I had no idea graphene could do this.
Friday, July 31, 2020
Exploring solar panel efficiency breakthroughs in 2020
But combining layers with other materials like synthetic perovskite capture other wavelengths of incoming light to increase overall efficiency.
Weird place names.
Here are some other funny ones:
Slickpoo, IDAHO
Why, ARIZONA
Why Not, NORTH CAROLINA
SMACKOVER, ARKANSAS
No Name, COLORADO
Climax, GEORGIA
BUGTUSSLE, KENTUCKY
UNEEDUS and WENEEDU, LA
Hell, MICHIGAN
Hot Coffee, MISSISSIPPI
KNOCKEMSTIFF, OHIO
Lick Fork, WEST VIRGINIA
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/502251/funniest-town-name-all-50-states It takes 2200 miles to get from Why to Why Not.
Tuesday, July 28, 2020
Making copper pans
Rolling the copper from disc into a pan - 2:03"You have to be very much in each other's heads."
Tips when you learn to fly FPV drone
Get a remote and a simulator, like Liftoff.
Practice flying
Limit yourself to 30-minute flying sessions
Get a pre-built drone -save lots of time and get flying sooner
Fly in an open field at first
Embrace the culture - learn from other enthusiasts nearby
Monday, July 27, 2020
Cross cultural relationships and creativity
Sunday, July 26, 2020
How Energy Got So Cheap | WSJ
;
Ferro-Fluid interactive Sculptures | Obsessed
NYTimes: Fearsome Thunderstorms of Córdoba Province?
"United States, which is home to the most extensive weather forecasting infrastructure in the world, around a third of severe weather predictions still prove wrong...The false-alarm rate for tornadoes continues to hover at about 70 percent, while the average warning time has only increased from about 10 minutes in the mid-1990s to 15 minutes today."
"When the earth warms in the spring and summer months, hot wet air rushes upward in columns, where it collides with cool dry air, forming volatile cumulus clouds that can begin to swell against the top of the troposphere, at times carrying as much as a million tons of water."
""convective available potential energy," or CAPE — a measure of how much raw fuel for storms the sky contains."
"as a storm travels along hot, saturated ground, its base tends to spread out and flatten, sucking up all available energy. The more it draws in, the faster and stronger the vacuum becomes, forming a narrow shaft of rushing air at the center of the storm, or updraft...each of the storms had generated such large, powerful updrafts that they'd eventually merged together and begun to spawn other, smaller updrafts, creating what's called a "mesoscale convective system" — in short, a giant, organized complex of perhaps 50 or more, which becomes self-sustaining as it germinates more and more offspring. Most M.C.S.s on the Great Plains take about four or five hours to form; this one, according to time stamps, materialized in less than 30 minutes...And because water produces heat as it condenses at altitude, the added moisture accelerates the process further."
Tornado Intercept Vehicle
At 2:50 he describes the six layers in the armored covering that is mechanically lowered to the ground when deployed.
Saturday, July 25, 2020
Ultra-black deep sea fish.
"...among the darkest creatures ever found...To qualify as ultra-black, a species must reflect less than 0.5% of the light that hits it. One of the fish that was recently discovered, the Oneirodes species, reflected between .044% to .051%...For comparison, black paper reflects about 10% of the incident light that hits it...."
How To Stop A Colossal Bridge Corroding
Inspection involves hammering a wedge into the cable, and removing a segment for inspection and splicing a replacement back in, then compressing the cable back to its compact baseline with a 100-ton jack. Wow. Why can't they just insert an analyzer probe into the wedged-open cable, and not impair the integrity of the cable?
Thursday, July 23, 2020
scamquery.com
Checks for scam risk by checking whether a website is recent, popular, secure, and how other sites have rated it.
NW beach destinations, coastal Washington and Oregon
Hobuck Beach
map
wide-open sands, delightful tide pools...Cabins from $150, camping $20. Hobuck Beach Resort, 2726 Makah Passage, Neah Bay, Bay, 360.645.2339)
Shi Shi Beach
towering sea stacks framing miles of beach, and wind-curved conifers dotting the shoreline, this extreme northwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula really brings the vistas...
Rialto Beach
offshore sea stacks, towering bluffs...Hike two miles on the flat but rocky beach to its northern boundary for a look at Hole-in-the-Wall, a dramatic rock arch carved by sea and wind; you can walk through the hole at low tide...
Lake Ozette and Ozette River
down-home Lost Lake Resort on Lake Ozette, an hour hike inland via boardwalk (campsites, starting at $17.50; cabins, starting at $80. Clallam Bay, 208660 Hoko Ozette Road; 360.963.2899; lostresort.net)
Seabrook
New England–style planned village on the Washington coast with an incredibly beautiful, sandy beach
Copalis Beach
28 cozy, tastefully restored cabins perched among windswept pines...hiking nearby sand dunes, $279 in the summer...ironspringsresort.com
Long Beach
Cape Disappointment
rough seas and sheer weather drama—roiling surf...Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center...and wood-fired, thin-crust pies at Serious Pizza at the Cape Disappointment Store Ilwaco, 243 Robert Gray Drive
Hug Point
five miles south of bustling Cannon Beach, you’ll likely whiz right past the little sign for Hug Point. But keep your eyes peeled and you’ll be rewarded with a cozy beach in a tiny cove where you can while away the day in relative seclusion.
Newport
where you'll find the Oregon Coast Aquarium...head down one of the adjacent docks to pick up the freshest fish possible for dinner: You have to buy the whole fish...you’ll need a cooler for transport
Sunday, July 19, 2020
Frank Gehry sketches
"Talent is liquified trouble" - it"s a mental unrest with state of things as they are.
Saturday, July 18, 2020
$4200 hydrofoil electric surfboard
Waydoo Flyer ONE - Innovative eFoil Redefining Watersports, via @Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waydootech/waydoo-flyer-one-innovative-efoil-redefining-watersports?ref=android_project_share
3 secrets of resilient people | Lucy Hone
2) carefully choose where to place your attention. Focus on the things you can change, intentional, deliberate, continuing effort to tune in to the good. (We're hard-wired to notice threats) Don't lose what you have to what you have lost. Think of 3 good things that happened today.
3) Is what I'm doing helping or harming me? Be kind to yourself.
Life takes sudden unanticipated lurching changes of direction.
Locusts pullulate in East Africa
2:28 Each day, a typical swarm eats more food crops than 35,000 people.
Big Engineering excerpts
Tesla Pushing Down Solar Prices
3:05 Prices coming down to 8.5 year payback time for small 4kW solar system generating about 15 kWhr/day
Dramatic drone footage of mountain biking
Confident posture changes you
Friday, July 17, 2020
Computers reading lips
Remarkable accuracy in speech recognition. Note at 3:58 that the artificial intelligence also "watches" the eyebrows and forehead.
Thursday, July 16, 2020
Monday, July 13, 2020
Doublespeak
All the different ways people confuse and bamboozle listeners with confounding verbiage.
Ominous sea rise
This video provides a clear and compelling explanation of why one particular glacier melt is especially threatening, because it's currently being undermined by warm water that could make a vast quantity of ice slide into the ocean.
Sunday, July 12, 2020
Variation in sparrows
"What's happening with the sparrows is "kind of like an Australian person coming to New York, and all the New Yorkers start suddenly deciding to adopt an Australian accent," he said."
Canada's Sparrows Are Singing a New Song. You'll Hear It Soon. https://nyti.ms/2VGVHNL
Jamie:
My cynical hunch was that the novelty of the doublet ending and the sole source of Northern BC of such were both over-stated.
The paper is available online as is a seminal one from 1965 which it briefly references to say triplets were ubiquitous.
The new paper clearly shows a trend in doublets heading East which must be as they claim cultural transmission - very cool.
But the latter paper from 1965 actually states "Six of the 433 recorded birds (1.4 per cent) sang a song that ended in doublets instead of triplets: 1 from Quebec ... 2 from Maine ... 2 from Ontario ... and 1 from Manitoba... The occurrence of this feature in Whitethroat songs is thus not restricted to western birds, as Saunders (1935: 270) suggested."
So there is more to it as always. I wonder if noise pollution might also play a role on their shared wintering grounds. Or perhaps more and more Western birds gradually showing up in the East due to increasingly differential mortality (caused by us humans no doubt).
TE: It's really interesting. I didn't realize how many decades this has been studied.
Here's a study confirming what you suspected, that urban noise pollution is affecting the White-crowned songs.
"Urban noise, which is louder at low frequencies, increased during our study period and therefore should have created a selection pressure for songs with higher frequencies. We found that the minimum frequency of songs increased both within and between dialects during the 30-year time span."
And this intriguing study that males share more varied songs with their nearest neighbors than distant visitors.
"Machine learning song analysis methods allow us to overcome perceptual bias in the classification of the songs of New Zealand hihi (Notiomystis cincta). We show that males share more song elements of their repertoire with their neighbors than with more distant males or with males from the same natal area."
And here's a lovely homespun warm ode to the variations in song and appearance of the song sparrow.
And isn't the Ipswich sparrow just a pale variant of the Savannah sparrow?
Mitochondrial DNA Variation, Species Limits, and Rapid Evolution of Plumage Coloration and Size in the Savannah Sparrow.
"haplotypes found on Sable Island representing the "Ipswich sparrow" were not distinctive, thereby failing to support species status for this taxon."
What Does Wabi-Sabi Mean? - Japanology
Intriguing word history and insight into the Japanese aesthetic.
"Thus, in contemporary culture, wabi-sabi has been relieved of much of its existential melancholy and has been embraced as a pleasure – in authentic expression, natural materials, rough edges, imperfect glazes, even deliberate flaws. It stands in particularly marked contrast to the characteristics of modernism, with its mass-produced uniformity and its seemingly-indestructible materials like plastic, stainless steel, silicon and the rest. In Japan particularly, the contrast can be startling."
Special High Intensity Training memo
Very funny:
"In order to assure the highest levels of quality work and productivity from employees, it will be our policy to keep all employees well trained through our progrom of Special High Intensity Training..."
Saturday, July 11, 2020
Watch "Building the Perfect Squirrel Proof Bird Feeder" on YouTube
19:57 "It turns out squirrels are incredibly crafty, curious by nature, athletic, and persistent."
Bill Gates drinks sewage water
Once it's filled with water from the tap, he takes a sip from the jar...Bill feigns surprise because five minutes ago, the water was human waste pumped in from a local sewage facility. It was transformed into clean water by what's called the OmniProcessor, a new kind of low-cost waste treatment plant funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ...can transform global sanitation. Using an innovative blend of steam power and water filtration, according to Gates and his foundation, this plant can convert up to 14 tons of sewage into potable water and electricity each day...
The potential benefits are enormous. Forty percent of the global population---or 2.5 billion urban residents---practice open defecation or otherwise lack adequate sanitation, and an additional 2.1 billion urban residents use facilities that do not safely dispose of human waste...It's about the size of two school buses placed side by side. A steel blue staircase runs along one side, and a kind of conveyor belt feeds raw sewage into a drum...the OmniProcessor is really three things: a steam power plant, an incinerator, and a water filtration system...The trick is that these three things feed off each other...The first thing I did was work out the thermodynamics...looking at the energy, and was pleasantly surprised early on that it looked like this could work...A steam engine generates heat for a dryer, which accepts the raw sewage and dries it out. Then the sludge is boiled, and this separates the solids from the water. The incinerator then burns the dried-out solids, producing a high-temperature, high-pressure steam that helps drive the steam engine and, through a generator, makes electricity that can power the OmniProcessor...At the same time, water vapor produced by the sludge dryer travels through a cyclone to spin out any entrained particles, and then other filters---a coarse filter and a fine half-micron membrane filter that resembles Goretex fabric---remove additional substances. A condenser then turns the vapor back into water, which is aerated and passes through multiple activated charcoal filters.
Deepfakes: Is This Video Even Real? | NYT
3:25 "If you don't know 100%, hand on heart, 'This is true,' please don't share. Because it's not worth the risk."
Controlling drones and robot arms with your hand movements directly
With a wave of your hand...
"conductive graphene with enhanced biocompatibility, anti-oxidation, and solderability, which allows a wireless flexible circuit...offers gel-free, high-fidelity recording of muscle activities. The performance of the printed electronics is demonstrated by using real-time control of external systems via electromyograms...to capture all finger motions with an accuracy of about 99%"
Drone
Robot arm
Thursday, July 9, 2020
Passive compliance, and the World's Largest Car Factory - avoid injury, promote safety
Very cool robots in the world's largest car factory. Watch the gentle hug at 3:02, and the "floating chair" at 4:20.
These collaborative robots, or "cobots," are powerful machines that have to be carefully programmed with passive compliance, force-monitoring, force-limiting, and clever design to avoid causing harm to the humans in close proximity to them.
"Passive compliance is applied during the setup of the robotic cell and will always stay active in the background to fulfill its safety role. It may be inherent to the structure of the robot, like a torque limitation device on the end effector or a torque limitation on the joints. It can also be a form of collision detector that prevents collisions from occurring or prevents them from being harmful."
https://blog.robotiq.com/bid/69962/How-Do-Industrial-Robots-Achieve-Compliance?hs_amp=true
https://blog.robotiq.com/bid/69962/How-Do-Industrial-Robots-Achieve-Compliance?hs_amp=true
This article talks a bit about all the design factors in making cobots safe (see the safety section.)
Modifying Turbo Subarus with Aftermarket parts
Wednesday, July 8, 2020
Graphene
Here are a few thoughts on investing in graphene. I liked your take on penny stocks, that they are highly manipulated by big players trying to flush out people's stop loss orders, and so on.
I wasn't able to find stock exchange symbols for all of the companies below, and most are not available in US markets. These 3 APGMF & HDGFH & FGPHF are available but dinner if them have a foreign transaction fee involved.
Investing in graphene
Graphene is a single-atom-layer carbon material with unique properties - 200 times stronger than steel, with flexibility, good conductivity and transparency.
A brief overview:
This page and this one describe the many types of applications for graphene in automobiles - for structural stiff lightweight material, batteries (supercapacitors), paint coatings, etc.
Buyer beware - lots of scam companies claiming to be working on graphene.
"...the UK Financial Conduct Authority warned investors to beware of scams involving graphene... "If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is."
The first 4 are "pure-play" graphene companies, I think.
This page lists the following companies working on graphene technology:
1.) Real Graphene: graphene-enhanced battery cells. ...[I bought one of their portable smartphone chargers and it charges very rapidly.]
2.) Versarien.(AIM:VRS)...proprietary materials technology
3.) Applied Graphene Materials. (APGMF) (AIM:AGM)..."proprietary "bottom up" process for the production of high specification graphene... owns the intellectual property and know-how behind the graphene production process"
4.) G6 Materials Corp.(TSX:GGG)...with a focus on the market of industrial composites - thermoplastics, thermosets such as epoxies, and inks
5.) Archer Materials.(ASX:AXE) ...advanced materials company that offers a range of graphene products, including graphene powder, nanocomposites, and oxide.
6.) Directa Plus. ...claims to have developed patented graphene material that is portable and scalable
7.) Comet Resources. (ASX:COI) ...produces graphene using a process of electronic exfoliation from graphite
8.) First Graphene (FGPHF) ...one of the lowest-cost global graphene suppliers in the world... claims to have developed an environmentally sound method of converting graphite with the lowest cost into high-quality graphene on a scale
9.) Nanotech industries: graphene batteries, as well as our production of conductive epoxies, conductive inks and electromagnetic interference shielding
10) Haydale graphene Industries: (HDGHF) ...patented proprietary scalable plasma process that's aimed at functionalizing graphene and other nanomaterials
Monday, July 6, 2020
Sunday, July 5, 2020
The Forger | The New York Times" on YouTube
Beautifully animated, endearing story of a man who single-handedly saved thousands of lives from the cruel group of menacing regimes.
Larnell Lewis Hears A Song Once And Plays It Perfectly
5:46: " The shortest pencil is longer than the longest memory." Write it down.
Car Design Trends That Need to Stop
I really enjoyed this. He makes some good points and he had a good sense of humor about it.
And, just for comparison, here are auto designs he does like. Just look at that Ferrari Roma.
Friday, July 3, 2020
The Pitfalls of Using Google Ngram to Study Language
Google's ngram function reveals word prevalence in millions of books over hundreds of years, which is an amazing tool for studying language.
"Google populated the database from over 5 million books published up to 2008."
But there are some pitfalls...
"OCR, or optical character recognition, is how computers take the pixels of a scanned book and convert it into text. It's never a perfect process...lowercase long s in old books looks a lot like a f: ...case versus cafe, funk versus sunk, fame versus same."
"Google Book's English language corpus is a mishmash of fiction, nonfiction, reports, proceedings, and, as Dodds' paper seems to show, a whole lot of scientific literature. "It's just too globbed together," "
"scientific publications are taking up more and more of the the corpus, certain non-scientific terms may appear to fall in relative popularity..."
"He notes that a search for Barack Obama restricted to years before his birth turns up 29 results..."
[If] "a book only appears once—whether it's been read once or millions of times...[vs] some random paper on mechanics. The two texts are weighted equally. It doesn't reflect what people are talking about so much as what people are publishing about..."
You can even search for wildcards and multiple forms of a word (book_INF for booked, booking, books) and other advanced searches - see https://books.google.com/ngrams/info
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DHacBPWrB8g" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Thursday, July 2, 2020
Cosmic Crisp Apples
""They were bred for flavor first and foremost," said Kathryn Grandy, director of marketing for PVM, which describes the apple as "remarkably crisp, sweet, sharp, tangy and unbelievably juicy." And because they store well and maintain their flavor for more than a year, customers can expect to be able to buy the variety year-round, she said."
Wednesday, July 1, 2020
Federal Officials Turn to Pooled-sample Testing Strategy as Infections Surge
Here's how the technique works: A university, for example, takes samples from every one of its thousands of students...setting aside part of each individual's sample, the lab combines the rest into a batch holding five to 10 samples each.
The pooled sample is tested for coronavirus infection. Barring an unexpected outbreak, just 1 percent or 2 percent of the students are likely to be infected, so the overwhelming majority of pools are likely to test negative.
But if a pool yields a positive result, the lab would retest the reserved parts of each individual sample that went into the pool, pinpointing the infected student. The strategy could be employed for as little as $3 per person per day,
...But if a batch tests positive, the retesting of each patient's sample would be considered a diagnosis and need to come from a certified lab — tacking on a delay of several days for the verdict — noted Kelly Wroblewski, chief of infectious diseases at the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
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