We Need More Science: 03/17/15

You Can Now Send Money on Facebook. What’s in It for Them?

Facebook just unveiled a new service that lets you send money via its instant messaging app, Facebook Messenger. It’s kinda like existing services from SnapChat, Square, and Venmo, letting you readily swap money other with people (as opposed to businesses) both near and far. But there’s a big difference: It runs on Facebook.

That means this new service instantly reaches the vast number of people who are already on Facebook. Suddenly, it’s far easier for a large swath of the population to send and receive cash. But friend-to-friend payments can also feed the much larger ambitions of Mark Zuckerberg and company.

Once Facebook has your credit card, it can build out services—revenue-generating services—that tempt you to spend.

Facebook’s new payments tool, you see, encourages all those millions of Facebookers to store their credit card info on the company’s machines. And this will likely fuel Facebook’s efforts to transform itself into a kind of e-commerce engine that competes directly with the likes of Amazon. Facebook is already testing a “buy” button on its social network that lets you instantly purchase stuff that shows up in your newsfeed. But that button becomes a lot more powerful if you’ve already entered your credit card into Facebook.

Facebook is moving in the same direction as Apple and Google. It wants to be the place where you spend not only your time but your money.

Facebook Payments No Surprise

The new Facebook service is no surprise. Last summer, David Marcus, the CEO of payments giant PayPal, joined Facebook to oversee Messenger. And later, on a Facebook earnings call, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg indicated that Messenger would dovetail with some sort of peer-to-peer payments service.

In the meantime, Snapchat added a payments tool to its popular messaging app, piggybacking on an existing tool from San Francisco startup Square. But Snapchat isn’t nearly as popular as Facebook. And its collection of other services isn’t nearly as large.

The Facebook social network is used by over 1.3 billion people worldwide, and Messenger, which the company spun off from its social network, now serves around 500 million, according to the company’s latest public numbers. That’s probably about two and half times the number on SnapChat.

This means more people are more likely to use Facebook’s payments service than those others. But more important for Facebook, especially since it says it’s not going to charge for sending and receiving money, is your data—in this case, debit and credit card numbers. To send money, you have to store your Visa or Mastercard details with Facebook. To receive money, the company explained, you have to do the same. And once Facebook has that data, it can build out services—revenue-generating services—that tempt you to spend.

Facebook Becomes Your Store

Facebook declined to be interviewed for this story. And it’s unclear whether these stored cards will also be immediately available for use on the Facebook social network as well as on Messenger. But with those cards in hand, Facebook has a more direct path towards the world of Amazonian e-commerce. Last summer, around the same time it hired PayPal’s Marcus, Facebook started testing a “buy” button in users’ News Feeds, letting them instantly purchase goods and services without leaving Facebook. This too requires a credit card on file with the company.

For the consumer, all this is yet another push towards a world where you can more easily spend your money. It’s like Google Wallet or Apple Pay—except it only works online, not in stores. If you send payments via your debit card on Messenger, you can authenticate the transaction simply by pressing the fingerprint reader on your Apple iPhone. And odds are, things will work much the same way with the Facebook buy button.

For Facebook, all this is, well, the next big financial step. The site will give companies a means of not only advertising goods and services, but actually selling them. And ultimately, that will drive the advertising revenues of the future. Google is moving down a similar path.

But as is so often the case with Google, Facebook, and Apple, a question lingers: Do you want these companies handling so much of your existence? Facebook already knows what you like and who your friends are. Are you ready for it to also know what you buy?

Open Source Works. Just Ask Facebook

Facebook likes to share its toys. Over the years, the company has released the source code and designs for many of its internal projects, allowing the rest of the world to use them, modify them, and build on them—all for free.

Plenty of companies are now releasing open source projects in the hopes that other companies will help improve their software, but Facebook stands out because its projects actually end up being used by so many others. A startup called Datastax built an entire company to support users of Facebook’s database Cassandra, and now even Apple is exploring the use of Facebook’s ambitious server designs in its data centers.

So it’s no surprise that one of Facebook’s newest open source projects, Presto, is winning over outside companies too. Facebook recently released a new version of the big data tool, saying it’s at least twice as fast as previous versions. But even without the new improvements, Presto had already found a home at several other big-name internet operations, including Airbnb, Dropbox, and Netflix.

New big data tools like Hadoop let companies to store and analyze huge amounts of data relatively cheaply and efficiently. But they initially required serious programming chops to use. Presto, in short, lets data analysts use the SQL skills they already have to query data stores in new age systems, such as Hadoop and Cassandra. Plus, it’s much faster than the standard tools for querying Hadoop.

It’s similar in many ways to other open source tools, such as Cloudera’s Impala and MapR’s Drill, which also seek to speed up and simplify Hadoop queries. But one big difference between Facebook and a company like Cloudera and MapR is that Facebook makes tools for its own use, not tools it thinks other companies will want to use. And that means the software Facebook develops has already been battle tested at one of the largest websites in the world before it’s ever even offered up to the rest of the world.

“We added Presto to our suite of data infrastructure tools because it has a track record of production use in a real-world environment,” says Dropbox software engineer Fred Wulff, who points out that the company evaluated several different options.

For Argyle, which offers a fraud detection service for wireless carriers, the tool was a better fit for the company’s needs, says chief marketing officer Ian Howells. And, well, the price was right. “Think back a few years,” Howells says. “If you had to buy a distributed SQL engine that would run on thousands of servers, how much would that have cost if you were to go to Teradata or Oracle? Facebook made it free.”

Of course, unlike Drill or Impala, which are backed by companies whose sole purpose is to develop and support these tools, there’s no commercial support for Presto. But though there aren’t any companies offering commercial support for Presto now, we’ve already seen companies like Datastax and Continuuity emerge to commercialize technology originally developed by Facebook. Don’t be surprised if a Presto company is next.

Microsoft’s Bold Plan to Ditch Passwords in Windows 10

For as long as we’ve called for the death of the password, it’s still conspiring to make our lives both more complicated and less secure than they should be. In Windows 10, Microsoft will do its part to ease that particular pain. So long, random string of letters, characters, and numbers. Hello, well, Windows Hello.

Windows Hello, announced today on Microsoft’s blog, is an authentication system relies not on typing memorized gibberish but on face, eye, and fingerprint recognition. Unlocking your laptop or phone will be as simple as looking at or touching it.

Biometric solutions like this aren’t unique to Microsoft; Android has offered a Face Unlock feature since 2011, and fingerprint ID has been unlocking laptops and smartphones for years now. But the technology behind previous offerings—particularly facial recognition—has historically been lacking, and certainly not as ubiquitous as Windows Hello would be given the predominance of Windows machines in the world.

That’s not to say that Microsoft has necessarily gotten it right. There are signs, though, that Hello could succeed where others have muddled, particularly in its compatibility with Intel RealSense 3D cameras, a next-generation tech that can at the very least tell a human from a photo (a distinction with which early Face Unlock devices struggled). Better still? All of the data is stored locally, and not on some remote Microsoft server.

Once you’ve signed in with Windows Hello, Microsoft’s Passport technology will help beat back the password scourge throughout your computing experience. Once you’ve identified yourself with Hello (or a PIN of your device lacks biometric prowess), the operating system will authenticate apps and websites without sending a password at all. It won’t work on everything, but you should get more use out of it as companies and organizations continue enlist in the Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance, a group dedicated to the eradication of passwords as we know them.

While Hello hasn’t yet trickled out to Windows 10 beta testers, we should be hearing more about how it works in practice soon. As long as it beats “typing the name of the street you grew up on,” we should be in good shape.

How the Velvet Worm Pulls Off Its Bizarre Slime Attack

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The Velvet worm (Peripatus sp.) is believed to be an evolutionary "link" between annelids and arthropods. It is a predatory creature that spins a web to capture it's food. This one was photographed in the Peruvian Amazon. Dante Fenolio / Science Source

The velvet worm hunts by night. The sun would dry it up and kill it, is the problem. But the worm doesn’t see very well. Or hear very well. So to maximize its chances of catching dinner, it sprays streams of quick-hardening slime in a wide arc, hoping to catch crickets or spiders who happen to be in the firing solution. It’s…strange. “It’s like casting a very broad net in front of your head,” says Gonzalo Giribet, a biologist at Harvard University. “It’s a very clever mechanism for something that doesn’t see very well in the dark.” Now it turns out that the clever mechanism relies on some pretty sophisticated physics.

Biologists used to think the goo-spray was straightforward physiology, a wiggle of muscles. But no: To send a spray that wiggles back and forth as fast as the one in this video, the worm would need muscles that could contract every 20 milliseconds. And they don’t. Even the worm’s quickest-moving muscles, located in the jaw, can only twitch in half a second. So how does all that spray spray?

The trick, it turns out, is fluid dynamics. A liquid flowing fast through a flexible tube (like the worm’s slime cannons) won’t always be a perfectly straight stream. Small, random deviations in the flow nudge the tube slightly to one side or the other. When the tube rebounds and tries to straighten out, that reorients the stream in the other direction. These opposing forces push each other harder and harder, and soon, the tube is flexing back and forth—like an untended garden hose writhing when the faucet is wide open. Physicists call this behavior an elastic instability, and it causes the velvet worm’s slime tubes to oscillate up to 60 times per second. “Somehow, evolution led to an animal that uses this elastic instability to capture prey,” says Andrés Concha, a physicist at Adolfo Ibañez University in Chile, who led the new analysis.

No one had ever looked at the physics of how velvet worms shoot before, so to show that their idea was right, Concha’s team took high-speed video of the velvet worms in action (to get them to shoot, they tickled the worms using a fine brush). Then they built a model slime-shooter. When they streamed water through the mock-up tubes, they triggered the same back-and-forth fluctuations seen in the velvet worms. Considering that the velvet worm has survived for some 500 million years, it must be a pretty good hunting strategy.

Who Will Make You Sick of Comic Book Movies, DC or Marvel?

With the abundance of comic book movies being made there’s no way there won’t eventually be a backlash, but will it be Marvel or DC that pushes us over the edge? Andre from Black Nerd Comedy pays Angry Nerd another visit to discuss if it’ll be Spider-Man or Fantastic Four that makes us revolt.

Want even more Angry Nerd? Check out his WIRED YouTube Channel.

BONUS:

Black Nerd Comedy and his adventures with Michelangelo.

Watch Out, Comcast: Apple May Soon Launch a Live TV Service

Apple may soon join the ranks of CBS, HBO, and DISH Network with the launch of its own web TV service, which would allow viewers to stream live television from select channels, without a cable package.

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, the new service may launch as early as September, and will give subscribers access to around 25 channels including ABC, CBS, and FOX. The service, which will reportedly cost $30 or $40 a month, will be available exclusively on Apple devices, including Apple TV.

With this new service, Apple would become part of a growing cohort of companies that are working to offer cord cutters a slimmed-down version of the traditional cable package at just a fraction of the cost. In January, DISH Network announced the launch of SlingTV, a new service that gives viewers access to channels like ESPN and the Food Network. Meanwhile, last fall CBS announced the launch of CBS All Access, its standalone streaming service. And of course, there was last week’s announcement that HBO was launching its new web TV service, HBO Now, exclusively on Apple TV.

But while all of these companies are pursuing a common goal, Apple stands apart from the competition largely because it is a device manufacturer. As such, Apple has far more flexibility to strike contracts with rival broadcasters than, say, CBS could. And though DISH Network took a major step with the launch of SlingTV, the company’s incentive will always be to prop up its existing cable package by ensuring that SlingTV is not a completely comprehensive—and therefore, more attractive—alternative to cable.

Apple, however, doesn’t have the same ties to the cable bundle. Its only incentive is to make its web TV service as robust as possible, in order to do what Apple does best: sell more hardware. By releasing its streaming service exclusively on Apple devices, the tech giant stands to get a leg up on competing technologies, like Google’s Chromecast, Roku, and the Amazon Fire TV. Plus, unlike services like SlingTV, Apple will have full control over the platform on which it disseminates this new service.

Of course, all of this depends on Apple building a truly comprehensive package. According to the Journal‘s sources, however, that might not be so easy. NBCUniversal channels, including NBC, Bravo, and USA, are notably missing from the list of expected channels. That’s because, the Journal reports, Apple and NBCUniversal’s parent company Comcast had a “falling out” when the two companies failed to reach an agreement on launching a web TV service of their own. Plus, Apple could run into issues with companies like Netflix, which have longstanding licenses with media companies.

Still, sources say that Apple is in talks with other major media companies, including Walt Disney Co., 20th Century Fox, and CBS Corp., which could help flesh out some of its offerings. An announcement is expected from Apple in June.

Watch Out, Comcast: Apple May Soon Launch a Live TV Service

Trust Us, These 10 Bands at SXSW Are About to Blow Up

Courtney Barnett performs in London, December 5, 2014. Gus Stewart/Redferns/Getty

South By Southwest has three distinct threads, but none are as overwhelming as the Music program: Thousands of performers descend on Austin to play a seemingly unending onslaught of concerts, showcases, and unofficial shows all over the city. It’s a scheduling nightmare that only becomes worse as the week goes on and the perma-hangover settles in. In recent years, NPR music critic Steven Thompson has whittled down the terrifyingly packed event schedule to a thorough but still just-about-manageable 100 acts. But sometimes even taking six hours to listen to it all is just too much. So with that in mind, we pulled together the 10 as-yet-unknown bands and performers playing at SXSW that you’ll want to keep an ear out for—and if you’re in Austin, be sure to seek them out. (A quick note on methodology: all but one artist has not yet been featured as the musical guest on an American late-night television program, and none have released more than two albums on any sort of official record label.)

Courtney Barnett

Recommended If You Like: Angel Olsen, Swearin’

After two buzzed-about EPs, Melbourne singer/songwriter Courtney Barnett releases her debut full-length Sometimes I Sit And Think And Sometimes I Just Sit drops right after SXSW. The title is a telling look at her conversational (and sometimes rambling) lyrical style, which packs dense verses into tight spaces without ever losing their meaningful touch. It’s a loquacious sensibility that pairs well with the crunchy guitar textures and bouncing bass lines she seems to prefer. Though she warns, “Put me on a pedestal, and I’ll only disappoint you,” it’s not hard to imagine her playing to throngs of adoring fans on a mountaintop in a few years.

Speedy Ortiz

Recommended If You Like: Liz Phair, Archers Of Loaf, Pavement

Originally the solo project of former UM-Amherst teacher Sadie Dupuis (she has a master’s degree in poetry), Speedy Ortiz is now a full-time band prepping their second album, Foil Deer, out April 21. Dupuis’ lyrical dexterity has helped the band evolve quickly from exciting trifles like “Taylor Swift” to Foil Deer lead single “Raising The Skate,” a thoroughly confident statement of purpose best illuminated by Dupuis’ comment to FADER: “It’s crazy frustrating seeing women and girls, myself included, put in positions in which they have to shirk credit for their talent or otherwise risk getting dissed as overbearing and bitchy.”

San Fermin

Recommended If You Like: Of Monsters And Men, Andrew Bird, The Decemberists

A collective of performers centered around composer and Yale graduate Ellis Ludwig-Leone, San Fermin was originally the outlet for his more pop-leaning compositions, but it’s since snowballed into a showcase for classically trained musicians who prefer big-name summer music festivals to symphony halls. They’re more baroque than The Decemberists, but more in line with the most orchestral urges of someone like fun.’s Nate Ruess. Expect the anthemic “Jackrabbit,” the title of track off the group’s upcoming second album, to be popping up on movie trailers and commercials everywhere. Or at least it will be if there’s any justice in the world.

Charlie Belle

Recommended If You Like: R.E.M., The Magnetic Fields, spring (the season)

Four years ago, Austin teenage siblings Jendayi and Gyasi Bonds recorded a bedroom cover of The Magnetic Fields’ “Strange Powers” that spread like wildfire across the Internet, and now they’re on the verge of their first EP as Charlie Belle. They shuffled bassists just before SXSW, but show no signs of slowing down—they’re playing Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls Party. Still young but by no means inexperienced, they’re armed with the most infectious kind of power-pop.

Fantastic Negrito

Recommended If You Like: Lead Belly, Skip James

In keeping with delta blues traditions, a lengthy creation myth precedes Oakland’s Fantastic Negrito (real name Xavier Dphrepaulezz): one of 15 children in an orthodox Muslim household; a mid-’90s Interscope deal as Xavier; a near-fatal car crash that left him in a coma; a creative rebirth under the moniker Fantastic Negrito. He recently won the NPR Tiny Desk Contest, beating out over 7,000 other entries—and his impassioned vocal performance shows exactly why he’s got a real chance at breaking through this time around.

Kate Tempest

Recommended If You Like: Mos Def, Carol Ann Duffy, Samuel Becket

It’s not all that rare to see musicians branch out into other disciplines like fashion or acting—but it’s unique for one to start garnering wide acclaim in multiple artistic arenas. Kate Tempest is that rarity, a wordsmith capable of bending language to her will on the page, on record, and on a theater stage. She won the 2013 Ted Hughes Prize for Innovation in Poetry—for Brand New Ancients, which she also performed onstage in London and New York— and was nominated for the 2014 Mercury Prize for Everybody Down, an album wherein each track corresponds to a chapter in her novel The Bricks That Built The Houses. Every slam poet and rapper dreams of finding the kind of emotional and sociopolitical artistic groove Kate Tempest has tapped into, and it shows no signs of slowing down.

Field Mouse

Recommended If You Like: The Breeders, Sonic Youth

Rachel Browne and Andrew Futral met at SUNY Purchase back in 2010, and their musical collaboration led to Field Mouse, whose debut Hold Still Life came out last summer on Topshelf Records. They write loud, dense, dreamy songs, with Browne’s vocals occasionally swimming above the mix. It’s the closest anyone will ever get to sounding like Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth and Kim Deal of The Breeders teamed up to make a racket (and not the lullaby-esque Washing Machine standout “Little Trouble Girl”).

Fatherson

Recommended If You Like: Frightened Rabbit, We Were Promised Jetpacks, Idlewild, music that is good

With a defiant debut album title like I Am An Island, Glasgow-based trio Fatherson could come off like they’re trying to shut everyone else out. But instead, they’re following in the footsteps of other Scottish rock crossovers with heavy sounds but inviting hooks—aided by singer Ross Leighton’s ability to soar over a busy chorus.

Vérité

Recommended If You Like: Ellie Goulding, Lorde, Lana Del Rey

Every year a few female vocalists with impressive range pair up with prodigiously gifted electronic producers to ignite new pop sensations. Vérité will be one of those for 2015. Vocalist Kelsey Byrne grew up around music—her father is a rock musician, and she once played in an all-girl punk group—but she never once met producer Elliot Jacobsen (who plays drums for Ingrid Michaelson) during the two years they worked on her Echo EP . The result is every bit as enticing and club-dominating as The Love Club, the EP that first introduced Lorde to the world.

Strawberry Runners

Recommended If You Like: Hello Saferide, Mega Gem,

Though the band has existed in some capacity for two years, it only solidified a permanent lineup in the past six months. Vocalist and guitarist Emi Knight attended Goddard College in Vermont with guitarist David Runge, plays in Mega Gem with drummer Tomas Campos, and met bassist Eli Saragoussi in the band’s home base of Denver. The band only has 13 ramshackle songs scattered across a handful of EPs, but the version of “Hatcher Creek” included in NPR’s Austin 100 is a great leap forward, and shows why the band has been the go-to opener for anyone on the indie rock circuit swinging through the Mile High City. It’s laidback and spacey, but catchy enough to command attention.

Bob Moog’s Beautifully Intricate Drawings of Synth Circuits

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A 1964 schematic shows a "capacitance actuated" relay. It's unclear what this was for exactly, but theremins are "capacitance actuated" in that the placement of your hands determines the frequency of the sound. Bob was fond of using the incognito initials "B.S." to hide the fact that R.A. Moog Co. was a one-man company at this time. The Bob Moog Foundation

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Moog drew this 1966 schematic of an oscillator controller by hand. As its name implies, it was used to regulate the frequencies of two or more oscillators, electronic circuits that provided the sine, triangular, pulse, and sawtooth waveforms. It's those waveforms that produce different synthesizer sounds. The Bob Moog Foundation

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About the controller schematic from the previous slide... This is the the 1966 "schemtic" for the oscillator it likely controlled. The Bob Moog Foundation

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This schematic shows a Renfer Capacitance Relay Oscillation Board, which likely led to the creation of 12 capacitance sensing antennas that composer John Cage used to create Variations V. The Bob Moog Foundation

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This is the control plate to a Moog Midget. What the heck is a Moog Midget? You may know it better as the Concertmate MG-1, an analog synth manufactured by Moog and sold by Radio Shack in the early 80s under the Realistic brand name. The Bob Moog Foundation

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This circuit trace layout from 1970 shows the 903A module, basically a noise circuit that provided white and pink noise. The Bob Moog Foundation

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Here's a layout for Moog's Synthesizer 1c, a preconfigured model made in 1968. The Bob Moog Foundation

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In 1968, Moog synthesizer systems gained console (C) and portable (P) designations. Here we have a system layout for the Synthesizer IIIP. The Bob Moog Foundation

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The layout for the Synthesizer 1P. This smaller version of the hulking 1C could be hauled around in its special cabinet. The Bob Moog Foundation

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Here we have the mechanical drawing for the Moog 1130 Percussion Controller, basically an acoustic transducer inside a tom drum that converts the beating of the drum head into a voltage output that can be used to control devices like a Minimoog. Check it. The Bob Moog Foundation

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An elaborate mechanical drawing for the connector cable to goes to the 1130 drum controller. The Bob Moog Foundation

Launch Slideshow

Bob Moog isn’t considered the father of electronic music for nothing. The inventor’s modular synthesizers not only inspired everyone from Sun Ra to Rick Rubin, they’ve also given birth to countless musical genres. In fact, as renewed interest in these monolithic beasts continues to grow, Moog’s influence on modern music remains as profound as ever.

From his early days making and selling theremin parts to the development of the modular synth that bore his name, Moog spent a lifetime collaborating, tinkering, and refining his analog machines. The end results of that process are well known: the Prodigy, the Minimoog, the 55, to name but a few. Yet the detailed thinking and electronic puzzle solving that helped usher those instruments into reality has been less visible. Until now.

As part of its ongoing effort to document both the man and the history of electronic music, The Bob Moog Foundation released a new batch of 15 original instrument schematics dating back to 1964. These technical drawings of boards and circuits (many of which were done by hand) show the circuitous path of electricity as it passes through the various components. As a whole, they highlight some of the seminal developments in the evolution of the Moog synthesizer. But they also offer a rare glimpse at some of the custom designs Bob developed specifically for musicians over the years.

Even if you can’t read them like an electrical engineer would, the schematics are fascinating to look at—particularly now that Moog Music Inc. and several other vintage synth makers are actively reviving these old designs from the ’60s and ’70s. Moog may not have been known for his musical aptitude, but there’s an undeniable artistry to these drawings. They’re a window into not only the history and progression of his instruments, but also the extent to which collaboration with other artists influenced his designs.

You can check out the first 20 drawings, released last August, at the foundation’s schematics page. And if you happen to be in or around Ithaca, New York between now and May 30th, The History Center in Tompkins County is running an exhibit called Switched-On: The Birth of the Moog Synthesizer, which gives a more detailed and interactive account of the evolution of the Moog synth.

An August 28, 1969 “Jazz in the Garden” performance at the Museum of Modern Art. The photo shows three consoles that Moog produced to hold its modular synth systems.

The Bob Moog Foundation

Nintendo Teams With Japanese Mobile Game Giant to Put Mario on Phones

Nintendo has gone mobile.

The maker of Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, which has long resisted any suggestions that it put its games on smartphones and tablets, said today that it would team with DeNA, one of Japan’s leading mobile game companies, to create games using its popular franchises for mobile devices. The two companies will enter into a capital alliance that will see Nintendo acquire 10 percent of DeNA’s outstanding stock for about 22 billion yen and DeNA acquire 1.24 percent of Nintendo’s stock for approximately the same amount.

“Nintendo has decided to utilize smart devices aggressively,” said Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata in a joint presentation with DeNA earlier today. “Now that smart devices have grown to become the window for so many people to personally connect with society, it would be a waste not to use these devices.”

“We are challenging ourselves to redefine what ‘Nintendo platforms’ mean,” Iwata said.

Iwata did not specify which games or franchises might be headed to smart devices. A Super Mario endless runner? Zelda Crush Saga? Nintendo’s chief didn’t say, but he did rule out a specific category of games: Nintendo will not, as so many publishers have, simply port its existing classic game software to phones.

“There are significant differences in the controls, strengths and weaknesses between the controllers for dedicated game systems and the touchscreens of smart devices,” he said. “We have no intention at all to port existing game titles for dedicated game platforms to smart devices because if we cannot provide our consumers with the best possible play experiences, it would just ruin the value of Nintendo’s IP.”

Although Iwata, in the presentation, pointed out the current weakness of Nintendo’s sales of dedicated game devices like Wii U and 3DS, he said the company remains committed to producing game hardware. To that end, he announced that Nintendo has a “dedicated game platform with a brand-new concept under the development codename ‘NX'” that it will discuss next year.

Nintendo and DeNA will also partner to create a customer membership program that will span all devices, to replace the company’s Club Nintendo customer loyalty program that it wound down earlier this year.

“I believe teaming up with Nintendo is the best possible strategy to achieve growth in DeNA’s core business of mobile gaming,” said DeNA president and CEO Isao Moriyasu. “I grew up playing Nintendo games, and I’m already excited that I will soon be able to play Nintendo IP games on smart devices.”

We Have to Ask: Is Community Really Still Community?

The new season of Community premieres today. Is it good? Well, sure. Like any sitcom that makes it to a sixth season, hanging out with the characters is fun, situations are predictable, and it’s decently funny. But you can’t really take a moderate stance here, because this isn’t just any old sitcom. This is Community, a show that has survived its showrunner being fired/rehired, losing several of its original cast members, and finally abandoning TV altogether for the friendlier shores of Yahoo of all places—all because of its rabid fanbase.

So rather than asking “is Community good,” a more interesting question might be a variant on something Joel McHale’s Jeff Winger asks in response to apparent change spearheaded by consultant Francesca (Paget Brewster), one of two new additions to the cast: “How much can you improve Greendale before it stops being Greendale?” Put another way: How much does Community have to change before it stops being Community, or at least becomes something more like Community: The Post-Transfer Years?

There’s more than enough grounds to ask the question. Even ignoring the rise of streaming platforms (something that’s changed everything from Arrested Development to The Killing and has had at least one major effect in lengthening running times), there’s the more pressing issue of the stripped-down cast. Half of the original study group is gone: Donald Glover’s Troy is off sailing around the world with Levar Burton, Chevy Chase’s Pierce is unceremoniously dead (but maybe floating around as a hologram), and now Yvette Nicole Brown’s Shirley has moved to Atlanta to take care of her ailing father and join a show that sounds like it should be airing on USA (characters welcome!). By now, Community is essentially a televised thought experiment, a Show of Theseus—or, if you’re focusing on the implications of the change for Britta/Troy/Annie/Jeff pairings, a ‘ship of Thesus.

Yahoo/Sony Pictures Television

This isn’t a new question. Cheers, for example, became a noticeably different, goofier show when Shelley Long’s Diane was replaced by Kirstie Alley’s Rebecca, who lacked the explosive, borderline violent sexual chemistry with Ted Danson that led to “Sam and Diane” being shorthand for TV romance. On the other hand, some shows have successfully replaced actors within roles without substantially changing the tenor of the character or the show (the new Aunt Viv from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Darren on Bewitched). High-profile casting changes tend to feel gross—not that anyone was necessarily in the tank for Two and a Half Men, but the show was almost certainly on its last legs by the time it subbed Ashton Kutcher in for the flailing and erratic Charlie Sheen (who, coincidentally, replaced Michael J. Fox on the last season of the underrated Spin City and turned the show from a lighthearted workplace sitcom into a weird will-they-won’t-they with Heather Locklear).

Besides, Community‘s fourth season, though it was on the original network and had the full cast, was far less Community than this new season, thanks to showrunner Dan Harmon’s absence. The characters weren’t themselves, the pop culture references became punchlines instead of Trojan horses for emotional rabbit punches, and pretty much everything that happened had to be swept under the rug as the result of a “gas leak” at the beginning of season five. Does that mean the showrunner is the most important part of the continued identity of a show? Not quite—the last two seasons of Seinfeld, sans Larry David, are noticeably weirder and more unhinged than the others, but they’re still Seinfeld, finding a surreal take on the material that produced a few classic episodes (“The Little Kicks,” “The Comeback”).

Maybe it makes more sense to think of a sitcom as a vibe, whether that comes primarily from one mind (in this case, Harmon’s, as fleshed out by his lieutenants) or just a general aesthetic. Community in its sixth season might not have Pierce to kick around, or even consistent Troy & Abed in the Morning gags, but it’s still very much taking place in the same Greendale. All of its characters are more or less the same, and its world is deep enough that it could theoretically just lean on its supporting characters. (Just getting to hear Garrett shriek again is fun.)

That’s why these first two episodes are largely about introducing the two new characters and explaining how and why they fit into Community. Paget Brewster’s aggressively boring Francesca and Keith David’s aging ’90s badass Elroy are both slightly adrift misfits who begin to be taught lessons in weirdness by the rest of the gang—just like Jonathan Banks’ sorely missed Buzz Hickey last season. Abed, ever the meta-voice of the viewer, questions whether Francesca’s groundedness spells the end of the misfit version of Community, the one that can ignore continuity concerns like the whereabouts of “that girl I was dating.” Abed’s ability to acknowledge the fictionality of the show has always veered between actual fourth-wall awareness and a sugary depiction of mental illness, but it’s within identifiable bounds here, and even if it’s annoying for some viewers, it’s recognizably Community.

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Besides, like Frankie says, “good shows change.” It’s easy to forget how weird and special it was that Community‘s early seasons aired alongside The Office, Parks and Rec, and 30 Rock like it was no big deal. If it’s settled into a goofy hangout sitcom that eschews delving into the nature of reality for easy gags about its own age? Well, that’s the cost of any TV show sticking around. But where most sitcoms would go out of their way to distract their viewers from that aging, as long as Community‘s fans continue to keep it alive, the show will continue shoving its decay in our faces—and it’ll be as sad as it is funny.