Nanomaterials have extended the cycle of innovation on batteries and supercapacitors. Both are dependent on the surface area of the plates or electrodes. And being able to precisely make peaks and valleys say 6 atoms in diameter, is a huge leap.

Artificial intelligence has one very major caveat. We don’t know if it…

Funny, both fusion and chemical battery storage literally require a “quantum leap” to achieve their goals.

Chemical batteries have practical limitations in physics.

If you use the word “battery” to describe any electrical storage device, there have been literal quantum leaps in supercapacitor technology in the last…

It’s sad that the MIT machine is going offline. But it’s existence seems to have become a limiting factor for MIT fusion research. On the eve of its decommission, they pushed the limits and got two atmospheres of plasma pressure.

I’m not a physicist. But I remember when they started building these things in the 80s. At…

Trolley problem accidents are rare. Mercedes could be lying about choosing innocent lives over occupants, and it would take a long time for the first case that’s brought to court.

Car companies do that all the time.

I’ve been to 40 states. I’m convinced there is no state in the US, where people know how to “drive in the rain”.

Considering that they’re ten years ahead of where I thought they’d be with autonomous cars at all, that’s a bit of a minor point engineering problem as you get closer to the goal. It might not be an easy one to solve, but I don’t think it’s going to take that long to solve it either. Everyone working on autonomous…

I really wonder how long it will take for autonomous cars to start looking really different.

What no one has said, is how truly autonomous cars will affect families. Kids will be able to take their own autonomous cars to “drop off” destinations. Even single seat ones for the kids to get around in.

The SUV as kid…

That would be the children who never listened to their mothers when they said “If <person you are emulating> jumped off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff too?”

Darwin. Live it, or die. Hopefully before spawning. We don’t need more of that kind of dumb making it to future generations.

This is hilarious. I expect to see many humorous YouTube videos involving drivers and those drones in the near future.

I’ve had a couple of different philosophies visited upon me in my car shopping history. One of them, is the concept of the Roach Car.

You know that when you buy a car with 100,000 miles on it, something will go wrong that is costly, and the break you get on the price at that mileage isn’t enough to make up for the…

A large part of the problem with VHS, is it starts with NTSC.

Even 1" tape, the reel to reel studio format concurrent with VHS, looks bad today when you’re acclimated to 4 times the resolution and massively better color bandwidth of HD.

Also, you lost some detail through composite video. SVHS cables convey luminance…

True fact. Porn get wins in the tape format wars, as well as driving the growth of DVDs, Blu-Ray, the internet and maybe even internet streaming.

Is that the way it’s done in a Pixar short like this? My impression of the studio, was that they were very specialized and animators don’t rig, riggers don’t animate, only modelers model, etc. But that’s for production, and a project like this might have people doing or learning other jobs they wouldn’t usually do.

If they’re the heads, and other people did the animation, then they’re not really “Animators” in the sense of the project. They’re writers, directors, etc. Animators are all below the line, not the people in charge.

When shorts like this are completed and become property of Pixar, does Pixar remunerate all the animators for the unpaid time the spent making it?

I’m assuming when they say “spare time” they mean, the animators own time for which they’re not being paid.

Cost of manufacturing was not why we used VHS instead of Beta. It was Sony’s cost of licensing both for tapes and machines that killed it in the marketplace. And Sony wouldn’t even license Beta technology to another company until around 1981. When it was already too late. VHS had the consumer volume and installed base…

It’s a nice thought, but the Dutch are ahead of everyone as far as bicycling. Largely the Netherlands is flat as a board and even old men can ride between cities.

The US is on the opposite side of the coin. It has flat areas, but most cities don’t seem to be flat.

And the US is full of people who really think only…

This just shows how 33,000 emails could easily be worthy of deletion, when you get wastes of time both because of and about subject lines, and the whole existence of zombie appointment reminders.

That’s assuming a bunch weren’t just auto deleted by spam bots.

I sure delete a lot of email every day. I’d hate for someone…

Matter, because it has detectable mass. Dark, because they know more about the properties it lacks that other matter has, and because of that they don’t have instruments that can better define it. So far.

The property it lacks, is electromagnetic charge. Besides having accumulated gravity, it also seems to have the…

It is a “thing”. That is, it is derrived mathematically from physics based on long tested models. One theory is that it’s like a river of particles that have mass but no electrical charge, called “Weakly Interacting Massive Particles” (WIMPs). They might be known particles like neutrinos, or they might be something we…