These are two videos from inventor Simone Giertz of her Truckla, a Tesla Model 3 she modded into a pickup truck. The first video is a fake commercial for the Truckla, the second much longer video (thirty minutes!) documents how the modifications were made. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling inspired. "You’re not modding a Tesla into a monster truck." And why not? "For one, you don’t have the money to buy a Tesla." Not buy — lease. "And what happens when it’s time to turn it back in?" Oh I’ll be dead long before then, presumably after trying to jump the Grand Canyon and coming up six miles short. Keep going for the videos.
Thanks to Madz, who agrees it’s only a matter of time until somebody mods the cockpit of their Tesla into a bedroom, complete with bedside table and sleep mask.
via Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome https://geekologie.com/
As early as next Monday night, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch a cluster of 24 satellites for the US Air Force. Known as the Space Test Program-2 mission, the rocket will deposit its payloads into three different orbits. Perhaps the most intriguing satellite will be dropped off at the second stop—a circular orbit 720km above the Earth’s surface. This is the Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 spacecraft.
After a week in space, allowing the satellites deposited in this orbit to drift apart, LightSail 2 will eject from its carrying case into open space. About the size of a loaf of bread, the 5-kg satellite will eventually unfurl into a solar sail 4 meters long by 5.6 meters tall. The Mylar material composing the sail is just 4.5 microns thick, or about 10 times as thick as a human hair.
This experiment, which will attempt to harness the momentum of photons and “sail” through space, is the culmination of decades of work by The Planetary Society. “This goes back to the very beginning, to Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray and Lou Friedman,” the organization’s chief executive, Bill Nye, told Ars in an interview. “We are carrying on a legacy that has been with us since the founders. It’s just an intriguing technology because it lowers the cost of going all over the place in the Solar System.”
Starts with Sagan
As he popularized space and science in the 1970s on television talk shows and in books, Sagan sometimes espoused the virtues of solar sailing. Theoretically, the continual acceleration of photons, although much more gradual than chemical propulsion, could push spacecraft to other stars because this acceleration is continual. Originally, he’d hoped to launch a solar sail to catch up to Halley’s Comet in 1986, but that never happened.
After Sagan co-founded The Planetary Society in 1980 to advocate for government support for space exploration, he and others continued to push the technology. But because the US government was focused on more traditional modes of exploration—the space shuttle program and chemical-powered probes to the outer Solar System—the Planetary Society eventually took up the cause on its own.
LightSail 2 undergoing health checks following vibration testing at the Air Force Research Laboratory.
AFRL
In the late 1990s, the society began work on the Cosmos 1 project to demonstrate a solar sail. This was an ambitious project that involved eight “blades” of a solar sail that covered 600 square meters, and, from an initial altitude of 800km, was intended to raise its orbit by 50km or 100 km over a month in space.
Unfortunately, Cosmos 1 never reached space. It lifted off in 2005 aboard a Volna rocket, which was launched from a Russian submarine in the Barents Sea. The rocket’s first stage failed, and the payload was lost. Undeterred, the Planetary Society built a demonstrator named LightSail 1 that launched in 2015 aboard an Atlas V rocket. This version experienced several technical problems, however, which led to improvements for Light Sail 2. This latest project has cost about $7 million, paid for by the society’s members.
LightSail 2
This version of a solar sail will have a total area of 32 square meters, and mission planners will deploy the sail about two weeks after launch if all goes well. (More details about what will happen can be found here). Using a momentum wheel to adjust the orientation of its sail, the spacecraft will essentially attempt to demonstrate that it can “tack” into the stream of photons emanating from the Sun. Success will come as the spacecraft manages to raise its orbit over the course of a month.
And then what? Japan’s space agency, JAXA, flew a solar sail demonstration mission in 2010 named IKAROS, and NASA flew a very tiny demonstrator named NanoSail-D in 2010 as well. But since then governments have largely ignored the sci-fi-like technology that could provide a much cheaper means of propulsion around the Solar System and beyond. Too much fiction, apparently, and too little science.
Nye hopes the Planetary Society’s solar sail mission will put a little more science behind the technology, leading to additional technical developments by NASA or other international space agency because of its potential to democratize space travel. “It’s the most romantic of space technologies,” he said. “Really, we’re sailing among the stars. It’s fantastic.”
New Version of Monopoly Has a Smart A.I. Banker That Prevents Cheating
Monopoly is one of the board games where people cheat the most and is known for turning entire families against each other. The new “Voice Banking” edition replaces the person in charge of the bank with a Smart A.I top hat that takes care of all transactions.
The new virtual banker is no Siri, though, and does not require access to your wi-fi network or the Internet. Players start the game by identifying themselves via one of four buttons located on top of the hat, and then sends verbal instructions to the assistant via commands such as “Buy Atlantic Avenue.” The assistant takes care of all financial transaction, so no paper money is included with the game, which eliminates one method of cheating.
For those interested, the “Voice Banking” edition of Monopoly is available for pre-order on Amazon and will be available for shipping on June 26 for $29.99.
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via [Geeks Are Sexy] Technology News http://bit.ly/23BIq6h
"Sully" Sullenberger, who landed a plane on the Hudson River in 2009, says he understands how the pilots of two jets that crashed would have been confused as they struggled to control the aircraft.
The team behind Project Borealis have released this update video that shows all the work they’ve been able to do so far, ranging from concept art to level design to physics trickery, which is my favourite because look what they’ve done to the Gravity Gun:
I’m also very into the fluffy arctic headcrabs:
There’s a complete rundown of where they’re at here:
While there’s a full (and obviously still very much work-in-progress) gameplay showcase here:
We have a habit, in the gaming industry, of declaring things “The Year Of ___.” 2013 was The Year Of Luigi. 2014 was The Year Of Luigi’s Death Stare. 2019 is The Year Of Gooigi. However, if Gooigi had not transformed into an unassailable, medium-defining phenomenon, we might also be tempted to call this The Year Of Auto Chess.
Auto Chess is a mode in which players spend gold to recruit heroes, who they can then strategically pair with other heroes and combine with copies of themselves to increase their power. Each round, these heroes automatically duke it out. Players repeat this process until only one is left standing. After the Dota 2 mod took Steam by storm earlier this year, Valve announced its own version, called Dota Underlords. And now Riot’s League of Legends-themed spin on the deck builder has turned Twitch into its personal plaything. Teamfight Tactics, as it’s known, has been on top of Twitch ever since an hour after its release yesterday. As of this publishing, it had nearly 200,000 concurrent viewers, beating perennial first-placer Fortnite by about 60,000. This, on its own, is not entirely surprising. League of Legends generally sits near the top of Twitch itself, and big, new games have a tendency to ascend on the platform thanks to the curiosity of both streamers and potential players.
There are, however, a few things worth noting in this case: Teamfight Tactics is peaking at much higher numbers than Dota 2‘s Auto Chess mod ever has, positively dwarfing the original Auto Chess’ all-time high of 65,000 concurrent viewers back in March. This makes sense, given that the mod version of Auto Chess hasn’t gotten an official push from Valve in the same way Teamfight Tactics has from Riot.
Teamfight Tactics is also intended to be more accessible than Auto Chess, much like LoL is to Dota. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the beta for Valve’s Dota Underlords becomes available to everyone sometime this week. For now, though, with all eyes currently on Teamfight Tactics, Dota 2‘s once-popular Auto Chess modhardly has any viewers, hovering in the low thousands.
Much like Auto Chess and the typical Dota 2 crowd, Teamfight Tactics is drawing streamers who don’t normally succumb to the prickly and particular siren’s song of MOBAs. However, unlike other 2019 breakout Twitch hits like Apex Legends, this one hasn’t managed to snag many streamers from the platform’s absolute highest (read: Fortnite-playing) echelons. Viewers, then, are a bit more spread out between big but not quite enormous streamers like Lirik, Reckful, and DisguisedToast—some of which come from LoL and others of which do not.
There’s an appeal to watching streamers learn this game. DisguisedToast, for instance, is forcing himself to get 10 wins before he’ll end his stream today, and while I don’t approve of that from a labor practices standpoint, it has been rewarding to watch him learn, figure out new strategies, and, er, break the game. Teamfight Tactics is not a reflex-intensive game, meaning that viewers stand to gain strategic knowledge from streams that’s actually applicable to their own games—unlike when they watch, say, Shroud play Apex (or literally any shooter, for that matter).
While the game is a multitude of genres away from Apex, the comparison is still useful to an extent. Apex received a large streamer-centric marketing push from Electronic Arts, with a launch-day “partner” program that reportedly cost the publisher $1 million for Ninja alone. If Riot is employing any similar tactics, it’s not being particularly transparent about them—not that EA was transparent about what its partner program entailed at the time, either. Regardless, Teamfight Tactics isn’t managing the preposterous 400,000+-viewer peaks Apex did at launch.
Teamfight Tactics does, however, have another weapon worth mentioning in its holster: Riot’s history. People have been waiting for a League of Legends follow-up for eons, and while I’ve heard from sources for years that the company is stuck in a state of analysis paralysis that leads to project cancellation after project cancellation, this is the most meaningfully different thing Riot has released in years. It’s still part of LoL, sure, but it’s nearly a separate game. This has generated even more excitement, interest, and curiosity.
As ever, there’s a chance—a good chance, even—that Teamfight Tactics will fall out of Twitch’s top spot in a matter of days or weeks. It’s got momentum for now, but it’s still in beta, and has plenty of rough edges. Plus, I’m sure Nintendo will announce Gooigi Auto Chess before too much longer, and that, truly, will be checkmate (something Auto Chess does not actually have).
Take a moment to think about all the street signs that blur past as you’re driving. Stop signs, speed limits, and traffic warnings all add up to a massive amount of infrastructure for a city that’s challenging and costly to maintain. But piggybacking on Google’s hard work, scientists have found a clever way to streamline the process of tracking signage in need of repair.
Cataloguing the condition of a city’s infrastructure is usually a time consuming manual process carried about by workers, which can occasionally be quite dangerous when it involves roads and traffic. But if you can remember as far back as 2007, that’s when Google first introduced Street View for Google Maps. It’s a feature that required the company to strap cameras to hundreds of cars and people, and send them off to explore and photograph nearly every last highway, byway, road, and corner of the world. (Even offworld.) It was a massive undertaking, but the results were made freely available to anyone with a device and an internet connection—including a specially trained AI now.
Geospatial scientists (a person who studies how people utilize physical) at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, created an AI-powered piece of software that’s capable of recognizing and identifying specific street signage using Google Street View’s sprawling image database. The system can spot signage with almost 96 percent accuracy, and identify what type of sign it is with 98 percent accuracy. Using just the 2D images and metadata from Google Maps and Street View, it can also accurately catalog the exact geo-location of each sign, so it’s easy to track down should repairs be needed.
Is it a completely reliable solution? No. Google’s search engine is constantly recrawling the internet to ensure it’s always up to date, but the cost to have a Google Street View camera car re-photograph every road in the world on a daily, even weekly basis, would be astronomically prohibitive. As a result, the street view imagery on Google Maps isn’t always up to date. But the system could work in conjunction with other solutions, such as upgrading garbage trucks, which travel the same streets every week, with cameras to capture supplemental imagery which the AI could also scan to keep an infrastructure database up to date.
