Month: November 2018

Enlarge / A bike of roughly the same vintage as the author's. (credit: Billy Meinke / Flickr)

We tend to think of technology as something that moves electrons around. But I'm going to take a little diversion into technology that is used to move us around (and yes, our electrons as well, you pedants). The humble bicycle has been in existence for roughly two centuries, and the general outlines of what we use today were in place by the early 1900s, so you'd be forgiven for thinking that not much has changed. I certainly hadn't given it much thought.

I had to reevaluate that view when, in an effort to get more exercise, I decided to replace the bike that I had bought in the early 1990s. Just in shopping, it became apparent that a lot had changed—I faced decisions that I hadn't realized existed. Much of the underlying technology had transformed, and the changes generally solved significant problems. My old bike, a Trek 1200, was bought on a grad student's budget as a high-speed commute machine; adjusting for inflation, its successor was within about $200 of the same price. But it was like buying into a completely different world.

So join me in a trip through a quarter century of cycling technology, with an emphasis on the hardware that's within most people's price ranges.

Enlarge / Horses are spooked as the Woolsey Fire moves through the property on Cornell Road near Paramount Ranch on November 9, 2018 in Agoura Hills, California. (credit: Matthew Simmons/Getty Images)

The Woolsey Fire currently burning in Los Angeles County has destroyed much of the Western Town, a key feature of Paramount Ranch. The site was where the Main Street scenes in Westworld were filmed.

The news was first announced Friday by the National Park Service, which manages the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

We are sorry to share the news that the #WoolseyFire has burned Western Town at #ParamountRanch in Agoura. We do not have any details or photos, but it is our understanding that the structures have burned. This area is an active part of the incident and we cannot access it. pic.twitter.com/oC4n7KR8ZT

— Santa Monica Mtns (@SantaMonicaMtns) November 9, 2018

The church featured in the HBO series was also built on the ranch, and appears to be still standing, according to a tweet from cast member Evan Rachel Wood, who plays the sentient android Dolores Abernathy.

Enlarge (credit: Asmodee Digital)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

Terraforming Mars is one of the most popular heavy strategy games of the last two years (read our 2016 review); it earned a nomination for the Kennerspiel des Jahres (expert’s “game of the year”), losing to the very good but much simpler Exit: The Game series. It’s currently ranked #4 on BoardGameGeek’s master ranking of all board games, a ranking that tends to skew towards complex games that eschew luck in favor of strategy and engine building.

Now, an adaptation from Asmodee Digital brings the game to Windows via Steam. (Android and iOS ports are coming soon.) The Windows port offers local play, online multiplayer, and a solo challenge mode that functions as a good learning tool in addition to providing a strong single-player experience.

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Lee, Duke University)

Twenty years ago, the neuroscientist John E. Dowling wrote a book about the brain called Creating Mind. Since then, our understanding of cellular neurobiology and even systems neuroscience has exploded. So Dowling decided to update his book. Yet our understanding of the mind has not exploded apace with our understanding of the brain—scientists and philosophers can’t even agree on a definition of what “mind” is. This updated book, called Understanding the Brain: From Cells to Behavior to Cognition, is not going to settle that debate.

Most chapters of this new version begin with an anecdote describing some poor soul who is suffering from a neurological disorder the chapter explains: Bob lost his memory as he aged; Tess had depression; Helen Keller was Helen Keller; etc. It worked for Oliver Sacks, and it works here. Professor Dowling starts off with the basics by outlining the structure and organization of the brain, the cells that compose it, and how chemical and electrical signals are transmitted through those cells. He uses the visual system, which he spent his career studying, as a synecdoche to represent how sensory data from the outside world gets perceived and processed.

This background information is the bulk of the book; we don’t get to higher brain functions like language, rationality, and emotions until the last third. The pinnacle—consciousness—is not broached until the last (and shortest) chapter.

Peer review is not this painful, promise.

Update: This week, Ars staffers from across the country gather together in real life for our annual meeting, Technicon. We're supposed to be talking more than typing, so we're resurfacing a few classic Ars stories just in case the front page gets lonely. This one, which originally ran on November 3, 2010, centers on our peers (the scientific ones, not the Arsians) and the two basic functions of the much-discussed "peer review."

It is often said that peer review is one of the pillars of scientific research. It is also well known that peer review doesn't actually do its job very well, and, every few years, people like me start writing articles about alternatives to peer review. This isn't one of those rants. Instead, I'm going to focus on something that is probably less well known: peer review actually has two jobs. It's used to provide minimal scrutiny for new scientific results, and to act as a gatekeeper for funding agencies.

What I would like to do here is outline some of the differences between peer review in these two jobs and the strengths and weaknesses of peer review in each case. This is not a rant against peer review, nor should it be—I have been pretty successful in both publications and grant applications over the last couple of years. But I think it's worth exploring the idea that peer review functions much better in the case of deciding the value of scientific research than it does when acting as a gatekeeper for scientific funding.