Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "SmarterEveryDay" channel.

  1. Great video! How did the colors look for the human eye at the bottom of the pool? The video shows greenish blue cast on everything but did you see colors like that yourself? I would have expected to see some kind of color calibration target at the bottom and video color corrected for that.
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  2. I think the most important thing is that you lose but you have understanding how to improve your performance. If the required effort to advance even a little bit in the game is too high, it will not be interesting to play. On the other hand, if the game is too easy and you can play through it without any effort, it will be boring, too. And if the player cannot understand how they can improve their performance, the apperance to the player will be "this game sucks". Some games, use adaptive difficulty setting and identical looking enemies get stronger if you've been playing without failures for a longer time. I remember playing GTA and getting a mission that was practically impossible to accomplish and after failing maybe 5 times in a row, the automatic difficulty setting nudged downwards and even the enemy count for the mission halved. Then it was too easy. So if you go with adaptive difficulty setting, it should have really smooth ramp instead of going directly from "way too hard" to "way too easy" or vice versa.
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  3. Okay, now do the same with Pierburg variable venturi carburetor such as one found in old Saab 900 engines. That thing is pretty nice because it doesn't need a choke to run run cold and since the venturi dimensions change according to throttle the fuel is mixed very well on all throttle levels. And there's no electronics or other external controls of any kind - it all works with vacuum from the carburetor. The genious part is having a oil dampener to allows the user to rapidly change the throttle position without the engine stalling because the venturi change speed is limited by the oil dampener. And you could tweak the dampening both by changing the amount of oil or the viscosity of oil in the dampener to tune it perfectly.
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  4. XO seemed to be pretty relaxed guy until your questions got closer to classified stuff. Then he went totally tight slipped.
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  5. There's actually zero change to get into orbital speeds with plastic potato gun.
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  6. If every CEO would be like Tory Bruno we would have a lot less problems with commercial companies.
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  7. 28:18 I think this is the most important thing to understand here: in case of complex metal structures it's already faster to manufacture and stress test the full part using this manufacturing method than do full 3D stress analysis on software on computer to figure out if the resulting part would be good enough for the designed purpose.
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  8. Same here. I was already aware of the paper trick and I always assumed it works because of slowing down the "projectile" during the fall but it appears to be just the surface tension after seeing the slow motion video.
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  9. It's indeed interesting how simple neurons are and yet we still don't have a clear explanation what's the brain's equivalent to the back propagation algorithm used for computer AI systems.
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  10. You get a similar feel with a DSLR with a broken LCD panel and 1 GB memory card. The important part of the film photography is not having a method to instantly check your results. That forces you to think more about what you're doing. Even if you have configured your DSLR to not show the preview automatically, you still know that you can immediately review the photo if needed. Taking photos of important moments without ability to know if the photo was successful and not being able to just shoot 100s of photos to make sure you have at least one successful shot makes all the difference. Also most film SLRs come with a really high quality lens (for its time!) which is usually much better than the kit lens most people shoot with their DSLR.
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