* Posts by gizmo17

7 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2010

EU aviation wonks give all-electric training aeroplane the green light – but noob pilots only have 50 mins before they have to land it

gizmo17

Re: Reserve power?

"ridiculous and unfair" seems a bit strong to me, but it's certainly incomplete. Then again, so is curb weight, but in a different way.

[VW = vehicle weight, FW = fuel weight, CW = curb weight]

VW + FW = CW

range_ice = k_ice * FW_ice

range_ev = k_ev * FW_ev

What happened with Tesla was, roughly, that k_ev reached a point where range_ev comes close to range_ice at nearly the same CW, because, as you point out, VW_ice is quite a bit less than VW_ev, even though FW_ev is much greater. But it's also undeniable that at present, k_ev < k_ice. So for a small increase in FW_ice, you can get very high ranges, it's just that there's not much demand for it since refueling is fast and easy and no one really wants to drive for 10 hours straight anyway.

It will be very interesting to see if k_ev is high enough for big trucks now; I suspect it's very close. For planes, I think we have a ways to go.

Boffins put the FUN into fungus by rigging yeast to squirt out the active ingredients in cannabis

gizmo17

Re: not entirely true..

Re: "Growing marijuana is also an incredibly intensive, expensive and environmentally unfriendly process that needs lots of heat, light and water."

Couldn't the same be said about growing tomatoes? I'm genuinely curious here - where's the intensive, expensive. and environmental unfriendliness part?

AI boffins rebel against closed-access academic journal that wants to have its cake and eat it

gizmo17

Re: Does Nature Publishing Group (actually Springer?)....

"The debate on Open Access Publishing is not new and has been going on for more than a decade btw."

A good deal longer than that, actually. JAIR will very shortly be celebrating its 25th anniversary issue. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, it serves much the same community as this new offering appears to be targeting.

gizmo17
Pint

Re: Blood suckers

"The best and only rational system would be a no-cost publishing service labs can access for free, being thus able to keep an eye on what is happening in their research domain."

Right you are, and here's one celebrating its 25th birthday:

https://www.jair.org/index.php/jair

Self-driving car devs face 6-month backlog on vital $85,000 LIDAR kit

gizmo17

Re: I wonder...

"The way we humans (and bats) do it is by having massively parallel processing available. "

Which, by the way, is very probably why it was *Intel* that splashed out on MobileEye - imagine the profits if every car made needs a smallish supercomputer rather than just something powerful enough to run the entertainment system and backup camera.

Australian geoboffin discovers 3.7 billion year old fossils after ice melts

gizmo17

Google "long and short scales" for one possible reason.

Trouser-bomb clown attacks - how much should we laugh?

gizmo17
Joke

Pants bomber jokes

Right on Lewis, as usual. We need some 'pants bomber' jokes. I offer these poor attempts in the hopes that someone with a real sense of humour will improve on them:

q: What's the preferred brand of underwear for terrorists?

a: Fruit of the BOOM!

How stupid do you have to be to show up in heaven for your 72-virgin payoff having blown off the equipment?