If you’ve ever wondered when Jupiter will next be aligned with Mars, Van Cleef & Arpels has a watch that will tell you. Its new Midnight Planetarium Poetic Complication watch has six rotating disks, each bearing a tiny sphere representing one of the six planets visible with the naked eye.
The disks rotate at different speeds so that each sphere makes one revolution around the dial in the time it takes the actual planet it represents – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter or Saturn – to orbit the sun. Mercury in 88 days, Venus in 224, Earth in a year, Mars in 687 days, Jupiter in 12 years and Saturn in 29. It’s a very complex watch and a true display of supreme watchmaking. Time is indicated by a shooting-star symbol rotating around the dial’s circumference. Leveraging the brand’s specialty in jewelry, each of the planets are represented by precious and semi-precious stones, ranging from red jasper to serpentine and turquoise. An even more extravagant edition is available with baguette-cut diamonds set into the bezel.
The planet module was designed by Christian van der Klaauw, renowned for his movements featuring astronomical indications. The movement is self-winding and contains 396 components. The case is 44 mm in diameter and made of rose gold. The dial is made of aventurine and the planets of semiprecious stones. Price: about $245,000; a diamond-set version will be about $330,000.
Zach Mack, NYC-based craft beer connoisseur and co-owner of Alphabet City Beer Company combined forces with VinePair, an online wine information site, to create this very handy infographic that can help you determine what time of wine you might enjoy by the type of beer you like (and vice versa).
Many loyal beer and wine drinkers have the silly idea that you must be loyal to one beverage more than another. At VinePair we say, “can’t we all just get along!” This opinion is never more prominent than around the Super Bowl. With that in mind, we’ve partnered with our friends at Alphabet City Beer Co. to recommend great wines for people who love beer. Just because beer is your beverage of choice doesn’t mean you can’t cheat on it every once and a while.
Color plays a big part in the vivid world of Borderlands 2, particularly in its loot system, so it makes sense Gearbox is adding a colorblind mode to its shooter. In an extensive post that goes into what colorblindness is and what can be done to help ...
USA TODAY: "Super Bowl ticket demand down because 'teams are not sexy'"
'Lance Patania, president/CEO of Prominent Tickets, a ticket brokerage in Glen Rock, N.J., said his firm was offering $800 face value tickets for $1,200. In other years, he's seen markets this early in the week in the $2,300-$2,500 range. ... "If this game was in San Diego or Miami, it would still not be a good ticket because the teams are not sexy. ... You don't have these huge fan bases that you would have if Washington or Dallas or New York or someone else was in it." '
37 pointless, useless wing recipes 'Peanut Butter and Jelly Wings' 'Baked Chocolate Covered Cherry Balsamic Wings' 'Waffle-Wrapped Bacon Chicken Wings Drizzled with Maple Syrup'
whoa whoa wait back that ass up
Superbowl Sunday is days away and if you want to impress your buddies, you definitely don’t want to bring those boring buffalo wings to the party. We dug around a little and found a few wing dishes that might make you the culinary MVP of the Super Bowl.
I think the ballot seed/two-round playoff model works well, so well that I'd actually like to see the NFL use it over the horseshit division=home field seeding they use now
The NFL routinely rewards undeserving champions and gives playoff spots to inferior teams. College football's Playoff structure has a number of flaws, but the use of human judgment as opposed to impersonal rules isn't one of them.
In American pro sports, teams get their golden tickets to the postseason by virtue of set, objective criteria: records, followed by tie-breakers. The champion for a given season is then determined by the team that wins the playoff.
For fans who stick to American pro sports, this can seem like the only way to crown a winner and any deviation from this method seems strange. But for sports fans who are familiar with international soccer leagues, there is no built-in assumption that regular seasons must be followed by playoffs. In much of the world, the regular-season champion is the champion.
Major college football is the one major American team sport that deviates from the U.S. pro sports model. And even though it's adding the College Football Playoff, it has too many participants and too little centralized management to have objective criteria for four Playoff spots, so a human element is a necessary element of picking teams.
The role of subjective opinion in college basketball isn't a major issue, because of the large number of teams in March Madness. But college football's small postseason structure causes the analogies to crooked figure skating judges to come fast and furious.
Part of the criticism of the role of subjective judgments in selecting Playoff teams is the assumption that the American pro sports model is better. Objective is better than subjective. Set rules are better than human assessment. All conference champions should get to enter. Regular seasons are the preludes for decisive playoffs. Tournaments are better than awarding titles on the basis of the entire sample size.
A playoff does not even attempt to crown either the best or most deserving team. The very purpose of a playoff or tournament is the exact opposite: No matter a team's talent or apparent destiny, everything can be undone on a single day by a single bounce of the ball. (Admittedly, that's actually the allure of a playoff, hence why they call it March Madness.) Yet we've become so accustomed to playoffs that it's difficult for us to think of any other way of selecting a champion. (Playoff-think is such a dominant paradigm that Neil Paine of FiveThirtyEight proposed mitigating some of the arbitrary tendencies of the NFL playoffs by giving points to teams that had better seasons than their opponents before the games even start.)
The NFL structure might be more objective and less prone to the effects of human bias, but that can have negatives as well as positives. The recent history of the NFL Playoffs illustrates Brown's point.
The playoffs this year have worked out, because the elite teams have advanced. There will be no questions as to whether the Super Bowl winner will be a deserving champion, as it's fairly clear that Denver and Seattle were the best teams in their respective conferences. If they aren't the two best teams in the NFL, they're pretty darn close.
However, this prospect of the best teams playing in the Super Bowl is a relatively new development for the NFL:
The reigning Super Bowl champions, the Baltimore Ravens, tied for the worst record of any of the 12 playoff participants in 2012. And lest we think that Baltimore's record was depressed by a tough slate, the Ravens had the lowest SRS -- a rating that combines margin of victory and strength of schedule -- of any of the eight division-winners.
The Ravens replaced the New York Giants as the kings of the NFL, and the Giants are a wonderful example of how an objective playoff system like that of the NFL can produce underwhelming champions. The 2011 Giants went 9-7 in the regular season, which placed them eighth out of 16 teams in the NFC, before beating a sequence of more accomplished teams. This triumph came on the heels of the 2007 Giants beating a bevy of teams with better résumés, culminating in a Super Bowl win over an opponent with six fewer losses.
And then you have the 2008 Cardinals, a team that made the Super Bowl despite finishing 12th out of 16 teams in the NFC during the regular season and making the playoffs only because they won one of the worst divisions in NFL history.
While this year's playoffs have produced more deserving Super Bowl participants than recent tournaments did, imagine if the NFL had a subjective selection committee this season.
The Arizona Cardinals went 10-6, but missed out on the playoffs in favor of the 10-6 Philadelphia Eagles and the 8-7-1 Green Bay Packers. One can quibble about whether the Cardinals or Eagles had a better season, but there is no argument between the Cardinals and Packers. Arizona had a better record and scoring margin against a tougher schedule. If the NFL employed a selection committee to pick its 12 playoff spots, then the Cardinals would have received a spot. Instead, the NFL has an objective, hard-and-fast rule stating that every division champion gets a playoff spot, no matter the quality of the division or the team that wins it.
Sports fans and commentators generally accept the results of playoffs, because the championship is decided on the field. The problem with this approach is that it elevates the operation of rules above all else, and it treats the exercise of human judgment as being a negative.
Or, put another way, the field sometimes lies. The objective NFL system says that a 13-6 team can become the champion by defeating an 18-0 team on a neutral field one month after losing to that 18-0 team at the 13-6 team's home stadium. That happened in 2007. A subjective system could account for the results of the entire season and reach a result that few would dispute ends up crowning the most deserving champion: the team that was unbeaten for five months wears the tiara.
The College Football Playoff is going to have problems. Most importantly, a four-team playoff is still too small in a sport with dozens of contenders who have few common opponents as a result of the declining quality of non-conference schedules.* The use of neutral sites is going to create burdens on the fan bases of the teams that end up playing two playoff games. There are legitimate questions about the credentials of individuals on the selection committee. After all, subjective decisions are only as good as the people making them and the data upon which those people rely.
However, the fact that a committee exists in the first place is not necessarily a problem. The only way to reach that conclusion is to be completely accepting of and obedient to impersonal selection rules, regardless of the results generated by those rules.
* - The trick with a playoff is to make it big enough that it includes all legitimate contenders, but not so big that it can crown the 2007 Giants. At the end of any college football regular season, there are rarely, if ever, more than six to eight teams that can legitimately claim to be the best in the country. Likewise, if you make the playoff small enough, then the teams that make it into the tournament should each have a strong enough résumé to be subjectively named the country's best team. Thus, eight is the highest number that makes any sense. It seems likely that college football's playoff will expand to that level ... and then shoot past it in an effort to make more money, just as has been the case with the NFL and MLB.
Pete Seeger, a 20th-century troubadour who inspired and led a renaissance of folk music in the United States with his trademark five-string banjo and songs of love, peace, brotherhood, work and protest, died Monday night after being hospitalized in New York for six days. He was 94.
games that are more fun to read about than play beat
A massive battle involving more than 2,200 players in main battle is underway in CCP's massively multiplayer online game Eve Online, easily the largest battle in the game's decade-long history, according to Alexander "The Mittani" Gianturco, the CEO of Goonswarm Federation.
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Today is all about 2nds. It is the 2nd anniversary of the Obscure Video Games tumblr, so I figured I should celebrate by doing an HD remake of my 2nd GIF ever. Long-time followers may also remember that the 2nd guy from the left on weirdo Mt. Rushmore used to be my avatar.
So anyhow, thanks for sticking with me! This second year has been insane:
I can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like a year from now, but I promise to do my best to keep this thing going and worth your time.
I suppose I’m overdue for “shout outs”, but Instead of just giving you a list of the best video game blogs, here are some of the people on tumblr who seriously follow my blog and make all the work I put into it seem worthwhile:
Girl Scout cookie season begins in earnest next month, and the kids are packing a new, gluten-free treat -- a chocolate chip shortbread cookie -- in some select test markets.
The bad news? Los Angeles isn't one of those test markets. But Orange County is.
"Millions of Americans have problems eating food with gluten -- so we've created a delicious cookie just for them!" explains the Girl Scouts' website. The cookie is described as "chocolate chips nestled in a bite-size, gluten-free shortbread cookie."
The cookie is made of rice and tapioca flours, as well as "real chocolate chips and real butter" and cane sugars. "They contain no artificial flavors, no artificial colors, no high fructose corn syrup, no palm oil, and no hydrogenated oils," the website says. Four bite-sized cookies have 130 calories.
Also, the hunt for Girl Scout cookies is getting a tech makeover. There's a new Girl Scout Cookie Finder App. (You could also use the online Find Cookies search on the scouts' website, using your ZIP Code.)
National Girl Scouts Cookie Weekend kicks off officially Feb. 7. The scouts' cookie sales are billed as the world's largest girl-run business, bringing in an estimated $790 million.
For months now I’ve been stewing about how much I hate @HistoryInPics and their ilk (@HistoryInPix, @HistoricalPics, @History_Pics, etc.)—twitter streams that do nothing more than post “old” pictures and little tidbits of captions for them.1 And when I say “nothing more” that’s precisely what I mean. What they don’t post includes attribution to the photographer or to the institution hosting the digital image. There’s no way to easily learn more about the image (you can, of course, do an image search through TinEye or Google Image Search and try to track it down that way).
Alexis Madrigal recently wrote a piece for The Atlantic revealing that @HistoryInPics is run by a couple of teenagers who are savvy at generating viral social media accounts to bring in money:
They met hustling on YouTube when they were 13 and 15, respectively, and they’ve been doing social media things together (off and on) since. They’ve built YouTube accounts, making money off advertising. They created Facebook pages such as “Long romantic walks to the fridge,” which garnered more than 10 million Likes, and sold them off. More recently, Di Petta’s company, Swift Fox Labs, has hired a dozen employees, and can bring in, according to an Australian news story, 50,000 Australian dollars a month (or roughly 43,800 USD at current exchange rates).
Madrigal’s piece focuses primarily on the ethics of the pair making money off of unattributed photographers’ work. (Unsurprisingly, they are entirely nonchalant about their appropriation of such photographs.) That aspect of these posts is part of what bothers me. (Unsurprisingly, as an English PhD who works in a library, I’m a firm believer in attribution.)
Another aspect of those accounts that makes me batty is their casual relationship to the truth. Matt Novak, in his Paleofuture blog, has written about some of the most ridiculous of viral photos, tracking down what they really are, rather than what their posters purport them to be. In “9 Fun Facts That Are Total Lies” and “7 (More) Fun Facts That Are Total Lies” Novak reveals, shockingly, that Teddy Roosevelt didn’t ride that moose across that river and that Nikola Tesla wasn’t a swimming instructor. (Disappointing, I know.)
Matt Novak sorts out the real Tesla from the fake.
As Novak explains,
Nikola Tesla was many things: a pool hustler, a gambling addict, a eugenicist, and a legendary genius. But despite what you may have seen recently in the miscaptioned photo above, Nikola Tesla was never a swimming instructor.
The photo is actually from 1898. And while the photo does bear a resemblance to the genius inventor, it’s almost certainly not him.
By 1898, Tesla was neck-deep in robotics, radio, and X-ray research. The man was also quite wealthy, enormously famous, and an obsessive tinkerer not known for taking leisurely swims. It seems highly unlikely that he took up a day job as a swimming instructor. But I wouldn’t be surprised one bit if someone was working on a graphic novel with a similar plot at this precise moment.
I can’t stand going through these feeds to find more too-good-to-be-true images, but I’m sure that you could, faithful readers. First, however, you’d have to get over your shock that a huge portion of what they post—and making up their most popular content—are pictures of celebrities. The Beatles as teenagers! Michael Jordan in college! Paul Newman with a beard! Kurt Cobain! Marilyn Monroe—again and again and again!
I only know about these accounts because people retweet them a lot (even, most horrifyingly, people whose jobs involve a respect for metadata and historical accuracy). At first I thought the accounts were just odd—who knew there was such a pent-up demand for old photos?—and then as they started proliferating, they starting annoying more and more. I muted them so that they wouldn’t show up in my twitter feeds, but they continue to bother me (it’s hard to mute them all, since there are so many of them).
Neither Madrigal nor Novak get at all of what bothers me, although they each get a part of it. So let me tell you what gets my goat.
Feeds like @HistoryinPics make it impossible for anyone interested in a picture to find out more about it, to better understand what it is showing, and to assess its accuracy. As a teacher and as someone who works in a cultural heritage institution, I am deeply invested in the value of studying the past and of recognizing that the past is never neutral or transparent. We see the past through our own perspective and often put it to use for our own purposes. We don’t always need to trace history’s contours in order to enjoy a letter or a photograph, but they are there to be traced. These accounts capitalize on a notion that history is nothing more than superficial glimpses of some vaguely defined time before ours, one that exists for us to look at and exclaim over and move on from without worrying about what it means and whether it happened.
But history is not a toy. It’s not a private amusement. And those of us who engage with the past know how important it is and how enjoyable it can be to learn about it and from it. These accounts piss me off because they undermine an enterprise I value. Historical research—indeed, humanistic inquiry as a whole—is being undermined by the constant plugging of economic value as a measure of worth, the public defunding of higher education, and the rampant devaluing of faculty teaching.
And so @HistoryInPics makes me angry not for what it fails to do, but that it gets so many people to participate in it, including people who care about the same issues that I do. Attribution, citation, and accuracy are the basis of understanding history. @HistoryInPics might not care about those things, but I would like to think that you do. The next time you come across one of these pictures, ask yourself what it shows and what it doesn’t, and what message you’re conveying by spreading it.
And so as to not leave you on an angry note, I leave you with the following recommendations. Want some old pictures to laugh at? @AhistoricalPics is a hilarious, spot-on mockery of the trend. Looking for a twitter feed that will call attention to interesting historical tidbits while also providing accurate information and reliable attributions? @SlateVault, curated by actual historian Rebecca Onion, is a vault of treasures indeed. If those don’t give you enough outlet for your whimsy, try @libraryofaleph, which tweets verbatim the captions of images in the Library of Congress, allowing your imagination to run wild and then letting you search the Library of Congress yourself.
Follow these accounts and resist the others. You’ll thank me in the long run.
I despise them so much I’m not going to link to them or list them all. You’re clever. You can figure it out. [↩]
Anyone out there looking for an excuse to root for the Seahawks?
Reports are starting to surface out of Las Vegas that Floyd Mayweather is a real jerk who makes me hella-jealous. According to numerous gambling websites, Mayweather laid $10.4 MILLION on the Broncos to win the Super Bowl straight-up. It's important to note that these reports are coming from gambling information networks, not from Floyd himself, so maybe take them with a grain of salt.
*Betting Info* Floyd Mayweather L48hours bet 10.4Million on Broncos -2 (Action with 7 different shops + 4 offshore accts) 8Million in credit
There are other reports that Floyd put $3 million on the Broncos to cover (-.5) at HALFTIME.
The five-division world champion has been known to wager large sums on sporting events, having won $400k betting on Alabama in last year's national title game. There were also reports that he put $3 million on Michigan to cover against Alabama earlier that season.
Reports that Floyd Mayweather has put $3m on Michigan at +14, but 69% of our bettors are on 'Bama http://t.co/f6W8pzJo
That's a far cry from dropping seven zeros on a single game. Even for a guy who has made over $350 million in his career, betting $10 million on a single game like this, if true, is one of the most stupid and ballsy things I've ever heard of. Floyd can do what he wants with his money, but that won't stop me from rooting for the Seahawks out of pure unadulterated jealousy that one man has enough cash to do this.
'Even Hallmark know their Tebow kitty can't play quarterback. Nevertheless, look at this cat. What an upstanding young role model for the kids. No tattoos or anything.'
Hallmark believes in kittens, and they're going all in to prove it.
Strong pun work Kitten Bowl. We're picking up what you're putting down. Paw-Lamalau looks light on his feet, but putting him at "running cat" is a missed opportunity for "fur-ee safety."
Tim Teepaw
Even Hallmark know their Tebow kitty can't play quarterback. Nevertheless, look at this cat. What an upstanding young role model for the kids. No tattoos or anything.
Dandy Dalton
THEY FOUND A GINGER CAT AND HE'S SO CUTE AND LOOK AT THAT COLLAR IT'S LIKE FOUR SIZES TOO BIG.
Catvin Johnson
Receiver, dependable, loves Catalina Island. Man, at least try Hallmark -- you just copied over a profile of Calvin Johnson.
TONGUE.
Terry Bradclaw
Yep.
Hairy Rice
Watch out! Vampire kitteh!
Fun fact: Jerry Rice drinks human blood almost exclusively. Kind of surprising Hallmark would break that news this way.
'If I were to make a guess, I would say that this was done by Welcke and/or Kohfahl as a demonstration piece to court potential clients.
This raises a couple questions, though, such as why they didn't just do a birdseye of an actual place as their spec example. Perhaps even more interesting is that the naming -- "Great Western Central City" -- might make it seem as though they might've done other examples. Maybe "Old New England Coastal City", or "Southern Agricultural City"?'
Birdseye Map of (Fictive) "Great Western Central City" Map of (fictive) "Great Western Central City" Date: 1880s Author: Kohfal Dwnld: Full Size (9mb) Source: Library of Congress Print Availability: See our Prints Page for more details pff Don't know much at all about this map. The metadata at Library of Congress is pretty thin. If you can add to this, let me know. This map is a fascinating one, and...
"In the month of January, every interview about game development that I have published, am currently at work on, or will file focuses on or includes a woman dev discussing her work and the landscape." Fuck yes, Leigh.
During the month of January, I did a couple big features that gathered perspectives from many developers — the first of these is about the supposed self-promotion age and how it affects game developers.
This becomes increasingly relevant as artists and creators are looking for ways to make a living outside an increasingly-strained infrastructure, and seeking funding from fans is a major avenue. I wrote an editorial about the launch of Double Fine’s Broken Age (which I backed, but still have yet to play) — it helps encapsulate the ways that for every new opportunity crowdfunding offers, there are new disruptions in the traditional creator-audience relationship, and things get complicated.
Last year there was much talk of “developer dads,” and the tonal shift in commercial games that comes from devs having kids of their own. But mothers make games too; some of them balance parenthood with indie careers, and want more visibility on their experience. Here’s my feature on indie moms, their unique opportunities and challenges, and how the culture of game development tends to shut them out of the conversation.
I spoke to Samantha Kalman about her multidisciplinary background in music and tech, and how it led to her successfully-funded Sentris game; I also spoke to Mitu Khandaker about Redshirt, her cynical space social media sim, and creating a healthy community around a game about how reality can be awful.
In addition to Kalman and Khandaker, in these and other articles I interviewed Brianna Wu, Katharine Neil, Tanya Short, Elizabeth Sampat, Beth Maher, Leanne Bayley, and Nina Freeman just in the past four weeks or so.
In the month of January, every interview about game development that I have published, am currently at work on, or will file focuses on or includes a woman dev discussing her work and the landscape. Both pieces with more than one source include more than one woman.
I thought I’d quietly see if this was possible in the new year — not everything I file in a given month is an interview or includes quotes, but much of it is, and I wondered if I could spend a month covering game development while always including — even centering on, where possible — the voices of women working in the space, in a way that came naturally and kept the focus on the creative space and the developers’ work.
It came surprisingly easily. It took half an effort. There are so many passionate women in games, many of them eager to share their work and experiences, and not only when it’s time for a “women in games” panel.
I believe cultural change comes with increased visibility on the people who share your wish for change, and that’s something I can contribute as a writer. There is always more to be done — I certainly don’t want to seem to be patting myself on the back for paying attention to a handful of mainly white, young women I know on social media and from events — just to show others how possible it is to take even a basic step; how simple, and how low-friction it is to shift conversation about games to include women without decreasing the utility of the piece or narrowing its potential audience.
It’s easy to get more coverage of women in games; it’s easy to include women speakers at your event (as my friend Courtney Stanton aims to do with her Boston conference, No Show). If you “can’t find” anyone, or if the panels you do attend or articles you do read are always about the same people, you can keep looking, and you can try harder. I’ll try harder.
The Elder Scrolls Online will not require a PlayStation Plus membership to play on PS4, ZeniMax Online Studios Game Director Matt Firor wrote in a PlayStation Blog update. Bethesda confirmed to Joystiq that the subscription-based MMORPG will require ...
By the time the sun rose on Friday, December 19th, the Homestead Miami race track had been taken over by robots. Some hung from racks, their humanoid feet dangling above the ground as roboticists wheeled them out of garages. One robot resembled a gorilla, while another looked like a spider; yet another could have been mistaken for a designer coffee table. Teams of engineers from MIT, Google, Lockheed Martin, and other institutions and companies replaced parts, ran last-minute tests, and ate junk food. Spare heads and arms were everywhere.
It was the start of the Robotics Challenge Trials, a competition put on by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the US Department of Defense dedicated to high risk, high reward technology projects. Over a period of two days, the machines would attempt a series of eight tasks including opening doors, clearing a pile of rubble, and driving a car.
The eight robots that scored highest in the trials would go on to the finals next year, where they will compete for a $2 million grand prize. And one day, DARPA says, these robots will be defusing roadside bombs, surveilling dangerous areas, and assisting after disasters like the Fukushima nuclear meltdown.
Mark Gubrud, a former nanophysicist and frumpy professor sort, fit right in with the geeky crowd. But unlike other spectators, Gubrud wasn’t there to cheer the robots on. He was there to warn people.
“DARPA’s trying to put a face on it, saying ‘this isn’t about killer robots or killer soldiers, this is about disaster response,’ but everybody knows what the real interest is,” he says. “If you could have robots go into urban combat situations instead of humans, then your soldiers wouldn’t get killed. That’s the dream. That’s ultimately why DARPA is funding this stuff.”
As the US military pours billions of dollars into increasingly sophisticated robots, people inside and outside the Pentagon have raised concerns about the possibility that machine decision will replace human judgment in war.
Around a year ago, the Department of Defense released directive 3000.09: "Autonomy in Weapons Systems." The 15-page document defines an autonomous weapon — what Gubrud would call a killer robot — as a weapon that "once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator."
The directive, which expires in 2022, establishes guidelines for how the military will pursue such weapons. A robot must always follow a human operator’s intent, for example, while simultaneously guarding against any failure that could cause an operator to lose control. Such systems may only be used after passing a series of internal reviews.
"It's a veto power that you have about a half-second to exercise. You're mid-curse word."
The guidelines are sketchy, however, relying on phrases like "appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force." That leaves room for systems that can be given an initial command by a human, then dispatched to select and strike their targets. DARPA is working on a $157 million long-range anti-ship missile system, for example, that is about as autonomous as an attack dog that’s been given a scent: it gets its target from a human, then seeks out and engages the enemy on its own.
Some experts say it could take anywhere from five to thirty years to develop autonomous weapons systems, but others would argue that these weapons already exist. They don’t necessarily look like androids with guns, though. The recently tested X-47B is one of the most advanced unmanned drones in the US military. It takes off, flies, and lands on a carrier with minimal input from its remote pilot. The Harpy drone, built by Israel and sold to other nations, autonomously flies to a patrol area, circles until it detects an enemy radar signal, and then fires at the source. Meanwhile, defense systems like the US Phalanx and the Israeli Iron Dome automatically shoot down incoming missiles, which leaves no time for human intervention.
"A human has veto power, but it’s a veto power that you have about a half-second to exercise," says Peter Singer, a fellow at the Brookings Institute and author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. "You’re mid-curse word."
Gubrud, an accomplished academic, first proposed a ban on autonomous weapons back in 1988. He’s typically polite, but talk of robotics brings out his combative side: the DARPA challenge organizers assigned him an escort after he accosted director Arati Prabhakar and tried to get her to admit that the agency is developing autonomous weapons.
He may have been the lone voice of dissent among the hundreds of robot-watchers at DARPA’s event, but Gubrud has some muscle behind him: the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), an organization founded in 2009 by experts in robotics, ethics, international relations, and human rights law. If robotics research continues unchecked, ICRAC warns, the future will be a dystopian one in which militaries arm robots with nuclear weapons, countries start unmanned wars in space, and dictators use killer robots to mercilessly control their own people.
Concern about robot war fighters goes beyond a "cultural disinclination to turn attack decisions over to software algorithms," as the autonomy hawk Barry D. Watts put it. Robots, at least right now, have trouble discriminating between civilians and the terrorists and insurgents who live among them. Furthermore, a robot’s actions are a sum of its programmer, operator, manufacturer, and other factors, making it difficult to assign responsibility if something does go wrong. And finally, replacing soldiers with robots would convert the cost of war from human lives to dollars, which could lead to more conflicts.
ICRAC and more than 50 organizations including Human Rights Watch, Nobel Women’s Initiative, and Code Pink have formed a coalition calling itself the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Their request is simple: an international ban on autonomous weapons systems that will head off the robotics arms race before it really gets started.
"Tireless war machines, ready for deployment at the push of a button, pose the danger of permanent ... armed conflict."
There has actually been some progress on this front. A United Nations report in May, 2013 called for a temporary ban on autonomous lethal systems until nations set down rules for their use. "There is widespread concern that allowing lethal autonomous robots to kill people may denigrate the value of life itself," the report says. "Tireless war machines, ready for deployment at the push of a button, pose the danger of permanent (if low-level) armed conflict."
The UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons will convene a meeting of experts this spring, the first step toward an international arms agreement. "We need to have a clear view of what the consequences of those weapons could be," says Jean-Hugues Simon-Michel, the French ambassador to the UN Conference on Disarmament and its chairman, who persuaded the other nations to take up the issue. "And of course when there is a particular concern with regard to a category of weapons, it’s always easier to find a solution before those weapons exist."
Watching the robots stumble around the simulated disaster areas at the DARPA trials would have been reassuring to anyone worried about killer robots. Today’s robots are miracles of science compared to those from 20 years ago, but they are still seriously impaired by lousy perception, energy inefficiency, and rudimentary intelligence. The machines move agonizingly slowly and wear safety harnesses in case they fall, which happens often.
The capabilities being developed for the challenge, however, are laying the groundwork for killer robots should we ever decide to build them. "We’re part of the Defense Department," DARPA’s director, Arati Prabhakar, acknowledges. "Why do we make these investments? We make them because we think that they’re going to be important for national security." One recent report from the US Air Force notes that "by 2030 machine capabilities will have increased to the point that humans will have become the weakest component in a wide array of systems and processes."
"If we can protect innocent civilian life, I do not want to shut the door on the use of this technology."
By some logic, that might be a good thing. Robot shooters are inherently more accurate than humans, and they’re unaffected by fear, fatigue, or hatred. Machines can take on more risk in order to verify a target, loitering in an area or approaching closer to confirm there are no civilians in the way.
"If we can protect innocent civilian life, I do not want to shut the door on the use of this technology," says Ron Arkin, PhD, a roboticist and ethicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who has collaborated extensively with Pentagon agencies on various robotics systems.
Arkin proposes that an "ethical governor," a set of rules that approximates an artificial conscience, could be programmed into the machines in order to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law. Autonomy in these systems, he points out, isn’t akin to free will — it’s more like automation. During the trials, DARPA deliberately sabotaged the communications links between robots and their operators in order to give an advantage to the bots that could "think" on their own. But at least for now, that means being able to process the command "take a step" versus "lift the right foot 2 inches, move it forward 6 inches, and set it down."
"When you speak to philosophers, they act as if these systems will have moral agency," Arkin says. "At some level a toaster is autonomous. You can task it to toast your bread and walk away. It doesn’t keep asking you, ‘Should I stop? Should I stop?’ That’s the kind of autonomy we’re talking about."
"No one wants to hear that they're building a weapon," says Doug Stephen, a software engineer at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) whose team placed second at DARPA’s event. But he admits that the same capabilities being honed for these trials — ostensibly to make robots good for disaster relief — can also translate to the battlefield. "Absolutely anything," Stephen says, "can be weaponized."
His team’s robot, a modification of the humanoid Atlas built by Boston Dynamics, earned the most points in the least amount of time on several challenges, including opening doors and cutting through walls. When it successfully walked over "uneven terrain" built out of cinder blocks, the crowd erupted into cheers. Stephen and his team will now advance to the final stage of the challenge next year — alongside groups from institutes including MIT and NASA — to vie for the $2 million prize.
That DARPA funding could theoretically seed the rescue-robot industry, or it could kickstart the killer robot one. For Gubrud and others, it’s all happening much too fast: the technology for killer robots, he warns, could outrun our ability to understand and agree on how best to use it. "Are we going to have robot soldiers running around in future wars, or not? Are we going to have a robot arms race which isn't just going to be these humanoids, but robotic missiles and drones fighting each other and robotic submarines hunting other submarines?" he says. "Either we're going to decide not to do this, and have an international agreement not to do it, or it's going to happen."
The reception for David Lynch's theatrical take on Dune was mixed, to stay the least. But for all of its narrative issues, it certainly was a lovely film to look at. Writing on io9, former concept artist Ron Miller provides some insight into how the world of Arrakis was created. Miller — whose job included crafting large-scale paintings to represent scenes from the film — touches on "the immense effort that when into quality and attention to the every detail" in the movie. "Nothing was stinted when it came to either of those," he explains. He also takes a moment to mention the oft-derided final product, a film he says was destroyed when studio executives cut too much important material. "The problem was that what they ordered cut was narrative and character development," he explains. "What was left was action — all too often disjointed — and no rationale for why it was all taking place."
Panflute Hero was the result of a weekend at Way Out West Hackathon 2013. It’s a very silly panpipe version of Guitar Hero, which doesn’t use a plastic guitar controller. Instead, it’s controlled by a hand-built, bamboo set of faux panpipes (which are built according to the Golden Mean), all equipped with Arduino sound sensors that detect blowing, and controlled by a Raspberry Pi sending “blow” events to a desktop over TCP. Simulated flute noises are emitted when a “blow” is sensed, and…well, see for yourself.
The game itself is built in Lua, and runs on a PC (no reason you couldn’t run a port on a Pi). There’s some considerable *cough* sophistication in there, with libspotify playing some of Spotify’s horrifyingly large library of panpipe choons, which are delicately gameified for your panpiping pleasure.
Instructions, code (Jhonny says: “In the spirit of hacking and hackathons, our code really blows (get it?). You can look at it in BitBucket and publicly shame us if you want. Please don’t.”), and some kick-ass panpipe cover versions of the greats are available on the project webpage. Let us know if you make your own; I can imagine the controllers getting mildly unhygienic after much shared use, but any party involving Panflute Hero is bound to be a blast. A gently tootling blast.
Rafet Cimbaljevic absolutely demolishes a whole stack of wood in almost no time thanks to this glorious machine that creates small pieces of wood from larger timber.
Color plays a big part in the vivid world of Borderlands 2, particularly in its loot system, so it makes sense Gearbox is adding a colorblind mode to its shooter. In an extensive post that goes into what colorblindness is and what can be done to help ...
Birdseye Map of (Fictive) "Great Western Central City" Map of (fictive) "Great Western Central City" Date: 1880s Author: Kohfal Dwnld: Full Size (9mb) Source: Library of Congress Print Availability: See our Prints Page for more details pff Don't know much at all about this map. The metadata at Library of Congress is pretty thin. If you can add to this, let me know. This map is a fascinating one, and...
Leigh Alexander:
The Elder Scrolls Online will not require a PlayStation Plus membership to play on PS4, ZeniMax Online Studios Game Director Matt Firor wrote in a PlayStation Blog update. Bethesda confirmed to Joystiq that the subscription-based MMORPG will require ...
