Michael Collins

One of the nation's brightest and most influential writers will be writing a comic book for Marvel. Ta-Nehisi Coates, the national correspondent for The Atlantic and National Book Award nominee, will be writing Black Panther, one of Marvel's premier superheroes next Spring. The New York Times reported:

His passions intersected in May, during the magazine’s New York Ideas seminar, he interviewed Sana Amanat, a Marvel editor, about diversity and inclusion in comic books. Ms. Amanat led the creation of the new Ms. Marvel, a teenage Muslim girl living in Jersey City, based on some of her own childhood experiences … After that event, Marvel reached out, paired Mr. Coates with an editor, and discussions about the comic began. The renewed focus on Black Panther is no surprise.

For the last few years, diversity, and the lack of it, in comic books has been a major discussion. Coates's thoughtfulness and the way he writes about race and its relationship to politics, economics, and issues like mass incarceration is respected and virtually unmatched in this country. Coates is a major comic book fan, and described writing for Marvel as a "childhood dream." The reality of Coates writing a black superhero is a gigantic step in an industry where female and non-white creators are still a minority fighting for their voices to be heard.

Black Panther is also Marvel's first black superhero to get his solo film since Blade (whose rights were owned by a different company at the time). Black Panther will make his first filmic appearance in Captain America: Civil War (May 2016) before his movie hits theaters in 2018.

Hovertext: Still, this is the most current reference I've made all week.

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Only 20 general admission tickets left :) Thanks, geeks! 

The words “alternate reality game ” were the last thing some hardcore Pokémon fans wanted to hear last night. I understand why. It’s a spin-off. It’s on mobile. You can’t play from the comfort of your own home. And yet! Pokémon Go could be the shot in the arm that the monster-collecting series needs.

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The hardest part of the game is trying to figure out Witcher way to go next.



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CC ollider is reporting that a planned reboot of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is in the works, and that this one will be “female-centric”.

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Here’s an interesting letter from “Stockholm” to Seattle

Dear Seattle,

I am writing to you because I heard that you are looking at rent control.

Seattle, you need to ask your citizens this: How would citizens like it if they walked into a rental agency and the agent told them to register and come back in 10 years?

I’m not joking. The image above is a scan of a booklet sent to a rental applicant by Stockholm City Council’s rental housing service. See those numbers on the map? That’s the waiting time for an apartment in years. Yes, years. Look at the inner city – people are waiting for 10-20 years to get a rental apartment, and around 7-8 years in my suburbs. (Red keys = new apartments, green keys = existing apartments).

Stockholm City Council now has an official housing queue, where 1 day waiting = 1 point. To get an apartment you need both money for the rent and enough points to be the first in line. Recently an apartment in inner Stockholm became available. In just 5 days, 2000 people had applied for the apartment. The person who got the apartment had been waiting in the official housing queue since 1989!

In addition to Soviet-level shortages, the letter writer discusses a number of other effects of rent controls in Stockholm including rental units converted to condominiums and a division of renters into original recipients who are guaranteed low rates and who thus never move and the newly arrived who have to sublet at higher rates or share crowded space. All of these, of course, are classic consequences of rent controls.

Addendum: More details on Sweden’s rent-setting system can be found here, statistics (in Swedish) on rental availability in Stockhom are here and a useful analysis of the Swedish housing crisis with more details on various policies (e.g. new construction is exempt for 15 years but there isn’t nearly enough) is here. Jenkins wrote a comprehensive review of the literature on rent controls in 2009 that echoed what Navarro said in 1985 “the economics profession has reached a rare consensus: Rent control creates many more problems than it solves.”

Hat tip to Bjorn and Niclas who confirmed to me the situation in Stockholm and to Peter for the original link.

Drop a basketball with backspin from a great enough height, and something rather interesting happens. In the video below, Veritasium’s Derek Muler explains the Magnus effect, and why the phenomenon can cause a ball with even a little spin to swerve so dramatically from its expected path.

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I love me some good level grinding. I'm okay with this.



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At the 1989 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nintendo of America's then-chairman Howard Lincoln took the stage to reveal some unexpected news: the company was partnering with European electronics firm Philips to make a CD-ROM-based games console. While the announcement took everyone in the audience by surprise, Sony engineer Ken Kutaragi was the most shocked of all. Just the night before, he and several Sony executives had been demonstrating a product developed in partnership with Nintendo. It was to be the world's first hybrid console, featuring an SNES cartridge slot and a CD drive, with both formats available to game developers. That product, called "Play Station" (with a space), would never see the light of day. Industry lore suggests that only 200 of the Play Station consoles were ever produced, and hardly anyone has actually seen one of the fabled consoles in the flesh. However, pictures of the legendary original Play Station surfaced on reddit yesterday, showing the hybrid console in all its grey and yellowed-plastic glory. Absolutely glorious. I could look at the pictures for hours.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking the Paris riots against Uber are worker versus capitalist, the attacks are rentiers versus capitalists and worker versus worker.

More pictures here.

Hovertext: ...we think.

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In case you missed it, the new little kids' books (which are suuuuper limited) are on sale now! 

If you shop online, an Amazon Prime membership is easily worth it for the free two-day shipping alone. But that’s not all a Prime membership gets you. Here are some of the perks you may have forgotten.

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Now that's what I call being cable ready.



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From Dusk till Dawn and Sin City director Robert Rodriguez is no stranger to children’s adventure movies, having created the Spy Kids franchise. Now, though, he’s delving into an existing children’s series, bringing the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Jonny Quest to the big screen.

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There needs to be one for furries, too. That explanation would simply be, "You'll like this."



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Hovertext: Things you learn drawing comics - you can't do the Devil's Tuning Fork in color.

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The post Wiggle room has the most potential. appeared first on Indexed.

Hovertext: Twist ending: The kid's eyes are pure white because he's a monster too! Spooooooky!

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Hovertext: Tell me I'm not a remarkably predictable unit in an economic system beyond my control!

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I'm tumblring 

As it was rumored, so it has come to pass! Dominic Cooper, a.k.a. Howard Stark in the early days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, has been cast as the lead in Seth Rogen’s TV adaptation of Garth Ennis’ hit Vertigo comic Preacher.

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Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One is chock full of tributes to the geek culture of the late 20th century, especially its movies and video games. And it turns out that the movie version will be helmed by a man who has inspired incredible amounts 1980s and 1990s nostalgia all on his own: Steven Spielberg.

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It's Joseph Gilgun, the British actor who you might best know as Rudy in Misfits. He's English, not Irish, but at least he has Cassidy's gaunt look. He joins Ruth Negga as Tulip and Ian Coletti as Arseface , leaving only the lead, Jesse Custer, remaining.

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Oops!



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The Project Zero team at Google has posted details of a new attack that targets a computer's' DRAM. It's called Rowhammer. Here's a good description:

Here's how Rowhammer gets its name: In the Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) used in some laptops, a hacker can run a program designed to repeatedly access a certain row of transistors in the computer's memory, "hammering" it until the charge from that row leaks into the next row of memory. That electromagnetic leakage can cause what's known as "bit flipping," in which transistors in the neighboring row of memory have their state reversed, turning ones into zeros or vice versa. And for the first time, the Google researchers have shown that they can use that bit flipping to actually gain unintended levels of control over a victim computer. Their Rowhammer hack can allow a "privilege escalation," expanding the attacker's influence beyond a certain fenced-in portion of memory to more sensitive areas.

Basically:

When run on a machine vulnerable to the rowhammer problem, the process was able to induce bit flips in page table entries (PTEs). It was able to use this to gain write access to its own page table, and hence gain read-write access to all of physical memory.

The cause is simply the super dense packing of chips:

This works because DRAM cells have been getting smaller and closer together. As DRAM manufacturing scales down chip features to smaller physical dimensions, to fit more memory capacity onto a chip, it has become harder to prevent DRAM cells from interacting electrically with each other. As a result, accessing one location in memory can disturb neighbouring locations, causing charge to leak into or out of neighbouring cells. With enough accesses, this can change a cell's value from 1 to 0 or vice versa.

Very clever, and yet another example of the security interplay between hardware and software.

This kind of thing is hard to fix, although the Google team gives some mitigation techniques at the end of their analysis.

Slashdot thread.

EDITED TO ADD (3/12): Good explanation of the vulnerability.

Percentage of annual net electricity generation by renewables in 1948: 32

Percentage of annual net electricity generation by renewables in 2005: 11

The main difference of course is the fall in the relative import of hydroelectric power.

By the way, those numbers are read off a graph and thus are approximate.  They are from p.67 of Mara Prentiss, Energy Revolution: The Physics and the Promise of Efficient Technology, new and noteworthy from The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, recommended.

KERPOW

By James Ring, Google Engineering

This is no ordinary Buddha statue. As the CT scan at the right clearly shows, there's a mummy concealed inside!

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Whee!