You would end up with the "religious week" and the "standard week" moving relative to one another over the years, in a classic case of trying to fix messy details and thereby adding more details (as in https://xkcd.com/927/).
I agree. The author's description of what is "reasonable" sounds like a blueprint for many of my late nights struggling with Windows:
"apps that assume that printing works will still behave in a reasonable manner: You’re just on a system that doesn’t have any printers and all attempts to install a printer are ineffective."
Maybe the underlying assumption is that the users will give up before spending an "unreasonable" amount of time on these tar pit features.
If I understand trial law correctly, the rules of evidence already prohibit introducing a video at trial without proving where it came from (for example, testimony from a security guard that a given video came from a given security camera).
But social media has no rules of evidence. Already I see AI-generated images as illustrations on many conspiracy theory posts. People's resistance to believing images and videos from sketchy sources is going to have to increase very fast (especially for images and videos that they agree with).
All the more reason why we need to rely on the courts and not the mob justice (in the social sense) which has become popular over the last several years.
Nothing will change. Confirmation bias junkies already accept far worse fakes. People who use trusted sources will continue doing so. Bumping the quantity/quality of fabricated horseshit won't move the needle.
There's also underfunded research on far-UV light, which at the right wavelengths kills pathogens without apparently affecting humans. It might really be that simple.
Was anyone else hoping it would detect the ball by simply completing a circuit (since the rails are metal and so is the ball)? Then it could give a magnetic tug after an appropriate time. Maybe this would be flaky because of the poor contact between rails and a rolling ball, but an inductive proximity sensor feels like overkill.
It looks like the rails are already a complete circuit - I think they're a single piece of wire that is bent at the end to make a loop, and there are a couple lateral braces soldered on to keep them properly spaced.
You'd have to split the rails into two pieces and replace the lateral braces with something nonconductive (plastic) which wouldn't look nearly as nice; and the device would be a lot more prone to going out of calibration if the spacing drifted.
Its probably possible but there's a lot of downsides to save $2 on a sensor, some of which will be eaten up elsewhere as it will add some additional parts.
Edit: It would also somewhat spoil the magic, as that's the first thing most of us would think of (I certainly did).
I was thinking a pair of tiny contacts could touch the ball and complete the circuit, but you're right, this isn't an engineering opportunity, but a performance issue. You shouldn't expose electricical components in a perpetual motion simulator.
Of course, slogans cannot be perfect. Slogans are tools for communication and should be judged as such. If "most people take it as" meaning something unhelpful, then it's defunct as a slogan. ("Black lives matter" is understood a lot more often, which is why it still works.)
An example of a textbook which starts from the discrete, linear-algebra form of QM (using the Stern-Gerlach spin experiment) is "Quantum Mechanics: A Paradigms Approach" by David McIntyre of Oregon State University. It's not quite like what's described here, but much closer to it than the more traditional way of teaching QM (using differential equations).
Google Ngram Viewer seems to agree, putting peak usage of "do the needful" in the mid-1800s. A phrase I would tend to use instead, "do what is needed", appears to be much more recent.
I have long harbored an ambition of creating a Journal Of Implausible Chemistry, for the publication of research on hydrogen chains and other molecules cruelly disallowed by our impoverished reality.
