Thursday Things: Take a Shower Edition
20 May 2021. Vol 3 No 20 By Dan McGirt. #93
Welcome to Thursday Things! If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the heading or at the end of the post to let me know. You can also comment by clicking the dialogue bubble next to the heart.
Improving productivity. Photo by Seth Doyle on Unsplash
Lasers Could Clear Space Junk From Orbit. Not going to lie. I love lasers. Blasting space junk with lasers would be my dream job. Alas, the approached discussed in this article is more subtle.
Ever since humans started launching rockets into space, the amount of junk flying around Earth has been growing, to the point where debris has damaged satellites or forced the space station to shift its orbit. Now researchers in Australia want to use lasers to track the wayward particles, and even shove them out of the way before they cause problems.
Using the system, D’Orgeville and her colleagues can fire a series of infrared laser pulses at the orbiting flotsam to measure where they are and where they’re headed. …
But the team wants to go further than that, and use yet another laser to actually push some of the debris out of the way. If they discover that two tiny pieces of space junk were headed for a crash—which might result in more, harder-to-track debris—they could fire a 20-kilowatt infrared laser at one of the pieces. The light pressure from the laser would be enough, after a few shots, to gently nudge the junk onto a different trajectory. “It's not going to destroy the debris or anything, but at least you can move it out of its way,” she says.
Well, where’s the fun in that? So much for my dream of being a Space Sanitation Laser Operator.
World first: Oblique wave detonation engine may unlock Mach 17 aircraft. Buy me a ticket on an aeroplane. Ain’t got time to take — oh, we’re there already.
UCF researchers say they've trapped a sustained explosive detonation, fixed in place, for the first time, channeling its enormous power into thrust in a new oblique wave detonation engine that could propel an aircraft up to 17 times the speed of sound, potentially beating the scramjet as a hypersonic propulsion method.
I don’t quite follow all the physics and engineering involved, but what I got from this article is engine go boom, plane go fast.
But not as fast as a laser.
Looks good to me. Source: UCF
News you can use. How Being More Productive Starts With Doing Nothing. Way ahead of you!
Even brief timeouts help the brain reinforce long-term learning and productivity. You come out of downtime able to learn more, and can access that learning faster. “When you take a break, you may want to do something mind-consuming to help with motivation, but technically your best way of taking a break is to do something mindless,” says Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan
Tips in the article include taking long showers (“Letting your mind wander here can be a stepping stone to quieting more hectic environments.”), taking long solo walks, staring out the window, and napping. I pretty much have those covered. So I must be a productivity powerhouse. It’s science!
I assume Tesla also took lots of long showers and naps. Nikola Tesla invention from 100 years ago suddenly makes more sense today
Tesla's macrofluidic valve -- often just called the Tesla valve -- is a sort of odd-shaped conduit for fluids in which a main channel is interspersed with a series of diverting teardrop-shaped loops. The loops are oriented in such a way that fluids easily flow through in one direction, but when reversed, the flow is almost totally blocked.
In other words, it can be thought of as a sort of one-way or check valve, which anyone who has done a fair amount of plumbing or work with pumps will be familiar with. The advantage of Tesla's design is it has no moving parts that can wear out like the springs and other mechanisms on conventional check valves.
Who knew that Tesla, in addition to all his work with electricity and earthquake machines, also made cutting edge contributions to plumbing? That had to be an idea that came to him in the shower, right?
Spotlighting another Substack newsletter, this entry from Not Boring intrigued me this week: The Great Online Game: How to Win the Internet. As advertised, it was not boring. Here’s a taste:
We’re all playing a Great Online Game. How well we play determines the rewards we get, online and offline.
The Great Online Game is played concurrently by billions of people, online, as themselves, with real-world consequences. Your financial and psychological wellbeing is at stake, but the downside is limited. The upside, on the other hand, is infinite.
Social media is the clearest manifestation of this meta-game. Beginner-level Twitter feels weird, like a bunch of people exposing their personal thoughts to the world. Medium-level Twitter is Threads and engagement hacks. Twitter Mastery is indistinguishable from an ongoing game. This is also true for Reddit, Discord, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and other social networks. …
The Great Online Game is free to play, and it starts simply: by realizing that you’re playing a game. Every tweet is a free lottery ticket. That’s a big unlock.
Anyone can play. You can choose how to play given your resources and skills at the current moment. You can level up fast. Financial and social capital are no longer tied so tightly to where you went, who you know, or what your boss thinks of you. This game has different physics and wormholes through which to jump. It’s exponential instead of linear.
And the rabbit hole just gets deeper from there. I’ll need to read this a few times more, but I like the framework (I’ll avoid saying “paradigm”) of thinking of the online world as one big game. Like the Game of Thrones, you’re playing whether you know it or not — and the sky’s the limit for achieving your goals if you learn to play well. Read the whole thing at Not Boring.
Thank you for reading Thursday Things. Please click the hearts, comment, and use the share button to send this issue to a friend who might enjoy it. See you next Thursday!