Month: July 2017

The first trailer for Ready Player One, based on Ernest Cline's legendary novel, just dropped at San Diego Comic-con.

Ever since Cline's novel shot to the top of bestseller lists, fans have been waiting for the movie. It's the story of a kid growing up in the near future, dreaming of escape from his life in a massive, dystopian trailer park. He's only happy in the Oasis, a massive multiplayer VR world, where he indulges in his love for 1980s pop culture.

This trailer is a little uneven at first, but won me over when the 80s Rush song "Tom Sawyer" provided the perfect soundscape for an incredible VR-powered car chase.

Enlarge (credit: Yale University Press)

In February 2003, the largest demonstration in Britain's history saw two million people march across London to protest the approaching Iraq War. Dozens of other cities across the world saw similar events, and yet.

Why did politicians feel safe ignoring the millions who participated in those marches—yet stand down after the protests against the proposed intellectual property laws SOPA and PIPA? Why did Occupy apparently vanish while the Tea Party has embedded itself into US national electoral politics? How much did Facebook really have to do with the Arab Spring? How—and this is the central question technosociologist Zeynep Tufecki considers in her new book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest—do digital media change the reality and effectiveness of social protest?

Over the quarter-century since the Internet went mainstream, much has been written and argued about digital technologies' ability to transform disparate individuals into a movement. Dismissives argue that social media-fueled movements are too fragile and their participants too uncommitted to achieve much. (Writing in Slate, Tufecki found that tone in Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion, despite broad agreement that oppressive governments are sufficiently smart and motivated to harness these technologies for self-preservation.) Online-protest optimists saw the Arab Spring as evidence that these enabling tools create democratic change. And there are those who presume that governments will never be digitally literate or quick enough to take advantage, an early example being John Perry Barlow's 1996 essay A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

The Emmy-nominated showrunners of The Americans, Joel Fields (L) and Joe Weisberg (R), sat down with Ars at ATX Television Fest 2017. One of 'em is a regular reader who enjoys our iOS and macOS reviews (but will revert to a flip phone when the show isn't in production). (video link)

Warning: This post contains mild spoilers from the first five seasons of The Americans.

AUSTIN, Texas—On its surface, FX’s The Americans is a sleeper-cell spy drama set in DC during the Cold War. But fans will quickly tell you the show’s more about relationships and the difficulties of family and marriage; the show’s creators echo this sentiment, too.

“If you really look at the show honestly, the picture it paints of marriage is that there's a lot of ups, a lot of downs, and it's not an easy road,” showrunner Joe Weisberg says to fellow showrunner Joel Fields. The duo met up with Ars during this summer’s ATX Television Festival, and this author’s recent wedding comes up pre-interview. “He’s right at the beginning; he just got married. I don’t know if I want to lay out for him what’s really ahead.”

Enlarge / These bikes have not been thrown into the Puget Sound... yet. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

SEATTLE—Let's say you want to whisk across a city's downtown at a pace somewhere between walking and taxiing, and you're not interested in bus waits or looking like a dork on a hoverboard. How about a bike? How about a bike that you can pick up on practically any street corner, then leave behind in the same fashion when you're done?

That's the promise of not one but two bike-sharing efforts (Spin and LimeBike) that launched in Seattle this week. They differ largely from another former Seattle bike-sharing program, Pronto, in that they don't require any official docks. Take a bike; leave a bike. It's the two-wheeled equivalent of app-powered, car-sharing services like Daimler AG's Car2Go and BMW's ReachNow, only with a much cheaper rate of $1 per half hour of use.

Upon hearing about these services launching in my town, I got excited. Hop from place to place with shared bikes and my phone? Cool! But a few days of intermittent use—and some very odd encounters—have cooled my pedaling heels.

In the early 1950s, just as rock ‘n’ roll was hinting at social change, the first video games were quietly being designed in the form of technology demonstrations—and a scientist was behind it. In October 1958, Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist William Higinbotham created Tennis for Two. Despite graphics that are ridiculously primitive by today’s standards, it has been described as the first video game in history.

Higinbotham was inspired by the government research institution’s Donner Model 30 analog computer, which could simulate trajectories with wind resistance, and the game was designed for display at an annual public exhibition. Although his purpose in creating the game was rather academic, Tennis for Two turned out to be a hit at the three-day exhibition, with thousands of students lining up to see the game.

At first glance, today's video gamers and scientists might appear to be worlds apart. But starting with Tennis for Two, video games have quietly and consistently been within the purview of academic study. Each generation of gamers has seen new titles created at various research institutions in order to explore programming, human-computer interaction, and algorithms. Lesser-known chapters of history reveal these two worlds are not as far apart as you might think.

Enlarge (credit: European Network on Invasive Alien Species)

Across the globe, invasive species have caused no end of trouble. Their populations can explode because they have no natural predators. Or they are predators themselves who push native species to the brink of extinction. They can upset ecosystems that had evolved a fine balance.

But, according to a new study published this week in PNAS, not every invasive species is a negative. In some cases where we've wiped out a key component of the local ecosystem, an invasive species can take its place. The study's example? An invasive algae can restore lost habitat to coastal ecosystems, providing a nursery for species like crab and shrimp.

The work that led to this conclusion took place in tidal flats on the coast of North Carolina. Normally, this type of geography is broken up by distinct habitats provided by different organisms: coral reefs, beds of sea grass, and oyster reefs. The habitats formed by these species provide shelter for other species, allowing entire ecosystems to develop. But, over the last century or so, many of these habitats have been wiped out, leaving bare sediment behind.