If the proof of concept takes an hour to code up, or proving the market exists just takes a bit of googling, then sure, you can prepare that before the first meeting where you suggest the idea.
If the proof of concept requires spending a few days in the machine shop making jigs and parts, purchasing equipment, and a custom PCB, then I really hope you'll bring it up for discussion beforehand in a meeting. Ten minutes of discussion with colleagues might be as useful as several iterations of prototyping. Not so that they'll shoot it down, but because someone might say "oh yeah, we have a spare mcguffin from last year's demo that you can use, should save you lots of time."
You must have very different kinds of meetings than I do. Unless you're going into that meeting with a rehearsed PowerPoint presentation, or there's a strict agenda that doesn't allow any time for exploration, I expect to hear imperfect-ideas-in-infancy. One of the reasons we have meetings is to allow collaboration to happen. It's a format for working together.
You can fire the shot and then patch the hole at the same time, proposing solutions to the same problem you pointed out, rather than just shooting and letting one person handle defense from every attack.
Definitely impressive as a proof of concept. A lot of the other problems can be solved with iteration. There are some IP67-rated drone motors meant to both fly and run underwater (available from Westmag for example).
There might be less that can be done about the underwater drag, but if it doesn't need to go long distances underwater that's not as much of a problem. For the RF signal, it can either run autonomously underwater, or use a fibre-optic umbilical, or even convert from an umbilical to wireless when it takes to the air.
You can do a lot with chaos. One of the things it lets you do is find an unforced trajectory from the vicinity of any state to the vicinity of any other (accessible) state. Sensitivity to initial conditions means sensitivity to perturbations, which also means sensitivity to small control inputs, and this can be leveraged to your advantage.
Multibody orbits are one such chaotic system, which means you can take advantage of that chaos to redirect your space probe from one orbit to another using virtually zero fuel, as NASA did with its ISEE-3 spacecraft.
You have to account for the energy required to break the bonds of the CH4, though. This means if you burn methane the usual way you get (CH4 + 2O2 --> CO2 + 2H2O + 803 kJ/mol); if you burn it with an ideal zero-emissions reaction, you get (CH4 + O2 --> C + 2H2O + 409 kJ/mol), or just a little more than half the energy from the same gas.
Your accounting works if someone else does the pyrolysis for you and you're left with just the H2 and C at the end, but mine includes the energy consumed by the pyrolysis step that breaks the methane molecule (albeit neglecting any thermodynamic losses, which there will be several -- for example you need to recapture the heat carried away by the hot carbon atoms). On the other hand, you can hardly wish for a better feedstock for CVD diamond production...
Interesting to see this on the HN front page. On the subject of methane pyrolysis, it turns out if you look at the Gibbs free energy calculation, about half of the energy of methane combustion is released from the formation of water, and the other half from the formation of carbon dioxide. That suggests that if you can be efficient with conserving the heat of pyrolysis, you can make a methane power plant that starts with a pyrolysis step to separate out the carbon atoms in an oxygen-free environment, and then burn the remaining hydrogen to power the cycle, and the end result would be a zero-emissions natural gas power plant. It would require twice as much gas to run, but if you can find a good value-added use for the carbon, it could potentially still be cost effective.
This would probably be much more efficient than doing pyrolysis to extract the hydrogen for use in electricity generation somewhere else, because you don't lose the substantial stored heat energy in the process of cooling that hydrogen back down.
And I can't help but wonder if fossil fuel companies might suddenly start endorsing aggressive zero-emissions targets if there's a way for this to double the demand for their products, rather than eliminating it.
It's mainly the laser itself that is the expensive part. If you only care about resolution it's easy, you just need a single-mode laser. But if you care about accuracy it's very difficult, because then the wavelength needs to be stable, and that requires a much more expensive laser. Most people looking for an interferometer are interested in accuracy, unless they're just measuring vibrations.
The short summary of this hypothesis is that the ocean develops hypoxic zones, anaerobic bacteria boom, and eventually the ocean starts releasing masses of poisonous H2S gas that wipes out most life on land (and strips the ozone layer for good measure).
They speculate that this might have been a mechanism behind the "great dying" at the end of the Permian. I'm sure the thinking has advanced in the last 20 years, but whenever people ask what the worst-case scenario for global warming could be, my mind drifts back to this.
Just to expand on that, usually the etched scale pitch is 20 microns, but digital quadrature detection gives you 4x the resolution of the scale pitch, resulting in a 5 um distance between successive rising / falling edges of the quadrature signal. Analog measurement can be used to interpolate to much finer resolution, even 1 nm for good quality optical scales with good electronics.
You don't need to transform every vertex of the 3D model though. If you're rendering an astronaut on mars, you just feed the graphics engine the relative position of the astronaut and the camera. The detailed rendering of the astronaut's eyebrows can all be done natively in floating point once you've calculated that offset.
The rendering can be done relative to the camera position though, can't it?
So for the graphics you just subtract all world coordinates from the camera coordinate, and cast the result to float; for the game physics and AI, you work directly in fixed point.
Is there a reason that game developers don't use fixed-point math for Cartesian coordinates?
A 64 bit integer and a 64 bit float both chop up your coordinate system into the same number of points, but with the integer, those points are equally spaced which is the behaviour you'd expect from a Cartesian coordinate system (based on the symmetry group of translational invariance).
And even a 32-bit integer is still fine enough resolution to support four kilometres at one-micrometer resolution. With 64 bits per axis you can represent the entire solar system with 15 nm resolution, while maintaining equal resolution at any location, and exact distance calculations between any points no matter how close or how far.
Unfortunately you can't; society has changed too, in many ways. Even some government services now require either an iOS or Android device to access (like vaccination records here in BC).
A dumb phone does less for you now than it did in 2005, just like a horse does less for you now than it did in 1895. Even if you really like horses, you can't ride them on the same streets you once could.
If the proof of concept requires spending a few days in the machine shop making jigs and parts, purchasing equipment, and a custom PCB, then I really hope you'll bring it up for discussion beforehand in a meeting. Ten minutes of discussion with colleagues might be as useful as several iterations of prototyping. Not so that they'll shoot it down, but because someone might say "oh yeah, we have a spare mcguffin from last year's demo that you can use, should save you lots of time."