TR Forums

Captain Ned wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

I think he means AJ the forum member, not TRAJ the subject of the story.

For the family's sake, I sure hope that's the case.

Yes, that is the person I am talking about, the action jim from the story has vanished, hopefully for good.

Starfalcon wrote:

Yes, that is the person I am talking about, the action jim from the story has vanished, hopefully for good.

That's a relief. The thought of TRAJ procreating is too horrible to behold.

Meme video of the year, courtesy of a gorilla at the Dallas Zoo and some post-production help.

https://twitter.com/BobHagh/status/877920282710859776

That is one awesome gorilla.

Today i put all my propellers on my brand new quad, which took 20 hours to build, backwards. I've never heard such a terrifying scream of self shredding goodness. Luckily for me all i had to replace was a few led strips. I still need to do my tuning but i'm hoping to get some speed testing done in the morning.

This would be Darwin Award worthy if they didn't already have children:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/pregnant-mo ... one-wrong/

Meet sam.



Sam has a peak power output of 1 kilowatt. He weighs 625 grams and generates at least 7.2 kilograms of thrust. The newest edition to my lineup.

Those tacky gold motors weren't in the original plan, but due to unexpected controller compatibility issues i had to make some changes. Just didn't want anyone to think i'd actually like....buy solid gold motors for the look or something... At any rate, i'm expecting a minimum of 80 mph still even though these new motors added a significant amount of weight. I'll eventually work the other motors into a backup frame of the same design once i work out a compatible controller.

Of course, sam is pushing a little beyond spec, so he might just melt the first time i try to speed test it.

I think i need a new motherboard or something. Since new it's had a problem with dropping usb connections seemingly randomly. It's very annoying to be using your mouse and suddenly get a device malfunction, and it happens on every port. My attempts to fix it with drivers have all failed although i shouldn't really need to fix usb drivers of all things anyway.

Lately something new has started happening that i'm not even sure what's going on anymore. I may be browsing a webpage and get a whiteout style pauses for 2 seconds or so, every few minutes. These pauses are most noticable while doing something like typing or scrolling a fully loaded web page. Windows will also have the same pauses while navigating it's interface. I may be in a right click menu moving the mouse up and down, but suddenly nothing will highlight or be clickable for several seconds. Mouse cursor still fully active, and nothing ever crashes, but it seems to be getting more frequent over time. Interestingly enough, games never have this problem.

I feel it's obviously waiting for something, dpc latency shows no problems, but it's definitely waiting for something. Motherboard or ram problem perhaps.

If it's an ASMedia USB controller you have my condolences.

As far as the random freezes go, have you checked the system event logs to see if anything strange is going on?

Well i poked through them, i found a problem at least. Not sure if it's the culprit though. Dropbox had generated 68,000 errors of some variety. One per second, something about failing to connect to a driver. For now i've just disabled drop box and i'll see if the hanging problem goes away.

While at the beer store yesterday, upon viewing the ever-increasing packaging options I had a moment of clarity, presented here for all to see.

Captain Ned's Last Theorem:

Let N equal a positive whole integer greater than 2 and represent the number of containers in a package.

For any value of N, a beverage manufacturer/distributor will not produce a package size where N is a prime number.

It's a bit of a stretch, but crowlers could be considered an exception.

Edit: D'oh, I have no idea why I originally read your post as saying the package size (i.e. in ounces) was 2^N. Clearly I was over-thinking this, and while not fully awake on top of that.

Holiday 5-pack?

Now that I'm thinking straight, yes it makes sense. Prime numbers of things don't pack neatly into rectangular arrays.

I could see a top tier fancy micro brewery making a star shaped carriage for 5 one day. Stores could obviously be annoyed at the odd shape, I think Walmart would outright reject such a product. Otherwise it would definitely be a different looking eye catcher.

Hexagonal 7-packs would tile nicely in the warehouse, but they wouldn't fit well in your rectangular fridge.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

Hexagonal 7-packs would tile nicely in the warehouse, but they wouldn't fit well in your rectangular fridge.

That was the one exception that occurred to me as well, but I have a feeling retailers would hate the things.

It was coming across a stack of square 16-packs of some IPA that kicked my mind into gear and dropped this theorem on me while still in the beer store. The cashiers are probably still wondering about the old dude muttering about prime numbers on his way out the door. They clearly did not see the import of my epiphany.

The biggest complaint, im sure, would be the totally unnecessarily wasted shelf space. But I think certain types of stores would tolerate it.

Hexagons would work OK for floor displays, since hexagons pack well. A little wasted space around the edges, but the better interior packing could make up for it, depending on the size of the display. And it would be eye-catching.

I could see one complaint being that the central can in the pack won't get cold as fast.

Oh i see what you guys are saying. I was thinking more of a carrier holding a hexagonal perimeter array of bottles. Are you guys thinking hexagonal boxes?

Heiwashin wrote:

Oh i see what you guys are saying. I was thinking more of a carrier holding a hexagonal perimeter array of bottles. Are you guys thinking hexagonal boxes?

No, more like the current fashion IPA 4-pack plastic holders modded into a 7-station hexagram with 1 in the center (which would also help eliminate complaints about cooling time for the center beer).

Captain Ned wrote:

Heiwashin wrote:

Oh i see what you guys are saying. I was thinking more of a carrier holding a hexagonal perimeter array of bottles. Are you guys thinking hexagonal boxes?

No, more like the current fashion IPA 4-pack plastic holders modded into a 7-station hexagram with 1 in the center (which would also help eliminate complaints about cooling time for the center beer).

How does that help the cooling issue? Just the fact that you'd probably take the center one last?

just brew it! wrote:

How does that help the cooling issue? Just the fact that you'd probably take the center one last?

No box, so better air circulation.

Ahh we're talking box vs no box. Gotcha. Still not going to get much circulation to the center can though. There's a solid ring of cans all the way around it.

just brew it! wrote:

Ahh we're talking box vs no box. Gotcha. Still not going to get much circulation to the center can though. There's a solid ring of cans all the way around it.

Always saw the folding/gluing complexity of a hexapod box as too much compared to the new "top-grabber" plastic jiggers being used now.

And in retail coolers with wire shelves, natural vertical convection currents will chill that middle can just fine. An ice-filled cooler will do just as well given the circulation space. Besides, Penrose tiling efficiency aside, it's not like this would ever be more than a short-term stunt by some brewery.

Captain Ned wrote:

While at the beer store yesterday, upon viewing the ever-increasing packaging options I had a moment of clarity, presented here for all to see.

Captain Ned's Last Theorem:

Let N equal a positive whole integer greater than 2 and represent the number of containers in a package.

For any value of N, a beverage manufacturer/distributor will not produce a package size where N is a prime number.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but here's a 3-pack of Budweiser, and here an 11-pack.

It all comes down to rectangles. Rectangular packages fit well into the spaces we have (shelves, floors, trucks, and coolers), and stacks of said packages build in their own structural integrity when stacked around other packages.

A sleeved three was also in my thoughts, but that 11 pack of 7 oz splits must have been a 7-11 one-time promotional item whereby they got AB to pay for the low-density space up front.

I had thoughts that N being 3, 5, or 7 might have some actual proof cases. Never thought I'd see an 11, and a 13 or 17 might well spell the beginning of the End Times.

Oh well, I've pretty much occupied an entire page of DYMT with a random whimsy that struck me in the beer store so I've achieved my goal. Entropy has increased. Nicholas Léonard Sadi Carnot has once again been proven correct.

Maybe this can be one of those theoretical times where entropy naturally decreases. Hopefully it does that by reversing the heat spread into everyone's beer for a while.

Heiwashin wrote:

Maybe this can be one of those theoretical times where entropy naturally decreases.

Well, as long as you've got a landing place for the "reversed" entropy and the entropy caused by the local reversal of the Second Law, we're good.

That said, has anyone run Alan Guth's inflation model against the Three Laws of Thermodynamics, or is the inflation period somehow assumed to have happened outside/before the physical laws we can track back to when the CMB coalesced?

I don't know higher maths at all, but I have had a deep and abiding interest in cosmology since about the time I was awakened to Science^TM by Project Apollo.