STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

[MIKA27]

Tony Abbott Wants To Make Your Gadgets And Cars Cheaper

Free-trade agreements are getting a bit of a bad wrap lately what with the overbearing Trans-Pacific Partnership looming ominously on the horizon. But Prime Minister Tony Abbott is championing a free-trade agreement with Japan that could make gadgets and cars made in the country cheaper for us Aussies to buy.

The Prime Minister travelled to Japan to meet with the country’s leaders and discuss — among other things — a free-trade agreement.

Such an agreement, according to PM Abbott, would see Aussies pay less for some of the great cars and gadgets made there.

News Limited reports the PM’s comments:

“I am confident that the long awaited free trade or economic partnership agreement between Japan and Australia will shortly be finalised. More affordable Japanese consumer products will be good for Australian families.”

Tariffs on car imports would drop from five per cent to zero per cent in Australia if the FTA was signed, meaning that Japanese autos would likely be $1500 cheaper on average.

Read more over here.

Thanks, Tony but I'll believe it when I see it.

[MIKA27]

Why The Xbox One Doesn't Use Hyper-V

Microsoft’s aim with the Xbox One was to use as much Windows technology as possible, and when Windows Threshold appears, it should be theoretically possible to run a single piece of code on both platforms. Yet despite that Windows dependency and the need to run multiple apps in parallel, the Xbox One doesn’t actually use Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualisation technology. This is why.

Microsoft partner dev lead Frank Savage gave a fascinating presentation on the development process for the operating system for the Xbox One during the Build 2014 conference in San Francisco last week. Here, in his own words from that presentation, is how virtualisation works on the Xbox One, and why it runs multiple custom versions of Windows 8.

“Games on consoles have to be predictable. Nothing is worse when you are playing a console game than having the game hitch. When it hitches, you want to throw the controller at the TV. When it hitches and you miss a shot at somebody, you want to throw the controller at the TV as fast as you possibly can. So we want to avoid that if we can. The only way to avoid that is to make it predictable.

“You get six CPU cores inside the console, four on one side of the bus and two on the other side of the bus. Those six CPU cores have to respond the same way every time. If they don’t and it runs differently every time you run it, that’s bad. And it means that there’s a lot of things Windows can’t do in the background all the time, because if it does, it will screw up that predictability. You can’t have that, and drove some operating system decisions about how we were going to do things and what made sense and what didn’t.

“That predictability is critically important. When these guys say it has to run at 30 frames per second at 1080p, or they want to run at 60 frames per second at 1080p, they’re not kidding — they really need 60 the whole time. And 16.67 milliseconds is not a lot of time to get stuff done.

“We live in this world where we need an operating system that can do two wildly different things when you think about it. The first thing it has to be able to do is be predictable and powerful, so that we can get these AAA games to run with as much of the console as you can give them, but I also need a world where I can switch away from that game really quickly to something like a Netflix or a Hulu or some other app. Having that other piece where I can switch away to means that that other piece is very unpredictable.

“I don’t know what apps are going to be running there five years from now, two years from now, six months from now. There’s no way to know. I know what we’re going to have at launch but I don’t know what comes after that. So there has to be some way to know this one can be anything it needs to be while the other one is extremely predictable and doesn’t take anything away from the game at all.

Three Operating Systems In One Console

“This turned out to be a really, really hard problem to solve with a single operating system, so in typical Microsoft fashion we built three. The first operating system that we have — the one that boots the console, the one that basically actually owns where everything and how everything works — is the host operating system (HostOS).

“The HostOS owns all the resources, it owns all the memory, it owns all the CPU and GPU, it controls all the controllers, it traffic directs all the network traffic that’s coming in or out of the box, and its job is to be the security layer as well as to control all these interfaces.

“So the HostOS is completely opaque to you as a developer. You never see it, it just works — it works really well actually which is awesome — but this is the piece where we put all of the eggs that control security and control resources management to the box.

“Part of what it is doing is it’s also hosting what were two Hyper-V virtual machines. So the shared partition or shared OS or SRA side of the Xbox One contained an operating system that is visually and in fact code indistinguishable from Windows 8. So it’s running on the shared partition right now is Windows 8. It just works, but it has a lot of other jobs to do besides just running apps. It can run apps and it runs them very effectively but it’s also in charge of the Xbox Shell.

“System Services is all the system services that games require to be able to run. The networking stack lives here, some of the audio stuff lives here, a lot of the Kinect processing happens here, and this particular shared partition when a game is running gets two CPU cores all to itself and 3GB of RAM, depending on the mode that it’s in.

“The low-level operating system is here as well, which is basically the Windows 8 and kernel pieces. So this thing is the first thing that spins up after the HostOS. Your Xbox finishes booting, you see the shell come up. The shell really isn’t anything more than an app. It can run other apps and it comes up and now you are sitting in the Xbox One.

“The exclusive partition hasn’t come up yet. The exclusive partition fires up when you play a game. You say ‘I want to play Forza Motorsport’, it says ‘fine’. It spins up that partition, and gives it all the resource it needs and Forza takes off. Everything that Forza needs below that either goes straight through to the shared partition if it’s networking or things like that.

“But there are other things that need to run way faster than that on the exclusive side in order to get the performance that we need. Those things could be like the video driver. When I’m issuing DirectX 11 commands to draw cars or to draw trees or to figure out what perimeter target I need to use, all of these commands essentially go straight through the exclusive OS to the HostOS through a series of well-known channels.

Not Your Mother’s Hyper-V

“This is why it’s not a Hyper-V virtual machine anymore and we call it a shared partition instead. These things would have run any operating system in the world that was X86 or X64 compatible. They don’t anymore. They run the shared OS and they run the exclusive OS and they don’t run anything else. They’re hand-tuned and they’re hand-coded and they run as fast as is humanly possible.

“To give you some kind of idea, when we first spun up the exclusive partition when we first started doing it, we had a bunch of games tests we would run. Some were between 5 and 10 frames per second, most of it spent sending commands back and forth to the CPU. Over the period running up to launch, we were able to get that so tight and so small that those games run over 200 or 300 frames per second today. The CPU utilisation is so small that it can run very, very quickly through those channels and do exactly what it needs to do.

“This is critically important for these guys because they need it to be powerful and they need it to be predictable. So the exclusive partition also is running Windows 8, but it’s a Windows 8 that has gone on a massive, massive diet, and in fact diet is probably the wrong word. We put it on a diet for a while but then we got out the knives and the hatchets and the chainsaws and learned a lot about how Windows is interconnected with itself that may surprise you and probably I shouldn’t talk about, but let’s just say that there were cases that didn’t make as much sense as you might have thought.

“But the good news is we were able to get rid of all of that and we have an extremely lean and mean operating system in there now that’s very tight and very small. We have all the Win32 APIs in there for games coming from Windows 7 or games coming from other more PC-type targets, but we also have the WinRT pieces so if we have a game from the phone or store that you want to put in the exclusive partition, it’s relatively easy to port that too. All of the test games that I built for this run in both Windows 8 and Xbox One even today. It has been trivially easy to do that. “

[polarbear]

Congrates on 100 pages, Mika

This is by far one of my fav threads on the internet

Keep Up the good work ;-)

[NJP]

Love your work Mika, thank you again.

[paulF]

Congrates on 100 pages, Mika

This is by far one of my fav threads on the internet

Keep Up the good work ;-)

+1 Mika. Brilliant work

[MIKA27]

Flipping Smart Cars In San Francisco Is A Thing Now

Smart Cars are great. They’re made by Mercedes for squeezing around tight cities like San Francisco. But the shining jewel on the Californian coastline is now home to something more sinister for these novelty cars: people are flipping them over as a prank.

Look. It’s not funny. It’s maliciously damaging to people’s property that they work very hard for.

But at the same time, it is funny. It’s hysterical.

Considering it’s in San Francisco, it’s either a new wave protest against tech companies and gentrification, or it’s an art project.

Either way, it’s one of those things you can’t help but laugh about.

[MIKA27]

Suck It, Robots: Toyota Is Giving Jobs Back To Humans

How the tables have turned. The past few years have seen countless human jobs filled with our less-whiny robot counterparts. But it turns out that, at least for Toyota, the pros of total automation haven’t outweighed the cons. Meaning human factory workers are back in business.

It’s certainly an unconventional move — intentionally taking a step backwards usually is — but Toyota’s reasoning makes sense. Apparently, it’s been suffering from an excess of average workers and a dearth of master craftsmen. As project lead Mitsuru Kawai told Bloomberg:

We need to become more solid and get back to basics, to sharpen our manual skills and further develop them. When I was a novice, experienced masters used to be called gods, and they could make anything…

We cannot simply depend on the machines that only repeat the same task over and over again. To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine.

So while robots may be able to work faster for less money, Toyota pays for their lack of ingenuity and expertise in the long run. For instance, at Toyota’s Honsha plant, workers are now physically twisting, turning, and hammering metal into crankshafts — a process that was previously automated. Consequently, these hands-on experiences have led to a reduction in scrap material and a shortening of the production line by 96 per cent in three years.

Of course, both options come with drawbacks. The push for human workers means that Toyota won’t be building new factories for at least another three years. But in the battle of quality over quantity, humans still come out on top — for now, at least

[MIKA27]

New 'Godzilla' Trailer Gives You Best Look Yet At Everyone's Favourite Giant Lizard

Godzilla, the latest remake in a saga of man versus lizard remakes is coming next month, and this new trailer delivers the best look at the new old beast we’ve had yet.

This. Looks. Awesome.

I think just about any film can be improved with the liberal application of Bryan Cranston. And explosions. And a giant lizard.

Godzilla hits theatres next month.

[MIKA27]

Lake Monsters: Freakish Giants?

When it comes to the matter of lake monsters, two things can be said with a high degree of certainty:

A: sightings have been reported from pretty much all around the world; and

B: the theories for what they may be are as many as they are varied. Ogopogo, Champ, Morag, and the monsters of Loch Ness, Scotland have all captured the collective imagination of the public and the media, as well as the attention of cryptozoologists, the scientific community, and monster-hunters.

But, if lake monsters really do exist – and I think they do – then what are they? That’s a good question…

Certainly, and beyond any shadow of doubt (and particularly so when it comes to the matter of what lurks within Loch Ness) the most popular theory is that the creatures are plesiosaurs: marine reptiles that lived from the Triassic Period, thrived in the Jurassic Period, and finally met their demise at the end of the Cretaceous Period. If such beasts did survive extinction, such a discovery would not just be amazing – it would be beyond amazing!

The plesiosaur theory is far from being the only one, however. As far as Nessie is concerned, Steve Plambeck has offered the intriguing and engaging possibility that the animals are giant-sized salamanders. Then, of course, there is the paranormal theory (which, personally, I do think has some merit), the idea of something complete unknown to science, and even huge catfish, sturgeon and alligator gar.

And there’s another possibility, too: giant eels. Over the years,there have been a number of reports of allegedly huge eels on the loose in the canals of Birmingham, England – most of which date from the late 1970s to the mid-to-late 1980s.

Richard Freeman is the Zoological Director of the Devon, England-based Center for Fortean Zoology (CFZ), and a former head-keeper at England’s Twycross Zoo. Freeman is an adherent of the theory that eels – of appropriately monstrous size – may be the key to the mystery. He says:

“The idea of a prehistoric reptile in these cold northern lakes is a non-starter. However, the monsters could be some kind of large fish. I think the best bet are giant sterile eels. The common eel swims out to the Sargasso Sea to breed then die. The baby eels follow scent trails back to their ancestral fresh waters homes and the cycle begins again. Sometimes, however, a mutation occurs and the eel is sterile. These stay in fresh water and keep on growing. Known as eunuch eels, no-one knows how old they get or how big.”

Hayley Stevens has undertaken an excellent study of a strange creature (or creatures) dwelling within the waters of England’s Lake Windermere. It has become known as Bownessie. In her article, Hayley provides a solid overview of the mystery, and contemplates on the nature of the beast. On that very matter of the creature’s identity, Hayley consulted with Jonathan Downes, the founder and director of the CFZ, who also believes the giant eel scenario has merit.

Jon told Hayley: “European eels are not supposed to get bigger than 4 feet but there is (or was) a 5 foot plus one in Blackpool Tower Aquarium (of all places). I think that once or twice in a generation in a large body of water like Windermere or Loch Ness, a specimen of 8-12 feet could be living.”

He also notes: “In February 2004 two Canadian tourists came upon a 25-foot eel floating in the shallows of Loch Ness. At first they thought it was dead but when it began to move they beat a hasty retreat. In the 1980s a 20-foot eel was reported in the Birmingham Ship Canal. Another 20 foot eel was supposedly caught in the cooling system in some aluminum works in Dores.”

Jon makes another intriguing point, too: “One theory suggests that these rare, naturally occurring, mutations may now be on the increase due to pollution. PCBs have long been implicated in causing sterility in fish. Could they be causing more eunuch eels in the deep lakes of Scotland?”

And as Nessie authority Roland Watson notes: “…it is well known that Loch Ness is teeming with eels. No one knows accurately how many eels inhabit the loch because of their behavior. This is because eels are classed as benthic or ‘bottom feeders’ in that they tend to live on or close to the surface of a sea or lake bottom. Therefore, sonar devices which can be adept at picking up fish in open water cannot easily pick up eels which stay close to the sloping sides of Loch Ness.”

To many seekers of strange beasts, the idea of giant eels – rather than plesiosaurs – lurking in the waters of our world’s lakes might seem tame and even disappointing. If, however, one day you find yourself confronted on the waters of Loch Ness by a marauding, 20-foot-long eel, I seriously doubt you will have any qualms about calling it a monster!

In that sense, monsters live. But, they may not be what many believe (or want) them to be: they may just be extremely large versions of very well known creatures…

[MIKA27]

Wind Turbines Get Off the Ground – Literally

Birds are pretty solidly against windmills but humans on both sides of the wind power debate may soon have a new option to consider, cheer or criticize – high altitude turbines.

Altaeros Energies was founded in 2010 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a mission to develop and deploy the world’s first commercial airborne wind turbine. In late March 2104, the company announced it is ready to break the world record for the highest wind turbine. The record is currently held by the Vestas V164-8.0-MW, a conventional ground turbine built in Denmark with a 460-foot base and blade tips that reach over 720 feet high.

Altaeros Energies’ Buoyant Airborne Turbine or BAT is a helium-filled blimp-like cylinder with the fan blades inside the tube. It is designed to be tethered at high altitudes where winds are stronger, sending the electricity to the ground via wire. For those concerned a bout a blimp being batted about my high winds, the BAT is actually a form of aerostat, the industrial airships used for lifting heavy equipment which are built to survive hurricane-force winds.

In 2013, Altaeros successfully tested a BAT prototype in Maine, reaching a height of 500 feet in 45 mph winds. The record-setting attempt will take place in Alaska near Fairbanks where airborne turbines could someday bring clean power to remote areas. The BAT is expected to reach 1000 feet, breaking the Vestas record by 280 feet.

If successful, the BAT has immediate benefits to many Alaskans. Diesel generators used in remote areas can cost from 35 cents up to $1 per kilowatt-hour, a cost Altaeros says it can reduce to around 18 cents per kilowatt-hour. Since that is still too expensive for conventional use, Altearos plans to market the BAT to isolated towns, military bases, businesses needing temporary power quickly and rescue operations in power-deprived disaster areas.

Buoyant Airborne Turbine sounds like a clean power solution that’s not full of hot air.

[MIKA27]

The Mayans Were Real Head Bashers

It’s a good thing for us the Mayans weren’t around to hear the disparaging comments the world made in 2012 about their calendar. It turns out they had a fondness for responding to criticism by cracking heads with spiked clubs.

Researchers studying Mayan remains have found indications that the culture was particularly violent in warfare, with tactics including flaying, decapitation, heart extraction and head fractures. To learn more about the head injuries, Dr. Stanley Serafin, a bioarchaeologist from Central Queensland University, led a team studying 116 Mayan skulls recovered from 13 sites in Mexico dating from between 600 BC and 1542 AD. Their findings are published in the online and print editions of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Serafin’s team found that many of the injuries were two oval-shaped indentations next to each other, which is consistent with wounds inflicted by wooden clubs with stone spikes. They also discovered that men had more of these fractures than women and they were on the front left of their skulls, suggesting they were hit by a right-handed person on a level surface with little cover to duck behind.

This contradicts previous accepted theories that the Mayans favored surprise attacks rather than face-to-face hand-to-hand – or in this case, hand-to-head – combat.

The era when the injuries were inflicted was also studied. Dr Serafin’s team found no evidence that violence contributed to the mysterious end of the Classic period from 250 AD to 900 AD. However, violence and warfare increased in the Postclassic period (900 to 1500 AD) as the Mayans suffered hard times.

While no spiked clubs have been found at Mayan archeological sites, paintings depicting warfare show them being used along with spears, atlatls (a spear-throwing device), darts, arrows, slings for hurling stones and maquahuitl – a wooden weapon edged with obsidian or flint and wielded in chopping or slicing motions like a sword.

[MIKA27]

This $1,300, Lightning-Fast External Drive Is Worth Every Penny

It’s fairly unassuming sitting on a desktop. It’s small, about the size of your fist. And it’s perhaps a bit ominous with that Cyclops blue eye glowing at you. The aluminum folds along the sides, designed to expel heat from the internal workings, give the impression of something high-performance.

Those impressions are correct — spin it around and you’ll see a pair of Thunderbolt 2 ports in the back. This is LaCie’s new Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2, a drive designed to move giant files, video streams, and masses of data at speeds that push the limits of what external drives can achieve.

A couple of very important things to note: While there are plenty of options in LaCie’s Thunderbolt series of storage drives, this particular model is the only one to utilize the second-gen Thunderbolt 2 I/O specification, and it is only available as a 1TB SSD.

Those “onlys” add up — the retail price of this little box is $1,300. But it’s meant for content pros who really need a very fast external drive with crazy-fat throughput — filmmakers working with 4K video, for example — and professional devices always command high price tags.

The original Thunderbolt technology offered basically twice the throughput speed of USB 3. Not too shabby, but the newer Thunderbolt 2 offers a full four times the data transfer speed of USB 3. Such in-the-blink-of-an-eye transfer times are loved by video editors, most of whom are running Mac OS X and using one of the rare computers with Thunderbolt 2 built in, like the new Mac Pro or latest MacBook Pro with Retina. This crowd is central to LaCie’s business — the new Little Big Disk even comes in a darker colored case to better match the Mac Pro’s particular luster. And though Thunderbolt is an Intel invention, Windows PC vendors (most of whom are using Intel CPUs) have ironically shunned Thunderbolt, putting their money behind USB 3.0 instead.

The Little Big Disk’s incredible throughput is the obvious big selling point, but that’s only part of what makes the drive truly impressive. Unique to Thunderbolt 2 technology is its ability to handle two simultaneous streams through a single cable, such as a data stream as well as a video signal, purposefully designed for the exceptional throughput demands of 4K video. Thunderbolt 2 supports daisy chaining up to six peripherals at once, from other hard drives to cameras and monitors with DisplayPort 1.2 compatibility.

Installation is two steps: Plug in the AC power brick (the drive, alas, does not draw power from the computer like a USB drive does) and connect the supplied Thunderbolt cable from the SSD drive to your computer. Out of the box, the dual PCI SSDs are configured as a RAID 0 set, which is better for speed. Using Disk Utility (or your utility of choice), you can re-configure it as a mirrored RAID 1 drive for added protection, or as JBOD.

The only thing unsexy about the Little Big Disk is its one-percenter’s price. And even then, you’re not exactly being gouged for margins; SSD chips are expensive, and the build quality here is top-rate. LaCie also includes all necessary cables, from Thunderbolt to an array of international electrical socket plugs. It’s tiny, lightweight, and highly mobile. In fact, it is an incredible storage device — for those who can put it to use.

[MIKA27]

EXBURY EGG FLOATING HOUSE IN ENGLAND

We’ve proven many a times that collaborations between several designers always lead to the most creative projects. The Exbury Egg floating house proves that notion to still ring true.

Designer Stephen Turner has teamed up with the likes of SPUD Group and PAD Studio to create a floating shelter that will serve as home for the next 12 months. Shaped like a giant wooden egg, the shelter was constructed using boat building techniques, which means there should be no issues if the water gets a bit uneasy during a storm. Equipped with everything from a small stove and shower to the hammock bed and desk, this tiny dwelling has all the essentials. As you may have already guessed, the residence utilizes solar power for electricity, keeping you completely off the grid.

[MIKA27]

TAG HEUER MONACO V4 TOURBILLON WATCH

Some of us don't need much out of a watch to make us happy — understated good looks and a face without much flash are plenty. But there are some of us who need more, who find beauty in the sheer complexity of masterful watchmaking.

The Tag Heuer Monaco V4 Tourbillon Watch is made with the latter in mind, as it features the world's first belt-driven tourbillon (the most complicated watch component around), all of which is fully visible through the face and case back. It also features a polished black titanium case, a beveled sapphire crystal, a sapphire case back, water resistance to 50 meters, and a hand-stitched alligator strap. So if you're the kind of guy who likes to keep things complicated, this watch has your name written all over it.

[MIKA27]

CICLOTTE EXERCISE BIKE

Yes, it's ridiculously expensive, but the Ciclotte Exercise Bike ($12,000) is also the only piece of exercise equipment I've seen that screams to be seen instead of hidden in a bunker-like home gym.

The Ciclotte features a complex dual satellite epicycloid transmission, a carbon-and-alcantara adjustable saddle, a touch-screen display, pedals placed closer to the saddle for correct biomechanics, a slender, unicycle-style frame, and unique carbon handlebars. Getting in shape never looked so good.

[MIKA27]

Why Street Protests Don't Work

Street protests are in. From Bangkok to Caracas, and Madrid to Moscow, these days not a week goes by without news that a massive crowd has amassed in the streets of another of the world’s big cities. The reasons for the protests vary (bad and too-costly public transport or education, the plan to raze a park, police abuse, etc.). Often, the grievance quickly expands to include a repudiation of the government, or its head, or more general denunciations of corruption and economic inequality.

Aerial photos of the anti-government marches routinely show an intimidating sea of people furiously demanding change. And yet, it is surprising how little these crowds achieve. The fervent political energy on the ground is hugely disproportionate to the practical results of these demonstrations.

Notable exceptions of course exist: In Egypt, Tunisia, and Ukraine, street protests actually contributed to the overthrow of the government. But most massive rallies fail to create significant changes in politics or public policies. Occupy Wall Street is a great example. Born in the summer of 2011 (not in Wall Street but in Kuala Lumpur’s Dataran Merdeka), the Occupy movement spread quickly and was soon roaring in the central squares of nearly 2,600 cities around the world.

The hodgepodge groups that participated had no formal affiliation with one another, no clear hierarchy, and no obvious leaders. But social networks helped to virally replicate the movement so that the basic patterns of camping, protesting, fundraising, communicating with the media, and interacting with the authorities were similar from place to place. The same message echoed everywhere: It is unacceptable that global wealth is concentrated in the hands of an elite 1 percent while the remaining 99 percent can barely scrape by.

Such a global, massive, and seemingly well-organized initiative should have had a greater impact. But it didn’t. Though the topic of economic inequality has gained momentum in the years since, in practice it is hard to find meaningful changes in public policy based on Occupy’s proposals. By and large the Occupy movement has now vanished from the headlines.

In fact, government responses usually amount to little more than rhetorical appeasement, and certainly no major political reforms. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, for example, publicly validated the frustrations of those who took to the streets of her country, and promised that changes would be made, but those ‘changes’ have yet to materialize. The reaction of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the protests in his country was more aggressive. He accused the opposition and protesters of plotting a sophisticated conspiracy against him, and tried to block Twitter and YouTube. Earlier this month, Erdogan scored a huge victory in Turkey’s local elections. The same dynamic has played out during demonstrations against violence in Mexico City and corruption in New Delhi: massive marches, scant results.

Why? How can so many extremely motivated people achieve so little? One answer might be found in the results of an experiment conducted by Anders Colding-Jørgensen of the University of Copenhagen. In 2009, he created a Facebook group to protest the demolition of the historic Stork Fountain in a major square of the Danish capital. Ten thousand people joined in the first week; after two weeks, the group was 27,000 members-strong. That was the extent of the experiment. There was never a plan to demolish the fountain—Colding-Jørgensen simply wanted to show how easy it was to create a relatively large group using social media.

Anti-government protesters wake up in their encampment in Bangkok.

In today’s world, an appeal to protest via Twitter, Facebook, or text message is sure to attract a crowd, especially if it is to demonstrate against something—anything, really—that outrages us. The problem is what happens after the march. Sometimes it ends in violent confrontation with the police, and more often than not it simply fizzles out. Behind massive street demonstrations there is rarely a well-oiled and more-permanent organization capable of following up on protesters’ demands and undertaking the complex, face-to-face, and dull political work that produces real change in government. This is the important point made by Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, who writes that “Before the Internet, the tedious work of organizing that was required to circumvent censorship or to organize a protest also helped build infrastructure for decision making and strategies for sustaining momentum. Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment.”

There is a powerful political engine running in the streets of many cities. It turns at high speed and produces a lot of political energy. But the engine is not connected to wheels, and so the “movement” doesn’t move. Achieving that motion requires organizations capable of old-fashioned and permanent political work that can leverage street demonstrations into political change and policy reforms. In most cases, that means political parties. But it doesn’t necessarily mean existing parties that demonstrators don’t trust to be change agents. Instead, as I have written elsewhere, we need new or deeply reformed parties that can energize both idealists who feel politically homeless and professionals who are fully devoted to the daily grind of building a political organization that knows how to convert political energy into public policies.

As many have noted, social media can both facilitate and undermine the formation of more effective political parties. We are familiar with the power of social media to identify, recruit, mobilize, and coordinate supporters as well as to fundraise. But we also know that clicktivism and slacktivism undermine real political work by creating the feel-good illusion that clicking “like’’ on a Facebook page or tweeting incendiary messages from the comfort of one’s computer or smartphone is equivalent to the activism that effects change.

What we’ve witnessed in recent years is the popularization of street marches without a plan for what happens next and how to keep protesters engaged and integrated in the political process. It’s just the latest manifestation of the dangerous illusion that it is possible to have democracy without political parties—and that street protests based more on social media than sustained political organizing is the way to change society.

[MIKA27]

The Atomic Polygon Desktop

The icons are big and bright on this desktop, but it doesn’t make this design by Flickr user Aswath any less interesting. It’s a nice mix of fun and functional, perfect for a laptop display. Here’s how he set it up.

If you want your desktop to look like the one above, here’s what you’ll need:

• The wallpaper from Wallpapers Wide
• The Rainmeter system tweaking and monitoring tool for Windows
• The Basic Skins Suite for the media player on the desktop
• The Do I Need a Jacket? skin for Rainmeter for the weather forecast
• The Alphabar skin for Rainmeter for the status and shortcut bar across the bottom of the screen
• The Dexclock wallpaper clock utility
• The Flax Fairy wallpaper clock for the time display in the background
• Fences by StarDock to show/hide the application icons and any other tools on the desktop at will

I like this one because it’s both clean and functional. Fences lets you show icons when you need to see them, and get rid of them when you don’t. If you like what you see here but run into problems setting it up, head over to Aswath’s Flickr page to ask how he customised some of the utilities to look and work just so.

The Atomic Polygon Desktop

[NJP]

Smart car tipping. I love it.

[MIKA27]

The Cool Spaceships Of Star Citizen

If everything goes well, Star Citizen is going to be one of the games of the decade — an immersive space opera in which players would be able to have a parallel life. There are 200 teams designing spaceships for this persistent universe in a worldwide contest. Here are a few of them.

Some are clearly inspired by movies or TV shows. Like this from Aliens…

…or this, which looks like a big Battlestar Galactica Raptor.

Some of them are really ’80s:

Oh, and there will be cities too:

In case you don’t know what Star Citizen is, here’s its creator Chris Roberts — of Wing Commander fame — giving an amazing demo:

Here’s the demo of one of the ships:

[MIKA27]

Amazing New Spinal Cord Implant Revives Paralysed Man's Legs

A pioneering new technique which uses electrical implants in the spines of paralysed patients can help them move their legs again — and could soon allow them to walk once more too.

The new research, part of a study by scientists at the University of Louisville’s Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center, saw four wheelchair-bound men — who were completely paralysed below the waist — fitted with an array of electrodes in the lumbosacral region of the spinal cord. That’s the main processing unit which links the brain to the spinal cord and it was hoped that by correctly stimulating it the patient’s’ legs could be made to move once more.

It worked. Now, all four patients can move their legs and toes, and some can even lift up to 100kg with their legs. The research is published in Brain. New Scientist explains how it works:

The implant restores what in healthy people would be the resting potential of the spinal cord, the baseline electrical activity that keeps the cord alert, but which wanes through lack of use in people who are paralysed… Once this background electrical impetus is restored artificially, the cord reawakens and can register the brain’s “intent” to move from the brain and convert this into fine movement at the motor neuron level. And by modulating the voltage for each individual and for each task, algorithms that optimise delivery of electrical activity for specific movement can be worked out and applied at will by the patients.

As you’ll see when you watch the video, above, the co-ordination isn’t there for these patients to walk yet — but that’s the next step for the researchers. They hope that increasing the number of electrodes — from 16 to 27 — will make the control more fine-grained, and help them walk again. The researchers are currently testing the new devices in animals.

Leg movement isn’t the only upside, though. All the patients have reported that, to varying degrees, they have regained recovered bladder, bowel and sexual function. In other words, this thing totally changes lives; let’s hope it’s widely available soon.

[MIKA27]

These Pterodactyls Combat Jets Are So Damn Cool

I love these three concept designs for the combat jets in the sci-fi love movie Is This Heaven, directed by Bastiaan Koch. They look like pterodactyls. Are those flexible metal wings? So cool. I love how the pilot gets into them.

Here’s the movie plot:

Jack, a soldier in a future war, finds love in the after-life only to be revived, causing him to repeatedly throw himself back into the fight ever harder, seeking death.

When he is finally discharged, detained and restrained, his only hope to rejoin his love is an unlikely friendship Jack found whilst sparing an enemy’s life; a young girl named Mathilda.

But is his love real, or a figment of his imagination? For some, it does not matter, as long as it drives him to continue to win the war.

Some more concept designs:

Bastiaan Koch is a Dutch-American film director, artist and concept designer. His work includes mecha and exoskeleton robotics work with Industrial Light & Magic.

You can follow him Twitter and his production company site. You can follow the movie process in Facebook.

[MIKA27]

Banish the Black Box: There’s a Better Way to Capture Plane Crash Data

One month after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished, search officials said the Australian navy ship Ocean Shield has twice detected signals that may be coming from the airplane’s black box data recorder. The signal is at the same frequency used by the locator beacon on the device. Angus Houston, the retired Australian Air Force chief, called it “a most promising lead.”

Additional ships will search the area in an attempt to home in on the signal. Should the signal indeed be from the downed plane’s black box or cockpit voice recorder, authorities will begin the arduous task of retrieving them from the sea floor. Then they can finally begin to piece together the mystery of Flight 370.

The fact that the black box and cockpit voice recorders must be physically retrieved and the data downloaded seems positively archaic in an era when we all have GPS in our pocket, OnStar in our cars and the NSA can track anyone, anywhere. Indeed, the technology exists to render black boxes obsolete, and the question of why we aren’t using it came to the fore after Air France Flight 447 crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. WIRED explored the question of why we still use black boxes and what alternatives there are in this piece from 2011, which remains relevant in light of MH370.

The black boxes were sitting on the ocean floor in what would have been plain sight, if there were any light at a depth of 12,800 feet. They were guarded by silent corpses, the passengers and crew of an Airbus A330 that plummeted to the bottom of the Atlantic in June 2009. For nearly two years, the boxes—not black, actually, but bright orange—had lain amid some of the most rugged undersea terrain in the world, 11,500-foot mountains rising from the ocean floor, covered with landslides and steep scarps. Until the days in May when an advanced robotic submersible, the Remora 6000, brought the two black boxes from Air France flight 447 to the surface, they were among the world’s most sought-after artifacts, the keys to understanding why a state-of-the-art widebody jet fell out of the sky on a routine flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, killing all 228 aboard. Since no one knew the exact coordinates of the crash, the searchers had to extrapolate their grid from the plane’s last known location. It took a team led by the king of undersea searchers, Dave Gallo of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, to find the wreckage; Phoenix International, a deepwater recovery company, finally brought the recorders home. Why did it take so long? “You can find a needle in a haystack,” Gallo says, “but you have to find the haystack first.”

French accident investigators removed the memory cards, carefully dried them, plugged in the right cables, and soon announced that the boxes had preserved nearly all the data they had captured—two hours of audio recorded from the cockpit and a complete record of thousands of measurements taken between takeoff and the moment the Airbus crashed. It was regarded, rightly, as a technological triumph. Although voice and data recorders are built to withstand the most extreme conditions of shock, fire, and pressure—they get fired from an air cannon as part of the testing regimen—they are not designed to preserve data for so long at such depths. The black boxes, built by Honeywell, had greatly exceeded their specifications.

But this elaborate and expensive undersea search could have been avoided; the technology has long existed that could make the recorders obsolete. As the BEA, the French agency that investigates air accidents, struggled to explain the crash in two inconclusive interim reports in 2009, the question was already being asked: If real-time stock quotes can be transmitted to anyone with a smartphone, why does the vital work of investigating an airplane crash still depend on reading physical memory chips that must be rescued from the wreckage?

The tragedy of Air France 447 might have been on the minds of executives from Bombardier, the Canadian aircraft manufacturer, when they announced in 2010 that their new CSeries narrow-body jets, scheduled to come to market in 2013, would be the first commercial airliners built with the capability to transmit telemetry data instead of merely recording it. The idea—to stream black box data in real time, either directly to a ground station or by satellite relay—isn’t new, even though there remains no consensus on whether to call it an uplink, which is conceptually accurate, or a downlink, which expresses the physical relationship of an airplane to the ground.

Bombardier is advertising the innovation not as a way to improve crash investigation—survivability of data after a crash isn’t something airplane manufacturers like to boast about—but as a way to give airlines a central database for routine information on airplane operations and mechanical performance. At a minimum, the data could be stored securely as a backup to black boxes in the event of an accident. One company, Calgary-based FLYHT AeroMechanical Services, already provides this service as an aftermarket retrofit; so far, smaller carriers and charters have been the main customers.

But until the Air France crash, streaming data was mostly considered a solution in search of a problem. Black boxes were almost always found: The last US or European accident from which onboard data recorders were not recovered was the World Trade Center attacks, in which both planes were essentially vaporized. When planes crash into the ocean, locator beacons on the black boxes send out an ultrasonic ping designed to be heard through the water at distances of up to several miles. “Approach and landing accidents are half the crashes in a given year,” says Bill Voss, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, “and then you just walk over and pick it up.” Even in the more difficult cases, black boxes usually survive. Data was retrieved from the recorders aboard the hijacked United Airlines flight 93, which nosed into a Pennsylvania field on 9/11 at an estimated speed of over 550 miles an hour, gouging a crater 8 feet deep.

Invented in the 1950s after a spate of accidents involving the de Havilland Comet, the first commercial jet, flight data recorders have become standard equipment on all but the smallest aircraft. The earliest models recorded data with a moving stylus on a roll of foil; as recently as 1994, when USAir flight 427 rolled over and crashed on approach to Pittsburgh, the flight data recorder on the Boeing 737 measured only 13 parameters, such as altitude, airspeed, heading, pitch and roll, and whether the pilots were pulling or pushing on the control column. It did not, for instance, record the position of the rudder or of the rudder pedals in the cockpit—information that turned out to be crucial in the investigation, which took five years before probable cause was ascribed to a malfunction in the rudder’s hydraulic control valve.

As a result, the latest black boxes are far more sophisticated. The FAA requires most planes flying today to monitor only 88 parameters, generally once or twice per second, but data recorders on modern commercial jetliners may track as many as 3,000 data points, including the status of every system on the aircraft, the positions of cockpit controls, and pressure and temperature readings from fuel tanks and hydraulic systems. Sensors monitor every point in the engines from intake to exhaust. And starting next year, new rules will require that critical measurements such as the positions of flaps, ailerons, and rudders get sampled eight times per second. Some airlines use this data for routine purposes like scheduling engine maintenance, but you never know what might turn out to be important in a crash investigation. It is, of course, far more information than is available to pilots in the cockpit—or that they could possibly absorb during a crisis. When something goes wrong at 550 miles an hour, it can go wrong very quickly.

The Present: Onboard Recorders: Today, ruggedized electronics capture and record what happens during a flight—data that later gets downloaded or erased.

1 Input This circuit board is the first stop in the box for data—up to 3,000 parameters—collected by sensors throughout the fuselage.

2 Armor The casing, made of stainless steel and/or titanium, can withstand impacts at up to 3,400 g’s.

3 Memory Thermally insulated solid-state flash drives store up to several gigabytes of data.

4 Beacon The distress signal self-activates after an accident, sending out an ultrasonic pulse every second for 30 days. The ping can be detected through 14,000 feet of water.

“Keep your hands out of the sandbox,” warns the technician at the L-3 Aviation Recorders plant in Sarasota, Florida. In a waist-high wooden planter filled with sand sits an L-3 black box. Three components are mounted on an aluminum chassis: a box containing the circuitry and battery, the underwater locator beacon, and a squat cylinder holding the memory chip that would, in a real accident, invisibly preserve in its very atoms the trajectory of an aircraft’s fatal plunge or the dying words of pilots as the ground rushed up to fill their field of vision. A quarter-ton weight looms 10 feet above, with a protruding steel pin an inch and a half long centered above the memory-chip housing. When the weight is released, it falls with a crash onto the machine below, bending and crumpling the base but dealing little more than a deep scratch to the bright orange case. That is the “penetration-resistance test,” one of a half-dozen trials by fire, water, and gravity through which black boxes must demonstrate the ability to protect their precious cargo.

“You could make a nice laptop case out of that stuff,” a visitor remarks to Thomas Schmutz, L-3 Aviation Recorders’ vice president for engineering. “What is it?”

“Metal,” Schmutz says drily. It’s probably some combination of steel and titanium, but the exact composition is a secret, as are the ingredients in the wafer of insulating material that preserves the data on the chip even after it’s cooked for an hour at over 2,000 degrees. In their rites of passage, black boxes are shot out of a cannon at a crushing 3,400 times the force of Earth’s gravity, squeezed in a hydraulic press at 5,000 pounds for five minutes, and subjected to water pressure at a simulated depth of 20,000 feet. They are soaked in jet fuel, lubricating oil, and hydraulic fluid for 48 hours and immersed in seawater for 30 days. The housing isn’t meant to be watertight—you don’t want 600 atmospheres of pressure differential bearing on the walls, Schmutz says—but the data has to survive anyway.

On rare occasions a crash will damage the circuit boards so they can’t just be plugged in and read. In that case, technicians can, under high magnification, put leads directly on the memory chips and pull the data off, bit by bit. It’s a demonstration of the lengths to which the aviation industry will go to assure access to this information. Billions of dollars in liability claims may hinge on it, after all, not to mention the lives of future passengers. But as impressive as all this brute-force technology is, there’s a much more elegant solution.

L-3 builds 3,500 to 6,300 black boxes a year here for aviation and oceangoing ships. On a test bench, a black box trails a bundle of wires as thick as a child’s arm. In a jet those wires would be threaded through the fuselage to every working part of the plane, affording a tiny glimpse into the immense complexity of a modern jetliner. For the most part, the recorders piggyback on the sensors that feed information to the cockpit displays and the autopilot, although the ones made by L-3 use a separate, dedicated three-axis accelerometer as a check against the plane’s own inertial guidance system. At one station, two women are assembling control panels for cockpit voice recorders. “There’s the erase button,” says John Kerwin, vice president of operations. “I’ve never met a pilot yet who believes it works, but it does.”

And that illuminates one major problem with the idea of streaming data from aircraft in flight, at least as it pertains to cockpit audio: the near certainty that pilots will never stand for it. By law, cockpit voice recordings may be accessed only by investigators after an accident. When a flight arrives safely at the gate, the pilot hits the erase button. (It won’t work in flight or during taxiing.) In the event of an accident, transcripts may be released as part of a report but not, as a rule, the actual recording. This is partly a matter of professional pride, partly to spare the feelings of pilots’ families if they are killed. But primarily it seems to be a labor-management issue. The Air Line Pilots Association, the aviators’ union, mobilized last year to fight a bill that would allow airlines to use voice and data recorders to evaluate the performance of cockpit crews—a proposal evidently inspired by a well-publicized incident in which two Northwest Airlines pilots, lost in conversation, failed to notice Minneapolis outside the window and overflew their destination by more than 100 miles.

In principle, streaming voice links could be encrypted for transmission and treated with the same confidentiality on the ground; in practice, anyone familiar with the issue agrees that pilots will insist on keeping the voice recordings on board the plane, under their physical control. Even outside safety experts agree it’s probably a bad idea to make flight crews worry about how every innocent remark might sound to the gimlet-eyed denizens of Flight Operations. (Some cloud formations really do look like a flight attendant’s behind.) Streaming voice “won’t happen,” says Flight Safety’s Voss. “We don’t need an aircraft reality program.”

The Future: Streaming Data: In the coming years, data about airplanes in flight could be transmitted to a storage facility on the ground.

• 1 Transmission Top-mounted antennas communicate with satellites. At lower altitudes, data can be sent directly to ground receivers.
• 2 Bandwidth To save money, planes could flash data intermittently, switching to streaming in an emergency.
• 3 Satellites By 2015, a constellation of dedicated search- and-rescue satellites will track planes’ locations more quickly worldwide.
• 4 Storage Servers Today, roughly a dozen servers around the world store and send real-time flight data. Eventually, every airline would own its own servers.

Would pilots object to streaming data from flight recorders? Hard to say, because a spokesperson for the union would not comment for this article—a measure, perhaps, of how sensitive the issue is. The Pilots Association opposed black boxes, too, when they were proposed, but relented when data from one helped clear a pilot accused of flying too close to the ground. A likelier source of objections are the airlines. Data storage is practically too cheap to measure, but data bandwidth—especially on satellites, which would be required for coverage over oceans and the poles—is expensive (about $1 per kilobyte). That’s a cost not likely to be absorbed without a fight by an industry whose margins aren’t much bigger than the olive that legendary American Airlines chief Bob Crandall removed from passengers’ salads, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

But that’s an economic challenge. The technical ones are less daunting. The Iridium network, which covers the entire globe with 66 orbiting satellites, could probably accommodate the bandwidth needed to transmit at least the 88 required parameters from the 8,000 or so commercial flights in operation at any moment. Krishna M. Kavi, a professor of computer science at the University of North Texas, estimates that the worldwide demand would be about 64 megabits per second, only a portion of which would have to be sent by satellite. Using different assumptions, Seymour Levine, an inventor who has devised his own telemetry, estimates the maximum bandwidth requirement at 25 Mbps and the total storage requirement for a day’s worth of data at 100 gigabytes—a quarter the speed of a fast broadband connection and less disk space than an iPod classic.

This data, aggregated terrestrially instead of scattered among thousands of black boxes constantly flying around the world, would inevitably call forth other uses. Airlines could mine it for information about flight operations and use it to schedule maintenance and fine-tune fuel efficiency. Jet engines are already among the most closely monitored machines in the world, but manufacturers can always use more data; FLYHT AeroMechanical Services claims that its system, called AFIRS, detected and transmitted a warning about an out-of-spec turbine vibration in time to prevent a possibly catastrophic in-flight failure aboard one of its customers’ planes. But to really think outside the, um, box, you have to consider the implications of having all this information while the airplanes are still in the air.

In most cases, by the time anyone pulls the black box data, it is by definition too late. The catastrophe has already happened. Pilots are usually on their own in coping with onboard emergencies, and for all their skill and courage, they can easily be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data pouring into the cockpit. But suppose there were a way to share that load? It would require a system for detecting when an aircraft is in trouble, triggered manually by the pilots or automatically when, say, an engine flames out or the plane makes an unusual movement. And then it would link to a pilot or engineer standing by on the ground, who could receive data and communicate with the pilots on board—a NASA-like mission control.

In August 2001, after running out of fuel over the Atlantic, the pilots of an Air Transat flight glided to a heroic landing in the Azores, saving the lives of the 306 people aboard. But the reason they ran out of fuel in the first place was that one tank was leaking. This caused a weight imbalance, which they tried to correct by pumping fuel from the heavy tank into the one with the hole. Would an experienced pilot, seeing the same data from the safety of the ground, have caught the mistake? If you’d been aboard that plane, you certainly would have thought a streaming data link was worth trying.

Levine, together with his wife, has patented a system he calls Safelander that would enable ground-based pilots to take remote control of airplanes in flight—something, he points out, that could have foiled the 9/11 hijackings had it been in operation. If it sounds far-fetched, consider that the military now does this routinely, flying drones in combat and surveillance missions overseas from remote locations in the United States. There are predictions that freight airlines may decide in the next few years that a plane whose only passengers are, say, lobsters can be safely flown by one pilot with a backup on the ground to handle takeoffs, landings, and emergencies. Or by no onboard pilots at all.

Workers pull the Air France flight 447 data recorder from the bottom of the Atlantic

After the Air France disaster, the International Civil Aviation Organization convened a panel on how to ensure that black-box data is never again lost in a crash. One proposal garnering support is to require duplicate black boxes that would automatically eject from a plane on impact, propelled by compressed air or even a small explosive charge. Equipped with GPS and a radio transmitter, they would float on the surface of an ocean, broadcasting their location. Such a pop-out, pop-up box would be far less expensive than full-scale, always-on data streaming—and for all its advanced technology, the airline industry, which in most of the world is directly or indirectly controlled by national governments, is remarkably conservative and penurious.

Still, some limited version of data streaming will probably be adopted, according to participants in the meetings. “Triggered transmissions,” which would begin automatically when certain safety parameters like airspeed, vertical descent rates, roll, or pitch are exceeded, would offer most of the safety benefits at a fraction of the cost of an always-on system. Based on existing crash data, engineers have even devised experimental algorithms that can tell with near-perfect accuracy when a plane is in danger of crashing about 30 seconds in advance—in a simulation. Obviously, you would still want the black boxes to reconstruct the whole scenario after the fact, but that’s the point: The transmission would also give you the plane’s last location, so you’d know where to start looking, giving you a head start not just on finding the black box but on dispatching rescue and recovery teams.

That’s a more powerful idea than most people realize, says Matt Bradley, a former commercial pilot and vice president of business development at FLYHT. “People assume that a modern airliner is being tracked continuously from takeoff to landing,” Bradley says. “If you’re flying from Chicago to Miami, sure. But over the oceans, or north of 60 degrees, or over a lot of Asia and South America, there is no radar. Nobody sees you, and nobody sees you if you go down.”

That much is clear from the BEA’s summary of communications among controllers on both sides of the Atlantic in the early morning hours of June 1, 2009. Long after Air France 447 was in the water, stations kept asking one another if they’d heard from the crew, whose last communication, to a station on the Brazilian coast, was at 1:35 (Coordinated Universal Time). Sometime after that it went missing, and around 2:48, half an hour after it was expected to report its position to controllers at Dakar, Senegal, there was a flurry of chatter. But the fact that no one had actually heard from the pilots did not seem to set off any alarms. More than an hour elapsed before anyone thought to ask about the flight again, when Cape Verde called Dakar asking when the flight was due to pass a certain waypoint in the Atlantic.

The Dakar controller replied that the plane was supposed to pass at 3:45, whereupon the controller at Cape Verde pointed out that it was already 4:08. A full hour later, Dakar reported, with a cheerful “No worry,” that the flight was in Cape Verde’s airspace. As late as 6:35, a controller in Madrid reported to Brest—the air traffic control center in France responsible for southern Europe—that AF447 was in contact with Casablanca. Air France’s operations center called Casablanca and a few minutes later called Brest to say that in fact Casablanca hadn’t heard from the plane. Brest reported back that the Casablanca center was in contact with AF459.

Oops. Wrong flight.

In fact, Air France 447 transmitted a number of distress messages right after 2:10, but no one was listening. These were brief, automated signals from the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System. Its messages go to the airline’s headquarters and usually concern minor anomalies to be checked by ground crews during maintenance. If anyone had been monitoring them, though, the messages would have been cause for alarm: They reported, in quick succession, a divergence in readings among the plane’s three airspeed gauges, the disengagement of the autopilot, various system failures, and a cabin vertical-speed advisory, signaling a change in altitude at a rate exceeding 1,800 feet per minute. But these messages were discovered only after everyone knew that the plane had crashed.

With just this data, a plausible scenario has emerged to explain the accident: Ice, possibly from thunderstorms, may have partially blocked one or more of the Pitot tubes that project from the fuselage and measure airspeed. Divergent readings from the airspeed indicators would cause the autopilot to disengage, at which point the pilots would have had to adjust thrust manually without knowing for sure how fast they were going. At that altitude, around 35,000 feet, the margin for error in speed control is narrow. A little too slow and the thin air passing over the wings can’t provide lift, sending the aircraft plummeting in a stall; a little too fast and windspeed over portions of the wing approaches the speed of sound, causing buffeting and loss of control. Plotted on a graph of stall velocity against altitude, the boundaries of the safe-flight region make a sharp angle that pilots call the “coffin corner.” Exceed the envelope in either direction and the results can be disastrous.

Whether that is actually what happened is a secret that only the microchips in the black boxes can reveal. The story of flight 447 is an unsettling reminder to those who cross the vast empty places on the globe of just how alone they actually are—and the potential for technology to make them just a little less lonely as they thunder through the night.

[MIKA27]

New York man exonerated after 25 years in prison for murder

A New York man has been exonerated over a 1989 murder as part of larger review of questionable convictions.

Jonathan Fleming, now 51, had been on holiday in Disney World at the time of the murder and had documents supporting his alibi, but he was still convicted.

Since then, a key eyewitness has recanted and prosecutors turned up a hotel receipt proving he was in Florida hours before the killing.

"I feel wonderful," Mr Fleming said after a judge dismissed his case.

"I've always had faith," he said. "I knew that this day would come some day."

He had told officials from the start he had been in Florida when Darryl Rush was killed in Brooklyn in 1989. Prosecutors argued the shooting was motivated by a dispute over money.

He had plane tickets, videos and postcards from his trip, but prosecutors at the time suggested he could have made a quick round-trip plane trip to return to New York.

Despite a key witness saying she had lied soon after his 1990 conviction, he had lost his previous appeals.

A review of the case files produced a hotel receipt Mr Fleming paid in Florida five hours before the shooting and a letter from Orlando police saying employees at the hotel remembered him.

Neither the receipt nor the police letter had been provided to Mr Fleming's first defence lawyer, despite rules that generally require investigators to turn over such material.

Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson said in a statement he had dropped the case against Mr Fleming because of "key alibi facts that place Fleming in Florida at the time of the murder".

The move comes amid scrutiny of Brooklyn prosecutors' process for reviewing questionable convictions, led in part by Mr Thompson, who was elected last year.

When Mr Fleming was asked about his plans, he said: "I'm going to go eat dinner with my mother and my family, and I'm going to live the rest of my life."

[MIKA27]

THE BEER MOTH TRUCK HOTEL ROOM

When it comes to the perfect weekend getaway, we can’t imagine the thought of a 1956 Commer Q4 is at the top of list – or even on the list for that matter. We think this vintage fire service truck turned 2-person accommodation may change your mind. Introducing the Beer Moth.

If you’re really looking to explore everything the Scottish countryside has to offer on your next vacation, then look no further than this bad boy. Located on the Inshriach House estate in Aviemore, the truck has been completely retrofitted and updated to provide you and your spouse with a solid night’s rest. The roof has been raised a foot, an oak parquet floor rescued from a Tudor mansion has been hand-laid, and an old cottage door has been given new life on this mobile “hotel.” The Beer Moth comes equipped with one double bed, and while they do allow pets, there are no kids allowed. Purchase

[MIKA27]

HONDA CX500 MOTORCYCLE BY KUSTOM RESEARCH

Typically, if we were to say Honda CX500 custom, you would probably continue scrolling. But what Thomas Parrish (owner/operator of Kustom Research) has done with this 2-wheeler may lead to a change of heart.

Considered by many to be one of the ugliest horses from the Honda stable, the CX500 can be a great platform for would-be and up-and-coming custom bike builders to really stand out in the crowd. That’s exactly what Parrish did. Working as an engineer by day, he had to dedicate nights and weekends to transforming this motorcycle from ugly duckling to cream of the crop. The vehicle has been outfitted with a slew of custom components from the headlight mount up front all the way down to the rear subframe out black. The black and white paint job was the perfect color scheme when it came to creating a bike that’s worthy of all enthusiasts attention.