The two famous postulates of special relativity are that the laws of physics are the same for all inertial frames of reference, and the speed of light in vacuum is the same for all inertial frames of reference.
Is the same true for non-inertial frames of reference.
So, in essence, it's pretty safe to say that the FPGA they are talking about is just a NES emulator coded into the FPGA, rather than a faithful reproduction of the original NES hardware. Which makes their statement of it being more accurate than a software emulator doubly dumb.
But then, again, they could just be very cleverly trolling. It's not out of the realm of possibility. Poe's Law.
How do you interpret the word "appealing" other than entertaining, enjoyable, attracting interest, attractive? Those are all concepts of entertainment. Which should be completely inconsequential in Vault.
We can't send it to Moons, because it's not that entertaining. And we can't send it to Vault, because Vault is based on clear cut rules. Without such rules, any crappy game would be possible to publish, and we kinda keep the level of TASing at superplay in general. Again, this game is not crappy. It's just not that appealing.
That seems completely contradictory. It can't go to Moons because it's not entertaining enough, it can't go to Vault because it's not entertaining enough. So what's the difference?
I thought the original idea of Vault was precisely that entertainment, being "crappy", being "unappealing", is completely inconsequential. Every game deserves a TAS, and Vault is for those that aren't entertaining enough.
I still fail to see the harm in accepting this. I might have understood it if the number of currently published TASes were in the tens. It's not. It's in the thousands. One more isn't going to make that much of a difference. And I'm certain that if I dug enough I could find several TASes of several games that are much worse than this one.
(Note that I'm a complete layman on this subject, so I may well be talking out of my ass.)
No, what you say is correct. But it doesn't help answer the question.
It might indicate that your question is malformed because of a wrong assumption. You seem to assume that matter that's falling into a black hole slows down and never actually crosses the event horizon (assuming the event horizon doesn't move), and just stays stationary there, forming a plank-thick crust.
I doubt that's true from any perspective, not even from an external one. How can you say that there's a crust of matter surrounding the black hole almost touching its event horizon, if you can't even observe it?
(Even if you could observe such a thing, it makes me think that it would lead to a paradoxical observation of this crust of matter being so dense as to be within its own Schwarzschild radius... which is too complicated for me to even try to guess how it would work.)
To motivate the argument for why this is the case, matter is imagined to "fall" into the black hole, though of course, from the perspective of an external observer, time slows down and length contracts until, as time heads off to infinity, the matter is compressed to within the thickness of a Planck-length, just beyond the horizon.
Note also that any light emanating from that falling matter will red-shift until it becomes completely invisible (ie. it essentially stops emitting light). Thus, AFAIK, it wouldn't be even theoretically possible to observe the matter falling forever from the outside.
Although matter stops at the event horizon
I'm not sure it's correct to say that matter stops at the event horizon. An external observer will never see the matter crossing the event horizon (both because it "slows down" as it approaches it, and because it red-shifts to invisibility, from the perspective of the external observer), but that doesn't mean it just literally stops.
(Note that I'm a complete layman on this subject, so I may well be talking out of my ass.)
Btw, it's unclear to me whether that FPGA is actually replicating the original NES transistor-by-transistor, or whether it's just essentially an NES emulator coded into an FPGA.
I somehow get the feeling it's the latter. In which case the video is doubly dumb, because there is essentially no difference from a software emulator. It's just that the software emulator has been made into an FPGA.
And here's an AVGN video about PS1 Planet of the Apes where they deliberately ignored the fact the the PlayStation has a lack of perspective correct texture mapping.
James Rolfe, when play-acting the AVGN character, sometimes deliberately plays dumb, even with things he knows better. It can be confusing at times. It becomes even more confusing when this playing-dumb leaks to his supposedly "non-acted" James Rolfe persona in some of his "let's play" videos with Mike and other people.
For example in one of his videos, where he revisited NES Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, he kept his original shtick (from his first video where he commented on that game) that he just doesn't understand why in the Mr Hyde side he just suddenly dies out of nowhere, calling the game idiotic and completely bonkers because of that. Yet, in another one of his videos, where he was showing the game to some friends, he actually explains exactly how the game works and what the idea is (ie. if you reach the same point as Hyde as you reached with Jekyll, you die). In other words he does know the idea in the game, he just pretended not to in that other video.
I don't know if he knows and understands the texturing limitations of the PS1 in that video, but it's possible he does, and is just acting dumb.
As for that emulator thingie video by Mike and that other guy, I have no idea. They seem completely misinformed and idiotic about it, but I suppose it's theoretically possible they are just trolling.
The whole point of April Fools is that it's a way to goof off and let off some steam and fuck around. If it becomes a competition with winners and losers than it becomes too serious.
Why would it be wrong to celebrate and reward creativity? It doesn't have to become a "competition".
Maybe it could be its own separate event, held pretty much after the day? After all, why should we wait 8 months for the awards?
And perhaps there could be more than one award category?
I saw this problem somewhere:
A unit sphere (centered at the origin) is cut by two cylinders of radius 1/2. The cylinders are parallel and tangential to each other, as well as tangential to one of the main axes (which also means the cylinders are tangential to the sphere from the inside). The cylinders cut the sphere all the way through (you can think of them as infinitely long if you wish). What is the volume of this shape, ie. this sphere that has two holes cut into it?
What's peculiar about this is that the answer is relatively simple, but getting it might be a bit hard.
This is actually a bit of a complex question for me.
One of the reasons why I love the Quake speedruns in particular is precisely because the game doesn't have many exploitable glitches (I don't consider flaws in level design that allow for unintended shortcuts to be glitches, as glitches are generally considered errors in programming, not errors in level design.) The very nature of Quake as a game, and the fact that it's so glitch-free, makes the speedruns just awesome to watch. I'm not so sure I would like them so much if the runs were heavily glitched. (For example, I don't really like speedruns of the new Doom precisely because they are so glitched. I find them a bit boring. They just lack that awesomeness that Quake speedruns have.)
That being said, I do appreciate some speedruns of some games that are heavily glitched. For example, I confess that I find glitched runs of Ocarina of Time more entertaining than the glitchless ones (although the latter are cool too).
But then, it depends a bit on the kind of glitches and exploits being used, and how these glitches are triggered. For example in Ocarina of Time any% all glitches are triggered purely via skillful (often frame-perfect) gameplay. Completely within the gameplay proper, controlling the playable character with normal controls using the game controller. All out-of-bounds glitches, item glitches, superslides... all are triggered via regular gameplay.
Things like corrupting the save data by resetting the console at the proper situation, or messing up game settings in the game's options menu, or things like that, are not part of OoT speedrunning. (Resetting is used in the longer categories, but only to get faster to dungeon entrances and things like that, and that's about it, not to glitch the game. I can live with that.)
Things like going to the game's graphical settings and lowering the framerate in order to make a glitch work (The Talos Principle), or saving and loading like 50 times to make some glitch work (Half-Life 2) are techniques I really don't like that much. I would much prefer if actual gameplay was being used to complete the game, not these non-gameplay metafeatures.
The irrationality of sqrt(2) is one of the more famous easy proofs in mathematics, and one of the typical examples often given of proof by contradiction. (In other words, we assume that sqrt(2)=a/b, an irreducible fraction, and prove that it leads to a contradiction.)
I was thinking if this could be generalized. So the hypothesis is: The square root of any non-square integer is irrational.
But the approach to this might not be as simple as with the special case of sqrt(2). I couldn't get far with this.
Not too long ago I heard that speedrunning is not a sign of skill in video games.
I honestly don't understand what that's supposed to even mean. I would be really interested in knowing what the person who said that considers "skill in video games", and why that definition wouldn't apply to speedrunners.
One has to simply watch, for example, one of the Quake speedruns in order to witness an astonishing amount of skill, both in terms of speedrunning, of course, but also in terms of just playing the game itself (such as being amazingly good at aiming and shooting at enemies with extreme efficiency).
In fact, I think that speedrunning a particular game, and being extremely good at it, can have an effect on how the person would play that game "casually" as well.
In particular, a video game developer company published a mission pack for Quake (consisting of 10 levels) in 2016 for its 20th anniversary. I watched the video of one of the world's top Quake speedrunners playing those levels for the first time, ie. a "blind" playthrough, more or less casually. Of course in the hardest difficulty. His style of play was significantly different from how eg. I would play such games. He certainly died significantly less frequently than I would have, and completed all the ten levels relatively quickly, even though the difficulty was at its maximum and he had never seen those levels before. He probably completed all the levels at least 10 times faster than I would have. Not that he rushed through the levels; he just played so efficiently, and was killed so few times (even not at all in many levels).
If that's not skill, I don't know what is.
That discredits his entire argument exactly because it uses the dirtiest sort of cheating in order to enforce his otherwise flawed demands.
If you and I have an argument, and you are ready to put effort required to prove me wrong, or, if needed, have a compromise, but I instead hit you with a knife, we can not really expect that the argument is gonna resume the usual way. Because I've just proven that I'm not interested in any outcome really, I'm interested in acting destructively.
You could be the bigger person and critique the actual argument being presented, like a reasonable and rational person. Instead, you choose to nitpick about a word and dismiss the argument based on that. That's not a counter-argument at all. And then you call his use of some word a "dirty tactic".
Present a rational argument why his opinion is incorrect. "You used a word I don't like" is not an argument.
I'll just write the answer in spoiler tags, if somebody wants to know:
The series consists of the products of every pair of consecutive odd primes. In other words, 3*5=15, 5*7=35, 7*11=77, and so on.
I can confirm that the links don't appear (probably) if Flash isn't installed. I recently removed it from my system.
I don't think Flash should be required for those links to appear.
Oh ok! I get it then. The next number in the series is 4758. The series is just the natural numbers, and you're just omitting numbers at random so it's not too obvious. ;P
The formula still makes sense even when omitting the 6 from the beginning.
For those who might still be wondering about that series, the formula to get it is quite simple. It's not something super-complicated or contrived.
Here's a small puzzle for you. How does the series continue?
15, 35, 77, 143, 221, 323, 437, 667, 899, 1147, 1517, 1763, 2021, 2491, 3127, 3599, 4087, 4757, ...
