"Arenas, whose father Gilbert played in the NBA, was involved in the single-car crash last April when he said the Cybertruck's keypad and steering wheel wouldn't respond. Arenas said he awoke to find the passenger side of the dashboard engulfed in flames and tried to use his digital key to escape, only to find the Tesla app had locked him out. I tried to open the door and the door wasn't opening," he said."
A few follow-up questions that occur to me: will an understanding of theoretical limits make the actual record breaking seem more routine and less interesting? And will many records be broken beyond the theoretical limit, making these calculations seem rather crude and short-sighted?
There was a youtube video I came across a few weeks ago which took Usain Bolt's world record and did a bio-mechanical analysis to see how far off he was from his absolute theoretical best. It was... surprisingly close. I think they had him at like an 8.9s 100m if he did everything perfectly.
For those who don't know the current records well, from Wikipedia[0]:
The men's world record is 9.58 seconds, set by Jamaica's Usain Bolt in 2009, while the women's world record is 10.49 seconds, set by American Florence Griffith-Joyner in 1988[a].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_metres
[a] is a footnote on the wikipedia page, discussing the validity of the record due to wind speed measurement concerns; read the page and footnote if you care about that level of detail
It will be interesting to see what records the Enhanced Games (where athletes are allowed to take [more/different] performance enhancing drugs openly) throw up when they are held.
You'd need to persuade someone already at a pretty elite level to take part though. Maybe someone who just did their last Olympics?
They may do better than unenhanced humans (a fair number of eastern bloc records from the pre-testing era still stand today, especially in women's throwing events), but they're not going to exceed any hard biomechanical limits. No drug can grow more type II fibers or change the firing rate of the nerves.
The one extreme option out there is surgery to change the attachment point of the tendon to the bone, generating more torque from the same contractile force. Some possibly acropyphal rumors claim lifters in nations with very unscrupulous doctors may have done that when the opportunity presented itself because of an incidental muscle tear.
I agree in that they won't make bones tougher or tendons more elastic. They maybe able to add more TypeII fibres though if they grow additional muscle?
The other big thing on the horizon is gene doping, such as with Myostatin in Bully Whippets.
I found this aside on one of the graphics rather surprising:
> Sometime in the next 2000 years, the Sun is expected to leave a local cloud of gas and dust. After that, it may enter the G cloud. If it is denser, it would squash the protective magnetic bubble of the heliosphere, potentially exposing the Solar System to a barrage of cosmic rays.
Mostly surprised that I hadn't heard more about this. 2000 years is practically tomorrow in cosmological time!
I’m assuming our solar system has moved through various interstellar mediums throughout history, and from reading above it sounds non-trivial. Is it? Do we know anything about how this may have influenced the development of Earth?
Learning this gives me a very “oh my god we’re hurtling through space!” feeing that I haven’t felt in a long time.
> > If it is denser, it would squash the protective magnetic bubble of the heliosphere, potentially exposing the Solar System to a barrage of cosmic rays.
That seems highly exaggerated. The Wikipedia article you mentioned is more sober:
> The Local Interstellar Cloud's potential effects on Earth are greatly diminished by the solar wind and the Sun's magnetic field.
A change in the density of the near interstellar medium would shift the heliopause, but it would require a massive increase in density to move it from where the Voyager probes are now to somewhere close to the inner solar system where it could have a noticeable impact.
Due to stochastic nature of interstellar magnetic fields, cosmic rays, trajectory of which are bent by those, are practically observed from all directions, so even if solar system distorts its own magnetic field this will have almost no effect on vosmic rays flux. Magnetic field is not a shield, for the charged particles it is rather a lens which converges or diverges their trajectories.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. "The G-Cloud contains the stars Alpha Centauri (a triple star system that includes Proxima Centauri) and Altair (and possibly others)" [0]
"There is a simple way of... [accurately ascertaining] if a novice can indeed land an airliner, according to Patrick Smith: use a professional flight simulator, the kind airlines train their pilots with.
"Stick a person in a true, full-motion airline simulator at 35,000 feet, with no help, and watch what happens," he says. "It won't be pretty."
Have always been surprised it doesn't get more attention on this forum. It's a paid app, and it shows in the quality. Very smart and dedicated single developer (this is feasible for an email client since the protocol is stable and doesn't change very much), an active mailing list and user community. Clean with few bugs in my use. Definitely aimed at developers and people who want to peer into the internals of email.
"Arenas, whose father Gilbert played in the NBA, was involved in the single-car crash last April when he said the Cybertruck's keypad and steering wheel wouldn't respond. Arenas said he awoke to find the passenger side of the dashboard engulfed in flames and tried to use his digital key to escape, only to find the Tesla app had locked him out. I tried to open the door and the door wasn't opening," he said."