The detonation produces higher pressure and temperature, causing higher exhaust gas velocities. More energy in the exhaust means more push from the same amount of propellant. About 15% more. The other yet to be realized in practice advantage is that by eliminating the compressor stages on a rocket engine its construction is simplified, and despite needing a much stronger combustion chamber, it could actually be lighter.
If it can live up to more efficient, cheaper, and lighter then it will certainly see widespread use.
There are bound to be issues with new larger designs, but nothing show stopping is expected.
> Most companies decided to just pull diesel cars from the US market, and it turns out that all of the ones that stayed were tricking the tests in one way or another.
That's just not true. There were three options, stop selling diesels, implement a selective catalytic reduction system, cheat the test. All three were done.
> That's just not true. There were three options, stop selling diesels, implement a selective catalytic reduction system, cheat the test. All three were done.
What you are saying isn't accurate. A selective catalytic reduction system wasn't sufficient to pass the test without also cheating. Many of the affected VW cars did have selective catalytic reduction. Post lawsuit required fix these cars now use MASSIVE amounts of urea requiring constant refills, wear out the SCR components frequently on short intervals, and don't have nearly the performance they were designed to have. These companies were unable at the time to figure out how to get vehicles, even with SCR to have the performance and reliability buyers were expecting without also cheating on the tests. After the VW scandal, it was later found that BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, Fiat Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan, and several other companies were all also cheating. I am not aware of a single diesel passenger vehicle sold in the ~2009-2016 time period in the USA that wasn't later found to be cheating on emissions tests.
>I'm actually surprised that there isn't more direct action against overly aggressive drivers.
What direction action could a cyclist take on a car driver that intentionally buzzed them while passing? I suppose if you happen to catch up to them at a light you could vandalize their car. Make a habit of doing that and you'll wind up the victim of an unfortunate accident that no one will be punished for.
I'm sure there are logistical hurdles to this that aren't occurring to me, but I was basically thinking along the lines of posting GoPro videos with visible license plates to an online community of like-minded folks and "allowing nature to take its course", so to speak.
It's generally been my experience that online communities of cyclists tend to have fairly high moral standards (for example, every single one I'm in has very strict and explicit rules against sexism, racism, homophobia, etc) and vigilantism isn't really even joked about. People will get plenty upset and outraged, but I've never seen people even joke about harming a driver in an incident, even when they caused substantial injury or even death.
Literally all we want is for people to be held legally accountable - in both the criminal and civil sense.
That aside, vigilantism is by and large something that only ingroups can "get away" with. When outgroups do them, things generally end very poorly for them. Politicians, press, police, courts, etc would never abide violence by cyclists. I mean, for chrissakes, cyclists are subject to incessant violence by motorists and nobody bats an eye.
I think maybe the better answer is to give that to the cops. And if you're unhappy with enforcement, elect different politicians. A major reason we have a justice system to begin with is so we don't have vigilantes.
I think it really boils down to, they need a near future myth for investors to speculate their stock price up. That myth is, ubiquitous, always-on AR is just around the corner, and they're going to be the platform it runs on.
Reminiscent of the Uber play - once it was widely noticed they couldn't drive costs down enough to achieve profitability, there needed to be another narrative to maintain optimism in the company.
And so the narrative changed, from:
"through the magic of {pixie dust technology} we can make providing chauffeur services so cheap it would be hugely profitable"
to
"we will replace all the human drivers with robots, any day now"
Of course, that future was much, much further away than purported, but it certainly was useful for pumping up optimism in a company where the present-day situation isn't necessarily favorable.
FB's money-printing products seem to be facing major headwinds. They're scandal-wracked, user growth is plateauing heavily especially in the most profitable markets, and a fast-moving competitor is rapidly eating into their most coveted growth areas and they seem unable to convincingly fight the trend. A narrative shift is certainly needed for them.
I would add this is as much about recruiting as the stock price. The scandals are crushing morale. Top engineers can go work at Apple and build the actual devices that enable FB, TikTok, etc. Or they can go work to transition the planet to sustainable energy at Tesla. Or go work on making life interplanetary at SpaceX. Or they can go build spyware, aimed at convincing people to buy shoes, at Facebook.
They needed a more exciting vision to continue to attract top talent, which is generally a prerequisite for a high stock price anyway.
Problem is, if Uber recent news are anything to go by, in the current environment investors aren't interested in promises, they want to see results and they want to see them now.
Uber literally just forecasted positive cash flow by the end of this year, and the stock tanked. FB banking on a far future R&D move is not likely to fly well with investors. Most certainly not in the near future.
Oh I fully agree, investors won't be nearly as credulous with FB as they were with past companies with wildly optimistic visions (and not nearly such rosy results in reality) like WeWork or Uber.
I think it's both a function of investors having been burned in the recent past with unicorns failing to deliver on their lofty promises, but also the reality that FB has suffered significant (read: catastrophic) reputation damage from the endless stream of scandals. FB employees seem to have an inexhaustible belief that they can weather any storm without permanent harm, but I suspect that isn't actually true.
More than that, the narrative shift isn't convincing. At least with Uber they had fancy robot cars to show off, even if they didn't work. What does FB have to convince us of the metaverse future? A lot of expensive CGI-rendered "concept reels" and very little actual product that is actually here (or imminent). The recent Superbowl ad did not contain a single frame of actual product footage - nor did the "fake" product in any way resemble anything FB has announced!
And the little that does exist (Horizon Worlds) is... really... really... painfully bad. The fact that FB has even let the public at these experimental products (rather than iterate internally) is baffling.
As someone who's been in the consumer tech space for a really long time the strategy here is just mind-boggling. The company continues to pitch no actual product - it has remained frustratingly vague about what the metaverse even is - but also insist at the same time that the entire company is reorienting around it. What little is released is shockingly poor - to the point where one wonders if these half-baked products will poison the well against a better thought-out and genuinely useful product further down the line. It reeks not of visionary thought and more dragging whatever you can out of the experimental arm of the company to try to cement the narrative shift.
This seems like the most plausible explanation to me. But Zuckerberg does also seem weird and unsocialized enough to actually believe there's potential in the metaverse.
A future myth? They've been printing money for over a decade now. Their first positive net income was 2009. Apart from last quarter, they're still gaining users every year, sometime double digit percentages. They were able to squeeze multiple times the revenue out of their user base than other social networks.
If they execute on VR half as well as they did their core product than the hype is real
Yes, exactly. This is just like Uber and self-driving cars…only instead of “this will lower our costs and finally make us profitable!” it’s “this is another platform where we can have infinite growth!” It’s a tacit acknowledgement that the days of wild growth for their existing platform are over.
Take the money from public education and fund vouchers. Those vouchers aren't going to get you into the good private school, you'll need money on top of the voucher for that. They get you in the school that prepares your for life in prison. https://time.com/101440/new-orleans-charter-schools-shouldnt...
If you look at the economic backgrounds and general location of students you will find that is the true predictor of educational outcomes (on average) rather than whether that child is at a charter or public school.
>weekly pediatric hospitalizations peaked at 7.1 per 100,000 children, which is about four times higher than delta's peak rate of 1.8 per 100,000.
Maybe more than .0007%? You are orders of magnitude more likely to be struck by lightning over the course of your lifetime than to be hospitalized by COVID as a child [0].
7.1 in 100k is 0.0071%, not 0.00071%, off by a factor of 10.
Your lightning strike source states your lifetime chances are "1 in 15,300", which is slightly less likely than 7.1 in 100k (= 1 in 14,084), so, you are more likely to be hospitalized by COVID as a child right now than be struck by lightning over the course of your lifetime.
Personally I wouldn't want any of the children in life to be hospitalized with COVID or struck by lighting, which is why we take precautions regarding COVID and don't let children play outside in thunderstorms.
I remember literally over 5 years ago hearing from someone at a big auto-manufacturer, and they just explained, they can't afford to have their cars known for killing people. They sell a shit tonne of cars, and if they start running people over they're done. It'd be an extinction level event for their brand, and probably a serious knock to the entire industry. Apparantly Tesla is happy to take that risk. it's not that Tesla is more advanced, it's that they're happy making claims that no other company in an industry obsessed with safety would make.
Imagine Volvo, but instead of Volvo you have a company that distinguished themselves by their lack of interest in safety.
Only recently looking at cars, what I have found interesting is collision detection and automatic breaking. It seems some manufacturers have a reputation for getting it right, and other manufacturers a reputation for a terrifying feature that drivers disable due to it going off at exactly the wrong time.
I find my father-in-law’s Volkswagen T-Cross terrifying to drive. If it’s not distracting you with shrill warning beeps and bongs, it’s getting confused and slamming on the brakes at every slick or shiny surface. It is unquestionably more dangerous than if it just left the driving to me.
Hard to understand how people have affection for this brand.
...Because they weren't daft enough to commit to emplying blackboxes with no means of formal proofing to a safety-critical operation. Musk's approach is a massive public safety no-no. The cost of specifying and proving through trial the capabilities of what Musk is aiming for is the work of several lifetimes. Musk and Tesla just fucking YOLO it, yeeting out OTA's that substantially change the behavior of an ill-tuned system whose behavior can't even be reliably enumerated; and sinking the operational risk in drivers on the road.
Sometimes, conspicuous lack of progress is a good thing. It isn't something you necessarily appreciate until you suddenly start having to confront the law of large numbers in a very real and tangible way. Some incremental changes simply are not feasible to take until they are complete. Level 3 automation is one of those...
There is no solution to self driving that doesn’t involve a black box. The safety of the system is easy to measure. When there are fewer interventions than accidents for a solid chunk of time, FSD will be safer. It could eventually reach 1 intervention per hundred thousand accidents, if you would just let them continue.
> When there are fewer interventions than accidents for a solid chunk of time, FSD will be safer. It could eventually reach 1 intervention per hundred thousand accidents, if you would just let them continue.
And in the meantime, I and other drivers, cyclists, pedestrians are subject to increased danger for what? Oh, Tesla's profits? Forgive us if we don't all see this as an acceptable tradeoff.
They aren’t in any danger. The guy driving in the video is crazy and not disengaging when the car is misbehaving. With your hand brushing the wheel, a person can regain full control of the vehicle well before there is any danger. And yes, I would like to see not only Teslas profits go up, because they are the only company doing self driving, I would also just like to see this project move forward. It’s the coolest project in the world and if it succeeds it will save millions upon millions of innocent lives.
Furthermore if you really were so edge-of-your-seat scared of traffic fatalities then Tesla would be at the bottom of your list. Why don’t you go do something about the droves of people that stream out the back of bars and into their cars every night? They kill thousands every year meanwhile Tesla has killed roughly zero people.
It really doesn't matter whether the driver should or should not be disengaging, there are many, many studies categorically proving that "allowing the driver to be mostly relaxed and not required, only to require immediate intervention in dangerous situations" is absolutely, empirically less safe. You can't just white wash it away by "oh well, it will get better". When? And don't mention a word about Elon's opinion on when. The guy has been promising "this year" every single year for nine years now. More realistic estimates have this a decade, or two, away, at the very earliest. And I have huge doubts that when it does, Tesla will be nowhere near it. Their phantom braking fiasco proves just how horrific Tesla's approach to testing is, throwing multiple releases out into the wild with less than 72 hours between them, for absolute safety features. Anyone who claims that those releases were subject to any form of rigor in testing whatsoever is deluded, and anyone claiming that testing it on the public roads is somehow acceptable is equally deluded.
I am very, very well aware of exactly what causes traffic fatalities. According to the software at my work, I have personally responded to 378 fatality MVAs as a paramedic. Please don't try to assume everyone is ignorant about realities - we are not blindered, and only physically capable of recognizing and responding to one danger at a time.
You can't ask people to use a driving aid and not end up less focused. With advertising, "infotainment" (which is really disguised entertainment), music, oustide environment and passengers it is already hard for a driver to focus on his driving. You can't expect any human being short of people paid for that to keep hands brushing the wheel and feet ready to slam the brakes.
Having said that I am not sure most people are safer for cyclists and pedestrians. FSD is in such a bad state right now that the tesla is driving in the streets at the speed 80y old people do. What I saw in a video is a car that drive at a similar pace to a cyclist, it is even much slower in the crossing sections.
And however much Tesla likes to say "Oh, yes, yes, the driver should be paying full attention", everything else they say and do says the opposite. Latest example is the update that rearranged some of the climate control and added/updated some larger hot buttons at the bottom of the screen. Not all functions are available to be pinned at the bottom. You get a limited choice, which includes Netflix.
So to be clear you can have an always available hot button for Netflix, but not for climate control. All Tesla's handwaving is entirely bullshit. "The driver is in the seat for legal purposes only. The car is driving itself."
> There is no solution to self driving that doesn’t involve a black box.
LIDAR greatly reduces the "black box" necessity. It basically allows you to do things like "if object is in the way then hit brake/move elsewhere", where the sensor doesn't really fail in good weather.
Given its safety over DL-only solutions, this should be step 1 to getting to FSD. Not reckless beta-testing with black box techniques.
Tesla has chosen the cheap way, which is also the irresponsible way.
I'd rather my car's safety systems be later to market but proven safe, than early to market and have me and the others around me as unpaid beta testers.
That half-life is obviously applicable only at a given temperature and at a given humidity, because water or similar substances are required to hydrolize, i.e. break, the bonds between nucleotides.
If the DNA molecule is immobilized in a solid, either by freezing or by extreme drying, the half-life will be much longer.
That half-life was for bird bones preserved at 13.1 Celsius degrees.
Even in this paper it was mentioned that at minus 5 Celsius degrees some information from the DNA should remain even after 1 million years.
Unfortunately, there are very few, if any, places on Earth where ancient DNA would have the chance to be preserved for a long time either by freezing or by extreme drying.
Look at the link! Claim of possible DNA from a dinosaur. It’s a bold claim (although carefully caveated) but doesn’t seem crackpot to me, especially considering there are other surviving macromolecules like proteins in soft tissue from dinosaurs.
https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/7/4/815/5762999?login=f...
For now the claim is for possible DNA fragments from the cartilage of a dinosaur, with a length of at least 6 nucleotides, but there is no evidence yet that the fragments are long enough to have preserved any useful information. It is likely that fragments with a length of at least a few hundred nucleotides would be needed.
The paper that started this thread was not about the decomposition of the individual nucleotides, which might be preserved even from dinosaurs, but about the speed of the fragmentation of the DNA molecule, which causes a continuous loss of information until the fragments are so short that no useful information remains.
I certainly hope that we will find cases of extremely lucky preservation of long DNA fragments that are more ancient than what was found until today.
Until now, the oldest DNA that was preserved well enough to allow sequencing of significant parts of it had an age of up to a few tens of thousands of years, e.g. from mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, cave bears, cave lions, Neanderthal humans etc.
The impact that killed the dinosaurs surely ejected some rocks into space. I wonder, what are the odds there's still some space rock floating around the solar system today, holding some ancient DNA, preserved by the cold of space. Perhaps even in nearby Moon or Mars surface?
If it can live up to more efficient, cheaper, and lighter then it will certainly see widespread use.
There are bound to be issues with new larger designs, but nothing show stopping is expected.