The physics of what's happening in that 0.1 seconds of contact should bother you.
Those tires are completely stationary when they hit the ground. The plane is moving at 250 km/h. For the first fraction of a second, the rubber isn't rolling. It's skidding. Pure friction has to accelerate 22 wheels, each weighing 120 kg, from zero to 155 mph in roughly a tenth of a second.
The tread surface goes from -50°C at cruising altitude to over 200°C at the moment of contact. A 250-degree temperature swing in 0.1 seconds. The smoke you see at every commercial landing is rubber vaporizing off the tire surface. Studies at Manchester and Heathrow found that tire smoke at touchdown produces a greater magnitude of particulate emissions than the jet engines themselves.
The tires are inflated to 200 PSI, six times your car's tire pressure, and they're filled with nitrogen instead of air. Regular air contains moisture that would flash to steam and oxygen that could combust at those friction temperatures. Nitrogen eliminates both risks.
Each tire costs $5,500 and lasts about 250 landings before replacement. The A380 carries 22 of them. At max landing weight, those 22 contact patches are distributing 391 metric tons across roughly 15 square feet of rubber. That's 57,000 pounds per square foot.
The reason they don't pre-spin the wheels before landing, which would eliminate the skid and save millions in tire wear, is weight. Adding electric motors to 22 wheels increases fuel burn on every single flight. The math says it's cheaper to vaporize rubber 250 times and buy new tires than to carry the motors.
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
@josesaezmerino Yo lo descubrí el año pasado, con 40, que tenía AACC. Y sí, muchas cosas empezaron a encajar. Sobre todo el por qué me cuesta sostener la atención o la manera en que aprendo (muy autodidacta).
Ánimo con esa doble excepcionalidad!
this is actually insane
> be tech guy in australia
> adopt cancer riddled rescue dog, months to live
> not_going_to_give_you_up.mp4
> pay $3,000 to sequence her tumor DNA
> feed it to ChatGPT and AlphaFold
> zero background in biology
> identify mutated proteins, match them to drug targets
> design a custom mRNA cancer vaccine from scratch
> genomics professor is “gobsmacked” that some puppy lover did this on his own
> need ethics approval to administer it
> red tape takes longer than designing the vaccine
> 3 months, finally approved
> drive 10 hours to get rosie her first injection
> tumor halves
> coat gets glossy again
> dog is alive and happy
> professor: “if we can do this for a dog, why aren’t we rolling this out to humans?”
one man with a chatbot, and $3,000 just outperformed the entire pharmaceutical discovery pipeline.
we are going to cure so many diseases.
I dont think people realize how good things are going to get
Just shipped v2 of my flight sim inspired by
@levelsio!
You can now fly anywhere on Earth:
- NY
- Hong Kong
- Rio
- Your hometown
- Literally anywhere
Speedran this in ~1hr using Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 since they both shipped today!
https://t.co/eQu9zILlUg
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Una banda de oligarcas digitales se está forrando con la explotación de los peores instintos humanos. Los menores han sido sus principales conejillos de indias.
En esto el Gobierno acierta de pleno.