Month: September 2018

Polar

Polar's focus has always been on the elite athlete, and its newest family of devices doesn't change that, even though they may not look the part. Polar announced the new Vantage series of wearables today, which includes the $499 Vantage V and $279 Vantage M fitness watches. Borrowing many design aspects from Garmin, the Vantage devices look and feel way more wearable than any previous Polar devices, but they don't sacrifice fitness chops in the process.

The past few Polar devices we've tested looked like bulky wrist cuffs, but that design is gone. The Vantage fitness watches look a lot like Garmin's Vivoactive 3, featuring circular cases, three side buttons, and 1.2-inch (30mm) round displays. The Vantage M is the more lifestyle-focused product of the two, so it has interchangeable bands that users can swap out depending on the occasion. It also lacks a touchscreen, whereas the Vantage V has a touch display (in addition to those three side buttons) and stationary bands.

Enlarge / A Charter Spectrum vehicle. (credit: Charter)

Now six weeks after New York government officials ordered Charter Communications to leave the state, Charter has received two deadline extensions and is trying to negotiate a deal that would let it keep operating in New York.

The New York State Public Service Commission (PSC) voted on July 27 to revoke its approval of Charter's 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable (TWC) and gave Charter 60 days to file a plan for transferring the network to another provider. New York alleges that Charter hasn't expanded its network enough to meet broadband deployment requirements that it agreed to in order to get the merger approved. Charter claims it has met the requirements, and it vowed to fight the order to leave the state.

But there's still a chance that Charter and New York could strike a deal that would avert a lengthy court battle and sale of the network to a new provider. Charter was originally ordered to submit an exit plan by September 25 and to leave the state six months after that. But the PSC has now granted two extensions, resulting in a November 8 deadline for filing an exit plan and a May 8, 2019 date for leaving New York. In the meantime, both sides say they've been having productive talks.

Enlarge / Currents and fields in the KSTAR Tokamak. (credit: Jong-Kyu Park)

The success of Tokamaks for fusion is a story unto itself, with the toroidal magnetic containers setting records for keeping high-energy plasmas under control, a necessary step for sustaining fusion. The overriding narrative, at least on the scientific side, is that when you have an unstable plasma, it is really hard to build a control system that keeps the plasma hot and confined, even in a Tokamak.

Now, researchers have used the Korean KSTAR Tokamak to show that they can gain control of a particularly nasty plasma instability called an edge localized mode. The instability essentially exhausts the plasma onto the wall, ablating it away. If a plasma reactor the size of ITER were to have an edge localized mode instability, it would likely destroy the inner lining of the vacuum vessel.

Symmetries giveth, symmetries taketh

I don’t pretend to understand plasma instabilities in a Tokamak very well. But I do know that some of the problems are the result of the shape of the magnetic field. The shape of the Tokamak is a boon: it's symmetric, which makes the device simple, it makes calculations possible, and it offers high confinement.

Enlarge / At 8:15am ET on Thursday morning, a less organized Florence approaches the North Carolina coast. (credit: NOAA)

Ten years ago today, Hurricane Ike made landfall as "only" a Category 2 hurricane along Galveston Island near Houston. Though Ike had 110mph winds at landfall, it had grown very large over the Gulf of Mexico, and this large size allowed it to develop an enormous amount of "integrated energy" that manifested itself as a devastating storm surge. With about $30 billion in damages, Hurricane Ike was, at the time, the second-costliest U.S. hurricane on record.

As of Thursday morning, Hurricane Florence has weakened to 110 mph as it contends with slightly increased wind shear and drier air. Technically this means Florence is no longer a "major" hurricane, and may not be when it reaches the North Carolina coast early on Friday morning. Practically, however, that won't matter when it comes to storm surge and inland rainfall.

Storm surge

The simplest, most common metric for the measurement of a storm's intensity is maximum wind speed, and certainly this matters in terms of pure destructive potential when it comes to, say, losing a roof or propelling debris through the air. But when it comes to water, the maximum wind speed matters less than the size of the wind field for both storm surge and the destructive power of waves moving onshore. And Florence is a large storm, with hurricane-force winds extending outward up to 80 miles from the center and tropical-storm-force winds outward up to 195 miles.