There are a bunch of cool physics things you can do with a video like this. For me, I’m going to answer two questions. First, how far away was this camera from the boosters when they turned on the engines? Second, what kind of acceleration did the boosters have while slowing down?
Watch the video above and be sure to have the sound on. Notice that you see the rockets turn on before you hear them? Actually, there are several sounds and I’m not exactly sure what each one is. I know there are multiple sonic booms—but I’m not sure if they happen before or around the same time as the rocket engine. Actually, Destin from Smarter Every Day has a very nice video about the sounds of the Falcon Heavy launch—listen to it with earphones.
So, let’s assume that the really loud sound is from the engines turning on. We see them before we hear them because light travels way faster than sound. In fact, it wouldn’t be crazy to assume that the light from the engines travels to the camera in zero time—at least that’s what I’m going to do. This means that the time between seeing the rockets and hearing them is due to sound traveling over some distance. By knowing the speed of sound and the time difference, I can calculate the distance. In normal conditions, the speed of sound is approximately 343 m/s. From the video, the time between the flash and the sound is about 9.8 seconds. Here is the calculation of the distance.
That seems pretty close—just a little bit over 2 miles away. But that also shows you how loud these things are. Now, you could use this distance and try to find the exact location of the observing camera. Oh, here is something for you to try if you want a homework question: Look at the difference between the time the rockets turn off and the camera stops hearing the sounds. This could be used to find the distance from the camera to the landing point (rather than the distance to the rockets in the air). You could then use this to estimate the altitude of the rockets when the rockets turn on.
Now for the second question: What was the acceleration of the rockets during the landing phase? I am going to start with an assumption—that the rockets were traveling at the speed of sound at the time of rocket ignition. This probably isn’t exactly true, but it should be around that speed. The only other thing I need is the acceleration time. This isn’t too difficult to see both when the rockets fire and when they touch down. From this, I get a thrust time of 15.6 seconds.
Acceleration is defined as the change in velocity divided by the change in time. I estimated the initial velocity, and the final velocity is obviously zero. This means the acceleration would be:
That’s a fairly reasonable acceleration—just over 2 g’s. Two things to note. This is the magnitude of the acceleration—so I left off the negative sign. Also, this is the average acceleration. It’s very possible that some parts of this landing had accelerations higher than 22 m/s2.
If you want, you can try to get the position vs. time for the landing boosters—but it might be difficult from this video as it’s not entirely stable.
‘Altered Carbon’ and TV’s New Wave of Transhumanism
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The future belongs to those who can afford it. This may be virtually true in today’s world, where surviving retirement can feel impossible, but it’s also the literal premise of Altered Carbon, Netflix’s new prestige sci-fi series. Based on Richard K. Morgan’s novel of same name, the neo-noir is set several hundred years in the future, when human consciousness has been digitized into microchip-like “stacks” constantly being swapped into and out of various bodies, or “sleeves.”
This technology, along with innovations like human cloning and artificial intelligence, has given society a quantum leap, but it’s also sent socioeconomic stratification into overdrive, creating dire new realities for the poor and incarcerated while simultaneously producing an elite upper-class. Called “Mets”—short for “Methuselahs”—the members of Altered Carbon’s 0.001 percent have achieved virtual immortality thanks to vaults of their own cloned sleeves and cloud backups full of their stacks. It’s either dystopia or utopia, depending on one’s bank account.
Whatever your views on the show’s plot, in which a former rebel supersoldier named Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman), on ice in a stack prison, is revived and hired by a Met to solve the murder of his last sleeve, Altered Carbon’s best quality is its worldbuilding. In the 25th century, transhumanism—the belief that human beings are destined to transcend their mortal flesh through technology—has reached its full potential, and some of its end results are not pretty, at all.
But Altered Carbon is only the latest bit of transhumanism to hit TV recently. From Black Mirror’s cookies and Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams’ mind-invading telepaths and alien bodysnatchers to Star Trek: Discovery’s surgical espionage and Travelers’ time-jumping consciousness, the classic tropes of body-hopping, body-swapping, and otherwise commandeering has exploded in an era on the brink, one in which longevity technology is accelerating more rapidly than ever, all while most people still trying to survive regular threats to basic corporeal health and safety.
These tropes have enjoyed a healthy existence in sci-fi and horror for decades, but now more than ever transhumanism is ubiquitous in pop culture, asking us to consider the ethical, personal, political, and economic implications of an ideology with a goal—implementing technology in the human body to prolong and improve life—that is already beginning to take shape.
The Birth of Transhumanism
A crucial fact to remember about transhumanism and the philosophies it inspired, including the ones modeled by Altered Carbon’s Mets, is that its conception was heavily rooted in eugenics. Though earlier thinkers had already produced work one could call transhumanist today, the term wasn’t coined until 1951, by Julian Huxley, a noted evolutionary biologist (and brother to Brave New World author Aldous Huxley). Julian Huxley believed strongly in the fundamentally exclusionary theory that society would improve immensely if only its “best” members were allowed to procreate. In the speech in which he first used the word “transhumanism,” he claimed that in order for humans to “transcend the tentative fumblings of our ancestors,” society ought to enact “a concerted policy … to prevent the present flood of population-increase from wrecking all our hopes for a better world.”
While he didn’t necessarily believe the criteria for what constituted “best” should be drawn along racial or economic lines, the ideology Huxley promoted was inherently elitist. It also allowed for virtually as many interpretations as there are people, and plenty of those people, particularly those in power—especially in Huxley’s time, but also in the fictional future of Altered Carbon—did and do believe “best” means “white, straight, financially successful, and at least nominally Christian.” As a result, the concept he named ended up being primarily conceptualized in its infancy by white men of privilege.
This, of course, didn’t remain the main interpretation of transhumanism for long. In the years following Huxley’s coinage, humans made profound leaps in technological innovation, first in computers and then in AI, which allowed more people to envision the possibilities of one day being able to transcend their organic limitations. The basic concept was easily repurposed by those whose oppression has always been tied to physical violence—notably people of color, LGBTQ people, and women.
By the early 1980s, scholars like Natasha Vita-More and Donna Haraway had revamped the concept with manifestos that argued transhumanism ought to be about “diversity” and “multiplicity,” about breaking down constructs like gender, race, and ability in favor of a more fluid, “chimeric” alternative in which each person can be many seemingly contradictory things at once—including human and machine. (As WIRED’s Julie Muncy explains in her review of the first season, Altered Carbon touches upon but never really takes a stance on this dimension of a post-corporeal world.)
The Future, Revisited
As Silicon Valley boomed, so did transhumanism. Millionaire investors have poured endless cash into anti-aging research, machine intelligence companies, and virtual reality; meanwhile, the possibility of extended or superhuman life has veered even further into becoming the exclusive purview of the extremely rich (and, more often than not, extremely white and extremely male). In 1993, mathematician and science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge pegged the arrival of the singularity—the moment at which technology, particularly AI, supersedes human intelligence and either eliminates humanity or fuses with it, allowing people to finally become “post-human”—at around 2030; by 2005 futurist Ray Kurzweil was agreeing with Vinge in his now-seminal book The Singularity is Near. (The Verge has a solid timeline of transhumanist thought here.)
Add privatized healthcare, police brutality, immigration, sexual assault, and plenty more extremely real threats to people’s physical bodies—not to mention the exponential growth of the TV industry itself—and you’ve got the perfect cocktail for a flood of transhumanist sci-fi shows that give form to anxieties viewers have about both wanting to escape the physical confines of their blood-bag existences and being absolutely, justifiably terrified of what could go wrong when they actually do.
But however uncomfortable it may be, that dilemma is not accidental. It has become necessary to understanding and surviving our current techno-political moment. Whether enjoying the ecstasy of possibility in Altered Carbon’s disembodied immortality or writhing in the agony of imagining eternity as a digital copy of one’s own consciousness, the roller coaster of emotions these shows elicit ought to be a major signal to audiences that now is the time to be thinking about the cost of pursuing technological immortality. If stacks and sleeves are indeed our inevitable future, the moral quandary won’t lie in the body-swapping itself—it’ll be reckoning with who gets to do it and why.
Chinese cops are using facial-recognition sunglasses. Here’s how that tech works.
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Facial-recognition technology is no longer a gimmick in dystopian science fiction movies or CSI-style cop shows: It’s increasingly used in more pedestrian ways. Your face can unlock your iPhone X, for example. Or, if you’re flying with Jetblue from Boston to Aruba or the Dominican Republic, you have the option of using your visage as your boarding pass, a system that involves an offsite U.S. Customs and Border Protection algorithm making the matches. And now, the tech—featuring a camera attached to sunglasses— is being used by police officers in crowds in China, The Wall Street Journalreported on Wednesday.
In addition to the glasses, the Chinese system involves a connected mobile device that the police officers carry that contains offline face data, allowing the system to work quickly. According to the Journal, at one city’s railway station, they’ve nabbed seven people associated with crimes using this method, as well as others traveling under false identities.
Here’s how artificial-intelligence-powered technology like this works in general—and what one potential pitfall of it is. (Besides, you know, the whole surveillance-state thing.)
First, look for faces. Then, matches.
Software that powers facial recognition generally uses a two-step process, says David Alexander Forsyth, the chair of the computer science department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an artificial intelligence expert. Step one is to figure out where the faces are in the image in question; the system is looking for a window-like section of the image that also has someone’s countenance in it, and not the other stuff of modern life, like stop signs and cars.
Step two: it needs to see if it can match the face to any in its database. “Turns out, that’s a harder problem,” Forsyth says, in comparison to step one. “People tend to look like each other.” (At least to algorithms.)
The system isn’t just eyeballing the image the way a human would—it’s looking at a representation of it in the form of data, which consists of numbers, Forsyth says. “That representation has to emphasize things that make people look different from each other,” he notes—like details involving the shape of features like lips, noses, and eyes. The representation also needs to make sure it is unaffected by variables that might throw it off, like light on someone’s face. The software then examines that representation to see if it has a match with a face it has on file.
“The last 10 years or so have seen amazing advances and changes in classifier technologies,” he adds. “The procedure of building that representation of the image has become extremely sophisticated and very effective.”
Artificial intelligence systems need oceans of data in order to learn how to do their jobs well, and facial recognition technology is no different. “Right now, the best way we know, by a long, long way, is to have an immense number of pictures of faces,” to build and train these systems, Forsyth explains. Algorithms need to learn what subtle details to focus on to accurately differentiate people.
The false-match problem
But despite the sophistication of the technology, it remains a difficult field. “The consequence for a mixup can be truly terrible,” he adds. In short: it can have false positives, and think that it has flagged someone who is a person of interest but who is, in fact, not.
There’s a key difference between using the technology in this way, as China is, and the way you engage with it on an iPhone X, for example. In the case of the smartphone, you are purposely presenting yourself to it so it can unlock the device; it is a low-stakes interaction. That’s because if it fails to recognize you, you simply use your passcode, while Apple says the odds of someone else unlocking it with their face are one in a million. After all, your iPhone only needs to learn the details of your own face, which it considers in three-dimensional form.
But using technology like this to scan the multitudes of faces in crowds in settings like airports or train stations presents unique challenges, because of the false-match problem—an outcome that doesn’t just affect that individual, but also other travelers who could be delayed by it. “Actually using it can be quite tricky,” Forsythe warns.
Tech
via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now http://ift.tt/2k2uJQn
Rest, my child. CNN’s autoplay videos can’t hurt you any more. In the latest public version of Chrome, you can just right-click any tab and select “mute site.”
You can do this even if the site isn’t currently making any noise. So go ahead and pre-emptively silence all the loud sites you want. Lifehacker contributor Tim Donnelly demonstrates:
Chrome let users mute tabs in the past, but it wouldn’t remember which sites a user always wanted to mute. As we reported in December, Chrome introduced autoplay muting in the beta release of Chrome 64. But now the change will roll out to all of us normies who use the normal public releases of Chrome. (If you still want to mute a tab, you can turn that feature back on; scroll halfway down this article on MakeUseOf.)
CNN knows, deep in its heart of hearts, that you just wanted to read a news article, not to watch a video recapping the article. But CNN, like any site, makes far more money from a video ad than from the static ads on a page of text. So they just play the video immediately, without your consent, hoping the ad will play before you finally stop it.
It’s silly what sites will do to force a video ad on you! They might even embed a video in the middle of an article about how to mute videos! What a world!
Qualcomm will power 5G devices from LG, Sony and more in 2019
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Since the first 5G standard was approved two months ago, the industry has been racing to deliver next-generation mobile data to the world. Qualcomm made two announcements today that show us real-world 5G is almost here. First, it revealed a slew of consumer electronics companies that have committed to making 5G-ready mobile devices starting in 2019, using Qualcomm’s X50 5G modem. This list includes LG, Sony Mobile, HTC, ASUS, Xiaomi, ZTE, Netgear and more. Don’t forget, Samsung also announced a partnership with Qualcomm last month to work on 5G technology through the next few years.
But what use are 5G-ready devices if the carriers haven’t rolled out support? Not much. The good news, that Qualcomm also announced today, is that 18 mobile operators around the world will be testing 5G networks on the same X50 modem. US participants include AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint, while major players elsewhere like Vodafone, Telstra, Deutsche Telekom, NTT Docomo and China Mobile are also on board.
Still, these commitments indicate that, at the very least, the brands revealed today will be racing to deliver 5G-ready devices in 2019. With carriers like AT&T already deploying mobile 5G in test cities, it looks like we don’t have to wait too much longer to get connected to the next generation. But like what happened with 4G LTE, the 5G onslaught may face challenges, so don’t expect the rollout to be widespread and speedy at first.