The ridiculously dramatic drop in power we dedicate to lighting is one that is just tough for folks to internalize. As you said, used to, you could have ~10 lights in your house that would add to upwards of 1kw. Nowadays, you can have 50 lights and barely hit 500w. Just mind blowing how far we dropped energy on those.
Same goes for televisions. Your modern TV is probably closer to the basic light bulbs before LEDs.
I'm assuming the general trend is true for all things solid state. That said, lighting is by far the biggest drop for most houses. Remarkably so.
> I'm assuming the general trend is true for all things solid state. That said, lighting is by far the biggest drop for most houses. Remarkably so.
For commercial and industrial installations, VFDs have probably been the biggest efficiency gain, even moreso than lighting. Half of all electricity consumed is used by motors. Thank goodness for solid state power electronics!
Lead time for "how long until we can start using it" is one that is hard for a lot of folks to really take into consideration. There are terms for this, "earned value" and such. I have rarely seen them used in such a way that the planning actually worked out, long term.
I confess I assumed that the spirit of that award was more in "using what you have" than it was in making a simpler solution? They definitely over indexed on how clever the door desks were, though.
It is funny how much people assume quality from appearances, though. Same for costs.
There was/is a Home Depot and an Ikea equidistant from every Seattle amzn location. Bezos just though the door desk was "cool", and didn't both to cost compare with Ikea till after many of the door desks had been built. They were undoubtedly stronger than the Ikea equivalent, but that is unlikely to ever have been an issue.
Sadly, this isn't really right. Humanity settled on solar time. For somewhat obvious reasons.
Alas, I don't see my preferred method of changing the clock by 10 minutes every month taking hold. Basically ever. :D
I also don't think this is nearly as important for places that are not further away from the equator. If you are on the equator, you are almost certainly fine with no change throughout the year.
That method wont work, that is a too large change that happens to seldom. What you want is a leap second every hour for five months to switch between standard and daylight savings time and back, with a month of constant time around each solstice. That gives you a smooth transition without perceptible discontinuities.
Only works during the day? Which, come to think of it, I'm not entirely clear how humans kept time at night long ago. I'm assuming they learned roughly where some constellations were?
I challenge the idea that 10 minutes is too large of a change?
I accept that it was too many changes back when we didn't have smart phones/clocks controlling the vast majority of time pieces. Even most cars, nowadays, set themselves off of a GPS signal.
Nowadays, though? A surprising number of people flat out don't notice that the time even changed until people tell them about it.
As the other response said, though; if you look at when people were on solar time, the length of an hour just flat out wasn't constant. Such that most animals are already used to wake times changing throughout the year. It was specifically our move to a mechanical method that was constant that is causing this.
To that end, shifting to a change every month would, in many ways, be a step back towards how sundials worked with constant changes. As you say, we could go even more continuous someday. That feels like it would have slightly more complications. But by the time everything is controlled by a central computer like thing, most of them would be completely obviated.
No. This works if you are able to tell a work of fiction and don't have to provide evidence.
And it works because we all know that repetition and practice are, in fact, important. So it feels believable that having people just repeat something over and over is the answer.
Similarly, people can be swayed by the master coming in and producing a single artifact that blows away everyone. You see this archetype story as often as the student that learns by just repeating a motion over and over. (Indeed.... this is literally the Karate Kid plot...)
The truth is far more mundane. Yes, you have to repeat things. But also yes, you have to give thought to what you are doing. This is why actual art classes aren't just "lets build things", but also "lets learn how to critique things that you build."
While I agree something like this sounds really neat, I am curious what the value proposition is? Pointedly, is it any higher than doing the same thing in a video game in a fantasy world?
The difference is that it's useful for navigating the real world. You could have way better directions displays that show directions in context instead of just schematically. It would make the petabytes of imagery that has already been collected much more accessible and therefore useful, instead of being relegated to a special clunky Street View mode that is rarely visited. It would enable exploring real spaces in a way that provides much better spatial context, to build a spatial memory that helps your navigation when you get to the real place. And yes, it would be fun. At one time, Google was into that sort of thing.
I could see this as an argument for a heads up display. So, good for projecting directions onto a windshield or for having the glasses thing. But this? I don't see how a VR world helps anyone navigate the real world. That is, you seem to be saying the VR data is needed for AR usage. And I just don't see how those are helping each other too much.
I'm fully bought off on the "it would be fun" aspect. I don't see a value proposition for it, though.
A heads up display doesn't need a 3D rendering of the environment around it because the environment is already visible through the screen. The 3D rendering is so you can see what to expect before you get there. If you don't understand why that could possibly be useful then I don't know what to tell you; you'll have to take it for granted that some people's brains work differently than yours and can benefit from seeing places they are about to visit in 3D before they get there.
Apologies, I meant my point to be that navigating a place is more helped with AR techniques than it is VR ones. Which, as you say here, is less helped by 3D rendering than it is other things. Indeed, I meant that to be my point.
Do I think it could be useful if you rehearse navigating a place before getting there? Yeah. Ish. I can see obvious military style value adds for that. Average person, though? I still have a hard time seeing the value.
Reminds me when places were offering video tours of places. Is a neat idea. But ridiculously low in actual value.
Reading a map isn't that hard. It just sounds like an elaborate way to illustrate navigation with crayons. A cool product demo, but not very useful in practice.
Google maps has two different versions of this. One of them has a step by step series of street view images and the other does a full animated fly through of every street. The second one may be web only.
A more accurate, 3D mapped street view could probably allow GPS-less geolocation and could also help autonomous vehicles as they would get more information than what they can immediately see.
I could see well-mapped street view with good services built around it, and maybe a way to pay for and schedule regular updates, being used for towns to monitor public space long term too.
I think many things could be built on a better street view, but I also don't want Google to get yet another de facto monopoly in a new domain.
This already exists. If my phone fails to get a good GPS signal Google Maps prompts me to turn the camera on and spin around in a circle. I would also be unsurprised to learn Waymo uses Street View
I confess I don't know what to make of this. Without seeing the reasons why these are banned, what is the point? Would be like lamenting how you can't use asbestos. Sure, but is that necessarily a bad thing?
Yeah, I don't think that is generally viewed as a good thing, though? And I would not be surprised to learn California has some stricter rules on it. (Would honestly not be surprised to find out some of these "banned" items are due to asbestos level concerns.)
The PSP version of this game was a lot of fun, if frustrating in how the "random spawn" of enemies really cut against some of the difficulty. In particular, it would really suck to have a random spawn come in where your jump was taking you.
Read differently, the United States needs more of a forcing function to get people to take the bus and less focus on convenience.
You can maybe frame it as this story does that it is the time cost of the stops. This somewhat completely ignores the extra time people would have to walk between the stops, though?
It also completely ignores that Atlanta's metro does target about this distance for bus stops? Which would be a compelling argument against it driving adoption, to be honest.
Same goes for televisions. Your modern TV is probably closer to the basic light bulbs before LEDs.
I'm assuming the general trend is true for all things solid state. That said, lighting is by far the biggest drop for most houses. Remarkably so.
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