In yet another historic reversal of long standing precedent, the US Supreme Court on Thursday ruled 6 - 3 along party lines to severely limit the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency in regulating carbon emissions from power plants, further hamstringing the Biden administration's ability to combat global warming.
The case, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 20-1530, centered both on whether the Clean Air Act gives the EPA the power to issue regulations for the power industry and whether Congress must "speak with particular clarity when it authorizes executive agencies to address major political and economic questions," a theory the court refers to as the “major questions doctrine.”
Last year, hurricanes hammered the Southern and Eastern US coasts at the cost of more than 160 lives and $70 billion in damages. Thanks to climate change, it's only going to get worse. In order to quickly and accurately predict these increasingly severe weather patterns, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Tuesday that it has effectively tripled its supercomputing (and therefore weather modelling) capacity with the addition of two high-performance computing (HPC) systems built by General Dynamics.
“This is a big day for NOAA and the state of weather forecasting,” Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, said in a press statement. “Researchers are developing new ensemble-based forecast models at record speed, and now we have the computing power needed to implement many of these substantial advancements to improve weather and climate prediction.”
General Dynamics was awarded the $505 million contract back in 2020 and delivered the two computers, dubbed Dogwood and Cactus, to their respective locations in Manassas, Virginia, and Phoenix, Arizona. They'll replace a pair of older Cray and IBM systems in Reston, Virginia, and Orlando, Florida.
Each HPC operates at 12.1 petaflops or, "a quadrillion calculations per second with 26 petabytes of storage," Dave Michaud, Director, National Weather Service Office of Central Processing, said during a press call Tuesday morning. That's "three times the computing capacity and double the storage capacity compared to our previous systems... These systems are amongst the fastest in the world today, currently ranked at number 49 and 50." Combined with its other supercomputers in West Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi and Colorado, the NOAA wields a full 42 petaflops of capacity.
With this extra computational horsepower, the NOAA will be able to create higher-resolution models with more realistic physics — and generate more of them with a higher degree of model certainty, Brian Gross, Director, NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center, explained during the call. This should result in more accurate forecasts and longer lead times for storm warnings.
"The new supercomputers will also allow significant upgrades to specific modeling systems in the coming years," Gross said. "This includes a new hurricane forecast model named the Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System, which is slated to be in operation at the start of the 2023 hurricane season," and will replace the existing H4 hurricane weather research and forecasting model.
While the NOAA hasn't yet confirmed in absolute terms how much of an improvement the new supercomputers will grant to the agency's weather modelling efforts, Ken Graham, the Director of National Weather Service, is convinced of their value.
"To translate what these new supercomputers will mean for for the average American," he said during the press call, "we are currently developing models that will be able to provide additional lead time in the outbreak of severe weather events and more accurately track the intensity forecasts for hurricanes, both in the ocean and that are expected to hit landfall, and we want to have longer lead times [before they do]."
When Rivian drivers do eventually get on the road, they'll have their pick of charging networks including a brand new one from the EV truckmaker itself. Rivian announced on Monday that the first three sites of its burgeoning "Adventure Network" of Level 3 fast DC chargers are coming online and will be accessible to nearly every other EV on the road, regardless of who makes it.
The first station opened in Salida, Colorado with four chargers capable of delivering 200 kW of power — that's about 140 miles of range for an R1T in 20 minutes — in addition to the existing set of Level 2 chargers. Rivian will officially open the other stations in Inyokern and Bishop, California, later in the week.
You've probably never heard of any of these towns unless you frequent Yosemite National Park, Sequoia National Forest, Mammoth Lakes or Death Valley National Park. Similar to Jeep's efforts to install charging stations at trailheads, Rivian's Adventure Network seeks to add fast charging capabilities along both popular cross-country routes and also near national parks and other out-of-the way locations.
Rivian
“We designed Rivian charging to support electrified adventure, and these first sites demonstrate how we’re enabling drivers to responsibly reach some of the nation’s most breathtaking natural spaces,” Trent Warnke, Rivian’s Senior Director of Energy and Charging Solutions, said in a statement. “In addition to scenic or off-the-beaten-path destinations, our fast charging rollout is designed to ensure travelers have places to charge along major transportation corridors coast to coast.” To that end, the company hopes to install some 3,500 chargers at 600 sites nationwide.
The skies overhead could soon be filled with constellations of commercial space stations occupying low earth orbit while human colonists settle the Moon with an eye on Mars, if today's robber barons have their way. But this won't result in the same freewheeling Wild West that we saw in the 19th century, unfortunately, as tomorrow's interplanetary settlers will be bringing their lawyers with them.
In their new book, The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration, renowned astrophysicist and science editor, Donald Goldsmith, and Martin Rees, the UK's Astronomer Royal, argue in favor of sending robotic scouts — with their lack of weighty necessities like life support systems — out into the void ahead of human explorers. But what happens after these synthetic astronauts discover an exploitable resource or some rich dork declares himself Emperor of Mars? In the excerpt below, Goldsmith and Rees discuss the challenges facing our emerging exoplanetary legal system.
Almost all legal systems have grown organically, the result of long experience that comes from changes in the political, cultural, environmental, and other circumstances of a society. The first sprouts of space law deserve attention from those who may participate in the myriad activities envisioned for the coming decades, as well, perhaps, from those who care to imagine how a Justinian law code could arise in the realm of space.
Those who travel on spacecraft, and to some degree those who will live on another celestial object, occupy situations analogous to those aboard naval vessels, whose laws over precedents to deal with crimes or extreme antisocial behavior. These laws typically assign to a single officer or group of officers the power to judge and to inflict punishment, possibly awaiting review in the event of a return to a higher court. This model seems likely to reappear in the first long-distance journeys within the solar system and in the first settlements on other celestial objects, before the usual structure of court systems for larger societies appears on the scene.
As on Earth, however, most law is civil law, not criminal law. A far greater challenge than dealing with criminal acts lies in formulating an appropriate code of civil law that will apply to disputes, whether national or international, arising from spaceborne activities by nations, corporations, or individuals. For half a century, a small cadre of interested parties have developed the new specialty of “space law,” some of which already has the potential for immediate application. What happens if a piece of space debris launched by a particular country or corporation falls onto an unsuspecting group of people or onto their property? What happens if astronauts from different countries lay claim to parts of the moon or an asteroid? And most important in its potential importance, if not in its likelihood: who will speak for Earth if we should receive a message from another civilization?
Conferences on subjects such as these have generated more interest than answers. Human exploration of the moon brought related topics to more widespread attention and argument. During the 1980s, the United Nations seemed the natural arena in which to hash them out, and those discussions eventually produced the outcomes described in this chapter. Today, one suspects, almost no one knows the documents that the United Nations produced, let alone has plans to support countries that obey the guidelines in those documents.
Our hopes for achieving a rational means to define and limit activities beyond our home planet will require more extensive agreements, plus a means of enforcing them. Non-lawyers who read existing and proposed agreements about the use of space should remain aware that lawyers typically define words relating to specialized situations as “terms of art,” giving them meanings other than those that a plain reading would suggest.
For example, the word “recovery” in normal discourse refers to regaining the value of something that has been lost, such as the lost wages that arise from an injury. In more specialized usage, “resource recovery” refers to the act of recycling material that would otherwise go to waste. In the vocabulary of mining operations, however, “recovery” has nothing to do with losing what was once possessed; instead, it refers to the extraction of ore from the ground or the seabed. The word’s gentle nature contrasts with the more accurate term “exploitation,” which often implies disapproval, though in legal matters it often carries only a neutral meaning. For example, in 1982 the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea established an International Seabed Authority (ISA) to set rules for the large portion of the seabed that lies beyond the jurisdiction of any nation. By now, 168 countries have signed on to the convention, but the United States has not. According to the ISA’s website, its Mining Code “refers to the whole of the comprehensive set of rules, regulations and procedures issued by ISA to regulate prospecting, exploration and exploitation of marine minerals in the international seabed Area.” In mining circles, no one blinks at plans to exploit a particular location by extracting its mineral resources. Discussions of space law, however, tend to avoid the term “exploitation” in favor of “recovery.”
Like strokes and folks, there are different types and sources of radiation both terrestrial and in space. Non-ionizing radiation, meaning the atom doesn’t have enough energy to fully remove an electron from its orbit, can be found in microwaves, light bulbs, and Solar Energetic Particles (SEP) like visible and ultraviolet light. While these forms of radiation can damage materials and biological systems, their effects can typically be blocked (hence sunscreen and microwaves that don't irradiate entire kitchens) or screened by the Ozone layer or Earth’s magnetosphere.
Earth’s radiation belts are filled with energetic particles trapped by Earth’s magnetic field that can wreak havoc with electronics we send to space. Credits: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio/Tom Bridgman
Ionizing radiation, on the other hand, is energetic to shed an electron and there isn’t much that can slow their positively-charged momentum. Alpha and beta particles, Gamma rays, X-rays and Galactic Cosmic Rays, “heavy, high-energy ions of elements that have had all their electrons stripped away as they journeyed through the galaxy at nearly the speed of light,” per NASA. “GCR are a dominant source of radiation that must be dealt with aboard current spacecraft and future space missions within our solar system.” GCR intensity is inversely proportional to the relative strength of the Sun’s magnetic field, meaning that they are strongest when the Sun’s field is at its weakest and least able to deflect them.
Chancellor, J., Scott, G., & Sutton, J. (2014)
Despite their dissimilar natures, both GCR and SEP damage the materials designed to shield our squishy biological bodies from radiation along with our biological bodies themselves. Their continued bombardment has a cumulative negative effect on human physiology resulting not just in cancer but cataracts, neurological damage, germline mutations, and acute radiation sickness if the dose is high enough. For materials, high-energy particles and photons can cause “temporary damage or permanent failure of spacecraft materials or devices,” Zicai Shen of the Beijing Institute of Spacecraft Environment Engineering notes in 2019’s Protection of Materials from Space Radiation Environments on Spacecraft.
“Charged particles gradually lose energy as they pass through the material, and finally, capture a sufficient number of electrons to stop,” they added. “When the thickness of the shielding material is greater than the range of a charged particle in the material, the incident particles will be blocked in the material.”
How NASA currently protects its astronauts
To ensure that tomorrow’s astronauts arrive at Mars with all of their teeth and fingernails intact, NASA has spent nearly four decades collecting data and studying the effects radiation has on the human body. The agency’s Space Radiation Analysis Group (SRAG) at Johnson Space Center is, according to its website, “responsible for ensuring that the radiation exposure received by astronauts remains below established safety limits.”
According to NASA, “the typical average dose for a person is about 360 mrems per year, or 3.6 mSv, which is a small dose. However, International Standards allow exposure to as much as 5,000 mrems (50 mSv) a year for those who work with and around radioactive material. For spaceflight, the limit is higher. The NASA limit for radiation exposure in low-Earth orbit is 50 mSv/year, or 50 rem/year.”
SRAG’s Space Environment Officers (SEOs) are tasked with ensuring that the astronauts can successfully complete their mission without absorbing too many RADs. They take into account the various environmental and situational factors present during a spaceflight — whether the astronauts are in LEO or on the lunar surface, whether they stay in the spacecraft or take a spacewalk, or whether there is a solar storm going on — combine and model that information with data collected from onboard and remote radiation detectors as well as the NOAA space weather prediction center, to make their decisions.
The Radiation Effects and Analysis Group at Goddard Space Flight Center, serves much the same purpose as SRAG but for mechanical systems, working to develop more effective shielding and more robust materials for use in orbit.
“We will be able to ensure that humans, electronics, spacecraft and instruments — anything we are actually sending into space — will survive in the environment we are putting it in,” Megan Casey, an aerospace engineer in the REAG said in a 2019 release. “Based on where they’re going, we tell mission designers what their space environment will be like, and they come back to us with their instrument plans and ask, ‘Are these parts going to survive there?’ The answer is always yes, no, or I don’t know. If we don’t know, that’s when we do additional testing. That’s the vast majority of our job.”
NASA’s research will continue and expand throughout the upcoming Artemis mission era. During test flights for the Artemis I mission, both the SLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft will be outfitted with sensors measuring radiation levels in deep space beyond the moon — specifically looking at the differences in relative levels beyond the Earth’s Van Allen Belts. Data collected and lessons learned from these initial uncrewed flights will help NASA engineers build better, more protective spacecraft in the future.
And once it does eventually get built, crews aboard the Lunar Gateway will maintain an expansive radiation sensor suite, including the Internal Dosimeter Array, designed to carefully and continually measure levels within the station as it makes its week-long oblong orbit around the moon.
“Understanding the effects of the radiation environment is not only critical for awareness of the environment where astronauts will live in the vicinity of the Moon, but it will also provide important data that can be used as NASA prepares for even greater endeavors, like sending the first humans to Mars,” Dina Contella, manager for Gateway Mission Integration and Utilization, said in a 2021 release.
NASA might use magnetic bubbles in the future
Tomorrow’s treks into interplanetary space, where GCR and SEP are more prevalent, are going to require more comprehensive protection than the current state of the art passive shielding materials and space weather forecasting predictions can deliver. And since the Earth’s own magnetosphere has proven so handy, researchers with the European Commission's Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) have researched creating one small enough to fit on a spaceship, dubbed the Space Radiation Superconducting Shield (SR2S).
The €2.7 million SR2S program, which ran from 2013 to 2015, expanded on the idea of using superconducting magnets to generate a radiation-stopping magnetic force field first devised by ex-Nazi aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun in 1969. The magnetic field produced would be more than 3,000 times more concentrated than the one encircling the Earth and would extend out in a 10-meter sphere.
“In the framework of the project, we will test, in the coming months, a racetrack coil wound with an MgB2 superconducting tape,” Bernardo Bordini, coordinator of CERN activity in the framework of the SR2S project, said in 2015. “The prototype coil is designed to quantify the effectiveness of the superconducting magnetic shielding technology.”
It wouldn’t block all incoming radiation, but would efficiently screen out the most damaging types, like GCR, which flows through passive shielding like water through a colander. By lowering the rate at which astronauts are exposed to radiation, they’ll be able to serve on more and longer duration missions before hitting NASA’s lifetime exposure limit.
“As the magnetosphere deflects cosmic rays directed toward the earth, the magnetic field generated by a superconducting magnet surrounding the spacecraft would protect the crew,” Dr Riccardo Musenich, scientific and technical manager for the project, told Horizon in 2014. “SR2S is the first project which not only investigates the principles and the scientific problems (of magnetic shielding), but it also faces the complex issues in engineering.”
Two superconducting coils have already been constructed and tested, showing the feasibility in using them to build lightweight magnets but this is very preliminary research, mind you. The CORDIS team doesn’t anticipate this tech making it into space for another couple decades.
Researchers from University of Wisconsin–Madison's Department of Astronomy have recently set about developing their own version of CORDIS’ idea. Their Cosmic Radiation Extended Warding using the Halbach Torus (CREW HaT) project, which received prototyping funding from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program in February, uses “new superconductive tape technology, a deployable design, and a new configuration for a magnetic field that hasn't been explored before," according to UWM associate professor and researches lead author, Dr. Elena D'Onghia told Universe Today in May.
NASA
“The HaT geometry has never been explored before in this context or studied in combination with modern superconductive tapes,” she said in February’s NIAC summary. “It diverts over 50 percent of the biology-damaging cosmic rays (protons below 1 GeV) and higher energy high-Z ions. This is sufficient to reduce the radiation dose absorbed by astronauts to a level that is less than 5 percent of the lifetime excess risk of cancer mortality levels established by NASA.”
Or astronauts might wear leaden vests to protect their privates
But why go through the effort of magnetically encapsulating an entire spaceship when really it’s just a handful of torsos and heads that actually need the protection? That’s the idea behind the Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment (MARE).
Developed in partnership with both the Israel Space Agency (ISA) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), two of the MARE vests will be strapped aboard identical mannequins and launched into space aboard the Orion uncrewed moon mission. On their three-week flight, the mannequins, named Helga and Zohar, will travel some 280,000 miles from Earth and thousands of miles past the moon. Their innards are designed to mimic human bones and soft tissue, enabling researchers to measure the specific radiation doses they receive.
Its sibling study aboard the ISS, the Comfort and Human Factors AstroRad Radiation Garment Evaluation (CHARGE), focuses less on the vest’s anti-rad effectiveness and more on the ergonomics, fit and feel of it as astronauts go about their daily duties. The European Space Agency is also investigating garment-based radiation shielding with the FLARE suit, an “emergency device that aims to protect astronauts from intense solar radiation when traveling out of the magnetosphere on future Deep Space missions.”
Or we’ll line the ship hulls with water and poo!
One happy medium between the close-in discomfort of wearing a leaded apron in microgravity and the existential worry of potentially having your synapses scrambled by a powerful electromagnet is known as Water Wall technology.
“Nature uses no compressors, evaporators, lithium hydroxide canisters, oxygen candles, or urine processors,” Marc M. Cohen Arch.D, argued in the 2013 paper Water Walls Architecture: Massively Redundant and Highly Reliable Life Support for Long Duration Exploration Missions. “For very long-term operation — as in an interplanetary spacecraft, space station, or lunar/planetary base — these active electro-mechanical systems tend to be failure-prone because the continuous duty cycles make maintenance difficult.”
So, rather than rely on heavy and complicated mechanizations to process the waste materials that astronauts emit during a mission, this system utilizes osmosis bags that mimic nature’s own passive means of purifying water. In addition to treating gray and black water, these bags could also be adapted to scrub CO2 from the air, grow algae for food and fuel, and can be lined against the inner hull of a spacecraft to provide superior passive shielding against high energy particles.
“Water is better than metals for [radiation] protection,” Marco Durante of the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, told New Scientist in 2013. This is because the three-atom nucleus of a water molecule contains more mass than a metal atom and therefore is more effective at blocking GCR and other high energy rays, he continued.
The crew aboard the proposed Inspiration Mars mission, which would have slingshot a pair of private astronauts around Mars in a spectacular flyby while the two planets were at their orbital closest in 2018. You haven’t heard anything about that because the nonprofit behind it quietly went under in 2015. But had they somehow pulled off that feat, the plan was to have the astronauts poop into bags, sophon out the liquid for reuse and then pile the vacuum-sealed shitbricks against the walls of the spacecraft — alongside their boxes of food — to act as radiation insulation.
“It’s a little queasy sounding, but there’s no place for that material to go, and it makes great radiation shielding,” Taber MacCallum, a member of the nonprofit funded by Dennis Tito, told New Scientist. “Food is going to be stored all around the walls of the spacecraft, because food is good radiation shielding.” It’s just a quick jaunt to the next planet over, who needs plumbing and sustenance?
The Metaverse, as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions it, will be a fully immersive virtual experience that rivals reality, at least from the waist up. But the visuals are only part of the overall Metaverse experience.
“Getting spatial audio right is key to delivering a realistic sense of presence in the metaverse,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Friday blog post. “If you're at a concert, or just talking with friends around a virtual table, a realistic sense of where sound is coming from makes you feel like you're actually there.”
That concert, the blog post notes, will sound very different if performed in a full-sized concert hall than in a middle school auditorium on account of the differences between their physical spaces and acoustics. As such, Meta’s AI and Reality Lab (MAIR, formerly FAIR) is collaborating with researchers from UT Austin to develop a trio of open source audio “understanding tasks” that will help developers build more immersive AR and VR experiences with more lifelike audio.
The first is MAIR’s Visual Acoustic Matching model, which can adapt a sample audio clip to any given environment using just a picture of the space. Want to hear what the NY Philharmonic would sound like inside San Francisco’s Boom Boom Room? Now you can. Previous simulation models were able to recreate a room’s acoustics based on its layout — but only if the precise geometry and material properties were already known — or from audio sampled within the space, neither of which produced particularly accurate results.
MAIR’s solution is the Visual Acoustic Matching model, called AViTAR, which “learns acoustic matching from in-the-wild web videos, despite their lack of acoustically mismatched audio and unlabeled data,” according to the post.
“One future use case we are interested in involves reliving past memories,” Zuckerberg wrote, betting on nostalgia. “Imagine being able to put on a pair of AR glasses and see an object with the option to play a memory associated with it, such as picking up a tutu and seeing a hologram of your child’s ballet recital. The audio strips away reverberation and makes the memory sound just like the time you experienced it, sitting in your exact seat in the audience.”
MAIR’s Visually-Informed Dereverberation mode (VIDA), on the other hand, will strip the echoey effect from playing an instrument in a large, open space like a subway station or cathedral. You’ll hear just the violin, not the reverberation of it bouncing off distant surfaces. Specifically, it “learns to remove reverberation based on both the observed sounds and the visual stream, which reveals cues about room geometry, materials, and speaker locations,” the post explained. This technology could be used to more effectively isolate vocals and spoken commands, making them easier for both humans and machines to understand.
VisualVoice does the same as VIDA but for voices. It uses both visual and audio cues to learn how to separate voices from background noises during its self-supervised training sessions. Meta anticipates this model getting a lot of work in the machine understanding applications and to improve accessibility. Think, more accurate subtitles, Siri understanding your request even when the room isn't dead silent or having the acoustics in a virtual chat room shift as people speaking move around the digital room. Again, just ignore the lack of legs.
“We envision a future where people can put on AR glasses and relive a holographic memory that looks and sounds the exact way they experienced it from their vantage point, or feel immersed by not just the graphics but also the sounds as they play games in a virtual world,” Zuckerberg wrote, noting that AViTAR and VIDA can only apply their tasks to the one picture they were trained for and will need a lot more development before public release. “These models are bringing us even closer to the multimodal, immersive experiences we want to build in the future.”
Toyota's US launch of the unpronounceable bZ4X EV is off to a rough start with the automaker announcing on Thursday a broad recall of the vehicle barely two months after its debut, due to a potentially deadly situation that could lead to the vehicle's wheels separating while driving at speed.
Some 2,700 of the electric crossovers are subject to the recall — 2,000 destined for the European market, 260 to the US, 110 to Japan and 20 to Canada. The company implores owners to park their vehicles immediately and not resume driving them until a more "permanent" solution can be devised.
"No one should drive these vehicles until the remedy is performed," Toyota said in the Thursday notice. "After low-mileage use, all of the hub bolts on the wheel can loosen to the point where the wheel can detach from the vehicle. If a wheel detaches from the vehicle while driving, it could result in a loss of vehicle control, increasing the risk of a crash. The cause of the issue and the driving patterns under which this issue could occur are still under investigation."
Subaru has issued a similar recall for about 2,600 Solterra EVs. These EVs are functionally identical to the bZ4X and are produced on the same lines at Toyota's Motomachi facility. There's no word yet on when Toyota engineers might have a solution for the issue.
More than a million new titles are published annually in the US, far more than even the most bibliophilic secret agent could get through. Even with a weekly publishing schedule, we can only bring you 52 Hitting the Books each year. To help shine a spotlight on all the fantastic stories that can’t be featured in our weekly column, we now bring to you Hitting the Books Quarterly, a semi-semi-annual roundup of books that may not strictly be about tech but we figure you’ll like nonetheless.
This edition’s selection runs the gamut from STEM to Sci-Fi including selections from New York Times bestselling author John Scalzi, UC Berkeley Professor of Sociology Carolyn Chen, and journalist Stephen Witt. We hope you enjoy.
Silicon Valley may tout itself as the Emerald City at the end of America’s yellow brick road but one need only pull back the curtain to find the oppressive capitalist machinery hidden behind. In her new book, Work Pray Code, UC Berkeley Professor of Sociology Carolyn Chen examines how an industry already primed to worship the Myth of the Founder has steadily imposed itself upon the religious beliefs and practices of its workers, hawking Buddhist-adjacent “wellness programs” in hopes of them achieving productivity enlightenment. What, you thought the company town wouldn’t include a company church?
In the earliest days of social media, just as the popularity of physical media began to wane but long before the emergence of omnipresent streaming services, existed a time of boundless possibilities. It was a time when any song ever made could be yours, free and at the click of a button, assuming that at least one other person on your network had a complete copy. Many a music collection was assembled during the unregulated file sharing era, much to the chagrin of the recording industry. But no one pirated music anywhere near the scale of Dell Glover. In his 2016 book, How Music Got Free, journalist Stephen Witt explains how Glover exploited his position working in a North Carolina compact-disc manufacturing plant to surreptitiously steal and leak more than 2,000 albums over the course of a decade before being apprehended. Someone get that guy a medal.
Stuck in a dead-end gig job amidst the depths of the first COVID lockdown, Jamie Gray is looking for an out, any out of his dreary cash-strapped existence. Unlucky for him, he’s about to get exactly what he wants in The Kaiju Preservation Society, the latest from John Scalzi, NYT bestselling author of Old Man’s War and Redshirts.
Walt Disney may have held the initial spark of inspiration for what would eventually become one of the world’s largest media empires, but ever since his noggin went into cold storage, the responsibility of bringing those stories, rides, and attractions to life has fallen to the company’s legion of passionate designers, fabricators and builders: the Imagineers. Women of Walt Disney Imagineering assembles first hand accounts of a dozen women who worked behind the scenes and struggled in an overwhelmingly male industry to ensure that Disney’s theme parks live up to their reputations as the most magical places on Earth.
In this taut, time-travelling thriller, NCIS special agent Shannon Moss is tasked with uncovering as to why a Navy SEAL murdered his family — and where his teenage daughter disappeared to. Exploiting the world’s “Deep Time” chrono-hopping phenomena, Moss skips along the fourth dimension, flitting between alternate realities in search of clues to the killer’s motivation. That is, until she stumbles upon a near-future event that may end humanity entirely.
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Got a recommendation for a book that you just couldn’t put down? Drop us a line at Tips@engadget.com about it and we might just include it in a future roundup!
As distressing a prospect it may sound, our world did exist before social media. Those were some interesting times with nary a poorly lit portion of Cheesecake Factory fare to critique, exactly zero epic fails to laugh at and not one adorable paw bean available for ogling. There weren't even daily main characters! We lived as low-bandwidth savages, huddled around the soft glow of CRT monitors and our cackling, crackling signal modulators, blissfully unaware of the societal upheaval this newfangled internet would bring about.
In his new book, The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media, author and Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, Kevin Driscoll examines the halcyon days of the early internet — before even AOL Online — when BBS was king, WiFi wasn't even yet a notion, and the speed of electronic thought topped out at 300 baud.
Early on, the heartbeat of the modem world pulsed at a steady 300 bits per second. Streams of binary digits flowed through the telephone network in 7- and 8-bit chunks, or “bytes,” and each byte corresponded to a single character of text. The typical home computer, hooked up to a fuzzy CRT monitor, could display only about a thousand characters at once, organized into forty columns and twenty-four rows. At 300 bits per second, or 300 “baud,” filling the entire screen took approximately thirty seconds. The text appeared faster than if someone were typing in real time, but it was hardly instantaneous.
In the late 1970s, the speed at which data moved through dial-up networks followed a specification published by Ma Bell nearly two decades before. Created in the early 1960s, the AT&T Data-Phone system introduced a reliable technique for two-way, machine-to-machine communication over consumer-grade telephone lines. Although Data-Phone was initially sold to large firms to facilitate communication between various offices and a single data-processing center, it soon became a de facto standard for commercial time-sharing services, online databases, and amateur telecom projects. In 1976, Lee Felsenstein of the People’s Computer Company designed a DIY modem kit offering compatibility with the AT&T system for under $100. And as newer tech firms like Hayes Microcomputer Products in Atlanta and US Robotics in Chicago began to sell modems for the home computer market, they assured consumers of their compatibility with the “Bell 103” standard. Rather than compete on speed, these companies sold hobbyist consumers on “smart” features like auto-answer, auto-dial, and programmable “remote control” modes. A 1980 ad for the US Robotics Phone Link Acoustic Modem emphasized its warranty, diagnostic features, and high-end aesthetics: “Sleek... Quiet... Reliable.”
To survive, early PC modem makers had to sell more than modems.
They had to sell the value of getting online at all. Today, networking is central to the experience of personal computing — can you imagine a laptop without WiFi? — but in the late 1970s, computer owners did not yet see their machines as communication devices. Against this conventional view, upstart modem makers pitched their products as gateways to a fundamentally different form of computing. Like the home computer itself, modems were sold as transformative technologies, consumer electronics with the potential to change your life. Novation, the first mover in this rhetorical game, promised that its iconic black modem, the Cat, would “tie you into the world.” Hayes soon adopted similar language, describing the Micromodem II as a boundary-breaking technology that would “open your Apple II to the outside world.” Never mind that these “worlds” did not yet exist in 1979. Modem marketing conjured a desirable vision of the near future, specially crafted for computer enthusiasts. Instead of driving to an office park or riding the train, modem owners would be the first truly autonomous information workers: telecommuting to meetings, dialing into remote databases, and swapping files with other “computer people” around the globe. According to Novation, the potential uses for a modem like the Cat were “endless.”
In practice, 300 bits per second did not seem slow. In fact, the range of online services available to microcomputer owners in 1980 was rather astonishing, given their tiny numbers. A Bell-compatible modem like the Pennywhistle or Novation Cat offered access to searchable databases such as Dialog and Dow Jones, as well as communication services like CompuServe and The Source. Despite the hype, microcomputers alone could sometimes seem underwhelming to a public primed by visions of all-powerful, superhuman “world brains.” Yet, as one Byte contributor recounted, the experience of using an online “information retrieval” service felt like consulting an electronic oracle. The oracle accepted queries on virtually any topic — “from aardvarks to zymurgy” — and the answers seemed instantaneous. “What’s your time worth?” asked another Byte writer, comparing the breadth and speed of an online database to a “well- stocked public library.” Furthermore, exploring electronic databases was fun. A representative for Dialog likened searching its system to going on an “adventure” and joked that it was “much less frustrating” than the computer game of the same name. Indeed, many early modem owners came to believe that online information retrieval would be the killer app propelling computer ownership into the mainstream.
Yet it was not access to other machines but access to other people that ultimately drove the adoption of telephone modems among micro- computer owners. Just as email sustained a feeling of community among ARPANET researchers and time-sharing brought thousands of Minnesota teachers and students into collaboration, dial-up modems helped to catalyze a growing network of microcomputer enthusiasts. Whereas users of time-sharing networks tended to access a central computer through a “dumb” terminal, users of microcomputer networks were of- ten themselves typing on a microcomputer. In other words, there was a symmetry between the users and hosts of microcomputer networks. The same apparatus — a microcomputer and modem — used to dial into a BBS could be repurposed to host one. Microcomputers were more expensive than simple terminals, but they were much cheaper than the minicomputers deployed in contemporary time-sharing environments.
Like many fans and enthusiasts, computer hobbyists were eager to connect with others who shared their passion for hands-on technology. News and information about telephone networking spread through the preexisting network of regional computer clubs, fairs, newsletters, and magazines. At the outset of 1979, a first wave of modem owners was meeting on bulletin board systems like CBBS in Chicago and ABBS in San Diego to talk about their hobby. In a 1981 article for InfoWorld, Craig Vaughan, creator of ABBS, characterized these early years as an awakening: “Suddenly, everyone was talking about modems, what they had read on such and such a bulletin board, or which of the alternatives to Ma Bell... was most reliable for long-distance data communication.” By 1982, hundreds of BBSs were operating throughout North America, and the topics of discussion were growing beyond the computing hobby itself. Comparing the participatory culture of BBSs to amateur radio, Vaughan argued that modems transformed the computer from a business tool to a medium for personal expression. Sluggish connection speeds did not slow the spread of the modem world.
True to the original metaphor of the “computerized bulletin board,” all early BBSs provided two core functions: read old messages or post a new message. At this protean stage, the distinction between “files” and “messages” could be rather fuzzy. In a 1983 how-to book for BBS software developers, Lary Myers described three types of files accessible to users: messages, bulletins, and downloads. While all three were stored and transmitted as sequences of ASCII characters, Myers distinguished “the message file” as the defining feature of the BBS. Available day and night, the message file provided an “electronic corkboard” to the community of callers: a place to post announcements, queries, or comments “for the good of all.” Myers’s example routine, written in BASIC, identified each message by a unique number and stored all of the messages on the system in a single random-access file. A comment in Myers’s code suggested that eighty messages would be a reasonable maximum for systems running on a TRS-80. A caller to such a system requested messages by typing numbers on their keyboard, and the system retrieved the corresponding sequence of characters from the message file. New messages were appended to the end of the message file, and when the maximum number of messages was reached, the system simply wrote over the old ones. Like flyers on a corkboard, messages on a BBS were not expected to stay up forever.
PuffCo has continually improved upon the form and function of its heating element since the Peak made its debut at CES 2018. In 2020 it showed off a more reliable and precise heater with the over-accessorized Peak Pro. In 2022, PuffCo has once again refined its vaporizing system — further shrinking the heating element and doing away with the water chamber entirely — into a one-handed vape experience, the Proxy.
Engadget -- Andrew Tarantola
The Proxy takes much of the same crucible tech found in the Peak Pro — such as side walls that heat instead of the floor to prevent the hash from boiling off until you actually draw — and makes it small enough to fit into the formfactor of a pipe. In fact, the idea behind the Proxy came about because Peak users kept using their devices dry (without water in the chamber) to taste more of the terpenes.
It measures about five inches long and just under four inches from the base to carb cap, not much larger or heavier than a conventional tobacco pipe. It feels more comfortable in hand than the Firefly 2 or the Storz & Bickel Mighty, the latter of which is hefty enough to double as a self-defense brick when the need arises. Smashy, smashy.
Engadget -- Andrew Tarantola
The vape is composed of three modular parts: the glass pipe section, a base unit and the replaceable chamber inside of that. The chamber twists and clicks into the base, and the base slides into the pipe body. Easy peasy.
Cleaning is also a breeze, as everything is swabbable if not fully submersible in 90-percent isopropyl. That’s a relief because good lord this thing spills hot hash like a hung over short order cook working the deep frier on Sunday morning. Within four sessions, I’ve got congealed ABX Live Resin pooling around the underside of the chamber, dribbling out of the base’s airflow path and encrusted around the inner lip of the pipe body. That said, cleaning up from what you see below took about three fluid ounces of iso, a paper towel and five minutes of my time (three of those dedicated to letting the parts soak). It’s a lot easier to swab clean than the blown-glass dab monstrosities popular in the previous decade.
Engadget -- Andrew Tarantola
The fact that the Proxy tends to dribble all over itself isn't so much a matter of its various pieces not fitting together snugly (they do!) but rather a limitation inherent to the material it vaporizes. CO2 oil by its nature tends to be an ooey-gooey mess, which is a big part of why I stopped messing around with oils in the first place — there’s just so much more cleanup and maintenance required than with flower or edibles. At least with this, I don’t have to worry about accidentally knocking it over and spilling bong water across the rug.
Messiness aside, the Proxy is dead simple to use. Once the base has been charged using the included USB to USB-C cable, which takes about 30 minutes on average, simply spoon a little hash into the chamber, hold the only button on the device for three seconds to unlock it (so it doesn't accidentally activate in your bag or pocket), single tap to select between the unit’s four increasing temperature settings (colored in order blue, green, red and white), and then double click to get it heating.
Like the Peak and Peak Pro, the Proxy will rumble when it reaches the selected temperature and will stay hot for around four drags before automatically turning off the heat. You can extend the session by double tapping the control button up to four times and I got around a half dozen, four-puff sessions on Green heat level before having to recharge. Triple clicking gives you an estimate of the remaining battery life, with Green, Orange and Red denoting the three levels.
Engadget - Andrew Tarantola
And, like the Peak, the Proxy communicates through a series of colored patterns emitted by the LED ringing the chamber: a slow pulse means it's heating up, three red flashes means the battery is spent and a solid red ring means you let the unit get too hot and it won’t respond until it’s had time to sufficiently cool off. But unlike the Peak, the Proxy isn’t encumbered by a companion smartphone app so you’ll never have to worry about keeping the thing updated or having your personal data leak.
Given my own cannabis habits which centers mostly on middling strength 510 cartridges — all the hash, less of the mess! — and chomping on Breez tablets, I don’t see the Proxy becoming a daily driver — with an MSRP of $300, it had damn well better. But for those days when I want a more tactile experience and to be so high I’m looking down on stars, the Proxy will be first out of my magic funtime drawer.
