Viewing profile — vikingerik

Right. Although in-universe, it was the NX-01 that was the genesis of the name for starships. NCC-1701 was a century later.

There's a fun time loop here: The Star Trek Enterprise and the real-life space shuttle Enterprise were each named after the other. In real life, the shuttle was named after the Sta…

The definition isn't fuzzy, we define a brown dwarf as an object that has undergone deuterium fusion. The fuzziness is in the physical properties needed to achieve that. 13 Jupiter…

The other reply gave good info, but didn't quite answer this. Once an object's core acquires enough temperature/pressure/density to start protium fusion, it will continue, not burn…

Summary: It's low resolution at only 256 x 80, stretched vertically to the screen size. It's only 16 colors so only 4 bits/pixel. That comes to 10kb per frame. A variant of Huffman…

Second Reality was art indeed, but the GUS didn't make all that much difference for it. The soundtrack didn't have higher rate samples for the GUS's memory to hold or more channels…

Did you know there's a long version? (Of the song, not the flowchart, though another reply has that too) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Svz-W5w2bPM There's a 7-minute version, wit…

Best is subjective there, of course. Tetris is proven solvable with that bag method. https://tetris.wiki/Playing_forever 20 cycles through the bag can be packed into exactly 56 lin…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_rotation doesn't say anything about bimodal. There's a formula with a relation between size and rotation speed, including the fact that smalle…

Consumers don't want to understand it because they don't want to consume less.

The article says "10x luminosity", and here's what seems to be the explanation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Luminosity_Large_Hadron_C... That's the wiki article for the new …

Publix is also on that first list, of happy and overstaffed and privately owned. I do most of my shopping there and it's much more pleasurable than Kroger or Walmart.

The rarity is that very few copies ever existed of a standalone boxed SMB. Not every console came with SMB. One very early package didn't have it, and one later package included SM…

Well, if there are 100,000 competitors and you want to win, then the 99.99th percentile isn't enough, and yes you would try to reach 99.999.

Right, iterating through pixels is better. The tricky part about iterating the angle is that you need to choose the step size correctly or else you could skip pixels. Like if you i…

Yes, this is broadly correct. The free market will (roughly) arbitrage out any differences between owning and renting. The hidden factor is that whatever money you have in house eq…

Any angle within 23º of east-west will have henging at some time of year. You'd have to have the entire street grid be aligned diagonal rather than cardinal.

Love that "land for turn", although I think it might shift the balance a little too much, in that you can make a deck with too much land and high cost spells and know you can cast …

I think this reason is dependency. Anything I'm doing where the action of one hand depends on the other has to go left-to-right. I can only finger frets with the left and then pick…

On MacOS (at least my older version on a 2015 MBP), Cmd-~ switches between app windows. Totally undiscoverable but knowing that restores a lot of usability.

I've always thought he just kind of slurred over the "a", like you'd do in casual speech, it came out like "f'r'a man". In the recording there's a tiny slight bit of a vowel after …

Several real pinball tables do this, keep a hidden ball staged to make it seem to instantly reappear. The Rick & Morty machine in particular does this - you can shoot into a portal…

And the version from Full Tilt is a significantly enhanced version of the game. It has multiball, where the Windows bundled version doesn't.