I'm wasting my mod points now by posting, but I can't let that lie. A volcanic eruption that can kill everybody spouts vast quantities of CO2 - that's how it kills them - it suffocates them.

The guy in prison would be the first to go because CO2 is heavier than air and would fill the gaol as soon as possible.

Depending on the internal resistance perhaps your wire just melts really quickly, breaking the circuit.

That appears to be the sort of claim they are making, although I think they say the total volume will only be 20% less.

And they claim the practicalities, efficiencies and economies of Li nano-titanate and Li nano-phosphate batteries - which have half the specific energy of Lithium-Ion again. That's four times the specific energy of like-for-like batteries.

We're just going to have to see if it works and see what the price is.

Also the ICE weighs an awful lot more than 280lbs while four small in wheel motors weigh very little. then there's the gearbox, the driveshaft, the lead-acid battery (hint, hint "LEAD"). The coolant, the brake fluid (not needed with decent inwheel motors).

The electric version will be /much/ lighter overall.

Medicine and Sports Science
(The two go hand in hand - they could both come under the umbrella of "phisicianism" :)

I've looked at you example again and there are not enough samples to determine that it is a skewed normal curve so we can't know whether it is actually a counter example.

I suspect it isn't but I have ladies to meet and dance argentine tango with in a few hours so I'm not going to spend the time forming a pedantic proof or disproof of any of this.

Hah! Who's the smart one now?

Good counter example, but what are the chances of getting such a perfect example in the real world? That was constructed with the aim of landing 50% below the mean. Nature has no such purpose.

It's a skewed normal, with the mean at 100 and at least one person over 200, for 50% to be below the mean you'd need one with a negative IQ.

So it is likely that far /more/ than 50% have below average intelligence otherwise you need somebody who actually removes intelligence from the universe.

Or is that what politicians are for?

You might want to blur the image (and blur the inverse). This will allow for minor camera pan or rotation but you'll need a fairly high threshold. The thickness of the hands determines the blur kernel size and just how high is the threshold.

You have known lighting conditions and a strictly limited camera orientation and object configurations.

You can take the inverse of the pixel values as they would be if the hands weren't there (you can mock up the pixel values under the hands by hand since you only need an approximate inverse of the background plate). Then you add that inverse to an image and threshold to get black hands on white background.

Now you can use a hough transform to find all potential hands and you know the locations of the centres of the dials so you can sieve the potential hands down to actual hands. You can then do some simple trigonometry as you know which angles relate to which numbers.

Done.