Enlarge / "Expanding the Possibilities.....with Artificial Intelligence" (credit: SMS Power )

Even massive Sega fans would be forgiven for not being too familiar with the Sega AI Computer. After all, the usually obsessive documentation over at Sega Retro includes only the barest stub of an information page for the quixotic, education-focused 1986 hardware.

Thankfully, the folks at the self-described "Sega 8-bit preservation and fanaticism" site SMS Power have been able to go a little deeper. The site's recently posted deep dive on the Sega AI Computer includes an incredible amount of well-documented information on this historical oddity, including ROMs for dozens of previously unpreserved pieces of software that can now be partially run on MAME.

An ’80s vision of AI’s future

Enlarge / An 18th-century fire engine designed and built by Richard Newsham, purchased in 1728 for St Giles Church, Great Wishford, UK. (credit: Trish Steel/CC BY-SA 2.0 )

When Don Lemon, a physicist at Bethel College in Kansas, encountered an 18th-century fire engine designed by English Inventor Richard Newsham on display at the Hall of Flame museum in Phoenix, he was intrigued by its pump mechanism . That curiosity inspired him to team up with fellow physicist Trevor Lipscombe of Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, to examine the underlying fluid mechanics and come up with a simple analytical model. Their analysis, described in a new paper published in the American Journal of Physics, yielded insight into Newsham's innovative design, which incorporated a device known as a "windkessel."

A quick Google search on the " windkessel effect " yields an entry on a physiological term to describe heart-aorta blood delivery, dating back to the man who coined it in 1899: German physiologist Otto Frank . "Windkessel" is German for "wind chamber," but the human circulatory system doesn't have a literal wind chamber, so Frank's use was clearly metaphorical. However, there are earlier English uses of the wind chamber terminology that refer to an airtight chamber attached to a piston-driven water pump to smooth the outflow of water in fire engines like those designed by Newsham, per Lemon and Newsham.

Rudimentary firefighting devices have been around since at least 2 BCE, when Ctesibius of Alexandria invented the first fire pump; it was re-invented in 16th-century Europe. Following the 1666 fire that destroyed much of London, there was a pressing need for more efficient firefighting strategies. This eventually led to the invention of so-called "sucking worm engines": leather hoses attached to manually operated pumps. John Lofting is usually credited with inventing, patenting, and marketing these devices, which pulled water from a reservoir while the hose ("worm") enabled users to pump that water in a supposedly continuous stream, the better to combat fires. But nothing is known of his sucking worms after 1696.

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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: Pirates! Specifically, an interview with historian Rebecca Simon on the real-life buccaneer bylaws that shaped every aspect of a pirate's life.

One of the many amusing scenes in the 2003 film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl depicts Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) invoking the concept of " parley " in the pirate code to negotiate a cease of hostilities with pirate captain Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush). "The code is more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules," he informs her. Rebecca Simon, a historian at Santa Monica College, delves into the real, historical set of rules and bylaws that shaped every aspect of a pirate's life with her latest book. The Pirates' Code: Laws and Life Aboard Ship .

Simon is the author of such books as Why We Love Pirates: The Hunt for Captain Kidd and How He Changed Piracy Foreve r and Pirate Queens: The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Rea d . Her PhD thesis research focused on pirate trails and punishment. She had been reading a book about Captain Kidd and the war against the pirates, and was curious as to why he had been executed in an East London neighborhood called Wapping, at Execution Dock on the Thames. People were usually hung at Tyburn in modern day West London at Marble Arch. "Why was Captain Kidd taken to a different place? What was special about that?" Simon told Ars. "Nothing had been written much about it at all, especially in connection to piracy. So I began researching how pirate trials and executions were done in London. I consider myself to be a legal historian of crime and punishment through the lens of piracy."

Enlarge / This photo is exactly what it was like to be on the E3 show floor. Exactly. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Today's news that the Electronic Entertainment Expo is officially, totally, and completely dead was a bit bittersweet for your humble Ars Technica Senior Gaming Editor. Don't get me wrong, I'll miss the chance to meet industry luminaries, connect with far-flung associates, and play games months ahead of time in a setting that's as much a theme park as a trade show. But after spending many a late night covering 15 E3 shows in 16 years, I can say that the crowds, the smells, and the sensory overload associated with the LA Convention Center aren't always all they're cracked up to be .

Still, those who have been there will tell you that, for a gaming fan, there was nothing quite like the bombast and spectacle of the E3 show floor in its heyday.

For those who haven't been there, we've sorted through literally hundreds of E3 photos taken by Ars journalists over the years to assemble a few dozen of the best into this visual travelogue-meets-history-lesson. We hope that skimming through the galleries below will give you some idea of the madcap event that E3 was and why it has generated so many lasting memories for those who attended.

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How did science get started? A few years back, we looked at one answer to that question in the form of a book called The Invention of Science . In it, British historian David Wootton places the origin within a few centuries of European history in which the features of modern science—experiments, models and laws, peer review—were gradually aggregated into a formal process of organized discovery.

But that answer is exquisitely sensitive to how science is defined. A huge range of cultures engaged in organized observations of the natural world and tried to identify patterns in what they saw. In a recent book called Horizons , James Poskett places these efforts firmly within the realm of science and arrives at his subtitle: "The global origins of modern science." He de-emphasizes the role of Europe and directly dismisses Wootton's book via footnote in the process.

Whether you find Poskett's broad definition of science compelling will go a long way to explain how you feel about the first third of the book. The remaining two-thirds, however, are a welcome reminder that, wherever it may have started, science quickly grew into an international effort and matured in conversation with international cultural trends like colonialism, nationalism, and Cold War ideologies.