Month: March 2019

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  A view of the new Tesla Powerpack installation in Osaka. [credit: Tesla ]

On Wednesday, Tesla announced that it had installed a bank of 42 Powerpacks at a train station in Osaka to service the Kintetsu Railway during the summer or in the event of an emergency.

The electric railway encompasses 311 miles of track powered by overhead lines and third rails. In its "disaster preparedness" capacity, the Tesla batteries will provide emergency backup power in the event of a blackout, providing a short burst of electricity to move any trains that might be stalled in tunnels or under bridges to safety.

The system is small—it has a little more than 7 megawatt-hours (MWh) of capacity and delivers 4.2 megawatts (MW) of power at one time. That's enough to power stranded trains on Kintetsu's track for just under a half an hour in an emergency.

Enlarge / The aurora created by the Starfish Prime high-altitude nuclear test in 1962, as seen from Honolulu. The electromagnetic pulse from the blast has fed a host of worries about the potential for North Korea or some other state to destroy America with an EMP weapon. (credit: Nuclear Weapons Archive)

On March 26, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at preparing the US to withstand an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. "Human-made or naturally occurring EMPs can affect large geographic areas, disrupting elements critical to the Nation's security and economic prosperity, and could adversely affect global commerce and stability," Trump's order stated. "The Federal Government must foster sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective approaches to improving the Nation's resilience to the effects of EMPs."

The new order places two types of threats under the EMP umbrella—those caused by high-altitude nuclear explosions and those created by geomagnetic disturbances (GMDs) resulting from solar flares. In addition to mandating new risk evaluations for EMP attacks by the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and director of National Intelligence, the order calls for DOD and the Commerce Department to develop better space weather forecasting for "natural EMP" prediction. The order also puts EMP weapons high on the priority list for the State Department's nuclear non-proliferation agenda, and it seeks to spur information sharing and research and development efforts across multiple agencies.

Electromagnetic pulses damage electrical and electronic systems by inducing voltages in wiring. The resulting voltage spikes can cause thermal failure, shorts, and other damage that breaks the equipment. (I've experienced this on a smaller scale when a lightning strike outside my home induced voltages in my Ethernet cables, damaging my network adapters and killing a switch.)

Enlarge / Virginia Gardner plays Aubrey, who mourns the death of her best friend on the same day that a mysterious signal could end the world as we know it, in Starfish. (credit: Yellow Veil Pictures)

A grieving young woman finds herself grappling with monsters from another dimension on what may well be the end of the world in Starfish, an atmospheric new film from UK director A.T. White. Can she work through her grief to piece together the elements of a mysterious signal that may be the key to averting the apocalypse?

(Some spoilers below.)

Described in promotional materials as a "cosmic horror thriller," Starfish tells the story of a young woman named Aubrey Parker (Virginia Gardner, The Runaways) who has just lost her best friend, Grace. After spending the night in her friend's apartment, Aubrey wakes up the next morning to find that everyone else has mysteriously vanished and that strange, ravenous monsters are roaming the streets. A strange signal from another dimension seems to be the culprit, opening a doorway between worlds. Grace knew something about this because she left a mixtape for Aubrey with the message "THIS MIXTAPE WILL SAVE THE WORLD." Aubrey embarks on a scavenger hunt for six other mixtapes Grace made for her to solve the mystery and, yes, perhaps even save the world.

Enlarge / A 17-minute charging race puts Xiaomi at 100 percent, Oppo at 65. (credit: Xiaomi)

We all know battery density hasn't kept pace with the power demands of smartphones, but would you settle for a smartphone that just charged really, really quickly? Xiaomi is teasing a new high mark for speedy phone charging: a "100W" quick-charge solution. Xiaomi Senior Vice President Xiang Wang shared a video on Facebook of the new charging solution in action, saying that "Xiaomi's engineers have created a 100W fast-charging solution, which can fully charge a large 4000mAh battery in just 17 minutes!"

The video shows a charging race between two phones, Xiaomi's unnamed "100W" prototype and a phone with "50W" charging from "Brand O", which looks like it's an Oppo RX17 Pro. I put both of these wattage ratings in quotations because neither phone actually hits its rated charging speed. Xiaomi's video shows a live, in-line power reading, and the "100W" charging shows a sustained ~80W (18V / 4.5A) from about 5-30 percent, with a peak of 88W. The competing 50W Oppo quick-charge solution caps out at around 40W.

Branding aside, what matters is the actual charging speed, and Xiaomi's ability to fully charge a phone battery in 17 minutes is impressive. The test stops when the Xiaomi phone fills up, leaving the Oppo battery stuck at a mere 65 percent. Considering that Xiaomi was charging a 4000mAh battery and that Oppo only had a 3700mAh battery, Xiaomi's solution is about 1.6 times faster than Oppo's quick charge, which is currently the fastest charging scheme on the market.

SpaceX recently updated the Falcon 9 page of its website with a new video showcasing some of the rocket's recent launches and landings. On the video's YouTube page, there's an option for 4K video, and it is spectacular.

Some highlights of the video include close-ups of the Falcon 9 engines re-lighting to prepare for landing and deployment of the landing legs themselves.

We've seen a lot of these views before, but we've never seen them with this amount of clarity. Anyway, stop wasting your time reading this article and just watch the video.

Enlarge / Weirdly, Facebook internally tags this image as "stop bullying." That is not what today's TOS update is about. (credit: Facebook)

Facebook's terms-of-service agreement will be updated next week with a new anti-hate rule: any content that falls in the space of "white nationalism" or "white separatism" will be banned. The update, from a Wednesday Facebook news post titled "Standing Against Hate," comes nearly two weeks after the platform was used to widely share live video of a mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand.

It also comes well after public outcry against Facebook's existing policy, which wagged a finger at "white supremacy" but counted the other aforementioned types of speech as acceptable. Today's news post acknowledges that previous divide in its policy by saying it wanted to leave room for "national pride" types of speech that exist across the world.

The news post explains that Facebook's conversations with critics led the company to conclude that "white nationalism and separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups." However, the news post doesn't explicitly clarify why exactly that is the case, instead simply citing an internal "review of hate figures and organizations." If you're looking for a range of academic voices speaking on why white nationalism is inherently linked to racism, Vice's lengthy September report on the matter is a good start. That report acknowledges the systemic forces that so-called white-nationalist sites and advocates can lean upon to imply racism or racially motivated violence without saying it loudly enough for, say, an algorithm-driven social media platform to flag it.

Enlarge / You know, it almost looks like these two console add-on devices (PlayStation VR and Sega CD) could connect together. In terms of historical sales data, they kind of do. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Nearly three years after consumer virtual reality became a real thing, the market is still trying to determine whether it’s a growing market niche or a dwindling technological fad. Entering into that debate this week comes Sony, which is now trumpeting 4.2 million PlayStation VR headset sales through March 3 of this year.

While 4.2 million is certainly a big number in and of itself, its actual import depends a lot on what you’re comparing it to. So to put Sony’s latest report in context, we’ve gathered a bevy of relevant comparison numbers for you to peruse in both chart and list form. Use this as a handy reference for your next debate about whether console virtual reality is a “dead end” or not.

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  Fig. 1: Comparing an accessory like PSVR to standalone consoles isn't entirely fair. That said, this shows how the total audience for PSVR games is growing much more slowly than that for standard console experiences.

• 130 days: Time since release for PSVR to sell 915,000 headsets (~7K/day) (Source)
• 417 days: Time since release for PSVR to sell 2 million headsets (~4.8K/day) (Source)
• 673 days: Time since release for PSVR to sell 3 million headsets (~4.5K/day) (Source)
• 872 days: Time since release for PSVR to sell 4.2 million headsets (~4.8K/day) (Source)

• 43 days: Time since release for the PS4 to sell 4.2 million units (Source)
• 154 days: Time since release for the Xbox One to ship 5 million units (Source)
• 317 days: Time since release for the Wii U to sell 3.91 million units (Source)

• 4.08 million: Rough Superdata estimate for PSVR headset sales through the end of 2018
• 0.99 million: Rough Superdata estimate for Oculus Rift headset sales through the end of 2018
• 1.3 million: Rough Superdata estimate for HTC Vive headset sales through the end of 2018
• 4 million: Rough Nvidia estimate for total “PC VR” headset sales through the end of 2018

Sources: (1) (2) (3) (4)

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April 1 has long been a spectacularly annoying day to be alive, with brands falling over themselves to be "funny" and usually revealing themselves to be anything but. This was almost tolerable in the days when we were talking simply fake advertisements in print media, but it has taken on a new dimension online, as companies have actually modified the services that we rely on daily in an attempt to be "funny."

This was particularly striking in Google's 2016 mic drop feature on Gmail, where clicking the "mic drop" button sent a recipient a gif of a Despicable Me minion—a vile affront to humanity in and of itself—and then muted and archived the conversation, thus hiding any responses to it. Cue widespread complaints from users who clicked the button by accident, denying themselves jobs and offending their bosses.

Microsoft, for one, wants no part of this. In a move that can only be welcomed, Microsoft's Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela sent a company-wide e-mail (leaked to the Verge) imploring staff to refrain from creating any public-facing April Fools' Day stunts. Capossela writes that according to the company's data, the stunts have "limited positive impact" and can result in "unwanted news cycles."