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mobby_6kl posted:We'll just murder all the mosquito with lasers Photonic fences might conceivably, eventually, be used around hotels and resorts to protect rich people but I doubt it'll be deployed on a larger scale across the 3rd world. It's kinda over-elaborate. Gene drive seems promising though if people would get on board with it..
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Sep 24, 2017 20:54
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Bates posted:Photonic fences might conceivably, eventually, be used around hotels and resorts to protect rich people but I doubt it'll be deployed on a larger scale across the 3rd world. It's kinda over-elaborate. Gene drive seems promising though if people would get on board with it.. I think people always mock the laser thing because they always make up some hyper elaborate system. So it's like describing fly tape to someone and them coming up with some sort of mobile tentacle that chases down flies. You wouldn't need to build some totally 3 degrees of freedom auto turret with advanced targeting AI or anything with some blaser laser that vaporizes a bug to ash. A real deployed system would be something more like a toy car motor on a post that spins a little thing at a steady rate then has some super simple detector for stuff passing in front of it, like a low res camera or probably just some beam break not even a computer detector thing. Then an extremely low powered laser that just relies on the fact you don't need to turn a mosquito to dust to gently caress up it's eyes or wings or something. Then just have a couple on the posts and a couple posts and it'll statistically reduce the number of mosquitoes over time. Like it wouldn't be free but it wouldn't be some billion dollar project.
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Sep 24, 2017 21:22
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I think people always mock the laser thing because they always make up some hyper elaborate system. So it's like describing fly tape to someone and them coming up with some sort of mobile tentacle that chases down flies. You wouldn't need to build some totally 3 degrees of freedom auto turret with advanced targeting AI or anything with some blaser laser that vaporizes a bug to ash. A real deployed system would be something more like a toy car motor on a post that spins a little thing at a steady rate then has some super simple detector for stuff passing in front of it, like a low res camera or probably just some beam break not even a computer detector thing. Then an extremely low powered laser that just relies on the fact you don't need to turn a mosquito to dust to gently caress up it's eyes or wings or something. Then just have a couple on the posts and a couple posts and it'll statistically reduce the number of mosquitoes over time. Like it wouldn't be free but it wouldn't be some billion dollar project. I mean more in the sense that you have to deploy a number of units in every village and hamlet and they require power and likely skilled labor for maintenance. That's all well and good in a developed country with good iinfrastructure but it's not a practical solution in the 3rd world. The technology itself may work great though.
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Sep 24, 2017 22:38
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I meant that as we'll have frikin lasers if we ever get malaria or some ebola poo poo in the first world. Mostly as a joke but the tech is becoming more and more straightforward to make as time goes on.
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Sep 24, 2017 22:48
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Bates posted:I mean more in the sense that you have to deploy a number of units in every village and hamlet and they require power and likely skilled labor for maintenance. That's all well and good in a developed country with good iinfrastructure but it's not a practical solution in the 3rd world. The technology itself may work great though. The place you are thinking of where everyone lives in a grass hut with simple tools exists and is real but the third world is more than that. like mumbai is in the third world, has 18 million people has an average income less than 1000 a year and you can get malaria right downtown, but it also is a modern city with no particular infrastructure problems with having electricity. The third world and places with malaria aren't one thing and just because it won't help every single place doesn't mean it can't help any of the places. Owlofcreamcheese fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Sep 25, 2017 |
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Sep 25, 2017 00:28
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:The place you are thinking of where everyone lives in a grass hut with simple tools exists and is real but the third world is more than that. like mumbai is in the third world, has 18 million people has an average income less than 1000 a year and you can get malaria right downtown, but it also is a modern city with no particular infrastructure problems with having electricity. The third world and places with malaria aren't one thing and just because it won't help every single place doesn't mean it can't help any of the places. Yeah it's dumb to generalize the 3rd world in that way. Places with bad infrastructure and few recources will have trouble with it but those are also the places that need a solution the most. It's not a silver bullet is all I'm saying.
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Sep 25, 2017 00:54
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mobby_6kl posted:I meant that as we'll have frikin lasers if we ever get malaria or some ebola poo poo in the first world. Mostly as a joke but the tech is becoming more and more straightforward to make as time goes on. Even in the absence of life-threatening diseases, there are plenty of places in the first world (such as Florida) where mosquitoes are a big enough pain in the butt to create a healthy market for this technology. And from what I've heard of how it works, it should be possible to produce a device for less than $1000 that would protect a decent size yard.
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Sep 25, 2017 01:05
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Bates posted:Yeah it's dumb to generalize the 3rd world in that way. Places with bad infrastructure and few recources will have trouble with it but those are also the places that need a solution the most. It's not a silver bullet is all I'm saying. Why do they need it the most? Dense poor cities are where a majority of people live and thus where a majority of disease occurs.
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Sep 25, 2017 01:09
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Why do they need it the most? Dense poor cities are where a majority of people live and thus where a majority of disease occurs. Those are the places that have the least doctors, medicine and prevention resources.
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Sep 25, 2017 06:10
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Bates posted:Those are the places that have the least doctors, medicine and prevention resources. I guess. So what though? 200 million people get malaria every year. Is it worth fretting that some technology might help one type of ultra poor but not some other type? The guy dharavi slums in india seems just as deserving of help as the guy living in some rural area of kenya.
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Sep 25, 2017 12:47
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I guess. So what though? 200 million people get malaria every year. Is it worth fretting that some technology might help one type of ultra poor but not some other type? The guy dharavi slums in india seems just as deserving of help as the guy living in some rural area of kenya. My claim was "I doubt it'll be deployed on a larger scale across the 3rd world." which I corrected to mean places with poor infrastructure and few resources. If you disagree then make your case. Incidentally I don't think cities or crazy dense slums are the best places to deploy a technology that require good sight lines. There could be applications where it would work great but there's some limitations that I think will keep it more as a supplement. Gene drive as mosquito population control require far fewer resources to deploy. You could feasibly do it with drones and cover large areas relatively quickly. I think that has a better chance to meaningfully impact malaria infection rates.
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Sep 25, 2017 15:59
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Bates posted:My claim was "I doubt it'll be deployed on a larger scale across the 3rd world." And my claim that the image of the third world as just mud huts and simple tools isn't really right. It's not like you step outside of europe and no one has ever heard of a lightbulb or something. Malaria affects 200 million people a year across whole regions of the world. It doesn't just affect one type of person in one situation. Lots of people that live near electricity get malaria. There is cities you can go to starbucks and still walk around and get malaria.
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Sep 25, 2017 17:08
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:And my claim that the image of the third world as just mud huts and simple tools isn't really right. It's not like you step outside of europe and no one has ever heard of a lightbulb or something.
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Sep 25, 2017 17:45
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Guavanaut posted:Yeah, there's entire continents outside of Europe that get unreasonably mad about them being 'banned'. God, that whole freak out was 100% based on the fact we named lightbulbs by the power they used instead of the light they put out and the way that made people get dumb brains and not be able to understand a 60 watt lightbulb could use anything but 60 watts to make the same amount of light. Like not even LEDs or fluorescent or anything. Like even at the time you could just buy a "60 watt" bulb that only used 50 watts but welp, the power useage was right in the name so no one could handle that discussion and decided if 60 watts of power useage was banned that must mean the object called a 60 watt bulb was banned.
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Sep 25, 2017 18:02
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:And my claim that the image of the third world as just mud huts and simple tools isn't really right. It's not like you step outside of europe and no one has ever heard of a lightbulb or something. Now you're just repeating things I already agreed with and explicitly corrected. Owlofcreamcheese posted:Malaria affects 200 million people a year across whole regions of the world. It doesn't just affect one type of person in one situation. Lots of people that live near electricity get malaria. There is cities you can go to starbucks and still walk around and get malaria. Places that have Starbucks and electricity does not fall in the category of "places with poor infrastructure and few resources" where getting electricity and skilled labor is a problem. Look, if it works it can have useful applications but I don't think it'll be cost-effective in poorly developed rural areas or dense urban settings. I'll leave it at that because I frankly have no idea what we're arguing about anymore.
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Sep 25, 2017 18:16
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:God, that whole freak out was 100% based on the fact we named lightbulbs by the power they used instead of the light they put out and the way that made people get dumb brains and not be able to understand a 60 watt lightbulb could use anything but 60 watts to make the same amount of light. Like not even LEDs or fluorescent or anything. Like even at the time you could just buy a "60 watt" bulb that only used 50 watts but welp, the power useage was right in the name so no one could handle that discussion and decided if 60 watts of power useage was banned that must mean the object called a 60 watt bulb was banned. I think part of the reason that people got so mad (other than the "but I'll only get 5W of light" misconception) was that a lot of cheap CFLs which were assumed to be the default replacement when the switch was first announced were just awful. It's a bit like the current thing about some European countries talking about banning pure combustion cars in 30 years, people react based on the current state of battery/bulb technology, and assume that government jackboots are going to steal their Audi tomorrow and force them to buy an e2oPlus. Unrelated, I'm excited to see how short wavelength they can push LED techs. They got down to 250nm for commercial aluminum nitride LEDs some years back, with useful applications in spectroscopy, but there's a challenge in breaking 235nm.
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Sep 25, 2017 18:39
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Some of the more common models of LED streetlights are apparently emitting enough blue light to cause issues with visual acuity and glare for motorists. The AMA released a statement about the problem. My town's been refitting its streetlighting over the past year or two, I wonder if there'll be a similar initiative to switch to warm white before too long.
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Sep 25, 2017 19:00
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Bates posted:Places that have Starbucks and electricity does not fall in the category of "places with poor infrastructure and few resources" where getting electricity and skilled labor is a problem. This seems like the "technology is bad because it's disproportionately benefit rich people over poor people" but stretched to some grotesque version where both the rich and poor people in the story are people living in third world countries and are people who are poor enough to be dying of malaria.
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Sep 25, 2017 20:28
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Guavanaut posted:On that topic, LED lighting has come along in bounds recently. It's within living memory that high brightness LEDs were purely the domain of telecoms and laboratories. I do a ton of hobbyist electronics stuff and ws2812b addressable LEDs are the funniest thing, how fast we went from "blue LEDs don't exist" to "blue LEDs are expensive" to "blue LEDs are cheap" to "blue LEDs are so small and cheap you can get an RGB LED" to "also we put a microchip in this single LED" and you can just buy a big pack of them for nothing.
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Sep 25, 2017 20:38
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I do a ton of hobbyist electronics stuff and ws2812b addressable LEDs are the funniest thing, how fast we went from "blue LEDs don't exist" to "blue LEDs are expensive" to "blue LEDs are cheap" to "blue LEDs are so small and cheap you can get an RGB LED" to "also we put a microchip in this single LED" and you can just buy a big pack of them for nothing. As we see, technology hasn't improved meaningfully in decades 
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Sep 26, 2017 08:06
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:This seems like the "technology is bad because it's disproportionately benefit rich people over poor people" but stretched to some grotesque version where both the rich and poor people in the story are people living in third world countries and are people who are poor enough to be dying of malaria. Never mind that there are all sorts of examples of aid workers using technology to better help Third World citizens - using Skype to collaborate with doctors and engineers, 3D printing prosthetics for land mine victims, things like that. Owlofcreamcheese posted:I do a ton of hobbyist electronics stuff and ws2812b addressable LEDs are the funniest thing, how fast we went from "blue LEDs don't exist" to "blue LEDs are expensive" to "blue LEDs are cheap" to "blue LEDs are so small and cheap you can get an RGB LED" to "also we put a microchip in this single LED" and you can just buy a big pack of them for nothing. Didn't the team responsible for the first blue LEDs get a Nobel Prize a few years ago?
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Sep 26, 2017 12:38
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Cockmaster posted:Didn't the team responsible for the first blue LEDs get a Nobel Prize a few years ago? Blue LEDs are a big deal, both in terms of what they revealed about semiconductor crystallography, and because they can be used with red and green LEDs, or with phosphors, to make a whole new light source.
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Sep 26, 2017 12:55
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Blue LEDs, not 24 hours ago, let me make this skittle color detector machine (use a photo diode, then check light intensity with a red, a blue and a green light to figure out the relative color of something): (Answer currently outputted by the ring of lights, next step is the answer outputted by having a servo motor rotate a little spout so it can sort skittles into bins. ) Owlofcreamcheese fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Sep 26, 2017 |
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Sep 26, 2017 14:08
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Cockmaster posted:Didn't the team responsible for the first blue LEDs get a Nobel Prize a few years ago? Yes, the scientists who developed the electronic materials needed to make a bright, efficient blue LED got the Nobel Prize. The blue LED is 100 years old, but until the 90's wasn't very bright or efficient.
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Sep 26, 2017 14:10
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silence_kit posted:Yes, the scientists who developed the electronic materials needed to make a bright, efficient blue LED got the Nobel Prize. The blue LED is 100 years old, but until the 90's wasn't very bright or efficient. The first blue LED was in 1979, it's not 100 years old.
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Sep 26, 2017 14:15
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:The first blue LED was in 1979, it's not 100 years old. There were experiments in the early 20th century where people were able to see electroluminescence from crude forms of semiconductors aka how an LED works. IIRC people were seeing faint blue light out of an crude form of silicon carbide but I might be wrong about the color.
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Sep 26, 2017 15:59
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silence_kit posted:There were experiments in the early 20th century where people were able to see electroluminescence from crude forms of semiconductors aka how an LED works. IIRC people were seeing faint blue light out of an crude form of silicon carbide but I might be wrong about the color. LEDs in general are from 1907 but blue was some whole other thing where no one got any blue light till 1979 and it was a real actual nobel prize worthy thing to get real usable blue LEDs in 1994.
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Sep 26, 2017 16:23
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[quote="“Owlofcreamcheese”" post="“476782127”"] it was a real actual nobel prize worthy thing to get real usable blue LEDs in 1994. [/quote] I agree, perfecting gallium nitride has been very useful and has created the solid state lighting industry. Gallium nitride is also entering into other forms of electronics and is enabling new functionality.
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Sep 26, 2017 16:55
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silence_kit posted:I agree, perfecting gallium nitride has been very useful and has created the solid state lighting industry. Gallium nitride is also entering into other forms of electronics and is enabling new functionality. LEDs are a weirdly huge deal technology that just seems so boring no one ever thinks about how big a deal they are. Like imagine an iphone with like, gameboy screen lighting.
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Sep 26, 2017 18:05
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The Game Gear had a decently backlit screen. I guess that leads on to the other technology that is a huge deal that people seldom think about. Image an iPhone with Game Gear battery life.
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Sep 26, 2017 19:27
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:(Answer currently outputted by the ring of lights, next step is the answer outputted by having a servo motor rotate a little spout so it can sort skittles into bins. ) But can it revert the green skittles to the proper LIME flavor?
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Sep 26, 2017 19:29
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Guavanaut posted:The Game Gear had a decently backlit screen. I think the lower power lights are the bigger player here, and even then screen lighting is like 80% of my phone's batter use. Fuckin wild.
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Sep 26, 2017 19:37
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Guavanaut posted:The Game Gear had a decently backlit screen. I actually have no idea what technology the gamegear backlight used? I think it was too early for cold cathode fluorescent. Was it like, just an actual fluorescent bulb? was it like, an incandescent bulb? Did incandescent backlit LCD exist? Cold cathode was the 2000s monitor solution to backlighting and most of the 90s solution was "front light" or something. I have no idea how the gamegear worked.
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Sep 26, 2017 19:52
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Yeah, it was a single fluorescent tube and a metal reflector. I think it may have even had heated filaments for lower voltage starting. Cold cathode tubes have been around since the first neon signs, but you need a high voltage to kick them into action, which probably wouldn't have been economical for portable components back then. (Most cold cathodes used a big tar potted shunted transformer until pretty recently.) Twinned with running off 6x AAs it didn't have a long battery life. I don't think you could backlight an LCD with incandescents without running into temperature problems with the crystal structure.
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Sep 26, 2017 20:08
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Tnega posted:But can it revert the green skittles to the proper LIME flavor? I actually haven't had skittles in like a decade and it's shocking how awful they taste. But I needed some easily color sortable objects to mess around with. It's weird, I had to make a light detector circuit board thing in college and it was a real major project. Now this is like some joke project I did for fun that is like 50 times more complicated than what I made in college and it was just some goof thing I threw together for fun that I actually did a harder way than I needed because it was too easy to even be a fun DIY project. I think people generally understand computers got better, maybe mixed with some dumb "except for the last 5 years they stayed the same and all that changed was videogame graphics!" but I don't think anyone really gets what a big revolution in like embedded systems and microcontrollers is happening.
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Sep 26, 2017 20:17
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Here's a gamegear bulb, thanks ebay.
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Sep 26, 2017 20:24
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Guavanaut posted:
Looking it up I do totally remember incandescent LCD displays totally existed. For like clock radios and stuff. I don't know if anything ever released commercially with a pixel based display with a light bulb backlight but now that I say it it was a wicked 80s thing to have a clock radio with a light up display that had one single christmas light light bulb inside.
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Sep 26, 2017 20:30
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It's weird, I had to make a light detector circuit board thing in college and it was a real major project. Now this is like some joke project I did for fun that is like 50 times more complicated than what I made in college and it was just some goof thing I threw together for fun that I actually did a harder way than I needed because it was too easy to even be a fun DIY project. Yeah it's really amazing how far miniature electronics have come. Nowadays you really only a hobbyist-grade soldering setup, a pile of cheap Chinese stripboard and a digikey account to build advanced circuits. Even moderately complicated signal processing tasks don't need any custom hardware because you can always throw in an arduino or a raspberry pi for the list price (not inflation adjusted) of a 1970s opamp.
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Sep 26, 2017 20:33
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blowfish posted:Yeah it's really amazing how far miniature electronics have come. Nowadays you really only a hobbyist-grade soldering setup, a pile of cheap Chinese stripboard and a digikey account to build advanced circuits. Even moderately complicated signal processing tasks don't need any custom hardware because you can always throw in an arduino or a raspberry pi for the list price (not inflation adjusted) of a 1970s opamp. Now I actually wonder what college classes for embedded systems even are anymore. When I took one 15 years ago it was a huge deal top level class where you were writing hosed up assembly on a chip that had memory measured in bytes. Now like, microcontroller programming is basically "oh it's exactly like computer programing but everything is really easy because libraries don't need to generalize anything so everything is extremely straightforward".It's so easy now!
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Sep 26, 2017 21:19
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Now I actually wonder what college classes for embedded systems even are anymore. When I took one 15 years ago it was a huge deal top level class where you were writing hosed up assembly on a chip that had memory measured in bytes. Now like, microcontroller programming is basically "oh it's exactly like computer programing but everything is really easy because libraries don't need to generalize anything so everything is extremely straightforward".It's so easy now! Yeah my son's finishing his senior year at UNH CompSci and they are doing some robot vision project. When I did my grad school work there (early 1980's) I was coding a 6502 to read some sort of DAC to do a flying-dot scanner with a CRT tube. Yeah, things change.
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Sep 27, 2017 00:39
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