Deep-learning bird simulator adjusts multiple control surfaces to optimize efficiency and stability.
Friday, November 22, 2024
Musician Charged With Music Streaming Fraud Aided By AI and bots
Where can you find songs with names like: "Zygophyceae," "Zygopterous," "Zygotic Washstands," "Zyme Bedewing," "Zymoplastic," and "Zyzomys," written by the artists you love, like: "Calliope Erratum," "Calm Baseball," "Calm Knuckles," "Calms Scorching," "Calorie Event," "Calorie Screams," "Calvinistic Dust," "Camaxtli Minerva," and "Camel Edible."
What a great idea! If you don't have talent in music, just get AI to generate songs, and computer bots to "listen" to the songs billions of times, and you can make millions in royalties! The only downside, and it's just a small one, is that after several years the FBI slams you with multiple counts of fraud and a lifetime in jail.
"Some music distributors and streaming platforms caught wind of Smith's activities a year or two after he started [and] removed Smith's music from its stores... A source close to Spotify confirmed it was the streaming platform that detected the fraud in 2019."
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Displacing the Panama canal.
If this container-shipping railway were built, 7:25 it's estimated to increase the GDP of the entire country of Mexico by 3-5%.
4:28 the rail would be slower than the Panama canal route, because it necessitates unloading and reloading a ship at each end. However, freight conditions have restricted the number of ships that can pass through Panama canal, leading to 3:30 a bidding war, where ships can bid up to millions of dollars to jump the queue. This makes the shipping railway
Monday, November 18, 2024
Sunday, November 17, 2024
Saturday, November 16, 2024
Talhotblond, a dark rabbit-hole of internet catfishing leads to murder
"while "Jessi" was a real person, Thomas had been chatting [online] with her mother, Mary Shieler, catfishing and posing as her daughter online"
Monday, November 11, 2024
Design constraints of piston rings
James, you first introduced me to the concept that high-performance engines are designed to burn through a lot of oil on purpose - a liter every 1600km. I understood in general, but this in-depth analysis goes into great detail about the way a piston ring exerts pressure on the cylinder wall, and how the lower rings are cleverly designed to scrape oil and deposits off the cylinder walls.
You can skip to 3:56 after the discussion of steam-engine piston rings.
6:26 I didn't realize that combustion pressure forces its way behind the inner diameter of a piston ring, pushing the ring against the cylinder wall.
7:39 I also didn't realize that piston rings convey half the heat from the piston to the cylinder wall.
14:23 graphite-steel is stronger, and chrome or other minerals are deposited onto the surface of the piston ring to enhance strength and wear-resistance.
The world's biggest desalination plants shouldn't exist
Sunday, November 10, 2024
Why are street lights turning purple?
The main reason is that the phosphor layer on top of the LED is failing and popping off, causing the blue light to shine through without being converted to white light (see 10:29).
Friday, November 8, 2024
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
How physicists broke the solar efficiency record.
Very interesting description of how to squeeze every last photon of energy out of solar energy.
You may have to read the next sentence twice to really take in the magnitude of it.
20:00 "470 exajoules* of energy reach the Earth's surface every 8 minutes, which is the same amount of energy that the entire world's population uses in a year."
*An exajoule is 10^18 joules, equivalent to 277.8 terawatt hours
Monday, November 4, 2024
Thursday, October 31, 2024
Women bosses - be nice, or be assertive?
https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/men-45-women-0/
"It is really the very, very fine line of being a shrew on one hand and a puppet on the other that any woman in public life has to walk," says former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, a Democrat from Illinois.
So what's a woman to do? Be nice and kind and friendly, as our gender stereotypes about women require? Or be tough and decisive, as our stereotypes about leadership demand? To be one is to be seen as nice, but weak. To be the other is to be seen as competent, but unlikable."
https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/how-to-win-people-over/
" an amazing and depressing study...looked at longitudinal data of 15 years about of professors teaching evaluations...you might think, oh, evaluations are going to get better for the people who succeed and stay because they'll become more experienced professors. And then, I don't know, maybe at the end of their career, they tail off and they get worse...When they were younger, they would get high evaluations. As they went into middle age, their evaluations would drop, and as they got older, their evaluations would rise again...women who got the lowest teaching evaluations...middle stage of their career, those women were perceived as the most assertive and the least warm...Because if someone's gonna have control over me, I care a lot about the fact that they are gonna do good things with it, not just to help me, but to make sure they're gonna use it responsibly. If I don't respect somebody, I could be concerned, and wait a second, you're gonna have all this control, and you're just gonna mess it up."
An antidote: "humor bragging is saying something positive about yourself, while also using humor that is not self-deprecating"
World's largest iron mine, Australia
https://youtu.be/F1bJYHl5iJw?si=KgW_bpadB5XySU6r
Largest iron mine profits from very little over-burden to be removed before encountering high-grade ore. Many of the mine's operations run autonomously, and trains ship out ore 365 days a year,
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
The surprising solutions to the world's water crisis with Hannah Fry
https://youtu.be/FDY2McKLvlM?si=OTflTWbMb1xOZdBF
7:12 "Practical Action" is drawing water up from aquifers using solar power, to sustain localized farming.
12:39 a correlation between water depletion and social unrest.
23:21 water is this issue of national security. Singapore had to teach rock bottom before they changed their approach to the importance of water. Let's hope the rest of the world learns how important water security is, and will continue to become.
Monday, October 28, 2024
Take off shoes indoors - to limit exposure to micro plastics
"Finnish schools, shoes are taken off by coat racks near the classrooms (shoe schools). The new course of action is to take shoes off right when entering the building (sock schools)...concentrations in corridors were significantly higher in shoe schools compared to sock schools...elemental concentrations (Li, Al, Si, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, Cd, Ba, Pb) in settled dust were also higher in shoe schools compared to sock schools"
"Contaminants tracked in from outside, such as lawn pesticides and lead dust from work or home renovation: Use a doormat, remove shoes at the door, and plant shrubs and grass to help reduce dust levels and limit the potential to track dust indoors."
"...estimated that between 9,000 and 400,000 metric tonnes of microplastics are released from shoes globally per year from regular use...trail running events deposit significant plastic fibres and rubber fragments onto soil...100 runners release about 425,000 rubber particles over a 10 km race...85% of used shoes in the UK were sent to the dump rather than recycled or reused...once they're in the landfill, shoe plastics degrade...and release ethylene and methane, two potent greenhouse gases"
"We recommend not heating food in plastic containers, because chemicals leach from that plastic into the food product...placing plastic in the dishwasher can have a similar leaching effect by degrading plastic containers...[prevent exposure by] taking off your shoes when coming inside, to removing dust, and vacuuming frequently."
Friday, October 25, 2024
Faroe Islands tidal generators underwater kites
Small 1 MW tethered kites combined with battery storage to wean the insulated Faroe Islands off fossil fuel.
What's the difference between "Internet" and "the Web"
2:48 "I know that people use the words web and internet interchangeably but they are actually different things the web that's the bit that you see on your screen it's the collection of pages the stuff that is is stored in vast data centers owned by companies like Google and Amazon the internet however that is the physical infrastructure it's the network of cables running over land and along the seafloor that literally link up one machine to another carrying huge volumes of data."
Sunday, October 20, 2024
Getting Internet to remote impoverished people
Ok first of all, I didn't know the "Internet" and "web" are different things.
2:48 "I know that people use the words web and internet interchangeably but they are actually different things the web that's the bit that you see on your screen it's the collection of pages the stuff that is is stored in vast data centers owned by companies like Google and Amazon the internet however that is the physical infrastructure it's the network of cables running over land and along the seafloor that literally link up one machine to another carrying huge volumes of data."
This team is distributing local Internet data 10-20 km by beams of light, rather than radio waves. 5:30 The challenge turns out to be small wind-induced movements of the tower, 6:09 solved by tiny compensatory movements of a mirror, akin to video stabilization gimbals.
Google's moonshot "X" program 7:38 operates at "the intersection of purpose and profit," solving such problems to reach 2:20 the last 3 billion people not connected to the Internet.
Amazon hunting down counterfeiters
https://youtu.be/o_7XarmoDIw?si=RuoK5bdlNZa2Svxk
3:28 Amazon ends up paying $150 per seized item to deter counterfeiters.
4:37 customers have a harder time detecting if his are counterfeit with online shopping because they can't see and touch them; clues are recently-launched sellers, and fewer reviews.
6:46 the landscape changed in 2024 when a judge ruled that Amazon can't be "hands-off" when a product is fake, but has to take some of the blame, and recall defective goods.
8:38 Amazon covers the cost of investigation and lawsuits, empowering small businesses to take on counterfeiters they wouldn't otherwise be able to tackle, financially.
Saturday, October 19, 2024
Reversing pump "battery" dam failure
This power plant is a net consumer of electricity, but it helps meet peak daytime demand. After pumping all night, and reversing during the day, out achieves
2:56 overall 70% efficiency
10:12-12:50 A combination of human errors led to the failure in this unmanned system: not accounting for wall settlement, dislodged water-level sensors, backup water-level sensors placed on the highest portion of the wall, and no human confirmation of water levels monitored by these systems.
12:50 "unfortunately, when you rely on complicated systems for safety, the likelihood of failure goes way up."
Monday, October 14, 2024
DIY engine control modules
This guy seems really incredible to me, programming electronic control units for fuel injection himself, to not only revive old engines but make them more fuel efficient and powerful.
What's "Eggs Halifax?"
Wow, this journalist went down a convoluted rabbit-hole in search of the origin of eggs Benedict with smoked salmon sometimes taking on the name "Eggs Halifax."
Although there's no definitive answer, it could get well get its name from Halifax, NS.
Being ok with Uncertainty
This podcast explains so much about human nature, politics, and conspiracy theories based on whether our brain is wired as prey or predator. If you want to skip past the researcher's personal history to the meat of the episode, start at 23:32.
Dividing people into those who 1) have a need for closure vs 2) are ok with uncertainty turns out to be much more useful than the classic "type A vs B" archetype. And it turns out this affects everything in our lives - whether we like abstract art, are prone to like conspiracy theories, what political party we lean towards.
To me, it also explains why politicians will lean into bizarre things like scaremongering of transgender surgery happening in schools, immigrants eating cats and dogs, and immigrants being rapists and murderers.
From the transcript -
"our brains are wired to make sense of the world. You know, we are sense-making animals. And each of these traits in some way speaks to our drive to make sense. How quickly do we need to make sense of the world? How much are we willing to live with uncertainty? This difference turns out to have ramifications in all kinds of different areas. One of the areas that you have looked at and others have looked at is in our appreciation of aesthetics."
"conspiracy theory beliefs are really rooted in a very simple causal mechanism. They say that whatever the crisis is, or the horrible event is, it's not some complex systemic thing. It is something that has been caused by powerful people operating in the shadows to benefit themselves and harm others. And it provides a really quick closure to what could be a complex problem...what you're looking for is, I'm dealing with a situation of high ambiguity, high uncertainty, and if I can just locate the culprit that's responsible for all of this, in some ways it moves you from that world of uncertainty to a world of predictability and closure."
"I think about need for cognition as something that's a bit of a luxury. Because if you're high in need for cognition, it signals that you have the time, you feel that you have the time and security to be able to dedicate to thinking about something for a long period of time. Having high need for cognition is actually correlated with people who are less likely to be monitoring their environments for threat. If you're not monitoring for threat, and you're not looking around the corner to see who's lurking, you can just, you know, I call it CUD chewing. You can chew your CUD all day."
"people who enjoy thinking about things, and you know, really kind of struggling to solve problems, these are the same people who really enjoy abstract art and syncopated jazz, for example, over really predictable, like pop music or country music, that has a more predictable cadence, chorus, and verse structure."
"people who enjoy thinking actually are less likely to be persuaded by more emotional or heuristic kind of appeals. They require evidence-based argumentation to be persuaded by information."
"I think about this in terms of how people monitor for threats in their environment. And when I think about it that way, it actually gives me sort of a unifying narrative that helps explain a lot of what's going on. I think that based on what we know now, it seems that individuals are born, perhaps genetically... predisposed, to have physiological systems that deal with threat in their environment. And that shapes physiological patterns, which then shape psychological tendencies. And for people who are high-threat monitors, they are all about survival in the face of threat, and it's on their mind all the time. What serves these people best is making decisions quickly and efficiently based on heuristics, emotions, intuition, and shortcuts. That is what causes them to have this lower need for cognition. It's not that they can't, it's that it doesn't make sense for them based on their sort of psychophysiological predispositions. Similarly, these are folks who, because they're monitoring for threat, of course they're going to want to be in situations that are highly certain, ordered, predictable. They're not going to be very high in tolerance for ambiguity because that exposes them to threat."
"In a survey, we looked at whether or not individuals who had higher or lower need for closure had different levels of support for transgender individuals. What we found is that even accounting for all these other things, need for closure is associated with more negative opinions of transgender people, transgender candidates, and transgender rights. And this is one of those things that is intuitive on its face. And when we thought about studying this construct, I just thought, you know, for folks who need for there to be a yes or no answer, black and white, it would make sense for these folks, the concept of gender fluidity or the concept of gender being a social construct, that I could imagine that that might be hard for them to reconcile. And sure enough, our results actually showed quite a robust effect of need for closure on these outcomes."
Wednesday, October 9, 2024
Criticism of Amtrak and Via rail
This well-illustrated critique of traveling in North America by train compared to Europe (where population densities are much larger) is quite a stark comparison - our rail system is expensive, slow, not prioritized relative to freight traffic, rough ride, and expensive with unnecessary charges and delays. Rail is much cheaper and environmentally friendly per mile.
Wednesday, October 2, 2024
Are we running out of sand?
Sand is a complex material: It's not just beach sand, but a range of materials with different properties. (0:22)
Sand is essential for concrete: Concrete is a vital building material, and sand is a key ingredient. (3:19)
Sand is not evenly distributed: It's a non-renewable resource, and mining it can have environmental impacts. (4:49)
We can make sand: Crushing rocks can create manufactured sand, which can be more environmentally friendly and even stronger than natural sand. (5:09)
Sand shape matters: Rounded sand is easier to work with, but angular sand can make stronger concrete. (6:48)
• Workability vs. strength: Adding water to concrete makes it easier to work with, but weakens it. Rounded sand requires less water, leading to stronger concrete. (9:32)
The myth of dune sand: The idea that dune sand is unusable in concrete is a myth. (12:19)
Sand scarcity is misleading: The real issue is the cost of fans is increasing, due to environmental regulations and transportation costs. (14:27)
The video concludes that while the world is not running out of sand, we need to be more mindful of the costs associated with its extraction and use. (17:36)
Concrete is a huge industry: The scale of concrete production leads to significant environmental and social impacts. (14:47)
Sand is not the only option: We can use recycled concrete aggregates and other materials to reduce our reliance on virgin sand. (17:11)
• Technology can change the game: Just like diamonds and timber, sand can be produced synthetically and sustainably. (15:30)
Clever illusion - circle turns into square.
Interesting illusion:
Ambiguous cylinder explained:
Another explanation video:
Monday, September 23, 2024
Post-pounding machine
Pounding posts into the ground without having to dig a hole, and without pouring concrete.
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Auditory illusion
This is so wild - you hear different words from the same sounds, depending what words you're reading at the same time as the sound.
Interactive sculpture?
This sculptor creates art with sugar.
@5:25 the sculpture will melt, unless people ride bicycles to generate electricity to run the air conditioner that preserves it.
Now that's interactive sculpture!
Thursday, September 19, 2024
Human versus AI Geoguesser
I find this a very significant milestone, like the computer that beat the world chess master 27 years ago. Some grad students built an AI platform to guess geographic location over 2 months, and it easily beat the world champion who is superhuman at this task, who has practiced and memorized for years how to recognize a random location. Watch this guy idly talk while doing this superhuman task.
Thursday, September 12, 2024
Cloth concrete forms
Permeable flexible cloth concrete forms facilitate labor-saving rapid construction is unusual shapes.
Barefoot walking
"We didn't evolve to wear shoes."
at 0:13, I think he's saying that cushioning in footwear increases the duration of time that a foot impacting the ground transfers forces to your body, which increases damage.
1:43 The calluses that build up naturally from barefoot walking toughen the surface without impairing tactile sensitivity.
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
Coffee grounds improve concrete
Scientists Discovered An Amazing Practical Use For Our Leftover Coffee Grounds
We could be producing concrete that's 30 percent stronger by processing and adding charred coffee grounds to the mix, researchers in Australia discovered.
Their clever recipe could solve multiple problems at the same time.
Every year the world produces a staggering 10 billion kilograms (22 billion pounds) of coffee waste globally. Most ends up in landfills.
"The disposal of organic waste poses an environmental challenge as it emits large amounts of greenhouse gases including methane and carbon dioxide, which contribute to climate change," explained RMIT University engineer Rajeev Roychand.
With a booming construction market globally, there's also an ever increasing demand for resource intensive concrete causing another set of environmental challenges too.
"The ongoing extraction of natural sand around the world – typically taken from river beds and banks – to meet the rapidly growing demands of the construction industry has a big impact on the environment," said RMIT engineer Jie Li.
"There are critical and long-lasting challenges in maintaining a sustainable supply of sand due to the finite nature of resources and the environmental impacts of sand mining. With a circular-economy approach, we could keep organic waste out of landfill and also better preserve our natural resources like sand."
Organic products like coffee grounds can't be added directly to concrete because they leak chemicals that weaken the building material's strength. So using low energy levels the team heated coffee waste to over 350 °C (around 660 °F) while depriving it of oxygen.
This process is called pyrolyzing. It breaks down the organic molecules, resulting in a porous, carbon-rich charcoal called biochar, that can form bonds with and thereby incorporate itself into the cement matrix.
Roychand and colleagues also tried pyrolyzing the coffee grounds at 500 °C but the resulting biochar particles were not as strong.
The researchers cautioned that they still need to assess the long term durability of their cement product. They're now working on testing how the hybrid coffee-cement performs under freeze/thaw cycles, water absorption, abrasions and many more stressors.
The team is also working on creating biochars from other organic waste sources, including wood, food waste and agricultural waste.
"Our research is in the early stages, but these exciting findings offer an innovative way to greatly reduce the amount of organic waste that goes to landfill," said RMIT engineer Shannon Kilmartin-Lynch.
"Inspiration for my research, from an Indigenous perspective, involves Caring for Country, ensuring there's a sustainable life cycle for all materials and avoiding things going into landfill to minimize the impact on the environment."
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-discovered-an-amazing-practical-use-for-our-leftover-coffee-grounds
That's a good thing, because (remarkably) we're running out of sand - at least, 3:21 the rough-edged sand that's good for binding concrete together.
Innovative Electric tugboats
Electric tugs - a significant improvement.
5.3MWhr batteries
5:57 1/10 the noise of diesel-powered
3:13 designed in Vancouver BC
8:37 not useful in locations needing 10 dockings a day (presumably because of charging down-time)
4:11 Motors are mounted vertically, perhaps to make it easier to rotate the direction of the propellers.
6:53 Used in Kittimat Bay guiding ships 159 miles (longest navigation channel in the world) along a narrow inlet to a hydroelectric-powered aluminum smelter. (https://youtu.be/LBDQf5t3rlc?si=Ak1e-4coq1-qHSBa)
Douglas channel:
Monday, September 9, 2024
Unfair algorithms in the gig economy, Uber
Invisible algorithms give riders variable pay for the same work.
Sunday, September 8, 2024
Coffee stir sticks vs spoons
"...despite distributors' assertions that wooden stir sticks are "better" for the environment than plastic ones, they still represent a potentially significant negative impact on the environment–specifically as it relates to the destruction of virgin resources required to make the sticks and the waste generated after their use."
Saturday, September 7, 2024
China hydroelectric dam ambitions
China huge ambitions for 125 GW of hydropower come at a cost, especially the risk of disaster in this earthquake-prone region. Thousands of people and ancient buildings will be destroyed.
Wednesday, September 4, 2024
Bees' monolecty
Some bees have been painstakingly observed to forage from a very limited range of flowers, known as "oligolecty," or "monolecty" if it's truly a single species, which is apparently debatable.
This seems to me to be very expensive for the bee (more travel for less nectar than random opportunistic foraging,) with little benefit, yet very valuable for the plant requiring no effort, except maybe co-evolution of the plant to favor that bee species, which isn't really much "effort."
What evolutionary drive is there for this specific foraging? Is it just that in foraging a specific species they would become "expert" faster, recognizing which flowers have the most yield of how to get the most pollen and nectar efficiently?
A brief review of monolecty in bees and benefits of a broadened definition. 2020
On a realted note, this story of a specific hummingbird and a specific flower co-evolving to benefit each other is equally remarkable.
https://youtu.be/7xRxpicxeFQ?si=_kpTdjXXBhZwE47l
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