No they don't require travel. People couldn't travel anywhere near as simply as we can, back in the Ancient era.
One only needs to get an answer that works only if the world is round, that's all. Stand on a cliff. See further out to sea than at the bottom of the cliff, but not to infinity (or any reasonable approximation). Ships and oil rigs and wind turbines at sea? You can't see the bottom of them, if they are far enough away. Shouldn't happen on a flat earth. You should see all of them or they should all too far away enough to see. They shouldn't have the bottoms chopped off unless the Earth is curving away from you (now, does "flat Earth" imply perfectly flat or merely a curved plane? Nobody argues that one).
Observe an eclipse, then explain it without the Earth getting in the way. It's a disc? Really? Every eclipse (dozens a year). From every different angle? When the Moon is in all kinds of different positions? You know what object casts a disc shadow no matter which angle you look at it from? A sphere.
And simple travel does not mean "thousands of miles". Your latitude changes everything - from shadows on the ground, to what stars are visible, and that shouldn't be true on flat-earth. Grab a telescope. Now track an object without an equatorial mount (basically an angled gear on a tripod). Arms tired from all the adjustment yet? Okay, put it on an equatorial mount but don't adjust for latitude. Watch as the objects you see drift enormously within a matter of minutes.
Now put it on an equatorial mount that's properly set to your latitude. Watch as everything works and stays in your viewfinder. Now explain that in flat-earth terms.
Technically there should be no difference in latitude at all on a flat-earth - why would it be heated in a band with two tropics E->W but not the same N->S? Does the Earth have a strip of parallel E->W heating elements in it? And is this Earth still circular or is it plane-flat? Because then it gets even odder (if it was circular and centrally heated, you'd expect one point on Earth to be "hottest" and distance from that to result in temperature drops all over, yes?
Far too complex to explain for flat-earth, very simple demo for round-Earth. Explain winter. You don't need to travel to prove that the tropics exist, the equator is mean-hottest and the further North/South you go the colder it gets. You DO need to prove some mechanism for flat-earth to emulate that without being ridiculous.
This is the sort of thing we give to kids to prove in their lunch break, much like the Egyptians, Greeks and every civilisation since has managed to do, casually, without people suddenly expressing denial of it (despite being persecuted for suggesting the Earth is not the center of the universe, etc. simultaneously), without any hi-tech tools, major travel networks, or photography.
I don't lack the words, arguments, reasoning, explanation or capability to prove this to you. What I lack is the impetus, the motivation, and the hourly fee.
P.S. I'm a mathematician. Unfortunately, you try to state there's no math(s) I can use in a matter of seconds to prove the earth is round. There is. But you need to know maths. I can quite happily grace you with a complete geometric analysis of things that ONLY HAPPEN ON SPHERICAL OBJECTS and then link them to things that happen on Earth. But I've avoided the maths because a) I don't get paid enough to write papers for Slashdot flat-earth commentors, b) I would be accused of "using maths, it's all just theory, you know, etc. etc." (I'd give it three comments before someone mentioned completeness, for example).
Go out. Touch that world. Explain why a flat disc, or hyperbolic paraboloid, or plane, or anything other than a near-perfect sphere would result in that phenomenon.
Watch as "compensation effect" takes hold and you have to change not just the shape of the Earth but the orbits of the planets, the motion of the
I'm sorry, why should we be bothering to work out how to prove it to him? That's up to him, if he wants to go against the entirety of established science - with all their own proofs and evidence - for the last few thousand years.
Flat-earth nonsense is literally predating civilisation. Everyone since has known that it's not flat, nobody in their right mind in even the 14th Century was thinking "Oh, the world is entirely flat". The Ancient Greeks knew it - and could prove it.
It doesn't need any complicated tools, experience, mathematics or intellect to prove it in a matter of seconds. And the more time we waste celebrating and legitimising idiocy like this, the more pathetically sad I am for humanity.
Want to prove it? Buy a round the world ticket and look out the window. You don't need to see curvature of the Earth (though that's easily done) in order to prove that the world isn't a flat plane. Unless you think somehow that the (round) Sun and Moon both circle us perfectly, spend half the day hiding underneath that flat plane, yet always appear from the East no matter where you are on the planet and for some reason the MIDDLE of the planet is closer / warmer, not East vs West.
These people are literally the biggest fools I've ever encountered. It would be ironically funny if someone had suggested this in the 1700's or something, but they still would have been laughed at. To think that they BELIEVE this stuff is worse than anything I can imagine. The Flying Spaghetti Monster has more evidence than this tosh.
Let's please just stop giving them any kind of credence that they are susceptible to "just the right piece of logical thinking, if only we could explain it" but continue laughing at them for their ignorance.
And every single launch ONE of his rockets has failed to land on its ass-end too, or taken out the landing platform on the way down.
Because it's a stupid idea. I'm sure your comic-book-reading 7-year-old internal mind is thinking "Wow, cool, just like in my picture books", but in reality NASA used to ditch because ditching is cheaper, safer, easier and you could re-use them from the ocean if you could be bothered to do so (hint: most of the cost is in the fuel they carry, and being as lightweight as possible - i.e. not having much left to worry about ditching once it's empty).
If you really read Musk's stuff, it basically goes along the lines of "We're going to do something spectacular!" and then ends up with something that's not actually that spectacular at all, is often ridiculously wasteful (if you can afford to throw everything away and not make a profit, of course you can do stupid things), and is usually not at all practical or profitable.
There's a reason his sales figures for the car are 0.1% of cars sold every year. It's got little to do with simple truck logistics in Norway. There's a reason his vacuum-train idea is going nowhere. There's a reason his batteries are industry-standard lithium cells in a box.
It's all hype. Honestly, just go look. The whole "rockets landing on their ass" thing is really the epitome of his whole persona. Might look cool. But doesn't work anywhere near reliably enough to be worth the effort. I imagine there's a crowd of ageing NASA guys all laughing into their hands or facepalming every time they're mentioned.
Honestly, he's a billionaire salesman. He can throw his money away on anything you like. He might even succeed at a couple. But in terms of actually advancing us, or forming a coherent business plan around it, the businesses are useless. By his own admission, SpaceX and Tesla nearly went bankrupt at least once each. They are only propped up by his throwing a personal fortune (earned for selling off a company predicated on holding a credit card number in proxy) at it. Once that stops being the only real source of income, they will all collapse.
"In a big city you should still be able to see Venus and Mars with the naked eye. Likely Jupiter and Saturn too. I know I can within the glow of San Antonio."
Inner-city London, with over-cast skies for most of the year? Good luck!
P.S. I am now an amateur astronomer. It's... technically possible with the right kit in a dark place to see some things. I have a photo of Saturn (tiny but you can make out the rings). And you can see Venus. But with the naked eye? Not a chance for the majority of the year. It's a good clear night if you can pick out the major constellations with the naked eye, but you won't see a starfield.
It depends where you are, the weather, light pollution (HUGE in London), good chance, etc. but the fact is that the skies just aren't bright enough to go "Oh wow, look, that's a planet" like they would have been in the Stone Age. You might - if you know what you're looking for - spot them after a while of adjusting and looking for them (e.g. a 9 hour drive through the night) but they aren't leaping out at you.
Hence, city-dwellers would be shocked by what you can see by driving 10 miles from the nearest bulb and just sitting for five minutes looking up.
Ancient cultures all named thousands of stars and gave them associated legends, as well as navigated by them. They knew about comets, meteors, stars and galaxies.
To be honest, they were more likely to notice something unusual - especially if it moved over time - than the average person would be today. The naked eye doesn't pick up much in a city nowadays.
You know how I got into astronomy at age 30? I saw Venus for the very first time, while driving to Scotland for 9 hours.
A culture that revolves around day-time and can't do anything of an evening because of insufficient light, yet being a species that naturally wakes up throughout the night - they're going to spot a red star going across the sky just like they could spot Venus doing so. And it would be a "Oh, look, that's unusual" rather than "ARGH! We're all gonna die!" purely because it wouldn't actually be that unusual or interesting to them, given the size and brightness of said star in the sky.
The solar system is about 40AU (depending on your definition of planet).
So "close" is really... well, testing things a bit. Astronomically, yes, very close.
Practically? It's 20,000 times the size of the entire solar system away and to my knowledge only two objects have ever left the solar system.
Chronologically? It happened 70,000 years ago which, again, is tiny in astronomical terms but it's already long gone. We could do nothing about it in a reasonable time, we'd barely be able to study it, and if it was slightly to the left we'd all be interstellar dust (again) by now.
Though interesting, it's hardly close or anything we can really utilise or study,
I'd be more worried along the lines of "chances are something else could come and go this and wipe us out and likely we'd never know it was going to happen". Not just stray asteriods (which obviously would be knocked for six by something like this straying close) but an entire damn star. That's solar-system-ending.
The human driver wasn't driving, despite the fact that he should have been.
The footage shows him playing on some kind of device constantly for minutes before crash - a phone or a central console or something? His eyes are on the road less than 20% of the time, and his hands aren't on the wheels.
Had the car not been automated, he would have had to be touching the wheel at least, and probably looking at the road rather than his phone.
By no means a guarantee, but having an automated car has thus created two problems - an inattentive human driver who trusts the car implicitly enough to do something that's basically going to be quite obviously fatal, and a car that's not capable of actually performing the duties said guy should be performing.
It's like the worst of both worlds in one. Offloading all the critical functions from the thing that can do it if they bother, to something that can't do it no matter how hard it tries, with no way to pull it back in any reasonable amount of time.
It's an indicator, either on the car itself or a car behind it.
Never noticed that on a dark road your indicators are visible reflecting off objects hundreds of yards away? It's only daylight that makes us think they are just "illuminated" rather than "illuminating".
(Could also just be a flashing orange light facing the other direction of traffic, it's hard to tell of you don't know the local customs and equipment - if it was the UK I'd say it's a cone-top hazard light or a flashing street sign - but certainly nothing unusual).
So name someone in TECH that's not in Science, or IT. Because you're just narrowing the field rather than expanding it.
Famous female scientists, I can probably name one or two, but they won't be universal and they won't have much to do with "technology" as such (sure, they use it, but they won't be considered "tech people").
I'm considering high-tech (sorry) industrial, manufacturing, IT, etc. and I'm still stuck. Is Ferrari involved in tech? Is Mr Musk only because of Tesla or despite that?
And again - okay, go ahead. Outside of purely scientific fields (biologists, theoretical physicists, etc.) but counting people who build, invent, engineer, etc. anything considered high-technology - name a female that the person sitting next to me now will know.
If your vehicle is moving such that your reaction+braking distance is greater than your visibility (whether that's a sensor or an eye), then you're at fault. It's really that simple. You are putting the car into a position where you cannot possibly react to any feasible hazard in the road ahead.
I'm prepared to believe that the video contrast is not reflective of what it looks like from the car, but I've ALWAYS found that dashcams are better than you think and see more than you would, especially in post-analysis.
But the woman isn't DIVING across the road at 100mph. She isn't stepping out from behind parked cars where there's no possibility of being seen. She's walked across the road. The light-beams of the car pick her up. No corrective action is taken until she's already inevitably dead. The car didn't see her. Like the driver didn't see her.
If it was a human driving, that's because "it was dark". Then slow down, so your headlights illuminate the area you're going to need to brake inside.
If it was the computer driving, the sensors weren't able to pick up objects outside a certain range. Then it shouldn't ever be going fast enough to not have a braking distance inside that range.
It's really quite simple.
There's a whole lane to her left. She's at walking speed. You didn't see her despite being "wider" than a person because of the bike. There's a dark spot and your headlights aren't illuminating it and the street lighting isn't great at that point. But no corrective action occurs. The front doesn't dip. The car doesn't slow. The steering doesn't avoid. The speed isn't dropped when visibility drops.
That's an emergency braking scenario, sure. Unexpected pedestrian maybe (but in the UK, you get that kind of thing all the time, and we don't have jaywalking etc. laws). But the fact that even the low-light kit of a CCTV camera can't pick her up until even emergency braking wouldn't suffice means that it was going too fast for the conditions. And that NOTHING appears to change in terms of the car's motion... that indicates absolute failure.
Sorry, no matter how perfect a driver we might think we all are... this is bad driving. That the human "driver" isn't looking is merely incidental in this case, because he couldn't have done anything from that speed - and thus it shouldn't have been AT that speed.
This would be excuseable on a non-lit motorway (designated absolutely no pedestrians, no side-walks, no access to pedestrians, CCTV surveillance and automated warning of "pedestrians in road" for miles if it does happen). But on a lit road, what we'd class as a "dual-carriageway" in the UK, though it might be legal to do quite high speeds, it's always at the driver's discretion and responsibility. And that change from "I can see all the road" to "I can see what's in my beams" should have prompted a slow-down.
And, at the very least, evidence of braking and movement to the left to try to avoid the pedestrian. That camera literally doesn't dip right up to the point it hits her. That means no braking or no suspension. It literally didn't "see" her at all. Not even at the last moment. Not at all until contact occurred. It didn't detect her, even "too late" or try to avoid it. It didn't even know it was going to collide until it actually did.
I hope like hell that whatever transport safety board is responsible demands data from the car about when it detected her and what its expected detection range was at the speed it was doing, and what action was taken before collision.
I also find it suspicious that it cuts out at point of impact (sure, censor it)... that might suggest that maybe the car just kept going and the guy had to stop it.
OK, I'm not anti-feminist, I have a fairly good grounding in tech fields (I mean, it's my career, hobby and interest, so you have to have, no?), I read the news, I see new tech come out, I know the main brands, I am aware of some famous people associated with those brands and things they've said and done - over the last 30-something years.. So long as we're constraining it to tech as in consumer-brands, things you'll have heard of, not "science" as such, etc.
Erm... well, I'm struggling. I'm sure that someone can reel off 20 names, but I honestly can't think of one that springs out that the random person in the street will have heard of. Who's the female Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates? Even Jeff Bezos etc. is pushing it expecting people to know who he is, but who's a female in a similar position that a person in the street will go "Oh, yes, I forgot about her!" or "I didn't think you meant that type of company".
Sure, it's indicative of a problem in the tech field but is it really that damning if there aren't any female household names in tech? People who you'd say "Oh, this should be a good interview / discussion / court case / advert, it's got her in it"? I can't name one.
Okay, I'm going to cheat. Google. "famous women in tech" (the equivalent male version of which gives me Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai (?), Evan Spiegel (wasn't he in Ghostbusters?))
Sheryl Sandberg. Nope.
Grace Hopper. Not by name. Picture suggests possibly one of those NASA calculator people from decades ago? (Google tells me she was a programmer... okay).
Ada Lovelace. Now I know who she is. It's possible a few of my science-y friends will have heard of her. But the person in the street won't have. And how far back are we going here.
Meg Whitman
Radia Perlman.
Hedy Lamarr (I know she did some cool stuff, including something like inventing the glider plane or something? But nobody's going to have her on the tip of their tongue for tech innovation alongside, say, Bill Gates).
Okay, I'll go more recent: Sheryl Sandberg (again), Susan Wojcicki (?), Ginni Rometty, Meg Whitman, Angela Ahrendts, Safra Catz, Ruth Porat, Lucy Peng, Amy Hood, Jean Liu, Zhou Qunfei,... I've not heard of any of these people, sure as hell none of my friends have.
Maybe the reason that people can't name a famous woman in tech is because there aren't many (or maybe any depending on your definition of "famous" and "tech"... is Julian Assange?). That, sure, is a problem. But making it sound like we're dumb because we can't name one when... well, there aren't any... that's just attacking people on the basis of them being ignorant of a fact which you possess. That's not a fair fight. How many of those reporters could name one BEFORE they started writing the article? How many of the people interviewing the people in the street?
For sure women are under-represented, and I don't see why that couldn't and shouldn't be changing. But I don't see why a "man-in-the-street" quiz is somehow detrimental to that.
If you want us to name a famous woman in an industry - be that person. Make us remember your name. For sure, nobody is ever going to remember mine. But if you say "tech" and "woman" together, pretty much the Venn intersection is exceedingly narrow and niche.
((I'd also like to point out that all the guys I can name, I dislike. Because to a tee they are business and mouth-piece over any kind of actual technical innovator, loudmouths, eccentric, say stupid things, etc. etc. These aren't engineers, they're salesmen and stock-brokers.))
a) Yep, but there's this thing called "reputation". b) I'm not. But it's framed as such. "Look, even the Whatsapp guy says he wouldn't tolerate this and wouldn't have done it", where that's EXACTLY what he did, to every WhatsApp user.
"We sold you all out to them years ago, including all your data, for money to become billionaires. Now we are telling you that you shouldn't ever give them your data and should delete your account with them immediately."
Tell me a) why I should listen to you, b) how you think this makes you the hero?
"All in all there were 4155 draw calls, 1113 textures involved and 88 render targets."
And a lot of clever trickery that engine etc. programmers have to apply, texture artists have to take account of, etc. etc etc.
The "shortcuts" give convincing near-realism on low hardware for a hefty development price.
Ray-tracing gives convincing realism on high hardware for much less development all over.
As such, I can see a move towards ray-tracing.... eventually. Especially if you can put in a hardware features that helps it, wrap that in an API and force people to buy not just a GPU or a GPGPU but something that's capable of accelerating raytracing specifically. Then you could convince gamers that they need a new card. Especially if you consider, say, VR on top - VR and ray-tracing seems to go together naturally.
Now you have the same incentive as people who had to go out and by an FPU, a Voodoo card, etc. etc. to play the latest-greatest game that consoles can't get near for another few years. It's what sold Quake, which in turn sold OpenGL cards.
If things go right, VR/RT will be the reason that people upgrade their machines to play the next mega-game. And developers will push for that not just for showmanship but because their lives suddenly become cheaper and easier. Why bother to sit and texture a glass and come up with so-many-different bump maps, texture maps, reflection maps, etc. etc. when you can just specify that it's glass and have done with it and let the API convert it.
I remember playing about with POV-Ray back in the day. My old Pentium could barely render a frame in a day. But the descriptive language used to generate the scenes was much easier than the things I see being shoved into graphics memory nowadays.
If you pull the description of material properties out of the artists hands and into an API or engine, and then let the hardware do the description and heavy-lifting, ray-tracing is suddenly much easier than trying to craft it all yourself.
The same way that early 3D games all had to write their own 2.5D / 3D engines (e.g. Doom) that did everything themselves and were overtaken by a handful of OpenGL statements and compatible hardware that didn't need the clever tricks, massive optimisation and limitations.
And if you can get real-time ray-tracing, the creation tools basically mirror the production hardware. You have no need to pre-render, Z-order, edge-cull or almost anything else. You just describe the scene as you like, and that's your finished scene - the ray-tracing handles the rest.
I can quite see an era where ray-tracing takes control of the industry because it's just not worth faffing about optimising when you can just throw the whole scene at the hardware and let it do the work.
Maybe at that point, games will return to gameplay and atmosphere rather than just eye-candy, because they'll all be photo-realistic with almost no extraneous effort over downloading a library object and putting it into a scene.
Note: If you can't see 6 feet in front of you, drive at a speed that you can stop within 6 feet. It's really not rocket science.
I would hazard that if you were driving at such speed, though not impossible, it would be incredibly unlikely to kill any pedestrian, cyclist, or vehicle occupant who might appear in your path.
P.S. What's wrong with your humans that you can't trust them to cross a road outside a special area? Plenty of countries give priority to pedestrians and teach small children how to cross a road safely.
Was it raining causing limited visibility? Doesn't matter. Choose a speed appropriate to the conditions and your distance of visibility. Fail that? You fail at driving, machine or not.
Did she dart out between two cars right in front of the moving vehicle? Doesn't matter (think little boy retrieving his ball from the road). Choose a speed appropriate to the conditions and the potential hazards around you. Fail that? You fail at driving, machine or not.
Was she crossing and then doubled back? Doesn't matter. Choose a speed appropriate to the conditions. Brake don't swerve. If she doubled-back, if means you aimed at parked cars, etc. Fail that? You fail at driving, machine or not.
Did the human behind the wheel have time to try and react?Doesn't matter (but the answer is no, apparently). Your co-pilot / passenger should not have to take the wheel in an emergency. Fail that? You fail at driving, machine or not.
If you can invent a machine, any machine, that is even capable of interpreting the laws, let alone understanding them, let alone applying them, let alone formulating enough decision making to adjust their world to allow them to be applies, then you will be the richest person on the planet overnight.
"The woman was crossing the street outside a crosswalk when she was hit, the spokesperson said."
And in just about every civilised society to do so is perfectly acceptable and you still have right of way as a pedestrian.
"Jaywalking" is a stupid law unless you are literally trying to obstruct traffic or cause an accident.
Fact is, all the super-duper software in the world didn't spot her in time and killed her. Which kinda puts a dent in your plans that this software is somehow any better than the human in the driving seat (who also didn't spot her).
But Facebook? Who runs the app? I thought it was well understood that it's a bloated mess that doesn't even do the messaging, and people just use the website version instead.
Which won't be loaded/active/tracking location 24/7.
I have a very long rant about town-planning and road infrastructure. Don't make me start it.
But there are two options - allow or penalise. If you need that amount of traffic to get to a place, you need a road, and side-roads, and feeder-roads and sink-roads that can take the capacity PLUS MORE.
If you don't WANT that amount of traffic then you have to penalise it. Tolls. Prohibitions. One way systems. Or... yes... just making it traffic-heavy. Literally traffic is it's own limiter - if it takes you an hour to get to a place because of traffic, you will change the way you get there or not go there.
Town-planners really need to work out what it is that they want because 99.9% of the time they clearly WANT the end result of the traffic (jobs, etc.) but they don't want the traffic itself. They deliberately do not invest, manage or encourage traffic while penalising it heavily, and then blaming drivers who are trying to get to work.
And traffic-management turns to nonsense when you hear the term "flow". It means "the roads are jammed, but they're still moving at 1mph so technically it's not a jam".
If you need cars to come in, then you need to widen the roads and accesses and get them in and to their destination as fast as possible.
If you don't want cars to come in, then start blocking roads and putting in other measures.
To be honest, if you can bypass traffic management by using a satnav and going another way? By now? It's been 20 years since we all started buying satnavs, that's not long enough to change how you manage the traffic? And the way to stop it? Cut off the routes those cars would use.
But, better, would be that you design and manage your roads to get everyone that needs to traverse a portion of the network through as quickly as possible.
Hint: This means no traffic lights (I'm in the UK, we have roundabouts, which technically can jam up if one entrance is overloaded but if one entrance is overloaded guess what? There's your problem, further down that road!). No ridiculously narrow roads. No cutting a lane out without any warning. No allowing traffic to block junctions (yellow hatched boxes exist in the UK - use them and enforce them).
All those things are for managing "flow", not capacity. Literally stopping 50% of the traffic for 50% of the time is not effective in terms of getting people to their destination on time. All it does is ensure you don't get complete logjam where your stupidly-designed roads narrow the traffic bandwidth.
But if you get traffic jams... it's because you've designed poorly. Having every intersection being a complete four-way, light-managed system is a symptom of this. It's where you gave up trying to direct the traffic and just said "We'll just stop them so they don't get into a complete gridlock".
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh. Really? We're going to do this?
No they don't require travel. People couldn't travel anywhere near as simply as we can, back in the Ancient era.
One only needs to get an answer that works only if the world is round, that's all. Stand on a cliff. See further out to sea than at the bottom of the cliff, but not to infinity (or any reasonable approximation). Ships and oil rigs and wind turbines at sea? You can't see the bottom of them, if they are far enough away. Shouldn't happen on a flat earth. You should see all of them or they should all too far away enough to see. They shouldn't have the bottoms chopped off unless the Earth is curving away from you (now, does "flat Earth" imply perfectly flat or merely a curved plane? Nobody argues that one).
Observe an eclipse, then explain it without the Earth getting in the way. It's a disc? Really? Every eclipse (dozens a year). From every different angle? When the Moon is in all kinds of different positions? You know what object casts a disc shadow no matter which angle you look at it from? A sphere.
And simple travel does not mean "thousands of miles". Your latitude changes everything - from shadows on the ground, to what stars are visible, and that shouldn't be true on flat-earth. Grab a telescope. Now track an object without an equatorial mount (basically an angled gear on a tripod). Arms tired from all the adjustment yet? Okay, put it on an equatorial mount but don't adjust for latitude. Watch as the objects you see drift enormously within a matter of minutes.
Now put it on an equatorial mount that's properly set to your latitude. Watch as everything works and stays in your viewfinder. Now explain that in flat-earth terms.
Technically there should be no difference in latitude at all on a flat-earth - why would it be heated in a band with two tropics E->W but not the same N->S? Does the Earth have a strip of parallel E->W heating elements in it? And is this Earth still circular or is it plane-flat? Because then it gets even odder (if it was circular and centrally heated, you'd expect one point on Earth to be "hottest" and distance from that to result in temperature drops all over, yes?
Far too complex to explain for flat-earth, very simple demo for round-Earth. Explain winter. You don't need to travel to prove that the tropics exist, the equator is mean-hottest and the further North/South you go the colder it gets. You DO need to prove some mechanism for flat-earth to emulate that without being ridiculous.
This is the sort of thing we give to kids to prove in their lunch break, much like the Egyptians, Greeks and every civilisation since has managed to do, casually, without people suddenly expressing denial of it (despite being persecuted for suggesting the Earth is not the center of the universe, etc. simultaneously), without any hi-tech tools, major travel networks, or photography.
I don't lack the words, arguments, reasoning, explanation or capability to prove this to you. What I lack is the impetus, the motivation, and the hourly fee.
P.S. I'm a mathematician. Unfortunately, you try to state there's no math(s) I can use in a matter of seconds to prove the earth is round. There is. But you need to know maths. I can quite happily grace you with a complete geometric analysis of things that ONLY HAPPEN ON SPHERICAL OBJECTS and then link them to things that happen on Earth. But I've avoided the maths because a) I don't get paid enough to write papers for Slashdot flat-earth commentors, b) I would be accused of "using maths, it's all just theory, you know, etc. etc." (I'd give it three comments before someone mentioned completeness, for example).
Go out. Touch that world. Explain why a flat disc, or hyperbolic paraboloid, or plane, or anything other than a near-perfect sphere would result in that phenomenon.
Watch as "compensation effect" takes hold and you have to change not just the shape of the Earth but the orbits of the planets, the motion of the
I'm sorry, why should we be bothering to work out how to prove it to him? That's up to him, if he wants to go against the entirety of established science - with all their own proofs and evidence - for the last few thousand years.
Flat-earth nonsense is literally predating civilisation. Everyone since has known that it's not flat, nobody in their right mind in even the 14th Century was thinking "Oh, the world is entirely flat". The Ancient Greeks knew it - and could prove it.
It doesn't need any complicated tools, experience, mathematics or intellect to prove it in a matter of seconds. And the more time we waste celebrating and legitimising idiocy like this, the more pathetically sad I am for humanity.
Want to prove it? Buy a round the world ticket and look out the window. You don't need to see curvature of the Earth (though that's easily done) in order to prove that the world isn't a flat plane. Unless you think somehow that the (round) Sun and Moon both circle us perfectly, spend half the day hiding underneath that flat plane, yet always appear from the East no matter where you are on the planet and for some reason the MIDDLE of the planet is closer / warmer, not East vs West.
These people are literally the biggest fools I've ever encountered. It would be ironically funny if someone had suggested this in the 1700's or something, but they still would have been laughed at. To think that they BELIEVE this stuff is worse than anything I can imagine. The Flying Spaghetti Monster has more evidence than this tosh.
Let's please just stop giving them any kind of credence that they are susceptible to "just the right piece of logical thinking, if only we could explain it" but continue laughing at them for their ignorance.
And every single launch ONE of his rockets has failed to land on its ass-end too, or taken out the landing platform on the way down.
Because it's a stupid idea. I'm sure your comic-book-reading 7-year-old internal mind is thinking "Wow, cool, just like in my picture books", but in reality NASA used to ditch because ditching is cheaper, safer, easier and you could re-use them from the ocean if you could be bothered to do so (hint: most of the cost is in the fuel they carry, and being as lightweight as possible - i.e. not having much left to worry about ditching once it's empty).
If you really read Musk's stuff, it basically goes along the lines of "We're going to do something spectacular!" and then ends up with something that's not actually that spectacular at all, is often ridiculously wasteful (if you can afford to throw everything away and not make a profit, of course you can do stupid things), and is usually not at all practical or profitable.
There's a reason his sales figures for the car are 0.1% of cars sold every year. It's got little to do with simple truck logistics in Norway. There's a reason his vacuum-train idea is going nowhere. There's a reason his batteries are industry-standard lithium cells in a box.
It's all hype. Honestly, just go look. The whole "rockets landing on their ass" thing is really the epitome of his whole persona. Might look cool. But doesn't work anywhere near reliably enough to be worth the effort. I imagine there's a crowd of ageing NASA guys all laughing into their hands or facepalming every time they're mentioned.
Honestly, he's a billionaire salesman. He can throw his money away on anything you like. He might even succeed at a couple. But in terms of actually advancing us, or forming a coherent business plan around it, the businesses are useless. By his own admission, SpaceX and Tesla nearly went bankrupt at least once each. They are only propped up by his throwing a personal fortune (earned for selling off a company predicated on holding a credit card number in proxy) at it. Once that stops being the only real source of income, they will all collapse.
5 technically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But the furthest is still only 141AU away.
"In a big city you should still be able to see Venus and Mars with the naked eye. Likely Jupiter and Saturn too. I know I can within the glow of San Antonio."
Inner-city London, with over-cast skies for most of the year? Good luck!
P.S. I am now an amateur astronomer. It's... technically possible with the right kit in a dark place to see some things. I have a photo of Saturn (tiny but you can make out the rings). And you can see Venus. But with the naked eye? Not a chance for the majority of the year. It's a good clear night if you can pick out the major constellations with the naked eye, but you won't see a starfield.
It depends where you are, the weather, light pollution (HUGE in London), good chance, etc. but the fact is that the skies just aren't bright enough to go "Oh wow, look, that's a planet" like they would have been in the Stone Age. You might - if you know what you're looking for - spot them after a while of adjusting and looking for them (e.g. a 9 hour drive through the night) but they aren't leaping out at you.
Hence, city-dwellers would be shocked by what you can see by driving 10 miles from the nearest bulb and just sitting for five minutes looking up.
Some beetles navigate by the Milky Way.
Ancient cultures all named thousands of stars and gave them associated legends, as well as navigated by them. They knew about comets, meteors, stars and galaxies.
To be honest, they were more likely to notice something unusual - especially if it moved over time - than the average person would be today. The naked eye doesn't pick up much in a city nowadays.
You know how I got into astronomy at age 30? I saw Venus for the very first time, while driving to Scotland for 9 hours.
A culture that revolves around day-time and can't do anything of an evening because of insufficient light, yet being a species that naturally wakes up throughout the night - they're going to spot a red star going across the sky just like they could spot Venus doing so. And it would be a "Oh, look, that's unusual" rather than "ARGH! We're all gonna die!" purely because it wouldn't actually be that unusual or interesting to them, given the size and brightness of said star in the sky.
1 light-year is 63,241 AU.
An AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
The solar system is about 40AU (depending on your definition of planet).
So "close" is really... well, testing things a bit. Astronomically, yes, very close.
Practically? It's 20,000 times the size of the entire solar system away and to my knowledge only two objects have ever left the solar system.
Chronologically? It happened 70,000 years ago which, again, is tiny in astronomical terms but it's already long gone. We could do nothing about it in a reasonable time, we'd barely be able to study it, and if it was slightly to the left we'd all be interstellar dust (again) by now.
Though interesting, it's hardly close or anything we can really utilise or study,
I'd be more worried along the lines of "chances are something else could come and go this and wipe us out and likely we'd never know it was going to happen". Not just stray asteriods (which obviously would be knocked for six by something like this straying close) but an entire damn star. That's solar-system-ending.
The human driver wasn't driving, despite the fact that he should have been.
The footage shows him playing on some kind of device constantly for minutes before crash - a phone or a central console or something? His eyes are on the road less than 20% of the time, and his hands aren't on the wheels.
Had the car not been automated, he would have had to be touching the wheel at least, and probably looking at the road rather than his phone.
By no means a guarantee, but having an automated car has thus created two problems - an inattentive human driver who trusts the car implicitly enough to do something that's basically going to be quite obviously fatal, and a car that's not capable of actually performing the duties said guy should be performing.
It's like the worst of both worlds in one. Offloading all the critical functions from the thing that can do it if they bother, to something that can't do it no matter how hard it tries, with no way to pull it back in any reasonable amount of time.
It's an indicator, either on the car itself or a car behind it.
Never noticed that on a dark road your indicators are visible reflecting off objects hundreds of yards away? It's only daylight that makes us think they are just "illuminated" rather than "illuminating".
(Could also just be a flashing orange light facing the other direction of traffic, it's hard to tell of you don't know the local customs and equipment - if it was the UK I'd say it's a cone-top hazard light or a flashing street sign - but certainly nothing unusual).
Children.
And Tech != Science.
So name someone in TECH that's not in Science, or IT. Because you're just narrowing the field rather than expanding it.
Famous female scientists, I can probably name one or two, but they won't be universal and they won't have much to do with "technology" as such (sure, they use it, but they won't be considered "tech people").
I'm considering high-tech (sorry) industrial, manufacturing, IT, etc. and I'm still stuck. Is Ferrari involved in tech? Is Mr Musk only because of Tesla or despite that?
And again - okay, go ahead. Outside of purely scientific fields (biologists, theoretical physicists, etc.) but counting people who build, invent, engineer, etc. anything considered high-technology - name a female that the person sitting next to me now will know.
If your vehicle is moving such that your reaction+braking distance is greater than your visibility (whether that's a sensor or an eye), then you're at fault. It's really that simple. You are putting the car into a position where you cannot possibly react to any feasible hazard in the road ahead.
I'm prepared to believe that the video contrast is not reflective of what it looks like from the car, but I've ALWAYS found that dashcams are better than you think and see more than you would, especially in post-analysis.
But the woman isn't DIVING across the road at 100mph. She isn't stepping out from behind parked cars where there's no possibility of being seen. She's walked across the road. The light-beams of the car pick her up. No corrective action is taken until she's already inevitably dead. The car didn't see her. Like the driver didn't see her.
If it was a human driving, that's because "it was dark". Then slow down, so your headlights illuminate the area you're going to need to brake inside.
If it was the computer driving, the sensors weren't able to pick up objects outside a certain range. Then it shouldn't ever be going fast enough to not have a braking distance inside that range.
It's really quite simple.
There's a whole lane to her left. She's at walking speed. You didn't see her despite being "wider" than a person because of the bike. There's a dark spot and your headlights aren't illuminating it and the street lighting isn't great at that point. But no corrective action occurs. The front doesn't dip. The car doesn't slow. The steering doesn't avoid. The speed isn't dropped when visibility drops.
That's an emergency braking scenario, sure. Unexpected pedestrian maybe (but in the UK, you get that kind of thing all the time, and we don't have jaywalking etc. laws). But the fact that even the low-light kit of a CCTV camera can't pick her up until even emergency braking wouldn't suffice means that it was going too fast for the conditions. And that NOTHING appears to change in terms of the car's motion... that indicates absolute failure.
Sorry, no matter how perfect a driver we might think we all are... this is bad driving. That the human "driver" isn't looking is merely incidental in this case, because he couldn't have done anything from that speed - and thus it shouldn't have been AT that speed.
This would be excuseable on a non-lit motorway (designated absolutely no pedestrians, no side-walks, no access to pedestrians, CCTV surveillance and automated warning of "pedestrians in road" for miles if it does happen). But on a lit road, what we'd class as a "dual-carriageway" in the UK, though it might be legal to do quite high speeds, it's always at the driver's discretion and responsibility. And that change from "I can see all the road" to "I can see what's in my beams" should have prompted a slow-down.
And, at the very least, evidence of braking and movement to the left to try to avoid the pedestrian. That camera literally doesn't dip right up to the point it hits her. That means no braking or no suspension. It literally didn't "see" her at all. Not even at the last moment. Not at all until contact occurred. It didn't detect her, even "too late" or try to avoid it. It didn't even know it was going to collide until it actually did.
I hope like hell that whatever transport safety board is responsible demands data from the car about when it detected her and what its expected detection range was at the speed it was doing, and what action was taken before collision.
I also find it suspicious that it cuts out at point of impact (sure, censor it)... that might suggest that maybe the car just kept going and the guy had to stop it.
OK, I'm not anti-feminist, I have a fairly good grounding in tech fields (I mean, it's my career, hobby and interest, so you have to have, no?), I read the news, I see new tech come out, I know the main brands, I am aware of some famous people associated with those brands and things they've said and done - over the last 30-something years.. So long as we're constraining it to tech as in consumer-brands, things you'll have heard of, not "science" as such, etc.
Erm... well, I'm struggling. I'm sure that someone can reel off 20 names, but I honestly can't think of one that springs out that the random person in the street will have heard of. Who's the female Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates? Even Jeff Bezos etc. is pushing it expecting people to know who he is, but who's a female in a similar position that a person in the street will go "Oh, yes, I forgot about her!" or "I didn't think you meant that type of company".
Sure, it's indicative of a problem in the tech field but is it really that damning if there aren't any female household names in tech? People who you'd say "Oh, this should be a good interview / discussion / court case / advert, it's got her in it"? I can't name one.
Okay, I'm going to cheat. Google. "famous women in tech" (the equivalent male version of which gives me Elon Musk,
Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai (?),
Evan Spiegel (wasn't he in Ghostbusters?))
Sheryl Sandberg. Nope.
Grace Hopper. Not by name. Picture suggests possibly one of those NASA calculator people from decades ago? (Google tells me she was a programmer... okay).
Ada Lovelace. Now I know who she is. It's possible a few of my science-y friends will have heard of her. But the person in the street won't have. And how far back are we going here.
Meg Whitman
Radia Perlman.
Hedy Lamarr (I know she did some cool stuff, including something like inventing the glider plane or something? But nobody's going to have her on the tip of their tongue for tech innovation alongside, say, Bill Gates).
Okay, I'll go more recent: Sheryl Sandberg (again), Susan Wojcicki (?), Ginni Rometty, Meg Whitman, Angela Ahrendts, Safra Catz, Ruth Porat, Lucy Peng, Amy Hood, Jean Liu, Zhou Qunfei, ... I've not heard of any of these people, sure as hell none of my friends have.
Maybe the reason that people can't name a famous woman in tech is because there aren't many (or maybe any depending on your definition of "famous" and "tech"... is Julian Assange?). That, sure, is a problem. But making it sound like we're dumb because we can't name one when... well, there aren't any... that's just attacking people on the basis of them being ignorant of a fact which you possess. That's not a fair fight. How many of those reporters could name one BEFORE they started writing the article? How many of the people interviewing the people in the street?
For sure women are under-represented, and I don't see why that couldn't and shouldn't be changing. But I don't see why a "man-in-the-street" quiz is somehow detrimental to that.
If you want us to name a famous woman in an industry - be that person. Make us remember your name. For sure, nobody is ever going to remember mine. But if you say "tech" and "woman" together, pretty much the Venn intersection is exceedingly narrow and niche.
((I'd also like to point out that all the guys I can name, I dislike. Because to a tee they are business and mouth-piece over any kind of actual technical innovator, loudmouths, eccentric, say stupid things, etc. etc. These aren't engineers, they're salesmen and stock-brokers.))
a) Yep, but there's this thing called "reputation".
b) I'm not. But it's framed as such. "Look, even the Whatsapp guy says he wouldn't tolerate this and wouldn't have done it", where that's EXACTLY what he did, to every WhatsApp user.
And you can't un-sell your data.
So:
"We sold you all out to them years ago, including all your data, for money to become billionaires. Now we are telling you that you shouldn't ever give them your data and should delete your account with them immediately."
Tell me a) why I should listen to you, b) how you think this makes you the hero?
The tricks played to make things look real have been very convincing and took up less power.
But go look at a teardown of a single scene in GTA V
http://www.adriancourreges.com...
"All in all there were 4155 draw calls, 1113 textures involved and 88 render targets."
And a lot of clever trickery that engine etc. programmers have to apply, texture artists have to take account of, etc. etc etc.
The "shortcuts" give convincing near-realism on low hardware for a hefty development price.
Ray-tracing gives convincing realism on high hardware for much less development all over.
As such, I can see a move towards ray-tracing.... eventually. Especially if you can put in a hardware features that helps it, wrap that in an API and force people to buy not just a GPU or a GPGPU but something that's capable of accelerating raytracing specifically. Then you could convince gamers that they need a new card. Especially if you consider, say, VR on top - VR and ray-tracing seems to go together naturally.
Now you have the same incentive as people who had to go out and by an FPU, a Voodoo card, etc. etc. to play the latest-greatest game that consoles can't get near for another few years. It's what sold Quake, which in turn sold OpenGL cards.
If things go right, VR/RT will be the reason that people upgrade their machines to play the next mega-game. And developers will push for that not just for showmanship but because their lives suddenly become cheaper and easier. Why bother to sit and texture a glass and come up with so-many-different bump maps, texture maps, reflection maps, etc. etc. when you can just specify that it's glass and have done with it and let the API convert it.
I remember playing about with POV-Ray back in the day. My old Pentium could barely render a frame in a day. But the descriptive language used to generate the scenes was much easier than the things I see being shoved into graphics memory nowadays.
If you pull the description of material properties out of the artists hands and into an API or engine, and then let the hardware do the description and heavy-lifting, ray-tracing is suddenly much easier than trying to craft it all yourself.
The same way that early 3D games all had to write their own 2.5D / 3D engines (e.g. Doom) that did everything themselves and were overtaken by a handful of OpenGL statements and compatible hardware that didn't need the clever tricks, massive optimisation and limitations.
And if you can get real-time ray-tracing, the creation tools basically mirror the production hardware. You have no need to pre-render, Z-order, edge-cull or almost anything else. You just describe the scene as you like, and that's your finished scene - the ray-tracing handles the rest.
I can quite see an era where ray-tracing takes control of the industry because it's just not worth faffing about optimising when you can just throw the whole scene at the hardware and let it do the work.
Maybe at that point, games will return to gameplay and atmosphere rather than just eye-candy, because they'll all be photo-realistic with almost no extraneous effort over downloading a library object and putting it into a scene.
Yeah, you have to love the graphic towards the bottom:
"Board Industry Support"
API: Microsoft.
That's it. The only option. Not very "broad".
Note: If you can't see 6 feet in front of you, drive at a speed that you can stop within 6 feet. It's really not rocket science.
I would hazard that if you were driving at such speed, though not impossible, it would be incredibly unlikely to kill any pedestrian, cyclist, or vehicle occupant who might appear in your path.
P.S. What's wrong with your humans that you can't trust them to cross a road outside a special area? Plenty of countries give priority to pedestrians and teach small children how to cross a road safely.
Most countries don't even have a concept of jaywalking. Pedestrians have priority, except on motorways.
Was it raining causing limited visibility? Doesn't matter. Choose a speed appropriate to the conditions and your distance of visibility. Fail that? You fail at driving, machine or not.
Did she dart out between two cars right in front of the moving vehicle? Doesn't matter (think little boy retrieving his ball from the road). Choose a speed appropriate to the conditions and the potential hazards around you. Fail that? You fail at driving, machine or not.
Was she crossing and then doubled back? Doesn't matter. Choose a speed appropriate to the conditions. Brake don't swerve. If she doubled-back, if means you aimed at parked cars, etc. Fail that? You fail at driving, machine or not.
Did the human behind the wheel have time to try and react?Doesn't matter (but the answer is no, apparently). Your co-pilot / passenger should not have to take the wheel in an emergency. Fail that? You fail at driving, machine or not.
If you can invent a machine, any machine, that is even capable of interpreting the laws, let alone understanding them, let alone applying them, let alone formulating enough decision making to adjust their world to allow them to be applies, then you will be the richest person on the planet overnight.
"The woman was crossing the street outside a crosswalk when she was hit, the spokesperson said."
And in just about every civilised society to do so is perfectly acceptable and you still have right of way as a pedestrian.
"Jaywalking" is a stupid law unless you are literally trying to obstruct traffic or cause an accident.
Fact is, all the super-duper software in the world didn't spot her in time and killed her. Which kinda puts a dent in your plans that this software is somehow any better than the human in the driving seat (who also didn't spot her).
Google, possibly.
But Facebook? Who runs the app? I thought it was well understood that it's a bloated mess that doesn't even do the messaging, and people just use the website version instead.
Which won't be loaded/active/tracking location 24/7.
I have a very long rant about town-planning and road infrastructure. Don't make me start it.
But there are two options - allow or penalise. If you need that amount of traffic to get to a place, you need a road, and side-roads, and feeder-roads and sink-roads that can take the capacity PLUS MORE.
If you don't WANT that amount of traffic then you have to penalise it. Tolls. Prohibitions. One way systems. Or... yes... just making it traffic-heavy. Literally traffic is it's own limiter - if it takes you an hour to get to a place because of traffic, you will change the way you get there or not go there.
Town-planners really need to work out what it is that they want because 99.9% of the time they clearly WANT the end result of the traffic (jobs, etc.) but they don't want the traffic itself. They deliberately do not invest, manage or encourage traffic while penalising it heavily, and then blaming drivers who are trying to get to work.
And traffic-management turns to nonsense when you hear the term "flow". It means "the roads are jammed, but they're still moving at 1mph so technically it's not a jam".
If you need cars to come in, then you need to widen the roads and accesses and get them in and to their destination as fast as possible.
If you don't want cars to come in, then start blocking roads and putting in other measures.
To be honest, if you can bypass traffic management by using a satnav and going another way? By now? It's been 20 years since we all started buying satnavs, that's not long enough to change how you manage the traffic? And the way to stop it? Cut off the routes those cars would use.
But, better, would be that you design and manage your roads to get everyone that needs to traverse a portion of the network through as quickly as possible.
Hint: This means no traffic lights (I'm in the UK, we have roundabouts, which technically can jam up if one entrance is overloaded but if one entrance is overloaded guess what? There's your problem, further down that road!). No ridiculously narrow roads. No cutting a lane out without any warning. No allowing traffic to block junctions (yellow hatched boxes exist in the UK - use them and enforce them).
All those things are for managing "flow", not capacity. Literally stopping 50% of the traffic for 50% of the time is not effective in terms of getting people to their destination on time. All it does is ensure you don't get complete logjam where your stupidly-designed roads narrow the traffic bandwidth.
But if you get traffic jams... it's because you've designed poorly. Having every intersection being a complete four-way, light-managed system is a symptom of this. It's where you gave up trying to direct the traffic and just said "We'll just stop them so they don't get into a complete gridlock".
Amazon employ 566,000 people. That's 4 times more than Apple, for instance.