Day: December 18, 2017

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15 Reasons Why Mark Hamill Is Our Favorite Person

1. Mark Hamill has only gotten better with age

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2. Don’t get us wrong, he’s been cool from the very beginning — here he is re-enacting the classic Star Wars poster with Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher

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3. He’s made millions of fans happy

Watch him surprise the hell out of a Star Tours group in Disneyland

The Force is strong with @hamillhimself as he surprised guests on Star Tours @Disneyland. #TheLastJedi #StarWars

A post shared by Star Wars Movies (@starwarsmovies) on

4. He’s a staunch defender of the prequels (and Jake Lloyd)

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via padawanlost

5. Some of his stories are unbelievably heartwarming

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6. That Joker voice of his is so unsettling and iconic that it even threw Daisy Ridley out of step

7. Mark never goes anywhere without his favorite jumper

He’s got a pretty good sense of humor about it, too

8. In fact, Mark has a pretty good sense of humor about most everything

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9. That includes interactions with fans…

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10. …and of course self-depricating jokes

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11. People think Sebastian Stan (aka the Winter Soldier) looks a heck of a lot like a young Mark Hamill, and they’re not wrong

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…which makes Sebastian’s message to his "father" all the more heartwarming

12. That’s not the only "son" Mark has adopted

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13. To be clear, he seems like a great dad to his actual kids, too

14. He’s gotten pretty good at his trolling game over the years

15. But the best part about Mark Hamill is how he’s truly touched people’s lives

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via ed_solomon

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Hyundai, Kia, Genesis and Subaru clean up in IIHS 2018 safety ratings

Hyundai, its partner Kia and its Genesis division are the big winners in the latest vehicle safety ratings from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, accounting for six of the 15 models that earned the Top Safety Pick+ awards for 2018. Subaru was right behind with four, Mercedes-Benz had two, and Toyota, BMW and Ford each had one.

Another 47 vehicles earned the Top Safety Pick designation, where Toyota had 10 vehicle models, with Hyundai recognized for nine models. All but one of the seven vehicles in Subaru’s lineup, the BRZ, qualified for one of the awards.

IIHS strengthened the criteria for the Top Safety Pick+ award for 2018 to require headlights to earn a “good” rating — an “acceptable” rating was previously enough to notch the “plus” award — and good or acceptable passenger-side protection in the small overlap front crash, which replicates a crash involving just the front corner of a vehicle. It also required vehicles to have acceptable or good headlights for the first time to earn a Top Safety Pick award. Most of winners for both awards qualified on the basis of optional upgrades.

IIHS in October began evaluating the passenger side of vehicles in its small overlap front crash test after it said it became clear that automakers were neglecting that side of the vehicle as they focused on improving driver-side protections. IIHS first began conducting driver-side small overlap crashes in 2012. It began measuring both how well low and high beams illuminated the road and the amount of glare they produce for oncoming vehicles as part of its ratings in 2016.

The Top Safety Pick+ winners are listed below. The list doesn’t include any minivans, pickups or minicars, which don’t appear on either list of awardees.

Small cars

Midsize cars

Large luxury cars

Midsize SUVs

Midsize luxury SUV

The full list of Top Safety Pick winners is available here.

Related Video:

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Vine Founder Teases Vine 2.0 or Possibly Some Kind of Pretzel

Earlier today, Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann tweeted the above image captioned only with the letters “v2.” Mirroring the logo of the dearly departed mini-video service, the pretzel-y picture seemed to reinforce what Hofmann hinted at last week: Vine might be making a comeback.

While fellow co-founders Colin Kroll and Rus Yusupov busy (and embarrass) themselves with runaway hit HQTrivia, Hofmann has apparently remained obsessed, as many of us have, with Vine. After being shuttered by Twitter in October of last year, the big-with-teens looping video platform has been bereaved by many as Too Good For This Cruel World.

Unfortunately, all we know so far is that Vine 2.0 (Vine VA? 2A? Does anyone else find that logo inscrutable?) is something Hofmann has been considering. Nothing concrete exists, as a product, or as a plan to keep the service’s potential sequel from succumbing to the same fate.

I want to be excited. But as with any reboot, a recreation of something now canonized has the potential to ruin the reputations of both.

Even if Vine 2.0 never sees the light of day, it’s predecessor’s content will always live on as nearly-unwatchable YouTube compilations.

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I Want to Replace My Entire Keyboard With Fidget Spinner Keys

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2017 was poised to be one of the most disappointing years in history, filled with a non-stop barrage of depressing developments and defeats. But then, with a last-minute, game-winning buzzer-beater, a company called Hammer revealed a series of replaceable fidget spinner key caps for your keyboard and partially redeemed 2017.

If you don’t understand why upgrading your keyboard with 26 or more tiny fidget spinners is a good idea—nay, a great idea—then I’m afraid 2017 has already sucked your soul dry. I’m sorry for your loss, but the rest of us who are totally willing to pry all the keycaps off our keyboards will never find ourselves lacking a distraction when we’re procrastinating on responding to an important email.

Hunt and peck typists need not apply, as these replacement keys don’t come labeled in any way. They’ll essentially turn your keyboard into a blank slate, requiring masterful touch typing skills to get any actual work done. They’re also incredibly expensive, and at $20 per key it will cost you over half a grand to just replace your A to Z keys alone. But without them, that fancy mechanical keyboard you custom-built is really only half complete at best.

[Massdrop via Popular Mechanics]

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The Secret to Sorting 25,000 Jumbled Dice Involves Some Surprisingly Simple Physics

Image: Asencio et al (Phys Rev Let 2017)

Physics has a bit of a problem. Stuff that you don’t really think about, like single items moving on frictionless surfaces or two bodies traveling in the void of space, are really easy to explain. Stuff you experience every day, like water dropping or M&Ms spilling on the floor, are incredibly complex.

A team of Spanish and Mexican scientists were therefore interested in a problem I bet you’ve thought of: How to perfectly compact a container full of jumbled dice. In experiments, and through a series of light twists on these “cubic particles,” the dice assumed a perfect alignment inside of a cylinder.

“In this work, we have shown that twisting a sample of cubic particles is a highly efficient way to achieve ordered packings,” the authors write in the paper published recently in Physical Review Letters.

You might remember that things falling to the Earth always accelerate at around 10 meters per second squared—they go ten meters per second faster for every second they’re falling. At accelerations greater than half that, the dice packed after 10,000 twists.

This is due to the presence of the flat surfaces on the dice; when they slide past one another, these surfaces prefer to line up. And unlike previous experiments that have involved a lot of tapping, the twisting action led to eventual ordering regardless of how hard the twisting was (up to a point). Tapping requires much more specific motions and rates to order the dice.

There are uses for experiments like these—mainly industrial ones where companies need to pack a lot of stuff into a container. And one scientist not involved in the study, Matthias Schröter of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Germany, told Physics that the ordering of the dice came from the presence of the boundary—the container. It’s kind of like a crystal growing, except with dice. “The experiments are solid and quite clean,” he told Physics.

Next up, time to test this experiment in space.

[PRL via Physics]

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Firetruck Appears To Drift Across Four Lanes Of Traffic Thanks to Steerable Rear Axle

This is a video of a firetruck smoothly gliding across four lanes of rush hour traffic in Dallas, Texas thanks to its steerable rear axle. I like how the guy in the vehicle that’s filming drops a “What the f***?….That was pimp,” like he’s some sort of badass and wasn’t just in the middle of blasting Mr. Big’s ‘To Be With You.’

Keep going for the whole video.

Thanks to n0nentity, who was convinced for the longest time growing up that fire trucks were built to start fires, not extinguish them. Ahahahahahahaha, same. I thought the hose was a flamethrower.

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Google’s AlphaGo AI can teach itself to master games like chess

Google’s DeepMind team has already advanced its AlphaGo AI to dominate Go without human input, but now the system is clever enough to master other board games without intervention. Researchers have developed a more generalized system for AlphaGo Zero that can train itself to achieve "superhuman" skill in chess, Shogi (a Japanese classic) and other game types knowing only the rules, all within less than a day. It doesn’t need example games or other references.

This doesn’t mean that DeepMind has developed a truly general purpose, independent AI… yet. Chess and Shogi were relatively easy tests, as they’re simpler than Go. It’ll be another thing entirely to tackle complex video games like StarCraft II, let alone fuzzier concepts like walking or abstract thought. There’s also the question of speed: less than 24 hours works for board games, but that’s too slow for situations where AI needs to adapt on the spot.

Even so, this is a major step toward AI that can accomplish any task with only minimal instructions. Robots and self-driving cars in particular may need to learn how to navigate unfamiliar environments without the luxury of pre-supplied training material. If nothing else, chess champions have one more reason to be nervous.

Via: MIT Technology Review

Source: ArXiv.org

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