YouTuber EC Henry brought 3D models of popular Star Wars ships into an application from Autodesk called Flow Design that can simulate and illustrate how a vehicle moves through various mediums, like the breathable air that seems to exist on most planets in a galaxy far, far away.
The iconic X-wing, which can travel through space at the speed of light, is actually far less aerodynamic than the comparatively primitive fighter jets we use here on Earth. Even worse is the Empire’s TIE fighter, which is an aerodynamic disaster and would be outmaneuvered by even a mynock any time it tried to do battle on a planet’s surface—despite what movies like The Force Awakens would have you believe.
YouTuber EC Henry brought 3D models of popular Star Wars ships into an application from Autodesk called Flow Design that can simulate and illustrate how a vehicle moves through various mediums, like the breathable air that seems to exist on most planets in a galaxy far, far away.
The iconic X-wing, which can travel through space at the speed of light, is actually far less aerodynamic than the comparatively primitive fighter jets we use here on Earth. Even worse is the Empire’s TIE fighter, which is an aerodynamic disaster and would be outmaneuvered by even a mynock any time it tried to do battle on a planet’s surface—despite what movies like The Force Awakens would have you believe.
‘Electronic Skin’ Allows User of Prosthetic Hand to Feel Pain
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Demonstration of the pain detection task, with built-in reflex. GIF: Osborn et al., 2018/Gizmodo
Current prosthetic limbs aren’t yet capable of transmitting complex sensations like texture or pain to the user, but a recent breakthrough by scientists at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, in which a synthetic layer of skin on an artificial hand transmitted feelings of pain directly to the user, takes us one step closer to that goal.
Pain sucks, but we’d be lost without this extremely valuable sensation.
“Pain helps protect our bodies from damage by giving us the sensation that something may be harmful, such as the sharp edge of a knife,” Luke Osborn, a co-author of the new study and a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, told Gizmodo. “For a prosthesis, there is no concept of pain, which opens it up to the possibility of damage. We found a way to provide sensations of pain in a meaningful way to the prosthesis as well as the amputee user.”
Working with JHU neuroengineer Nitish Thakor, Osborn and his colleagues developed a system called e-dermis—a skin-like layer that gives prosthetic limbs the capacity to perceive touch and pain. Pressure applied to the e-dermis is transmitted to the user’s brain via an electric nerve stimulator implanted in the arm above the prosthesis, allowing the system to emulate actual sensations. In tests of the e-dermis system, a volunteer amputee said he could tell the difference between objects that were rounded or sharp, saying the sensation of pain registered a three out of 10 in terms of severity. This study was published today in Science Robotics.
People who use prosthetic limbs can use these pain signals to avoid damaging their prosthesis, just as they use the warning of pain to avoid harming any other body part. Sharp objects and heat can wreck the fingertips of an artificial hand or cause damage to its cosmesis, or skin-like covering. Serious damage to an artificial limb is no joke, as some of the more expensive units can cost upwards of $70,000 or more. What’s more, a prosthetic limb that can feel its surroundings adds to its utility.
Clearly, pain is unpleasant, and we should work to minimize the amount of pain that people are regularly exposed to. As the authors of the new study admit, an ideal prosthesis would “allow the user to maintain complete control” and choose to “overrule pain reflexes” if desired. For example, users should be able to switch off the pain function and have automated, built-in pain reflexes kick in when the limb senses something is causing damage. That’s the ultimate goal, but in the meantime, the JHU researchers are seeking to create more realistic prosthetic limbs capable of delivering a rich diversity of tactile information, including pain.
As noted, modern prostheses don’t provide meaningful tactile feedback or perception, so users can’t tell if something is rough, smooth, sharp, cold, or hot. To overcome these deficiencies, the JHU researchers built their e-dermis device by mimicking the way pain works on natural skin. Specifically, they modeled the way nerve cells within skin, called nociceptors, process pain and transmit the resulting signals to the brain for processing via mechanoreceptors (as a important aside, while we experience pain at the point of injury, the actual sensation of pain is produced by the brain).
“We feel pain through receptors in our skin,” said Osborne. “We have what are called mechanoreceptors that send information about anything we touch to our brain. That’s why we can feel things like pressure or texture. Nociceptors, on the other hand, convey sensations of pain when we touch something sharp or have a cut. We built a multilayered electronic dermis, or e-dermis, that tries to mimic the behavior of these different receptors.”
Diagram of the e-dermis system. Illustration: Osborn et al., 2018/Science Robotics
To make it work, the researchers created a neuromorphic system—a device that mimics the behavior of the nervous system with circuits. In this case, their neuromorphic model took the output of the e-dermis (i.e. the tactile information produced when touching an object) and transformed it into electric spikes, or neural signals, that replicated the behavior of mechanoreceptors and nociceptors. These spikes were then used to electrically stimulate the peripheral nerves of an amputee volunteer (i.e. transcutaneous nerve stimulation, or TNS). When provided with this nerve stimulation, the volunteer was able to feel sensations in his artificial hand.
In experiments, an amputee volunteer could feel pressure, the tapping of a fingertip, and even objects that elicited painful sensations. He could tell the difference between non-painful and painful tactile perceptions, including variations in an object’s curvature and sharp edges. The volunteer said the sensations felt like they were coming directly from the so-called phantom hand. EEG scans taken during the experiments appeared to show that regions in the brain associated with the hand were activated in the participant’s brain.
The JHU researchers documented which stimulations the user found painful and which felt more like normal touch. The volunteer was asked to rate the discomfort of the perceived sensations in the phantom hand using a scale from -1 to 10, where -1 is something enjoyable or pleasant, 1 is very light pain like an itch, 2 is a discomforting feeling like a pinch, 3 is uncomfortable but tolerable, like an accidental cut, and so on, During this experiment, the highest level of pain was ranked as a 3.
The volunteer performing the sensation task. Image: Osborn et al., 2018/Science Robotics
“One of the most surprising aspects of this work was being able to identify different stimulation patterns that produce different sensations in the phantom hand of the amputee volunteer,” said Osborn. “In this case, those sensations were of pressure or pain.”
To make the system more life-like, the researchers also added an automated pain reflex to the system. When the prosthetic hand touched a sharp object, the fingers automatically jerked away, “to prevent damage and further pain,” as the researchers write in the study. Importantly, the volunteer had no control over these reflex movements.
Sharlene Flesher, a PhD candidate in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh who wasn’t involved with the new study, said the new study is “a good piece of work that’s very complete,” and that “the progression they present is solid.” That said, she felt the EEG results were “silly.”
“They claim that it demonstrates that the participant felt the sensations in the left hand, but EEG does not provide the spatial accuracy to claim that,” Flesher told Gizmodo. “The result agreed that the sensations were on the left side of the body and probably somewhere on the arm, I did not buy that it was in the hand from the EEG report. I would have liked to see more detail about how they mapped the sensations, but it appears that they did a good job finding stimulation sites that evoked sensations in the phantom hand.”
As for building prosthetics that allow users to feel pain, Flesher agrees that triggering full-on pain should not be the goal.
“Whether or not pain should be relayed is interesting, and they kind of get at it here. If the prosthesis can identify ‘painful’ situations and minimize them, does discomfort really need to be relayed to the user? I think if they keep the pain sensations in an informative range, where it doesn’t cause so much pain so as to be a distraction, it’s useful,” she said. “However, they also evoked sensations with different modalities, such as pressure and tingle, so one reasonable pain-free alternative would be to have the tingle sensation indicate a painful touch. That being said, if they can evoke pain, pressure and tingle, using all three could convey more information.”
This is very promising work, but there are many other aspects of touch. Looking ahead, the JHU researchers would like to explore other perceptions that could be provided through sensory feedback, including temperature and proprioception (such as knowing the relative location of our body parts, like an arm above the head).
“By adding in different sensations, we can continue to improve upper limb prostheses to make them even more functional and lifelike,” said Osborn.
Because soon the only animals left on earth will be made of plastic, this is the hermit crab LEGO build created by LEGO enthusiast Paul Friesen. In his own words while I go down a rabbit hole online considering setting up a paludarium (a vivarium with both land and water features) for freshwater vampire crabs because my brain is a wild horse that can’t be tamed:
I got this shell, and I knew what I needed to build. I used most of my smaller Flaming Yellowish Orange parts for the belly, and orange parts for the upper body. the claws can open and close, thanks to Droid bodies and Bionicle Eyes.
Great job. Also, I’m sure you’ll all be interested to know that I’ve decided to put my vampire crab paludarium on hold for now because I’m going to be moving very soon, and the last thing I’d want to do is cause any undo stress to my animals — their health and wellbeing is my utmost priority. “You never said you were moving. What about me?” What about you? “I’m your ROOMMATE.” Our lease ends at midnight, I’d start packing.
Thanks to Lydia, who agrees we have a lot to learn from crabs and turtles.
Nintendo’s Two-Switch Combo Is A Neat Digital Magic Trick
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At an E3 where Nintendo and its partners largely played it safe with big Smash Bros. and Pokémon sequels, the company tucked a clever new Switch development in a trailer for a new Mario Party. Blink and you’d miss it: the sight of two Nintendo Switch screens connected into one oddly-shaped game board.
On the last day of E3, I got to see a quick demo of the two-screen technology. I wasn’t allowed to play the games myself, but in a meeting room bearing the name of the company’s outgoing CEO, I watched the latest Switch concept in action.
Nintendo reps showed off three mini-games that make use of the dual screen.
In the first, a baseball game, allowing up to two players per team, involved propping up a pair of Switches back-to-back to give opposite perspectives of a baseball diamond. One team would pitch and field. The other would get up to bat. This was fine, but not the magic I’d booked the meeting to see.
The other two demos were short but sensational. They each involved using two Switch units’ screens as connectable surfaces.
The first demo involved bananas and two Switch screens. Each screen shows halves of some bananas or banana bunches, each half bleeding off the edge of the system like the edge of a puzzle piece. The player needs to move the screens around on a table until two of the halves are lined up to make a whole, then swipe their finger through it to confirm the connection. (The game was also demoed during Nintendo’s Treehouse Live show and can be viewed 16 minutes into this clip.) The game was timed, and the player has to think quickly. After each successful connection, the screens display more complex banana arrangements, necessitating more fiddling with those Switch screens to line them up the right way.
The second multi-screen game, also from Super Mario Party, involves multiplayer tank combat. Each screen’s battlefield consists of a 5×9 grid, and the screens can be joined in any way that retains some of the seams of that grid. Once the player lines up the screens at any right or straight angle, they swipe their finger to make the connection. The screens reconfigure themselves to ensure there’s an open and contiguous battlefield across both devices. At that point, players can start driving their tanks into battle from one screen to the next.
Nintendo wouldn’t let me try the games, nor talk to me about how they work. Watching the games in action, I gather that the systems may be linked wirelessly but don’t actually communicate their position. The act of drawing one’s finger from one screen to the other appears to be the main (and possibly the only) way that the screens extrapolate their relative positions.
Figuring out how the magic trick is done would make it a shade less exciting, but I’m still enamored with what Nintendo’s done here. I could be wrong, after all. And I wouldn’t put it past Nintendo to come up with wilder, even better ideas for games that use this concept. How about a double-wide view for a new co-op side-scroller?
Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s ‘Everything Is Love’ Marks a New Step in the Album’s Evolution
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On Saturday night under the shield of London Stadium, just as Beyoncé and Jay-Z brought their most recent “On The Run II” tour date to a close, a large sign announced itself with a playful wink: “ALBUM OUT NOW.” It was the latest message from two artists whose careers have been marked by public dramas both cryptic and blunt—they had again summoned their congregation; the long-anticipated joint album was finally, startlingly, here.
The days since have augured all manner of revelations: the project, titled Everything Is Love, is a measured exegesis on themes hauntingly mundane to the Carters—family and success, love and betrayal of the flesh. It is a fitting finale to the couple’s unofficial musical trilogy, which began in 2016 with Beyoncé’s Lemonade, an album of sheer grace and fury—which was also televised through an hour-long broadcast on HBO—and continued on 4:44, Jay-Z’s 2017 apology record, where he, at last, owned to his infidelity. “I apologize to all the women whom I toyed with your emotions/’Cause I was emotionless,” he rapped to his wife on the title track.
Still, one of the more remarkable aspects of Everything Is Love is its economy; spread across nine tracks, it clocks in at just under 40 minutes. The album—a lean and loud thing; puffed up but never obnoxiously self-important—descends as the omega of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s years-long saga of woe and redemption. It is, in every formulation, an album of the moment—one that slyly speaks to the evolutionary shifts befalling the music industry but also reconstructs that narrative into something new and strange and necessary.
To lacerating effect, the Carters—as they are officially billed on Tidal, the streaming platform the couple has a stake in, where the album was exclusively housed for 24 hours before coming to Spotify and Apple Music—chart the passageways of how they got to where they are, all while having fun along the way. New York Magazine‘s Craig Jenkins encapsulated the album’s all-embracing sentiment perfectly: “It’s the sweetest possible ending to the trauma of the last two records, husband and wife united in shade and shit-talk,” he wrote, concluding: “The message isn’t ‘Y’all could never do this.’ It’s that against all odds, two of us just did.”
The album, as genre, is currently undergoing a remolding. Along with Everything Is Love, a mostly unconnected string of releases from Tierra Whack (Whack World), Kanye West (ye), Matt & Kim (Almost Everyday), Pusha-T (Daytona), Nas (NASIR), and Kid Cudi and West (Kids See Ghosts), have adopted an intentionally spare framework—the 15-track Whack World, for example, runs just 15 minutes. They are projects that test the boundaries of how we come to understand what an album is, and what it ought to be. Of late, one central thesis has taken hold: In an overstuffed music landscape, where, according to the New York Times, “woozy, blown-out rap albums” govern the charts, moderation has become an antithetical form of self-optimization. As it turns out, by doing less—slender track arrangements, compact running times—these artists have done and said more than their contemporaries.
One of the more remarkable aspects of Everything Is Love is its economy. It is an album of the moment—one that slyly speaks to the evolutionary shifts befalling the music industry but also reconstructs that narrative into something new and strange and necessary.
The album as we know it—a loose or tightly-woven collection of audio recordings that, per rules outlined by The Recording Academy must be either 30 minutes in length, or 15 minutes in length with a minimum of 5 tracks to qualify as such—has experienced radical alterations in the last decade, fragmented into three distinct categories: The album as album, the album as playlist, and, more recently, the album as EP.
Historically, albums were statement pieces for artists—the culmination of weeks, or months, or years of work siphoned into a cohesive, crackling exposition. Think Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Beyonce’s Lemonade, or even West’s 2016 mantlepiece The Life of Pablo. These albums were meant to exist in the multiple, registering as events and as cultural tentpoles: constantly played and constantly argued over. It was the album at its most maximalist and moutwhwatering.
Naturally, that all changed with the rise of the streaming marketplace, which again revamped the album’s algorithm. The album was no longer solely occupied with the statement it was trying to make; albums were now optimized for playlists. They’d become bloated experiments in global fusion (Drake’s 22-track, 81-minute-long More Life) and creative anarchy (Future’s HNDRXX and FUTURE; 17 tracks each and released a week apart), ceding authority to streaming overlords, whose business models, in part, prioritized artists with the most spins (in 2017, streaming accounted for two-thirds the music industry’s revenue). Albums of a such repute heralded a permanent shift in the calculus of pop power.
Even Cardi B’s brilliant and ferocious Invasion of Privacy, released in April, translated more as a collection of singles than a unified album, spurred in part by the playlist-centric projects of 2017 and 2018. Cardi’s ascent started with the placement of “Bodak Yellow” on Apple’s A-List: Hip Hop playlist and later on Spotify’s Rap Caviar, where it skyrocketed. “It doesn’t feel like a hit, it feels like a moment,” Apple’s Carl Cherry told Billboard at the time. In our new song-based economy, albums had become a kind of dead weight. Just look to Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles” and Migos’ “Bad and Boujee”—tracks that accrued an incredible amount of viral currency and nearly eclipsed each group’s respective album (both songs peaked at Number One on the Hot 100).
Lately, though, the album has evolved into a slight, willowy offering—it’s the EP all grown up. The batch of releases out of GOOD Music—West, Cudi, and Pusha-T, with a Teyana Taylor project set to follow—demonstrate a new configuration for the genre. Particularly Daytona and Kids See Ghosts, which adopt the song-craving appetite of the streaming era and apply it to a condensed album format: expertly curated with no clutter, just seven songs that demand rotation. Whack, a 22-year-old singer and rapper from Philadelphia with an absurdist bent, took the concept one step further with Whack World—each song is exactly one-minute long but feels a galaxy wide—telling the Times: “I have a really short attention span, but I have so much to offer. I wanted to put all of these ideas into one universe, one world. I’m giving you a trip through my mind.”
Even in such a unsteady industry, the album has remained a constant, and malleable, asset. What the Carters have essentially done with their latest is reconstruct the before into the now. It is a lean, pluralistic Megazord of an album—a statement EP suited for every kind of playlist. For two artists who have an appetite for grandiosity, Everything Is Love—for all its swagger and self-praise—reads as a decidedly controlled piece of art. It is Beyoncé and Jay-Z doing what they have always done: giving us what we didn’t know we needed until we had it.
Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s ‘Everything Is Love’ Marks a New Step in the Album’s Evolution
https://ift.tt/2MCFgvX
On Saturday night under the shield of London Stadium, just as Beyoncé and Jay-Z brought their most recent “On The Run II” tour date to a close, a large sign announced itself with a playful wink: “ALBUM OUT NOW.” It was the latest message from two artists whose careers have been marked by public dramas both cryptic and blunt—they had again summoned their congregation; the long-anticipated joint album was finally, startlingly, here.
The days since have augured all manner of revelations: the project, titled Everything Is Love, is a measured exegesis on themes hauntingly mundane to the Carters—family and success, love and betrayal of the flesh. It is a fitting finale to the couple’s unofficial musical trilogy, which began in 2016 with Beyoncé’s Lemonade, an album of sheer grace and fury—which was also televised through an hour-long broadcast on HBO—and continued on 4:44, Jay-Z’s 2017 apology record, where he, at last, owned to his infidelity. “I apologize to all the women whom I toyed with your emotions/’Cause I was emotionless,” he rapped to his wife on the title track.
Still, one of the more remarkable aspects of Everything Is Love is its economy; spread across nine tracks, it clocks in at just under 40 minutes. The album—a lean and loud thing; puffed up but never obnoxiously self-important—descends as the omega of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s years-long saga of woe and redemption. It is, in every formulation, an album of the moment—one that slyly speaks to the evolutionary shifts befalling the music industry but also reconstructs that narrative into something new and strange and necessary.
To lacerating effect, the Carters—as they are officially billed on Tidal, the streaming platform the couple has a stake in, where the album was exclusively housed for 24 hours before coming to Spotify and Apple Music—chart the passageways of how they got to where they are, all while having fun along the way. New York Magazine‘s Craig Jenkins encapsulated the album’s all-embracing sentiment perfectly: “It’s the sweetest possible ending to the trauma of the last two records, husband and wife united in shade and shit-talk,” he wrote, concluding: “The message isn’t ‘Y’all could never do this.’ It’s that against all odds, two of us just did.”
The album, as genre, is currently undergoing a remolding. Along with Everything Is Love, a mostly unconnected string of releases from Tierra Whack (Whack World), Kanye West (ye), Matt & Kim (Almost Everyday), Pusha-T (Daytona), Nas (NASIR), and Kid Cudi and West (Kids See Ghosts), have adopted an intentionally spare framework—the 15-track Whack World, for example, runs just 15 minutes. They are projects that test the boundaries of how we come to understand what an album is, and what it ought to be. Of late, one central thesis has taken hold: In an overstuffed music landscape, where, according to the New York Times, “woozy, blown-out rap albums” govern the charts, moderation has become an antithetical form of self-optimization. As it turns out, by doing less—slender track arrangements, compact running times—these artists have done and said more than their contemporaries.
One of the more remarkable aspects of Everything Is Love is its economy. It is an album of the moment—one that slyly speaks to the evolutionary shifts befalling the music industry but also reconstructs that narrative into something new and strange and necessary.
The album as we know it—a loose or tightly-woven collection of audio recordings that, per rules outlined by The Recording Academy must be either 30 minutes in length, or 15 minutes in length with a minimum of 5 tracks to qualify as such—has experienced radical alterations in the last decade, fragmented into three distinct categories: The album as album, the album as playlist, and, more recently, the album as EP.
Historically, albums were statement pieces for artists—the culmination of weeks, or months, or years of work siphoned into a cohesive, crackling exposition. Think Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Beyonce’s Lemonade, or even West’s 2016 mantlepiece The Life of Pablo. These albums were meant to exist in the multiple, registering as events and as cultural tentpoles: constantly played and constantly argued over. It was the album at its most maximalist and moutwhwatering.
Naturally, that all changed with the rise of the streaming marketplace, which again revamped the album’s algorithm. The album was no longer solely occupied with the statement it was trying to make; albums were now optimized for playlists. They’d become bloated experiments in global fusion (Drake’s 22-track, 81-minute-long More Life) and creative anarchy (Future’s HNDRXX and FUTURE; 17 tracks each and released a week apart), ceding authority to streaming overlords, whose business models, in part, prioritized artists with the most spins (in 2017, streaming accounted for two-thirds the music industry’s revenue). Albums of a such repute heralded a permanent shift in the calculus of pop power.
Even Cardi B’s brilliant and ferocious Invasion of Privacy, released in April, translated more as a collection of singles than a unified album, spurred in part by the playlist-centric projects of 2017 and 2018. Cardi’s ascent started with the placement of “Bodak Yellow” on Apple’s A-List: Hip Hop playlist and later on Spotify’s Rap Caviar, where it skyrocketed. “It doesn’t feel like a hit, it feels like a moment,” Apple’s Carl Cherry told Billboard at the time. In our new song-based economy, albums had become a kind of dead weight. Just look to Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles” and Migos’ “Bad and Boujee”—tracks that accrued an incredible amount of viral currency and nearly eclipsed each group’s respective album (both songs peaked at Number One on the Hot 100).
Lately, though, the album has evolved into a slight, willowy offering—it’s the EP all grown up. The batch of releases out of GOOD Music—West, Cudi, and Pusha-T, with a Teyana Taylor project set to follow—demonstrate a new configuration for the genre. Particularly Daytona and Kids See Ghosts, which adopt the song-craving appetite of the streaming era and apply it to a condensed album format: expertly curated with no clutter, just seven songs that demand rotation. Whack, a 22-year-old singer and rapper from Philadelphia with an absurdist bent, took the concept one step further with Whack World—each song is exactly one-minute long but feels a galaxy wide—telling the Times: “I have a really short attention span, but I have so much to offer. I wanted to put all of these ideas into one universe, one world. I’m giving you a trip through my mind.”
Even in such a unsteady industry, the album has remained a constant, and malleable, asset. What the Carters have essentially done with their latest is reconstruct the before into the now. It is a lean, pluralistic Megazord of an album—a statement EP suited for every kind of playlist. For two artists who have an appetite for grandiosity, Everything Is Love—for all its swagger and self-praise—reads as a decidedly controlled piece of art. It is Beyoncé and Jay-Z doing what they have always done: giving us what we didn’t know we needed until we had it.
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