The lack of including the before photo in the article says something. There was clearly real, albeit minor, damage done.
The fees seem high for such a small blemish. Automated rule enforcing systems are very frustrating to hit. They usually enforce good rules, but overly strictly and often trend into gotchas that are intentionally exploitive. (Eg, red light cameras that have reduced yellow light times.) I doubt the savings of those fees being put into renters who do leave damage marks will be passed on to those who don't.
It isn't. Consoles at this stage are general purpose computers with hardware and software explicitly designed to prevent consumers using it as such. If consumer rights had any real teeth, any hardware device would be required to allow their owners to install any piece of software of their choosing, including replacing the operating system.
I'd say it's better to call it a unit of counting.
If I have a bin of apples, and I say it's 5 apples wide, and 4 apples tall, then you'd say I have 20 apples, not 20 apples squared.
It's common to specify a length by a count of items passed along that length. Eg, a city block is a ~square on the ground bounded by roads. Yet if you're traveling in a city, you might say "I walked 5 blocks." This is a linguistic shortcut, skipping implied information. If you're trying to talk about both in a unclear context, additional words to clarify are required to sufficiently convey the information, that's just how language words.
Exactly. Pixels are indivisible quanta, not units of any kind of distance. Saying pixel^2 makes as much sense as counting the number of atoms on the surface of a metal and calling it atoms^2.
Pixels then become containers and subpixels become quantfiable entities within each pixel. In the apple analogy, each crate contains three countable apples and you can count both the crates and the apples independently.
This idea itself breaks down when we get to triangular subpixel rendering, which spans pixels and divides subpixels. But it's also a minor form of optical illusion, so making sense of it is inherently fraught.
That is exactly how it is and it makes the whole article completely pointless. Especially as the article in the second sentence correctly writes "1920 pixels wide".
Is it that, or is it a compound unit that has a defined width and height already? Something can be five football fields long by two football fields wide, for an area of ten football fields.
This example illustrates potential confusion around non-square pixels. 5 football fields long makes perfect sense, but I'm not sure if 2 football fields wide means "twice the width of a football field" or "width equaling twice the length of a football field". I would lean towards the latter in colloquial usage, which means that the area is definitely not the same as the area of 10 football fields
I don't think that's obvious at all if you're talking about the length and the width and not describing something I know to be much smaller in any dimension than the length of a lane.
No, it is a count. Pixels can have different sizes and shapes, just like apples. Technically football fields vary slightly too but not close to as much as apples or pixels.
Football fields also have the fun property of varying in the third dimension. They're built with a crown in the middle so that water will drain off towards the edges, and that can vary significantly between instances.
And pixels are even starting to vary in the third dimension too, with the various curved and bendable and foldable displays.
Pixel counts generally represent areas by taking the number of pixels inside a region of the plane, but they can represent lengths by taking the number of pixels inside a certain extent of a single line or column of the grid: it is, actually, a thin rectangle.
Yes, city blocks are like pixels or apples. They do not have a standard size or shape.
Edit: To clarify, if someone says 3 blocks that could vary by like a factor of like 3 or in extreme caesx more so when used as a unit of length it is a very rough estimate. It is usually used in my country as a way to know when you have reached your destination.
It think the point of the article is that you don't say "5 pixels wide x 4 pixels tall" but just "5 pixels x 4 pixels", though I would say that "5x4 pixels" is the most common and most correct terminology.
And the article concludes with : "But it does highlight that the common terminology is imperfect and breaks the regularity that scientists come to expect when working with physical units in calculations". Which matches your conclusion.
> And the article concludes with : "But it does highlight that the common terminology is imperfect and breaks the regularity that scientists come to expect when working with physical units in calculations". Which matches your conclusion.
But it's not true. Counts (like "number of pixels" or "mole of atoms") are dimensionless, which is a precise scientific concept that perfectly matches the common terminology.
I've been playing and enjoying this game since it was first posted on hn. Doing this is absolutely key to getting a good score. Eg, for the final answer in today's puzzle, I had the outer answer, and had to work backward 3-4 layers. The other good thing to do is, if you have an answer to work forward a couple layers. Once you know that an answer makes the next couple questions make sense, you're much less likely to give an incorrect guess.
This post seems to be missing an additional opportunity: Zig's build can involve go build! Use Build.addSystemCommand, have it depend on library step, and have the install step depend on that step. This reduces the steps to build to just 'zig build'
My biggest problem with “zig build” is learning it. Mainly because it still changes from version to version, and having a clear picture of what steps are and how they interact is somehow hard for me.
Obviously I will overcome this, but unlike zig itself, the build file still feels like guesswork to me.
The generated html docs can also be hard to read / understand. Zig 0.14.0 changed something about LazyPath (I think that‘s how it‘s called) and I had a hard time figuring out how to migrate.
The Apollo program had a wartime budget and a wartime risk tolerance.
The US and Russia were at war, though they did not directly engage with each other due to the threat of mutual nuclear destruction. Along with various proxy wars, technological dominance in space was a key factor in this war. If one side gained enough advantage, they could potentially leverage it into using it to win a direct war. Another factor is that Kennedy's assassination protected the program from political pressure within the US.
Since then, other factors have turned the attention of the space program: The USSR fell apart and didn't pose much of a threat, reducing the budget to a fraction of the size. The Space Shuttle was designed to be the next big thing in space, as a reusable launch vehicle; it could only do low earth orbit and fell short of its goals. Focus shifted to science, and a lot of good science could be performed in low earth orbit; This has lead to, for example, the significant achievement of a continuous human presence in space since the year 2000. Finally, the accepted risk for Apollo was several times what is acceptable today. Even if we had all of the old hardware on the launchpad ready to go for another mission, NASA would never put an astronaut on it.
Methane flare. Liquid methane will turn to gas as it warms up, so they need to get rid of it somehow. Nitrogen and oxygen they can just vent. Generally methane is flared to prevent explosive gas buildup and (the worst of) greenhouse gas effects. Sometimes it's cooled back into a liquid, but that is apparently more effort than it's worth because flaring seems common practice.
Edit: just remembered the second stage is hydrogen. So it might be flaring that, or maybe the smaller flare off to the side is hydrogen.
Well, Starship is specifically designed to make it to Mars if refueled in LEO. So it could deliver monstrously large Mars rovers. If they're going for the outer planets, they could do as you suggest after the first burn using a refueled Starship. Either way you're sacrificing a Starship second stage (old, or better yet reduced mass version) to the gods of delta V.
The fees seem high for such a small blemish. Automated rule enforcing systems are very frustrating to hit. They usually enforce good rules, but overly strictly and often trend into gotchas that are intentionally exploitive. (Eg, red light cameras that have reduced yellow light times.) I doubt the savings of those fees being put into renters who do leave damage marks will be passed on to those who don't.