FPV night drone racing on a neon-colored course

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/02/fpv-night-drone-racing-on-a-ne.html

A cool next step would be to add in an augmented reality feature so the drones can shoot virtual missiles or lasers at each other during the race. If your drone gets hit it suffers a temporary power loss or something.

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One word comes to mind:

A E S T H E T I C

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Second, but with real lasers and real rockets :imp:

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I’m afraid you have to go to Iraq or Afghanistan to play that game. And you don’t hunt other drones, but newlyweds.

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Close call at the 58 second mark!

From my experience with FPV racing, that’s totally unnecessary, as most races are determined by the player who crashed last.

I mean, it would be really cool, but people really don’t need help busting up their expensive machines.

Sigh. I have a bunch of drones that I would love to be able to fly but crazy neighbors that would try to shoot them down, miss, and kill neighbor’s children. So they stay in their pelikan cases (the drones, not the kids).

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Well the same goes for these things but they still have laser guns.

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neon color = red

Was anyone else thinking Peppy was going to show up during that first video? …No, just me…okay.

Fun thing I discovered:
Google search “Do a barrel roll”

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Take it up with Pantone:


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Take it up with the Oxford English Dictionary.

Oh, I most assuredly shall do!

We already have an accurate word which means “fluorescent”, so I will just use that.

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I like this one better - both as drone racing video and for the soundtrack

Your prerogative, of course.

Yes, I just used “prerogative” in the now-popular modern, egalitarian sense of the word rather than the original legal meaning of the word. You can write them about that too.

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I find it humorous that lexical “descriptivists” refer people to dictionaries to explain away their peculiar usages. I suppose it can be attributed with temporary authority when convenient.

All meanings have the potential to be equally “modern”, since time is not a fixed point. There being a simultaneous “now” was debunked in the 1800s (as measured with Earth’s Gregorian calendar).

The legal meaning is not original either. It can be easily deduced in a moment that to pre-rogate means to ask first.

I am not talented enough to write them into existence, but I can certainly write to them.

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Well, yes. Languages evolve over time and the meaning of any particular word need not fixed or limited to its original definition. Which was rather my point.

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Not quite! You said that it was more egalitarian for more recent definitions to eclipse older ones, which suggests less plurality than all definitions always being equally valid.

Extending biological metaphors such as evolution to language has limited applicability, because biological changes are not only merely aesthetic or expressive but also functional. Natural selection is a blind unconscious process which has no informational content other than an inbuilt program of perpetuating itself. That is, I think, a rather low bar for symbolic communication.

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I think you misunderstand me. I said the modern popular use for the word “prerogative” has a more egalitarian MEANING than the older definition, not that it is more egalitarian for newer definitions to eclipse old ones.

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Which one might be older depends entirely upon when you are. But it seems inaccurate to say that the legal definition is original. Like nearly all legal terms, it had a more general meaning which was adopted by a specialized group.

Is it aristocratic for neon to be a “noble gas”? I am far more egalitarian than most people I meet, but it never occurred to me that other gasses should be equally deserving of the name “neon”. Rather than making its users more free or descriptive, it seems more sloppy. Like enshrining a mistake which is only likely to cause further confusion. Perhaps it is a lexical mutation which seems like an evolutionary leap to others, but an unhealthy DNA transcription error to me.

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