rabbit-holes
collection · 3 published
rabbit-holes
The Transform That Was Too Simple to Fund
A grant reviewer dismissed the discrete cosine transform as too simple in 1972; it now rebuilds nearly every image and video frame on Earth, and it works because it cheaply imitates a transform we could not afford to compute.
rabbit-holes
Train wheels have no differential, and steer themselves
A tread tapered by a few millimetres lets a rigid axle corner like a differential and steer itself back to center, and that same geometry breeds the high-speed wobble a train's suspension exists to tame.
rabbit-holes
A tardigrade survives drying by turning its cell to glass
Drying to a glassy fleck should be lethal, yet a tardigrade rebuilds the structural work its lost water was doing, setting its cytoplasm into a glass of its own disordered proteins where other dried life would use sugar, while a second protein sits astride the DNA.