Time or technical challenge are not the issue. The issue is that the utility of a social network is a function of the number of individuals in that network.

That’s why Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit all still have dominant positions in their regimes. If you want to see what your friends are saying you need to be on the same network they are on. And if they are on Twitter, signing up for Bluesky doesn’t magically get you their content. I’m off twitter, never really used insta, I have my FB account, but I only log in now when I need to check on specific things (like seeing if people were OK after the wildfires swept through the town I used to live in), and I guiltily admit I still use reddit, largely because a lot of the niche subs I frequent aren’t here. I know the solution to that last problem is for someone like me to step up and make them, but… I’m tired boss. I can either be a volunteer firefighter, or I can admin a firefighter com on Lemmy. I can’t do both.

I was coming here to say that! It’s possibly apocryphal, but the way I heard it was that the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign did this when they did their main quad (I still remember them telling me this when I got a tour before applying there 30 years ago). And they didn’t just look for where the plants were dead, but they also looked for broadleaf weeds, which sustain trampling better than grasses (it’s a land grant university in the midwest. Of course there’s an agriculture angle).

Are you a helicopter pilot? I thought you rotated with power out, just not as fast as you would without the tail rotor. I could be wrong… I only worked on the engines and used them as a passenger. I’ve only flown sail planes…

I mean, you do have some control during autorotation descent, but it’s at best an extremely hard landing if your pilot is really skilled. They build crumple zones into the seat mounts for them.

It’s a pretty cool technique. You adjust your rotor pitch to let you fall faster which let you put/keep angular momentum into your rotor, then at the last minute before slamming into the ground you pull hard on the collective and turn all that angular momentum in your rotor into lift to make it so that you don’t slam the ground at full speed. You can manipulate the cyclic control (direction controls) during autorotation, but you’re spinning the whole time, so it’s very hard to guide an autorotation to a specific landing area.

Even a well maintained helicopter is a safety nightmare.

I started my career in aerospace at a company that makes helicopter engines and later I became a search and rescue mountaineer/EMT in a county with more helicopters used for SAR than anywhere else in the US. We beat it into our new members “never pass up the opportunity to turn down a helicopter ride”.

The mountain rescue association tracks member fatalities and injuries. Helicopter accidents are, by a large margin, the leading cause of line of duty death in mountain rescue, and we spend only a couple percent of our time in them.

I used helicopters a lot when I was on mountain rescue.

I never saw an air sick bag

It will always be a matter of “for how long?”. Location from integrated acceleration is what we call a stiff problem. Meaning that any error is compounded as you continue to integrate (slight over simplification, but good enough for the point). There will never be a sensor that has zero error, so it’s just a question of how much integration you can do before the errors make the results unusable.

Do you have a recommendation for a good cheap android phone (didn’t worry, I’ll run a rom) that one could get to have a “clean” phone?

I’ve been thinking about getting a phone that has none of my socials on it for when I go to Canada to get vaccines

Without GPS or tower based error correction any location prediction based on conservation of momentum in the phone will be useless before very long if the phone is moving.

I live in Maine. Riding a motorcycle in the winter is not only highly unpleasant, it’s borderline suicidal.

I’m all for 2 wheeled transport where it works, but anywhere that gets snow for months out of each year it’s a non starter as a primary transportation mode