I'm not sure that use taxes really support road maintenance, at least in my state. The reason is that money is fungible, and the income from use taxes can be offset by a reduction in support from the general fund.

I'm a physicist, and I love invariants. In my work, being able to use the optical invariant is a superpower. It governs the statistics of light beams.

I wonder if it helps that a lot of people take more than one picture of the same thing, thus providing them with effectively stereoscopic images.

Also, frames from live photos

The article mentions a spatial light modulator, which I believe the Lytro camera did not have.

The image(s) were also trash unfortunately and a PITA to process. Barely usable even in ideal circumstances.

eh??

Processing was as simple as "click on the thing you want in focus". and 4MP was just fine for casual use it was targetting

You couldn’t offload and use the refocus feature without their software and 4MP was half what smartphones were doing in 2012 (rapidly increasing above 8MP after that). Fixed lens so you couldn’t improve the image quality with glass - that’s totally understandable given the product but it is still a limitation to the visual quality.

That’s a bad recipe for casual and professional users alike. Can’t ingest into your workflow quickly, images are low res, can’t improve the image, and your smartphone was better just missing one, admittedly neat, feature. If that existed in phones people would use it like crazy I imagine.

Too narrow of a use case IMO, too many compromises for one feature, hence why it failed.

I doubt resolution is a limiting factor LCoS (transmissive ones are lower resolution typically though, but you could build reflective) phase modulators are available in 4k resolution (and maybe even higher). And I don't know if you need that much resolution because the regions you're trying to focus are quite broad, in fact I suspect the resolution of your phase modulator would not limit resolution but the max distance between focused regions, because it would set the max phase ramp you can achieve.

Loss, i.e. equivalent aperture is a different matter and I think this would imply quite a light loss.

> I doubt resolution is a limiting factor LCoS (transmissive ones are lower resolution typically though, but you could build reflective) phase modulators are available in 4k resolution (and maybe even higher)

We’re talking about a specific camera, the lytros, which had a 4MP resolution. I’m not saying there was a limitation in the technology broadly speaking. Just that this camera was not worth it for the time. It’s sacrificed too much for one feature and at $400 it just didn’t sell

I looked into the details at the time, and as I recall the camera had lower resolution than the 4 MP of the sensor because of the microlens array. A lot was written about this at the time.

I remember a friend, who was a photography buff, was quite excited about the camera. But he didn't actually buy one.

sensor was 40MP, image was 4MP

I remember "-tucky" being used in my part of Southeastern Michigan, in the early 1980s. It may have been related to the historical migration of people from Appalachia to the Detroit area during the heyday of the car industry.

That may be true, but a modern money system could get you pretty close to that ideal, where the main difference is the friction of transactions.

It's close to ideal for a loaf of bread, or a bag of nails. I can hop on my bike and turn my money into either of those things in a few minutes. Turning money into a house is further from that ideal of course.

First time parent? Just kidding.

My experience as a parent, and the conventional wisdom of parents I've known, including my own, is that there's no predicting the influence of a given toy on a kid's development[0]. My hunch is that toys are better if they give the kid more agency to make up their own play and games without supervision, and many of the toys mentioned in the article are of that ilk. That could be because I still like toys, to this day, with that kind of built-in agency.

Also, growing up in a emotionally stable family culture that values curiosity and learning is probably a huge deal.

[0] Excluding cellphones and the Internet, which are their own discussion of course.

Something I'm wondering. My kids are grown now. When they were little, we got a toy with connecting magnetic pieces, don't remember the name. The magnets broke out of the brittle plastic easily and it was actually a pretty low quality toy although the concept was cool.

There was also some kind of recall or warning about the possibility of kids ingesting the magnets. That's about all I remember. Of course you never know as a parent whether the latest safety threat is serious or over-hyped. The claimed threat was that the magnets would click together in your intestines and wreak havoc.

I wonder what the present conventional wisdom is on those magnets.

The way it used to be, is if they come back with fasteners and nails attached after playing in the grass it's worth mentioning to the pediatrician on the next visit.

Magnetix?

That might be it, and a quick search suggests that there were some recalls associated with it. Also, my kids didn't really gravitate to it. Their "construction" toys were a hodgepodge of blocks, some cheap "thomas train" knock-offs, stuffed animals, you name it, all combined into one giant mess. ;-)

This is anecdotal, but I remember this sentiment becoming widespread in the 1980s, along with the imminent hyperinflation and currency collapse.

Political candidates (Carter and Reagan) promised reductions in federal spending, but couldn't get past the obvious lack of any real discretionary control due to the size of the biggest ticket items such as the entitlements and military. The conservative message of "entitlements will make you immoral" was replaced by "entitlements are unsustainable," making it sound like serious economics but without any real basis.

It's easy to liquefy, so it has a density advantage over air, and would be bad if released but not super bad.

Suffocation seems like the most relevant concern in the event of a catastrophic leak.

It is a necessary risk. Oxygen is dangerous when heat is involved, and its low critical point is harder to work with than co2.