Green Baron

Of course, thanks for the correction :-) The simulation hypothesis (not "theory") otoh can not be verified, nor falsified. It is scifi, philosophy. And has problems if the universe is infinite. Attention, philosophy: https://www.simulation-argument.com/faq.html And as a more substantial counterweight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper#Philosophy

I can only talk about my motives. I am not drawn more to trains above everything else. My hobbies can change. I have actually built and played with RC planes and cars, slot car races (a huge fun !), made strong wooden bows and other paleolithic weaponry. I am slowly building this layout and looking forward to playing with it, invite others if interested. And one day i'll probably tear it down and make something different. Who knows. Edit: i do not find beauty in an expensive high performance car. I find it boring to operate a wheel and pedal, it is often a show off, a prosthesis. Want a pitchfork ? :-)

*grabs imaginary pitchfork* How can i enlighten you if you say you don't understand ? May i ask, do you have a hobby ? Possible reasons, applicable to other hobbies as well: it needs hand crafting as well as basic technical understanding to build a layout. It helps leaving a stressful job behind for a moment. It is beyond price to see children's glowing eyes watching the trains. It gives the illusion of control over a small technical contraption. It is a small idyllic world if built "well". List continues ... Or, in one word, it is a hobby. One of the better ones, i find :-)

First: Welcome to the forum ! On a philosophical level, you should let go of the concept of "outside" when talking about the universe. You can be outside of a house or a car because these have a size in a world with 3 spacial dimensions. But you cannot be outside of the universe because there is no outside. The universe does not expand into something, it has no edge or rim, it might actually be indefinitely large. It does indeed look like the expansion accelerates indefinitely. There will not be a big crunch, rather a big dilution, big rip, "heat death" or maximum entropy, depending on the value of the cosmological constant. The hypothesis of a big crunch was in discussion but has been discarded because of evidence to the contrary. Observation of the visible universe tells us that the universe will expand indefinitely, as uncomfortable as this may be :-) Look up the "cosmological constant", info on it can help you to find out more about the possible final states of the universe.

Ok. 2837

Right you are :-) C, like many other languages, can easily be modularized. There is no size limit to a project other than the space on disk. Libraries are loaded and released dynamically when needed, so memory isn't a limiting element either (it's the system bus and data transfer that hinder most). In a top-down approach a huge program is broken down into manageable "chunks" depending on need and purpose, and there are other approaches. When i said >20 million lines i meant that literally. I am not sure if there is much code (if at all) from the 90s in a modern kernel(*), from whatever OS, compiler or library. Too many people work on these things and too fast are the changes, also much has changed in the language (and in other languages as well). But i am just a humble hobby tinkerer and by no means knowledgeable, just posting the common places. One can have a look at a big project by simply loading down the sources from kernel.org for example (~100mb). They are actually quite well readable i find :-) C is not a mammoth, rather a Ferrari. Not commenting on mammoth DNA because too far ot :-) (*) That actually might be more the case with Windows and its need for backward compatibility than with Linux and its need for stability and speed, i guess ... Also, Linux' packaging systems with shared objects and references to them are more flexible than many windows applications that all bring their own dlls in different versions, but i may be wrong here.

Yeah, just 20 million lines or so ... like in OS kernels, various compilers, libraries ... peanuts :-) Seriously, C is the second most popular language today.

I have no idea what that was about, maybe something like this ? :-) 2803

C abstracts the assembly level away. But you can easily integrate and even inline assembly routines. Only your code isn't portable any more afterwards.

Exactly ! Morrowind and Oblivion were single player with a nice atmosphere, i find (yes, still sometimes) the former better than the latter. But if i can't buy it, download or get a copy and play without submitting to one of the data krakens, i won't play ...

I too think so, though i am not a specialist. We have come a long way since the Apple ][. Frequency, miniaturisation, floating point arithmetic, heavy parallel and superscalar processing, pipelining, etc. hasn't made the entry level easier. Back in the day a single programming language was all one had, now there's networking, SQL databases, object oriented programming, scripting, a whole stack of APIs with their specialties, graphics programming languages, .... Phew ... :-)

2789

A little addition: a foehn is something different than a hurricane. Tropical cyclones are low pressure areas and form over warm water surfaces. They receives their energy from outside, the warm water. A foehn is (mostly) the result of air containing high moisture that crosses a mountain ridge, where it is forced upwards, raining out, and falls down again on a lee ward side. It is an adiabatic process, there is no or little energy exchange. The dry air from high levels, when it crosses the ridge towards the lee side is denser than the surrounding, beginning to sink, being compressed, sinking faster ... and so on. It is usually a local effect, channeled in valleys and limited to the immediate forelands, and with limited duration until circulation changes. In the Alps they occur frequently "pre-frontal" and die down when the front passes through. Just for completeness :-)

*cough* 2759 is divisible by 31. 31 * 89 = 2759. How about .... 2767 !

2741

Humans write the code at all levels. But i probably don't understand the question ? Setting out on a search like "memory register circuits layout" gives you a plethora of information of the electrical basics. You can play with it by trying out assembly, if you're on windows with https://nasm.us/, if you're on Linux then everything is on your PC already. There are many tutorials out there. If you want to skip assembly you can try out with C (just one example: https://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/bitwise_operators.html), shifting bits and bytes, operations in the number systems base 2, 8, 10, 16 until you dream of it, be it sweet dream or nightmare :-) This shifting in itself does not make for an interactive application, but enough of them combined in a meaningful manner do. True. We have adopted the Arabic numbering system that emerged in the early middle ages. Other systems exist, Egyptian, Roman, Ionic, .... one can use what one is accustomed to. Just look at the British guys, ... *duckandcover* :-)

Abstraction. From hardware over BIOS, device drivers, OS kernel, Terminals, GUIs to application programs. Each level uses functionality of the lower ones. To answer your question in depth a several million lines of code would be here. Or simply download Linux sources. It is all there :-) Watching a light go on and off would be an interaction. But i guess that with "interaction" you mean pushing a mouse over a window and the windows border start to blink or clicking somewhere and a program starts to run. Should that be case, then what was said upthread is true: you try to understand too many things at the same time. It is a long way from letting different voltages run through the electronics to programming a graphical user interface and many levels are in between. First, i think, you must just accept that 0 and 1 are the basic information carriers. It was said why this so (easy to implement, shieldable from the environment, etc.). The first computers (core memory) could not be moved or shaken or the bits would literally flip. You do not need to know how the currents run through the hardware to program a graphical user interface. A high level language plus an API that provides the necessary functionality is "all" one needs for that. Example: just to open a window on a GUI requires some prep, like making room in memory, setting default values, shuffling around data from system to graphics memory, swapping buffer contents, etc. In the end many thousands of instructions were done in the background until the window pops up, though the high level representation may just have 100 lines of cod all in all (depending on the system, don't kill me, real programmers :-)). You do not program all this, you call ready made routines from an API that do the work. Again, that is were abstraction comes into play. The programmer uses a language, includes an routines from others, that build on lower level routines, that build on kernel functionality, that calls os routines, that call firmware in devices, ... If you want to dive into the honorable world of system programming or so, go ahead. But first read the recommended books :-)

Got reminded of the time by a grumbling stomach. Went into the kitchen ... half an apple leftover from breakfast muesli, a package of blue cheese and two carrots from the fridge, apple and cheese cut in cubes, carrot rasped, a quick sauce from olive oil/balsamico vinegar/a bit of spicy mustard, salt, pepper ... less than 5min. Now if this isn't fast food :-) Yummy

My support for being so careful during a hard time !

It would not. What should it fire ? The black powder in the primer would fizzle (assuming no flint lock), hopefully a spark would make its way to the cartridge, that in itself would fizzle away. "Psh ... pssssh". Like @p1t1o said. The expansion of the gas in the barrel drives the mass of the bullet. There has to be a pressure for the accelerated reaction to take place. Too heavy a bullet can damage the barrel or the mechanism with possible consequences for the shooter. Haven't we all played with black powder as boys :-) ? There was a certain amount of hope(tm) necessary that even a correctly prepared musket would fire on command. Or later. Or not at all. At least not now :-)

My jigsaw gave in to entropy. Well, it was a 20,- thing and lasted >10 years, so no complaints here. I bought a new one (30,-). The old blades don't fit (of course not). Will it last 15 years ? *looks at the plywood sheets*. I won't bet ... Edit: as interesting all these micro scales are, like anything below N, i wouldn't find it satisfying to play with it. A counter roundabout is the perfect place. I somehow think H0 (zero) is the action size. It makes a noise, it roughly obeys physics and not just surface tension or brownian movement. One can "handle" it. N is just ok if space really matters.

2719

My sympathies.

Maybe it helps if you see a computer as a pyramid of abstractions, each one using the functionality of the lower levels and combining them to do something more complex and at the same time hiding its own functionality completely through an interface. On the lowest level you have the hardware, currents representing 0s and 1s, memory units, registers, etc. That is the hardware. Some basic routines are hardwired and can be called from the layer above. It also offers interfaces to basic protocols to transport bits from a to b. On the next level you have routines to control the flow of data, to address directly physical units (a drive, a network port, ...), but also in prep for the next layer, to address logical entities, like a packet of data. They run on the hardware through an interface of basic routines they can call. (leaving the official path here) A control program uses these routines to provide abstract management of processes, memory, i/o access, user rights, processor time, schedules, etc. It contains specialized routines to close the interfaces between user and hardware like a graphics card or a drive unit. So it is possible for a programmer to write programs that run on several graphics cards without actually caring about how they work. The abstraction layer (lets call it kernel) offers an interface in his direction that connects to specialized routines in the other one. Sometimes a programmer interacts with this level when writing very basic routines Above the management program sits the application layer. APIs as well belong to this layer. These are libraries that offer prefab routines for a purpose to a programmer, to integrate in his own programs. The application layer in itself can get rather complex with many layers of abstractions. For example a game, written in a high level language that runs on an application called runtime environment and using several levels of "middleware" like a game "engine" and scripting. Compiler, terminals, everything we do, be it gamer or programmer, uses this layer and its interface to the management layer, which uses the protocols of the lower level, which uses the currents and hardware units of the base level. Hope that wasn't totally nonsense :-) tl:dr: Complexity is all about abstraction and interfaces to work with. Each higher level widens the functionality of the lower levels by adding data structures and algorithms. In the end it is 0s and 1s that are combined by small wires to represent values. ---------------- An "official" example of such a pyramid of abstractions is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model

Don't eat peanuts while repairing these ... molecules :-) Voith Maxima: 5000 diesel hp hauling away a 3000t gravel train: And another one: To my knowledge the strongest single frame diesel hydraulic loco ?