The Official Cool Stuff Thread
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Time-lapse video of an old Chevy small block being rebuilt
Chevy Small-Block V8 Engine Rebuild Time-Lapse | Redline Rebuild - S1E1 – 03:49
— Hagerty
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Too bad it won't onebox.
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A crow taking a ride on an eagle's back.
PS: this belongs here too:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUtS52lqL5w&feature=youtu.be
Sooo satisfying
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Camera shutter speed synchronized with helicopter blade rotation:
http://i.imgur.com/tzxTiGm.webm
Edit: also on YouTube:
Camera shutter speed synchronized with helicopter blade frequency – 00:49
— whataboutlarry1
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And that studies telling us smoking is harmless were OK too.
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That camera thing is just the Russian's misinformation for distracting from their anti-gravity technology development.
The US made that Sgt. Bilko remake with Steve Martin for the same reason.
Trufax.
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Making of the latest Time cover:
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@tar said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
I am reminded of this 'tediously accurate scale model of the solar system', which is pretty much what it says it is...
It still works! Love those comments along the way...
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@dcon said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@tar said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
I am reminded of this 'tediously accurate scale model of the solar system', which is pretty much what it says it is...
It still works! Love those comments along the way...
SATURN TITAN
URANUS
NEPTUNE
PLUTO
(we still love you) That was about 10 million km (6,213,710 mi) just now.Pretty empty out here.Here comes our first planet...As it turns out, things are pretty far apart.Weâll be coming up on a new planet soon. Sit tight.Most of space is just space.Halfway home.Destination: Mars!It would take about seven months to travel this distance in a spaceship. Better be some good in-flight entertainment. In case you're wondering, you'd need about 2000 feature-length movies to occupy that many waking hours.Sit back and relax. Jupiter is more than 3 times as far as we just traveled.When are we gonna be there?Seriously. When are we gonna be there?This is where we might at least see some asteroids to wake us up. Too bad they're all too small to appear on this map.I spy, with my little eye... something black.If you were on a road trip, driving at 75mi/hr, it would have taken you over 500 years to get here from earth.All these distances are just averages, mind you. The distance between planets really depends on where the two planets are in their orbits around the sun. So if you're planning on taking a trip to Jupiter, you might want to use a different map.If you plan it right, you can actually move relatively quickly between planets. The New Horizons space craft that launched in 2006 only took 13 months to get to Jupiter. Don't worry. It'll take a lot less than 13 months to scroll there.Pretty close to Jupiter now.Sorry. That was a lie before. Now we really are pretty close.Lots of time to think out here...Pop the champagne! We just passed 1 billion km.I guess this is why most maps of the solar system aren't drawn to scale. It's not hard to draw the planets. It's the empty space that's a problem.Most space charts leave out the most significant part â all the space.We're used to dealing with things at a much smaller scale than this.When it comes to things like the age of the earth, the number of snowflakes in Siberia, the national debt... Those things are too much for our brains to handle.We need to reduce things down to something we can see or experience directly in order to understand them.We're always trying to come up with metaphors for big numbers. Even so, they never seem to work.Let's try a few metaphors anyway...You would need 665 of these screens lined up side-by-side to show this whole map at once.If this map was printed from a quality printer (300 pixels per inch) the earth would be invisible, and the width of the paper would need to be 475 feet. 475 feet is about 1 and 1/2 football fields.Even though we donât really understand them, a lot can happen within these massive lengths of time and space. A drop of water can carve out a canyon. An amoeba can become a dolphin. A star can collapse on itself.Itâs easy to disregard nothingness because thereâs no thought available to encapsulate it. Thereâs no metaphor that fits because, by definition, once the nothingness becomes tangible, it ceases to exist.Itâs a good thing we have these tiny stars and planets, otherwise weâd have no point of reference at all. Weâd be surrounded by this stuff that our minds werenât built to understand.All this emptiness really could drive you nuts. For instance, if youâre in a sensory deprivation tank for too long, your brain starts to make things up. You see and hear things that arenât there.The brain isn't built to handle "empty.""Sorry, Humanity," says Evolution. "What with all the jaguars trying to eat you, the parasites in your fur, and the never-ending need for a decent steak, I was a little busy. I didnât exactly have time to come up with a way to conceive of vast stretches of nothingness."Neurologically speaking, we really only deal with matter of a certain size, and energy of a few select wavelengths. For everything else, we have to make up mental models and see if they match up to the tiny shreds of hard evidence that actually feel real.The mental models provided by mathematics are extremely helpful when trying to make sense of these vast distances, but still... Abstraction is pretty unsatisfying.When you hear people talk about how, "thereâs more to this universe than our minds can conceive of" it's usually a way to get you to go along with a half-baked plot point about UFOs or super-powers in a sci-fi series that you're watching late at night when you canât get to sleep.Even when Shakespeare wrote: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophyâ â he's basically trying to give us a loophole to make the ghost in the story more believable.But all this empty space, these things of a massive scale, really are more than our minds can conceive of. The maps and metaphors fail to do them justice.You look at one tiny dot, then you look for the next tiny dot. Everything in between is inconsequential and fairly boring.Emptiness is actually everywhere. Itâs something like 99.9999999999999999999958% of the known universe.Even an atom is mostly empty space.If the proton of a hydrogen atom was the size of the sun on this map, we would need 11 more of these maps to show the average distance to the electron.Some theories say all this emptiness is actually full of energy or dark matter and that nothing can truly be empty... but come on, only ordinary matter has any meaning for us.You could safely say the universe is a "whole lotta nothing."If so much of the universe is made up of emptiness, what does that mean to people like us, living on a tiny speck in the middle of all of it?Is the known universe 99.9999999999999999999958% empty? Or is it 0.0000000000000000000042% full?With so much emptiness, aren't stars, planets, and people just glitches in an otherwise elegant and uniform nothingness, like pieces of lint on a black sweater?But without the tiny dots for it to stretch between, there would be no emptiness to measure, and for that matter, no one around to measure it.You might say that so much emptiness makes the tiny bits of matter that much more meaningful - simply by the fact that, against all odds, they aren't empty. If you're drowning in the middle of the ocean, a floating piece of driftwood is a pretty big deal. What if trillions of stars and planets were crammed right next to each other? They wouldn't be special at all.It seems like we are both pathetically insignificant, and miraculously important at the same time.Whether you more strongly feel the monumental significance of tiny things or the massive void between them depends on who you are, and how your brain chemistry is balanced at a particular moment. We walk around with miniature, emotional versions of the universe inside of us.It's reassuring to know that no matter how depressingly bleak or ridiculously momentous we feel, the universe, judging by its current structure, seems well aware of both extremes.The fact that you're here, in the midst of all this nothing, is pretty amazing when you stop and think about it.Congratulations on making it this far.Might as well stop now. We'll need to scroll through 6,771 more maps like this before we see anything else.
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Gmail remembered its words!
Ugh...I hated those damned icons, especially when you couldn't have any words on them at all.
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@boomzilla said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
Gmail remembered its words!
Ugh...I hated those damned icons, especially when you couldn't have any words on them at all.
Seems to be as obtuse as normal...
Edit: Nevermind, dug around and found it:
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@tsaukpaetra That option has been there for a long time. I'm still on the old gmail and I have words:
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@hungrier said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@tsaukpaetra That option has been there for a long time. I'm still on the old gmail and I have words:
I've never seen it there for a long time.
Then again, after hovering over the buttons and learning the glyph-to-function I've never really needed the text anyways.
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My son built a working crossbow (shoots Nerf darts) using Legos and rubber bands.
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@pie_flavor said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
I keep trying to invite myself on the work trips to Shenzhen just so I can visit the Shenzhen Electronic Market.
So far my projects have always been deemed critical when these are happening, suspicious.
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@rhywden said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
The university's dean had a restraining order against him (he wasn't allowed to approch him closer than 200 meters due to a brawl he instigated)Only in academia. In industry, you would be fired before the restraining order.
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@boomzilla said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
100 km/h baseball to the noggin? While that may be survivable I certainly won't nominate myself to try that one out.
I wouldn't recommend that. I've had something like that happen to me. Fortunately, I have a really hard head, and it hit me pretty square on the eye socket.
Thus the dark glasses.
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@fbmac said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
And that studies telling us smoking is harmless were OK too.
That one was kind of interesting. The tobacco industry studies relied on animal testing. They couldn't give animals lung cancer by having them smoke. Turns out lung cancer takes many years to develop, and non-human animals generally don't live long enough.
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@Tsaukpaetra That looks like CG. I think it's the unnatural lighting and colors.
Here's another one:
MACK THE KNIFE – 02:27
— Alexey Rom
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@Zecc I can't be the only one who wants to know what it'd sound like if the paper tape ran out and all the pins went open at once... right?
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@anotherusername said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@Zecc I can't be the only one who wants to know what it'd sound like if the paper tape ran out and all the pins went open at once... right?
I have to assume there's a pin that's a kill switch that stops it if open.
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@anotherusername said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@Zecc I can't be the only one who wants to know what it'd sound like if the paper tape ran out and all the pins went open at once... right?
Not now you're not.
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@tharpa said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
That one was kind of interesting. The tobacco industry studies relied on animal testing. They couldn't give animals lung cancer by having them smoke. Turns out lung cancer takes many years to develop, and non-human animals generally don't live long enough.
The Russians are still trying to get over their disappointment at being unable to persuade a bear on a unicycle to power up a vaping pen.
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@boomzilla Can they make it bigger - and replace the camera's with chairs?
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@dcon said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@boomzilla Can they make it bigger - and replace the camera's with chairs?
They did mention it goes up to 7ft in diameter.
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I wrote a Raytracer for DOS, 16 VGA colors – 15:00
— BisqwitI wonder how well that would run on modern hardware?
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@Tsaukpaetra I don't know what to think of it at this point. It looks like it might have some potential because it is not exclusively powered by electricity, but then it might have hidden losses everywhere causing the efficiency calculations to get very complicated.
Also, at this point I'm not sure it will leave the humidy in the cooled volume alone. I didn't quite get if the final pre-cooler bank is supposed to go outside or inside, and because it consumes at least some of the water in it there must be some humidity change somewhere.
Finally, I don't see this staying healthy unless you have some bacteria-killing thing in there, while you might start with pure water in the system it's only a matter of time until "contaminated" air gets pulled in and some kinds of bacteria start growing in the system.
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@kazitor said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
Air Conditioner
I see what you did there.
Thanks!
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@JBert said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
Finally, I don't see this staying healthy unless you have some bacteria-killing thing in there, while you might start with pure water in the system it's only a matter of time until "contaminated" air gets pulled in and some kinds of bacteria start growing in the system.
The salty stages will be fine; strong brines inhibit pretty much anything from growing that might cause trouble. The other parts⌠face the same problems in this area that other types of AC systems do. Seriously, bacteria, algae and other biological grot are real problems whatever.
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The Stunning Balloon Animals of Masayoshi Matsumoto
Masasyoshi Matsumoto is an insanely talented Japanese artist who specializes in realistic balloon animals.
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From that site:
The Book That Grew is a one of a kind book created by artist Diana Scherer by manipulating grass roots into growing in the shape of letters and diagrams.
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@boomzilla Here's a similar thing that it turns out is made by the same guy:
Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion – 01:08
— The Illusion contest
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Absolutely amazing.
Edit: actually wanted to post the video below, but I'll leave the video above anyway.
ăŚă§ăĺ Źéç¨ĺçť čąčŞç – 12:07
— Kokichi Sugihara
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Chrono Trigger the Musical - Peaceful Days – 05:14
— Man on the InternetChrono Trigger: The Musical. Some people took one of the greatest video game soundtracks of all time and put words to it, and it's every bit as glorious as it sounds. The voices are (mostly) perfect, although Lucca singing with a German accent just sounds kinda weird to me. But Crono and Marle are spot-on, (yes, Crono sings and speaks in this version,) Frog sounds like an experienced, competent knight, Robo is strongly autotuned to give him a "robotic" voice, Magus's voice actor was clearly taking cues from the Phantom of the Opera and comes across as delightfully evil... and then there's Ayla. Wow. I don't know where they found her, but the person singing is the perfect Ayla. Loud and boisterous and enthusiastic, exactly the way the cavewoman is supposed to be.
Not all the songs are masterpieces, but there are more good ones than mediocre ones, and the ones that really stick the landing are amazing! I ran across this a few days ago and I have not been able to get Singing Mountain out of my head ever since, except a few brief times when some other song from this takes its place. My biggest gripe about it, though, is that it's not finished. They've done 37 songs out of what was supposed to be 60. Not sure when/if the rest are coming, but I'm hoping for more soon!
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Researchers build a heat shield just 10 atoms thick to protect electronic devices
Excess heat given off by smartphones, laptops and other electronic devices can be annoying, but beyond that it contributes to malfunctions and, in extreme cases, can even cause lithium batteries to explode.
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Cerebras reveals world's 'largest computer chip' for AI tasks
The chip, which is larger than an iPad, is designed for complex artificial intelligence systems.
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I keep wanting to read their name as Cerberus.
The Wafer Scale Engine, designed by Cerebras Systems, is slightly bigger than a standard iPad.
Why is it square? If you're making only one chip from a wafer, why not use the entire wafer? Wafers are circular. Why discard 36% of the wafer's area?
It has not yet revealed how much the chips cost.
I believe the cost to manufacture a wafer is in the neighborhood of $20k, although it depends very much on the specific process technology (which the article doesn't reveal, not that I know enough about manufacturing to estimate the cost better if it did give details) and, of course, the number of wafers in a manufacturing lot. Factor in less than 100% yield (some chips will be defective, despite the redundancy they have to have, without which their yield would be 0%); add packaging, cooling and profit, and I'd guess at least $40k each, maybe closer to $50k.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
Why is it square? If you're making only one chip from a wafer, why not use the entire wafer? Wafers are circular.
They are? Why is that?
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
@HardwareGeek said in The Official Cool Stuff Thread:
Why is it square? If you're making only one chip from a wafer, why not use the entire wafer? Wafers are circular.
They are? Why is that?
Because they're cut as cross-sections from the (cylindrical) silicon crystals that are grown under precise conditions.
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I have a mental image of pizzaioli tossing silicon wafers above their heads, and you're taking that away from me.
Professional weather forecast
