Not that I think shooting into the air for minor reasons is a *good* idea, but the chances of it being dangerous to the point of killing (or even injuring) someone are really really low. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire

First of all, even in a densely populated city, the ratio of square meters of human-occupied space to unoccupied space is really low. So, you gotta be quite unlucky to have a bullet fired up land on a human instead of house / dirt / concrete / whatever.

Second, when the bullet comes down it won't be traveling at its muzzle velocity, but at its terminal falling velocity. Mythbusters did a test on that, as have various other sources, and most find that a bullet falling at terminal velocity isn't fast enough to kill unless you're outstandingly unlucky. Deaths have been recorded, but at a lower rate than, say, Hippos, pulling a Carradine, or having an icicle fall on your head.


I guess it is sorta like hailstones, which could potentially have relatively comparable mass, aerodynamic properties, and terminal velocities as bullets in some cases. I've been caught in a hailstorm before, and while it was enough to sting and be rather painful, it wasn't near strong enough to break the skin.


So, given all of that, IF it came down to a situation where a policeman has to show a dangerous assailant that they mean business and are willing to fire their weapon to resolve it, firing straight up into the air might potentially be a good way to accomplish that without immediately shooting to kill / injure the assailant. In some scenarios, possibly. NOT that a stopped car trying to dump drugs (via balloon or whatever else) is an example of such a scenario.

This is what happens when you learn aerodynamics online.

Pretty good race. I gave up on the 2014 season about halfway through, and though it's still almost certainly going to be a Mercedes year, I'm pretty hopeful that there will at least be some good races.

If Red Bull ends up a Ferrari customer for 2016 such as rumors were suggesting at one point, and Honda makes their engine competitive within the stupid development rules (or the rules are relaxed), maybe things will be okay by then.

I think the next step is to allow them to to put venturis under the cars using similar regulations to the Champcars in their heyday (no skirts and ride height minimums so it's more like bonus downforce). Even the DW12's today don't suffer dirty air anything like the F1 cars do. Of course, I'm not an aerodynamics expert and I'm sure the F1 designers put a lot of thought into designing their cars specifically so that they screw with the aero of any following car, so who knows how that would work. Also, the Champcars were a lot closer to a spec series than F1 is.

Bah, aerodynamics are for those who can't build engines.

Oh christ... do I really have to explain this?

@shinyblurry said "...that means it was intelligently designed."

I was specifically refuting that argument.

"intelligent design" means that something was designed on purpose by a designer, i.e. I want a plane, so I sit down and design the aerodynamics, propulsion, control surfaces, etc so that at the end, I have a means to fly from A to B. If the plane doesn't fly, as a designer, I need to work on it until it does.

A genetic algorithm is not "intelligently designed". The system itself creates the end product, often with no fixed goal or purpose. The designer does not have an input.

So, it's entirely possible that the universe is a computer simulation where a fixed set of constraints were set up at compile time and then left to run.

No specific end goal or purpose, merely to see emergent behaviours, which actually gels pretty well with what we know about the formation of the universe and life.

If you'd like to learn more, I recommend reading Artifical Life by Steven Levy as a good primer on the subject.

On the other hand, if you just want to make snide remarks, I suggest you stick to a topic you actually have a fucking clue about.

There's some debate on the exact phenomenons at play and their extents, but the gist of it is correct, it's not like they have "no idea" how it works. An airfoil moving through air (or any other fluid, same principles work in water as well) generates a higher pressure below it and a lower pressure above it, which results in lift. This can be done even with simple flat plank by using angle of attack, or more effectively if you shape it like a good airfoil. Similarly the wings in racing cars do the same thing but flipped upside down, pushing the car down to the ground (though exploiting underbody aerodynamics can be much more effective if regulations allow it).

The only thing that really bothered me in the video was the insistence on the angle of attack being required for lift. Some planes are so light and have wings that produce so much lift (due to size and shape), that at high speeds they actually need to have negative angle of attack to fly level. If the plane didn't point down a bit it'd just keep climbing higher and higher.

Are you sure that's a drone? The aerodynamics of that environment don't seem compatible. I know quadros are pretty steady, but the camera even dips into the water at one point which is definitely (to my limited knowledge) something a drone can't do.
I imagine you meant some other kind of drone than what I'm picturing, no?

It's probably not as bad as you think. Fish are aerodynamic (hydrodynamic?) so they would probably enter the water nose first no matter how they started out. Their tails dragging more, and forcing their heads downwards. Their terminal velocity is also very slow being they weigh so little. Pelicans dive into waters quite a bit faster than these fish would fall, and they suffer no ill effects.

I haven't done any studies, but considering how much it would cost to outfit a plane like this and fly around fish-bombing, I would think they figured out if the fish would survive or not.

Quick research reveals some stuff about wingsuit flying over snow.

Those wingsuit skydivers are probably traveling about 60-100 mph. During that near miss, when the one skydiver flairs his suit, he probably dropped down to as little as 40 mph.

Ski racers can travel around 50-100 mph. We see crashes at those speeds all the time in snow and the skiier is generally uninjured.

The fastest skiiers, in the aerodynamic suits, are travelling 120-150 mph. Those crashes are obivously survivable, although catastrophic injury happens.

So, it stands to reason that a serious accident involving a wingsuit flyer over snow is very survivable. With some time to flare, there's no reason they couldn't walk away with little more than bruises. In fact, I suspect it's only a matter of time before we finally see a wingsuit pilot land without a parachute. Maybe over snow first, eventually over water and ultimately...why shouldn't we see someone with the skill to land on solid ground. With appropriate advances in equipment.

No way! I wonder how much horsepower that Volvo had to have push that barn door aerodynamics (or lack thereof) through the air at that speed!
LOL

That's crazy. I wonder if this will be as game changing as when they introduced wings to produce aerodynamic downforce in car racing?

So.. it takes a lot of energy to lift a boat like that. All of that energy is coming from the wind. So, in order for this to be an efficient design, the energy it takes to lift the boat has to be less than the energy normally lost due to drag in the water. Wow... drag sucks! (is a 'drag').

Daft Punk - One More Time

Well this one is the weakest of the pit stop features, but I liked the first three and posted this on the back of liking the others more!

The teams are all so secretive that they would never make the interesting technical discussion that we want... if you take the Sauber cutaway series for example, gearboxes would be an obvious episode to cover, but for contractual reasons they can't show us the inside of their gearbox because it comes from another team! These videos are the best that I can find, but unfortunately most F1 fans will have seen them as filler pieces during the race coverage

I do feel that I have failed in tagging and channel assignment though, can you suggest what I should have put to avoid wasting your time? The more technical ones will always be in the engineering channel, and the less technical ones will be in sports/wheels.

I did post a few which were a little bit more interesting from a technical point of view:

• http://videosift.com/video/RS27-Engine-on-the-dyno-Renault-Sport-F1
  
• http://videosift.com/video/How-to-strip-and-paint-an-F1-car-Caterham-Unchained-ep-4
  
• http://videosift.com/video/Understanding-Aerodynamics-A-brief-lesson-by-Mike-Gascoyne
  
• http://videosift.com/video/Adrian-Newey-Drives-RB6-And-Leyton-House-March-Silverstone