Andrew

WOW HERE'S SOME GOOD NEWS FOR ANYONE WHO THOUGHT THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE'S ALL-CAPS DATA BLASTS WERE A LITTLE BRUSQUE IN THIS LOWERCASE-FRIENDLY INTERNET AGE. ON MAY 11TH, THE NWS WILL SWITCH TO USING MIXED-LETTERS IN SOME FORECAST PRODUCTS, AND THE TRANSITION SHOULD BE COMPLETE BY THE END OF THE YEAR. YEAH, THAT'S RIGHT, KID.

THE NWS HAS, IF YOU CAN GODDAMN BELIEVE IT, ONLY JUST NOW BEEN ABLE TO UPDATE ITS SOFTWARE TO THE POINT WHERE MIXED CASE IS POSSIBLE. EVEN THOUGH IT WANTED TO SWITCH EVER SINCE FOR SOME REASON TYPING LIKE THIS STARTED TO SEEM KIND OF RUDE IN THE '90S, IT STILL HAD SOME CLIENTS USING TOTALLY OUTDATED EQUIPMENT CALLED TELEPRINTERS THAT WOULD ONLY RECOGNIZE CAPITAL LETTERS. REALLY?! GOD.

"PEOPLE ARE ACCUSTOMED...

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Martin Kaste, reporting for NPR: FBI Director James Comey gave a speech this week about encryption and privacy, repeating his argument that "absolute privacy" hampers law enforcement. But it was an offhand remark during the Q&A session at Kenyon College that caught the attention of privacy activists. Kaste points to a tweet by The Kenyon Collegian, "Comey admits he puts a piece of tape over the webcam lens on his laptop." The thought of the FBI chief taping over his webcam is an arresting one for many. His comment Wednesday was in response to a question about growing public awareness of the ways technology can spy on people, and he acknowledged sharing in the surveillance anxiety. "I saw something in the news, so I copied it. I put a piece of tape -- I have obviously a laptop, personal laptop -- I put a piece of tape over the camera. Because I saw somebody smarter than I am had a piece of tape over their camera." Not everyone is a fan. Security and privacy activist Christopher Soghoian said, "FBI Director Comey has created a "warrant-proof webcam" that will thwart lawful surveillance should he ever be investigated. Shame on him."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

prisoninmate quotes a report from Softpedia: UbuntuBSD maintainer and lead developer Jon Boden is now looking for a way for his operating system to contribute to the Ubuntu community and, eventually, become an official Ubuntu flavor. Just two weeks ago, [Softpedia] introduced the ubuntuBSD project, whose main design goal is to bring users an operating system powered by the FreeBSD kernel while offering them the familiarity of the Ubuntu Linux OS. Right now, ubuntuBSD is in heavy development, with a fourth Beta build out the door, and it looks like the developer already seeks official status and wants to contribute all of his work to the main Ubuntu channels. [Canonical has yet to respond.]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For 30 minutes this afternoon, the world stood still to watch two BuzzFeed employees wrap rubber bands around a watermelon. It was the most ridiculous use of Facebook's new Live Video feature imaginable, and yet it was some of the most compelling live content the world has ever seen. 800,000 people watched live.

I think, years from now, we will all remember when we first heard about the live watermelon video. For me, it was from a tweet. "Why would I watch a watermelon be wrapped in rubber bands?" I thought. "That sounds like a dull waste of time." But I could not have been more wrong.

pic.twitter.com/Nfqf5PUwn5

— Jesse McLaren (@McJesse) April 8, 2016

For those of you just hearing about this, honestly, I don't know if...

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Google is considering making Apple's Swift programming language a "first class" language for Android, reports The Next Web. Executives from Google, Facebook, and Uber reportedly attended a meeting to discuss Swift in December, around the time that Apple officially made Swift an open source language.

Google's Android operating system currently supports Java as its first-class language, and sources say Swift is not meant to replace Java, at least initially. While the ongoing litigation with Oracle is likely cause for concern, sources say Google considers Swift to have a broader "upside" than Java.

As outlined by The Next Web, adopting Swift would be a major undertaking for Google, due to the need to create a runtime for Swift and incorporate it into APIs and SDKs, many of which would need to be rewritten, but it is something that Google could do. A Swift-based Android operating system would be a boon for developers, who could create native apps for both platforms. Swift is a well-liked programming language because it's simple to learn, easy to work with, and fast.

Along with Google, Facebook and Uber are also said to be considering making Swift "more central" to their operations. At Facebook, employees are already working with Swift internally, though how deeply remains in question, and at Uber, it is not clear if work on a transition to Swift has begun.

Switching over to Swift would be a long process for Google that could span multiple months or years due to the need to rewrite Android services, apps, and APIs, so it is not likely to be adopted in the near future, and Android support is integral, says The Next Web, for the deep integration that Facebook and Uber want to adopt.

Apple first announced Swift in June of 2014 and expanded on it with Swift 2 in June of 2015. In December, the programming language was made open source.
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Re-saving an image over and over and over again in a lossy format (a format like JPEG that tosses some data each time you save/compress the file) slowly but surely degrades the image. This is called generation loss, and it’s demonstrated beautifully in these almost painful-to-watch YouTube videos.

The videos are created by YouTube user Jon Sneyers, who used a script to save and resave and resave the same image over and over, 500 times. He then turns each resave into a frame of the videos below, the result of which falls somewhere between horrifying and artistic:

“The first frame of this video shows the lossless images, the next frame shows the sizes at the lowest quality of the range,” Jon explains in the video description, “there is a different quality scale for each format; it is chosen to get roughly the same filesize at the lowest quality.”

If you’re more into a stepwise transition that doesn’t go quite as smoothly, Sneyders shared some still frames in a YouTube comment as well.

Here’s the lossless image:

Here it is after 10 generations:

After 50:

After 100:

And after 500:

As you can see, WebP does a terrible job of maintaining its integrity (although the degradation is somehow… beautiful), JPEG holds up surprisingly well, and BPG degrades differently than JPEG, but not necessarily better or worse. Each of these is the result of how a specific format goes about compressing an image.

FLIP, a lossless format, sees no generation loss after the initial compression. You can think of that one as the control.

George Mason University Antonin Scalia School of Law does not make for the nicest acronyms, especially when intending to honor a late Supreme Court justice.

Give it a second. Yup, "ASSoL" or "ASSLaw." Not great. And probably not what the Charles Koch Foundation and anonymous donors were thinking when they donated a total of $30 million (the largest gift in the school's history) to change the name of GMU's Arlington, Virginia, law school to recognize Scalia.

When the school announced it was changing the name last week, Twitter exploded in tasteless jokes. Hashtags #ASSLaw and #ASSoL were made, and some even thought it was an April Fools' Day joke due to the announcement's timing.

Luckily, the change was not permanent. In a letter reported by blog Above the Law, the law school's dean, Henry Butler, wrote a letter to alumni commenting on the acronym controversy and announcing another name change.

"The name initially announced," Butler wrote, "has caused some acronym controversy on social media. The Antonin Scalia Law School is a logical substitute. We anticipate the naming will be effective on July 1, 2016 pending final approval by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia."

So the Antonin Scalia Law School, or ASLS, it is.

I'll just leave you with this:

From August 2015, an anonymous source began leaking around 11.5 million secret documents created by the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca to German news outlet Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ).

Comprised of documents created since the 1970s, the 2.6 terabytes of data (known as the Panama Papers) shine light on 214,000 anonymous offshore companies located around the world, often setup to hide their owners’ identities and business dealings.

“The data provides rare insights into a world that can only exist in the shadows. It proves how a global industry led by major banks, legal firms, and asset management companies secretly manages the estates of the world’s rich and famous: from politicians, Fifa officials, fraudsters and drug smugglers, to celebrities and professional athletes,” SZ writes.

One of the individuals now mired in controversy is Prime Minister of Iceland Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson. Leaks from the Panama Papers show that the 41-year-old and now wife Anna Sigurlaug Pálsdóttir owned an offshore that held millions of dollars in bonds during the country’s financial crisis.

According to The Guardian, the papers show that Gunnlaugsson co-owned a company called Wintris Inc, set up in 2007 in the British Virgin Islands to handle investments with his partner.

Gunnlaugsson is said to have owned a 50% stake in Wintris for more than two years, which was later transferred to his wife who held the other 50%. However, while Gunnlaugsson was still a Wintris shareholder he was elected to parliament as leader of the Progressive Party. He never declared his Wintris shares on Iceland’s register of MPs’ financial interests as required.

Sunday Gunnlaugsson walked out of an extremely awkward interview (below) and is now facing calls to hold a snap general election.

If an election does in indeed go ahead, Icelandic politics will be on a knife edge. Last Friday Gallup published the results of its latest poll and it shows that the leading political force in Iceland is the Pirate Party.

As the chart clearly shows, not only is the Pirate Party way ahead of its nearest rival, but it’s also polling just ahead of the combined Independence Party/Progressive Party coalition government – and this was the position before the Panama leaks controversy.

For a country that relies on coalition governments this is a pretty big deal and for the local Pirate Party the achievement is nothing less than astonishing. In 2013 (and after just a few months of existence) the party achieved 5.1% of the vote and entered national government with three Members of Parliament.

It is now looking at the possibility of a much bigger prize with Pirate MP and spokesperson Birgitta Jónsdóttir noting that the party is prepared.

“In these strange times anything is possible,” she says.

“It’s a really liquid situation. But, of course, if it happens we are ready. We have been asked time and time again since we scored so high in the polls. We are ready.”

Jónsdóttir says she feels that Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson won’t step down and during a live TV broadcast yesterday he confirmed as much, stating that the Panama Papers contained “nothing new” about his and his wife’s business affairs.

Nevertheless, this storm is far from over. With the revelation that the Prime Minister’s finance minister and interior minister also had stakes in offshore companies, thousands of people protested outside Iceland’s Parliament last evening calling for the government to step down.

Only time will tell how this situation will play out, but the prospect of a Pirate-led coalition government is both intriguing and unprecedented.

Update: Prime Minister of Iceland Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson resigned.

Update: Or not?

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

This summer, many traditional media outlets will abandon a last vestige of old technology journalism: the capitalized "Internet." The Associated Press has announced that its highly influential style guide will be updated this year to require "internet" be kept lowercase. The "web" will also be lowercase "in all instances." Yes, that means the grammatical tyranny of the internet as a proper noun is nearly dead. The changes will go into effect on June 1st, when the AP publishes the 2016 edition of its Stylebook.

Many newspapers and websites — including this one — base their style guides on the AP. The Verge has never capitalized internet, however. (As per our internal style guide: "internet, definitely not Internet.")

We will...

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Happy pi day! The date 3/14 is, of course, a poor approximation for π, which has infinite digits (3.1415926...). But that raises a few questions: How many digits have we actually found? And how many do we need?

Back in 2010, Shigeru Kondo and Alexander Yee caused a stir when they announced they'd calculated pi to 5 trillion digits with homemade computers. (The whole project nearly collapsed when Kondo's daughter turned on a hair dryer and tripped a circuit breaker.) Since then, other researchers have used Yee's methods to calculate 22 trillion digits and counting.

It's a phenomenal bit of number crunching. It's also, for most everyday purposes, overkill.

Marc Rayman, the director and chief engineer for NASA's Dawn mission, recently made this clear in response to a question on Facebook. NASA, he explained, certainly doesn't need trillions of digits for its calculations. In fact, they get by with using just 15 — 3.141592653589793. It's not perfect, but it's close enough:

The most distant spacecraft from Earth is Voyager 1. It is about 12.5 billion miles away. Let's say we have a circle with a radius of exactly that size (or 25 billion miles in diameter) and we want to calculate the circumference, which is pi times the radius times 2. Using pi rounded to the 15th decimal, as I gave above, that comes out to a little more than 78 billion miles.

We don't need to be concerned here with exactly what the value is (you can multiply it out if you like) but rather what the error in the value is by not using more digits of pi. In other words, by cutting pi off at the 15th decimal point, we would calculate a circumference for that circle that is very slightly off. It turns out that our calculated circumference of the 25 billion mile diameter circle would be wrong by 1.5 inches.

Think about that. We have a circle more than 78 billion miles around, and our calculation of that distance would be off by perhaps less than the length of your little finger.

Going further, if you used 40 digits of pi, Rayman says, you could calculate the circumference of the entire visible universe — an area with the radius of about 46 billion light-years — "to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom." That'll do!

Mathematicians have been able to calculate 40 digits of pi since the 1700s. Ever since then, they've been rocketing far beyond our wildest spaceship needs:

(Nageh/Wikimedia Commons)

Read more: Steven Strogatz's 2015 piece on why pi matters is pretty great.

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Your iPhone may be small, but it has a clever amount of security built into it — and that's what makes it so hard for anyone, including the federal government, to access.

This is what the FBI wanted to do with the iPhone belonging to San Bernardino terrorism suspect Syed Farook. And the best way to break into an iPhone is to guess the passcode, which for most people is four-digits — or, for newer devices, six digits. (You can also use a custom alphanumeric password, but that's not the default.)

The FBI wanted to guess a bunch of passcodes until it guessed the right one. But this is what the bureau ran into:

You can try it on your iPhone now:

• After five incorrect guesses, your phone locks down for one minute.
• After nine incorrect guesses, it locks down for an hour.
• After 10 incorrect guesses, the phone deletes all its data — but this security features is turned off by default.

So even though the iPhone allows you to guess up to 12.5 pass codes per second, the default security makes it incredibly annoying and time-consuming to guess the passcode. But enabling the feature that self-deletes all of its data makes it virtually impossible for intruders to start guessing random passwords.

So the FBI wanted Apple to write software that disabled these features. That would look something like this:

Easy peasy. Even if a computer can only guess 12.5 passcodes per second, you could get through every six-digit possibility in just over 22 hours. For a four-digit passcode, you could get through every possibility in about 13 minutes.

Apple refused to do this, which is why the Justice Department filed a lawsuit to compel the company to help. But then the FBI came out and said it had found a way into Farook's phone, and dropped the suit.

How was it done?

We don't know.

My colleague Timothy B. Lee has a great collection of theories on how this might have been done — one of which involves "microscopic surgery" to extract the encryption key from the hardware. There were also reports that the FBI worked with the Israeli company Cellebrite, which reportedly signed a contract with the FBI in 2013. A law enforcement source said this isn't the outside group they worked with to hack the device Update: Bloomberg is now reporting that the FBI did indeed work with Cellebrite.

In case you're curious, here's the Cellebrite device that unlocks the iPhone:

Why it's scary that we don't know

As far as we know, the FBI has not told Apple how it got into Farook's phone. But in the cybersecurity world, experts believe the best-case scenario is to share security flaws so companies can protect consumers. The idea is that it's better for everyone to know about an open door, versus just a select few.

But already, the FBI has offered to help local enforcement agencies unlock phones, which hints they intend to hold onto this security flaw.

The FBI may be compelled to share this information under a new Obama administration process called the "equities review," which looks at whether security flaws it finds should be kept secret or shared, according to Bloomberg. But there is an exception for national security, and it's unclear whether this iPhone vulnerability would fall under that purview — because we don't know how the phone was hacked.

But whatever the method, those who work on cybersecurity are almost universally concerned. There is a way to break into your iPhone that someone out there knows about — and given that a third-party helped Apple, it's not just the FBI. But since the FBI hasn't disclosed the flaw, Apple users are not protected from it.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly states that FBI Director James Comey told USA Today they did not work with Cellebrite. It was actually an anonymous law enforcement source — and now Bloomberg is reporting the FBI did indeed work with Cellebrite.

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April Fools' Day is barely underway, and Google has already had a joke backfire: A "mic drop" button in Gmail that inserted a GIF from the Minions movies into an email reply, and then hid all subsequent replies, ended up infuriating people who use their Gmail for professional reasons.

Google

The "mic drop" button was in the same spot where the "send and archive" button usually is, and thanks to muscle memory, plenty of people ended up clicking it who didn't intend to.

"I use gmail for my one-man business," one wrote on Google's forums. "I can't afford for you clowns to mess around with my business."

"April fools jokes are great fun but not when they affect my business correspondence and increase the chance of something serious occurring like not seeing my clients' responses to important emails," another wrote.

Google ended up apologizing: "Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year. Due to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs."

The "mic drop" uproar shows how pranks are viewed differently when they come from a corporate behemoth rather than a scrappy startup.

Google has been doing April Fools' jokes since 2000, not long after the company was founded. When the company announced Gmail, it was on April 1 with a conversational, unserious-sounding press release. The amount of storage Gmail offered was so unprecedented at the time that many people assumed the product was just another company prank, like the lunar research station it announced the same day.

But Gmail is no longer a joke, and Google is no longer a scrappy startup — its parent company, Alphabet, is the world's most valuable company, and it's learning that it can't always afford to make a joke users might not get.

After ten years of waiting, Tesla has revealed the Model 3, the vehicle that CEO Elon Musk hopes will take the electric car to the masses.

At the unveiling of the Model 3 this evening at the company's design studio in Hawthorne, California, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the car will deliver at least 215 miles of range beginning at just $35,000 — that's a bold claim, and an important one for Tesla to meet. Musk is "fairly confident" that deliveries will begin by the end of 2017, and "you will not be able to buy a better car for $35,000, even with no options."

0-60MPH in less than 6 seconds

The base car will do 0-60MPH in less than 6 seconds, with versions that go "much faster." Range will be at least 215 miles, but Tesla hopes to exceed...

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Tesla has brought in more than $115 million in preorders on the new Model 3 today, according to company CEO Elon Musk. That's 115,000 cars worth more than $4 billion at the base price of $35,000 — but expect many of those cars to sell for considerably more than the base price.

He revealed the numbers at the end of the special event for media and current Tesla owners, though we don't know much more about the car other than the base price, the fact that it will go at least 215 miles on a charge, and that it'll ship at the end of next year.

Considering the fact that most of those preorders came before the car was revealed, Tesla might just have a hit on its hands, even though the car won't begin shipping until late next year.

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With the release of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, it's a very serious few weeks for virtual reality. So it's the perfect time to lighten up with Google's latest April Fools' Day product: an all-new VR headset that truly lives up to the medium's promise. That's Google Cardboard Plastic, "the world's first actual reality headset."

Designed with "4D integrated perspective, 360-degree spatially accurate sound, 20/20 resolution, and advanced haptics for realistic touch sensations," Plastic is an elegant piece of hardware that claims to let you "notice what you do, see, and feel more than before" — because it's a clear block of plastic, obviously. As Google puts it, "what's realer than real? Probably nothing. Or maybe something! I doubt it,...

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Google announced today it would no longer support its Wallet Card starting June 30th. The prepaid debit card, which launched back in November 2013, let you pay for things in person and online using your Wallet balance at any retailer that accepted MasterCard. It also let you withdraw money from ATMs. In an email sent to Wallet Card owners, Google says it wants "to focus on making it easier than ever to send and receive money with the Google Wallet app."

For those with unactivated Wallet Cards, you can still activate the card and use it until the cutoff date. The Google Wallet mobile app still exists; Google repurposed it as a Venmo and Square Cash rival for peer-to-peer payments in September. However, you'll no longer be able to add...

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One in six Americans get food poisoning every year, and those sicknesses can be deadly. In order to protect consumers, there are several checks and balances in place — among them, scientists who test random samples of food products sold in the US to make sure they're safe to eat.

So what's it like to be one of those scientists? And how does this work change your perceptions of food?

This week, Cynthia Mangione, a food laboratory specialist at the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, and Stephanie Brock, a radiation health supervisor at the Kentucky Department for Public Health, took to Reddit to answer questions about their jobs. They spend their days "testing products imported into the US for dangerous pathogens, as well as illegal dyes, metals, antibiotics and more." Here are the three most surprising reveals:

1) They've found lead, arsenic, and mercury in imported spices and in dietary supplements

One of the things we test for is illegal dyes or metals in spices. We've found lead, for example. Or spices that have been replaced with fillers like peanut cake. It's actually a significant issue in spice manufacturing. American spice companies have been very interested in our findings because they don't want this stuff in the marketplace either.

They also wrote: "We often find dangerous levels of arsenic, lead and mercury in medical supplements."

Unfortunately, supplements are barely regulated in the United States. The makers of these pills — which are commonly sold at pharmacies, natural health stores, and gyms — don't need to prove their products are safe or even effective before putting them on store shelves.

That fact that prompted Vox's Soo Oh and me to comb through government databases, court documents, and scientific studies to find out what dubious ingredients have been found lurking in popular supplements. We uncovered more than 850 products that have contained illegal and/or hidden ingredients — including banned drugs, pharmaceuticals like antidepressants, and other synthetic chemicals that have never been tested on humans.

2) The one food safety testers avoid eating: sprouts

grafvision/shutterstock

I have given up sprouts because of ongoing concerns with their safety. We also make sure to wash ready-to-eat veggies (despite the "triple wash" designation).

According to the Food and Drug Administration's food safety website, sprouts — such as alfalfa, clover, radish, and mung bean sprouts — are a higher-risk food. This is because they are eaten raw and, unlike other fresh produce, need to grow in warm and humid environments — the ideal breeding grounds for dangerous bacteria such as salmonella, listeria, and E. coli. Washing them doesn't always kill that potentially harmful bacteria.

Since 1996, there have been more than 30 outbreaks in the US associated with sprouts. In a recent analysis of food outbreaks in the US, sprouts were among the leading culprits.

3) The craziest thing they found in a food they tested…

We recently found a whole mouse in an energy drink!

Can't really explain this one, but it's pretty disturbing.

One big unanswered question

The one thing on many redditors' minds was whether there are particular companies or countries that were more often guilty of manufacturing or importing contaminated food products. The food scientists wouldn't dish, saying they weren't prepared to name names. But you can search for some of that information on an FDA website. The data is fascinating. Or, as one redditor put it, "A faith sucking rabbit hole."

We've only begun to think through how self-driving cars could one day reshape our roads, cities, and lives — for better and for worse.

They might, for example, make traffic lights obsolete. Which... is actually a bit unsettling.

In the video above, researchers at MIT’s Senseable City Lab demonstrate how streets full of autonomous vehicles wouldn't necessarily need stoplights. If the cars were all communicating with each other, they could simply slow down a bit and "slot" their way through intersections at steady speeds without ever causing a collision.

The model for "slot-based intersections" is described in this recent paper in PLOS One. The researchers found that reducing reliance on stoplights would greatly cut down on delays and congestion. No more waiting for the light to turn green. Cars would lower their speed to fit into a "slot" and then breeze right through the intersection without stopping.

It's neat, but it also raises some thorny urban-planning questions. Slot-based intersections obviously don't work for places where pedestrians need to cross. Or for bicycles. So what do you do there? More broadly, accommodating people who walk or bike is going to be a major challenge for autonomous vehicles (AEVs). There's a real risk that in an AEV-centric future, roads could end up catering far more to cars than they do today — pushing everyone else out.

Granted, this technology is all a ways off, as Kevin Hartnett points out in the Boston Globe. Cars will first need to be able to communicate not just with each other but likely with a central traffic controller. And roads would have to be filled entirely with autonomous vehicles — if you had even one human driver, that could muck up the flow. A stoplight-free future is decades away, maybe more.

Still, it's a good example of how radically self-driving cars could remake our transportation systems, in positive and not-so-positive ways. As my colleague David Roberts says, it's wrong to imagine that AEVs will simply replace conventional vehicles on the road in a 1-1 fashion and all else will stay equal. All else won't stay equal. Massive systemic changes are likely to emerge from a future filled with AEVs — changes that are very difficult to predict in advance. It's much like how the advent of the internet didn't simply replace the postal service.

The end of stoplights is one example of a possible systemic change with far-reaching implications. No doubt there will be many more.

Go deeper:

• The transformative potential of self-driving cars
• 15 ways self-driving cars could change our lives
• The biggest challenge for self-driving cars: getting rid of the drivers

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Mac: Last year, XKCD’s Randall Monroe released Simple Writer, a web app that restricted your writing to the top 1,000 most commons words in the English language. If web apps aren’t your thing, Cleartext is a free Mac app that does the same thing.

Read more...

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Shows like House of Cards and Daredevil might get all of the attention, but Netflix's impressive push into original programming is on all fronts — including children's shows. One of the most highly-anticipated is the Voltron revival from Dreamworks Animation, and this weekend we're getting our very first look at the new show.

The 59-second spot focuses on the assembly of the dynotherms into the titular Defender of the Universe, which should bring back memories to fans of the original ‘80s animated show. It's pretty much mech porn so far, but no one is complaining.

Netflix's revival is officially called Voltron: Legendary Defender, and it's just one of several shows that are part of the streaming service's partnership with Dreamworks...

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Today is a religious rarity that will not occur again in our lifetimes. For most Christians in the West, it is Good Friday, the day of Jesus's crucifixion. It is also March 25, the traditional day of observing the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel came to Mary and told her she would become pregnant with Jesus.

This overlap has happened just three times in the 20th century (1910, 1921, and 1932) and twice in the 21st (2005 and 2016). And it won't occur again until 2157.

It's a rare event because the Christians use different methods to schedule holy days. Fixed feasts, like Christmas (December 25 in the West) and the Annunciation (March 25), fall on the same day every year. And movable feasts, like Easter, fall on different days depending on the lunar calendar.

A March 25 Good Friday presents a tension for Christians: The Annunciation is a day of joy, when believers celebrate the beginning of Jesus's earthly life and Mary's enthusiastic embrace of her role as Christ's mother: "Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word," she told the angel. But Good Friday is the darkest day of the Christian year — the day Christ was beaten, nailed to the cross like a common criminal, abandoned by nearly all of his friends and family, and killed.

Christians over the centuries have dwelled on the tension that a March 25 Good Friday presents. As Eleanor Parker outlines in a terrific post on her blog, the overlap of the Annunciation and Good Friday fascinated medieval artists. Here is a 14th-century illuminated manuscript that shows the crucifixion (on the left) next to the annunciation (on the right):

And when Good Friday fell on March 25 in 1608, John Donne wrote a poem, appropriately titled "Upon the Annunciation and Passion Falling upon One Day." He describes "this doubtful day / Of feast or fast, Christ came and went away."

The difficulty of honoring both days simultaneously is so great that whenever March 25 falls during the week of Easter, the Catholic Church pushes its Annunciation celebration to later in the year. (This year, the church's feast of the Annunciation is April 4.)

Still, as Parker points out, there's a richness in the "paradoxical conjunction of feast and fast." Even when Good Friday doesn't fall on March 25, it is mysterious and tension-filled for Christians. They mourn the death of Jesus but look forward to his resurrection just a few days later. They grieve his suffering but believe this suffering makes way for great joy: the salvation of the world.

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