Recent content by Shovel

Indeed, a measure of brightness as described by a human can only be a very rough approximation. Iris adjustments and neural circuitry will mess with perceived brightness levels and humans can see well in a large range. Few people realize that outdoor sunlight is enormously brighter than indoor...

Pretty much every modern AAA title will use more than 4 threads (many have dozens), but usually only 2-3 see any real action, while the others spend most of their time idle. This goes as far back as Valve's 2004 source engine, which has tons of threads, but the vast majority of the CPU work is...

As far as I know mini and micro usb are electrically compatible, so you could splice together your own cable on the cheap if you have two connectors you don't mind destroying. No circuitry should be involved, just direct wiring. Correspondingly, the adapters should be pretty cheap anyway...

Not sure if this is too far off topic. The Earth's motion is prograde around the sun, meaning the sunset side of the planet is always on the trailing edge of the Earth's orbit around the sun. Since the sunset side is warmer on average, wouldn't this side emit more black-body radiation, causing a...

I imagine it is similar to the reason why a slinky, when held vertically from one end over the grand canyon, will not stretch to reach the canyon floor. Instead it will stretch to the point where the force of gravity equals the spring force of the slinky, and remain in that state indefinitely...

I believe the OP's 10^80 number refers to the number of particles in the observable portion of the universe - which is always finite regardless of whether or not the whole of the universe is infinite or not.

What if the ruler is very, very long (1 Mpc or longer)? Will it be pulled apart?

Charge it whenever possible, going below 30% is much worse than keeping it above 70%. If you are not planning on using it in the very-near future (the next few days) charge it to 40-60% and store it in a cool (not cold) place. If you are planning on using it soon best to charge it fully to 100%...

I don't think his argument is that an error exists due to SR/GR, I think he is implying that the error is static, not compounding. This appears to be more of an engineering/computing than a physics question. Others correct me if I am mistaken, but the reason the error compounds is because in...

I imagine there is some background-level of neutrinos in the detector, and spikes in activity correspond with CERN's emission timing. Over thousands of bursts, you can be certain that it's coming from CERN. As an example, billions of photons pass through your cell phone every second, this...

V50's posts have convinced me there has to be an error somewhere. The numbers just do not match up with previous experiments and the supernova data. Massive photons could be possible, but this experiment would exceed the upper bound on their mass supported by so many other, more accurate trials...

68 bytes is just the default value. You can set it to capture the whole packet by using the "-s 0" option. It's set to that by default because it's just enough to capture packet header information without revealing content; making it a useful network diagnostic without snooping through user data.

Forgive me, I'm not at all familiar with any of these approaches or why nobody agrees on them. But what would be wrong with this method: Use the CMB as your rest frame, in an idealized nearly-flat space (like a large void). Estimate the mass-energy of nearby individual galaxies and their...

Under the standard cosmological models, neither an open or closed universe has an "edge". In the open model, the universe is infinite and you can travel in anyone direction with a superfast warp drive and pass unique galaxies that you have never encountered before for all eternity without ever...

Wouldn't the quantized nature of light imply that there was some last photon emitted before a given distant galaxy receded beyond the Hubble length? This would imply that there will be a final photon that will reach us and it will happen in finite time. After that, the galaxy will have vanished...