tags: trivia

Chinese government wanted to abandon Chinese written language because it seemed fundamentally incompatible with computers — there was no way to fit 70k+ characters on a QWERTY keyboard and the character set was bigger than available memory

“My son excitedly called me over to point out that 1/998 has decimal digits of successive powers of 2. 0.001002004008016032064128256”

“[A] cave that has remained isolated for 5.5 million years. […] Despite a complete absence of light and a poisonous atmosphere, the cave is crawling with life. There are unique spiders, scorpions, woodlice and centipedes, many never before seen by humans, and all of them owe their lives to a strange floating mat of bacteria.”

“Why play Chess using pieces of just one color? Because it’s weird, that’s why! […] on-lookers understand enough about what’s going on to know that something is very wrong. And that’s exactly the point of Monochrome Chess - […] to distort their sense of reality.

The other half of the fun comes from the fact that Monochrome Chess requires unconventional thinking on the part of the players. To play Monochrome Chess, you need to unlearn many of the strategies and techniques you know from Normal Chess. To be good at Monochrome Chess, you need to learn to think in new ways.”

Solar-powered plane flying at altitudes higher than 20 km, for 90 days, beaming internet connectivity down… WJW

Because 3 and 4 are factors of 12, dozenal system is easier for computing thirds and fourths than decimal system, which means it is more convenient in everyday life.

“Some people complain that 48 fps looks too much like a video game - which happens to be perfect for how we’re using it. The in-video-game action sequences of VGHS Season 2 were shot at 48 fps with the intention of playback at 48 fps. The in-the-real-world sequences are shot at a much more traditional 24 fps.”

“What happens when you send something by mail? […] I put a small camera in a box […] and shipped it.”

talk by Kyle Johnson

Slides are horrible, the speaker is annoying, he does way too much sales talk… But hell, the things he says about Nolan’s film? Mindblowing.

(I didn’t really like the “Inception”, nor understand it.)


links collected by
Maciej Konieczny

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