hwillis

Also, weight is no longer an issue like it historically was. You used to march to a place and set up camp to fight; now you run patrols and missions. Soldiers need to carry packs and water and ammunition; every loadout will be heavy and cumbersome.

Transport and communications make heavy loadouts possible. Realistic sci fi would not have two armies sprinting at each other or dramatic last stands or light loadouts. Unfortunately that makes for extremely boring movies. People carrying 100 lbs of gear and ambushing each other, then sitting in cover and waiting for heavy fire support is not dramatic.

That said IMO there's a dearth of "heavies"- dress up some huge 7' guy with 4" thick plates of chunky armor and those leaf spring stilts and have him sprint around with a machine gun. That would be fun! If you have a massive population and elite soldiers then why does every single guy look incredibly normal?

Alao shoutout to edge of tomorrow for shaving the coolest power armor of any movie, even if it looked pretty dumb when they were just gliding around on wires. Tom Cruise sprinting in that getup looked awesome.

Translating: Normally you have a large single sensor per laser, which makes measurements at a very high rate. With flash lidar, you split the sensor up like an image sensor. In a normal image sensor, each pixel can collect light for a long time, but if you do that with lidar you have no distance resolution. The sensor is sitting idle 99% of the time, and you pay in sensitivity and accuracy.

Array sensors, MEMs, and phased arrays all struggle because they're all really good at small-angle differences, while the reason for scanning lidar is large-angle differences. Maybe one day we'll start making curved dies and it'll be easier to have a really wide FOV without needing multiple sensors.

That said a battery factory is a good place to put solar. The final stage of battery manufacturing is several priming charge/discharge cycles which build up resilient layers inside the battery. You can push power into/out of the grid (or use discharging batteries to charge other cells) but having a big DC source nearby is still going to be convenient.

Modernizing all the control systems etc is the nightmare. The ferries were already electric- all ferries are; they have diesel engines driving generators which drive electric motors. They still have the exact same generators running the same motors. The batteries are installed and ready even though they won't be used until the port is electrified years from now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkgT9Z8Z2RU

charitable foundations and donors. basically the same groups as "Sesame Street was brought to you by..."

GLP-1 is a hormone that is released every time you eat, and the drugs are virtually identical hormones at natural levels that take ~100x longer (half life of a couple hours) to be excreted. It's a tiny amount of one more peptide among millions- that part is certainly safe.

If there's any issue with the drug it would be from the constant activation of a natural hormone receptor. Like how anabolic steroids can hurt you, and TRT can affect your natural testosterone production. Maybe after 10 years it breaks your natural satiety system and makes you always/never hungry. That kind of thing would probably show up in mouse models.

Either way- obesity is the largest cause of lost years in the first world and it isn't close. If you are obese your whole life you die 10-15 years earlier and are sicker. It's not going to kill you as fast as untreated t2 diabetes, but in both cases it would be crazy not to take a drug that can just make those problems just go away.

It has approximate weights. Neuron connection strength is determined by the number of synapses (1-100s, sometimes 1000s), the type of synapse neurotransmitter, and the number of receptors. The connectome has 1 and 2 and is only missing 3. The number of receptors may not even be that important- the fact that the number of synapses is important may well mean the number of receptors is unreliable.

Neurons also don't transmit scalars to each other. The synapse is stimulate by frequency of action potentials much more than strength.

> And it doesn’t have a body.

It does have nervous connections outside the brain. That behavior is not as complex.

> Figuring out the behaviour of the neurons could take decades

Neurons are not that complex in terms of matching in->out behavior. Since spiking is frequency-based, you can verify it quite well by ensuring the frequency of spikes in->out matches; you can even measure single neurons with implanted electrodes. You don't need so much precision to see individual spikes, since the size of the spikes does not matter much at all.

Long term potentiation also makes measuring individual neuron strength even less important- if you model potentiation correctly, then over time you'll converge accurately as understimulated connections weaken and vice versa.

The real issue is we have barely any clue how potentiation works and can't model it well at all. It's very important to brain behavior and most of the interesting things brains do. Its kind of an issue.

With an air transport pilot flying 700 hours and making $220k annually, with 300 flights and 150 people per flight, that's <$5 per seat. The flight crew's wages are a very small part of the cost of a ticket.

> IndiGo, India’s largest airline, announced it would be an “early adopter” of a wrist-worn fatigue-monitoring device it was developing with French defense and aerospace company Thales Group.

That's toeing the line. If your employer is measuring things like your heart rate variability and blood pressure to figure out how close you personally are to a heart attack, and deciding whether it's worth it to cancel your flight so you can rest- that's abhorrent. It's somehow worse than the employer purchasing your health. It's planned obsolescence for people. How many people would drop dead a year after retiring? Horrifying.

The problem is not a lack of pilots or the needs of the country, either. There are foreign pilots and airlines. It's just pilots being driven far too hard by institutions. It won't go away when there are more pilots, it will just become calcified. This is a habit that should be ended through legal means, and fast.

[1] https://www.dgca.gov.in/digigov-portal/?page=jsp/dgca/Invent...

This is for a computer graphics conference, not an architectural conference. The point is to generate more-plausible interiors instead of copy-pasting the same layout. They are generating the feeling of more realistic spaces. You're the one coming in and saying that they don't know what they're doing, and trying to simplify an art into something you understand.

The excess sites will naturally be clustered together and weakly tend away from the interior walls. The optimizer prefers straighter walls, so it tries to cover the room in large cells (which have big straight edges) and then shove the rest of the points into a small area where they aren't affecting the internal walls. Thats why they tend to cluster into the center of internal rooms, or towards exterior corners where the wall is preset.

> we compute the norm of the tangent edge vector, which is equivalent to the norm of the 2D normal direction. Minimizing this loss has the following two effects: simplifying the wall between two adjacent rooms by penalizing its length, and aligning the boundary to the coordinate axis by making the coordinates of the tangent vector sparse in 2D.

The optimizer also seems like it should handle corridors okay as long as the corridor area is set to something reasonable. A corridor is just a room that is allowed to be long; since the other rooms will try to take up relatively square spaces you should be left with a long connecting area.

> And storage spaces have to be sized appropriately to their intended purpose: you don't want three-foot-deep shelves.

Like you said, this is the same minimum/maximum width problem that makes corridors wonky. I think this is relatively easily solved, though. A "minimum width" constraint is really just a requirement that no voronoi site is within X distance of a wall. A shelf is a sub-area in a room where there must be 2 borders within X distance of a voronoi point. Things like furniture and kitchen islands are also basically represented like that, as constrained areas.

A simpler alternative to complex per-point constraints would be to have area constraints per control point- a bunch of single-point "rooms" inside the actual rooms. In the case of a corridor, since the voronoi cells tend towards a square, you just need to set that area to the minimum width and they should avoid shrinking below that width.

Rectangularity is enforced by the wall loss function, which is adjustable.

> personal needs: some people need lots of storage space, some a room to play videogames, some a huge kitchen with an isle.

That's... the point. You decide you want your kitchen to be 20% bigger and the floor plan readjusts itself without needing somebody to draw up a new plan.

> With that said, I feel like this project might be good for less serious application like procedural game design, but is too naive for real architectural use.

Given that this is a paper submission to the Pacific Graphics conference, yes. Architecture is not really the point. You could also point out some much more obvious architectural needs, like the fact that houses need an outside too.

Likewise if you're more than about a meter away, the gradient has also dropped off and forces are much smaller.

Imagine a bubble around the entrance to the core: that's the danger spot where field gradients can be >3 T/m. Fun fact: take B^2/(2*u0) and you get units of Pascals. Magnetic pressure and fluid pressure can be thought about pretty similarly, except that free space is very impermeable and things like iron instead act like "holes" that can create strong flows between areas of different magnetic pressure. You can have a 3 T field separated from you by air, but if you stick a steel rod into it suddenly both ends of the rod will be at 3 T.

3 T works out to about 500 psi of magnetic pressure. If you have a small, 5 mm iron sphere in a 3 T/m gradient, the pressure difference across it is only ~2.5 psi. Size matters a LOT. 2.5 psi may be a slight tug; 50 psi may pull a wire straight through you. And 10 psi may be fine when it's embedded in you already, but given a distance to accelerate it can go pretty fast.

No. The drive unit of a Tesla + 4 battery modules weighs 500 lbs. That's 21 kWh, 80 miles of range and 500 horsepower. And 300 lbs of that is in the drive unit; more common conversion kits weigh ~150 lbs. You could use 500 lbs of regular lead car batteries and still get way more than 20 miles.

https://stealthev.com/product/tesla-performance-rear-drive-u...

https://www.evwest.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=40&pro...

But you can't take advantage of that without handling every specific make of car. You need to design a specific solution for each engine.

> If you can integrate the motor assembly into the wheel hub you don't need any kind of axle at all.

This has a lot of downsides; the unsprung weight is very high which makes the ride much harsher. It's also very hard on the motors because of the shaking. There's only a few inches of space to claim in a normal wheel well by replacing and widening the tire. If you replace the suspension knuckle you have to make it work for all different makes.

All that said, I do think there's an underserved opportunity for a drop-in solution that just replaces the engine. Basically the same thing you're proposing, but why keep the old engine?

Replace it, and you can make a series-parallel hybrid, which is the ideal type. It's an engine connected by a clutch and single reducer to the driveshaft, with a motor connected to the engine (or by gears). At low throttle the motor acts like a generator, using the opportunity to increase engine load, charge the battery, and run the engine in a more efficient torque. At high throttle the motor joins the engine, increasing power. At cruise, the motor freewheels. For short trips the engine disconnects and the car runs on battery. You don't need an additional generator, the engine gets an efficient shaft connection, and it can still run battery-only. Best of all worlds and IMO worth trashing the engine.

If you drop in a full unit with batteries etc you might need a few configurations for different engine bays, but you can just have a variety of mounting points for different makes. Plug into the radiator for cooling. Give a serpentine belt wheel for accessories, or just have an AC onboard and use a spool valve to split some off to col the batteries better.

Beating human locomotion in the general case is pretty far off. It's a combination of body plan, extreme optimization of joints and energy storage, and really good algorithms.

One killer feature of the human body is synovial fluid. It's very thin, non-newtonian, self-replenishing and contained in particularly low-friction bearing surfaces. It's certainly better than 99.9% of mechanical joints, because these surfaces filter, heal and re-lubricate themselves. Mechanical joints have sticky grease so they stay lubricated without maintenance, and work in the presence of water and grit. It's doubtful that any joint that doesn't heal itself can compete, long-term.

[1]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/durus-sri-ultra-efficient-humanoid...

What's even more shocking is that conversion of food to energy period is ~90% efficient, which is crazy to me. The fact that you can burn food and measure the energy given off, and that's very close to how much energy you get from eating it- that's insane.

The efficiency of the human body is all over the place. Muscles are only ~30% efficient, and the rest is waste heat... but humans walk using orders of magnitude less power than any walking robot. As far as I know we have never made a powered walking machine that is 10% as efficient as a person. The only way we can beat it is with a carefully balanced, specially-lubricated pair of legs that is leaned downhill on a treadmill and powered by gravity.