Recent content by kjl

Do you really need to know exactly how the wind is pushing on the sails to such a fine degree? From your 3rd point (adding in multiple sails) it sounds like you are trying to design a craft of some sort, maybe? In which case it seems more important to know how hard, and in what direction...

That's not my video - I do not think it is "unfakable" in that there is always somebody willing to believe a bigger trick or conspiracy. ( ) Where I think that video could help people to understand is that the wind->propeller->gear->wheels system is non-intuitive, especially as used in your...

Or, for a more visceral demonstration that may or may not give you that "aha" moment, see: Pretend that the long toothed rod is "wind", and then the toothedRod->gear connection is basically just a 100% efficient prop. The vehicle moves faster than toothed rod in direction of travel. Oh...

"Perception" is not a weird, magical thing for which we need to resort to hand-wavy guesses and new theories. Dogs seemingly perceive things better than us for a number of reasons, but mostly because they have ~40 times as many chemical receptors in their noses, and the "smell" part of their...

Perhaps some of the coke froze, expanded, and increased the interior pressure enough to lower the freezing point...?

There may be some way of calculating the weight you should use, but it will change based on the distribution of the length of the lines. I think a key question is: if you find a line in your smaller square with one or more endpoints that lie outside the smaller square (so you only see a segment...

How about: (4&5) % 3 == 4 % 3 == 1 but (4%3) & (5%3) == 1 & 2 == 0

I don't know if anybody's ever figured out the phase diagram for Coke :) but it sounds like it has the same "backwards" property that water has (that increasing pressure will keep it as a liquid in colder temperatures), which makes sense, since it's mostly water. and see...

It should be possible, if not practical. I have no idea what the best mirror that we can currently build is, but wikipedia says a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_mirror" bounces 99.999% of light back. Log base .99999 of .1 is ~230,000, which means if we bounce light off of these...

I have no idea; he was talking about manipulating black holes and spinning particles around it so I thought we were in idealized physics land, not real world. :D He seemed surprised that you could store "arbitrary amounts of energy" in a finite package and was talking about evaporating black...

Absolutely; the gas being released takes up significantly more volume than the initial liquids and solids.

Do you really need anything so exotic? It seems to me a simple flywheel can store arbitrary amounts of energy. Spin faster, store more energy.

I wonder if, even ignoring this density gradient due to gravity, a ping pong ball would still stick to the interior of the balloon (if it happened to touch the edge first), not due to any density effects, but cohesion between the water molecules (assuming your plastic ping pong ball is hydrophobic).

I've seen this a bunch of times, from watches to my phone camera lens to my "waterproof" camera lens. I don't know for sure what it is, but would guess it's not atmospheric pressure, but simply temperature differences between the watch and the outside air. Just like breathing hot moist air...

Ah, see, I told you my calculus was old and rusty. I don't know what a Jacobian is. Maybe for your application, it would be better to rotate that sphere by 90 degrees. e.g. for every shaded point construct your sphere so that the pole lies somewhere on the plane of the surface, so that the...