The article seems to say the strength is compared to the strength of the same wood before treatment. At least that's the impression I got.

And you could use it for larger structures. I was just thinking about more efficiency with things like wider stud widths so you'd need less wood for the same wall.

Um, it's not artificial trees. It's engineered wood. They remove the lignin from wood and replace it with synthetic particles. It makes it stronger.

Stronger wood means you could potentially use less of it in construction, which should be good for the environment.

So these animations are only showing you a quarter of the picture. It's a plot of the absolute value of the Electric field. It doesn't tell you anything about the direction of the field, nor does it show the Magnetic field.

So for the dipole, all it is is two straight wires, about a quarter wavelength long connected to a transmission line. Imagine the top connected to the center of the coax, and the bottom connected to the shield.

When a wave coming down the coax hits the antenna, it causes a current in the wires. Electrons will be pushed into the top wire and pulled out of the bottom wire. This creates a charge on the wires, negative on top, and positive on the bottom, and you can see that in the animation.

But because waves reverse, soon you'll get a reverse current and the top will become positively charged and the bottom negatively charged. This can happen billions of times a second for something like 2.4GHz wifi.

And also, current creates a magnetic field. So when current is flowing in the wires, there is a magnetic field wrapping around them. This current hits zero when the wires are fully charged, and is at it's maximum right when the wires are neutral.

So now you have Electric and Magnetic fields all swirling around each other at a constant frequency. This is you get EM radiation.

If I haven't lost you yet, you should consider going to school for electrical engineering; antenna theory is some of the most esoteric shit this side of Quantum Mechanics.

I'm an EE grad student, who's specializing in microwaves and antenna theory.

So a good way to think about this, is that changes in the Electric and Magnetic fields don't propagate instantly; they travel at the speed of light. So if I turn on an electromagnet, it will take some time for any metal near it to feel that force. Even though that time will probably be measured in nanoseconds, it still takes a nonzero time between the magnet being energized, and for the metal to feel the magnetic force.

Now imagine an antenna as a tiny electromagnet that's being flipped from positive to negative billions of times a second in a sinusoidal pattern (this is an EXTREME oversimplification of what an antenna is, but for the purposes of this discussion, it's enough). The changes in the field will only propagate at the speed of light, but the magnet is changing extremely fast.

This makes it so that if you take a snapshot of the magnetic field at a single instant, you will see the field shift from positive to negative to positive to negative with distance from the antenna. If you measure the distance it takes to go from positive to negative to positive again, that's your wavelength.

Here's a gif of an ANSYS simulation I made of the Electric Field of a simple dipole antenna over time. You can see the wave-like pattern in the field magnitude.

And here's one I made of a Yagi Antenna.

I did. We used to watch Cocomelon and Have Fun Teaching a lot together; he loved the counting ducks and the ABCs. Part of our bedtime routine was a 3 minute cartoon video of singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

I was wondering if we were giving too much screen time to him, until he recited his ABCs and knew his planets by sight at 1 year old. Little dude's 5 now, and really into Numberblocks. Kid knows almost all of his times tables (still stumbles with 7's and 8's), which is damn impressive amount for a kindergartener and can do powers of 2 up until 1024.

You ask me, I think educational screen time should be studied for beneficial effects of childhood development. Did a treat on my little guy.

Yep! If you remember vectors, Cartesian geometry is also linear. Every vector is a linear superposition of eigenvectors, which are the x,y, and z unit vectors in 3D geometry.

Yeah, mine wasn't that great either. I didn't get it until I had linear signals classes and was like "huh...I wish I paid more attention in my linear algebra class."

They didn't do a very good job of explaining the applications of the class, I feel. Linearity applies to so many things.

Superposition is a fancy way of saying the whole is equal to the sum of its parts.

If you add two waves, the amplitude of the resulting wave at any point is the sum of both the original waves at the point.

So if wave 1 is sin(x)

And wave 2 is -sin(x)

The two combined give us sin(x) - sin(x) = 0

That's how noise cancelling works.

Note that superposition only works in linear systems. Sound is linear, electromagnetic waves are linear, electric circuits using only linear components (Resistors, Inductors, Capacitors) are linear, etc.

Linearity is definitely beyond an ELI5 discussion though, I think.

It's possible in the sense that anything that happened before the big bang is unmeasurable and unfalsifiable. At least as far as I'm aware with our current knowledge of physics.

It's why the big bang is considered the start of time. Any events from before it are akin to events that happen inside an event horizon. They don't really exist in any meaningful sense.

So do addicts. If you were on the jury, who would you believe? A guy who got suspended for DUI 12 times insisting he's innocent, or the officer with dash cam footage?

The Biden Administration announced a few months ago that they're funding feasibility studies into geoengineering; releasing reflective aerosols into the stratosphere to increase the Earth's albedo.

That should tell you everything you need to know about where we are with thin.

Just drove through that intersection last night for the first time after dark and I was real confused.

Also bluer light fucks with your night vision and sleep triggers. Street light LEDs should have a lower color temperature.