February 5, 2025
Pono [poh-noh] (Hawaiian for ‘proper’ or ‘righteousness’) was a portable digital media player and music download service for high-resolution audio. It was developed by musician Neil Young and his company PonoMusic, which raised money for development and initial production through a crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter. Production and shipments to backers started in 2014, and shipments to the general public began in the first quarter of 2015.
Pono’s stated goal to present songs ‘as they first sound during studio recording sessions,’ using ‘high-resolution’ 24-bit 192kHz audio instead of ‘the compressed audio inferiority that MP3s offer’ received mixed reactions, with some describing Pono as a competitor to similar music services such as HDtracks, but others doubting its potential for success. Pono was discontinued in 2017, and alternative plans were later abandoned. Continue reading →
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February 3, 2025
The phantom time conspiracy theory is a pseudohistorical conspiracy theory first asserted by Heribert Illig in 1991. It hypothesizes a conspiracy by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II, and possibly the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, to fabricate the Anno Domini dating system retroactively, in order to place them at the special year of AD 1000, and to rewrite history to legitimize Otto’s claim to the Holy Roman Empire.
Illig suggested this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary and physical evidence. According to this scenario, the entire Carolingian period, including the figure of Charlemagne, is a fabrication, with a ‘phantom time’ of 297 years (614–911) added to the Early Middle Ages. Substantial evidence contradicts the hypothesis and it failed to gain the support of historians, and calendars in other European countries, most of Asia and parts of pre-Columbian America contradict this. Continue reading →
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January 30, 2025
“Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us” event began as a satirical Facebook post by Matty Roberts in June 2019, which jokingly proposed raiding the classified military base in search of aliens and garnered over 2 million RSVPs. Roberts later stated his intentions for the event had been purely comedic, and disavowed responsibility for any casualties had there been any actual attempt to raid the military base.
On the day of the event, only about 150 people were reported to have shown up at the two entrances to Area 51, with none succeeding in entering the site. Two music festivals were planned to coincide with the event: Alienstock in Rachel, Nevada, and Storm Area 51 Basecamp in Hiko, Nevada. An estimated 1,500 people attended these festivals, according to state and local law enforcement. Air Force spokeswoman Grace Manock stated government officials were briefed on the event and discouraged people from attempting to enter military property. Nevada law enforcement also warned potential participants against trespassing. Continue reading →
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January 26, 2025
Deep learning super sampling (DLSS) is a family of real-time deep learning image enhancement and upscaling technologies developed by Nvidia that are available in a number of video games. The goal of these technologies is to allow the majority of the graphics pipeline to run at a lower resolution for increased performance, and then infer a higher resolution image from this that approximates the same level of detail as if the image had been rendered at this higher resolution. This allows for higher graphical settings and/or frame rates for a given output resolution, depending on user preference.
All generations of DLSS are available on all RTX-branded cards from Nvidia in supported titles. However, the frame generation feature is only supported on 40 series GPUs or newer and multi-frame generation is only available on 50 series GPUs. Nvidia has also introduced Deep learning dynamic super resolution (DLDSR), a related and opposite technology where the graphics are rendered at a higher resolution, then downsampled to the native display resolution using an artificial intelligence-assisted downsampling algorithm to achieve higher image quality than rendering at native resolution. Continue reading →
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January 7, 2025
The Outrage Industrial Complex (OIC) is a combination of forces including media outlets, social media influencers, political fundraising messaging, and individuals in media, political leadership or advocacy that in the late 20th and early 21st centuries exploited differences of opinion and what was termed a culture of contempt drawn along political and social lines, increasing distrust of institutions and society, to advance their own desires for fame, wealth, higher office, or for geopolitical reasons.
The OIC creates and distributes outrage media, digital or print content specifically intended to provoke anger or outrage among its consumers to increase engagement. The complex includes media outlets, social media influencers, political fundraising messaging, and individuals in media, political leadership or advocacy who call out ‘outrages,’ hoping to generate what Richard Thompson Ford, writing for ‘The American Interest,’ calls a sense of ‘righteous indignation’ and rage borne of frustration in their readers or listeners, often for their own purposes of attracting advertisers or fame or to intentionally cause social disruption in a country or region. Continue reading →
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December 29, 2024
A meme coin is a cryptocurrency that originated from an Internet meme or has some other humorous characteristic. It is often used interchangeably with the term shitcoin, which typically refers to a cryptocurrency with little to no value, authenticity, or utility.
It may be used in the broadest sense as a critique of the cryptocurrency market in its entirety—those based on particular memes such as ‘doge coins,’ celebrities like Coinye, and pump-and-dump schemes such as BitConnect—or it may be used to make cryptocurrency more accessible. The term is often dismissive, comparing the value or performances of those cryptocurrencies to that of mainstream ones. Supporters, on the other hand, observe that some memecoins have acquired social currency and high market capitalizations. Continue reading →
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December 23, 2024
AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol, also known as the DeepMind Challenge Match, was a five-game Go match between top Go player Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, a computer Go program developed by DeepMind, played in Seoul, South Korea between 9 and 15 March 2016. AlphaGo won all but the fourth game; all games were won by resignation. The match has been compared with the historic chess match between Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov in 1997. Kasparov’s loss to Deep Blue is considered the moment a computer became better than humans at chess.
AlphaGo’s victory was a major milestone in artificial intelligence research. Most experts thought a Go program as powerful as AlphaGo was at least five years away; some experts thought that it would take at least another decade before computers would beat Go champions. Most observers at the beginning of the 2016 matches expected Lee to beat AlphaGo. With games such as checkers, chess, and now Go won by computer players, victories at popular board games can no longer serve as significant milestones for artificial intelligence in the way that they used to. Deep Blue’s Murray Campbell called AlphaGo’s victory ‘the end of an era… board games are more or less done and it’s time to move on.’ Continue reading →
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December 16, 2024
In quantum computing, quantum supremacy or quantum advantage is the goal of demonstrating that a programmable quantum computer can solve a problem that no classical computer can solve in any feasible amount of time, irrespective of the usefulness of the problem. The term was coined by Caltech theoretical physicist John Preskill in 2011, but the concept dates to Russian mathematician Yuri Manin’s 1980 and theoretical physicist Richard Feynman’s 1981 proposals of quantum computing.
Conceptually, quantum supremacy involves both the engineering task of building a powerful quantum computer and the computational-complexity-theoretic task of finding a problem that can be solved by that quantum computer and has a superpolynomial speedup over the best known or possible classical algorithm for that task. Continue reading →
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December 9, 2024
SpinLaunch is a spaceflight technology development company working on mass accelerator technology to move payloads to space.[3] As of September 2022, the company has raised US$150 million in funding, with investors including Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Airbus Ventures, ATW Partners, Catapult Ventures, Lauder Partners, John Doerr, and the Byers Family.
SpinLaunch’s projected cost per kg of payload is approximately $1,250 – $2,500. This projection is significantly less expensive than SpaceX’s current price per kg of payload on the Falcon 9 of $6,000. SpaceX’s projected cost per kg on Starship, however, is less than $1,000 per kg. What real costs and prices for either SpinLaunch or Starship remains to be seen. Continue reading →
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December 2, 2024
Video nasty is a colloquial term popularized by the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVALA) in the United Kingdom to refer to a number of films, typically low-budget horror or exploitation films, distributed on video cassette in the early 1980s that were criticized by the press, social commentators, and various religious organisations for their violent content.
These video releases were not brought before the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) due to a loophole in film classification laws that allowed videos to bypass the review process. The resulting uncensored video releases led to public debate concerning the availability of these films to children due to the unregulated nature of the market. Continue reading →
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November 13, 2024
The Buffett Indicator, named after Warren Buffett, measures market valuation by dividing a country’s total stock market value by its GDP. A ratio of 100% suggests fair market. For example, if stocks are worth $50 trillion and GDP is $25 trillion, a 200% ratio would suggest the market is overvalued.
It was proposed as a metric by Buffett in 2001, who called it ‘probably the best single measure of where valuations stand at any given moment,’ and its modern form compares the capitalization of the US Wilshire 5000 index to US GDP. It is widely followed by the financial media as a valuation measure for the US market in both its absolute, and de-trended forms. The indicator set an all-time high during the so-called ‘everything bubble,’ crossing the 200% level in February 2021; a level that Buffett warned if crossed, was ‘playing with fire.’ Continue reading →
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October 22, 2024
The crayon-eating Marine is a humorous trope (or meme) associated with the United States Marine Corps, emerging online in the early 2010s. Playing off of a stereotype of Marines as unintelligent, the trope supposes that they frequently eat crayons and drink glue.
In an instance of self-deprecating humor, the crayon-eater trope was popularized by Marines through social media and in Maximilian Uriarte’s comic strip ‘Terminal Lance.’ The joke’s ubiquity has led to real-life humorous consumption of crayons and has been referenced by the Marine Corps itself in celebration of National Crayon Day. Multiple products have capitalized on the trend, including two lines of edible crayons created by former Marines and a coloring book by Uriarte. Continue reading →
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