Russian Meteor Explosion Might Mean Earth Gets Hit More Often Than We Think

[Russian Meteor Explosion Might Mean Earth Gets Hit More Often Than We Think]

The latest analysis of the bollide that burst over Chelyabinsk, Russia in February suggests that the risk from such airbursts — which occur when friction in our atmosphere heats up a meteor — may be greater than previously thought.
Meteorite collisions are often compared in size to nuclear explosions, but because they are speeding toward Earth they have momentum that makes them far more destructive. And to make matters worse, they may occur more often than currently estimated.

On the morning of Feb. 15, a fireball lit up the skies above the town of Chelyabinsk. A 12,000-ton bollide estimated to be roughly 20 meters in diameter came screaming into the atmosphere at more than 42,000 mph. Locals could feel the heat from the blast while dozens of dashboard cameras made recordings of the event, which were disseminated widely on social media.

The best estimates of how much energy was released by the Chelyabinsk explosion come from infrasound measurements taken by an array of sensors all over the world. These instruments detect low-frequency sound waves traveling through the atmosphere. The longer the waves’ period is, the larger the explosion. Infrasound measurements are calibrated from atmospheric nuclear testing done in the 1950s, which is why asteroid explosions are often described in megaton units. The bomb that exploded at Hiroshima had a yield of 16 kilotons while the most powerful nuclear weapon active in U.S. service, the B83 bomb, has a yield of up to 1.2 megatons. The Chelyabinsk blast is estimated to have been between 200 and 800 kilotons, on par with a huge atomic weapon.

But meteors explode in a very different way than a typical nuclear bomb, says physicist Mark Boslough of the Sandia National Laboratories, who studies asteroid impacts and is presenting a talk today about the Chelyabinsk event at the American Astronomical Society’s 2013 Division for Planetary Science meeting in Denver.

“When an asteroid explodes, its momentum is conserved and that explosion continues down toward the Earth,”

Boslough said.

For that reason, the people who live in Chelyabinsk explosion are very lucky to be alive, he added. If the bollide had come into the atmosphere at a less steep angle, its blast would have been aimed right at the ground, likely doing much more damage.

That an airburst continues traveling in the same direction as a meteorite was only appreciated starting in the 1990s, particularly after the impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter. This understanding has led to revisions in estimates of the size of the asteroid that exploded over the Siberian tundra in 1908. This blast, known as the Tunguska event, flattened trees over a 2,000-square-kilometer area.

Scientists in the mid-20th century used nuclear blast comparisons to estimate Tunguska’s power. To make trees fall down over that large an area, a nuclear weapon would have to be 10 to 20 megatons. Now knowing how asteroid impact bursts can deliver more energy to the ground, the Tunguska bollide estimate has gotten smaller, suggesting that an object of roughly 100,000 tons entered the atmosphere and delivered a blast of between 3 and 5 megatons.

Tunguska and Chelyabinsk are thought to be among the most powerful asteroid impacts in recent history. That both would come within about 100 years of one another is slightly worrying to scientists like Boslough.

That’s because current estimates are that an impact the size of Chelyabinsk should happen roughly once a century while a Tunguska-level event should happen once every millennium. To see two such once-in-a-long-while events within close succession makes “you wonder if you’ve got your probabilities right,” said Boslough. He gave a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation suggesting that the chances of these two occurrences — plus a third airburst near South Africa in 1963 (.pdf) that was somewhere in size between Chelyabinsk and Tunguska and was was only observed by infrasound sensors — is somewhere on the order of 0.2 percent.

Our current probability estimates of asteroid impacts are most calculated using astronomical data. Telescopes search for space rocks and note the number that cross Earth’s orbit. But models based on these asteroid surveys have a lot of assumptions built into them, mostly because detecting asteroids is a big challenge, particularly smaller ones that would cause airbursts, and we don’t know exactly how many more of them we have yet to find. It’s possible that we’ve missed many and that airbursts like Chelyabinsk and Tunguska happen more than once a century or millennium.

Agreeing with this assessment is geoscientist Peter Schultz of Brown University, who said that Chelyabinsk “should be kind of an eye-opener.”
After all, he added, Earth experiences an airburst explosion similar in energy to Hiroshima almost every year, but they are more likely to happen over the ocean or uninhabited areas and go unnoticed by people other than the scientists who track them. Geological evidence also suggests that larger asteroids that hit the Earth’s surface strike more frequently than we think. In Argentina alone, scientists have found glass that was formed in impacts from about eight or nine large events that occurred in the last 10 million years.

“This is about a factor of five to 10 higher than what has been predicted,”

said Schultz.

On the other hand, that Chelyabinsk and Tunguska happened in close succession might just be a fluke. Boslough said that two data points in of themselves shouldn’t make us believe that asteroid impacts happen more frequently than we think.

“That’s what we would call ‘not statistically significant,’”

he said.
As with anything relying on probability, we will simply have to wait and see. The longer we observe asteroid impacts on Earth, the better we will be able to estimate their frequency.

It’s pretty much a guarantee that “eventually we’ll have a close encounter of a bad kind,” said Schultz.

[Eye contact may not be a social cure-all]

Locking eyes with someone may not be the universal route to persuasion.

“Stand up straight and look people in the eye”—so go the most basic commandments of engaging confidently with your fellow humans. But a new study finds that eye contact is not a blanket solution to persuading your conversation partners. Depending on how someone’s opinions square up to yours, eye contact can have the opposite effect.

Prior research and anecdotal evidence suggest that people who make eye contact are more “persuasive, likable, and competent,” write the study’s authors. But regardless of how persuasive a person may seem because they look others in the eye, if their message is somehow controversial or disagreeable, their eye contact may ruin their chance of convincing someone.

 

For one study, the authors had participants fill out surveys of their political views and then watch a handful of videos of speakers discussing “hot-button” political issues, some of them looking into the camera and some looking away. The participants were allowed to look wherever they wanted, and the researchers used eye tracking software to see how often the participants gazed into the eyes of the speakers. They then measured how convinced they were by the speaker’s points.

The participants tended to look in the eyes of speakers whose views they shared more. This suggests a confirmation bias in the idea that people who use eye contact are more persuasive—according to this study, eye contact seems to occur more often when the person listening is already generally on board with what the speaker is saying. Participants also tended to look at a speaker’s eyes more when the speaker was looking away.

However, the longer a viewer spent looking at a speaker, especially if the speaker was looking at them directly, the less the viewer was persuaded by the speaker’s points. The effect was more pronounced for issues on which the viewer either opposed the speaker or had no opinion.

 

In the second study, the researchers presented participants with videos of a speaker they disagreed with on some issue, with some instructed to look at the speaker’s eyes and others his mouth. Again, the researchers tracked the participants’ eyes and gave them questionnaires on their beliefs before and after the videos to see how their views had changed.

The researchers found that viewers who were allowed to look at the speaker’s mouth rather than his eyes ended up more persuaded by what he was saying than participants who had been made to look him in the eyes. Eye contact seemed to have negatively affected the speaker’s ability to be convincing.

 

The authors suggest that their findings run counter to the oft-repeated advice to look people in the eyes—eye contact is not always persuasive. This may have its roots in evolution. Between animals, eye contact is sometimes “competitive or hostile,” signifying aggression, conflict, and an opponent’s need to prepare to defend rather than an attempt to win someone over or to your side of an argument. “The very experience of meeting the gaze of a disagreeing other… creates a social dynamic characterized by resistance to persuasion,” write the researchers.

The scope of the study was small and conducted only on university students, and the authors acknowledge that the reasons for the lack of attitude changes and behaviors in the two studies may not be linked. They further note that eye contact has a number of social uses beyond persuasion, like signaling “openness to approach and trust.” But when it comes to being convincing, the solution to persuasiveness problems may not be so simple and may even be worsened by an unflinching gaze.

[Solid report claims Apple’s iPhone 6 will finally feature a bigger 4.8-inch display]

With the iPhone 5s launch behind us, industry watchers are now turning up the heat as they sniff around for details on next year’s iPhone 6. We have already seen a few early reports from multiple solid sources suggest Apple will finally make the move to a larger display in next year’s iPhone 6, and now another report from a well-respected source suggests Apple is indeed finally getting ready to satisfy critics and launch a smartphone with a larger screen.

Jefferies & Co. analyst Peter Misek on Monday issued a research note to investors in which he reversed course on Apple. Misek previously had a Hold rating on Apple shares with a $450 price target, but he’s now bullish on Apple’s prospects. As a result, Misek upped his target to $600 on Monday morning and slapped a Buy rating on Apple’s stock.

There are a few reasons for the analyst’s change of heart, one of which is that his supply chain sources indicate that Apple is getting more favorable prices from its component suppliers. This is a change from Misek’s position earlier this year and if accurate, it would obviously boost Apple’s bottom line. Beyond margins, however, the analyst says Apple is finally going to cave and launch an iPhone 6 with a bigger display.

“Despite still seeing risk to CQ4 and FY13 revs, we now believe better [gross margins] will allow Apple to skate by until iPhone 6 launches with its 4.8″ screen,” Misek wrote in the note. ”We est ~50% of smartphone shipments have >4″ screens and that iPhone 6 will catalyze a large upgrade cycle. The stock is attractive based on the attitude change, FY15 revs >+15%, and valuation.”

Misek has had a few good calls regarding unreleased Apple products in the past, and he is considered by many to be among the top analysts covering Apple right now. That certainly doesn’t make an iPhone 6 with a 4.8-inch display a done deal, but it adds fuel to earlier reports from The Wall Street Journal and plugged in KGI Securities analyst Ming-chi Kuo.
Apple shares jumped more than 1% on Misek’s report.

[Security camera catches USPS worker's amazingly lazy delivery]

It's bad enough when FedEx or UPS throw your delivery onto your porch. But a home security camera catches a USPS truck driving across a lawn so it can get closer to the front door.

There will never come a day when you have truly seen it all.
As living proof of this belief, might I offer you this footage from the security camera owned by Mark Anderson of LaGrange, Ga.

Anderson had set up his home technology primarily to monitor his disabled mother. He linked it to a private YouTube account.
However, when he took a quick look at what was going on at home from his desk at work, you might imagine his incredulity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hs_9s31Je7Y
For there was a USPS delivery woman bringing a package to his door.
There was one small issue with her method of delivery. In order, it seemed, to make it easier to get to Anderson's front door, the USPS driver had maneuvered her truck straight across his lawn.
Anderson made the footage public to only 10 people. But then it appeared on Reddit and soon, on YouTube, where it was noted: "The package was not heavy in any way, and yet this woman made the decision to do this."

He said he recorded this footage using open-source iSpyconnect software with a Panasonic camera.
He told The Blaze that he'd like the USPS to reprimand the woman in some way.

[Another Fukushima Storage Tank is Leaking]

Reports say it could be draining into the Pacific Ocean

 

Another tank holding toxic water at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan is leaking water, according to officials.
According to a new report from Reuters, the Fukushima plant's operator discovered a leak in another tank on site, which may be draining toxic water into the Pacific Ocean.

The report said approximately 430 liters (113 gallons) of water spilled over a period of as much as 12 hours. The water that leaked had 200,000 becquerels per liter of radioactive isotopes, including strontium 90. The legal limit for strontium 90 is 30 becquerels per liter.
The water likely flowed into a trench leading to the Pacific Ocean -- which is about 300 m (330 yards) from the tank.

A plant worker reportedly misjudged how much water the tank could hold. To top it off, the tank is tilting on an uneven area.

Japan's government is learning that Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) isn't handling the containment of toxic water as well as it had hoped. The government stepped in last month and said it would help improve water management at the plant.
In fact, it came up with an idea to create an "ice wall" around the plant. The ice wall technique turns soil into a permafrost-type condition through the use of refrigerated coolant. This would build an underground containment wall made of ice to hold the water and stop it from going into the Pacific.
However, the ice wall won't be completed anytime soon. The government doesn't have a cost estimate for the project yet, but Kajima Corp. -- the construction company that largely built the nuclear plant -- has until March 31, 2014 to create a feasibility study of the ice wall. The government would like the project to be completed by July 2015.

Back in August, it was reported that Fukushima is leaking about 300 tonnes of toxic water into the Pacific Ocean per day. The water, which is seeping through the soil and through the plant into the ocean, contains radioactive particles of cesium, tritium and strontium.

This all started in March 2011, when a 9.0-magnitude earthquake shook Japan and crippled the reactor at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. It caused quite a bit of havoc with the release of radioactive water, contamination of crops and of course, the thousands of lives lost.
Ever since, Tepco has been pouring "hundreds of metric tons" of water per day over the Fukushima reactors to keep them cool. The toxic water is then stored in tanks above ground. But many are raising questions as to whether the storage tanks are strong or large enough to contain all the water.

[Samsung's 13MP smartphone module, Wordament hits Android]

Samsung shows camera module with 13MP sensor, image stabilization

Future smartphones from Samsung could have greatly improved photographs, thanks to the company's new camera sensor. The 13-megapixel component includes an anti-shake function that is able to correct angular errors of up to 1.5 degrees, writes Tech-On, beating the 0.7 degrees offered by other mobile camera sensors. The module can also produce an image that is eight times brighter than earlier generations of the item, allowing it to be used effectively in low light situations. Samsung Electro-Mechanics is negotiating with smartphone producers and plans volume production early next year.

[Geek Answers: Why is all life carbon-based?]

If you read any amount of science fiction, you’ll probably come up against the idea of alien life based on some element other than carbon. Almost universally, this element is silicon, but some writers have gone further afield in imagining totally novel forms of life — for instance, Carl Sagan once imagined life forms that could evolve and thrive in the gaseous sea that is Jupiter (aside from its core). Still, why do most writers consistently turn to silicon as the most likely carbon substitute? And why is carbon the basis of all life currently known?

Basically, the answer is that life is complex, and more to the point that it must be complex. You can’t create an organism capable of regulating its internal state, of moving, eating and excreting, and of replicating itself to create offspring, without a wide variety of molecules. You’re going to need a central building block that can support complex branched structures while remaining strong — but not so strong that you can’t easily rearrange the whole thing later. There’s also the fact that carbon happens to be an abundant element on Earth, one available to early replicators, but for the most part we are carbon-based because carbon makes a good backbone.

The reason carbon has this property is somewhat complicated but can be boiled down to this: when bonding with other atoms due to its natural chemical properties, carbon will form four bonds. There are only a few elements that can do this naturally. Oxygen, for instance, will naturally form two bonds (think H2O). The four-bond structure allows a wide variety of possible chains with branches that have branches that have branches. When a bonding slot is unwanted, the carbon-hydrogen bond that usually fills the gap isn’t very reactive, so it won’t interfere with whatever else might be going on in the area.

Probably not how silicon based life would actually look.

Consider the periodic table of elements, which is arranged so that elements with the same number of bonding slots (in parlance, the same number of “valence electrons”) will lie in vertical columns. This means that if you find carbon (element #6) and look directly below it, you’ll find the next most logical element to form the backbone of a living system — and ‘lo, we find silicon. This is why science fiction tends toward postulating silicon-based life: it shares the main virtue that brought carbon to power here on Earth.

Looking further down the list brings us to less used elements like Germanium and Tin — these heavy elements are large and unwieldy, forming weaker bonds than their higher vertical neighbors because they hold other atoms a greater distance from their nucleus. Within the class of elements that can form complex molecules, carbon has helpful chemical properties for making and breaking chemical bonds. We already know of several thousand species that use silicon extensively in their overall biology — but none of them use silicon in DNA, so they are still considered to be carbon-based. Carbon forms strong double and triple bonds, not just allowing the branched structure of DNA but protecting that structure with strong chemical properties.

The fact is that life probably could technically arise from a wide variety of molecules, but carbon seems to be by far the most likely. A species based on silicon might be funneled down roughly similar evolutionary paths as a carbon-based one, but something based on, say, phosphorus could turn out totally unrecognizable. Everything from its physical structure to its method of genetic inheritance would have to be wildly different. When imagining alien species, the most outlandish concepts would start not from a different environment, but from an totally different sort of chemistry.

[LG Starts Mass-Production of Curved Display Smartphones for November Launch]

Samsung has already announced to launch its curved display smartphones this month. Now its rival LG announces to launch its own curved display smartphones of 6-inch. LG Electronics' Display unit has announced today to start the mass-production of the world’s first flexible OLED panel for smartphone.

Dr. Sang Deog Yeo, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of LG Display, said, “LG Display is launching a new era of flexible displays for smartphones with its industry-leading technology. The flexible display market is expected to grow quickly as this technology is expected to expand further into diverse applications including automotive displays, tablets and wearable devices. Our goal is to take an early lead in the flexible display market by introducing new products with enhanced performance and differentiated designs next year.”

LG Display also claims that 6-inch curved display is the world’s slimmest and lightest and largest among current smartphone OLED displays. This flexible OLED panel is made up of plastic substrates which use a film-type encapsulation technology and a protection film to the back of the panel that makes it curved yet unbreakable.

This curved display radius is 700mm from top to bottom. This vertically concave panel is just 0.44mm thick that makes it the world’s slimmest among current panels. Its weight is also just 7.2g that makes it world’s lightest.

LG has already launched the world’s first curved 55-inch OLED TV panel at CES 2013. Samsung's curved display TV is also in the market. The research firm IHS Display Bank predicts that the flexible display market will grow to reach USD 1.5 billion worldwide by 2016 and USD 10 billion by 2019. Hence a more room is there for new innovative technology of curved display devices especially in smartphone market.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vO3HdcWDd9I

[5 Wi-Fi security myths you must abandon]

Wi-Fi has evolved over the years, and so have the techniques for securing your wireless network. An Internet search could unearth information that’s outdated and no longer secure or relevant, or that’s simply a myth.

We’ll separate the signal from the noise and show you the most current and effective means of securing your Wi-Fi network.

 

Myth No. 1: Don’t broadcast your SSID
Every wireless router (or wireless access point) has a network name assigned to it. The technical term is a Service Set Identifier (SSID). By default, a router will broadcast its SSID in beacons, so all users within its range can see the network on their PC or other device.

An SSID that isn't broadcast will still show up as an 'Other Network' in Windows 7.

 

Preventing your router from broadcasting this information, and thereby rendering it somewhat invisible to people you don’t want on your network, might sound like a good idea. But some devices—including PCs running Windows 7 or later—will still see every network that exists, even if it can’t identify each one by name, and unmasking a hidden SSID is a relatively trivial task. In fact, attempting to hide an SSID in this way might pique the interest of nearby Wi-Fi hackers, by suggesting to them that your network may contain sensitive data.

You can prevent your router from including its SSID in its beacon, but you can’t stop it from including that information in its data packets, its association/reassociation requests, and its probe requests/responses. A wireless network analyzer like Kismet or CommView for WiFi, can snatch an SSID out of the airwaves in no time.
This wireless network analyzer showed the hidden SSID of 'cottage111' after I connected a device to the network.

https://kismetwireless.net/
http://www.tamos.com/products/commview/

The analyzer captured the SSID from the association packets that the device exchanged with the router.
Disabling SSID broadcasting will hide your network name from the average Joe, but it’s no roadblock for anyone intent on hacking into your network, be they an experienced blackhat or a neighborhood kid just goofing around.

 

Myth No. 2: Enable MAC address filtering
A unique Media Access Control (MAC) address identifies every device on your network. A MAC address is an alphanumeric string separated by colons, like this: 00:02:D1:1A:2D:12. Networked devices use this address as identification when they send and receive data over the network. A tech myth asserts that you can safeguard your network and prevent unwanted devices from joining it by configuring your router to allow only devices that have specific MAC addresses.

Setting up such configuration instructions is an easy, though tedious, process: You determine the MAC address of every device you want to allow on your network, and then you fill out a table in the router’s user interface. No device with a MAC address not on that table will be able to join your network, even if it knows your wireless network password.

But you needn’t bother with that operation. A hacker using a wireless network analyzer will be able to see the MAC addresses of every computer you’ve allowed on your network, and can change his or her computer’s MAC address to match one that’s in that table you painstakingly created. The only thing you’ll have accomplished by following this procedure is to waste some time—unless you think that having a complete list of the MAC addresses of your network clients would be useful for some other purpose.

A wireless network analyzer scans the airwaves and shows the MAC addresses of the wireless routers and access points on your network, as well as all the computers and other devices connected to them.
MAC-address filtering might help you block the average Joe from connecting to your router from an unauthorized computer or other device, but it won’t stop a determined hacker. It will render your network more difficult for legitimate users to work with, however, because you’ll have to configure your router every time you add a new device to it or provide a guest with temporary access.

 

Myth No. 3: Limit your router’s IP address pool
Every device on your network must also be identified by a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. A router-assigned IP address will contain a string of digits like this: 192.168.1.10. Unlike a MAC address, which the device sends to the router, your router will use its  Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP) server to assign and send a unique IP address to each device joining the network. According to one persistent tech myth, you can control the number of devices that can join your network by limiting the pool of IP addresses your router can draw—a range from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.10, for instance. That’s baloney, for the same reason that the next claim is.

 

Myth No. 4: Disable your router’s DHCP server
The flawed logic behind this myth claims that you can secure your network by disabling your router’s DHCP server and manually assigning IP address to each device. Supposedly, any device that doesn’t have one of the IP addresses you assigned won’t be able to join your network. In this scenario, you would create a table consisting of IP addresses and the devices they’re assigned to, as you would with a MAC addresses. You’d also need to configure each device manually to use its specified IP address.

Disabling your router's DHCP server and manually limiting the number of IP addresses it can assign are not effective security procedures.
The weakness that negates these procedures is that if a hacker has already penetrated your network, a quick IP scan can determine the IP addresses your network is using. The hacker can then manually assign a compatible address to a device in order to gain full access to your network. As with MAC address filtering, the main effect of limiting IP addresses (or assigning them manually) is to complicate the process of connecting new devices that you approve of to your network.

This scanning app reveals all of the IP addresses in use on a wireless network.

 

Myth No. 5: Small networks are hard to penetrate
This myth suggests that reducing your wireless router’s transmission power will make it harder for someone outside your home or place of business to sneak onto your network because they won’t be able to detect it. This is the dumbest security idea of them all. Anyone intent on cracking your wireless network will use a large antenna to pick up your router’s signals. Reducing the router’s transmission power will only reduce its range and effectiveness for legitimate users.

 

No myth: Encryption is the best network security
Now that we’ve dispensed with five Wi-Fi security myths, let’s discuss the best way to secure your wireless network: encryption. Encrypting—essentially scrambling—the data traveling over your network is powerful way to prevent eavesdroppers from accessing data in a meaningful form. Though they might succeed in intercepting and capturing a copy of the data transmission, they won’t be able to read the information, capture your login passwords, or hijack your accounts unless they have the encryption key.

Several types of encryption have emerged over the years. Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) provided the best security in the early days of Wi-Fi. But today WEP encryption can be cracked in a matter of minutes. If that’s the only security your router provides, or if some of your networked devices are so old that they can work only with WEP, it’s long past time for you to recycle them and upgrade to a newer standard.

Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) came next, but that security protocol had security problems, too, and has been superseded by WPA2. WPA2 has been around for nearly 10 years. If your equipment is old enough to be limited to WPA security, you should consider an upgrade.

WPA2, with an AES-encrypted preshared key, is an effective security protocol for home networks.

Both WPA and WPA2 have two different modes: Personal (aka PSK, an acronym for Pre-Shared Key) and Enterprise (aka RADIUS, an acronym for Remote Authentication Dial In User Server). WPA Personal is designed for home use and is easy to set up. You simply establish a password on your router and then enter that password on each computer and other device that you want to connect to your Wi-Fi network. As long as you use a strong password—I recommend using 13 or more mixed-case characters and symbols—you should be fine. Don’t use words found in the dictionary, proper nouns, personal names, the names of your pets, or anything like that. A strong password might look like this: h&5U2v$(q7F4*.

Your router might include a push-button security feature called Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS). WPS enables you to join a device to your WPA2-secured wireless network by pushing a button on the router and a button on the client (if the client also supports WPS). A flaw in WPS leaves it vulnerable to brute-force attacks, however. If you’re particularly security-conscious, you might consider turning off WPS in your router.

Enterprise-mode WPA2 is designed for networks run by businesses and organizations. It provides a higher level of security than WPA, but it requires a RADIUS server or a hosted RADIUS service.

Now that you understand the best way to secure your network, spend a few minutes making sure that your router is configured properly.

[People Don't Use Words Any More]

"We usually just talk using Emojis."

This is what 18-year-old Hope R. told me in a recent conversation we had about how she and her friends use their phones to communicate with one another. The college freshman, who has had an iPhone for two years and admits she "only calls her parents on the phone and no one else, really", explained that emojis sent alongside every text are the new normal.
When I asked her about email, she dismissed it quickly.

"I just use that for school."

Emojis, the smileys in Japanese electronic messages and web pages, earned their way into digital culture royalty just a few years back, when various developers created apps for mobile users to download that allowed them the option to add little picture messages into text conversations. When Apple introduced iOS 6, it allowed iPhone users to directly integrate emojis into their keyboard through the OS settings.
Now, they're everywhere in pop culture. Katy Perry recently released a video for her hit song "Roar" which consists solely of the lyrics to the song as conveyed through emojis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=e9SeJIgWRPk

In 2009, a man named Fred Benenson began a Kickstarter to help him raise money so that he could compile an emoji-only translation of Herman Melville's literary classic Moby Dick.

He succeeded, raising just under $4,000, and the book, "Emoji Dick", is still available for sale.

http://www.emojidick.com/

An iPhone user myself, I understand. Emojis are fun, and some of the more obvious ones are a quick fix (although, one could argue that we're simply demoting the way we communicate rather than moving forward by sending tiny pictures instead of texting words, which we do instead of talking on the phone or face-to-face). I use the heart and a few of the smiley faces every once in awhile.
While it was a hard sell to convince me that emojis were useful, it was undeniable that they were popular, and beginning to shift the foundation of how we communicate, even if only slightly.
She sent me her most recently used emojis:

Later in the week, Hope and I talked through Facebook chat.

As we typed back and forth about emojis, I thought about a scene in the HBO show GIRLS, where two of the characters argue about the state of their relationship at a party.
Ray: "You know, when I'm not around you, when you just send me a text full of emojis, it is so easy to dismiss you."
Shoshanna: "What is wrong with emojis?"
Ray: "A panda next to a gun next to a wrapped gift? It makes no sense."

He's right. It makes no sense. There's no translation for a panda next to a gun next to a wrapped gift. And that's what made this scene so popular among viewers.

New York Magazine's Vulture created an entire fan fiction-esque text sequence between characters Ray and Shoshanna back in January following the show's season 2 premiere. We have all of these easy ways to communicate, and yet, the way we choose to utilize can sometimes leave us scratching our heads.
Hope told me she understood Shoshanna's motives.

"It's like you could send someone just emojis when you have nothing else to say. It's a way to say hi without saying hi. In this case, she was probably trying to remind the guy that she was still alive."

So why not just say hi?

"I don't know ... because now you don't have to."

When it comes to communicating with her friends, Hope says she just uses emojis to try to make the conversation a little more aesthetically interesting. She doesn't know when it started to be an everyday thing, but now she says it's weird when people don't use emojis. Again, she reminds me that they're right there in the keyboard, easy to get to and easy to use. 
This is a conversation Hope sent me between her and one of her friends:

Later, when she had to go to class, we agreed to finish up our conversation another time. The next day she texted me, and we finished up the interview in iMessage (I'm in blue):

She went on to tell me she sends an emoji of a rocket ship next to a heart when she wants to "send love" to her friends.
It wasn't until we had finished talking that I realized we had conducted 90% of our conversation over Facebook chat or text. There were no emails, and only a quick 5 minute phone call. This had nothing to do with whether either of us were in a place where we could talk out loud. Typing, via whatever medium, was apparently the more convenient route to take.
She also mentioned that emojis "lightened" the mood. If someone texted something that could be seen as mean, then an emoji would help make it seem friendlier.

Take the letter "K" for example. As texting became a more normalized way of communicating over the last few years, it's often been said that sending the one letter "K" (as in "okay") is considered the worst thing you can ever text (according to Buzzfeed). It comes across as "curt, or mean, or rude" according to Hope.
Why? I had to ask.

Out of the mouths of babes? Maybe not. Screengrabbed from the phones of teens?

Absolutely.

[LG’s New Nexus Phone Gets Detailed In Leaked Service Manual]

There has been no shortage of leaks that claim to show off Google’s next Nexus smartphone (including this not-so-subtle nod from Google itself) over the past weeks and months, but we may have just hit the mother lode this weekend. The folks at Android Police have gotten their hands on a hefty, near-final draft of a 281-page service manual for the forthcoming device, which still technically bears the LG D821 model number.

Really though, LG isn’t fooling anyone here. The document is chock full of diagrams and images (some of the device in various states of disassembly) that depict a very familiar-looking phone sporting some Nexus 7-like branding on its rear end. An earlier FCC filing already revealed some of the juicy details — the inclusion of a 4.95-inch 1080p IPS screen and a 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 with 2GB of RAM — but this newly leaked manual manages to shine a little extra light (not to mention extra credibility) on those earlier reports.

The new Nexus will likely be available in 16 or 32GB variants, and will feature an LTE radio and an 8-megapixel rear camera with optical image stabilization (there’s no mention of that crazy Nikon tech, though). NFC, wireless charging, and that lovely little notification light are back, too, but don’t expect a huge boost in longevity — it’s going to pack a sealed 2,300mAh battery, up slightly from the 2100mAh cell that powered last year’s Nexus 4. That spec sheet should sound familiar to people who took notice of what happened with the Nexus 4. Just as that device was built from the foundation laid by the LG Optimus G, the Nexus 5 (or whatever it’s going to be called) seems like a mildly revamped version of LG’s G2.

At this point I’d usually urge you to approach such leaks with caution, but it hardly seems necessary now. As much as I love my mental image of a lone prankster toiling into the wee hours of the morning on a meticulously crafted forgery, the sheer complexity and granularity of the information contained in this document makes that scenario an unlikely one. And the icing on the cake? LG asked Android Police to pull the offending document and images earlier today — AP complied with the request, but there’s no way to get the cat back into its bag now.

It’s hard to argue with the timing, too. The first anniversary of the Nexus 4’s unveiling is fast approaching, and as solid as the device was, it found itself being outclassed by a more powerful breed of smartphone within a matter of months. The Galaxy Nexus and the Nexus 4 made their official debuts in October 2011 and 2012 respectively, and now that we’ve got persistent rumors of a Google event scheduled for October 14 floating around, I’d wager all this cloak-and-dagger business should be dispensed with very shortly. Until then, feel free to dig around in the full document below for more technical tidbits — happy hunting!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/173744848/LG-D821

[Hollywood: How do we secure high-def 4K content? Easy. Just BRAND the pirates]

'You only have to get it wrong once, and you end up in prison'

Movielabs, the R&D business for Hollywood studios, has just issued a new specification for securing 4K high-def streaming video content, and one of the things that it’s going to demand is forensic watermarking.

This spec is being described as “recommendations”, but studios will need to adopt these overnight as the hard and fast rules if they want to gain security approval to distribute quality 4K video.

A watermark has to be introduced in all 4K delivery, at the worst case at the server streaming the content (so that each stream is unique), or better still at the device. The latter will mean that the guilty party customer can be identified from the source of any copy found on the internet.

 

 

How it works

By now forensic watermarking is becoming tougher and tougher to break. In some systems, the watermarking process writes a unique device number into the content over a large number of frames in code, using key pixels, and in others it is only measurement against a pristine version of the file that reveals randomly placed pixels in a key coded sequence, which depict the device or stream identity.

Most systems these days use more than one single set of algorithms to rigidly record the device identity being used to render the stream. As one cryptographer we discussed it with this week said to us: “With encryption you know when you have broken it, because the content just plays, but in removing watermarks there is always an element of doubt, and you only have to get it wrong once, and you end up in prison.”

 

The same expert said to us, “Watermarking has been used a lot by studios to protect content prior to its release. In 4K now we will see the onus placed on operators who deliver that content, either to cinemas or to pay TV systems.”

 

In order to be sure you have got rid of a video watermark, you either have to spend a lot of money, getting lots and lots of copies of the movie and comparing them and removing the differences, but then also changing it further. In the end you can only be sure you are not identifiable as a pirate after you have compromised the quality of the output, and in 4K that defeats the object. At least this is the thinking of the studios.

Movelabs said: “The system shall have the ability to securely forensically mark video at the server and/or client to recover information necessary to address breaches. The watermarking shall be robust against corruption of the forensic information.

 

"The watermark shall be inserted on the server or on the client such that the valid insertion is guaranteed even if the device and its secrets are compromised.”

 

Hang on, how are we supposed to get up to scratch?

This kind of demand is perhaps the one that is going to stretch most of the security businesses out there. We know that some media content management industry leaders – including Verimatrix, Irdeto and Civolution – have systems that can already meet these criteria, but a number of other players will have to go back to the drawing board or license the techniques.

 

We understand that many of them, including Nagra (another secure digital media player), have a system through partnership with Civolution. Widevine, now owned by Google, is also known to have its own watermarking system, but this has not been heard of since the acquisition and it may not have kept up with recent innovations in watermarking.

Blu-ray player makers and their component suppliers may be forced to license this type of technology in a rush – creating a windfall for one or two of these players.

 

In audio watermarking, the industry has standardised the Cinavia system – an analogue watermarking and steganography system supported by default on Blu-ray players – and a similar standardisation process may occur as we move into 4K in video.

Movielabs is also insisting on Cinavia in protecting 4K. This is a system which was first proposed by Verance in 1999, but only finally came to market in 2010. It alters frequencies in the normal hearing range for humans – previous methods used sounds outside the hearing range, but these were too easily removed. The Cinavia system is of course already used in Blu-ray players, so those should have that capability already.

 

Milk that serial

Another aspect of the protection for 4K is that players must have access to key identifiers for the individual device – its serial number – and this must, under these new 4K rules, be somehow bound to the version of the content. In other words, the content doesn’t play without that device, because its serial number needs to be present – some part of it needs to be mixed up in the authentication process – before that version of the content can play. Apparently this has to be designed so that if a piece of content is hacked, it is only hacked for that device and this gives no clue as to how to hack another movie or another device.

 

Another technical requirement is revocation and renewal of key algorithms. The system has to be able to revoke any client that is breaching the rules, and at the same time, renew and refresh the algorithms that are running on any device out there. The idea is that once a device has been caught spawning a pirated copy, it can either be switched off permanently or it can only play what has already been bought or lower density copies of future content.

And for an operator to be able to offer 4K content, there must be processes and agreements in place to respond rapidly to renew compromised software components.

 

Now what that means is that not only does it have to be renewable, but someone has to get paid to watch the internet to see if this particular version of the 4K file emerges anywhere. That will suit security businesses like the Irdeto’s Intelligence offering – which came out of its purchase of Bay TSP a few years back. This is its main job, to scour the internet for illegal copies. It detected about 15 billion piracy instances during 2012 and that number is sure to rise with the advent of 4K.

If the 4K content is being moved as a stream off the key player such as a set top or Blu-ray player, it must use HDCP 2.2 or better and each output should only go to authorised devices.

 

But Hollywood has not stopped there. It wants to see a secure or trusted execution environment on any device that it runs on. Again this is fine for a set top vendor or a Blu-ray manufacturer, but we cannot see Apple putting this into its tablets and phones. Apple has the ability to run such a system from its silicon, but it does not extend that ability to App developers that want to offer video.

Right now this spec is not about Apple devices, because they cannot handle 4K as yet, but this is aimed fairly and squarely at general pur-pose devices, including PCs and Tablets, to keep them out of the 4K loop until they change their ways and get onboard with hardware based protection.

 

Not only must the execution environment be secure when processing keys, but it must have a hardware based root of trust. It must also support runtime integrity checking of secure applications, something that companies like Arxan, Irdeto and AuthenTec have been pushing in their software only security implementations, but they do not have hardware root of trust.

 

This means 4K, at least right now, will not be able to go to general purpose devices at all, until they have a permanent, factory-burned encryption facility. Such a system will also have to use 128 bit encryption and above, and be resistant to side-channel attacks, which includes differential power analysis among others.

This whole enterprise is fraught with layer upon layer of security that will require mass cross licensing between major security players – one strong in one area, and another strong in another and we would not be surprised to see a single or maybe two reference designs put together by consortia, that can supply every step in the IPR chain.

 

While Movielabs has not yet said which trusted implementers can manage compliance to these tests, they are bound to be the usual 2 or 3 security specialists globally that run these checks.

Faultline's take on this is that this is a holding action that cannot be sustained. It is really trying to keep 4K in with the specialist hardware players that are totally reliant on the studios for content to play, and preventing general purpose devices to enter until they get their act together.

 

We think that once 4K has been out for a while, these restrictions will become relaxed, otherwise the multiscreen revolution will restricted to HD, and that will not satisfy an increasingly difficult to impress video consumer. Similar moves were put in place informally for HD when tablets hit the market, but within a year all the guidelines were swept aside by the studios own need to get onto the iPad. And this will almost certainly happen once again.

[Tanzania - Any Animal That Touches This Lethal Lake Turns to Stone]

There's a deceptively still body of water in Tanzania with a deadly secret—it turns any animal it touches to stone. The rare phenomenon is caused by the chemical makeup of the lake, but the petrified creatures it leaves behind are straight out of a horror film.

Photographed by Nick Brandt in his new book, Across the Ravaged Land, petrified creatures pepper the area around the lake due to its constant pH of 9 to 10.5—an extremely basic alkalinity that preserves these creatures for eternity. According to Brandt:

    I unexpectedly found the creatures - all manner of birds and bats - washed up along the shoreline of Lake Natron in Northern Tanzania. No-one knows for certain exactly how they die, but it appears that the extreme reflective nature of the lake’s surface confuses them, and like birds crashing into plate glass windows, they crash into the lake. The water has an extremely high soda and salt content, so high that it would strip the ink off my Kodak film boxes within a few seconds. The soda and salt causes the creatures to calcify, perfectly preserved, as they dry.

    I took these creatures as I found them on the shoreline, and then placed them in ‘living’ positions, bringing them back to ‘life’, as it were. Reanimated, alive again in death.

 

[Calculator Unboxing Parody]

Unboxing videos are perhaps the biggest waste of YouTube storage to grace the planet: watch a pimple-faced youth take a phone out of a cardboard container and play with some basic functions! Woo. But here's one worth watching.

Put together by the guys at Numberphile, this calculator unboxing does a wonderful job of parodying the glut of videos that exist for smartphones and tablets. Stupid functionality tests! Insightful comments about cardboard boxes! Drop tests!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eaJtjJNrWf0

[LG Has a Curved, Flexible-screened Smartphone in Production]

LG has revealed to a Korean website that it's already put a curved, flexible-screened smartphone into production—which will go on sales in Asia later this month.

The South Korean ZDNet site explains that sources within LG have told it that the Z will be a high-end Android handset with a flexible display. Sadly—though, arguably, inevitably—that screen will be mounted on a fixed shell. Still, baby steps, eh?

The phone will apparently be curved, much like LGs recent OLED TVs. The sources claim that the curve will make the handset better for gaming and movie watching, as well as feeling more natural in the hand. Inside, the sources claim the phone will be similar to the LG G2, powered along by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor.

ZDNet claims that the phone could launch as soon as the end of this month in South Korea, but it remains unclear what it'll look like, where else it will be available, or what it'll cost. Let's wait and see.

[Track Your Laptop in Case You Lose It]

Very useful for commuters, students and ppls that carry their laptop everywhere like me

Cheers

[Post a word starting with the last letter of the previous word....]

Yogurt                 or yoghurt or yoghourt (or other spellings listed below) is a fermented milk product (soy milk, nut milks such as almond milk, and coconut milk can also be used) produced by bacterial fermentation of milk.

 

yogurt, yoghurt, yoghourt, yogourt, yaghourt, yahourth, yoghurd, joghourt, and jogourt. In the United Kingdom and Australia, yogurt and yoghurt are both current, yogurt being more common while yogurt is used by the Australian and British dairy councils, and yoghourt is an uncommon alternative. In the United States, yogurt is the usual spelling and yoghurt a minor variant. In New Zealand, yoghurt is preferred by the New Zealand Oxford Dictionary. In Canada, yogurt is most common among English speakers, but many brands use yogourt, since it is an acceptable spelling in both English and French, the official languages of Canada. The word is derived from Turkish: yoğurt, and is related to the obsolete verb yoğmak "to be curdled or coagulated; to thicken". The letter ğ was traditionally rendered as "gh" in transliterations of Turkish prior to 1928.

[Wait for it...]

....it's a loooooong run...

[First look at Ben Affleck Batman]

That's original! Is he really Ben Affleck?

[Post a word starting with the last letter of the previous word....]

Echo             a sound or series of sounds caused by the reflection of sound waves from a surface back to the listener.

 

(the noise got echo... )

[Post a word starting with the last letter of the previous word....]

Sabin      unit of acoustic absorption of one square foot of a perfect absorber

[Mac OS X Mavericks Gold Master Sent to Developers]

Apple's newest version of OS X is almost ready for launch.

Apple's newest version of its OS X operating system has hit Gold Master. OS X 10.9, also known as Mavericks, is rumored to be launching this month. Previous versions of OS X have hit Gold Master in the month of their release, so Mavericks is looking pretty good for an October release. The "Golden Master" label on this build means it's the final version that will be shipped to the public save for any last-minute issues that need to be ironed out.

Announced at WWDC back in June, Mavericks isn't a massive departure from OS X Mountain Lion. This is Apple's tenth release of OS X and brings the desktop OS closer to iOS with the introduction of Maps and iBooks to the Mac. Maps brings mapping technologies from iOS to the Mac, including vector graphics, 3D view and interactive Flyover. With Maps you can plan a trip from your Mac, then send it to your iPhone for voice navigation on the road. Maps integration throughout Mavericks gives users maps from within Mail, Contacts and Calendar.

iBooks now works across devices, so you can read a book on your Mac, make notes or highlights, and then pick up exactly where you left off on your iPad or iPhone.

Other new features include Finder Tags and Tabs, enhancement of multi-display support for power users, new core technologies for power efficiency and performance, and an all new version of Safari.

You can easily tag any file in the Finder, in iCloud, or when saving a new document. Tags appear in the Finder Sidebar to enable you to view files by project or category. Finder Tabs reduce the clutter on the desktop by consolidating multiple Finder windows into one window with multiple tabs.

New core technologies in OS X Mavericks improve energy efficiency and responsiveness. Timer Coalescing intelligently groups together low-level operations so that the CPU can spend more time in a low-power state, saving energy without affecting performance or responsiveness. App Nap reduces the power consumed by apps not in use. When your system's memory begins to fill up, Compressed Memory automatically compresses inactive data. When these items are needed again, Mavericks uncompresses them.

Additional features in OS X Mavericks include:

▪ iCloud Keychain, which safely stores your website login information, credit card numbers and Wi-Fi passwords, and pushes them to all of your devices so you don't need to remember them. Information is always protected with AES-256 encryption when it's stored on your Mac and when it's pushed to your devices;
▪ An updated Calendar, which adds integration with Maps, continuous scrolling so you can zip through weeks or months, and a new Inspector to simplify event creation and editing;
▪ Interactive Notifications, allowing you to reply to a message, respond to a FaceTime call or even delete an email without leaving the app you're using. Websites can now use notifications to keep you up to date on the latest news, scores and other information. While You Were Away Notifications make sure you see what happened while your Mac was asleep; and
▪ Xcode 5, with powerful, intuitive new tools for developers that measure every aspect of app performance and energy use, as well as app testing.

[This Amazing Magnetic Pen Will Take Hours From Your Life]

Think about how many cumulative hours you’ve wasted with pens in your lifetime. You’ve spun them; you’ve drummed them; you’ve unscrewed them and launched their tops off like little rockets. The pen’s unimpeachable status as a tool needed to get things done lets it slide undetected into even the most oppressive fun vacuums–places like lecture halls and meeting rooms–whereupon it assumes its most vital function of giving you something to fiddle with. And when it comes to fiddling, this magnetic pen is a quantum leap beyond your standard plastic Bic.

‘I don’t like calling it a toy.’

Polar, as the wonder pen is called, is a writing implement made of 12 neodymium magnets. But according to Andrew Gardner, the man behind the design, distraction was never the goal. “It wasn’t intended to be something to fiddle with,” he says. “I don’t like calling it a toy.” Indeed, the unique design does offer some functional benefits. It allows for a stylus tip to be hidden in the body itself, for one thing. It also lets the owner customize the implement to his or her desired size. The pen, which can be preordered for about $40, was intended to be a “modular platform where you can add new tips and new cartridges,” Gardner explains. It’s “a really organic platform for creativity.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=f0q_YfGZCrM
But you have to imagine that the 8,000-some backers who have already pledged over a half a million dollars to the project saw something else when they looked at Polar. They had to have watched the clip showing all the things it can do–seeing all the mesmerizing magnetic structures it can transform into–and come to the obvious conclusion: This thing the Sistine Chapel of time wasting.

Gardner, who works as Indiedesign in Waterloo, Ontario, has been fascinated with magnets since a young age. He’s been an avid disassembler of pens for just as long. When those two passions converged earlier this year, he knew he was onto something right away. “You’d think it was more of a progression, but it wasn’t actually,” he says. He found it to be an elegant solution even before he figured out all of its, erm, extracurricular potential; the magnets hold everything together, so it requires no screws and no glue. “When I first came up with the design,” Gardner explains, “I actually did a lot of looking around, like, ‘how has nobody ever done something like this. This has to be done by somebody, so I better go do it.’”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=m4gChx4fl3k
Polar’s fantastic crowd-funded success has come with its drawbacks. There are already a slew of magnet-pen copycats rushing to market, and some have tried to peg Polar as a health hazard, throwing it in with other controversial small magnet products like BuckyBalls, whose fun was matched only by their swallowability. And then, of course, there’s the lingering concern that always comes with carrying a stack of magnets in your pocket: that you run the risk of messing up some other thing, either wiping the magnetic data off your credit card or somehow turning your smartphone into an expensive paper weight. Gardner says been carrying one around himself, though, and has no ill effects to report with his electronics or his credit cards. He has, however, found that Polar is strong enough to wipe flimsier transportation cards clean, a fact that’s left him trapped behind the turnstile on more than one occasion. Still, that’s a small price to pay, especially considering that he had the perfect thing to keep him busy until he managed to flag down some help.

[Quantum Computer Passes Math Test, But Doesn’t Answer the Big Question]

Is the world’s first commercial quantum computer the real deal or not? No one is quite sure.

The most recent experiment adding fodder to this debate used the quantum computer made by the Canadian company D-Wave Systems to determine hard-to-calculate solutions in a mathematical field known as Ramsey theory. Despite the machine’s success, many scientists are still skeptical of this quantum computer’s legitimacy.

D-Wave Systems’ second-generation quantum computing device.

“At the moment, it’s not clear to my eyes that D-Wave device is what we would call a quantum computer,” said computer scientist Wim van Dam from the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the recent work.

Quantum computers harness the weird quirks of the subatomic world to run algorithms at extremely quick speeds and solve problems that stymie our current electronic devices. That’s because classical computers rely on transistors that hold memory in the form of zeros and ones. A quantum computer, by contrast, uses subatomic particles (called qubits) that can be a one, a zero, or a simultaneous superposition of these two states.

Since the early 2000s, researchers have been able to build rudimentary quantum computers but it wasn’t until 2011 that D-Wave announced a commercial product with a 128-qubit processor. If it were truly a quantum computer, it would be leaps and bounds ahead of any other product, but the company’s statements have been met with raised eyebrows from the computer science community. Still, D-Wave sold its first products to companies such as Lockheed Martin while their second-generation device was bought up by Google and NASA.

The D-Wave 128 Chip

The latest experiment used the D-Wave machine to find solutions to optimization problems in what is known as Ramsey theory, after British mathematician Frank Ramsey. This field deals with situations in which a certain kind of order appears within a disordered system.

A well-known problem called the “party problem” asks what the minimum number of guests you would need to invite to a gathering to ensure that a small subset is made of people who all know each other and another who all don’t. Solutions to this problem are given in what’s known as Ramsey numbers. Calculating the minimum number of guests to ensure groups of three strangers and three friends is fairly easy (the answer is six). But increasing the number of people makes the solution increasingly hard to calculate, with most Ramsey numbers being beyond the capability of our current computers.

D-Wave’s device was able to implement an algorithm to calculate Ramsey numbers for different configurations, though none that weren’t already known from previous work. The findings appeared Sept. 25 in Physical Review Letters.

While noting that the D-Wave experiment’s calculations were correct, the authors of a commentary piece in the same issue wrote that “many more tests would be needed to conclude that the logical elements are functioning as qubits and that the device is a real quantum computer.”

D-Wave experimentally assembled
Graeme Smith and John Smolin from IBM’s Watson Research Center, the authors of the commentary, question just how coherent the qubits of D-Wave’s computer are. Coherence refers to how long the particles are able to remain in a state of superposition (where they are both zero and one simultaneously), which is notoriously tricky to maintain. Even small amounts of noise can cause the qubits’ quantum mechanical wavefunction to collapse, turning them into classical objects that don’t work like a true quantum computer.

But the algorithms used to calculate these Ramsey numbers “don’t need as much coherence as a full-blown quantum computer,” said physicist Frank Gaitan of the University of Maryland, who worked on the D-Wave experiment.

Ion trap, part of a quantum computer
Gaitan adds that D-Wave’s machine is not necessarily a universal quantum computer, which could run any algorithm given to it. Instead, it is designed to be particularly good at solving optimization problems, such as those in Ramsey theory, and the evidence from his research shows that the device “uses some kind of quantum effect that solves some kind of problems.”

Even then, there is still some question as to whether D-Wave’s system is truly a quantum computer. Van Dam noted that Ramsey number problems aren’t a good choice for proving anything about quantum computers. That’s because “it’s a really easy problem,” he said.

He gave an analogy. Imagine a company says they built a self-driving car and then placed it on top of a hill. They start the car and it rolls to the bottom of the hill. You could say the car drove itself down or you could say it was carried downhill by gravity, and it might be hard to determine which one it is.

D-Wave Quantum Computer Fully Assembled
Gaitan hopes that future work will help clear up these problems. The current generation of D-Wave’s system can’t calculate any unknown Ramsey numbers. But their third-gen device, expected to come out in 2015, should have 2048 qubits, which might be enough to figure out new Ramsey numbers that are beyond the capability of current computers.

[This Prehistoric Elephant Had a Huge Spork for a Mouth]

Russian writer Anton Chekhov insisted that everything irrelevant to a work of fiction be removed — if you describe a rifle mounted on the wall, someone had better fire it off at some point. This dramatic principle is called Chekhov’s gun, and it actually applies quite well to the natural world: Animals don’t waste energy developing worthless characteristics. Traits that help a species survive get passed along through generations, while those that are no longer useful fade away (or in the stubbornly contrary case of the human appendix, abruptly explode).

Scientists obviously can’t know for sure, but Platybelodon’s vocalizations may have sounded something like “herp a derp derp.”

 

If Chekhov had time-traveled back between 8 million and 20 million years and met Platybelodon — an ancestor of the modern elephant that looked like it got hit in the face with a shovel, then absorbed that shovel into its mouth — he would have demanded the creature explain itself. What possible purpose could such a ridiculous trait serve? “A good one, thank you very much,” Platybelodon would reply, probably in a really funny voice.

The spork-faced Platybelodon’s strange jutting jaw actually consists of a second pair of flattened, widened tusks (tusks themselves being modified incisors). When the genus Platybelodon, which means “flat tooth,” and its species were first described in the 1920s, “their lower incisors were thought to function to shovel, scoop, dig and dredge soft vegetation in aquatic or swampy environments,” vertebrate paleontologist William Sanders of the University of Michigan wrote in an email to WIRED. “But recent analysis of tusk wear surfaces show that they were used more as scythes to cut tough vegetation.”

Platybelodon’s remarkable modified tusks. Image: American Museum of Natural History, via the Biodiversity Heritage Library

The paleontologist who proposed this slicing behavior in 1992, David Lambert, theorized that instead of roaming shorelines, Platybelodon fed on terrestrial plants, grasping branches with its trunk and cutting them away with its built-in scythe. Indeed, cross-sections of the tusks reveal a structure that provides extra strength and resistance to abrasion for such foraging, said Sanders.

So it could well be that Platybelodon wandered around Miocene Asia, Africa, and North America, scything vegetation like some sort of peasant, only without all the pesky class struggles. And it was just one of a horde of similar animals in the family Gomphotheriidae, all with modified lower tusks of varying styles. The Platybelodon genus alone had more than 15 species, reaching “the apex of development of these lower tusks,” according to Sanders. Their radically flattened teeth suggest “strong selection for specialized feeding on a particular range of plants,” which was crucial given that “for much of the Miocene there were often three to five or more genera of proboscideans occurring in the same landscape, competing for forage.”

Pegging the various appearances of such proboscideans, though, is difficult, because flesh-like schnozes don’t fossilize as easily as bone. We’re actually quite lucky to have Platybelodon preserved at all, considering that fossilization is a really hard thing to pull off. Even if you can avoid getting carted off in a dozen different directions by scavengers, you need to settle in the right spot. And Platybelodon just so happened to do us a solid by dying — sometimes en masse — next to or in rivers, the prime locales for fossilization.

Osborn’s reconstruction of Platybelodon from his 1936 book Proboscidea. Males sported larger scythes than females — an example of sexual dimorphism.

Henry Fairfield Osborn, a paleontologist who described Platybelodon in a 1932 paper and quite extensively four years later in his book Proboscidea, accordingly assumed the creature to be a water-dredger (thanks to the work of Lambert and others we now believe that Platybelodon, like a lot of animals, was probably just partial to water and happened to sometimes die in it). In his book, Osborn quoted another paleontologist, Alexei Borissiak, who in 1929 wrote that Platybelodon was “deprived of a trunk” but would scoop through the water and “seize its food with its muscular upper lip, covering the mandible.” In fact, Borissiak reckoned Platybelodon’s snout looked a bit like that of the hippopotamus, “although much more lengthened out.” Osborn’s illustrations of Platybelodon certainly reflect this.

But “think about what an elephant looks like,” Sanders asks us. “The trunk is a very separate entity from the mouth. You have to be able to get food into your mouth, and if your front limbs are occupied in posture, and you have upper and lower tusks that would make it difficult to have a long projecting tongue or mobile lips, then you need a proboscis.”

A model of Platybelodon featuring a dexterous proboscis, in keeping with Lambert’s grab-and-slash theory.

“[Osborn's] ego preceded his expertise,” he added, “and we are still digging out from the weight of his ‘authority’ on proboscideans.” Yet Osborn’s flat trunk/lip persists in most modern reconstructions — including an oh-so-close-to-actually-being-cute one in the Ice Age movies — conflicting with Lambert’s more widely accepted grab-and-scythe theory.

Trunks aside, could the bizarre mug of Platybelodon, so wonderfully adapted for feeding, have proved cumbersome when, say, fleeing from predators? Sanders doesn’t think so. And even if Platybelodon did face-plant here and there, its size would have proved quite the advantage as far as not getting eaten goes. It was somewhat smaller than the modern African elephant, which only rarely falls prey to that continent’s apex predator, the lion. But according to Sanders, Platybelodon might have had a counterpart predator in the ferocious wolf-like creodonts, meaning “flesh tooth,” meaning a slicing tooth designed to deprive you of flesh, meaning let’s be grateful it was Platybelodon worrying about them and not us.

So be they teeth like scissors or teeth like a shovel, evolution never creates a rifle it doesn’t intend to fire. Where fiction has Chekhov’s gun, nature has Platybelodon’s giant spork.