A new book promises “the untold story of the cyberweapons market — the most secretive, invisible, government-backed market on earth — and a terrifying first look at a new kind of global warfare.” Its author — a New York Times cybersecurity reporter — shares the book’s story about David Evenden, a former National Security Agency analyst who later worked in Abu…
Tag: Soccer
A photonic curveball has real-world examples in soccer, baseball
Have you ever been amazed by a curveball goal scored by Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi or Christiano Ronaldo? Then you have—possibly without knowing it—been exposed to the Magnus effect: the fact that spinning objects tend to move along curved paths. In a new publication that appeared in Physical Review Letters this week, Robert Spreeuw shows that the same effect occurs to…
Werner Herzog On Asteroids, Star Wars, and the ‘Obscenity’ of a City On Mars
78-year-old filmmaker Werner Herzog shared some interesting thoughts before the release of his new documentary on asteroids, Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds now available on Apple TV+. From Herzog’s new interview with the science site inverse: Herzog tells Inverse he’s less concerned than ever that a meteorite will destroy the Earth, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still be worried about…
Soccer Telecast Ruined When AI-Controlled Camera Mistakes Ref’s Bald Head For Ball
Futurism reports:
Fans of the soccer team Caledonian Thistle FC from Inverness, Scotland, experienced something hilarious this week when the robot camera operator — automatically trained to keep the lens trained on the soccer ball using AI — kept mistaking the linesman’s bald head for the ball, as IFL Science reports. The result: angry (or amused) soccer fans kept losing track of…
Citigroup Tech Executive Unmasked as Major QAnon ‘High Priest’
QAnon’s biggest news hub was run by a senior vice president at Citigroup, the American multinational investment bank and financial services company Citigroup. Jason Gelinas worked in the company’s technology department, where he led an AI project and oversaw a team of software developers, according to Bloomberg. [Alternate URL] He was married with kids and had a comfortable house in a…
Solar telescope GREGOR unveils magnetic details of the sun
The Sun is our star and has a profound influence on our planet, life, and civilization. By studying the magnetism on the Sun, we can understand its influence on Earth and minimize damage of satellites and technological infrastructure. The GREGOR telescope allows scientists to resolve details as small as 50 km on the Sun, which is a tiny fraction of the…
Can Stadiums Replace Fans With Cardboard Cutouts and Avatars?
A new article on The Hustle tries to explain why sports stadiums are suddenly full of fans made out of cardboard:
Back in March, a German filmmaker and soccer aficionado named Ingo Müller was sitting at home, complaining to his wife about not being able to attend the matches of his favorite club team, Borussia Mönchengladbach. “She said, ‘If you’re really pissed…
When the NBA Returns It May Use ‘NBA 2K’ For Crowd Noise
One of the issues with the NBA’s plan to restart its season in July is playing games without fans in the arena. According to a report from The Athletic, there’s a proposal to pipe in crowd noise from the NBA 2K video game. Engadget reports: NBA 2K also serves as the platform for the league’s official esports series and has already…
The 50 Years of Crowd Control Research Police Are Ignoring
Thelasko shares an excerpt from FiveThirtyEight: Researchers have spent 50 years studying the way crowds of protesters and crowds of police behave — and what happens when the two interact. One thing they will tell you is that when the police respond by escalating force — wearing riot gear from the start, or using tear gas on protesters — it doesn’t…
Gamemakers Inject AI To Develop More Lifelike Characters
moon_unit2 writes: The AI technique that DeepMind used to teach machines to play Atari can now bring new video game characters to life. WIRED reports that researchers at Electronic Arts and the University of British Columbia in Canada developed a reinforcement learning method for animating humanoid characters. The approach feeds on data gathered through motion capture, but then uses reinforcement learning…