Nobody Cares! (Science & Tech Edition)

[Free]

So, Apple fired Scotty?

 

[Veritable Quandry]

 

[Free]

It'll be 2219 and people will still be making Clippy "jokes."

 

[Free]

The future...

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

 

[Tigger]

Replace your glass with transparent aluminium, no sorry, wood. I meant see through wood.

Scientists invent 'transparent wood' in search for eco-friendly building material

 

[danielravennest]

Replace your glass with transparent aluminium, no sorry, wood. I meant see through wood.

Scientists invent 'transparent wood' in search for eco-friendly building material

When I read the article, I see this is actually wood fiber-reinforced acrylic plastic. Not so surprising you can see through it. The nearest retro equivalent is corrugated fiberglass panels, where the reinforcement is glass fiber rather than wood fiber:

 

[danielravennest]

First Starhopper engine test near Brownsville TX. This is the "flying test stand" that was built outdoors a couple of months ago. The point is to test the engines, tanks, valves, flight electronics, and software working together, on a cheap, disposable platform. Eventually they will do take-offs and landings, going up to 5 km high. A second unit is being built that will be closer to flight-worthy and go much higher and faster. My nickname for this one is "Starfarter", since it runs on methane, and toots at the end.

 

[Free]

It's Y2K, version 2!

GPS “rollover” event on April 6 could have some side-effects

GPS’ UTC clock, used for more than navigation, is about to reset. There might be some surprises.

arstechnica.com

On April 6, the Global Positioning System will reach the end of an era—or more correctly, an epoch. That’s when the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) clock used by the satellite navigation system will reach the limit for its 10-bit “week number” (WN) counter and flip back to 0000000000.

GPS time is linked to the official UTC clock time provided by the US Naval Observatory. But the GPS version of the clock tracks the date by counting the number of weeks since the beginning of the current GPS “epoch”—August 21, 1999. So as the clock reaches midnight tonight on the prime meridian, the GPS calendar will suddenly become 20 years out of date.

This should not come as a surprise for most newer GPS navigation systems. There has been plenty of warning—GPS went through a similar flip once before. And the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center issued a warning in April 2018 that this rollover was coming, as it will every 1,024 weeks—until the modernization of the GPS constellation is complete, and then the WN counter will be increased in size to 13 bits.

Most newer GPS receivers will shrug off the rollover because they’ve been programmed to accommodate the epoch change. But older systems won’t—and this may prove to have some interesting side-effects, as timing data suddenly jumps by 19.7 years.

 

[Tigger]

This is a cool twitter thread that answers an intriguing question:

Why do Spanish vultures, that can easily fly 400 km, avoid crossing the border into Portugal?

 

[Free]

What the what?!

 

[Free]

I sure hope that includes all the times I've called her a daft bitch for her incompetence.

 

[Tigger]

Police in the UK are getting new tech to tell if a driver is using their phone. At least that's the headline, but what is the reality of it?

Police to use mobile phone detectors to catch drivers using handsets

High-tech mobile phone detectors will be used by police in a bid to stop motorists using handsets at the wheel.

www.standard.co.uk

The article admits to the first issue, that there is no way to know who in the car is using a phone.

Is it going to detect the presence of a phone or is it going to detect an ongoing call, it does apparently spot whether bluetooth is in use and it seems to assume that if it is, then the driver is using a handsfree kit. But what about the inbuilt handsfree features of many phones, and given that most phones these days have capable voice assistants it doesn't follow that having a live call means you had any contact with the phone rather than just "Ok google..." or "Siri..."

This seems massively problematic to me. Unless it can detect *what* kind of device is being used via an active bluetooth connection it could be just streaming music. Secondly while it can probably detect calls, what about texts? what about internet usage? How will it determine if you are using a voice over IP app or a sat nav app with live traffic info.

 

[Govi]

Those signals will be produced by anyone using their phone as a GPS navigator.

 

[Tigger]

That's why I'm curious how these 'detector' devices work. It must be possible to distinguish between a voice call and internet traffic by examining the signal. But just how far do they go?

 

[Govi]

I think that if there are no obstacles, our phones have a broadcasting range of as many a 22 miles: a signal power level ranging from 0.6 to 3 Watts, depending on what its hardware guesses to be the signal strength needed to reach the cell phone tower it's talking to.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

My phone and my watch communicate with each other over Bluetooth. My phone and my car stereo also communicate with each other over Bluetooth, largely for playing music from my phone over my stereo. Would they be targeting those signals? Also, how would they differentiate between a driver using his or her phone while driving, and passengers doing the same?

 

[Caete]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

This very terrible-quality video, taken with a potato or something, has started making the rounds. It first appeared on Twitter and is unsourced, but purports to show the "anomaly".

 

[Ava Glasgow]

This very terrible-quality video, taken with a potato or something, has started making the rounds. It first appeared on Twitter and is unsourced, but purports to show the "anomaly".

I suspect it was taken from at least a mile away, at a high zoom level.

But what is the anomaly it shows? I just see it sitting there and then boom.