Month: April 2021

Enlarge / President Joe Biden speaks during an event on gun control in the Rose Garden at the White House April 8, 2021 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Alex Wong )

Over 105,000 people have signed a petition urging President Biden to quickly break the Federal Communications Commission's 2-2 deadlock between Democrats and Republicans.

Senate Republicans created the 2-2 deadlock in December 2020 by confirming a Trump nominee during the lame-duck session before Democrats took control of the White House and Senate. If not for that confirmation, the FCC would have had a 2-1 Democratic majority heading into Biden's presidency. But with the FCC stuck in partisan deadlock, consumer advocates say that Biden must act quickly to add a Democratic commissioner.

The petition is on the Battle for the Net website operated by advocacy groups Fight for the Future and Demand Progress. The groups said:

Earlier this week, speedrunner Niftski became the first player to ever beat Super Mario Bros. in under four minutes and 55 seconds (4:54.948, to be precise). That might not sound too impressive on the surface; it's only about a quarter-second under the world record set by Miniland just two months ago, after all, and less than a second under the first sub-4:56 time (4:55.913) set by Kosmic a year ago.

But once you understand everything that needed to come together to break SMB's 4:55 barrier, the feat becomes something akin to speedrunning's version of the four-minute mile. Niftski's performance is within spitting distance of the machine-generated perfection of tool-assisted speedruns, which use emulator-recorded frame-perfect inputs to push a game to its limits. Niftski's performance approaches the theoretical limits of what a human can achieve in this seminal game.

What goes into a feat like this? Join me for a quick primer.

Enlarge / Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks to the media about the cruise industry during a press conference at PortMiami on April 8, 2021 in Miami, Florida. (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle)

The state of Florida has filed a lawsuit against the United States of America and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, claiming that the health agency’s guidance for the cruise industry is “arbitrary and capricious” and that it should be immediately dubbed “unlawful.”

“Today, Florida is fighting back,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said in a news conference at Miami’s seaport Thursday, in which he announced the lawsuit. “We don’t believe the federal government has the right to mothball a major industry for over a year based on very little evidence and very little data. And I think we have a good chance for success.”

The lawsuit comes just days after the CDC released updates to its Conditional Sailing Order (CSO), which the cruise industry called “unduly burdensome” and “largely unworkable.”

Enlarge / One of the remarkably intact Dmanisi skulls at the time of its discovery. (credit: Guy Bar-Oz)

We have an extensive collection of fossils from the lineages that produced us humans. A large number of Australopithecus and early Homo skeletons track the transition to bipedal walking and the appearance of features that mark our present anatomy. But it's much harder to figure out what led to the mental capabilities—complex language, the near-constant use of tools, and so on—that help set humans apart.

Much harder—but not entirely impossible. Remains of skulls can help us figure out the likely cranial capacity of extinct species. And the brain actually leaves its mark on the interior of skulls, allowing some aspects of the brain's anatomy to be pieced together. Now, an international team has done this sort of analysis on a set of Homo erectus from a critical point in our species' past. They have found that some earlier brain species persisted well into the history of our genus Homo, but that didn't stop those ancestors from migrating out of Africa.

Reconstructing brains

How do you figure out what a brain once looked like? You need a reasonably intact skull, which is relatively rare, given the fragility of the bones. Once the skull is reconstructed, it's possible to make what's called an "endocast" of the interior of the skull, capturing the details of its features, including where it conformed to the underlying brain. In some cases, endocasts form naturally during the deposition of material around a fossil. They could also be made after discovery and now can be done virtually thanks to our ability to scan and reconstruct 3D volumes.

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  The Nokia X20, showing a lovely stock Android home screen. [credit: HMD ]

HMD announced a big pile of smartphones yesterday, the most interesting of which is the Nokia X20, a €349 ($415) device that seems destined for a wide distribution. HMD's "Nokia X" line represents a new model number scheme for the company, which previously was using decimal numbers like "6.1." The Nokia X model is being dusted off from when Microsoft first started selling Android phones (not the second time Microsoft started selling Android phones).

The headline feature of the X20 is Qualcomm's brand-new Snapdragon 480 SoC, which was just announced back in January. The Snapdragon 480 is an 8 nm chip, with two 2 GHz Arm Cortex A76 CPUs and six 1.8 Ghz Cortex A55 CPUs. This is Qualcomm's first low-end SoC to support 5G, if that does anything for you, and there's even an option (though Nokia did not exercise it on the X20) for mmWave antennas. More importantly, Qualcomm says the CPU and GPU should be twice as fast as the old Snapdragon 460.

The other big news of the day is that Nokia is extending support to three years now, with three years of major OS updates and three years of monthly security updates. Previously, the company was doing two years of major updates. It seems like everyone—even lame-duck manufacturers like LG—is extending their Android support lately.

Enlarge (credit: Rego Korosi)

YouTube is blocking advertisers from using social and racial justice terms like “Black Lives Matter” to target videos. At the same time, the site is allowing targeting for terms including “white lives matter” and “all lives matter,” according to an investigation by The Markup.

Google’s ad policies officially deter advertisers from targeting users based on “identities and belief,” instead encouraging them to focus on “a user's interests.” But it’s a fine line that the company has struggled to define. Four years ago, companies boycotted YouTube because their ads were appearing alongside hate content. Google responded with new ad policies, which allowed the company to remove ads from offending content.

Now, Google’s advertiser-facing keyword block is having unintended consequences. The company appears to be trying to eliminate the need for retroactive moderation, though it’s not clear which keywords will be blocked and why. 

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  This is the 2021 Honda Accord Hybrid, a 48 mpg sedan (unless, like here, it's in Touring trim, in which case it's a 44 mpg sedan thanks to bigger wheels and tires). [credit: Honda ]

Back in 2018, I tried out the 10th-generation Honda Accord and came away impressed. Sedans might have lost their allure among the focus groups and tastemakers that influence automakers' product plans, but there's still plenty of life in the form factor, as the Accord demonstrated. Honda recently gave the Accord a refresh for model year 2021, and that seemed like a good opportunity to revisit it.

This time there's no manual transmission, as Honda has sadly dropped that option. Instead, we spent some time with the Accord Hybrid, which starts at $26,370 and offers a rather appealing 48 mpg (4.9 l/100 km).

The Accord's refresh has been pretty mild in terms of styling changes. The large grille is now actually a bit larger, but horizontal strips of chrome brightwork give it a much less unfinished appearance than before. The front-looking radar sensor is better integrated, and there are new, more powerful headlights (although not on the cheapest Accord Hybrid trim). There are some new wheel designs, again, for each trim other than the basic one. (This will be a theme.)