LONDON: More suspected migrants have been spotted at Dover in Kent on Saturday as the huge increase in crossings since lockdown was imposed continues. Pictures taken at the busy trade port show people wearing face masks being processed by officials.It follows reports of another large influx of...

Nintendo Servers look to be down this evening with many users receiving a 2219-2502 Error on Nintendo Switch

Chinese fans of Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons are paying a premium on foreign consoles and finding ways to skirt limits imposed by local regulators on a game that has become both a breakout worldwide hit and political flashpoint.

Chinese fans of Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons are paying a premium on foreign consoles and finding ways to skirt limits imposed by local regulators on a game that has become both a breakout worldwide hit and political flashpoint.

We may be required to socially distance here in the physical world, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is still making house calls-in Animal Crossing.

A mysterious nocturnal animal was leaving its tracks on the delicate mirrors of the telescopes at the Smithsonian's Whipple Observatory in Arizona. With a little ingenuity and a live trap, the mystery was solved. The visitor proved to be a ringtail cat, a member of the raccoon family.

The post Astronomers solve mystery of dusty foot trails crossing telescope mirrors appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Drainage tunnels running under roads can provide small animals with safe road crossings, mitigating habitat fragmentation, a new study has confirmed. The researchers suggest that the tunnel design can be further improved to aid animal movements, for example, by providing dry ledges to ensure the routes are still available in times of high rainfall.

A rare opportunity to see the planet Venus cross in front of the face of the sun is coming up next week. On June 5 to 6, Venus will "transit" the sun for the l

Wildlife underpasses and overpasses have reduced animal-related car crashes in Colorado.

25-year-old wave runner Lindsey Russell undertook the 20-mile challenge to raise money for charity.

Spontaneous by nature, desire paths are the most optimal way to get from point A to B as decided by pedestrians, not planners.

A Canadian company and a partner are the latest to defraud an EPA system designed to bring more renewable fuels into the market.

Surrounded by an abundance of recreational opportunities, including private parks, three pools, lighted sports fields, a dog park and four miles of trails, life at Braeburn at Spencer's Crossing is all about making the most of your leisure time

A bridge for crossing a passage of a navigation channel includes a section in the form of a single span, which may be displaced by vertical translation between a base position spanning the passage, in which the span rests on fixed support sections of the bridge, and a raised position, for opening the passage, and a support structure for the span on displacement of the span, and a drive for lifting the span. The bridge has only one support structure, with the drive, located on one side of the passage to be spanned.

A system includes a determination module and a communication module. The determination module is configured to be located onboard a first vehicle configured to travel along a first route including a crossing corresponding to an intersection of the first route with a second route. The determination module is configured to be communicatively coupled with a remote crossing module. The determination module is configured to determine, based on a speed of the first vehicle, timing information corresponding to a time at which the first vehicle will travel proximate to the crossing on the first route. The communication module is configured to transmit the timing information to the remote crossing module. The timing information includes a reference time configured as an absolute time corresponding to a time for impeding travel of a second vehicle along the second route through the crossing.

From the new releases everyone's talking about to the cult classics they should be, here are five things to stream and skip this week. Well, we still can't go to the movies — it may be the least of our problems, but it still really sucks. So this week we turn our attention to the world of streaming, where approximately 98.87 percent of our entertainment now exists.…

Richard Lutz meanders through another miasmic week

I work at the Pennsylvania Center for the Book and a new book of poetry by local author Marjorie Maddox came across my desk recently. The title immediately caught my attention: “A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry.” I thought, collective nouns and poetry? What a great idea! I'm a former elementary school teacher. So, I immediately started thinking about all the possibilities for this book in the classroom. Learning about collective nouns, words that describe groups of animals, individuals, or things is often part of the curriculum. When I wanted a fun way to help children understand the concept of collective nouns, I used to use a book by Ruth Heller called “A Cache of Jewels and Other Collective Nouns.” That book just gives you a page with one word, the collective noun, and a simple illustration. So, you can imagine my delight at discovering Marjorie Maddox’s entertaining poems, along with Philip Huber's imaginative scratchboard artwork. This book takes Heller's idea a step

And she wants to visit your island.

I'd like to use this thread to figure out if we should, can, or will play a game inside animal crossing. I've heard it's been done but I don't know any details. Would it be funny to play a version of d&d or a similar role playing game? I think maybe? Or keep it simple? Should we try it?

Sun April 19 at 8:00 PM,

Wastewater as an early warning system for COVID-19 outbreaks, how a statistician conquered Roll Up The Rim, the Canadian-born former Green Beret behind a failed plot in Venezuela, Nintendo's Animal Crossing brings calm to self-isolation, how zookeepers are coping with the pandemic, the return of Fraggle Rock and more.

Three-dimensional zebra crossings have turned up in Iceland, England and even the tiny outback town of Boulia in Queensland and now one Sydney council is exploring whether it could join the trend.

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader.

Northern pastoralists are upbeat after the Fitzroy Crossing Bull Sale recorded strong results, despite a year of extreme weather.

This seems to be something of a thing. Our last "Tales From the Quarantine" post focused on how television celebrities had taken to offering people help on Twitter with their virtual home decor in the latest Animal Crossing game. This post also involves Animal Crossing, but in a much more direct way. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there are enormous numbers of people who have suddenly found themselves without jobs or regular income. And, so, they've turned to irregular sources of income instead.

Ars Technica has an interesting interview with one of many people who have taken to the internet to indirectly sell Animal Crossing's "bells", the currency of the game.

In the midst of COVID-19, some New Horizons players are turning to World of Warcraft-style gold farming methods to make ends meet. In early April, Lexy, a 23-year-old recent college grad, created a Twitter account offering up bells (Animal Crossing’s in-game currency) for real-world cash (she requested we refer to her by a nickname to avoid potential reprisal from Nintendo). “I got laid off due to COVID so I'm farming bells in ACNH,” she wrote. “I really need to make rent this month so I'm selling 2 mil bells per $5, please message me if interested, I'll give you a discount the more you buy.”

Before setting up this unorthodox income stream, Lexy had been working at a supermarket while developing her animation portfolio. She began exploring the idea of turning bells into cash after showing friends just how much in-game income she’d been making. “One of them asked to legitimately buy some for me,” she recalled in a Twitter interview. “I did some research and found some people selling bells on sites such as eBay, but for pretty ridiculous prices.” (Current prices on eBay seem more competitive, with some sellers offering rare gold tools and gold nuggets to sweeten the deal).

The threat from Nintendo is probably real. After all, unlike some other games where people do this sort of thing, Nintendo's game doesn't include any method for selling in-game resources for real currency. Nintendo is also notoriously prudish about things like this. And, finally, to make an effective go at this sort of thing, it takes some manipulation of the console in a way that is somewhat controversial with gamers generally.

Understandably, Lexy adjusts the clock on her Nintendo Switch to speed up the game’s slow, “natural” money-making cycle of harvesting daily fruit, digging up bells from the ground, and planting a daily “money tree” that can yield big profits. This kind of in-game “time traveling” is controversial practice among casual Animal Crossing players, but it's a practical necessity to maximize real-world bell-farming profits.

As for how much money people like Lexy are bringing in, it's in the four figures, but she wasn't any more specific than that. Payments are made through digital apps like PayPal, after which she visits the game islands of others and deposits the bells.

That all of this is going on during a global pandemic that has some folks farming bells to make ends meet and others with apparently enough disposable income to be buyers is all, of course, deeply strange. But it's also just yet another way technology is having an impact on our lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Folks in the neighborhood where the 7-year-old was struck and killed 24 hours earlier couldn’t help but notice the new arrivals Friday: Two guards positioned at the intersection near a homemade memorial honoring the lost and lovable child.

Van Gogh or Klimt, anyone? The new Animal Crossing Art Generator allows you to bring artworks from the museum's archives into your imaginary worlds.

ANIMAL Crossing New Horizons became a welcome break from the coronavirus pandemic last month when Nintendo's most ambitious second-life game debuted to critical acclaim. Since release, the developers have added a string of updates, one of which included sly art seller Redd.

It's a bumper pod! David Price leads Ashleigh Macro and Henry Burrell down the topical rabbit hole to discuss why Black Friday largely sucks, but is an interesting venture for publishers as well as consumers. Who else bought a Switch?

We then tackle the Mac root issue that hit headlines worldwide before tearing the Pixel Buds a new one. And we all downloaded Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp to see what the fuss is about.

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Cricket -- Australia -- Anecdotes.

Georg Lindgren.

Source: Statistical Science, Volume 34, Number 1, 100--128.

Abstract:
We describe and compare how methods based on the classical Rice’s formula for the expected number, and higher moments, of level crossings by a Gaussian process stand up to contemporary numerical methods to accurately deal with crossing related characteristics of the sample paths. We illustrate the relative merits in accuracy and computing time of the Rice moment methods and the exact numerical method, developed since the late 1990s, on three groups of distribution problems, the maximum over a finite interval and the waiting time to first crossing, the length of excursions over a level, and the joint period/amplitude of oscillations. We also treat the notoriously difficult problem of dependence between successive zero crossing distances. The exact solution has been known since at least 2000, but it has remained largely unnoticed outside the ocean science community. Extensive simulation studies illustrate the accuracy of the numerical methods. As a historical introduction an attempt is made to illustrate the relation between Rice’s original formulation and arguments and the exact numerical methods.

The art within Shing Yin Khor's virtual world represents a sassy response to the game's built-in natural history museum

Gamers are brushing up on their art history knowledge to spot Redd's counterfeit creations

Airing on the aquarium's Twitch channel at 4 p.m. EST today, the two-hour session will focus on the video game's diverse insect population

Maple Leafs defenceman Justin Holl is ready to go. He's just waiting for the green light. Holl has spent most of the COVID-19 pandemic that shut down the NHL, and much of North America, at home in Minnesota since the season was paused March 12.

Jane's Skype conversations with Fariha across the world in Bangladesh helped Fariha learn English while providing an opportunity to share the love of Jesus.

Program will explore what life would be like for a two-month crossing of the Atlantic Ocean from Europe to the New World.

Middletown --

Location: North Broad Street (Railroad Crossing) between Cedar Lane Road and Middletown Warwick Road/Summit Bridge Road, Middletown.

Times and Dates: 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday, March 18, 2020 until 5:00 a.m. on Thursday, April 2, 2020

Traffic Information: DelDOT announces to motorists that Delmarva Central Railroad will be replacing the railroad crossing, performing railroad signal upgrades, and doing general maintenance on their railroad crossing on North Broad Street. DelDOT's crews will be reconstructing the existing traffic signals. [More]

Milford --

Location: US 113 Southbound (Railroad Crossing) between Route 14/Milford-Harrington Highway and East Lane, Milford.

Times and Date: 8:00 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 15, 2020.

Traffic Information: DelDOT announces to motorists that Delmarva Central Railroad will be performing general maintenance on their railroad crossing on US 113 in Milford. [More]

Lincoln --

DelDOT announces to motorists that Delmarva Central Railroad will be resurfacing and performing general maintenance of their railroad crossing at Butler Avenue between North Old State Road and Front Street.

The closure will begin at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday, April 18, 2020 until 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, April 21, 2020.

Detour Routes:

Eastbound: Butler Avenue onto North Old State Road to Johnson Road to Front Street and return to Butler Avenue. [More]

Those sent home will continue to be monitored by local officials for signs of ill health, though, provincial officials say.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has ordered a probe into the drowning of several Afghan migrants last week after reports that Iranian border guards allegedly forced them into a river.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just gave her very first commencement address...inside the Nintendo Switch game, Animal Crossing. ......

Japan's Nintendo Co Ltd said on Thursday its fourth-quarter profit soared 200% due to surging demand for its Switch games console, and that title Animal Crossing: New Horizons shifted a record 13.4 million units in its first six weeks.

The runaway success of Nintendo Co Ltd's island life simulator Animal Crossing: New Horizons has overshadowed an uncomfortable fact for fans of the Switch console - it lacks upcoming titles.

Japan's Nintendo said Thursday it sold 21 million Switch units in the year ended March, smashing its forecast of 19.5 million units, with hit title Animal Crossing: New Horizons shifting 13.4 million units in its first six weeks. Ciara Lee reports