Skateboarders are undoubtedly some of the coolest professional athletes, but does that apply to fingerboarders as well, who perform impossible tricks with tiny decks just a few inches long? Normally, no, but through the lens of Sebastian Linda’s camera, what kid wouldn’t aspire to be a pro fingerboarder one day?
Source: Gizmodo – Over-the-Top Cinematography Makes Tiny Skateboard Tricks Look Like the Coolest Sport Ever
A beautiful new species of hermit crab discovered near the island of Bonaire is a helpful reminder of the planet’s endless secrets.
Source: TreeHugger – Candy cane crab is a new species from the Caribbean
For more than a decade, the online advertising world has been dominated by “display ads,” served up to consumers alongside web content, search results or social media posts. But they’re not the only game in town, one digital ad exec says. From a report: “I think the advertising world going forward is going to be filled with fewer, better ads,” Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer said on the latest episode of Recode Media. “The display advertising market is going to crater. By giving away stuff for free for so long, we’ve created an ad economy that is bigger than it should be,” he added. Schafer says there’s a untapped value in “nonstandard” ads, meaning branded content and other forms of advertising on platforms such as Snapchat, Musical.ly, WeHeartIt and Imgur.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – ‘The Future of Advertising is Fewer, Better Ads’
Enlarge (credit: Louisville, KY)
Baseball, America’s pastime, has been part of the nation’s culture for more than 140 years—we go to games, watch games on TV, and teach our kids to play. Fans can get obsessive about statistics, figuring out various ways of measuring a player’s probability of contributing to a win.
They should start checking the travel schedule. A recent article published in PNAS indicates that jet lag can be an important factor in baseball. Jet lag seems to hinder home-team offensive performance and negatively affect defensive performance for both home and away teams. These results showed the surprisingly strong effect of disrupted circadian rhythms on elite athletic performance.
The scientists behind this study analyzed 20 years of Major League Baseball (MLB) data, including more than 46,000 games. They were looking for instances of teams experiencing at least two hours of jet lag, as represented by the numbers of time zones they crossed while traveling just before games. They also accounted for important potential confounders, such as home-field advantage and direction of travel (eastward or westward). Previous studies have shown that it is easier to adjust to westward travel than eastward travel.
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Source: Ars Technica – Jet lag hits for power against major league ballplayers
The notoriously secretive National Security Agency is raising “security concerns” to justify an apparent new policy of pre-emptively denying Freedom of Information Act requests about the agency’s contractors.
Source: Gizmodo – The NSA Has Found a New Way to Categorically Deny FOIA Requests
This is a video of a man restoring a rusty meat cleaver he found in the trash to as-good-as-new quality. He says the whole process took three hours, making me wonder if the value of the time spent during the restoration was worth it. Or maybe it was a labor of love. A bunch of people in the comments suggested the quality of the knife indicates it was relatively cheap and intended to be thrown out, while other suggested his technique for restoration was all wrong (he should have taken the handle off, not rubbed it with olive oil, etc.). Amazing, nobody suggested that maybe this guy shouldn’t be digging murder weapons out of the trash in the first place.
Hit the jump for the video.
Source: Geekologie – Video Of A Man Restoring A Rusty Meat Cleaver To As-Good-As-New
At Overwatch fan site Kotaku, we have a whole Slack room dedicated to the eponymous first-person shooter/dating sim. In it, we post memes and strategy tips and argue over who to ship Lucio with.
Source: Kotaku – A Playlist Of Songs That Overwatch’s Reaper Would Die For
Amazon has been working for a while now to build out its shipping and distribution network. Now the online retailer has started coordinating its own shipments from Chinese merchants to its warehouses in the US via ocean freighters. The Wall Street Jo…
Source: Engadget – Amazon is now managing its own ocean freight
For those Linux gamers interested in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, a new Linux update is available…
Source: Phoronix – Shadow of Mordor Updated For Linux With Performance Improvements
There’s a lot of war in Star Wars, as its name implies. But while lightsabers swinging and blaster fire screaming down hallways is a lot of fun to watch, what if the Rebels and Empire resolved their conflicts more peacefully instead? like, say, a game of Force-chess?
Source: Gizmodo – What If Star Wars Was Resolved Without War?
(credit: Wikimedia Commons)
D-Wave, a company based in British Columbia, has announced a new version of its quantum annealer: the D-Wave 2000Q. As the name suggests, the number of bits has increased from about 1,000 to just over 2,000. This is, for D-Wave, an important step on its roadmap to world domination. D-Wave’s approach is to increase the number of qubits come hell, high water, or lack of quantumness.
Luckily, hell has stayed south of the border, winter has prevented flooding, and the associated papers indicate that their new board preserves the quantum behavior of the previous generation. But under the hood, it appears that D-Wave has made some pretty significant changes to scale up.
The D-Wave computer is based on a process called annealing. Annealing involves a series of magnets that are arranged on a grid. The magnetic field of each magnet influences all the other magnets—together, they flip orientation to arrange themselves to minimize the amount of energy stored in the overall magnetic field. You can use the orientation of the magnets to solve problems by controlling how strongly the magnetic field from each magnet affects all the other magnets.
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Source: Ars Technica – Explaining the upside and downside of D-Wave’s new quantum computer
(credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
Verizon and Charter have discussed a potential merger that would combine two of the country’s biggest Internet providers, according to a Wall Street Journal report today.
“Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam has made a preliminary approach to officials close to Charter,” and Verizon is “working with advisers to study a potential transaction,” the report said, citing “people familiar with the matter.” It’s still unclear whether Charter’s top executives are interested in a merger.
Spokespeople for Verizon and Charter both declined comment when contacted by Ars today.
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Source: Ars Technica – Verizon approached Charter about megamerger, WSJ says
Though NASA has confirmed 3,440 planets outside our solar system, no one has ever been able to confirm an exomoon. While we know they’re out there, huddling around their respective planets, new research could clue us into why we haven’t been able to find one yet—and it could be because their planets are assholes.
Source: io9 – Alien Planets Have No Respect for Their Moons
With BioWare’s Mass Effect: Andromeda set to launch in less than two months (March 21st, to be exact), we had a hunch that there would be an influx of trailers before then. As it happens, we were right! A couple of days ago, BioWare released a video that highlights the Pathfinder Team, which introduced the game’s two playable characters, siblings
Source: Hot Hardware – Mass Effect: Andromeda Cinematic Trailer Showcases Bad Guys, Follow-Up Video Details The Crew
I’m always up for a good sci-fi FPS. But can someone tell me if this has anything to do with the original Prey at all? That was a long time ago; all I remember is being a Native American dude whose girlfriend gets killed by aliens—and this looks like a far cry from that. Heck, the pre-order image actually gives me a BioShock vibe (I must have played too much of that if anyone in a bubble-like helmet makes me think of a Big Daddy).
Bethesda Softworks announced Prey will debut on May 5 on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and the Windows PC. Bethesda, a division of ZeniMax Media, said that the next game from Arkane Studios will feature sci-fi combat aboard Talos I, an immense space station orbiting the moon in the year 2032. As main character Morgan Yu (yes, an Asian American character), you are the subject of an experiment that was supposed to alter humanity forever. But it has gone terribly wrong. The space station has been overrun by hostile aliens (who look like dark smoke rings), and they are now hunting you. As you dig into the dark secrets of Talos I and your own past, you must survive using the tools found on the station, your wits, weapons, and mind-bending abilities to defeat the Typhon alien threat.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Prey Will Bring You More Aliens To Slaughter On May 5
Here is a good article for those of you who are wondering where we’re at in regards to wireless sound quality. You’ve probably heard of aptX, which is basically a codec that gets around the limitations of Bluetooth with compression. Based on this reader’s experience, aptX, when coupled with a pair of quality headphones, provides quality that is nearly indistinguishable compared to a wired set.
…how can aptX make a difference, considering it is still operating within the restriction of the 345 Kbps Bluetooth audio streaming specification? The difference is in the way the signal is compressed before being transmitted, as aptX does not use psychoacoustic techniques to achieve its compression. It is still considered “lossy”, but aptX uses time domain-based, not frequency domain-based, compression using ADPCM (adaptive differential pulse-code modulation). With the ADPCM compression used in aptX Bluetooth streams, the difference between the quantized samples can be transmitted and used to reconstruct the original signal on the receiving end, saving data, and therefore valuable bandwidth.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Qualcomm aptX Bluetooth Review: Improving Wireless Sound
Yesterday morning, Marvel and Square Enix teased in separate tweets that they had an announcement to make. The internet went into overdrive: A superhero world for Kingdom Hearts 3? Wrong. Very wrong. Today, the two companies revealed a multi-game par…
Source: Engadget – Square Enix is making an ‘Avengers’ game for Marvel
2017 is now in full swing, and Netflix is yet again bringing a ton of new original movies and TV shows alongside some decent stuff from other networks. That includes some real winners this month, like Finding Dory and The People v. O.J. Simpson.
Source: Kotaku – All the Best Movies Coming to and Leaving Netflix in February 2017
Uber continues to be the transportation service of choice for business travelers, making up 52 percent of all expenses in Q4, according to a study by Certify. From a report: The online travel and expense management service provider today claimed Uber received the majority share of ground transportation, compared to 40 percent the same quarter in 2015. Additionally, the private on-demand ride hailing service was the most expensed service in 2016.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Uber Was the Most-Expensed Service, With 6% of all Business Receipts in 2016
Here it is, folks! Notorious gadget leaker Evan Blass has done it again, giving us our first real glimpse at Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S8 flagship. The image, which includes both the front and rear of the device, confirms some of the rumors that we’ve heard about the highly anticipated Android device.
The front of the Galaxy S8 appears
Source: Hot Hardware – First Samsung Galaxy S8 Image Flaunts All-Glass Front And Legacy Headphone Jack
