Month: September 2022

Enlarge / Diego Luna returns to the role of Cassian Andor in the newest Star Wars series on Disney+. (credit: Lucasfilm)

At its worst, Star Wars: Andor is a sanded-off, PG-13 version of some of the best TV dramas of the past decade. It's easy to see traces of The Wire, Lost, and Breaking Bad in this story of Star Wars-adjacent scum and villainy. However, as you might suspect, such nuanced TV inspirations can only go so far in a franchise that regularly features chirping droids and action figure tie-ins.

At its best, though, Andor plays out like no other Star Wars film or TV entry to date, and it bodes well for the series' post-Skywalker future. Andor flexes its adult-ish aspirations to better resemble the gritty content that has made series sidebars like comics, novels, and video games beloved. While its momentum takes a little too long to kick in, enough quality coalesces by the end of the series' first 100 minutes to make it a worthy recommendation for fans of compelling sci-fi television, let alone Star Wars loyalists.

At Disney+, an initial release of three episodes says a lot

Trouble seems to find Cassian Andor a lot in his series. (credit: Lucasfilm)

This series "follows" the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story the only way Lucasfilm really could: by building a prequel out of its likable anti-hero Cassian Andor. (Spoiler alert: If this series had been a direct timeline sequel to that film, it would, uh, include far fewer characters.) Since his name's in the title, Andor features as the star, and the events rewind to both his biggest adult and childhood adventures.

Enlarge / A selection of Stable Diffusion images with a strikeout through them. (credit: Ars Technica)

Getty Images has banned the sale of AI generative artwork created using image synthesis models such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2, and Midjourney through its service, The Verge reports.

To clarify the new policy, The Verge spoke with Getty Images CEO Craig Peters. "There are real concerns with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models and unaddressed rights issues with respect to the imagery, the image metadata and those individuals contained within the imagery," Peters told the publication.

Getty Images is a large repository of stock and archival photographs and illustrations, often used by publications (such as Ars Technica) to illustrate articles after paying a license fee.

Enlarge (credit: Logitech)

Those leaks were real! Logitech is jumping into the handheld game console arena, and cloud gaming is the primary platform? The company has announced the "Logitech G CLOUD Gaming Handheld," a Steam Deck/Nintendo Switch-style portable that runs Android, has a full suite of controller buttons, and is meant to take your cloud gaming collection on the go.

The device is powered by an eight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G—that's two Cortex A76 CPUs, four A55 CPUs, and an Adreno 618 GPU all built on an 8 nm process. That's a mid-range chip that's very close to what you get in a Pixel 5a. It's good enough for some local games, but those will be local Android games, and those are not the focus of this device. Besides the "Cloud" in the name, Logitech says the handheld takes "massive libraries of AAA titles and advanced graphics from the cloud and puts it all in your hands. This allows you to play a ridiculous amount of games from Xbox, Nvidia GeForce NOW, and even Steam Link." (Logitech continually snubs Stadia and Luna in its promotional materials, but presumably they will work, too.)

The spec sheet also includes a 7-inch, 60 Hz,1920×1080 LCD,  4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, plus a MicroSD slot. There's a USB-C port for 18 W charging, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, stereo speakers, and Wi-Fi 5 (aka 802.11ac) support. For buttons, you get a pretty standard layout of a D-pad, two joysticks, ABXY face buttons, four shoulder buttons (two analog), and then four system buttons for things like "Home" and "Menu." Logitech's FAQ goes out of its way to say that video out is not supported, so no Switch-style TV hookups.

Enlarge / There’s a long tradition of experimentally testing the weak equivalence principle—the basis of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. (credit: ONERA)

One of the most counter-intuitive notions in physics is that all objects fall at the same rate, regardless of mass, aka the equivalence principle. This was memorably illustrated in 1971 by NASA Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott during a moonwalk. He dropped a falcon feather and a hammer at the same time via a live television feed, and the two objects hit the dirt simultaneously.

There's a long tradition of experimentally testing the weak equivalence principle, which forms the basis of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. In test after test over many centuries, the equivalence principle has held strong. And now the MICROSCOPE (MICROSatellite pour l'Observation de Principe d'Equivalence) mission has achieved the most precise test of the equivalent principle to date, confirming Einstein yet again, per a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters. (Additional related papers appeared in a special issue of Classical and Quantum Gravity.)

Testing, 1,2,3

John Philoponus, the 6th-century philosopher, was the first to contend that the velocity at which an object will fall has nothing to do with its weight (mass) and later became a major influence on Galileo Galilei some 900 years later. Galileo supposedly dropped cannonballs of varying masses off Italy's famed Leaning Tower of Pisa, but the story is probably apocryphal.

Enlarge (credit: NREL)

This week, the US Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab released its annual analysis of solar energy in the US. It found that nearly half the generating capacity was installed in the US during 2021 and is poised to dominate future installs. That's in part because costs have dropped by more than 75 percent since 2010; it's now often cheaper to build and operate a solar plant than it is to simply buy fuel for an existing natural gas plant.

The analysis was performed before the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains many incentives and tax breaks that should expand solar's advantages in the coming years.

Solar, by the numbers

In terms of large, utility-scale solar installs, the US added over 12.5 gigawatts of new capacity last year, bringing the total installed capacity to over 50 gigawatts. Texas led the way, with about a third of the total capacity added (3.9 GW) going online in the Lone Star State. Combined with residential and other distributed solar installations, solar alone accounted for 45 percent of the new generating capacity added to the grid last year.

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United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres had just returned from a visit to flooded Pakistan when he stepped before the UN General Assembly to give a speech on Tuesday. Poverty-stricken regions experiencing the most severe climate change impacts like Pakistan were front-of-mind when he declared, “Today, I am calling on all developed economies to tax the windfall profits of fossil fuel companies.”

Guterres made it clear how taxing fossil fuel companies could help struggling countries recover, recommending that developed economies convert rocketing oil and gas industry profits into funds to help struggling nations recover. By redirecting funds “to countries suffering loss and damage caused by the climate crisis and to people struggling with rising food and energy prices,” he suggests “polluters must pay” for the damage that reports have shown fossil fuel companies are largely responsible for.

The Guardian called Guterres’ appeal his “most urgent, and bleakest, speech to date.” However, Guterres did suggest that “by acting as one, we can nurture fragile shoots of hope” and overcome “loss and damage from disasters” and reverse a “once-in-a-generation global cost-of-living crisis" that he said is "unfolding" and "turbocharged by the war in Ukraine.”