Month: March 2017

Enlarge (credit: Tom Mendelsohn)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com—and let us know what you think.

Sometimes, as serious gamers living through a golden age of board game invention, you want to sit down to a three-hour cardboard extravaganza of cards, dials, miniatures, tokens, custom dice, and two-volume rulebooks.

But other times, you just want to play something fun that doesn’t involve 20 minutes of set-up—and something that your mom can understand. Cottage Garden is precisely that game, an hour’s worth of gentle, intuitive loveliness in a box.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

When wireless networking based around the 802.11b standard first hit consumer markets in the late nineties, it looked pretty good on paper. Promising "11 Mbps" compared to original wired Ethernet's 10 Mbps, a reasonable person might have thought 802.11b was actually faster than 10Mbps wired Ethernet connections. It was a while before I was exposed to wireless networking—smartphones weren't a thing yet, and laptops were still hideously expensive, underpowered, and overweight. I was already rocking Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps) wired networks in all my clients' offices and my own house, so the idea of cutting my speed by 90 percent really didn't appeal.

In the early 2000s, things started to change. Laptops got smaller, lighter, and cheaper—and they had Wi-Fi built in right from the factory. Small businesses started eyeballing the "11Mbps" that 802.11b promised and deciding that 10Mbps had been enough for them in their last building, so why not just go wireless in the new one? My first real exposure to Wi-Fi was in dealing with the aftermath of that decision, and it didn't make for a good first impression. Turns out that "11Mbps" was the maximum physical layer bit rate, not a speed at which you could ever expect your actual data to flow from one machine to another. In practice, it wasn't a whole lot better than dial-up Internet—in speed or reliability. In real life, if you had your devices close enough to each other and to the access point, about the best you could reasonably expect was 1 Mbps—about 125 KB/sec. It only got worse from there—if you had ten PCs all trying to access a server, you could cut that 125 KB/sec down to 1.25 KB/sec for each one of them.

D-Link's DI-514 802.11b router. It was a perfectly cromulent router for its time... but those were dark days, friend, dark days indeed. (credit: source unclear, GNU Free Documentation License.)

Just as everybody got used to the idea that 802.11b sucked, 802.11g came along. Promising 54 screaming Mbps, 802.11g was still only half the speed of Fast Ethernet, but five times faster than original Ethernet! Right? Well, no. Just like 802.11b, the advertised speed was really the maximum physical layer data rate, not anything you could ever expect to see on a progress bar. And also like 802.11b, your best case scenario tended to be about a tenth of that—5 Mbps or so—and you'd be splitting that 5 Mbps or so among all the computers on the network, not getting it for each one of them like you would with a switched network.

Enlarge / Pew pew! (credit: Frontier Developments)

After a three-week pause due to a copyright complaint, Kickstarter has un-frozen the crowdfunding campaign for Spidermind Games’ Elite: Dangerous pen-and-paper RPG. The campaign’s page is back online as of 21:45 GMT.

The complainant appears to have been an individual named Chris Jordan, who filed the complaint on behalf of Ian Bell Elite Rights LLP. Ian Bell is the co-creator of the original 1984 space combat and trading simulator Elite. Bell and partner David Braben parted ways after Elite, with Bell pursuing other interests while Braben continued developing the Elite series (Braben also was instrumental in the development of the Raspberry Pi).

At some point, Ian Bell allegedly sold his portion of the Elite copyright to Chris Jordan. In an e-mail to Spidermind Games obtained by Ars, Jordan appears unhappy that the Elite: Dangerous RPG does not credit Bell. “I’m sad to see you commercially exploiting the work of the one man without which Elite would never have existed, without permission, credit or even mention,” wrote Jordan. “Given you say you are an Elite player and fan, I’m assuming your omission isn’t through mere ignorance.”

Enlarge / Imprecise (credit: Dean Calma / IAEA)

If there’s one thing everyone needs to understand about science, it’s that science is uncertain. It’s a process of gradually getting closer to the truth, with self-correcting mechanisms built in. Unfortunately, communicating this uncertainty without undermining trust in science is tricky. People who hear that climate science has uncertainty often think “scientists aren’t so sure that climate change is happening,” when the reality is more like “climate scientists aren’t sure whether we’re looking at 2°C or 4°C of warming by 2100.”

If scientists understood better how people perceive uncertainty in science, they could do a better job of communicating their results and, perhaps, improving trust in science. With this in mind, Stephen Broomell and Patrick Bodilly Kane, two researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, have conducted a series of studies exploring how people understand scientific uncertainty. Their findings suggest that precision in particular seems to matter to people and that Republicans in particular attach a field’s value (including how much funding it should get) to its perceived precision.

And it should come as no surprise that the same people have funny ideas about which sciences are precise.

Bigelow Aerospace

Before the 2016 presidential election, businessman Robert Bigelow was one of the few people in the aerospace community to openly support Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Now that Trump is in office, Bigelow says the new administration is moving forward with a realistic space exploration plan that focuses on the Moon, rather than Mars.

"Finally, we have someone practically engaged in the conversation here," he said Friday, during an interview with Ars. "The prior administration excluded the Moon, but that was really unrealistic. With Mars, there are issues with cost, and more. The Moon offers by far the most practical target in the near term, and of course the Moon has a far superior business case at the current time than asteroids or Mars."