Month: January 2020

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  Chrome's current, very annoying notification pop-up. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

In a blog post yesterday, Google outlined plans for a less intrusive permission UI for Chrome's notification feature. Chrome's current permission UI spawns a pop-up box near the address bar, which covers Web content and is one of the many annoying pop-ups that can spawn when a website loads, alongside "subscribe to our site/newsletter" and "this site uses cookies."

Google's post says that, while notifications are "an essential capability for a wide range of applications," Chrome's permission pop-up is also "a common complaint" among users that "interrupt[s] the user's workflow and result[s] in a bad user experience." To address these complaints, Chrome 80 will introduce a quieter notification UI. Interestingly, Mozilla announced basically the same changes to Firefox recently.

The quieter UI will block notifications by default, rather than spawn a pop-up asking if users want to allow notifications or not. On the desktop, a message appears in the address bar saying "Notifications blocked," and clicking on the adjacent bell icon will allow the user to enable notifications. On mobile, there is still a pop-up, but it is less intrusive than before, being reduced to a single bar instead of a full-screen pop-up.

Three siblings who have lost their father discover a collection of magical keys at their ancestral home and must keep them from falling into the hands of a demonic figure in the spookily atmospheric official trailer for Locke and Key, a Netflix adaptation of Joe Hill's award-winning graphic novel series of the same name.

(Mild spoilers for the comics below.)

It's a compelling storyline. Following the brutal murder of their father, Rendell, the surviving members of the Locke family—mom Nina and three children, Tyler, Kinsey, and Bode—arrive at Key House, Rendell's Massachusetts ancestral home. Shortly after arrival, Bode, the youngest sibling, finds a magical key, and then another, and another, each with its own special power.

Enlarge / IDL TIFF file (credit: NASA)

Ahead of every Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, the world’s climate modeling centers produce a central database of standardized simulations. Over the past year, an interesting trend has become apparent in the most recent round of this effort: the latest and greatest versions of these models are, on average, more sensitive to CO₂, warming more in response to it than previous iterations. So what’s behind that behavior, and what does it tell us about the real world?

Climate sensitivity is one of the most-discussed numbers in climate science. Its most common formulation is the amount of warming that occurs when the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere is doubled and the planet gets a century or two to come to a new equilibrium. It's an easy way to get a sense of what our emissions are likely to end up doing.

In climate models, this number is not in advance; it emerges from all the physics and chemistry in the model. That means that as modeled processes are updated to improve their realism, the overall climate sensitivity of the model can change. As results have trickled in from the latest generation of models, their average climate sensitivity has noticeably increased. A new study led by Mark Zelinka of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory analyzes these new model simulations, comparing their behavior to the previous generation.

I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again: MAGFest (The Music and Gaming Festival) is the best gaming convention I go to all year. The gathering of thousands of video gamers, tabletop gamers, cosplayers, chiptune music fans, and all other manner of nerds creates an electric atmosphere that lasts through four whole days, both day and night.

Other fan-focused conventions like PAX can capture some of that feeling, but the presence of major game publishers at those shows ends up creating a more corporate feeling. Over 18 years, MAGFest has maintained its atmosphere as a grassroots gathering of all manners of fans, giving them a chance to share in their common interests in a safe and controlled space. It's the perfect way to start a new year.

Here are some of the most interesting images I encountered during this year's show.