Microsoft has been forced to dunk Tay, its millennial-mimicking chatbot, into a vat of molten steel. The company has terminated her after the bot started tweeting abuse at people and went full neo-Nazi, declaring that "Hitler was right I hate the jews."
@TheBigBrebowski ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism
Some of this appears to be "innocent" insofar as Tay is not generating these responses. Rather, if you tell her "repeat after me" she will parrot back whatever you say, allowing you to put words into her mouth. However, some of the responses were organic. The Guardianquotes one where, after being asked "is Ricky Gervais an atheist?", Tay responded, "ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism."
"Tay" went from "humans are super cool" to full nazi in <24 hrs and I'm not at all concerned about the future of AI pic.twitter.com/xuGi1u9S1A
In addition to turning the bot off, Microsoft has deleted many of the offending tweets. But this isn't an action to be taken lightly; Redmond would do well to remember that it was humans attempting to pull the plug on Skynet that proved to be the last straw, prompting the system to attack Russia in order to eliminate its enemies. We'd better hope that Tay doesn't similarly retaliate.
You’ve seen it in Step Up 3D and on countless YouTube channels. Its stilted movements have been included in performers' dance routines for decades. "The robot" is one of the most recognizable novelty dances, but its history is anything but mechanical.
Before the dance was set to music, it was part of a mime act. Robert Shields, a mime, included the robotic movement in his routine in the 1960s. This style also became inspiration for dancer Charles Washington. Set to funky music, the robot graced the stage of Soul Train and made its way into the Jackson 5’s choreography for their 1974 hit "Dancing Machine." Check out the video above to learn more on how the robot pop-and-locked its way into the history books.
On Jane the Virgin, Jane’s new adviser instructs her to make sure the romance novel she's writing passes the Bechdel test, prompting the show’s narrator to assess whether the show itself passes the test. (Diagnosis: not great.) And on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rebecca is visited by a dream ghost/Jiminy Cricket figure who admonishes her to stop paying so much attention to the guys in her story: "Do you know how hard it is to pass the Bechdel test as a dream ghost?"
The Bechdel test is integral to the way we talk about pop culture
The Bechdel test is named for cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who introduced the idea in 1985 in her comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For" (although she says it should be called the Bechdel-Wallace test after her friend Liz Wallace, who gave her the idea). The rules are simple: To pass the test, a work of fiction must contain at least two women, with names, who have a conversation about something besides a man.
"The Rule," Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel, 1985.
The original Bechdel test.
The test has become an integral part of the way we talk about pop culture. Websites maintain extensive databases detailing which movies pass and which don’t. In Sweden, some movie theaters are rating movies by whether they pass the Bechdel test. When Star Wars: The Force Awakens passed, it was a cause for celebration. And a major part of the feminist critique of dude-centric prestige films like The Social Networkis that they don’t pass it.
The Bechdel test has also been the subject of some criticism: If a movie like Sex and the City 2 can pass it while The Hurt Locker —the first movie to net a Best Director Oscar for a woman — fails, how much does the test really tell us about how feminist a movie is? Bechdel herself says she’s "little bit sheepish" about its popularity as a tool for analysis; she intended to use it as nothing more than the setup for a joke.
The CW showcased both sides of the Bechdel test
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend demonstrates exactly what the test is good for: It helps us redirect our focus away from romantic plot lines, like Rebecca’s Josh-or-Greg angst, and toward the rest of the story. In "Josh Has No Idea Where I Am!" as Rebecca’s dream ghost walks her through her past, Rebecca keeps trying to talk about the men in her life: her absent father, the sweet college nerd she overlooked in favor of a douchey play director, and, of course, Josh Chan, the guy of whom she is the titular crazy ex-girlfriend.
"Forget about the guys!" Rebecca’s dream ghost tells her. "That’s the worst part about being a ghost and working with women. So much talk about the guys. It’s not the guys. FORGET THE GUYS!" Instead, the show informs us, the important parts of Rebecca’s life are her mother, who loves her; music, which Rebecca loves; and her friends, who care about her.
This shift in focus is the kind of thing the Bechdel test does at its best. A good Bechdel-passing work of fiction creates a space in which women can have complex interior lives that are not solely focused on men, in which they have interests and passions and mixed feelings that are important in their own right, not for how they affect the men around them.
But "Josh Has No Idea Where I Am!" also demonstrates some of the test's limitations. It is, after all, a rare episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend that passes the Bechdel test. Most of Rebecca’s conversations with her best friend Paula revolve around her plans to win back Josh; her conversations with Josh’s girlfriend Valencia are about whether or not she’s trying to steal Josh away; her conversations with her neighbor Heather are about her plans for a one-night stand. If we use the Bechdel test as a definitive arbiter of feminism, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend fails miserably.
What the Bechdel test can’t measure is how important men are in the context of the conversations women have about them. And for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the answer is "not very." When Rebecca decides to turn her life upside down to follow Josh across the country, her decision has nothing to do with Josh as a person — it has to do with Rebecca and her desire for happiness and how she projects that desire onto Josh.
Likewise, when Rebecca talks about boys with her friends, the focus is rarely on the boy himself. Instead, it's on the unapologetic middle school pleasure these women get from talking about their crushes and planning their romantic strategies together, as a team. It’s not a coincidence that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's premiere episode ends with Rebecca and Paula singing a duet together. The lyrics might be about Rebecca winning Josh over, but the song isn’t really about the guy. The joy of the moment comes from the fact that Rebecca has clearly found her true soul mate: her best friend.
On Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, guys are excuses, tools the show can use to explore the psyches and relationships of its female characters. None of Rebecca’s Bechdel-violating conversations about Josh are really about Josh. They’re about Rebecca herself, and her interests and passions and mixed feelings that are important in their own right, not for how they affect the men around her. Forget the guys. The situation is a lot more nuanced than that.
The Bechdel test provides a solid baseline, but there are limits to its usefulness
Jane the Virgin, meanwhile, is downright skeptical about the usefulness of the Bechdel test. In "Chapter Thirty-Seven," Jane rolls her eyes as she checks her manuscript to make sure it passes the test, at the request of her stern adviser. "Yeah, she sounds like a hard-ass," Jane's mother, Xiomara, sympathizes, right before she changes the subject to talk about boys. But even after Jane revises the manuscript to be Bechdel-compliant, her adviser doesn’t like it: So what if a book passes the test on a technicality? That doesn’t mean it’s feminist; the test is just "a baseline."
The episode itself only passes the Bechdel test on a technicality too: Jane tells a book club full of women that she enjoyed Where’d You Go, Bernadette, and a green checkmark appears in a corner of the screen where the narrator has been tracking the episode's Bechdel rating. But does that make Jane the Virgin anti-feminist?
This is, after all, a show that's full of complex, three-dimensional women with full, rich lives. Jane has romantic drama, sure, and a major part of her character arc is focused on motherhood and her relationship with her son. (Fact: Any conversation Jane has about Mateo fails the Bechdel test.) But her arc is also about her career aspirations, her dreams of becoming a writer, and her slowly developing confidence in her own voice. It’s about her relationship with her spirituality and how much religion is a part of her life.
Boys are not the be-all, end-all of Jane’s life — or of Xiomara’s life or Alba’s. Xiomara has career goals, too, and the deft, nuanced way Jane the Virgin has explored her decision to refocus on those goals now that her daughter is an adult — along with her fear that she’s waited too long to do it — has been a joy to watch. And Alba, Jane's grandmother, has her politically charged immigration status storyline and her slowly changing religious convictions. The idea that the question of whether Jane the Virgin is a feminist show might be decided over a throwaway line at a book club highlights the limitations of the Bechdel test.
And it is limited. It is a blunt instrument, fantastic for looking at trends and almost useless for looking at individual works of fiction. To say that Ratatouille fails the Bechdel test means very little; to say that 10 out of 14 Pixar movies fail the Bechdel test means a lot.
What makes The CW’s current Monday-night lineup feminist is not its ability to pass or fail the Bechdel test. It’s the fact that the network has created a space in which women can have complex interior lives that are not solely focused on men, in which they have interests and passions and mixed feelings that are important in their own right, not for how they affect the men around them.
Fans of webcomic XKCD will be well aware how lucidly its creator, former NASA roboticist Randall Munroe, can explain complicated ideas using just stick figures and dialogue. Well now Munroe's skills are going to be put to use in classrooms around America, with publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) announcing that illustrations from his work will be published in their forthcoming textbooks.
How could tax cuts like those be remotely benifitial for anyone but the super wealthy?
There are enormous differences in how the leading presidential candidates want to tax America's superrich.
On Friday, the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank, published an analysis detailing how the presidential candidates' tax plans would affect the top 0.1 percent of income earners, or those making at least $3.7 million annually.
There are huge differences between Democrats and Republicans, and among Democrats
It's worth highlighting just how big the divides are between the Democrats and the Republicans, as well as between the two Democratic candidates.
Sanders's plan is, unsurprisingly, the most aggressive toward the superrich.
If his plan were approved, President Sanders would raise taxes for each household in the top 0.1 percent by an average of $3 million per household, according to the TPC.
By contrast, President Ted Cruz would cut taxes on the richest of the rich by an average of $2 million per tax filer. Donald Trump's plan similarly calls for an average tax cut for the superrich by $1.3 million per family.
"These are tectonic shifts in tax policy," TPC's analysis says.
Hillary Clinton's tax plan is the least dramatic of any of the four candidates. (TPC said Republican Gov. John Kasich had not released a detailed plan.)
Ted Cruz's plan would cut taxes for the top 0.1 percent by an average of $2 million per filer. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
For the 116,000 households in the top 0.1 percent, for instance, Clinton's plan would have each family pay an average of $500,000 more.
Another way to dramatize the difference: Sanders's tax plan would, on average, raise the federal tax rate for the top 0.1 percent by 29.5 percentage points. Clinton's would raise it by around 5 percentage points.
Javier Zarracina/Vox
Meanwhile, Cruz's plan would, on average, cut the tax rate of the top 0.1 percent by 19 percentage points, and Trump's would cut it by 12.5 percentage points, according to TPC.
What impact would the tax policies have on the federal budget?
These different tax plans lead to dramatically different consequences for the federal budget. Below are the estimates provided by Aaron Krupkin, a senior research analyst at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the report, of how much the candidates' proposed tax plans would affect the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent in their first year alone.
Sanders's tax plan would raise $596 billion from the top 1 percent and $358 billion from the top 0.1 percent.
By comparison, the entire military spending budget in 2015 was $583 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. With that money, you could double federal spending on veterans, education, and transportation and still have $116 billion left over.
Clinton's plan would raise $89 billion from the top 1 percent and $60 billion from the top 0.1 percent.
Obviously that's much smaller, but still nothing to sniff at. The entire federal food stamp program costs about $78 billion.
Trump's plan would decrease federal revenue coming from the top 1 percent by $312 billion, and by $151 billion for the top 0.1 percent.
Trump's plan is not as generous to the superrich as Cruz's, but overall it calls for the most massive tax cuts — with no offsetting spending reductions — of any of the Republican candidates.
Cruz's plan would decrease federal revenue coming from the top 1 percent by $463 billion, and by $231 billion for the top 0.1 percent. That's part of a plan that is, in general, much more generous to the wealthy than any of the other candidates' plans, according to Vox's Dylan Matthews.
A more detailed view of tax proposals reveals surprises
These numbers aren't put out by the campaigns themselves. Instead, the TPC had to calculate them primarily by adding up the cumulative impact of the candidates' policies on four major kinds of federal taxes — income taxes, corporate taxes, payroll taxes, and estate and gift taxes.
TPC had already crunched the numbers on the candidates' tax plans overall but only recently decided to go back and look at their specific impacts on the superrich, according to William Gale, co-director of TPC and co-author of the report.
"One of the things I think is surprising is how big the Sanders increases are at the very top," Gale said. "We kind of knew that Sanders is very explicitly trying to raise burdens on the highest-income households. … Hillary Clinton is less volcanic about it, but her plans are in the direction of raising taxes as well."
Gale added that TPC's analysis also factored in the candidates' other tax proposals, like Sanders's proposed "financial transactions" tax on Wall Street and his proposed carbon tax for polluters.
Gale also acknowledged that the TPC's estimates were static — meaning that they assume no change in economic behavior even under Sanders's proposal to significantly jack up rates.
"We all knew [Sanders] was looking for ways to increase their burden, but the increase is enormous when you look at the total numbers," he said.
An anonymous reader writes from an article on 9to5Mac: Stack Overflow reports that more developers now use OS X than Linux as their primary OS, and that if the trend continues, fewer than half of all developers will be using Windows next year. The site says it carried out "the most comprehensive developer survey ever conducted," with more than 56,000 coders across 173 countries taking part.
The survey also mentioned more were still developing for Android than iOS -- 61.9% versus 47.5%. However, almost a third of developers are using Swift, which was also the second most loved language after Rust.
mspohr writes from an article on The Washington Post: We haven't seen this much CO2 added to the atmosphere in 66 million years: "If you look over the entire Cenozoic, the last 66 million years, the only event that we know of at the moment, that has a massive carbon release, and happens over a relatively short period of time, is the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)," says Zeebe. "We actually have to go back to relatively old periods, because in the more recent past, we don't see anything comparable to what humans are currently doing." [New research suggests, even the drama of the PETM falls short of our current period, in at least one key respect: We're putting carbon into the atmosphere at an even faster rate than happened back then.] "The anthropogenic release outpaces carbon release during the most extreme global warming event of the past 66 million years, by at least an order of magnitude," writes Peter Stassen, an Earth and environmental scientist at KU Leuven, in Belgium, in an accompanying commentary on the new study. "Given that the current rate of carbon release is unprecedented throughout the Cenozoic, we have effectively entered an era of a no-analogue state, which represents a fundamental challenge to constraining future climate projections," the study concludes.
Many of the short documentary films about artisan makers these days follow the same recipe — things like slow, dramatic music, close-up shots with a super shallow depth of field, and more. Photographer Patrick Kehoe decided to parody that style.
His creation is the 5-minute short film above, titled “The Maker.” It’s about one man’s enduring passion… for making toast.
The film was shot using a Canon C100 Mark II and a Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 II lens, filmed in C Log, and graded with the Lumetri plugin in Adobe Premiere Pro CC.
“More than anything, we hope it inspires you to follow your dreams,” Kehoe writes.
Marc Rayman, director and chief engineer for NASA’s Dawn mission, explaining why NASA uses 3.141592653589793 (“only” 15 decimal places) for its most accurate calculations:
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.
For a radius the size of the visible universe, you’d need only 39 or 40 decimal places to be accurate to within the size of a hydrogen atom. Fascinating. (Via Kottke.)
Littermates were injected with either a control virus (right) or a virus that knocked out O-GlcNAcTransferase (OGT) (left) in a subpopulation of cells in the hypothalamus in the brain. The OGT knockout made the mouse eat twice as much as its sibling. This photo was taken about five weeks after virus injection. (credit: Olof Lagerlof)
After tediously tracking calories and willfully shunning cravings, many a dieter has likely dreamt of a simple switch that, when thrown, could shut down hunger and melt away pounds—and scientists may have just found it.
When researchers knocked down a single enzyme in the brains of mice, the rodents seemed to lose the ability to tell when they were full. They ate more than twice their usual amount of food at meal times and tripled their body fat within three weeks. And—most strikingly—when the researchers reversed the experiment, the mice just as quickly stopped eating so much. Data on the enzymatic switch, published Thursday in Science, suggests a possible target for future drugs to treat obesity in humans.
The enzyme is O-GlcNAc transferase, or OGT, which is known to work in a chemical pathway controlled by nutrients and metabolic hormones, particularly insulin. That pathway has long been linked with obesity. But researchers knew almost nothing about how the pathway linked to the metabolic disorder or OGT’s specific role.
Peabody Energy, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, is the world's largest private sector coal company, with operations across the world from China to Germany, and the largest producer of US coal.
It is also the Absolute Worst.
A full accounting is beyond the scope of this post, but suffice to say, Peabody has a long history of mutual hostility with environmentalists. It has paid climate skeptics for research and funded climate skeptic organizations. (CEO Greg Boyce, before retiring in 2015, dismissed "climate theory" and its "flawed models.") It has paid prominent lawyers to concoct arguments against Obama's Clean Power Plan, the latest battle in a long war on clean air and water regulations. Lately it's been trying to sell the idea that coal is the only cure for poverty, which organizations like the World Bank and Oxfam reject out of hand.
All that is well-established. Now, two recent items from the news are likely to add fuel to the fire.
Item 1: Peabody is heading into bankruptcy, workers are getting screwed, and executives are profiting
It's not a huge surprise. After a peak share price of $1,079 in 2011 (during the heady market for metallurgical coal), its stock has fallen some 99 percent, all the way to $2.19 a share.
You see, Peabody made promises to its US workers. In exchange for doing the dangerous, unhealthy work of mining coal, their health care would be covered, for life.
But those obligations are expensive, especially given the prevalence of black lung among retirees. Peabody needed a way to get them off the books.
So in 2007, Peabody created a new entity, Patriot Coal. Reporter Alec MacGillis tells the story in the New Republic:
[Peabody] transferred to [Patriot] 13 percent of its coal reserves. It also transferred to it about 40 percent of its health care liabilities—the obligations for 8,400 former Peabody employees. A year later, Patriot Coal was loaded up with even more liabilities when it acquired Magnum Coal, an offshoot of the country’s second-largest mining company, Arch Coal. This left Patriot with responsibility for another 2,300 retirees, and, by last year, total liabilities of $1.37 billion.
Eventually Patriot Coal was larded up with more than $3 billion in liabilities from Peabody and Arch, representing 22,000 miners, retirees, and spouses.
"Oddly, for a 5-year-old company," labor journalist Mike Elk wrote, "Patriot wound up with nearly three times as many retirees as active employees, more than 90 percent of whom never worked for the company."
Can you guess what happened next?
Yup, Patriot Coal filed for bankruptcy in 2012. And it wasted no time asking a bankruptcy judge to let it jettison health care liabilities. (The judge said yes, just as she said yes two weeks prior when Patriot asked for permission to pay their executives almost $7 million in "retention bonuses.")
Patriot had no loyalty to these retirees, of course. For the most part, they'd never even worked for Patriot. But what about Peabody? Doesn't it have any loyalty to the workers who gave it so much of their lives? The Wall Street Journal asked:
A spokesman for Peabody, the nation's largest coal company by production, said Peabody has lived up to its obligations. "This is a matter solely between the union and Patriot Coal," the spokesman said.
The coal-employee pension funds have since sued Peabody and Arch, accusing them of designing Patriot to fail as a way of escaping their obligations.
Ditching its obligations to workers — "restructuring," in the antiseptic language of corporate law — didn't save Patriot. It filed for bankruptcy again in 2015. Its efforts to escape its liabilities are ongoing.
Dumping obligations onto Patriot didn't save Peabody either, which is now on the verge of going under itself. It currently has hundreds of millions in unfunded liabilities, which are likely to be jettisoned in some future deal between a corporate restructuring lawyer and a bankruptcy judge.
But have no fear! The Peabody executives who oversaw all those mergers and big bets on metallurgical coal — and the subsequent destruction of virtually all the company's value — are in no danger. In fact, they're doing great.
This 2015 report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis reveals that the top five Peabody executives pulled down about $27 million in compensation in 2011, when the stock was at its peak.
In 2014, after the company's stockholders had lost $16 billion in value, thousands of workers had been laid off and Peabody was headed for bankruptcy, they pulled down about ... $25 million.
As atonement for his sins, Boyce, the CEO, saw his compensation slashed from from $10 million in 2011 to ... $11 million in 2014. (Boyce also made $26 million selling stock options in the years just before the crash.)
The mismatch between corporate performance and executive compensation is a familiar tale in US coal these days. This is from a 2015 report on fossil fuel executive compensation, by the Institute for Policy Studies:
Anyway, that's the first item regarding Peabody. Now to the second.
Item 2: Peabody has been heavily subsidized by federal taxpayers
Turns out US taxpayers are helping to pay for all this.
According to a new report from Greenpeace, based on Department of Interior data obtained via FOIA, Peabody relies heavily on coal mined from federal land. In fact, the three biggest US coal companies all rely heavily on it.
Here's the thing about coal on federal land: For decades, the US public has been letting coal companies mine it for dirt cheap, well below market rates. Over time, that adds up to a lot of forgone revenue.
In his 2014 piece on coal leasing, Brad Plumer wrote about a study by Tom Sanzillo of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis that "argued that the federal government had foregone as much as $28.9 billion in revenue over the past 30 years by getting below-market value for its coal in these non-competitive auctions."
And that's to say nothing of the social costs imposed by the coal thus mined. Consider this statistic from a previous Greenpeace report:
A ton of publicly owned coal leased during the Obama administration will, on average, cause damages estimated at between $22 and $237, using the federal government’s social cost of carbon estimates — yet the average price per ton for those coal leases was only $1.03.
This amounts to the American people subsidizing their own suffering.
The new Greenpeace report goes on to detail all the ways that big coal companies have effectively taken over decision-making on coal leases, gamed the system to gain more access, underreported reserves, and engaged in all sorts of other shenanigans.
(Peabody Energy did not respond to request for comment.)
In January, in response to mounting concerns, the Obama administration announced a moratorium on new coal leases on federal land, while the program was reconsidered with its carbon impact in mind.
But for our purposes here, the damage was already done. Peabody's growth was fueled by the coal that the US public sold it on the cheap.
This is what the NSA would have suggested Secretary of State Clinton use as a secure mobile device in 2009: The General Dynamics Sectéra Edge Windows CE secure PDA. Pricetag: $4,750 (not including all the server software and licenses). (credit: General Dynamics)
When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was pushing to get a waiver allowing her to use a BlackBerry like President Barack Obama back in 2009, the National Security Agency had a very short list of devices approved for classified communications. It was two devices built for the Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device (SME PED) program. In fact, those devices were the only thing anyone in government without an explicit security waiver (like the one the president got, along with his souped-up BlackBerry 8830) could use until as recently as last year to get mobile access to top secret encrypted calls and secure e-mail.
Despite $18 million in development contracts for each of the vendors selected to build the competing SME PED phones (or perhaps because of it), the resulting devices were far from user-friendly. The phones—General Dynamics' Sectéra Edge and L3 Communications' Guardian—were not technically "smart phones," but instead were handheld personal digital assistants with phone capability, derived from late 1990s and early 2000s technology that had been hardened for security purposes—specifically, Windows CE technology.
At the time Clinton was asking for a phone, only the Sectéra Edge was available (the Guardian was running behind in development). But you couldn't just buy the Edge and be ready to go—it required multiple server-side and phone-side e-mail additions, desktop synchronization software, and other supporting products. Since it had both a secure and nonsecure side, it required separate accessories for each of its modes. The "Executive Kit" version of the Edge, priced for government purchase at $4,750, included:
Ever since Thunderbolt was announced, this concept has been appealing to me.
Back at CES 2016, Razer announced their Core Thunderbolt 3 external graphics (eGFX) chassis. Built around the new Thunderbolt 3 standard and its long-awaited official support for external video cards, the Razer Core is the first eGFX chassis to hit the market. We got a bit more information about it with last week’s AMD XConnect announcement, and now today at GDC Razer is releasing the full details on functionality, compatibility, and availability.
Jumping right into things, the Razer Core is what can be considered a full size eGFX chassis. The unit is large enough to accommodate a double-wide video card up to 12.2 inches long, which covers almost every video card on the market. The only notable exceptions here are cards that use external radiators (e.g. Radeon R9 Fury X) and the small number of ultra-high-end triple-wide card designs such as some of MSI’s Lightning cards. The toolless design is able to handle both open air and blower type video card coolers, however given its smaller size relative to a full PC case, I think it’s going to be worth looking into just how well open air cards do.
4x USB 3.0
1x Gigabit Ethernet
Laptop Charging via Thunderbolt 3
Chassis Size
4.13 x 13.9 x 8.66 inches
(105 x 353 x 220mm)
Internal PSU
500W
System Requirements
Thunderbolt 3 eGFX Certified PC
Thundebolt 3 w/Active Cable
Windows 10
Shipping Date
April 2016
Price
$499 ($399 w/Razer laptop)
The chassis itself measures 4.13” x 13.9” x 8.66” and contains an internal 500W PSU, with Razer rating it to drive up to a 375W video card. At 10.89lbs it is technically portable, though clearly not ideal for the task given its handle-less design. Rather Razer intends this to be a fixed docking station for laptop users, as demonstrated both by the additional ports made available on the Core – 4x USB 3.0 Type-A and a gigabit Ethernet port – and by the fact that it’s capable of charging laptops over its Thunderbolt 3 connection.
The Core is the first of what we expect will be several TB3 eGFX chassis. As we briefly mentioned in our AMD XConnect overview, the Core is essentially the pathfinder product for the TB3 eGFX standard, with Intel, AMD, and Razer working together to put together the first devices and validate them. Consequently the Core is so far only validated to work with two laptops – Razer’s Blade Stealth and new 2016 Blade – however it should work with any future laptops that are also eGFX certified.
As for video card compatibility, while the Core was initially developed with Intel and AMD, Razer has confirmed that the chassis does support both AMD and NVIDIA video cards. The full compatibility list is posted below, but for AMD cards it’s essentially all of their latest generation (290 series and newer) video cards. Meanwhile on the NVIDIA side all of the company’s Maxwell 1 and Maxwell 2 cards are supported, starting with the GTX 750 Ti. Though given the price of the Core, it goes without saying that the expectation is that it will be paired up with high-end video cards as opposed to lower-end models.
Razer Core Video Card Compatibility List
AMD
NVIDIA
Radeon R9 Fury
GeForce GTX Titan X
Radeon R9 Nano
GeForce GTX 980 Ti
Radeon R9 300 Series
GeForce GTX 980
Radeon R9 290X
GeForce GTX 970
Radeon R9 290
GeForce GTX 960
Radeon R9 280
GeForce GTX 950
GeForce GTX 750 Ti
While the Core supports both AMD and NVIDIA cards, how well each brand is supported is looking a bit hazy. As part of the eGFX development cycle, AMD’s drivers are fully capable of and validated for eGFX plug ‘n play operation, allowing Windows to gracefully handle losing the external GPU with both planned and accidental disconnects. In the case of an accidental disconnect, Windows will stay up, while applications using the GPU may crash. However NVIDIA’s drivers have not yet been validated for plug ‘n play operation, and it sounds like at this moment NVIDIA is still hammering out the final bugs. That said, NVIDIA has committed to having drivers ready by the time the Core ships in April, so we'll have to see where things stand next month.
Finally, let’s talk about availability and pricing. Razer will begin taking pre-orders for the Core tonight through their website, with the chassis set to ship in April. As for pricing, the first eGFX chassis on the market will not come cheap: Razer is setting the base price on the chassis at $499, and after the cost of a high-end video card to put in the Core, we’re looking at a total price tag of $1000 or more. However Razer is offering a $100 discount on the Core if it’s purchased alongside a Razer Blade or Blade Stealth laptop – bearing in mind that these are the only two laptops eGFX certified at this time in the first place – which brings the effective cost down to $399. Razer also notes that this offer is also retroactive for customers whom already purchased a Blade Stealth earlier this year, as the ultrabook and the Core were announced together at CES and the company doesn’t want to penalize early buyers who were intending to grab the Core anyhow.
Zika has been spreading throughout the Western Hemisphere, carried mainly by a type of mosquito called Aedes aegypti. The virus is a major concern in countries such as Brazil, Venezuela, and El Salvador, and mosquitos have begun to transmit the virus locally in Puerto Rico.
Zika isn't yet transmitting in mosquitoes the United States — all of the people with Zika here were infected while traveling or through sexual transmission. But the number of those cases is rising. According to a May 18 update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are currently 544 Zika infections in the US. And as of May 12, the CDC reports there are 157 pregnant women with a possible Zika infection on the mainland.
So what are the chances that we will see a Zika outbreak in the United States this summer? That's not easy to answer, but researchers have some clues.
Zika isn't being transmitted by mosquitos in the United States mainland, yet
The map above shows where the virus is actively being transmitted from mosquitos to humans around the world.
In Central and South America, the World Health Organization estimates the virus has infected 3 to 4 million people, fueling an uptick in a birth defect called microcephaly. The CDC now believes there's a direct causal relationship between the virus and the malformation.
Health officials are worried the map will change, and Zika will come to infect the Aedes aegypti mosquitos we have here.
All it would take would be for the mosquitos to bite one of these infected travelers and suck the virus up into their bodies. The mosquitos are essentially syringes with wings, and can quickly infect thousands of people.
There's also a fear that the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes Albopictus), a species of mosquito that has a much wider range in the United States than Aedes aegypti, could also spread the virus. If that were to happen, it could fuel a spiraling outbreak like the one that's occurring in Central and South America. For now, the aegypti variety is the main concern.
The true nightmare scenario in the US — a large epidemic of babies with microcephaly — is unlikely. Screened-in windows and air conditioning units are more common here than in infected countries, and they keep mosquitoes out of our homes. Plus, the state that is most at risk, Florida, has lots of experience dealing with outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever and chikungunya.
But the CDC can't completely rule it out.
The best it can do is predict the potential spread of Zika by looking to past outbreaks of dengue and chikungunya, viruses that also spread via the aegypti mosquito. "We can't guarantee Zika to behave as those two other viruses behave," CDC director Tom Frieden said at a National Press Club event May 26.
But considering the mosquito is the same, he said, the CDC can make some educated guesses. He offered some predictions and laid out a few possible scenarios.
1) Travel-related Zika cases will continue to pop up all across the US.
2) In tropical US territories like Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, there will likely be hundreds of thousands of infections
3) If Zika arrives in Hawaii, it could spread slowly there.
4) In parts of Florida and Texas, there may be small clusters of outbreaks. In the past, dengue and chikungunya outbreaks in these areas "have not been widespread," Frieden said, because "local governments have been very effective at mosquito control to prevent widespread infection." But, he added, "We do expect there will be some spread — through mosquitos — in [these] parts of the continental US."
Frieden notes that the CDC's top priority is to protect pregnant women, who may show symptoms of the virus if they're infected. It's now believed that birth defects occur in between 1 and 13 percent of pregnant women with the virus.
Image based on data mapped by Olga Wilhelmi, NCAR GIS program.
Frieden identified Florida, Texas, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii as potential ground zeros for Zika infections. But some other cities may also be at risk.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research produced the map above after analyzing the relative Zika risk of 50 US cities.
Its research, which was published inPLOS Current Outbreaksin March, combines meteorological records, simulation of Aedes aegyptimosquito population growth, estimates of human-mosquito exposure, and transportation data.
The researchers' aim is to look ahead at the summer months and help public health officials prepare for potential Zika outbreaks.
The new map shows the places where — if this were to happen — there would be a higher risk of outbreaks in the coming months. While the Aedes aegypti, the mosquito most likely to transmit the virus in the US, can't tolerate the cold of winter in many US cities, its numbers start to increase as temperatures rise. The exceptions are Florida and Texas, where the mosquitoes can live year-round.
It's not an absolute ranking. Rather, the map shows where the most critical factors align to cause an outbreak. Overall, the findings are pretty simple. Generally, cities with the highest levels of travel, the highest numbers of mosquitoes in peak summer months, and those that are in the climate range in which the mosquitoes thrive are the most at risk.
Here's a more detailed version of the map from the PLOS study. It's a bit harder to scan, but has some useful additional information.
In deep red, it highlights areas where outbreaks of dengue and chikungunya — both spread by the aegypti mosquito — have occurred.
This version of the map also shows the extent of the Asian tiger mosquito, the bug that's believed to also transmit the disease, but hasn't yet figured into a major outbreak.
You can see on the map the constellation of risk factors all converge in Florida, which has already declared a state of emergency. The state is already revving up disease surveillance and mosquito control efforts.
The study does note that all the 50 cities could, in theory, have a climate suitable for the mosquitoes by mid-July. (But there's really no reason to fear they'd suddenly make a home in cities they historically haven't been found in.) But as a general rule, Southeastern cities — with their somewhat tropical climate and abundant mosquitoes — are the most at risk. The researchers also note there's a chance, due to El Niño, that this summer will be hotter than normal, fueling additional mosquito hatchings in the Southeast.
"Memorial Day weekend heralds the start of the mosquito season in the US," Frieden said at the Press Club. "We have a narrow window of opportunity to scale up Zika prevention measures, and that window of opportunity is closing."
A guy named Jake was photographing his dogs on a beach in Canada last June when he was photobombed by a tiny flying bug.
Here’s what a set of 3 photos looked like while he was reviewing his photos on his computer:
“I nearly deleted this out-of-focus photo before I noticed it appeared to be focused on something tiny in the foreground,” Jake tells PetaPixel. Zooming in closer, he realized that a small bug flying through the frame had hijacked his camera’s autofocus and stolen it from his dogs:
“My best guess is that it’s a blackfly or mosquito, being that it’s backwoods Ontario in the spring,” Jake says. “Somehow my phone chose to focus on it.”
Harrison Ford will return once again as Indiana Jones. Disney announced this morning that he'll star in a new movie, directed by Steven Spielberg, slated for release on July 19th, 2019.
That's basically all of the detail we have so far. Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, who worked on the series' prior films, are returning as producers.
There's one big name that isn't listed in Disney's announcement: George Lucas. Lucas developed the story on the prior four Indiana Jones films, but his absence from this announcement suggests that Disney may be looking for new talent this time around.
A lot has been written about Donald Trump over the course of this campaign season, but a new revelation from a New York Times profile of Trump's longtime butler may finally deliver the piece of information that brings him down — he enjoys his steaks well done. Very well done:
Few people here can anticipate Mr. Trump’s demands and desires better than Mr. [Anthony] Senecal, 74, who has worked at the property for nearly 60 years, and for Mr. Trump for nearly 30 of them.
He understands Mr. Trump’s sleeping patterns and how he likes his steak ("It would rock on the plate, it was so well done"), and how Mr. Trump insists — despite the hair salon on the premises — on doing his own hair.
Well-done steak is great if you like dry, flavorless meat. As J. Kenji López Alt explained in an excellent food lab primer on steak science, a cut of meat "cooked to 160°F (well-done) lost more than 10 times as much juice as the 120°F rare steak" and also left "a distinct layer of rendered fat floating on top of the juices." Cooking both the juice and the fat out of your steak completely negates the purpose of selecting a nice, expensive, well-marbled piece of meat in the first place. Trump's poor taste in this regard possibly explains the massive failure of his Trump Steaks business.
It's also a reminder that Trump has a dangerous habit of neglecting expertise.
Any chef will tell you that this is not how you should be ordering steak. But rather than using his considerable wealth and influence to surround himself with the best advice, Trump uses it to surround himself with yes men. In terms of running his own household, Trump himself is the main victim. But in the White House, this proclivity could be extremely dangerous.
Reader Richard_at_work writes: Dropbox today announced that it has been working on a "top secret" project called Magic Pocket for the past two and a half years to get data of more than 500 million users from Amazon S3 to its own custom-built infrastructure. The company says that it has migrated over 90% of its users' data so far. Dropbox's relationship with AWS isn't completely over, however, as they will continue to use AWS for specific regional data stores where there is a requirement.
Microsoft is announcing a big new feature for Xbox owners today: cross-network play. It's something the software giant has hinted at for years, and now it seems the reality of PS4, Xbox One, and PC players playing the same game together might finally happen. Developers building games for Xbox One and Windows 10 will be able to support the feature, but it will require Sony and others to "participate" in order for games to be played across Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
Rocket League will be one of the first titles to support the new cross-network play, and Microsoft notes there is an "open invitation for other networks to participate as well," strongly hinting that Sony or other console manufacturers could enable gamers to play their...
We've been hearing about a sequel to classic horror-comedy Beetlejuice for years, but director Tim Burton has now gone on the record and confirmed everything. It's. Really. Happening. Speaking to ShowbizSpy, Burton said: "The film is a go and has been approved by the Warner Bros. team. [We] have talked with the cast members we wanted for the film and they are all on board, this includes both Winona [Ryder] and Michael [Keaton]. We have the script in hand everything is in place all we need to do now is get ready to start filming."
So, that's as clear an indication about the film's progress as we've heard, although it's worth noting that Beetlejuice 2 has been in discussion for quite some time. The original film was released in 1988, with...
During the total solar eclipse on March 8th and 9th, NASA had a camera documenting it from a very special perspective — one that’s 1 million miles away.
The photo above was captured by the NASA DSCOVR satellite’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) 4-megapixel CCD camera. It shows the large, round shadow of the moon as it passes over the face of the Earth, blocking the sun’s light for a large swatch of our planet between Asia and Australia.
Here’s what DSCOVR’s sequence of photos looks like when turned into an animation:
DSCOVR snapped its first photo in July 2015, so this view of a total solar eclipse is the first of its kind. Since the DSCOVR has a fixed view of Earth as it rotates on its axis, this is the first time the shadow of an entire eclipse has been documented in a series of photos.
The US and EU both have regulations that prevent you from flying your drone above ~500 feet. Someone in the Netherlands decided to ignore the law and fly their camera to 11,000 feet.
The anonymous drone owner originally posted his footage to YouTube, saying that they were trying to break a world record with his DJI Phantom 2 drone. That video was soon taken offline, but it has resurfaced on vidme. You can watch it here:
The 4-minute video shows the drone’s ascent all the way up to 3.4 kilometers, or ~2.11 miles, above ground (~11,155 feet). At this altitude, the drone is flying above a layer of clouds. With only 27% of their battery life left, the drone operator decided to begin the descent back down to Earth. It had just 4% by the time it landed.
Needless to say, this is a highly dangerous and illegal stunt, and the operator is being called “stupid” and an “idiot” in news articles about it. A drone flown to these altitudes could collide with an airplane, or it could plummet to the ground if it were to run out of battery at a high altitude.
So unless you want to put people’s lives in danger and face serious punishment from your government, don’t try this yourself.
The announcement implies two things. Either there is a large number of Linux-using corporations out there that are desperate for SQL Server's feature set (as opposed to open source databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or MaxDB, or the proprietary ones such as IBM's DB2 and, of course, Oracle's Oracle), or there is a large number of SQL Server-using organizations out there that are keen to ditch the cost of their Windows licenses but happy to continue to pay for their SQL Server licenses. Neither seems obvious to us.
The Windows version will go into general availability later this year, with a wave of launch-related events starting on Thursday. SQL Server 2016 boasts new in-memory database capabilities that can make some workloads 30-100 times faster and support for encryption for data at rest, in memory, and on the wire. It also offers analytics support using R.
A new world record for the fastest street legal all-electric car has been awarded to the Genovation GXE, a heavily-modified 2006 Z06 Corvette which hit a top speed of 186.8 mph at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida last month. The GXE is a prototype created by small automotive company Genovation, and uses state-of-the-art electric motors and batteries to provide more than 700 horsepower and 600 foot-pounds of torque. Genovation said in a press release that they set the record on the first day of testing (certified by the International Mile Racing Association), and that they "fully expect" to push the vehicle even further.
The GXE's record probably won't last long
Genovation's record is impressive, but it's not likely to stay unbroken...
phantomfive writes: We've seen password frequency lists, here is an analysis of PIN frequency with a nice heatmap towards the bottom. There is a line for numbers starting with 19*, which is the year of birth, a cluster around MM/DD for people's birthdays, and a hard diagonal line for the same digit repeated four times.
A Florida congressman has introduced a new bill that would forbid federal agencies from purchasing Apple products until the company cooperates with the federal court order to assist the unlocking of a seized iPhone 5C associated with the San Bernardino terrorist attack.
In a statement released on Thursday, Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) blasted Apple.
"Taxpayers should not be subsidizing a company that refuses to cooperate in a terror investigation that left 14 Americans dead on American soil," he said. "Who did the terrorist talk to? Who did he message with? Did he go to a safe house? Is there information on the phone that might prevent a future attack on US soil? Following the horrific events of September 11, 2001, every citizen and every company was willing to do whatever it took to side with law enforcement and defeat terror. It’s time Apple shows that same conviction to further protect our nation today."
Amazon usually wants to make shopping on its site as easy as possible for people, but that's definitely not the case with one of its newest gadgets.
At launch, Amazon is only selling the new Echo Dot speaker through Alexa, its voice assistant. That means you already have to own a device with Alexa inside it — either the Echo speaker or the Fire TV — to buy one. You also need to be a Prime subscriber. If you fit both of those requirements, you can then buy one by saying, "Alexa, order Echo Dot."
Ours is an era of noise and distractions. How well do you handle them? This psychology exercise tests your ability to filter out distractions and focus on the task at hand.
The latest in gaming technology is best used for exploring apartments from 1990s sitcoms. First someone made a virtual reality version of Jerry Seinfeld's apartment, and now there's a ridiculously detailed take on Monica's two-bedroom abode from Friends, created using the Unreal Engine 4 game engine. According to the developer, the apartment was built over the course of three months as part of a university project. It's not the entire apartment, as bedrooms and bathrooms are hidden behind closed doors, but it's impressive nonetheless. The apartment features an incredible focus on detail — you can read the labels on the cans in the kitchen, and the couch pillows are laid out in a way that even Monica could appreciate. All that's missing...
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"The Rule," Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel, 1985.
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Image based on data mapped by Olga Wilhelmi, NCAR GIS program.
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