I get the impression this is a video-only thing because you need multiple vantage points of the scene. You can still extract a single frame in the end of course (like the article itself does), but you’ll need to shift around meaningful distances, like attack submarines do with Target Motion Analysis.
That’s 25 attoseconds, no?.. If so, that’s impressive.
The power record holder right now is the Măgurele laser in Romania, at 10 PW, but it lasts a thousand times longer, at 25 femtoseconds I believe. I can’t find clear info on pulse duration anywhere. They do intend to decrease pulse durations it seems.
I think “blitzkrieg” matches somewhat: don’t stop to engage every stronghold, just drive around them, isolate them, and cut off their support networks.
And the juicier tl;dr bits (note that XKCD only dares consider an electron moon, not a whole sun):
The amount of energy in our electron Moon, it turns out, is about equal to the total mass and energy of the entire visible universe.
[…], the energy from all those electrons pushing on each other is so large that the gravitational pull wins, and our singularity would form a normal black hole. At least, “normal” in some sense; it would be a black hole as massive as the observable universe.
Would this black hole cause the universe to collapse? Hard to say.
The spring on its own:
That’s the longest time I’ve ever heard someone take to build up a comeback. Be on your guard!
This doesn’t make sense to me. The ultimate value of shares is in the dividends they represent, no? If there are no dividends ever, what are they sharing in? Is it just a postponement until future dividends? A share in control of activities?
I get that there’ll be speculation that will keep values increasing, and selling can net a profit, but what does the last share-holder get?
Huh. Apparently bees do eat pollen, for the proteins and fats it contains. I thought it was only nectar, but no.
Disagree. Just because luck saved your ass doesn’t mean what you did wasn’t stupid.
Winning a round of Russian Roulette doesn’t make you a genius.
a chewing gum made from lablab beans, Lablab purpureus—that naturally contain an antiviral trap protein (FRIL)—to neutralize two herpes simplex viruses (HSV-1 and HSV-2) and two influenza A strains (H1N1 and H3N2). The chewing gum formulation allowed for effective and consistent release of FRIL at sites of viral infection.
They demonstrated that 40 milligrams of a two-gram bean gum tablet was adequate to reduce viral loads by more than 95%, a reduction similar to what they saw in their SARS-CoV-2 study.
Vaccines turned me into a newt!
Thanks, and sorry about that! I removed the colon from near my URL now, just in case.
“could help solve” was the quote.
Physics is like that joke about halving the distance to a woman at a bar*. I don’t expect it will ever be entirely solved, but whatever stands as the “for all practical purposes” of the era might. I’m taking “help solve” as just another halving of the distance in this analogy.
* A mathematician and an engineer are sitting at a table drinking when a very beautiful woman walks in and sits down at the bar.
The mathematician sighs. “I’d like to talk to her, but first I have to cover half the distance between where we are and where she is, then half of the distance that remains, then half of that distance, and so on. The series is infinite. There’ll always be some finite distance between us.”
The engineer gets up and starts walking. “Ah, well, I figure I can get close enough for all practical purposes.”
The real meat of the story is in the referenced blog post: https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/how-unix-spell-ran-in-64kb-ram:
TL;DR
If you’re short on time, here’s the key engineering story:
McIlroy’s first innovation was a clever linguistics-based stemming algorithm that reduced the dictionary to just 25,000 words while improving accuracy.
For fast lookups, he initially used a Bloom filter—perhaps one of its first production uses. Interestingly, Dennis Ritchie provided the implementation. They tuned it to have such a low false positive rate that they could skip actual dictionary lookups.
When the dictionary grew to 30,000 words, the Bloom filter approach became impractical, leading to innovative hash compression techniques.
They computed that 27-bit hash codes would keep collision probability acceptably low, but needed compression.
McIlroy’s solution was to store differences between sorted hash codes, after discovering these differences followed a geometric distribution.
Using Golomb’s code, a compression scheme designed for geometric distributions, he achieved 13.60 bits per word—remarkably close to the theoretical minimum of 13.57 bits.
Finally, he partitioned the compressed data to speed up lookups, trading a small memory increase (final size ~14 bits per word) for significantly faster performance.
There was something wrong here, but the… right kind of wrong.
Looking back, those times were an incredible desert of of titillation compared to the desserts of today.
No, never did find it… But I’m pretty sure now that pen really was his. It was just a mildly unlikely coincidence that he had one just like mine.
I felt at the time that I’d been conned out of some things in the past, and that had me set a bit too hard on “not being fooled again”, so I overdid it.
One particular case I remember is exchanging toy cars with someone, and them claiming later that day that they lost the car i just gave them. So I spent a good few minutes looking for it with them. I even insisted “no, let’s look again” when they suggested we give up. I felt bad that they’d lost out on our exchange, so I gave them back the car they’d given me, just to ease their misfortune. Only to hear the next day how they’d been bragging about fooling me. Gah.
I had a similar thing with a pen, the very same year I think… I had a mildly special pen which one day I lost. Went looking for it and found it sitting on a (slightly older) classmate’s desk, so i grabbed it and said “hey, that’s mine”. He tried to pretend that no, it was his, and he sounded very convincing about it, and even got the teacher involved. They both looked at me with infuriatingly condescending expressions as I explained how it was mine.
The teacher suggested “just let him have it” to the classmate, who conceded.
I went back to my desk fuming and scratched my initials into it before returning to show them, "look, see, it was mine! The classmate immediately pointed out “you scratched those in just now” and I think I mumbled something incoherent before going back to my desk, to the teacher’s mortification with the whole situation.
It had already begun dawning on me at this point that the classmate was right… That wasn’t my pen. It was his and just looked like mine. But it was too late at this point and I didn’t know how to handle it other than to keep quiet and try to forget about it.
offended beeping
I love news titles that are basically “guess which word’s the verb” games.