Agreed, this protein target is high for likely many people.
Results from this meta-analysis [1] says
> protein intakes at amounts greater than ~1.6 g/kg/day do not further contribute RET [resistance exercise training]-induced gains in FFM [fat-free mass].
Said more plainly: if you're working out to gain muscle, anything more than 1.6g/kg/day won't help your muscle gains.
For those curious about why, see Figure 5. Americans also get too much protein already, ~20% more than recommended [2]. There are negative effects from too much protein (~>2g/kg/day) like kidney stones, heart disease, colon cancer [3]. Going back to the 1.2-1.6 g/kg/day range, this can be a good range if you're already working out, so get out there and walk/run/weight lift/swim/bike!
>So top of the list for us, of course, designing this thing is safety.
Funny issue I learned after talking to a founder at a similar company: although the battery packs were certified safe for cars (passing crash tests, wild heat differences from AK to AZ, people sitting on top of the battery packs in the car)
... the founder had issues re-certifying the batteries for safe use in a static location for grid storage.
The certification process treated his company like the batteries were made from scratch even though they used the same BMS/coolant lines/etc. already proven and tested.
It's clear you still need strong safety regulations and practices in the rare case there's an event, but the founder noted the grid storage industry regulations were adding redundant safety testing and slowing down adoption. The founder also added it's difficult to compete on cost even with effectively free used EV batteries in this startup space of grid storage against the low cost of Chinese made grid-specific batteries due to the added testing + custom hardware + space constraints and other items. (Caveat: I didn't fact check any of their statements)
Also a cape wind proponent here, I got carried away with my comment below reminiscing about the "just one more year" feeling for cape wind for the past 20 years.
My wind energy professor[1] assigned everyone the task of arguing against cape wind as one of our assignments (and later, for it). Of course, we found a few valid arguments for and against, but enormous reasons for it. The professor had a despondent take on utility scale wind, even though it was environmentally + economically viable, partially from the decades of fighting against the often irrational public perception.
Example homework:
"Wind turbines will block our sunset"
> no, dune grass will block more of the sunset for you, many turbines won't even be visible (insert math)
"Wind turbines will be too loud"
> no, they're so far away from shore that even your breathing is louder (insert math)
"They won't make energy cheap enough to reduce costs"
> no, even using conservative payback plans and limited life, it still works (insert math)
"The native's sunset ritual will be ruined by the wind turbines"
It's less about a conspiracy against renewables, you start to feel this conspiracy for pro foreign fossil fuels in the Boston area.
The iconic Citgo sign, core to Boston's image [2]-> maybe
The iconic Rainbow tank for liquid natural gas[3] -> maybe maybe
The fact that Boston receives tanker ships of LNG from Russia[4]-> maybe maybe maybe
[1]I have a Wind Energy Certificate from my university education, but this was not my focus
I don't even think it's that there's a conspiracy in favor of foreign energy. It's that the area is rich enough to indulge in stupidity. They can literally eat cake.
Because there's no actual impetus to "not suck" all sorts of stupid emotional "but the seagulls" arguments that would normally not stop anything resonate. And of course the foreign energy interests are happy to fan those stupid flames.
Maybe $300+ energy bills (also a result of short sighted let them eat cake policies) will be what finally does it.
I've worked in this space in automation with industrial grade robots and more bespoke end effectors that don't look like mainstream robots, but fulfil specific needs. Responding to some of your questions with how I could see the above touch sensor helping:
Trash sort and recycling: Not many robots here, majority of sorting takes advantage of object material properties. Some companies tried to add delta robots to keep up with the high rates required to even approach profitability, but they weren't good enough. Maybe some municipalities or universities that have lots of funding could justify adding robots, but it's just hard to financially justify.
Recalibration: I'm curious what the developers have for handling reduced magnetic fields over time along with gunk. Silicone is washdown rated, but anything soft at high throughput with parts will start to wear out and change pickup characteristics.
Washing and destemming a tomato is more of a problem to solve now that will need another 10+ years of price reductions in robot+end effector costs and increased efficiency before it beats bulk washing and hand-destemming (or crude machine work). Maybe it'll be a grad-student's project for a theoretical future home-bot
The Lenovo TrackPoint is likely already 95% of what you'd need from a trackpad, but this touch sensor is likely not even focused at that market.
Things I see useful for this robot touch sensor:
* Simpler version that detects part presence, is just a Boolean feedback of "part detected" which can stick on existing end effectors. This is often handled by load calculations of the robot to detect if it has a part, but could also detect if a part has substantially "moved" while it's been gripped, sending a signal to the robot to pause
* Harder to suggest items for food as soft grippers (inflatable fingers) will grip at the precise pressure that they're inflated, reducing the need for sensitive feedback. The application for this touch sensor would be food that needs a combination of different pressures to properly secure something, can't think of a great example
* Hard to also suggest places where this sensor would help with fine alignment, as major manufacturers have motor and arm feedback with WAY more sensitivity than the average person would realize, google Fanuc " Touch Sensing". But, this could help when the end effector is longer and it's harder for the joints to detect position
* Fabric manipulation. Fabric is just a hard problem for robots, adding in more information about the "part" should be helpful. Unlocking more automations for shoe manufacturing at reasonable prices is a big wall
This is a very insightful summary, thank you! A few things to add about AnySkin that might be relevant:
- AnySkin expressly handles wear and gunk by being replaceable. So if it wears out, and you have a heuristic or learned model for the old skin, it will work pretty well on the new skin! We verify this through an analysis of the raw signal consistency across skins, as well as through visuotactile policies learned using behavior cloning. We found swapping skins to work for some pretty precise tasks like inserting USBs and swiping credit cards.
- Could definitely be used for part motion detection
- Soft, inflatable grippers are effective, but often passive. AnySkin is not just soft, but also offers contact information from the interaction to actively ensure that blueberry doesn't get squished!
- This sensor would be key for robots that seek to use learned ML policies in cluttered environments. Robots are very likely to encounter scenarios where they see an object they must interact with, but the object is occluded either by their own end-effector(s) or by other objects. Touch, and an understanding of touch in relation to vision becomes critical to manipulate objects in these settings.
- Industrial robots do have very sensitive motor and arm feedback. However, these systems are bulky and unsafe to integrate into household robotic technologies. Sensors like AnySkin could be used as a powerful, lightweight solution in these scenarios, potentially by integrating with some exciting recent household robotics models like Robot Utility Models.
- ReSkin, the predecessor to AnySkin, has previously been used quite effectively for fabric manipulation! (see work from David Held's group at CMU). AnySkin is more reliable as well as more consistent and could potentially improve the performance seen in prior work.
> - Industrial robots do have very sensitive motor and arm feedback. However, these systems are bulky and unsafe to integrate into household robotic technologies. Sensors like AnySkin could be used as a powerful, lightweight solution in these scenarios, potentially by integrating with some exciting recent household robotics models like Robot Utility Models.
I bet having good touch sense would let you get away with much cheaper mechanical systems for the robots.
Industrial robots are mainly bulky because they need to be very robust and precise at almost incredible speeds. (I work with those). Its not uncommon to have a 500+ kg robot on 500kg rail (totaling 7 axes) to actuate a 1mm wide, 5cm long nozzle, and moving it at speeds of 1+ meter/second, while navigating it in a gap where it has 0.5mm space on each side of the nozzle. Consistently, all day every day.
Lots of industrial robots arent even meant to touch their work piece, yet the robustness is the only way to make the whole assembly rigid enough.
I can imagine a touch-sense equiped arm could be made way smaller (less rigidity being compensated by quick enough feedback loop), but the speeds would probably have to decrease quite a bit. Not a problem for home robots tho.
> Washing and destemming a tomato is more of a problem to solve now that will need another 10+ years of price reductions in robot+end effector costs and increased efficiency before it beats bulk washing and hand-destemming (or crude machine work). Maybe it'll be a grad-student's project for a theoretical future home-bot
Heh, fair. I wasn't thinking of this as a practical usage, it was just the first thing to come to mind when imagining a task requiring a lot of pressure sensitivity and a range of forces.
Then again, now that I've said it, I believe the current approach to this is to breed really hard, tasteless tomatoes and then agitate them in a vat. Perhaps we can eventually get tastier produce if robots can handle more fragile things!
Hm... or you could invert things and make a glove, then use it as a controller. (VR, or just a richer set of control dimensions for eg photo editing or something.) I guess that needs to generalize across hand shapes and sizes, not just swapping out the glove, but I'd be up for a calibration/training phase.
> * Harder to suggest items for food as soft grippers (inflatable fingers) will grip at the precise pressure that they're inflated, reducing the need for sensitive feedback. The application for this touch sensor would be food that needs a combination of different pressures to properly secure something, can't think of a great example
How do you know the right pressure without feedback? A lot of foods vary in firmness over time and ripeness. Lemons, for example. I guess most don't, as long as you're sticking to a single type of food.
Context for those not following running news, The Boston Marathon lowered qualifying times for most prospective runners for 2026 race [0]. Because the Boston Marathon has limited capacity, you can only run if you either:
1) raise $5k+ for a charity (limited spots)
2) run a full marathon below* a qualifying time
The reason it's below* is because even if you run under a qualifying time, there may be enough people even faster than you that fill up the available spots.
This results in some years where you needed to be many minutes faster than the posted qualifying time to guarantee a spot, and every few years, the BAA (group in charge of Boston Marathon) drops the qualifying times.
Note, even though the qualifying times have been dropping, they have been even faster in the past (see the 1980s)[1]
As someone that's done the Boston Marathon a few times, I am glad they are trying to find a good balance of reasonable qualifying times for the most participation without dramatically expanding the field. I'm also always surprised with how popular and well known this marathon is given the NYC marathon (and others) are harder to get into, only about 2 of the miles are actually in Boston [2], and the start/finish are so far away making participating a logistic headache. But that could be what gives it the charm and why I'm now thinking about doing 2026
I can't answer this for everyone, but as someone who has run 5 marathons and is running my 6th in 5 weeks (Frankfurt).
Boston has some kind of mythical status among marathoners. You're _not_ really there until you've qualified for Boston. I do not know where this comes from, but what I do know is that QUALIFYING for Boston as a male (33) is a BHAG that's fun to chase after.
Boston is the 6th of the 6 Abbot Marathon that are considered the "big" 6.
New York, London, Chicago, Boston, Berlin and Tokyo. All the others you either win the lottery our you've 4 of the other ones. Nothing you can really do in 6 conseq years.
It's not even the fastest course, but it's the course for those who are "serious" about running as a hobby. Running a marathon isn't enough. Running Boston separates you from the try-hard crowd, with a lack of a better word.
> Boston has some kind of mythical status among marathoners. You're _not_ really there until you've qualified for Boston. I do not know where this comes from
It's literally because BQ is a tough target time. Even if you don't run Boston it's a mark you're in the top X% (X is a bit hard to calculate). So it's a status symbol. Just like 'Ivy League' or "D1 sport".
Similarly in the UK, it's the London qualifying time known as Good For Age or the more challenging 'Championship Place'.
And it's self-fulfilling. You get the time so you chose to run because you have it which keeps the time hard for others.
The race itself is, I'm told, a pain-in-the-ass because of the logistics but also the profile - despite being net-downhill it's got a nasty hill at mile 20. Plus with the race route being pretty much "26 miles straight, then hook a right", if there's a headwind, there's a headwind for 26 miles. If there's driving rain, it's in your face for 26 miles (see 2018's race).
(As an aside, there's a few tricks for the Abbot Majors to get places [aside from just buying one of the expensive guaranteed tour company places or being an elite runner])
I've always thought it was a real shame that the Boston Marathon is so mythical, because there's a much more symbolic potential route: start at the Old North Church in the North End (the "one if by land, two if by sea" place), through downtown/the common/Back Bay, then take Mass Ave all the way to the Lexington Battle Green (site of the first battle of the revolution), and that's almost exactly half a marathon in distance while more-or-less reenacting the Midnight Ride.
An otherwise unmotivated position sustained as desirable only by the difficulty generated by the number of people trying to crowd into it serves as a deeper representation of this country than the story you're proposing to replace it with. ;)
Not a marathon runner but live in Boston and I have been told the route is fairly high difficulty due to hills in particularly challenging stretches. Not sure how true this is but one of my coworkers ran it competitively last year and he got wrecked by the elevation changes.
The first couple of miles are downhill. You're also running with a very large densely-packed group who are just as fast as you. It's very easy to get sucked along to run much faster than you planned for the first few miles.
The Newton Hills, esp. Heartbreak Hill, are near where many people will hit the proverbial wall, distance-wise. Having to go up ever-steeper hills at the same time can be really taxing.
There are so many things that can go slightly wrong, and when you have to endure those slight inconveniences for 26.2 miles/2+ hours, it can feel like an aerobic Chinese water torture.
The year I ran, we had a tailwind, so I had an relatively easy time of it.
Come to Baltimore and check out Satyr Hill. It is very easy to leave your legs behind and not realize that until you have four to six miles to go and no energy.
(But what do I know? I haven't run Baltimore since 1984.)
A while back I thought maybe, just maybe, if everything went in my favor, I could qualify at 3:10. Then they lowered it to 3:05, and that might as well be the far side of the moon.
According to TFA it's now 2:55. There is no way in the universe I would ever run a sub-3 marathon. (I'm no longer in that age bracket, but the time for my bracket is similarly impossible.)
That's fine with me. It's awesome that so many people are running marathons that the most prestigious one is utterly full. It's a really absurd hobby, and the best thing about race day is all of those people going "Wow, we're about to do something incredibly stupid together."
There are plenty of other fun marathons to do. This year mine is gonna be the Dramathon -- which will end with bottles of scotch.
The carbon-plate shoes (starting with the Nike Vaporfly, then AlphaFly) have resulted in faster race times. The Boston Athletic Association is reacting accordingly.
My favorite part: "Despite all the evidence and research I have laid out above, it should be noted that only certain people seem to get benefits from the foams, carbon fiber plates and other technologies associated with these shoes. Research has come out just recently that the actual benefit derived from each subject varies greatly based on individual factors (Herbert-Losier et al., 2020). These performance changes can be as great as 10% (or more) in some people and for others may actually be detrimental. So as much as we talk about the percentages gleaned from the research suggesting how much certain elements contribute to changes in economy, remember that each person is unique in that effect."
I've been sitting on the idea of putting several of these tags around the house and have them display quote, jokes, and facts.
The best guide I've found so far is this one [0], as it uses easy to procure tags + guides on GitHub + offers an application to auto-upate tags via screenshot area of a website and seems like it could be done in an afternoon.
However, I'm hoping to find an even more streamlined approach that I could turn into a gift to others (assuming they want a 3rd party device on their network), where the tags sync to a raspberry pi (or similar cheap USB powered device), and it uses very cheap tags, if anyone has done this or has plans.
Does he mention a price or part number at some point? I'm quite a good way in, and he hasn't mentioned anything, and the description is empty.
EDIT: I see the description now, they're called Hanshow Stellar and sell for $20-$25 a piece. Not the price point I thought of when I heard "cheap", but eh.
Related reading "I’m living in a carbon bubble. Literally."[0] which has a lot of great basic charts and graphs on everyday data related to CO2. Information in this reading that is relevant to 4000 PPM on the Space Station
-Typical CO2 concentrations can reach 4000 ppm in a car
-"On the International Space Station, the odds of a crew member reporting a headache double for every 1300 ppm increase in CO2 concentration [Law 2014]."
-Nearly every cognitive function go "down" in score when CO2 PPM levels go from 1k to 2.5k. The exceptions are Focused Activity Cognitive Score goes UP and information search stays about the same. Not shown are effects over 2.5k.
Important to note the Space Station is at a different pressure and has no gravitational effects on airflow compared to where many of the studies were done on Earth.
I do not work nor have studied in a CO2 related field but gained a fascination with how we overlook it in daily life (like many here) and have since purchased CO2 measuring devices and read various studies. I think missing from my notes here is a link to NASA done research on the effects of CO2 on astronauts on the space station.
NASA’s Office of the Chief Heath and Medical Officer has published a number of technical briefs [0] that cover a variety of human spaceflight related risks and topics. In particular, they have one for carbon dioxide [1, PDF warning] with some references that may interest you.
Related video "Tesla Autopilot Crashes into Motorcycle Riders - Why?"[0],
summarized to: vision used by Tesla seems to process motorcycles differently, and may be incorrectly "assuming" the closer spaced brake lights on a motorcycle is actually a far away car.
More details on the homicide here[1], which shows the crash happened during daylight hours and the bike resembles a sport bike. This is a different condition than my referenced video (night collisions with cruiser-style motorcycles), but I suspect similar incorrect assumptions by Tesla vision happened.
Another theory I've heard is that the driver was holding down the accelerator to prevent phantom braking. If this is true Tesla will likely respond fairly quickly to prove it wasn't them. So the longer they don't the less likely this theory is.
> Another theory I've heard is that the driver was holding down the accelerator to prevent phantom braking.
Would be interesting to know how commonly this workaround is applied by Tesla owners. If this is common enough it seems like a case where a feature that's merely unreliable becomes a safety issue due to second-order effects. Echoes of Therac 25[1].
To add: there's ongoing research to "reverse-engineer" the magnetic properties of certain meteorites that contain tetrataenite [0], which is as strong as a rare-earth magnet, but requires no rare-earths, but takes millions of years to make[1].
I studied techniques to speed this process up in the lab over a decade ago when this was new, and got to handle meteorites in the process.
A less "magnetically invasive" way to check if a material has magnetic material would be to put a compass nearby (as recommended by the site). Also, one could put a rare earth magnet on a string, watch it align to the earth's field away from the rock in question, then bring it carefully close to the meteorite seeing if it settles to a newer direction. This would still expose the meteorite to a magnet, but a very small field vs checking if something sticks.
Sounds like fun research and a quick skim seems to indicate success in fabrication - congrats! Did you get to the point of making magnets and if so, how strong did they get?
A similar project to what the author worked on is "WikiShootMe" [0] that finds Wikipedia photos near you (green/yellow/blue), and needed (red) on a map. This was discussed here 2 years ago [1].
Results from this meta-analysis [1] says
> protein intakes at amounts greater than ~1.6 g/kg/day do not further contribute RET [resistance exercise training]-induced gains in FFM [fat-free mass].
Said more plainly: if you're working out to gain muscle, anything more than 1.6g/kg/day won't help your muscle gains.
For those curious about why, see Figure 5. Americans also get too much protein already, ~20% more than recommended [2]. There are negative effects from too much protein (~>2g/kg/day) like kidney stones, heart disease, colon cancer [3]. Going back to the 1.2-1.6 g/kg/day range, this can be a good range if you're already working out, so get out there and walk/run/weight lift/swim/bike!
[1]: https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/bjsports/52/6/376.full.pdf
[2]: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/protein-is-important-but-were-...
[3]: https://www.health.harvard.edu/nutrition/when-it-comes-to-pr...
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