reidacdc

I think yes?

Kinetic energy scales as velocity squared, so a car at 100 MPH has 4x the energy of a car at 50 MPH. But in the 50 MPH scenario there are two cars, so the total energy dissipated in the 50 MPH head-on collision is half that of the 100 MPH brick-wall collision. In the brick-wall case, presumably all the energy is available to demolish the one car, but in the head-on case, the energy is spread out demolishing two cars.

Impact force is maybe trickier, it depends on the acceleration, but if the two 50 MPH cars end up with zero momentum, then they have 50 MPH of delta-v each over some collision time. The single car of course has 100 MPH of delta-v. If the collision times are the same (arguably a reasonable approximation if the head-on is a highly symmetric), then the impact force in the head-on case is half that of the brick-wall case.

I'm not sure if this is a fair question or not, but suppose I have a 6-byte blob I want to send. I can pad it out to 8 bytes, use this scheme to encode it, and send it.

Then I want the receiver to understand that only the first 6 bytes of their decoded results are part of the transmission -- how do I do that?

Base64 has a special character ('=') that is used for encoding padding, but this method doesn't seem to have that. The spec says "it is up to the application to ensure that frames and strings are padded if necessary", which suggests they've scoped this problem out.

I suppose I can always build a little "packet" that starts with the payload length, so that the receiver can infer the existence of padding if there is additional data beyond the advertised payload length, but now the receiver and I need to agree on that protocol.

I noticed that too.

I was also surprised that they called out the complexity of EV drivetrains (and charging systems, but I don't know anything about those) as a factor. My prior understanding was that EV drivetrains are significantly simpler than ICE ones, the number of moving parts is comparatively low for EVs, and you don't have the large temperature gradients and intense mechanical impulses that come from repeatedly igniting fuel/air mixtures.

I don't dispute the empirical claims, but as the parent comment implies, I think this is mostly about the maturity of the repair ecosystem, and it's reasonable to expect that that will improve as EVs become more prevalent. It's not a reason to stop, it's a reason to keep going.

Sorry for the late reply, but no to all three. We lived in Chicago when this became a thing. My grandmother did live in Denver (well, Aurora) though.

First hit for me is the Bluesky social media logo.

I love this, it's got that "technical correctness is the best correctness" vibe going on big-time, and it will probably change the way I see that slice of the world.

Butterflies loom weirdly large in my life, at one point many years ago my grandmother decided that butterflies were my wife's "thing" (they aren't, we're not sure how this happened), and so for many years we got butterfly-themed gifts from her. It was merely odd, so we just rolled with it, but now we have various butterfly tchochkes around, all of which, a brief survey reveals, are in the dead pose.

Definitely not my field, but a colleague of mine in grad school who was doing GR stuff was convinced that black holes didn't have singularities.

As I recall (it was a long time ago), it was mostly an aesthetic preference, he felt it was far more likely that at very high curvatures or energies or both, the domain of validity of GR would be exceeded, and Something Else would happen that preserved the theory in the low-curvature regime.

It sounds like that's not even required, if I'm reading this right (did I mention it's not my field?), it sounds like even within GR, singularities are avoidable? Very cool.

And in French, in particular, it's named after India, but the word is an abbreviation and contraction of the phrase "poulet d'Inde" ("Indian chicken"), which got shortened to "dinde".