Things you don't need to know...

Bernard Fanning of Powderfinger fame.

pibbur who knows about some Ozzie bands, but not this one.

PS. Doesn't sound too bad:

DS.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_140283
HD 140283 (or the Methuselah star)[9] is a metal-poor subgiant star about 200 light years away from the Earth in the constellation Libra, specifically toward Ophiuchus.
A study published in 2013[12][13] used the Fine Guidance Sensors of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to measure a precise parallax (and therefore distance and luminosity) for the star,[1] and employ this information to estimate an age for the star of 14.46 ± 0.8 billion years.[1] Due to the uncertainty in the value, this age for the star may or may not conflict with the calculated age of the Universe as determined by the final 2015 Planck Satellite results of 13.799 ± 0.021 billion.
Seems it's possible a star older than the universe exists.
Of course methods used to determine age aren't precise enough, but imagine what could mean if it's really older than the universe itself.
Maybe the time in general works totally different from our perceiving, maybe it works differently only in the area that particular star exists and maybe we don't know shit. :)

Can't wait for a book or scifi movie/episode that'll go wild about Methuselah star.
In the meantime, while historians still brainwash people into believing mayan civilization didn't use wheel, let's learn from another historical discovery documented on wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus
When the platypus was first encountered by Europeans in 1798, a pelt and sketch were sent back to Great Britain by Captain John Hunter, the second Governor of New South Wales.[7] British scientists' initial hunch was that the attributes were a hoax.[8] George Shaw, who produced the first description of the animal in the Naturalist's Miscellany in 1799, stated it was impossible not to entertain doubts as to its genuine nature,[9] and Robert Knox believed it might have been produced by some Asian taxidermist.[8] It was thought that somebody had sewn a duck's beak onto the body of a beaver-like animal. Shaw even took a pair of scissors to the dried skin to check for stitches.
 
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_140283

Seems it's possible a star older than the universe exists.
Of course methods used to determine age aren't precise enough, but imagine what could mean if it's really older than the universe itself.
Maybe the time in general works totally different from our perceiving, maybe it works differently only in the area that particular star exists and maybe we don't know shit. :)

If it could be proven that the star is older than the current estimate for the age of the universe, I think the conclusion would be that the universe is a bit older than we thought, rather than the star having existed before the universe.
 
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If it could be proven that the star is older than the current estimate for the age of the universe, I think the conclusion would be that the universe is a bit older than we thought, rather than the star having existed before the universe.
Where's excitment in that? Where are thrills and suspense?

And why should we adapt all discoveries to previous "prejudices"? Thus my second example in the post. :)

As we are nearing cyberpunk launch and all that, might be good to know that mutants do exists in the real world as well?
Evolution = mutations.
And it's not always bad:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elizabeth-taylor-distichiasis-extra-eyelashes_n_842539
Although she avoided any of the complications associated with distichiasis, Liz's diagnosis certainly factored into her childhood.

"Well, that sounded just awful," the girl's mother later recalls, "a mutation. But, when he explained that her eyes had double rows of eyelashes, I thought, well, now, that doesn't sound so terrible at all."
And my she was beautiful.
 
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The VAST majority of Australians don't even own a Boomerang; we just sell them to tourists!! :p :)
 
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Xkcd:
review.png


pibbur who agrees, although some quests tend to be repetitive and you can't save everywhere. Great that you can bake bread.
 
Use imagination!
 
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https://bnonews.com/index.php/2019/...orized-south-korea-identified-after-30-years/
Serial killer who inspired ‘Memories of Murder’ identified after 30 years

The article does say he won't answer for any of murders from the movie because of korean statute of limitations. However the same never caught till now mass murderer inspired more than just the movie masterpiece mentioned above. It's one of cases covered in Signal, a sci fi series you don't need to know about, but you should.

A bit more about this specific mass murderer and works that used his crimes to protest on only 15 years sol (it was changed to 25 years in December 2007 with no retroactive applicance and then completely removed in 2015):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwaseong_serial_murders
 
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You don't need to know that for me and other moderators, 13 threads on the first page of the Off-topic forum are identified as spam. For some reason there are still registrations who didn't catch on that the first seven posts need to be manually approved, so posting spam is pointless (as is other stuff that would end up in P&R anyway).
 
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I hate cheap RNG and so called procedural generation. It needs only a coin input to be yet another slot machine.

But if you're making a maze, for whatever purpose, isn't it logical to use a machine to create it with RNG? I'd say yes as it should always make a fresh looking maze and besides a machine should be able to make a maze completely navigable without unused "tiles" or a path closed everywhere so you can't reach the maze's end.

I hate RNG because of it's abuse in videogames industry, but sometimes, the dreaded RNG can be used not just to annoy the audience.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190919-the-maze-puzzle-hidden-within-an-early-video-game
There was always something intriguing about Entombed, recalls John Aycock at the University of Calgary, in Alberta, Canada. And because it had fallen into obscurity, it hadn’t been pulled apart and analysed in depth before – one the main reasons Aycock and his co-author Tara Copplestone at the University of York, UK, were drawn to Entombed as a subject to study over the other 500 games made for the Atari 2600 console.
The pair are among a growing number of “video game archaeologists” who are unearthing long forgotten pieces of software and pulling them apart. Inside they are finding clues to how the early days of video gaming came about, but also secrets that can help modern programmers with some of the problems they are facing today.

Like intrepid explorers of catacombs, Aycock and Copplestone sought curious relics inside Entombed. But they got more than they bargained for: they found a mystery bit of code they couldn’t explain. It seems the logic behind it has been lost forever.

It turned out that the maze is generated in a sequence. The game needs to decide, as it draws each new square of the maze, whether it should draw a wall or a space for the game characters to move around in. Each square should therefore be “wall” or “no wall” – “1” or “0” in computer bits. The game’s algorithm decides this automatically by analysing a section of the maze. It uses a five-square tile that looks a little like a Tetris piece. This tile determines the nature of the next square in each row.

How? That’s the fascinating part. The fundamental logic that determines the next square is locked in a table of possible values written into the game’s code. Depending on the values of the five-square tile, the table tells the game to deposit either wall, no wall or a random choice between the two.

It seems straightforward, but the thing is, no-one can work out how the table was made.

Aycock and Copplestone have tried retro-engineering the table. They looked for patterns in the values to try and reveal how it was designed, but this was to no avail. Whatever the programmer did, it was a stroke of mild genius. Every time the game is played, a reliably navigable maze is pumped out. Were the table’s values random or even slightly different, the maze would likely fail to be drawn with a playable path through it. It just seems impossible to explain.

I can't remember a more exciting article to me than this one about games development in the past couple of years. This piece of games history appeared on BBC, of all games coverage internet places, did we get so decadent there are no proper articles out there on sites specialized in games except paid shills?

If only I had time, I'd be trying to replicate or devise a new method for the logic from the article myself. Sadly, other stuff is preventing me to go for it, so at least I'd try to mock dart to try it himself, if only he was still around.
 
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Reminds me of the Antikythera machine. It must have been something great, yet no-one today is able to fully understand it ...
 
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That impossible machine, because if we'll blindly believe everything historians say it simply can't exist in reality yet it does, was replicated several times by different people, here's one of them from a decade ago:



Note that prior to the discovery of a mechanism with such complexity the history tought us (and still is) that the first mechanical astronomical clocks of similar sophistication were designed and built in Europe in the 14th century.

The mechanism that shouldn't exist proves that in the very same Europe over a 1000 years had to pass before children got the same toys their ancestors enjoyed. Why is that so? What happened with the technology at one point and why it was lost? That's something noone will ever know.

But we do know why the code art from my previous post was lost. Today repetitive mediocrity sells. Noone is interested in ingenous code any more, everyone wants to make WoW and GTA killer, for that you need to make something as shallow as possible and hope the audience recognizes it's dumb enough.
Thus the code remained only as an assembler puzzle within a rare title on some obsolete console.
 
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