I mean, it’s a really slick gimmick. I think having a bendy screen is cooler than two screens even if it’s more expensive/difficult to manufacture and doesn’t provide any real benefit.

I’m sure there are a half-dozen ways you could at least fake it. Like if the bezel can be made clear and they overlap somewhat.

I bought a vinyl of the soundtrack to 2001 A Space Oddyssey at a antique store.

The clerk told me “oh wow, that’s the year I was born!”

My wife tells the story that my response was the most deadpan “cool” she has ever heard.

What I don’t understand is why nobody makes a foldable phone where it’s just two flat screens with an invisible bezel along one edge so they fit seamlessly together when fully opened.

It’s not like there’s a use case where you operate the phone half unfolded and require both halves of the screen to be seamlessly connected.

If the flexing feature wasn’t a gimmick and there was an actual use case for a foldable pocket iPad, someone would have released a phone like the Kyocera Echo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyocera_Echo to commercial success.

Yeah, it was a budget portable device released in 1995 running a processor from 1984. I think it was just written in straight assembly. I’ve even found some unreachable code snippets in the assembly that print debug messages which confirm that theory.

Thanks for the response!

I think the issue is that the “structured programming equivalent” is just a really, really long function that’s not any easier to read.

digitalblasphemy.com ftw

The solar sail reflects light instead of absorbing it so you get to double dip on photon momentum.

And sure, you can steer with the laser I suppose, but with that kind of super weak deltaV, you’re not going to be exactly doing donuts in the solar system.

Even the massive solar sail only imparts a super small amount of force. It’s only useful because it does so for free over a long period of time with no air resistance.

You’d be better off using a conventional thruster to do whatever steering you needed to do before letting the sail take over. It’s not like you need to steer around any obstacles.

Sure, but it would be less efficient than a sail, and since the incoming radiation would impart inertia on the solar panels, you would still be limited on where you could steer.

Yeah, I’m working on that part. It’s just messy because a lot of portions of the code can’t be confined to functions. There’s a lot of GOTO equivalents.

I ditched my smartphone spring of 2023. Still use it on WiFi at home, but every time I leave the house, I only carry a fliphone.

Every time a stranger asks me about it, they say something like “I wish I could ditch my smartphone.” Like I get it. It’s not easy. I can’t even go to a baseball game unless my wife has our tickets on her phone. Paying for parking sometimes requires an app.

Yet apparently everyone hates this thing that they are now required to carry around.

How did we get here?

Could help, but could also add a lot of weight and complexity to handle an issue that is exceedingly rare.

Do ICE vehicles ever eject their gas tanks?

If I’m reading Wikipedia correctly, it takes 348 Joules of heat to boil a gram of CO2.

Water is 2257 Joules per gram. As long as you don’t need anything cooled under 100C, water is the way to go for cooling. It’s also a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to deal with than liquid CO2.

Water turning into steam soaks up an enormous amount of heat. I assume that thermal runaway happens somewhere above 100C, right?

CO2 extinguishers work by displacing oxygen, not by cooling.

(For the US market. They still make sedans for Europe)

One of the temporary fixes for the Chevy Bolt fires was to update the software to detect if the battery was about to go up and then honk the horn to warn everyone which I think is hilarious.

17 second demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgO_uZA5vXg

I once set oil on fire while making stovetop popcorn while drunk. This knowledge likely saved my house.

deleted by creator

Ok a few things:

Batteries don’t need “a few sparks” to catch fire. They will generate plenty of heat if punctured and self-ignite.

You don’t pour water on a grease fire because grease floats and it will spill out of your pot and catch the rest of your kitchen on fire. Also the water will boil and splatter oil everywhere.

Also pouring water on a battery fire is the preferred way to put it out. Many of the chemicals in the battery will release oxygen when heated, so the best way to put it out is to cool it down as much as possible by dousing it with a shitload of water. It isn’t always possible to apply enough water to the core of the fire which is why they are hard to put out. Sand won’t do anything because the fire is self-oxidizing.

Yes lithium metal reacts with water, but that’s not what makes batteries hard to put out.

I do a lot of my browsing from an iPhone 11. At least twice a day, a page will crash and reload halfway through whatever article I was trying to read. I get it’s a few generations old, but since when do you need state of the art tech to view what should be a static page.