flies react to light stimulus and will change their wing/flight patterns while stationary (glued to a stick) when exposed to similar conditions. i think the spider got something out of this

Your video, Flight Patterns - Bugs under streetlight, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Would you make that same argument about your personal life? That is:

"when has more knowledge ever been a disadvantage for the development of your personal life?"

If not, what reasons do you give, and why do you disregard those reasons in the case of the sum collection of millions of personal lives which comprise a society?

Resources are finite, as is time. You don't (I presume) spend all your time obtaining knowledge at exorbitant cost. There is no benefit to the wanton collection of knowledge. Most people only seek knowledge if it can be used for some sort of benefit be it physical, spiritual, philosophical or otherwise.

We could for example, divert billion of dollars from our transportation budget into research on the flight patterns of winged insects, but what would that investment of money and time gain us? To make it personal, you could spend half of the wages from your job and hire research assistances to obtain and report vast amounts of random information to you. Would you consider such endeavors advantageous or disadvantageous to either societal or personal development?

I think the root of your fallacy is the assumption that knowledge is free.

>> ^lavoll:
imstellar, when has more knowledge ever been a disadvantage for the development of human society?

there are many issues i have with this.

1) delta-wing aircraft are almost useless for passenger air travel. they're far more efficient for flying, but you can't put people anywhere but the center, since anyone over a wing would end up sideways whenever the plane banked. also, this would fly in a mild version of the parabolic flight pattern used by the vomit comet which, i believe, is rightly so called.

2) i'd imagine these craft would be kinda useless for freight, mainly because of how much helium one would need, though i could easily be wrong on that one.

3) it's probably slow. especially the first ascent to altitude. and landing it must be a lot of fun.

that's just the first couple of things i could think of. to be fair, i have no training in aviation or aerodynamics past high school physics, which was a while ago.

that all having been said, i love seeing new innovation in engineering. anyone interested in aviation should watch this TED talk by Burt Rutan on how the US govt has allowed innovation in aviation to stagnate

dupe

*kill Search must be screwed up, because searching for flight patterns didn't show the other one.

dupe

No, it's on. Exact dupe: http://www.videosift.com/video/Flight-Patterns

this was already on the sift....

no! i was wrong- i was thinking of this: http://www.videosift.com/video/US-flight-patterns-colour-coded-no-sound

Not sure if this is a dupe of this one from mlx b/c firewall blocking YT:

http://www.videosift.com/video/Flight-Patterns