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vikingerik

2,604 karmajoined 5 years ago

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vikingerik
·2 days ago·discuss
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, with two more verses that aren't in the version you always hear on the radio. The one starting at 3:45 in that video is particularly powerful and chilling.
vikingerik
·5 days ago·discuss
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 lines and that pattern can be repeated forever. Such a solved game might not meet everyone's definition of best. Although for casual play it's great to have every piece coming regularly.
vikingerik
·8 days ago·discuss
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 smaller stars live longer and have more time to spin down, but it's nearly monotonic. Stars spin down because of their magnetic field exerting torque on their stellar wind, an effect that's much larger than any transfer of angular momentum to planets.
vikingerik
·9 days ago·discuss
Consumers don't want to understand it because they don't want to consume less.
vikingerik
·10 days ago·discuss
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 one. Says "Increasing LHC luminosity involves reduction of the beam size at the collision point, and either the reduction of bunch length and spacing, or significant increase in bunch length and population."

The linked article says the new one will have "between 140 and 200 proton–proton collisions in every bunch crossing, compared to around 60 during the last LHC run." So the "10x luminosity" seems to be composed of ~3x more protons at a time along with presumably a ~3x tighter focused beam.
vikingerik
·14 days ago·discuss
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.
vikingerik
·27 days ago·discuss
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 SMB3 instead. So SMB was sold as a standalone for these cases, but very few units were needed or extant.
vikingerik
·last month·discuss
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.
vikingerik
·last month·discuss
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 iterate in 1-degree increments, you'll plot 360 pixels total, but the size of the circle on your canvas might be more than 360 pixels wide. I'm sure there's a way to choose the angle iteration step size to guarantee not skipping pixels, but you'd often duplicate work and re-plot the same pixel twice.

So yes, start at (R, 0), increment the y-coordinate each time and possibly decrement the x-coordinate, until x=y which will be at 45°. If the circle's center is an integer on the pixel grid, you can reflect/translate each pixel in that first octant to all eight as you go. If the center is fractionally positioned, you'd have to calculate it all the way around, iterating primarily on y or x depending on the location.
vikingerik
·2 months ago·discuss
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 equity represents opportunity cost that it isn't in investments. If you have 400k in a house and the stock market returns 6% over inflation, then the opportunity cost is 2k per month in interest, which is comparable to what you'd pay in rent.

There are tax advantages that favor owning (in the US), for a primary resident and not an arbitrageur - mortgage interest and capital gains when you sell are not taxed, while capital gains in a non-retirement account are.

You can gain by appreciation and leverage, of course - but you can just as easily not, you don't know if your city is going to be the next high-flying Austin or Boulder, or run-down Detroit. My own house has been flat in estimated value for four years in an area that I thought would continue to rise.
vikingerik
·2 months ago·discuss
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.
vikingerik
·2 months ago·discuss
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 them reliably. There needs to be a risk factor in building up to high mana to make low mana spells matter.

Possible tweaks, maybe it has a cost (all lands have cycling 1 or 2 mana or life.) Or delay that draw until end of turn, which feels like about the right power level, but does have memory and execution issues.
vikingerik
·2 months ago·discuss
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 with the right. Can't go the other way, can't have the right hand act before the left, even if the left has the more complex task.

It's like Super Mario Bros. With a 4-way d-pad and 2 action buttons, why is the more complex 4-way on the left? Because most of the time you're holding a direction first with less requirement for precise timing, and then pressing the button at the correct instant depending on the movement. (We're talking general platformer play, not hyper precise d-pad moves for something like Super Metroid speedrunning.)

Even typing on a keyboard, I never hold a right-side shift or other modifier key, it's always left-shift then the target key.
vikingerik
·2 months ago·discuss
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.
vikingerik
·2 months ago·discuss
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 the "r" sound. I don't think he blew the line, just didn't speak it clearly.
vikingerik
·2 months ago·discuss
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 ball (actually a different hidden one) reappears instantly some distance away.
vikingerik
·2 months ago·discuss
And the version from Full Tilt is a significantly enhanced version of the game. It has multiball, where the Windows bundled version doesn't.
vikingerik
·2 months ago·discuss
Most likely that pricing rule was/is at a more local level. The national level in the US doesn't have anything like that, but there are some states or cities or counties that can and do.
vikingerik
·2 months ago·discuss
Hey, some of us are old enough to have done it on a TI-82 instead!

I already knew Basic from a DOS PC, but did write a Breakout clone while bored in classes on my TI-82.
vikingerik
·2 months ago·discuss
The Onion headline should be: Ted Turner dies at 87:05