The internal application was to improve mobility in space suits. We had a partnership with some medical researchers looking to help patients with otherwise limited mobility.
Shoulders are difficult. The human body has a lot of amazing degrees of freedom. One of the biggest challenges was efficient and effective transfer of the assist forces to the body.
A lot of the design of the human body sacrifices strength for mobility and range of motion. Most muscles have really unfortunate mechanical leverage, to the degree it's quite impressive we're so strong as we are.
Adding to that, without completely butchering mobility is probably no easy task.
What's remarkable to me about this is how specialized our shoulder-arm linkage is for overhand throwing.
A lot of the typical difference between the male and female upper body comes down to this specialization. There is some evidence of facial adjustment to punching, but we could hit much harder with a more chimp-like shoulder, this doesn't require knuckle walking: but we wouldn't throw a spear as far nor as accurately.
I'm also impressed everytime I lift weights and think about how close the muscles attach to the joint providing very little leverage. On a side note - this is why chimps f.x. are so strong - their muscles attach further from the joints and by that provide more leverage.
Just a small note, that abbreviation seems extremely rare to me. You might have better readability by saying "e.g." which means the same thing, or just writing it out. It took me a while to figure out whether you were referring some body part belonging to chimps or something
seriously? I speak internally while writing and "for example" feels more fluent than "exempli gratia". that's why I prefer fx. I'm not a native speaker, though
Another native speaker chiming in. This is my first time encountering f.x. and it took me quite a while to figure out (essentially guess) what it meant. Most people I know and situations I've encountered use e.g. (possibly without even knowing what it means). In common usage e.g. is "for example" just like etc. means "and additional things" or i.e. means "that is".
I wish I could write or speak another language anywhere close to as well as you do English.
You're right! I certainly don't think of the words "exempli gratia" -- I literally think the letters "e g" as a mental shorthand for "for example". I often find myself writing "e.g." first, and then expanding it to "for example" when re-reading what I wrote.
Sorry. English is weird. "f.x." seems like it should be a preferable abbreviation for "for example", but it just isn't idiomatic. I figured out that was what you meant when reading it, but it definitely stood out in much the same level of wrongness as seeing code that isn't formatted correctly or that uses a non-idiomatic way of doing things (list comprehensions in Python).
I always thought e.g. meant "example given"; there's also "i.e." which I presumed meant "in example".
anyway, "for example" takes two seconds to type (if that), if abbreviations cause confusion (in general, in any situation, especially professionally), avoid them.
Anyway I'll brb, I got an I&A meeting for our SAFe procedure, gotta get our CI's and DoD in order and make sure we execute LCM properly. No I don't know what any of these abbreviations mean, but this is the situation we find ourselves in, lmao
I'd suggest sticking to "e. g." as well. I'm also not a native speaker and have never seen the abbreviation "f. x." before so I couldn't figure out its meaning.
If you know what e.g. stands for, you don't need to expand it. Native speakers just say "e.g.", as in, "ee gee". If you don't know what "fx" stands for then how would you expand it? It's not a common abbreviation at all
It's probably a feature of non-western English varieties. I've never seen "fks" used to mean "for example" and would never imagine that that's what it stands for.
Yep, and they vary somewhat from person to person. I think it's part of why some people are apparently stronger than they look: longer tendons give more leverage with less muscle mass.
I was thinking more within human variances. For example, I've seen athletes with high calf muscles who can jump really high. If there an advantage to those whose calf muscle stretch to the bottom of the leg? Do they have some increased range of motion that this helps with?
And why people dislocate their shoulders so frequently, just doing like normal things. Someone I knew dislocated his shoulder swimming freestyle. Just happened.
- Great font, I've always liked the DIN Font for its clarity (DIN is a German industrial norm)
- font-size and line-height match each other well and follow best-practices (line-height is 1.4 times the font-size)
- well-fitting margins after paragraphs
- clear distinction between headline and text, this also applies to meta information etc.
- line length is < 90 chars so your eyes don't have to travel too far to get back to the start
All in all very well done.
edit: There's obviously even more like choice of colors, contrast, graphical elements etc. Just wanted to point out that someone really thought about this and not just installed some theme and that's it.
I'm curious: what do you consider best practices for font-size and line-height, as well as margins between paragraphs? I've recently revamped my website and used an online type scale tool [0] to get my typography, but margins don't seem to be as plug and chug.
If you're absolving an apprenticeship as a (print) media designer you'll learn that line-height for long(er) text should be somewhere between 120% and 160% of the font-size.
This ensures that your eyes/brain can easily distinct between two lines and "hop" along. The upper limit ensures that you won't lose track of the line because two lines are too far away from each other.
Line length limit comes from this, too. It's hard work for the brain to save a line you just read, jump back to the start of the next line and continue. Short (but not too short!) lines help with that, too.
Paragraph margins are historically based on blank lines, so you can adapt that for your digital text, too and use margin-bottom: 1em or sth. like that (better use the line-height value for the margi, so you include that space, too).
Rules like these obviously date back to the print age, as there are several types of reading (more technical "ways to obtain the information") defined and refered to in "design rules".
You'll "read" a large poster different than a dictionary which is why you can/should deviate from these rules, depending on the setting.
Headlines for example don't need a line-height of 160% but will often work very well with 120% or even smaller. There are no strict rules but more guidelines, so you'll have to develop a sense and feel for that.
Other design rules and their implications play a role, too. Contrast of text to background, phenomena of large color areas, stroke-width of the font and lots of more.
For web typo with I am personally using sans-serif fonts with a larger font-size. Even with wider layouts this helps with getting shorter lines, slightly larger typo improves readability, more line-height reduces the "wall of text" effect, paragraph margins help to distinct different parts of text from each other.
There should be good beginners literature available if you find this interesting.
Also: Try fiddling with the etzh.ch page. Set the line-height to 1.2 and the font-size to 1 rem and you'll immediately see how not to do it. :-D
My immediate thought was: We could use those to power wings and fly!
You see, I spent the last weeks reading up on Otto Lilienthal. And while we might think that we have already "cracked" flying, we actually haven't. Humans still cannot fly. We can only board. What we do not have achieved is the sense of "flying like a bird", which Lilienthal was after. The idea that you control your movements through the air directly, not mediated through knobs and buttons, but by using your own body.
Motors that provide rotational power are not suited for wings. The are suited only to propellers. So that's where artificial muscles perhaps would be able to shine.
Also, I imagine that a bird needs to have fine-grained sense perception in its wings, to be able to compensate for subtle differences in air speed and pressure. And it seems that this is something these researchers are doing as well, with those sensors embedded in the fabric.
There have been massive struggles taken on by individuals and small teams to create ornithopters that can carry people. A solely human powered ornithopter was able to stay airborne for 19 seconds - using a mediatory lever to transfer push/pull leg power into wing motions.
Cool video. I wish they would have used an electric car for the camera man. As it is, the car's engine noise tremendously distracts from the grace of the ornithopter.
To fly like a bird, you probably need more motion control over the wings than just "up and down". I believe birds can angle their wings, they can curve them, and they can sense differences in air speed and air pressure across the wing's surface. That's why it seems to me that any form of artificial muscle would be a huge step.
The video was taken about 10 years ago, I doubt an electric vehicle would have been a viable option. As it is today, one that can go that fast is pretty expensive right? It's a massive weakness to the 'thopter that it can't do an independent take off and landing.
Yes, I think you're right. The pilot for the skycycle was blown like a kilometer off course by a strong gust of wind and almost wanted to give up. If he'd had the level of control you talk about, he'd probably have been able to keep going the direction he wanted to in spite of the wind.
I’m sorry, I hadn’t seen that the video was 10 years old. Totally valid point. As of today, renting a Tesla for a day or two is easy and doesn’t cost that much either. The bigger problem is that you’ll want to own one afterwards, and feel silly in any other car.
The problem of “flying” in the sense you describe is fundamentally limited by the square cube law. Even birds, whose anatomies are literally evolved for flight, will have a tough time staying in the air if they are scaled up to have a similar mass to us humans.
Lilienthal himself didn't, as far as I know, address your precise argument (the water strider bug scaling issue). But your comment reminded me of this snippet from his 1889 book:
The bodies of flying creatures are not so materially lighter than those of other animals, as to justify us in considering this difference in weight an essential condition of flight. It is often asserted that the hollow bones of birds facilitate their flight, especially since the hollows are filled with heated air, but it does not require much thought to come to the conclusion that this diminution of weight is barely worth mentioning. Also, we have not been able as yet to prove that the muscle and bone substance, as well as other parts of the bird's body, are specifically light. [...] After a bird is plucked, no one will assert that it is propor tionally lighter than other animals, and our housewives are certainly not under the impression that a pound of bird's flesh, even with the hollow bone included, is more bulky than an equal weight of flesh from another animal. [0]
Some birds and several pterosaurs got to human masses and more. Staying in the air is not much of a problem, but launching is. Pterosaurs have a massive advantage here in that they launched with all four limbs, meaning they could use their flight muscles to launch. Birds can't do this and have to rely on their legs (which are useless in the air).
Wikipedia says a Pteranodon[0] might have weighed up to 200kg. I wonder if the different mix of gases in the atmosphere during the Cretaceous period made any difference to how much weight could be supported while flying.
Annoyingly, the wikipedia article was wrong, and mistakenly gave the figures for Quetzalcoatlus in that paragraph. Pteranodon weighed more like 20-30kg (I've edited it).
The constraint on the size of flying animals is launch, not flight. Pterosaurs could get bigger than birds because they used quadrupedal launch, meaning they could use their flight muscles during the initial leap.
I never cease to be amazed how damn _big_ dinosaurs were. The size comparison on the page for Quetzalcoatlus is seriously mind boggling - the thing was almost the size of a small plane!
While there were pterosaurs as large as a giraffe (having similar proportions when on ground), they were very light for their size, probably no more than 2 to 4 times heavier than a human.
The obvious step would be not try to fly, would be improving hang gliders to be safer, catch better the wind currents or avoid obstacles proactively and have more autonomy. If the device suddenly fails, you still are in a hand glider.
Also engineering a motor that would flap like a colibri for hours without failing will be really hard and uncomfortable by the generated heat burning your back, but a motor that would flap here and there like a vulture for one or two minutes and then rest again would be much more easy to design and maintain. Would need also less weight of combustible.
Flapping like a colibri would, I suppose, also be rather loud and create noise. What fascinated Lilienthal was the way large birds like storks fly: They do flap their wings to take off, and also when there are no thermals. But most of the time, they glide or use thermals to gain altitude.
I do have to say, whenever I see a stork above, or even just a red kite or pelican, I feel envious. Our drones and planes just seem crude in comparison.
To be clear: I'm not talking about flight as a means to get from A to B as quickly as possible. That's the domain of the jet engine, and no bird can match it. I'm talking about flying as a thing you do for the enjoyment of it, as a thing of beauty and wonder. In short, that which inspired humans to dream about flying machines in the first place.
Hang gliders are probably too fast to ever be safe (70kmh average), require big turns, take forever to fold and unfold, are big and heavy, but paragliders are fantastic in this regard (more like 40kmh for non-speed flying). Position is different (comfy chair with feet up vs laying on stomach), but once you fly you don't think about it.
Basically the only thing missing is the functionality for paraglide to become rigid structure on demand and they will be bombproof. There is some initial progress in this regard but its a long way from reality. Endgame would be probably some electrically-induced rigidity via some easy-to-manage remote. Or some smart behavior in between based on whats happening, that would allow easily things not considered possible currently.
Although technically it is gliding, but to me wingsuits look close enough to flying that adding the mechanism for flapping doesn't really increase the experience of flying by much. (Spoken from a point of view of a spectator and not someone who has done some form of flight besides in airliners.)
Very true. But imagine you could strap on such the wings of a glider along with artificial muscles that map to, say, your arms and hands. You could take off and fly and land like a bird. No need for a cliff or runway or anything. You'd also be as silent as an eagle circling above the tree tops.
That prop notebook is hilarious. Multiple pen colors. Figures of...something, marked "Figure 3." And our "scientist" adds a median box to a plot with no tic marks or labels.
It's like the "please pipette some colored fluids for the cameras" of the bio world.
If you could actuate hard, padded shell in this manner it could be a true exoskeleton. You'd just have to figure out how to design joints on the shell to have exact same range of motion as the limb inside it.
This is a cool technology. I worry about the risk of causing non-age related sarcopenia though. I expect that can, or perhaps is, mitigated by tuning the inputs to require a near maximum effort from the human to get a near maximum effort from the device. That would maintain adequate muscle stimulation, while still achieving the disability adaptivity goal.
Looking forward to the future where wearable exoskeletons/exomuscle provide endurance, possible reduced injury, strength, etc.
If the market is going to sell us AR glasses, a wearable ecosystem could provide battery power and shift weight around (away from your head). This system would provide power for any number of accessories (phone, watch, earbuds, etc).
etc may include: helmet mounted night vision optics, EW/ECM/jamming equipment, long range radios, gun optic sights, power to re-charge suicide drones if suitable targets fail to appear.
I assume you are referring to the link in the article to [0], for me there is a button labelled 'PDF' with a "download arrow" in the upper right next to print. Perhaps there is an extension blocking the button/function?
https://roundupreads.jsc.nasa.gov/pages.ashx/787/New%20weara...
The internal application was to improve mobility in space suits. We had a partnership with some medical researchers looking to help patients with otherwise limited mobility.
Shoulders are difficult. The human body has a lot of amazing degrees of freedom. One of the biggest challenges was efficient and effective transfer of the assist forces to the body.