Guiding Ships with Moire Patterns
tinkerings.orgI've been looking for something similar in concept for when I back into my garage from a side street with basically no driveway. It's a very narrow single-car garage. I can consistently back in well enough for myself, but if I'm not dead-on and I have passengers, passengers on one side of the car are going to have to squeeze to get out.
Essentially it can be hard to tell if I'm perfectly parallel with the garage walls and whether I'm off center, or rather if I'm within tolerance to back in even if the angle isn't perfect.
I've looked into building something like range lights [1], but I don't think the math scales down to short distances. Plus if I'm looking in the rearview mirror or my backup camera, neither of which are perfectly aligned with the direction of travel, that might mess with optical navigation aids.
I might have to dig into this moire approach to see if it would be more feasible.
Yes, obviously this is a minor inconvenience that I'm able to deal with on a regular basis, but it's fun to theorycraft.
In my mental model, the tennis ball tells you when you've backed in / pulled in the appropriate distance. I'm not seeing how it would help me back in straight / centered in my garage, or at least not until I've already backed in so far that I'd need to pull out again to try again.
I have done similar in the past with what I call "taking mental snapshots", but it's always easier if there are things you can change to simplify the process. i.e. make sure to align the side mirrors with the flower pots when I'm backed up enough to begin straightening out (direction of the misalignment tells which way to adjust).
The extreme end of this would, of course, be putting lines down for the rear tires. I'm just curious if there's a better way using what you already have so it doesn't look dorky.
Ultimately the only trick to backing up perfectly is the distance to each side being equal as you reverse in as straight of a line as you can, so I'm not sure it takes more than two surrounding reference points being compared to another two points on the car. Distance to each side is comparing the lower corners of the rear window to the lower corners of the garage opening. Flower pots or something else further away gives you better "angular resolution" when you're straightening up (no idea what else to call it).
Some napkin math says a couple inches of precision should be achievable at reasonable distances?
I can see that this would be not very intuitive for left/right guidance but are similar systems used in ship navigation?
The other common mark you’ll see are leads which are two lights, one behind the other. The front is lower and the rear is higher. When they’re aligned you’re on the channel. These also have day shapes attached that provide an upwards and downwards facing triangle to align.
> - Tom Scott, 8 years ago
Ah, research in the pre-LLM era was quite different. You actually had to know which questions to ask.
Going one level down further, it's really hard to imagine what it was like doing research into something you have zero clue about in the pre-Google era. I guess you just asked a librarian and hoped they'd point you roughly towards the right section and then just started to read random books?
You get a much better response if you ask the right questions in the right language though. Expertise still has value.
I guess you just asked a librarian and hoped they'd point you roughly towards the right section and then just started to read random books?
You looked it up in an encyclopedia first, which gave you the basics. That gave you enough to find it in a library using the Dewey Decimal code. From there you could generally trust the book because they tended to be trusted if they were in a library. For newer topics you swapped books for journals.
Researching a niche topic as someone outside of the academic community with no journal access was basically impossible.
Come to think of it though, as long as civilization has existed, libraries have been a thing. Or well, monasteries or some kind of place that kept records and copied books. And before that you just asked the oldest person in your village/tribe and hoped they knew I guess. It's weird that access to knowledge has basically been unchanged for the past ~10k or so years until now.
It's about finding the questions to ask. About learning to learn. The tour guided us through actually using the library and how to learn the library which is a way to find the questions first and then find the answers afterwards. The librarian then outlined their role in helping the student in how to learn, and how to use the various facilities too.
Learning the question is something that is most fundamental to learning but is kind of overlooked.
A good knowledge system should probe initial enquiries to identify what the users actual desires, gaps and questions are. No one wants a sycophantic doctor, they want one that can ask probing detailed questions to learn whats really going on.
"I think it's a long way off"
Welp, I hope this one doesn't age similarly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E
This looks to be similar to the 3-light system that the author talks about.
https://insidedio.blog.gov.uk/2016/08/22/safe-approach-to-po...
To provide navigational certainty the vessel’s navigator visually aligns one set of three up with the other (i.e. they act as a pair) and because each of the three lights is a different colour the navigator can be certain he’s lining up the correct lights.https://www.ouruboroi.com/moire