth or layoffs, developers tend to move around. As new studios open, as alternative workplaces become available, the risk for these developers will lessen, and Las Vegas will become an even more inviting place for relocation.

The more industry talent that finds its way to Las Vegas, the more industry talent that is grown locally, the more we’ll see local studios continue to spawn. Las Vegas is the capital of casino gaming — with luck, traditional video games won’t be far behind.