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The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx is now live on Steam as a $10 download, and it's a phenomenal look at the underbelly of Valve video game development, told with a wealth of inside access and a host of multimedia goodies.

The project, as led by journalist Geoff Keighley, is a years-in-the-making look at Valve's journey to release a new Half-Life game, complete with stories about other attempts that never got off the ground. Separated into 12 "chapters," the app is predominately driven by Keighley's text, full of interviews and quotes, and every page comes with embedded image galleries and pictures to drive each point home.

Get ready for a Borealis-load of Valve secrets

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  An interactive slider chart lets you dig through a few surprises in Valve's game-development timeline, which Keighley's story describes at great length. [credit: Geoff Keighley ]

The app's biggest dirt is arguably its confirmation of exactly what started and stopped within Valve on the way to getting Half-Life: Alyx out the door this March. That includes information on Half-Life 3—and it is a much firmer account of Valve's history than what IGN reported earlier this year.

Enlarge (credit: Oz Rittner)

People living on the Israeli coast 120,000 years ago strung ocher-painted seashells on flax string, according to a recent study in which archaeologists examined microscopic traces of wear inside naturally occurring holes in the shells. That may shed some light on when people first invented string—which hints at the invention of things like clothes, fishing nets, and maybe even seafaring.

Seashells by the seashore

Picking up seashells has been a human habit for almost as long as there have been humans. Archaeologists found clam shells mingled with other artifacts in Israel’s Misliya Cave, buried in sediment layers dating from 240,000 to 160,000 years ago. The shells clearly weren’t the remains of Paleolithic seafood dinners; their battered condition meant they’d washed ashore after their former occupants had died.

For some reason, ancient people picked them up and took them home.

Enlarge / A Frontier Communications service van. (credit: Mike Mozart / Flickr)

Frontier Communications misled thousands of customers about the prices it charges and about the speeds its broadband network can provide, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson's office has found.

The state's investigation of Frontier's business practices found evidence of the telecom "failing to adequately disclose taxes and fees during sales of cable, Internet, and telephone services; failing to adequately disclose its Internet Infrastructure Surcharge fee in advertising; misleading consumers by implying that the Internet Infrastructure Surcharge and other fees are mandatory and/or government-related fees; and misleading consumers as to Internet speeds it could offer, and failing to deliver speeds and service as advertised."

The findings are described in a settlement that will force Frontier Communications to pay a $900,000 fine and force the new owner of Frontier's network in Washington state to change its business practices. Among other things, the settlement requires Frontier's current owner in Washington to stop charging the $3.99-per-month Internet Infrastructure Surcharge. The company "neither admits nor denies the State's findings." The settlement still needs court approval before it can take effect.

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  The Note 20 Ultra in all its glory. [credit: Jimmy Is Promo ]

Samsung might have recently set the Galaxy Note 20 reveal for August 5, but somebody already has a prototype unit. YouTuber Jimmy Is Promo has posted a hands-on video and a few images of the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, the bigger of the two upcoming units.

Like previous leaks indicated, the Note 20 is even bigger than last year's model. Jimmy is Promo did an excellent job, and by taking some Note 10+ comparison shots, we can clearly see the Note 20 Ultra is taller and wider than the Note 10+, which was already one of the biggest smartphones on the market.

The Galaxy Note series is usually very close to the Galaxy S series released earlier in the year, and it looks like that's the case this year, too. Like the S20, the Note 20 goes with a curved front display and a hole punch front camera, with the one design change being taller corners. The rear camera block gets new styling with circles around each camera, making the lenses appear bigger than they really are. The camera layout looks identical to the Galaxy S20 Ultra, so expect the three big cameras to be a main camera, wide-angle lens, and a telephoto, followed by a tiny depth camera tucked away under the flash.

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  Fig. 1: When adjusted for inflation, the top-end price for big-budget console games has never been lower than today's $60 (lines are a moving average of the last three data points).

Last week, 2K made waves by becoming the first publisher to set a $70 asking price for a big-budget game on the next generation of consoles. NBA2K21 will cost the now-standard $60 on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but 2K will ask $10 more for the upcoming Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 versions of the game (a $100 "Mamba Forever Edition" gives players access to current-generation and next-generation versions in a single bundle).

It remains to be seen if other publishers will follow 2K's lead and make $70 a new de facto standard for big-budget console game pricing. But while $70 would match the high-water mark for nominal game pricing, it wouldn't be a historically high asking price in terms of actual value. Thanks to inflation and changes in game distribution, in fact, the current ceiling for game prices has never been lower.

The data

To measure how the actual asking price for console games has changed over time, we relied primarily on scanned catalogs and retail advertising fliers we found online. While this information was easier to find for some years than others, we were still able to gather data for 20 distinct years across the last four decades. We then adjusted those nominal prices to constant 2020 dollars using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' CPI inflation calculator.

Enlarge (credit: mat_n)

The climate is sometimes compared to a huge ship, in that it takes some time to turn it in a new direction, meaning that actions to limit global warming produce very gradual results. While the lack of instant gratification is certainly frustrating, having some indications of progress could at least sustain patience with the energy transformation needed. The problem is that Earth’s climate system differs from that metaphorical huge ship in a key way—there is a significant amount of natural variability that can also mask a change in trend.

So before we see any change in climate trends from our present actions, we have to both wait for them to start and wait for them to become large enough to be detectable against a background of natural variability.

A new study led by Bjørn Hallvard Samset takes on the question of how long it will take to clearly see the effects of reducing emissions. “This paper is about managing our expectations,” the authors say in their new work. Failure of that management could mean that undertaking the work of climate mitigation would lose support if people are expecting instantaneous progress that doesn’t materialize.