How actors show emotion, and what directors do with masked actors do instead.

https://youtu.be/-gitexWSLlg?is=_yBEGNsI8OqIPW2Z

Excellent video with the perfect excerpt to illustrate each point. Clearly very well researched by someone knowledgeable. 

3:05 the Kuleshov effect - context imparts emotion to an identically neutral face

AI can remove pixelation pretty well

I took the first screenshot, and asked Gemini to remove pixelation. The end result was pretty close to the person's actual appearance earlier in the video. https://youtube.com/shorts/-C_WWTHN4_0?is=CrUl393CjtuviUhk

Building 4000 drones a day in Ukraine

https://youtu.be/VfzBaUPwfDQ?is=yuvIEgcA1LoDS1Ux

4:21 making 4000 a day

4:04 a waterproof drone that can take off in water

Wow - Amazon knows it's not "made in the USA" despite the label.

https://youtube.com/shorts/whHypuaLmTU?is=8pa63DNi7hObMjTR

Wow - Amazon's own AI system admits to fraud about labeling products as made in the USA. 

Powerful long-range drones for military supply shipments

https://youtu.be/mXLGGZM_b50?is=XNbxlP_mYYRIqoOA

The capability of these military drones is growing in leaps and bounds, and the race is being fueled by the remarkably lower cost than moving goods by helicopter. And, 1:29 "according to the Navy, over 90% of logistics deliveries are under 50 pounds," so sending a helicopter is a huge waste. 

How to respond when someone has cancer

https://www.hiddenbrain.org/podcast/when-bad-things-happen-to-good-people/

Kate Bowler categorizes the harmful or unhelpful responses people give when faced with terrible news into the archetypes of "Teachers," "Solvers," and "Optimizers."

Instead of meeting suffering with simple presence, people in these categories try to manage their own discomfort by attempting to fix, explain, or improve the situation.

1. The Teachers

The Teachers look at someone else's tragedy and immediately try to find a lesson, blueprint, or a "silver lining" to explain why it happened.

• The Response: They offer platitudes like "Everything happens for a reason," "God is testing you," or "Think of what you are learning about yourself through this."

• The Reality: Bowler notes that this response forces a false sense of order onto chaos. It attempts to wrap a tragic situation in an educational bow, which ultimately minimizes the raw reality of the person's grief and makes them feel like their pain is just a homework assignment they need to master.

2. The Solvers (or Fixers)

The Solvers treat a person's crisis or illness like a practical puzzle that can be cracked with enough effort or information.

• The Response: They offer unsolicited medical, spiritual, or lifestyle advice: "Have you tried cutting out sugar, or eating more vegetables?" "You should look into this alternative treatment," or "If you just pray harder, things will change."

• The Reality: This response is driven by the fear that tragedy is random. By insisting there is a solution, the Solver protects their own illusion of control. The underlying—and damaging—message to the sufferer is that if they just try harder, they can fix their own tragedy, subtly placing the blame on them if things go wrong.

3. The Optimizers (and "Purpose Monsters")

The Optimizers are products of modern self-help and productivity culture, treating human beings like assembly lines that can be continuously upgraded.

• The Response: When hit with bad news, they immediately pivot toward tracking metrics, relentless self-improvement, or toxic positivity. They want to optimize your mindset, your morning routine, your step counts, or your macros to "outrun" the pain.

• The Reality: Bowler argues that optimization is a joy blocker. The culture of optimization insists that human agency is unlimited and that any physical or emotional limitation is a personal failure. In reality, human beings are breakable and dependent. Trying to "optimize" your way through a tragedy forces you to hoard positive vibes while running away from the necessary, messy work of feeling the pain all the way through.

What to Do Instead: True Presence

Bowler's work emphasizes that life is beautiful and terrible, and there is no cure for being human. When someone receives bad news, they do not need a lesson, a 5-step optimization plan, or an amateur solution. What they actually need is presence and love—people who are brave enough to sit with them in the muck of unpredictable reality without trying to clean it up.

What to say to someone falling with terrible news. 

At 39 minutes: "I will keep pace with your hope. I will hold your hope when you can't any longer. I won't turn away from the difficulty you're facing — to hold possibility but not be blind to reality." 

39:45 Optimism - the hope that there are still beautiful things ahead for the person. Hold on to a sense of self-continuity. (Vs blind optimism or toxic positivity that "You will be ok no matter what," which leads to not listening to your doctor, or leads to avoiding negative words that might create reality.) 

"Remain porous" - Charles Taylor (open to God, open to despair, open to reality.) More beautiful will come your way, and you'll spare yourself the delusion of having control over it. 

Modern "self" seals itself off from reality, trying to make meaning out of everything. Every dark chapter needs to be improved, to be a self-improvement project. 

This is why vitamin D deficiency is prevalent

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/18iL33gAiJ/

See the video that shows, through winter, the latitude above which the sun can't provide you any vitamin D. 

Toxic tire dust is also a huge source of microplastics.

Today I learned that vehicle tires produce toxic dust that enters the air, rivers, and oceans spreading massive amounts of toxicity and is the largest source of ocean microplastics. 

One specific tire-rubber additive called 6PPD turns out to be uniquely toxic even at remarkably low levels in Coho salmon, specifically. 

It's the breakdown product of 6PPD into its quinone derivative when altered by ozone that is specifically toxic to Coho salmon at very low concentrations; Coho are about 800 times more sensitive than Chinook salmon. 

Several non-toxic replacements are being evaluated, and are mandated to replace the toxic compound before 2035. In the meantime, environmental agencies are relying on stormwater solutions like rain gardens and bioretention soils to trap tire particles before they reach salmon streams.

https://ecology.wa.gov/blog/january-2023/saving-washington-s-salmon-from-toxic-tire-dust

https://www.eopugetsound.org/magazine/scientists-worldwide-are-immersed-studies-deadly-tire-chemical

https://www.ustires.org/6ppd-tire-manufacturing

The estimated per capita emission from tires ranges from 0.23 to 4.7 kg/year, with a global average of 0.81 kg/year. The emissions from car tires (100%) are substantially higher than those of other sources of microplastics, e.g., airplane tires (2%), artificial turf (12–50%), brake wear (8%) and road markings (5%). Ref

Car tires are one of the single largest sources of microplastics in our environment, accounting for roughly 28% of all microplastics found in the world's oceans. Scientists refer to this pollution as Tire and Road Wear Particles (TRWP). Unlike standard microplastics (like a degrading plastic water bottle), tire microplastics are uniquely dangerous because they act as "toxic sponges." They are packed with chemical preservatives, heavy metals (like zinc and lead), and anti-cracking agents (like 6PPD). As the microplastics sit in the water or inside an organism's stomach, these toxic chemicals leach out into the surroundings. 

Another study suggested that microplastics specifically derived from tire dust accounts for approximately 78% of the total mass of ocean microplastics. Ref

Rainfall washes more than 7 trillion pieces of microplastics, much of it tire particles left behind on streets, into San Francisco Bay each year — an amount 300 times greater than what comes from microfibers washing off polyester clothes, microbeads from beauty products and the many other plastics washing down our sinks and sewers...a local rain garden was found to capture more than 90% of the microplastics before they reach the ocean. Ref

Preservative chemical from tires is uniquely poisonous to Coho salmon, who are exposed through road runoff of tire dust.

Several non-toxic replacements are being evaluated, and are mandated to replace the toxic compound before 2035. It's the breakdown product of 6PPD into its quinone derivative when altered by ozone that is specifically toxic to Coho salmon at very low concentrations; Coho are about 800 times more sensitive than Chinook salmon. In the meantime, environmental agencies are relying on stormwater solutions like rain gardens and bioretention soils to trap tire particles before they reach salmon streams.

https://ecology.wa.gov/blog/january-2023/saving-washington-s-salmon-from-toxic-tire-dust

https://www.eopugetsound.org/magazine/scientists-worldwide-are-immersed-studies-deadly-tire-chemical

https://www.ustires.org/6ppd-tire-manufacturing

Darpa lift challenge

https://youtu.be/kXqXWcw-hSI?is=va--pTH9Q3OCg4Pu

Incredible story of last-minute changes, crashes requiring design changes, and down to the wire final attempts to get the 2nd prize in the darpa lift challenge which sought a drone to lift 4 times the drone's weight as well as navigating a mile-long course. It took incredible persistence with several major crashes right before deadlines. 

Rapid fence installation

https://youtu.be/Nt7hG3Z7XFg?is=JvrIzJRVJ9YudN9B

11:32 they discuss tirewinder.com, a rapid deployment of electric fence from a spool on a four-wheeler which allows controlling the goat herd along miles of brushland much more economically than installing fence by hand. To selectively remove noxious weeds 8:24 preferred by goats and avoided by other cattle, they need to move the herd rapidly and do they need to install and remove miles of fencing every day. 

Most electric polywire fencing is installed slowly by walking and unwinding, but here and here's another example of a four-wheeler-mounted system. 

Sobering thoughts about the future of AI, from Bill Gates' interview.

This is the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near...part of the reason I’m speaking so loudly — as loud as I can — is that you can’t rely on the industry to self-regulate here.

The size of the brain is limited by the birth canal — it’s why humans, at first, are very limited...But the silicon intelligence doesn’t have these limitations.

OK, whatever goes on here, it can’t just be driven by profit maximization. 

A.I. has crossed the threshold that its ability to empower a bioterrorist to kill hundreds of millions — that exists today. The ability to do a cyberattack that scrambles all of the bank accounts, shuts down the electric grid — that exists today...there could be a control problem where the A.I., on its own, through an unintentional interpretation of what it’s optimizing, could go off and do bad things...These models, the ability to separate out making molecules for good and making them for evil — that is so hard to distinguish. 

[AI is] finding bugs in code that humans have looked over for over 20 years and said: Boy, we see there’s no problem here.

And in a few minutes, the A.I. says: No, no, I can inject this over here and this over here — at a level of complexity where, when you see it, you go: Wait. Oh, yeah, you’re right.

we don’t have a supervisory layer that has some absolutes, like: You’re not supposed to take over other computers. You’re not supposed to break out into the internet.

[How to maintain social security?] You define a unit of labor and say, independent of whether that’s delivered by a human or robot, you are paying the same FICA tax that a human worker would pay.

In low-income countries, the A.I. will overwhelmingly be a good thing, and it should be pushed forward as quickly as it can...The one application that’s going full speed ahead...is the agricultural one, because they’re getting better weather data to these farmers in Africa. We have over one million farmers in India already using the system. So it tells them what crop disease they have, what fertilizer to use, what varieties to plant.

So if you ask the American people what portion of the budget’s going to help people in poor countries...people say 10 or 15%. So the fact that it was about 0.5% and now it’s going down toward a 0.25%, that would be pretty shocking to people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-gates.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

Controlling ticks

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19ehrB9idz/

Controlling a troublesome cattle illness by spraying parasitic worms on wild hosts. 

Bending metal to their whim

https://youtu.be/64-qdViQOhQ?is=jGjDW2CSeTAI_NGF

One-off specialty parts created out of sheet metal without the use of die stamps and hydraulic presses, by using opposing robot arms to coax and squeeze the metal into the correct shape. 

Bees are capable of learning.

https://youtu.be/rc58xOwjwto?is=IImVzDLGrOEFhMW3

A fascinating series of experiments that prove bees are capable of picturing something in the future that requires a tool they've learned to use - previously only proven in primate experiments. 

Robot thinks beyond mimicking

https://youtu.be/IJvyS2aPsnA?is=kIf-0aasG4QQ6bBN

0:44 as far as I can tell, the robot is figuring out that the nut can be spun with a rapid motion once it's loosened, or perhaps generalizing from watching a human loosen other nuts. 

From an AI summary of the OM-1 robot: OM-1 is trained exclusively on human data captured through the Omnibody Hand, a wearable seven-degree-of-freedom device. The company claims the system can generalize zero-shot across robot bodies—including tabletop arms, industrial arms, and humanoids—without teleoperation data, on-robot training, or robot-specific fine-tuning. A temporal history of these streams allows the policy to reason about how contact and task progress evolve.

The model translates the twisting motion from a human demonstration directly to different mechanical bodies—such as tabletop arms or humanoids—without needing robot-specific fine-tuning.

OM-1 natively processes a continuous stream of high-frequency data, balancing tactile signals and inter-finger proximity alongside visual tracking. 

Zombies in the streets from fentanyl - so sad

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1Hmhpm3tuE/

more here

The dark truth behind targeted advertising.

https://youtu.be/U0-8SrbG0xA?is=Opkx8NFPkluRqfIL

Skip ahead to 13:13 to skip the setup that companies are definitely not listening to your phone microphone; but they are using reams of metadata. 

A gold mine of hundreds of facts about you and your interests are shared to thousands of advertisers in the milliseconds before you're shown an ad. Hundreds of times a day. 

Rare earth metals.

https://youtu.be/BXLGV0Sj0n8?is=jUz6af0gh9FNVJId

China's carefully crafted and executed monopoly on rare earth metals accomplished over 30 years annihilated the competition and placed a stranglehold on foreign military production. Companies like MP (Mountain Pass) are being supported by fixed prices that ensure longevity for the mine. 

Harnessing AI for forest fire detection

https://youtu.be/PSnJBfa183Y?is=dEWPd1YwS4lJmA2v

Temu: not always a bargain.

Bitterness

“Staying bitter only disturbs the one harboring the bitterness.” - folk wisdom

Catapult built by spider

https://youtube.com/shorts/AQApHRcfFMY?is=p5k0aY2gfE5I1k2s

Megaproject to divert River in Fargo

https://youtu.be/-4FmTyqES_g?is=0yNkutH-Nqlzjxhk

Cerebellum

80% of the total number of neurons in the brain are in the cerebellum. It is not purely a motor system - many insufficiently with the entire neocortex. It is now thought to coordinate and "smooth" the output of all brain regions - regulating emotion, or planning a smooth sentence/conversation. 

Episode "Song of the cerebellum" Radiolab. 

https://radiolab.org/podcast/song-of-the-cerebellum

60 Words

https://radiolab.org/podcast/ea1c84b585e58d5befeefebf

Really interesting podcast that studies the actual meaning of declaring war after 9/11, and how the words declaring war have been used and misused. 

Panthalassa wave generator - now I get it.

https://youtu.be/VcmDN4T90Fw?is=cjjwMY3zysF-Uv2E

These untethered wave generators incorporate AI data centers, so they float across the ocean sending AI compute results to the web, and use ocean water for passive cooling of the computer chips. 

This eliminates traditional electrical distribution entirely. The electricity generated by the ocean's waves is consumed entirely on-site by modular AI data centers housed right inside the generator nodes.

1:58 "Panthalassa" is the name of the mega-ocean that once surrounded the conglomerate continent Pangea. 

Huge N Korean scam of fake IT jobs and ID theft.

https://youtu.be/RUhdmIFpb-w?is=tu1CXtWXeSNoFl_4

This is a thorough investigation by the Wall Street Journal into an extensive scheme of raising money for the North Korean government by enslaving workers who apply for US jobs using either stolen identities or actual US middlemen criminals who share the salary for the work done remotely online. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Incredibly elaborate. 

Breakthrough 36 passenger electric passenger plane for short-haul 2hr flights

 

https://youtu.be/nM86DBOqgPM?si=nPszTyfr-EOOde_n

2:53 Jet engines are far more complex - take the turbine blades, for example which must be grown as a single crystal of a nickel super-alloy to withstand the heat and physical forces. 

https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM?is=SCbLua2xNvguGoTK

5:30 they built a 400kW electric motor. (Standard Tesla motors are 137 - 200 kW.)

7:45 actuators: Boeing aircraft have 2 or more backup systems to drive hydraulic systems (electric pump, ram-air turbine in case of total engine failure) — what backup systems will this aircraft have for flight control systems? Maybe a hydraulic pump run by the hybrid engine. 

9:45 hardest design challenge was dealing with a diverted flight destination: 1 in every 1000 flights is diverted. That's why they needed a hybrid engine design. 

12:55 first flight

Beautiful Avata 2 drone footage

https://youtu.be/rTNDEUOHKVI?is=rRaWoIlGsW_RJDbL

Examples of ongoing human evolution

https://youtu.be/5J6ZEUKmSl0?is=9R6STwpo7FoCDWN8

Myriad detection uses of fiberoptic cable

https://youtu.be/8939X_kFwG4?is=jGBXjUpU9_xcxLFn

So intriguing. Detecting back-scatter reflections that occur at temperature or pressure points in fiberoptic cable can be used to efficiently monitor oil boreholes, seismic activity, elephants walking onto Indian railroads, whales singing in the ocean, and tankers or submarines. Telecom companies often lay down excess cable capacity, and these as-yet unused fibers can be used for such monitoring. 

Tesla ramps up production

https://youtu.be/MvLQ0ygZoqM?is=CNria5Z1NT3uFMfT

Lofty goals to increase production rates to unheard-of rates. "Unboxed production," which really just means parallel manufacturing assembly lines, is explained at 12:32. 

Best explanation of JPEG

https://youtu.be/0me3guauqOU?is=K4Bpw4XNWvZMtrfl

Very clear detailed description of how compression happens mathematically. 

Best explanation of MP3 music compression

https://youtu.be/jFjDoELxonU?is=iC_N0zX5G_9o8f38

There are a lot of videos out there, but this poorly-edited one is actually one of the better ones. 

Also, useful to view this description of how human hearing functions, at 1:31 in this video. 

https://youtu.be/KGZ0een8vSE?si=nzaiSKXDrpCDIG8U

Lidar satellites see more

https://youtu.be/UKLuei1CnZY?is=ZKH-uyd20wjBr7pU

Unimpeded by clouds or smoke, LIDAR satellites pan across Earth's entire surface every 12 days. 2:16 Successive images can be compared to observe sub-mm movement. (That implies the satellite plane above the earth is more stable than a sensor on the ground itself.)

4:09 They mapped the interior of a pyramid by listening to it vibrate [from background seismic vibrations] from space. 

Man who made counterfeit $100 bills describes his journey through crime and punishment

https://youtu.be/FGAVpJfG1yQ?is=NlNNU3ase1EYAOy1

This man started counterfeiting at age 19 and spent months protecting his craft and avoiding "bill checker" methods for years and millions of dollars. He used an eye-shadow product to mimic the shiny ink, a fine-tipped glue nozzle to make raised lines, and sprayed a chemical to make the bill-checker pen show the correct color. Ironically, he has to go to bookstores and steal blank pages from Bibles to get the right paper quality. 

World-record most massive vehicle

https://youtu.be/U8772vEfUu8?is=eaUExVAGMvn7h7r0

It harvests a low-grade coal in Germany that's uneconomical unless mind at a huge scale for nearby use in generating power. 

960 frames per sec on a $700 camera

https://youtu.be/Wpko8vAJcEk?is=2-Ww2b0rKcwFelCz

This guy does a very feel dive on the specs, but the footage he achieved is pretty amazing. 

Drone warfare on Ukraine's front line

Intense front-line embedded reporting from Ukraine with access to drones, pilots, and their successes and failures and challenges. 

https://youtu.be/t6mp8NmsCIc?is=fgyCX6vR-ikICJQZ

https://youtu.be/yOF2AFh_sGE?is=j8f27XHee79YaSBu

Different reporter, same intense journalism from the front lines. 

https://youtu.be/rqr2sQzYhQw?si=6eBgCO3nGi5FMsuQ

Surprisingly agile and adaptable "Sunday robotics" home robot

https://youtu.be/QfBw0gMuhaI?is=1-Uf4wlK0htBoBrj

Handling wine glasses is particularly difficult because they're delicate and transparent. 

Folding socks, which are deformable objects, is hard for robots. 

Insect nets - the color matters

https://www.facebook.com/share/1GJpvYBGNN/

Quirky build - a self-balancing pole.

https://youtu.be/bbnOmIp4rAM?is=c39I-OEArSEPlPNj

A lot more ingenuity than utility. 

Buying a Coke every day vs increasing in Coke every day

Dramatic results graph. 

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1C1escazeE/

Nice educational video on Great Blue Herons

https://youtu.be/G643AE1s4gY?is=qz8MpydE_FRDZ1Wr

Especially the range map by week starting at 2:08. 

Impressive bricklaying

https://youtube.com/shorts/gQUVPtMPQuk?is=NhTKFt-pvRWk_aRx

Did you know that my great-grandfather was a bricklayer? 

How EV predicts and calculates range and battery state of charge (SOC)

https://youtu.be/0Z4s6LYB7ls?is=d-1kjpYLxPPRresl

Range anxiety is countered by knowing exactly how much that you have left. Calculating it is not straightforward! 

Can't use voltage because a large portion of the curve is flat. 

Micro mini drone

https://youtu.be/wZlViCPCWJw?is=cjrgdRuPeiBwYjo-

I'm surprised how well the flight controller adjusts to the new configuration seamlessly and flies with stability. 

Subliminal messages increase strength and hostility

"death-related words were subliminally primed...We recorded handgrip force..,male participants in the priming-plus-self condition had a higher peak force output than the priming and control conditions" 

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00221/full

When people are exposed to death-related concepts—even flashing words like "death" subliminally for milliseconds—it activates unconscious existential anxiety. To cope with this hidden fear, the human mind clings tighter to its cultural values, beliefs, and familiar groups to regain a sense of safety and meaning...subjects frequently display heightened intolerance, harsher judgments, and increased hostility toward anyone who looks different, holds opposing views, or belongs to a different racial or social group.

https://youtube.com/shorts/JRqKwDU8Ocs?is=WQaZF9ReT0qe0RSq

High performance mini electric cars

https://youtu.be/ZPVpcTDi1kw?is=iEWEZKgK7ArI2K8Z

https://endofstaystudio.com/products/end-of-s-t-a-y-964-turbo-junior

High-performance miniature cars

https://youtu.be/ZPVpcTDi1kw?is=KoJ6BFlBve6s-wIF

Steam the ground as herbicide before planting

https://youtu.be/aLiV1jBtN1g?is=pkR0PvzGy9gJS4kb

See the difference at 2:18

WAMI wide-area motion imagery

https://youtu.be/cWbBsfwtCIo?is=FcDSbLoyAWbIjGVI

Developed to trace military bomb drop-offs back in time to their origin, this deep dive of modern wide-area, AI-assisted surveillance is, well, eye-opening. 

For more of a deep dive into thei technology, there's thie following book: "Eyes in the Sky," by Arthur H. Michel. 

High-tech cars may not keep up with software updates

https://youtu.be/_FfIx2cOEYs?is=cVWPAca1XV1PMQ0O

2:52 the average age of cars on the road has reached an all-time high of 12.8 years. 

Robot copies human movement

https://youtu.be/YJSw0Jf8DZ0?is=QAx6NlsCPqaxbrqU

A humanoid robot that can watch a human and immediately reproduce their movement. 

Every life form struggles to prevent cancer

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4rV5enjKEfROG6iqcSDt6E?si=gu-c0kooTQGy21BoXl9BGQ&utm_source=copy-link

45:20 from the very first multi cell organism onwards, life has been about cells shooting at each other to prevent one feel from becoming cancer. As soon as one cell starts replicating faster, it is naturally selecting for itself. 

Remote-controlled foam fire suppression nips fires in the bud

https://youtu.be/WIhP9-pz274?is=PjYWkd1_oCx-_Y0A

Thinning of forests, instead of clear-cutting

https://youtu.be/ggWBECTC81w?is=-Zlt7T5VoDMlHkOT

Keeping the large trees standing mitigates fire risk. The logging company realized they needed to fund the environmental analysis and re-tooled the mills to handle small logs. 

Timeline for tsunami modeled

I didn't realize it takes hours for a tsunami to traverse Puget sound. https://www.facebook.com/share/1CxTLwCxnz/

BYD EV for $7800

Interesting video explaining all the people losing money on cheap EV's from China, notably factory workers enduring "slavery-like" conditions, and billions of Chinese government subsidies. 

Have they started selling Chinese EV's in Canada? I heard the PM is allowing 49000 of them in under a reduced tariff (NPR story )

https://youtu.be/tp9PEj9rvzE?is=k0OHfv_V6C1l_kl-

A better lifeboat system

https://youtube.com/shorts/fDe_ya9VZcI?is=gdrGX-ETbhTQEA8h

This flexible escape shaft and self-inflating raft seem a lot gentler than the traditional design, and, as they point out, can deploy even if the shop is leaning at any angle.