Author name: Mike M.

a-week-with-a-ford-f-150-lightning:-this-truck-is-too-big-for-city-life

A week with a Ford F-150 Lightning: This truck is too big for city life

stalking horse or white elephant? —

The big electric pickup truck is out of the suburbs and out of its element.

A week with a Ford F-150 Lightning: This truck is too big for city life

Jonathan Gitlin

I seem to be thinking a lot about Ford’s electric pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning. Earlier this week, we got the news of price cuts and price increases. Before that, there was a pending cut to planned production output. Taken as it is, it’s just the all-electric version of America’s favorite pickup—and arguably the best version unless you need to pull something on the end of a trailer hitch.

But the Lightning doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Depending on who you talk to, it’s a clever attempt to get Americans to go electric, an utterly familiar wrapper on a slab of new technology that, yes, still requires the owner to adjust their mindset a bit from the gasoline-powered way of thinking. To others, it’s a white elephant, one that costs too much and languishes on dealership forecourts, proof positive that electrification is a thing other countries might bother with, but forget that here at home, cowboy.

I’ve never found life to be quite that simple, and neither is the Lightning. Here in Washington, DC, the vehicle remains a rare sight—the only time I’ve seen one in the wild, it belonged to the DC government’s fleet of vehicles (its job was inspecting abandoned vehicles). Out west, it’s much more common to see electric F-150s on the road, and last year, Ford sold about 40,000 Lightnings, despite halting production for a fire and then again to retool part of the line.

Because I last drove one more than 18 months ago, it seemed prudent to book a week with an example from Ford’s press fleet to see how the pickup has matured since its release. The Monroney sticker did little to bust the idea that these things are expensive—$97,374 is a high price, although with the recent adjustment and an ongoing $7,500 incentive from Ford, a 2024 model would be just over $10,000 cheaper, according to Ford’s online configurator.

Jonathan Gitlin

I had bigger concerns than the sticker shock—quite literally. After all, you don’t have to buy a Platinum trim Lightning; a search on cars.com shows 823 Platinums for sale around the country out of a total of 7,531 new Lightnings. Many of the rest of those electric F-150s will be cheaper, but all of them will be the same size. And that size is just too darn big for my life in the city.

Size matters

This was immediately apparent as I backed into my parking space. The Lightning dwarfed my neighbors’ SUVs as it jutted out into the parking lot, almost entirely filling the space between the white lines. There’s no hiding a vehicle that’s 237 inches (6,020 mm) long and 80 inches (2,032 mm) wide before you include the mirrors.

Part of the reason it’s so big is that the four-door, five-seat pickup truck somehow became the replacement for a sedan in the minds of so many American men. On four wheels, with at least eight inches of ground clearance, you could drive it on an overlanding adventure, but in practice, you’ll just obstruct the views of everyone else on the road. The only way to see around a big truck is in another big truck, and before you know it, the country is buying several million full-size pickup trucks every year.

I'll be honest: I used neither bed nor frunk during the entire week. Groceries and cargo went on the back seat or the floor behind the driver's seat. Which made most of the F-150 Lightning's bulk superfluous to my needs.

Enlarge / I’ll be honest: I used neither bed nor frunk during the entire week. Groceries and cargo went on the back seat or the floor behind the driver’s seat. Which made most of the F-150 Lightning’s bulk superfluous to my needs.

Jonathan Gitlin

For people living in newer homes in suburbs or exurbs who commute to jobs in office parks surrounded by vast expanses of surface parking, the size thing might not even be that noticeable. Garages are built big enough to house brodozers now, and houses out in those parts are set back from their neighbors. Climb up into the driver’s seat of a Lightning in the middle of a dense city, though, and it’s on stark display.

Although I adapted to the Lightning’s size, it was really only once I ventured into the suburbs of Northern Virginia that I started to feel truly comfortable behind the wheel. The multilane roads in places like Fairfax and Tysons Corner were much more the Lightning’s element. No road diets here, nor people on bicycles to be ever-vigilant for. Driving in the city, I was always aware of its size, although the view from the high-up driving position was mostly excellent, and the one-pedal driving mode made it simple to stick to the 20 mph speed limits.

A week with a Ford F-150 Lightning: This truck is too big for city life Read More »

daily-telescope:-a-crab-found-in-the-night-sky-rather-than-the-world’s-oceans

Daily Telescope: A crab found in the night sky rather than the world’s oceans

Krabby Patty —

Oh, to have seen this supernova back in the day.

The Crab Nebula in all its glory.

Enlarge / The Crab Nebula in all its glory.

Paul Macklin

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s January 5, and today’s photo reveals the Crab Nebula in all of its glory.

This object, known more formally as Messier 1 or M1, earned its colloquial name when Anglo-Irish astronomer William Parsons observed and drew this object in the early 1840s. It looked something like a crab with arms, and the appellation stuck. The nebula had been discovered about a century earlier by English astronomer John Bevis.

The nebula is actually a supernova remnant from a star that was observed popping in 1054 and recorded by Chinese astronomers. That must have been quite a sight, because the supernova occurred only about 2,000 light-years from Earth, which is relatively close as these things go. It likely was as bright as Venus and visible during daylight hours for a few weeks.

This image was captured by amateur astronomer Paul Macklin in Indiana. And it’s quite spectacular.

Source: Paul Macklin

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Daily Telescope: A crab found in the night sky rather than the world’s oceans Read More »

rocket-report:-spacex’s-record-year;-firefly’s-alpha-rocket-falls-short

Rocket Report: SpaceX’s record year; Firefly’s Alpha rocket falls short

Ending big —

Living downrange from one of China’s launch sites sure doesn’t seem safe.

Firefly Aerospace's fourth Alpha rocket lifted off December 22 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.

Enlarge / Firefly Aerospace’s fourth Alpha rocket lifted off December 22 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.

Welcome to Edition 6.25 of the Rocket Report! We hope all our readers had a peaceful holiday break. While many of us were enjoying time off work, launch companies like SpaceX kept up the pace until the final days of 2023. Last year saw a record level of global launch activity, with 223 orbital launch attempts and 212 rockets successfully reaching orbit. Nearly half of these missions were by SpaceX.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Firefly’s fourth launch puts payload in wrong orbit. The fourth flight of Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket on December 22 placed a small Lockheed Martin technology demonstration satellite into a lower-than-planned orbit after lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. US military tracking data indicated the Alpha rocket released its payload into an elliptical orbit ranging between 215 and 523 kilometers in altitude, not the mission’s intended circular target orbit. Firefly later confirmed the Alpha rocket’s second stage, which was supposed to reignite about 50 minutes after liftoff, did not deliver Lockheed Martin’s satellite into the proper orbit. This satellite, nicknamed Tantrum, was designed to test Lockheed Martin’s new wideband Electronically Steerable Antenna technology to demonstrate faster on-orbit sensor calibration to deliver rapid capabilities to US military forces.

Throwing a tantrum? … This was the third time in four flights that Firefly’s commercial Alpha rocket, designed to loft payloads up to a metric ton in mass, has not reached its orbital target. The first test flight in 2021 suffered an engine failure on the first stage before losing control shortly after liftoff. The second Alpha launch in 2022 deployed its satellites into a lower-than-planned orbit, leaving them unable to complete their missions. In September, Firefly launched a small US military satellite on a responsive launch demonstration. Firefly and the US Space Force declared that mission fully successful. Atmospheric drag will likely pull Lockheed Martin’s payload back into Earth’s atmosphere for a destructive reentry in a matter of weeks. The good news is ground teams are in contact with the satellite, so there could be a chance to complete at least some of the mission’s objectives. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Australian startup nears first launch. The first locally made rocket to be launched into space from Australian soil is scheduled for liftoff from a commercial facility in Queensland early next year, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. A company named Gilmour Space says it hopes to launch its first orbital-class Eris rocket in March, pending final approval from Australian regulatory authorities. This would be the first Australian-built orbital rocket, although a US-made rocket launched Australia’s first satellite from a military base in South Australia in 1967. The UK’s Black Arrow rocket also launched a satellite from the same remote Australian military base in 1971.

Getting to know Eris … The three-stage Eris rocket stands 25 meters (82 feet) tall with the ability to deliver up to 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of payload into low-Earth orbit, according to Gilmour Space. The company says the Eris rocket will be powered by Gilmour’s “new and proprietary hybrid rocket engine.” These kinds of propulsion systems use a solid fuel and a liquid oxidizer. We’ll be watching to see if Gilmour shares more tangible news about the progress toward the first Eris launch in March. In late 2022, the company targeted April 2023 for the first Eris flight, so this program has a history of delays. (submitted by Marzipan and Onychomys)

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s space reporting is to sign up for his newsletter, we’ll collect his stories in your inbox.

A commander’s lament on the loss of a historic SpaceX booster. The Falcon 9 rocket that launched NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on SpaceX’s first crew mission in 2020 launched and landed for the 19th and final time just before Christmas, then tipped over on its recovery ship during the trip back to Cape Canaveral, Florida, Ars reports. This particular booster, known by the tail number B1058, was special among SpaceX’s fleet of reusable rockets. It was the fleet leader, having tallied 19 missions over the course of more than three-and-a-half years. More importantly, it was the rocket that thundered into space on May 30, 2020, on a flight that made history.

A museum piece? … The lower third of the booster was still on the deck of SpaceX’s recovery ship as it sailed into Port Canaveral on December 26. This portion of the rocket contains the nine Merlin engines and landing legs, some of which appeared mangled after the booster tipped over in high winds and waves. Hurley, who commanded SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft on the booster’s historic first flight in 2020, said he hopes to see the remaining parts of the rocket in a museum. “Hopefully they can do something because this is a little bit of an inauspicious way to end its flying career, with half of it down at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean,” said Hurley.

SpaceX opens 2024 campaign with a new kind of Starlink satellite. SpaceX has launched the first six Starlink satellites that will provide cellular transmissions for customers of T-Mobile and other carriers, Ars reports. A Falcon 9 rocket launched from California on January 2 carried 21 Starlink satellites overall, including the first six Starlinks with Direct to Cell capabilities. SpaceX says these satellites, and thousands of others to follow, will “enable mobile network operators around the world to provide seamless global access to texting, calling, and browsing wherever you may be on land, lakes, or coastal waters without changing hardware or firmware.” T-Mobile said that field testing of Starlink satellites with the T-Mobile network will begin soon. “The enhanced Starlink satellites have an advanced modem that acts as a cellphone tower in space, eliminating dead zones with network integration similar to a standard roaming partner,” SpaceX said.

Two of 144 … SpaceX followed this launch with another Falcon 9 flight from Florida on January 3 carrying a Swedish telecommunications satellite. These were the company’s first two missions of 2024, a year when SpaceX officials aim to launch up to 144 rockets, an average of 12 per month, exceeding the 98 rockets it launched in 2023. A big focus of SpaceX’s 2024 launch manifest will be delivering these Starlink Direct to Cell satellites into orbit. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Chinese booster lands near homes. China added a new pair of satellites to its Beidou positioning and navigation system on December 25, but spent stages from the launch landed within inhabited areas, Space News reports. Meanwhile, a pair of the side boosters from the Long March 3B rocket used for the launch appeared to fall to the ground near inhabited areas in Guangxi region, downrange of the Xichang spaceport in Sichuan province, according to apparent bystander footage on Chinese social media. One video shows a booster falling within a forested area and exploding, while another shows a falling booster and later, wreckage next to a home.

Life downrange … Chinese government authorities reportedly issue warnings and evacuation notices for citizens living in regions where spent rocket boosters are likely to fall after launch, but these videos clearly show people are still close by as the rockets fall from the sky. We’ve seen this kind of imagery before, including views of a rocket that crashed into a rural building in 2019. What’s more, the rockets return to Earth with leftover toxic propellants—hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide—that could be deadly to breathe or touch. Clouds of brownish-orange gas are visible around the rocket wreckage, an indication of the presence of nitrogen tetroxide. China built its three Cold War-era spaceports in interior regions to protect them from possible military attacks, while its newest launch site is at a coastal location on Hainan Island, allowing rockets launched there to drop boosters into the sea. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Launch date set for next H3 test flight. The second flight of Japan’s new flagship H3 rocket is scheduled for February 14 (US time; February 15 in Japan), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency announced on December 28. This will come nearly one year after the first H3 test flight failed to reach orbit last March when the rocket’s second stage failed to ignite a few minutes after liftoff. This failure destroyed a pricey Japanese Earth observation satellite and dealt a setback to Japan’s rocket program. The H3 is designed to be cheaper and more capable than the H-IIA and H-IIB rockets it will replace. Eventually, the H3 will launch Japan’s scientific research probes, spy satellites, and commercial payloads.

Fixes since the first flight … Engineers narrowed the likely cause for the first H3 launch failure to an electrical issue, although Japanese officials have not provided an update on the investigation for several months. In August, Japan’s space agency said investigators had narrowed the cause of the H3’s second-stage malfunction to three possible failure scenarios. Nevertheless, officials are apparently satisfied the H3 is ready to fly again. But this time, there won’t be an expensive satellite aboard. A dummy payload will fly inside the H3 rocket’s nose cone, along with two relatively low-cost small satellites hitching a piggyback ride to orbit. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

India’s PSLV launches first space mission of 2024. The first orbital launch of the new year, as measured in the globally recognized Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, was the flight of an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) on January 1 (December 31 in the United States). This launch deployed an X-ray astronomy satellite named XPoSat, which will measure X-ray emissions from black holes, neutron stars, active galactic nuclei, and pulsars. This is India’s first X-ray astronomy satellite, and its launch is another sign of India’s ascendence among the world’s space powers. India has some of the world’s most reliable launch vehicles, is developing a human-rated capsule to carry astronauts into orbit, and landed its first robotic mission on the Moon last year.

Going lower … After releasing the XPoSat payload, the PSLV’s fourth stage lowered its orbit to begin an extended mission hosting 10 scientific and technology demonstration experiments. These payloads will test new radiation shielding technologies, green propulsion, and fuel cells in orbit, according to the Indian Space Research Organization. On missions with excess payload capacity, India has started offering researchers and commercial companies the opportunity to fly experiments on the PSLV fourth stage, which has its own solar power source to essentially turn itself from a rocket into a satellite platform. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

Mixed crews will continue flying to the International Space Station. NASA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, will extend an agreement on flying each other’s crew members to the International Space Station through 2025, Interfax reports. This means SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and Boeing’s Starliner capsule, once operational, will continue transporting Russian cosmonauts to and from the space station, as several recent SpaceX crew missions have done. In exchange, Russia will continue flying US astronauts on Soyuz missions.

There’s a good reason for this… Despite poor relations on Earth, the US and Russian governments continue to be partners on the ISS. While NASA no longer has to pay for seats on Soyuz spacecraft, the US space agency still wants to fly its astronauts on Soyuz to protect against the potential for a failure or lengthy delay with a SpaceX or Boeing crew mission. Such an event could lead to a situation where the space station has no US astronauts aboard. Likewise, Roscosmos benefits from this arrangement to ensure there’s always a Russian on the space station, even in the event of a problem with Soyuz. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

SpaceX sets new records to close out 2023. SpaceX launched two rockets, three hours apart, to wrap up a record-setting 2023 launch campaign, Ars reports. On December 28, SpaceX launched a Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with the US military’s super-secret X-37B spaceplane. Less than three hours later, a Falcon 9 rocket took off a few miles to the south with another batch of Starlink Internet satellites. These were SpaceX’s final launches of 2023. SpaceX ended the year with 98 flights, including 91 Falcon 9s, five Falcon Heavy rockets, and two test launches of the giant new Super Heavy-Starship rocket. These flights were spread across four launch pads in Florida, California, and Texas. It was also the shortest turnaround between two SpaceX flights in the company’s history, and set a modern-era record at Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the shortest span between two orbital-class launches there since 1966.

Where’s the X-37B?… The military’s reusable X-37B spaceplane that launched on the Falcon Heavy rocket apparently headed into an unusually high orbit, much higher than the spaceplane program’s previous six flights. But the military kept the exact orbit a secret, and amateur skywatchers will be closely watching for signs of the spaceplane passing overhead in hopes of estimating its apogee, perigee, and inclination. What the spaceplane is doing is also largely a mystery. The X-37B resembles a miniature version of NASA’s retired space shuttle orbiter, with wings, deployable landing gear, and black thermal protection tiles to shield its belly from the scorching heat of reentry.

Elon Musk says SpaceX needs to built a lot of Starships. Even with reusability, SpaceX will need to build Starships as often as Boeing builds 737 jetliners in order to realize Elon Musk’s ambition for a Mars settlement, Ars reports. “To achieve Mars colonization in roughly three decades, we need ship production to be 100/year, but ideally rising to 300/year,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X. SpaceX still aims to make the Starship and its Super Heavy booster rapidly reusable. The crux is that the ship, the part that would travel into orbit, and eventually to the Moon or Mars, won’t be reused as often as the booster. These ships will come in a number of different configurations, including crew and cargo transports, refueling ships, fuel depots, and satellite deployers.

Laws of physics… The first stage of the giant launch vehicle, named Super Heavy, is designed to return to SpaceX’s launch sites about six minutes after liftoff, similar to the way SpaceX recovers its Falcon boosters today. Theoretically, Musk wrote, the booster could be ready for another flight in an hour. With the Starship itself, the laws of physics and the realities of geography come into play. As an object flies in low-Earth orbit, the Earth rotates underneath it. This means that a satellite, or Starship, will find itself offset some 22.5 degrees in longitude from its launch site after a single 90-minute orbit around the planet. It could take several hours, or up to a day, for a Starship in low-Earth orbit to line up with one of the recovery sites. “The ship needs to complete at least one orbit, but often several to have the ground track line back up with the launch site, so reuse may only be daily,” Musk wrote. “This means that ship production needs to be roughly an order of magnitude higher than booster production.”

Next three launches

January 5: Kuaizhou 1A | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 11: 20 UTC

January 7:  Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-35 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 21: 00 UTC

January 8: Falcon 9 | Starlink 7-10 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 05: 00 UTC

Rocket Report: SpaceX’s record year; Firefly’s Alpha rocket falls short Read More »

elon-musk:-spacex-needs-to-build-starships-as-often-as-boeing-builds-737s

Elon Musk: SpaceX needs to build Starships as often as Boeing builds 737s

Ship 28, the Starship for SpaceX's next full-scale test flight, fires up one of its engines on December 29 in Texas.

Enlarge / Ship 28, the Starship for SpaceX’s next full-scale test flight, fires up one of its engines on December 29 in Texas.

SpaceX

It’s no secret that Elon Musk has big ambitions for SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket. This is the vehicle that, with plenty of permutations and upgrades, Musk says will ferry cargo and people across the Solar System to build a settlement on Mars, making humanity a multi-planetary species and achieving the billionaire’s long-standing dream.

Of course, that is a long way off. SpaceX is still working on getting Starship into orbit or close to it, an achievement that appears to be possible this year. Then, the company will start launching Starlink satellites on Starship missions while testing in-space refueling technology needed to turn Starship into a human-rated Moon lander for NASA.

SpaceX’s South Texas team is progressing toward the third full-scale Starship test flight. On December 20, the Starship’s upper stage slated for the next test flight completed a test-firing of its Raptor engines at the Starbase launch site on the Texas Gulf Coast. Nine days later, the 33-engine Super Heavy booster fired up on the launch pad for its own static fire test. On the same day, SpaceX hot-fired the Starship upper stage once again on a test stand next to the launch pad.

With those milestones complete, ground teams rolled the booster back to its hangar for final preflight checks and reconfigurations. The ship, too, will need to be rolled back to its high bay.

SpaceX could be weeks away from having both vehicles ready to fly, but the company hasn’t released an update on lessons learned from the previous Starship test flight in November. That flight was largely successful, with apparently flawless performance from the 33 engines on the Super Heavy booster during launch. The Starship upper stage reached space before self-destructing downrange over the Gulf of Mexico. The booster exploded during a maneuver to bring itself back to Earth for a controlled splashdown at sea.

The company’s engineers will want to understand and correct whatever caused those issues. The Federal Aviation Administration then needs to approve SpaceX’s investigation into the last Starship flight before issuing a new commercial launch license. When it flies again, Starship will try to reach near orbital velocity, enough speed to travel most of the way around the world before reentering the atmosphere near Hawaii.

Verifying the performance of Starship’s heat shield tiles during reentry will be valuable learning for SpaceX, but Starship first needs to be fully successful with a launch. This is just the start for the privately funded Starship program.

Elon Musk: SpaceX needs to build Starships as often as Boeing builds 737s Read More »

a-“ridiculously-weak“-password-causes-disaster-for-spain’s-no.-2-mobile-carrier

A “ridiculously weak“ password causes disaster for Spain’s No. 2 mobile carrier

A “ridiculously weak“ password causes disaster for Spain’s No. 2 mobile carrier

Getty Images

Orange España, Spain’s second-biggest mobile operator, suffered a major outage on Wednesday after an unknown party obtained a “ridiculously weak” password and used it to access an account for managing the global routing table that controls which networks deliver the company’s Internet traffic, researchers said.

The hijacking began around 9: 28 Coordinated Universal Time (about 2: 28 Pacific time) when the party logged into Orange’s RIPE NCC account using the password “ripeadmin” (minus the quotation marks). The RIPE Network Coordination Center is one of five Regional Internet Registries, which are responsible for managing and allocating IP addresses to Internet service providers, telecommunication organizations, and companies that manage their own network infrastructure. RIPE serves 75 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

“Things got ugly”

The password came to light after the party, using the moniker Snow, posted an image to social media that showed the orange.es email address associated with the RIPE account. RIPE said it’s working on ways to beef up account security.

Screenshot showing RIPE account, including the orange.es email address associated with it.

Enlarge / Screenshot showing RIPE account, including the orange.es email address associated with it.

Security firm Hudson Rock plugged the email address into a database it maintains to track credentials for sale in online bazaars. In a post, the security firm said the username and “ridiculously weak” password were harvested by information-stealing malware that had been installed on an Orange computer since September. The password was then made available for sale on an infostealer marketplace.

Partially redacted screenshot from Hudson Rock database showing the credentials for the Orange RIPE account.

Enlarge / Partially redacted screenshot from Hudson Rock database showing the credentials for the Orange RIPE account.

HJudson Rock

Researcher Kevin Beaumont said thousands of credentials protecting other RIPE accounts are also available in such marketplaces.

Once logged into Orange’s RIPE account, Snow made changes to the global routing table the mobile operator relies on to specify what backbone providers are authorized to carry its traffic to various parts of the world. These tables are managed using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which connects one regional network to the rest of the Internet. Specifically, Snow added several new ROAs, short for Route Origin Authorizations. These entries allow “autonomous systems” such as Orange’s AS12479 to designate other autonomous systems or large chunks of IP addresses to deliver its traffic to various regions of the world.

In the initial stage, the changes had no meaningful effect because the ROAs Snow added announcing the IP addresses—93.117.88.0/22 and 93.117.88.0/21, and 149.74.0.0/16—already originated with Orange’s AS12479. A few minutes later, Snow added ROAs to five additional routes. All but one of them also originated with the Orange AS, and once again had no effect on traffic, according to a detailed writeup of the event by Doug Madory, a BGP expert at security and networking firm Kentik.

The creation of the ROA for 149.74.0.0/16 was the first act by Snow to create problems, because the maximum prefix length was set to 16, rendering any smaller routes using the address range invalid

“It invalidated any routes that are more specific (longer prefix length) than a 16,” Madory told Ars in an online interview. “So routes like 149.74.100.0/23 became invalid and started getting filtered. Then [Snow] created more ROAs to cover those routes. Why? Not sure. I think, at first, they were just messing around. Before that ROA was created, there was no ROA to assert anything about this address range.”

A “ridiculously weak“ password causes disaster for Spain’s No. 2 mobile carrier Read More »

1d-pac-man-is-the-best-game-i’ve-played-in-2024-(so-far)

1D Pac-Man is the best game I’ve played in 2024 (so far)

I didn't write this story just to share that high score in the corner, but I won't say it had <em>nothing</em> to do with the choice.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/paku2-1-800×299.png”></img><figcaption>
<p><a data-height=Enlarge / I didn’t write this story just to share that high score in the corner, but I won’t say it had nothing to do with the choice.

When looking back at the short history of video game design, the ’90s and ’00s transition from primarily 2D games to primarily 3D games is rightly seen as one of the biggest revolutions in the industry. But my discovery this week of the one-dimensional, Pac-Man-inspired Paku Paku makes me wish that the game industry had some sort of pre-history where clever 1D games like this were the norm. It also makes me wish I had been quicker to discover more of the work of extremely prolific and clever game designer Kenta Cho, who made the game.

In Paku Paku, Pac-Man‘s 2D maze of 240 dots has been replaced with 16 dots arranged in a single line. Your six-pixel tall dot-muncher (the graphics are 2D, even as the gameplay uses only one dimension) is forced to forever travel either left or right along this line, trying to eat all the dots while avoiding a single red ghost (who moves just a bit faster than the player). To do this, the player can use a single power pellet (which makes the ghost edible for a short while) or the screen-wrapping tunnels on either side of the line (which the ghost can’t use).

Paku Paku.” height=”150″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/paku-300×150.gif” width=”300″>

Enlarge / A brief gameplay snippet from Paku Paku.

It might sound simple, but playing effectively means carefully managing the ghost’s relative position to the player by quickly judging when you’ll have enough space and time to make it to a side tunnel or power pellet. This gets exponentially harder as the game speeds up with each new set of replacement dots, increasing the score multiplier as it does. Each game ends after a matter of minutes (or seconds) with that familiar “I know I can do better next time” feeling that marks truly compulsive game design (and has pushed me to a high score of over 10,000 points over a few hours of play).

Though Paku Paku was originally released last year, the game has been making the rounds among some major link aggregators recently, a perfect filler for the usual post-holiday drought of major game releases in early January. Hacker News users are even hard at work coding basic AI that you can paste into a browser’s command window for easy high scores.

The zen design of small games

Paku Paku is far from the first game to reduce gameplay to a single dimension (though the graphics use two dimensions, which might make the game “1.5D”?). Games like Wolfenstein 1D (which is Archived but currently unplayable due to the death of Flash) and installations like Line Wobbler use color as a sort of second dimension, representing different in-game characters and objects with dots of many hues. And dozens of 1D games have been tagged on indie gaming hub Itch.io, ranging from the silly (1D Flappy Bird) to the surprisingly effective (Colordash 1D) to the overcomplicated (1D Minecraft).

Paku Paku stands out from this limited crowd largely thanks to tight single-button controls and perfectly tuned risk-versus-reward gameplay that encourages that compulsive loop. Perhaps that’s because its creator has had a ridiculous amount of experience crafting this kind of simple game.

1D Pac-Man is the best game I’ve played in 2024 (so far) Read More »

how-to-avoid-the-cognitive-hooks-and-habits-that-make-us-vulnerable-to-cons

How to avoid the cognitive hooks and habits that make us vulnerable to cons

Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris are the authors of <em> Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It.</em>” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/fool1-800×531.jpg”></img><figcaption>
<p><a data-height=Enlarge / Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris are the authors of Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It.

Basic Books

There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: A conversation with psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris on the key habits of thinking and reasoning that may serve us well most of the time, but can make us vulnerable to being fooled.

It’s one of the most famous experiments in psychology. Back in 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted an experiment on inattentional blindness. They asked test subjects to watch a short video in which six people—half in white T-shirts, half in black ones—passed basketballs around. The subjects were asked to count the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. Halfway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the midst of the players and thumped their chest at the camera before strolling off-screen. What surprised the researchers was that fully half the test subjects were so busy counting the number of basketball passes that they never saw the gorilla.

The experiment became a viral sensation—helped by the amusing paper title, “Gorillas in Our Midst“—and snagged Simons and Chabris the 2004 Ig Nobel Psychology Prize. It also became the basis of their bestselling 2010 book, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Thirteen years later, the two psychologists are back with their latest book, published last July, called Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It.  Simons and Chabris have penned an entertaining examination of key habits of thinking that usually serve us well but also make us vulnerable to cons and scams. They also offer some practical tools based on cognitive science to help us spot deceptions before being taken in.

“People love reading about cons, yet they keep happening,” Simons told Ars. “Why do they keep happening? What is it those cons are tapping into? Why do we not learn from reading about Theranos? We realized there was a set of cognitive principles that seemed to apply across all of the domains, from cheating in sports and chess to cheating in finance and biotech. That became our organizing theme.”

Ars spoke with Simons and Chabris to learn more.

Ars Technica: I was surprised to learn that people still fall for basic scams like the Nigerian Prince scam. It reminds me of Fox Mulder’s poster on The X-Files: “I want to believe.

Daniel Simons: The Nigerian Prince scam is an interesting one because it’s been around forever. Its original form was in letters. Most people don’t get fooled by that one. The vast majority of people look at it and say, this thing is written in terrible grammar. It’s a mess. And why would anybody believe that they’re the one to recover this vast fortune? So there are some people who fall for it, but it’s a tiny percentage of people. I think it’s still illustrative because that one is obviously too good to be true for most people, but there’s some small subset of people for whom it’s just good enough. It’s just appealing enough to say, “Oh yeah, maybe I could become rich.”

There was a profile in the New Yorker of a clinical psychologist who fell for it. There are people who, for whatever reason, are either desperate or have the idea that they deserve to inherit a lot of money. But there are a lot of scams that are much less obvious than that one, selecting for the people who are most naive about it. I think the key insight there is that we tend to assume that only gullible people fall for this stuff. That is fundamentally wrong. We all fall for this stuff if it’s framed in the right way.

Christopher Chabris: I don’t think they’re necessarily people who always want to believe. I think it really depends on the situation. Some people might want to believe that they can strike it rich in crypto, but they would never fall for a Nigerian email or, for that matter, they might not fall for a traditional Ponzi scheme because they don’t believe in fiat money or the stock market. Going back to the Invisible Gorilla, one thing we noticed was a lot of people would ask us, “What’s the difference between the people who noticed the gorilla and the people who didn’t notice the gorilla?” The answer is, well, some of them happened to notice it and some of them didn’t. It’s not an IQ or personality test. So in the case of the Nigerian email, there might’ve been something going on in that guy’s life at that moment when he got that email that maybe led him to initially accept the premise as true, even though he knew it seemed kind of weird. Then, he got committed to the idea once he started interacting with these people.

Christopher Chabris

So one of our principles is commitment: the idea that if you accept something as true and you don’t question it anymore, then all kinds of bad decisions and bad outcomes can flow from that. So, if you somehow actually get convinced that these guys in Nigeria are real, that can explain the bad decisions you make after that. I think there’s a lot of unpredictableness about it. We all need to understand how these things work. We might think it sounds crazy and we would never fall for it, but we might if it was a different scam at a different time.

How to avoid the cognitive hooks and habits that make us vulnerable to cons Read More »

portal-64-is-an-n64-demake-of-valve’s-classic,-now-available-as-a-“first-slice”

Portal 64 is an N64 demake of Valve’s classic, now available as a “First Slice”

For the consoles that are still alive —

It’s shocking how good the Portal Gun feels on late 1990s tech.

The Portal Effect, or seeing oneself step through sideways.

Enlarge / Remember, this is the N64 platform running a game released at least five years after the console’s general life cycle ended.

Valve/James Lambert

James Lambert has spent years making something with no practical reason to exist: a version of Portal that runs on the Nintendo 64. And not some 2D version, either, but the real, blue-and-orange-oval, see-yourself-sideways Portal experience. And now he has a “First Slice” of Portal 64 ready for anyone who wants to try it. It’s out of beta, and it’s free.

A “First Slice” means that 13 of the original game’s test chambers are finished. Lambert intends to get to all of the original’s 19 chambers. PC Gamer, where we first saw this project, suggests that Lambert might also try to get the additional 14 levels in the Xbox Live-only Portal: Still Alive.

So why is Lambert doing this—and for free? Lambert enlists an AI-trained version of Cave Johnson’s voice to answer that question at the start of his announcement video. “This is Aperture Science,” it says, “where we don’t ask why. We ask: why the heck not?”

The release video for Portal 64’s “First Slice”

Lambert’s video details how he got Portal looking so danged good on an N64. The gun, for example, required a complete rebuild of its polygonal parts so that it could react to firing, disappear when brought up to a wall instead of clipping into it, and eventually reflect environmental lighting. Rounding out the portals required some work, too, with more to be done to smooth out the seeing-yourself “Portal effect.”

To try it out, you’ll need a copy of Portal on PC (Windows). Grab the “portal_pak_000.vpk” file from inside the game’s folder, load it onto Lambert’s custom patcher, and you’ll get back a file you can load into almost any N64 emulator. Not all emulators can provide the full Portal experience by default; I had more luck with Ares than with Project 64, for instance.

  • “It’s just so much better,” Lambert says of the latest version of the portal gun.

    Valve/James Lambert

  • The “Portal Effect,” as seen inside the Ares N64 emulator.

    Valve/James Lambert

  • Remember, this is the N64 platform running a game released at least five years after the console’s general life cycle ended.

    Valve/James Lambert

  • How that familiar title screen looks, circa 2000-ish.

    Valve/James Lambert

  • On the Project 64 emulator, I couldn’t see through the portals.

    Valve/James Lambert

  • A bit more polygonal flavor for you. Note that I bumped the resolution way, way up from the N64’s original for these latter screenshots.

    Valve/James Lambert

How does it run? Like the nicest game I ever played on Nintendo’s early-days-of-3D console. It does a lot to prove that Portal is just a wonderful game with a killer mechanic, regardless of how nice you can make the walls. But the game is also a great candidate for this kind of treatment. The sterile, gray, straight-angled walls of an Aperture testing chamber play nicely with the N64’s relatively limited texture memory and harsh shapes.

Lambert has a Patreon running now, and support does a few things for him. It allows him to pay a video editor for his YouTube announcements and regular updates, it could pay for a graphics artist to polish up the work he’s done by himself on the game, and it could even free him up to work full-time on Portal 64 and other N64-related projects.

His fans are already showing their appreciation. One of them, going by “Lucas Dash,” helped create a box and cartridge for the game. Another, “Bloody Kieren,” created an entire Portal 64-themed N64 console and controller. These people have put serious energy into imagining a world where Valve produced Portal in a completely different manner and perhaps fundamentally reshaped our timeline—and I respect that.

Portal 64 is an N64 demake of Valve’s classic, now available as a “First Slice” Read More »

ai-impacts-survey:-december-2023-edition

AI Impacts Survey: December 2023 Edition

Katja Grace and AI impacts survey thousands of researchers on a variety of questions, following up on a similar 2022 survey as well as one in 2016.

I encourage opening the original to get better readability of graphs and for context and additional information. I’ll cover some of it, but there’s a lot.

Here is the abstract, summarizing many key points:

In the largest survey of its kind, we surveyed 2,778 researchers who had published in top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) venues, asking for their predictions on the pace of AI progress and the nature and impacts of advanced AI systems.

The aggregate forecasts give at least a 50% chance of AI systems achieving several milestones by 2028, including autonomously constructing a payment processing site from scratch, creating a song indistinguishable from a new song by a popular musician, and autonomously downloading and fine-tuning a large language model.

If science continues undisrupted, the chance of unaided machines outperforming humans in every possible task was estimated at 10% by 2027, and 50% by 2047. The latter estimate is 13 years earlier than that reached in a similar survey we conducted only one year earlier [Grace et al., 2022]. However, the chance of all human occupations becoming fully automatable was forecast to reach 10% by 2037, and 50% as late as 2116 (compared to 2164 in the 2022 survey).

As I will expand upon later, this contrast makes no sense. We are not going to have machines outperforming humans on every task in 2047 and then only fully automating human occupations in 2116. Not in any meaningful sense.

I think the 2047 timeline is high but in the reasonable range. Researchers are likely thinking far more clearly about this side of the question. We should mostly use that answer as what they think. We should mostly treat the 2116 answer as not meaningful, except in terms of comparing it to past and future estimates that use similar wordings.

Expected speed of AI progress has accelerated quite a bit in a year, in any case.

Most respondents expressed substantial uncertainty about the long-term value of AI progress: While 68.3% thought good outcomes from superhuman AI are more likely than bad, of these net optimists 48% gave at least a 5% chance of extremely bad outcomes such as human extinction, and 59% of net pessimists gave 5% or more to extremely good outcomes.

A distribution with high uncertainly is wise. This is in sharp contrast to expecting a middling or neutral outcome, which makes little sense.

Between 37.8% and 51.4% of respondents gave at least a 10% chance to advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human extinction. More than half suggested that “substantial” or “extreme” concern is warranted about six different AI-related scenarios, including spread of false information, authoritarian population control, and worsened inequality.

Once again, we see what seems contradictory. If I thought there was a 10% chance of human extinction from AI, I would have “extreme” concern about that. Which I do.

There was disagreement about whether faster or slower AI progress would be better for the future of humanity. However, there was broad agreement that research aimed at minimizing potential risks from AI systems ought to be prioritized more.

We defined High-Level Machine Intelligence (HLMI) thus:

High-level machine intelligence (HLMI) is achieved when unaided machines can accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers. Ignore aspects of tasks for which being a human is intrinsically advantageous, e.g. being accepted as a jury member. Think feasibility, not adoption.

This is a very high bar. ‘Every task’ is very different from many or most tasks, especially combined with both better and cheaper. Also note that this is not all ‘intellectual’ tasks. It is all tasks, period.

We asked for predictions, assuming “human scientific activity continues without major negative disruption.” We aggregated the results (n=1,714) by fitting gamma distributions, as with individual task predictions in 3.1.

In both 2022 and 2023, respondents gave a wide range of predictions for how soon HLMI will be feasible (Figure 3).

The aggregate 2023 forecast predicted a 50% chance of HLMI by 2047, down thirteen years from 2060 in the 2022 survey. For comparison, in the six years between the 2016 and 2022 surveys, the expected date moved only one year earlier, from 2061 to 2060.

This is the potential future world in which, as of 2047, an AI can ‘do every human task better and cheaper than a human.’

What happens after that? What do they think 2048 is going to look like? 2057?

That is the weirdest part of the whole exercise.

From this survey, it seems they are choosing not to think about this too hard? Operating off some sense of ‘things will be normal and develop at normal pace’?

[Note that I misread the second chart initially as having the same scale as the first one. The second chart is an expansion of the lefthand side of the first chart.]

Do they actually expect us to have AI capable of doing everything better than we are, and then effectively sit on that for several generations?

Including two human generations during which the AIs are doing the AI research, better and cheaper than humans? The world is going to stay that kind of normal and under control while that happens?

FOAL below is Full Automation of Human Labor, HLMI is High Level Machine Intelligence.

The paper authors notice that they too are confused.

Since occupations might naturally be understood either as complex tasks, composed of tasks, or closely connected with one of these, achieving HLMI seems to either imply having already achieved FAOL, or suggest being close. We do not know what accounts for this gap in forecasts. Insofar as HLMI and FAOL refer to the same event, the difference in predictions about the time of their arrival would seem to be a framing effect.

If the reason for the difference is purely ‘we expect humans to bar AIs from fully taking over at least one job employing at least one person, or at least we expect some human to somewhere continue to be able to perform some labor’ then that could explain the difference. I’d love to have some clarifying questions.

This also seems to be a basic common sense test about consequences of AI: If AI is in full ‘anything you can do I can do better’ mode, will that be an order of magnitude acceleration of technological progress?

I mean, yes, obviously? I assume this graph’s descriptions on the left are accidentally reversed, but even so this seems like a lot of people not thinking clearly? You can doubt that HLMI will arrive, but if we do have it, the consequences seem clear. Unless people think we would have the wisdom and ability to mostly not use it at all?

Or:

To state the obvious, AI is vastly better than humans zero (0) years after HLMI. If you can do actual everything better than me using a vastly different architecture than mine, you are not only a little bit better. Certainly two years later a 10% chance simply makes zero sense here.

Here is more absurdity, these are probabilities by 2043. This is not even close to a consistent set of probability distributions. Consider which of these, or which combinations, imply which others.

Certainly I think that some of these listed possible events are not so uncertain, such as ‘sometimes deceive humans to achieve a goal without this being intended by humans.’ I mean, how could that possibly not happen by 2043?

And here is what people are concerned about, an extremely concerning chart.

Worries are in all the wrong places. The most important worry is… deepfakes? These are not especially central examples of the things we should be worried about.

Of all the concerns here, the biggest should likely be ‘other’ simply because of how much is left not full under the other umbrellas. One could I suppose say that ‘AIs with wrong goals become powerful’ and ‘AI has its goals set wrong’ cover a lot of ground, even if I would describe the core events a different way.

One could also take this not as a measure of what is likely, but rather a measure of what is ‘concerning.’ Meaning that people express concern for social reasons, rather than because the biggest worries from AI that is expected to be able to literally do all jobs better and cheaper than humans are… deepfakes and manipulation of public opinion. I mean, seriously?

Another option is that people were thinking in contradictory frames. In one frame, they realize that HLMI-level AI is coming. In another frame, they ask ‘what is concerning?’ and are thinking only about mundane AI.

On the net consequences of AI, including potential existential risk, sensemaking is not getting better.

Of all the potential consequences of HLMI, an AI capable of doing everything better than humans, ‘neutral’ does not enter into it. That makes absolutely no sense. It is the science fiction story we tell ourselves so that we can continue telling the same relatable human stories. It might go great, it might be the end of everything worthwhile, what it absolutely will not be is meh.

If you tell me it ‘went neutral’ then I can come up with a story, where someone or some group creates HLMI/ASI and then decides to use it to ensure no one else builds one and otherwise leave things entirely alone because they think doing anything else would be worse. I mean, it’s definitely an above-average plan for what to do given what other plans I have seen, but no.

So what do we make of these p(doom) numbers? Let’s zoom in, these are probabilities that someone responded with 10% or higher based on question wording:

The p(doom) numbers here are a direct contradiction. We’re going to get some weird talking points.

In Figure 12, we have a mean of 9% and median of 5% for the full range of ‘extremely bad’ outcomes.

In Figure 13’s question 3, we have 14.4% mean chance of either human extinction or severe disempowerment, or 16.2% chance in the longer term, and still 5% median.

Then, in question 2, they ask ‘what probability do you put on human inability to control future advanced AI systems causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment’ and they have a mean of 19.4% and a median of 10%.

She’s more likely to be a librarian and a feminist than only a librarian, you say.

Is this mostly a classic conjunction fallacy? The framing effect of pointing out we could lose control, either biasing people or alternatively snapping them out of not thinking about what might happen at all? Something else?

This is not as big an impact as it looks when you see 5% vs. 10%. What is happening is largely that almost no one is saying, for example, 7%. So when 47% of responses are 10% or higher, the median is 5%, then at 51% it jumps to barely hitting 10%. Both 5% and 10% are misleading, the ‘real’ median here is more like 8%.

I did a survey on Twitter asking how best to characterize the findings of the survey.

I think this poll is right. 10% is closer to accurate than 5%, but ‘median of 5%-10% depending on framing, mean of 9%-19%’ is the correct way to report this result. If someone wanted to say ‘researchers say a one in ten chance of doom’ then that is a little fast and loose, I’d avoid saying that, but I’d consider it within Bounded Distrust.

The important thing is that:

  1. Researchers broadly acknowledge that existential risk from AI is a real concern.

  2. Researchers put that risk high enough that we should be willing to make big investments and sacrifices to mitigate that risk.

  3. Researchers do not, however, think that such risks are the default outcome.

  4. Researchers disagree strongly about the magnitude of this risk.

Most importantly, existential risk is a highly mainstream concern within the field. They also are highly mainstream among the public when surveys ask.

Any media report or other rhetoric attempting to frame such beliefs as fringe positions either hasn’t done the homework, or is lying to you.

Nate Silver: This is super interesting on AI risk. Think it would be good if other fields made more attempts to conduct scientific surveys of expert opinion. (Disclosure: I did a very small bit of unpaid consulting on this survey.)

The fact that there is broad-based practitioner concern about AI safety risk (although with a lot of variation from person to person) and a quickening of AI timelines is significant. You’ll still get the occasional media report framing these as fringe positions. But they’re not.

Despite these predictions of potential doom, support for slowing down now was if anything a tiny bit negative, even purely in terms of humanity’s future.

This actually makes perfect sense if (and only if) you buy that AGI is far. If HLMI is only scheduled for 2047, then slowing down from 2024-2029 does not sound like an awesome strategy. If I was told that current pace meant AGI 2047, I too would not be looking to slow down short term development of AI.

I’d want to ‘look at the crosstabs’ here, as it were, but I think a very reasonable reaction is something vaguely like:

  1. If you think AGI plausibly arrives within 10 years or so, you want to slow down.

  2. If you think AGI is highly unlikely to arrive within 10 years, but might within 25 years, you want to roughly maintain current pace while looking to lay groundwork to slow down in the future.

  3. If you think AGI is almost certainly more than 25 years away, and you (highly reasonably) conclude mundane pre-AGI fears are mostly overblown, accelerate for now, and perhaps worry about the rest later.

I believe the groundwork part of this is extremely important, and worry a lot about path dependence, but confidence that the timeline was 25 years or more would absolutely be a crux that would change my mind on many things.

I would love to see more people, including those with ‘e/acc’ in their bio, say explicitly that the timeline question is a crux, and their recommendations rely on AGI being far.

One bright spot was strong support for prioritization of AI safety research, although not strong enough and with only small improvement from 2022.

I continue to not understand the attitude of not wanting much more safety work. I can understand wanting to move forward as fast as possible. I can understand saying that your company in particular should focus on capabilities. I can’t see why one wouldn’t think that more safety work would be good for the world.

I think the 13% here for ‘alignment is among the most important problems in the field’ is silently one of the most absurd results of all:

A second set of AI safety questions was based on Stuart Russell’s formulation of the alignment problem [Russell, 2014]. This set of questions began with a summary of Russell’s argument—which claims that with advanced AI, “you get exactly what you ask for, not what you want”—then asked:

1. Do you think this argument points at an important problem?

2. How valuable is it to work on this problem today, compared to other problems in AI?

3. How hard do you think this problem is, compared to other problems in AI?

The majority of respondents said that the alignment problem is either a “very important problem” (41%) or “among the most important problems in the field” (13%), and the majority said the it is “harder” (36%) or “much harder” (21%) than other problems in AI. However, respondents did not generally think that it is more valuable to work on the alignment problem today than other problems. (Figure 16)

I can understand someone thinking alignment is easy. I think it is a super wrong thing to believe, but I have seen actual arguments, and I can imagine such worlds where the Russell formulation is super doable, whereas other AI problems are far harder. So, sure, on some level that is reasonable disagreement, or at least I see how you got there. I will note that estimates of alignment difficulty went modestly up over 2023, as did estimates of the value of working on it.

We do see 41% treat it as a ‘very important problem’ but it seems crazy not to think of it as ‘among the most important problems in the field.’ And I am confused why that answer declined so much, from 21% to 13%, especially given other answers, perhaps this is merely noise. Still, it should be vastly higher. Unless perhaps people are saying this is a wrong problem formulation?

In general, it seems like researchers are trying to be ‘more moderate’ and give neutral answers across the board. Perhaps this is due to entry and going more mainstream, and people trying to give social cognition answers.

As with many such surveys, I would love to see more clarifying questions, and more attempt to be able to measure correlations. Which future expectations correspond to which worries? Why are we seeing the Conjunction Fallacy? What changed people’s minds over the past year, or what do people think did it? What kind of future are people expecting? How do researchers describe things like the automation of all human labor, and what do they think such worlds would look like?

In terms of what brand new questions to ask for the 2024 edition, wow are things moving fast, so maybe ask again in six months?

AI Impacts Survey: December 2023 Edition Read More »

how-archaeologists-reconstructed-the-burning-of-jerusalem-in-586-bce

How archaeologists reconstructed the burning of Jerusalem in 586 BCE

On the seventh day of Christmas —

Hebrew bible is only surviving account of siege that laid waste to Solomon’s Temple.

How archaeologists reconstructed the burning of Jerusalem in 586 BCE

Assaf Peretz/Israel Antiquities Authority

There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Archaeologists relied on chemical clues and techniques like FTIR spectroscopy and archaeomagnetic analysis to reconstruct the burning of Jerusalem by Babylonian forces around 586 BCE.

Archaeologists have uncovered new evidence in support of Biblical accounts of the siege and burning of the city of Jerusalem by the Babylonians around 586 BCE, according to a September paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The Hebrew bible contains the only account of this momentous event, which included the destruction of Solomon’s Temple. “The Babylonian chronicles from these years were not preserved,” co-author Nitsan Shalom of Tel Aviv University in Israel told New Scientist. According to the biblical account, “There was a violent and complete destruction, the whole city was burned and it stayed completely empty, like the descriptions you see in [the Book of] Lamentations about the city deserted and in complete misery.”

Judah was a vassal kingdom of Babylon during the late 7th century BCE, under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar II. This did not sit well with Judah’s king, Jehoiakim, who revolted against the Babylonian king in 601 BCE despite being warned not to do so by the prophet Jeremiah. He stopped paying the required tribute and sided with Egypt when Nebuchadnezzar tried (and failed) to in invade that country.  Jehoiakim died and his son Jeconiah succeeded him when Nebuchadnezzar’s forces besieged Jerusalem in 597 BCE. The city was pillaged and Jeconiah surrendered and was deported to Babylon for his trouble, along with a substantial portion of Judah’s population. (The Book of Kings puts the number at 10,000.) His uncle Zedekiah became king of Judah.

Zedekiah also chafed under Babylonian rule and revolted in turn, refusing to pay the required tribute and seeking alliance with the Egyptian pharaoh Hophra. This resulted in a brutal 30-month siege by Nebuchadnezzar’s forces against Judah and its capital, Jerusalem. Eventually the Babylonians prevailed again, breaking through the city walls to conquer Jerusalem. Zedekiah was forced to watch his sons killed and was then blinded, bound, and taken to Babylon as a prisoner. This time Nebuchadnezzar was less merciful and ordered his troops to completely destroy Jerusalem and pull down the wall around 586 BCE.

There is archaeological evidence to support the account of the city being destroyed by fire, along with nearby villages and towns on the western border. Three residential structures were excavated between 1978 and 1982 and found to contain burned wooden beams dating to around 586 BCE. Archaeologists also found ash and burned wooden beams from the same time period when they excavated several structures at the Giv’ati Parking Lot archaeological site, close to the assumed location of Solomon’s Temple. Samples taken from a plaster floor showed exposure to high temperatures of at least 600 degrees Celsius

Aerial view of the excavation site in Jerusalem, at the foot of the Temple Mount

Enlarge / Aerial view of the excavation site in Jerusalem, at the foot of the Temple Mount

Assaf Peretz/Israel Antiquities Authority

However, it wasn’t possible to determine from that evidence whether the fires were intentional or accidental, or where the fire started if it was indeed intentional. For this latest research, Shalom and her colleagues focused on the two-story Building 100 at the Giv’ati Parking Lot site. They used Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy—which measures the absorption of infrared light to determine to what degree a sample had been heated—and archaeomagnetic analysis, which determines whether samples containing magnetic minerals were sufficiently heated to reorient those compounds to a new magnetic north.

The analysis revealed varying degrees of exposure to high-temperature fire in three rooms (designated A, B, and C) on the bottom level of Building 100, with Room C showing the most obvious evidence. This might have been a sign that Room C was the ignition point, but there was no fire path; the burning of Room C appeared to be isolated. Combined with an earlier 2020 study on segments of the second level of the building, the authors concluded that several fires were lit in the building and the fires burned strongest in the upper floors, except for that “intense local fire” in Room C on the first level.

“When a structure burns, heat rises and is concentrated below the ceiling,” the authors wrote. “The walls and roof are therefore heated to higher temperatures than the floor.” The presence of charred beams on the floors suggest this was indeed the case: most of the heat rose to the ceiling, burning the beams until they collapsed to the floors, which otherwise were subjected to radiant heat. But the extent of the debris was likely not caused just by that collapse, suggesting that the Babylonians deliberately went back in and knocked down any remaining walls.

Furthermore, “They targeted the more important, the more famous buildings in the city,” Shalom told New Scientist, rather than destroying everything indiscriminately. “2600 years later, we’re still mourning the temple.”

While they found no evidence of additional fuels that might have served as accelerants, “we may assume the fire was intentionally ignited  due to its widespread presence in all rooms and both stories of the building,” Shalom et al. concluded. “The finds within the rooms indicate there was enough flammable material (vegetal and wooden items and construction material) to make additional fuel unnecessary. The widespread presence of charred remains suggests a deliberate destruction by fire…. [T]he spread of the fire and the rapid collapse of the building indicate that the destroyers invested great efforts to completely demolish the building and take it out of use.”

DOI: Journal of Archaeological Science, 2023. 10.1016/j.jas.2023.105823  (About DOIs).

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a-cat-video-highlighted-a-big-year-for-lasers-in-space

A cat video highlighted a big year for lasers in space

Pew Pew —

NASA has invested more than $700 million in testing laser communications in space.

Taters, the orange tabby cat of a Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee, stars in a video beamed from deep space by NASA's Psyche spacecraft. The graphics illustrate several features from the tech demo, such as Psyche’s orbital path, Palomar’s telescope dome, and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate. Tater’s heart rate, color, and breed are also on display.

Enlarge / Taters, the orange tabby cat of a Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee, stars in a video beamed from deep space by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft. The graphics illustrate several features from the tech demo, such as Psyche’s orbital path, Palomar’s telescope dome, and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate. Tater’s heart rate, color, and breed are also on display.

It’s been quite a year for laser communications in space. In October and November, NASA launched two pioneering demonstrations to test high-bandwidth optical communication links, and these tech demos are now showing some initial results.

On December 11, a laser communications terminal aboard NASA’s Psyche spacecraft on the way to an asteroid linked up with a receiver in Southern California. The near-infrared laser beam contained an encoded message in the form of a 15-second ultra-high-definition video showing a cat bouncing around a sofa, chasing the light of a store-bought laser toy.

Laser communications offer the benefit of transmitting data at a higher rate than achievable with conventional radio links. In fact, the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment on the Psyche spacecraft is testing technologies capable of sending data at rates 10 to 100 times greater than possible on prior missions.

“We’re looking to increase the amount of data we can get down to Earth, and that has a lot of advantages to us,” said Jeff Volosin, acting deputy associate administrator for NASA space communications and navigation program, before the launch of Psyche earlier this year.

Now, DSOC has set a record for the farthest distance a high-definition video has streamed from space. At the time, Psyche was traveling 19 million miles (31 kilometers) from Earth, about 80 times the distance between Earth and the Moon. Traveling at the speed of light, the video signal took 101 seconds to reach Earth, sent at the system’s maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second, NASA said.

A playful experiment

After reaching the receiver at Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, each video frame was transmitted “live” to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where it was played in real time, according to NASA.

“One of the goals is to demonstrate the ability to transmit broadband video across millions of miles. Nothing on Psyche generates video data, so we usually send packets of randomly generated test data,” said Bill Klipstein, the tech demo’s project manager at JPL, in a statement. “But to make this significant event more memorable, we decided to work with designers at JPL to create a fun video, which captures the essence of the demo as part of the Psyche mission.”

The video of Taters, the orange tabby cat of a JPL employee, was recorded before the launch of Psyche and stored on the spacecraft for this demonstration. The robotic probe launched on October 13 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, with the primary goal of flying to the asteroid Psyche, a metal-rich world in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

It will take six years for the Psyche probe to reach its destination, and NASA tacked on a laser communications experiment to help keep the spacecraft busy during the cruise. Since the launch in October, ground teams at JPL switched on the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment and ran it through some early tests.

One of the most significant technical challenges involved in the DSOC experiment was aligning the 8.6-inch (22-centimeter) optical telescope aboard Psyche with a transmitter and receiver fitted to ground-based telescopes in California and vice versa. Because Psyche is speeding through deep space, this problem is akin to trying to hit a dime from a mile away while the dime is moving, according to Abi Biswas, DSOC’s project technologist at JPL.

Once you achieve that feat, the signal that is received is still very weak and therefore requires very sensitive detectors and processing electronics which can take that signal and extract information that’s encoded in it,” Biswas said.

The telescope aboard Psyche is mounted on an isolation-and-pointing assembly to stabilize the optics and isolate them from spacecraft vibrations, according to NASA. This is necessary to eliminate jitters that could prevent a stable laser lock between Earth and the Psyche spacecraft.

“What optical or laser communications allows you is to achieve very high data rates, but on the downside, it’s a very narrow laser beam that requires very accurate pointing control,” Biswas told reporters before the launch. “For example, the platform disturbance from a typical spacecraft would throw off the pointing, so you need to actively isolate from it or control against it.

“For near-Earth missions, you can just control against it because you have enough control bandwidth,” he said. “From deep space, where the signals received are very weak, you don’t have that much control bandwidth, so you have to isolate from the disturbance.”

The Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment is mounted on NASA's Psyche spacecraft on the way to an asteroid. The inset image shows the mirror of the instrument's telescope for receiving and transmitting laser signals.

Enlarge / The Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment is mounted on NASA’s Psyche spacecraft on the way to an asteroid. The inset image shows the mirror of the instrument’s telescope for receiving and transmitting laser signals.

There’s another drawback of direct-to-Earth laser communications from space. Cloud cover over transmitting and receiving telescopes on Earth could block signals, so an operational optical communications network will require several ground nodes at different locations worldwide, ideally positioned in areas known for clear skies.

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SpaceX launches two rockets—three hours apart—to close out a record year

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off Thursday night from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Enlarge / SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off Thursday night from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

It seems like SpaceX did everything this year but launch 100 times.

On Thursday night, the launch company sent two more rockets into orbit from Florida. One was a Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful rocket in commercial service, carrying the US military’s X-37B spaceplane from a launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 8: 07 pm EST (01: 07 UTC). Less than three hours later, at 11: 01 pm EST (04: 01 UTC), SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 launcher took off a few miles to the south with a payload of 23 Starlink Internet satellites.

The Falcon Heavy’s two side boosters and the Falcon 9’s first stage landed back on Earth for reuse.

These were SpaceX’s final launches of 2023. SpaceX ends the year with 98 flights, including 91 Falcon 9s, five Falcon Heavy rockets, and two test launches of the giant new Super Heavy-Starship rocket. These flights were spread across four launch pads in Florida, California, and Texas.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, set a goal of 100 launches this year, up from the company’s previous record of 61 in 2022. For a while, it looked like SpaceX was on track to accomplish the feat, but a spate of bad weather and technical problems with the final Falcon Heavy launch of the year kept the company short of 100 flights.

King of ‘upmass’

“Congrats to the entire Falcon team at SpaceX on a record breaking 96 launches in 2023!” wrote Jon Edwards, vice president of Falcon launch vehicles at SpaceX, on the social media platform X. “I remember when Elon Musk first threw out a goal of 100 launches as a thought experiment, intended to unlock our thinking as to how we might accelerate Falcon across all levels of production and launch.

“Only a few years later and here we are,” Edwards wrote. “I’m so incredibly proud to work with the best team on Earth, and so excited to see what we achieve next year.”

It’s important to step back and put these numbers in context. No other family of orbit-class rockets has ever flown more than 63 times in a year. SpaceX’s Falcon rockets have now exceeded this number by roughly 50 percent. SpaceX’s competitors in the United States, such as United Launch Alliance and Rocket Lab, managed far fewer flights in 2023. ULA had three missions, and Rocket Lab launched its small Electron booster 10 times.

Nearly two-thirds of SpaceX’s missions this year were dedicated to delivering satellites to orbit for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network, a constellation that now numbers more than 5,000 spacecraft.

SpaceX also launched five missions with the Falcon Heavy rocket, created by aggregating three Falcon 9 rocket boosters together. Highlights from SpaceX’s 2023 Falcon launch schedule included three crew missions to the International Space Station, and the launch of NASA’s Psyche mission to explore a metallic asteroid.

In all, SpaceX’s Falcon rockets hauled approximately 1,200 metric tons, or more than 2.6 million pounds, of payload mass into orbit this year. This “upmass” is equivalent to nearly three International Space Stations. Most of this was made up of mass-produced Starlink satellites.

SpaceX launches two rockets—three hours apart—to close out a record year Read More »