Life Is Strange and ‘‘Games Are Made’’: A Philosophical Interpretation of a Multiple-Choice Existential Simulator With Copilot Sartre

The multiple-choice video game Life is Strange was described by its French developers as a metaphor for the inner conflicts experienced by a teenager in trying to become an adult. In psychological work with adolescents, there is a stark similarity between what they experience and some concepts of existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s script for the movie Les Jeux Sont Faits (literally ‘‘games are made’’) uses the same narrative strategy as Life is Strange—the capacity for the main characters to travel back in time to change their own existence—in order to stimulate philosophical, ethical, and political thinking and also to effectively simulate existential ‘‘limit situations.’’ This article is a dialogue between Sartre’s views and Life is Strange in order to examine to what extent questions such as what is freedom? what is choice? what is autonomy and responsibility? can be interpreted anew in hybrid digital–human—‘‘anthrobotic’’—environments

On the Concept of Creal: The Politico-Ethical Horizon of a Creative Absolute

Process philosophies tend to emphasise the value of continuous creation as the core of their discourse. For Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and others the real is ultimately a creative becoming. Critics have argued that there is an irreducible element of (almost religious) belief in this re-evaluation of immanent creation. While I don’t think belief is necessarily a sign of philosophical and existential weakness, in this paper I will examine the possibility for the concept of universal creation to be a political and ethical axiom, the result of a global social contract rather than of a new spirituality. I argue here that a coherent way to fight against potentially totalitarian absolutes is to replace them with a virtual absolute that cannot territorialise without deterritorialising at the same time: the Creal principle

CFD applications: The Lockheed perspective

The Numerical Aerodynamic Simulator (NAS) epitomizes the coming of age of supercomputing and opens exciting horizons in the world of numerical simulation. An overview of supercomputing at Lockheed Corporation in the area of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is presented. This overview will focus on developments and applications of CFD as an aircraft design tool and will attempt to present an assessment, withing this context, of the state-of-the-art in CFD methodology

Transonics and fighter aircraft: Challenges and opportunities for CFD

The application of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to fighter aircraft design and development is discussed. Methodology requirements for the aerodynamic design of fighter aircraft are briefly reviewed. The state-of-the-art of computational methods for transonic flows in the light of these requirements is assessed and the techniques found most adequate for the subject application are identified. Highlights from some proof-of-feasibility Euler and Navier-Stokes computations about a complete fighter aircraft configuration are presented. Finally, critical issues and opportunities for design application of CFD are discussed

Some possible sources of IceCube TeV-PeV neutrino events

The IceCube Collaboration has observed 37 neutrino events in the energy range $30\, TeV\leq E_{\nu} \leq 2$ PeV and the sources of these neutrinos are unknown. Here we have shown that positions of 12 high energy blazars and the position of the FR-I galaxy Centaurus A, coincide within the error circles of ten IceCube events, the later being in the error circle of the highest energy event so far observed by IceCube. Two of the above blazars are simultaneously within the error circles of the Telescope Array hotspot and one IceCube event. We found that the blazar H2356-309 is within the error circles of three IceCube events. We propose that photohadronic interaction of the Fermi accelerated high energy protons with the synchrotron/SSC background photons in the nuclear region of these high energy blazars and AGN are probably responsible for some of the observed IceCube events.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure, references adde

Risk and Efficiency in Credit Concession: A Case Study in Portugal

The relationship between banks and customers has contributed to several theories in banking economics. The quality of the credit is crucial for banks. Banks classify the risk through quantitative and qualitative indicators. Quantitative indicators are much used by banks, but qualitative indicators are also considered in credit risk evaluation. Taken together, they contribute to increase efficiency and decrease doubtful credit. Several issues arise in order to understand if risk evaluation affects the efficiency of the banking sector or if it affects the bank customer relationship. We wish to analyse some quantitative and qualitative indicators used by the Portuguese banking system. Despite the reputation of a client being a very important qualitative indicator, it is not enough to determine a classification of low risk.credit, banks, bankruptcy, risk

Multi-TeV flaring from blazars: Markarian 421 a case study

The TeV blazar Markarian 421 underwent multi-TeV flaring during April 2004 and simultaneously observed in x-ray and TeV energies. It was observed that the TeV outbursts had no counterparts in the lower energies, which implies that this might be an orphan flare. In the context of hadronic model, we have shown that this multi-TeV flaring can be produced due to the interaction of Fermi-accelerated protons of energy $\lesssim 168$ TeV with the background photons in the low energy tail of the synchrotron self-Compton spectrum of the blazar jet. We fit very well the flaring spectrum with this model. Based on this study, we speculate that Mrk 501 and PG 1553+113 are possible candidates for orphan flaring in the future.Comment: 8 pages, two columns, 3 figure

Photohadronic scenario in interpreting the February-March 2014 flare of 1ES 1011+496

The extraordinary multi-TeV flare from 1ES 1011 +496 during February-March 2014 was observed by MAGIC telescopes for 17 nights and the average spectrum of the whole period has a non-trivial shape. We have used the photohadronic model and a template EBL model to explain the average spectrum which fits well to the flare data. The spectral index $\alpha$ is the only free parameter in our model. We have also shown that the non-trivial nature of the spectrum is due to the change in the behavior of the optical depth above $\sim 600$ GeV $\gamma$-ray energy accompanied with the high SSC flux.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, LaTe