February 22, 2018 – Page 2 – Peter's Quasi-Daily Blah-g

February 22, 2018

Half-Life’s Gordon Freeman Comes To Final Fantasy 15 PC

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The excruciating wait for a new Half-Life game carries on with no end in sight. If all you care about is seeing protagonist Gordon Freeman in a new setting, Final Fantasy XV may be just the ticket, as Square Enix has announced a new limited-time promotion involving the upcoming PC version.

Players who purchase Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition, the RPG’s PC version, through Steam by the end of April will receive the Half-Life Pack. This will be distributed through the Steam Workshop and allows you to dress up as Freeman. There are three different components to this: the HEV suit itself, Freeman’s glasses, and his signature crowbar, which can be used as a weapon.

These items can be equipped in both the single-player campaign–letting you deal with the bizarre sight of seeing Final Fantasy XV star Noctis cosplaying as Gordon Freeman–or in Comrades, the game’s online multiplayer mode. You can see what the latter looks like in the gallery below.

Square Enix has already released a benchmark tool to help you evaluate your PC’s ability to run the game and announced the pre-order bonuses that are available. You’ll be able to try out the game itself with a demo releasing for free to everyone on February 26, though the specifics of what that entails have not been shared.

Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition launches on March 6. That same day will see the release of the Royal Edition on PS4 and Xbox One.

Games

via GameSpot’s PC Reviews http://ift.tt/2mVXxXH

February 22, 2018 at 09:48AM

February 22, 2018

There’s No One Way to Explain How Flying Works

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There's No One Way to Explain How Flying Works | WIRED

Let’s be clear—airplanes are complicated. Sure, it’s entirely possible to get a piece of paper and fold it in a particular way so that it flies. But the physics of flight isn’t trivial. It’s even harder to give an explanation of the forces on a flying aircraft in a short video—which is what I did with my recent WIRED video on the physics of flying.

One of the most common comments to this video was something like this:

What the heck is wrong with this video? Some dude is trying to explain how planes fly and he didn’t even say the word “Bernoulli.” Everyone already knows that planes fly because of Bernoulli’s principle. This guy needs to go back to school.

OK, the part about going back to school is probably true (I can always learn more). But it turns out you don’t really need Bernoulli’s principle to explain how airplanes can fly.

Let’s suppose I wanted to explain the flight of a plane. I could use this common explanation:

A wing is curved on the top. When it runs into the air, some air goes over the top and some goes underneath. Since the top air path is longer, it has to go faster. According to Bernoulli’s principle, faster air reduces pressure. With less pressure on the top, the plane gets pushed up. It’s physics.

Alas, there are problems with an explanation like this. The first problem is that air doesn’t travel over the top at a faster speed because it’s a longer path—that’s just not true (check out this great video explaining the common problems with the flying explanation). The second problem is attacking a complicated idea (flying) with another difficult concept (Bernoulli’s principle). By using Bernoulli’s principle, the physics of flight becomes like a word association game. I say lift force, you say Bernoulli. Don’t worry about what that means, just remember that Bernoulli is the right answer.

You can see these kinds of explanations in other areas. My favorite is the question of what causes the seasons on Earth. Or like I phrase it: Why is it hotter in the summer? If you ask people on the street, I bet a majority of them will say something about the tilt of the Earth’s axis. Indeed, it is warmer on Earth (in the Northern hemisphere) because of Earth’s tilted axis. But if you press further and ask why this makes it warmer, there is a good chance they’ll respond that the tilt of the Earth brings us closer to the sun, thereby heating things up. HINT: This is wrong. The real reason that it’s warmer in the summer is that the sun travels higher in the sky for a longer time. Both of these factors means more solar heating of the ground and hotter weather. In fact, because the Earth’s orbit isn’t completely circular, we are actually farther from the sun during the summer—but it’s still hotter than the winter.

So, in the end people get this false sense of understanding (whether it’s about flying planes or the reason for the seasons).

In the case of wing lift, I like to use more fundamental ideas—like the momentum principle. This is the same idea that you would use to explain the forces on a wall when a ball hits it. It’s more likely a human will be able to relate to the idea of a bouncing ball than something like Bernoulli’s principle. Here’s the short version of the way a wing works. The wing crashes into air in such a way that it pushes it down. Since forces come in pairs, pushing the air down means the air pushes up on the wing. Boom, that force is what we call lift.

This goes along with my Number 1 Rule in Science Communication:

You can rarely be 100 percent correct in your explanation, but you can be 100 percent wrong. The goal isn’t to be correct in your writing, it’s to not be wrong.

The flying video doesn’t tell the whole story, but it isn’t wrong. Also, explaining the lift force using the momentum principle isn’t new (for instance see this paper) and it doesn’t tell the full story. The interaction with the wing and the air not only depends on the bottom of the wing but what happens with the air on the top of the wing. In physics, it’s always complicated.

Tech

via Wired Top Stories http://ift.tt/2uc60ci

February 22, 2018 at 09:06AM

February 22, 2018

Razor-sharp snowflakes are wreaking havoc on Olympians’ skis

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Razor-sharp snowflakes are wreaking havoc on Olympians’ skis | Popular Science

“Alpensia” sounds like a venue straight out of Frozen, but you won’t find any summer-loving snowmen there—just really cold Olympians. The ski resort in Pyeongchang, South Korea is among the coldest ever to host the Winter Games, and the bitter temperatures have claimed some unexpected casualties: skis.

During the lead up to the games, athletes and trainers told Reuters’ Peter Rutherford they were trashing their skis during practice runs. The slopes were so frigid as to render high-tech equipment worthless. But why?

Turns out that in the right temperatures, snowflakes can turn from fluffy sparkles into razor-sharp, ski-destroying spikes. And for downhill skiers, who rely on the physics of friction to zip down the slopes, super-cold snow can spell disaster for their most important accessories.

“At temperatures just below freezing, it’s more like skiing on water. But with colder air, it’s more like skiing on sand,” says Kenneth Libbrecht, professor of physics at Caltech and a specialist in the structure of snowflakes.

It may not look like it, but speedy skiers are bound to the laws of physics like the rest of us. Even as their bodies zip downwards with the help of gravity, they face friction that can impact their speed and, in extremely cold temperatures, their skis.

You’d think friction would simply slow skiers down, but it can actually make skis glide across the snow more quickly. As the skis drag, they melt a small amount of snow beneath them. This isn’t a result of pressure, says Libbrecht, but rather of heat. That melted snow acts like a lubricant and makes the skis slip even more quickly.

But heat is just part of the story—and physicists aren’t exactly sure how the rest of the tale goes. For years, they’ve debated the exact mechanism of snow, ski, and skate friction. Right now, the prevailing theory is that ice and snow melt a tiny bit as soon as they’re formed, creating a quasi-liquid film that gets friction going the second a ski or skate touches them.

That film acts like a lubricant. Add Olympians’ skis to the mix and you get even more speed. They’re made of high-tech composite materials designed to absorb racing wax, which creates more lube and, hypothetically, even faster runs.

Sounds speedy, right? Sure…until things get really cold. “The colder it gets, the harder it is to melt that layer of ice,” Libbrecht explains. And when temperatures get below about -15°C (just below 16 °F), snowflakes tend to be extremely sharp—the equivalent of tiny, crystalline razors.

“It’s not like a piece of steel slicing through you,” he clarifies, but the sharpness of the flakes combined with the slower melt rate of a cold day is enough to damage skis. What should be a slippery experience ends up being more like skiing over sand, with no layer of lube to protect skis. Instead, the cold, spiky snowflakes damage the equipment in a phenomenon known as base burn.

Your average skier might try for another run. But for an Olympian, who may win or lose a race by just a fraction of a second, that’s obviously not an option.

Olympic athletes show up at the Winter Games with tons of skis under the best of circumstances—up to 70 pairs for some competitors. But when it’s as cold (and spiky) as it is in Pyeongchang, they might just wish they’d packed a few more for good measure.

Tech

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now http://ift.tt/2k2uJQn

February 21, 2018 at 02:55PM

February 22, 2018

Net Neutrality Gets Its Official Execution Date—But the Fights to Keep It Alive Are Going Strong

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Net Neutrality Gets Its Official Execution Date—But the Fights to Keep It Alive Are Going Strong

If all goes as the FCC’s Republican commissioners planned, December 14th will be known as the day that net neutrality died. But thanks to the mercifully slow gears of the federal bureaucracy, big changes don’t happen immediately. On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of net neutrality protections is scheduled to hit the federal register. Sixty days later, it’ll be official. But there’s a lot happening in the meantime.

Assuming that everything goes on schedule, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s “Restoring Internet Freedom” order will be published in the federal register tomorrow and become formal policy for the agency sometime around April 23rd. There’s no reason to believe that this FCC will reverse course on its own, but there are so many fights still to be resolved over the next year or so, and it’s even possible that we won’t have to wait until April to be reassured that all traffic on the web will be treated equally.

Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon recently told Bloomberg that his philosophy for dealing with the media is “to flood the zone with shit” so that it’s hard to keep up. It’s easy to see how that philosophy transfers to the Trump administration’s approach to most subjects, be it intentional or through incompetence. Pai’s leadership at the FCC may be filled with corporate cronyism and a disregard for what the public wants, but among Trump officials, he’s very good at flooding the zone with shit and pushing through his agenda quickly. Right now, he’s moving to make access to broadband more difficult for the economically poor. Pay too much attention to that, and you might forget that the bad thing he did in December isn’t done yet. So, we’d recommend you stay focused on at least a single date: February 27th.

The Senate currently needs a single additional vote to nullify the repeal of net neutrality by using the Congressional Review Act (CRA)—assuming it can pass the House and President Trump’s veto. At the moment, all Senate Democrats have agreed to vote in favor of the repeal, leaving the vote at a tie. Vice President Mike Pence would be called on to break that tie, and he’d likely vote in favor of the FCC. So, the activists at Battle for the Net, along with a large list of high-profile partners, are organizing a day of action on February 27th. You don’t have to get out in the streets and carry a sign if you don’t want to. Just go to the site for the #OneMoreVote campaign and get the info you need to encourage your Senator to get behind the CRA.

Still, that measure faces hurdles once it moves from the Senate to the House, due to greater Republican representation in that chamber. Even if it fails, it’s nice to be able to name and shame the people who opposed the CRA, then vote them out of office.

There’s more good news in that over half of the states in the US are moving forward with their own net neutrality protections. California, New York, Montana, Hawaii, and Vermont all have legislation in the works that would preserve the internet that we know and hate to love. The FCC has said that states aren’t allowed to pass their own net neutrality laws, but many are trying through various legal workarounds. And as of last month, 21 states sued the FCC to restore its original rules. We’re also likely to see a flood of new lawsuits in the 10-day window following the publication of the new rules in the Federal Register.

Even if all of these measures fail, let’s all go to our happy place and remember the FCC inspector general’s corruption investigation into Ajit Pai’s dealing with Sinclair Broadcasting. It’s been all too clear that Pai is serving the interests of big corporations and he might have been doing it on their explicit instructions. There’s time to fix the damage that he is doing, but it’d also be nice to see him held accountable for doing in private what’s so obvious in public.

[Ars Technica, Reuters]

Tech

via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com

February 21, 2018 at 02:36PM

February 22, 2018

This Star Wars Documentary on Sound in The Last Jedi Is Delightful

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This Star Wars Documentary on Sound in The Last Jedi Is Delightful

Sounds are the unheralded heroes of movies. They flutter into your eardrums without you even realizing it, and become as crucial a part of the experience as anything else. And nowhere is that truer than in Star Wars, where the sound department has to create sounds for things we’ve never seen before.

Throughout the years, you’ve probably heard stories of how the lightsabers got their sounds or similar trivia. Now, NBC News is adding to that Star Wars sound vocabulary. It recently released a 26-minute video called The Force of Sound, which explores sounds in Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi. And it’s wonderful. Here’s the full thing.

There’s just so much good stuff in there, but the BB-8 coin slot foley stuff may be my favorite. Or maybe the gloves acting as porgs. Honestly, it’s all gold and such a great, eye-opening look at the filmmaking process.

The Last Jedi is still in theaters and is coming home in March.

[ABC News]

Tech

via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com

February 21, 2018 at 08:18PM

February 22, 2018

The People of Wauconda, Illinois, Would Like You to Stop Asking If They Have Black Panther’s Vibranium

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The People of Wauconda, Illinois, Would Like You to Stop Asking If They Have Black Panther's Vibranium

The afrofuturistic wonderland from Black Panther is not a real, physical place, but Wauconda, a small village just about an hour outside of Chicago, Illinois, is. And like the fictional Wakandans, the actual Waucondans would really like it if you stopped bothering them about vibranium.

In the days since Black Panther hit theaters, people living in Wauconda have been receiving calls and e-mails from people with questions about Wakanda and whether the city was planning on changing anything about itself to celebrate the movie. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter Wauconda’s mayor described a number of calls her office has received with people shouting “Wakanda forever!” or asking if the town of less than 20,000 is hiding Wakanda’s valuable metal:

“At first, I was like, is there a full moon out? Someone called and asked how we pronounced the village name and when I told him, he began yelling, ‘Wakanda forever!’ which I am guessing is from the film.”

It’s interesting to note that Wauconda’s name comes from a word that translates to “god” in the language of the Kaw and Osage Nations. In Osage, the word is typically written as “Wah.Kon.Tah” though it’s pronounced identically to Wakanda.

When asked recently by Indian Country Today whether Marvel’s borrowing “Wakanda” for the name of its fictional African country was appropriative or offensive, Osage tribe member and language student Kilan Jacobs said that personally, it didn’t bother him because of the respect the movie has for the name:

“It was a sacred home place to them. Beyond that, I have no way of knowing if in some real African language this is an actual place name or word they have as well. But overall I felt no disrespect or misdoing. The movie was great and uplifting.”

Tech

via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com

February 22, 2018 at 09:27AM

February 22, 2018

Study Finds That a Third of You Would Rather Use Your Phone Than Talk to Humans

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motorola phone obsessed

Motorola published the results of a study yesterday that describe a world in which too many of us are obsessed with our phones, would rather use our phones than talk to people, and possibly consider our phones to be best friends. That’s all pretty alarming stuff, though not necessarily surprising.

Moto asked Dr. Nancy Etcoff, a mind-brain behavior expert from Harvard, to put together the study before handing it off to an independent group to run it. The goal was to look at behaviors of phone users across generations while also understand the impact of them on relationships with ourselves, people around us, and the places we visit or socialize in.

There were a handful of interesting findings, like the ones I mentioned above. This study showed that 33% of respondents “prioritize their smartphone over engaging with people they are about and want to spend time with them.” Yeah, that’s not OK. Additionally, 53% of Gen Z respondents described their phone as a “best friend.” That’s beyond lolz-worthy and also, as I noted above, not surprising. Kids these days, am I right? Thankfully, 60% of respondents acknowledged that they need to have better phone-life balance.

To further the fun, Motorola setup a quiz with 10 questions that attempts top rate you based on your relationship with your phone. You can access the quiz right here.

I took it and came in at a level 3, which is probably still bad, but maybe not as bad as you level 5ers.

Why did Motorola, a company who wants to sell you phones that you consider to be a best friend, run this study? Who knows. But they are hawking a SPACE app, that attempts to help you take breaks from your phone, as a part of it. They also tossed in a Moto Mods mention and Moto Display, because, yeah.

Anyways, the numbers were interesting enough to share, because we really all are addicted to these damn glowing screens.

// Motorola

Study Finds That a Third of You Would Rather Use Your Phone Than Talk to Humans is a post from: Droid Life

Tech

via Droid Life: A Droid Community Blog http://ift.tt/2dLq79c

February 22, 2018 at 10:31AM