TED Community » Larry Winiarski
About Me
Degree in Engineering Physics.
Worked in the Forest Products Industry for 15 years, and developed log optimization routines and 3d Laser Scanning hardware used around in the world in 4 different companies.
Changing career to move into Renewable Energies because that is what is needed.
Invented a very inexpensive Lineal Fresnel concentration system shown here http://www.aquaflector.com and shown on "Invention Nation" show on the Science channel.
Working on a new version
My car runs on vegetable oil and I am designing a small electric car, because all the current ones suck (except the aptera..but it's too expensive for me)
- Location:
- United States, Corvallis, OR
- Gender:
- Male
- I am:
- Activist, Agnostic, Brainstormer, Concerned citizen, Designer, Engineer, Idea generator, Inventor, Job-seeker, Single
- Languages:
- English
- My website links:
- Aquaflector
More About Me
I'm passionate about
Solar Energy,
Getting the world to lower it's population to increase area for wildlife
Electric Cars
Increasing Wildlife Habitat
Teaching
An idea worth spreading
Aerodynamics for cars absolutely suck because marketing people can't seem to pull their heads out of their A...s. Someone needs to get this idea out.
Here is a page from wikipedia about this. On this page you can compare different cars. A person might imagine that the cars get better over the years, but sadly, some of the best designs are 60 years old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_drag_coefficients
I'd like to compare the new "Savior" to the car industry - The Chevy Volt has an drag coefficient of .301..not bad, but not great. But is beat by the Rumpler_Tropfenwagen made in 1921 which had a drag coefficent of 0.28
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumpler_Tropfenwagen
This ought to be a fucking outrage!!!!
It is criminal to waste fossil fuels on this.
Talk to me about
Solar Energy
Electric Cars
People don't know that I'm good at
Computer Programming, Concentrated Solar, Linux
Comments
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A reply on Talk: James Stavridis: A Navy Admiral's thoughts on global security
EXACTLY! This guy seems like an honorable guy with good intentions, but the road to hell (or a military dictatorship) is paved with good intentions.
Egypt and China and Burma are all examples of this. The military controls vast amounts of infrastructure. Not a good model to follow IMHO.
The US government had something called separations of powers. Sadly not enough people (including a fair amount of people commenting here) seem to understand or appreciate the purpose of it.
A reply on Conversation: Are there any circumstances where its OK for local police to enter another countries Embassy?
A reply on Talk: Ramesh Raskar: Imaging at a trillion frames per second
Imagine a square 1x1.
Let the upper left corner represent the cap,
Let the upper right corner represent the camera
Let the bottom line of the square represent the table
path (a) is from the upper left corner (cap) to the bottom left corner (table) and then diagonally across the square to the upper right corner (camera).
The distance for path (a) is 2.414.
path (b) is from the upper left corner (cap) to the midpoint of the bottom segment (middle of table), then back to the upper right corner(camera)
The distance for path (b) is 2.236.
path (b) is shorter than path (a) so photons traveling path(b) will arrive FIRST and photons traveling path (a) will arrive second.
So consider the case of the bright flash emitted when the light hits the cap and
emitted in all directions. Some travel path (a) and Some travel path (b)
So even though photons traveling path (a) hits the table first, it is a longer path overall.
contrasting to photons which travel path (b) hit the table second, but still beat the
photons traveling path (a)
This makes a particular illusion that you see the light hitting the table "out of order"
You can read an earlier comment of mine for a little more detail
A comment on Talk: Ramesh Raskar: Imaging at a trillion frames per second
First the 'Camera' isn't exactly like a normal camera. It looks similar but the imaging sensor is different in that it doesn't record a square frame. Rather it records just a few pixels (probably a line) over a very very very short time period.
He fires a laser and then after a very very short time he records a few pixels. He has a very accurate timing system to do this. Similar to what someone would use to measure the speed of light very accurately. then he repositions the view (using a mirror) and resets the the laser again and waits exactly the same amount of time and gets a new row of pixels slightly below first row. After few hundred experiments he gets an entire frame. The pixels are very very fast, but because of the limitations of his camera, he can only take a few of them at one time. The camera isn't designed like a normal camera to take a single frame. It's designed to take a 'movie' of a few pixels for a very very brief period in time. Thus a single frame takes many many experiments to build up, but when he has it, he also has a mini-movie for a very short time period..
Then he repeats the experiment again, but starts recording pixels just a little bit later after the laser fires.. So now you have 2 mini-movies, one taken very slightly after the other.
Now, you just keep repeating the process and you get a few hundred frames. That's enough for a 10 second movie. It basically takes 100,000 experiments to get there and everything has to remain perfectly utterly still.
There are some technical details and he might do things in a different order and I'm not really sure how he gets the color (there could be several ways this might work) but I think essentially this is how the high speed part actually works.
A comment on Talk: Ramesh Raskar: Imaging at a trillion frames per second
The second example of looking around walls, is essentially putting an intermediary reflector in front a RADAR beam. In a way this is also what happens when you look at something through a mirror that you can't see from your vantage point. This actually happens in real life with airplanes that can 'appear' below the surface of the earth because the radar signal is reflecting off the ground. Of course they aren't really underground, but their reflections appear to be coming from the ground. Basically this happens with all radar systems to some extent. It's just that the 'ghosted' reflections are much dimmer than the first reflection, so you can usually ignore them. But in this case, he is only looking for these 3-time reflections, so it's a pretty weak radar/lidar signal.
It's more complicated with a door than a mirror because a door doesn't reflect as well (and reflects in all directions) but if you look carefully, you can usually see rough reflections in non-mirrored surfaces as well. Even things that don't act like perfect mirrors, usually act like bad mirrors, because the light tends to reflect 'more' at a given angle. Visible light might actually be a negative here, because a larger wavelength (like millimeter radar) probably reflects more predictably.
A comment on Talk: Ramesh Raskar: Imaging at a trillion frames per second
The 'ripples' are man-made. Light waves are 1/1000th of a millimeter and too small to see. It's a superimposed picture of the light at various times during the experiment to show how the light moved. For the circles, you have to understand how the light gets from the bottle, to the table, then back to the camera. Imagine a flash from cap of the bottle. (that's where it got brightest) It goes out in all directions at the speed of light. Some goes directly to the camera and arrives first, but the rest of it goes in different directions and hits something and then some of it goes to the camera. This bounced light takes a longer time so it shows up later in the movie. Now the table is going to be hit with light all over, but there is ONE unique point on the table that is going to have the FIRST reflection to make it back to the camera. It's not next to the cap OR the camera, but is roughly 1/2 way in between. This is because there is one unique point on the table that is the shortest total distance from the cap to the table and back to the camera. This shows as a small circle of light. Now a little bit later there are going to be a bunch of points in a rough circle around the FIRST point on the table which aren't the shortest distance, but are just a tiny bit longer and that all come a little bit later. Then a larger and larger circle as time goes by. (it's get dimmer too). It has nothing to do with "Einstein" or "Relativity". It's just reflections/echoes take longer when they have a farther distance to travel.
There is a stellar version of this called 'Light Echo'. It happens when a star get's bright and the direct light goes to you first, but later it hits pre-existing clouds of dust and then reflects back at later times. It creates the illusion of an explosion but is really echos from further and further out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_echo
A reply on Talk: Ramesh Raskar: Imaging at a trillion frames per second
First the picture shows the movie with all the frames superimposed. So you are seeing all the light at one time. The ripples are not wavelengths of light. They would be much too small. I'm sorry if this sounds blunt, but it was kind of a faked picture showing how light moved over time by superimposing the light for the whole movie and then removing the light in evenly spaced bands in time.. (and doing some color coding in the process)
I see no mystery in the concentric circles on the table. The part towards the observer are cropped out so you only see the parts of the circles away from the observers. The center of the concentric circle is where the first reflection would appear. It appears in only one place to start out with, because there is one place on the table that is the shortest distance from the source (the bright flash when the laser hits the cap) to the observer. (i.e.shortest time for a reflection). As time progresses the reflection circle get's bigger because it is possible for light to travel a longer distance before it gets to you.
If a gunshot goes off a distance away, you first hear the crack of the rifle crisply, then as time goes by you hear the sound as the reflections from the ground at various places slowly reach your ear. Basically stretching the sharp sound over many seconds.
No mystery at all, nor do I see why it was presented as one.
A reply on Talk: James Stavridis: A Navy Admiral's thoughts on global security
If you are worried about people sitting around with nothing to do, we have a program for that. It's called the Reserves.
I'm not against the standing forces doing Humanitarian aid for things like disasters, or transport. They have a lot of equipment sitting around that can move very quickly. It's a great idea to train for disasters and be quick to mobilize. There is probably no organization on earth that can move as fast as the Military for disasters.
But for long term humanitarian aid, It just doesn't make sense. the truth is the Military is ridiculously expensive even for things like food service. That's why they hire so many contractors to supply food and drive trucks. It will never be as cheap as a civilian organization. There is a good reason for that . The Military is designed for emergencies. And that's what they should be doing.
Here the Pentagon gives the figure for a soldier in Afghanistan at between $800,000 and $1.4 million (and rising)
http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/28/one-soldier-one-year-850000-and-rising/
A typical Peace Corp worker is a College Graduate with honors who volunteers for around $5k/year. That is less than 1/100th the cost.
I'm sorry, but there is just no possible way the Military can touch the cost/benefit ratio as the Peace Corp.
A reply on Talk: Ramesh Raskar: Imaging at a trillion frames per second
First. Visible light waves are very very very small about 1 millionth of a meter. You are not seeing light waves in these pictures
I think he's showing his laser pulse at various times. Kind of like taking a bunch of pictures of a guy jogging and just show one picture every second instead of 24/second and spaced far enough apart so the pictures aren't on top of one another. So you see a sequence of images spread apart.
it's not light waves. It's sequences of pulses of light that each contain millions of tiny photons.
Now consider the reflection off the table. You are naturally going to see the very first point of reflection at a point where the light has to travel the shortest path from the source, then hitting the table and bouncing back to the camera. (This is the same point as if the table was a mirror) As time goes by, the path can get longer and so it expands from this point in a radial pattern. ( there are no ripples are going forwards because he has cropped the ripples which would be going forwards out of the picture. @9:31).
The stellar version of this is light echo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V838_Monocerotis#Light_echo
The 'modified' picture is a silly recreation based on what you would see if the speed of light from the laser was finite, but the reflections were basically infinite. It's like watching a picture of an explosion and someone decided they didn't like seeing the light first and several seconds later hearing the sound, so they modified the sound track so they happened at the same time.
For an amusing example of this by our news media you can watch these 2 videos of an rocket fuel factory explosion in Nevada
here's a real one (first 30 seconds)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7pRtgisV9s
typical fake (lots of them)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUPIDVMl8XM
A reply on Talk: Ramesh Raskar: Imaging at a trillion frames per second
It does take away from the 'magic' of the talk. I'm guilty of that. What he is doing is still very impressive. but you have to admit it is a little funny that not ONCE in a ten minute talk does he mention that his 'movies' are actually composites of millions of repeated scenes, rather than a single pulse of light which he shows. Don't you think that's kind of funny?
I admit I feel a little bad exposing the trick he is obviously hiding, but I would also say that exposing the 'trick' is what actually advances technology, stirs creativiy and challenges people. NOT what you just did, which is to say we were being 'negative'
He's definitely a visionary but he's also being purposely misleading to people who aren't in the field and people are right to call him on that. It's actually kind of condescending when you think about it.
You may call it a 'disruption'. Maybe it is, but IMHO TED isn't supposed to be a magic show. It's supposed to be educational and informative, and while he could have done that, he chose to be dramatic instead.
Would you rather we stay silent instead and not expose the 'Trick'? Do you think ignorance is what actually advances science?