Posted in entertainment, space
Mars One is done.
“The company that aimed to put humanity on the red planet has met an unfortunate, but wholly-expected end. Mars One Ventures, the for-profit arm of the Mars One mission was declared bankrupt back in January but wasn’t reported until a keen-eyed Redditor found the listing.”
Fancied being part of a reality TV show about colonizing Mars? Sorry.
Both “The Wandering Earth” and “Crazy Alien” are adapted from works by Liu Cixin, the writer who has led a renaissance in science fiction here, becoming the first Chinese winner of the Hugo Award for the genre in 2015.
His novels are sprawling epics and deeply researched. That makes them plausible fantasies about humanity’s encounters with a dangerous universe. Translating them into movies would challenge any filmmaker, as the director of “The Wandering Earth,” Guo Fan, acknowledged during a screening in Beijing last week.
Science-fiction movies have been slow to catch on in China, but led by “The Wandering Earth,” a wave of new blockbusters might change that.
The “CSI Effect” has been described as being an increased expectation from jurors that forensic evidence will be presented in court that is instantaneous and unequivocal because that is how it is often presented for dramatic effect in television programs and movies. Of course, in reality forensic science, while exact in some respects is just as susceptible to the vagaries of measurements and analyses as any other part of science. In reality, crime scene investigators often spend seemingly inordinate amounts of time gathering and assessing evidence and then present it as probabilities rather than the kind of definitive result expected of a court room filled with actors rather than real people.
Circa 2015
Researchers have used an infrared laser to cool water by about 2°C (36°F) — a major breakthrough in the field. As they are cooled by the laser, the nanocrystals developed by the University of Washington team emit a reddish-green ‘glow’ (shown) that can be seen by the naked eye.
‘Typically, when you go to the movies and see Star Wars laser blasters, they heat things up’, senior author and assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Washington Peter Pauzauskie explained.
‘It was really an open question as to whether this could be done because normally water warms when illuminated.’
Posted in entertainment
Meet the gamers who remind us that when everybody plays, we all win. https://xbx.lv/2WvDLoa #GamingForEveryone #SuperBowl #SBLIII
A new breed of algorithms has mastered Atari video games 10 times faster than state-of-the-art AI, with a breakthrough approach to problem solving.
Designing AI that can negotiate planning problems, especially those where rewards are not immediately obvious, is one of the most important research challenges in advancing the field.
A famous 2015 study showed Google DeepMind AI learnt to play Atari video games like Video Pinball to human level, but notoriously failed to learn a path to the first key in 1980s video game Montezuma’s Revenge due to the game’s complexity.
We’ll be honest, over the years on Translogic we’ve featured a lot of potentially scary tech. Like in many facets of life though, often the things that seem the most frightening actually turn out to be some of the most incredible. On this episode, we’ve hit new heights of both fear and amazement as our host Bucko actually gets to drive a fully functional, bipedal, outrageously badass mech suit. Stop reading. Just watch.
When a company reaches the top of the ladder, they typically kick it away so that others cannot climb up on it. The aim? To prevent competition. When this happens in the pharmaceutical world, in terms of patents, companies quickly apply for broad protection of their products, which can last decades, and, in doing so, they fence off entire research areas for others.
In this video, Tahir Amin an attorney Tahir Amin who specializes in patent law, explains how this “skewed” system hurts everyday people.
Your online profile is less a reflection of you than a caricature.
Whether you like it or not, commercial and public actors tend to trust the string of 1s and 0s that represent you more than the story you tell them. When filing a credit application at a bank or being recruited for a job, your social network, credit-card history, and postal address can be viewed as immutable facts more credible than your opinion.
But your online profile is not always built on facts. It is shaped by technology companies and advertisers who make key decisions based on their interpretation of seemingly benign data points: what movies you choose to watch, the time of day you tweet, or how long you take to click on a cat video.
Decoder, developed in collaboration with a games developer, gets users to assume the role of an intelligence officer tasked with breaking up global criminal gangs (users are able to select a character and their backstory).
To meet the objective, users have to identify different combinations of number strings in missions littered with distraction.
Winning each mission means users unlock letters of the next criminal location (the higher the score, the more letters revealed).
