Purportedly a comparison of Bentley and Tesla SUVs, but along the way an Alfa Romeo supercar gets totally punked.
https://youtu.be/ib-02b2ooLY
We’re professionals. Professional idiots, but professionals.
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Category Archives: physics
What 100 year flood means
“And this is where you first start getting a sense that maybe engineering hydrology isn’t the most exact of sciences. …none of the Imperial units for these values agree, but if you do the math, the conversion factor is just about one, so we ignore it. We just leave it off! This is not something we take out to the fifth decimal place.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EACkiMRT0pc
SpaceX does it again
Another Falcon9 successfully landed on a moving barge this morning.
In order to make the economics work, these birds do a ballistic reentry, essentially falling out of the sky and making a corrective landing burn at the last possible minute. Since this Falcon was delivering a Japanese communications satellite to high orbit, the lifter fell a lot further than the last one did, ending up going twice as fast and requiring a 12-G final burn before touching down softly on the recovery vessel Of Course I Still Love You.
Congratulations to Elon Musk and the SpaceX team, who are among the many people who don’t read this blog.
Radioactivity Art
Greenpeace photographer Greg McNevin has created a beautiful series of photographs based on walking around areas formerly contaminated by the ongoing Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters with an LED stick connected to a geiger counter. It’s unfortunate that most people won’t be able to see the art past the politics, but I think it has value in both spheres.
SpaceX lands at sea
A little late with the news, but anyway the SpaceX’s Falcon-9 has successfully landed on the drone barge “Of Course I Still Love You”. The landing deck is 170 by 300 feet long, and the Falcon’s legs stand 60 feet apart. As you can see by the whitecaps, the sea was very rough with high altitude crosswinds of 50 mph and low altitude winds of 25 mph.
For true space geeks, the beautifully produced full 18 minute video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZXu_rYF51M
Orbital ATK Cygnus 6 space truck
The unmanned Cygnus cargo mission OA-6 went up Saturday on a Russian/American Atlas V, successfully delivering a new 3d printer to the International Space station. The ISS crew snagged the Cygnus today with their robotic arm.
Interesting side note on this mission, before Cygnus 6 plunges to its fiery reentry doom it’s going to test artificial gecko feet and be used for a fire-in-space experiment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JkQ12JluJ0
Mikulski Space Telescope Archive
I’m not a huge fan of outgoing Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski herself, but the viagra online mastercard If viagra india online you are not attracted towards your female’s look, you cannot get hard in the bed. No Fall capsules and Maha generic cialis canadian Rasayan capsules are the herbal anti-aging pills for men to become young and energetic all the time. The man has a sexual erection only when he get the highest quality of the medicine when they levitra professional cheapest . href=”https://archive.stsci.edu/”>Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes is pretty great. I like their little code snippets.
$1 million Google Tiny Box prize won
Belgian contenders The Red Electrical Devils have won the $1,000,000 Google Tiny Box prize.
There’s a .pdf of the paper describing their design here, but don’t bother trying to read it if the word “schematic” means nothing to you.
Google’s challenge was for a tiny, lightweight device that converts DC (the type of electricity that batteries and solar panels put out) to AC (the type of electricity that is most useful for doing work). Such devices are called “inverters” and improvements in inverter technology would obviously be useful for electric cars, home solar power systems, and many another thing.
The winning team exceeded Google’s minimum requirements to win by three times, creating a device that is ten times smaller than existing technologies while meeting all of Google’s other restrictions (such as 95% or better efficiency, air cooling, &etc.) It’s extremely impressive work.
Mansplaining manspreading
Jason Kottke referred to this as “hilarious mansplaining about manspreading” but I thought it was interesting.
In an extremely crowded subway car or airport trolley, I’ll end up sitting with my legs at a 45 degree angle to one side and my back curled so that my chest is nearly touching my thighs, or even in a complete fetal position with my feet on the seat and my arms wrapped around my legs. The passages between seats are so narrow in American mass transit that I can’t have my legs stick straight out, because my knees will be battered into pulp by passersby with briefcases and purses, and the people on either side of me (especially if they are men) won’t have room for their shoulders if I lean back in my also-too-narrow seat.
It turns out there’s a reason for this, it’s basically because I’m shaped like most men – I have longer thighs and wider shoulders than the reedy eloi the seats were apparently designed for.
Holiday Pi
This one’s for Ezra!
Einstein via teenager
https://youtu.be/CYv5GsXEf1o
mood tiles
Remember mood rings? Check out thermochromic tiles.
Mapping 2.4Ghz wifi
As featured on hackaday and more than a few other sites.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqqEYz38ens
3M Rube Goldberg
Or Heath Robinson, if you’re British.
David Byrne on music and architecture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se8kcnU-uZw
Virgin Galactic Feather
A simple and entertaining explanation of the rentry mechanism of Space Ship Two.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n8q41DWhQk
300 bottle rockets
From Colin Furze (previously linked for his pulse jets).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQf5cGPcP48
new discovery in science of blowing up stuff
Audi e-Diesel
Audi and Sunfire have invented a robot plant. With a dumb name.
The Dresden energy technology corporation sunfire is Audi’s project partner and the plant operator. It operates according to the power‑to‑liquid (PtL) principle and uses green power to produce a liquid fuel. The only raw materials needed are water and carbon dioxide. The CO2 used is currently supplied by a biogas facility. In addition, initially a portion of the CO2 needed is extracted from the ambient air by means of direct air capturing, a technology of Audi’s Zurich‑based partner Climeworks.
blackboard skillz
Blackboards are better than whiteboards. Even if they’re green blackboards.
How a lead-acid battery works
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhIRD5YVNbs