Notorious b.s.d. posted:

i don't think fusion will ever be a source of electric power, period. not in my lifetime, not in your lifetime, probably not in the lifetime of our species

iter and the stellarator are fascinating exercises in high energy physics but i have no idea how either one is meant to lead to electric power generation

President Beep posted:

what if...........

everyone drove good??? huh? can we do it?

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

Schadenboner posted:

Wait, but if we had all the cars roped together somehow each one wouldn't need it's own motor. There could be one (or more) of these motor-having cars (let's call them "Engines") at the front or back of the line of cars to pull or push the connected un-powered cars.

That would be a great idea!

mrmcd posted:

Of course it's loving Megan McArdle, she of the broken calculator.

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

ate all the Oreos posted:

jfc

haveblue posted:

wait is this not a joke? someone actually proposed that for realsies and that's not a photoshop making fun of oblivious tech people

haveblue posted:

wait is this not a joke? someone actually proposed that for realsies and that's not a photoshop making fun of oblivious tech people

quote:

There’s been one hiccup since it opened last year: Apple employees keep smacking into the glass.

Surrounding the Cupertino, California-based building are 45-foot tall curved panels of safety glass. Inside are work spaces, dubbed “pods,” also made with a lot of glass. Apple staff are often glued to the iPhones they helped popularize. That’s resulted in repeated cases of distracted employees walking into the panes, according to people familiar with the incidents.

Some staff started to stick Post-It notes on the glass doors to mark their presence. However, the notes were removed because they detracted from the building’s design, the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing anything related to Apple. Another person familiar with the situation said there are other markings to identify the glass.

Apple’s latest campus has been lauded as an architectural marvel. The building, crafted by famed architect Norman Foster, immortalized a vision that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had years earlier. In 2011, Jobs reportedly described the building “a little like a spaceship landed.” Jobs has been credited for coming up with the glass pods, designed to mix solo office areas with more social spaces.

darthbob88 posted:

I can't seem to find it anywhere. The closest is this, which is a lot of drooling over autonomous vehicles and such, followed by "Of course, the best solution right now is still mass transit".

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

it's a joke, but megan mcardle produces laughable material so often you cannot be blamed for doing a double take

silence_kit posted:

when solar cells get warm, their efficiency degrades. hopefully when they evaluate this idea, they include the solar cell efficiency penalty and/or necessary refrigeration energy cost when running the solar cells at intensities of what I assume are many many multiples of 1 sun.

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

a shitlord posted:

even if the regulation had passed, and required existing developers to retrofit sprinklers into older buildings, Grenfell Tower might not have gotten a sprinkler system before the fire occurred.

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

and that all of those people deserved to burn to death in that london tower fire


she is a total piece of libertarian poo poo and i would gleefully watch her public execution

fishmech posted:

remember there are people who belive just using "communications" will mean cars can be just a foot apart at full speeds on various roads, because what's a stopping time and what do you mean you can't just set speed = 0 instantly

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

what if we linked the cars to one another with physical couplings, so that braking force could be distributed down the chain

and then maybe we could only have one active operator, or engineer, if you will

infernal machines posted:

also real-time zero latency mesh networks are totally practicable traffic management solutions

drunkill posted:

^^^^ You might actually be able to fit an extra row of autonomous cars in there as they can drive closer together. Still, a good meme.

Deteriorata posted:

If vehicle-to-vehicle communication is part of the autonomous systems, they can stay much closer. The safe gap is for dealing with human reaction times.

Deteriorata posted:

No, that's not what it means. It means that it takes anywhere from 0.5s to 2s or more for your brain to perceive that the stop lights on the car ahead of you are on until you get on the brake. This is called "reaction time." Your car continues to travel at full speed while your brain is figuring out what to do.

Part of the safe distance is an allowance for reaction time. That distance can be reduced if reaction time is reduced.



The yellow part is reaction time, which can be mostly eliminated with vehicle-to-vehicle communication. The instant the car in front of you starts braking, your car will, too.

Devor posted:

The reason that a platoon of autonomous vehicles can not only reduce most of that yellow distance, but a lot of that red distance, is that every car in an autonomous platoon does not need to be doing "Is the roadway in front of me safe" checks every moment.

For current driver-operated cars, each person has to be able to see enough of the roadway in front of their car to be able to say "There are no debris/obstructions or stopped vehicles here, I can continue driving at my current speed". If you're in a platoon of coordinated autonomous vehicles, the front vehicle is the only one that has to be checking that - the trailing vehicles just have to maintain communication and be prepared to brake on instruction from the lead car.

You would still need a little buffer to account for situations like an errant vehicle or deer or crazy person running into the roadway, and allow for some room for the cars to initiate a simultaneous stop, but for access-controlled high speed roadways, a set of close-following autonomous cars does not really have to worry about a stopped car materializing in the center of the pack.

Devor posted:

The reason that a platoon of autonomous vehicles can not only reduce most of that yellow distance, but a lot of that red distance, is that every car in an autonomous platoon does not need to be doing "Is the roadway in front of me safe" checks every moment.

For current driver-operated cars, each person has to be able to see enough of the roadway in front of their car to be able to say "There are no debris/obstructions or stopped vehicles here, I can continue driving at my current speed". If you're in a platoon of coordinated autonomous vehicles, the front vehicle is the only one that has to be checking that - the trailing vehicles just have to maintain communication and be prepared to brake on instruction from the lead car.

You would still need a little buffer to account for situations like an errant vehicle or deer or crazy person running into the roadway, and allow for some room for the cars to initiate a simultaneous stop, but for access-controlled high speed roadways, a set of close-following autonomous cars does not really have to worry about a stopped car materializing in the center of the pack.

silence_kit posted:

when solar cells get warm, their efficiency degrades. hopefully when they evaluate this idea, they include the solar cell efficiency penalty and/or necessary refrigeration energy cost when running the solar cells at intensities of what I assume are many many multiples of 1 sun.

silence_kit posted:

that reminds me—during the height of the solar cell research/funding era, with Solyndra and all of that, the US government funded research of transparent solar cells lol

it’s probably not that much money and so it doesn’t really matter but man what a stupid idea

lancemantis posted:

also a centrally managed traffic flow might not be worth the cost of the additional infrastructure vs the amount of throughput achieved -- people unsurprisingly have already done studies on this and though there would be an improvement, it simply might not be significant enough


wat

fishmech posted:

in response to

we have:

quote:

etting.
b) CACC1 controller: Both CACC controllers use direct
vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication to exchange messages
contains the vehicle’s acceleration. These messages are
sent asynchronously by each car at a frequency of 10Hz.
The CACC1 controller sends the measured value from the
accelerometer to the following vehicle. This means that the
value in this message can directly be used by the following
vehicle, instead of having to derive the acceleration from
multiple radar readings. This makes the CACC1 controller
more responsive than the ACC controller. In Algorithm 3, the
pseudocode for the behaviour of this controller is given

quote:

B. Uncertainty & Delay
The algorithms that we described in the previous sections
are fairly straightforward, and if one knows the delays of
communication and information processing, it would seem
easy to compute the minimal safe time headway cars should
maintain to avoid crashes. However, since sensor information
and wireless communication comes with a lot of uncertainty,
the computation of the minimal safe time headway is not a
trivial task. In this section, we describe the various factors of
uncertainty that are present in our sensors, and the values we
used for these uncertain parameters.
....
• Failure in broadcasting: About 1% of all sent messages
do not arrive at their destination. This is a simplification,
because currently, we do not take into account bursts of
packet loss.
...
• Communication delay: 10ms. This is how long it takes
for a message to be received.

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

hobbesmaster posted:

eventually someone cited a paper about how this would work... https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f4ce/6a4c2b1717f79b8ea96e0cb0d3fc60c2db1c.pdf


oof realtime wireless for a safety critical application, lets see what they have to say to mitigate that


oh dear.

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

eschaton posted:

lol Megan McArdle

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

infernal machines posted:

ps, this is all in the clear as encryption makes the latency spike.

gosh i sure hope no one starts spoofing malicious messages

my bitter bi rival posted:

without a doubt one of the dumbest motherfuckers on this planet.

prisoner of waffles posted:

she's paid to be wrong about things and literally educated, groomed, and selected by a Koch-funded institute

Say what you will about how disgusting the right wing is, they know how to build institutions, create talent funnels, and exercise power with and through nominally centrist allies

I guess the people who just loving love power know more about how it works, how to build it, how to use it

JawnV6 posted:

they can make hot mirror/cold mirror coatings, why would this be impossible