HCIdivision17

It's not uncommon to contact the police so that a quick statement can be made and the paperwork logged. It seems to help with the insurance stuff and getting a third-party's eye on the scene.

Rockwell Automation did some work to modernize this with the ironically named retro-encabulator [0]. It follows the same principles, but uses the off-the-shelf parts we've come to appreciate from RA affiliates. GE was the main supplier of this updated version [1], and reviews show that its performance was excellent in the field.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w

[1] http://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/humor/ge-turbo-encabulator....

EDIT: There's quite a lot of controversy convering this area of reseach in the following decades. A more technical overview [2] on the turbo-encabulator's operations is discussed in an article covering Chrysler's tulmultuous efforts to apply it to their automotive line. The short of it is that despite being an impressive leap forward in technology, if mass produced it would generate dangerous quantities of DHMO [3]. It just goes to show how a small unexpected side effect can derail even well researched technical solutions.

[2] http://www.curbsideclassic.com/automotive-histories/automoti...

[3] http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

I got about 20,000K for that page. The animated page does seem to climb a bit, but now that I've reloaded the page, it doesn't seem to be that high, sticking around 21,000K. So... maybe it just wasn't releasing all the memory as fast or something in Chrome?

I've got 165,372K, which is still a bit high, but not that high. The Economist tab is at 97,144K, Outlook is 84,340, and HN is 28,016K.

I think part of it is from the GPU: my GPU memory was marginally smaller than Umbrella's tab's usage once I turn to it (and slowly went down to 95,000k when I left). So maybe it's the little droplets or something.

Believe it or not, I can just buy moonshine off the shelves where I live. I don't (because moonshine), but I could. It's a bit expensive and you can't buy gallon jugs of it, but it's there.

I really like IPython for that reason: it does what I expect. There's a bunch of magic, but they explicitly call it out as such. It's been built to handle that frustration.

I really like your explanation, and especially the final analogy. Sets the tone that we should be concerned with figuring out why all those factories are burning down. That shouldn't happen naturally. But you would generally not get in the way of the fire trucks putting the fired out: urgent and immediate help is needed, even if it's costly. Besides, the bill gets sent to the company in the end.

Yup. I suspect I (with likely a large number of people who tend to sites like this) would have no problem filling our time well. And for those that don't, I'd bet a good number of them could learn to :)

No doubt, but it's a problem I'm willing to struggle with :)

I think it's part of the worry people have had for ages and ages: what do you do idle? Do you find things to do? Or just stop doing things? Or do you create and/or learn a skill? Do you work harder to leverage it all for power?

Nicely put. This how I always think about economics: we've got plenty of numbers and models, but meaningfully large experiments are are to design without risking a lot of livelihoods. Science is brutal at scale, and I'm ever impressed with the techniques to make sense of the noise.

I'm not sure I understand; doesn't

  BOOK.LANGUAGE.eq("DE")

mean something like

  Book.Language = 'DE'

in SQL? That's certainly a boolean expression. I've only started reading the manual, though, so it's possible I got the semantics wrong, but I've had SSMS point out to me this sort of thing before.

Well, I liked it at least. It enhances the game in the same way jumping from 16bit to 64bit makes a lot of stuff nicer. It doesn't fix fundamental deficiencies, but it makes the good stuff gooder. Being able to just look at the mirror instead of pressing a key feels way better and is far more natural.

But you gotta give 'em points for mapping the FOV control to the 'seat position' (or something close).

Euro Truck Simulator 2 is pretty damn good. I haven't seen it mentioned here yet, but people are more than happy to put scores of hours on that game. And the VR really improves it.

I think there's a good argument to be made that the sooner we make this tech boring, the better. I want this stuff to be off-the-shelf, got-it-by-default now. When it's fully proliferated and cheap with loads of Stack Overflow-like answers and tutorials for it (like phone accelerometers and motion capture software), the sooner we'll really start developing and digging into the cool stuff. And get the crufty stuff out of the way.

But I fundamentally disaggree that it's less interesting. I'm going to assume you're just jaded by the awesome we're constantly surrounded by instead of just taking the easy, boring interpretation. Even 2D animation is advancing where you wouldn't expect (I found the technical work giving the artists better control on The Paperman surprising [0]). New rendering philosophies, networking algorithms, AI/bots, social integration, all of this leads to a refinement that's well worth the effort.

It took a long, long time to get from oscilloscopes [1] to the Occulus, and hopefully in a couple generations we'll have even cooler stuff. Expect to see demos and then have to wait a while for the hard, brutal engineering work to make it actually usable [2].

For the Occulus, the real win is getting the feedback loop between a just-good-enough-monitor and the accelerometer down to few enough milliseconds the brain can kinda fall for it. Like a cartoon, but for motion feedback. Expect other companies to say "I can do better" and let the races begin. The Occulus is a big deal, and better stuff is just a little bit away.

Don't be jaded! Real cool stuff is in the pipe!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZJLtujW6FY [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_for_Two [2] http://dougengelbart.org/events/1968-demo-highlights.html

Hear, hear! I have a DK2 and the experience with E:D is stunning. It's got a brutal screen door effect in pixelation, hurts my face after 20 minutes (I need to wear glasses under it), can make you mildly motion sick, and is pretty low resolution. And it's awesome. I can't help but think about how much I loved Privateer when I was a kid, and this is better in every way, times 10. The little stuff like looking at a thing while flying and the interface highlights and tags it with no mouse/keyboard input - the first time that happens it feels like the damn thing is reading your mind. It's merely calculating where you're looking, but it feels unreal.

The actual experience is great despite enormous product flaws. I'm thrilled there's so many options coming down the pipe, as that will make the

I think this is the actual study:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1966000...

I fundamentally dissagree that it was trivial, but I worked on large vacuum systems and feel a bit close to the topic. But I also fundamentally agree that the experimentation was barbaric and cruel. But... I also don't see how we could have worked around it. I hope it's some consolation that they never doubly-exposed the dogs; I'm actually surprised that wasn't attempted.

Unshielded hard vacuum is horrific. The problem isn't that it's awful - that's obvious - but exactly how does it affect the body? (I've sealed a hole with my hand and got a hickey, but I've never been immersed in it.) Even today, studying things in a vacuum is difficult; it's always behind a think layer of material that's hard to observe through, and even with cleverness you're testing through the neck of a bottle or only looking back on data logged by some gizmo. And there are a lot of confounding variables; narrowing the time-to-unconciousness/death was the most critical, and each test batch needed multiple samples to make sure no data was wasted. One note that came out was that it seems clearly better to recompress with pure oxygen; would that fire hazard be worth the risk in space (especially after Apollo 1), or would they need to design a mechanism to temporarily mange it? I could see that argument having a significant impact on the cabin design.

But yeah. We can do better. A damn sight better. We can illuminate and record and monitor so much better. A couple years ago I stuck a 20 dollar pen camera in a machine and captured video - with sound - at such an unbelievably higher resolution and fidelity than what they had eked out at incredible cost; it's downright heartbreaking to think what they could have done today instead. Hell, we could probably now just simulate portions of the effects.

I'd hope the scale of this experiment would never need to be repeated today. We're likely at the point where we can risk learning from accidents now.

Addendum: Here's an interesting clip about a year later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO8L9tKR4CY EDIT: `curtis beat me to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819055

I wouldn't pay too much heed to the commentary, since we can be sure the test pilot's survival wasn't miraculous at all - he was repressurized fast enough survival was very likely. But you can see how primitive it was, and how little was understood. That one accident was so useful, simply because the subject was concious for a few seconds and could talk about it.

I'm glad (at least hopeful) we're past that sort of groping in the dark.

EDIT: Whoops, Apollo 1 happened two years later. I remembered it had a full oxygen environment for - IIRC - keeping the astronauts more alert and safer at low pressures. I'd be interested to know if that was informed by the dog/chimp study, and if they only reversed their decision for a full oxygenated cabin after the crew burned alive. These days I just assume all safe industry/procedures came from someone's loss.

You're right, but one of the main issues is that you probably don't have enough strength in your lip muscles and throat to keep the air in without outside pressure. A single ATM of pressure is easy to leak, and your body is undergoing some real nasty expansion problems; As the sibling commenter notes, too, holding your breath is likely dangerous, as your internal chest cavity may not be able to apply enough compressive force to hold the air in. (And microscopically your lung will try to inflate excessively, leading to internal bleeding, I think.)

There's a really cool idea for a spacesuit that's basically just a fabric wet suit that's just really compressive (via electromuscles or cinched bands or w/e). That way your body gets the ability to hold onto the gas in your lungs without the risk of your lungs attempting to expand out your gut and throat.

It's an interesting idea though: what if you could train your abdomen and chest to compress a lung full of air in a vacuum? Then you just gotta keep your mouth and nose shut somehow. (It'd be really difficult - it'd take a force like trying to inflate a car tire with your mouth. Possible, but seems hard.)

Almost everything we know on the topic came from those dogs and the people who suffered accidents. It's the really unpleasant side of industrial and extreme environment danger: intuition just isn't enough to make big decisions on. The alternative is learning through trial and error, and industrial accidents teach us that is enormously bloody, expensive, and reactionary.

If it helps, every major write-up on the topic talks about what the dogs went through. A high price was paid, but they aren't forgotten nor did they suffer in vain - and most made a full recovery in fairly short order. You can be sure countless lives across space exploration will be saved because we'll know who can be saved and what's needed to bring them back.

This kind of illustrates that it's not that your blood boils or anything crazy like that, but rather that without external pressure, your body relies on your squishy flesh to hold the internal pressures in check. So you'll get a full-body hickey/swelling and the bends (though deep sea divers can, of course, suffer far worse since their internal pressure can be multiple atmospheres). If you've any exposed mucus membranes, expect them to off-gas and to start to freeze on the surface.

But all that takes time to really set in, so you've got a minute or so before you're really hurt. By that time, your real problem is simply that you've stopped breathing, which turns out to be a big deal.

Remember: vacuum is first and foremost an asphyxiant!

(Re asphyxiant, here's my favorite story on the topic: http://www.sciforums.com/threads/vacuum-pockets-and-safety-n... )

There's a lot at work in the optics of this stuff. When you say "whatever doesn't stand out is unworthy of attention", I think it's fairer to say "whatever doesn't stand out isn't seen", as in is below the threshold of detection. A crossing guard's blinking red light can be invisible in some times of day/year, and at night everything that isn't well lit is just some shade of shadow, which looks an awful lot like unoccupied air. For the avoidance systems, I think we're really going to net win on that, since they'll need to see things that aren't well illuminated, like fallen trees and ditches. (I really, really hope so at least.) Basically, the systems will have better eye sight than us.

In a lot of ways, I think this is a form of faking a HUD for people. We want humans to shine, like there's an OLED display overlay pointing at people or like a thermal imager behind walls. Reflective paint does that really well - at least it makes clothing-shaped blobs hovering in mid-air - but I think the intensity is merely that car lights are bright, so the retroreflection is far brighter than the little LED lights people tend to buy. You need something that a motor vehicle driver considers conspicuous, which is going to be something with the lumen output of a head light or brake light. In the video you linked, the bike's red tail light really isn't really bright enough, but the jacket absolutely is unmistakable. And blinking things really are great, since movement catches attention nicely (so long as bright-vs-dim has enough contrast). The bobbing retroreflecting foot pedals in the clip show they're an excellent tell-tale of a bike on the road.

That was the first rule of the motorcycle training course: you're harder to see. Worse, I've had people seem to make eye-contact with me and pull out, and then saw the shock on their face when they actually noticed me; someone once described it as a bad check, where they're looking for cars, and since you're not a car the road's clear. (It's such a confusingly bad heuristic, too, since people seem to do that to trains and trucks as well.)

So to help things along, it's useful to be conspicuous. In overcast, low-contrast weather, I'd love for this stuff for my chaps when it's cold and drizzly.

EDIT: I wonder what the high viz stuff triggers in terms of object collision warnings in the head. Like, perhaps it seems like a sign, and that makes a person double check they're still on the road? I have that sort of knee-jerk check when someone with bright blue headlamps get behind me, since that color in a mirror used to invariably mean police.

Yup, looking back TVTropes linked to it; not sure how I missed it the first time. It's one of my favorite lines, but I always have a hard time searching for it. At least I'll be able to find it through via the sideways channel of your comment now!

When I watched Tomorrowland, this is the idea that struck me: that it had been a long time since I've seen anyone who was so determined to be optimistic.

There's a really great quote I came across in a comic [0]:

  Max: Fear is easy. Fear is cheap. 
    Instead of fear, we're going to give the people hope. 
  Sam: Fear vs. Hope. Hardly an even match. 
  Max: That's because you think of hope as something light
    and fragile. My version of hope has calluses and dirt
    under the fingernails and isn't past bringing brass
    knuckles to a fight.

I like to think there's a sort of grinding optimisim that really gets things done. Where people slog through the hard work, slowly and gradually dragging us to a slightly better future. You can knock a lot down with some FUD conflagration, but there's some stuff that will be lasting. And this article highlights stuff that will - at least - last a couple decades.

[0] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/Freefall

I think there should be a category of "there I fixed it" just for over zealous welders. I worked with a robot that had an aluminum tool that got mangled every time the robot got in a fight with the lift table. This was a Kuka 450 (as in kg), and it could really stack. A maintenance guy thought it was an enormous chore rebuilding the tool each time, so he bolted (literally) a 3/8 inch steel plate to the thin aluminum a frame. And when that tore welded the whole shebang. Next time the robot snapped its wrist, since the tool could no longer buckle and absorb the impact, and it rather impressed the service engineer with the... sturdiness of the tool.

I wanted to share the story about environmental's efforts to put gas meters on the safety release valves on our large liquid argon dewars, but we thankfully convinced them that accidentally blowing a crater in the plant was a worse OSHA violation than upsetting our local regulators. (An accident in a nearby county with a truck hauling liquid gas dewars resulted in a death by displacing all the air in the intersection with Argon, leading the inert gas to be classified as a dangerous controlled substance that needed to be monitored and metered...)

"The Long Earth" - Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter - First in trilogy about parallel worlds; the combination of those two authors makes it both fanciful and grounded, which is a bit odd.

"Clockwork Rocket" - Greg Egan - First in the Orthagonal trilogy; An alien story where physics is different.

"Seveneves" - Neal Stephenson - Goes great with the recent hard sci-fi space movies.

EDIT: "What-if" - Randall Munroe - Saw this on another list and need to make sure is shows up as often as possible. This is the thing to hand every kid as part of their back-to-school pack.

Just as a small follow-up, there's a few videos that precedes that one where you can glimpse a bit of its inner workings: (Part 1 of 3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejbC9Oaor2E

Certainly not everyone, to be sure. Really, I'm sorta griping about that lady who's like "But can it play other songs?" It seemed remarkably ungracious. A lot of the crowd jokes were kinda lame, but that's my projection of an overly-reverential attitude about it.

My comment really does a disservice to the useful comments/questions. Like "why try to build a pipe organ?" which honestly I think we all wanted to ask.

And - full disclosure - I would have totally wasted my chance to ask something meaningful, as I woulda gone full stupid basking in the presence of it.

It's a real shame the croud is a bit... unsophisticated. The machine is an utter work of genius. People have made video games that revolved around less sophisticated and featureful puzzle boxes. And it's made entirely of wood. It's got logic gates. It plays music. It has tons of puzzle locks. It's gorgeous.

I think it's entirely fair that he claims on the site that it's the coolest desk in the world. I would love just to see all the things it can do - heck I'd pay for that short video.

This is a sane idea, but sunrise is often far later than when people are expected to get up 'early'. And add the crazy that DST is to one's schedule, and waking up early becomes a very strange, shifting ideal. (Lately, I've heard 4am to 5am match this ideal; personally I like to have attainable goals, like slouching into work before the crack of noon.)

While it's certainly no coincidence, there's a lot of confounding reasons. The industrial revolution's timing of shift work placed a very long-lasting and extremely strong weight on punctuality. And that punctuality often run 24/7, meaning that the clock's crucial tipping points often landed at unpleasant hours like 7am (be at your station at 7am, which means getting there between 6:30am and 6:45am, which means leaving the house by 6am, which means waking by 5am...)

Add that a lot of people who work physically hard in that sort of tiring shift work (especially people my parent's age) learn to consider early rising a moral virtue and a badge of worth, and you've got a lot of pressure to hold it up as an admirable standard. It can get pretty silly, to the point that I've seen people promoted for punctuality despite a record of poor performance; factories are different, of course, but America was built on the power of heavy industry, so it's a philosophy that pervades. To wit: even in fields where work spans months instead of hours, getting up daily 'before your competitors' gives you an 'edge'. It's a really odd notion if you look at it closely.

On the other hand, I find the added mild stress of waking early, combined with a ritual (absolutely and especially like making coffee as noted in the article) helps me have an excellent start to the day. I don't usually do that, but I really like it when I do.

Waking early is nice, so long as I'm not horribly sleep deprived to start; or so stressed that I can't fall asleep early.

EDIT: I should note that I'm just skimming the surface here. That industrial timing may really be rooted in how trains had to be critically on-time, which forced plants to be ready or miss the ride, and vice-versa. The whole topic is stressful to read about, but really interesting.