Month: August 2021

Enlarge / Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during an event on August 10, 2021. (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle)

With the hypertransmissible delta variant on the rampage, Florida has become the epicenter of transmission in the US. The state is experiencing its largest surge of COVID-19 cases yet in the pandemic. Hospitalizations have reached record levels, and deaths are on the rise.

But instead of focusing on the response to the dire public health emergency, state officials appear to be squabbling over pandemic data and health measures.

On Monday night, Florida's health department blasted media outlets for reporting the state's most recent daily COVID-19 cases counts—as the counts were relayed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Enlarge / A study of "harmonic surprise"—points where the music deviates from listener expectations—in popular music over several decades found that Childish Gambino's "This is America" had the most contrastive harmonic surprise. (credit: YouTube/Donald Glover)

Hip-hop artist Childish Gambino (aka actor Donald Glover) made a splash in 2018 with the release of his Grammy-winning hit single, "This is America." With its stark, sudden shifts between choral melodies in major chords and menacing percussive elements drawn from the trap subgenre, the song constantly defies the listener's expectations throughout.

That's why "This is America" also tops the list of pop songs rich in so-called "harmonic surprise," or points when the music deviates from listener expectations. This is according to a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience that analyzes Billboard hits from 1958 to 2019. And it's no coincidence that the tune is among the most recent: the study also found that harmonic surprise in popular music has been increasing over the decades—a phenomenon the authors have dubbed "inflationary surprise."

"Music is culture. Culture evolves over time, so the content of music needs to evolve as time goes by, just to have the same success as previously released music," said co-author Scott Miles, a neuroscientist specializing in how music preference forms in the brain. "This study gets to the heart of what is a dynamic effect within popular culture, in a very concrete and measurable way. These findings [also] help further our understanding of how music is processed in the brain."

Enlarge / Unity unites with Parsec in a $320 million deal. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

The parent company of Unity, one of the most popular game development engines in the world, has made arguably its biggest acquisition of another gaming company yet. The deal, announced on Tuesday, sees Unity taking control of Parsec, a peer-to-peer game-streaming protocol. The acquisition is valued at $320 million.

In the years since Unity's 2005 inception, its tools have been used to make games for pretty much every console, smartphone, and VR platform imaginable. It's similar to other publicly available game engines like Unreal, as it revolves around a general toolset that can be used to build video games from scratch or expanded upon as developers see fit. Unity users can then nimbly port finished games across a variety of weaker and stronger platforms.

A recent stock market IPO by Unity Technologies infused the company with cash, which it has used to, among other things, move ahead with company acquisitions. However, Parsec may not immediately seem like a good fit for Unity's reputation. How does peer-to-peer game streaming tie into someone trying to make video games?