I hadn't read that, and it was interesting. I'm going to send it to our friend. I have read a fair bit about people having long-term planning issues before age 25, with a general conclusion that people aren't really adult until then (whatever 'adult' means: people still make dumb decisions when they're 80, if the expected payout is high enough.) And I'm glad you thought it was insightful: someone modded me flamebait, when I'd put actual thought into composing that rather than my usual offhand blathering.
The rise in the use of methamphetamines seems to have driven a lot of this behavioral change: people don't do a great job of thinking long-term under those circumstances. Dan Savage of Savage Love fame has written and talked about this extensively, because meth is such a large factor in the rave/dance scene, particularly the gay dance scene.
What I think is more depressing is a sense of the inevitability of AIDS, coupled with a sense that AIDS is at least manageable (IF you have good medical insurance) that leads a lot of young gay men to pretty much shrug and decide they'll deal with AIDS when they get it. My girlfriend's best friend is a wonderful guy and not particularly stupid, but he was all twitterpated over this boy in California who was HIV positive, and was ready to go out there and move in with the guy, and when we were like "WHY??!?" he shrugged and said "love's worth AIDS." Which makes me question my characterization of him as not particularly stupid, but I think twenty-three-year-olds sometimes have issues actually comprehending what 50 years of an expensive daily drug regimen would be like.
and yet I wonder if the guy whose body they came from will get any piece of the profits.. Let's hope he does..
Why?
The only logically reason why he deserves anything would be to encourage others to get tested for similar things, and I don't see too many researchers looking desperately looking for random people to come forward and have their antibodies tested.
If a corporation finds a gold vein on property for which I own the mineral rights, because I asked them to test a sample of rock I'd found, I would expect them to pay me for the gold.
One of the photographers that took the amazing pictures of the Niagara Falls Power Station tailrace tunnels (with a pretty amazing writeup of rappelling down a 100 meter shaft full of rusty broken machinery in the dark while evading security people) does a lot of urban underground photography. If you poke around a bit -- which I'm not going to do from work -- you can find his contributions to the pretty-girls-not-wearing-clothes-in-sewer-systems genre of Art Photography.
One good-and-bad thing about hydrogen, depending on what you're trying to do, is the width of concentrations in which it's flammable: 4 to 75%. That's really great if you're using it as a fuel, but really awful if you don't *want* it to burn furiously. In contrast, for instance, propane is only flammable between 2 and 10%, and gasoline fumes between 1 and 6%, and those are still considered dangerous.
But, as you say, one big plus of hydrogen is that the flames tend to go upwards, fast, meaning that you're a lot safer than when around gasoline fumes when things start to burn.
While I agree that the scientific horrors of war -- which, by the way, I think really started in WWI with the indiscriminate use of gas warfare -- shook the public's faith in science, I think a more general problem is that around 1900 or thereabouts we started crossing a threshold of research speed wherein wide sections of science were changing within a person's lifetime. It's okay to tell people the world is round and then wait 200 years and tell them the world rotates the sun and not vice versa because all the people who grew up believing something else have died off. But once you get to the point where our scientific model of the world is changing multiple times within a person's lifetime, people stop trusting science.
Now, the problem here is that people *shouldn't* trust science. Science isn't about The Truth, it's about making the best possible model of the natural world, and if that model comes up inadequate, science changes and accepts the new model. But people who don't work in science don't want to keep up with all the changes, in the same way that people who don't work with traffic enforcement don't want to keep up with regular changes in what sort of driving maneuvers are illegal this week, or whatever. If it's not what you do for a living, you just want to know enough to not be stupid or get bitten, you don't want to have to spend a lot of time keeping up. -- hey, just like computer security and keeping your computer free from malware, huh?
So once enough people were doing research and coming up with newer and better models, and scientific 'facts' like 'pluto is a planet' started changing within a person's lifetime, people stopped trusting science because they realized that it could change next week. While science has to work this way, since it's based on research (and when the known facts change, you *better* change your model) that makes it easy for people who aren't involved in it to discount it as mostly theoretical, particularly when some sections of it may contradict their own prejudices.
One I just read is Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style by Randy Olson. It's not a great book but it sure covers the basic ideas. People go into discussions with preconceptions and prejudices. That's always the case. The question is how much they let those preconceptions steer their thinking. People who spend a lot of time on research are somewhat more likely to let go of their preconceptions because they're used to doing that, but most people aren't. In general people would rather believe something they want to be true, whether or not it IS, and it's easier to influence people if you say something interesting that's sort of factual, than if you say something boring that's 100% factual. People who spend a lot of time doing research find it much easier to be boring and 100% factual, and as a result, they do a poor job of convincing the rest of the world that what they're saying is relevant or worth thinking about.
The GX270 was such a problem for us that a year ago we switched to Hewlett Packard -- which I'm not convinced is particularly better. However, since we buy 3000 desktops/laptops a year, maybe they'll notice and do something about their quality.
In other news, I'm now the proud owner of two free ex-corporate GX270's. Turns out lots of people sell refurb kits for about $20USD that include all the bad caps. They're very obvious: they're the ones that are all puffed up and bleeding brown snot out of the tops. There are two that are hard to replace because of soldering iron clearance issues with a heatsink that's basically riveted to the board, but a 60W soldering iron will solve that problem if you're careful.
His definition of ethics is lousy
on
Plagiarism Inc.
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· Score: 1
How is a strip club unethical? It may be immoral depending on your view of morality, but it's a legal business that doesn't misrepresent itself. Plagiarism is a lie: it is unethical and probably immoral, depending, again, on your view of morality.
Well its been a while since I have seen any AC batteries, so I guess that's why they went with the DC ones.
You try buying replacement laptop batteries off ebay, you'll see so many Anonymous Coward batteries you'll wish you'd never heard of ebay OR batteries. Here is a friend's discussion of the performance of ebay batteries.
Likewise there are stories about WWII fighter aircraft designers looking at beat-up planes, finding out which pieces hadn't broken, and removing material from them to make the plane lighter and more maneuverable.
>If Obama had put some requirment in place that the oil companies could start to comply with
Like, say, "no more drilling"?
I fail to see how making more complicated rules makes them more legal. If "you have to drill relief wells along with your main well" is legal, why isn't "no more drilling for six months"?
If you'd like to make some, it's pretty easy. Mix half table salt and half baking soda, put it in a cheap crucible -- I believe even a steel cup will work -- and heat it over a bunsen burner. It's nicely molten at a low red heat. I've used it to make sodium metal by electrolysis. Back in the day, Schwinn used to make all their bike frames using molten salt baths: they'd assemble the frames from tubing and pieces of brass, and lower the whole works into a molten salt bath. The brass would melt and braze the steel tubes together, they'd take it back out, brush off the heat scale, paint it, and send it out. Molten salt is reasonably nice stuff to work with.
I have a group of friends that post on an old BBS-like system, LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter. Same people, posting to all four places. I put them in that order because that's the order that shows their relative value to me. On the old BBS they post long, interesting discussions of their lives, a dozen paragraphs about the troubles one woman is going through having her mom involuntarily committed to an institution because of Alzheimer's and her conflicts with her relatives over the process, another dozen paragraphs about another friend's decision-making process about buying a TIG welder and why he chose the one he did. On Facebook, those same two people post things like "hey baby pics!", and on twitter they post "I like cheese!"
There isn't room on FB or Twitter to say stuff that has depth, and so many people are on them that you can't say anything controversial without offending someone. I haven't looked at FB for six months because my conservative religious aunt found it, and then me, and I have to deal with her for the rest of her life so I'm not going to be posting about my anarchist friends' orgy. I suppose I could spend the time to figure out how to build a filter that lets only a few people see it, or make another private FB account that prospective employers can't see, but why bother? I've got a bunch of friends on a BBS that nobody in the rest of the world will ever see and I can say anything I want there, with a 2 kilobyte post that lets me say *exactly* what I want to say.
The medium is part of the message, unrelated to the quality of a person's friends.
One cool characteristic of eletric power is that you can send it through dozens of miles with a reasonable efficiency. So it's possible to generate power in rural areas and consume it in urban areas, *pretty much like we do with food*. That's where the name solar farm comes from.
While a home grown garden is awesome, the bulk of the food you consume is generated or collected in extensive, mass-producing, corporate farms.
You choose an interesting analogy, and because I think it is an excellent analogy, let me address it first. "Transportation now major production cost for food". When we buy food that's been raised overseas, we're paying a *lot* of money for the oil that's been used to get it to us. For well-off people, that's a reasonable tradeoff right now, although transportation costs and our cultural reliance on just-in-time manufacturing are going to be very challenging for our economy over the next decade.
Likewise, exactly, energy transmission. Transformers are lossy. Interstate power lines are lossy. I work in designing semiconductors that drive LED lighting, and one of the slides we show to people when we're talking about what we do, is a giant energy budget for the US. *Half* the energy we produce is used in moving the other half of the energy to the end users. Now, that's largely driven by coal and gasoline: electricity transports with much better efficiency than those. But it's still not great. (Unfortunately my google-fu is failing me and I can't find a copy of the slide online.) But: dozens of miles is okay for power distribution; however, in most cases dozens of miles doesn't get you to a place where land is non-arable and only useful for massive solar farms. If we manage to start making reasonably-priced superconducting transmission lines, it makes a lot of sense to fill Nevada, the Sahara, and the Gobi with solar cells and move the electricity halfway across the globe. But until then, it's a lot more sensible to have the solar cells tens of meters away from the loads.
For that matter, there's also the problem of maintaining long transmission lines. We've had people killed locally because they decided to strip the valuable copper out of running transformers, and I'm not living in a particularly poverty-stricken area. Imagine trying to keep a transmission line running across multiple feuding countries filled with destitute people.
I sometimes worry about the 'lasting-ness' of all my JPEG photography compared to my film negatives through this same issue.
What you need is a distributed, persistent, peer-to-peer file system. Luckily, just such a thing can be built cheaply, using commodity hardware and software. Include a 19 year old woman who isn't wearing a shirt in each of your photographs, and you can be guaranteed that you will have 100% retention and worldwide availability of your photography hundreds of years into the future.
Totally true... for about a year. And then they'll have soaked up every watt those cells can provide and want more. (And why not? They should have as good a life as anyone else.) Nighttime illumination revolutionized industrialized nations, more than doubling their productivity and manufacturing capability, and I'd expect and hope the same thing would happen across southeast asia and africa.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that low-efficiency solar cells are useless. What I'm saying is that because land is not free and insolation is fixed, the surface area of solar cells is important if the solar cells are going to be colocated with the energy consumers. If we can design and build good transmission lines, that opens up enormous amounts of useless land and sea (and perhaps outer space) and then ultracheap solar seems like a much better idea, but there's still a tradeoff with lossy transmission.
You need both. It'd be great to have dirt-cheap solar cells, sure, but current 20% efficient cells can produce the amount of power a house needs, mounted on the roof of the house. If you make dirt-cheap 1% efficient cells you need 20x the space, which exceeds the entire yard space of most suburban and urban houses. Then, you have a solution that only makes sense for huge power generation companies that can afford to buy up half of Nevada to cover it with solar cells and transport the power. If we can make reasonably-priced, reasonably-efficient cells we can have microgeneration at each individual house.
While this isn't as much the case in very rural, very poor areas, where making kilometer-square solar arrays is viable, there's at least two orders of magnitude less money to be spent in such locations, so you're back to the same problem.
The point of *good* science fiction is to explore the repurcussions. (Trash science fiction just explores the fantasies of what could happen if everything went right.) Stanislaw Lem used to say that if all knowledge of literature was erased, the first thing people would start writing would be science fiction, of the prediction-of-catastrophe-if-we-keep-this-up sort.
In The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson neatly brushed the disposal problem under the rug by saying that the replicators could also take stuff apart (at an implied zero or negative entropy) so when something wore out you just put it back in the machine and had it remade for a small energy charge. That'd be awfully nice, but not very likely to actually happen so conveniently.
To be fair, The Diamond Age was not truly a post-scarcity society because people had to pay for the energy used for duplication (hence the scene where after the kids had created all this stuff they had to stick it all back in the compiler and destroy it again because their mom couldn't pay the bill for what they'd made.) So, what they had was an everything-available-for-a-reasonable-price society, a la iTunes. Unfortunately for our future, I think that's the most likely result if/when we DO manage to make matter compilers, since they'd necessarily take energy to run as a function of thermodynamics.
I *would* like to live in that world, because the only things worth more than their energy content would be innovations, that could briefly be hawked for above their energy content value, and when everyone has equal access to the best toolset, that makes for a very low barrier of entry for bringing innovations to the world. I think we'd see an amazing flowering of non-obvious but very useful inventions.
I have several coworkers who have done this, using DC motors from treadmills and blades made from pieces of 6" schedule 40 plastic pipe cut on an angle, a la the MAKE magazine plans here, with more details in this version. The problem is that 1: most places simply don't have enough wind to make energy generation worthwhile, and 2: those that do, often have storms in which the wind is so great it destroys the wind turbine. My friend who lives in Wyoming has built several vertical-axis turbines using 55 gallon drums with blades attached to the outside, that do okay (but not well, because they're mounted pretty close to the ground -- but they've survived the occasional 100mph windstorm) while my friends here in Colorado have made ones that have produced a consistent 40-60 watts until a windstorm has destroyed them, in both cases ripping the mooring lines and their concrete footings out of the ground and smashing the turbine when it hit the ground. They're very simple, just a commercial generator with blades spinning it directly.
A successful design needs to have some system for surviving gusts, and every design I've seen adds a lot of extra parts. Tails that predispose the propeller to point out of the wind, work well, but seem to impact the efficiency pretty heavily. The best designs use controllable-pitch props, but that's an innately difficult bit of mechanical engineering, adding lots of moving parts.
In fact, this is arguably the single most impressive and important pattern ever devised.
Really? Not the universal Turing machine pattern, or the pattern that emulates the game of life itself? Those both seem more impressive to me.
Well, he did say "arguably", which is arguably the worst weasel word in the history of mankind.
FUNNY! But at the same time, I think weasel words are critically important. Science should be based on weasel words: may, could, indicates, possibly, probably, likely. When you hear someone saying non-weasel words: is, will, shall, always -- you're either talking to God or to someone who talks to God. Mathematicians, for instance, which is why they can say that in base 10, two plus two IS four. But past that, I'm all for weasel words.
That's a superb joke, but if you're bored and want to read some extensions of the idea you should find a copy of Venus Equilateral by George Smith some time. In one of the stories, engineers make (by mistake, basically) a device that can replicate other devices, and then realize it can replicate itself, so they build a few mostly for fun. Since they're on an isolated space station they transmit information about what they've done back to earth and then find out that earth's economy is collapsing because everyone's either duplicating money or duplicating duplication machines and there's no reason to buy anything. Smith explores how that affects the economy for a while (one character's snooty wife has to stop being a socialite and get a job as a nurse, because Smith was basically a 1930's misogynist) and then has his engineers cook up a physical item that contains energy, which the matter duplicator can't duplicate (since it only deals with matter) to act as a new basis for currency. He wrote all this in the 1940's, so, y'know, prior art and all that.
Here's the hackaday entry about the feline facial recognition project. The actual project itself is located on a pretty slow server, so you'll have to just go with that, but the idea (from 2003) is what you say: it lets in cats that aren't carrying stuff in their mouths, but doesn't let in raccoons or skunks, and since he's captured pictures of them trying to get in, that's pretty useful.
Slashdot Mirror
I hadn't read that, and it was interesting. I'm going to send it to our friend. I have read a fair bit about people having long-term planning issues before age 25, with a general conclusion that people aren't really adult until then (whatever 'adult' means: people still make dumb decisions when they're 80, if the expected payout is high enough.) And I'm glad you thought it was insightful: someone modded me flamebait, when I'd put actual thought into composing that rather than my usual offhand blathering.
What I think is more depressing is a sense of the inevitability of AIDS, coupled with a sense that AIDS is at least manageable (IF you have good medical insurance) that leads a lot of young gay men to pretty much shrug and decide they'll deal with AIDS when they get it. My girlfriend's best friend is a wonderful guy and not particularly stupid, but he was all twitterpated over this boy in California who was HIV positive, and was ready to go out there and move in with the guy, and when we were like "WHY??!?" he shrugged and said "love's worth AIDS." Which makes me question my characterization of him as not particularly stupid, but I think twenty-three-year-olds sometimes have issues actually comprehending what 50 years of an expensive daily drug regimen would be like.
and yet I wonder if the guy whose body they came from will get any piece of the profits.. Let's hope he does..
Why?
The only logically reason why he deserves anything would be to encourage others to get tested for similar things, and I don't see too many researchers looking desperately looking for random people to come forward and have their antibodies tested.
If a corporation finds a gold vein on property for which I own the mineral rights, because I asked them to test a sample of rock I'd found, I would expect them to pay me for the gold.
One of the photographers that took the amazing pictures of the Niagara Falls Power Station tailrace tunnels (with a pretty amazing writeup of rappelling down a 100 meter shaft full of rusty broken machinery in the dark while evading security people) does a lot of urban underground photography. If you poke around a bit -- which I'm not going to do from work -- you can find his contributions to the pretty-girls-not-wearing-clothes-in-sewer-systems genre of Art Photography.
But, as you say, one big plus of hydrogen is that the flames tend to go upwards, fast, meaning that you're a lot safer than when around gasoline fumes when things start to burn.
Now, the problem here is that people *shouldn't* trust science. Science isn't about The Truth, it's about making the best possible model of the natural world, and if that model comes up inadequate, science changes and accepts the new model. But people who don't work in science don't want to keep up with all the changes, in the same way that people who don't work with traffic enforcement don't want to keep up with regular changes in what sort of driving maneuvers are illegal this week, or whatever. If it's not what you do for a living, you just want to know enough to not be stupid or get bitten, you don't want to have to spend a lot of time keeping up. -- hey, just like computer security and keeping your computer free from malware, huh?
So once enough people were doing research and coming up with newer and better models, and scientific 'facts' like 'pluto is a planet' started changing within a person's lifetime, people stopped trusting science because they realized that it could change next week. While science has to work this way, since it's based on research (and when the known facts change, you *better* change your model) that makes it easy for people who aren't involved in it to discount it as mostly theoretical, particularly when some sections of it may contradict their own prejudices.
One I just read is Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style by Randy Olson. It's not a great book but it sure covers the basic ideas. People go into discussions with preconceptions and prejudices. That's always the case. The question is how much they let those preconceptions steer their thinking. People who spend a lot of time on research are somewhat more likely to let go of their preconceptions because they're used to doing that, but most people aren't. In general people would rather believe something they want to be true, whether or not it IS, and it's easier to influence people if you say something interesting that's sort of factual, than if you say something boring that's 100% factual. People who spend a lot of time doing research find it much easier to be boring and 100% factual, and as a result, they do a poor job of convincing the rest of the world that what they're saying is relevant or worth thinking about.
In other news, I'm now the proud owner of two free ex-corporate GX270's. Turns out lots of people sell refurb kits for about $20USD that include all the bad caps. They're very obvious: they're the ones that are all puffed up and bleeding brown snot out of the tops. There are two that are hard to replace because of soldering iron clearance issues with a heatsink that's basically riveted to the board, but a 60W soldering iron will solve that problem if you're careful.
How is a strip club unethical? It may be immoral depending on your view of morality, but it's a legal business that doesn't misrepresent itself. Plagiarism is a lie: it is unethical and probably immoral, depending, again, on your view of morality.
Only the batteries are DC.
Well its been a while since I have seen any AC batteries, so I guess that's why they went with the DC ones.
You try buying replacement laptop batteries off ebay, you'll see so many Anonymous Coward batteries you'll wish you'd never heard of ebay OR batteries. Here is a friend's discussion of the performance of ebay batteries.
Likewise there are stories about WWII fighter aircraft designers looking at beat-up planes, finding out which pieces hadn't broken, and removing material from them to make the plane lighter and more maneuverable.
Like, say, "no more drilling"?
I fail to see how making more complicated rules makes them more legal. If "you have to drill relief wells along with your main well" is legal, why isn't "no more drilling for six months"?
If you'd like to make some, it's pretty easy. Mix half table salt and half baking soda, put it in a cheap crucible -- I believe even a steel cup will work -- and heat it over a bunsen burner. It's nicely molten at a low red heat. I've used it to make sodium metal by electrolysis. Back in the day, Schwinn used to make all their bike frames using molten salt baths: they'd assemble the frames from tubing and pieces of brass, and lower the whole works into a molten salt bath. The brass would melt and braze the steel tubes together, they'd take it back out, brush off the heat scale, paint it, and send it out. Molten salt is reasonably nice stuff to work with.
There isn't room on FB or Twitter to say stuff that has depth, and so many people are on them that you can't say anything controversial without offending someone. I haven't looked at FB for six months because my conservative religious aunt found it, and then me, and I have to deal with her for the rest of her life so I'm not going to be posting about my anarchist friends' orgy. I suppose I could spend the time to figure out how to build a filter that lets only a few people see it, or make another private FB account that prospective employers can't see, but why bother? I've got a bunch of friends on a BBS that nobody in the rest of the world will ever see and I can say anything I want there, with a 2 kilobyte post that lets me say *exactly* what I want to say.
The medium is part of the message, unrelated to the quality of a person's friends.
One cool characteristic of eletric power is that you can send it through dozens of miles with a reasonable efficiency. So it's possible to generate power in rural areas and consume it in urban areas, *pretty much like we do with food*. That's where the name solar farm comes from. While a home grown garden is awesome, the bulk of the food you consume is generated or collected in extensive, mass-producing, corporate farms.
You choose an interesting analogy, and because I think it is an excellent analogy, let me address it first. "Transportation now major production cost for food". When we buy food that's been raised overseas, we're paying a *lot* of money for the oil that's been used to get it to us. For well-off people, that's a reasonable tradeoff right now, although transportation costs and our cultural reliance on just-in-time manufacturing are going to be very challenging for our economy over the next decade.
Likewise, exactly, energy transmission. Transformers are lossy. Interstate power lines are lossy. I work in designing semiconductors that drive LED lighting, and one of the slides we show to people when we're talking about what we do, is a giant energy budget for the US. *Half* the energy we produce is used in moving the other half of the energy to the end users. Now, that's largely driven by coal and gasoline: electricity transports with much better efficiency than those. But it's still not great. (Unfortunately my google-fu is failing me and I can't find a copy of the slide online.) But: dozens of miles is okay for power distribution; however, in most cases dozens of miles doesn't get you to a place where land is non-arable and only useful for massive solar farms. If we manage to start making reasonably-priced superconducting transmission lines, it makes a lot of sense to fill Nevada, the Sahara, and the Gobi with solar cells and move the electricity halfway across the globe. But until then, it's a lot more sensible to have the solar cells tens of meters away from the loads.
For that matter, there's also the problem of maintaining long transmission lines. We've had people killed locally because they decided to strip the valuable copper out of running transformers, and I'm not living in a particularly poverty-stricken area. Imagine trying to keep a transmission line running across multiple feuding countries filled with destitute people.
Are you sure? I have a PhD and sometimes, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I'm just making it up as I go along...
When you graduate from high school you know everything.
When you graduate from college you realize you don't actually know everything.
When you get a masters' degree you realize you don't know *anything*.
When you get a PhD you realize nobody else does, either.
I sometimes worry about the 'lasting-ness' of all my JPEG photography compared to my film negatives through this same issue.
What you need is a distributed, persistent, peer-to-peer file system. Luckily, just such a thing can be built cheaply, using commodity hardware and software. Include a 19 year old woman who isn't wearing a shirt in each of your photographs, and you can be guaranteed that you will have 100% retention and worldwide availability of your photography hundreds of years into the future.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that low-efficiency solar cells are useless. What I'm saying is that because land is not free and insolation is fixed, the surface area of solar cells is important if the solar cells are going to be colocated with the energy consumers. If we can design and build good transmission lines, that opens up enormous amounts of useless land and sea (and perhaps outer space) and then ultracheap solar seems like a much better idea, but there's still a tradeoff with lossy transmission.
While this isn't as much the case in very rural, very poor areas, where making kilometer-square solar arrays is viable, there's at least two orders of magnitude less money to be spent in such locations, so you're back to the same problem.
In The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson neatly brushed the disposal problem under the rug by saying that the replicators could also take stuff apart (at an implied zero or negative entropy) so when something wore out you just put it back in the machine and had it remade for a small energy charge. That'd be awfully nice, but not very likely to actually happen so conveniently.
I *would* like to live in that world, because the only things worth more than their energy content would be innovations, that could briefly be hawked for above their energy content value, and when everyone has equal access to the best toolset, that makes for a very low barrier of entry for bringing innovations to the world. I think we'd see an amazing flowering of non-obvious but very useful inventions.
A successful design needs to have some system for surviving gusts, and every design I've seen adds a lot of extra parts. Tails that predispose the propeller to point out of the wind, work well, but seem to impact the efficiency pretty heavily. The best designs use controllable-pitch props, but that's an innately difficult bit of mechanical engineering, adding lots of moving parts.
From the article:
In fact, this is arguably the single most impressive and important pattern ever devised.
Really? Not the universal Turing machine pattern, or the pattern that emulates the game of life itself? Those both seem more impressive to me.
Well, he did say "arguably", which is arguably the worst weasel word in the history of mankind.
FUNNY! But at the same time, I think weasel words are critically important. Science should be based on weasel words: may, could, indicates, possibly, probably, likely. When you hear someone saying non-weasel words: is, will, shall, always -- you're either talking to God or to someone who talks to God. Mathematicians, for instance, which is why they can say that in base 10, two plus two IS four. But past that, I'm all for weasel words.
That's a superb joke, but if you're bored and want to read some extensions of the idea you should find a copy of Venus Equilateral by George Smith some time. In one of the stories, engineers make (by mistake, basically) a device that can replicate other devices, and then realize it can replicate itself, so they build a few mostly for fun. Since they're on an isolated space station they transmit information about what they've done back to earth and then find out that earth's economy is collapsing because everyone's either duplicating money or duplicating duplication machines and there's no reason to buy anything. Smith explores how that affects the economy for a while (one character's snooty wife has to stop being a socialite and get a job as a nurse, because Smith was basically a 1930's misogynist) and then has his engineers cook up a physical item that contains energy, which the matter duplicator can't duplicate (since it only deals with matter) to act as a new basis for currency. He wrote all this in the 1940's, so, y'know, prior art and all that.
Here's the hackaday entry about the feline facial recognition project. The actual project itself is located on a pretty slow server, so you'll have to just go with that, but the idea (from 2003) is what you say: it lets in cats that aren't carrying stuff in their mouths, but doesn't let in raccoons or skunks, and since he's captured pictures of them trying to get in, that's pretty useful.