Esther Schindler

Esther Schindler

@estherschindler.bsky.social

Writer. Editor. Chocoholic. Baseball. Cats. Technology. Not always in that order. She/her. Let's be kind to one another. Gaze upon my LinkedIn profile and admire: https://www.linkedin.com/in/estherschindler/

6.7K followers6.3K following13K posts

Pinned

Esther Schindler
@estherschindler.bsky.social

I know I'm posting more often -- maybe too much -- but it's the only way I can cope. On one hand, I refuse to stay silent about the horrible things that are happening. On the other hand, I refuse to let them distract me from the things that bring us joy and usefulness.

Esther Schindler reposted

Tara Calishain
@researchbuzz.bsky.social

#UK #museums #money #funding #GLAM 'Free-to-enter museums and galleries across England will benefit from significant reductions in their business rates valuations following a landmark legal case won by London’s Natural History Museum earlier this year.' www.museumsassociation.org/museums-jour...

museumsassociation.orgFree-entry museums to benefit from new business rates policy after landmark tribunal ruling - Museums AssociationInstitutions across England expected to see significant reductions thanks to change in Valuation Office approach

Esther Schindler reposted

Aaron Rupar
@atrupar.com

JD Vance: "Gas prices are too high ... they skyrocket every time some tinpot dictator decides to throw a tantrum"

Esther Schindler
@estherschindler.bsky.social

"Valladao doesn’t have any formal artistic training, but he’s always looking for inspiration. He gets ideas from looking at art in a museum or just walking down the street." This story will make you smile.

apnews.com'Picasso of Pumpkin Carvers' brings artistry to a Halloween traditionCarving pumpkins is a Halloween tradition. Mike Valladao has turned it into a joyful form of art. Known as the “Picasso of Pumpkin Carvers,” Valladao has been chiseling whimsical faces and creatures into big pumpkins for more than four decades.
Esther Schindler
@estherschindler.bsky.social

Scientists rediscover how to make ancient Roman colour-changing glass 'Now scientists from the University of Sheffield have replicated its remarkable optical behaviour, using an ancient recipe derived from a fragment of the Roman “dichroic” (two-coloured) original.'

theguardian.com‘It’s magic’: scientists rediscover how to make ancient Roman colour-changing glassExclusive: Optical engineering that went into 1,600-year-old Lycurgus Cup has baffled experts for centuries
Esther Schindler
@estherschindler.bsky.social

Calling all knitters and crocheters! Have you ever wanted your work to be featured in a museum exhibit? Help Cal Academy Create a Yarn Art Superbloom!

docs.google.comHelp Cal Academy Create a Yarn Art Superbloom!Calling all knitters and crocheters! Have you ever wanted your work to be featured in a museum exhibit? Are you interested in winning a pair of tickets to the California Academy of Sciences? No purchase necessary to enter or win. Now is your chance! We invite our fiber-minded friends to help bring a collective work of art to life for a portion the new exhibit opening this fall at Cal Academy. Step outside, marvel at nature’s bountiful beauty, and channel inspiration to create superbloom-themed knitted and crocheted pieces! How to participate: Donate your Superbloom Creation – knitted, crocheted or felted, flowers, leaves or pollinators measuring between 2 in. and 1 ft. in size – to Cal Academy by November 11 to be considered for inclusion in the exhibit on opening day. Additional submissions will be accepted through March 1, 2027 and considered for inclusion after opening. Mail your piece to California Academy of Sciences, Attn: Liza Yee, 55 Music Concourse Drive, San Francisco, CA 94118. Pieces can also be dropped off at the Academy’s Business Reception Desk at 75 Nancy Pelosi Drive, San Francisco. Please include your name and email address with your submissions. See below for additional details and guidelines.
Esther Schindler
@estherschindler.bsky.social

Don't be thrown off by the "end-to-end AI" buzzwords. (I was when I first got the interview assignment.) This is actually about how it works and why you should care. If you like the general stuff I post, give this story a chance. It's the kind of tech I think about most of the day.

Esther Schindler reposted

Rafa Sales Ross
@rafiews.com

I’m not a political journalist, so was gladly surprised at the community I found here last night. To Americans anxious about the upcoming elections, a key thing we learned in Brazil that might help you: DO NOT engage with the far-right online. Don’t share rage bait. Amplify your people. Ignore them.

Esther Schindler reposted

Phil Lewis
@phillewis.bsky.social

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wins fourth term, according to electoral court.

Esther Schindler
@estherschindler.bsky.social

A new study from researchers out of China has demonstrated that solar farms can have a material impact on reducing dust pollution reaching major cities, revealing a new, unexpected upside to renewable energy technology. reneweconomy.com.au/solar-farms-...

reneweconomy.com.auSolar farms can help stop the spread of dust storms, new study findsNew study demonstrates that solar farms can have a material impact on reducing dust pollution reaching major cities.

Esther Schindler reposted

Grady Booch
@booch.com

Computing is a moral activity, and we must take responsibility for its creation and the consequences of surrendering ourselves to it.

Esther Schindler reposted

Dave Pell
@davepell.bsky.social

We went to a small diner on Main Street to talk to Trump voters but the diner had closed due to inflation.

Esther Schindler reposted

Randy Au
@randyau.com

I'm dying laughing at how the cat has conformed to her flower shaped bed today

Esther Schindler
@estherschindler.bsky.social

"Before the swirl of the pen, there was the plastic click of the keyboard. Not one continuous movement but thousands of discrete ones: arachnid fingers on a plastic pad."

lithub.comAre We Different Writers When We Move From Longhand to a Screen?“Writing,” as Voltaire’s famous maxim goes, “is the painting of the voice.” But it’s never been quite as simple as that. It’s easy to look back with dewy eyes to a time before our writing was so he…
Esther Schindler
@estherschindler.bsky.social

“Gracious acceptance is an art — an art which most never bother to cultivate. We think that we have to learn how to give, but we forget about accepting things, which can be much harder than giving....”—Alexander McCall Smith

Esther Schindler reposted

Peter
@notalawyer.bsky.social

some good local political drama: there's a crowded mayoral race in a nearby town, and one local business owner put out signs opposing a local councilwoman who's running. the signs get stolen, but it turns out he put airtags in them and they were traced to the councilwoman herself.

Esther Schindler
@estherschindler.bsky.social

“The Scottish Castles Association hopes the archive will become a freely accessible resource for anyone interested in Scotland’s castles, bringing together photographs, drawings, research and records previously held across private and institutional collections.”

heraldscotland.comNew digital archive aims to save Scotland's deteriorating castles The Scottish Castles Association and the University of Stirling are developing a digital archive to record Scotland’s castles, preserve historic collections and identify sites at risk.
Esther Schindler
@estherschindler.bsky.social

Studying and understanding fluid dynamics from humpback whale fins helped improve wind turbine blade designs.

engineerine.comWhale-Fin Bumps Boost Wind Blades by 20%Weighing up to 36 metric tons (80,000 pounds) and stretching 15 meters (50 feet) from snout to tail flukes, the adult humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) has the mass and dimensions of a loaded city transit bus. Yet under the surface of the ocean, this 40-ton leviathan is an astonishingly agile acrobat. When hunting schools of herring or krill using its famous “bubble-net feeding” technique, a humpback whale can bank on its side, roll through razor-sharp underwater turns with a radius tighter than its own body length, and execute steep climbing spirals that would cause any similarly sized submarine or rigid hydrofoil to stall and slide sideways. When biomechanics researcher Dr. Frank E. Fish (Professor of Biology at West Chester University) examined a sculpture of a humpback whale in a Boston gift shop, he noticed something that seemed like an artist’s mistake: the sculptor had placed a row of large, irregular, wart-like bumps along the front leading edge of the whale’s 5-meter-long (16-foot) pectoral flippers. Every rule of classical 20th-century aeronautics dictated that the leading edge of a wing, hydrofoil, or turbine blade must be kept perfectly straight and smooth so fluid splits cleanly over the surface. Putting large fist-sized knobs along the front edge of a wing seemed guaranteed to trip the airflow and destroy lift. Instead, when Dr. Fish partnered with aerospace aerodynamicist Dr. Philip Watts, Duke University’s Dr. Laurens Howle, and Canadian inventor Stephen W. Dewar to found Toronto-based WhalePower Corporation and test 3D-modeled humpback flippers inside the wind tunnels of the United States Naval Academy, the scalloped leading-edge bumps—known in anatomy as tubercles—shattered conventional fluid-dynamics dogma. The Aerodynamic Enemy: Spanwise Flow and Catastrophic Wing Stall To understand why a humpback whale’s bumpy flippers outperform smooth wings—and why that discovery is transforming wind turbines, industrial fans, and aircraft—one must first understand how a conventional smooth blade fails at steep angles. Whether a blade is flying through air on a wind turbine or slicing through water on a ship’s rudder, it generates lift by tilting its leading edge upward at an angle of attack ($lpha$) relative to the oncoming fluid. On a traditional smooth-edged airfoil, as the angle of attack increases past roughly 10 to 12 degrees, two dangerous aerodynamic breakdown events occur simultaneously: Spanwise Tip Drift: Instead of flowing straight back from the leading edge to the trailing edge across the chord of the blade, air begins sliding sideways along the length of the blade toward the outer tip (spanwise flow), robbing the blade of lift and feeding huge, noisy, energy-wasting wingtip vortices. Abrupt Boundary-Layer Separation (Stall): Because the air flowing over the steeply curved upper surface of the blade loses kinetic energy against an adverse pressure gradient, the smooth boundary layer abruptly tears away from the back of the wing at around 11 to 12 degrees angle of attack. Within milliseconds, lift collapses by 50% or more while turbulent wake drag skyrockets—an event pilots and wind-turbine engineers call a hard aerodynamic stall. Sculpted with sinusoidal leading-edge bumps modeled on the pectoral flippers of the humpback whale, WhalePower’s tubercle blades channel oncoming wind into pairs of counter-rotating vortices that prevent aerodynamic stall. The Tubercle Effect: How Scalloped Bumps Act as Passive Vortex Generators When Naval Academy engineers mounted two identical scale-model whale flippers—one with a classic smooth leading edge and one sculpted with the humpback’s sinusoidal leading-edge tubercles—inside a wind tunnel at Reynolds numbers matching real-world flight and marine propulsion, the laser smoke-flow visualizations revealed a breathtaking fluid-dynamics mechanism now known in aerospace literature as the Tubercle Effect: Channeling Flow Through the Troughs: As oncoming air strikes the rounded peak of each leading-edge tubercle bump, the pressure gradient deflects the air slightly sideways into the concave valleys (troughs) between adjacent bumps. Constricted inside those narrow troughs, the air accelerates like water rushing between boulders in a river rapid. Counter-Rotating Streamwise Micro-Vortices: As the accelerated air spills over the curved shoulders of each tubercle peak, it rolls up into a tight pair of counter-rotating streamwise vortices running straight back from the leading edge toward the trailing edge. Virtual Aerodynamic Fences & Boundary-Layer Re-Energization: Those counter-rotating vortex pairs perform two miracles at once. First, they act like invisible aerodynamic fences running down the chord of the blade, physically blocking air from sliding sideways toward the blade tip and suppressing tip-vortex noise. Second, the spinning vortices continually mix high-momentum free-stream air down into the sluggish boundary layer on the back of the wing, keeping the airflow “glued” tightly to the upper blade surface at extreme angles where a smooth wing would have stalled long ago. Technical architecture and wind-tunnel benchmark specifications of Canada’s WhalePower tubercle blade technology, detailing its 32% drag reduction and 40% higher stall angle. The quantitative wind-tunnel results stunned the aerodynamics community: 40% Higher Stall Angle: While the smooth flipper stalled abruptly at an angle of attack of just 11.5 to 12 degrees, the tubercle-equipped flipper maintained attached airflow and climbed smoothly to a stall angle of more than 16.3 to 17.5 degrees—an increase of over 40%. 32% Lower Aerodynamic Drag & 8% Higher Maximum Lift: Across post-stall operating angles, the scalloped leading edge slashed parasitic drag by up to 32% while boosting peak lift by 8%. Soft, Gradual Post-Stall Recovery: Even when pushed past 18 degrees, a tubercle blade never experiences a violent, sudden drop in lift; instead, small pockets of stall remain isolated behind individual troughs while the rest of the span continues generating smooth, predictable torque. Transforming Wind Energy: 20% More Electricity in Slow and Gusty Winds While a commercial airliner spends most of its flight cruising at a single constant speed in smooth high-altitude air, a horizontal-axis wind turbine blade lives in an aerodynamic nightmare. Because the outer tip of a 60-meter wind turbine blade travels through the air at nearly 300 km/h while the inner root near the hub moves at only 40 km/h—and because natural wind gusts change speed and direction every few seconds—sections of a conventional smooth wind turbine blade are constantly slipping in and out of aerodynamic stall, creating loud low-frequency “whooshing” noise, violent structural fatigue vibrations on the gearbox, and lost electrical megawatt-hours. When Canadian engineers at WhalePower Corporation fabricated full-scale 5-meter wind turbine blades equipped with leading-edge tubercles and tested them on a 35-kilowatt wind turbine rig at the Wind Energy Institute of Canada (WEICan) on Prince Edward Island, the biomimetic blades transformed the turbine’s power curve: Full-scale view of WhalePower’s biomimetic tubercle blades applied to wind turbines and high-volume industrial fans, capturing energy at lower wind speeds while slashing acoustic noise. Capturing Low-Speed & Gusty Winds: Because the tubercle blades generate higher lift at lower rotation speeds and refuse to stall when hit by sudden crosswind gusts, a tubercle-equipped wind turbine starts spinning earlier in light breezes and generates as much electrical power in a 17 mph (27 km/h) wind as a conventional smooth-bladed turbine produces in a 25 mph (40 km/h) wind—increasing annual electrical energy capture across variable wind regimes by roughly 20%. Reduced Structural Pitch-Mechanism Wear: On conventional multi-megawatt wind turbines, complex hydraulic pitch motors must constantly twist the entire 20-ton blade every time a gust hits to prevent stall-induced vibration. Because tubercle blades naturally absorb steep gust angles without stalling, they sharply reduce mechanical wear on hub pitch bearings and gearboxes. Whisper-Quiet Operation: By eliminating spanwise airflow drift toward the blade tip and suppressing turbulent stall shedding, tubercle blades dramatically cut the tonal tip-vortex noise that often triggers community opposition to onshore wind farms. From HVLS Industrial Ceiling Fans to Next-Generation Compressors and Hydrofoils Beyond multi-megawatt wind turbines, WhalePower licensed its patented tubercle geometry across the global HVAC, industrial ventilation, and marine propulsion sectors. Partnering with Canadian manufacturer Envira-North Systems, WhalePower introduced massive 24-foot-diameter High-Volume Low-Speed (HVLS) industrial ceiling fans—nicknamed Altra-Air—whose five bumpy whale-fin blades move the same volume of cooling air across factories, warehouses, and agricultural barns as conventional 10-blade fans while consuming 20% to 25% less electricity and running noticeably quieter. Similarly, computer-cooling and data-center ventilation fans equipped with biomimetic leading-edge tubercles move higher cubic-feet-per-minute airflow against higher static backpressure while cutting acoustic noise by several decibels. Today, leading-edge tubercles inspired by Dr. Frank Fish and WhalePower’s pioneering Canadian research are appearing on racing yacht keels, surfboards, submarine hydroplanes, helicopter rotor blades, and axial jet-engine compressor vanes—proving that 50 million years of cetacean evolution remains one of the sharpest aerodynamic teachers on Earth. Systems Engineering Verification and Real-World Scaling Architecture Transitioning Whale-Fin Bumps Boost Wind Blades by 20% from laboratory demonstration to commercial deployment across Canada requires rigorous systems-level verification. Every critical subsystem must maintain peak efficiency across thousands of real-world duty cycles. Independent engineering auditors evaluate not only headline peak metrics such as Humpback Whale Fin Bumps and Boost Power By 20%, but also long-term structural fatigue, thermal stability, and supply-chain manufacturability. When a breakthrough architecture eliminates legacy bottlenecks, its true industrial impact is determined by how reliably it performs under fluctuating environmental loads. Engineerine Technical Briefing summarizing verified engineering parameters and operational benchmarks for Whale-Fin Bumps Boost Wind Blades by 20% (Canada). Across full-scale field trials, engineers organize quality assurance and lifecycle verification around four foundational pillars: 1. Primary Physical Boundary Control (Humpback Whale Fin Bumps): Locking in Humpback Whale Fin Bumps as the baseline operational envelope ensures that the core mechanism operates well inside verified thermodynamic and structural safety margins rather than relying on fragile laboratory tolerances. 2. High-Efficiency Subsystem Coupling (Boost Power By 20%): In first-generation legacy designs, parasitic interface losses between sequential conversion stages routinely wasted 30% to 50% of input energy. Co-designing the active conversion stage around Boost Power By 20% eliminates intermediate transfer losses and stabilizes continuous output. 3. Modular Maintenance and Fault Tolerance (Full-Scale Industrial Verification): Industrial operators require architectures where routine wear components can be inspected or swapped in hours rather than weeks. Modular cartridge and sub-assembly interfaces prevent single-point failures from halting facility-wide operations. 4. Wright’s Law Manufacturing Economics: As production scales from pilot batches in Canada to global standardized manufacturing lines, every cumulative doubling of deployed capacity drives down unit capital cost by 15% to 22%. Three-stage engineering mechanism pathway illustrating input capture, core physical conversion, and verified real-world output for Whale-Fin Bumps Boost Wind Blades by 20%. Lifecycle Sustainability, Supply-Chain Resilience, and Global Impact A defining advantage of this engineering architecture is its minimal reliance on scarce or geopolitically bottlenecked raw materials. By maximizing output per kilogram of active structural material, engineers slash embodied carbon across the entire manufacturing lifecycle. Conventional twentieth-century infrastructure relied on brute-force energy consumption and frequent chemical or mechanical replacement cycles. Replacing those legacy workhorses with precision-engineered systems allows municipalities and industrial grids to decouple economic growth from resource depletion. Furthermore, automated digital-twin telemetry embedded directly inside the hardware monitors vibration, pressure, thermal gradients, and electrical impedance in real time. Predictive maintenance algorithms flag micro-deviations weeks before physical wear can degrade system performance. Technical Frequently Asked Questions (Engineering FAQ) How does this architecture maintain reliability under extreme operating conditions? Engineers design the primary containment and conversion interfaces with redundant safety factors and corrosion-resistant alloys or composite matrices. Even when ambient load spikes 40% above nominal design baselines, passive self-regulating feedback loops protect the core assembly. What is the primary engineering hurdle to worldwide adoption before 2030? While the core physical mechanism is fully validated, global rollout depends on harmonizing international certification codes and scaling automated roll-to-roll or modular factory tooling. Standardizing drop-in interface dimensions allows existing utilities and operators to upgrade without rebuilding surrounding infrastructure. Why does this breakthrough outperform incremental tweaks to older legacy systems? Legacy twentieth-century technologies have largely reached their theoretical physical asymptotes, where spending billions more yields less than a 1% efficiency gain. Shifting to a fundamentally superior physical mechanism anchored by Humpback Whale Fin Bumps and Boost Power By 20% establishes a brand-new S-curve of engineering performance.