Month: September 2017

Enlarge / Thursday, 12z European model operational run; forecast for Sunday morning at 8am ET. (credit: Tropical Tidbits)

Hurricane Irma continues to move west-northwest toward the Straits of Florida at a good clip, about 16mph. At this rate, the storm remains only about 60 to 72 hours from reaching the southern Florida coast, if it indeed makes landfall there. The National Hurricane Center's updated track forecast for the storm as of 11am ET is shown below.

The gallery below provides information about the last 10 track forecasts from the National Hurricane Center (they are updated every six hours), going back to the morning of Tuesday, September 5. At that time, the professional forecasters at the Miami-based hurricane center had the storm moving into the Florida Keys, between Southern Florida and Cuba, early on Sunday morning.

As we get closer to this weekend, the logical question becomes "how much can we trust these track forecasts?"

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Francis Rawls

A man jailed for two years for refusing to decrypt his hard drives must remain confined while he appeals his contempt-of-court order to the US Supreme Court, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

Francis Rawls, a fired Philadelphia cop, has been behind bars since September 30, 2015 for declining a judicial order to unlock two hard drives that authorities found at his residence as part of a child-porn investigation.

After a two-year failed effort to convince the lower courts that his confinement amounted to a Fifth Amendment violation of his constitutional right against compelled self-incrimination, his lawyers asked a Pennsylvania federal judge if Rawls could be released pending the outcome of a forthcoming appeal to the US Supreme Court.

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Warning: This post probably has some mild spoilers about the 2018 Han Solo movie. If you don't want to know anything about that film, stop reading here.

One of the Millennium Falcon's overriding charms is the fact that it looks like a total piece of junk. It's something people are bound to point out the first time they see it, yet this odd looking thing—a Corellian YT-1300f to those in the know—always has it where it counts.

However, expect a somewhat different-looking Falcon in the upcoming Han Solo movie. That tidbit is courtesy of the Fingered podcast at Making Star Wars, as one of its presenters recently got a look at what might be fandom's most beloved spaceship.

Enlarge / Rhesus macaques are a social species, complete with gossip and angry faces. (credit: flickr user: jinterwas)

What’s in a newborn brain? It’s a question we’re obsessed with, because its answers seem to promise us basic truths about what we humans are as a species before our culture muddies the waters. A paper in Nature Neuroscience this week shows that monkeys raised without exposure to faces don’t develop specialized face-recognition domains in their brains. The results help to explain our own brains a little better, and the research also sketches an idea of how environmental input might lead to specialized brain circuitry over time.

Face recognition is something that seems to be profoundly central to us as a social species. Adult human brains have circuitry dedicated to processing faces, and even very young babies seem to look at faces more than at other objects in their environment (although these results are debated by researchers in the field). Other primates also preferentially look at faces and have dedicated brain circuitry to handle it.

As an incredibly social species, are we born with the concept of “face” somewhere in our brains, enabling us to latch on to this all-important part of our environment as soon as we’re out in the world? Some researchers think that this is the best explanation of infants’ preference for looking at faces. Others think it’s more likely that we develop the concept of what a face is over time, based on our experience of the world.

Enlarge / Zombie cookies. (credit: Eric Sonstroem)

The online advertising company at the center of Verizon's "zombie" cookie controversy cannot avoid a proposed class action lawsuit filed by Verizon Wireless customers, a federal appeals court ruled this week.

Turn, Inc. is an online advertising clearinghouse that allegedly attached un-deletable tracking cookies to Verizon customer identifiers to collect and send their Web browsing and usage data to Turn’s servers. Verizon customers Anthony Henson and William Cintron filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Turn on behalf of all Verizon customers in New York, but the company argued that the customers should be forced into arbitration.

Previously, the US District Court in Northern California granted Turn's motion to compel arbitration. But a panel of three judges at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit unanimously overturned that ruling on Tuesday.

Enlarge / By your powers combined... (credit: cookie_cutter / Getty Images)

Before we start, it’s important to state the following as clearly as possible: if you are in an area that is under mandatory evacuation orders because of an approaching hurricane, stop reading this article and get out. Don’t try to ride out the storm. If you don’t leave now, you might die. Your stuff isn’t worth your life. Get out now. You can read this later, when you’re safe.

From personal experience, one of the most jarring things about being stuck in a storm is the disconnection from reality and the removal from normalcy. Familiar and safe surroundings become menacing when power is lost and the wind is howling. Especially for folks used to being online all the time, losing power in a disaster and being cut off from communication can be terrifying.

While there’s not much to do for a multi-day power outage aside from buying a generator—a solution that comes with its own problems, since generator-related deaths tend to outnumber storm-related deaths in any given US-landed hurricane—there is a quick way to bridge the power gaps posed by a few isolated hours without power here and there: hook your infrastructure components up to an uninterruptible power supply.

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If you want access to the full catalog of films from the Star Wars franchise or the Marvel universe after 2019, you'll need to sign up for Disney's forthcoming streaming service, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced on Thursday.

Last year, Netflix began streaming a wide range of Disney titles, including Disney animated films and films from Disney's Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel divisions. Last month, Disney announced that it would be pulling a number of Disney titles from the Netflix catalog.

In that announcement, Disney left the door open to keeping the Star Wars franchise and Marvel films on Netflix. But now Disney is slamming the door shut on a renewed Netflix deal, choosing instead to use movies like Iron Man, Captain America, and the forthcoming Star Wars: Episode IX as a draw to a new Disney-owned streaming service.