Month: March 2020

Automotive manufacturers are in a constant state of searching for newer, better, faster, and overall more efficient ways to produce their cars, not only in regards to to time and money but also to pollution. Toyota’s latest technology, an airless paint atomizer, addresses all three. 

Toyota claims to have the the first airless paint atomizer used to paint car bodies in the world. By using this technology, Toyota says it achieves more than 95% coating efficiency, meaning what actually sticks to the body, in comparison to 60 to 70% efficiency from a normal paint atomizer that does use air. In addition to painting cars more quickly and effectively, this technique could potentially reduce the Toyota Group’s carbon dioxide emissions by about 7%. 

The machine arms for both the air paint atomizer and the airless paint atomizer are similar, but the small parts that distribute the paint at the tip of the gun are very different. The airless atomizer has a rotating tip that creates centrifugal force when spinning. That tip has roughly 600 grooves that are meant to direct the paint. Once the tip gets going, it draws the paint into the grooves while creating an electrostatic umbrella toward the car. The paint slides through the grooves, forms into tiny dots, and is drawn to the body of the car for more accurate painting. With air, the paint is essentially thrown at the body and what sticks sticks, while much is lost to rebound.

An issue with this type of paint process is the uneven nature of car bodies. If the distance between the paint gun tip and the body is fluctuating, it becomes difficult to maintain a steady electrical current. Toyota engineered its atomizer to eliminate that issue by monitoring the variations and automatically adjusting the current. To ensure evenly distributed and sized paint particles, the spray gun maintains about 3.9 inches of distance between the tip and the car body.  

For now, Toyota is using this technology in its Takaoka and Tsutsumi plants in Japan, but the expectation is the airless paint atomizers will be used throughout the Toyota Group’s global manufacturing. Toyota is also looking into licensing the technology to other companies. The video above further demonstrates how the process functions.

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With people preparing to hunker down in isolation in order to avoid the spread of covid-19, it seems Discord is hoping to ease potential cabin fever by raising the limits on its Go Live game streaming feature.

In a recent blog post titled “Helping out where we can,” Discord founder Jason Citron decided to temporarily increase the number of concurrent viewers who can watch Go Live streams from 10 to 50 people. The idea is that while people are cooped up inside, being able to more easily stream and share your gameplay with others on Discord should make being cooped at home a little more tolerable.

Discord’s Go Live feature initially launched back in August and gave Discord users a simple (and free) one-touch solution for streaming games to other users on the same Discord server. And because there’s practically no delay or need to set up a dedicated channel on Twitch, YouTube, Facebook or one of the other major streaming platforms, Go Live quickly became a popular tool for sharing gameplay between friends in real-time.

However, because Go Live wasn’t intended for mass sharing, since its launch, the total number of people that could watch a local stream at any given time was capped at 10 until Discord’s recent change.

Currently, it’s not clear how long Discord will keep the Go Live viewer limit at 50, as upping the viewer count could result in increased server costs for Discord. But with so many people turning to video games for escape and entertainment while avoiding exposure to the coronavirus, Discord upgrading the capabilities for Go Live is a nice gesture.

The other day, I was scrolling through Netflix, looking for a distraction from all the pain of my hair and all my terrible car opinions, seeking out some quality space-travel-focused sci-fi, because I love that crap. As I was scrolling, looking at the thumbnails of the various movies and shows and whatever, I realized something: when those thumbnails showed a picture of a spaceship, you could almost instantly know, generally, what that show or movie was about. I mean it! Here, let me show you.

There’s almost always at least one signature spacecraft for any of these space-based sci-fi shows, and I was realizing that they design of the ships, while varying wildly from movie to movie, seemed to be remarkably consistent for a given sub-genre of space sci-fi.

You could look at one ship and immediately know that, say, the show would take place in the relatively near future, and have a pretty good gorunding in science, or look at another and immediately know nobody gave two shits about physics, but it’ll be a fun ride.

I compiled several thousand examples and fed them into the Jalopnik Mainframe (a cluster of over 400 Timex-Sinclair 1000 computers dumped into an abandoned hot tub in a bunker underneath Ed Begley Jr’s combined EV R&D lab/sex-lab) which ran an advanced AI that categorized the ships into eight distinct classes.

I took those ship classes, translated the descriptions into English from the AI’s native Dutch, and produced this handy chart, which you can use to make your space-movie choices quicker and better!

If you want to see the big version, or maybe print it out for your ceiling so you can lay in bed and contemplate it, click here.

Did we miss any categories? I’m pretty sure most space-based sci-fi fits into one of these. Star Wars is 4, Star Trek is 3, I’d put the monolith from 2001 and 2010 in 7 but the Discovery and Leonov in 2, and I think the big cylindrical Heighliners from Dune go in 7.

Categorize your favorites! What could it hurt, right?

As the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19 continues to spread around the world, lawmakers suggest another measure to prevent the spread of disease: a Vulcan greeting. 

While hand washing and limiting exposure remain ideal ways to protect yourself and others from spreading illnesses like the flu or COVID-19, lawmakers and “Star Trek” fans alike have suggested that, instead of shaking hands, using the Vulcan greeting that Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock on the original series of the beloved franchise, famously devised.

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