I said boring dive site, and I stand by it. Featureless, lifeless rock is not exactly my idea of an interesting dive site.

And taking a lungful from the cameraman's octopus would be a really bad idea.

If you're free diving, you don't inhale compressed air at depth unless it's an emergency, and you're going to resurface with the safety diver very slowly.

@Curious, the diver is Guillaume Néry. He's real and he's done this kinda thing before.
*related=http://videosift.com/video/Underwater-Base-Jumping

i live near Anchorage, a town called Wasilla, you may know this as where loons come from.

Yes, a crazy nice nearly snowfree winter is being had. Roads have been fantastic except for maybe 2 days so far. We had maybe 4-5 inches of snow in our yard which, weeks ago, compressed down on some warmer/melty days and then re-froze into a very hard ice pack of just an inch or two thick across the entire yard. Enough to bust your ass for sure.

I bet the snow plowers and snow machiners are lamenting.

Looks a lot like residual frame compression errors.

A rotary (Wankel) engine has a triangular device that acts as the piston, which rotates in a chamber close to a figure 8 shape. Each side of the triangle acts as it's own piston as it rotates, first intake through a port (no valve) then compression, detonation, expansion, and finally exhaust through another port (still no valve).
Radial engines (what I think you meant) are relatively normal piston driven engines where the pistons are arranged in a circle around the crank at a 90 deg angle from the cranks rotation. These are usually used in prop driven airplanes.
This motor arranges the pistons in the same orientation as the cranks rotation...a 90 deg difference from radial engines. This makes it far more compact, but also puts the pistons in a single, rotating, revolver like arrangement of cylinders. It's a bit of a combination of rotary and radial engine features.

Revolutionize, probably not. Be an improved option over 'regular' internal combustion in (apparently) weight, size and efficiency, maybe. This seems to be a great option for a hybrid. Being smaller and lighter is what you want in an energy efficient vehicle, as is fuel efficiency. Since fossil fueled vehicles will be the norm for the foreseeable future, any step towards making them more efficient is a good thing (although not the end goal, true enough). This seemed to have many advantages of Wankel motors (rotaries) without the efficiency problem due to low compression/incomplete combustion. 14:1 on pump gas is INSANE! My offroad race motor is only 12:1 and it needs trick racing fuel.
Also, as far as simplicity, this had no valves and assorted crap, just inlet and outlet ports (from what I understood anyway) like Wankels. That's a HUGE jump in simplicity, with an entire system eliminated, so there's far less to break/wear out/need tuning. IF manufacturing cost can be reasonable, I see this as a great step forward possibly making hybrids more acceptable to many more people.

I don't think a short attention span is enough justification to say this is a bad example of a video. If people aren't interested in a subject you can't force them to be interested, but at the same time, the video's visualizations showed without telling where someone who wanted to know more where to look. Even in the video they annotated that this is more of a research jumping off point, that it is indeed a compressed version, and even paid a little lip service to other complications if only to get you going on your own.

I spent a good few hours looking at ISIS, trying to figure it out myself a week before this video came out, now that this video is out it did the same in about 4 and a half minutes. Granted, this is without on demand sourcing of sources, but like I said above, its a great primer. For people that want to know and don't, this is a good place to start. For those who don't care why does it matter?

I know that long lenses can compress a scene (so it makes the two planes look closer than they are) but even taking this into account that's way too close. The plane crossing the runway would still be on the runway when the plane landing touched down. They were probably less than ten seconds from a collision.

theFreak, I call it "age".

Combined nicely with a great deal of aches and pains sourced in earlier bad decisions. Like the guy who rode that raft down the ramp into a horrifically compressed spleen.

This might work on air, because you can compress air, but I'm pretty certain it won't work on water.

Water is not a marble. It's not even millions of marbles, though that might better illustrate how it would move through the 'valve'. In reality the water is going up all those side channels AND the central 'smooth' channel all at once. The back eddies from the side channels will serve to help guide the water flowing up the main tube and if you can get ANY suction out of that sucker at all I'd be amazed.

Like I say, air is more complex. It might work there, but the efficiency would be so low I can't ever see this replacing a standard pump.

compression is fascinating. i used to work for a mobile phone OS company where i modified the language variant compiler to compress files based on a premade dictionary of words which were common over the whole software - it cut down the ROM size by many megabytes (which was a big deal back then). You could cut the amount of traffic on the internet by having a dictonary of common cats stored in the image decoder.

To further illustrate the complexity involved in compression, think about the following:
If I replace "The computerphile channel handles computer topics" with "The computerphile channel handles <30,8> topics", how does the decoder tell the difference between the 2 byte <30,8> pointer and the data it represents?

Objects in motion yadda yadda. His 18mph is going the wrong direction once he starts up the ramp. And it requires a lot of strength to force his body mass to alter direction through a 360° turn. A car is long and compresses on a wheel. A human body is tall and compresses on the mechanism moving it forward, negating it's own ability to move "forward".

SFOGuys' gottit-That's why the extra space at the balloon never changes-I used to do this but just compress the thing into my mouth as the other end took up the slack-Sometimes it would POP!

Another cool trick I used to do when I sold balloons(I can blow up one of these and tie it off in under five seconds) was to blow one up for a kid begging me for a free one then break it in half holding the air in both sides then offer it, and let it go when they went to grab it-The two ends go sailing-off in random directions with a "Whheeeeeeeeent!"..kids would either be devastated or ask me to do it again and again

This isn't an exercise in engineering so much as marketing.

The pneumatic motor is limited by the extreme lack of energy stored in compressed air. All inneficiencies in translating that stored energy into motion are failures in the system. The goal is to carefully remove all unnecessary sources of energy loss from the motor.

So there's an interesting engineering challenge in making this work 'at all' using Legos. There are design compromises that must be made, given the restrictions on form imposed by available parts; as well as the stress limitations of the material. It's like someone giving you a pile of reeds and asking you to build a Manhattan 5-Story Walkup. Can it be done? Is there enough stress resistance in the material for something of that scale? A fun challenge with no practical implications. Manhattan low-rises have been built before, you're not innovating architecture and you're definitely not contributing anything to the future of construction.

The question is, does it require a "technology genius" to accomplish? Someone tell me what a "technology genius" is first. Whatever it is...I suspect you don't need one on your team in order to search the internet for pneumatic piston motor schematics and copy/paste a parallel series of 256.

This exercise is inspiring and fun...until you add the marketing entrepreneur, casting hyperbole around and spending other people's money. It is unsettling to think that the new generation of capitalists are chasing the specter of Elon Musk; self promoting egotists who create nothing and take credit for everything. As a longtime member of the internet in good standing, I reject every stealth intrusion of marketing and entrepreneurship into my sandbox.

Hooray for Raul Oaida, engineering buff and hobbyist. Down with Steve Sammartino, marketer, entrepreneur, "brainchild" originator, keeper of secrete locations, crowd funder, project contact and fathead.

I don't actually know, but I assume there is a cylinder of compressed air somewhere running the engine... this doesn't really make it useless, although the practicality of air cars in general is... well... usually limited:

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/vehicles/air-car.htm