Month: June 2019

A high school field trip to the ancient archaeological site of Petra turns tragic, and supernatural creatures are unleashed to prey on the living in Jinn, the first Arabic language original series from Netflix. Forget the Westernized concept of genies found in our popular culture, like Aladdin or I Dream of Jeannie. This series draws on more traditional Arabian/Islamic mythology for its portrayal of the jinn, and it's all the richer for it.

(Mild spoilers below.)

Mira (Salma Malhas), a high school student in Amman, Jordan, is struggling with the recent loss of her mother and brother, and her mixed feelings for her jealous boyfriend, Fahed (Yasser Al Had), who is pressuring her for sex. When the high school class takes a field trip to Petra, tensions emerge, largely driven by Tareq (Abd Alrazzaq Jarkas), your typical high school bully with a broad misogynistic streak for good measure. He and his cronies torment the shyly anxious Yassin (Sultan Alkhail) because they think he ratted them out to the teacher for their many misdeeds.

Enlarge (credit: NASA)

With the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing fast approaching, there's a veritable deluge of programs, events, and media of various forms, all dedicated to recapturing an astonishing moment in humanity's collective history. All of these things face a serious challenge: the Apollo missions have been revisited so many times and from so many angles, it's difficult to say anything truly new.

Go for the obvious points, and you'll face telling a big chunk of your audience things they already knew. Aim for something truly novel, and there's the risk that you'll end up focusing on an aspect that's obscure simply because it's not that interesting or important. These problems are compounded for an audience like Ars', where most of us have spent a bit of time obsessed by the space program, and the hurdles to finding some novelty grow even higher.

The promise of a new angle on a familiar subject was what got me listening to a production by the BBC's World Service entitled 13 Minutes to the Moon. This multi-episode podcast focuses on what's really the key moment in Apollo 11: the final descent and touchdown of the Eagle lander that delivered Armstrong and Aldrin to the Moon's surface.

Enlarge / Assemble just the right deck, and draw just the right cards, and you'll get the equivalent of a universal Turing machine within the game, a new study finds. That makes it the most computationally complex real-world game yet known. (credit: Gordon Chibroski/Portland Press Herald/Getty Images)

Consider this hypothetical scenario: Bob and Alice are playing a game of Magic: The Gathering. It's normal game play at first, as, say, Filigree robots from Kaladesh face off against werewolves and vampires from Innistrad. But then Alice draws just the right card from her customized deck, and suddenly Bob finds himself caught in the equivalent of a Turing machine, the famed abstract device that can simulate any computer algorithm. Thanks to the peculiarities of the rules of Magic, Bob can now only finish the game when he meets whatever condition Alice has programmed her in-game algorithm to accomplish—for example, to find a pair of twin primes greater than one million.

It may be a highly unlikely scenario, but a recent paper posted on the physics arXiv proves that it's possible in principle to build a simple computer within this massively popular tabletop game using just the right combination of Magic cards. While the inputs must be pre-programmed, "Literally any function that can be computed by any computer can be computed within a game of Magic," said co-author Alex Churchill, a longtime Magic fan who has been working on the problem for several years.

Furthermore, he and his co-authors—Stella Biderman of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Austin Herrick of the University of Pennsylvania—have concluded that Magic might be as computationally complex as it's possible for any tabletop game to be. In other words, "This is the first result showing that there exists a real-world game [of Magic] for which determining the winning strategy is non-computable," the authors write.

Enlarge / The most recent graduate from Ford's police academy, the Police Responder Hybrid Sedan.

In 2013, Amy Krekelberg received an unsettling notice from Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources: An employee had abused his access to a government driver’s license database and snooped on thousands of people in the state, mostly women. Krekelberg learned that she was one of them.

When Krekelberg asked for an audit of accesses to her DMV records, as allowed by Minnesota state law, she learned that her information—which would include things like her address, weight, height, and driver’s license pictures—had been viewed nearly 1,000 times since 2003, even though she was never under investigation by law enforcement. In fact, Krekelberg was law enforcement: she joined the Minneapolis Police Department in 2012, after spending eight years working elsewhere for the city, mostly as an officer for the Park & Recreation Board. She later learned that over 500 of those lookups were conducted by dozens of other cops. Even more eerie, many officers had searched for her in the middle of the night.

Krekelberg eventually sued the city of Minneapolis, as well as two individual officers, for violating the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, which governs the disclosure of personal information collected by state Departments of Motor Vehicles. Earlier this week, she won. On Wednesday, a jury awarded Krekelberg $585,000, including $300,000 in punitive damages from the two defendants, who looked up Krekelberg’s information after she allegedly rejected their romantic advances, according to court documents.