It is funny, I had the exact same reaction, and I’ve been puzzling why. I guess it is sort of “hell yeah, humans 1+ on the creative scale.”
I love how they use Princess Leia and a space battle with the Enterprise as examples.
Nerds gonna nerd!
For some reason I can’t cut/paste article, but IBM announces 2 nanometer microchip breakthrough.
IBM still exists!?
Just kidding. But wow I didn’t expect anything from them of any significance anymore.
I suppose they’ll just patent something and then make royalties on it?
Here is the Ars Technica link:
Money line: the circuits are roughly the size of two DNA strands.]
And yes, the most immediate market would seem to be cellphone manufacturers. They say it should quadruple battery life while also speeding up the phone.
Matt_W
1814
Pretty interesting article on aging in mammals. Did you know bats and naked mole rats are unusually long-lived?
Still more evidence in support of my “pants are bullshit” hypothesis.
Matt_W
1816
This video is really good.
Could have titled that “And the amazing thing was nobody died!”
The storytelling from Lovelock was delightful.
JD
1820
Now I want to play DotT again…
101 years old and still such a sharp mind - delightful indeed.
Yeah, that’s great. As he reminisces, he’s still so clearly enthused by the process of discovery.
Man I had this idea (I e. Solar in Kenya, as I am from there originally) a few weeks ago.
Good to see I’m not mad lol.
When I visited Jordan a couple of times some years ago, I was shocked to see so little solar. I mean, Amman for instance gets well over 300 days of sunshine a year. Turns out that for a long time the Saudis were funneling discount oil to the Kingdom, for reasons. Those reasons apparently ended, and so did the oil subsidy, so I was told that they were now somewhat belatedly looking skyward.
The combination of sunlight, open undeveloped space perfect for solar farms, and no existing infrastructure to speak of should make these type of places perfect for 21st century modern solar grids. But the economic prospect in terms of payoff seems limited, especially when a country like Jordan, with no oil exports to fund things, can’t really pour in a ton of money.
My first impression is “Hrmphh!” My second thought is that there is inertial forces built up into the system of propeller and craft that would allow it to briefly go faster than the wind. But then at the end, they claim it goes 2.8x the speed of the wind? Asking for smarter people to help me out here:
That descriptor is notably missing from the actual video on Youtube, digg added it. Muller’s statement is that it’s counterintuitive, and that “people will therefore claim that it breaks physics,” and I suppose digg just proved his point. It most definitely does not violate physics.
At around 17:27 in the video Derek gives what seems to me to be a pretty clear explanation of the mechanism - a fan spinning in (relatively) stationary air is still going to provide thrust.
I’m reminded of the whole “airplane taking off on a treadmill” thing on Mythbusters, which has a similar “frame of reference” misunderstanding behind it.
I get that, airplane on a treadmill never gave me a second’s pause because I knew airplane wheels weren’t powered. But the claim of going 2.x faster makes me think they’re trying to say that it can sustain faster than air travel downwind beyond inertia in the system, and that’s where I jump off. They may have just been cheating and found a moment in time where the wind dropped to nothing and the prop was still spinning, am I right in thinking that’s the only way?
