Hadn't heard of that, but I get the concept. Cool idea.

Off the top of my head, I'm concerned about pump and generator efficiency. You're going to use some amount more energy to pump a volume of water up to the high basin than you will get back by gravity feeding it through generators. To be fair, efficiency is a problem with using and recharging chemical batteries as well, but the limited amount that I remember from college engineering courses tells me that efficiency in the electrical / solid state world tends to be more easily obtained than in the mechanical world.

And as another "to be fair", efficiency is a bigger concern for things like fossil fuels, where burning one unit of fuel produces a set amount of energy and you have to improve efficiency to get the most value out of that energy. With things like solar and wind being "free" energy when active but requiring storage for when the source is inactive (night / calm winds), efficiency still certainly matters, but not as much as with a scarce / non-renewable source of energy.

Anyway, I'd like to see concrete numbers comparing the utility and efficiency (in various metrics) of your hydro storage vs battery storage.

See, that's much better. Mechanical looking creatures with the kind of humming sounds you expect from murder-drones. But they land in water and none get a short circuit so it's apparently not killerrobotbirdie-murdertime.

so, one thought; the original Wii was success without having the highest graphics, but offering great games and an original experience.

And---while I look forward to great engines (though water and skin and hair are still so hard to get right)--the story and the mechanics are more important to me...

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Pink is a combination of red and white light.
There are almost surely numerous combinations of various spectral colors that will look exactly like ultra-pink to our limited eyes. Fitting into the various color gamuts involved in color reproduction and perception is not very simple at all.

Whiter than white washing powders work by using fluourescence -- they transmute some of the ultraviolet light striking them into visible light. The reason this works is explainable by a color gamut, the gamut of the human eye. If we could see in the ultraviolet range that is being absorbed then the trick wouldn't be nearly as effective. There are animals, for example bees, that do see colors bluer than we can, and in fact some flowers have patterns that are visible only to them.

It is possible that fluorescence is partly responsible for ultra-pinkness. If it is, that would have been more interesting than what was presented.

I suspect, but do not know, that the CMYK or RGB color representation schemes are up to the task of encoding the colors you describe. The problem is that there is no practical process that can sense them in an image, nor any practical process that can mechanically reproduce them.

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I can imagine this in a horror film. Someone walking down a dark alley. They hear a buzz and turn their head. Nothing. Continue walking, another buzz, this time closer. They look up. Nothing. Turn the corner and and this flying lawnmower comes down the street at 30MPH flipping around like a mechanized butterfly knife!!

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This is extremely important, and (as far as I know) is extremely prevalent in Judaism, where the notes and interpretations are literally just as important as the scripture itself. These notes have been debated and clarified over the centuries by people who specialise in studying it; beyond that there is still debate, and the notes are still evolving. This means they have something of a self-righting mechanism whereby the mistakes of the past can be corrected.

This is in a way similar to the scientific approach, but using debate instead of empiricism.

The problem is that most christian churches ignore this fact and go by the interpretations of the church leader(s). The most extreme are the bible literalists who can justify pretty much anything by cherry-picking passages. The larger established churches like the catholics have some of this, but are largely missing the key feature of self-correction (except over far longer periods of time, and almost fully at the discretion of the pope).

I guess the hint for these is the rotational test that they show at the first.

1) A sticky object that would let go like a wall crawler that climbs down a wall would create this effect. (see below)
2) You can't. As you approach infinite speed it would get very close. (see below)
3) The bike will move forward. (see below)
4) The outside parts of the wheels that overlap the rail. Also if the train has a flywheel that is larger than the wheel size the bottom of the flywheel would also always move backwards faster than the train was moving.

1) He says "what object is inside?" so I'm not sure a liquid would count. Also a viscous liquid would flow a slow rate and would probably not stop and start. You might be able to get a viscous liquid to stop and start if you had fins, but that still might just move slowly or gain enough momentum to roll fast without any flow.

2) A little excel calculation shows that the average velocity approaches twice the initial but will never hit it.

attempted m/s - total time - average m/s
1 100 1
2 50 1.333333333
3 33.33333333 1.5
...
200 0.5 1.990049751
201 0.497512438 1.99009901

3) I'm not sure if the parameters of this experiment are explained sufficiently.

If it is allowed to slip then no matter the mechanical advantage a hard pull should always be able to get the bike to skid back and defeat friction.

If the bike is not allowed to slip on the ground then I don't understand how it could ever move backwards, the only options would be that it doesn't move at all or it moves forward.

If it can't slip then the ratio of the pedal to the wheel is what is in question. Bikes only have gear ratios higher than 1 and the crank is smaller than the tire so the tire will always rotate more than the crank thus the bike should move forward.

Minus the cobra being bottle fed that was sifted not long ago?

Although you can't actually see the mechanics of it in that video like you can here.

I'd tag related, but I don't think I can.

I dunno about that. There's lots of scientific evidence for quantum mechanics. It was disagreement between experimental results and theory which lead to the development of quantum mechanics in the first place. There have definitely been repeatable experiments demonstrating quantum entanglement, for instance.

String Theory, now, that's where you've got your unprovable assumptions. Whereas quantum mechanics at least has a big "we don't know why this is" hole in the middle, the string theory guys would just posit the existence of a bunch more dimensions to make the equations work.

Not that I actually understand the mathematics of any of it, mind you.