Month: December 2017

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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

GIF

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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Lyft’s self-driving car pilot launches in Boston

It took several months, but Lyft and nuTonomy have made good on their promise to test autonomous ridesharing cars in Boston. The two have launched a pilot program that gives "select" Seaport-area passengers a ride in one of nuTonomy’s self-driving Renault cars. If you’re one of the few to hop in (the Lyft app will make it obvious), your feedback will help refine the system to make sure it’s both comfortable and safe.

This is as much a tech demo as it is a trial run. Lyft and nuTonomy aren’t shy about using the Boston experiment to help you "better understand the impact" of self-driving cars — that is, to sell you on the concept so that you’ll be a customer when driverless cars dominate. Marketing strategy aside, it’s still an important step for everyone involved. NuTonomy may see the most benefit as it improves its navigation systems, but it also gives Lyft an opportunity to integrate driverless cars into its service. And of course, that first contact for passengers could reduce fears and (eventually) make self-driving cars a mainstay of daily life.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: nuTonomy

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Google puts celebrities to work answering your search questions

It’s easy to find celebrity info if you’re determined to look for it, but wouldn’t you rather hear it straight from the source? You just might. Google is adding a feature to mobile searches in the US that has celebrities answering questions in selfie-style videos. If you want to know Gina Rodriguez’s favorite movie or whether Will Ferrell can play the drums, you’ll see a video that can take over the full screen.

Other celebrities answering questions on launch include Nick Jonas, Priyanka Chopra, James Franco, Tracee Ellis Ross and Seth MacFarlane, among others. That’s definitely not a comprehensive celeb list, but Google is promising more videos from both up-and-coming and well-known stars in the "next few months." There’s no mention of international availability.

The feature is intended to offer a "surprise" to searchers. At the same time, it’s also a slight competitive edge for Google. If you’re a Nick Jonas devotee, wouldn’t you rather hear answers from him on Google instead of reading text on Bing? So long as you like the videos in the first place, this could keep you coming back just in case your favorite star has a custom Google answer.

Source: Google

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