Comments by "Geoffrey Lyons" (@granatmof) on "Veritasium" channel.

  1. I gotta be honest, there's an issue of scaling that I'd want verified by experimentation. What happens with 30 m, 100m, 500m? There are frames of the video where the random motion of the end of the rope look like many of the shapes or at least have the features. This itself results in the question of how literal should the figures be taken from the question.
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  2. surprised you didn't get to play with the newer systems under development that seek to combine passive night vision and thermal vision. The lag make them unusable in combat, but they look really great from some footage released. It's part of the US Army's future warrior program though, so maybe not Navy yet.
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  3. pointing out that there are real aspects of LEDs that can give them shorter lifespans. Leds wear out when they get older, and have components: capacitors, transistors etc, that control the LEDs that are more likely than the LED to fail. Secondly LEDs lose their ability to convert electric current into photons as time goes by, or may lose their ability to uniformly produce the expected wavelengths: LEDs produce less light over time and CRI can shift over time. These factors are more prevalent in the "Type A" replaceable bulb shape. So much so that if you by home lighting fixtures, it may be were it to get not replaceable LED fixtures and then replace the fixture entirely when the LED burns out. And this creates additional waste: not only the electric components of the lights, but the fixture is now more replaceable (and more expensive). And that presents the two edge sword of what you call technological obsolescence. If you look at the Nixon "Kitchen Debate" from the 50s, when he was VP, Nixon argues that the cheaper more affordable, but shorter lived product cycle leads to faster innovation, and faster technological adoption. Anytime you have something designed to "last forever" or provide long term reliability you run into issues of cost, time to construct and technological obsolescence. Who wants to go to the cutting edge hospital of 1950? But disposable, short product life has mean you not only have incentive for innovation but a market for it. In the examples of "the perfect light bulb" or the "indestructible suit" you may not for example considered the full technological implication: people not upgrading when a veritably better product comes to market, or when people inevitable get caught in the fashion statement of the product. There's an indestructible suit. What happens when some inevitably throws it away? it sits forever in a landfill, being indestructible. We've run into this problem with disposable plastic goods, so not really that great. In the case of "the perfect light bulb" you end the market for innovation: so now all the bulbs are still 1920s efficiency and performance. There's no innovation for LEDs or no implementation of LEDs bulbs. In addition to innovation, We've even run into another of those technological issues: standards obsolescence and development. We're all familiar of the mess that is USB, but in discussion of light bulbs we have a similar issue. The screw base, as ubiquitous as it is, means technological innovation is forced to comply in a non optimal form factor. The cost of not supporting 99% of the home lighting standard means few customers and higher per unit production costs. We need a new form factor for replaceable LED components in my opinion. LEDs either come in relatively bespoke non replaceable forms: expensive lamps, fixtures, strips, bars, that inevitably result in greater e-waste. Or in what should be obsolete light bulbs, and that's not counting the cheap LED products that die in a year. And in roads and construction we actually have an interesting example. Asphalt is like 90% recyclable, and many diverse materials can form part of the aggregate, it often lasts a decade. Concrete meanwhile lasts much longer (sometimes 50+years), cannot be recycled, and is a headache to remove. Concrete has the issue that the steel reinforcement that gives it strength will eventually rust and start to expand and crack the concrete. In the meantime it can still wear, crack, the soil can shift under it. But people typically prefer concrete. I don't have any solutions, just some observations. Sometimes the solution that works for now is good enough to get to the point where you can readdress the issue. Perfect is the enemy of the good, sometimes the better. Now Edison and GE in their prime were monopolists, and those always kill innovation for profit.
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  4. Diffusion approximation are also used in nuclear reactor modeling. Neutron transport is really a model of populations anyway.
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  5. Surprised you didn't get into the steel rebar reinforcement, which is the major limiting factor of concrete structures. The Steel provides sheer and tensile strength but it also eventually corrodes. The rust expands on the inside of the concrete causing stress and cracking and ultimately causes structural weakening. There aren't very many alternatives for steel reinforced concrete, or a least not many that builders trust like steel.
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  6. If my memory is to be believed, I've actually moved through a number of slightly different universes.
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  7. IQ is useful for population studies, not individual person. Like if you do a IQ survey of a region and tie higher and lower IQs to low and high levels of pollution, it's useful.
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  8. Another great example is assuming humans are only one of many examples of life in the universe. We are just as likely to be the first form of semi intelligent species as being the 125th or the 4,045,372th. So are we first or one of many?
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  9. The same things apply for recruiting cult member. "educated" or "intelligent" people are more susceptible to cults and more difficult to free from the cults. People predesposed to think they are capable of learning or understanding some "secret higher understanding" of the world are more like to hold fast to that fake solution.
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  10. There are some colored night vision cameras you could have bought to film this. They've been around since like 2017. The video showed stars and cars in the difference.
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  11. This is an indication of how much engineering is required by the US military to make accurate weapon systems.
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