Month: January 2020

Enlarge / The character Picard's first impulse is to be comforting and safe. The show Picard's first impulse is to slowly tear down the sense of comfort and safety the audience starts with. (credit: CBS)

The first Romulan you meet in Star Trek: Picard speaks with a soft Gaelic accent and wears a comfortable, practical cardigan. She is the very model of a classic cozy housekeeper, an archetype made instantly recognizable by her bearing and manner, and yet in the same breath she's utterly foreign and unexpected.

This marriage of familiar with unfamiliar—this attempt to take what you know but then tilt it to one side and jiggle it around a bit to throw you off-balance—is as good a metaphor as any for what Picard seems to be doing. This is not the comfortable, well-worn world of Star Trek I was born and raised in and am now sharing with my own child. This is something different, and based on the first episode at least, I badly want to follow this path and see where it leads.

(Mild spoilers for the first episode of Picard, "Remembrance," follow below.)

In my years writing about games for Ars, I've covered my fair share of surprising glitches, long-secret codes, arbitrary code execution tricks, and deeply hidden content buried within some classic games and hardware. But none of that prepared me for the above Twitch video clip I saw this morning, showing a fleet of flying Arwings from Star Fox 64 invading the world of Ocarina of Time to attack Link.

It's the kind of scene you'd expect to see only in a fan-made animation, or in a ROM hack of the type Nintendo is so fond of taking down from the Internet. But what made this clip truly impressive was the fact that it was apparently running on an unmodified version of the original Japanese Ocarina of Time ROM, using standard N64 hardware and control accessories.

I spent all morning tracking down how such a thing was even possible. Explaining it all involves a bit of a deep dive into the nature of Nintendo 64 machine language instructions, Ocarina of Time memory management, and the mid-'90s development of the game itself. If you're as curious about all this as I was, come and take a journey with me.

Enlarge / SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA - JANUARY 24: Disinfection workers wearing protective gear spray anti-septic solution in a train terminal amid rising public concerns over the spread of China's Wuhan Coronavirus at SRT train station on January 24, 2020 in Seoul, South Korea. (credit: Getty | Chung Sung-Jun)

An outbreak of a never-before-seen coronavirus continued to dramatically escalate in China this week, with case counts reaching into the 800s and 26 deaths reported by Chinese health officials.

To try to curb the spread of disease, China has issued travel restrictions in the central city of Wuhan, where the outbreak erupted late last month, as well as many nearby cities, including Huanggang, Ezhou, Zhijiang, and Chibi. Hundreds of flights have been cancelled, and train, bus, and subway services have been suspended. Collectively, the travel restrictions and frozen public transportation have now locked down an estimated 35 million residents in the region.

So far, all of the outbreak-related deaths and nearly all of the cases have been in China, but the viral illness has appeared in travelers in several other countries. That includes Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and the US.

The Shoreline Amphitheater, the home of Google I/O. It's right in Google's backyard. (credit: Shoreline Amphitheatre)

The dates are set for Google I/O 2020—Google's biggest show of the year will take place on May 12-14. As usual, the show is at the Shoreline Amphitheater, an outdoor venue located right next to Google's Mountain View headquarters. Google announced the date through a cryptic command-line-driven space game at events.google.com/io/mission/. There is also this tweet:

Cosmos aligned. We'll be back at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View for this year's #GoogleIO on May 12-14! pic.twitter.com/3bZqriaoi1

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) January 24, 2020

Last year's Google I/O was one of the more eventful entries in recent memory, as it saw the return of the Google hardware launch. Google started targeting the midrange smartphone market by debuting the cheaper Pixel 3a at the show, and it launched a bigger smart display, the Google Nest Hub Max. Android saw the release of Android (10) Q Beta 3, a revamped gesture navigation system, and disclosure of the "Project Mainline" update system. Alongside the Nest Hub, there was also major upheaval in how Nest operates. Nest stopped being a standalone company and merged with Google in February 2018, but at Google I/O 2019, we started to see the reality of this change: Nest became a sub-brand of Google, and the "Works with Nest" smart home platform got a shutdown date.

For 2020, there's a good chance we'll see the launch of the Pixel 4a, which has already hit the rumor mill. The phone seems to throw out most of the oddities of the Pixel 4 in favor of a thin bezel. It would be a no-nonsense smartphone with a front hole punch display, a headphone jack, and a rear fingerprint reader. If Google sticks to the typical Android schedule, we should see the next beta version, Android 11 R, debut in March, with a second beta in April and a third beta in time for I/O. You might think a third beta would be uneventful, but last year Google withheld a lot of features to show off on the big stage at I/O.

Enlarge (credit: Serdar Acar / EyeEm)

Physicists can create serious mathematical models of stuff that is very far from physics—stuff like biology or the human brain. These models are hilarious, but I'm still a sucker for them because of the hope they provide: maybe a simple mathematical model can explain the sexual choices of the disinterested panda? (And, yes, I know there is an XKCD about this very topic). So a bunch of physicists who claimed to have found a fundamental law of memory recall was catnip to me.

To get an idea of how interesting their work is, it helps to understand the unwritten rules of “simple models for biology.” First, the model should be general enough that the predictions are vague and unsatisfying. Second, if you must compare with experimental data, do it on a logarithmic scale so that huge differences between theory and experiment at least look tiny. Third, if possible, make the mathematical model so abstract that it loses all connection to the actual biology.

By breaking all of these rules, a group of physicists has come up with a model for recall that seems to work. The model is based on a concrete idea of how recall works, and, with pretty much no fine-tuning whatsoever, it provides a pretty good prediction for how well people will recall items from a list.