The Verge: “Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss on making The Matrix Awakens with Epic Games”

A big reason for doing the demo is to demonstrate how Epic thinks its technology can be used to blend scripted storytelling with games and much more, according to Epic CTO Kim Libreri, who worked on the special effects for the original Matrix trilogy. We really believe strongly in big, massive open worlds not just for games, he tells The Verge. You want to be able to navigate massive, huge spaces just like you can in our world. So we’ve made that a lot easier to do in the engine.

The main sandbox experience in The Matrix Awakens isn’t a game as much as it’s a tech demo that Epic plans to release for developers to build on and replicate. Everything in the virtual city is fully loaded no matter where your character is located (rather than rendered only when the character gets near), down to the detail of a chain link fence in an alley. All of the moving vehicles, people, and lighting in the city are generated by AI, the latter of which Libreri describes as a breakthrough that means lighting is no longer “this sort of niche art form”.

Alex Heath, Vjeran Pavic & Phil Esposito

Judging from the demo video, the rendering does look impressive. The cityscapes, buildings, highways, cars, and so on, looked indistinguishable from real-world footage to me – at least at that resolution. People’s movements and faces still have a noticeable artificial quality though – perhaps a reflection of our human perception, which is more sensitive to minute changes in facial expressions.

The Roots of Progress: “Why has nuclear power been a flop?”

Excessive concern about low levels of radiation led to a regulatory standard known as ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable. What defines “reasonable”? It is an ever-tightening standard. As long as the costs of nuclear plant construction and operation are in the ballpark of other modes of power, then they are reasonable.

This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear power to be cheaper than its competition. Nuclear can’t even innovate its way out of this predicament: under ALARA, any technology, any operational improvement, anything that reduces costs, simply gives the regulator more room and more excuse to push for more stringent safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything else. Actually, it’s worse than that: it essentially says that if nuclear becomes cheap, then the regulators have not done their job.

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Further, the NRC does not benefit when power plants come online. Their budget does not increase proportional to gigawatts generated. Instead, the nuclear companies themselves pay the NRC for the time they spend reviewing applications, at something close to $300 an hour. This creates a perverse incentive: the more overhead, the more delays, the more revenue for the agency.

The result: the NRC approval process now takes several years and costs literally hundreds of millions of dollars.

Jason Crawford

Complaining about excessive regulation stifling innovation has been a favorite refrain of the tech industry for years, but this story about nuclear power exemplifies how excessive regulation actually looks like. As I was reading it, I was tempted to attribute these exaggerated safety concerns to public fears resulting from nuclear plant accidents such as Chernobyl – except these standards were implemented a decade earlier than Chernobyl, so perhaps the negative perception around nuclear stems from its association with nuclear arsenal and the constant threat of nuclear conflict during the Cold War. Safety regulations are certainly necessary in an area as sensitive as nuclear, both regarding the ongoing operation of reactors and for waste disposal, but they shouldn’t be so overbearing by design that they drive up the costs of nuclear power and prevent it from becoming an economic alternative to fossil fuels.

The Atlantic: “The Bad Guys are Winning”

All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote the propaganda of another—and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.

Anne Applebaum

Some interesting points in this article, but I think its central premise – that the autocratic state of the 21st century is somehow fundamentally different than autocratic states of the past – misses the mark considerably. Sure, some of their methods for spreading propaganda have been updated considerably and have vastly more reach in a digital age, and they lack a shared ideology, but other aspects are quite similar to the 20th century. I mean, the Soviet Union and its client states formed a literal military defensive treaty to counter NATO, and their economic ties were extensive as well – how much more collaborative could they get? The Soviet Union has supported China and Cuba on numerous occasions, invaded countries to either install a puppet regime or quell uprisings such as the Prague Spring. That’s hardly different from the actions of Russia in neighboring states during recent years, or China’s in Hong Kong.

CSPI Center: “The effect of population structure on transmission”

As we have seen, in order to study the spread of infectious diseases, epidemiologists use models that make various simplifying assumptions. In particular, they typically assume a homogeneous mixing population, which means that contacts between people are totally random, so everyone is equally likely to infect everyone else if they are infected. However, this assumption is totally unrealistic, because in the real world transmission occurs in a highly structured population and contacts are not random. If you are infected, the probability that you are going to infect most people in the population is effectively zero, because you’ll never have any contact with them. Of course, there are many people you will never have any contact with, but whom you could nevertheless indirectly infect by starting a chain of infections that goes through them, but for most people the probability that this will happen is infinitesimal, whereas it’s much higher for people you interact with often because they are your colleagues, friends, members of your family, etc. and people who frequently interact with them. In reality, the virus doesn’t spread in a homogeneous mixing population, but in a highly structured one where each individual has different patterns of interactions with different people. How the virus spreads depends on who interacts with whom, how often they interact and what type of interaction they have, since those facts determine what chains of infections can exist and how likely each of them is depending on where the virus starts from in the population.

Thus, while standard epidemiological models represent the population as a collection of particles that interact randomly with each other, it’s better seen as a complex network where nodes are individuals and edges represent potential interactions between them that could result in transmission. Each edge in the network has a weight that indicates how easily transmission can occur along that edge if one of the individuals it connects happens to be infectious, which is determined by the frequency and nature of the contacts between them. Epidemiologists of infectious diseases have produced a voluminous literature on models that assume a virus spreads on these kinds of networks, so it’s not as if they didn’t know that real epidemics don’t spread in a homogeneous mixing population and hadn’t studied how population structure can affect transmission, but this literature had essentially no effect on applied work during the pandemic, perhaps because the kind of data that would be necessary to model real epidemics in that way is almost never available. Yet I think that population structure could hold the key to the mystery I have identified above, namely that the effective reproduction number often undergoes large fluctuations that, as far as we can tell, can’t be explained by changes in people’s behavior. Indeed, what I’m proposing is that we can solve this mystery by postulating that the network on which the epidemic spreads has what in network science is called “community structure”, which means that it can be divided into subnetworks whose nodes are internally densely connected while the subnetworks are only loosely connected to each other.

Philippe Lemoine

Interesting study about a conundrum that has puzzled many since the start of the pandemic, yet few have offered plausible solutions: why does transmission fluctuate so much even in the absence of clear measures or changes in human behavior? There are multiple examples for this, and the author mentions some of the more known, such as Florida and the Indian Delta wave, which subsided almost as abruptly as it started. The recent surge in Romania has also ended relatively fast, despite scarce measures from the authorities – as before, I mostly attribute these swings to schools openings, and the current reduction in cases comes after schools were closed again all over the country.

O’Reilly Media: “Frank Herbert: Chapter 5: Rogue Gods”

In Dune, Herbert used heroic myth elements from the Western tradition in an effort to awaken in his readers a sensitivity to the needs that prompt a messianic religion. But even so, it is too easy to see messianism as something that happens only to desert peoples like the Fremen. Less immediately apparent is the fact that to Herbert the neurotic use of science in modern Western civilization betrays the same pattern as messianic religion.

Herbert’s feelings about science are most clearly presented in Dune and in three short novels that followed its publication, The Green Brain, Destination: Void, and The Eyes of Heisenberg. Each of these works reveals the two faces of science: it may he used to help man come to terms with the unknown, or to help him hide from it. In the latter case, it is a kind of religion, whose false god inevitably turns on his worshippers.

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The irony is that Paul is not a freak but an inevitable product of the Bene Gesserit’s own schemes. Although he has come a generation early in the plan due to Jessica’s willfulness in bearing a son instead of a daughter, the real surprise is not his early birth but the paradox of the Sisterhood’s achievement: the planned instrument of perfect control, the Kwisatz Haderach, was designed to see further than his creators, He could not help but know the emptiness of their dreams. The universe cannot be managed; the vitality of the human race lies in its random generation of new possibilities. The only real surety is that surprises will occur. In contrast to the Foundation trilogy’s exaltation of rationality’s march to predicted victory, Dune proclaims the power and primacy of the unconscious and the unexpected in human affairs.

Tim O’Reilly

With the renewed interest in the Dune universe following the recent movie, I have discovered this book on its subreddit. While I have only read this chapter yet, the insights into Herbert’s thinking are fascinating. The parallels with Asimov’s Foundation were always apparent to me, but I considered its closest analog in Dune to be the Mentats’ abilities, Paul’s prescience, and later Leto’s Golden Path. Instead, the author reveals that the Bene Gesserit and their breeding program were intended as a commentary and reaction to Asimov’s psychohistorians – which does make a lot of sense in the context of Herbert’s themes for the series.

The Guardian: “The disastrous voyage of Satoshi, the world’s first cryptocurrency cruise ship”

The difficulty in starting a new form of government, said Friedman, was simply a lack of space. All the land on Earth was taken. What they needed was a new frontier, and that frontier was the ocean. Let a thousand nations bloom on the high seas, he proclaimed, with Maoish zeal. He wanted seasteading experiments to start as soon as possible. Within three to six years, he imagined ships being repurposed as floating medical clinics. Within 10 years, he predicted, small communities would be permanently based on platforms out at sea. In a few decades, he hoped there would be floating cities with millions of people pioneering different ways of living together.

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The final entry on the FAQ page, regarding the possibility of having pets on board, gave a bracing insight into the tension between the idea of freedom and the reality of hundreds of people closely cohabiting on a cruise ship. The answer linked to a separate document, containing a 14-point list of conditions including one that declared no animal should exceed 20lbs in weight, and any barking or loud noises could not last for longer than 10 minutes. If a pet repeatedly disturbed the peace – more than three times a month or five times in a year – it would no longer be allowed to live on board. Any pet related conflict, instructed point 13, shall be resolved in accordance with Section V (F) of the Satoshi Purchase Agreement or Section IV (F) of the Satoshi Master Lease, where applicable. Dogs would only be permitted in balcony cabins, and it was advised that owners buy a specific brand of “porch potty”, a basket of fake grass where your pet could relieve itself. (Pet waste thrown overboard would result in a $200 fine.)

Sophie Elmhirst

This bizarre and unlikely story initially remined me of Jules Verne’s novel L’Île à hélice – mostly the general outline, as I read the book decades ago in my youth and I wouldn’t consider it one of Verne’s best works. But I doubt some of the characters mentioned throughout the piece ever encountered his books. One of them recounts how he used to work 17 hours a day – that doesn’t leave much room for reading, or anything else for that matter. If they had a more diverse education, maybe these people would reflect a bit on planning and consequences before launching such projects doomed to failure. The idea that a pocket of people could exist completely isolated from modern society and without a set of rules regulating the community is utter fantasy. By the end, I was happy to read that the cruise ship they bought survived this whole adventure and is awaiting better days for tourism, whenever the pandemic finally subsides.

The Guardian: “Inside the airline industry’s meltdown”

The airline industry’s metabolism is ordinarily slow – planes ordered years in advance, routes plotted and pilots trained with measured care. During the pandemic, though, decisions had to be made with uncommon speed. Late in March, for instance, a KLM flight somewhere above Novosibirsk, bearing towards Shanghai, was told that every incoming flight crew now had to quarantine for 14 days in a Chinese state hospital. This rule was so new that it hadn’t existed when the plane left Amsterdam; circumstances had changed mid flight. Executives scrambled to get an approved exemption from Dutch and Chinese authorities so that the crew could stay aboard the plane in Shanghai and bring it home 18 hours later.

The same month, Elbers retired three Boeing 747s – huge, fuel-guzzling craft that were on the verge of being put out to pasture anyway. Mere weeks later, they had to be hastily pulled out of storage and pressed into service to ferry medical equipment and PPE from China to the Netherlands. There were complicated repatriation flights to be flown. Two thousand Dutch travellers had to be retrieved from Australia. The first repatriation flight to Sydney had to leave with 48 hours’ notice, but it had been 20 years since KLM had flown there – so long that the routes and permits had to be plotted afresh and reloaded into flight computers.

Samanth Subramanian

Interesting insight into some of the lesser known aspects of the airline industry, and how it was brutally disrupted by the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic early last year. Unfortunately for the people in this business – and for those of us who enjoy traveling and can’t wait to get on a plane to a new destination – the future appears increasingly turbulent. The new omicron variant of the virus has prompted new travel restrictions, echoing the measures put in place at the beginning of the pandemic, though on a much smaller scale. And the migrant crisis at the EU border with Belarus has been partly defused by stopping incoming passengers from the Middle East. Another incident from earlier this year, also involving Belarus, which forced a Ryanair flight to land in order to capture a dissident, points to the increasing uncertainty and risks when boarding a flight caused by rising international tensions.