Exclusive: John McAfee Wanted for Murder (Updated)

[The following piece ran on Gizmodo.com on November 12, 2012]

Antivirus pioneer John McAfee is on the run from murder charges, Belize police say. According to Marco Vidal, head of the national police force’s Gang Suppression Unit, McAfee is a prime suspect in the murder of American expatriate Gregory Faull, who was gunned down Saturday night at his home in San Pedro Town on the island of Ambergris Caye.

Details remain sketchy so far, but residents say that Faull was a well-liked builder who hailed originally from California Florida. The two men had been at odds for some time. Last Wednesday, Faull filed a formal complaint against McAfee with the mayor’s office, asserting that McAfee had fired off guns and exhibited “roguish behavior.” Their final disagreement apparently involved dogs.

UPDATE: Here is the official police statement:

MURDER
On Sunday the 11th November, 2012 at 8:00am acting upon information received, San Pedro Police visited 5 ¾ miles North of San Pedro Town where they saw 52 year old U.S National Mr. GREGORY VIANT FAULL, of the said address, lying face up in a pool of blood with an apparent gunshot wound on the upper rear part of his head apparently dead. Initial investigation revealed that on the said date at 7:20am LUARA TUN, 39years, Belizean Housekeeper of Boca Del Rio Area, San Pedro Town went to the house of Mr. Faull to do her daily chores when she saw him laying inside of the hall motionless, Faull was last seen alive around 10:00pm on 10.11.12 and he lived alone. No signs of forced entry was seen, A (1) laptop computer brand and serial number unknown and (1) I-Phone was discovered missing. The body was found in the hall of the upper flat of the house. A single luger brand 9 mm expended shells was found at the first stairs leading up to the upper flat of the building. The body of Faull was taken to KHMH Morgue where it awaits a Post Mortem Examination. Police have not established a motive so far but are following several leads.

As we reported last week, McAfee has become increasingly estranged from his fellow expatriates in recent years. His behavior has become increasingly erratic, and by his own admission he had begun associating with some of the most notorious gangsters in Belize.

Since our piece ran on last week, several readers have come forward with additional information that sheds light on the change in McAfee’s behavior. Continue reading Exclusive: John McAfee Wanted for Murder (Updated)

My Dream Airplane Takes to the (Virtual) Skies

In real life, there’s no such thing as a perfect airplane. Every element of design must balance benefits and disadvantages with regards to the nature of the intended mission. But when Popular Mechanics asked me to build the ultimate fantasy airplane, I said: Screw that! I figured it would be more fun just to kluge together my favorite parts from the coolest airplanes I’d ever seen. The result may not make too much sense aerodynamically, but for sheer curb appeal it’s a one-ship Dream Team. The article describing my bizarre, lovely beast is in this month’s (December 2012) issue, including a link to the X-Plane flight-sim website where you can download and fly the plane for yourself.

Secrets, Schemes, and Lots of Guns: Inside John McAfee’s Heart of Darkness

[The following piece ran on Gizmodo.com on November 12, 2012]

As dawn broke over the interior of Belize on April 30, an elite team of 42 police and soldiers, including members of the country’s SWAT team and Special Forces, converged on a compound on the banks of a jungle river. Within, all was quiet. The police called out through a bullhorn that they were there looking for illegal firearms and narcotics, then stormed in, breaking open doors with sledgehammers, handcuffing four security guards, and shooting a guard dog dead. The compound’s owner, a 67-year-old white American man, emerged bleary-eyed from his bedroom with a 17-year-old Belizean girl. The police cuffed him and took him away, along with his guards.

Inside, the cops found $20,000 in cash, a lab stocked with chemistry equipment, and a small armory’s worth of firearms: seven pump-action shotguns, one single-action shotgun, two 9-mm. pistols, 270 shotgun cartridges, 30 9-mm. pistol rounds, and twenty .38 rounds. Vexingly for the police, all of this was actually legal. The guns were licensed and the lab appeared not to be manufacturing drugs but an herbal antibacterial compound.

After fourteen hours, the police let the man and his employees go, but remained convinced they had missed something. Why else would a wealthy American playboy hole himself up out here, far from the tourist zone on the coast, by a navigable river that happened to connect, twenty miles downstream, with a remote corner of the Mexican border? Why else would he hire, as head of security, a rogue cop who’d once plotted to steal guns from the police and sell them to drug traffickers?

It’s not too unusual for eccentric gringos to wind up in Central America and slowly turn stranger—”Rich white men who come to Belize and act strangely are kind of a type,” one local journalist told me. But this one’s story is more peculiar than most. John McAfee is a founding father of the anti-virus software industry, an inveterate self-promoter who built an improbable web security empire on the principles of trust and reliability, then poured his start-up fortune into a series of sprawling commune-like retreats, presenting himself in the public eye as a paragon of engaged, passionate living: “Success, for me,” he has said, “is being able to wake up in the morning and feel like a 12 year old.” But down in Belize, McAfee the enlightened Peter Pan seems to have refashioned himself into a kind of final-reel Scarface. Continue reading Secrets, Schemes, and Lots of Guns: Inside John McAfee’s Heart of Darkness

How Psychopaths Remain Invisible

The word “psychopath” gets thrown around a lot, but in psychiatry it has a specific meaning. Psychopaths are aggressively narcissistic and impulsive and feel a relentless urge for sensation-seeking. They lack empathy and compulsively manipulate others through bullying or deceit. They believe that they are exempt from the rules and show a marked predilection for lying, even when it is not advantageous for them. Continue reading How Psychopaths Remain Invisible

Distant Tracks

A striking visual echo between two very different things:

The image on the left was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars. (I found it here.) It’s a zoom-in from outer space, showing the newly arrived Curiosity rover shortly after it began trundling around on the surface of the Red Planet. As a science fan, I find it incredibly wonderful that we not only have a brand-new mobile lab roaming Mars, but we can look down on the surface from orbit with telescopes so powerful they can make out the rover and even the twin tracks it has left behind in the soil. In this image Curiosity has just left its touchdown spot; the bluish (false color, btw) splotch to the lower right is where the “sky hook” retro rockets have blasted away the dust from the underlying bedrock. What we have, in essence, is a story in a single image — the arrival of a visitor to a distant planet, and the beginning of its exploratory career.

The image to the right shows another wanderer and its strikingly similar set of tracks. It’s a little hard to read, so here’s a rendering of the tracks alone, without all the extraneous background detail:

Here we see not the beginning of a journey, but the end.  The circle to the left is the fossilized remains of a horseshoe crab very much like the kind that wash up on beaches today. Some 150 million years ago, during the reign of the dinosaurs, this individual got swept by a wave out of the ocean and into a stagnant lagoon. The water there had no oxygen, so the clock was ticking. The creature managed to scurry along the muddy bottom for 32 feet before expiring. Apparently it’s not entirely unusual for fossilized horseshoe crabs to turn up alongside traces of their final steps; what’s special about this one is that this particular set of tracks tells an entire story, from the disturbed area of mud where the wave deposited the beast, to the meandering course it took as it sought to escape, to its moment of death. To see the whole set of tracks, and read a more detailed story, click here.

What I love about these pictures is how similar they seem, though they represent two very different kinds of wanderers, separated by hundreds of millions of years and hundreds of millions of miles. Nabokov famously opined that true literature can be recognized as a thing that creates an “indescribable tingle of the spine.” What tends to be overlooked, it seems to me, is that science can create that same feeling.

Human-Powered Helicopters Go Head to Head

The field of human-powered flight achieved an unlikely milestone yesterday when, for the first time, two independent teams went head-to-head in an attempt to win the Sikorsky Prize. Unclaimed after 22 years, the Prize—a human-powered hover of 60 seconds and an altitude of three meters altitude while remaining within a 10-meter square box—has long been believed by many aeronautists to be flatly impossible to attain. But recent achievements have convinced most observers that not only will the prize fall, but it will fall soon.

Before this year, attempts were few and far between, with only three machines ever managing to leave the ground. In 1989, a craft built by students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo stayed airborne for 7.1 seconds. Five years later, Yuri I, built by students at Nihon University in Japan, flew for 19.5 seconds. After a dormant long period, the prize was reinvigorated in 2009 when the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation bumped the prize amount up from $25,000 to its present quarter million. Last year, a team from the University of Maryland’s A.J. Clark School of Engineering achieved 11.4 seconds with a machine dubbed Gamera.

Given all those anemic results, it’s no wonder skepticism remained rife. But this summer the Gamera team fielded a larger, lighter-weight version of its earlier machine, this one called Gamera II, that quickly racked up a string of stunning achievements. This past June, the team upped their best time to an astounding 50 seconds, then in early August improved that to 70 seconds. The duration requirement was in their grasp, but could they pull off the altitude? A three-day visit by an official from the National Aeronautic Association, who could certify a bid for the Sikorsky Prize, was scheduled for Tuesday, August 28 to Thursday, August 30.

Meanwhile, 300 miles to the north, a secretive insurgent campaign was underway…

Read the rest of the story at Popular Mechanics.

The U.S. Army’s New ‘Battle Blimp’

For years, aeronautical dreamers have extolled the promise of hybrid airships—blimp-like aircraft that rely on a combination of buoyant gases and dynamic lift to fly. Such a craft, they say, could achieve the efficiency of a lighter-than-air vehicle and the controllability of a conventional airplane—but repeated attempts to fulfill this vision have so far come to naught.

Earlier this month, however, Northrop Grumman achieved the first flight of what may well prove to be the first operationally successful hybrid airship. The Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, or LEMV, is a 300-foot-long triple-hulled blimp scheduled to be deployed to southwestern Asia next year, where it will loiter at 20,000 feet for up to three weeks at a time, providing a round-the-clock surveillance-coverage capability equivalent to that of 25 fixed-wing drones. Northrop Grumman provided PM these exclusive images of the blimp during its initial testing phase in Lakehurst, N.J.

The LEMVtook off for the first time in the late afternoon of August 8 and flew for 90 minutes. Although the craft is designed to operate autonomously under the guidance of its own control system, two Northrop Grumman employees occupied it during the flight test.

Read the full story, and see more exclusive photos, at Popular Mechanics.

What Your iPhone Does to Your Brain

About three years ago, Search and Rescue professionals started to notice a change in the kind of emergency calls that were coming in. Typically, a rescue mission would start when a hiker failed to report in by a designated time. But then, with increasing frequency, the calls started coming from the missing people themselves: “Hi, I can’t find my trail, I don’t know where I am, I don’t have anything to eat, and it’s getting dark. Can you come get me?” The reason for the change was simple: more people were getting cell phones. Today, of course, everyone does, and the majority of missing-person searches are now initiated by the missing.

This has turned out to be a mixed blessing for Search and Rescue. On the one hand, lost hikers with cell phones don’t have to wait for a day or two before a search gets underway. On the other hand, more people are getting into trouble, because they know that if worse comes to worse, they’re just a phone call away from help. You don’t really need to study a map before you go into the back country, or carry a first aid kit, or enough food and clothes to get you through the night. Just make sure your cell phone bill’s paid up. People head off into the wilderness without thinking about it very much, because they feel that they don’t have to.

The dumbing down of backcountry rescue is just one example of a trend that’s affecting almost every aspect of our cognitive life. I call in mental outsourcing. More and more we’re using technology, especially smartphones, as auxiliary brains, delegating to them mental functions—such as memory, sense of direction, and problem-solving—that we used to routinely do ourselves. Which is perfectly understandable: Why do things the hard way when the easy way is right there at your fingertips? But a growing body of research suggests that the more we offload mental effort, the more we lose the ability to perform those functions for ourselves, with measurable degradation of the corresponding brain regions. Our clever gadgets, in other words, are making us dumb. Continue reading What Your iPhone Does to Your Brain

I’ll Try Anything: Riding Shotgun with Aerobatic Champ Kirby Chambliss

Every year Kirby Chambliss, a five-time national aerobatic champion and Red Bull racer, performs his airshow routine for the crowd at the EAA Airventure fly-in at Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It’s a gut-churning spectacle, an aggressive, low-altitude sequence of end-over-end tumbles, tail slides, flat spins, at what have you. Having ridden along with a few aerobatic pilots in the past, my main thought while watching Chambliss has always been: Thank God I’m not in that plane.

Then a few days before this year’s show I got an email from a PR representative at GoPro, one of Chambliss’ sponsors, asking me if I wanted to go along for a ride. My first reaction was to shudder. But as someone who writes a column called “I’ll Try Anything,” I feel a necessity to keep an open mind about things. So I said yes.

I met Chambliss and his team at 8am at a hanger at the north end of the field. The plane, a half-million dollar custom job that’s entirely built in the United States, was a gleaming work of art in aluminum tubing and carbon fiber: Strong, powerful, precise. “No matter what you do to this plane in the air, you can’t break it,” Chambliss assured me. I zipped into a flight suit, strapped on a parachute, and climbed into the front seat.

The drawback to flying at Oshkosh is that there are always a ton of airplanes trying to land and take off, making for long waits in the sweltering heat. By the time we finally were ordered to lineup on the runway, the prospect of getting up into the cool clean air with Chambliss was actually starting to seem appealing.

We climbed to 3000 feet, and the show began. Continue reading I’ll Try Anything: Riding Shotgun with Aerobatic Champ Kirby Chambliss

Can You Really Be Helplessly Addicted to Heavy Metal, Skittles, or Sunday Football?

Roger Tullgren had a problem. The heavily tattooed and multiply pierced 42-year-old Swedish dishwasher was having a tough time holding down a job. The problem was that Tullgren had very strong feelings out heavy metal, and about Black Sabbath in particular. He just couldn’t function without the sweet straits of death metal peeling the paint off his workplace walls. His employers and coworkers often felt differently, and as a result Tullgren kept finding himself out of work. Then, at last, psychologists came to the music lover’s aid. They declared that he had a full-blown disability in the form of a psychological dependence on Black Sabbath. That’s right, he was addicted to rock. And so his employer had to give Tullgren special dispensation to rock out while doing the dishes.

This is how addiction has come to be seen: no longer a hazard exclusively associated with drugs and alcohol, but one lurking in any pleasurable experience. Enjoy candy? According to Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, sugar is a habit-forming toxin. “It’s addictive,” he told the New Scientist.

Fancy a bit of pigskin? “For some people, watching football can become an obsession,” University of Alabama psychologist Josh Klapow told the college’s web site, UAB News, which noted that “a football addiction can endanger relationships and wreak havoc on the life of a super-fan.”

Hang out on Facebook? “Internet addiction” is one of the new mental illnesses being weighed for inclusion in the DSM-V, the latest revision of psychology’s diagnostic bible. And the American Society of Addiction Medicine thinks that the DSM is being too conservative. They would like to porn, gambling, and even eating to be categorized right alongside heroin and cocaine. “Addiction is addiction,” ASAM member Dr. Raju Haleja told the web site The Fix. “It doesn’t matter what cranks your brain in that direction.”

This profusion of addictions represents a cultural change in how we explain unacceptable behavior. Continue reading Can You Really Be Helplessly Addicted to Heavy Metal, Skittles, or Sunday Football?