Month: October 2018

Errolson Hugh

A quick look through the Cars Technica back catalog (the carchive, perhaps?) shows that autonomous driving technology and racing technology are both topics we return to quite often. But it has been a while since we covered their intersection—specifically, what's been going on at Roborace. The series first broke cover at the end of 2015 and then wowed everybody with the Robocar a few months later. It looks outrageous, made possible because it does not need to protect a human driver or generate meaningful downforce, two factors that overwhelmingly influence most race car designs.

Initially, the idea was for a driverless support series for Formula E. Roborace would supply teams with identical Robocars, and the teams would try to program a better racing AI. However, it's fair to say that the idea of watching a grid full of AI cars race each other did not meet with universal approval. "We realized that humans are very much part of the storyline of autonomous driving technology. The machines need to learn from humans. What’s it like to take a ride in one as a passenger? These cars have to learn how to fit into a human world. Human and AI cars will share the road," said Rod Chong, Roborace's deputy CEO.

Enlarge (credit: TechBargains)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a deal on the coral version of Google's Daydream View VR headset, which is down to $40 at Verizon as of this writing.

While this is not the absolute lowest we've seen Google's mobile VR headset, it's still more than half off its standard $99 list price. Smartphone VR is still the lightest VR experience, but if you plan on buying a new Pixel 3, want to use it as your own personal movie theater, and don't want to splash the cash on a more-advanced and standalone headset like the upcoming Oculus Quest, the Daydream View is still a decent entry point.

If you have no interest in virtual reality, we also have deals on AMD processors, sous vide cookers, the Nvidia Shield, storage, and much more. Have a look for yourself below.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

California's net neutrality law will cause "significant lost revenues" for Comcast, the nation's largest cable company said in a court filing this month.

Comcast described the net neutrality law's potential impact on its ability to charge online service providers and network operators for network interconnection.

"The paid interconnection provisions will harm Comcast's ability to enter into new, mutually beneficial interconnection agreements with edge providers that involve consideration, leading to a loss of existing and prospective interconnection partners and significant lost revenues," Comcast Senior VP Ken Klaer wrote in the filing in US District Court for the Eastern District of California. ("Edge provider" is the industry term for websites and other online platforms, such as Netflix and Google.)

We recently ran a little poll of our science readers to find out what they were looking for from our coverage. One of the things that was clear was that you wanted to know how things work—what's the technology that enables the latest science (and vice versa), and how does it operate?

These things can be a challenge to handle via text, since there are often a lot of moving parts, things that really require diagrams to explain, and so forth. In a lot of ways, this makes video a better tool for helping people visualize what's going on. Given that we've got access to people who make some fine videos, we decided to give it a try.

What you'll see above is our first go at explaining a pretty amazing bit of technology: the Large Hadron Collider. Nearly everything about the LHC—its detectors, the data filtering, the clusters that store, share, and analyze the data—is pretty astonishing. But at the heart of it all, the key to enabling everything, is the fact that we have a way to accelerate objects so that they are moving so close to the speed of light that the difference is a rounding error. How do we do that? Hopefully, after watching the video, you'll come away with a pretty good idea.

Enlarge / Batman: he drinks, and he knows things. Wait, maybe that's a different guy. (credit: Warner Bros.)

This week we are serializing yet another episode from the After On Podcast here on Ars. The broader series is built around deep-dive interviews with world-class thinkers, founders, and scientists, and tends to be very tech- and science-heavy. You can access the excerpts on Ars via an embedded audio player, or by reading accompanying transcripts (both of which are below).

This week my guest is Sam Harris: a neuroscientist turned bestselling author turned podcasting colossus. We’ll be running the episode in four installments, starting today. Harris has described his job as “thinking in public.” In doing this, he has never been one to shrink from controversy. He irked many by revealing himself as a committed atheist in his first book, 2004’s End of Faith. He’s spent much of the time since then articulating a genuinely heterodox set of political and other beliefs.

The uniqueness of Harris’ perspective is evidenced by his ability to trigger comparable gusts of outrage from both the left and the right (generally from the extremes of each camp). The many fans and supporters he has won likewise hail from throughout the political spectrum. I’ll add that a lot of Sam’s fascinations and domains of expertise are apolitical. These include meditation and the nature of consciousness, as well as both philosophy and neuroscience writ large.

The Pixel 3 XL is out, but even after the usual slate of announcements and reviews, there's still a few things we don't know about it. For some answers on the internals, we turn to iFixit, which recently ripped open the Pixel 3 XL to show the world its insides.

In last year's Pixel 2 XL, the LG OLED display panel was a big concern. Last year LG jumped back into the OLED smartphone market, after being absent for years, and it found itself way behind the competition. The display was grainy and dirty looking at low brightness, and there were burn-in issues. Others complained of a color shift whenever the phone was looked at on an angle. The smartphone OLED industry leader is Samsung, which supplies displays for its own Galaxy line and for Apple's high-end iPhones.