All posts tagged: quirk

Free Waymo Rides in California? You Can Thank a Regulatory Quirk

Published by skeptic

Robotaxi companies have thrived in California, where the good weather, enthusiasm for technology, and sophisticated labor force have supported their growth for nearly two decades. But a delayed decision from a state regulatory agency is now slowing Alphabet’s subsidiary Waymo, the US leader in driverless robotaxi service. The holdup means that Waymo isn’t yet allowed to expand into parts of Northern and Southern California. And, in an upside for riders, Waymo still isn’t able to charge California passengers for rides in its new vehicle, a pale blue Chinese-made car it’s calling the Ojai, which started picking up riders last month. If Waymo continues to operate these vehicles in its driverless ride-hail service, they could be gratis until the end of September and perhaps beyond. (The company continues to charge for rides in its Jaguar I-Pace robotaxis, which make up the majority of its fleet.) Unlike other states that allow robotaxis to launch testing operations and later public service without much, if any, oversight, California doesn’t allow the vehicles to hit the roads without permission. To …

Scientists just revealed a strange quirk in how we exit train stations

Published by José Betancourt

An analysis of data collected by a pedestrian tracking system at the Eindhoven Centraal Railway Station in the Netherlands found that, after exiting a train, individuals tend to follow the same walking path as the person directly in front of them. This happens even when they do not know that person and even when such a choice leads to a longer travel time. The research was published in the *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*. When walking in crowded spaces such as busy streets, train or bus stations, airports, or mass gatherings, people generally try to reach their destination while avoiding obstacles, delays, collisions, and discomfort. Their route is shaped by physical features such as walls, doors, stairs, kiosks, corridors, signs, and bottlenecks. They also respond to crowd density, often avoiding areas that look too congested or slow. Walking paths are likely influenced by perceived travel time, not only by actual distance, because a shorter route may feel worse if it is crowded. Also, being in a crowd forces people to continuously adjust their …

A quirk of relativity is the closest thing to achieving immortality

Published by Jenni Sidey

From your own experiential perspective, the laws of physics are stacked against you if you ever hope to achieve immortality. From a thermodynamic perspective, every system tends toward increasing entropy-and-disorder, and the only way you can combat that is by constantly inputting an external source of energy. In other words, everything about you, including your body and mind, is destined to eventually break down. Although you might try to leverage the power of relativity to dilate time and slow its passage, that will never work from your individual perspective; time only dilates or slows relative to an observer in a different reference frame from your own. No matter how quickly you move or how deep of a gravitational field you enter, you’ll still experience the passage of time as normal: at the rate of one second per second. While this may confine a human’s dream of immortality to solutions that rely on technological enhancements, bio-hacking your body, or science-fiction level technology that relies on novel physical laws and/or phenomena, there’s still plenty that relativity has …

Watch Peter Tork Quietly Mouth Other Actors’ Lines in The Monkees: A Strange Quirk You’ll Never Unsee

Published by José Betancourt

And now for something entirely random. As noted on Metafilter, “Peter Tork from the Monkees had a strange little quirk. Sometimes, when other actors … were delivering their lines Tork would unthinkingly mouth their dialogue along with them, as seen in this YouTube compilation. Once you spot it, it makes the show (which was already kinda weird) weird in a whole new way.” The YouTuber who created this compilation spent countless hours staring at Peter’s lips. Given the alternative these days, it’s not a bad use of time. Related Content Jimi Hendrix Opens for The Monkees on a 1967 Tour; Then Flips Off the Crowd and Quits <a title="Permanent Link to How the 1968 Psychedelic Film Head Destroyed the Monkees & Became a Cult Classic” href=”https://www.openculture.com/2022/02/how-the-1968-psychedelic-film-head-destroyed-the-monkees-became-a-cult-classic.html” rel=”bookmark”>How the 1968 Psychedelic Film Head Destroyed the Monkees & Became a Cult Classic <a title="Permanent Link to Watch Frank Zappa Play Michael Nesmith (RIP) on The Monkees–and Vice Versa (1967)” href=”https://www.openculture.com/2021/12/watch-frank-zappa-play-michael-nesmith-rip-on-the-monkees-1967.html” rel=”bookmark”>Watch Frank Zappa Play Michael Nesmith (RIP) on The Monkees–and Vice Versa (1967) Source link

The maths quirk that can cheer you up if you’re feeling unpopular

Published by skeptic

Orlando Gili/Millenium Images Your friends are likely to have more friends than you do. Don’t worry, it’s nothing personal. It’s just about how networks organise. We can represent a friendship group as a network. Draw a node (dot) for each person and a line between two nodes if those two people are friends. By doing this for a group of people who interact in person or online, we can build a representation of friendship connections. This network allows us to explore questions such as the number of degrees of separation. If someone is a friend of your friend, they are connected to you at degree 2. Their friends are at degree 3, and so on. How many links must we follow to get from one person to another? Connections tend to cluster together. Think of a group of friends – people you live near, some of your work colleagues or people who attend your astrophotography club. It’s likely that a lot of these people are friends with each other, so many of your “friends of …

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