Recent content by 256bits

They put swimming pools on the top of high rise buildings, for the view. So far safe. In an earthquake, the water will slosh back and forth if the building sway frequency matches the resonant slosh frequency of the pool water. Instances where the seige in the pool is so severe, the wave...

More dangerous as a spectator than contestant. I have seen videos....

Just wondering... Are people ready for an autonomous robot pothole machine on their street? They might be wary of a road machine wandering around in its own and demand a human supervisor as a safety precaution, so that some curious kid doesn't get too close and end up as pavement. Any liability...

In a sprawling, 165-page essay that became required reading in Silicon Valley, the former OpenAI researcher positioned himself as a kind of prophet for the coming age of artificial super intelligence. The crash marks a dramatic turn for Aschenbrenner, who launched the fund after gaining...

Already been done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Nano_Hummingbird. Flapping wing drones are easier to make than what one would think from narrator in the video seems to imply. They have been around for quite some time. Glidder --> flap the wings a bit --> propelled flight. Drone...

That is scary! The human mind will not be able to keep up with the extremely rational and logical thinking of silicon. Capt Kirk was wrong. It is not the robots that will self destruct due to 'does not compute, ... ".

Interesting using the concept of persistence of vision for their drone model. Always a new idea cropping up, At a spin rate of 25 rps ( 1500 rpm ) of the drone body, the eye can just not keep up. A stroboscope would be able to stop action the spinning machine. The fan in my window does the...

pretending I do not understand English, I fathom the mooses are saying: Moose 1 - Who is that nice filly over there? Moose 2- Must be new to the area, I neither have seen herbivore.

In the news media, reports to the extent to which kids are manipulated is minimal from earlier years of the internet and social media when some cases drew attention. At least it appears that way. And yet, folks did draw attention to their younger kids, who had no say in the matter, by posting...

A while back ( 10 years or so ) someone told me their child had to delete their account on Facebook due to being under 16, maybe under Biden. Under Trump, the tech social media switched sides so that might not now be as much of a concern. But a lost account is lost revenue. Some oversight...

Here is a representations of 2 spheres, one 9% larger in volume than the other due to phase change of water from liquid to solid.

One can calculate the radial increase from the volume boost due to the phase change. For a container of stretchy material that expands willingly, ( such as thin rubber balloon ) A 9% increase in volume translates into a 2.9 mm difference from initial inner radius to final. The outer radius...

And others have lost their shirt on failed stock purchases. Movement from one grouping to another is not disallowed for any one individual. The statistics apply to the group behavior, and can attempt to predict overall future trends from past data. If based on only wealth, the economic...

Very good questions I must admit, and not without merit. One would tend to think that the 'pressure' of the ice would shrink the bubble size according to PV=nRT, hence the thermodynamic reference. Consider an arch or dome under external load. The material of the dome becomes stressed and resists...

Isn't that where light bends when passing from one medium to the next?