Nest announced this week that glass break detection is arriving for the Nest Secure security system early this month, specifically for the Nest Guard unit.
The way it works is simple. Users will need to have Nest Guard within 15ft. of whatever glass or door they want to monitor. If Guard detects the sound of a door or glass breaking, it instantly analyzes the sound on-device to confirm it was indeed that sound and not something else, then it goes about its alarm system duties (loud noises) and notifies you.
If you have a Nest Guard installed in your home, here’s the process of enabling this new feature.
How to Enable
Open your Nest app.
Tap the Settings icon on the Nest app home screen.
Select Security > Security levels.
Choose Away and Guarding or Home and Guarding.
Tap Glass break detection.
Turn on Glass break detection and choose the amount of time you want before the alarm sounds.
To set up glass break detection in another security level, go back to step 3.
Martin Scorsese made waves when he said Marvel movies are "not cinema." The famed Oscar-winning director has now clarified his remarks as part of an opinion piece for The New York Times–and he isn’t backing down.
Scorsese started off by stating that he does not detest Marvel, he just doesn’t see those types of superhero movies as "cinema" as he defines it. He said many franchise films are "made by people of considerable talent and artistry." He doesn’t watch or enjoy Marvel movies because they do not personally appeal to his "taste and temperament."
"I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself," he said. "But I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies–of what they were and what they could be–that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri."
Scorsese–who won an Oscar for The Departed–said Marvel movies do in fact contain "many of the elements that define cinema as I know it." However, he says he can’t call Marvel movies true cinema by his definition because they lack "revelation, mystery, or genuine emotional danger."
"Nothing is at risk" in Marvel movies, Scorsese added. "The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes."
The director went on to say Marvel movies are effectively remakes in spirit in part because they have gone through a process that removes a semblance of personality.
"Everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted, and remodified until they’re ready for consumption," he said.
Scorsese singled out directors like Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker), Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar), and Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, Punch-Drunk Love) as movie-makers who create experiences that deliver "something absolutely new." Their movies take Scorsese to places of "unnameable areas of experience."
The director said he’s sharing his opinions about Marvel movies, superhero movies, and franchise films because he sees them as a threat to the traditional movie-going experience. Movie theatres only have so many screens, so they choose to run sequels and franchise films, while independent theatres are losing ground.
"In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen," he said. "It’s a perilous time in film exhibition, and there are fewer independent theaters than ever."
"If you’re going to tell me that it’s simply a matter of supply and demand and giving the people what they want, I’m going to disagree," he added. "It’s a chicken-and-egg issue. If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing."
You can–and should–read Scorsese’s full piece at NYT to better understand the context of his comments, and gain a full understanding of what he’s saying and why.
Scorsese’s original comments inspired other directors to speak out as well. The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola took things further, saying Marvel movies are "despicable."
"I don’t know that anyone gets anything out of seeing the same movie over and over again. Martin was kind when he said it’s not cinema," Coppola said. "He didn’t say it’s despicable, which I just say it is."
Scorsese’s next movie is The Irishman, starring Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino. It is playing in select theatres now and debuts on Netflix on November 27.
On Monday, a small capsule launched off its test stand at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, reaching speeds of more than 600 miles per hour in just seconds. The spacecraft was Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule, which will begin carrying NASA astronauts to the International Space Station next year. Later this week, SpaceX will also perform a test of its Crew Dragon capsule, a second try after a catastrophic explosion ended a similar trial run earlier this year.
These tests are meant to demonstrate the capsules’ ability to handle a suborbital emergency. If something goes seriously wrong while the astronauts are perched on top of a rocket, the capsules are supposed to jettison them to safety. Passing these tests is a major milestone as the two companies race to be the first to ferry NASA astronauts to space. But getting an astronaut safely off the pad doesn’t count for much if you can’t bring them just as safely back to Earth. And for that you need lots of big parachutes that are guaranteed to work every time—which is trickier than it sounds.
In Monday’s Starliner test, only two of the capsule’s three parachutes deployed. Technically the capsule only needs two to land safely back on Earth, and Boeing deemed the test a success. Still, parachutes have long bedeviled space companies, and Monday’s partial deployment suggests they continue to pose a significant technical challenge. SpaceX had a similar incident earlier this year when all of its parachutes failed to deploy during a drop test.
“Parachutes remain a challenging area for both providers,” an Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel report on Boeing and SpaceX’s commercial crew programs noted earlier this year. “Both providers have experienced technical challenges, albeit different ones, related to the deployment and performance of their parachute systems.”
Each company is going through a different certification process for their commercial crew program, but the parachutes ultimately face the same fundamental challenges. They have to withstand extreme forces as they slow a 10 ton vehicle from over 100 miles per hour to a running pace. Complicating matters, these loads are constantly shifting as the parachute inflates—if it inflates at all. Toss in some added randomness from the wind, and you’ve got yourself a wickedly complex engineering problem.
Before this week’s launch, Boeing had successfully tested its parachutes by dropping a Starliner test vehicle from a balloon five times. On Monday, once the Starliner capsule reached its peak altitude, it released the drogue parachutes that then pull out the much larger main parachutes. The main chutes’ canopies are wide enough to fit three school buses end-to-end. Boeing says it is still investigating why the third parachute didn’t open.
“It’s too early to determine why all three main parachutes did not deploy, however, having two of three deploy successfully is acceptable for the test parameters and crew safety,” Boeing spokesperson Todd Blecher said in a statement.
The parachutes used in Boeing’s Starliner are a scaled-down version of legacy parachute designs developed by NASA nearly 20 years ago as part of the Constellation program. After this Bush-era push to the moon was canceled, the Orion capsule was redesigned and outfitted with a new parachute system. Since the design of Boeing’s parachute system is so similar to NASA’s, the company had to perform fewer tests to demonstrate the system’s safety compared to SpaceX. But despite the extensive testing of the chutes, a Boeing spokesperson says there is still work to be done to ensure astronauts return safely back to Earth.
In particular, engineers are concerned about “asymmetric loading.” Different parts of a parachute experience different amounts of stress as the chute inflates, which means it’s critical to reinforce those areas that experience the most force. But that adds weight to the system, which restricts the carrying capacity of the capsule. So engineers try to limit reinforcements only to those areas that are absolutely necessary by modeling the chute’s deployment under various conditions.
A video still showing an Exploration Upper Stage in flight.
NASA
On Halloween, NASA posted a document that provides some perspective on the agency’s long-term plans for the Space Launch System rocket. This is the agency’s titanic booster that has been under development since 2010, has an annual budget of more than $2 billion, and will not fly before at least 2021. The new document, known as a Justification for Other Than Full and Open Competition, explains why NASA rejected a lower-cost version of an upper stage for its rocket.
Early on, the space agency opted to build the large SLS rocket in phases. The initial version, Block 1, would have a placeholder upper stage. As a result, this initial variant of the rocket would be somewhat limited in its capabilities and only marginally more powerful than private rockets—most notably SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and Blue Origin’s New Glenn boosters—developed without the deep pockets of US taxpayers.
The much more capable Block 1b of the SLS rocket will stand apart from these private rockets. With its more powerful second stage, known as the Exploration Upper Stage, it will more than double the lift capacity of these private rockets. Additionally, it will have the capability to launch both large amounts of cargo and the crewed Orion spacecraft at the same time.
At the outset of the program, NASA chose Boeing to build both the core stage of the SLS rocket, as well as the Exploration Upper Stage. In recent years, Congress has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars for the agency and Boeing to design this new upper stage to fit on top of the SLS rocket. The agency has yet to move into development of the upper stage, however.
A comparison between the Interium Cryogenic Propulsion Stage and the more powerful Exploration Upper Stage.
NASA
There are several reasons for this. NASA wants Boeing to finish the SLS rocket’s core stage first, as it is already four years late. Moreover, because of Boeing’s performance on the core stage and projected costs of the Exploration Upper Stage, the agency was curious if there were other aerospace companies interested in building a powerful upper stage for the SLS rocket.
Two years ago this frustration, in part, led NASA to issue a request for industry to provide a “low-cost replacement” for the RL-10 rocket engine that powered the Exploration Upper Stage, as well as perhaps an entirely new stage itself. An agency spokesperson said at the time the request sought to “open up the field of possible responses” and reduce costs of the SLS rocket’s proposed upper stage.
Since that time, the issue of the Exploration Upper Stage has largely simmered behind the scenes. The new document released on Halloween, however, provides some clarity for what happened. And instead of opening upper stage bidding into a formal bidding process, NASA decided to stick with Boeing’s version of the Exploration Upper Stage. Because this was a non-competitive process, NASA had to justify it with the new document.
The bidders
In the new paperwork, we learn that Boeing and its long-time competitor, Lockheed Martin, proposed to build the Exploration Upper Stage as designed, with four RL-10 rocket engines manufactured by Aerojet Rocketdyne. In addition, Blue Origin submitted an “alternate response” to the upper stage design.
This design was based upon Blue Origin’s BE-3U rocket engine, a modified version of the motor that powers the New Shepard launch system, which will also fly in the upper stage of the company’s New Glenn rocket. A single BE-3U engine has more thrust than four RL-10 engines combined. So Blue Origin likely proposed an upper stage powered by a single BE-3U engine.
The costs
Rocket engine costs are something of a black box, but it is likely that a single BE-3U engine will cost about the same, or less, than a single RL-10 engine. Therefore Blue Origin’s upper stage would almost certainly cost significantly less than the Exploration Upper Stage proposed by Boeing. (NASA’s justification document redacts the agency’s investment to date in the Exploration Upper Stage.)
Various sources have suggested wildly different cost estimates for the Exploration Upper Stage. But one thing we know for sure from NASA’s 2017 request of industry is that the agency sought to cut costs and must have believed Boeing’s price was too high.
How high was it? We can make an educated guess. Using the Advanced Missions Cost Model, we can roughly estimate the development cost of an upper stage with a dry mass of 13.1 metric tons at $2.5 billion (we rated the development difficulty factor as “high” rather than “very high”). Based upon this model, the total cost for eight Exploration Upper Stages—which NASA announced in October it was beginning to order—came in at $8.6 billion. Subtracting development costs, then, this gives us a per-unit cost of each Boeing upper stage of $880 million.
It is not difficult to see the quandary here for NASA. Even if the agency succeeds in the herculean task of bringing the cost of a single core stage down to $1 billion, flying the Exploration Upper Stage will make each launch of its SLS rocket cost on the order of at least $2 billion. This is not the foundation of a sustainable space program. Indeed, NASA would find itself in the situation of the SLS rocket being too expensive to fly often, and unable to fly it often enough, to eventually make the SLS rocket affordable.
Despite this, in NASA’s new justification document, the agency rejects Blue Origin’s less-costly alternative.
Justification
NASA sets out three reasons for not opening the competition to Blue Origin. In the document, signed by various agency officials including the acting director for human spaceflight, Ken Bowersox, NASA says Blue Origin’s “alternate” stage cannot fly 10 tons of cargo along with the Orion spacecraft.
Moreover, NASA says, the total height of the SLS rocket’s core stage with Blue Origin’s upper stage exceeds the height of the Vertical Assembly Building’s door, resulting in “modifications to the VAB building height and substantial cost and schedule delays.” Finally, the agency says the BE-3U engine’s higher stage thrust would result in an increase to the end-of-life acceleration of the Orion spacecraft and a significant impact to the Orion solar array design.
Despite these reasons, perhaps the overriding rationale in the NASA document is that moving away from the Exploration Upper Stage’s current design would require time the agency does not have in its rush to reach the lunar surface by 2024.
NASA would “incur additional costs and schedule risk due to changes in the design and analysis cycles,” the document states. “The alternate solution is a heavier stage with a different length and diameter than EUS. New wind tunnel models, load cycles, and integrated dynamics models would need to be produced and verified.”
A real competition?
The irony in this document is that NASA said it would consider opening up a competition for the SLS rocket’s new upper stage in 2017. And then two years later it told a bidder that proposed a commercial, cheaper upper stage that its bid failed because NASA and Boeing had already designed their rocket around Boeing’s proposal. This seems like less than a fair competition.
Moreover, NASA is already procuring an interim upper stage for the SLS rocket from United Launch Alliance, a company co-owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin. United Launch Alliance has extensive experience with the RL-10 engine and building upper stages. It also has tooling and factory space for this purpose, and it likely would have been cheaper and faster for NASA to contract with ULA. However, this would have meant that Boeing had to share any profits from the upper stage with Lockheed.
As a result, NASA has gone with a contractor that significantly under-performed on the SLS core stage, which is years behind schedule, billions of dollars over budget, and yet to prove itself in flight. Now it has bet the future of its deep space exploration program for at least the next decade on the same company. NASA fans can only hope that Boeing builds rockets as well as it does lobbying coalitions.
Did you now that someone actually built a DIY DeLorean hovercraft, and this hovercraft could be yours for the right money? Current bid is for the vehicle is $22,500, about half of what the maker was asking last year. Behold:
After blowing people’s minds for the last 7 years, San Francisco artist Matt Riese is auctioning his custom handmade Delorean Hovercraft! Check out this insane highlight reel of it hovering over land and water! The 7-day auction goes from Monday, October 28th to Monday, November 4th, 2019 and will be hosted by specialty vintage car auction website BringATrailer.com
The hovercraft comes with its own custom tilting hover-on/off flatbed trailer and free phone consultations with the builder for any questions you might have.
This thing is one-of-a-kind and will definitely give you the time of your life!
Unfortunately, the hovercraft only has a top speed of 31 MPH… so forget about travelling to the past Back to the Future style. This baby needs to reach 88 MPH for the magic to happen!
NVIDIA has unveiled a new RTX GPU features that will accelerate a new AI feature in Premiere Pro and speed up Adobe’s 3D apps, Dimension and Substance Alchemist. As Adobe just announced, Premiere has a new feature called Auto Reframe that can analyze content in a regular, 16×9 horizontal video and automatically convert it to a vertical smartphone format. That process can take a long time, but NVIDIA said it will go 400 percent faster on NVIDIA RTX GPUs compared to just using the CPU.
As it does with games, RTX GPUs will also allow Adobe Dimension users to speed up rendering of 3D environments (an example is shown above) that use dynamic lighting, reflections and soft shadows. "We’re also adding interactive ray tracing that will enable artists to render fantastic 3D photorealistic scenes that take their environments to the next level," said ADobe’s 3D and AR director of engineering, Ross McKegney.
The RTX tricks will also speed up the latest version of Adobe’s Substance Alchemist, a tool that helps artists create realistic textures for 3D objects. That app will take advantage of AI deep learning built into RTX GPUs, NVIDIA notes. "Material creation that used to take an artist hours of painstaking masking and editing to remove lighting can now be done by AI in seconds," according to Adobe.
Finally, NVIDIA unveiled its latest Studio Driver, promising to boost performance in compatible Creative Cloud apps like Adobe Premiere and After Effects. It’ll also boost other apps like Autodesk Arnold, Cinebench and Redcine-X Pro. The new driver and features for Adobe’s apps are now available.
If you’re fluent in two languages, there’s a good chance you want to read news stories in both — say, to keep up with both your country of origin and the one you now call home. And if that’s the case, Google now has your back. Google has updated News for Android and iOS with support for displaying stories in two languages with just a single feed. You could keep up with both American and Korean news, or even use the same language to keep tabs on news in different countries.
The approach is now available in Google News’ language settings for 141 countries and 41 language variants. This won’t be a complete help if you’re a full-fledged polyglot who speaks three or more languages, but it beats having to use multiple apps or the web to get a more complete picture of the news that matters.
