NZGumboot

Not exactly. First, a GPU can't run a pixel shader against EVERY pixel simultaneously. A typical screen might have about two million pixels, while GPUs max out at a few thousand concurrent 'threads of execution' i.e. it effectively draws in chunks of a few thousand pixels at a time. Second, the GPU doesn't need to run pixel shaders against a whole screen, it's capable of running shaders against any arbitrary shape you like using triangles. So the efficient way to draw a line is to send the GPU two triangles that match the line geometry that you want, and then only run the pixel shader on the pixels that the triangles overlap. Much more efficient.

Yes, the color of every pixel is ultimately determined by a shader program, but as you might expect it's more complicated then that.

There is what is referred to as a graphics pipeline consisting of a mix of fixed-function hardware stages and programmable stages. At a high level, it does the following: 1) the GPU accepts a set of 3D triangles from the CPU, 2) a 'vertex' shader program transforms (flattens) the 3D triangle vertices into 2D triangle vertices with pixel coordinates, 3) the GPU rasterizes the 2D triangles to determine exactly which pixels the triangles cover, 4) a 'pixel' shader program is run for each covered pixel to determine the color of the pixel, 5) the resulting pixel color is stored in a frame buffer (which may involve blending it with the existing color). This 'pipeline' is then repeated many times (with different triangle meshes and shaders) until the whole frame is drawn.

Hope that helps!

You're right that there could be multiple things which separately explain the things that dark matter explains (not just the two you listed, but the others as well: gravitational lensing, galaxy cluster motion, etc). But the strength of the dark matter model is that it can explain all of these phenomena; which is why most physicists prefer dark matter over other theories. It's very easy to come up with a theory which explains a single phenomena, but very hard to come up with one that simultaneously explains multiple phenomena.

You're right. The Big Bang theory really only concerns itself with what happens starting at around 10^−43 seconds after the presumed singularity that started the universe. That presumed singularity is just a consequence of running General Relativity backwards, and we know that quantum effects are also important at these kinds of insane energy densities, so the singularity can be thought of as a placeholder, until something better comes along. (A complete theory of Quantum Gravity would help a lot.)

No, the Rayleigh Criterion is still correct, you just have to consider the "aperture size" to be the size of the combined multi-telescope device (which would be the size of the Earth if the telescopes are on the opposite sides of the Earth). In practice to get the best quality image you need a telescope every X meters (I'm not sure the exact distance required) but even a 2x2 telescope array over a large distance would still give you significantly more resolving power than just a single telescope on it's own.

I totally agree that lockdowns are super expensive, and should only be used as a last resort, but I think you're missing the purpose of lockdowns. The purpose is not to save the lives of <however many people are dying right now>. The purpose is to bring the R number <https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52473523> below one, so that the number of sick people doesn't increase to the point where the health care system is overwhelmed (which would lead to a substantially increased death rate).

Taiwan is an example of a country that managed to eliminate covid-19 without lockdowns, so it is possible, but part of their success is likely due to the fact that the authorities acted very early to impose strict quarantine rules and contact tracing (when there were fewer than 10 new cases per day!) AFAIK every other country that has managed to eliminate community transmission has done so via lockdowns.

If you include the ejected mass, then momentum is conserved in that system. The ejected mass goes one way, the rocket goes the other. The momentum of the rocket is equal and opposite to the momentum of the ejected fuel.

Not true for the EmDrive.

The force cannot possibly depend on the drive's kinetic energy, because the kinetic energy is based on the velocity, which is relative to the frame of reference you use to measure it. If your frame of reference is the drive itself, then the kinetic energy is always zero, and conversely it's always possible to use a remote galaxy as a frame of reference, which makes the kinetic energy (and velocity) absurdly high.

When you do the math, in order to extract infinite free energy as per OP's argument, you have to get the drive up to a certain speed (think of a y=x line intersecting with a y=x^2 parabolic curve). The required speed depends on the performance of the drive (i.e. the N/kW figure), with a higher performance drive meaning a lower required speed before you can start extracting energy. For a photon drive, the speed you need to reach to extract infinite free energy is... the speed of light. Which you can't get to. So OP's argument only applies to drives which perform better than a photon drive, which naturally includes the EmDrive.

It's pretty simple. You can use the known laws of gravitation and the visible distribution of matter in a galaxy to predict how fast stars at the edge of the galaxy should move. But when we do this we find that the stars are moving much faster than expected. So EITHER the formula for gravity is wrong OR there is extra matter there which we can't see, i.e. dark matter. Dark matter is currently the preferred explanation because it also explains a bunch of other, unrelated, phonenomena, but it has as yet never been directly detected or measured.

Not really floating, since that implies a certain freedom of movement that atoms in a solid don't have. But otherwise you are correct, since each electron is a tiny magnet (protons and neutrons are also magnets but their magnetic field strength is much smaller so they can safely be ignored). A macroscopic magnet is just a material where the electron magnetic fields add together to an macroscopically appreciable value, rather than cancelling each other out, i.e. the direction of the electron magnetic fields are largely aligned.

Free protons (protons outside of an atom) have never been observed to decay. Protons inside a nucleus can of course decay, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission

Outside of Earth orbit, space objects become incredibly rare, and outside the solar system they are rarer still. There are much bigger problems to worry about, believe me.

By the way, dark matter is likely passing through your body right now. It's effects can only be seen on the scale of galaxies.

That's a good point, but the fact that all Turing machines are equivalent (and the fact that the equivalence is purely mathematical, and does not rely on any laws physics) implies that computers in ANY universe would be similar to ours. At least in terms of what it can compute. Even if the laws of the parent universe made their computers dramatically faster than ours, you would still expect that they would choose our universe's laws of physics so that they were relatively easy to compute, so as to save CPU time. That doesn't seem to be the case -- it takes us a supercomputer to accurately simulate a volume a fraction of the size of a proton. Of course this doesn't prove anything -- it's possible that computers in the parent universe are so ridiculously powerful that even simulating a trillion galaxies is just a drop in the bucket -- but IMO it is suggestive.

You're assuming that movement properties are special, and that non-movement properties don't affect the environment until they are collapsed. This is not the case -- quantum mechanics treats all quantum properties in the same way. An indeterminate spin can be detected in the same way an indeterminate position can be detected (i.e. indirectly, via diffraction and interference effects). It is true that if particle A and B are entangled so that spin A + spin B = 0, then that may help you optimize your "universe computer", but it doesn't gain you much since any gains will be offset by needing to store the fact that A and B are entangled. Not just that, but you have to take into account the fact that any number of particles can be entangled, with any arbitrary linear combination of properties.

IMO the biggest reason to think the universe isn't a computer is just how darn non-computable quantum mechanics is. The complexity grows at an absurd rate. Even for just the position of two particles you have a 6-dimensional wavefunction with (as far as we know) an infinity of possible values for every (infinitesimal) point in that 6-dimensional state space.

Things in superpositions only becoming "set" after observation... that is just lazy evaluation. It's fun to think about.

Lazy evaluation is generally used to defer some expensive computation until later. In this case, though, the pre-measurement state (a superposition of states) is MORE complicated (computationally speaking) than the post-measurement state, which is nominally a single definite state. It's not a good analogy I'm afraid.

I'm not an astronomer, so don't take this as gospel, but I believe that large undiscovered planets are expected to be rare. Mainly because they would have had to form in the inner solar system (where all the matter was) and then somehow flung into the outer reaches of the solar system (perhaps via a major collision).

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1633/

Yes, there is. Firmware updates must be digitally signed using Apple's private key. That means no one except Apple can edit out the device check, or indeed modify the firmware in any way.

Umm, you can have many macs with only a single GPU configuration - if they are all identical models. Similarly, you can have one copy of Lion and install it on multiple machines (AFAIK). There is nothing in their statement that proves that they were only using one mac.

This is from October 2009 (yes, more than a year ago), when Mozilla blocked two .NET-related plugins because of a security flaw (with Microsoft's blessing, no less). As far as I know, both plugins were both unblocked within a week or so. See http://shaver.off.net/diary/2009/10/19/update-on-the-net-fra... for more information on what happened.

If you want to really understand the language, do what I did, and write a compiler (http://jurassic.codeplex.com/). You'll learn about fun oddities, like why the lexical scope introduced by the catch block is different from any other type of scope and why declaring variables inside an eval is different from declaring variables in the parent scope.