Month: December 2018

Enlarge / From Samsung's press site. Wait, that logo looks familiar! (credit: Samsung)

Samsung's official news site had a bit of a mishap this week, and somehow Ars Technica's logo ended up in one of the company's press releases. The press release, first spotted by Android Police, was for an HDR10+ certification and content program. The accompanying picture featured the usual slew of industry logos—Qualcomm, Samsung, ARM, and so on—and then at the bottom, the Ars Technica logo!

The press release doesn't mention Ars by name, but instead lists a company called "ARSPRO" in Moscow as one of Samsung's partners. Apparently someone at Samsung's press department Googled (or Bixby-ed?) the "ARSPRO" logo, and the Ars Technica logo popped up instead. (This is likely because of our "Ars Pro" from Ars Pro subscription program, which unlike "ARSPRO" is not based in Russia and is in fact very awesome!)

This isn't the first time Samsung has had a partnership snafu. Earlier this month, the company announced it was partnering with the "Supreme" clothing brand in China, only to have Supreme come out and say Samsung had partnered with a "counterfeit" (but legal!) version of Supreme.

Nintendo/Maxis/VGHF

This year, we learned that a long-lost version of the classic gaming series SimCity, originally meant for the NES, had found its way from Nintendo's archives to the hands of collectors. That story got a tidy Christmas update this week in the form of a comprehensive data dump, complete with stories, videos, and—perhaps most important—a ROM download of the working, incomplete game.

Frank Cifaldi, founder of the non-profit Video Game History Foundation, posted the complete story on Tuesday. There's a lot of catch-up to be done about how the heck this SimCity version came to be, and Cifaldi breaks down some important tales, including the origins of SimCity, how Nintendo got involved, and the working relationship of game-industry legends Shigeru Miyamoto and Will Wright.

Enlarge / Tesla's Model 3 page on Friday. (credit: Tesla)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Saturday that his company would cover any lost tax credit that a customer might incur if Tesla is late to deliver a promised vehicle.

In the US, drivers who purchase a battery electric vehicle qualify for a $7,500 Federal Tax Credit on the purchase of their vehicle—unless the automaker has sold more than 200,000 electric vehicles. Once that happens, customers of the automaker get two more quarters to qualify for the full credit, at which point the tax credit starts decreasing. Beginning January 1, Tesla customers will only receive a $3,750 credit.

Tesla customers generally place an order, then wait for a delivery time which could be days or weeks in the future. In mid-October, Tesla promised that any orders placed by October 15 would be delivered by the end of the year, thus qualifying for the full tax credit. Later, Tesla appeared to extend this deadline to November 30.

Enlarge / Classic whale tails. (credit: NOAA)

On Wednesday, Japan announced that it was pulling out of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), a step that will allow it to restart commercial whaling in the spring. The move comes after a failed attempt to get the IWC to set legal quotas for legal hunting by its members. For whales, the news is good and bad: the move with shift Japan's hunting to its territorial waters, and away from the healthier populations in the Antarctic.

The plunge in whale populations in the 1970s ultimately resulted in an international moratorium on the commercial hunting of whales. The IWC allowed some exemptions for subsistence hunting among native populations, and left a loophole for killing whales in the course of scientific research. Japan exploited that loophole, sending large vessels to the Antarctic that killed hundreds of whales annually, with their meat ending up for sale in Japan.

But Australia, which has put whale sanctuaries in place to protect Antarctic populations, took Japan to the International Court of Justice and won a suit over the practice. The International Court determined that there was little to Japan's claim that its whaling program was for science, as the country had never explored non-lethal alternatives or determined whether the number of whales it killed was appropriate to answer any scientific questions.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you all, beloved readers! It's the day after Christmas and the vast majority of the Ars staff is enjoying their well-earned vacations and preparing to return to work and tackle the new year, but a few of us—Megan, Sam the Red, Dr. Jay, and I—are holding down the fort here for the back half of the week. With Ken, Eric, and Nate out, that means they have foolishly left me in charge of things. It's a bit like when the Enterprise's real crew goes to bed and the night crew takes over!

Because doing real work is difficult and boring, I've been coming up with creative ways to dodge actual responsibilities and do fun stuff instead, and a tweet from @pinstripedline provided exactly the right inspiration for exactly the right kind of work-dodging. To wit:

(credit: @pinstripedline)

For those unfamiliar with this particular meme format, this is a recreation of a scene from Die Hard in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry. It's a somewhat older meme format, having first surfaced roundabouts 2004-ish, but it's always been one of my favorite bits of Internet silliness. Seeing that frame from Die Hard made something click in my brain, and suddenly the medieval meme possibilities seemed endless.

Enlarge / Collective Suicide (1936), by Mexican muralist David A. Siqueiros, is an example of the "accidental painting" technique developed by the artist. (credit: A. Aviram/MOMA, New York, via R. Zenit)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science story that comes our way. So this year, we're running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one story that fell through the cracks each day, from December 25 through January 5. Today: the fluid dynamics of modern painting techniques.

In the 1930s, a small group of New York City artists began experimenting with novel painting techniques and materials, including Mexican muralist David A. Siqueiros and Jackson Pollock. For the last few years, a team of Mexican physicists has been studying the physics of fluids at work in those techniques, concluding that the artists were "intuitive physicists," using science to create timeless art.

"One of the things I have come to realize is that painters have a deep understanding of fluid mechanics as they manipulate their materials," said Roberto Zenit, a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who is leading the research. "This is what fluid mechanicians do. The objective is different, but the manipulation of these materials that flow is the same. So it is not a surprise that fluid mechanics has a lot to say about how artists paint."