palordrolap

I admit it's been a while since I did the calculations so I must have misremembered the speed of sound part.

Trying again now (with less brain than I once had) I think you could still get a few million intercommunications between stars hundreds of light years apart within their lifespans, and stars only a handful of light years apart could be even more chatty.

Dammit I must have clicked outside my subscriptions again.

So anyway here's a reminder that if you take a stellar lifetime and map it down to something like a human lifetime, the relative slowness of the speed of light mostly goes away, down to something within an reasonable approximation of the speed of sound in air, give or take.

This means that stars, at least in close proximity to each other, could theoretically be having conversations (by means of light across vacuum) that to them, don't seem to take all that long at all.

And they have all that boiling mass doing who knows what and so much real time to think...

Find yourself a language that allows negative indices to count back from the end of an array.

In those languages, index 0 is usually the first element, but if you're particularly perverse and negate your indexing, you can start at 1, or rather -1, at the other end and work backwards.

0-indexing originally comes from needing to add to the array's base memory address to locate elements. If you have an array at memory address 1234, you might expect to find the first element at that address, which would be 1234+0, and the next at 1234+1, etc.

1-indexing started as either a deliberate abstraction from that idea, and/or else there's something else stored at 1234 that the array data type needs and the real elements start at 1234+1.

All that said, there's at least one language that insists the indices of an array be of a subtype of some Integer type that must have a limited range. Then you can start and end wherever you like, and the whole 1 vs 0 business is meaningless (except to whoever writes the compilers for that language anyway).

Retired racing driver Damon Hill approves this post.

I'm British, so black tea with milk (or substitute) and some kind of sweetener to taste is what most of us (and most of Ireland too) go for.

As for which black tea, we don't really consider that unless we're at least a couple of levels into serious tea drinking. Most supermarkets sell own-brand and name brand tea bags that we gladly grab every time we're in a supermarket, but what's in them is generally a blend made for taste more than anything else.

I am not sure how tea purchasing works in other countries. Sometimes what we drink is called "breakfast tea" or "builder's tea", if that helps.

They're doubling it every week, so a googol is only ~4 years off.

The Internet suggests that caffeine might be interfering with your adenosine receptors, and may actually be making you more sleepy.

Try tea occasionally instead. It has other compounds that can offset caffeine effects, even if it also contains caffeine. Or try decaf coffee and see if it paradoxically causes you to be more alert.

The last panel reminds me of the "animator loses his mind and draws everything with his left hand" part of Don Hertzfeldt's Rejected, albeit without the unnerving undertones.

Who knows what data type they're using. Based on the values given, it's already getting close to 128 bits, and most languages don't have a data type that large in their standards.

I figure it will be more like "Vasily! Print another page of zeros!"

"Till you die, you say? Guards!"

In before you're going to need a telemetry spoofer in order not to attract attention. On the other hand, it takes an extraordinary amount of government paranoia before they start going after random citizens.

North Korea did this already. I expect that Russia's effort will be as good if not better. Bonus comedy points if they use NK's effort as a starting point.

But I wouldn't try to use it if my Internet location was outside Russia. Or maybe even if it wasn't.

Also: something something falling out something something Windows.