Month: November 2016

Enlarge (credit: Kym Farnik)

With nations gathering in Marrakech to continue talks on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming, a new UN report is another stark reminder of the work to be done. This latest “Emissions Gap Report” highlights the remaining differences between the talk that produced last year’s landmark Paris Agreement and the walk required to reach those goals.

The stated goal of international talks has long been to limit global warming to 2°C above pre-Industrial Revolution temperatures. But at the behest of some countries, including low-lying island nations, an aspirational target of just 1.5°C was added in Paris. The emissions-reduction pledges made as a part of that agreement finally steered the world away from a “business-as-usual” track that could have increased the Earth's temperature by 4°C or more by the end of the century. But everyone knows that staying below 2°C will take a lot more effort. Staying below 1.5 °C seems like a pipe dream.

However, the Paris Agreement includes several milestones between now and 2030. Countries are expected to take stock of their progress toward their pledges and “ratchet up” emissions cuts. And a scientific report was commissioned to clarify what it would take to stay below 1.5°C—and how the impacts of that much warming compare to 2 or 3°C.

Enlarge / Warning's printed on the underside... and I see a screw to possibly get into the controller ports... (credit: Kyle Orland)

Reviews and impressions of the NES Mini hardware began to circulate this week (including our own from yesterday). The next step, of course, is unscrewing of the nostalgic little box to see how it ticks—and whether its limited functionality might ever be expanded, either officially or by hackers.

The first major image of the NES Mini's motherboard hit the Internet thanks to Gamespot Senior Reviews Editor Peter Brown. His shots were shared and scrutinized by members of Reddit's Nintendo community. Code numbers on chips led those users to determine that the system (which emulates NES games and displays them on 1080p displays) is primarily fueled by an AllWinner R16 "system-on-chip" solution.

If the chip works as advertised by Chinese manufacturer AllWinner, as opposed to being customized for the NES Mini in any way, then it includes a dual-core Mali-400 GPU which could be powerful enough to pump out as many as 55 million triangles per second (in its 28nm, 500MHz variant). There's also a quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU, which has been clocked at 1.2GHz in smartphones, as well as 256MB of DDR3 RAM and 512MB of NAND flash storage.

Enlarge (credit: NiroDesign / Getty Images News)

French media reported Friday that an 18-year-old man from Dijon was convicted for "praising terrorism" and was given a suspended sentence of three months in prison because the SSID of his Wi-Fi network was "Daesh 21."

Daesh is the Arabic acronym for Islamic State, and "21" in this context represents the number for the Côte d’Or, the French department, or province, where Dijon is located.

The unnamed man was prosecuted under a new French anti-terrorism law (Article 421-2-5) passed in November 2014 that makes it a crime to "directly provoke acts of terrorism or to publicly praise one such act." If convicted, offenders can be punished by up to five years in prison and a €75,000 ($83,000) fine.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

Another election day in the US is rapidly approaching (Tuesday, Nov. 8—mark your calendars!). So for no reason in particular, we're resurfacing our close examination of the Dunning-Kruger effect from May 25, 2012.

In 1999 a pair of researchers published a paper called "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (PDF)." David Dunning and Justin Kruger (both at Cornell University's Department of Psychology at the time) conducted a series of four studies showing that, in certain cases, people who are very bad at something think they are actually pretty good. They showed that to assess your own expertise at something, you need to have a certain amount of expertise already.

Remember the 2008 election campaign? The financial markets were going crazy, and banks that were "too big to fail" were bailed out by the government. Smug EU officials proclaimed that all was well within the EU—even while they were bailing out a number of financial institutions. Fast forward to 2012, and the EU is looking at hard times. Greece can't pay its debt. Italy can, but the markets don't trust it to be able to. Spain and Portugal are teetering around like toddlers just waiting for the market to give them one good push. Members of the public are behaving like teenagers, screaming "F**k you," while flipping the bird. The markets are reacting like drunk parents, and the resulting bruises are going to take a while to heal.