Month: July 2017

Trippy Tippy Hippy Van

Why not a vehicle on its side? But, how? You can’t see through a roof. You can’t see through an undercarriage. Most vehicle bodies are much wider than they are tall, which means they will be far too narrow once flipped onto their sides. My first thought was that it needed to be both iconic, and a vehicle prone to rollovers for the visual gag to really work. But with such restrictive design parameters, which vehicle? A typical conversion van would have the longer, raised roof required, but offered nothing in the way of real aesthetic appeal, and most are far too heavy. What van has both a smaller body, a raised roof, and a look that is at once both iconic and desirable? The answer finally popped into my head—it had to be a classic Volkswagen Type 2 Westfalia camper van.

Robotics in India

amazing progress on logistics automation

“Chickpet is one of the oldest bazaars in Bangalore, dating back to the 16th century.” “A truck had backed up against a wide shopfloor, where packages were being unloaded and carried to a beltway. Scanners automatically read the barcodes and tagged the packages by type, weight, and destination. Further along, metal arms shot out and swept packets off the belt into bins.”

“All this was manual until recently at this courier company’s warehouse. Now, robotic sorters do the job. Who could have imagined robo workers in a Chickpet bazaar teeming with people?”

“But the robots have increased the capacity for processing consignments tenfold for the DTDC warehouse, and it’s far more accurate too, the processing manager, Bhupathi Anand, points out to me. Human errors in labeling and routing are costly for a courier company.”

“The robots come from Gurgaon-based GreyOrange, a rare hardware success story from India.”

Moon Express

Our Moon Express family of flexible, scalable robotic explorers are capable of reaching the Moon and other solar system destinations from Earth orbit.

this is very well done, as far as ambitious videos go. this company is arguably going to get to the prize before spacex. they’ve just received permission to land on the moon (from the us, which planted it’s flag there first): Press Kit

China textbooks

the us can always export textbooks on homeopathy, flat earth, creationism and alternate history:

When primary school administrators in the U.K. choose study materials for the fall semester this year, they will have a new option: math textbooks imported from Shanghai, a city celebrated as a global math power. It is a remarkable admission by British education authorities that their own methods have stumbled, and that Chinese educators – after years of racking up world firsts in math scores – have developed something admirable enough to import in whole cloth.

Fixing gerrymandering

A computer projection of how the law would work showed that in all states with at least 3 House seats, there would be no single-party districts. That means there would be rural Democrats and urban Republicans. Members of both major parties would share districts, with new incentives to collaborate on legislation addressing their shared constituents’ needs. Candidates would be forced to reflect a greater mix of views and voters would have real choices, including third party and independent candidates. A more representative and functional Congress would regain legitimacy.

Hypercanes

This is one vision of what it might have been like to visit the world as it ended 250 ma BP during the end-Permian mass extinction—the worst moment in the planet’s entire history. There might have been turbocharged “hypercanes” of almost unbelievable intensity assaulting the supercontinent Pangaea—the result of runaway global warming. These mega-storms might have had 800 km/h winds, filled with poisonous hydrogen sulfide sucked out of a rotting ocean that topped 37 celsius.