Month: November 2018

On Friday night, Boring Company CEO Elon Musk tweeted images of his tunnel-boring machine appearing to emerge from the dirt into a cavernous hole, with bystanders at the hole's edge watching the spinning boring head.

Congratulations @BoringCompany on completing the LA/Hawthorne tunnel! Cutting edge technology! pic.twitter.com/80WbSQekCQ

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 17, 2018

The tunnel began in January 2017 in the parking lot of SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Musk's goal has been to improve the speed and cost of tunnel boring, not only to alleviate surface-street traffic by lowering cars onto electric skates and then speeding them through a so-called "loop" system, but also to potentially dig sewer, water, and electrical tunnels for cities in a more cost-effective manner.

In late October, Musk tweeted that the more-than-two-mile-long Hawthorne tunnel would be completed by December 10, and The Boring Company would celebrate by giving rides to the public.

Throw traps, shoot guns, grind rails: that's the Sunset Overdrive way.

Update: There's no shortage of new games this 2018 holiday season, but we wanted to bring a surprise gem to your attention: 2014's Sunset Overdrive, a high-octane, parkour-driven visual stunner. With seemingly zero fanfare, a PC version arrived yesterday for Windows PCs (Steam, Windows Store). Nearly everything about the original games still applies to this PC version, so enjoy our original review (which first ran on October 29, 2014) below. The piece appears largely unchanged, but we have added some PC-specific thoughts (finally, Sunset in 60fps!) and a gallery from the new edition near the end.

Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. If I stay still, the monsters attack. If I stop sliding down rails, bouncing off of car hoods, or rappelling over zip lines, everything falls apart—the music in my head stops playing; the electricity stops surging through my dodge-rolls; the fire stops spewing from my duct-taped battle-axe.

Welcome to Sunset City, a sunny, dilapidated corpse of a not-so-futuristic riverside metropolis. The place used to be overrun by selfie-snapping hipsters until they chugged a brand-new energy drink that turned them into crazed mutants (we mean literally, as opposed to the figurative craze of a caffeine high). Somehow, "you" (by way of a relatively robust character creator, which happens to sport the dumbest hairstyles known to man) avoided taking a sip, and now you must survive and escape the madness alongside the few remaining human survivors.

Enlarge / Washboard terrain fills the basins in the right of this image. (credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

As we've gathered more details about the other planets of the Solar System, we've largely managed to explain the geography we've found by drawing analogies to things we're familiar with from Earth. Glaciers and wind-driven erosion produce similar results both here and on Mars, for instance. But further out in the Solar System, the materials involved in the geology change—water ice becomes as hard as rock, and methane and nitrogen freeze—which raises the prospect of some entirely unfamiliar processes.

This week, scientists proposed that some weird terrain found on Pluto could be the product of large fields of nitrogen ice sublimating off into the atmosphere. While this explanation could account for some properties of Pluto's geography, it doesn't explain why the process resulted in a series of parallel ridges.

On the washboard

The strange terrain lies to the northwest of Sputnik Planitia, the heart-shaped plane that dominates the side of Pluto we have the best images of. Called "washboard" or "fluted," the area consists of large numbers of roughly parallel ridges with roughly a kilometer or two separating them. Aside from their appearance and general orientation, these ridges don't seem to have a lot in common. They're discontiguous and don't fill the entire region. They run down slopes and spread across valley floors—in some cases a single ridge will run down a slope and then flatten out. And in several cases, they create a starburst-like pattern on along the walls of craters.

Enlarge / Julian Assange speaks to the media from the balcony of the Embassy Of Ecuador on May 19, 2017 in London, England. (credit: Jack Taylor/Getty Images)

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has asked a federal court to unseal documents related to the federal government's pending prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

The existence of that prosecution appears to have been accidentally revealed due to a cut-and-paste error in an unrelated sex crimes case. Now that its existence has been revealed, the Reporters Committee argues, there's no good reason to continue to withhold other details of the charges against Assange.

"Both the press and the public have a particularly powerful interest in access to sealed court records related to the government’s prosecution of Assange," the rights group said in its filing.

Richard Baguley

Let's be honest here: modern processors aren’t exciting. Speed bumps no longer thrill us, and we’ve become blasé about adding more cores. But we are living in a time when computers casually offer amounts of processing power that would have made previous generations swoon.

It’s also a competitive time, primarily with two companies fighting for your silicon spending and giving you great computing bang for your buck. On one side we have Intel, the 800-pound gorilla of the processor world. On the other side, we have AMD, the upstart that occasionally steals the crown by doing something unexpected that changes the rules.

Enlarge / Holding candles and photos, friends and family gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to remember Bijan Ghaisar, on December 8, 2017. He was killed by US Park Police, and his family still does not know exactly why. (credit: Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Two Democratic members of Congress have introduced a new bill that would mandate body cameras and dashboard-mounted cameras for uniformed federal law enforcement.

The law is meant to prevent situations like the November 2017 death of an unarmed Virginia man, Bijan Ghaisar, who died at the hands of United States Park Police officers in Fairfax County, Virginia. The 25-year-old had fled a car crash, but it remains unclear exactly why federal officers opened fire.

The House members, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), said in a Friday statement that absent dashboard camera footage, Ghaisar’s parents would know even less than they currently do as the FBI has yet to release any public information about the case.