Tom Elwood -best of the internet.

Zero-click scam: Malware embedded in an ad you scroll pay and don't even click on.

2026-10-18T21:19:10.448-07:00

https://youtu.be/oTNqhH4KzxY?is=enyHEjwjiSV6im8k

Elevator micro-adjustment when people get on board

2026-10-18T13:00:53.435-07:00

How much micro adjustment (in mm) is needed in a 50-storey building when a dozen people get in?

In a 50-story building, an elevator car sitting at the bottom floor will stretch by approximately 51 mm (about 2 inches) when a dozen people step inside. Therefore, the elevator's micro-leveling system must winch the car upward by that exact distance to bring it flush with the building floor again.

• Added Load (P): 8,829 N (12 people averaging 75 kg each = 900 kg total mass x gravity @ 9.81m/s²

• Cable Length (L): 175,000 mm (Assuming a standard 3.5 meters per story over 50 stories, measured when the car is at the lowest level to evaluate maximum possible stretch).

• Number of Cables (n): 6 cables (A typical configuration for heavy high-rise cars).

• Metallic Cross-Sectional Area (A): ~60 mm² per cable (Based on a standard 13 mm / 0.5-inch elevator wire rope. Because cables are braided strands wrapped around a core, the actual solid metal area is roughly 45% of a solid cylinder's area): π(13/2)² x 45% = 60mm²

• Modulus of Elasticity (E): 85,000 N/mm²

AI-intensive Alpha schools

2026-10-18T05:05:25.608-07:00

https://youtu.be/SC69VqCjRoQ?is=nR_vQN2pa-z5EpkI

Ridiculously high tuition averages $52000 a year.

AI teaching specifically tailored to the student's individual interests, tracks their engagement and alters methods accordingly

Very few teachers on site - mostly tech grads and life coaches staffing the schools

Intensive student monitoring and recording even at home and when sleeping

Large donations by the founders to politicians who control school vouchers which funnel public funding to private schools

Mesmerizing

2026-10-17T13:26:58.770-07:00

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dc30rOaM4EA/?psln=cHczeXdldXA1NDYw

-Tom

Save massive energy finally with straighter larger tubing in municipal systems

2026-10-17T12:24:14.431-07:00

Here's the short version:

• About half of the world's electricity runs electric motors, and half of that motor torque drives fans and pumps.

• Friction Reduction: Narrow, twisting pipes create massive fluid friction. Straight, wide-diameter pipes cut friction by 86% or more.

• Downsized Equipment: When friction drops, the pumps and motors pushing the fluid can be shrunk significantly (often by 80–90%).

• Lower Costs: Redesigning the whole loop frequently lowers total capital costs (because smaller pumps and motors cost less) while paying for itself in under a year or instantaneously on new builds.

https://www.brattle.com/insights-events/publications/brattle-qa-energy-leaders-innovators-amory-lovins-on-the-big-and-hidden-opportunities-in-decarbonization/

Weather forecasting keeps getting better

2026-10-17T12:14:35.065-07:00

Overall, weather predictions have come a long way in recent decades.

Forecasting skill increases by roughly one extra day of accuracy per decade.

A 5-day forecast today is roughly as accurate as a 1-day forecast was in the early 1980s, and a 3-day prediction of a tropical storm or hurricane track today is more precise than a 24-hour forecast was 40 years ago.

I've often wondered how much forecasting has improved. This video emphasizes how granular or hyper-regional current predictions are getting using AI and massive amounts of data.

https://youtu.be/_6jZlnRsXXQ?is=AsBNGcHpzRbsYMuO

Avoid car break-ins

2026-10-15T12:18:51.198-07:00

https://youtu.be/HC5fzVMm4vU?is=Rad1Ym8r7rstLjTL

Minimize, and hide valuables in spare tire compartment.

Leave the glovebox open, turn any bags inside out to show they're empty, make it obvious you have no electronics in the car, and *put the rear seat in the flooded-down position so they can see the trunk is empty.

World's largest electric aircraft just flew

2026-10-15T12:16:02.263-07:00

https://youtu.be/nM86DBOqgPM?is=wt8rxr92H8anuV2q

14:27 of we can [build an airplane] that is lower emissions, lower cost, better quality of life — we should do it.

3:10 jet engines are inefficient at taxiing, takeoff, and landing. For a short flight, [a jet] can burn 10% of it's fuel [load] taxiing.

3:25 the segment [of aviation] of regional flights is really badly served by the technology we have today.

3:32 half of all flights [flown today] are under 2 hours.

5:49 if you're a founder... every time you need more capital, there needs to be something material, something [one] can touch, that you've made.

8:10 [built-in redundancy] everything has to work, even if everything goes wrong

9:40 1 in 1000 flights gets diverted to another airport...you need 45 minutes of "loiter" and then [another 100 miles of range.]

AI makes a novel medical advance

2026-10-14T10:37:14.068-07:00

https://youtube.com/shorts/FoifEkBtxkE?is=XDcNm5AHfh5L2avr

AI was able to come up with a new hypothesis, and search for a drug that would make previously innocuous-seeming tumor cells "visible" to the immune system, without affecting normal cells.

How actors show emotion, and what directors do with masked actors do instead.

2026-10-11T15:31:08.385-07:00

https://youtu.be/-gitexWSLlg?is=_yBEGNsI8OqIPW2Z

Excellent video with the perfect excerpt to illustrate each point. Clearly very well researched by someone knowledgeable.

3:05 the Kuleshov effect - context imparts emotion to an identically neutral face

AI can remove pixelation pretty well

2026-10-10T09:43:54.484-07:00

I took the first screenshot, and asked Gemini to remove pixelation. The end result was pretty close to the person's actual appearance earlier in the video. https://youtube.com/shorts/-C_WWTHN4_0?is=CrUl393CjtuviUhk

Building 4000 drones a day in Ukraine

2026-10-10T09:41:53.927-07:00

https://youtu.be/VfzBaUPwfDQ?is=yuvIEgcA1LoDS1Ux

4:21 making 4000 a day

4:04 a waterproof drone that can take off in water

Wow - Amazon knows it's not "made in the USA" despite the label.

2026-10-10T09:16:13.863-07:00

https://youtube.com/shorts/whHypuaLmTU?is=8pa63DNi7hObMjTR

Wow - Amazon's own AI system admits to fraud about labeling products as made in the USA.

Powerful long-range drones for military supply shipments

2026-10-08T10:44:26.292-07:00

https://youtu.be/mXLGGZM_b50?is=XNbxlP_mYYRIqoOA

The capability of these military drones is growing in leaps and bounds, and the race is being fueled by the remarkably lower cost than moving goods by helicopter. And, 1:29 "according to the Navy, over 90% of logistics deliveries are under 50 pounds," so sending a helicopter is a huge waste.

How to respond when someone has cancer

2026-10-06T20:28:11.748-07:00

https://www.hiddenbrain.org/podcast/when-bad-things-happen-to-good-people/

Kate Bowler categorizes the harmful or unhelpful responses people give when faced with terrible news into the archetypes of "Teachers," "Solvers," and "Optimizers."

Instead of meeting suffering with simple presence, people in these categories try to manage their own discomfort by attempting to fix, explain, or improve the situation.

1. The Teachers

The Teachers look at someone else's tragedy and immediately try to find a lesson, blueprint, or a "silver lining" to explain why it happened.

• The Response: They offer platitudes like "Everything happens for a reason," "God is testing you," or "Think of what you are learning about yourself through this."

• The Reality: Bowler notes that this response forces a false sense of order onto chaos. It attempts to wrap a tragic situation in an educational bow, which ultimately minimizes the raw reality of the person's grief and makes them feel like their pain is just a homework assignment they need to master.

2. The Solvers (or Fixers)

The Solvers treat a person's crisis or illness like a practical puzzle that can be cracked with enough effort or information.

• The Response: They offer unsolicited medical, spiritual, or lifestyle advice: "Have you tried cutting out sugar, or eating more vegetables?" "You should look into this alternative treatment," or "If you just pray harder, things will change."

• The Reality: This response is driven by the fear that tragedy is random. By insisting there is a solution, the Solver protects their own illusion of control. The underlying—and damaging—message to the sufferer is that if they just try harder, they can fix their own tragedy, subtly placing the blame on them if things go wrong.

3. The Optimizers (and "Purpose Monsters")

The Optimizers are products of modern self-help and productivity culture, treating human beings like assembly lines that can be continuously upgraded.

• The Response: When hit with bad news, they immediately pivot toward tracking metrics, relentless self-improvement, or toxic positivity. They want to optimize your mindset, your morning routine, your step counts, or your macros to "outrun" the pain.

• The Reality: Bowler argues that optimization is a joy blocker. The culture of optimization insists that human agency is unlimited and that any physical or emotional limitation is a personal failure. In reality, human beings are breakable and dependent. Trying to "optimize" your way through a tragedy forces you to hoard positive vibes while running away from the necessary, messy work of feeling the pain all the way through.

What to Do Instead: True Presence

Bowler's work emphasizes that life is beautiful and terrible, and there is no cure for being human. When someone receives bad news, they do not need a lesson, a 5-step optimization plan, or an amateur solution. What they actually need is presence and love—people who are brave enough to sit with them in the muck of unpredictable reality without trying to clean it up.

What to say to someone falling with terrible news.

At 39 minutes: "I will keep pace with your hope. I will hold your hope when you can't any longer. I won't turn away from the difficulty you're facing — to hold possibility but not be blind to reality."

39:45 Optimism - the hope that there are still beautiful things ahead for the person. Hold on to a sense of self-continuity. (Vs blind optimism or toxic positivity that "You will be ok no matter what," which leads to not listening to your doctor, or leads to avoiding negative words that might create reality.)

"Remain porous" - Charles Taylor (open to God, open to despair, open to reality.) More beautiful will come your way, and you'll spare yourself the delusion of having control over it.

Modern "self" seals itself off from reality, trying to make meaning out of everything. Every dark chapter needs to be improved, to be a self-improvement project.

This is why vitamin D deficiency is prevalent

2026-10-06T14:46:05.645-07:00

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/18iL33gAiJ/

See the video that shows, through winter, the latitude above which the sun can't provide you any vitamin D.

Toxic tire dust is also a huge source of microplastics.

2026-10-04T18:52:15.383-07:00

Today I learned that vehicle tires produce toxic dust that enters the air, rivers, and oceans spreading massive amounts of toxicity and is the largest source of ocean microplastics.

One specific tire-rubber additive called 6PPD turns out to be uniquely toxic even at remarkably low levels in Coho salmon, specifically.

It's the breakdown product of 6PPD into its quinone derivative when altered by ozone that is specifically toxic to Coho salmon at very low concentrations; Coho are about 800 times more sensitive than Chinook salmon.

Several non-toxic replacements are being evaluated, and are mandated to replace the toxic compound before 2035. In the meantime, environmental agencies are relying on stormwater solutions like rain gardens and bioretention soils to trap tire particles before they reach salmon streams.

https://ecology.wa.gov/blog/january-2023/saving-washington-s-salmon-from-toxic-tire-dust

https://www.eopugetsound.org/magazine/scientists-worldwide-are-immersed-studies-deadly-tire-chemical

https://www.ustires.org/6ppd-tire-manufacturing

The estimated per capita emission from tires ranges from 0.23 to 4.7 kg/year, with a global average of 0.81 kg/year. The emissions from car tires (100%) are substantially higher than those of other sources of microplastics, e.g., airplane tires (2%), artificial turf (12–50%), brake wear (8%) and road markings (5%). Ref

Car tires are one of the single largest sources of microplastics in our environment, accounting for roughly 28% of all microplastics found in the world's oceans. Scientists refer to this pollution as Tire and Road Wear Particles (TRWP). Unlike standard microplastics (like a degrading plastic water bottle), tire microplastics are uniquely dangerous because they act as "toxic sponges." They are packed with chemical preservatives, heavy metals (like zinc and lead), and anti-cracking agents (like 6PPD). As the microplastics sit in the water or inside an organism's stomach, these toxic chemicals leach out into the surroundings.

Another study suggested that microplastics specifically derived from tire dust accounts for approximately 78% of the total mass of ocean microplastics. Ref

Rainfall washes more than 7 trillion pieces of microplastics, much of it tire particles left behind on streets, into San Francisco Bay each year — an amount 300 times greater than what comes from microfibers washing off polyester clothes, microbeads from beauty products and the many other plastics washing down our sinks and sewers...a local rain garden was found to capture more than 90% of the microplastics before they reach the ocean. Ref

Preservative chemical from tires is uniquely poisonous to Coho salmon, who are exposed through road runoff of tire dust.

2026-10-04T18:08:48.380-07:00

Several non-toxic replacements are being evaluated, and are mandated to replace the toxic compound before 2035. It's the breakdown product of 6PPD into its quinone derivative when altered by ozone that is specifically toxic to Coho salmon at very low concentrations; Coho are about 800 times more sensitive than Chinook salmon. In the meantime, environmental agencies are relying on stormwater solutions like rain gardens and bioretention soils to trap tire particles before they reach salmon streams.

https://ecology.wa.gov/blog/january-2023/saving-washington-s-salmon-from-toxic-tire-dust

https://www.eopugetsound.org/magazine/scientists-worldwide-are-immersed-studies-deadly-tire-chemical

https://www.ustires.org/6ppd-tire-manufacturing

Darpa lift challenge

2026-10-03T10:41:01.421-07:00

https://youtu.be/kXqXWcw-hSI?is=va--pTH9Q3OCg4Pu

Incredible story of last-minute changes, crashes requiring design changes, and down to the wire final attempts to get the 2nd prize in the darpa lift challenge which sought a drone to lift 4 times the drone's weight as well as navigating a mile-long course. It took incredible persistence with several major crashes right before deadlines.

Rapid fence installation

2026-09-30T10:11:56.871-07:00

https://youtu.be/Nt7hG3Z7XFg?is=JvrIzJRVJ9YudN9B

11:32 they discuss tirewinder.com, a rapid deployment of electric fence from a spool on a four-wheeler which allows controlling the goat herd along miles of brushland much more economically than installing fence by hand. To selectively remove noxious weeds 8:24 preferred by goats and avoided by other cattle, they need to move the herd rapidly and do they need to install and remove miles of fencing every day.

Most electric polywire fencing is installed slowly by walking and unwinding, but here and here's another example of a four-wheeler-mounted system.

Sobering thoughts about the future of AI, from Bill Gates' interview.

2026-09-29T09:28:15.125-07:00

This is the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near...part of the reason I’m speaking so loudly — as loud as I can — is that you can’t rely on the industry to self-regulate here.

The size of the brain is limited by the birth canal — it’s why humans, at first, are very limited...But the silicon intelligence doesn’t have these limitations.

OK, whatever goes on here, it can’t just be driven by profit maximization.

A.I. has crossed the threshold that its ability to empower a bioterrorist to kill hundreds of millions — that exists today. The ability to do a cyberattack that scrambles all of the bank accounts, shuts down the electric grid — that exists today...there could be a control problem where the A.I., on its own, through an unintentional interpretation of what it’s optimizing, could go off and do bad things...These models, the ability to separate out making molecules for good and making them for evil — that is so hard to distinguish.

[AI is] finding bugs in code that humans have looked over for over 20 years and said: Boy, we see there’s no problem here.

And in a few minutes, the A.I. says: No, no, I can inject this over here and this over here — at a level of complexity where, when you see it, you go: Wait. Oh, yeah, you’re right.

we don’t have a supervisory layer that has some absolutes, like: You’re not supposed to take over other computers. You’re not supposed to break out into the internet.

[How to maintain social security?] You define a unit of labor and say, independent of whether that’s delivered by a human or robot, you are paying the same FICA tax that a human worker would pay.

In low-income countries, the A.I. will overwhelmingly be a good thing, and it should be pushed forward as quickly as it can...The one application that’s going full speed ahead...is the agricultural one, because they’re getting better weather data to these farmers in Africa. We have over one million farmers in India already using the system. So it tells them what crop disease they have, what fertilizer to use, what varieties to plant.

So if you ask the American people what portion of the budget’s going to help people in poor countries...people say 10 or 15%. So the fact that it was about 0.5% and now it’s going down toward a 0.25%, that would be pretty shocking to people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-gates.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

Controlling ticks

2026-09-26T12:12:31.616-07:00

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19ehrB9idz/

Controlling a troublesome cattle illness by spraying parasitic worms on wild hosts.

Bending metal to their whim

2026-09-19T10:59:13.565-07:00

https://youtu.be/64-qdViQOhQ?is=jGjDW2CSeTAI_NGF

One-off specialty parts created out of sheet metal without the use of die stamps and hydraulic presses, by using opposing robot arms to coax and squeeze the metal into the correct shape.

Bees are capable of learning.

2026-09-16T22:12:23.285-07:00

https://youtu.be/rc58xOwjwto?is=IImVzDLGrOEFhMW3

A fascinating series of experiments that prove bees are capable of picturing something in the future that requires a tool they've learned to use - previously only proven in primate experiments.

Robot thinks beyond mimicking

2026-09-16T11:00:00.910-07:00

https://youtu.be/IJvyS2aPsnA?is=kIf-0aasG4QQ6bBN

0:44 as far as I can tell, the robot is figuring out that the nut can be spun with a rapid motion once it's loosened, or perhaps generalizing from watching a human loosen other nuts.

From an AI summary of the OM-1 robot: OM-1 is trained exclusively on human data captured through the Omnibody Hand, a wearable seven-degree-of-freedom device. The company claims the system can generalize zero-shot across robot bodies—including tabletop arms, industrial arms, and humanoids—without teleoperation data, on-robot training, or robot-specific fine-tuning. A temporal history of these streams allows the policy to reason about how contact and task progress evolve.

The model translates the twisting motion from a human demonstration directly to different mechanical bodies—such as tabletop arms or humanoids—without needing robot-specific fine-tuning.

OM-1 natively processes a continuous stream of high-frequency data, balancing tactile signals and inter-finger proximity alongside visual tracking.