Comments by "bruzote" (@bruzote) on "driving 4 answers" channel.

  1. I follow the general rule of thumb that if you can think about it, others before you have as well. Such thinking won't lead to me feeling hopeful of inventing something, but certainly got me looking up existing patents any time I thought my idea was a winner. I did have an idea for an unpatented idea at one point, but I realized it would be difficult to enforce and not that profitable for companies to implement. So, that was it. I can't even remember what it was, but it doesn't matter. It's very hard to invent something something valuable AND unpatented AND original (not found in "prior art") and then profit it off of it. If it's a big money idea, people will spend big money ripping you off and defending themselves from your protective lawsuits. That's if you can even afford to sue them.
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  2. It's guaranteed that the after-market kit kiddies only hear you say "track use", and so they want to buy kits to "make" their cars perform better when they will never actually put such demands on their care.
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  3. EVs are just around the curve. ;-D
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  4. The people putting all sorts of ridiculous junk on their car don't want facts. Many only want to believe that by spending more money and memorizing irrelevant parameters of their new brakes that they have accomplished something. Others might even understand this, but still don't care because they like the attention from all the dummies at the meet-ups.
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  5.  @marknasia5293  - *THRIVING* on disinformation? How much Kool Aid have you been drinking!
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  6. Even though small engines might seem like good candidates, every type of engine has to meet stricter emissions standards these days. You won't find two-stroke motors all over the place like you used to. Engines need to be extremely efficient at burning fuel. If a rotary valve engine suffers low end inefficiency at burning the fuel, it won't be acceptable. If it simply is inefficient with power but burns the fuel cleanly, well that would be less of an issue. So, how are the emissions? When I see the deposits around the cylinder, it has me wondering if the engine would pass.
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  7. Well, I can sympathize with both you and the professor. Regarding the professor, physicists often love their field for its elegance. The ideal concept of human-defined "Laws of Physics" is that they should be able to explain the infinite number of situation-specific laws and rules-of-thumb that people use for deciding things like which kind of tires to use. In a default approach through that idealism, a physics instructor (not so much an experimenter or applied physicist) might assume then that the laws of friction should explain decisions about tire friction. Unfortunately, among the laws of physics, about the worst laws you could depend on as approaching the ideal would be the Laws of Friction. One law, as you may know, states that the area of a frictional surface does not matter when it comes to how much friction is generated by a load. In the physics students' world, this law is "proven" in lab experiments they personally conduct. the problem is those very experiments - and the text books - fail to mention that the experiments use materials that follow the ideal the laws. The experiments should use sticky tape and rubber. Even if they did, physicists would at first argue that you are not measuring friction, you are measuring adhesion. Well, at that point you're almost defining things to get the outcome you want. Adhesion or friction, the goal is to determine the resistance to sliding, and the laws of friction in physics as taught to non-specialists are poorly advertised as being highly dependent on materials. Physicists know this, but they get so used to working with special cases of ideals, they quickly grow comfortable and forget the assumptions. There is also the other way to explain this. The physics instructor deals in the world where cows are spherical. He even MUST deal in the world. Have you tried to explain the infinite complexity of the real world to a typical student. More so, have you ever tried to write an equation for students that is even solvable without using idealized assumptions? The professors get locked into that world. It might even be worth it for the professor to be wrong just so twenty other students don't hear of your conversation and end up losing their understanding of the laws of physics that DO apply to many materials.
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  8.  @Workinprogressmaxi  - High school physics instruction assumes friction is only due to scale invariant roughness. (BTW, this video does a great job of simply showing what that roughness looks like.) The problem with tires is they exhibit significant scale-variant roughness, particularly as pressure is applied. Plus, tires can exhibit adhesion as well. Never mind the road properties that make things more complicated.
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  9. The best physics and mechanics instructors focus on the fundamentals of the problem and connect at the listener's level, not their own. This video is a good example of that. If anyone out there likes understanding physics with a common perspective, I suggest for atmospheric physics check out the short and easy books written some time ago by Craig Bohren. You can probably save money buying them used, btw. He wrote two books called "Clouds in a Glass of Beer" and "What light through yonder window breaks." You can literally understand certain physics problems by looking at a glass of beer (he uses them for a few lessons) or other things like looking at the patterns of frost on a car window. The beer lessons are actually good talking points when you're drinking carbonated beverages with friends or family or even strangers, I suppose.
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