speakeron

The lack of microlensing evidence is one reason. The other is that there are constraints on the amount of baryonic matter in the universe from nucleosynthesis calculations in the Big Bang (i.e. the extra missing matter needed to account for galactic rotation curves can't be 'ordinary' matter).

https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March10/Garrett/Garrett3...

The birthday problem isn't applicable here, because you're trying to match a specific combination rather than looking for any matching pair. So the average number of attempts needed is indeed 4096/2.

This is the same as the difference between a preimage (specific input) attack and a collision (any pair of inputs) attack on a hash algorithm[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimage_attack

Wasn't Knight Lore[1] on the Sinclair Spectrum (which came out in 1984) a 3D platform game? I certainly remember the buzz about it at the time where it seemed to be a qualitative leap in games technology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Lore

I don't think any of these are particularly convoluted; they're in straightforward procedural code with a line for each letter. Most programmers could adapt the code to produce another string without too much effort.

What I'd consider convoluted is something like the Goodstein sequence[1] which would grow to monstrous proportions using far more memory than could be stored even if every particle in the universe represented one bit and far more time than beyond when the last black hole has evaporated, yet collapsed down (eventually) to "Hello World". (I've no idea how to do this.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodstein%27s_theorem

The reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism was, of course, Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Torture vs Dust Specks"[1]

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs...

The pancreas is described by physics. Can a Turing machine make insulin?

This calculator[1] indicates that the temperature for a 2.5 cm radius black hole should be 0.007 K. So below the temperature of the cosmic background (2.7 K).

[1] https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/physics-notes/311-hawking-radiati...

That's beautiful. It's just begging for translation overlays on the exquisite wall detail.

It doesn't really say that: it just repeats the standard advice that 4000 IU is the safe upper limit. The real answer is to get yourself tested regularly if you supplement large amounts of D3. (I'd advise taking K2 with it too, but do your own research.)

2% (2 orders of magnitude above 0.02%) of 8 million (approximately the population of NYC) is 160,000 people. So that's clearly wrong being more than 3 times the entire US deaths.

The numbers you've seen are probably deaths of infected people not the entire population.

> Now I can be confident in what I'm getting when I buy a Western Digital drive. Good for them!

Are you confident that you'll get a drive that can work in a NAS when on the very same blog page they claim "WD Red HDDs are ideal for home and small businesses using NAS systems" and, indeed, on the data sheet[1], they claim that WD Red drives are "the hard drive of choice for 1 to 8 bay systems"?

At the very least they need to fix the data sheet; that's where I go to assess a drive's capabilities, not a vague blog post.

[1] https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...

Yes, it's called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. The wiki article mentions that it was used on 3% of severe cases in China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygen...

From the article:

There are other things we can do as well to avoid immediately resorting to intubation and a ventilator. Patient positioning maneuvers (having patients lie on their stomach and sides) opens up the lower and posterior lungs most affected in Covid pneumonia. Oxygenation and positioning helped patients breathe easier and seemed to prevent progression of the disease in many cases. In a preliminary study by Dr. Caputo, this strategy helped keep three out of four patients with advanced Covid pneumonia from needing a ventilator in the first 24 hours.

It should be taken with vitamin K2. The theory is that it aids calcium absorption into bones rather than dumping into arteries.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4566462/

I take about 5000 IU daily (with one or two days off every 10 days or so). I get tested regularly and measure at the top of the lab's 'normal range' (200 nmol/l). I also take vitamin K (especially K2).

Could be a one-shot Dyson Sphere designed to capture the energy of a supernova. Like an advanced civilization's version of a nuclear explosion-pumped X-ray laser[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_laser

Lucid dream research done in the 1970s had subjects signalling from within a dream using eye movement.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258201870_Lucid_dre...

> In the contrary, Intel has a lot of failures the last 2 years. Spectre, meltdown, ... This isn't bad luck anymore, it's more like bad karma if you are religious

It's more like regression to the mean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq2BxAJZ4Tc is also a very good series and gets into infinite collapsing ordinals towards the end.

The video is a basic introduction to the fast-growing hierarchy. They do state where Graham's Number sits in the hierarchy, but the explanation doesn't go as far as to say where TREE sits.

First program I ever wrote on a Sinclair Spectrum was to spin a disk on the screen.

I was disappointed with the performance, so for the second program I precalculated the sin/cos values and stored them in an array (and learnt that all programming is an exercise in caching).

I was still disappointed with the performance, so the third program I wrote was a hex loader so I could poke machine code straight into it (had to run down to the local electronics store to pick up copy of the Z80 assembler manual). I then was happy with the speed.

That kickstarted a career in software development which I still derive immense enjoyment from.

A quantum computer can find hash collisions in the square root of the time a classical computer can using Grover's algorithm. (So a 256-bit hash becomes as difficult as a 128-bit hash to reverse). Symmetric encryption (e.g. AES) is the same, so encryption itself doesn't have any problems with quantum computing (if you consider 128-bit AES to be safe in general).

Quantum computing affects the distribution of symmetric keys using public key encryption (and so affects a large amount of encryption as used in people's daily lives) which is vulnerable to quantum computers with sufficient bits.

Boris Johnson has a proven record of lying (he was even sacked from The Times for fabricating a quote).

Why assume his veracity in his quotes about the future of the UK?

Hambini has a good article on this[1]. The basic problem (apart from cost) is that only the ball bearing itself is ceramic; the inner and outer races are made of steel and the ball wears a groove into them which increases friction over time. Near the bottom of the article there's a 'power consumption vs kilometres' chart which illustrates this nicely.

"Hybrid ceramic bearings are the equivalent of trying to run a locomotive on an asphalt road - the hardness differential causes the road (raceway) to become damaged."

[1] https://www.hambini.com/blog/post/ceramic-bearings-vs-steel-...

> Agree with take off and cruising, but landing is magnitudes more complex, at least much more difficult for humans. Do you have a source that this is reliably automated?

Landing has been automated since the 1960s. The first airplane to do it in service was the De Havilland Trident[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flVcxfOnWi0

> Speaking of which, it’s high time that we consider changing how we clean ourselves after we use the toilet. Tersorium, anyone?

Rather than the Tersorium (basically a shitty sponge), the answer is the bidet or the bidet shower[1] which is common in the Middle East and Asia.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidet_shower

> FWIW, the pilots in the doomed Lion Air plane on the flight just prior to the accident flight did just that.

Not the pilots so much as the person sitting in the jump seat (who suggested disabling electric trim). It essentially took three pilots to save that plane.

The 'element zapper' (or 'picker' if you want it made permanent) in uBlock Origin also works great for these situations.

The 737 isn't trimmed with a trim tab; the whole stabilizer is moved (rotated) by a jackscrew driven by an electric motor.