British and Schuko are both relatively huge. Even the 2-prong europlug that small electronics use, that also can be installed in a Schuko outlet, often make the European version of things like usb-c chargers significantly larger than the US version. I live in Europe but travel a lot. For all small electronics I try to get a Japanese or US version, and then use a small adapter. For travel, a US usb-c charger plus EU adapter is smaller than an EU usb-c charger plus US adapter. British-style outlets can also be coaxed to take a europlug, not that I would advise anyone to do that.
You can get some nifty fold-flat BS1363 doodads, though. I have a USB-C charger that collapses into something about the size of a stack of 6 credit cards. Something similar is currently available as the "Galvanox Flat USB-C Charger" on Irish Amazon.
My international travel "brick" for laptop + phone is an Anker PowerPort Atom III Slim, which is flat multi-port charger with an IEC-320-C8 input. For the Continent, I plug in a "0cm cable" that's a Europlug nub. For US and UK/I, a NEMA cord with a compact BS1363 "shaver adapter" with a 1A fuse in it. Really wish I could get something flatter to be the adapter! Maybe I'll have to make one.
That is pretty nifty. I used an Anker A2669 for travel within the UK, a bit chunkier but also with folding pins.
I appreciate that they seem to put some effort into the design of their UK only products, instead of just shipping a US/Cn shaped charger with a BS1363 plug grafted on
It's not what you meant but toupees have gotten really good, the only problem is you can't be a public figure and have pattern baldness one day and a full head of hair the next. There's actually something called "the toupee fallacy" which means assuming an entire category of something is bad based on only noticing bad examples.
I Think You Should Leave had a sketch that's a fake ad for bald men who have been wearing toupees and want to stop but don't want to show up to work one day bald, making everyone think you've been lying to them. So the service is they send you a new toupee every week, each one balder than the last over the span of 52 weeks, so you can look like you're progressively going bald.
I'm not usually into cringe humor, but IMHO "I Think You Should Leave" is its own category. Episodes like Hat and Hot Dog Car ... I almost hurt myself laughing.
I looked it up yesterday and they have the ECU in the loop for the driving simulators (the ones the drivers practice with and that are used for checking mechanical changes). But these use empirical models, they can't simulate everything. You would have to get a lot right in the models and top of that know where to test edge cases and then simulate all inputs correctly for those. You can surely input yesterday's weather conditions but whatever model is there might not predict an output that goes to the next model and so on..
I'm sure there's also all kinds of other HIL testing but it comes down to thinking about all conditions and having models and tests that are realistic enough for those conditions. It's impossible to have perfect coverage.
It's probably kind of lucky that enough cars were impacted so that the issue was revealed instead of having a just a few cars knocked out of the race.
There’s room for debate but automated safety features on a racetrack isn’t like having them for normal highway driving. What if an edge case isn’t found in testing and automatic braking causes a crash instead of prevents it? How do you consider all edge cases when there’s 22 cars driving at 300km/h?
Aside from that it’s preposterous to think the FIA wants crashes or less safety. A large chunk of regulations are for safety and historically the drivers fight against many of the safety measures (in other words, FIA is historically not the ones blocking safety measures).
The simulators have the ECU in the loop but of course most of the inputs are simulated and they come from models for car dynamics and all kinds of behavior that have a lot of correlations and assumptions built in. As in a flight sim, some of the models are empirical (more like curve-fitting than simulation of physics). Losing power in straights is something a team would be highly motivated to see predicted in the simulator as that’s within normal conditions. But it’s not surprising the simulator can’t predict some edge cases, you’d need to get a lot of things right in the modeling and think of weird inputs.
What they probably could do yesterday, on top of checking a ton of telemetry, is understand which inputs were weird and put those into a simulator and get some hints for the FIA to work with. If you’re not aware, the FIA provides the ECU to all teams so that the telemetry used to check compliances and power modes are fair across all teams, and things like traction control are not there. This is why the FIA had to provide the firmware update.
I had no idea they were ending this program. I had a MEXT scholarship for a PhD in aerospace engineering. In my case I tried the recommendation via school first and didn't get it even though I did have a letter from a Professor. By coincidence a year later I had an internship in Japan with another Professor and with his support I got into the program via the embassy route.
Your experience mostly tracks with mine, but in my case there was a lot of interaction between Japanese and foreign students, and international journal and conference submissions were preferred. Many courses were offered in English and those that weren't, I could do homework and tests in English. Thesis had to be in English, even for Japanese students. It was a goal of the program to also help Japanese students get comfortable with international collaboration and working in English.
In my case I stayed in Japan for a decade and it was overall a very good experience.
One note about working as a student in Japan. You can work up to 28 hours a week without limitations as you noted. You can even work remotely for a foreign company, which is unique because if you have a work visa and freelance in Japan either as your main job, or a side job, your main client is supposed to be Japanese. This is a slightly grey area, your taxes are to be paid in Japan, and the company will be "operating in Japan" so be very careful about doing this by the books.
I fondly remember the text of pages loading almost instantly over dialup, and then over time images popped in. If you were lucky the author included image sizes, so elements didn't resize and move around.
A modern website has so many round-trip things happening for ads, tracking, and whatever goes on behind the scenes for frameworks and services are used. A lot of this is multiple round trips and blocking so you have to wait to start reading, and if something times out the website fails to load.
Between about 2012 and 2020 I had a mobile phone plan that throttled to 100kbps when I ran out of data (which was often). Throughout that time google search and hackernews worked at that speed normally, but in that time period the percentage of websites that fail to ever load changed from about 25% to virtually 100%.
It's even more important when it comes to heads. You can look up the rules in your region and for your application. Slats in homemade bunk beds and cribs have killed a lot of kids.
Seconding point 3a. I think many people assume brighter is better and also assume they can't possibly be dangerously blinding bright compared to a car's headlights or even deliberately want to fight back against headlights. But despite how bright and poorly aimed a lot of headlights are, a small light with literally no cutoff can be even worse. You could make it so a pedestrian can't see a car, or make it so a driver can't see a pedestrian.
Plus it's annoying. I was in a French city a while ago with a very nice pedestrian area full of outdoor tables. It's so nice to sit for dinner and look out at the surrounding old buildings, canal, people going by. Unfortunately every 30s or so you get blinded by the lights of a cheap scooter.
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