Sunday, July 17, 2022

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Polestar’s electric SUV will start at €75,000

Posted: 17 Jul 2022 12:08 PM PDT

Polestar won't officially debut its next EV until this fall, but the company has shared initial pricing information. Earlier this week, Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath said the Polestar 3 would start at €75,000 and top out at around €110,000, reports Automotive News Europe (via Autoblog). With the current parity between the euro and dollar, the automaker's first electric SUV could cost between $75,700 and $111,000 when it arrives in the US.

Of course, with Polestar 3 production not slated to start until early 2023, the exchange rate could tip back in favor of the euro, but Ingenlath's comments give us an idea of where the automaker plans to position the EV. A $75,000 price tag would put the base model Polestar 3 in about the same category as the Tesla Model Y and Rivian R1S, which before incentives cost $69,990 and $72,500 in their respective Performance and Explore trims. Meanwhile, you're looking at a car in Model X territory with the top-end model.

There's still a lot we don't know about the Polestar 3's specs, but the company has said the SUV would feature the same dual-motor powertrain as the Polestar 2 and a 372-mile range. Polestar also shared that it plans to produce the vehicle in the US partially. We'll likely learn more about the SUV before its October debut.

Apple may release M2 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros as early as this fall

Posted: 17 Jul 2022 10:20 AM PDT

Less than a year after announcing the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, Apple reportedly plans to update those devices as early as this fall. Responding to a reader question in his latest Power On newsletter (via 9to5Mac), Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says the company is already working on M2 versions of the 14- and 16-inch models.

According to Gurman, the design and features of the two computers are "likely to stay roughly the same" since Apple only redesigned the line last year to add MagSafe charging, more ports and better displays. The primary change will be the addition of M2 versions of the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips the company offers through its current models. "Look for much of the focus to be on the graphics side, just like with the standard M2," said Gurman of the upcoming SoCs. On the 2022 MacBook Air, graphics performance is about 35 percent faster if you go with the 10-core GPU variant. 

Although Apple reportedly hopes to release the new MacBook Pros sometime in the fall, Gurman notes the company could delay them to the spring of 2023. "Given the continued supply-chain challenges, it's hard to predict exactly when these will hit store shelves," he said. New Macs are just among a "deluge" of products Apple plans to release over the next year. In another recent newsletter, Gurman said the company was also working on a new HomePod and an extreme sports Apple Watch.

‘Soulframe’ is a free-to-play MMO from the studio behind ‘Warframe’

Posted: 17 Jul 2022 08:49 AM PDT

After nearly a decade of work on Warframe and more than five years since it canceled its most recent project, Digital Extremes is working on a new game. On Saturday, the studio announced Soulframe, a free-to-play MMO set in a fantasy world. Outside of an enigmatic teaser trailer, Digital Extremes has shared only a few details about Soulframe.

In an interview with The Washington Post, creative director Geoff Crookes said the game draws inspiration from classics The NeverEnding Story and Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke. Like the latter, Soulframe will explore what happens when humans collide with the natural world. "The conceit [in Soulframe] is that the world itself is a little angry about what's been done to it, and the grounds underneath tend to shift throughout the day," Crookes told The Post. "So there's going to be proceduralism within the cave networks and crevasses and so on underneath the world."

From a gameplay standpoint, Soulframe primarily focuses on "slow and heavy" melee combat. Despite including "Soul" in the title, Crookes told The Post his team didn't set out to create a Soulslike when they began work on the project – though it became impossible to ignore FromSoftware's latest masterpiece. "Elden Ring has absolutely been a subject of some conversation — maybe to do with camera, maybe to do with how excellent their combat pacing is," said Soulframe co-lead Steve Sinclair. "And you know, screw those guys, because damn, [Elden Ring] was absolutely fantastic."

Soulframe doesn't have a release date yet, and both Crookes and Sinclair emphasized the game is still early in development, but like with Warframe, Digital Extremes plans to involve the community in the creation process. So expect frequent behind-the-scenes Twitch streams. Moreover, some fans could receive early access to the game within a year.

Hitting the Books: How mass media transformed coyotes into scapegoats

Posted: 17 Jul 2022 08:00 AM PDT

As the boundaries between developed spaces and wildlands continue to blur, the frequency and intensity of human-animal interactions will surely increase. But it won't just be adorably viral trash pandas and pizza rats whistling on your veranda — it'll be 30-50 feral hogs in your garbage and birds of prey predating upon your precious pekinese. Next thing you know your daughter's knocked up and the fine china's missing! But it wasn't always like this, Peter Alagona explains in his new book, The Accidental Ecosystem. He explores how and why America's cities — once largely barren of natural features — have exploded with wildlife over the past 150 years, even as populations have declined in their traditional habitats.

In the excerpt below, Alagona examines our long and complicated relationships with the coyote, one that has lasted for millennia and ranged from reverence to revulsion, a narrative now influenced by the social media hivemind.

a drawing of a city with wild animals crawling over the buildings
UC Press

Excerpted from The Accidental Ecosystem: People and Wildlife in American Cities by Peter S Alagona, published by the University of California Press. © 2022 by Peter S Alagona.

Urban adapters and exploiters may be prepared for life among people, but are people prepared for life among them? In the 1970s and 1980s, when coyotes started showing up more often in dozens of American cities, residents and officials were unprepared, and many were unwilling to accommodate animals they saw as dangerous interlopers. As one teenager who lost her toy poodle to a coyote told the Los Angeles Times in 1980, "Coyotes make me mad. They take care of our rats, which are really disgusting. But I hate coyotes." The same year, the Yale social ecology professor Stephen Kellert found that, among US survey respondents, coyotes ranked twelfth from the bottom on a list of "most liked" animals, above cockroaches, wasps, rattlesnakes, and mosquitoes but below turtles, butterflies, swans, and horses. The most-liked animal was the dog, which is so closely related to the coyote that the two can mate in the wild and produce fertile offspring.

In his 2010 book Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight about Animals, the anthropologist Hal Herzog wrote that "the way we think about other species often defies logic." This is not to say that our ideas about animals are arbitrary, but rather that the ways we think about them are shaped as much by history, culture, and psychology as by physics, chemistry, or biology. In the absence of this social context, people's ideas about and actions toward other animals can seem nonsensical, hypocritical, or downright weird.

Animals are often presumed innocent or guilty — and thus treated with respect or contempt — based on the baggage our culture, through art or literature or tradition, has forced them to carry. An animal's inherent or perceived qualities also matter. We tend to give the benefit of the doubt to creatures that are big, that we think are cute, pretty, majestic, or humanlike, that seem to embody admirable qualities such as grit, entrepreneurship, or good parenting, or that at the very least leave us alone. Yet such perceptions rarely reflect a species's real behavior or ecology. Many people see rats as disgusting or dangerous, even though most rats pose little threat to most people most of the time. Cats, meanwhile, seem friendly and cuddly despite being ferocious predators and disease-ridden ecological wrecking balls.

Mass and social media play especially important roles in shaping perceptions. When large and charismatic wildlife species started showing up in many American cities more frequently in the 1970s and 1980s, around the time of Kelly Keen's death, newspapers and TV shows often adopted one of two tones: irony or sensationalism. Ironic images and stories emphasized how surprising it was to see wild animals showing up in supposedly civilized areas. Sensationalistic stories emphasized conflicts between people and wildlife. They often used military metaphors about wars and battles or echoed the paranoid, racist, and xenophobic tropes of the day, comparing wildlife to undocumented immigrants, gang members, criminals, terrorists, and "super predators."

These images were circulating in the media during an era when the proportion of Americans with firsthand experiences of wild places was flattening or even declining. During the 1970s and 1980s, \consumer products and better infrastructure fueled the growth of outdoor sports, including non hunting wildlife activities like bird watching and photography. Yet technology, which enabled so many people to enjoy the outdoors, also began inserting itself into these same people's encounters with nature, first mediating and then replacing them. Video screens allowed Americans to spend more time watching virtual creatures and less time interacting with actual animals. Animal-themed visual media exploded in popularity, while zoos and museums struggled to attract patrons. Between 1995 and 2014, even the National Park system saw its annual per capita visitation slide by 4 percent.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the people who encountered wildlife in cities often reacted by treating these animals like the caricatures they read about in the news or saw on TV. For many, creatures like coyotes looked like either cuddly pets or bloodthirsty killers. Neither image was accurate, of course, but both had real world consequences.

When people who viewed coyotes with suspicion saw them in urban areas, often the first thing they did was call the police. Involving the police tended to turn a non problem into a problem or make a bad problem worse. Yet moving away from a law-enforcement-based approach has been difficult.

As late as 2015, New York City, which saw its first coyote twenty years earlier, was still often approaching these creatures as outlaws. That April, the New York Police Department, responding to an early-morning 911 call reporting a coyote in Riverside Park on Manhattan's Upper West Side, deployed tranquilizer guns, patrol cars, and helicopters. The ensuing three-hour chase ended when officers failed to corner the fugitive canine. When questioned about the costly and time-consuming incident, the NYPD contradicted a statement previously issued by the Department of Parks and Recreation saying that the city would no longer pursue coyotes that did not appear to pose a threat. It turned out that the two departments did not have a written agreement spelling out this policy. NYPD officers were not trained on how to deal with coyotes, but it was up to them to decide how to respond. The result was predictable: the same excessive force that has plagued modern policing in general was mobilized to combat a wild animal that presented little if any risk.

Over time, some cities and their residents adjusted to their new reality of living with coyotes. Jurisdictions with ample budgets, supportive residents, and helpful institutions like zoos and museums developed research, education, conservation, and citizen science programs. Some parks and police departments started working together to develop new policies and practices, limiting the use of force and trying, with some difficulty, to respond only to genuine emergencies. One of the key messages wildlife officials stressed was that the decision to launch a response should depend on an animal's behavior — whether it appeared injured or sick or was acting aggressively — and not its mere presence.

As such messages have percolated, attitudes have evolved. In New York, as people have become more accustomed to living with coyotes, fear has given way to tolerance and even a tenuous kind of acceptance. In some neighborhoods, individual coyotes have become mascots with names, backstories, and social media accounts. Few people actually trust coyotes, and most people don't want them prowling around their backyards, schools, or playgrounds, but many communities have shown a growing willingness to embrace their furry neighbors.

As early as 2008, studies from suburban New York showed that most residents appreciated coyotes, enjoyed having them around, and even "found the likelihood of injury from a coyote acceptable." But people's willingness to live alongside coyotes in their communities dropped quickly when incidents occurred, suggesting that tolerance for them remained fragile. Overall, however, the longer most people lived with urban wildlife like coyotes, the more they viewed these creatures not as threats but as natural and beneficial members of multispecies urban communities.
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