vikingerik

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 coding gets it to 3.52kb per frame.

It's at 15 fps and is 12.5 seconds in length.

15 x 12.5 x 3.52kb = 660kb, which fits in a 4mb cartridge.

There is dithering to give the appearance of more colors, and it's done in vertical stripes rather than checkerboards because that compresses better. Then at runtime, every other scanline is offset by 1 pixel, and in opposite directions every other frame, so the dithering blurs back together to give the appearance of many more colors.

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 for it to mix. Later demos and games did use these capabilities, but for Second Reality, the GUS sounded just about the same as a 16-bit Sound Blaster.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 SMB3 instead. So SMB was sold as a standalone for these cases, but very few units were needed or extant.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 the "r" sound. I don't think he blew the line, just didn't speak it clearly.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Onion headline should be: Ted Turner dies at 87:05

Just Wikipedia. It cites two studies that found values of 8-13 mg and 3-32 mg per decaf cup, compared to regular which is 95-200. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decaffeination

FYI since many people don't know: Decaf isn't zero, it can still be several percentage points. In the US decaf is supposed to be under 3% of regular coffee but it's not commonly tested or enforced, so many types of decaf can be quite a bit higher. Several big cups of decaf can approach the caffeine content of one regular cup.

One other thing to compare is business and health regulations. Compliance with that is certainly more involved and costly today than in 1940 and would account for part of the price.

The Zocchi d100 isn't face-symmetric and thus isn't a fair die. It's as close as he could get. It's really effectively a golf ball with 100 dimples, but they aren't and can't be arranged perfectly symmetrically.

Any even number dX can be made as a fair die as a bipyramid or trapezohedron. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapezohedron These would be the only fair face-symmetric d100s. The standard d10 is this, and you sometimes see a d14 or d18 or something like that constructed this way. It becomes impractical with very thin faces past 20 or so. An odd-numbered fair die is also possible by using one twice as big and duplicating the numbers (like 1-5 twice on a d10.)

Of course this is comparing to one data point that is an outlier. If people are choosing to pay $3 in today's dollars for it, that means that in 2010 McDonald's was underpricing that item relative to its market value. Presumably deliberately as a promotion. Compare across everything you buy and compare like-to-like if you want to judge its accuracy.

This ticker's current speed is faster than that, though. It's going about 1e-9 dollar per second. That comes to about $0.03 per year, which as a fraction of the current base of $0.50, comes to 6% inflation per year.

I don't know how that speed was determined. Either it's using a linear decrease since 2000 (which isn't correct, the inverse of exponential inflation would be logarithmic decay, not linear), or it's weighting by recency for the high inflation since 2020 (which may continue, or may not.)

I have the Twin Galaxies world record on the Dreamcast version, at $114k total score, so yes :)

Not really. Jupiter alone is good enough. Its huge mass accounts for almost all of the gain you get from any such slingshot. Launch windows from Jupiter to anywhere occur every 12 years. Voyager's alignment was captivating, but realistically if it hadn't happened, we would have just done separate Jupiter-Uranus and Jupiter-Neptune missions instead.