SuperData: digital games and interactive media revenue was up 4% YoY to $120.1B in 2019, with $64.4B for mobile; Fortnite topped with $1.8B, vs. $2.4B in 2018 — The combined game industry grew 3% to $120.1 billion in 2019, according to market researcher SuperData in its year-end report.
In his recently published book “Astounding,” the author Alec Nevala-Lee brings American science fiction’s Golden Age back into focus by following four key figures: John W. Campbell, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard — and Isaac Asimov, who officially turned 100 today (his exact birth date was unknown).
Nevala-Lee’s warts-and-all portrait paints Asimov — known to his fans as the Good Doctor — far more sympathetically than the genre’s other founding fathers. He’s charming and self-deprecating, generous to other writers and editors, a politically progressive thinker and a tireless defender of science and rationality.
But Nevala-Lee is clear about another aspect of Asimov’s story: He was someone who unapologetically groped women.
As recounted in “Astounding,” Judith Merrill said Asimov was known in his younger days as “the man with a hundred hands.” Harlan Ellison wrote, “Whenever we walked up the stairs with a young woman, I made sure to walk behind her so Isaac wouldn’t grab her tush.” And Frederik Pohl even recalled Asimov telling him, “It’s like the old saying. You get slapped a lot, but you get laid a lot too.”
And these aren’t the words of Asimov’s critics or detractors; they’re his friends and peers. Asimov’s habits were so well-known that in 1962, the chairman of the World Science Fiction Convention invited him to give a talk on “The Positive Power of Posterior Pinching.”
I’d already heard rumors about Asimov’s behavior back in 2014, when I wrote a birthday essay for BuzzFeed describing him as my favorite author. But I limited the piece to my personal relationship with his work — to the ways in which the Foundation and Robot books turned me into a lifelong science fiction fan, and how his wide-ranging nonfiction expanded my horizons.
Six years later, Asimov remains one of my favorites (alongside Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delany and Philip K. Dick). And I’ve been happy to sing his praises when he’s in the news.
Still, it seems increasingly difficult to ignore the less admirable aspects of his personality. Fans, friends and other defenders might argue (as Ellison did) that “times were different,” that Asimov saw his behavior as “harmless” and that it’s a relatively minor blemish on his otherwise laudable career. But harassment at conventions is a serious problem, and if Asimov hadn’t died in 1992, it’s hard to imagine that he would have (or should have) escaped the #MeToo era unscathed.
Television critic Emily Nussbaum confronts some of these issues in her essay “Confessions of a Human Shield,” in which she asks, “What should we do with the art of terrible men?”
In the past, Nussbaum says she followed the conventional method of separating the art and the artist: “Decent people sometimes create bad art. Amoral people can and have created transcendent works. A cruel and selfish person — a criminal, even — might make something that was generous, life-giving, and humane.” But now, she admits that “the sociopath’s approach” no longer satisfies.
That’s particularly true with Asimov, whose personality seems inseparable from his work. One of his strengths as a writer was his ability to be clear, conversational and personal. When you read one of his science books or essays, you come away feeling like your good friend Isaac has been explaining things to you in a way that you can finally understand. Even his science fiction is usually prefaced by autobiographical essays written in that same friendly voice.
So for me, it’s not simply a question of separating the art and the artist. It’s about acknowledging that so much of what’s admirable in Asimov’s writing seems to emanate from the man himself — and that, like or it not, he did more to shape my worldview than any other single writer, convincing me (as I put it six years ago) that “ideas matter and the universe can be explained” — while also acknowledging how indefensibly he treated women.
And in the end, it may be something simpler that poses the biggest threat to Asimov’s reputation — namely, the passage of time.
Science fiction has changed dramatically in the past decade, with a gratifyingly diverse group of writers reshaping the field. A new canon is forming, one that doesn’t center on Asimov, Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. As the writer John Scalzi put it, “Heinlein and Clarke and Asimov and etc were and are titans. But remember that the titans were overthrown by newer gods — and that those gods themselves were supplanted over time.”
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This is probably how it should be. After all, Asimov’s work is very much of its era. Readers in 2020 and beyond will have an increasingly difficult time recognizing the future he depicted: a future without personal computers or the internet, and in which no one finds it remarkable that every single scientist, politician and person of importance is a man. (The major exception being the roboticist Susan Calvin, who’s still defined by her preeminence in a male-dominated field.)
Not that I think Asimov is about to fade into obscurity. In fact, Apple is producing a new TV+ series based on his Foundation stories, which take place over hundreds of years, depicting the efforts of a small group of scientists to rebuild civilization after the fall of the Galactic Empire.
So Asimov will probably be reentering the conversation soon. And despite my reservations, I’m glad.
Because for all the ways in which he might have missed major technological trends, and for all the ways in which his worldview was rooted in the 1930s and ’40s, Asimov still speaks to the challenges we face today. Not just in his famous Foundation and Robot stories, not just in the essays in which he defends science against religious fundamentalism, but also in “The Gods Themselves,” which I recently reread. Published back in 1972, the novel remains scarily prescient in its depiction of how humanity’s stupidity, greed and attachment to cheap energy can blind us to an existential threat.
And one of Asimov’s major subjects was the very passage of time that’s eroded his prominence in the field. His best work makes that it clear each generation will be eager to leave the last one behind, that it must face new problems with new ideas.
Despite his very real flaws as a writer and as a person, he encouraged us to search for those better ideas and work for that better future. That’s why his books will always have a place on my shelves. And that’s why I hope he’d be happy to give up some of that shelf space to writers who don’t look, think or write like him.
Enlarge / A recent study by University of Michigan researchers found evidence of Turing patterns in the movement of Azteca ant colonies on coffee farms in Mexico. (credit: University of Michigan)
Azteca ants build their nests in shade trees, and it's relatively common to find other nests in trees nearby. But these clusters of ant nests are often separated by large sections of shade trees where there are no nests at all. A December overview paper in BioScience by scientists at the University of Michigan argued that there is now substantial evidence that this unusual clustering is the result of self-organizing behavior of the ants—not external factors like temperature or moisture. In fact, the mechanism at work is strikingly similar to a process described by the late Alan Turing in a seminal 1952 paper.
Turing was attempting to understand how natural, nonrandom patterns emerge (like a zebra's stripes), and he focused on chemicals known as morphogens. He devised a mechanism involving the interaction between an activator chemical and an inhibitor chemical that diffuse throughout a system, much like like gas atoms will do in an enclosed box. The BioScience paper draws an analogy to injecting a drop of black ink into a beaker of water. Normally this would stabilize a system: the water would gradually turn a uniform gray. But if the inhibitor diffuses at a faster rate than the activator, the process is destabilized. That mechanism will produce a so-called "Turing pattern:" spots, stripes, or, when applied to an ecological system, clusters of ant nests.
The authors of the BioScience paper write:
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If you know nothing else about particle accelerators, you probably know that they’re big — sometimes miles long. But a new approach from Stanford researchers has led to an accelerator shorter from end to end than a human hair is wide.
The general idea behind particle accelerators is that they’re a long line of radiation emitters that smack the target particle with radiation at the exact right time to propel it forward a little faster than before. The problem is that depending on the radiation you use and the speed and resultant energy you want to produce, these things can get real big, real fast.
That also limits their applications; you can’t exactly put a particle accelerator in your lab or clinic if they’re half a kilometer long and take megawatts to run. Something smaller could be useful, even if it was nowhere near those power levels — and that’s what these Stanford scientists set out to make.
“We want to miniaturize accelerator technology in a way that makes it a more accessible research tool,” explained project lead Jelena Vuckovic in a Stanford news release.
But this wasn’t designed like a traditional particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider or one at collaborator SLAC’s National Accelerator Laboratory. Instead of engineering it from the bottom up, they fed their requirements to an “inverse design algorithm” that produced the kind of energy pattern they needed from the infrared radiation emitters they wanted to use.
That’s partly because infrared radiation has a much shorter wavelength than something like microwaves, meaning the mechanisms themselves can be made much smaller — perhaps too small to adequately design the ordinary way.
The algorithm’s solution to the team’s requirements led to an unusual structure that looks more like a Rorschach test than a particle accelerator. But these blobs and channels are precisely contoured to guide infrared laser light pulse in such a way that they push electrons along the center up to a significant proportion of the speed of light.
The resulting “accelerator on a chip” is only a few dozen microns across, making it comfortably smaller than a human hair and more than possible to stack a few on the head of a pin. A couple thousand of them, really.
And it will take a couple thousand to get the electrons up to the energy levels needed to be useful — but don’t worry, that’s all part of the plan. The chips are fully integrated but can be put in a series easily to create longer assemblies that produce larger powers.
These won’t be rivaling macro-size accelerators like SLAC’s or the Large Hadron Collider, but they could be much more useful for research and clinical applications where planet-destroying power levels aren’t required. For instance, a chip-sized electron accelerator might be able to direct radiation into a tumor surgically rather than through the skin.
The team’s work is published in a paper today in the journal Science.
As we close in on the launch date of Realme X50 5G, the company is revealing information about the smartphone in bits and pieces, through teasers. The latest teaser shows the front panel of Realme X50 5G. To recall, the phone was teased to sport dual selfie cameras and now the latest teaser shows a pill-shaped cutout for the dual selfie camera setup. Moreover, a chin that is slightly thicker than the bezels can be spotted at the bottom of the device.
Realme took to Weibo to reveal the latest teaser of the Realme X50 5G. The phone features a notch-less display as well. Though, it is seen sporting a punch-hole selfie camera module on the upper-left corner of the screen. Additionally, volume rockers are on the left edge of the display. The image teases minimal bezels with a slightly thick chin. The phone is seen in a blue finish on the edges.
Realme X50 5G is all set to launch on January 7 in China. The phone is claimed to deliver a two-day battery life on a single charge. Moreover, an alleged spec sheet has also leaked online tipping three variants of Realme X50 5G. The smartphone is rumoured to feature a 6.67-inch full-HD+ (1080 x 2400 pixels) 2.5D curved display made by JDI with Gorilla Glass 5 protection. It is said to come with 90Hz display refresh rate.
Realme X50 5G is confirmed to be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G SoC. It is said to come in two RAM variants, 6GB and 8GB and have up to 256GB storage onboard. The handset will sport a quad rear camera setup: a 64MP Samsung ISOCELL Bright GW1 sensor + a 13MP telephoto lens with 5x hybrid zoom support + an 8MP wide-angle lens, and a 2MP macro camera. The dual selfie cameras could be 32MP + 8MP.
Realme X50 5G is likely to come equipped with a 4500mAh battery that is said to have support for 30W fast charging.
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If information circulating the internet is to be believed, then Samsung will launch a truly bezel-less TV at CES 2020. The information comes from the German-based website 4KFilme. The website got its hands on some marketing material showcasing the frameless design of the 8K TV. The leaked image shows the TV with nearly nonexistent bezels on three sides and a very thin chin at the bottom. It is also expected that the TV will come with a ‘No Gap Wall Mount' design to ensure the TV sits flush with your wall. If you are wondering how you will get to the back of the TV to access the ports, know that the TV is said to come with Samsung’s One Connect Box. The One Connect Box has all the connectivity options and connects to the TV via a single cable eliminating the need to wiggle your hand behind a wall-mounted TV to get to the ports. The One Connect Box can be replaced means that if new HDMI technology releases, or Samsung can let users simply upgrade the One Connect Box. The new Samsung TV is said to be unveiled at CES 2020 along with Samsung’s 2020 range of 4K TVs. The leak also suggests that the TV will have the model number Q900T or Q950T. The upcoming 8K TV is said to share some DNA with Samsung’s The Wall TV. We will get more details on this at CES 2020.
In other Samsung news, the electronics giant has joined hands with the 8K Association to Launch a Certification Program. According to the press release, this association has established “a first-of-its-kind certification program designed to distinguish 8K-enabled televisions and other devices”. “We are proud to be one of the founding members of the 8K Association and to have our new lineup of QLED 8K TVs certified by the program,” said Hyogun Lee, Executive Vice President of the Visual Display Business at Samsung Electronics. “Our goal is to provide consumers with the ability to easily identify premium 8K displays from other devices when making purchasing decisions. Home entertainment and TVs are important investments for many of our consumers, and we hope that the 8KA Certification Logo will help guide them.” You can read more about the 8K association here.
A lot of TV manufacturers showed off 8K TVs at CES 2019, but Samsung is the only one to launch an 8K TV in India in 2019. Back in June 2019, Samsung announced their 8K QLED line-up of televisions for India. The company launched four 8K QLED TVs available in The four sizes - 65-inches, 75-inches, 82-inches and 98-inches. You can read more about the 8K QLED TVs available in India here.
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We recently came across some reports suggesting that Samsung is working on a watered-down version of the Galaxy Note10 handset. Allegedly called the Galaxy Note10 Lite, the smartphone is rumoured to debut at CES 2020. Ahead of the assumed launch, some new images of the handset have surfaced online, which hint at its S Pen and a new camera setup design. The images were posted on Twitter by the tipster TechTalkTV and they show off the device from most angles. While there is no info about the device’s display screen size, it is not curved from the sides, as we are used to on the Note series of Galaxy devices.
There’s a punch-hole camera on the center-top area, similar to the current Galaxy Note10 and there are slim-yet-notable bezels around the display. Moving on to the rear panel, it seems to be built out of plastic with a glossy finish, which could be one of the main differences between the standard version and the Lite variant. However, one notable change here is the main camera design, which is rectangular shaped and slightly reminds us of the Pixel 4’s camera. There are three sensors in the camera setup, along with an LED flash. There’s no information about their specs.
Live images of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Lite pic.twitter.com/GVU2uHblZF
— TechTalkTV (@Mr_TechTalkTV) December 31, 2019There is also a shot of the About Phone section of the Galaxy Note10 Lite. It suggests that the device could sport the model number SM-N770F/DS and it might come with dual-SIM support. The S-Pen is also shown off in one of the photos and it seems similar to the S Pen Samsung used on the Galaxy Note10. However, rumours suggest that it could come with additional functionality and might work even better than its predecessor. As for other specs, previous reports suggest that the smartphone could be powered by the Exynos 9810 processor. It could also come with up to 8GB RAM and up to 128GB of internal storage.
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Zheping Huang / Bloomberg : Baidu reports Q1 revenue up 1% YoY to ~$4.4B, above ~$4.35B est., the slowest growth in over a year, and net ...
