Month: May 2020

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  Entrance to the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy. [credit: Jennifer Ouellette ]

Visitors to Florence, Italy, invariably line up in droves to tour the world-famous Cathedral of St. Mary of the Flower, most notable for its soaring dome designed by Filippo Brunelleschi in the early 15th century. The lines frequently snake around the block, even in sweltering summer heat. For those who find the lines a bit too daunting, Florence is also home to another priceless gem: the Museo Galileo, housed in the 11th century Palazzo Castellani along the River Arno.

As the name implies, the museum is dedicated to Galileo Galilei, but the vast collection features all manner of historical scientific instruments and experimental apparatus from the Medici Collection, as well as later artifacts donated by the Lorraine dynasty. Many of them are so expertly made, they qualify as genuine works of art.

The first floor displays all the Galileo artifacts; most notable are two telescopes and a framed objective lens from the telescope through which he first observed the moons of Jupiter. There are also lots of smaller instruments—thermometers, sextants, astrolabes—and plenty of globes, as well as an enormous armillary sphere, designed and built by the Italian astronomer Antonio Santucci.

Enlarge / Portrait of Galileo Galilei by Justus Sustermans, circa 1640.

Galileo Galilei famously stood trial for suspicion of heresy for his insistence—based on astronomical observations through his telescopes—that the Copernican model of the solar system was correct. The Earth revolved around the Sun, not the other way around, contrary to the Catholic Church's teachings at the time. He was never formally charged with heresy, but he was forced to recant his stance. Legend has it that after he did so, he muttered, "E pur si muove" ("And yet it moves"), meaning the Earth.

As with many such legends, it's probably too good to be true. "It would have been crazy for Galileo to say that in front of the Inquisitor," astrophysicist Mario Livio told Ars. Livio is the author of a new biography of the famous scientist, Galileo and the Science Deniers, and while researching the book, he found himself captivated by the longstanding debate about whether or not Galileo really spoke those words. It resulted in a separate academic paper about his findings.

The earliest biography of Galileo was written by his protege, Vincenzo Viviana in 1655-1656, with no mention of the phrase. According to Livio, the first mention in print is in a single paragraph in the 1757 book, The Italian Library, by Giuseppe Baretti, written over 100 years after Galileo's death. That would point to the story being a myth. But then a science historian named Antonio Favaro spent four decades studying Galileo's life and work, publishing a massive tome, The Works of Galileo Galilei. In 1911, he also published several articles detailing his efforts to determine the origin of the famous phrase.

Enlarge (credit: Judy Gallagher / Flickr)

The modern world depends on good communication. If you were one of the few who didn’t believe that, the recent obsession with video conferences should have convinced you otherwise. The key for video is volume: huge streams of data facilitated by high-capacity optical-fiber communications networks.

It might surprise you to hear that, actually, optical communication is not very efficient. A recent paper shows off a laser that may allow the information density to be increased by using something called orbital angular momentum (OAM).

Low-bandwidth light

Before we get into the dizzying world of light that corkscrews its way through life, let’s see why light is used so inefficiently. An AM radio station might operate at a frequency of 500kHz and might use up to 5kHz of bandwidth, giving it a spectral efficiency of 1 percent. If we were to scale that up to optical frequencies, we should have a bandwidth of around 2THz, and you might expect data rates of 1Tb/s for a single wavelength.

Enlarge / Tropical Storm Arthur formed late Saturday night. (credit: NOAA)

The Atlantic hurricane season's first named storm formed late Saturday night off the eastern coast of Florida, when its sustained winds reached 40mph.

Named Tropical Storm Arthur, the system should move north-northeast for the next couple of days. Although there is a fair amount of uncertainty about this motion, Arthur should come near, or just over coastal North Carolina, where Tropical Storm Warnings have been raised. After this Arthur is likely to bend due eastward, away from the mainland United States and out to sea.

Because of low wind shear and moderately warm waters, Arthur may remain a tropical storm and even strengthen a little before succumbing to cooler waters later this week. The National Hurricane Center forecasts the system to reach maximum sustained winds of 50mph on Monday.

Enlarge / This is not an article about Daft Punk remixing or mashing up Jay-Z classics. It's a photo illustration about machine learning models being applied to famous people's voices. (But, hey, we're ready for that Daft Punk + Jay-Z collab over here.) (credit: Getty Images / Sam Machkovech)

In late April, audio clips surfaced that appeared to capture Jay-Z rapping several unexpected texts. Did you ever imagine you’d hear Jay-Z do Shakespeare’s “To Be, Or Not to Be” soliloquy from Hamlet? How about Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” or a decade-old 4chan meme? All of these unlikely recitations were, of course, fake: “entirely computer-generated using a text-to-speech model trained on the speech patterns of Jay-Z,” according to a YouTube description. More specifically, they were deepfakes.

“Deepfakes” are super-realistic videos, photos, or audio falsified through sophisticated artificial intelligence. The better-known deepfakes are probably videos, which can be as silly as Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong’s face superimposed on Will Ferrell’s, or as disturbing as non-consensual porn and political disinformation. But audio deepfakes— AI-generated imitations of human voices—are possible, too. Two days after the Jay-Z YouTubes were posted, they were removed due to a copyright claim. But just as quickly, they returned. The takedowns may have been a first attempt to challenge audio deepfake makers, but musicians and fans could potentially be grappling with the weird consequences of machine-generated voice manipulations long into the future.

Here’s a breakdown of Jay-Z’s copyright dispute, the laws around audio deepfakes, and what all this could mean in the years to come.

The creators of the surreal animated series Tooning Out the News had Rudy Guiliani on the show multiple times during their first week on air. They also had a six-year-old hang up on the former New York City mayor. Like many people around the world, the people behind Tooning Out the News are working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. For RJ Fried, that involved turning an iPad over to his young son while the showrunner sat in his bedroom, calling Guiliani every hour to see if he’d pick up, computer at the ready to record on short notice. What he didn’t realize was that, through the vagaries of the cloud, Guiliani’s calls were being routed to the iPad his son was using, and that his son had hung up on him (and also Stephen Colbert).

“I tried to explain the enormity of hanging up on the attorney of the president, who the president was, that this was his good friend,” Fried says. The explanation didn’t really take—his son just became convinced that he himself was now famous—but for Fried, the story has become emblematic of his bizarre-yet-productive time in quarantine.

Were Tooning Out the News a live-action series, neither the gaffes nor the triumph of luring Guilani onto the show in the first place would have been possible. It’s basically impossible to film a conventional television program while social distancing, which is why so many have paused production. Animated shows, however, from newcomers like CBS’ Tooning Out the News and Hulu’s Solar Opposites to veterans like The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers, Big Mouth, and Family Guy, along with Hollywood animation studios like Paramount, have been able to keep working, largely thanks to innovative technological workarounds. “All of us feel incredibly fortunate that we’re in this industry at this time,” Fried says.