Month: June 2016

US vs UK: Which Ars country wore E3 better? We scoured the show floor for gems that didn't quite make our top-ten list. (video link)

Truth be told, Ars Technica walked into this year's Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) with pretty low expectations. Before the doors opened, Nintendo and Sony had already confirmed that they wouldn't show off any brand-new consoles, and companies like Activision and EA excused themselves from the proceedings. But we still wound up discovering a ton of great stuff, mostly in the form of new games—so many, in fact, that we made our own War of 1812 out of it.

On E3's second day, Ars UK's Mark Walton proposed that I square off against him in a battle of international tastes with our camera crew in tow, and I obliged him. The premise was simple: which Ars nation could find cooler stuff on the E3 show floor? Spoiler alert: we both did fine, at least in terms of parsing the quality stuff from the hype.

(credit: Walt Feimer, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)

The LIGO detector has now seen at least two black hole mergers. The second merger it spotted was about what we would expect given a binary system of two massive stars. Both explode, leaving black holes behind that are just a bit more massive than the Sun; these later go on to merge.

But the first merger detected by LIGO was something rather unusual given that both black holes were around 30 times the Sun's mass. So far, we have not observed anything that could produce black holes in that mass range. Now, a new modeling study suggests that mergers with these sorts of masses might be common—but only if stars can collapse directly into a black hole without exploding first. This situation would require some of the Universe's most luminous stars to simply be winking out of existence.

The black holes involved in these mergers almost certainly began their existence as binary star systems. So in the new study, the authors performed a massive number of simulations of these systems using a modeling package called StarTrack. The simulations took into account the different amount of heavy elements present at different times in the Universe's existence—there are 32 different levels of heavy elements, and the team ran 20 million simulations at each of them. The simulations also took into account various models of the collapse of massive stars, as well as whether the process generated an asymmetrical force that could kick the resulting black hole into an energetic orbit.

Crater Lake National Park, Oregon, the site of some of Casey Nocket's vandalism. Story below includes links to some of the defacements. (credit: Howard Ignatius)

A woman who defaced national parks with graffiti was nabbed with the assistance of online outrage and, ultimately, the Reddit community.

The defendant, 23-year-old Casey Nocket from San Diego, was handed two years of probation and 200 hours of community service for using magic markers and acrylic paint (PDF) to deface rock formations in several national parks—from Death Valley in California to Zion National Park in Utah. The woman was also barred from all national parks and federal lands—which amounts to about one-fifth of the US.

Reddit users helped track down the woman who left the message "Creepytings" with her vandalism that occurred in 2014. What got her into trouble was her cavalier attitude about the vandalism on an Instagram post, which spread across the Internet and eventually to a hiking site and Reddit.

In the end, Mighty no. 9's launch couldn't live up to the optimism that's all over this colorful art.

Here at Ars Technica, we're used to crowdfunded projects failing to live up to expectations. Even by the standards of Kickstarter projects, though, this week's release of Mighty No. 9 is becoming a case study in launch debacles.

The full list of problems is quite lengthy, and middling to awful reviews for the game itself are just the start of it. Many backers and watchers began to worry last month when a tone-deaf, borderline insulting trailer showed a game with graphics reminiscent of those fan-made Net Yaroze games on the old PlayStation Underground discs.

A Eurogamer comparison video this week demonstrates that the final game looks markedly worse than the "evaluation test" showed to attract Kickstarter backers roughly three years ago. Considering the test footage reportedly took seven days to create and didn't have millions of crowdfunding dollars behind it yet, the difference is a bit baffling.

(credit: Getty Images | Vitalii Tkachuk)

The US Federal Communications Commission is trying to figure out exactly how much trouble is being caused by radio noise.

Many devices emit radio frequency energy that could interfere with radio services and increase the "radio spectrum noise floor," essentially the sum of all unwanted signals. The FCC is planning to study changes to the noise floor from human-made sources over the past 20 years.

It's commonly believed that "the noise floor in the radio spectrum is rising as the number of devices in use that emit radio energy grows," but the FCC said it hasn't found much quantitative data to support this presumption. As a first step toward the FCC producing such a study, the commission last week asked the public for input on the proper design of the study and input on the problem itself.

The Musudan intermediate range ballistic missile. Five out of six of these missiles have failed in test launches over the past three months. The sixth may or may not have been an improvement.

After repeated failed tests of its intermediate range ballistic missile over the past few months, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) attempted this morning to once again demonstrate its ability to strike with nuclear weapons, launching two Musudan missiles within four hours. The first missile traveled a mere 95 miles (about 150km) before crashing into the sea off the east coast of the Korean peninsula.

The second flew a more impressive 250 miles (about 400km). There is some disagreement about whether that launch was a complete success, however. North Korea did not previously announce the test or issue a warning to the UN's civil aviation authority of the launches, so it is possible that the missile was aimed at an intentionally closer target area. The real measure of whether the test qualified as a success would be its trajectory—if the missile reached a sufficient altitude to reach more distant targets.

The Musudan, also known as the BM-25, has been estimated previously to have a range of between 2,500 and 4,000km (1,500 to 2,500 miles). Based on 1960s-era Soviet technology with some homegrown tweaks (including a larger fuel supply for extending range), kits for the Musudan were allegedly sold to Iran by North Korea. But despite the fact that North Korea has had Musudan missiles for over a decade, there have been no flight tests of the system in the past—likely because the North Korean regime believed that the Soviet-era design was already proven to be reliable.