I dunno, I think I would've preferred Lua bytecode as a deliverable executable target, rather than WebAssembly. The tooling would be simpler, more efficient, and would allow a far wider ranger of interoperability with other engines.
One of the biggest factors for any flight simulation add-on is performance, and so most of the major add-on developers are building C++ modules (compiled to WASM) to eek out as much performance as possible. My understanding is that it's also possible to write some things in JavaScript (and perhaps TypeScript), but performance takes a hit. I would assume Lua falls into that same performance trap, as I know Lua can be used for X-Plane add-on development, but it's (again) considered the less performance-centric approach as compared to C++.
I recall at least one add-on developer for X-Plane (Zibo [1]) migrating some of their Lua code over to C++.
I'm unsure about the Weeping Figs' inclusion in the list, although I do expect NASA has considered this - but, don't Weeping Figs contain lactose, which becomes air born when dried into a dust, and isn't anaphylactic shock a potential consequence of lactose dust inhalation?
Or is it that the impact of Weeping Figs lactose content is minimal when compared to the benefits of the plant, overall - perhaps the lactose is why it is able to filter air so well, anyway?
This is a failure of Operating System Vendors, in my opinion.
If Operating Systems had a way for parents to adequately monitor/administer the machines of their children, this would not be such a huge, massive hole, in which to pour (yet more) human rights abuses.
Parents have the right to have an eye on their children. This is not repressive, it is not authoritarian, it is a right and a responsibility.
The fact that I can't - easily, and with little fuss - quickly see what my kids are viewing on their screens, is the issue.
Sure, children have the right to privacy - but it is their parents who should provide it to them. Not just the state, but the parents. And certainly, the state should not be eliminating the rest of society's privacy in the rush to prevent parents from having oversight of - and responsibility for - the online activities of their children.
The fact is, Operating System Vendors would rather turn their platforms into ad-vending machines, than actually improve the means by which the computers are operated by their users.
It would be a simple thing to establish parent/child relationship security between not just two computers, but two human beings who love and trust each other.
Kids will always be inquisitive. They will always try to exceed the limits imposed upon them by their parents. But this should not be a reason for more draconian control over consenting adults, or indeed individual adults. It should be a motivating factor to build better computing platforms, which can be reliably configured to prevent porn from having the detrimental impact many controllers of society have decided is occurring.
Another undeniable fact, is that parents - and parenting - get a bad rap. However, if a parent and child love and trust each other, having the ability to quickly observe the kids computing environment in productive ways, should be being provided, technologically.
When really, we should be building tools which strengthen parent/child relationships, we are instead eradicating the need for parents.
I'm a parent, I have researched it, and found it not great because it still involves third parties and doesn't promote local control/anonymity without involving some external entity - i.e. Apple requires accounts, Google still gets its metrics, etc.
Nice project! I have a couple of the Transcend SD-WIFI cards in my studio - one thing that I really like about them, is the Lua-based interface that allows programmatic control, remotely, of the filesystem. This has been quite useful.
Do you have any plans to support similar functionality?
Its appropriate, inasmuch as they are an apex predator, and spend a majority of their lives hunting for food - as opposed to many other whales which filter-feed as a harvesting mechanism ..
This is a great idea .. I wonder if it can be adapted to using recycled plastic threads, so that a fleet of these could be deployed into the ocean to recover plastics, turn them into nets, and use those nets to .. recover more plastic?
If I were shipwrecked on a tropical island, I'd make it my daily task to work out how to build something like this, into which I can feed plastic bottles, and get a brand new material that could be used for more construction.
Sure, knitting scarves is neat. But knitting a weather-proof shelter? Hell yeah!
To recycle plastic, the only viable way is to melt it. And the plastic must be very clean before it can be remelted. If it even is a kind of plastic that can be reheated multiple times. I am afraid the short answer is no.
In the context of ocean plastic recovery/harvesting, I don't know that the purity is all that important - the more important factor is, collection. Being able to take plastic bottles and turn them into a kind of string, for example, seems more viable - if a hopper could be designed which takes a plastic bottle, rotates it around a stripping knife, and the output is a long twine - this could then be fed into the knitting machine.
I imagine this rube-goldberg'esque strandebeest-like contraption sitting out there harvesting wind and waves, slowly turning every bottle it gorges on into a finely woven matte of materials .. maybe even reproducing itself, who knows ..
EDIT: I asked Grok to design a self-replicating ocean weaver, and I have to say .. it seems like a viable idea to me. Perhaps we will see this kind of plastic harvesting in the near future .. at the very least, were I to be stranded on a plastic-laden island, I'm pretty sure I could work out a way to build a raft with sails ..
There's some (fairly simple) devices in use or that you can make yourself to turn bottles into a kind of thread, but it's very hard to automate because bottles will be different in shape and condition.
But as you say, turning them into something else isn't the critical part, collecting them in the first place is. The most important thing is taking them out of the environment so they stop breaking down into microplastics and the like.
Personally I think all these creative solutions for reusing plastics aren't so important. Collect it and put it in a giant landfill like an old open mine, bury it and forget about it until a future generation invents an efficient way to recycle it, then mine it like a resource.
Whats crazy is that a significant portion of the aluminium minerals comes from a single source of bauxite in the world, near Pinjarra Western Australia .. something like 90% of the worlds aluminium is sourced from that one mine.
According this source [1], only about 35% of all bauxite is mined in Australia, so I don't think that's true.
What's crazy is how modern shipping has made it economical to process this elsewhere, all over the globe. For example, from one of the biggest bauxite mines, in Pará, Brazil, the raw bauxite is shipped across the Atlantic to be processed by Hydro in Norway, which refines it into alumina powder, which is then shipped elsewhere to be refined into aluminum. You would think it would be more cost-effective and energy-efficient to centralize this, not to mention more environmentally friendly.
Extracting aluminium from bauxite is notoriously energy-intensive. During the nineteenth century, European aristocrats used aluminium tableware because it was more expensive than silverware. (They later switched back to silver when the novelty wore off and they realised aluminium was too light to feel right in the hand.)
I took a small rabbit hole run into bauxite smelting when I found out a local place had their own power plant just for the process. It really does require that much energy.
If the Brazil plant is putting out enough ore, I can definitely imagine it is cheaper to sell it internationally to someone with hydro power than to build and operate their own power plant.
