• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • This is not an American invention, nor is it interchangeable with a roundabout.

    The main priority of roundabouts is safe traffic flow for cars, but they can (sometimes) still be very hostile to pedestrians. This type of intersection is meant to prioritize pedestrians as much as possible. The narrow street slows vehicles, and the sidewalk bump outs make people trying to cross the street extra visible and minimize the time they need to be vulnerable in the middle of the road.

    Which isn’t to say that roundabouts are necessarily bad, they just serve different purposes




  • From a physics perspective, yes it does. Not much, but yes it does do something.

    In order for a crumple zone to work, the material must be at least slightly softer than the rest of the structure. When you have a collision, both the strong structure and the relatively weak crumple zones will flex, but the crumple zones will flex more. In a big collision, like with another car, they might flex so much they have permanent damage (the crumple), but even with a pedestrian they will flex a little. The more they flex, the more it cushions the impact for both the pedestrian and the occupants of the car.

    As I said, the amount of cushion for the two parties is massively skewed in favor of the car, and crumple zones alone are not anywhere near enough to make cars safe for pedestrians. But objectively, yes they do slightly cushion the impact for a pedestrian, and in the perfect edge case collision it might mean the difference between life and death.










  • I want to preface this by saying that while I have done some undergraduate work in this area, I am by no means an expert on this topic. If I’m wrong or missing some context, hopefully someone with more knowledge than me can comment and correct me.

    This doesn’t really seem like much to me. The major quantum threat is Shor’s algorithm, which gives an attacker with access to a sufficiently powerful quantum computer the ability to easily solve the discrete log problem. This new protocol still relies on the discrete log problem, and is therefore still vulnerable to the same threat. I don’t understand everything in the paper, but from what I can tell I think they just made DH a little more robust in general, rather than actually providing a long-term quantum solution.