sensor fusion

David Sachs of InvenSense explains how gyroscopes, accelerometers and compasses work on their own and together, demonstrated on a modified Android handset. He covers sensor fusion algorithms and why rotation math such as Euler angles matters.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains how close nuclear fusion really is to break-even, and why headlines about ITER and lab milestones are misleading. She distinguishes plasma gain (Q plasma) from whole-system gain (Q total) and shows the latter is still far below one.

Real Engineering's Brian McManus explains Helion's approach to nuclear fusion: colliding two plasma rings, compressing them magnetically, and capturing energy directly from the changing magnetic flux rather than boiling water. It covers why this pulsed design sidesteps problems of tokamaks and laser fusion.

A former fusion scientist argues why fusion power by 2040 is unrealistic, covering the physics challenges, neutron issues and optimistic company claims, with a brief note of good news.

Technology Connections explains how automatic windshield wiper rain sensors work, using an infrared light source and total internal reflection in the glass.

Zach Hartwig of MIT introduces the key concepts of magnetic fusion energy and the state of fusion research. He then presents MIT's proposed pathway of using high-field superconducting magnets to build smaller, cheaper tokamaks on a climate-relevant timescale.

An MIT colloquium by Dennis Whyte on power exhaust and first-wall cooling in fusion reactors, including recent innovations and the SPARC and ARC designs.

MIT's Prof. Dennis Whyte explains the ARC/SPARC compact tokamak approach, in which new high-temperature superconducting magnets allow smaller and cheaper fusion reactors. He covers fusion physics, performance trends and the engineering path to net energy.

Yannic Kilcher interviews Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI, about the company's funding, its mission, and the release of Stable Diffusion. Topics include access to compute, handling harmful outputs, and avoiding the corrupting influence of profit.

A CAD-based animation from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics showing how the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator is configured and what its fusion research aims to achieve. It runs about 11 minutes.

Robert Bussard's 2006 Google Tech Talk on inertial electrostatic confinement fusion, a compact approach he argued could be cheap and clean, using boron-hydrogen fuel without neutron radiation. It runs about 93 minutes and covers the physics, funding history and his proposed development path.

A 2006 Google Tech Talk by Robert Bussard on inertial electrostatic confinement (polywell) fusion as a cheap, clean alternative to conventional thermonuclear reactors. He argues it could be made viable with modest funding.

A guest video by Welch Labs on 3Blue1Brown explaining how text-to-image and video models work. It covers CLIP, shared embedding spaces, diffusion models (DDPM, DDIM), conditioning, guidance and negative prompts.

A short, humorous critique of Helion Energy's fusion approach, framed as a response to a Real Engineering video. It covers low reactivity, neutron production, bremsstrahlung losses and diagnostics.

A very short demo of SmackBook, a hack that used the MacBook Pro's sudden motion sensor so that smacking the sides of the laptop switches desktop spaces.

A roughly three-hour technical livestream Q&A on Helion Energy's fusion approach and the National Ignition Facility. It covers neutron production, shielding, energy recovery, diagnostics and why tokamaks might fare better.

A live, overdub-free performance of 'Lingus' by Snarky Puppy, from the 'We Like It Here' DVD recorded in Utrecht. It features a Cory Henry keyboard solo.

Technology Connections examines an old feature-rich microwave and shows how it uses a humidity or steam sensor and lookup data to cook food well, arguing it beats many modern ones.

FortNine looks at why Tesla Autopilot has rear-ended motorcyclists, speculating that the vision system misreads motorcycle taillights as a distant car. It argues that radar and other sensors would help.

A short screen recording of an Ubuntu Karmic Koala desktop running KDE4 with Compiz Fusion 3D cube effects and CairoDock.

A short screen capture of SGI's File System Navigator (FSN, also called Fusion) running on IRIX 6.5 on an Octane. It shows the 3D file browser seen in Jurassic Park.

Chris Urmson's SXSW 2016 talk on Google's self-driving car project, covering 1.3 million self-driven miles and the gap between hype and reality. It shows sensor visualizations and playbacks of hard situations the cars met, and discusses failures such as the low-speed bus collision.

Corridor Digital makes a roughly seven-minute anime short using Stable Diffusion and related AI tools, based on a technique they teach in a longer tutorial. It was an early showcase of AI-assisted animation.

A short demo of an open-source Krita plugin that uses Stable Diffusion to generate and edit images in place. It adds ControlNet scribble and line-art support. You select an area, push a button, and new matching content appears.

Minutephysics compares how efficiently different processes convert mass to energy per E=mc^2, from fire and fission to fusion, antimatter and black holes, which can convert a large fraction of mass to energy.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk making the case for the liquid fluoride thorium reactor as an abundant, safe source of electrical power. It covers the technical motivations and design of thorium molten-salt reactors.

A short Techquickie explainer on why laptop webcams are much worse than phone cameras. It covers sensor size, image processing, and the interface differences between laptops and phones, with input from a Logitech engineer.

A short demo of interactive AI live painting in Krita using the Stable Diffusion plugin, where canvas changes update the generated image immediately. It uses an LCM sampler for speed and needs a high-end GPU for the interactive feel.

A hobbyist builds a prototype full-frame CCD camera from scratch, with open-source design files and a custom PCB. The video shows the first, still rough prototype.

Andrej Karpathy's CVPR 2021 presentation on Tesla's Autopilot, covering its vision-based approach, sensor choices and the scale of Tesla's deep learning compute cluster. This upload is a lower-quality copy of the talk.

Corridor Crew explain how they made an anime short by filming themselves and running the footage through custom-trained Stable Diffusion models. The video walks through the technique and its open-source foundations.

Royal Institution lecture by Dr Kate Lancaster on the most powerful lasers in the world and the extreme conditions they create. It includes live demonstrations and covers applications from industry to fusion.

A Key & Peele sketch in which two friends keep misreading the tone of each other's text messages while making plans.

Episode 2 of Corridor Digital's Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors, a short film made with AI-assisted animation techniques such as Stable Diffusion and DreamBooth. The story follows King Philip facing his twin brother and a barbarian king.

Waymo's 2018 360-degree video lets viewers look around inside a fully driverless ride. It is built from footage and real-time data of an actual trip on city streets.

A short Harris Corporation (L3Harris) promotional video showing wide-area airborne motion imagery, a sensor system for persistent real-time aerial surveillance of large areas.

Toyota Research Institute presents an approach for teaching robots new dexterous behaviors from human demonstration. It explains why this capability matters and what advances made it possible.

A ColdFusion documentary on the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, tracing their role in the opioid crisis that has killed over 200,000 people.

Brian Douglas introduces Braitenberg vehicles, simple robots whose sensors are wired directly to motors yet show surprisingly lifelike behavior. He draws on Valentino Braitenberg's book Vehicles.

Mark Rober tests whether self-driving cars can be fooled, comparing a lidar-equipped car with a camera-only Tesla in scenarios including a painted Wile E. Coyote wall and smoke.