Month: June 2018

Enlarge / Morning rush hour traffic makes its way along I-25 on October 12, 2017 in Denver, Colorado. (credit: RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

Denver police announced Friday that they had arrested a local 29-year-old Uber driver, Michael A. Hancock, on suspected first-degree murder.

Hancock is believed to have shot and killed his passenger with his Ruger SR40 in the early hours of Friday morning while they were driving down Interstate 25, a primary north-south artery in the city.

UPDATE: 29 YO Michael Hancock has been arrested for investigation of first degree murder for the early morning shooting on I-25 and Unversity. pic.twitter.com/YVvKFVy5ge

— Denver Police Dept. (@DenverPolice) June 1, 2018

According to USA Today, Hancock shot Hyun Kim, 45, after he claimed that Kim assaulted him.

Enlarge / Cutting edge at the time, we swear.

Doom (1993): Doom’s success lay not only with its addicting gameplay and technical innovations, such as its introduction of a portable game engine, but also in its innovative digital distribution. Note the prominent “shareware” advertisement on the top front of the game packaging. This groundbreaking game earned a spot in the inaugural class of the World Video Game Hall of Fame.

In the early 1990s, the video game industry was still dominated by that Italian-American plumber named Mario. The gaming giant Nintendo was not just restricting the number of third-party titles that could be released for its NES and SNES consoles, but it was also enforcing a strict moral code for its games. The SNES port of the wildly popular (and gratuitously violent) arcade game Mortal Kombat, for instance, replaced blood with sweat and substituted the game’s notorious fatalities with decidedly less violent “finishing moves.” Many game designers felt suffocated by Nintendo’s sanitized ecosystem and began returning to the wild west of video game development, the personal computer, to create exciting new games that challenged graphical and moral boundaries. Then, in 1993, a space marine blasted his way through hordes of invading demons, blazing a new path for games in the process. id Software’s Doom was a seminal release in video game history, influencing the form, feel, and perception of so many first-person shooters that followed.

Doom’s story begins with id Software, and id Software’s story begins with a company called Softdisk. Softdisk created disk magazines, which were electronic publications distributed on 5.25” floppy disks that provided readers with an interactive experience using graphics, games, music, and puzzles. In the late 1980s, computer programmer John Romero was working at Softdisk, creating games that would be included alongside magazine articles. One such game was Dangerous Dave (1988), which Romero created to accompany an article about the GraBASIC programming language. Dangerous Dave was a simple game heavily inspired by Super Mario Bros. in which players collected gold cups and defeated monsters.

Enlarge (credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

In the wake of the 2013 Snowden revelations, a lot of reporters, including here at Ars, began to take a long look at the digital tools we were using for secure communications.

After all, the National Security Agency whistleblower famously tried to reach journalist Glenn Greenwald through encrypted email, but Greenwald couldn’t be bothered to set it up. After much persistence and after roping in another journalist, Laura Poitras, eventually Snowden did get through—the rest is history.

Following that experience, we did what a lot of other reporters began to do: set up PGP keys, publish them, and wait for our legions of readers to begin corresponding with us à la Snowden. In practice, few actually did. (And our audience, theoretically, is more tech-savvy than most other sites.)

Enlarge (credit: Jaguar)

Change comes hard. And sometimes, it's slow. Until recently, no industry played closer to that model more than that of the automobile. Ever since the first series-produced cars of the 1900s placed the big internal combustion lump of iron at the front, the drive wheels at the back, and the passengers in the middle, the form factor of the automobile has stayed largely the same for 100 years. Variations have cropped up here and there—like rear-engine cars, front-drive cars with engines placed transversely, and the odd mid-engine car—but the reality for designers and engineers of the future's electric cars is more wide open now than in the prior 100 years.

Of course, there have been electric cars before. By 1912, for instance, 20 companies were in the electric car business, with more than 30,000 of them registered for street use in the US. So as we prepare ourselves for this latest incoming wave of viable, affordable, and practical modern electric cars, we wanted some big picture perspective. What does the drive for electric mean for design, engineering, and consumer perceptions?

Wayne Burgess is a long-time designer who's currently Jaguar's number-two man in charge of design. Likewise, Andreas Preuninger, head of GT car development at Porsche, has been around four-wheeled vehicles for quite a while. If anyone may have a clue what a renewed and seemingly genuine push for EVs will do to the vehicles we love, it's this type of industry lifer. After touching base with the duo recently, it's clear the coming changes in the name of better electric vehicles will impact cars for both driver and designer in ways that are and aren't immediately obvious to even the most dedicated petrolhead (err, batteryhead?).

Enlarge / No, no. Time crystals aren't anything like The Dark Crystal. (credit: Jim Henson Studios)

Sometimes, a paper contains so many buzzwords it is hard to take it seriously. Time crystals were first mooted in 2012, and a realistic discrete time crystal was observed in 2017. The crystals we are familiar with have a quasicrystal form, so time quasicrystals were soon discovered. But now, I’ve hit the jackpot with a time quasicrystal that is also a time supersolid. If that makes no sense to you, don’t worry, it doesn’t make sense to me either. 

Let’s unpack the word salad and see if we can extract something sensible from it.

Crystals and quasicrystals: neither heals disease

A crystal in space is a unit that repeats at regular intervals so that it fills a space without gaps. The repeating unit can only be translated, not rotated. Thus, you can get arrangements of atoms that make up a cube, for example, to fill a space.

Enlarge / Detail of the plug of an electric car being charged (credit: Getty Images)

On Thursday, California regulators approved three plans from the state's three largest utilities, which will together result in nearly $768 million in electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure spending. As a whole, the plan is the largest coordinated effort for state-level EV infrastructure spending thus far.

The California Public Utility Commission (PUC) was directed to smooth the path for infrastructure plans from the three utilities—Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E), and Southern California Edison (SCE)—by a 2015 law.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, PG&E will spend more than $22 million on installing 230 direct current fast-charging stations in the state. PG&E and SCE together will spend $236.3 million and $342.6 million, respectively, "on infrastructure and rebates to support electric trucks, buses, and other medium or heavy-duty vehicles," including 1,500 charging stations for those vehicles.