Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Sideprojects" channel.

It's also worth recognizing that a lot of these things probably were fundraising for further development. The diving suit in particular wouldn't be useful as a weapon as such, but it could potentially have had some use for salvage operations if a ship did go down in shallower water. Or potentially for helping to install underwater fortifications against ships, sort of like a minefield with debris rather than literal mines. And some wouldn't have worked at the time for the simple reason that the necessary materials hadn't yet been developed. If there had been a need to fall from higher heights, I'm sure they could have worked out a way of making the frame for the parachute lighter as it just needs to maintain enough of the shape to capture the wind and take some of the pressure off of the stitching. He did hit it out of the ballpark a few times, but people tend to forget about just how many bad, or impractical, ideas it can take to generate a few world changing gems.
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@DavidLLambertmobile Otis was also the the man that invented the first practical elevator emergency brake. I would love to be able to go back in time and watch his demonstration of the invention before that crowd. Chopping away at the cable holding him up, only to drop a few inches as the brake kicked in automatically.
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Um, no, salt causes water retention, and you'll sweat out a lot of it. Drinking pee is problematic, but mostly because there's a bunch of toxins that build up in it over time. But, the salt itself isn't a reason not to drink it. As long as you're not drinking the pee that was produced by drinking pee, you'll be fine. And as long as you're not doing it for more than a short period of time without getting other water to help wash the toxins out. It's certainly not something I'd recommend if you can avoid it, but it's not going to kill you faster than not drinking at all. I nearly died from extremely low sodium levels. They were that low in part because I sweated a lot of the sodium out of my body, and partially because I drank too much water that diluted it.
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The Soviet's contributions to WWII has been vastly understated by the US. It's doubtful that the US would have won either theater without their massive sacrifices.
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Hours if you're lucky. If you're wet, especially in water, it can be a matter of a few minutes. And often times it's not the hypothermia, it's the stupid stuff you do because you're brain is too cold to operate properly. The survival without water can vary. My grandfather lasted roughly 2 weeks, but he was inside with properly maintained room temperature and was going to die regardless. I personally managed nearly a month on basically no food. IIIRC, it was like a cup of yogurt a day due to a bad stomach infection. I felt fine through out, so I'm wagering that something closer to 3 months would be possible, although it would come with numerous longterm health impacts. This is why it's generally body temperature before water. (And it absolutely has to be clean, diarrhea can be absolutely fatal if you're already low on drinking water) And water before food.
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@Sanquinity These are cherry picked examples, but people underestimate just how many bad ideas creative geniuses often go through before they even get to the point of being worth recording. Then of those ones, there's a bunch more that get set aside for one reason or another and it's just a tiny fraction of them that even get any sort of real action taken to create. These all have flaws, but as you note, eventually something similar was created that did work. In several cases, like with the tank, there were other inventions that were required to make it actually work, and in the case of the flying machines, he had most of the necessary elements there, the engineering team made that work mostly with stuff they found in his drawings. Actually taking action to make things real is important, but people underestimate just how hard it is to be a visionary. Just creating ideas that can be acted on isn't necessarily easy, especially if you're more forward thinking than just a simple modification or improvement on what we've got. That's why so many companies are started by duos, one that's better with the vision and the other that's more business savvy.
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@MrBrock314 Ah, that's interesting. One of the issues that comes up with those sorts of things is that it's not always obvious at what point you can say that something has been invented. Often it comes down to the person that comes up with a practical solution rather than the first one to do whatever it is.
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@Razmoudah Math is short for mathematics. The Brits just do this weird thing where the remove the ematic from the middle. Resulting in a really awkward to pronounce word.
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It's the same thing for plane crashes. Boeing crashes not withstanding, it's gotten downright rare for a commercial jet to crash.
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It gets fairly complicated. I do think that the second nuclear bomb probably wouldn't have happened if there had been better communication, because the surrender would have taken longer had it been the cause. Also, the US had already leveled Tokyo. I do think that the Soviets probably did have more of an impact on the Imperial Japanese surrendering when they did than the US educational system was teaching when I was in highschool though because even with the nukes, the war could have gone on for quite some time just due to how spread out the Japanese Empire was and that there was such a limited supply of nukes.
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Despite the context of this video, that one applies to basically every portrayal of weapons in anything resembling an action film. By the time that episode was written, there were already countless movies and TV shows with more or less infinite ammo.
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Defining wins and losses in wars can be rather complicated if the result is anything either than either an unconditional withdrawal or complete capitulation. The US' Vietnam conflict could be interpreted as a success as the US was there as a result of the domino theory that if they lost Vietnam, that other countries would follow. And that really didn't happen. OTOH, the US lost a lot of service personnel and didn't get to keep any of the land, hence why it's more typically considered to be a loss.
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They wouldn't have needed to. At that point, the US was capable of striking the main Japanese islands and they were running low on resources to the point of being willing to sacrifice their own pilots to keep things going a bit longer. Even if the Soviets couldn't invade the islands, just keeping the Japanese off the mainland would have forced them to eventually surrender. Realistically, it was probably a bit of both.
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Deciding which side won a war isn't always easy. It all depends on the objectives in modern wars as one side is usually not destroyed or the other forced out completely. It's more common for one side to suffer heavy losses, but still retain the land, which is a bit of a mixed bag in terms of who really won.
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@NodDisciple1 Considering the notes, that's certainly possible. It's also possible that had he received funding, the device would likely have been tested near to the shore where there wasn't much pressure before going deeper. Any testing at all likely would have picked up the flaws. It's a lot harder to invent things in your head, or on paper, if you don't have the ability to conduct any testing or modeling of the proposed idea. Sometimes it works out on paper and there's some sort of unknown principle that blocks it. Especially back then when so much science hadn't yet been researched.
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@stevejester5658 Yes, and keep in mind that he was proposing it to the navy as a weapon rather than as a way of recovering expensive weapons. And he just had a theoretical drawing, he was asking for what is essentially venture capital to see if it could be created.
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I realize you're joking about the coffee, but it wasn't until roughly a century and a half later that coffee really took off in the US.
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The line between Schizoid Personality Disorder, OCPD, ADHD and ASD are a lot thinner than they should be, and it continues to cause a lot of problems as even many supposed experts can't get that right reliably.
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I think the difference is that the Wright Brothers pursued it to the point where they settled the question about whether or not it was possible to develop a practical flying machine. It's also kind of crazy how less than 70 years later humans weren't just routinely flying around in the air, but we'd already landed people on the Moon. That being said, the Wright Brothers were a lot closer tot he goal than DaVinci was, as there had been a lot of work done on gliders in the centuries in the mean time and the Wright Brothers had access to internal combustion engines to power it. They mostly contributed the control system and put all of the pieces together into something that could be incrementally improved into the aircraft we have today.
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It's just because the Brits don't know how to abbreviate words.
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I had an Australian boss that insisted that the British voluntarily surrendered their empire.
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Which isn't correct, the US won and the impressing of US Sailors stopped. It's not needless, the Brits weren't stopping the practice of impressing US sailors without a war. This was long before the UN and any sort of international body existed to potentially tell them to knock it off or else.
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 @ewandewar3667 Um, what? The aggressors were the British. The Canadian land became a target after the US decided that a war was necessary to prevent further kidnapping of American sailors.
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@ They're not, they're Canadians. There is no such place as America other than the US, unless you're referring to the supercontinent, which hardly anybody ever does other than when they need to trot out that silliness about how there are all these other Americans out there. It's a dumb and somewhat racist thing to say.
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@ It's pretty unusual to be speaking in a context where grouping all of the people of the Americas into a single term makes sense. It's bad enough lumping all the people who live in nations where Spanish is the national language into a group, including also the English and French speakers as well, pretty much completely breaks it.
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@ I think YT screwed up the reply, I don't see any indication that I was responding to you about that. I was specifically responding to a post where they were saying that Canadians are Americans. Or, I misclicked.
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@Jude30 TBH, shy of being some place like the inside of a shelter or whatever part of the building is the most structurally sound, the best you're going to get outside is sheltering from debris. You're not going to avoid being sucked up if it's that close. It's a moot point for me as we get like 1 tornado every few years around here and they're rarely around long to cause much damage. Most of the time, they'll hit nothing, or they might suck a roof off, but the likelihood of being injured is quite low. Contrast that with areas that get them more frequently and get larger ones. I'm personally, more concerned with mid-lattitude cyclones. We get those slightly more often, but again, it's not much of a risk as long as you're inside and don't get crushed by a falling tree. The gusts get to be up over 100mph, but I don't think we've ever had sustained windspeeds as high as a hurricane.
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It was taught that way in the US for quite a while in large part due to the timing. But, in recent years, there's been more debate over the actual cause of them surrendering at that time. But, the Russians, running low on resources and the US having the ability to level their cities were probably all significant contributions to the decision.
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Understanding the postive/negative reinforcment is important for when you want to set up your house to encourage things you want and discourage things that you don't want.
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The issue tends to be time. There's a lot of history that has to be left out in order to have students graduate when they do. You go to college and learn a bunch of stuff like that the HS version is often lacking to the point of bordering on fraud.
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@michaeljohnangel6359 Only if it is eventually created and you developed some portion of what it eventually required. I think that DaVinci was an inventor in the sense that some of it did work, or was made to work without much additional ideas. However, he's arguably more important as a visionary than as an inventor. One of the issues that folks like DaVinci have is that some of their ideas are so far ahead of their time that it's difficult to establish which ones are ahead of their time and which ones are just fantasy. And sometimes, even the fantasy ideas wind up having some pretty significant real world impact. Nobody knew definitively that it was possible for humans to fly using heavier than air planes until the Wright Brothers built one that did work and could be modified to become practical. It was highly suspected to be possible, and other inventors were close, but people had been trying for quite some time before they got the key components in place to actually do it. Same goes with the space race, people had dreamed of it for as long as there were people to see the moon, but until somebody actually got to space, it was a legitimately open question as to whether it was even possible. Today there are people who still don't believe it's possible, in large part due to the radiation exposure.
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@akulkis Either that or it's ennui or just complete indoctrination. Folks that aren't terrified in that sort of a situation are dangerously close to being suicide bombers. They've likely completely given up on coming back alive or have made their peace with death.
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That doesn't surprise me. There's a few things that need to be added if you want to go deeper. Also, keep in mind that the air pumps were a lot less sophisticated than they were in the 19th century, so just pumping the air down with the right bits of diving gear, still likely would have ended badly.
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@ That's what I was taught back in the '80s. It ended the practice of the British capturing sailors and impressing them into service under the crown and it was the last time the US fought with the British. To refer to it as anything other than a loss is a bit of a odd direction to take as there were no further hostilities between the countries after that that I've ever heard of.
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@ People who are teaching it as something other than victory are wrong. The Brits stopped impressing US sailors into their navy and from what I can tell, there were no further fights between the US and British forces. Eventually, we were on the same side with WWI. To not refer to it as a victory for the US, when the US got to keep independence without any sort of significant loss of land and was now free and clear of the empire completely is a bit of a stretch.
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@ It wasn't a stalemate, this is what victory looks like when you're on the defensive end of the conflict.
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@ That's mostly due to time, although sometimes it's on the basis of bias. There's really no good reason to let generations of students believe that Executive Order 9066 targeted Japanese Americans specifically when nowhere in the order does it specify Japanese or any other synonym for it. The Japanese-Americans were the largest group in the concentration camps, but German-Americans and Italian-Americans were also intentionally included and there were other groups like Chinese-Americans that were also mistakenly included even though the Chinese were effectively on the US' side of WWII as they were against the Imperial Japanese and shouldn't have been subject to the relocation order.
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@ Yep, I think the whole notion that things can't be both a stalemate and a win for one party are kind of misleading. It's kind of happening right now with Ukraine where they've managed to keep the Russians largely bogged down for years now. Sure, Russia has managed to secure significant amounts of land and kill significant numbers of people, when this is over, there may well be a credible view that Ukraine won as Russia doesn't appear to be any closer to fulfilling their aims and has run through a massive number of young men. .
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@sarumano884 That's a solid point. Even today, trade secrets remain a powerful way of protecting your information. It's part of why patents exist. You turn over all the details of your invention to establish that it functions and you're granted exclusive rights to that invention for a fixed period of time. For things that lack similar protections, trade secrets tend to do a similar thing, just far less reliably and you're on your own to ensure that they remain secret. It can be as simple as only a couple people knowing the recipe for a spice blend and them being the only ones to actually mix the batches.
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We definitely should mention the others because it's rather informative of how he went about having all those ideas. Walt Disney used a 3 room approach wherein the first room there literally were no ideas too stupid to mention. A second room where they would take that list and cull out the obvious ones that had some sort of significant issues. And a 3rd room where none but the stongest ideas were permitted to survive. People forget just how many ideas there are out there, if people haven't had an idea, it's far morel likely to be a terrible idea than one worth pursuing.
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I'll need to look into that, because that sounds awesome.
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@1112viggo The military nearly always has significant budgets for things like this. A minor improvement in key technology can make a massive difference in future conflicts.
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That's from the US side. I doubt that the Brits were spreading news of it to the other colonies.
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The second bomb was probably unnecessary and probably wouldn't have been dropped if lines of communication were better. They wouldn't have been able to surrender so quickly after it was dropped had they not already been planning to surrender. The thing that likely did it was that the Chinese were pissed, the Russians were pissed and the US was capable of absolutely destroying their cities with whatever warning the US cared to give. As in, they were running out of resources and were pinned down too tight to turn things around. Especially with both the Italians and Germans out of the war.
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