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[Reelya]

My brain is clearly not in future mode, because self-driving cars are apparently already a thing but we're still working out how that fits with our existing laws. Now we're at the point of asking not whether Tesla Autopilot cars are involved in accidents, but whether they're involved in more or less accidents per road mile than an averagely competent human driver.

Rather than the clean break from full-manual to full-auto that we might have imagined, this general easing in of AI features into cars is probably a more realistic way this stuff ends up in the market. The insurance people are the ultimate number-crunchers here: when those guys mandate that certain drivers have to have auto-pilot turned on to reduce their insurance premiums then you'll know the tech has come of age.

[MrRoboto75]

Like my 2020 car and its advanced cruse control.  It's able to detect its in lane and supposedly match speed with the car in front of it.  All you'd need is to teach it how intersections work, and hook it to the bluetooth phone GPS.

[bloop_bleep]

Like my 2020 car and its advanced cruse control.  It's able to detect its in lane and supposedly match speed with the car in front of it.  All you'd need is to teach it how intersections work, and hook it to the bluetooth phone GPS.

But also make it read signs, be aware of pedestrians and other obstacles, understand other cars' intentions, evaluate unusual situations on the road, ...

[Reelya]

Signs are for weak meat-brains.

[Starver]

Television bests Internet!

[Reelya]

People who are worried about 5G signals have no idea how lax RF emissions standards used to be.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/09/when-televisions-were-radioactive/570916/

tl;dr - back in the 1960s they discovered that most manufacturers of color TV sets made ones that were blasting viewers with X-rays.

[wierd]

A lot of CRTs can generate X-rays. Cathode Ray and X-ray sources are related technologies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_tube

The major difference being that CRTs aim the electron beam at a wide anode at the front of the CRT, and use it to excite phosphor material embedded on the inside of the glass, using a shadow mask and deflection plates, and typically run at lower voltages.

the X-ray tube is essentially a CRT, minus the deflection plates, and with a much smaller anode, driven quite a bit hotter.


As the article points out, it is the high voltages that give rise to the x-rays.  Later CRTs probably have a weaker flyback transformer, and fire a lower voltage electron beam.  This was likely made possible by better formulated color phosphors that needed less energy.  Still, any CRT is potentially an X-ray tube, given enough juice.


These days almost nobody is using a CRT, and LCDs are incapable of producing X-rays (that I know of anyway.. Maybe some old generation ones that use a CFL backlight, if the backlight is both high voltage, and poorly designed... But today's LCDs use an LED based backlight, and those are very low voltage.)

[Starver]

(I'm not even sure that was a CRT screen. Trying to work out whether that meant it was a pre-Digital Rollout TV. I suppose it could be being fed by SCART...  Anyway, I just thought you'd enjoy that. As with this, as I seem to be finding Technology/Engineering Fail things.)

So, a football club has a very smart coach to transport them around, with a very smart safety gadget fitted that sprays a fine alcohol solution around the interior as preventiative disinfectant.

It seems it already had a very smart safety gadget fitted that would prevent the coach from being driven if it thinks the driver is inebriated.

You already know the punchline.

[Starver]

Not (yet?) a tech failure: Jetpack helimedics!

Well, potentially. Can't help feeling this'll be (jet-powered-)pie-in-the-sky, with marginal gains[1], more for publicity (of both partners), but it's 'proven' engineering in and of itself...


[1] There's sometimes a trek from the safest landing place for the helimed unit to the casualty, and back with them on a stretcher. Maybe it could shave off time for the jetpack-pilot/medic to attend, if they can unpack an strap on and start up the thing quickly enough, but not obviously going to help any more on the return journey.

[wierd]

So, something not foolish for a change.


Recently, Mozilla's email client, Thunderbird, has started supporting encrypted email using GPG keys "intrinsically".  It no longer needs additional installs of GPG for windows, or Enigmail.

Once set up, it works transparently. 

I figured this was worthy of mention, even though almost nobody but super nerds like me will have any reason or desire to use encrypted email.

[wierd]

A curious device was demonstrated by the university of arkasas.

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-physicists-circuit-limitless-power-graphene.html

Uses thermal excitations in graphene to do work. Numerous curious applications.

[Rockeater]

ptw

[McTraveller]

Re: graphene thermoelectric power article:

I imagine Palpatine shouting "unlimited power!" rebutted by Inigo Montoya saying, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

[Egan_BW]

UNLIMITED
POWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

[Telgin]

I keep getting distracted by every news source repeating the meaningless unlimited power line, but it sounds like this is actually a pretty profound result if it does disprove Feynman's assertions like that article provides.  Something sounds fishy in general about this though.