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Comment by NikkiA | Hacker News Reader

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NikkiA·

LineScan is basically a digital version of the circular flow system used in horse racing since 1937.

https://www.donttakepictures.com/dtp-blog/2019/5/8/winning-b...

(which IIRC was a plot point in a Columbo episode one time - but wasn't every interesting piece of tech?)

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This is brilliant, thanks for posting. Things like this make me miss my deceased father. I would love to discuss this with him. He was the only person I knew of that genuinely loved thoroughbred horse racing for the beauty of the animals and for the sport. We would camp out right on the finish line at Belmont park (and often on random weekends when the place was mostly empty) and stay put for hours waiting for the Belmont Stakes. He was an amateur photographer and once got a press pass to photograph from the trench along the outside of the track. I noticed the tall narrow mirror mounted to the finish line pole, and he said it was for the photo finish camera but, not much elaboration beyond that.

Another interesting takeaway is that because you are taking a single line capture the pixel distance equates to time not to distance like a normal image.

What that means is that if you pick two points on the car, you can measure that distance in pixels and multiply by the frequency to get change in time. Divide the actual physical distance of those two points by that result and you know how fast the car was traveling.

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