I can’t help but wonder how people made accurate maps in the old days before satellites or even air-ships. To accurately map the edges of an island, they would need to either see it from above, or else to keep exceedingly—and painstakingly—difficult measures of both distance and angles as the shore twists and turns.
Tag: Explanation
☑ Postal Credits ASCII Art
During the end-credits of the game Portal, there is a series of ASCII art images displayed along with the great song “Still Alive”. Most are relatively easily recognizable, except the following one. What the heck is it? It almost looks like one of those yule-log cakes or jelly-rolls. Mmm… 😋
☐ Unbreakable Yellow Block in Bowser Level of Paper Mario 2
I liked the game Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. However I cannot figure out how to break the yellow block in the last Bowser level. It is surrounded by unbreakable blocks.
I’ve tried all the different sizes that Bowser can be in that level, and none seem to work. If he’s huge, he still cannot break the grey blocks and his breath doesn’t reach the yellow block, and if he is small enough to fit under there, his fire is insufficient to break it and there is not enough room for him to pound-jump on it.
How do you break the yellow block? What is in there?
☐ Heatsink Smoothness Meangingless?
Most computer cooling guides state that it is important for the bottom of the heatsink to be as shiny and smooth as possible to get the best and most contact with the surface of the CPU, and also to prevent air pockets and bubbles of thermal compound. To get this super surface, they endorse lapping and buffing the heck out of the bottom of the heatsink with finer and finer materials.
Why then is the surface of the CPU itself the opposite? Why is it that the surface of the CPU is rough like brushed steel, and has words and markings engraved on it? Does this not totally nullify the point of having a smooth, shiny surface? Are we supposed to buff the CPU surface until it is smooth and the markings are gone?
☐ Are Al-Qaeda Hypocrites or Just Stupid
If Al-Qaeda performs it’s terrorist actions to protest capitalism and combat the rich, then why do they do things like bombing buses? Don’t they realize that buses are used primarily by the poor and working/middle-class? Most rich people use cars, even in congested cities like New York. People like those that Al-Qaeda purports to be against aren’t being targeted, the people that they claim to be good are the victims. What gives, surely there are more apt targets?
☐ Why Wait to Degauss Again?
Why does pretty much every document that mentions the deguass function of monitors tell you to wait about 15 minutes before degaussing again? Does this mean that you must also wait around 15 minutes before turning off/on a monitor that automatically degausses when turned on.
Speaking of degaussing, what happens if a monitor is exposed to a magnetic field that is stronger than that created by the degaussing mechanism? Do you need to use a more powerful, external degausser, or will it be fixed over time because the degausser reduces the deviation by a bit each time it runs, until the deviation is within the degausser’s normal fixable range?
☐ Solar Cell Superman
If Superman is solar-powered (he draws his super powers from the yellow sun of the Earth), then how does he retain his powers at night?
Is he like a battery, where he stores excess during the day and runs on that at night? If so, then what happens if he does too much at night? Will he burn out and become like the rest of us until the sun comes up again? What happens if he goes on vacation and just lies around in the sun all day? Does he build up so much power that he explodes?
☐ Too Tough For SNL Hosts
Could somebody please explain to me why almost every Saturday Night Live host is always looking off set when they perform in a sketch? It’s horribly obvious they are looking at the cue cards, and sometimes, they don’t look anywhere BUT the cue cards.
They are supposed to be professional actors who have to memorise lines, rehearse, and so on just the same as the SNL cast do. Why then do they all constantly and continuously read the cue cards? Do they not remember ANY of their lines? Is it that they are unable to learn them in only a week? Did they not go to rehearsals?
I don’t understand why they are so dependant on the cue cards when they are doing exactly what they are trained for: acting. Perhaps the rigors of a weekly sketch comedy show are tougher than those of a long movie production. If this is the case, then going in the other direction (sketch comedy to movies) should be a piece of cake.
☐ Hard Drives Are the Bottleneck?
Can someone please explain something to me? When did optical drives become faster than hard drives? When you burn a CD or a DVD, the hard drive is apparently the bottleneck. That is, success depends on whether or not the data can be pulled off of the hard drive fast enough. Of course these days, they have underrun prevention technologies to avoid a failed burn if the hard drive cannot spit out the data in time, but those are not the magic bullet cure that they would appear at first glance.
My point is that hard drives are clearly faster than optical drives and any test will show that. You can do performance tests and they all show that hard disk drives have lower latency, lower seek times, higher data rates, and faster throughput than optical drives.
Yet, when you watch a disc being burned, the hard drive light is pretty much solid on, while the optical drive light blinks slowly.
These points are contradictory. Hard drives are faster than optical drives in both reading and writing and yet optical drives can seem to burn faster than hard drives can seek.
What’s going on? Can somebody explain this paradox to me?